Conway doesn’t know how to respond to this.
He says nothing.
Once more, a thick silence descends.
The traffic is heavy and every light seems to be red.
It’s torture.
When they pull into their driveway, Ruth straightens up. She opens her side of the car before Conway has even cut the engine. She then storms across the gravel and in through the front door of the house, slamming it behind her.
Conway follows. He moves slowly, digging out his keys. When he gets inside, Ruth is standing in the hallway with the phone up to her ear.
He drops his keys onto the hall stand.
Ruth lowers the phone and presses a button on it.
‘Four messages,’ she says. ‘One from the Times, one from the Sunday Business Post, two from Martin Boyle. All urgent.’ She looks at him. ‘Jesus. So I’m the last to know, is that it?’ She flings the phone down onto the hall stand. There are tears in her eyes. ‘Bankrupt?’
Conway picks up the phone and replaces it in its charger. ‘Look, I owe the bank a couple of hundred million, Ruth. There’s no way I can pay it back.’
‘But…’
He looks at her, says nothing.
‘What about…?’
At which point Molly and Danny come rushing down the stairs, ‘MOMMY, DADDY…’
Followed by Corinne, who is holding Jack.
The next few minutes are chaotic. Everyone moves to the kitchen at the back of the house. The kids dominate, which is fine, it provides convenient cover – because Conway doesn’t want to continue the conversation with Ruth, doesn’t want to answer any of her questions, her what-abouts. Besides, he knows them all in advance. What about the kids? What about schools? What about the house? What about the horses? What about Umbria? What about me?
But that’s all shit they can sort out, with lawyers and accountants, and a little bit of pulling together. What Conway would like to point out to Ruth, but can’t, is that this could all be so much worse, that they’ve been lucky, that the man whose funeral they’ve just come from, if he’d lived, was actually on the point of burying them.
There’s no shame in financial ruin if everyone else is going through it at the same time, is there? But the scandal of a trial for, at the very least, conspiracy to murder, the ignominy of that would be insurmountable, the disgrace of it ineradicable. Then they really would lose the house, and the kids really would suffer.
She doesn’t have a clue.
But he can’t tell her now, because the simple fact is he didn’t tell her then. How could he have? Why would he have? It wasn’t supposed to get that complicated and messy. He found himself in the situation and he handled it.
He protected his interests.
And moved on.
Not that he’s pretending it was easy, or that it didn’t leave a mark, it did…
He still dreams about it.
But -
And it’s just then, as he senses Ruth approaching – rapidly, from the left – that Conway realises what he’s doing. His mind might be elsewhere, but he’s staring at Corinne again. He has allowed himself to be distracted, mesmerised even, by the revealing gap that appears every so often between the bottom of her short silk top and the top of her sculpted blue jeans. He catches sight of it as she moves about the kitchen, as she reaches up for something, or leans over, his eye tracking this innocent, elusive slit of smooth, tanned skin.
When Ruth gets to him, it happens very fast. She swings her hand back and slaps him hard on the face.
‘You pig.’
He lurches sideways, sliding off the stool. He brings a hand up to his stinging cheek.
‘Jesus.’
‘MOMMY!’
‘Out,’ Ruth says to him, as they both turn to look at a shocked Molly. ‘Now. Out of here.’ She grabs him by the arm and they move towards the door.
Corinne, clearly shocked too, steps forward to distract Molly.
Out in the hallway, door closed behind them, Ruth raises her hand again, but Conway blocks it, takes a firm hold of her wrist.
‘Christ.’
‘Get out of this house,’ she says, resisting, her voice no longer shaky.
‘Ruth, I -’
‘Don’t -’
For a few seconds they stay like that, locked in position, staring at each other, and in steely silence – too many words required, too many knotty, complicated sentences, to even begin the process of -
But suddenly, Conway releases her. He turns and walks off, grabbing his keys from the stand as he passes it. Without looking back, he goes out the hall door. He is careful not to slam it behind him.
The ride to the compound is fast and bumpy. On the way, they pass through a tiny village, which Don Ribcoff points out as the scene of last week’s ‘incident’. Rundle tries to picture it, J.J. close to a heart attack as all hell breaks loose around him, but the images are insubstantial, fleeting, and in any case are superseded by others – ones nearer the surface, and drawn from memory, chiefly Rundle and Kimbela in a Paris apartment three years ago, what Rundle likes to think of as his Africa summit. There were plenty of guns around the place that day – none of them Rundle’s, as it happens – but at least outside the apartment it was fucking Paris.
This is going to be different. Outside wherever they sit down today it will be Congo.
Democratic Republic of.
No surprise then that Rundle’s guts are in a knot.
As he recalls, Arnold Kimbela was scary and charming in about equal measure. But that was then, when Rundle knew very little about the man – which was mainly that he was a local force to be reckoned with, commander of a brigade of the Congolese army that operated outside the control of the Congolese government, but who also, more importantly, ran the mines, doled out the contracts, a loose enough arrangement by international standards, even by official Congolese standards, but round here all that you needed.
In the meantime, no doubt, the scariness-to-charm ratio will have shifted considerably. Gregarious and larger-than-life as he was, and probably still is, the colonel has acquired a reputation for brutality.
Extreme methods.
And so on.
Rundle closes his eyes.
He doesn’t have much of a stomach for this sort of stuff, but he takes a pragmatic view. Short of invading the continent, there isn’t much anyone can do about how these people choose to run their affairs. However, the international trade in mineral resources is a vital one, and is also, frankly, unstoppable, so the cost – and, by extension, awareness of that cost – is extremely difficult to avoid.
Whatever that might mean.
He opens his eyes again.
He’s beginning to sound a bit like a politician.
He looks out of the window. Flat grey scrubland rushes past. One minute this place is astonishingly beautiful, and the next it’s drab.
And bleak.
Or is that just how he feels?
‘You ready for this?’ Don Ribcoff says.
Rundle turns to him. ‘Yeah. Piece of cake.’ He smiles. ‘I mean, it’s just business, right?’
‘Well, I don’t -’
‘Look, I know, I know, kids with Kalashnikovs, heart of darkness, all of that shit, but at the end of the day it’s a meeting, it’s negotiations, it’s striking a deal. I’m a businessman, he’s a businessman. We disagree, what’s he going to do, eat me?’
Ribcoff grunts. ‘We’re not likely to let that happen, but it doesn’t mean he wouldn’t try.’
‘Oh relax, Don. This’ll actually be pretty tedious. These mining contracts aren’t a barrel of laughs you know.’