The Laughing Monsters

ONE

Eleven years since my last visit and the Freetown airport still a shambles, one of those places where they wheel a staircase to the side of the plane and you step from European climate control immediately into the steam heat of West Africa. The shuttle to the terminal wasn’t bad, but not air-conditioned.

Inside the building, the usual throng of fools. I studied the shining black faces, but I didn’t see Michael’s.

The PA spoke. Only the vowels came through. I called over the heads of the queue at the desk—“Did I hear a page for Mr. Nair?”

“No, sir. No,” the man called back.

“Mr. Nair?”

“Nothing for such a name.”

A man in a dark suit and necktie said, “Welcome, Mr. Naylor, to Sierra Leone,” and helped me through the mess and chatted with me all through customs, which didn’t take long, because I’m all carry-on. He helped me outside to a clean white car, a Honda Prelude. “And for me,” he said, with a queasy-looking smile, “two hundred dollars.” I gave him a couple of one-euro coins. “But, sir,” he said, “it’s not enough today, sir,” and I told him to shut up.

The driver of the Honda wanted in the area of a million dollars. I said, “Spensy mohnee!” and his face fell when he saw I knew some Krio. We reached an arrangement in the dozens. He couldn’t go any lower because his heart was broken, he told me, by the criminal cost of fuel.

At the ferry there was trouble — a woman with a fruit cart, policemen in sky-blue uniforms throwing her goods into the bay while she screamed as if they were drowning her children. It took three cops to drag her aside as our car thumped over the gangway. I got out and went to the rail to catch the wet breeze. On the shore the uniforms crossed their arms over their chests. One of them kicked over the woman’s cart, now empty. Back and forth she marched, screaming. The scene grew smaller and smaller as the ferry pulled out into the bay, and I crossed the deck to watch Freetown coming at us, a mass of buildings, many of them crumbling, and all around them a multitude of shadows and muddy rags trudging God knows where, hunched forward over their empty bellies.

At the Freetown dock I recognized a man, a skinny old Euro named Horst, standing beside a hired car with his hand shading his eyes against the sunset, taking note of the new arrivals. As our vehicle passed him I slumped in my seat and turned my face away. After we’d passed, I kept an eye on him. He got back in his car without taking on any riders.

Horst … His first name was something like Cosmo but not Cosmo. Leo, Rollo. I couldn’t remember.

I directed Emil, my driver, to the Papa Leone, as far as I knew the only place to go for steady electric power and a swimming pool. As we pulled under the hotel’s awning another car came at us, swerved, recovered, sped past with a sign in its window — SPLENDID DRIVING SCHOOL. This resembled commerce, but I wasn’t feeling the New Africa. I locked eyes with a young girl loitering right across the street, selling herself. Poor and dirty, and very pretty. And very young. I asked Emil how many kids he had. He said there were ten, but six of them died.

Emil tried to change my mind about the hotel, saying the place had become “very demoted.” But inside the electric lights burned, and the spacious lobby smelled clean, or poisonous, depending on your opinion of certain chemicals, and everything looked fine. I’d heard the rebels had shot it out with the authorities in the hallways, but that had been a decade before, just after I’d run away, and I could see they’d patched it all up.

The clerk checked me in without a reservation, and then surprised me:

“Mr. Nair, a message.”

Not from Michael — from the management, in purple ink, welcoming me to “the solution to all your problems,” and crafted in a very fine hand. It was addressed “To Whom It May Concern.” Clipped to it was a slip of paper, instructions for getting online. The desk clerk said the internet was down but not always. Maybe tonight.

I had a Nokia phone, and I assumed I could get a local SIM card somewhere, but — the clerk said — not at this hotel. For the moment, I was pretty well cut off.

Good enough. I didn’t feel ready for Michael Adriko. He was probably here at the Papa in a room right above my head, but for all I knew he hadn’t come back to the African continent and he wouldn’t, he’d only lured me here in one of his incomprehensible efforts to be funny.

* * *

The room was small and held that same aroma saying, “All that you fear, we have killed.” The bed was all right. On the nightstand, on a saucer, a white candle stood beside a red-and-blue box of matches.

