City of Saints & Thieves(46)

I hold my breath.

He looks toward my hiding spot for a moment longer, then turns and walks out of the room.

I let my breath out in a low hiss.

On the other end of the line, Boyboy and Bug Eye are quiet.

“How do I erase?” I finally ask Boyboy through a clenched jaw. He walks me through buttons on the screen until I find what I’m looking for: traces of my presence in the room. In a little while I’ll creep back out in the dark. The camera won’t pick me up if I don’t turn on the light. There will be no sign of me left.

ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO DELETE? the screen asks. It is frozen on the last image of Mr. G’s face.

I touch the word YES.





TWENTY-ONE


I wake at dawn to dead quiet.

It’s disturbing.

Normally, mornings on my roof are full of the sound of traffic screaming through the city or the nasal chorus of ibises. But I forgot to open the window before falling into bed last night, so the air is both stale and silent. Even when I pull the curtains back and open the window I hear only the polite chirping of birds in the garden. They leave a lot of room for all the thoughts crowding my head.

I check, but there’s no message from Boyboy on my phone about the files I transmitted last night, so I just send him a text that says, ? It’s probably too early to hope he’s even awake, especially if he stayed up to decrypt files last night. I just hope Bug Eye let him go home.

I dress and poke my head out to see if Michael is up, but his door is still shut. I go downstairs, and hearing Mrs. G in the kitchen giving marching orders to the servants, I head in the opposite direction, out onto the patio. The sun hasn’t yet cut through the haze, and the garden has milky edges. Iridescent sunbirds shoot through the mist, flinging themselves from flower to flower. I lean against the balcony railing for a minute, looking out, feeling the damp and chill of the night rising from the ground.

Snippets of Mr. Greyhill’s phone conversation float through my head. He’s going to a tin mine near Kasisi and getting samples of something. Probably gold, right? And he’s going to check out a comptoir. Donatien’s used that word before. Comptoirs are the middlemen who buy gold from militias and smuggle it into other countries. But they’re mostly small-time. Maybe this one is from a different mining company that’s trying to butt in on Greyhill’s deals with the militia? Greyhill is going to take him out, from the sound of it. Or maybe get a Rwandan general to do it . . . ? It sounds bad. It also sounds totally murky and confusing.

Will the files off his hard drive make things any clearer? The files. My shoulders tighten. What if there’s nothing else on them? What if Boyboy can’t decrypt them? What if there’s not enough there to give Donatien? What do I do then? Move on to step two, or—

“Good morning, Christina.”

I jump. Mr. Greyhill’s voice sounds close in the thick air. I turn to see him walking toward me with two cups of tea in his hands. He looks ready for the office in a silk tie, his ash-colored hair combed flat to his head. He comes to stand beside me at the railing, so near that I could reach out and touch the crisp pleat on his sleeve.

“Good morning, sir.”

He hands me a teacup.

“Thank you.”

“It’s peaceful here, isn’t it?” He looks out over the yard. “I like to come here in the morning before work. Clears my head.”

I follow his gaze: the roofline of my old cottage is just visible behind the trees. “Yes, sir.”

He sips his tea, and I sip mine. Steam swirls around our faces. It and the birds the only things moving. I try to think of things to say, but all that goes through my mind is, Murderer. Murderer. Murderer. Does he know it was me who interrupted him the night before Mama died, when he had his hands around her throat? It was right down there, under that tree. Maybe I should just ask him what he was chatting about on the phone last night. What sort of things or people are you “taking care of” today, sir?

Finally, Mr. G says, “You know you’re welcome to stay here as long as you like.”

I dart a glance at his smoothly shaven face, surprised at the kindness in his tone. “Thank you, sir. But I’ll have to get back to school in a few days.”

“Yes, of course. Where did you say you were in school again?”

“I didn’t,” I say carefully. “The Alexander Academy, in Paris.”

“I see. Do you like Paris?”

I try to remember what Michael said. “The people are rude.”

His mouth lifts into a small smile. “Do you make it back here often? To Sangui, I mean?”

“No, sir.”

“I’m sure it’s quite strange being back.”

You have no idea. “Yes, sir.”

Mr. G keeps his eyes on the garden. “For the first few years I lived in Africa I couldn’t wait to get back to the US. Every vacation, every work trip to our headquarters in Chicago, was a relief. In America, there are good roads and traffic lights, and in most places you can walk around at night without any worry.”

I look at him, curious despite myself.

“But little by little, every time I went back, the place seemed more and more strange. It was too cold, too sterile. The stores were full of things that you could only buy in absurd quantities. People didn’t understand why I didn’t want to come home. I didn’t really understand it myself. I made my trips there shorter and shorter. That was twenty years ago. Now I only go if I must, for work, and I stay no longer than I have to.”