Kaniuru, who could be trusted to say what he wanted to hear. He played them time and again against each other. The Ruler would often meet with each separately. There were things that he wanted to remain between Kaniuru and himself, and others that he wished to share only with Tajirika. He also knew that they were crooks. Although they hated each other, he knew that he had to forestall the possibility of a conspiracy between them against him. My special advisers, he fondly called them, and it was to them that he now turned for help in finding the most appropriate means of dispersing the crowd. First up was Kaniuru.
Kaniuru came up with two proposals. If for some reason the Ruler did not want to deploy the armed forces, then he should play deaf to all pleas of restraint from foreign countries and give Kaniuru’s boys the license to trash the arrogant gathering as a lesson. Alternatively, efforts should be intensified to recapture the Wizard of the Crow, who should be compelled under threats of torture and death to use his powers to cure the maddening crowd of its queuing mania and cleanse it of all impure thoughts. He, Kaniuru, had already set snares for the wizard, and although they had yet to catch the quarry, he was positive that the Wizard of the Crow and the Limping Witch would not evade Kaniuru’s nose for long, he added, and laughed.
Tajirika, too, advised enlisting the services of the Wizard of the Crow but stressed the unlimited manufacture of Burl money, which would be divided into two piles.
The first lot would go to buying foreign currencies to be stashed in Swiss banks, adding to what was already there. The Ruler could also use the money to buy properties in tax havens abroad. As governor of the Central Bank, Tajirika would of course ensure that the new money got into circulation without a hitch; even so, he argued for the creation of new banks, Mwathirika Ltd.
The other pile would be used to disperse the crowd in the most effective, public, and peaceful manner possible. The Ruler would simply announce a day when money would fall on the waiting crowd like manna from Heaven. At an appointed time, four helicopters would drop Burl notes starting in the center of the crowd and fanning to the east, west, north, and south. The scramble would scatter the dissidents to the four winds.
The setting up of money-laundering banks sounded like a stroke of genius, and the Ruler could not help thinking that if the Wizard of the Crow were forced to reveal the secret of dollars growing on trees, this windfall income could also be put into national and international circulation easily, along the paths already tested with the Burl. The idea of Mwathirika banks was so appealing that the Ruler insisted that Vinjinia, Tajirika’s wife, become its nominal founder and managing director and the Ruler’s sons, its board of directors. Tajirika’s other suggestion was equally brilliant, achieving the desired result without recourse to bloodshed.
A crook after my own heart, the Ruler muttered to himself, mesmerized by the simple beauty of Tajirika’s plan, and he was glad that he had appointed him governor.
“And Titus,” said the Ruler suddenly, as if rewarding him for the clarity of his plan. “There is a chair and some clothes that I understand were taken from Sikiokuu’s offices. You now see the kind of ministers with whom I had surrounded myself? Appointing themselves heirs to my seat? I don’t trust-I mean, keep this evidence of treachery under lock and key for me until I decide what to do with Sikiokuu and his coconspirators.”
Tajirika sensed in this the Ruler’s discomfiture with the armed forces and, emboldened by the new trust the Ruler had placed in him, he deigned to offer more general advice.
“Thank you for the trust you have invested in me, and I swear never to betray you. And if I might say so, you may need fresh eyes and ears in the State House to uncover what some people might be up to, eyes that can also quietly oversee the leaders of the armed forces, a kind of super-eye on the military.”
“I don’t think that your experience in military affairs goes beyond your taking over an armed camp with shit and urine,” the Ruler said coldly, resenting Tajirika’s intimations of his unease with the military. “Stick to money matters.”
That was a misstep, Tajirika thought, and in an effort to recover he hastened to ask, “When may I start putting my fiscal plan in motion?”
“I will think about it,” said the Ruler.
Tajirika’s plan was appealing to the Ruler’s philosophy that greed and self-interest ruled the world. But Kaniuru’s plans had the ascendancy.
And then other events occurred that suddenly moved the Tajirika plan from the realm of aesthetics to that of the practical and immediate.
3
Tajirika had gone to the Central Bank early to get some work done before calls started coming in. This late to bed and early to work was one of the changes in his lifestyle since becoming the governor. He would read the local, then foreign papers, mainly the business pages, and then check the Internet for the latest international stock market results and exchange rates; that way he would start his day with a proper overview of the money market of the world.
But before he had even settled into his chair, the telephone rang. Shall I take it or not? Tajirika wondered. But what if I don’t take it and later it turns out to have come from the State House? The Ruler had the habit of calling his advisers at any time of day or night. Tajirika took the phone; it was someone from the
“We tried the State House and we could not get through,” the reporter told him. “So we thought of calling you instead.”
Even though he was not a minister, Tajirika did not mind people thinking or even knowing that the Ruler trusted him more than he did the ministers. And if he played his cards right, perhaps… who knows? he would sometimes tell Vinjinia.
“You have not strayed too far from the path,” Tajirika said, a touch of pride in his voice.
“We are actually calling you in your capacity as chairperson of Marching to Heaven,” the man said.
Tajirika felt his whole body tingle with excitement. Had the loans come through? In Marching to Heaven lay the biggest and most endless source of money, moreover money that did not require secret plantations and laundering facilities.
“You are talking to the right person,” Tajirika hastened to say. “What can I do for you?”
“A few words about today’s headline.”
“Today’s paper?” Tajirika asked.
“Yes,” the man said. Your reaction to the news.”
“I have not yet read it. Can you call back in five minutes? Or, better still, why don’t you just read it to me?”
“Global Bank Refuses to Lend Money for Marching to Heaven.”
“Excuse me,” Tajirika muttered.
“The Global Bank does not think that Marching to Heaven is a viable project. It is a case of free enterprise going too far.”
Tajirika’s hands shook. He did not wait for the reporter to stop reading.
“No comment. Please try the State House again,” said Tajirika in a tremulous voice.
He put the receiver down and reached for the
Tajirika did not know whether to cry for loss of these loans or laugh for joy: his proposed monetary policy was now more pertinent than ever.
The phone rang again.
Tajirika headed straight for the State House.
4