I’d flown down from Amsterdam through London Heathrow. I’d lost only an hour and I felt no jet lag, only the need of a little repair. I splashed my face and hung a few things and took my computer gear, in its yellow canvas carrier-kit, downstairs to the poolside.

On the way I stopped to make an arrangement with the barman about a double whiskey. Then at a poolside table in an environment of artful plants and rocks, I ordered a sandwich and another drink.

A woman alone a couple of tables away pressed her hands together and bowed her face toward her fingertips and smiled. I greeted her:

“How d’body?”

“D’body no well,” she said. “D’body need you.”

I cracked my laptop and lit the screen. “Not tonight.”

She didn’t look in the least like a whore. She was probably just some woman who’d stopped in here to ease her feet and might as well seize a chance to sell her flesh. Right by the pool, meanwhile, a dance ensemble and percussionist had all found their spots, and the patrons got quiet. Suddenly I could smell the sea. The night sky was black, not a star visible. A crazy drumming started up.

Off-line, I wrote to Tina:

I’m at the Papa Leone Hotel in Freetown. No sign of our old friend Michael.

I’m at the poolside restaurant at night, where there’s an African dance group, I think they’re from the Kissi Chiefdom (they look like street people), doing a number that involves falling down, lighting things on fire, and banging on wild conga drums. Now one guy’s sort of raping a pile of burning sticks with his clothes on and people at nearby tables are throwing money. Now he’s rolling all around beside the swimming pool, embracing this sheaf of burning sticks, rolling over and over with it against his chest. It’s a bunch of kindling about half his size, all ablaze. I’m only looking for food and drink, I had no idea we’d be entertained by a masochistic pyromaniac. Good Lord, Dear Baby Girl, I’m at an African hotel watching a guy in flames, and I’m a little drunk because I think in West Africa it’s best always to be just a tiny bit that way, and the world is soft, and the night is soft, and I’m watching a guy

Across the large patio, Horst appeared and threaded himself toward me through the fire and haze. He was a tanned, dapper white-haired white man in a fishing vest with a thousand pockets and usually, I now remembered, tan walking shoes with white shoelaces, but I couldn’t tell at the moment.

“Roland! It’s you! I like the beard.”

“C’est moi,” I admitted.

“Did you see me at the quay? I saw you!” He sat down. “The beard gives you gravitas.”

We bought each other a round. I told the barman, “You’re quick,” and tipped him a couple of euros. “The staff are efficient enough. Who says this place has gone downhill?”

“It’s no longer a Sofitel.”

“Who owns it?”

“The president, or one of his close companions.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

He pointed at my machine. “You won’t get online.”

I raised my glass to him. “So Horst is still coming around.”

“I’m still a regular. About six months per year. But this time I’ve been kept home almost one full year, since last November. Eleven months.”

The entertainment got too loud. I adjusted my screen and put my fingers on the keyboard. Rude of me. But I hadn’t asked him to sit down.

“My wife is quite ill,” he said, and he paused one second, and added, “terminal,” with a sort of pride.

Meanwhile, two meters off, by the pool, the performer had set his shirt and pants on fire.

To Tina:

I saw a couple of US soldiers in weird uniforms at the desk when I checked in. This place is the only one in town that has electricity at night. It costs $145 a day to stay here.

Hey — the beard’s coming off. It’s no camouflage at all. I’ve already been recognized.

With the drumming and the whooping, who could talk? Still, Horst wouldn’t let me off. He’d bought a couple of rounds, discussed his wife’s disease … Time for questions. Beginning with Michael.

“What? Sorry. What?”

“I said to you: Michael is here.”

“Michael who?”

“Come on!”

“Michael Adriko?”

“Come on!”

“Have you seen him? Where?”

“He’s about.”

“About where? Shit. Look. Horst. In a land of rumors, how many more do we need?”

“I haven’t seen him personally.”

“What would Michael be here for?”

“Diamonds. It’s that simple.”

“Diamonds aren’t so simple anymore.”

“Okay, but we’re not after simplicity, Roland. We’re after adventure. It’s good for the soul and the mind and the bank balance.”

“Diamonds are too risky these days.”

