Who Slashed Celanire's Throat? Read Free Page A

alliances and governed hand in hand with the local powers.
    Why did the French have to put everything to the fire and the sword?
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    Alix Pol-Roger, the governor, had gone to negotiate a site for installing a French presence in the northern territories, and Thomas de Brabant had replaced him. Given his character, this suited him perfectly. He had the power to decide, resolve, and take the law into his own hands. Cases were no longer referred to the native courts. Thomas meddled in the most sordid family affairs and poked his nose into the most tangled legal issues of land ownership. That very morning he was struggling with a problem. What a piece of bad luck! Monsieur Desrussie was dead! He was an unsavory character. But useful. Who was going to look after the children in the Home now? The officials who had not yet taken their place in the graveyard were overloaded with work. Recruit a director from the metropole? Out of the question! The ministry refused to spend a cent on the new colony. He thought he ought to walk over to the Home and settle any remaining business. He donned his pith helmet, grabbed his umbrella, striped in the colors of his country’s flag, and headed out.
    Thomas de Brabant had been appointed to the Ivory Coast three years ago. Like the bulk of the administration, he had been transferred from Grand-Bassam to Adjame-Santey and missed the ocean breeze and the smell of salt of the former capital. The Ivory Coast had been his first posting on graduating third from the school for senior officials for France’s overseas territories. Aged twenty-nine, he was married, but had had to leave his wife behind. The colonies, which are already hard on men, are lethal for women. The females of the species become dried, parched, and finally wilt. Charlotte, then, had remained on the fourth floor of a handsome building on the avenue Henri-Martin in Paris, the Brabant family being extremely well-to-do. During his annual leave, Thomas had returned to perform his conjugal duty, and ever since, with the faraway Charlotte and little Ludivine in his thoughts, he never forgot to take his quinine. His high position prevented him, so he thought, from having affairs with African women. As a result, he slept alone, eaten up with all kinds of desires, for the very women who were off-limits had a certain troubling effect on him.
    It had been raining, of course, since morning. At four in the afternoon the sky skimmed so low, it was almost dark. A scarlet stream surged down the middle of the winding track, and Thomas had not walked more than a few yards before his high leather boots were covered in mud. A soaked flag wrapped around a bamboo mast signaled the school next to the church. Despite this patriotic rag, Thomas knew full well what was going on behind the hedge of seccos. His spies had informed him of what Hakim was teaching his older pupils, and the entire mission had him under surveillance. As soon as they had collected enough evidence against him, he would be shooed out! In one clean sweep! Never mind he was an administrator’s bastard! At that very moment Hakim emerged from the school, surrounded by a group of young boys. With his jute bag folded into a hood over his head and his crumpled clothes, he looked anything but a scholar with a particular appreciation for the philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment. Thomas and Hakim avoided each other’s gaze and continued on their way, one toward the Home, the other walking down to the lagoon and the king’s compound.
    The Home for Half-Castes on the plateau of Adjame-Santey was a one-story building in a sorry condition. Yet it had been built according to the plans of the famous architect Sebastien Depelchin, who had set an example by abandoning there a dozen of his café-au-lait offspring. Behind the main building stood the house of the late director and his widow, one of the few converted Ebriés. The living room, transformed into a mortuary, was deserted