the humiliation of being around those two—“a whore and a fat wanker,” as he described them. After recovering from his shock, Douglas pointed out that he couldn’t fire his partner and asked the reason for Tony’s outburst. “Talk to your fucking partner” came the answer. Douglas did, and that provoked an argument between him and Dare. To the Texan’s remark that what he did with his personal life was of no concern to anyone, Douglas replied that it damned well was when it affected business. “Because of this high school shit, I’m going to lose a damn fine first officer!” In the end, a way was found to keep Tony on the payroll: Douglas transferred him to Nairobi to skipper the G1 on the Somalia runs, at an increase in salary, and brought the plane’s captain back to Loki to take Tony’s place as copilot on the G1C.
“So that little romantic intrigue is going to cost us another grand a month,” Douglas complained to Fitzhugh. “Dare and Mary, an item! Can you feature that? Talk about beauty and the beast. What the hell does she see in him?”
Involved as he was in his own intrigue, Fitzhugh elected not to speculate. The intricate equations that have bedeviled mathematicians for centuries were easier to solve than the riddles of the heart.
The problem in employee relations, combined with the financial stresses, made Douglas irritable and short-tempered. Once, in front of Fitzhugh and Rachel, he flung a pile of papers off the desk—they contained the business plan, which he was refining.
“I hate this!” he shouted. “You said it a while back, Fitz. Is this what we came here to do?”
“Yes, I did. But you see what’s causing this? It’s that wabenzi’s promise of more money. Forget that, and you’ll—”
“I’m not going to forget it, goddamn it! What the hell is the matter with you?” He paused and with a look directed the secretary to pick up the papers—Douglas wasn’t inclined to clean up the messes he made. “We have got to find some way to get those agencies on board. It’ll be good for us, it’ll be good for the people in the Nuba.”
“Win-win,” Fitzhugh murmured. “And the big mo.”
“There it is.”
Yes, there it was, Fitzhugh thought. Douglas was a soul split down the middle, the entrepreneur and the idealist. If he could enlist those agencies in his crusade, he could reconcile the halves of his divided self and serve God and Mammon at the same time.
A memoir written by a long-dead colonial official—Douglas had found it in a Nairobi bookshop—gave him an inspiration.
In the days when the British ruled Sudan, after Gatling guns and lyddite howitzer shells had opened the Native’s mind, disposing him to hear the missionary’s word and the lessons served up by apostles of Advancement and Justice—young men in topees and khaki drill who appeared in out-of-the-way places with vaccination kits or lists of crop production quotas or a contingent of Native policemen—a ceremony called Governor’s Day was held once a year. It provided a holiday for farmers and herdsmen, their chiefs with a venue to air their needs and gripes to His or Her Majesty’s representative, and him with a chance to tell His or Her Majesty’s subjects what the government would do for them and what it expected from them. The memoir contained a colorful account of a Governor’s Day celebration in the Nuba mountains, which Douglas read to Fitzhugh and Rachel one humid morning. It sounded like a real show, mingling aspects of imperial pomp with those of a tribal festival. A regimental band tooting the airs of empire; native soldiers presenting arms; turbaned dignitaries greeting the governor-general and his retinue of district officers; lofty speeches and exciting dances (the sort of dances that both shocked and captivated the Victorian mind, while reinforcing the conviction that it was the mind of a far superior civilization); and wrestling matches staged between champions cloaked in animal skins and plumed in ostrich feathers, grappling and tossing, bashing each other with iron bracelets that spilled as much blood as a bare-knuckle prizefight.
“Nuba Day!” Douglas cried out, closing the book with a clap and so startling the secretary that she accidentally hit the delete key on the desktop and sent an hour’s work into the ether.
“We must get a new computer. This one, you make one mistake and you lose everything and can’t retrieve it,” Rachel said.
“That’s what we’ll do! Nuba Day!”
Fitzhugh, working out flight schedules for the next day, looked up.