Free Spy Games by Adam Brookes

table littered with beer bottles and plates of French fries. The band played vibraphone, horns and hand drums, a pulsing, melancholy Ethio-jazz. Hallelujah waved him over and pulled out a stool. The group was made up of a couple of researchers, one or two expats, but mostly glum Addis journalists, battered by newspaper closures, arrests. Those without jobs were struggling, here selling the odd piece to a website, there doing some translation work, living with friends, making their beer last. The conversation slipped between English and Amharic.
    “Listen, everybody,” said Hallelujah to the table. “It seems that, in addition to his bold coverage of our many insurrections, Mr. Mangan has been stalking the Chinese.” He turned to Mangan. “So Philip, what did you find? Are we saved? Is China going to finance the African renaissance?”
    “I can announce that there will be a railway,” said Mangan. “A big one.”
    “Think of that, ladies and gentlemen,” said Hallelujah. “We are to enter the age of the locomotive.”
    “We are to enter the age of China.” This from tall, bespectacled Abraha, who worked in an agricultural institute. “They’ll run everything here soon.”
    “We had colonizers before,” said Hallelujah. “Didn’t turn out well for them.”
    “Is that what the Chinese are?” said Mangan. “Colonizers?”
    “I don’t know what they are,” said Abraha, “but they are everywhere. You’ve seen! Building railways, laying fiber, God knows what else. Next, they’ll bake
injera
and sell it to us.”
    The club was dim and loud.
    “You know, I heard a funny story,” said Abraha. “When the Chinese companies first turned up a few years ago, all the huge road projects starting up, they hired Ethiopian workers. Of course. Then they trained them in how you dig a ditch, build a wall, the Chinese way.”
    “Very quickly, and so it falls down a week later,” said someone, to laughter.
    “As opposed to the Ethiopian way,” said Hallelujah, “where completion of the wall, or ditch, remains a beautiful dream.”
    Abraha, chuckling, sought to wrest back control.
    “No, no, listen. This is all true. So the Chinese noticed that the Ethiopians used shovels with very long wooden handles. Always this long handle. So they watched a bit and they saw that the Ethiopians would dig for a minute or two, then stop digging. Then the Ethiopians would stand and cross their forearms on the end of the handle and rest their chin on their forearms and talk, or just close their eyes. All over the site, workers leaning on their long shovels, full of bliss. So what do you think the Chinese did?”
    Everyone looked at each other.
    “They took the shovels away? But then, how would they dig?” said someone.
    Abraha looked pleased, wagged a finger. “No. They went aroundat night with a saw and cut one foot off every handle! So the next day…”
    The table was laughing, holding up imaginary shovels, miming the workers’ falling over when they tried to rest on them.
    Mangan looked up to the door. Maja was there, walking toward the table. She wore a white cotton dress, her hair unruly on bare shoulders. He waved.
    Hallelujah waved at her, too.
    “Oh, yes, Philip, here is Maja. She is a Danish.”
    “A Dane,” said Mangan.
    “Yes, yes, a Dane,” said Hallelujah. He was animated now, Mangan saw, a bit drunk, happier, but still wound tight. “Maja, come and sit here.”
    Maja picked her way to the table, where Hallelujah made room for her, and she leaned over to give him a brief embrace. As she sat, she laid a hand on Mangan’s shoulder, and he felt the touch as if hyper-sensitized to it. He caught her eye, and she broke into a great big grin. She looked like someone who had just emerged from incarceration. Hungry for experience, fun. Hallelujah gestured to the waitress for more beers.
    “Maja, Maja, how is the poor Ogaden?” he said.
    “It is poor and unhappy, as you know, Hal. Let’s talk about something