5. The Hunger Strike

The fisherman's hut stood on a shelf of black rock above the sea, its walls built from coral rag and its roof patched with palm fronds that rustled in the wind like the wings of a thousand insects. It had been abandoned for years, and it smelled of salt and old nets and the dried guano of the seabirds that nested in the rafters. But it was safe, or as safe as any place could be in the Sultanate of Zanjibar for a family that had spoken the truth on the public airwaves.

The stone that had come through the window lay on the floor where it had fallen, wrapped in its paper and tied with a cord of palm fibre. Idris had not touched it since he had read the message. He sat with his back against the wall, watching the door, and his father sat beside him, and his sisters slept on a pallet in the corner, their breathing the only sound in the hush before dawn.

"He knows where we are," Omar said. His voice was flat, emptied of the passion that had filled the radio studio. "The man in the red tarboosh. He knows where we are, and he will come for us."

"The inquiry has been ordered. The commissioner has been suspended. The chamberlain has resigned. Why would he come for us now?"

"Because the inquiry is not a verdict. The inquiry is a delay, and the delay gives the powerful time to bury their secrets. If we are dead, the inquiry will have no witnesses, and the case will collapse, and everything will return to the way it was before. The commissioner will be reinstated, and the chamberlain will be rehabilitated, and the company will resume its work, and my wife's death will be forgotten."

Idris looked at his father, and he saw that the fear that had paralysed him for so long had been replaced by something colder and harder, a clarity that was almost indistinguishable from despair. "What do you want to do?"

"I want to go back to the city. I want to find the man in the red tarboosh before he finds us. I want to finish what we started."

"If you go back, you will be arrested. The writ of seizure is still in effect. The costs are still owed. The law is still the law."

"Then I will be arrested. But I will be arrested in the daylight, in front of the courthouse, with the radio journalists and the foreign press and the people of Stone Town watching. I will not be silenced in a fisherman's hut in the middle of the night. I will make my death, if it comes, a public event, and the public will see who killed me."

The words hung in the air of the hut, and Idris felt them settle into his chest like a challenge. He thought of his mother, standing in the doorway of her home, believing in the law until the roof came down upon her. He thought of Nadia, pulling levers that had been designed to be pulled by the rich. He thought of Zahir, the detective who had been suspended and silenced and whose box of evidence had been seized by the commissioner's men. And he thought of the ripples that had spread from his father's broadcast, the crowds in the squares, the questions that were being asked in voices that grew louder with each repetition.

"We will go back together," Idris said. "But first we must send the girls somewhere safe."

They made the arrangements that morning, through Tariq the smuggler, who had remained with them in the hut and who now sat on the rocks outside, smoking a cigarette and watching the sea. Tariq knew a fishing boat that would take Amina and Samira across the strait to the neighbouring sultanate of Al-Bahr, where a cousin of Nadia's ran a school for girls in the mountain town of Hajar. The journey would take two days, and the girls would be safe there, beyond the reach of the commissioner and the chamberlain and the man in the red tarboosh.

Amina refused at first. She stood in the doorway of the hut with her arms crossed and her jaw set, and she spoke to her father in the voice of a woman who had ceased to be a child. "I will not leave you," she said. "Mother stayed, and Mother died, but I am not Mother. I am your daughter, and I will stay with you."

"You are my daughter," Omar said, "and that is why you must go. Your mother stayed because she believed the law would protect her. You must go because you know better. You know that the law is a mask, and the mask has fallen, and the face beneath it is the face of the man in the red tarboosh. If you stay, he will use you against me, and I will not be able to protect you. If you go, I can fight, and I can fight without fear."

Amina looked at her father for a long time, and then she looked at Idris, and then she knelt beside Samira and whispered in her ear, and the younger girl nodded and stood and took her hand. They left at noon, climbing down the rocks to the fishing boat that waited in the cove below, and Idris watched them go with a grief that was sharper than any grief he had felt before, because it was a grief that he had chosen.

When the boat had disappeared beyond the headland, Idris and Omar and Tariq began the long walk back to Stone Town. They did not take the tunnels this time. They walked along the coast road, in full view of the fishermen and the goatherds and the women washing clothes in the streams, and every step they took was a step into the light.

