AK Page 16

  “I see the black lion,” he called.

  Major Dasu turned, let his eyes flick over the man and on to the AK. Paul could feel his anger. The man lowered his arms.

  “Silly kid went and pulled a gun on me,” he said, easy, amiable, as if he were now among friends.

  “He was in charge of the attack,” said Paul. “He gave the Deathsingers their orders. I watched him the whole time. And six days back he was watching the house where Michael Kagomi told me to go if anything happened to him.”

  “Kid’s been dreaming,” said the man.

  “That time he told me if I didn’t clear off the Deathsingers would come to my hut,” said Paul. “He might know what’s happened to my father. And your cousin.”

  “What’s your name?” said Major Dasu.

  The man shook his head. Major Dasu shrugged and called an order. Three men ran up.

  “Take charge of this fellow,” he said. “Search him. When you’ve done that get hold of a prisoner and tell him you’ll let him go if he tells you everything he knows about this man.”

  “He’s got a flick-knife in his jacket pocket,” said Paul.

  They led the man away. Major Dasu looked at Paul. “I told you, no guns.”

  “I didn’t shoot anyone. I just took the sound system out, that’s all.”

  “You did that?”

  “Sure.”

  Major Dasu snorted—probably the nearest a Baroba ever came to a laugh.

  “Deathsingers thought it was us,” he said. “That’s why they broke so easy.”

  “It was us,” said Paul. “Us Nagalai.”

  “You’re Kagomi’s son all right. You don’t let go of an idea. All right. But just keep it out of sight from now on. Off you go.”

  “You’ll tell me if you find out anything about my father?”

  “Sure.”

  He turned away. Paul folded the butt, unclipped the magazine, slid the gun up under his shirt, and covered the muzzle with his forearm. To account for the awkward posture he clutched his elbow with his free hand, as though he, too, had been hurt in the fighting, and made his way back to the mask seller’s stall. She refused to hand his basket over until he’d repaid the ten gurai she’d given him, saying he hadn’t stayed to guard her stall till all the fighting was over. She was a mean woman. All around the market people were rejoicing in the defeat of the Deathsingers, especially the traders who’d done no fighting and suffered no damage to their stalls. Paul hid the gun among the rolls of cloth and went to look for Jilli.

  The Fulu women were standing in an excited group among their burnt-out stalls, twittering their triumph, bandaging each other’s wounds but hardly seeming to notice their pain or loss. Efoni said she hadn’t seen Jilli since she’d left with Paul to watch the Deathsingers assemble. By now a makeshift hospital for the badly hurt was being set up, but she wasn’t there either. He tried the bar where Major Dasu’s messengers had waited and questioned anyone who would listen to him, with no luck. Major Dasu was deep in conference with the other gang leaders and Madam Ga, but one of his aides helped Paul find the actual messengers. One had bicycled off to fetch the Scorpions, but the one who’d stayed said Jilli had been going back toward the market.

  It was dusk now. Paul worked systematically along the stalls, searching and asking. He found her well after dark. At that edge of the market, traders dumped their broken stuff and rotten fruit and other trash for the shanty children to pick over. Paul heard the cry of discovery, the clack of children’s voices, the note of both shock and thrill. Sick with certainty he went to look.

  The children had pulled her out from the garbage and laid her on the ground. Paul shoved them aside and knelt. There was light from a stall nearby, but the shadows of the jostling children covered her and he could barely see. Touch told him that her face was all drying blood, her eyes glued tight so that he couldn’t lift the lids. There seemed to be no pulse or breath. He slid his arms beneath her thighs and shoulders and with the children’s help staggered to his feet.

  “Bring my basket. Two gurai,” he said and lurched towards the market. It was no use. She must be dead.

  It is my doing, he thought. Mine and my mother’s. It is because I sent her with the message. It is because I used my gun. It is because I remembered her and saw the burning hut. My mother didn’t like that. She’s a jealous bitch. She wants me for herself, alone. Soon as I’m learning to love someone else …

  His right arm was slipping from its hold. With an effort he shrugged Jilli’s body into a new position. At the jar of movement he thought he heard her moan.

