The Mission Song (9 page)

And as I listened I began to pick up the see-saw whine of fax machines working overtime in the rooms above us and the chirp of telephones too quickly smothered, and the fraught silences when nothing happened but the whole house held its breath. Each couple of minutes or less, a young female assistant came scuttling past us down our staircase to deliver a message to the bouncer, who opened his door six inches and slipped the message to someone inside before shutting it and putting his hands back over his balls.

Meanwhile the voices were still coming out of the conference room. They were male voices and each was
important
in the sense that this was a meeting of men who punched at their own weight, as opposed to one supremo talking to his underlings. I also noted that, although the
sound
of the words was English, the voices speaking them were of varying nationalities and cadences, now from the Indian subcontinent, now Euro-American or white African colonial, much in the manner of high-level conferences I am occasionally privileged to attend where platform speeches are delivered in English, but your off-stage discussions are conducted in the tongues of individual delegates, with the interpreters acting as the essential bridges between God’s striving souls.

There was one voice, however, that seemed to be addressing me personally. It was native English, upper-class, and compelling in its tonal rise and fall. So finely were my antennae tuned that after a couple of minutes of what I call my third ear I had convinced myself it was the voice of a gentleman I was familiar with and respected, even if I hadn’t caught a single word of what it was saying. And I was still hunting in my memory for its owner when my attention was diverted by a thunderclap below me as the door to the lobby flew open to admit the cadaverous, breathless figure of Mr Julius Bogarde, alias Bogey, my late mathematics teacher and chief luminary of the Sanctuary’s ill-fated Outward Bound Club. The fact that Bogey had perished ten years ago while leading a party of terrified schoolchildren up the wrong side of a mountain in the Cairngorms only compounded my surprise at his reincarnation.

‘
Maxie
,’ I heard Bridget breathe in reproachful awe as she sprang to her feet. ‘You mad sod. Who’s the lucky girl this time?’

And all right, he wasn’t Bogey.

And I doubt whether Bogey’s girls, if he had any, counted themselves lucky, rather the reverse. But he had Bogey’s gangly wrists, and Bogey’s manic stride and hellbent look about him, and Bogey’s haywire mop of sandy hair blown to one side by a prevailing wind and stuck there, and rosy bursts of colour on his upper cheeks. And Bogey’s sun-bleached khaki canvas bag, like a wartime gas-mask case in old movies, swinging from his shoulder. His spectacles, like Bogey’s, doubled the circumference of his faraway blue eyes, switching on and off as he loped towards us under the chandelier. And if Bogey had ever come to London, which was against his principles, this was undoubtedly the outfit he would have selected: a mangled go-anywhere, wash-it-yourself, fawn-coloured tropical suit with a Fair Isle sleeveless pullover and buckskin shoes with the nap worn off. And if Bogey had ever had to storm the regal staircase to our waiting area, this was how he would have done it: three weightless bounds with his gas-mask case slapping at his side.

‘My
fucking
pushbike,’ he complained furiously, giving Bridget a perfunctory kiss which seemed to mean more to her than it did to him. ‘Slap in the middle of Hyde Park. Back tyre shot to pieces. Couple of tarts laughed themselves sick. Are you the languages?’

He had swung suddenly round on me. I’m not used to words of that strength from clients, nor to repeating them in the presence of ladies, but I will say at once that the man described by Mr Anderson as my fellow genius in the field was like no client I’d ever met, which I knew even before he fixed me with Bogey’s diluted stare.

‘He’s Brian, darling,’ Bridget said quickly, fearing perhaps that I might say something different. ‘Brian
Sinclair
. Jack knows all about him.’

A man’s voice was yelling up at us and it was the same voice I had been relating to.

‘Maxie! Hell are you, man? It’s all hands to the pump.’

But Maxie paid the voice no attention and by the time I looked down, its owner had once more disappeared.

‘Know what this caper’s about, Sinclair?’

‘Not yet, sir.’

