The Mission Song (22 page)

Stay exactly where you are, Brian dear. Help is on its way to you now.

‘That Pitman’s, old boy? Looks more like a roll of barbed wire to me.’

Maxie is leaning over me, Bogey-style, his hands on the arms of my hot-seat as he peers at what Mr Anderson likes to call my Babylonian cuneiform. Spider has disappeared, sent packing by Maxie. Philip in pink shirt and red braces is standing in the doorway leading to the corridor. I feel dirty and don’t know why. It’s as if I’d made love to Penelope after she’s come back from one of her weekend seminars.

‘My home brew, Skipper,’ I reply. ‘A bit of speedwriting, a bit of shorthand, and a large chunk of me’—which is what I say to all my clients, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s never let them think your notebook is a document of record or you’ll end up in court or worse.

‘Read it for us again, old boy, will you.’

I read it again to them as ordered. In English, from my notes as before, omitting no detail however slight, et cetera. Maxie and Philip are annoying me, although I’m careful not to let it show. I’ve already told them that without Mr Anderson’s sophisticated sound-enhancer we could go on all night, but that doesn’t deter them, oh no. They need to listen to the
actual sound
on my headphones, which strikes me as rather irrational, given that neither of them speaks a word of my below-the-line languages. The passage they are obsessing about is the seven garbled seconds just after the first reference to the big cigar-smoking Dutchman, and if I can’t make head or tail of it, why on earth should they suppose
they
can?

I hand Philip my headphones, thinking they might like an ear each, but Philip hogs them both. He hears it once, he hears it three times. And each time he hears it, he gives Maxie this knowing nod. Then he hands Maxie the headphones and orders me to play the passage yet again and finally Maxie gives him a knowing nod back, which only confirms what I’ve been suspecting all along:
they know what they’re listening for and they haven’t told me
. And there is nothing makes a top interpreter look sillier, and more
useless
, than not being fully briefed by his employers. Furthermore it’s
my
tape, not theirs. It’s
my
trophy. It was me who wrested it from Haj’s grasp, not them.
I
fought Haj for it, it was
our
duel.

‘Great stuff, old boy,’ Maxie assures me.

‘My pleasure, Skipper,’ I reply, which is only polite. But what I’m thinking is: don’t pat me on the back, thank you, I don’t need it, not even from you.

‘Totally brilliant,’ Philip purrs.

Then both of them have gone, though I only hear the one pair of footsteps bounding up the cellar stairs because Philip is this soundless consultant, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he had no shadow either.

For what seems a long time after their departure, I did nothing. I took off my headset, wiped my face with my handkerchief, put my headset back on and, having sat with my chin in my fist for a while, played myself the seven-second splurge for the nth time. What had Maxie and Philip heard that I wasn’t to be trusted with? I slow-motioned, I fast-forwarded, and I was none the wiser: three to four beats with a
u
at the beginning, a three- or four-syllable word with -
ère
or -
aire
at the end, and I could think of a dozen words straight off with an ending that would fit:
débonnaire, légionnaire, militaire
, any
air
you liked to play. And after it, a splurge
ak
, such as
attaque
.

I removed my headset yet again, buried my face in my hands and whispered into the darkness. My actual words elude me to this day. To say I had feelings of actual betrayal is premature. The most I will admit to is a sense of dismay creeping over me, the origins of which I was determined not to examine. In the anticlimactic aftermath of my single combat with Haj, I was wiped out and flat on the deck. I even wondered whether our duel was a fantasy I had cooked up in my imagination, until I remembered how surveillance-conscious Haj had been from the moment he arrived in the guest suite. I was
not
, however—contrary to anything Penelope’s bosom friend Paula would maintain—
in denial
. I hadn’t even begun to work out what it was I was denying. If I had a sense of letting anyone down, it was turned inward. I had let
me
down, which is how I described my condition over the ether to Hannah, in what I now regard as the lowest point in my graph of that momentous day.

Sam? It’s me. Brian. What’s cooking?

Nothing is cooking. Sam is not at her post. I was counting on a bit of womanly sympathy, but all I’m hearing over my headset is background male chatter. She hasn’t even bothered to switch her mike off, which I consider somewhat careless and insecure. I glance at Aunt Imelda’s watch. The recess is running into overtime. Haj’s inconclusive account of his father’s flirtation with a rival outfit run by a fat Dutch fucker who smokes cigars seems to have put the cat among the pigeons in a big way. Serves him right for calling me
zebra
. Spider still hasn’t come back from wherever he went. There’s too much about the geography of this house that nobody tells me. Like where the ops room is. Or where Anton’s surveillance team keeps its lookouts. Where Jasper is hiding away. Where Benny is. But I don’t need to know, do I? I’m just the interpreter. Everybody needs to know except me.

I glance at the Underground plan. Haj and Dieudonné have split up. Poor Dieudonné, all alone in the guest suite. Probably having a quick pray. Haj has taken himself back to the gazebo, the scene of his supposed triumph. If only he knew! I imagine him staring out to sea with his goggle eyes, congratulating himself on having queered the Mwangaza’s pitch for him. Franco’s pinlight is out. Still closeted with the Mwangaza in the royal apartments, presumably. Out of bounds. Archive purposes only.

