The Blue Taxi (45 page)

He offered reassurance: Gilbert, in the Frosty King’s opinion, need not know in depth how motors really worked to be an adequate
purveyor of their parts. He urged Gilbert to keep at it, to be more theoretical, to operate instead in the kingdom of
ideas
and not get lost in details. “It’s not the nuts and bolts of it, my friend,” Mr. Frosty said, restraining a
ha-hah
, “it is knowing how to move things.
Management
is key. How
do
you think the British did it for so long?” Gilbert liked the sound of that. It relieved him of the fear of letting slip how
little he had learned. It let him think the difficulties he had had—with memorizing names, with understanding how cars actually
moved—were not a sign of weakness. No, they were certain proof that his role was more important than he’d thought:
I am no mere mechanic, then. I’m the man in charge
. He thought about the history makers, the colonialists, and Empire. And these thoughts gave him freedom. Strangely, this
not-needing to know unexpectedly achieved for him what the notepad and the handbook hadn’t: it brought engines to life.

In the days of Sarie’s breakdown, Gilbert’s mind grew sharp. He allowed himself to take some pleasure in his own imagination.
His mind conjured engines up for him, bright ones, rusted ones, big ones, small ones, engines of all kinds, and set them whirring
in his ears. He focused on the parts he thought that he could name, saw fan belts busily afan, radiators radiating, agleam
in a pale light. Could picture pistons dancing. And the names refracted, became
other words:
Pistons, pistols, crystals; radiators, aviators; fan belts, sand belts, sand
. He thought seriously of horsepower, considered wagon trains and steeds, saw cowboys, Kazakhs, Sultans, and the might of
Nordic men. In a kind of play, delirium, he understood at last—in a way that did not cause him pain—that every wire had a
place and that for all time this was true, whether he knew well or did not which wire went where. Releasing himself from the
need to know exactly how things worked, he felt their beauty rise. Their inner elegance or turmoil didn’t matter. Their overall
effectiveness, their magic general movement, took resolutely hold and drew him. Their mystery, indeed. Confident in his affection,
Gilbert grew increasingly enamored of them—cars and parts and smoke, the smells, their secret, complex sounds. Engines. He
forgot to hate his ignorance and learned instead what felt to him to be a manly, royal secret. He needn’t be an expert to
make a business work. He was not proposing to
fix
engines, after all, only to procure their little needs, their sundries. He was not, as Kazansthakis said, “about to build
a car.”

When not lolling at the Palm discussing
matters
with his friend, and now and then impressing engineers with tales, Gilbert spent his time beside his wife as she slept and
cried, or in the kitchen, where Agatha, fending for herself, ate buttered bread and looked out of the window. He felt a swelling
in himself. A transformation, joy. Through his rounds—hotel, home, and back—Gilbert understood: all the years of office work,
the rubber stamps and papers, the move into Kikanga, the sitting in the parlor with his library at hand, had been nothing
but a pause, a long, slow interim that had begun with Independence, and ended on the day that Uncle James’s letter showed
up in his box. An important hibernation. Time and history’s gestation, giving birth, at last, to a grown-up Gilbert Turner.
He felt more alive than he could remember feeling
since the first days of his marriage (five days in a borrowed coastal villa, Sarie vivid, furious, on the bed). Even Sarie’s
silence helped him. Ensured his victory, in fact. It seemed to him, indeed, as if he could, as he never had before, hear his
own heart speak.

There was only one more thing, and it had Gilbert stumped. Kazansthakis, who had made some subtle inquiries and who knew,
thought Gilbert, how a business should be run, urged his friend one evening at the Palm to bring someone else in. To take
on, as Kazansthakis put it, “an adviser.” “A partner, like. A Tonto to your Ranger. A fast horse to your cowboy.” At first
Gilbert had (amazed, in awe!) thought the Frosty King was making him an offer, the sort he’d dreamed of for so long. Could
it be? That he had been coming to the Palm for years, eyeing all the others hopefully, when he might have, all that time,
simply focused his desires on the man he met so regularly, the most faithful of his friends, the one who spoke his name? That
the Frosty King had wanted him like that, exactly as he wanted to be wanted, truly, all along? “A partner?” Gilbert said.
He looked down at the table, sure that he was blushing. The skin of his back tingled. He ran his thumb along the cracked rim
of his glass. “But aren’t you… ? Aren’t you busy with the parlor?”

