“Sergeant, you should understand that the decision as to whether you assist the ministry will be entirely your own. Your participation will be voluntary. Isn’t that correct, minister?”
“Absolutely. You bet you. Voluntary is absolutely correct.” Nu was beaming happily, but his glance held the chief’s, and Andrew had a sudden sense of undercurrents here, of powerful human wills brought abruptly into conflict. For an instant, the office walls contracted.
The chief’s glance never wavered.
“Well,” said Bwana Teggay into the silence. “I’ll just put Sergeant Mbutu in the picture, then, shall I?”
Minister Nu turned to him and said, “Good, Jimmy, you do that.” The walls snapped back to their original size. “Come along, chief,” he grinned. “Let’s get that drink.”
“Now,” said Bwana Teggay. “What do you know, sergeant, about Abraham Mayani?”
Andrew shrugged. “I know he operated during The Troubles as a kind of... Robin Hood figure.”
Teggay savored this for a moment, and then smiled his trim, taut smile. “Robin Hood, yes. As good a description as any. And about Robert Atlee?”
“Mayani’s friend. One of the few Wazungu who fought against the colonials.”
“Yes,” he said with the small prim nod of a schoolmaster. “The only one, actually. Up until 1953, Mayani and Atlee were both sergeants in the G.S.U.” Before Independence, the paramilitary branch of the constabulary. In the early fifties, it had grown to the size of the regular army. “They’d been raised together here in your township — Atlee’s father owned the Atlee Ginnery, and Mayani’s father was his foreman. There was talk that Atlee had been involved with Mayani’s sister, Rebecca, but no proof was ever adduced. Just another part of the myth, no doubt. According to the legends, Atlee slept with half the women in the country, African and European alike.”
Andrew nodded: he had heard the legends.
“As I’m sure you know,” Teggay continued, “those were years of turmoil. Our Great Leader was still in prison, but cells of Freedom Fighters were operating throughout the country, striking everywhere. There was even a clandestine organization within the G.S.U. itself. Mayani was an obvious candidate for this group — he was intelligent, physically strong, and extremely charismatic. He was approached, but he declined to join them. His political awareness hadn’t quite achieved ripeness, apparently.”
This said without even a glimmer of irony. Andrew felt his first prickle of unease.
“What radicalized Mayani was the murder of his father and sister. The father, Joseph, was one of the activists calling for a general strike — a politically more sophisiticated man, apparently, than his son. For weeks he was harassed by the police, both the regular branch and G.S.U. Finally, on the night of June 21, he was attacked in his house. He and his daughter were shot to death.”
Andrew nodded. “I read of this. The case never came to trial.”
Teggay smiled his small tight smile. “Hardly surprising, since the coroner’s report indicated that the weapon used was a Webley .45 automatic revolver. Which at the time, of course, was the service weapon of the constabulary.”
“Still, it was never proved that the police were responsible.”
Another smile, this time with an element in it almost of pity. “Not in a court of law, no.”
Scurry along, Andrew told himself. “It was at this time, was it not, that Mayani left the G.S.U.?”
“Yes. He applied for sympathetic leave, and the captain of his unit denied it. So Mayani simply deserted. He and Atlee both.”
“Atlee had applied for leave as well?”
“Yes. Also denied.” Teggay frowned slightly and glanced at the floor, as though trying to find there the thread of his narrative. He looked up. “The two of them were spotted by a G.S.U. squad at the funeral of Joseph and Rebecca Mayani. The G.S.U. gave chase, but Mayani and Atlee eluded them. For several weeks nothing was heard of either man. Then, in July, they burned to the ground a farmhouse belonging to their unit captain, thirty miles north of the capital. No one was hurt. The captain was away — chasing down a reported sighting of Mayani, as it happened — and Mayani and Atlee emptied the house at gunpoint.”
“As I recall,” said Andrew, “no one was ever hurt in any of Mayani’s operations.”
Another schoolmaster’s nod. “Correct. And throughout the next year, as more men joined him, there were a number of operations in the western part of the country, where he was hiding. Sabotage, mostly — bridges burned, train tracks dynamited. Most of these directed at the G.S.U. It was a hit and miss approach, tactically brilliant but strategically naive. Mayani simply failed to understand the importance of an organized, politically based guerrilla effort.”
“He never allied himself with any other group, as I recall,” said Andrew.
“Correct,” said Teggay. “He was an adventurer, unwilling to accept the idea of a centrally organized, firmly disciplined, democratic people’s liberation front.”
All this said, once again, with a perfectly straight face, providing Andrew his second prickle of unease.
“Then,” said Teggay, “in July of 1954, he pulled off his most ambitious effort. He robbed the constabulary payroll.”
“Yes,” Andrew said. “The Gold of Mayani.”
A brief nod. “Exactly. By then, the work of our Freedom Fighters had made a shambles of the economy. Merchants were refusing to accept the government’s currency. So the High Commissioner arranged for a shipment of gold from England. Twenty-five thousand British pounds, in sovereigns. To keep the shipment secret, he decided to have it delivered by sea, some two hundred kilometers north of here, and then bring it by lorry, under heavy guard, to the capital. It wasn’t an especially clever plan, but evidently he wasn’t an especially clever man. In any event, Mayani found out. He highjacked the shipment as it was being offloaded from the ship. He and Atlee, and the gold, were never seen again.”
“Some of his men were caught, as I recall.”
“Yes. And executed. But none would, or could, reveal anything about Mayani’s plans.”
“There was a famous pursuit.” Line drawings remembered from the secondary school history books: Mayani and Atlee dashing across the veldt on horseback, the wind tugging at their clothes.
“He was chased the length of the country,” said Teggay. “By the G.S.U. and the regular army. He was seen everywhere — including here, in your township. You know, of course, that his high school teacher, Daniel Tsuto, was living here.”
“And does still. A very old man now.”
“Yes. Something of a legend himself, I gather. He’s one of the people with whom we’d like you to talk.”
Suddenly realizing, Andrew said, “You believe that Robert Atlee came back for the gold.”
For the first time Teggay’s smile showed his teeth: small and pointed, like a rodent’s. “Full points, sergeant,” Teggay said. “Why else would he return?”
“Mayani, you think, is still alive?”
“Mayani’s dead,” he said curtly. “He was wounded during the highjacking — witnesses saw it happen.”
“The story is that he crossed the border to the west.”
“Legend,” said Teggay. “Myth. The man died of his wounds. Atlee hid the gold, escaped, and he’s only now come back to retrieve it.”
“Why wait so long?”
“Who knows? Perhaps he took with him enough to live comfortably for a while, and now it’s gone. Perhaps he was afraid for his life.”
“But he is seen here as a hero,” Andrew said. “He could have come back at any time, openly.”
Teggay’s smile was pitying once again. “Not to retrieve the gold. It’s the property of the government.”