Geoffrey finally had his wish and proved me wrong. In the end I needed his loyalty, and took his help again. This job is Geoffrey’s doing. He found it for me when he was visiting an American university and I was still in prison.
In the end loyalty counts when it lasts long enough, even if it’s for the wrong reasons. Sometimes death can come before the wrong reasons show up to spoil things. And now I have this letter.
What he has written is not important, but I have just spent the whole day studying the enclosure, a clipping from The Guardian. I’ve studied it over my lunch, in my hammock, on the toilet. I’ve studied it under the magnifying glass belonging to The Oxford English Dictionary. The headline is “BCCI Fallout Still Settling,” and the article deals with the embarrassing revelations from the BCCI’s former involvement with arms, money laundering, drug revenues, and the dirty work of governments around the world, some of which it seemed to own. It points out that several associated figures have recently met suspicious deaths and that remnants of the BCCI’s ruthless intelligence service may still be at work. I’ve read the article many times, but it is the two small photos that I have been studying all day.
It’s hopeless, the pictures are too small and of too poor quality. According to The Guardianthey are of two Indian businessmen who were found dead in a South African hotel, and who have now been linked by investigators to the BCCI. Neither the South African nor the Indian government admits them to be their nationals. One could be Benji. But the face is shadowed and the expression much grimmer than any expression I ever saw on Benji’s face. I wonder if the photo was taken from a corpse. All I can make out is that the man is about the same age as Benji would be now, and balding. A rounder face, but then there would have been time for Benji to put on weight and coarsen. He has a moustache, though it’s not quite the same shape as Benji’s. He’s wearing a collarless Indian shirt, which does not seem like Benji at all. I’ve been using all my intuition to make the photo speak to me. But nothing. Nothing is passing between me and the man in the photo.
Geoffrey never met Benji and I’m half regretting that I told him in my letter of my decision to search. He says he thought twice about sending me the clipping, only from what he knew it seemed like it might be relevant. He would try to find out more for me if I wanted, but he’d already held on to the clipping for nearly a year.
I’ve ignored Gabrielle’s advice and written to Monique asking her to press Adnam, and I’ve sent a second letter to Adnam, this time to his old London address. I’ve abandoned caution. My empty days feel like enemies now and I don’t see much hope in the flowers and trees, which have been looking foreign and exotic to me recently. You don’t walk through the woods here, you walk into them and disappear. They are limitiess, engulfing. I’m told there are bears. I might flee if there was somewhere to go. Neither Britain nor Tanzania would welcome me.
Somewhere between the hopeful innocence of Benji’s hopeless business schemes and this photo of a dead man’s face, all spirit drained from it, life teetered. It staggered step by step from innocent to sinister, from a sense of satisfactory order to a powerlessness. Each little step was too small to see then: coincidences, crossed boundaries, broken understandings, accumulating proofs that the world was not ordered as I believed.
The meeting Adnam had organised for us turned out to be at the St John’s Wood mansion that I had visited on my first day as Ismael’s poodle and had since forgotten. This coincidence should not have surprised me, except I assumed that everything from that time was finished.
“This is Marcella from Zanzibar, Benji’s associate. Marcella, this is my countryman, our distinguished host.” Ashraf held my eyes with a twinkle while our diminutive host smiled gently and in accordance with proper Moslem decorum did not offer this woman his hand. He stayed small, still and quiet, a denial of power that only served to assert it. “And this is our host’s wife, Zareen, so famously elegant. Adnam and Monique, the lovebirds, you know of course.”Ashraf dipped and pirouetted to make the introductions, movements that demonstrated the thickness of his thighs compared to the daintiness of his feet.
“Actually, I already know Zareen too.”
The tall, graceful woman searched my face with her dark eyes. “I’m sorry, Marcella. I thought I recognised you, but I can’t remember from where.”
“I’ve visited your home before. With someone called Ismael who knew your husband. We played Scrabble with your son. Years ago.”
“Oh, yes! I remember. But you look different.”
“My dresses were shorter in those days.”
“Perhaps it’s that. But you look wonderful anyway. So, I’m lucky today. I have two friends to visit me. Come—Monique, you too—we’ll go into the drawing room, leave the men to their business. My boy is a teenager now, you know, Marcella. He doesn’t like to play games with his mother anymore. Do you and Benji have children?”
Zareen walked ahead, leading us away. I looked back to catch Benji’s eye. The idea was that Benji had come here under the sponsorship of Ashraf and Adnam, to secure BCCI backing for a deal. My temporary five million had something to do with Benji’s credibility and I should have been there with him. I feared for him. Our host was money, Ashraf army, Adnam influence. Benji only had his faith in himself to win a place in this company, and that fragile thing, I believed, was assigned to my care.
Benji mouthed across the room, “It’s OK,” and pushed the palms of his hands downwards like a prophet
