silly,” Diana said in a motherly tone. “Really, I’m surprised at Malachy, asking you to meet him there instead of his picking you up here. He ought to know better.”
“Some of his parishioners are in the hospital, and he—”
“Come along now.”
Diana and Barrett led her to a Toyota pickup, painted utilitarian gray, with the red and white logo of International People’s Aid on the doors.
“So that’s your connection with Wes and Fitz? You’re with IPA?” Quinette asked, climbing into the middle of the bench seat. It was immediately obvious that she was too long-legged to avoid being kneecapped by the floor shift, so Diana traded places with her.
“I am,” John replied, steering through the gate with a cheery “Jambo!” to the askaris. “Field coordinator for its Sudan operations. Diana is one of our benefactors.”
“A rich bitch buying her way out of white liberal guilt is how Wes would put it,” Diana said. “How he has put it. Quite the character, isn’t he?”
“He would be if he didn’t work so hard at trying to be one,” Quinette observed, pleased that she drew a laugh from both people.
“Bloody good pilot, though,” John said, as if that forgave everything.
“If what I hear is true, I guess he has to be.”
“There are a lot of rumors in Loki, and one needs to be careful about the things one hears.”
“More careful about the things one says,” Diana added, looking at Quinette sidelong. “Loose lips sink ships—and crash planes as well.”
Quinette kept silent, considering herself warned not to press them about where Wesley Dare was headed today.
They went past the compounds of Norwegian People’s Aid and Doctors Without Borders. If the UN’s base, with its neighborhoods of white and blue bungalows and offices, was the city, the camps of the independent agencies were the suburbs, though the organizational flags flying above them and the armed guards at the gates lent them the look of military outposts, an image Quinette preferred, as she preferred to think of the people inside not as aid workers but as warriors enlisted in the battle against hunger and disease and conquest. A Hercules thundered overhead, bearing westward. The four engines, sending tremors through the air and through her skin, shook her back into the excited happiness she’d felt when she woke up; and the antiquated throb of propellers caused a remote in her brain to click and bleed all color from the scene, so she saw it in the documentary black and white of the History Channel, the plane becoming, briefly, a World War II bomber, soaring away to pulverize the enemy. The Herc was going to drop sacks of grain, not high explosives, but food was a weapon in this war. So was breaking the chains of the enslaved. Her grandfathers had liberated people in France. She was carrying on in their tradition. Maybe thirty or forty years from now, this crusade would be on the History Channel, and she would be able to tell her grandchildren that she’d been in it, been part of something altogether noble and so much bigger than herself.
The hospital, in a village near Loki called Lopiding, appeared unexpectedly. There were mud-and-wattle huts and little congregations of goats lazing under tall tamarind trees, then suddenly a high gate with the usual complement of askaris, and beyond it whitewashed buildings and white tents as big as barns, the Red Cross emblem on their roofs, and people swarming everywhere: doctors and nurses in surgical smocks, ambulatory patients wearing light brown hospital gowns. Almost all were Sudanese men and boys wounded in the war, legs in casts or braces, arms in slings, heads bandaged, hands wrapped in dressings like prizefighters. One young man on crutches was trying to kick a soccer ball with his good leg. She recognized on some faces the V-shaped cicatrix of Dinka, the horizontal lines of Nuer—she was learning the various tribal marks—but most of the other tattoos were strange to her, and some were not tribal markings at all but scars left by bullets and bomb fragments and landmine shrapnel.
“Here you are,” John said, stopping in front of the admissions building. “A pleasure meetin’ you. Be sure to tell Malachy that I expect him to watch out for you.”
Several Dinka sat around flattened boxes spread on the ground, playing cards. As she waited, she was conscious of their glances; admiring glances, she hoped, though she didn’t rule out the possibility that a white woman dressed like one of theirs presented a curious figure,