  10

  There were no medicines. Efoni cleaned Jilli up and laid her with the others in a cleared space between the burned stalls. They wrapped her in a half-charred blanket given by one of the weaver women. She had been clubbed, thrown on the rubbish heap and left for dead. Paul squatted at her side hour after hour, holding her thin-boned hand and trying to guess her needs, bathing her face or coaxing a few drops between the split and swollen lips, easing her blanket loose when she seemed feverish and wrapping it back before she chilled.

  Grim or sobbing, some carrying flashlights, people moved through the hospital space as they looked for missing members of their families. The patients muttered, moaned, or lay still. Two of them died that night. From the talk around him Paul learned that eleven other market people had been killed. Nobody knew how many Deathsingers, and the friendly gangs had taken care of their own.

  Tones changed as the night went by. At first the talk was excited, exultant, but later, at least around the hospital space, the voices quieted, sombre with the sense of loss, doubtful about tomorrow. Most of the Deathsingers had got away. This time the Scorpions’ ambush had taken them unawares. They had allies in the army, friends in Basso-Iskani’s government. They had power on their side. How would they try to use it?

  In the small hours Jilli’s body went limp. Paul thought she’d died, too, till he found her faint pulse, slower than before but steadier, and guessed she had slipped into real sleep. But as he eased his hand free her fingers tightened, so he stretched out on the ground beside her and dozed until dawn.

  At first light he went to the stand-pipe. The Oni-oni were in control, but making no charge, and the line was already long, with the market people expecting more trouble and filling their flasks early. He returned to find that a doctor had arrived, a pudgy Indian with a turban working his way down the line of wounded, resetting broken bones and bathing wounds with antiseptic. There wasn’t much else he could do. When he came to Jilli he knelt beside her, felt her pulse, bathed her wounds, and with his fingertips explored the bruises beneath her blood-matted hair.

  “Fractured, almost certainly,” he said.

  “She going be okay? She getting better?”

  The doctor shrugged.

  “You take her now to big hospital, please?”

  The doctor looked at him with soft, sad eyes.

  “How much?” said Paul. “Fifty dollar? Hundred dollar?”

  The doctor’s eyebrows rose almost to his turban but his eyes stayed sad.

  “You have that kind of money?”

  Paul nodded.

  “Thirty will be enough,” said the doctor. “It is not for me, I must inform you. My name is Dr. Singh and I work for Save the Children. I am due to go to Olo tomorrow, but when I heard of the trouble in the market I came to see what I could do. I have no facilities in Dangoum, but for thirty dollars I think I can get your friend a bed in the General Hospital, and for a few more dollars a week see that she is cared for. The hospital is of course free, but in this dreadful country everything has a price. Everything except death. Perhaps what has happened to your friend is the price for something.”

  “Yes,” said Paul.

  “We will need a litter. I will see to the other patients first.”

  “My thanks, oh my bes
t thanks.”

  The doctor smiled at him and turned to the next patient. By the time he came back Paul had constructed an adequate litter from the debris of the smashed stalls. They eased Jilli onto it, stacked the satchel and the basket of cloths around her, and carried her out to the doctor’s battered Jeep. Paul sat in the back to steady the litter as they eased through the first narrow streets, but when they reached the nearest avenue they found the entrance to it barred, with the cars that had come before them being ordered by soldiers to turn and go back. It was an awkward manoeuvre, and the doctor was still waiting his turn when Paul heard the wail of sirens. A moment later a cavalcade of limousines and outriders flashed up the avenue toward the palace. A helicopter drubbed overhead.

  “These must be the OAU observers arriving to see that all is peaceful and beautiful in Dangoum,” said the doctor. “You chose a somewhat tactless day for your fracas in the market.”

