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George?”
    “Cubans.”
    “You’re shitting me.”
    “I am not.” George was irrelevantly pleased at Teddy’s surprise. He’d supposed that Teddy would have already heard about the Cubans from Vera.
    “At a road block? I think that is not possible.”
    “Oh, they were Cubans. They weren’t making any secret of it, either.”
    “Fucking Peres,” Teddy said. “In this country we have eleven military advisers, Peres says. You do not put eleven military advisers on a fucking road block. I would like to use your name, George. Do you mind?”
    “Of course not. I didn’t see anything sinister or undercover in the thing. It was just a Cuban road block.”
    “That man is a
terrorist
. We have no need of Cubans to solve the problem.” Over Teddy’s head there sailed, in sepia, the two-masted winner of the Dakar race in 1933.
    The problem was that there were two kinds of Montedorians,as unlike as tigers and ocelots. Teddy was one kind: when you looked at his face you saw an odd crowd of different people there. His hair belonged to an African slave, his nose to a Portuguese slave trader, his mouth to a Syrian shopkeeper, his eyes to a British sailor. Teddy’s skin was a smooth khaki—the mongrel, camouflage, Creole colour. The other kind of Montedorian was as black as basalt. The Wolofs of the interior had their own language. They were nomads, farmers and hunters, where the Creoles were townsmen, fishermen, entrepreneurs. The Wolofs were Muslim, the Creoles Catholic. During the years of drought the gap between the two nations of Montedor, between the coast and the hills, had opened out from a fissure to a canyon. The Creoles suffered from bad nerves and insomnia: the command posts in the mountains, the tanks and road blocks, were supposed to help them sleep more soundly.
    “Peres does not want my road,” Teddy said. “He says it is a danger.” At present, the cobbled three-lane highway petered out seven miles beyond Bom Porto. After that, it was just a narrow pathway through the shale. “We have the promise of money from the World Bank. I see the Egyptian again next week. It is not so much the road itself, it is the building of the road. It is a major employment project. I will have Wolofs working on that road. With Creoles. In the same gang.
Communication”
He pronounced the word the Portuguese way.
Comunicão
. The
ão
was a soft and nasal miaow.
    “And all Peres sees is an army of hungry Wolofs marching down your road?”
    “Peres is a monkey. He loves guns. He hates my Ministry. The guy has a theory … you know? … that bad communications are always the safest.”
    George laughed. “Well, there’s something to be said for that. I was thinking rather along the same lines myself, earlier today.” He patted his jacket pockets, searching for his pipe, while Teddy watched him with a sour stare.
    “Oh—nothing to do with your road. In quite another context.” There had been a letter from his daughter in thelunchtime mail. George had been rattled by it. For one diverting moment, he saw Sheila as a Wolof charging down a dusty mountainside with a long banana knife.
    “That road is the most important piece of infrastructure in Montedor. We need communication like … like we need water.”
    “I suppose we do,” George said, still thinking of his daughter.
    “You
are
going to stay on, then?”
    “No … I wish I could. I can’t, Teddy.”
    “Sometimes I think you are a meatball.”
    “Oh, so do I, old love. So do I.”
    “You rapped with Varbosa?”
    “Yes. It didn’t change things.”
    “Special Adviser to the President on Foreign Trade … Sounds good.”
    “You’ve got too many advisers already.”
    “Not that kind, George.”
    “I’d just be a one-man quango.”
    “Say again?”
    “Quango? Oh, it’s something that’s all the rage in England now, or so they say. A quasi-autonomous government organization. It’s a sort of bureaucratic racket. Designed to keep old troopers in