“Give me your card,” he said to the reporter. “I can’t help you right now. Possibly later.”
The next day he asked his boss if he could take a few “personal days” to go to Nairobi to attend to some personal business.
SILENT AS A shadow, the Somali servant came in with a tray of tea and scones. Diana occupied one of the green leather armchairs, beneath the Masai spears and shield, her legs crossed and her hands locked over the knee.
“So what brings you here? Visiting us parasites?” she said.
“I cannot tell you how sorry I am I ever said that. I hope someday you can forgive me.”
“I forgave you some time ago. It’s the forgetting part that’s hard.” He watched her hands, with the testimony of bluish veins that her face and hair and body belied, pick up a scone, slice it in two, and methodically spread jam on each half. Leaning forward, she passed one to him. “But I have to say it is nice to see you. Please, please don’t make too much of that.”
“I won’t,” he said, although he was happy to hear it, happy, indeed amazed, that she had even let him in.
“You seem a bit tense. It must be awkward, your coming here.”
“Awkward? No, it isn’t for me if it isn’t for you. There is something I’ve been keeping to myself and I can’t stand it anymore. It’s driving me crazy. I’m”—he laughed nervously—“I’m hearing voices. Not with these”—touching an ear—“but in here, inside my head.”
She looked down contemplatively and rubbed a stain in the knees of her jodhpurs. “Voices?”
“Tara’s most of all. You see, I believe . . . no, I am virtually certain . . . how hard it is to actually say this to someone else . . . she was murdered.”
She made no reply and reached into the magazine rack beside her chair for a stack of old newspapers, which she placed on the tea table. The topmost was a copy of the Nation, the headlines decked.
LEGENDARY PILOT BELIEVED DEAD IN SUDAN
ONE AMERICAN, TWO KENYANS ALSO ABOARD
AIRCRAFT DOWN IN NUBA MOUNTAINS
SEARCH PLANE WITH TWO CREW MEMBERS MISSING
“Of course she was murdered. The Sudanese army pulled the triggers, but that isn’t what killed her, and you know what I’m saying.”
“Yes. I’ve been through that with Pamela. I’ve been through it with myself.”
“Khartoum has been making threats for years. They finally made good on it, and I’m just so sorry, so damned sorry it had to be her,” Diana said. He wanted to draw closer to her but was restrained by the stiffness of her posture, a certain frigidity in her manner. “Four kids, two still at university. Maybe she shouldn’t have gone on with such a risky way of making a living, but then, she didn’t have much choice.”
“Diana, I am not talking figuratively. I mean that she was really murdered. She wasn’t the intended victim, that reporter was. Phyllis was murdered, her camera crew were murdered. Wesley and Mary were murdered. By Douglas and another man you don’t know, Tony Bollichek.”
She tilted her chin and jerked her head back, as if from a foul smell. “That bears some explaining.”
That is what he did for the next half hour, interrupted once by a phone call—Diana was invited to a party—and by her questions. When he was finished, he asked what she thought, and she replied that she thought he sounded like a lawyer on closing arguments.
“Does it hold together? Does it make sense?”
“It does—to me. But all there is in it is proof that Doug is a pathological liar. If you brought it to a prosecutor, he would laugh you out of his office.”
“I have no intention of bringing it to a prosecutor. I never did. But I am going to do something.”
“Shouldn’t you wait till that crash investigation is over? You would have something more solid then.”
“That could take weeks, possibly months.”
She glanced outside, at bougainvillea spilling its red and purple over the garden wall, at the late light spilling over the Ngong hills. “I am so glad you’re quit of that man. That you confronted him and stood up to him, for once. And I admire your self-control. If it had been me, I believe I would have clawed his eyes out. How does one come to the point he did?”
“Greed, believing in something too deeply, but in the end . . . there is something missing in him. He lacks a moral imagination