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and Poupee would be watching for the first drop of my blood, not my bride’s. Then a battered staff car, its plates held together by chicken wire, stopped in the entrance to the clinic. A large hand seized my elbow and a handsome African in a parade-ground uniform, Captain Kagwa of the national gendarmerie, shouted through the aircraft noise.
    ‘She’s not for you, doctor! For pleasure you’ll have to sit with me!’
    ‘Captain Kagwa … For once you’re on time …’
    ‘On time? My dear doctor, we were delayed. Where’s Harare? How many men did he have?’
    ‘More than three platoons. Don’t worry, you gave them enough warning to escape.’ I pointed to the trucks heading towards the airstrip. ‘Why all this military action? I thought you’d already stolen everything in Port-la-Nouvelle?’
    ‘Doctor, I don’t want anything from you, not even your water. I’ve brought you something precious. What you Europeans really understand.’
    ‘Drilling bits, Captain?’
    ‘Drilling—?’ Kagwa pulled me into the rear seat of the jeep, where I sat among the field radios and ammunition boxes. ‘I’m talking about something real, doctor, something you can hold in your hand, that’s not going to run through your fingers like water. I’m talking about fame.’
    Fame? Had I been shot, along with Santos and Mrs Warrender, the news would scarcely have made the morning bulletin on the government radio station. I assumed that this was some complex game of the Captain’s – perhaps Harare was about to be betrayed by his own men and I would be called upon to identify the body as it lay in state at the Toyota showroom. Since my failed courtship of Mrs Warrender, I had grown to know this amiable but unpredictable police chief more closely than anyone else at Port-la-Nouvelle. A huge and often clumsy man, well over six feet tall, Kagwa was capable of surprising delicacy of mind. He was a modest amateur pianist, and had tried patiently to teach me the rudiments of the keyboard on Santos’s upright.
    A fanatic for self-improvement, Kagwa spent his spare time listening to a library of educational cassettes on politics, law and economics. One evening in Port-la-Nouvelle, when the French mining engineers had run riot through the beer parlours, I tried to compliment him by remarking piously that he and I were the only sober and responsible people in the town. He had clasped my shoulders in his immense hands and said, with great earnestness: ‘Doctor, you are not sober. You are not even responsible. No responsible man would search for water at Lake Kotto – I could arrest you tomorrow. You are Noah, doctor, waiting for rain, Noah without an ark.’
    A brief cloudburst would have been welcome as we reached the airstrip. The Dakota had already landed, and was taxiing through its own dust, engines setting up a storm of white soil. The two trucks filled with soldiers drew up alongside the control tower. One squad set off to patrol the airstrip perimeter, weapons raised to the forest canopy as if the soldiers expected Harare and his guerillas to be climbing into the sky. A second platoon formed an honour guard, heels stamping as they dressed off in two files. While they presented arms I saw that the entire scene was being filmed by the Japanese photographer. From the cockpit of her light aircraft Miss Matsuoka had removed a chromium suitcase packed with lenses and filters. Mounting a small cine-camera on a tripod, she filmed the Dakota as it lumbered up and down the earth strip, casting clouds of dust and dirt over the tractor parked beside the trees at the eastern end of the runway.
    At last, having convinced himself that he had landed, the African pilot shut down the engine. The noise faded, and the co-pilot’s window opened to the air. A blond-haired man in a safari jacket, with a deep sun-tan that was more electric than solar, leaned from the window and gave a series of encouraging waves, apparently returning the cheers of a