“No.”

Gulls and revving transport trucks filled in the silence. And something else, too regular to be wind-made, too tinny to be animal. Made by someone. Not by something. Someone. How Sam hated English patience. Not even willing to begin a dispute until he said it, until he gave height and history and complexion their due. “No, sir.”

“Yes, Kandy,” the harbour warden answered immediately. “Word was sent from Peradeniya that you have already agreed. They are yours now, until informed otherwise, as are these.” The harbour warden held out a rust-flaked ring dangling six bright keys, golden and impossibly small, as if to a doll-house prison.

“No,” Sam said again. “No, sir.” He drove his hands into his trouser pockets and did not look again into the prison-cage, into their staring faces, their heads nodding to some unheard prayer or song syncopated by the clink of bright metal knocking on iron bars.

“No discussion, Kandy. You have agreed, you have given your word to Commander Mountbatten himself. Am I not correct?”

“Right. But these are not what I, what anyone would call ‘special case’ prisoners. I don’t know what these are, but they are not what I agreed to, sir.”

“They are, I am informed, Ethiopians, who were turned over to us when we took Tunis from the Italians. Now, I shall certainly inform the quartermaster of how this business concludes between you, Kandy, and His Majesty’s war effort, in terms of taking and keeping. In terms of past and present and future taking and keeping, I should say.”

The two men were speaking in a corner of a warehouse mostly blocked off from common view by newly stacked crates that had come off the same ship as the prisoners, some of them already blooming mould flowers and all of them addressed to the quartermaster of Colombo, who for years now had been turning his head, once a week, when Sam Kandy and his carters came before dawn for PX crates full of—really it did not matter. It could be all the chocolate and radios of America and still, now, it did not matter. None of it.

The warden consulted his clipboard and tapped his finger six times. The triumph of official reality. “I have it right here, Kandy. This was signed and stamped at the site of first detention, Tunis, and signed and stamped at the dock of embarkation, Tripoli: ‘Six special case prisoners of war, to be detained in Ceylon until further notice, under best conditions as determined by SEAC authorities at destination.’ By Commander Mountbatten’s hand, yours are our best conditions, Kandy. Take the keys. I have transport already arranged. It departs for your village at noon. Now take the keys, man!”

Sam walked off, breathing dust and brine and squinting in search of Italians. The warehouse’s doors were now open to the city on one end and to the dark water on the other. Yellow-white morning sun poured in through the unending particulate of men at work in a wartime warehouse. The bright smoke and endless whorls of sawdust and fannings made him near blind but he felt a sudden and great lift from his sudden, great resolve: that he would not. He would take every last one of the Italians instead, set them up in the walauwa itself if necessary. But he would not be a keeper of men like those others, men who could neither curse nor challenge nor keep quiet of their own resolve. He would not keep them, not that way. He would not.

The warden sighed and followed. The coolies and perhaps even the stove-stomach quartermaster himself would now see him trailing after a native like he was some fussy shopkeeper trying to settle a bill. He did not like this kind of dealing with the locals. It was exposing. It lowered everyone. He would have almost kept the Ethiopians himself, but that would be a whole other kind of lowering. They’d been delivered the night before by men from a New Zealand cruiser, in a tarp-draped cage like some kind of circus attraction. The deckhands had grimaced as they pushed it, he’d thought from the toil of rough ship rope and brine-pocked trolley wheels kedging along the grit floor. But as the accompanying officer presented the transit document and the keys, the deckhands composed themselves solemn as pranking schoolboys to watch him, the harbour warden, remove the tarp and inspect the prisoners and make sure the count was right. He’d jumped back, dropping the clipboard and the key ring. The accompanying officer was already walking back to the ship. The deckhands departed shortly thereafter, having waited in vain to be asked what the prisoners ate. The warden was left by himself, on his haunches, his hands drumming the floor in search of civilization, watching them watch him feel around for his clipboard, pity and fear and puzzling wonder occupying the air between them as thickly as the cloud legions of electric-drunk bugs that swarmed every night when the overhead lamps were switched on to hum until dawn.

“Kandy!”

