Djibouti

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

THEY MET AT THE Club ZuZu and before long the young gentleman named Hunter was telling Jama where he lived.

"In a residential hotel on rue de Marseille. Sort of an upscale Frenchified joint done in Gallic moderne. My digs are on the top floor. A stairway takes one to the roof-it's quite nice-with a French-blue awning that rolls out to shade the deck, or rolls back to reveal as much sun as you'd ever want. Widows, I suppose well off enough, have suites there, but never venture topside."

The next afternoon they were on the roof, several floors above the surroundings, Jama lying naked. Hunter said, "I'm surprised you have tan lines."

Jama said, "You never kept house with a black man before?"

"Keeping house," Hunter said, "that's what we're doing?"

"Giving shelter to a seaman down on his luck. Hit over the head by a man stepped out of an alley. Robbed while I'm lying dazed and my ship is gone without me," Jama said, his black snake exposed for Hunter to admire.

"You want to touch it, don't you?"

Hunter said, "You mind?" HE WAS TWENTY-FIVE, AN American in this god-awful place to learn the shipping business. "I sit before a computer all day looking at figures and schedules. I'd rather be scraping hulls." He said, "I'm kidding. I'm bored. Maybe I should go to sea. Is it fun?"

Hunter was from New York, the grandson of a man who owned and ran a half-dozen shipping terminals, "practically with a whip," Hunter said. "Dad slipped away ages ago to sell debentures, and my dear mother, who swears she loves me more than her clothes, offered me up to her father, a dedicated scoundrel."

Another night at ZuZu's, Hunter watching the sailors on the dance floor, Jama's eyes on the slim chicks rolling their asses to the music, he said to Hunter, "When I missed my ship and got waylaid, I was following a boy down the alley."

Hunter said, "A boy?"

"A young man like yourself. And I've been punished for it, losing my ship and getting in trouble."

Hunter took Jama's hand, a candle burning between them on the table at ZuZu's, Hunter telling him, "No, you haven't, you've found what you're looking for," and Jama saw his luck turning.

The third day with Hunter, Jama telling him sea stories about incredibly ugly men finding each other and getting it on. "I saw two miserable dogs, both desperately in need of basic hygiene, kissing each other on the mouth. I did, one night when I walked in the head, I see these two hounds in each other's arms."

Hunter said, "Awww, the poor guys."

"Their grubby look reminded me, I'm shaving off my beard today."

"No! I love your beard."

"It smells old."

"It does not."

"I'm letting you shave it off," Jama said, "since you have a tender feeling for it. Use your scissors to cut it down to where you can use your straightedge to finish."

He seemed to like it, running his fingers through Jama's beard as he snipped, his eyes moist, sniffling at first. Jesus. Never said a word. Lathered Jama's face and became intent on shaving it clean. Hunter grinning by then, touching his work, surprising himself as he said, "Why, Mr. Bushy, you're more beautiful without it."

Jama said, "Is that right?" looking at himself in the mirror.

Hunter started on his hair with a comb and scissors till Jama told him he didn't need the comb. "Get to it, cut it down." There was no way to hurry him. Finally, turning his head from side to side in the mirror, Jama said, "Hunter, my boy, you did it."

Jama sat on a high stool in the bathroom, naked. Hunter stood between his legs, taller, head raised just a bit, still fooling with Jama's hair. Hunter said, "Hand me the scissors, the comb too, please, if you don't mind." He said, "Have you ever been referred to as a chic sheikh?" His head still raised.

Jama picked up the straightedge from the counter and sliced the blade across Hunter's throat.

He saw Hunter's eyes taking on a dreamy look, and brought him against his chest to bleed on him, wondering at what moment Hunter would know he was dead and Jama could let the boy slide down his body to the tiles. He'd take a shower and then look through Hunter's closet. Find something casual to wear, something maybe collegiate. He thought of Hunter looking even younger in his T-shirt and jeans and decided it was the way to go. Become Jama the college boy.

Or maybe James Russell, from Brown.

Wear this brown T-shirt with BROWN on the front of it big, in white. Coming out of the drawer it became BROWN UNIVERSITY with a coat of arms between the names, some red in it.

Jama slipped it over his head and looked in the mirror to see brown on brown, the shirt darker than his bare arms. The size an extra-large that hung straight on him to cover his biceps and flat stomach. He'd be lying naked on the bed and Hunter would pretend to play his ribs, saying if he could plug Jama in he could play him like an instrument. Jama told him he wanted to play music there was an instrument standing right next to him. They did a lot of that kind of shit, saying cute things to each other. This boy, a graduate of Brown University, would use words Jama had never heard people say, like sardonic and saturnine, and he'd have to look them up. He thought of a saturnine person as mostly cool. Hunter's style was acting like a child, begging Jama to tell him his real name and wanting to know why he'd changed it. All the time asking things like that. He said to Jama, "To be intimate is to know each other's secrets." He said, "God, to be the only person in the entire world to know your mysterious past."

The time came in bed, Jama spent and having a smoke, he told Hunter, "It's James." Tired of him begging in homosexual ways, some cute, some woeful.

"James Russell. All right? My name while I was doing time. My name before I turned to Islam and became an al Qaeda gunman."

Hunter said, "Oh, my God," spacing the words, and Jama had to hold him for a minute and got him to sit on the bed. He was all right after, by the time Jama got his shave. Full of questions till Jama told him, "Let's wait till we finish here." He didn't mind being called beautiful, but the guy beat it to death. Said he was Russell's love slave. This grown man who could have all the cooze he wanted, anywhere, turns it down as the way to go. But when he cranked up his homo shit with the gestures, he'd let it come out, knowing he was secure with a lover, and Jama would feel himself getting semihard. But no comparison to the ones he got thinking of Red Sea chicks and the number one, Celeste, his Ethiopian. The one Idris thought was his girl, set her up nice. Two days with Hunter were okay. The third day he couldn't take any more and ended the relationship.

Jama wedged his passport into a pair of Hunter's Reebok sneakers. By now it was hard to tell it was a passport, though it was readable inside. He'd make up a story how it got this way for Customs and Immigration when he got home. Tell them a Nile croc ate it and he had to cut the passport out of the croc's tummy.

He put on a pair of hundred-dollar jeans, the cuffs folding on the sneakers just right. He put other stuff, T-shirts and some of Hunter's panties and some aftershave, in a black flight bag, plain, no writing on it. He slipped on a pair of Hunter's shades that didn't fuck up his vision too much, ones he'd been wearing. Hunter had all kinds of glasses, all the cases here in his desk drawer. Jama brought them out looking at different styles. He picked up a case and this one was fat and soft with bills Jama pulled out, fifty, sixty new hundred-dollar bills. Six grand plus the three hundred he got from Hunter's billfold, sixty-three hundred, man. Where do you want to go?

There were a couple of things he would do first because he wanted to and had made up his mind.

Find the two Arab snobs, Idris and Lord Harry, and shoot them each in the head.

Then locate Aphrodite, loaded with frozen natural gas and-according to Qasim-C4 explosives, shape charges among the tanks, and watch the ship blow up Djibouti, the gateway to Islam. Or the back door to the West, the dividing line between God and Allah. Watch the city burn, people running for their lives. Qasim showed him how you could blow up the city with a cell phone from a safe distance. They had taken Qasim's cell days ago. But didn't Hunter have one? He believed so.

He had Hunter's car. Use it later tonight to dump his body. This afternoon he would stroll down the rue de Marseille to the Djibouti Airlines office and see about flights south to Nairobi, take it easy for a time, spend some of the money Allah had given him for being a good boy. Then come back…No, he should do it first. Kill anyone who knew his name.