They reached the city in the late afternoon, and the streets were not the streets they had left. The writ of seizure still hung on the door of the tea shop, but the tea shop was closed, and the windows were shuttered, and a crowd had gathered in the square outside the courthouse, a crowd of dockworkers and market women and students from the Sultan's academy, and they were carrying placards that bore the names of the dead. Some of the placards bore the name of Khadija Bakari. Some bore the name of Ahmed Haddad, the clerk who had been found hanging in his office. Some bore no name at all, only the question that Idris had written on the script: If the law will not give us justice, then what is the law for?

Nadia was standing at the edge of the crowd, her black robes dusty from the street, her white hijab bright in the afternoon sun. She saw Idris and Omar approaching and came to meet them, and her face was the face of a woman who had been fighting for so long that the fighting had become a kind of prayer.

"The Sultan has ordered a full inquiry," she said. "The commissioner is under house arrest. The chamberlain has fled to his estate in the eastern provinces, and the palace has issued a statement saying that his resignation was accepted with regret. The company's offices have been sealed, and the director, Khalid al-Mansour, has been summoned to the palace for questioning. But the man in the red tarboosh is still at large. No one knows his real name, and no one knows where he is."

"He knows where we are," Idris said. "He threw a stone through our window last night. He left a message."

"What did the message say?"

"That the truth is a debt that must be paid."

Nadia's face tightened, and she looked at the crowd in the square, and she looked at the courthouse with its Portuguese tiles and its dry fountain, and she said, "Then we must pay the debt before he collects it."

They walked together to the courthouse, and the crowd parted to let them pass, and the murmuring of the crowd was the sound of the sea, the same sound that had filled Idris's ears every night since he had returned from Cairo. At the door of the courthouse, a line of police constables was standing, their batons drawn, their faces blank. Behind them, on the steps, stood a man Idris had not seen before, a tall man in the uniform of the palace guard, with a scimitar at his belt and a medal on his chest.

"I am Colonel Farouk," the man said. "I have been appointed by the Sultan to conduct the inquiry into the Al-Nour demolition. You are Omar Bakari and Idris Bakari, and you are the lawyer Nadia al-Hashimi. You will come with me."

They followed him into the courthouse, and the doors closed behind them, and the crowd outside fell silent. The colonel led them through the arcade and into a chamber that Idris had never seen before, a room that was not a courtroom but a salon, with silk carpets on the floor and ivory screens on the windows and a portrait of the Sultan's grandfather on the wall. In the centre of the room was a table, and at the table sat three men: the judge who had dismissed the petition, the host of the radio program who had given Omar the microphone, and a third man whom Idris did not recognize.

"This is the inquiry panel," Colonel Farouk said. "They will hear your testimony, and they will make a recommendation to the Sultan. The recommendation will be binding. There will be no appeal."

The inquiry lasted for three days. Omar testified first, and he told the story again, the same story he had told on the radio, and his voice did not break this time. He told of the man in the red tarboosh, the contract, the ring, the dawn of the demolition, the blue curtain, the photograph. He told of his wife's refusal to leave and her belief in the law and her death under the corrugated iron. He told of the clerk's suicide and the forged note and the bribe that had been returned by the widow. He told of the judge's dismissal and the commissioner's writ and the chamberlain's photograph. And when he had finished, the three men at the table were silent for a long time.

Nadia testified next, and she presented the evidence that she had gathered over the weeks: the permit with its backdated date, the issuance log with its erased entry, the ring with its half-obliterated inscription, the photograph of the chamberlain's villa. She presented the affidavit that the judge had rejected, and she argued that the rejection itself was evidence of the conspiracy that had corrupted the court. The judge who was sitting on the panel did not look at her, and his face was the face of a man who was being forced to look at something he had spent his career pretending not to see.

On the third day, Idris testified. He told of his return from Cairo and his discovery of the ring at the dinner table and his conversations with his father in the dark. He told of Zahir, the detective who had been suspended and whose evidence had been seized. He told of the tunnels and the radio station and the stone through the window and the message that the truth was a debt that must be paid. And when he had finished, the host of the radio program leaned forward and asked him the question that he had been dreading.

"Why did your father accept the bribe, Idris Bakari? Why did he sign the contract and take the money and agree to evacuate your family home?"

Idris looked at his father, and his father looked at him, and the silence between them was the silence of the low table in the room above the tea shop, the silence that had been filled with bread and salt and the things that could not be said.

