Accusation (16 page)

A capped guard in a booth activated the security bar that rose and allowed them to enter the walled parking compound of the Red Cross offices, downtown near the central stadium. Row upon row of white four-wheel-drive Toyotas greeted them, a shining army, along with a few ranks of motley cars, some with drivers leaning against the doors, the building itself brick and bunkerlike. Up on the third floor, Sara stepped from the elevator to find a large man in a tweed jacket surging down the hall toward her.

Once in his office, door closed, Ed Levoix said, Have a seat. Renaud’s left town. Have you heard? I just heard. What a disturbing business this is, and I can’t say it looks good he’s taken off.

Sara took the chair in front of his desk while Ed Levoix moved to the far side of the desk, the window at his side. He made no move to sit but scanned about, as if searching for something else to be revealed. A large man but not flaccid, with a kind of restless strength like that of a Percheron horse. Back in the spring he’d sat at this desk while Juliet filmed him joking that he’d come to Addis and ended up in show business.

How did you hear he’d gone? Sara asked.

From someone who works for Save the Children UK who was supposed to have a meeting with him and ran into the man who works with him —

Tamrat Asfaw.

Ah, you know him, you’ve met him? A keen gaze atop the restlessness.

Talked to him.

And you’re here because, tell me again. You’re writing something or it’s to do with your friend’s film?

It’s a curious-enough story. I wanted to see what more I can find out.

So you might be writing something.

I don’t know yet.

You don’t need to be coy with me. Why wouldn’t you? The cocked eyebrow. That keenness. He looked as if he knew the usual thing would be to sit but for some reason unwillingness gripped him and he scanned the room again. When Sara asked him if he knew where Raymond Renaud had gone, he said he had absolutely no idea. He checked his watch. I know it’s early-ish, but do you feel like going somewhere for lunch? Or coffee? Have you had the coffee ceremony yet?

Sara offered her car for transport, but Ed Levoix said, Oh, no, we’ll walk. The Finfine. Unless you want to drive and meet me there. We’ll stop and tell your driver where we’re going. It’s not far. He’ll know it.

Out in the street, beyond the attendant’s booth and security barrier, the usual mayhem met them: a furious stream of vehicles, a clamour of street children, mostly boys. Without a word of preamble, Ed Levoix set off across the road, not at an intersection, surging into traffic while dodging both speeding cars and children, almost balletic, as if this were sport to him, a mad sport, while Sara tried to keep to his side.

He did not slow until they were within another gate and walking up a paved drive through a garden, at which point, mildly breathless, he said, My daily exercise. Otherwise there’s what, there’s polo. You can’t walk too much here.

Do you have a driver?

Oh, no, I drive.

A maître d’ in a white coat led them to a table laid with a white cloth in the spacious restaurant through which were scattered a few tables occupied by men in business suits and two nicely dressed women, then to a second, more secluded table that Ed Levoix approved of.

Do you eat meat? he asked from his carved wooden chair. Do you eat raw meat? I do, or I do here, but don’t feel any compulsion to try it. There was a discreet little maple-leaf pin on his lapel. He had a wide mouth, told her he’d grown up in Moncton, New Brunswick, good Catholic family, made it out of town on a university hockey scholarship. She figured the best thing to do with a man like this was sit back and see, amid the self-display, what he revealed to her. There was some skittishness beneath all his bravado. It’s almost noon, he went on. No beer until noon is my modus operandi, but we can at least order before noon as long as you have no objection. He clapped his hands to attract the attention of a waiter, as one of the Ethiopian men had done.

It’s a long way to come out of curiosity, he said with another keen look.

Sara asked him if he knew if there was an investigation underway.

Oh, undoubtedly there will be, but in a place like this, and especially since this all got started in Australia, it may take time. Do you know many people here?

Mostly Juliet Levin’s contacts.

