There was a funny smell in the room. Stone, sitting at a big hardwood desk, was wearing a herringbone sports jacket. And those dreadful brown slacks again. As if he didn’t want to look me in the eye, he kept turning his head back towards the window as he talked.
“I’m glad that I’ve got you on your own this time. It didn’t help having those two around before.”
“But why isn’t the Ambassador here?” I demanded. “If you want to discuss the same matter as on my last visit, I want to see the boss.”
“He’s not … really my boss,” Stone said, silkily. “Only in name. Let me help you with something. Let me tell you how the world works. There’s a show within a show here, Nicholas. People like me have to turn over the wheels when they stick. And, sometimes, people like me have to count on people like you. Bob Perkins is just ceremonial.”
He turned his head to the window again. Maybe he was worried someone might be listening. The window was slightly open. It was the tilting type, one big pane of glass with a wooden frame, and the refraction from the tilt threw up strange distortions of the garden outside, piling up trees and lawns at impossible angles. I couldn’t resolve them into what they actually should have looked like.
“What happened to Weir?” I asked. “I heard he was recalled to London. Because he was too friendly with Amin.”
Stone, for once, looked slightly taken aback. “Let’s … just say he was too talkative.”
I was pleased to have scored a point. “He didn’t seem that way to me,” I said, rather too smartly.
Stone frowned. “Getting back to what we were talking about last time, I suppose you’ve done nothing …”
“No,” I said shortly. “I haven’t. I was too afraid. Can’t you try another approach?”
He sighed and leant back in his chair. The room smelled of his aftershave, I realized.
“My work is nothing but approaches, Nicholas. There’s no constant, we just have to do what policy dictates, on a case-by-case basis. And in Uganda now, with things as they are, London thinks it is the right thing to do. We stopped a £12 million loan once he began that business with the Indians, but it wasn’t enough. We need you.”
“Why does it have to be me?” I said. “I’m a doctor, not a secret agent.”
“That’s the point. It’s your duty in that way. As a doctor. And as a British citizen. You must have heard, you must have seen what has being going on. There’s all the violence, lots of Brits booted out already. He’s even put the Kampala Club under guard. The next stage of his Economic War will be all of us gone. Including you, I’m certain.”
“I’m just doing a simple job,” I said. “I’m not getting in anyone’s way.”
“Well, you should be getting in the way. You should be getting in the way of the killings. The PM says that he must be stopped. It’s atrocious what’s happening. Law and order have collapsed, people are disappearing every day. We keep getting reports of massacres of soldiers, they’re dumping the bodies in the lake or in mass graves in the forests. It’s like Hitler.”
“You’re exaggerating,” I said, irritably. “Nothing is like Hitler.”
I was annoyed by the way he kept trying to take the moral high ground. There was a pause as he rummaged in his desk drawer, finally pulling out a manila folder.
“Look at these.” He pushed the folder across the desk. “I’ll make some coffee. You’ll need it. Then tell me what you think.”
There were about fifteen grainy black-and-white photographs in the folder. The first showed three soldiers in the cockpit of an armored car, two with helmets, one with a black beret. In the middle of them a man in a vest was looking up at the sky, his mouth open, as if he were calling out in pain. The soldier nearest had his shoulders slightly hunched, as if he were doing something with his hands at the front of the man—but I couldn’t see below the edge of the cockpit. It was a horrific image. I wondered who had taken the picture.
Another one showed a boy in shorts tied to a football goalpost. There was a black bag over his head and he was slumped forward. You could see his weight on the rope where it pulled against the post. At the other side a man in military police uniform was looking on, one arm raised as if he were about to intervene. Or had just given an order.
Looking at the photograph, stark there on the desk, part of me felt frightened, another part wanted to know the rest of the story. There were others that seemed to be in a sequence. A party of soldiers walking through the bush with a prisoner. Then the prisoner tied to a tree. A flour sack covering his face, the frayed corner of it tucked under his collar. In the next, I was shocked to see Amin, talking to the man with the bagged face, as if consoling him. His hand was resting on the man’s shoulder.
I thought of his hand resting on mine, less than a fortnight ago. I felt a shiver of fear, then, at the possibilities of what Amin might do if he knew I was here. The next photograph broke the sequence, showing another man’s clothed body sprawled on a curbside, covered with flies, even—which was odd, I remember thinking—on the parts that weren’t bloody. He had been bludgeoned about the head, and the bones around the eyesocket had shattered, turning out the white ball like a boiled egg.
I heard Stone’s voice behind me. “That’s only a fraction of it. We’re getting reports that are quite disgusting. Unbelievable. They’re putting … things in people’s mouths. They’re actually cutting their things off and putting them in their mouths.”
I turned round. Stone was carrying two steaming mugs on a round tin tray. He came off balance slightly as he pushed the door shut with his foot, and when he put the tray down there was a little pool of brown liquid in the well of it. I could hear the nylon crackle of his slacks as he walked over.
“It’s strange, that mouth thing,” he said, sitting down. “It’s as if they don’t want even those that die to talk. The State Research Bureau, you’ve surely heard of them, they have a speciality of shooting people there. An enormous amount of the skulls we have reported to us have broken jaws.”