"Because he was poor," Idris said. "Because poverty is a kind of violence, and the violence of poverty makes men do things they would not otherwise do. My father accepted the bribe because he wanted to give his children a home with running water and electric light. He accepted the bribe because the company promised him something that the law had never given him: hope. And he accepted the bribe because he did not believe that my mother would die. He believed that the company would honour its contract, and the eviction would be orderly, and the family would be resettled. He believed in the promises of the powerful, and his belief was his sin, and he has paid for that sin every day since the bulldozers came."

The inquiry panel was silent, and the colonel was silent, and the portrait of the Sultan's grandfather looked down from the wall with the painted eyes of a man who had never been poor.

On the fourth day, the panel delivered its recommendation. The Al-Mansour Trading Company was ordered to pay compensation of fifty thousand rials to the Bakari family. The commissioner was dismissed from his post and barred from public office. The chamberlain was exiled to his estate and stripped of his titles. The judge who had dismissed the petition was suspended pending a review of his conduct. The man in the red tarboosh, whose real name was revealed to be Mahmoud al-Jabari after all, was to be arrested and prosecuted for fraud, bribery, and conspiracy to commit murder.

But Mahmoud al-Jabari was not arrested. He had vanished, and the police who were sent to his house found only an empty room and a red tarboosh hanging on a peg and a photograph of the Bakari family, taken from across the street, with Idris and Omar and Amina and Samira circled in red ink.

The recommendation was announced on the radio that evening, and the crowds in the squares cheered, and the students in the academy sang the national anthem, and the dockworkers went back to their docks, and the market women went back to their stalls, and the city returned to its rhythms. But Idris did not cheer. He sat in the room that Nadia had rented for him in a boarding house on the Street of the Bookbinders, and he stared at the photograph that Zahir had given him, the photograph of the man in the red tarboosh standing beside the commissioner on the steps of the sanitation building.

There was a knock at the door, and when Idris opened it, Zahir was standing there. The detective's face was thinner than before, and his eyes were bruised with sleeplessness, but he was wearing his uniform again, and his badge was polished.

"The suspension has been lifted," Zahir said. "The commissioner's orders have been rescinded. I have been reinstated, and I have been assigned to find al-Jabari. I have come to ask for your help."

"Why do you need my help?"

"Because al-Jabari is not hiding from the police. He is hiding from you. The photograph with the red ink was a message, and the message was meant for your family. He is still trying to collect the debt."

Idris stepped aside and let Zahir enter, and the two men sat at the table by the window, and the photograph lay between them like a wound that had not yet healed.

"There is something I did not tell the inquiry," Zahir said. "Something I found in the box before the commissioner's men seized it. The bank deposit slip that was found with the clerk's body, the one with the bluish ink. I traced the account number, and the account did not belong to the clerk. It belonged to a holding company registered in Aden, and the holding company was owned by a trust, and the trust was administered by a lawyer in London. The lawyer's name is Jonathan Ashworth, and he is the same lawyer who represents the Al-Mansour Trading Company in its international dealings."

"What does that mean?"

"It means that the money that was deposited into the clerk's account came from the same source that finances the company's operations. The money was not a bribe. It was a payment for services rendered. The clerk was not paid to forge the permit. He was paid to take the blame for the forgery, and then he was killed before he could change his mind."

Idris stared at the photograph on the table, and the face of the man in the red tarboosh stared back at him, and the smile on the face was the smile of a man who knew that the law was a mask and that the mask had not yet fallen.

"If what you say is true," Idris said, "then the inquiry's recommendation is incomplete. The commissioner and the chamberlain were punished, but the men who ordered the killing are still free. The men in London, the shareholders and the lawyers and the accountants. They are still free, and they will do this again, in another city, in another country, and the poor will die under the bulldozers, and the law will protect the men who killed them."

"Yes," Zahir said. "That is what I came to tell you. The inquiry was a victory, but the victory is not complete. The machine is still turning. The levers are still being pulled. The chain of complicity that Nadia described is longer than any of us imagined, and it stretches across the sea to places where the Sultan's justice cannot reach."

Idris stood and walked to the window, and he looked out at the city, the minarets and the bell towers and the rusting cranes of the harbour, the spice market and the slave memorial and the colonial facades that had never been replaced. The city was the same as it had been when he had returned from Cairo, and it was different, and the difference was the difference that the truth had made.