  The roadblock in the next avenue was normal, with the soldiers letting cars through for twenty gurai. They barely glanced at Jilli. The hospital was a glistening silver-glass tower right at the top of the avenue. Dr. Singh negotiated their way in—five gurai for the doorman, twenty for the receptionist to listen to them, another fifty for her to make out a file and send them up to the ward. Then a wait in a lobby until an administrator came to tell them there were no beds free. Five dollars for him, and three for the ward sister—why, there was a bed after all! Just a misunderstanding, Dr. Singh. The sister had showed up so fast that it was as if she could smell the money, and the consultant came almost as soon. Ten dollars for him.

  Nothing for the nurses who undressed Jilli, clucking over her wounds, and then put her into a hospital nightdress and tucked her into a spotless-seeming bed. The consultant muttered to Dr. Singh about X rays, felt her pulse, examined her head. Dr. Singh beckoned Paul aside.

  “Dr. Anchang is a fine doctor,” he whispered. “Do not despise him for taking a bribe—how can he live on his state pay? He will care for your friend as well as it can be done in Dangoum. You have been lucky. See how many nurses there are, how clean the ward is? Even the air conditioning is working! This is because the OAU observers will be brought here tomorrow, this being the sort of thing the government wishes them to observe, eh? I have said your friend was hit by a truck. She is the daughter of friends of mine who are out of the country and you are their adopted son. They do not believe any of this, of course, but they will wish me to think well of them and put in good reports.”

  One day if you are lucky, Michael had once said, you will meet a really good man or woman and then you will know that there is hope for the rest of us. Paul hadn’t cried for years. He was a Warrior. Even last night, when he’d been carrying Jilli down through the market, certain she was dead, his eyes had stayed dry. Now tears streamed, uncontrollable. He fumbled in his satchel for money.

  “Oh, no,” said Dr. Singh, smiling. “I am here to give, not to take. Keep your money for these good nurses, who need it. I think your friend will recover, with their help. Perhaps we will meet again. Good-bye.”

  He shook hands with Paul, then with the consultant, and left. Paul found a stool and sat by Jilli’s bed, holding her limp hand. He couldn’t see that she was breathing, but every now and then a few bubbles would form between her bulging lips and show him she was alive. Other patients shuffled around, or lay and slept. Outside the window, ten stories below, he could see the top of the avenue, the curve of the Circus and the moat and part of the mound the palace stood on. After an hour the sister, a square, frowning Naga woman, just like a market trader apart from her uniform, noticed him.

  “You better go now,” she said. “We’ve got to get things ready for these bigwigs tomorrow. No visiting till day after that.”

  “Is she going to get better? When will you know?”

  “Got to wait for the X rays. Maybe she’ll wake up and not remember anything.”

  “She’ll be frightened if I’m not here. She’s never been in a place like this. She’s straight from the Strip.”

  “Okay, okay. We’ll tell her you’ll be back. What’s your name?”

  “Paul Kagomi.”

  He said it without thinking, as though it had been one of the teachers at Tsheba asking him. All his concern was with Jilli—nothing else mattered. The sister froze. Her eyes rolled right and left.

  “You know Michael Kagomi?” she muttered.

  He looked at her, trying to read her face. She’d taken three dollars to let Jilli into her ward—what else mightn’t she do for money? Michael was Naga, like her, but there were Nagai in the army, and the DDA. He thought of Dr. Singh. Hope for the rest of us.

  “My father,” he whispered.

  “Okay. Come back tomorrow, four in the afternoon. These OAU fellows will have gone by then. The radiographer, she’s my cousin—we’ll have the X rays done. And listen, those scum at the entrance, don’t you pay them anything. You’ve got a message for Sister Samora in Algeria Ward, tell them. And think up another name for yourself, okay?”

  He thanked her and left. On his way back to the market he saw another helicopter coming from the direction of the airport and settling down toward the palace. More observers? What would they see? What they were shown, of course—a clean ward in a hospital, scrubbed children singing in a school, soldiers helping dig an irrigation ditch. What did they care about Jilli, broken and mindless? About Michael Kagomi’s battered hands on the grille of his cell? Unless you shoved these things right under their noses they’d look the other way.

