‘Then you’ll wait a long time.’
Bunny drummed her fingers. ‘You don’t really fancy her, do you?’
He considered, ‘I do, a bit.’
‘She doesn’t seem your type,’ Bunny ventured.
‘What’s my type?’
‘Someone your intellectual equal. You’re brilliant, CP. You need a woman who can challenge you.’
‘Eleanor does challenge me. She cries. It’s mysterious. I couldn’t cry with a gun to my head.’
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‘If QUIETUS is exposed in the morning papers, popsy, you will bawl. Behind bars, with no hankie.’
‘I’m looking forward to prison.’ Calvin clasped his hands behind his head. ‘I’ll keep my feet on the ground with legirons.’
‘You’ve time for reflective incarceration in 1999. Meanwhile you have a job to do. The future of this planet depends on it, and part of that job is keeping your trap shut. Do let’s make this Eleanor creature your first and last indiscretion. Besides the risk, she’s terribly wet.
Oh, I’m sure she cries. I can see her bursting into tears in the middle of one of Norman’s presentations, overcome by how we can murder innocent babies. You need the constitution for this work. Mark my words, she doesn’t have it.’
‘Which may be to her credit.’
‘Don’t go schmaltzy on me, CP. A woman like that is best off dabbing sticking plasters on little boys’ boo-boos and squeezing fresh lemonade. Calling the kiddies in for din-din. Making pies.’
‘You’re making me hungry.’
‘ Not,’ she continued, ‘meddling in designer viruses. Just you wait.
If you hand her the HIV research, she’ll come back with one or two computer models and her heart breaking. All these weak TB-riddled skeletons covered in herpes, we have to do something.’
‘She’d be right. We do. We will.’
‘Give her a project that’s less important.’
‘Coffee, you mean. Tidying up.’
‘Just not HIV, it’s too crucial.’ At last the older woman couldn’t contain herself. ‘Honestly, CP. I don’t understand what you see in that girl!’
‘She’s warm.’
‘So is a kitty cat.’
‘Or a bunny?’
She flustered, ‘You and I are beyond that.’
‘Eleanor says no one is beyond that.’
‘You’ve claimed to be.’ She bristled. ‘Or have you changed your tune?’
‘Oh, no,’ he assured her. ‘Eleanor and I are chums. Full stop.’
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Bunny visibly relaxed. ‘Well, you had better stay chums. I hope you like her, because now you’re stuck. And she’d better not get too sweet on you, because some women finally weary of a peck on the cheek. You’ve given her quite a weapon. She can ruin us. I should simply upchuck if we were undone by a scorned female.’
Calvin sighed. ‘Madame Mort, can we clarify something here? I did not tell her. She found out.’
‘Whose fault was that?’
‘Mine,’ he admitted. ‘It’s true I could have shot her then and there.
But leaving aside my weak stomach, the police might actually investigate the disappearance of a mzungu. Instead, luring a nigger-loving DC Democrat into a holocaust conspiracy is quite a coup, don’t you think?’
‘An an intellectual exercise it’s commendable, but you cheated.
You didn’t convince her; she’s smitten.’
‘QUIETUS concluded long ago that it doesn’t matter how you do it so long as it works. And I’m afraid we have a much graver leak than our friend Ms Merritt.’ He told her about Threadgill.
‘How can you be so sure flavour of the month wasn’t in on the burglary? She had a key.’
‘She says she wasn’t.’
Bunny snorted. ‘She says.’
‘That’s right. So I believe her.’
‘You can be such a pushover, CP.’
‘I’m a good judge of character, and Eleanor still has some. I vetted everyone in the Corpse, including you, my duckie. Has any one of them finked? And I have it on good authority that Eleanor Merritt is made of harder stuff than she appears.’
‘On whose authority?’
‘My dead housekeeper’s.’
It wasn’t easy to do, but that shut Bunny Morton right up.
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14
Paying the Piper
‘After all this hugger-mugger, you go out with an organ grinder and Malthus on a string with a tin cup? Or do you hold 5,000-dollars-a-plate fund-raising dinners for the promotion of disease?’
