I said nothing. Ashraf sighed a second time, gave a little smile, then reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a gun from it, displaying it on the flat of his hand. “Marcella,” he said, “this is a crazy place for you to live. No one would even hear a shot.” He sounded annoyed with me, as if I had placed him in a difficult position.
I looked at the dense, dark thing he was offering me but did not move towards it. He reached to place it carefully on the arm of the couch nearest to me and furthest from him. “I want you to take it. Lose it for me. It is loaded. You could shoot me if you wanted. Just move this. Then pull the trigger. Please, take it.”
The gun stayed there, set on the worn brown fabric of the couch, too metallic for the room. There was no place for the blackness and heaviness of a gun in my room of old books, orange paperbacks, worn wood, furniture made comfortable by its long use in subtle, quiet pleasures. I saw, removing my attention, that snow was organising itself into delicate curves against the windows.
At last Ashraf flexed, stood and moved away from me and towards where I was looking. “White, white, white. What are you doing here, Marcella? A college. Are the people here very clever?”
“Not very.”
“Why aren’t you with Benji? I always thought you two were made for each other. The time in Bayswater was good, wasn’t it? We were a good team. Until I got Benji involved with the wrong people. Sorry for that.”
“Benji was quite capable of getting involved with the wrong people all on his own.”
I thought about Zanzibar and Benji in Zanzibar. About Mrs F lying dead there, among the ashes of her bar. About the mother I had not known and the father I hardly knew, both murdered. How it had all followed me around, though I had tried to out-distance it, my personal Zanzibar weather. I thought then how I would never go back, however much Benji needed me. Then I thought how this new life, this house, those student papers on the table, was not, after all, sufficient. Then I said, out of this moment of separation, out of the aloneness, out of an arcing back to a fuller past, out of a belief in friendship, out of the sheer desire for hope, out of the sudden possession of a good idea, “Benji’s in Zanzibar. He’s cooking up some new trouble. Money laundering, I think. He’s been in Zanzibar all this time. He could still make you a businessman.”
I watched Ashraf carefully. He was calm, the sign of a busy mind.
“Zanzibar,” he said at last. “Not so far from Moputo after all. Completely off the map. Of course, it’s your home. But we knew you didn’t go there. No one thought of Benji going there.”
“He has a plan to make Zanzibar the Hong Kong of Africa. Financial services. After they declare independence from the mainland Tanzania.”
Ashraf was walking around the room now, chuckling. He sneaked a lively glance at me. The idea seemed to be taking. “That crazy man. Perfect. The Hong Kong of Africa. And they want a coup. I think he needs me, don’t you?”
“That’s what I was thinking. That’s why I’ve told you. Benji needs you because he trusts people. He’s in love with wickedness but you know he’s not wicked. He has bad judgement. He can’t recognize wickedness in others. You know wickedness, that’s why I’ve told you where he is. So you can protect him. I’m trusting you. Trusting you one more time.”
“Marcella, are you trusting me because I’m wicked?”
“And because you could make a fortune. And because you were our friend once. And because you need a fresh start too. I think you need to escape these people too, don’t you?”
He was standing in front of the window now, smiling at me in a fixed way, as if leafing through my layers of thought, looking for a bottom. The whiteness outside the window frame made a portrait of him.
“Good!” he said finally, and set himself in motion, an easy stroll across the room. “I’m for Zanzibar, then.” He gave the impression that his work was done and that he was leaving at this very minute to assume a new life helping Benji in Zanzibar, just as soon as he picked up his overcoat and gun.
I said, “They’ll love you there,” and then, “You’re not going now, are you, Ashraf? You’ve not even finished your tea.” And I moved too, also unhurried, leaning forward to pick up the gun by its nose, as if to test its weight, removing it from his trajectory across the room, which now curved instead towards his tea on the mantle shelf.
“They’ll love you in Zanzibar,” I said. “You have the same religion.”
“Islam? I’m hardly devout.”
“No, conspiracy. You wanted me to get rid of this for you?”
He smiled slightly but did not reply. Instead he picked up his cup, drank from it and watched me with apparent approval as I slipped into my coat and boots and slipped the gun into my pocket. I sensed that something had changed in Ashraf now, and what was new in him was pleasure. And what he was enjoying, I thought, was that I had given him a delicious new uncertainty, a danger, a game with sufficient at stake to make it worth the play. Ashraf, I remembered, was indestructible. He never lost.
The parting look I gave him as I closed the door and moved out into the world of snow, was, I felt, ridiculously coy. I headed up into the field behind the house, chose a drift and plunged my arm deep into it, then took the