After he’d ordered two bottles of Axum beer and food for them both, she asked him about rumours, were there any, and he said, settling back in his chair, Not about the sort of things he’s been accused of. Or not that I heard over the last four years, which is most of the time he was in operation. Possible money trouble. Recently. That they were running out of money, and he wasn’t the world’s best administrator and had a few grandiosity problems. I am so very, very sad about all this.

Her bag was wedged between her feet. She was trying to decide whether to take out her notebook.

He liked to think big, Ed Levoix said. Not necessarily a bad thing, but he might have been better off sticking closer to home. One circus. With a social mission. Working with needy children here. That’s it.

He poured the beer when it arrived into two glasses and clinked his to hers.

What about embezzlement?

No, no, not that I ever heard. Oh, I don’t know. You’re not recording this, are you? Ed Levoix looked around him. If you are, I won’t say another word.

He leaned in closer. Sometimes, you know, it’s just children, the problems of working with children, they’re so — risky — or organizations that work only with children are. What is one to do? Give anyone who works with children monitoring bracelets? Was it suspect that he didn’t have a team of people working with him? Should he have thought of that? There’s the issue of money and what one can afford. We knew children lived with him, we knew it informally, but where else were some of the ones from out-of-town to go. Maybe he should have boarded them with families and paid the families. Or set up a dormitory? Where? He had space other people don’t have. He didn’t seem like one of those guys who bounce from one child-service organization to another, the creeps. I really don’t know what to think. He seemed very committed to this particular project, not like it was an excuse for — and it was a heck of a lot of work, I’ll tell you that much.

He frowned. Their food arrived, dolloped portions of meat and curried lentils, including a raw beef mixture called kifto, atop a wide tin plate of pancakelike injera, and Ed Levoix dove in, shaking his head, ripping off a piece of injera and swabbing up the meat mixture with it, all with one hand, red spice staining his fingertips. What’s sad is that we won’t be able to fund while there’s this cloud of suspicion. Who knows if the organization’s sustainable, which is a shame for the children.

Did you see him socially?

Oh, once or twice.

He has only been accused, Sara said. Not charged.

Yes, Ed Levoix said, staring at his red fingers. You saw the circus perform, didn’t you? Did you have any contact with him?

I met him in Toronto.

Again, the keen look. Oh, you did, and spoke to him?

Yes.

And?

He seemed intensely committed to the work.

He stared into the middle distance, wiping his stained fingers on his napkin. It’s all so tricky, he said. Moral outrage on the one hand and on the other not wanting to scapegoat and trying to figure out what to do or think.

Then, with a gust of spirit, as if he’d come to some decision: There’s a thing on at the Larsens’ this evening. The people your friend Juliet stayed with. A little soiree. Did they mention it to you? You should come along with me. I’ll let them know. I’m sure they’d be delighted to meet you. There’s someone who may be there. You might want to talk to him, and I know he’ll want to talk to you. If he’s not there, we’ll figure something else out.

At the end of the afternoon, as the light began to soften, Alazar parked the car near a cluster of small shops and pointed across the road to a stretch of open ground backed by trees. When Sara stepped out of the car, the smell of raw meat, flesh and fat, curdled from an open-fronted shop, the wooden sign above its roof outlined by white fairy lights spelling the word
Butchery
. From elsewhere wafted the odour of grilling meat, and the tremolo of a song from a radio, and up on an electrical wire, stretched across the shifting blue of the sky, the receiver and cord from a telephone dangled plainly yet mysteriously.

After lunch, they had gone back to Yitbarek Abera’s house, but the gate was still locked from the outside. From there, they returned to the Agip station, rain smearing across the windshield, hard drops drumming on the roof of the car. As the rain abated, Sara caught sight of Tamrat Asfaw in his dark-green tracksuit, walking on the far side of the road from the direction of town, gnawing on a cob of roasted corn. As he, in turn, with a glance across the road, seemed to catch sight of her, or at least saw something, a white woman through a car window, that brought an irritated flex to his features. From the other direction, a file of children in school uniforms appeared until Tamrat was encircled by them, chattering, wheeling, darting, black heads, lithe limbs. A bus blew past, dirty, mid-century in design. With a baleful glance across the road, Tamrat steered the children up the laneway. Sara wanted to yell after him, This is not a stakeout.

