Gambian Bluff

‘And what if they decide to use the weapons we give them to take what they want and just head for the border?’ Taal asked. ‘After having their revenge on whichever Field Force men put them in the prison.’

‘We can keep them under control. In groups of ten or so, under twenty of our men. And in any case, they will know that Senegal offers no sanctuary for them. I tell you, they will fight for us because only we can offer them freedom.’

‘And the moral question?’ Taal wanted to know. ‘These men are not in prison for cheating on their wives. They are murderers and thieves and…’

‘Come on, Junaidi,’ Jabang interrupted. ‘There are only two murderers in Banjul Prison that I know of. But there are a lot of men who were caught stealing in order to feed themselves and their families.’ He looked appealingly at Taal. ‘Most crimes are political crimes – I can remember you saying so yourself.’

Yes, he had, Taal thought, but a long, long time ago. In the intervening years he had learned that not all evil could be so easily explained. ‘I’m against it,’ he said, ‘except as a last resort.’

‘You were just telling me this is the last resort,’ Jabang insisted.

As soon as he could McGrath had pulled off the open road and examined Jobo’s wound. It had already stopped bleeding, and seemed less serious than he had at first feared. Still, it would have to be looked at by a proper doctor, if only because there was no other obvious source of disinfectant.

He drove the jeep straight down Independence Drive, mentally daring anyone to try to stop him. No one did, and once at the hospital the two men found themselves in what looked like a scene from Florence Nightingale’s life story. Somewhere or other there had been more fighting that day, because the reception area was full of reclining bodies, most of them with bullet wounds of varying degrees of seriousness. The woman receptionist, who must have weighed at least eighteen stone, and who would have looked enormous even in a country where overeating was commonplace, clambered with difficulty over the prone patients in pursuit of their names and details. Sibou Cham, who looked like grace personified in comparison, was forever moving hither and thither between the reception area and the treatment rooms as she ministered to the patients.

It was almost two hours before she got round to seeing Jobo.

‘You look all in,’ McGrath told her, with what he thought was a sympathetic smile.

‘Yes, I know, you have a bed waiting for me.’

‘I didn’t mean that,’ he said indignantly. ‘Not that it’s such a terrible idea,’ he murmured, as an afterthought.

She ignored him and bent down to examine the wound. ‘Did he really get shot by a sniper?’ she asked.

‘You don’t want to know,’ McGrath said. ‘Is he going to be OK?’

‘Yes, provided he keeps away from you for the next few days.’

‘It was not Mr McGrath’s fault,’ Jobo blurted out. ‘He saved us both…’

‘She doesn’t need to know,’ McGrath interrupted.

Sibou gave him one cold, hard look and strode out of the office.

‘I don’t want to get her in trouble,’ McGrath explained. ‘The other guy – you called him Jerry – what do you think he’ll do?’

Jobo thought. ‘I don’t know. He was always a scared kid when I knew him at school. And not very clever. He may worry that he’ll get in trouble for letting his partner get shot or for running away. He may just go home and keep quiet, or even go up to the family village for a few days.’

‘Or he may be telling his story to Comrade Jabang right this moment.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Well, there’s not a lot we can do about it if he is. Except maybe send you to your village for a few days…’

‘I come from Serekunda,’ Jobo said indignantly.

‘Oh, pity.’

The doctor came back with a bowl of disinfectant and a roll of new bandage. After carefully washing the entrance and exit wounds she applied a dressing, then the bandage, and told Jobo to take it easy for a few days. ‘If it starts to smell, or it throbs, come back,’ she told him. ‘Otherwise just let it heal.’

‘I’ll take him home,’ McGrath said. She was already on her way back to the reception area. ‘When do you get off?’ he called after her.

She laughed. ‘In my dreams,’ she said over her shoulder, and disappeared.

Outside the jeep was still there, much to McGrath’s relief and somewhat to his surprise. Darkness was falling with its usual tropical swiftness. He helped Jobo aboard, climbed into the driving seat, and started off down the road into town.

The first thing that struck him was how dark it was. Banjul’s lighting would have done credit to a vampire’s dining room at the best of times, but on this night every plug in the city seemed to have been pulled, and McGrath’s vision was restricted to what the jeep’s headlights could show him.

The sounds of the city told him more than he wanted to know. The most prominent seemed to feature a never-ending cascade of glass, as if someone was breaking a long line of windows in sequence. Some evidence to support this theory came at one corner, where the jeep’s headlights picked out a tableau of three shops, each with their glass fronts smashed, and fully laden silhouettes bearing goods away into the night.

The sound of tearing wood also seemed much in evidence, offering proof, McGrath supposed, that in the Third World not many shops were fronted by glass. Banjul seemed to be in the process of being comprehensively looted.

And then there was the gunfire. Nothing steady, no long bursts, just single shots every minute or so, from wildly different directions, as if an endless series of individual murders was being committed all over the town.

