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 had been a long collaboration with Moldova’s independence movement; he’d tried to establish an unbeatable case for the return of the Chagos Islands’ deported residents; and had advised Afghanistan’s loya jirga on a new constitution. Colleagues marvelled at his appetite for airlines blacklisted by US embassies, brothels masquerading as hotels, and his willingness to pop a Lariam with his morning coffee at a stage when they had grown dependent on the five-star hotel, the chauffeured pick-up, the left aircraft swivel into business class.
I sipped my beer, silently noting the absence of any reference to ‘my wife’, ‘my partner’ or ‘the kids’. No alimony, no pets. Gardening got a brief mention, but how far could that take a man? Was the law Winston’s only passion?
The roundabout route had brought him to the Horn of Africa. Winston had led a team that had virtually written the constitution of still-unrecognised Somaliland. He had found himself drafting legislation on ancestral grazing rights for a young mayor in the Ethiopian highlands – the man had raved about his work at a regional conference. A job in South Sudan had followed, and finally the authorities in Lira had reached out.
‘It was a bizarre experience. I boarded a bus in Juba, heading east. I thought this was going to be my only chance to see Lira – you know people rave about the 1930s architecture? – so I’d arranged a stopover. I couldn’t remember telling anyone my plans. As I got off the bus two men in their fifties, both with that weathered, tough look about them you get here, stepped forward and said, quietly and politely, “Mr Peabody? Could we have a word?” They must have monitored me all the way from Sudan. This is one of only about three governments in Africa, I reckon, capable of running such an effective intelligence network. It comes of spending decades under enemy occupation, I suppose. You learn the tricks of the trade.’
They had virtually frogmarched him to a nearby café and explained that someone important wanted to see him. Then they had driven him to the old Italian governor’s palace on the hill, through a single checkpoint – ‘He doesn’t do security, says if any member of the public wants to assassinate him he’ll have outlived his usefulness anyway’ – and ushered him straight into the president’s office, where he had been relentlessly wooed. For what could have been better calculated to win round a left-leaning maverick without a cause, a New World, African-American intellectual snob, than a brutally honest exposition of an African administration’s lack of preparedness to meet the most testing legal challenge of its short existence, delivered in a gruff monotone by the Man Himself during a protocol-free tête-à-tête?
‘For the first hour I wasn’t offered so much as a glass of tea, which is incredibly rude in this culture,’ he recalled, with a fond smile. ‘The zero-charisma charm offensive, I like to call it, a Lira speciality.’ And it had worked like a dream, I thought, noticing how uncharacteristically flustered Winston looked, like a lover voicing a girlfriend’s name at the family table.
‘He was just, well, extremely impressive.’ Winston threw me a surreptitious glance. ‘You’ll meet him one of these days and see for yourself. I suppose it’s partly that he appears to lack … wiles. What you see is what you get – that’s half of the problem when he’s operating in the international arena. No bowing and scraping from his staff, none of that “Your Excellency” nonsense. He was dressed very simply, an outfit I’ve now seen a hundred times. He was totally open, made no attempt to cover anything up. The machinery of government barely existed, he told me. They’d done their best in the bush during the war of independence, running clandestine schools, but literacy rates among the former fighters now in charge of the various departments were embarrassing. He had ministers, he said, who could barely read the newspapers, let alone master Microsoft Word. Wonderful military strategists, but they’d started out as goatherds. Even before the clash in Sanasa and the new war, most of the real work of government was being done by a few harried secretaries left over from the old regime whom no one really trusted. Shortages of printers, photocopiers, cartridges, even pens. The educated elite were taking their time returning from exile, and when they arrived they wanted to set up import-export outfits, not work in government. This was a state that could barely issue a driver’s licence so contesting a border dispute in The Hague was simply beyond its capacities.’
‘And you agreed to do it for them?’
He pursed his lips. ‘That’s not how I would phrase it. I see myself in a mentoring role. A facilitator, if you like. These guys may not have taken classes in international tort, but there’s no shortage of brains. Part of your job here will be to pass on what you have learned, thanks to your privileged Western education, to the local