She said to Alazar, I would really like to speak to some of the circus children and if possible to their families. Can you help me arrange this?

I will do it.

Is this your car? she asked as they set off once more, because, returning to it, and him, after her lunch with Ed Levoix, she’d had the sudden feeling that it wasn’t, its interior too impersonal, Alazar’s belongings — money, two cassette tapes — reduced to what he could carry in his small black nylon bag.

I borrow it.

He told her as they drove off that he was waiting to get married until he found a full-time job.

Under an early evening sky now cleared of clouds, amid the bustle of the small, tin-roofed shops, they waited for something to happen on the far side of the road. At last, an old minivan pulled up beside the open area, and the side doors slid wide, and circus performers, in costume, some of whom Sara was beginning to recognize, spilled out. From the driver’s seat, Tamrat exited, and then, also from the back of the van, climbed two men in suit jackets, whose presence felt initially forbidding, until the men began to help unload equipment — mats, speakers, unicycles, an amplifier, musical instruments. It became clear, as they set up, they were musicians, presumably replacing the other, younger musicians who’d fled.

There was no way to make herself invisible. No headscarf would truly hide her; it wouldn’t alter the colour of her skin. Sara had to hope that Tamrat, directing the performers to spread a large tarpaulin over the ground, was too preoccupied to notice her among the stalls on the other side of the road from where he was. The old frisson: how one’s motives, desires, one’s very self could be mistaken without one being able to do anything about it, and come to have a life of their own.

Atop the tarpaulin the children lined a double row of blue mats, then spread a second tarpaulin over the first. People drew close, some running across the road, as Sara did, along with Alazar, once the performance had begun.

Two boys set metal pipes on top of a smallish circular platform mounted on what looked like blocks of wood, and, on these, side by side, they laid wooden boards on which they stood tippily. As in the rehearsal hall the day before, they began to juggle. From the back of the crowd, Sara had to weave between heads to see them. One girl helped another climb up the boys’ bodies to stand, one foot perched on the shoulder of each, all three keeping their balance as they circled white pins through the air. Someone trilled and ululated. The musicians, off to one side, tugged at guitar and bass, creating a twangy, rhythmic accompaniment. From the front of the crowd Tamrat watched, arms gripped across his chest. When Sara glanced beside her, Alazar was grinning. The scent of his body offered a kind of comfort. A boy balanced a wooden chair on his chin, then hooked it by the back legs onto another, and raised them both, building a delicate tower of four chairs in the air. How had all these items, the chairs, the wooden platform, come out of one small van?

After the balancing acts, and the tumbling, bodies soaring horizontally above other bodies, as the light began to fade, two boys lit torches, two each, and were helped onto unicycles by some of the others. Space was cleared for them in front of the tarpaulin. When Sara looked again, Alazar had vanished, and it took her a moment to spot him, near the van, talking to one of the girl performers.

All of this felt suddenly fragile, despite the performers’ daring and courage and engagement, the strength of their bodies. There seemed to be no social message to the show other than shared joy, a surfeit of it. As the boys on their unicycles tossed the flaming torches back and forth, the crowd whooped and clapped. The lure of the circus. How excited Raymond Renaud must have been to bring this joy into being. Yet was the circus an ephemeral curiosity in this place and doomed to vanish? How heartbreaking that would be. Cumulonimbus clouds gathered again on the horizon. A boy in a pink leotard, the chair balancer, stood in the middle of the tarpaulin talking in rapid-fire Amharic, and Alazar, back at her side, was murmuring, Maybe we will speak to Kidsit tomorrow.