Free Jimfish by Christopher Hope Page A

Leader, Solitary Sun, Incomparable Helmsman, shown descending from heaven, garlanded with golden rays, while unseen choirs hymned his incomparable genius. There followed film of their arrival at the airport of Gbadolite and scenes of his relatives massing in the palace gardens to receive the rainof dollars. The nightly newscast closed with the Blessed Redeemer of Zaire ascending to heaven to the accompaniment of harps and trumpets.
    Unable to keep his eyes open a moment longer, Jimfish fell fast asleep wearing his splendid new suit of clothes, with his ceremonial pistol in its holster of python skin. So dead to the world was he that, when he felt someone shaking him gently, he was sure he was dreaming.
    He opened his eyes to find a black lady swathed in a silver veil, who bent over him and whispered: ‘Follow me and you will be very, very happy.’
    When he asked what this happiness might be, she touched her finger to his lips and whispered, ‘Trust me, Jimfish.’

C HAPTER 13
    Down a long , dimly lit passage and into another part of the palace, the veiled woman led Jimfish, seemingly knowing her way by instinct. She showed him into a room furnished with a fine red sofa and enormous tapestries, woven with hunting scenes of kings and knights pursuing wild boar. Here she told Jimfish to wait. He sat on the red sofa and pondered the tapestry. The hunters on their giant horses, their lances buried in the bleeding bellies of the snarling boars, and in the corner of the scene he saw the emblem of the President himself, a leopard on a chain, lunging at the prey.
    Yet despite the carnage in the tapestries, the atmosphere seemed to Jimfish softer and less brazenly opulent than he had found it in the rest of the palace.
    After a little while, the door opened and in came his guide, leading by the hand a woman, who held before her face a carnival mask. Jimfish jumped to his feet when she entered. There was something about her that made him sink back again on the sofa, his heart hammering hisribcage. At a sign from her attendant, the lady lowered her mask and there she was: his beloved Lunamiel, as lustrous and luscious as the day he had seen her last in faraway Port Pallid, when, lying on the red picnic rug in her father’s orchard, he and she had become as entangled as the tendrils of the strangler fig.
    It was all too much for poor Jimfish, still dizzy and exhausted by the events of the past days, and he fainted. When he came to, he was stretched full length on the sofa, his head in Lunamiel’s lap, struggling to make sense of it all, while she dabbed his lips and temples with a handkerchief dipped in cooling cologne.
    â€˜But they told me you were dead,’ Jimfish whispered. ‘That you were in church one Sunday when a bomb blew you to bits.’
    â€˜But for the grace of God I would have been blown to bits,’ Lunamiel said. ‘Such outrages were common in our country in the mad mid-1980s when everyone was at war. Whites were shooting blacks, blacks were bombing whites and each side was ready to destroy the other. But as it happened, I wasn’t in church that day – thanks to a miracle. My brother, Deon – who you will remember vowed to shoot you if ever he found you – had the luck to meet a rich Zairean businessman who promised him the deal of a lifetime if he would travel to the Congo to meet the Great Leopard, at the time dealing secretly with our government. Deon was offered exclusive mineral rights – cobalt, copper, gold, diamonds or all of them – if he provided strategic advice to the leader of Zaire, who had a problem very common across Africa. The President was immensely richand his people were starving. The question that plagued Sese Seko Mobutu and dozens of leaders like him was easy to state but hard to solve: how does a Big Man deal with the needs of poor people and still keep everything he has?’
    â€˜Certainly, that is a hard question,’ Jimfish