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but for the gray dogs in their skittish patrols, that they hadn’t talked to him for months.
    Surely they must check on me soon.
    So when, the very next day, they did finally check on him, it felt like an anticlimax. It came in an email from the Second Secretary, Commercial, Embassy of the United Kingdom. A small dinner, two days hence, very casual, at the house in Jakros village. Do come by.
    Mangan filled the time. He prized from Hallelujah the notes of the interview at Kaliti prison, forced himself to write them up and filed a story. “In Ethiopia, Islamic Charity Worker is Emblem of Anti-Extremist Crackdown.” It ran, cut down, deep in the internationalsection of the website, Habiba’s face peering from a tiny, bleary photo.
    After some consideration, he roused himself, called the desk and half-heartedly pitched a story on unrest and uncertainty in Ethiopia’s south and east. Dogged insurgency in the Ogaden, spillover from the war in Somalia, the bitter traffic in
chat
, guns, humans, zealotry and war that pulsed along Africa’s sunbaked Indian Ocean coast. The foreign editor sounded preoccupied:
send me a summary, Philip
.
    He bought a new shirt, took a jacket to the cleaners.
    On the appointed night, he showered, his lanky body pinkening in the steam, ran a comb through his red hair, dressed and took a taxi to Jakros—the gated community that catered to diplomats, the aid industry and, at the higher end, Ethiopia’s wealthy runners. An Olympic gold medalist resided in one of its larger mansions, Mangan knew.
    The car pulled up outside the Second Secretary’s house, a modest place of brick and concrete walls, creeping plants with orange flowers spilling over them, and an iron gate. Mangan got out of the taxi. The streets were quiet here. No music, no food stalls, no men slumped barefoot on the asphalt, their eyes glassy from
chat.
Expatriate life the world over, he thought. Lived at a hygienic remove.
    Hoddinott was the man’s name, a pale thirty-something, prematurely bald, a doughy frame in a Marks and Spencer suit. He and his wife, Joanna, were keen to appear stoic and cheerful in their hardship posting.
    “We love Addis,” said Joanna. “We absolutely love it here. How do you find it, Philip?”
    She told a long story of squatter families on the edge of the city, kicked out of their shanty and forced from the land by developers, the women gathering up children, plastic buckets, a coffee pot, a blanket, walking away through the muddied building sites.
    “Well, we did what we could. I took them clothes and some formula for the babies,” Joanna said. “But, honestly.”
    As it dawned on Mangan that he was the only guest, Joanna stood and announced brightly that she’d better make the salad. Hoddinott gestured that he and Mangan should go out into the garden, where a grill was lit and smoking.
    Hoddinott carried a bottle of chilled white wine and two glasses. He set them down on a garden table. Mangan eyed them while Hoddinott put on an apron, opened the top of the grill, peered in through a billow of smoke, then closed it again, sat and rubbed his hands together.
    “Right then,” he said. He poured the wine. Mangan watched the glass mist.
    “So how are you, Philip?” he said. “Are you settled? Are you well?”
    They are checking, thought Mangan.
    “I’m fine, I think,” he replied. “Who’s asking?”
    Hoddinott looked concerned.
    “Well, I am, for starters,” he said. “But you’re right. Others are interested, of course. They want to know you’re in fine fettle, sound of wind and limb, that sort of thing.”
    “I’m fine.”
    “Getting out much?”
    “No. Not really.”
    “Got a girl?”
    “For fuck’s sake.”
    “Sorry, sorry, don’t mean to pry.”
    Hoddinott’s expression was very level.
    “Heard anything from China?” he said.
    “Who would I hear from?”
    “Old friends. Associates. Anything?”
    “Sometimes.”
    “How do they contact you?”
    “Email. Social