“I didn’t know it was as bad as this,” I said, pushing the folder back towards him.
Stone put his hands on the desk. “Let me come to the point. Hundreds of people are dying every day, and what are you doing? Just carrying on as normal, just bumping along the bottom. Because if you don’t do anything, you are at the bottom: you’re in a cesspit, Nicholas, the whole place is, and you are one of the few people able to lift it out.”
“This is not fair,” I said. “It’s your fault, anyway. If you hadn’t put him in, none of this would have happened.”
He sipped his coffee. “It wasn’t us, not exactly. The Israelis as well … At the time, anyway, it was the right decision. Everyone said it was right for Britain, even the newspapers.”
“But that’s what it is, isn’t it? It’s all just policy with you. Expediency: that’s meat and drink to you people. When I came to see you, you suggested that—anyway, the point is, I cannot do what you ask. He is a human being, after all, whatever crimes his regime has perpetrated.”
“He’s a lunatic,” Stone said reprovingly. “One with a lot of blood on his hands and the ability to get a lot more on. He simply shouldn’t be running a country. Look, he’s just sent a message to the Queen insisting that she send an aircraft to take him to the Commonwealth Conference, and a company of Scots Guards to escort him. His latest thing is to send the so-called Pioneers of the Uganda Navy to Guinea-Bissau to liberate it from the Portuguese. He hasn’t got any ships, Nicholas, and Uganda is landlocked anyway. It would be quite funny if it weren’t for the thousands of people who are dying. All these silly larks of his, it’s like pornography. If you laugh at it, you’re stepping over the corpses. And if you work with him, well, it’s worse.”
I felt extremely uncomfortable. “I don’t … work with him. I occasionally have to treat him. Look, it’s not like I’m going out killing people. There are hundreds of Ugandans in the same position as me.”
“You could do something to help them, and the whole country. You’d be doing Uganda a favor. You have the medicines for it. You’re the only person close enough. Let me be honest with you: we need you to do more than calm him down now—I have orders to ask you to kill him.”
“That’s out of the question,” I said, laughing at the preposterousness of it, but also deeply shocked. “Doctors don’t do that sort of thing. We take an oath, you know.”
“I know,” he replied, quietly, “but the purpose of that is to save lives, and think how many lives you’d save by this. You wouldn’t get in trouble, I’d see to that. Whenever you get the chance to give him some jabs, just pump him full of adrenaline and make it seem like a heart attack.”
“Impossible,” I said, getting up. Something was still niggling at the back of my mind, though. It would be rather grand to rid the world of a dictator. And then I thought of Amin—that brief moment at State House when he had appeared to open up to me—and what it would mean to kill him, to kill anyone.
“Please sit down,” Stone said. “I know what we are asking you to do is difficult. But it would be the right thing. What is it they say—it only takes one good man to do nothing for evil to triumph?”
Stone the preacher again. That was what annoyed me most, not what he was actually asking.
“You’ve got a very misplaced idea of the right thing,” I said, loftily. “You can’t talk to me like this anyway. You can’t order me about, certainly not order me to murder somebody.”
“Sit back down. Please—just listen to me. This is straight from London.”
Why did I do as he said, and not walk out? All this could go away, things could go back to normal. I didn’t need to go out and look for this kind of excitement.
Seated again, I folded my arms, waiting for him to speak. Stone stood up and walked slowly round the desk. I could smell the aftershave again.
“Sometimes,” he said, “—and everything gets smoothed out in time—the moral path is the one that doesn’t seem so. It’s been like that throughout history. We’ll look after you, Nicholas. I’ve already arranged for a sum of money to be paid into your account in Scotland.”
“I do not want blood money in my bank account,” I said.
“You will,” he said from behind me, “mark my words. Fifty thousand pounds, and the same when it’s done.”
“You cannot make me do this,” I said. Yet it flashed through my head once again that he was right. I could actually kill Amin and get away with it. Who would be better placed? But there was, I conceded it to myself again, something in me that actually liked the man, monster though he was.
Stone sat back down in front of me. The sun was flooding the room with a deep red light.
“Think about it seriously,” he said. “We can get you whatever you want. Whatever you need. Women, money, a job somewhere else …”
I suddenly came to a decision. “I am not a killer,” I said. “I may be lots of things, but I am not a killer. Maybe it would be different if he were ill, and you asked me simply not to treat him. To let him die. But he isn’t ill, and I will not poison him.”
And then I left the room. Stone didn’t try to stop me. “The money will be in your account shortly,” he said, as I reached for the door. “It’ll stay there, but if you’re going to do it, get on with it, for Christ’s sake.”
As I walked over to the van, between the well-tended, sculptural plots of the Embassy garden, I regretted having come, and resolved that this would be the last time I had anything to do with Stone and his schemes. I had to keep to my own agenda—though I didn’t really know what that was. I drove home slowly, the sun on my hand on the steering wheel. When I got there, I made myself lunch. Delicious: avocado salad, some grilled perch, and a bottle of Pilsner.