How quaint it must seem now, but during the war, with so little certain — London itself was under almost nightly air attack — it was oddly comforting to sit on blankets on the sandy ground while an augmented phonograph played Tommy Dorsey and Artie Shaw. The heat had broken, a steady breeze came from the dhow harbor, and the ever-present mosquitoes, which the Bletchley Park crew had designated the Kenyan national bird, must finally have succumbed to our home-brewed repellent of three parts diesel fuel, one part each lime juice and coconut oil. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. The mix was volatile: Jenny and Mandy, our clerks, experimented with adding perfumes, but what started out as lavender might during the course of an evening distill itself into something akin to burning tires, and an innocent sandalwood, widely available in the Arab shops — it probably came from Persia as in ancient times, via Oman across the water — became pungently musky, strongly suggestive of the scent that blossoms with exercise, or fear, or intimacy.
Not that we girls needed scent to inspire interest. Hardly beauties, the clerks had the pick of every enlisted man in coastal East Africa, and since being promoted I had found myself in the same kind of high demand among my fellow officers — not so much a compliment as a bother. Now, while the Andrews Sisters swung out “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B,” another voice broke through. It was a rich baritone, full of that languid timbre cultivated by Englishmen of a certain background.
It was Trent-Smith, the young squadron leader at whose table I had dined the first day in Officers Mess. “Fancy Patti, Maxene and LaVerne, do you?” he said, sitting himself down next to me like a fresh wine glass inserted at an already crowded table. He had all but forced his way between myself and a bulky naval captain with a sharply etched David-Nivenesque mustache. “Just for the moment, old stick,” he said, not waiting for permission, and turned back to me. “It’s queer how we’ve colonized Africa only to have African music colonize us.”
“The Andrews Sisters are white,” I said.
“Their music isn’t. Don’t get me wrong. I do love jazz. But I hear they’re drinking an awful lot of Coca-Cola in England these days.”
“We Canadians are used to it,” I said. “We’re the 49th state.”
“Rather do like the Yanks,” he said. “Individually. Massed, they are a bit much. But we are flying their planes, dropping their bombs. Hard to dislike them for it. Not impossible, but hard. Bite the hand and all that.”
The Americans had been in the war for three months by now, and even in East Africa we were beginning to feel their presence. Since January, we shared our results on the Japanese codes with Washington, and as we cracked one cipher after another it was in everyone’s mind that the Americans would be able to do quite a lot more than the Royal Navy with the fruits of our labor. For one thing, they had submarines and were building more every day. My work on J8, the secondary code of the Japanese commercial fleet, especially the tankers, was coming along, but I felt I should be doing more; the other significant ciphers — J2, J3 and J6—had already been broken. But code-breaking is as much a function of time as anything else, and since my elevation to the officer corps I was frequently called away on liaison duties, a good deal of which, I admit, were of my own making.
If my job was to get close to Abraham Talal… very well then, I would do so. We dined together nightly, toured the Arab shops on Dika Street together, and went on long rides along the coast. On today’s trek we had gone inland to visit the site of an abandoned city where, as if by pre-arrangement, Abraham was able to sift in the ruins and come up with a shard of porcelain. “Ming,” he said. “These people were first-class merchants. You’ll find Persian bits as well and, if we search long enough, Venetian coin. Hard to believe, but at one time this was a center of commerce.” Whatever had compelled the inhabitants to flee — raids by Galla horsemen from the north, by Zimba cannibals from the inland forests, possibly a final attack by the Portuguese, perhaps lack of water — whatever the cause, there was now a finality about the place that was, even in the hot wet, chilling. Mombasa itself had been three-times destroyed and three-times rebuilt. Here the inhabitants had decamped never to return, leaving behind their pots, sticks of furniture, cloth, even pets: while our horses grazed nearby, Abraham casually pointed out the brittle skeleton of what could only have been a dog.
“Nothing lasts, does it?” he said. It was not a question, but a statement of fact.
I chose to hear it differently. “It can. Rather depends on will. Look at Mombasa.”
“Yes,” Abraham said, removing his roseate lenses so that I could see his eyes, somewhat bloodshot from the dust of the inland ride. “But Mombasa is only Mombasa. It’s never been Rome or London or New York. It’s lasted because no one ever demanded much of it. Nothing was ever created here. It’s just trade. A lot of it, but just trade.”
“Are you there, Ferrin?” It was Trent-Smith. “You seem miles away.”
“Just caught up in the music,” I lied.
He leaned close. “Do you think we could meet after the concert? I know a place.”
For an Englishman Trent-Smith was refreshingly direct. Perhaps it was the war, or the American influence, or maybe he had simply discovered that it worked. “I’m afraid my heart is… otherwise engaged,” I said.
He smiled broadly, a young man’s confidence radiating out like the sun’s last beams through the purple clouds behind the fort. “Ferrin, I hope you won’t be offended,” he whispered. “But, as they say in SoHo, I wasn’t aspiring that high.”
VII
I might have slapped him; perhaps I should have. But the secret was out. It was difficult keeping secrets in Mombasa. The Bletchley Park contingent knew that I did not normally return to Allidina Visram School until just before dawn, when Abraham’s Shirazi driver would take me back through the narrow streets below the balconied houses and along the deserted ring road, then past the dozing sentries of the King’s African Rifles. Weekends I was hardly ever around, and though I took care to show up at the weekly concert or the odd birthday party, the school was merely where I worked, however sleepily. There were probably jokes — “liaison” had two meanings, after all — and I suffered the occasional wink, but mostly it was all fetid inference: Trent-Smith was hardly the only one to proposition me, merely the boldest. A European woman who slept with an Indian was fair game. Abraham must have known, of course, as he knew everything.
“I don’t think the vice admiral is happy,” he said one Friday evening at dinner. “One would think he has better things to think about than my horses.”
“You shouldn’t judge him,” I said. “He’s just a man.”
“Perhaps, but a powerful one. You know what the Shirazi say: there is no such thing as a small enemy. How much more so when it is a large one. He seems compelled to covet what is mine.”
“He thinks you an inadequate guardian of the Marwari.”
“I am their only guardian, Joan. He will merely wish to display them at horse shows, like circus beasts. You know, I was never a nationalist, but it is possible to understand a Mohandas Gandhi. The British are an inferior race who have seized power and abuse it, endlessly and without shame. I am so glad they will be brought down after this war.”
“Brought down? You mean, if the Axis — ”