“You want to smuggle heroin? The drugs racket is terrible. It destroys the youth of a nation. And it’s too cheap. A kilo of heroin nets you six thousand dollars US. A kilo of diamonds makes you a king.”

To Tina I wrote: Show’s over now. Everyone appears uninjured. The whole area smells like gasoline.

“What do you think?” Horst said.

“What I think is, Horst — I think they’ll snitch you. They’ll sell you diamonds and then they’ll snitch you, you know that, because around here it’s nothing but snitches.”

Maybe he took my point, because he stopped his stuff while I wrote to Tina:

I’m getting drunk with this asshole who used to be undercover Interpol. He looks far too old now to get paid for anything, but he still sounds like a cop. He calls me Roland like a cop.

At any point I might have asked his first name. Elmo?

Horst gave up, and we just drank. “Israel,” he told me, “has six nuclear-tipped missiles raised from the silos and pointing at Iran. Sometime during the next US election period — boom-boom Teheran. And then it’s tit for tat, that’s the Muslim way, my friend. Radiation all around.”

“They were saying that years ago.”

“You don’t want to go home. Within ten years it will be just like here, a bunch of rubble. But our rubble here isn’t radioactive. But you won’t believe me until you check it with a Geiger counter.” The whiskey had washed away his European manner. He was a white-haired, red-faced, jolly elfin cannibal.

In the lobby we shook hands and said good night. “Of course they’d like to snitch you,” he said. He stood on his toes to get close to my left ear and whisper: “That’s why you don’t go back the way you came.”

* * *

Later I lay in the dark holding my pocket radio against the very same ear, listening with the other for any sound of the hotel’s generator starting. A headache attacked me. I struck a stinky match, lit the candle, opened the window. The batting of insects against the screen got so insistent I had to blow out the flame. The BBC reported that a big storm with 120-kilometer-per-hour winds had torn through the American states of Virginia, West Virginia, and Ohio, and three million homes had suffered an interruption in the flow of their electricity.

Here at the Papa Leone, the power came up. The television worked. CCTV, the Chinese cable network, broadcasting in English. I went back to the radio.

The phones in Freetown emit that English ring-ring! ring-ring! The caller speaks from the bottom of a well:

“Internet working!”

Working! — always a bit of a thrill. My machine lay beside me on the bed. I played with the buttons, added a PS to Tina:

I drew cash on the travel account—5K US. Credit cards still aren’t trusted. Exchange rate in 02 was 250 leones per euro, and the largest bill was 100 leones. You had to carry your cash in a shopping bag, and some used shoeboxes. Now they want dollars. They’ll settle for euros. They hate their own money.

I sent my e-mails, and then waited, and then lost the internet connection.

The BBC show was World Have Your Say, and the subject was boring.

The walls ceased humming and all went black as the building’s generator powered down, but not before I had a short reply from Tina:

Don’t go back the way you came.

Suddenly I had it. Bruno. Bruno Horst.

* * *

Around three that morning I woke and dressed in slacks, shirt, and slippers, and followed my Nokia’s flashlight down eight flights to the flickering lobby. Nobody around. While I stood in the candle glow among large shadows, the lights came on and the doors to both elevators opened and closed, opened and closed once more.

I found the night man asleep behind the desk and sent him out to find the girl I’d seen earlier. I watched while he crossed the street to where she slept on the warm tarmac. He looked one way, then the other, and waited, and finally nudged her with his toe.

I took an elevator upstairs, and in a few minutes he brought her up to my room and left her.

“You’re welcome to use the shower,” I said, and her face looked blank.

Fifteen years old, Ivoirian, not a word of English, spoke only French. Born in the bush, a navel the size of a walnut, tied by some aunt or older sister in a hut of twigs and mud.

She took a shower and came to me naked and wet.

I was glad she didn’t know English. I could say whatever I wanted to her, and I did. Terrible things. All the things you can’t say. Afterward I took her downstairs and got her a taxi, as if she had somewhere to go. I shut the car’s door for her and heard the old driver saying even before he put it in gear: “You are a bad woman, you are a whore and a disgrace…” but she couldn’t understand any of it.