It was eerie, and frightening. At Jobo’s house his mother pulled him inside and shut the door almost in the same motion, as if afraid to let the contagion in. McGrath climbed back into the jeep and laid the Browning on the seat beside him, feeling the hairs rising on the nape of his neck. He engaged the gears and took off, hurtling back up the street faster than was prudent, but barely fast enough for his peace of mind.

It was only half a mile to the dim lights of McCarthy Square, only forty seconds or so, but it felt longer. At the square he slowed, wondering where to go. The Atlantic Hotel offered a whites-only haven, but there would be guards there, maybe guards who were looking for him, and he knew he would feel more restricted, more vulnerable, surrounded by fellow Europeans. Particularly if the rebels suddenly got trigger-happy with their tourist guests. No, he decided, the Carlton offered more freedom of movement, more ways out. And he could sleep on the roof.

The Party envoys, along with an armed guard of a dozen or so Field Force men, arrived at the prison soon after dark, and after a heated discussion with the warden, which ended with his being temporarily consigned to one of his own cells, they addressed the assembled prisoners in the dimly lit exercise yard. Moussa Diba and Lamin Konko listened as attentively as everyone else.

There had been a change of government, the speaker told them, and all prisoners, with the exception of the two convicted murderers, were being offered amnesty in return for a month’s enlistment in the service of the new government. They would not be asked to fight against fellow Gambians or workers, only against foreigners seeking to invade the country. If they chose not to enlist, that was up to them. They would simply be returned to their cells to serve out their sentences.

‘What do you think?’ Konko asked Diba.

‘Sounds like a way out,’ Diba said with a grin. He was still inwardly laughing at the exemption of the two murderers, whom everybody in the prison knew to be among the gentlest of those incarcerated there. Both had killed their wives in a fit of jealous rage, and now spent all their time asking God for forgiveness. Some of the thieves, on the other hand, would cut a throat for five dalasi. He would himself for ten.

‘I’ve only got two years more in here,’ Konko said. ‘I’d rather do them than get killed defending a bunch of politicians.’

‘We won’t,’ Diba insisted. ‘Look, if they’re coming here to get us out, they must be desperate. It must be all craziness out there in Banjul. We’ll have no trouble slipping away from whatever they’ve got planned for us, and then we hide out for a while, see how the situation is, get hold of some money and get across into Senegal when it looks good. No problem. Right, brother?’

Konko sighed. ‘OK,’ he said with less than total conviction. ‘I guess out there must be better than being in here.’

There’s women out there,’ Diba said. Anja was out there. And with any luck he would have her tonight.

The two of them joined the queue of those waiting to accept the offer of amnesty. Since only three of the prison’s two hundred and seventeen eligible inmates turned down the offer it was a long queue, and almost an hour had passed before the new recruits were drawn up in marching order on the road outside. They were kept standing there for several minutes, swatting at the mosquitoes drawn from the swamp by such a wealth of accessible blood in one spot, until one of the Party envoys addressed them again. They were being escorted to temporary barracks for the night, he told them. On the following morning they would be issued with their weapons.

The barracks in question turned out to be a large empty house in Marina Parade. There was no furniture, just floor space, and not enough of that. The overcrowding was worse than it had been in the prison, and, despite the protests of the guards, the sleeping quarters soon spilled out into the garden. There was no food, no entertainment, and after about an hour the sense of too much energy with nowhere to go was becoming overpowering. The guards, sensing the growing threat, started finding reasons to melt away, and with their disappearance an increasing number of the prisoners decided to go out for an evening stroll, some in search of their families, some in search of women, some simply in search of motion for its own sake.

Diba went looking for Anja.

Finding Independence Drive partially lit by a widely spaced string of log brazier fires, he slipped across the wide road and down the darker Mosque Road. It could not be much later than ten, he reckoned, but Banjul was obviously going to bed early these days. There were no shops open, no sounds of music, and few lights glowing through the compound doorways. Occasionally the sounds of conversation would drift out across a wall, and often as not lapse abruptly into silence at his footfall.

Conscious that he had no weapon, Diba kept a lookout for anything which would serve for protection, and in one small patch of reflected light noticed a two-foot length of heavy cable which someone had found surplus to requirements and discarded. It felt satisfyingly heavy in his hands.

Some fifteen minutes after leaving Marina Parade he found himself at the gate to the compound where she had her room. Her husband’s family had once occupied the whole compound, but both his parents had died young, he had been killed in a road accident in Senegal, and his brothers had gone back to their Wollof village. She had fought a losing battle against other adult orphans, and the compound had become a home to assorted con men and thieves.

To Diba’s surprise the gate was padlocked on the inside. He climbed over without difficulty, proud of how fit he had managed to keep himself in prison, and stood for a moment, listening for any sounds of occupation. He heard none, but as his eyes became accustomed to the gloom they picked out a pile of identical cardboard boxes stacked against a wall. They were new stereo radio-cassette players. No wonder the gate had been locked. He walked gingerly down one arm of the L-shaped courtyard, and turned the corner. The first thing he noticed was the yellow glow seeping out under Anja’s door, the second was the sound of her voice, moaning softly, rhythmically, with pleasure.