Sam turned from his vain listening for the lilt and gutter of Italian mutter and curse. The warden stopped with a stutter, righted himself, and immediately held the clipboard in front of Sam’s face like a tablet he was daring him to break.

“Where are the others, sir?” Sam asked.

“The others, you say. What others? Are six of those not enough for you?”

“No. The other prisoners I watched come off a ship this morning. I will take—”

“You will take and keep, Kandy, what His Majesty’s Government requires you to take and keep. The war effort does not proceed via your vantage. It’s barely proceeding via ours of late. Now keep your word, man.”

“And otherwise, sir? Do you really think I will keep these fellows so I can take more mosquito nets and Horlicks candies from the PX?” This was not the man who lately had lied about his only son’s age to obtain a spot for him in a regiment of Indian soldiers transiting through Colombo to the Italian front. Holding here, against becoming the keeper of caged Ethiopians with padlocks driven through their lips, was everything, was not balancing or defeating or holding back but obliterating everything else.

Meanwhile, the warden did what his schooling and blood told him to do: he smiled himself deaf and blind to Sam’s counters and left.

“No,” Sam called out after him. But the warden kept walking. Sam followed. “I did not agree to this when I met your Commander Mountbatten Sir. You cannot force me to take them. It’s not, it’s not right.” Sam spoke with vehemence, with the impatient innocence of sudden virtue. He was outraged, shocked, and also pleased that the rest of the world failed to see things the same way.

“But I can. And I shall. You have already given your village’s name to the Commander’s aide, who in turn has given it to me. In two hours these fellows will be on a transport truck to”—here he flipped through his papers, victory assured by signed and sealed reality, his index finger scaling down script—“yes, Sudugama.”

“No. I cannot, I cannot give my word for their safety, for what will happen to them in the village, what will be done.”

“Good God, man, why have I been chasing you all morning trying to give you the keys? No one in your village will have any reason to fear.”

“No. It’s not them I mean, not the Kaffirs—”

“Ethiopians.”

“It’s not the prisoners who will do something in the village. It’s what the village will do to them.”

“That’s your concern, Kandy, and all the more reason for you to take the keys or I shall have no choice but to leave instructions with the transport driver to give the keys to the first villager he meets. Are we understood? Are we understood?”

They’d reached the prison-cage. The prisoners were still clinking, a golden glint playing about their black faces, their glum, padlocked mouths. He would not keep them and now there was nothing to be done but keep them. But he would not take them to Sudugama, at least not right away.

“Right. How are they fed?”

The warden waited, smiling tightly.

“How are they fed, sir?”

“Very good. Glad you remain a man of your word, Kandy. That’s the sort of thing we reward, as you well know.” He cleared his throat. “Now this will be the last that we, meaning you and I, ever discuss this matter. You will be contacted by another party regarding their next transfer, which is to occur when command deems conditions suitable. What remains is to sign here, Kandy.” The warden counter-signed and patted the document like a good boy’s head. It would be dropped in an oil barrel and burned minutes after the Ethiopians were taken from the warehouse. They were never here.

“I have to speak with the transport driver. How are they fed, sir?”

“You’ll find him in the depot on the south side of the warehouse. Ask for the man waiting to make the upcountry run. Here are your keys. The padlocks themselves, I understand, are new. The fellows were found already padlocked, but with Roman lock-and-key, which have been duly replaced with our own. Good day.”

“As to my question, sir?”

“You mean how these poor chaps are fed?” The warden flipped through his pages, found the answer, tapped it smartly, and looked up. Smiled. “As of now, Kandy, they are fed by you.”

Sam heard Curzon’s voice while he was still on the stairs. The office door must have been open. Curzon was ordering someone out, it seemed, in vain. Sam wondered how a beggar had come this far into the building and also how much of Curzon’s English he would have understood. Curzon’s voice was sliding around, from highest-pitched pique to gutter-toned curse before pirouetting, screeching back up again. Sam couldn’t remember when last he’d heard him scale about and lose himself this way, this much.