They were curling out of Wilson Airport. As the twin-prop gained altitude Calvin relaxed, all signs of human infestation reduced to scabby rash. In flying, even rivets on wings decrease velocity; he imagined that soon the nuts down on the planet would be sufficiently numerous to slow the earth’s orbit by several miles a second, an aeronautical inefficiency termed parasite drag.
‘We don’t tip our hand, if that’s what you’re asking. Follow my lead; shy away from direct questions. And Eleanor, you’re going to have to control yourself. Remember that we don’t have to fall in love; we just want his money. Save the ACLU rhetoric for after hours.’
‘In other words, we’re about to pay a call on a bigoted old coot.
I’m supposed to cross my legs and sugar my tea while he trashes Africans as subhuman breeding machines.’
‘Precisely.’
‘I don’t think I’m qualified for this work.’
‘It’s good for your education. Spend too much time in aid cliques concocting synonyms for blackmail because extortion is less racist and you get a distorted picture of the rest of the world, which is still carping contentedly about coons, nignogs, steelies and baboons.’
‘Are you?’
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‘I think every race on earth is chock-a-block with ham-headed degenerates, you know that. We’re all wogs.’
‘Right. The new broad-mindedness.’ She sounded sour.
‘Set yourself an assignment,’ he proposed. ‘Try not to find Bradley-Cox deplorable; try to find him interesting.’
Calvin cut a sumi arc through the sky like a brush across paper, one more suggestion of a goodness that bore no relation to justice.
Eleanor’s religion would have to transform. Grace; light; colour: they were beyond fairness.
‘Do you mention QUIETUS by name? It’s a give-away.’
‘In public we refer to our enterprise as the NAADP: New Angles on Active Demographic Prophylaxis. But that’s not what it really stands for.’
‘Which is?’
Calvin grinned. ‘The National Association for the Advancement of Dead People.’
Despite herself, Eleanor laughed.
Once landed in the Aberdares, Calvin briefed her on their quarry as Wendell Bradley-Cox’s driver chauffeured them from the airstrip.
‘BC is seventy. Resigning his commission in the Gurkhas, he made a bundle coffee-farming, and got most of the money out before Independence. Lost the shamba to Kenyatta, but kept the house. In the meantime he’s invested in an international credit investigation company, making oodles off other people’s bankruptcies when everyone else is losing his shirt. I’ll give him this, he made his own fortune, which is more than you can say for your average Kenya cowboy. One ungrateful daughter, gaga with a guru in CA: dead loss. Wife of twenty-five years left him last year for another woman.
Life has gone a bit fast for BC. He’s old-fashioned. Cannot fathom what’s happened to the world, Kenya, his life. You won’t have to push him hard to admit that things are getting worse generally, since they have certainly gotten worse personally, and these perceptions have a way of travelling in tandem. Wealthy, maybe, but a chap of modest needs: vodka and a new pair of slippers. No family, no farm—our man needs a purpose. We aim to oblige.’
Bradley-Cox’s manor was constructed on a generous colonial scale when Kenya was still frontier: all the wood and 191
land in the world,
the architecture was an attitude. The veranda skirted three-quarters of the house with a possessive view of the Aberdares. In the yard, a gardener desultorily nubbled a hedge clipped the week before: one of those large staffs with nothing to do, but who had to keep up the appearance of industry. A young girl swept stray eucalyptus leaves from the drive. Madam had fled; the young mistress was in America; no doubt BC’s decadent dinners were a thing of the past, the silver polished every Sunday and then tucked in a drawer. Their arrival drew a sidelong glance from the yard workers. BC didn’t have many visitors these days. In Happy Valley, the whites were no longer up to much mischief.
There were dogs, everywhere, and when Eleanor got out of the car they pawed her dress with mud prints. She pushed them off with pretence of affection, until a haggard but gentle-faced man whistled them from the porch. He was dressed, but the striped cotton shirt with its tail out and the rumpled beige trousers suggested py-jamas. Calvin was right about the slippers, with crushed heels.
Bradley-Cox shuffled towards them, shsh-shsh.
