Acts of faith (114 page)

“Fitzhugh Martin, private eye,” said Douglas, shaking his head in dismay. “If I didn’t know you better, I’d say you lost your—”

“Go to hell.”

Douglas folded up the flight plan and gave it back. “You look surprised, my man. I’m not worried what you’ll do with that.”

“You don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“Actually, I do.” He went to the file cabinet, withdrew the company checkbook, and sat down. “No boss would have tolerated listening to one tenth of the shit I’ve just listened to. But—I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating—I couldn’t have brought this airline to where it is, couldn’t have done it without you. That entitles you to the rest of the year’s salary as severance pay.” He filled in the amount and held the check across the desk. “You’re going to take this and walk out of here. That’s what you’re going to do.”

Fitzhugh was disappointed to see him resort to something so blatant and crude. It was worthy of a tinpot Kenyan politician. But he had to watch becoming too judgmental.
“I couldn’t have done it without you.”
That was another small true fact, and the deaths of those six human beings was another collaboration. With all the big and little moral compromises he’d made in the past three years, with all the rationalizations, justifications, and lies, all the pretending that what he knew to be true wasn’t true, he had enabled Douglas to do what he’d done and to think he could get away with it, as he probably would. In his own moral transformation, Fitzhugh had been like the frog immersed in water that is slowly heated; adjusting its body temperature to an ever-more-lethal environment, it is insensible to the danger it is in and boils to death. He had leaped from the pot just in time. Much longer, and he might have tolerated even this crime. His escape, however, was no absolution. He’d been an accomplice of sorts , and now he was being tempted to make one more, one final compromise. Knowing it would be fatal, he said, “If I quit, you don’t owe me anything. So I quit.”

“You’re sure? What you said to me was disgusting. Still and all, I wouldn’t feel right, seeing you walk out of here with nothing.”

“I can assure you, your feelings don’t count for anything.”

“Have it your way, then,” he said, tearing up the check and writing “void” on the stub.

“There are so many things I would like to know,” Fitzhugh said. “Most of all—not why, that’s easy—but how? How did you bring yourself to do it? How did the motive get translated into action? This was mass murder. Of people you knew. Did you ever have a moment of doubt, of hesitation?”

Douglas regarded him with the expression of a bemused boy, and Fitzhugh felt much the same deflation as he had last night. Like most people, he’d always assumed the face of evil would look its part, monstrous, grotesque, theatrically ugly; but here it was before him, the face of a bird-watcher, blandly handsome, veiled in innocence.

“Fitz, you are no longer an employee of this airline. I have work to do. I have to ask you to leave.”

L
OKI WAS A
tight little world, and the news that he had quit spread with the swiftness of a flash-flood. He was happy to discover that he was still employable. Several NGOs offered him jobs; the UN flight coordinator—this was the man who had replaced Timmerman—asked if he would accept a position as his deputy. Fitzhugh did, the UN forgave him his past sins, and he moved into the UN compound.

He’d ended up where he’d begun, once more a soldier in the army of international beneficence, and what he felt was a first cousin to despair. When he looked back on the past three years of work and risk, he couldn’t see what difference he had made. Tara had been so right: Sudan was a land of illusions. He was reminded of the warning on side-view mirrors—
CAUTION
:
OBJECTS IN THE MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR
. It was just the opposite in the mirror of Sudan. Whatever one’s object was—to end a famine, to bring peace, to heal the sick—it was farther away than it appeared, seemingly within one’s grasp but always beyond it.

Now he was the one who faxed Khartoum asking its approval for planes to land here or there. Not long ago he would have considered such work as tantamount to trafficking with the enemy; but he could no longer say with certainty who the enemy was. Knight flights on UN missions appeared on the daily list; he knew by the identification numbers who was flying the aircraft, and he would picture Douglas at high altitude, an unclouded conscience in unclouded air.

They bumped into each other now and then. Douglas was always pleasant. “Hey, Fitz, how are you doing,” he would say, as if nothing had passed between them. The man was amazing. He was like an actor who had become the role he was playing, but with this difference: The self-deception was not artful but as natural and unconscious as the feathers on the birds he observed. It was the absence of craft that granted him the power to deceive others. In his attractive costumes—the successful entrepreneur of aviation, the man of compassion, the crusading idealist—the murderer was invisible. So were the naked appetites and ambition that had driven him. And this was hidden, too: the derangement wrought by his faith in the rightness of his actions. He must have been persuaded that Wesley and Mary and Phyllis had betrayed the sacred cause—and him—and were therefore deserving of betrayal in turn. Deserving even of death. He had broken faith with the best that was in him and with the humanity he professed to serve. A malevolent voice had whispered a summons; he’d answered. Anyone who does not acknowledge the darkness in his nature will succumb to it. He will not take precautions against its prompting, nor recognize it when it calls.

The very sight of Douglas inspired in Fitzhugh a hunger to bring about a change in perceptions, to strip him bare so all could see him for what he was and Douglas could see himself in a clear light. Sometimes at night, gazing at the posters of his patron saints, Mandela, Malcolm, and Marley, he heard the souls of the dead crying out for justice. Tara haunted him most of all. Her cries were the loudest, as if the others had appointed that incorruptible woman to speak for them.
You haven’t done enough,
she admonished.
It wasn’t enough merely to have refused his bribe and quit his side. If you were an accomplice before, you are now an accessory after the fact, harboring a fugitive in your silence and inaction.