Over the years, Curzon had graduated from playing at a Ceylon Englishman to remembering nothing else, to insisting on it. By 1944 he had grown fine and fat as a spinning top; his wife, a fair-skinned Mount Lavinia Burgher, had taken to referring to her own family as natives; to dismissing dress-wearing women from prominent Colombo families as “zipper nonas”; and to pining with other fair Cinnamon Garden wives for the English goods of their girlhoods. She also complained, especially when Sam had disappeared those months only to return one day as if from a downstairs shave, with a scar on his forehead and no car and no wife, that the black harbour-work Curzon had been doing in the meantime was not what a man of his station was meant for. His was a name known throughout the Empire. He had two prefect-certain sons at Royal and a daughter who captained the hockey team at St. Bridget’s. He decided she was right: all he was ever meant to be was elsewhere than this. When he had made enough, they would close the Colombo house and take to hill country and find a good green estate. He had been stashing away errant export coupons for years. He would be a high-grown planter at Nuwara Eliya and she would become a plantation madam and they would have a trout stream and milking cows and he would never have to sight that salt-blue water again, save whenever it was that the war ended and the children left for Oxford, or Cambridge. In the meantime, there was money to be made. City warehouses were filling up smartly, goods waiting redistribution; more and more rubber tappers were needed from Cochin; a reliable letter-drop address in Singapore was asked for; a caravan-sized desk was wanted. And so Curzon kept his own daily appointments with titled men in the city, passing on untitled queries to Sam and otherwise confining himself to the Fort office, to reading and rereading damp planters’ memoirs until the heroic memories became his own, so that all that remained now was to shift triumphant and forget.

When Sam reached the second floor he rested his hand on the newel post. A woman’s voice was answering Curzon’s. Sam passed into the office and she turned and Mountbatten was also a man of his word. When last he’d seen her, in the British office at the Swiss Hotel, her long ladyfingers had been playing sonatas on her Royal, her face calm and smooth and oval and fair, yes ivory; her eyes had been open and considering, her small round mouth about to say—but it had been a busy office with a war to win, etc. But here, now, having words with Curzon, her face was the colour of battered tusks; her brow was broken up with colliding fault lines, and her eyes, narrow as if spat at but now widening, were more cat than sea green. There was more than recognition in those eyes. Not surprise, more like mild outrage that he had left her waiting this long, like this, with him. She was a fine long body in an ankle-length dress, white with gathered and strewn dark flowers playing across it, the cloth flowing down from the waist. There was some kind of yellow smudge, there, but no matter. The cloth hung fine upon those sudden, slashing hips and rose to a sweeter rising. And her throat, blushing too, like a fine vase smudged.

“Kandy,” Curzon began sternly.

“Charlie,” Sam countered with an off-hand voice, finished with this.

“Char-lie!” the woman repeated, suddenly bright as a morning bird, her hands on her hips, her eyes studying Sam’s studying hers.

“What in God’s name, what is this?” stammered Curzon.

“I already told him, sir,” she began, looking at Sam, her hand trying to cover that yellow smudge, “that I was sent!” Her pleading English was servant’s sing-song, but her mouth was red like flowers, like petals floating on milk. “I told him, sir, that I was sent to you as a—”

“This, this, this young woman tells me she was sent here, to us, by no less than Lord Mountbatten himself!” Curzon smirked. “No doubt,” he continued, feeling suddenly winded, “she must have heard our name while you were up there. Chased off for God knows what and now she’s come to Colombo to con us instead. My God but do they think the war makes nodding asses of us all? Claims her name is Ivory but refuses to say her good name, which says enough. She informs me she is to be our new secretary, on Mountbatten’s orders no less!”

“Sir please, I was sent to you as a special—”

“Enough!” Curzon bellowed.

“Sir please I was sent—”

Sam held out his hand and she stopped speaking. He walked toward her. Eyes studying eyes, mouths pursed. He showed her to the door and as she crossed the threshold Sam whispered “Wait.”

The door clicked shut. Sam turned. Curzon considered his partner’s set staring eyes, the set mouth. He knew at least this much after thirteen years of working beside Sam Kandy: what had just happened was part of a plan he did not yet know about. How much hill-country green, Charlie wondered, how high up, could he and his wife have if they left the city tomorrow?

“That woman is not our new secretary,” Sam said.

“I thought as much. Mountbatten!”

“That is correct.”

“Sorry?”

“Yes. She is mine.”