in, quietly served tea, and stole out again. The nature of the questions changed. What did Fitzhugh think the southern Sudanese were fighting for? Independence? Autonomy? A unified Sudan under a secular government? No idea, he replied. He wasn’t sure if they knew any longer. Sometimes he had the impression that the rebels were fighting out of sheer habit. After all, they had been at it, off and on, for thirty years.
“Out of habit, you say?” Barrett leaned farther forward, so that his body was bent like a stubby hairpin. “Oh, I cannot agree with that, not at all. They’re fighting because those butchers in Khartoum don’t give them any choice. Fight or die—it’s that simple, and make no mistake about it.”
“I suppose that’s true.” Fitzhugh, feeling a bit like a pupil who has given the wrong answer, glanced sidelong at Malachy for help, but he gave none; nor did Douglas Braithwaite, sitting directly across, long legs outstretched while he chewed on the tips of his aviator’s sunglasses and looked as if he were weighing Fitzhugh’s every word.
“There’s no supposin’ either,” said Barrett. His pallid face glowed. “It’s jihad for the Arabs, and there’s no quarter given in a jihad. Allah gives his stamp of approval to mass murder.” Barrett sat back and took a sip of tea, the color fading from his cheeks. “This war isn’t like these other African dust-ups. It’s a continuation of the Crusades. The crescent versus the cross. Comes down to that, wouldn’t you say?”
The war was nowhere near as clear-cut as that, but a voice in the back of Fitzhugh’s head cautioned him not to voice such an observation. Gray did not appear to be Barrett’s favorite color.
“Pardon me,” he said, wondering if it had been a mistake to buy a one-way ticket. “I’ve come all the way from the coast, thinking you were going to talk to me about a job.”
“And that is what we are doing. Isn’t that what we are doing?”
Barrett glanced at Diana, sitting alongside him, her legs crossed, hands clasped over a knee, hair aglow in the dazzle slicing through the casement windows.
“You’ve wandered a bit far afield,” she said in a voice tinged with exasperation. Soothing the scrapes caused by Barrett’s abrasiveness was probably something she did fairly often. “Your questions seem to be making Fitz uncomfortable.”
Fitzhugh remarked that he did not feel uncomfortable so much as baffled. It was as if Barrett were examining him not for his qualifications and experience but for his political correctness. He said that as a relief worker he had devoted himself to filling empty bellies, not to politics. “An empty belly is an empty belly, and what I think about the politics of the situation doesn’t have anything to do with anything.”
“On the contrary. Politics has everything to do with it.”
“That isn’t what I said!” Fitzhugh’s voice broke, like a fourteen-year-old boy’s, as it usually did when he got angry. “I said that what I think about the politics has nothing to do with it.”
“A Jesuit is what you should have been, John Barrett,” Malachy said. “Why are you being so argumentative?”
“And look who’s talkin’. Malachy, there’s no man as contentious as you. I’m not arguin’. It’s dedicated people we’re lookin’ for, committed people. For when the goin’ gets rocky, as rocky it is bound to get.” Barrett removed his glasses, blew on the lenses, and wiped them deliberately with a handkerchief. “Relief work is full of dilettantes. Nice people lookin’ to do some good in the world so they can feel good about themselves. They hand out a few chocolate bars and go home.”
Fitzhugh offered a none-too-amiable smile. “What is it you’re suggesting?”
Barrett, returning his glasses to his face, was about to reply when Douglas made a sound—not a sigh, an exhalation rather, long and slow. It was almost inaudible, yet it had the same effect as a judge’s gavel in a noisy courtroom. The conversation stopped, everyone turned to him. Fitzhugh would always remember that moment distinctly, because it was the first time he’d observed the American’s peculiar power to draw all eyes and ears to himself with nothing more than a vague gesture, a change of expression, or a breath. It was a kind of magnetism, too effortless to have been learned.
“Fitz doesn’t seem like any dilettante to me,” he said in his pleasing drawl. “Seems all right to me, and I’m the one who’ll be working with him. So how about we end the inquisition and tell