The Frosty King was shocked. He intended no such thing. He was shocked and then upset. It was quite beyond him how Gilbert
could have had the madness and the nerve to conjure this scenario. There was a moment’s pause. Gilbert’s open face. The scrape
of someone’s chair. A glass set down too quickly. Then the Frosty King laughed loudly, a bit too hard, perhaps. “Not me, you
fool!
You
need an
assistant.
”

To show he was not hurt, Gilbert nodded, blinked three or four times, and then laughed, too, though not quite sure at what.
He told the Frosty King that it had been a joke. “I know, old man,” he said, puffing out his chest even as his ears felt suddenly
on fire.
“And you know I wouldn’t have you. You’re always at the pictures. Your head’s in the freezer.” He took a sip of Congo Pilsner
and looked out at the sea. To appear consumed by serious thoughts, he frowned. What did Kazansthakis mean?

Kazansthakis did not want Gilbert to lose heart, but his own networks were far too precious to him to risk them all at once.
On a dubious plan, no less. On the daydream of an inefficient man. The spark plugs had been a special, one-time gift. A trial.
A favor he’d called in. And Xavier, without some recompense, would not do it again. He reached across the table and patted
Gilbert’s hand—Gilbert, who had lost his footing, who was staring at the sea and wondering how to look as though nothing could
harm him.

The Frosty King took hold of Gilbert’s fingers and squeezed mightily at them. “Listen.” Gilbert did. “This is what I mean:
for things to really work,” he said, “you’ll need a local man.” Gilbert, though he felt a headache threatening and that almost-healed
old itch ahover at his back, regained a bit of his composure. He prepared to listen, bravely. But he was afraid of what he’d
hear.

Still pinching Gilbert’s knuckles, so that Gilbert had to give him all of his attention, Kazansthakis said: “You need someone
who knows other places in the city. Who knows everything there is. Someone with connections. Someone who knows people we do
not. And someone you can trust. You can’t,” said Mr. Frosty, “do this by yourself How will you find custom?”

A girl brought him his soup. He let go of Gilbert’s hand. The pressure he’d exerted had, just as he had wanted, the effect
of stemming what the Frosty King had feared might be a burst of sobs, a breakdown. At the release of his sore fingers, Gilbert
held his glass between his palms and tried to take deep breaths, succeeded. Now assured that Gilbert Turner was not going
to crack up, Kazansthakis
turned towards his steaming broth, slurping as he spoke. “You”—
slurp-slurp
, and a wave of the thin spoon—“must bring the capital”—
slurp-slurp
—“and your partner find the means.”

Gilbert had not spoken. Watching Kazansthakis—so healthy and so broad!—so certain of himself, bent over the bowl, so prosperous
in the sunset—it seemed to Gilbert for a moment that everything he’d hoped for might now be at risk. He felt foolish. Oh,
why were his moods so inconstant? How could a person feel so confident one moment, so bare and lost the next? How could a
grown man feel so suddenly that he might begin to cry? He looked at Kazansthakis but he did not respond. He pressed his lips
together.
Why has he not said this before?

The old Gilbert in him threatened to come back, to say, “Oh, I’ll just scrap the thing. Try another project.” Even, “Souvenirs,
perhaps.” Yes, he very nearly thought:
What about the baskets?
But he couldn’t let that old Gilbert return. What would Mr. Frosty say, Mrs. Frosty think? No. Attached to his fresh life,
the new Gilbert stepped up:
A moment, please. You’re now too far along
. This new Gilbert—the one Gilbert esteemed—was made, he told himself, entirely of iron. He had come this far and he would
not turn back. He would not let himself fail.
All right
. Kazansthakis was his mentor,
knew things
. And this wise, emboldened Gilbert had to be prepared to do whatever he was told. And so the Gilberts—new and old, ashift—listened.

“Gilbert,” said the Frosty King, “what you need are some friends.”

