obviously dragged themselves from their huts and stood, some swaying from weakness, with their hands outstretched. Shaking his head, Luca threw his coffee onto the ground and sprinted the remaining distance.
‘Luca,’ his friend said, an expression of guilt spreading across his face.
Luca took in the emaciated figures crowded around him. ‘Tell me you haven’t…?’
‘I couldn’t stand by and let it happen.’
Luca began to say something then fell silent, shaking his head in disbelief. He couldn’t exactly get the antibiotics back again. The damage had been done.
‘Great,’ he said sourly. ‘Really fucking great.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Bill said again. ‘I just couldn’t stand the idea of us sitting healthily in our camp…’
Luca looked at the villagers gathered around them with their hopeful smiles. They held their medicine carefully in the palms of their hands, nodding their heads and giving thanks to these strange newcomers and their gift of healing.
‘But we only had a few courses,’ he sighed. ‘What the hell are you giving the rest of these guys?’
Bill gave a sheepish shrug and looked away.
‘Just a few painkillers. Everyone saw me give the antibiotics out, so I had to give them something. It’s all I could think of and… well, it won’t do them any harm.’
As he spoke, another hand stretched out from the crowd. As Bill doled out two small white pills, finishing the bottle, a movement from the far side of the village caught Luca’s eye. Another figure was striding towards them.
‘Who the hell…?’ he murmured.
She was tall, with two straight curtains of very dark hair framing her face. In contrast to the shuffling forms of the villagers, she moved with the vigour of full health, the hem of her dirt-stained tunic billowing out behind her.
She came close and even beneath the grey scarf that was tied like a surgeon’s mask across her face, the men could tell that she was furious. Strong dark eyebrows were angled low over green eyes that blazed with hostility. She stared from Bill to Luca, then back again. Around them, the crowd fell silent.
Raising her right arm, the woman yanked the scarf down to the neckline of her tunic.
‘What the hell do you think you are doing?’ she asked in English and with only the lightest trace of an accent. Jerking her chin up, she gestured to the bottle Bill was holding.
‘Give me that.’
Bill’s mouth dropped open in surprise as he handed over the empty plastic bottle.
‘You speak English.’
Ignoring him, she glanced at the bottle’s label before looking up again, eyes bright with anger.
‘Nurofen,’ she said. ‘You have got to be kidding me. Have you any idea how irresponsible that is?’
‘I just thought…’
‘No. You didn’t think,’ the woman cut in. ‘This village is riddled with cholera, and here you are handing out painkillers! Don’t you understand, these people actually believe your Western drugs will cure them? All you’re doing is abusing their ignorance.’
‘Hold on a second,’ Luca interrupted, pulling himself together. ‘Bill’s already handed out all our courses of antibiotics — stuff we now don’t have for ourselves. He couldn’t handle disappointing the others so had to give them something.’
The woman gave him a scornful glance. Then, turning to the assembled group of villagers, she spoke quickly in Tibetan, her voice low and emphatic. After a few moments the villagers began to look from her to Bill and Luca, their faces uncertain. As she continued speaking, they started to shake their heads and back off a pace or two, jealously guarding the white pills.
‘Of course they don’t believe me, why would they?’ the woman said, exhaling in frustration. ‘You’ve given them hope, and that’s the first they’ve had of it in a long time. But why do I get the feeling you won’t be around to pick up the pieces when they realise the drugs don’t work?’
‘Look, we didn’t mean any harm,’ Bill protested, his hands raised defensively.
‘That’s what you all say…’ she began, then drifted into silence, shaking her head in disgust. She let the empty bottle fall from her hand and Luca and Bill watched as it rolled a few centimetres on the ground before sticking on a patch of mud. Pulling the scarf back across her mouth, she gave them a final, withering glance before heading back towards the far end of the village. As she left, the crowd started to disperse, a few people staring down at the empty bottle before retreating to the wooden stoops of their homes.
‘Jesus,’ Luca said, his eyes wide. ‘Where the hell did she come from?’
‘I have no idea,’ said Bill, ‘but now I really do feel like an idiot.’
Luca turned to see his friend staring down at the empty bottle, his shoulders slumped.
‘You were only trying to help. Don’t take it to heart. At least a couple of them will be saved by the antibiotics.’
‘Yeah, but…’
As Bill raised his head, the beginnings of a smile crept across Luca’s face.
‘I’ll tell you one thing, though. We’re sure as shit not getting a dinner date out of this.’
Slowly Bill’s expression eased, the tension starting to drain from his face. He glanced back at the hut the woman had entered.
‘Who do you think she is? I mean, she barely even had an accent.’
‘Beats me,’ said Luca. ‘Maybe she’s an aid worker or something. She looked more Nepalese than Tibetan to me. Wherever she’s from, I get the feeling she wasn’t too impressed.’
‘Yeah, well, I was only trying to help,’ Bill muttered. Straightening his shoulders, he turned back towards their campsite.
After a final, curious glance towards the woman’s hut, Luca followed.
Chapter 24
‘Who is it?’
There was no reply, only repeated knocking, mechanical and incessant.
‘For the love of God, stop that infernal racket!’
With more than his characteristic lack of agility, Rene lumbered across the empty restaurant in the direction of the front door. He winced as he blundered through a shaft of sunlight, breaking through from the curtains, and gingerly rubbed his temples.
With years of experiencing biblically proportioned hangovers, he knew that an ice pack and a stiff dose of Paracetamol should just about see him through the day. Both, however, were kept in the kitchen which lay in the opposite direction from which he was currently headed. Reason enough for him to ignore the interruption altogether. Only the interminable knocking had galvanised him into any sort of action.
As he unbolted and swung open the door, Rene mustered what remained of his strength.
‘What the hell do you think…?’
He stopped abruptly, eyes slowly focussing on the silent figures in front of him. Three silhouettes stood in line on his doorstep, haloed by the harsh morning light. Rene squinted at them, feeling his headache double in size. Without a word, the leading two soldiers pushed past him and into the restaurant.
‘An unexpected pleasure,’ Rene said, stumbling back a couple of paces.
A third man stepped over the threshold. He was smaller than the other two. As he walked further into the room, Rene could see his face was delicate, almost feminine, with no trace of stubble. Only the harsh line of his thin lips offset the fragility of his features.
Captain Zhu looked Rene up and down in disgust. His eyes took in the checked shirt that had been hastily pulled on before he answered the door, displaying stains from the previous evening’s festivities. Above its collar, Rene’s jowly cheeks were blurred by a couple of days’ worth of stubble and his hair was still flattened by his pillow.
Zhu pulled a chair out from under a table and seated himself. Across the room, the two other soldiers were
