The Illegal Read Free Page A

How could a person be too courageous? He stepped out to shake his dusting cloth on the porch, and saw them coming. Ten men, carrying big sticks and cricket bats. Not the same men who had been in the truck. Different men. Swaying a bit on the road. Were they dancing? No. They were drunk.
    Keita shouted for the deacon, who rushed to the porch. “You must leave,” he said. “Now.”
    He turned and locked the doors. Then he took a cellphone from his pocket. Keita heard a woman answer.
    “Martha,” the deacon said, “get the constable to come out to the church. Troublemakers are on the way. Love you.”
    The deacon picked up his Bible. Keita stood with him. It didn’t feel right to leave him alone. A line of sweat ran down the side of the deacon’s forehead. The men were just a hundred metres away now, and Keita could hear them shouting like football hooligans. What did they want? Every second word from their mouths was a curse.Keita could run! He was the quickest boy in his school over every race, from 100 to 1,500 metres. He could run, and they would never catch him. But what about Deacon Andrews?
    “Fucking Faloos and their fucking church,” one of the men called out. “Let’s burn this shithole down!”
    “Keita, I will teach these young men the language of God,” said the deacon. “You get running.”
    Keita ran across the yard to the road, but stopped about fifty metres away. The deacon had walked out to meet the men. Keita didn’t understand why these men hated Faloos. Keita’s mother was a Faloo, but his father was a Bamileke, from Cameroon in Africa. Yoyo had written for a newspaper in France about the growing unpopularity of Faloos as shopkeepers and business people. Keita wished that he were 100 percent Bamileke, like his father. He wished that he, too, had come from Africa—a continent thousands of kilometres to the west of Zantoroland. Maybe then these men wouldn’t hate him.
    The men with sticks surrounded Deacon Andrews, who held the Bible closed in his hand and quoted from Exodus. The deacon towered above the men, but they attacked him like a pack of hyenas: from the front, from the sides and from behind. They knocked the Bible out of his hands. Keita watched it somersault through the air and land in a ditch. Deacon Andrews flung off the first man as if he were a small dog. He flung off the second. Then the men drew knives, and one of them shoved a blade deep into the deacon’s belly. Keita heard a wailing, furious cry—the likes of which he had never imagined a grown man could make.
    “You are not men,” the deacon cried out. “You have no souls.”
    Moments ago, the deacon had stood strong like a tree, but now he lay like uncoiled rope in a pool of blood.
    One of the men turned toward Keita. “Get the kid!” he shouted.
    A man with a cricket bat turned toward Keita, who set off running, checking over his shoulder to take a measure of his pursuer’s speed. The man was quick, and now he threw down the cricket batto run harder. Keita set out at 400-metre speed, sure that after a hundred metres, the pursuer would give up. But the man must have been a runner in his youth. At two hundred metres he was closing the gap. Keita tried to suppress his rising sense of panic and focus on running as fast as he could manage at a pace he could sustain over a distance.
    Keita was ascending a steep hill when the pursuer gave up and headed back toward the church. At the top of the hill, bent over and gasping for air, he turned and saw the men bashing in the church windows and throwing burning sticks inside.
    Within minutes, the Faloo Zion Baptist Church erupted in flames. Laughing and shouting, the men ran off in the direction they’d come from, shaking their sticks above their heads. Keita waited until he was sure they were not coming back. Then he ran back to the deacon and dropped to his knees. But Deacon Andrews was not breathing. Blood pooled under his head. He was motionless, an arm splayed out on