AT AROUND THIS TIME Victoria disappeared. She moved from her flat without informing Bat. He suspected that she wanted more money from him, which was fair since he had not seen her for some time now. At the Ministry of Works headquarters he was told that she had been transferred to Bombo, a town dominated by a military barracks on the way to the north. He decided to let her show her hand, as she eventually would.
Soon after, his brother’s fate became clear. As Bat was driving home one evening, a man waved him down at a road junction. He held a piece of paper out to him in the darkness. Bat lowered the window and took it, and the man walked away without saying a word. He parked by the roadside and read the note: “Abel, one of us killed. Radio failed. Sorry. Cain is alive and keeping watch.”
Bat’s suspicions were confirmed: his brother was involved in the bombings. He felt a jolt of fear. He felt exposed, open to attack from unknown forces. There were many questions he wanted to ask his brother, the biggest being whether he had targeted the General’s wife in order to extract revenge for him. And if he had thought about the possible consequences. He suddenly felt very angry with him. He regretted having given him the money. He wished there was something he could do to make him renounce his campaign of violence. The fact that he was the only family member who knew what Tayari was up to made him feel like an accomplice. By giving him the money he had become one, but what was he to do now? It had been exciting to hear about Bureau cars exploding, but where would it all end? And who was the dead boy? Where was Tayari hiding?
The news that his brother was keeping an eye on him did not reassure Bat. Nobody could be reassured when a government’s resources were turned to hunting somebody down. Luck always tended to run out. People tended to make mistakes as the pressure mounted.
Bat chewed the paper and threw it out the window. Did Tayari know where Victoria was? Where was his daughter now? In the barracks? He cursed himself and the circumstances for letting his child grow up in such an environment. Some mistakes seemed to carry incredibly harsh sentences, hurting everybody in the end, especially the innocent.
TAYARI’S COLLEAGUE HAD BEEN arrested with bomb-making equipment at a roadblock not far from the city. The quartet had earlier sworn that if caught, one should fight, hit a soldier in the balls and be shot to death on the spot. That was what happened. The boy had been travelling in the back of a van carrying potatoes and cassava. The soldiers had refused the bribe and insisted on opening the sacks. As the potatoes flooded the ground, the boy saw his life slip away. He grabbed the head of the crouching soldier, raised his knee with all his might, and drove it in the man’s face. The man collapsed with a curse on his bleeding lips, his rifle clattering on the tarmac. The boy reached for it, but before he could get off shots, two soldiers shot him in the chest and he bled to death.
FOR SOME TIME NOW, cars had stopped exploding.Speculation was that the bombing ring had been crushed or had run out of steam. Bat tried to keep his mind off the events. He was busy sifting data in preparation for the annual budget. For two whole months he put in twelve-hour days and could not find time to return home for lunch as agreed. But after the Marshal had blessed the budget and launched a new million-shilling bank-note, with a picture of him defecating on Europe, the pressure abated. The shortage of petrol continued, and Bat could only afford to return home for lunch once a week as the rations at the ministry were reduced further.
The people hired to keep an eye on Bat were very delighted with this turn of events. He had thrown them off the track for some time. Energized, they put final touches to their plan.
On the scheduled day, all the staff stayed away. Babit found herself with no cook, no gardener, no guard. When they were around, she hardly noticed them, because they worked well. Now that they were absent, she missed them. The cook was a widowed middle-aged woman living near the landing point of Katabi. The guard came from the town’s police station. Since the government paid him, she had little to do with him. The gardener was a large man in his forties. He had been injured in a car crash and subsequently had lost his job as porter at the airport. Since then he had been tending gardens and mourning his fall. He was very talkative and sometimes he told her stories. She both pitied and liked him. She sometimes gave him money because he was always broke and wasn’t ashamed to admit it. He was like a sad uncle, dogged by misfortune, unlucky in love. She noticed his absence more than the rest.
Shortly before nine, she went to the kitchen to decide what to cook. She wanted to prepare Bat’s favourite steamed bananas with fish or meat. She had dry fish in the house but no meat. The prospect of going to town for meat made her change her plan. She decided to cook fish. She soaked it in water to make the flesh tender. She made everything ready for the fire.
Shortly before ten she went for a bath. It would do her good on this bright sunny day. She filled the tub and slipped in, enjoying herself but keeping in mind not to indulge herself too long because of the cooking. She started dreaming, stretching things out to their blurred edges. Somewhere in the corners of her mind, she thought she heard the sound of a car. Bat never returned home in between leaving for work and lunch. He never forgot things. If this was an exception, she did not mind him finding her in the bath. He would most certainly crack a joke about something or sing at least a few bars of the song which had become their song: “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” If a miracle had happened and he had been given a day off, he might join her, re-creating some of the magic of the Grand Empire Hotel. The cooking could wait. They might drink a glass of red wine or beer in the tub and listen to the birds outside. He was bound to get angry with the staff for staying away without giving notice, as if, before moving in with him, she would protest, she had never cooked, shopped, or cleaned. Things are different now, he would counter sharply.
She could see the future of their relationship. Bat had the upper hand now, and she loved it. But over the years she would gain more leverage. He had told her that he loved her most of all because he had found her open, not yet embittered or hardened by the world, not yet set in her ways. They would set together like aging doors.
Suspended halfway between fantasy and reality, she hardly had time to see her visitors. In her eyes the green overalls were just the blurred forms which accompanied a chloroformed patient to unconsciousness, sometimes to oblivion. The visitors were swift, economical. Their scalpels, magnified by her fear, were inflated to the size and brutality of machetes. They towered, hovered, pressed down hard, and applied the speedy efficiency enjoyed by the best in their trade. They disrobed without fuss, cleaned themselves, bagged their garments, and prepared to go. They drank the tea they found in a thermos flask in the kitchen. They washed the cups and the flask and turned them upside down to dry.
AT THE SCHEDULED TIME the XJ10 swept into the yard with a flurry and a crunch of pebbles. Bat leapt out, tie eased, two top buttons undone almost in one movement. He filled his lungs, exhaled loudly, and savoured those few seconds when the wind hit his exposed chest. He pushed the door open, called Babit, but the house returned only his own voice to him, spurned. He called again as he dropped the briefcase on the sofa. He walked to the bedroom. He feared every lover’s worst nightmare: finding one’s lover in bed with another; his was of finding her with Tayari. It lasted a few seconds, but it bit deep. The bedroom was empty. Her clothes, a blue gown with red lines at the neck, and a white shift, were neatly folded, the black shoes near the bed polished, waiting. He felt his anticipation, eagerness, cooling and coagulating into something nasty. She knew how precious their appointment was to him; why had she betrayed it? What did she have to say for herself? Was this the beginning of another phase, the revelation of a Babit he had not yet had occasion to see? Why was he so angry? Because he had come to rely on her, and he wanted it to stay that way. Maybe she was sick; who said she would never fall sick?