‘That old fart Anderson didn’t tell you?’

‘
Darling
,’ Bridget protested.

‘He said he didn’t know either, sir.’

‘And it’s French, Lingala and Swahili-plus, right?’

‘Correct, sir.’

‘Bembe?’

‘Is not a problem, sir.’

‘Shi?’

‘I also have Shi.’

‘Kinyarwanda?’

‘Ask him what he doesn’t speak, darling,’ Bridget advised. ‘It’s quicker.’

‘I was interpreting Kinyarwanda only yesterday evening, sir,’ I replied, sending messages of love to Hannah.

‘Fucking marvellous,’ he mused, continuing to peer at me as if I were some exciting new species. ‘Where does it all come from?’

‘My father was an African missionary,’ I explained, remembering too late that Mr Anderson had told me I was the son of a mining engineer. It was on the tip of my tongue to add
Catholic
so that he would know the whole story, but Bridget was looking daggers at me so I decided to hold it back for later.

‘And your French is a hundred per cent, right?’

Flattered as I was by the positive nature of his interrogation, I had to demur. ‘I never claim a hundred per cent, sir. I strive for perfection, but there’s always room for improvement’—which is what I say to all my clients, from the mightiest to the humblest, but when I said it to Maxie, it acquired a brave ring for me.

‘Well, my French is failed O level,’ he riposted. His floating gaze had not left mine for an instant. ‘And you’re game, right? You don’t mind pushing the envelope?’

‘Not if it’s good for the country, sir,’ I replied, echoing my response to Mr Anderson.

‘Good for the country, good for Congo, good for Africa,’ he assured me.

And was gone, but not before I had notched up other points of interest regarding my new employer. He wore a diver’s watch on his left wrist and on the other a bracelet of gold links. His right hand, judging by its texture, was bulletproof. A woman’s lips brushed my temple and for a moment I convinced myself they were Hannah’s but they were Bridget’s, kissing me goodbye. I don’t know how long I waited after that. Or what I found to think about that lasted more than two seconds. Naturally I was pasturing on my newfound leader and all that had passed between us in our brief exchange.
Bembe
, I kept repeating to myself. Bembe always made me smile. It was what we Mission school kids yelled at each other, out on the red mud-patch, playing splash-soccer in the teeming rain.

I also remember feeling piqued at being deserted by Maxie and Bridget simultaneously, and there was a low moment when I wished I was back at Penelope’s party, which was what made me jump to my feet, determined to phone Hannah from the lobby, come what may. I was already descending the staircase—it had a highly polished brass handrail and I felt guilty putting my sweaty palm on it—and I was bracing myself to cross the hall under the eye of the grizzly bouncer, when the doors to the conference room parted in slow motion, and out poured its occupants in twos and threes until some sixteen of them were assembled.

I must exercise caution here. When you walk in on a large, buzzing group containing partly public faces, you take your mental snapshots and you start fitting names to them. But are they the right names? Of the ten or eleven white men, I am able here and now positively to identify two high-profile corporate chieftains from the City of London, one ex-Downing Street spin-doctor turned freelance consultant, one septuagenarian corporate raider, knighted, and one evergreen pop-star and intimate of the younger royals who had recently been the target of drugs-and-sex allegations in Penelope’s great newspaper. The faces of these five men are engraved in my memory for good. I recognised them as soon as they emerged. They remained in a bunch and talked in a bunch, not three yards from where I was standing. I was privy to fragments of their conversation.

Neither of the two Indian men was known to me, although I have since identified the more boisterous of the two as the founder of a multi-billion-pound clothing empire with headquarters in Manchester and Madras. Of the three black Africans, the only one familiar to me was the exiled former finance minister of a West African republic which, given my present circumstances, I will refrain from naming further. Like his two companions, he appeared relaxed and Westernised in clothing and demeanour.