The Frosty King explained: Gilbert’s job was to give orders and to pay for what came through. But for someone to give orders,
they need people nearby who will carry out the things that must be done. People who would know things that Gilbert Turner
didn’t. At first, at least, someone who could get him customers,
who would have more precise ideas about acquiring parts from this place or from that. Someone who—here the ancient Gilbert
cringed and the new one puffed and roared—someone who was
local
.

Gilbert knew the Frosty King was right. He shook but didn’t show it. He hadn’t any friends. And he had thought that Kazansthakis
knew. But if he didn’t, didn’t know, Gilbert did not want him to, did not want to say it. To show he understood, he nodded
and he smiled. “You’re right. I see. I should have thought of it myself A partner. A really local man.” Gilbert paused to
order two kebabs and another round of beer. He looked sagely at his hero. Dishonesty, he was coming to suspect, was not unconnected
to certainty and pride. He thought he’d try it out. He lied. “I have just the man.” Once spoken, as it goes, the lie almost
came true. He curled his upper lip and turned to face the sea. “That’s right,” he said. “I have someone in mind.”

Kazansthakis, who had expected arguments, complaints, or that terrible timidity Gilbert so frequently displayed, was pleasantly
surprised. The evening was so sweet, after all, the twinkling lights of fishing boats already making patterns by the shore.
The Frosty King finished his kebabs, didn’t press for details, finished his last beer. And next, aware that it was
he
this time, rising from his seat, and not the other way around, Gilbert rose, and said that Sarie would be waiting. Kazansthakis,
as if Gilbert, right before his eyes, were becoming a real man, turned his lips down, tipped his head up, leading with the
chin, and gave a single nod. Gilbert Turner, yes, might be shaping up. “Heigh-ho, then,” he said without to-do. “Give her
my regards.” Gilbert nodded back, and Kazansthakis softened. Making two thumbs-up with his fists high as Gilbert tucked his
chair in, the Frosty King gave his friend a smile. “It’s going to be all right,” he said. “Great guns! That’s the way to go.”

On the way back home, Gilbert wondered what to do. Wondered how to make it work. It was true. He needed what the Frosty King
called “networks,” and “connections.” He was ashamed that he had none. Great guns! And yet, when they’d first moved to Kikanga,
hadn’t he said all kinds of things about fitting with the locals? About melding with the scene, rejecting all the folk who’d
moved to Scallop Bay, the way wealth separated people so that some felt so much better than everybody else? Hadn’t he so recently
recalled Judge Hewett and his porter? The frightened native boy with a leopard at his throat? He’d believed in all of that,
he had. It was just that, as a reader—
As a thinker!
—he had been content to let Kikanga swell around him, while he read.

He’d been lazy, hadn’t he? He hadn’t made new friends. He didn’t speak the language. But he’d let the Frosty King believe
all kinds of things about the wisdom and the virtue of moving to Kikanga, of taking up a government-owned flat, of throwing
in his lot with locals. The new nation! As he had done with Uncle James, old-new Gilbert thought, he’d let untruths take hold.
It was time to turn untruths into fact. To live up to his story. How Mrs. Hazel Towson would have loved him at that moment!
Yes, he would come right in the end.

He walked slowly in the dark. He passed Mchanganyiko Street and chose not to go down it. Soon he found that he was wandering.
He walked and walked, past the mosque, past high Mansour House, past the busy roundabout, and ended at the buses, not far
from Libya Street. The answer came to him as he neared Mbuyu Mmoja Park. He recalled what Kazansthakis had once said, about
accidents fastening the wounded to those who’d seen them fall.

Of course the man was not his friend, exactly, but wasn’t he quite close to him somehow? Linked to him through Sarie? As the
call to prayer spilled from all the loudspeakers at once, he thought:
What about that Jeevanjee? Sarie’s little friend?
Wasn’t the mysterious Mr. Jeevanjee as local as one got, for an Asian in these parts? And wasn’t (here Bibi might have sucked
her cheeks in and said,
Blood’s not everything, you’ll see
) every Asian man an expert at doing things with money? He most likely had a shop or two already, had smuggled scores of things
into the country and sold them at great profit. And wouldn’t Sarie be relieved to know she
had
been helpful in the end?

Twenty-two