Free Jimfish by Christopher Hope Page B

agreed. ‘And I’d say impossible to solve. You can have either one or the other.’
    Lunamiel agreed. ‘But that was the test: if my brother came up with the answer he’d be a millionaire.’
    Jimfish was pleased: perhaps Deon Arlow had some qualities he’d not heard of back in Port Pallid. ‘And your brother agreed to help?’
    â€˜He did. But it took a considerable struggle with his conscience. He is a real white South African who had been taught, ever since he was very, very small, to distrust and dismiss other black Africans. But when it came to business, Deon was a great adapter and he could turn his coat quicker than anyone I ever knew. Whenever Deon crossed the South African on business he behaved in a manner so refined you might call it almost human. Deon knew his duty was to do business in Zaire, though of course he said nothing to our father, wishing to spare his feelings. And that is why, when the bomb exploded beneath the altar of my church in Port Pallid on that Sunday morning, ripping to shreds any number of worshippers, my brother and I were sipping champagne in first-class seats, high above the Victoria Falls, on a flight to Kinshasa.’
    â€˜It’s a miracle!’ said Jimfish.
    â€˜Someone has to pay for other people’s miracles,’ saidLunamiel. ‘Sadly, my father, believing I was indeed dead, set off to punish those he suspected of planting the bomb, shooting many of them, just as he would have shot you, my dear Jimfish, had you not fled the garden that day we sat together. As it happened, the men he killed were not the perpetrators of the attack. Agents of our own government had planted the bomb in church with what they regarded as the laudable intention of laying the blame at the door of black terrorists.’
    â€˜How sad and ironic,’ said Jimfish.
    â€˜Exactly so,’ said Lunamiel. ‘As you will see when I tell you that the very next Sunday, when my father and mother went to church to pray for me, they were themselves blown to bits by a bomb, placed beneath the altar, by the remaining members of the black liberation movement whom my father had not managed to shoot.’
    â€˜How terrible!’ Jimfish was horrified at the painful symmetry of these violent acts.
    â€˜And sad and ironic,’ Lunamiel agreed with a wan smile. ‘Both sides in our homegrown war now felt it was quits, at least for a while. But how did you come to be here, my dear Jimfish? I want to know everything that has happened since you fled Port Pallid for Zimbabwe and the outside world.’
    So Jimfish hugged her tightly and told her of his travels in Matabeleland, his work as a bio-robot on the roof of Reactor Number 4 at Chernobyl, of the treacherous murder of the good Jagdish and the death of Soviet Malala, his unforgettable teacher. And, hearing his adventures, Lunamiel was moved to tears more than once.
    â€˜Do you think it’s the fate of South Africans to end badly?’ he asked Lunamiel.
    She sighed. ‘Since arriving in this country I’ve heard it said over and over that the only good South African is a dead South African. And when I tell you what has happened to me, you may ask yourself whether death is not a desirable option.’
    And with Jimfish hanging on her every word, side by side on the red sofa, she told him her story.

C HAPTER 14
    â€˜My brother Deon is not only flexible in his principles and pragmatic in his business practices, he is positively elastic in family matters. We had not been in Zaire more than a few days when he enlightened me as to my role in his business.
    â€˜â€œYou are not merely my dear sister,” he explained. “You are going to play a vital role in the deal I’ve signed with a Big Man in the court of the Great Leopard. No less a personage than his Minister of Mines.”
    â€˜When I asked, very gently, why I had not been consulted before he signed the deal, Deon explained