Delegates emerging from a conference tend in my experience to be in one of two moods: resentful, or ebullient. These were ebullient, but bellicose. They had extravagant hopes, but also enemies. One such enemy was
Tabby
, like Tabby the cat, spat out between the yellowed teeth of the seventy-something corporate raider. Tabby was a slimy bastard, even by the standards of his trade, he was telling his Indian audience; it would be a real pleasure to slip one past him when the opportunity arose. Such fleeting impressions were swept from my mind, however, by the belated emergence from the conference room of Maxie, and at his side, as tall as Maxie but more elegant in dress and deportment, the owner of the voice that had seemed to speak to me while I was waiting on the staircase: Lord Brinkley of the Sands, art lover, entrepreneur, socialite, former New Labour minister and—always his strong suit where I personally was concerned—long-time defender and champion of all things African.

And I will say at once that my impression of Lord Brinkley in the flesh amply confirmed my high regard for him as seen on television and heard on my preferred medium, radio. The clean-cut features with firm jaw and flying mane mirrored precisely the sense of high purpose I had always associated with him. How often had I not cheered him to the echo when he was berating the Western world for its want of an African conscience? If Maxie and Lord Brinkley were linking arms in a hush-hush pro-Congolese endeavour—and they were linking them now, literally, as they came towards me—then I was honoured indeed to be a part of it!

Lord Brinkley also enjoyed my esteem for a personal reason, namely Penelope. As I hovered deferentially at the edge of the gathering I remembered with relish how Sir Jack, as he then was, had hit her great newspaper for record damages arising out of baseless allegations regarding his financial dealings, and how his triumphant vindication had in turn imposed a strain on our domestic bliss, with Penelope as per usual defending the sacred liberty of the press to besmirch whomever it chose, and Salvo siding with Sir Jack in consideration of his outspoken sympathy for the continent of Africa, and his determination to free its peoples from the triple curse of exploitation, corruption and disease, thereby putting it back on the table economically where it belongs.

So great had been my indignation, indeed, that unbeknown to Penelope I had written a personal and private letter of support to Lord Brinkley, to which he was gracious enough to send a letter in reply. And it was this sense of personal kinship—mingled I will admit with a certain proprietorial pride as one of his loyal fans—that emboldened me to step forward from my place in the shadows and address him man to man.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ I said, having first reminded myself that this was a no-name operation, and therefore carefully
not
saying, which I might have done, ‘Lord Brinkley’ or ‘My Lord’ or ‘Your Lordship’.

Upon which, he came to a smart halt, as did Maxie. From their puzzled demeanour I deduced they were unsure which
sir
I was addressing, so I shifted my stance until I was engaging Lord Brinkley directly. And I was pleased to note that, while Maxie appeared to be reserving judgment, Lord Brinkley was once more smiling graciously. With a certain kind of person, if you’ve got my skin colour, you get the double smile: first the token one, then the white liberal’s overbright number. But Lord Brinkley’s smile was a full-on application of spontaneous goodwill.

‘I just wanted to say I’m very proud, sir,’ I said.

I would have liked to add that Hannah would be equally proud if she only knew, but I contained myself.

‘Proud? Proud what of, dear boy?’

‘Being aboard, sir. Working for you in whatever capacity. My name’s Sinclair, sir. The interpreter that Mr Anderson sent. French, Swahili, Lingala, and minority African languages.’

The gracious smile did not waver.

‘Anderson?’ he repeated, searching his memory. ‘Not a name to me. Sorry about that. Must be a chum of Maxie’s here.’

This naturally surprised me, since I had wrongly assumed that the
Jack
of Mr Anderson’s conversation was standing before me, but such was clearly not the case. Meanwhile, Lord Brinkley’s fine leonine head had lifted, apparently in response to a summons from down the room, though I hadn’t heard one.

‘Be with you in just one jiffy, Marcel. Got a conference call booked for midnight and I want the three of you at my side. Dot the i’s and cross the t’s before that bugger Tabby does any more eleventh-hour cliff-hanging.’