Douglas made a fist and rapped him on the shoulder. They were at that moment like two wires, feeding off the same current.
“I’m impressed with your passion, and I mean that.” Tara’s body canted forward to emphasize her sincerity. “But Sudan, it’s a vast place, and there’s something about it—” She hesitated, searching for words; she was a pilot, accustomed to expressing herself in the language of action. “Something bigger than its size. All that distance is inspiring, it gives you the impression that anything is possible, but then it deals you a nasty setback, and you think nothing is. That’s the physics of Sudan. For every emotion there is an equal and opposite emotion.” A slight, uncertain smile—she was pleased with the turn of phrase but unsure if it made any sense. “My father’s project didn’t come to much. He knew our time in Sudan was coming to a close, he wanted to leave a legacy. Toward the end he saw nothing of the sort was going to happen. Dad left a disappointed man, wondering if all he’d accomplished for all those years was to draw a paycheck and provide an interesting life for himself and his family. Oh dear, listen to me! Nattering on. I’m afraid I’m not doing a good job, getting my point across.” She stood abruptly, straightened her shirt, and tugged at her jeans, a little too tight for her figure. “So I’d best shut up. My vocal cords aren’t used to all this talking. See you tomorrow, then? Wheels up at eight. I’ll have a driver come round to pick you up. Half past seven.”
They watched her walk off, her steps quick and short, her honey-blond hair bouncing over the back of her upturned collar.
“My goodness, looking at her from behind, you would think she was thirty,” Fitzhugh observed. “Her and that Diana.”
“Yeah,” Douglas drawled, stretching with a long, languid movement. “What do you figure all that was about?”
“Some advice from an old hand?”
“More to it than that, it seemed to me.”
Tara was by now out of sight, but Douglas continued to look after her, as if following her movements in his imagination.
“Pretty nice operation she’s got going here.” His head turned in a slow arc to take in the stone-walled tukuls, the bar and pool, the groundskeepers raking the dirt pathways bordered by whitewashed rocks, the gardens that scented the dry air. It was more of an examination than a casual survey, as if the place were for sale and he a prospective buyer. “Has her own airline and her own hotel. Yeah, pretty nice. It’s a safe bet that when she leaves, it won’t be with just the shirt on her back.”
Fitzhugh’s own words, but he didn’t care for the inference—if, that is, Douglas was making one.
“What are you getting at?”
“Ask you something? Do you think she’s on our side?”
“Of course she is!” The question shocked Fitzhugh. He rather liked Tara. “Would she be taking a big risk for us if she wasn’t? I think maybe you’re rankled by some of the things she said to you.”
“Doesn’t pull her punches, for sure. But I admire her for that.”
Fitzhugh finished his now-warm beer, put the back of his hand to his mouth, and belched.
“Now let me ask you something. Of all the sides in this war, which one do you think is ours?”
A GAME OF bau was in progress under a tamarind, men in homespun robes and bark skullcaps gathered with their treasuries of stones around egg-shaped holes scooped out of the ground in double rows. Tara’s driver braked as a goat with prominent ribs ambled across the main road, toward a market where women cloaked against the chill were buying and selling charcoal. Its smell mingled with the smells of woodsmoke and dung, the scent of backcountry Africa. Beyond the town the cliffs of the Mogilla range looked like copper battlements in the new light, the crests of the ridges like copper roofs. In the pickup’s cab, with Douglas wedged between him and the driver, Fitzhugh smoked his second cigarette of the day. The feeling that he was a twig in a current was still with him. He glanced at the plastic bags and cardboard boxes drifted alongside the rutted streets—the detritus of modern life had come to Loki without its blessings—at the rundown shops with signs that were reductively simple—TAILOR—or pretentious—MADAME’S EUROPEAN BEAUTY SALON—or baffling—GOD DOES NOT FORGET YOU, YOU FORGET HIM—and for a slivered moment regretted leaving