  He trudged on. The AK seemed intolerably heavy in its basket, a burden to be carried, a secret to be hidden, a shame—he’d never felt like that about it before.

  The smashed tape deck hadn’t been replaced so the speakers were silent, but it wasn’t only because of that that the market felt strange. The few customers who’d come were in a hurry to buy and get clear, and the traders milled around in groups, muttering, gossiping, snarling arguments to and fro. The liquor sellers were holding a furious meeting—they’d only opened up under pressure from the Deathsingers, who’d then wrecked their stalls in their retreat, smashing all the bottles they couldn’t carry away. It was the coppersmiths’ fault for starting the trouble in the first place. Quite a few traders seemed to feel like that, but mostly they were being shouted down.

  Paul threaded his way up to the Fulu section, found Efoni and told her what had happened to Jilli. Then he went to look for one of Major Dasu’s men, in case the man in the fawn suit had said anything about Michael. Up by the scene of the main fighting a crowd had gathered, a ring of people watching something at the centre. Wriggling between legs, Paul saw that a TV crew had arrived and were interviewing Madam Ga, who was standing in front of the cameraman, speaking in her usual commanding voice, sweeping the crowd with her gestures into cries of agreement and approval before pausing for the interpreter. Paul looked around the ring for one of the Scorpions, but couldn’t see any. He was about to worm his way out to hunt elsewhere when a man pushed through and ran up to Madam Ga. The TV people tried to shoo him away but Madam Ga intervened and began to listen to his message. The interviewer, a European, took the chance to come over and talk to the man with the microphone, close to where Paul stood.

  “Great, eh?” Paul heard him say. “She’s a natural. Shame it’s all about only water.”

  Madam Ga held up her hands. Everyone fell silent.

  “Listen here,” she called. “The soldiers are coming. Don’t know what for, but we don’t want them here. We can’t fight the soldiers. But we can go and talk to them. Come with me. Don’t bring any weapons. Don’t try and fight. Follow me.”

  She gathered her robe around her and strode off. The ring of people opened to let her through and then jostled after her, engulfing the TV people and separating them from each other. Paul found himself shoved up against the interviewer, a bony man with a ginger beard, who was calling out over the
heads of the crowd “Hey! What was all that about?”

  “Soldiers coming,” said Paul. “Madam Ga going to argue with them.”

  “Thanks. Derek! Bim!”

  He started to wave his arm to his friends to gather.

  “Please, mister,” said Paul. “You know Joel Funk?”

  “Joel, sure. How … Bim, kid here tells me the army are coming and Madam Ga’s gone off to face them out. Get what you can, but keep out of trouble. We don’t want ourselves slung out of the country over a squabble about water rights. Not worth it, just for that. Okay? Sorry, kid. No time to chat about old Joel.”

  “Please mister, this fight not just for water rights. This be all against Basso-Iskani. He sending in these Deathsingers. I see fellow done give all the orders—he from DDA, secret police. Okay?”

  The man stared down at Paul, pulling his beard.

  “Pretty politicized kids you have in Nagala,” he said.

  “Sure. I been in war, along by Michael Kagomi. Three year I done fight.”

  “Right. Hey! Derek! Where’s young Sonia? Look, darling, this kid tells me this is worth looking into. He says the gang who bust up the stalls is a branch of the secret police—is that right?”

  “Well, Simon, it is rumoured,” said the interpreter cautiously. She was a slim brown-skinned woman wearing a smart blue trouser suit.

  “And Michael Kagomi—is that right, kid?—who he?”

  “He was leader of one of the Malani commandos, and then minister for rehabilitation. He was arrested in the coup and is awaiting trial on corruption charges.”

  “Right. Let’s go see what’s up. Tag along, kid—you might be useful.”

  The alley between the smashed stalls was jammed with the excited crowd. Dust hung over everything, and there were jeers and whoops and whistles, wave after wave, all mixed with the deep throb of engines.

  “This is no good,” said Simon. “Can’t see a bloody thing.”

  “If they are soldiers they may shoot,” said the woman called Sonia. She looked pretty scared.