at the official government rate printed in the week-old Zimbabwe Herald he digs out from beneath his desk. They buy chocolate and Fantas, for themselves and for their driver, but when they emerge from the store the cart is already gone. If Veronica squints she can see a disappearing dark smudge where the cart track climbs back into the fields.
"No Milo chocolate," Lovemore looks with some disappointment at the Snickers in his hand.
"Is that good?" Jacob asks.
Lovemore looks at him as if he just asked if water was wet. "Don't you have Milo chocolate in Canada and America?"
Jacob and Veronica admit they don't. Lovemore shakes his head sadly at their deprivation and bites gloomily into his Snickers. They sit down outside, in an open-walled shade structure made of metal legs and a canvas top. Between bites, Lovemore explains that the store owner said a taxi – the word means here what matatu does in Uganda - to Bulawayo will soon arrive. From Bulawayo there is a bus to Chitungwiza, a township only miles from Harare. There they should be safe, at least for now.
The taxi will come from the east, but they watch the west. Not that there is anything they can do if they see soldiers approaching. Veronica feels much stronger than she did at dawn, but she knows she has no more long pursuits left in her, and Jacob and Lovemore are in worse shape yet.
The taxi comes before the army. Its white exterior is mottled with rust, its windshield is covered with spiderweb cracks, and its roof supports a toppling pyramid of baskets, boxes and sacks, all secured with fraying yellow rope. Lovemore is prepared to pay twenty American dollars apiece for their seats, but there is no need, only twelve of its sixteen spaces are inhabited.
Veronica squeezes herself into the back row, which she shares with a tall man in a shirt and tie, a gaunt teenage mother with two infants, and a fat woman in bright robes, all of whom seem entirely incurious about their new fellow-travellers. Jacob takes the seat in front of her, which folds into the minibus's single aisle. Its mechanism is broken and he has to sit at an angle, crammed next to three lean men in dirty clothes. Veronica can smell gasoline. The tiny storage area behind the back seat contains two full yellow jerrycans. She hopes they don't crash.
They drive for an hour, dropping off and picking up a few passengers in empty fields en route, before merging onto a heavily trafficked and potholed two-lane road. Here their driver accelerates until he is driving as if on speed and pursued by the devil, overtaking slower traffic from both sides. They zoom past roadside vendors selling jars of wild honey and bowls of bushfruit. They pass through small towns whose brick houses and smartly painted stores are beginning to sag and peel. The one police roadblock is so unexpected that Veronica doesn't even have time to be frightened; they are waved through by the time she sees the uniforms. She supposes no one was expecting them, or indeed any whites, to come via taxi.
Her brief impression of Bulawayo is of a city of wide boulevards, department stores and green parks. The streets are bustling with pedestrians but almost empty of vehicular traffic. The bus station is big and bustling, and the bus they transfer onto creaky but comfortable. It leaves when full, including a good thirty people standing in the aisle, Veronica is relieved they came early enough enough to get seats. She sits beside a window, next to Jacob, just behind Lovemore. By the time it rolls out of Bulawayo and onto the Harare road, twilight is dissipating into night.
"I thought they'd catch us," Veronica says wonderingly.
Jacob nods. "We got lucky with that cart ride. And it's not the whole Zimbabwe Army looking for us, just Gorokwe's troops, unofficially. Lovemore says his supporters are mostly here and in the east of the country, he doesn't have much influence in Harare. If we get to Harare we should be OK."
"I hope Lysander got out."
"I'm sure he did. He knows what he's doing. He's been here forever, he has lots of friends here."
Veronica frowns. She doesn't think that counts for much here and now, not with so much at stake. And if Lysander is gone their only friend is Lovemore. "Let's hope so."
Jacob shrugs. "Que sera sera. I'm beginning to understand the famous African fatalism, you know?"
Veronica does. It feels less