Her appeals grew more frequent and strident. Once, over the conversations in the flight coordinator’s office, over the hum of fax machines and printers and the click of keyboards, he heard her in the middle of the day, her voice so clear it was almost an auditory hallucination. And that night, as he lay alone in his blue and white bungalow, she visited him again and he answered her aloud. “What do you expect me to do? This is Africa, Tara, where justice is as rare as ice.” He didn’t expect an answer and was shocked when he heard one:
And where God and the Devil are one and the same.

A CNN correspondent named Peacock approached him one day at lunch. He said he had replaced Phyllis Rappaport and that the network had decided to pay tribute to their fallen correspondent by completing the story she’d been working on. That was proving difficult. She hadn’t informed the foreign news editor what it was about. Apparently she’d been waiting till she had it wrapped up. Most of her notes had been on the plane with her, but she had left some other background material in the office, and it was from these fragments that he was trying to piece the story together.

“That is where you got my name?” Fitzhugh asked.

It was, replied Peacock, a fortyish man with thick, dark hair and the complexion of a nightclub singer. Among the items Phyllis had kept in her office were four videotapes and some photographs. He needed someone to identify the people in them and answer some questions. Fitzhugh suggested he speak to Douglas Braithwaite. The reporter said he had, but Mr. Braithwaite did not want to cooperate.

Here was a difference he could make. He could bring it all out into the disinfecting sunlight. But would the possible outcome—Douglas’s ruination—quiet Tara’s voice? Would it satisfy her? He didn’t think so.
Where God and the Devil are one and the same.
Suddenly, there in the UN mess, his course of action was made plain to him. It would require him to make another compromise. If he could presume to call obtaining justice for those six souls God’s work, he would have to ask the Devil’s help.

“Give me your card,” he said to the reporter. “I can’t help you right now. Possibly later.”

The next day he asked his boss if he could take a few “personal days” to go to Nairobi to attend to some personal business.

S
ILENT AS A
shadow, the Somali servant came in with a tray of tea and scones. Diana occupied one of the green leather armchairs, beneath the Masai spears and shield, her legs crossed and her hands locked over the knee.

“So what brings you here? Visiting us parasites?” she said.

“I cannot tell you how sorry I am I ever said that. I hope someday you can forgive me.”

“I forgave you some time ago. It’s the forgetting part that’s hard.” He watched her hands, with the testimony of bluish veins that her face and hair and body belied, pick up a scone, slice it in two, and methodically spread jam on each half. Leaning forward, she passed one to him. “But I have to say it is nice to see you. Please, please don’t make too much of that.”

“I won’t,” he said, although he was happy to hear it, happy, indeed amazed, that she had even let him in.

“You seem a bit tense. It must be awkward, your coming here.”

“Awkward? No, it isn’t for me if it isn’t for you. There is something I’ve been keeping to myself and I can’t stand it anymore. It’s driving me crazy. I’m”—he laughed nervously—“I’m hearing voices. Not with these”—touching an ear—“but in here, inside my head.”

She looked down contemplatively and rubbed a stain in the knees of her jodhpurs. “Voices?”

“Tara’s most of all. You see, I believe . . . no, I am virtually certain . . . how hard it is to actually say this to someone else . . . she was murdered.”

She made no reply and reached into the magazine rack beside her chair for a stack of old newspapers, which she placed on the tea table. The topmost was a copy of the
Nation,
the headlines decked.

LEGENDARY PILOT BELIEVED DEAD IN SUDAN

ONE AMERICAN
,
TWO KENYANS ALSO ABOARD
AIRCRAFT DOWN IN NUBA MOUNTAINS

SEARCH PLANE WITH TWO CREW MEMBERS MISSING

“Of course she was murdered. The Sudanese army pulled the triggers, but that isn’t what killed her, and you know what I’m saying.”

“Yes. I’ve been through that with Pamela. I’ve been through it with myself.”

“Khartoum has been making threats for years. They finally made good on it, and I’m just so sorry, so damned sorry it had to be her,” Diana said. He wanted to draw closer to her but was restrained by the stiffness of her posture, a certain frigidity in her manner. “Four kids, two still at university. Maybe she shouldn’t have gone on with such a risky way of making a living, but then, she didn’t have much choice.”

“Diana, I am not talking figuratively. I mean that she was really murdered. She wasn’t the intended victim, that reporter was. Phyllis was murdered, her camera crew were murdered. Wesley and Mary were murdered. By Douglas and another man you don’t know, Tony Bollichek.”

She tilted her chin and jerked her head back, as if from a foul smell. “That bears some explaining.”

That is what he did for the next half hour, interrupted once by a phone call—Diana was invited to a party—and by her questions. When he was finished, he asked what she thought, and she replied that she thought he sounded like a lawyer on closing arguments.

“Does it hold together? Does it make sense?”

“It does—to me. But all there is in it is proof that Doug is a pathological liar. If you brought it to a prosecutor, he would laugh you out of his office.”

“I have no intention of bringing it to a prosecutor. I never did. But I am going to do something.”

“Shouldn’t you wait till that crash investigation is over? You would have something more solid then.”

“That could take weeks, possibly months.”

She glanced outside, at bougainvillea spilling its red and purple over the garden wall, at the late light spilling over the Ngong hills. “I am so glad you’re quit of that man. That you confronted him and stood up to him, for once. And I admire your self-control. If it had been me, I believe I would have clawed his eyes out. How does one come to the point he did?”