Leonora Tesla had come to the bush so she wouldn’t have to see anyone, except the HIV-positive women she worked with. After The Hague, after the hunting—after the shock of being called together and told by Harold the Volunteers must disband—even the smaller African cities had been too much for her. So she’d gone to the bush, traveling from village to village, staying not long in any one place. Her mandate was to establish craft cooperatives, micro-financing women’s paths to independence. The work suited her. Her days were filled now with distracting minutiae—finding hinges in one village so another’s kiln door could be repaired; lending the equivalent of four American dollars so a group could buy paper on which to keep records of baskets sold. And with beauty: the color-block quilts, the Oombiga pots whose tradition had almost been lost. Beauty suited Tesla too. Visual beauty: the way the women weaved echoed the stark subtlety of the African landscape. And musical beauty: The only artifact of 21st century technology she’d brought into the bush was an iPod loaded with—among other things—Bach preludes, Shostakovich symphonies and Beethoven sonatas. Reluctantly, she removed it now, cutting off Chopin as the Jeep neared. She hoped this wouldn’t take long. She’d ferry him around, this funder from . . . She’d forgotten to ask. She’d show him the kiln, the looms, the workshop. She’d rattle off her statistics on life-span extension and self-sufficiency, give him her little speech about hope for the next generation. The women would present him with a quilt or a pot for which he could have no possible use and he’d be patronizingly pleased with them and inordinately proud of himself for making this all possible. Then maybe he’d go away and leave them in peace.

Oh, Leonora, at least try to smile.

The other Volunteers used to say that regularly, and precisely because their work gave them little to smile about, she’d try. She did it now, a polite smile for the angular blond man who stepped from the Jeep. He smiled back and slapped his hat against his thigh to shake off the dust. He took off his sunglasses: well trained in the art of courtesy, at least.

“Leonora Tesla? I’m Günter Schmidt.”

He spoke in English with a soft accent she couldn’t quite place. Not German, but no law said his German name meant he was brought up in that country. That’s what the permeability of European borders was about. It was supposed to be a good thing.