"What do you want me to do?" he asked.

"I want you to come with me to London," Zahir said. "I have been authorized to travel there to interview the lawyer, Jonathan Ashworth. I will need a witness, someone who can identify the face of the man in the red tarboosh and testify to what he did. The British authorities have agreed to cooperate, and the Sultan has approved the mission. If we can find Ashworth, we can find the thread that connects the company to the forgery and the forgery to the murder. We can pull the thread, and the whole fabric will unravel."

"And if we cannot find him?"

"Then we will have tried. And the trying will be its own kind of justice."

Idris thought of his mother, and he thought of his sisters, safe in the mountain town of Hajar, and he thought of his father, who had finally spoken the truth and who now sat in the room above the tea shop, waiting for the compensation that would never bring his wife back. He thought of the bread that tasted of salt and the silence that was heavier than stone and the ring that had been left on the table as a pledge. And he thought of the man in the red tarboosh, who was still out there in the darkness, waiting to collect his debt.

"I will come with you," Idris said. "But first I must say goodbye to my family."

That evening, the family gathered for the last meal in the room above the tea shop. The writ of seizure had been removed from the door, and the tea shop owner had reopened his kitchen, and the tray of food that arrived was the same as it had always been: saffron rice, lentils, bread. But the bread did not taste of salt. It tasted of cardamom, the cardamom that Khadija Bakari had kept in the tin above the hearth, and the taste was the taste of her presence, still lingering in the room after all the weeks of grief and silence.

Omar sat at the head of the table, and Idris sat across from him, and the two places where Amina and Samira had sat were empty, but their absence was not the absence of loss. It was the absence of hope, the hope that they would return someday, when the danger had passed and the debt had been paid.

"Zahir has asked me to go to London," Idris said. "To find the lawyer who represents the company. To finish what we started."

Omar nodded slowly, and his hands were steady on the table, and his voice was steady when he spoke. "Your mother would be proud of you," he said. "She believed that the world could be changed, and she believed that the changing was the work of ordinary people, doing ordinary things, day after day. She believed that justice was not a destination but a direction, and she walked in that direction every day of her life. You are walking in the same direction, and that is all she ever wanted."

"Will you be safe here?"

"I will be as safe as any man can be in a country where the law is a mask. But the mask has cracked, and the face beneath it has been seen, and the seeing cannot be undone. Whatever happens to me, the truth is now in the world, and the truth will continue to do its work."

Idris rose from the table and embraced his father, and he felt the old man's arms around him, the same arms that had carried him as a child, the same hands that had signed the contract and taken the money and burned the evidence, the same hands that had been broken and had not yet been mended. But the hands were no longer trembling. They were still, and the stillness was the stillness of a man who had finally laid down his burden.

At dawn, Idris walked to the harbour, and Zahir was waiting for him at the gangplank of a steamer bound for Aden and the Suez and the long passage to England. The detective was dressed in civilian clothes, a suit of European cut that fit him poorly, and he was carrying a briefcase that contained the photograph and the bank records and the ring with the inscription of the House of Al-Mansour.

"The journey will take three weeks," Zahir said. "We will have time to prepare."

"Prepare for what?"

"Prepare for the moment when we stand in front of Jonathan Ashworth and ask him who gave the order to kill the clerk, and who gave the order to forge the permit, and who gave the order to send the bulldozers at dawn. Prepare for the moment when the chain of complicity is finally broken."

Idris looked back at the city, the white walls and the coral towers and the flags of the Sultanate snapping in the morning breeze. He did not know when he would return, or if he would return at all. But he knew that the direction he was walking was the direction his mother had walked, and that was enough.

The steamer cast off from the dock, and the gap between the hull and the quay widened, and the city receded into the haze of the morning. Idris stood at the rail and watched it go, and he felt the stone in his chest shift and settle and begin, at last, to dissolve.

But in the hold of the steamer, among the crates of tea and the bales of cotton and the trunks of the wealthy passengers, a figure was moving in the darkness. The figure wore a suit that was not a suit, and it moved with the silence of a man who had been trained to move silently, and it carried in its pocket a photograph of Idris Bakari, taken from across the harbour, with a circle of red ink around his face.

The man in the red tarboosh was no longer wearing a tarboosh. But he was still smiling. And the debt, he knew, was not yet paid.