vision of its golden future: a fleet of twenty planes, flying aid not only into Sudan but to Somalia and the Congo and other African basket cases as well. It would provide a shuttle service for relief workers traveling between Nairobi and Lokichokio; and in the unlikely event that the Sudanese civil war ended, it would be on hand to deliver materials and workers for the country’s reconstruction.
Adid occasionally jotted on a legal tablet, his round chin in his free hand, his expression betraying nothing of his thoughts. Suddenly he grimaced and, throwing his head backward, pinched the bridge of his nose. Douglas fell silent.
“Forgive me,” Adid pleaded as he removed a bottle of nasal spray from a desk drawer. He squeezed it into both nostrils. “A sinus condition. Please, continue.”
Douglas did, and when he was finished, Adid solemnly shook hands and suggested they reconvene at dinner that evening.”How does the Tamarind sound? The best seafood in town. If you like seafood.”
“I’m a brown food man,” Dare said, “but I’ll go along.”
Under a thin layer of gunmetal clouds, they walked back to the Norfolk Hotel. Douglas had insisted they stay there, despite the rates, or rather because of them. He didn’t want Adid to think they were required to accept budget accommodations. He asked Dare what he thought—the one-man conglomerate was a hard guy to read.
“Sure is. Askin’ us to dinner, that’s a good sign. But count on it, if he does bet on us, it won’t be a helluva lot. Hassan’s got it to burn, but that doesn’t mean he likes to burn it. He’s no gambler, strictly a percentage player.”
They crossed Kenyatta toward Muindi Mbingu. Sooty pythons coiled from buses, cars, garishly painted matatus, and secondhand London taxis to slither through the palms lining the middle of the boulevard. Toxic as it was, mile-high Nairobi’s air felt bracing after Loki’s empyrean noons.
“If you ask me, I think we should stay away from him,” Fitzhugh said, pausing to contribute to a band of village kids who were singing and drumming, their begging bowls set out. J. M. Kariuki, the great Kenyan socialist, had predicted this years ago—a country of ten millionaires and ten million beggars. “I don’t like him.”
“What don’t you like?”
“He’s what we used to call a wabenzi. That was a word for fat-cat profiteers who drove Mercedes-Benzes.”
“Who the hell cares what he drives?” Dare said.
“He’s out of our league, yes?”
“The idea is, he helps us get out of the league we’re in.” Erect, confident, ball cap pulled low over his forehead, Douglas strode through the crowds swarming around the pungent city market: an English lord in nineteenth-century Bombay, a Roman in some provincial Gallic town. “With an outside investor backing us, we can expand a lot faster than we ever could out of cash flow. Another lesson from my dad. Never do with your own money what you can do with someone else’s.”
“Kwenda huto!” In Texas-accented Swahili, Dare dismissed a hustler who was after their money, although what he was offering in exchange wasn’t exactly clear. The phrase was repeated several times as they passed the Jeevanjee Gardens, where AIDS orphans popped out of bushes reeking of human excrement to pluck at the sleeves of the two mzungu and their darker-skinned companion. A sprint across University Way brought them to Harry Thuku Road, separating the central police station from the University of Nairobi campus. Fitzhugh had always believed the placement wasn’t accidental: the university, generator of political dissent; the police right across the street, poised to quell student demonstrations.
At the entrance to the Norfolk, that relic of empire, its Tudor facade some nostalgic colonial’s re-creation of an English country house, safari vehicles were dropping off or picking up passengers weighted down with camera gear and dressed up like Out of Africa extras in multipocketed bush jackets and wide-brimmed hats with fake leopard-skin bands. More tourists, along with a few expatriates, were lunching on the Delamere Terrace, the same wood-beamed platform from which long-vanished sahibs and memsahibs, taking high tea, watched gazelle grazing on the plains—the view considerably altered now to one of smog-shrouded concrete and brick. The three entrepreneurs of aid found a free table, and just as he sat down to look at the menu, Fitzhugh was seized by a sudden longing, accompanied by a dread of spending the dinner hour in Adid’s company. He declared that he was opting out of the evening’s engagement, unless his presence was absolutely required, and he doubted it was.