Calvin introduced himself. ‘We met in—’
‘I know,’ BC interrupted. ‘Well, don’t just stand there. Come in.’
For an old man with little to attend to, he was curiously impatient.
Though it was only two in the afternoon, he met them vodka in hand. Eleanor accepted one herself because people like Wendell were suspicious of tee-totallers. She assessed him as one of those IV
drinkers: drip, drip, drip, all day long.
Despite the spectacular weather, Wendell led them to his sitting room, drapes drawn. Eleanor pined for the veranda, the wicker rocker with its mountain view, for the interior oppressed her. The mahogany and oriental carpeting were funereal; the brown glass eyes of koodoo heads looked bereaved. She couldn’t figure why such a well-kept room felt shabby, unless mental stagnation could settle on furniture like dust.
While a houseboy padded in with a tray of tomato sandwiches—BC would no more introduce him than he would his spat-ula—Wendell presented his dogs by name, all eight of them.
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‘You a hunter?’ asked Calvin.
‘Oh, I must have bagged my last trophy twenty years ago,’ said Wendell. ‘I dropped that eland, and when I approached her she was still alive. Animals are so expressive when they’re in pain. They know they’re dying. She looked at me as if to say, Why did you do this to me? That was the last time I killed an animal. I wouldn’t do it again.’
Yet the expression he described was his own: confused, wrung, innocent. Much as she had braced herself to bite her tongue and swallow her anger at racist claptrap, Wendell inspired nothing of the kind. His face had the misty, lost look of wounded game—chest heaving, ear twitching, flies beginning to settle on a beast already too far gone to flick them away. Maybe having your wife leave you for a lesbian after twenty-five years was something like being shot.
‘Now, people,’ Wendell went on, ‘I could see hunting them. People are vicious. An animal never comes at you. As long as you leave it be, it passes you by.’
‘Have you ever,’ Eleanor ventured, ‘looked a man in the eye?
When he was dying?’
‘Only the Japanese,’ he dismissed. ‘I don’t think they count. From what I saw in the war, that race is simply not human. We would come upon their POWs when they retreated. With a lady present, I hesitate to describe…Oh, it was dreadful.’ Wendell shuddered. ‘Men are the only animals that kill for fun.’
‘Cats,’ said Eleanor.
‘You know, you’re right,’ said Wendell, looking at Eleanor as if for the first time. ‘I don’t care for cats. Don’t keep them. No loyalty.
All very lovey-lovey so long as you feed them. But happy as you please, they’ll patter off to anyone else with a tin.’
‘Did you know,’ intervened Calvin, ‘that a female cat has an average of 2.8 surviving kittens, two litters a year? So say you start with two cats, and you don’t run any of the pussies over with a truck, by the end of ten years, you’re stocking Nine Lives Liver and Bacon for eighty million kitties.’
‘Crikey!’ Wendell exclaimed. ‘They’re as bad as the Kikuyu!’
That was the idea.
‘You hunt yourself, Piper?’
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‘I cropped elephants in Uganda for the game department.’
‘Don’t know how you could bear it. You biltong the cow, and then you have to take out the babies, don’t you?’
‘Yes, or they’d starve. But it’s for the elephants’ own good. You’ve seen what they do to their own habitat if they’re allowed to run ri-ot—’
‘Oh, yes. Oh, it’s terrible. Still—’ He stroked the Lab in his lap. ‘I couldn’t shoot the babies. I couldn’t look them in the eyes.’
Eleanor thought, this man loves animals and hates Africans, then tried Calvin’s exercise: Wendell wasn’t warped; he was interesting.
‘You know, when they outlawed hunting in Kenya,’ Wendell volunteered, ‘they also banned skeet and trap?’
‘Why was that?’
‘My neighbour Tempest-Stewart asked a minister himself. The MP replied, “Well, they have a right to live, too.”’ Wendell laughed until his pupils glistened. ‘They thought skeet and trap were animals!
Can you imagine, it took two years to get the law repealed.’
‘How’s the land managed here?’ Calvin inquired. ‘Still good-sized holdings?’
