Borderlines. Michela Wrong

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СКАЧАТЬ would have liked – ‘Typical of you, Paula,’ she’d wailed, ‘moving to darkest Africa on the strength of a fax’ – but I hadn’t actually laid eyes on Winston since our Boston meeting. He seemed somehow larger, louder, a player in his element.

      ‘So, first impressions?’ he asked. Two beers magically appeared in stumpy unlabelled brown bottles. As the meal progressed, dishes kept materialising without orders being placed, and I realised he must eat at the Torino every day. Winston might be innovative and risk-taking inside the courtroom, but out of it he was a creature not so much of habit but of obsessive routine.

      ‘Weeell … the city isn’t what I was expecting at all. I don’t know what I thought an African capital would be like, but it feels more like a riviera resort, or a stretch of LA. The palm trees definitely bring Evelyn Waugh and F. Scott Fitzgerald to mind.’

      He tilted his glass and carefully dribbled in some beer from the bottle. ‘Most African capitals barely existed before colonialism, so the cities often still look as their colonial masters intended. Infrastructure that stands the test of time can be a mixed blessing. It’s impossible to shake off.’

      ‘It seems incredibly clean. I suppose I was expecting open sewers and tin-shack slums.’

      ‘There are plenty of those, believe me, but not in this district. You’re in what was once Lira’s European quarter, which used to be off-limits to the “natives,”’ he made inverted commas in the air, ‘after the sun went down. It’s still the most elegant part of town. All the embassies and most of the hotels are here.’

      ‘And the climate …’

      ‘The climate?’

      ‘I realise I was a bit naïve, but I automatically assumed it would be hot and sweaty. I’m already wearing most of the clothes I packed.’

      He looked nonplussed. ‘Ah. Sorry about that. I should have asked Sharmila to brief you. We’re very high up, so it gets pretty cold once the sun goes down. I’m afraid it didn’t occur to me that would be an issue. My own wardrobe barely changes, irrespective of the season. You might be able to pick something up at the local market. Everything’s made in China, of course.’

      ‘Abraham mentioned I’ll be living with Sharmila. I don’t want to sound like a prima donna, but is there any chance I could have my own place, however small? I’m not used to sharing.’

      He gave me a probing look, alert for potential trouble. ‘Sorry, can’t do. It’s not penny-pinching, in case you’re wondering. The government designates where expatriates on the payroll live. Getting us to share makes keeping tabs on us easier.’

      ‘That sounds a bit paranoid. We’re on their side, after all.’

      ‘Not paranoid, just careful. The client’s prerogative.’

      He started elliptically, so much so that for the first fifteen minutes I wondered if he was meandering, a man who liked to talk for the sake of talking. But then I saw what he was doing. Like any good lawyer, he knew that context dictates meaning. He was painting in the background, sketching in the lines of perspective, ensuring that when he finally came to the story’s core, it would be properly framed.

      He ran through his curriculum vitae. A boy who had been parked for long hours in the library of the school in West Philadelphia, where his mother worked as a cleaner, who had grown to love the institution’s smell of old leather, the hush of concentration and masculine gravitas, the atmosphere, he would later learn, of a gentleman’s club. What would have been a tiresome ordeal for most boys his age providing him with a glimpse of a way out. A truck-driver father, whose absences were compensated for by a grandfather’s loving attention: Winston Peabody I, despairing of his pool-hall-frequenting son, was self-taught, politically active, the kind of iconoclast who felt compelled to declare his atheism to all and sundry, had poured his frustrated aspirations into his grandson, who had soaked up the references to Orwell and Fanon, Garvey and Du Bois, safe harbours of thought and inspiration in the choppy seas of adversity.

      The boy had fondly assumed that his grandfather – rarely seen without a pin-stripe waistcoat and half-moon glasses perched on the end of his nose – was a lawyer, possibly a judge. In fact, Winston Peabody I, the gifted child of railway labourers, had never spent more than two years in high school. When he left for work, battered briefcase in hand, he was headed for a legal aid office where the absence of a degree confined him to a clerk’s desk but did not prevent him murmuring quietly authoritative advice to the poor mothers who sat in the waiting room, facing eviction and welfare cuts. The boy had repaid the attention – and the fund-raising support of his local evangelical church – by filling the blank space above his grandfather’s desk where a framed law degree had always screamed to be. For the grandfather, it was a form of validation by proxy, the sins of the forefathers wiped out by the relentless determination of a legacy-conscious heir. The first and, to date, only member of his family to go to college, Winston Peabody III had gone one better, graduating from Cornell Law School first in his class. He was snapped up by the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, eventually migrating to the Fraud Section. Then Watergate broke, and in its wake came Lockheed, Bananagate and a host of scandals whose revelations of slush funds, political skulduggery and sleaze had triggered a bout of national self-loathing that had given birth to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). Winston had become a government sleuth, pursuing the kind of corporate misbehaviour deemed to bring the US into international disrepute.

      And then he had walked through the revolving door, taking his forensic understanding of the new anti-bribery legislation to Melville & Bart, where he found himself advising exactly the kind of American corporations he had once sought to prosecute. I must have looked judgemental at this point because, for the first time, Winston became defensive: ‘What people don’t always realise,’ he said, ‘is that in a lot of companies, senior management often genuinely believes it is behaving ethically. The CEO’s been kept in the dark by a regional manager who thinks buying the president’s son a new Porsche is standard business practice. We show these guys how to clean up their act.’ I nodded, as if in agreement. There was no disguising the fact that the gamekeeper had turned poacher, but it wasn’t hard to guess why. As a senior partner at Melville & Bart, Winston had probably pulled down in a month what he would have earned in a year at the Justice Department. Hard for a cleaner’s son, raised in poverty, to resist.

      A few years later, Winston had had an epiphany. A mining client had invited him to visit its project in Liberia. It was his first trip to the land of his forefathers and, strolling Monrovia’s ramshackle streets, he was surprised by how at home he felt. He was also surprised, sitting on the terrace of his Mamba Point hotel, watching fruit bats stir in the palm trees, to overhear conversations that revealed his client was bankrolling both the government and the rebels in the civil war. ‘I suppose it was pretty naïve,’ he said, with a rueful smile, ‘but I was shocked. When I came back, I called a partners’ meeting. I told them I would no longer represent the client and urged Melville & Bart to withdraw. My colleagues refused. It got fairly unpleasant. I was on the verge of resigning. Instead we struck a deal. I’d continue reeling in corporate clients but they would make some room for me to do pro bono work in the developing world on the side. My way of salving my conscience. I can sleep at night, the firm’s reputation gets a boost.’

      Winston started wandering the world, and found there was no shortage of causes to champion. Once frozen hard by the Cold War, international borders had turned liquid and negotiable in the former Soviet Union, the Balkans and Africa. New nation states were emerging, in urgent need of constitutions and bills of rights. Relations between neighbouring countries were up for redefinition. It was work that few of those governments knew how to handle. It was work that Winston Peabody III seemed born to do.

      There СКАЧАТЬ