I need sound. I don’t like the accusing voices that are starting to raise themselves inside my head, Hannah’s foremost. I’m not here to be criticised. I did my best for my employers. What was I supposed to do? Pretend I hadn’t heard Haj say what he said? Keep it to myself? I’m here to do a job and be paid for it. Cash. Even if it’s a pittance compared with what they’re paying Jasper. I’m an interpreter. They talk, I render. I don’t stop rendering people when they say wrong things. I don’t censor, edit, revise or invent, not the way certain of my colleagues do. I give it straight. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be Mr Anderson’s favourite son. I wouldn’t be a genius in my field. Legal or commercial, civil or military: I render everybody equally and impartially, regardless of colour, race and creed. I’m the bridge, Amen and out.

I try Sam again. Still away from her post. The background male babble in the ops room has stopped. Instead, thanks to Sam’s carelessness, I hear Philip. Moreover, he is talking clearly enough for me to hear what he’s saying. Who he’s talking to is anybody’s guess, and his voice is coming off at least one wall before it reaches Sam’s mike, but that doesn’t affect my hearing. I’m on such a low-high after my duel with Haj that if a fly coughed into my headset I could tell you its age and sex. The surprise is that Philip’s voice is so different from the high-gloss version I associate with him that for the opening bars I’m actually chary of identifying him. He is talking to
Mark
, and to judge by Philip’s imperious tone, Mark is an underling:

Philip: I want who his doctor is, I want the diagnosis, what treatment the patient’s getting if any, when they expect to discharge him if they do, who he’s receiving at his bed of pain and who’s with him apart from his wives, mistresses and bodyguards . . . No, I
don’t
know which bloody hospital he’s in, Mark, that’s your job, it’s what you’re paid for, you’re the man on the spot. Well, how many heart hospitals are there in Cape Town, for Christ’s sake?

End of phone call. Top freelance consultants are too important to say goodbye. Philip needs to talk to Pat. He has dialled a new number and Pat is who he asks for when he gets through.

Philip: The name is
Marius
, he’s Dutch, fat, fortyish, smokes cigars. He was recently in Nairobi and for all I know he’s there now. He attended business school in Paris and he represents our old friend the Union Minière des Grand Lacs. Who is he otherwise? (
ninety seconds in which Philip intermittently indicates that yes he is listening and making notes, as I am. Finally:
) Thank you very much, Pat. Perfect. Exactly what I feared, but worse. Just what we didn’t want to know. I’m very grateful. Goodbye.

So now we know. It wasn’t
débonnaire
or
légionnaire
or
militaire
. It was Minière and it wasn’t
attaque
, it was
Lacs
. Haj was talking about a mining consortium of which the fat Dutchman was the African representative. I catch sight of Spider standing the other side of his Meccano grid, checking his turntables, switching tapes and marking up new ones. I lift an earpiece and smile in order to be sociable.

‘Looks like we’re going to have a busy lunchtime, then, Brian, thanks to you,’ says Spider with mysterious Welsh relish. ‘Quite a lot of activity planned, one way and another.’

‘What sort of activity?’

‘Well that would be telling, now, wouldn’t it? Never trade a secret, Mr Anderson advises, remember? You’ll always get the short end of the bargain.’

I replace my headset and take a longer look at the Underground plan. The Mwangaza’s mauve pinlight is taunting me like a brothel invitation.
Come on, Salvo. What’s stopping you? School rules?
Out of bounds unless Philip personally tells you otherwise. Archival, not operational. We record but don’t listen. Not if we’re
zebra
interpreters. So if
I
’m not cleared to listen, who is? Mr Anderson, who doesn’t speak a word of anything but north country English? Or how about the no-balls Syndicate, as Haj called them: do
they
listen? As a diversion perhaps. Over the port and Havanas in their Channel Island fastness.

Am I really thinking like this? Has Haj’s sedition got under my skin without my noticing? Is my African heart beating more loudly than it’s letting on? Is Hannah’s? If not, why is my right hand moving with the same deliberation with which it fed Penelope’s
coq au vin
into the waste-disposal unit? I hesitate, but not because of any last-minute pangs of conscience. If I press the switch, will sirens go off all over the house? Will the mauve pinlight on the Underground plan flash out a distress signal? Will Anton’s anoraks come thundering down the cellar steps to get me?

I press it anyway, and enter the DRAWING ROOM of the forbidden royal apartments. Franco is speaking Swahili. Reception perfect, no echoes or noises off. I imagine thick carpets, curtains, soft furniture. Franco relaxed. Perhaps they’ve given him a whisky. Why do I think whisky? Franco is a whisky man. The conversation is between Franco and the Dolphin. There is no firm evidence as yet of the Mwangaza’s presence, although something in their voices tells me he’s not far away.

Franco: We have heard that in this war many aircraft will be used.

Dolphin: That is true.

Franco: I have a brother. I have many brothers.

Dolphin: You are blessed.

Franco: My best brother is a good fighter, but to his shame has only daughters. Four wives, five daughters.

Dolphin: (
a proverb
) No matter how long the night, the day is sure to come.

Franco: Of these daughters, the eldest has a cyst on her neck which hampers her prospects of marriage. (
Grunts of exertion confuse me until I realise that Franco is reaching for the same spot on his own lame body
) If the Mwangaza will fly my brother’s daughter to Johannesburg for confidential treatment, my brother will have good feelings towards the Middle Path.

Dolphin: Our Enlightener is a devoted husband and the father of many children. Transport will be arranged.

A clinking of glass seals the promise. Mutual expressions of esteem.

Franco: This brother is a man of ability, popular among his men. When the Mwangaza is Governor of South Kivu, he will be well advised to select my brother as his Chief of Police for all the region.