‘What do you think? Most Europeans have been bought out by Moi and his flunkies, for spare change. Who do you suppose oversees Moi’s shambas, the only farms around here that still get a bean or two out of the country?’
‘I can guess,’ said Calvin.
‘ Mzungus! As for the rest, the plots get carved up every generation.
I don’t see where it will stop. So help me God, it’s a disgrace what they’ve done to this country. They say this was the birthplace of civilization. It’s hard to believe. Something awful must have happened.’
‘What’s the water situation?’
‘Frightful. We’ve our own bore hole, and the time was you couldn’t sink a bore hole within half a mile of another, and even then with government permission. But now with a little baksheesh—’ He rubbed his fingers. ‘They’re drilled like pins in a cushion. The table has sunk so low that our hole, which used to pump 10,000 gallons a month, now only pumps two.’
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Wendell refreshed their drinks, with a disparaging glance at Eleanor’s full glass.
‘I was warned you chaps wanted money,’ Wendell returned. ‘So get on with it. What for?’
‘The exponential rise in human population in this century,’ Calvin began, ‘is the most massive biological transformation this planet has undergone since the last ice age. Every year erosion, overgrazing and salinity are destroying three million acres of productive farmland worldwide. People, Wendell, are worse than elephants.’
‘I’ve heard all this before. So?’
‘Ninety per cent of population growth in the next hundred years is expected to occur in the Third World. Africa alone will have multiplied itself four times in the second half of this century. Nigeria, for example, will rise from a population of thirty million in 1950 to three hundred million in 2025; a tenfold increase in a single lifetime.
At that point it will displace the United States as the fourth most populous country in the world— Nigeria, Wendell. You know what it’s like here—can it afford to get worse?’
Wendell was fidgeting with the dog.
‘Meanwhile,’ Calvin continued, though even the Labrador was beginning to whine, ‘fertility has plummeted in developed countries to below the replacement rate of 2.2. Only because of age structure and immigration have populations from our own part of the world not yet begun to shrink. The fertility rate in Germany is 1.4. Italy? A Catholic country? 1.2.’
He finally got BC’s attention. ‘I’m gobsmacked.’
It was one of Calvin’s favourite figures. ‘Small wonder that if
you go to New York City now, it’s virtually impossible to find a conolli in Little Italy; but you can buy plenty of eggrolls. Have you been to London lately?’
‘Two years back.’
‘A lot of Pakistanis on the street? Running all the shops? Iraqis?
West Indians?’
‘Not an Englishman in twenty.’
‘It’s a dying race, Wendell. And that’s just the start. Population growth where economies are drowning will encourage massive migration to countries that still have their heads above water. Are you getting the picture? Wendell: we are being 195
overrun. Third World countries may not have nuclear bombs, but they have much more powerful weapons: they have babies.’
Wendell made a gesture of casual despair such as only a man of seventy can afford. This talk of 2025 might have been of the Pleisto-cene or Mars. He would never submit to such a year, and of that reprieve Eleanor could only be envious. Like most of her generation, she was afraid of the future. How remarkable it must have been to live in the nineteenth century, with its myth of progress.
However, the money Wendell kept in Britain must have grown as abstract as 2025—with his vodka and slippers? Calvin was offering him a last chance to spend it, and the very old and the very young share a devil-may-care. Since the future is real to neither, they are both rash.
‘What are you suggesting?’ asked BC.
‘I can’t tell you.’
Wendell rubbed his chin in baffled amusement. ‘You expect me to hand you a blank cheque. To do whatever you please?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Cheeky chap.’
‘I dare say.’
‘You’re with…one of those aid capers? Because you people have been pouring money into this family planning palaver for years, and from the sound of your own song and dance it hasn’t done a speck of good.’
‘I couldn’t agree more. I was the head of the Population Division at USAID. I was fired.’
‘Goodness.’
‘I broke the rules. I don’t know your views on abortion, but I shipped off vacuum aspirators like Hoovers to Hiltons.’
‘I wouldn’t want my daughter to have one,’ Wallace admitted.
‘But if it meant a few less watu—’
‘I wouldn’t want your daughter to have one either.’