* * *

I woke to the sound of a groundskeeper whisking dead mayflies from the walk below my balcony with a small broom. Around six it had rained hard for fifteen minutes, knocking insects out of the sky, and I call these mayflies for convenience, but they seemed half cockroach as well. Later, in the lobby, when I asked the concierge what sort of creature this was, he said, “In-seck.”

Michael had called and left a message at the front desk. I asked the clerk, “Why didn’t you put him through to the phone in my room?” and the young man scratched at the desk with his fingernail and examined his mark and seemed to forget the question until he said, “I don’t know.”

Michael wanted to meet me at 1600. At the Scanlon. That said a lot about his circumstances.

I wandered into the Papa’s restaurant twenty minutes before the ten o’clock conclusion of the free buffet, the last person down to breakfast, and I found the staff thronging the metal warming pans, forking stuff onto plates for themselves. So this is what they eat, I thought, and by turning up with my own plate here I’m sort of fishing this fat banger sausage right out of somebody’s mouth. You half-American pig. I took some fried potatoes too — the word for them is “Irish”—and then I couldn’t eat, but I ate anyway, because they were watching me. Under their compassionate gazes I ate every crumb.

It was October, with temperatures around thirty Celsius most of the daytime, not unbearable in the shade, as always very humid. Right now we had a cool sea breeze, a few bright clouds in a blue sky, and a white sunshine that by noon would crash down like a hot anvil. The only other patron was a young American-looking guy in civilian clothing with a tattoo of a Viking’s head on his forearm.

The power was up. American country music flowed through the PA speakers. I took the latter half of my coffee to a table near the television to catch the news on Chinese cable, but the local network was playing, and all I got was a commercial message from Guinness. In this advertisement, an older brother returns home to the African bush from his successful life in the city. He’s drinking Guinness Draught with his younger brother in the sentimental glow of lamps they don’t actually possess in the bush. Big-city brother hands little bush brother a bus ticket: “Are you ready to drink at the table of men?” The young one takes it with gratitude and determination, saying, “Yes!” The announcer speaks like God:

“Guinness. Reach for greatness.”

* * *

After breakfast I went out front with my computer kit belted to my chest like a baby carrier. Sweat pressed through my shirt, but the kit was waterproof.

The only car out front had its bonnet raised. A few young men waited astride their okadas, that is, motorcycles of the smallest kind, 90cc jobs, for the most part. I chose one called Boxer, a Chinese brand. “Boxer-man. Do you know the Indian market? Elephant market?”

“Elephant!” he cried. “Let’s go!” He slapped the seat behind him, and I got on, and we zoomed toward the Indian market over streets still muddy and slick from last night’s downpour, lurching and dodging, missing the rut, missing the pothole, missing the pedestrian, the bicycle, the huge devouring face of the oncoming truck — missing them all at once, and over and over. On arrival at the market with its mural depicting Ganesha, Hindu lord of knowledge and fire, I felt more alive but also murdered.

The elephant-faced god remained, but Ganesha Market had a new title — Y2K Supermarket.

“I’m waiting for you,” my pilot told me.

“No. Finish,” I said, but I knew he’d wait.

I left the Boxer at the front entrance and went out by the side. I believe in the underworld they call this maneuver the double-door.

Outside again I found a small lane full of shops, but I didn’t know where I was. I made for the bigger street to my left, walked into it, was almost struck down, whirled this way by an okada rider, that way by a bicycle. I’d lost my rhythm for this environment, and now I was miffed with the traffic as well as hot from walking, and I was lost. For forty-five minutes I blundered among nameless mud-splashed avenues before I found the one I wanted and the little establishment with its hoarding: ELVIS DOCUMENTS.

Three solar panels lay on straw mats in the dirt walkway where people had to step around them. The hoarding read, “Offers: photocopying, binding, typing, sealing, receipt/invoice books, computer training.”

Inside, a man sat at his desk amid the tools of his livelihood — a camera on a tripod, a bulky photocopier, a couple of computers — all tangled in power cords.

He rose from his office chair, a leather swivel model missing its casters, and said, “Welcome. How can I be of service?” And then he said, “Ach!” as if he’d swallowed a seed. “It’s Roland Nair.”

And it was Mohammed Kallon. It didn’t seem possible. I had to look twice.

“Where’s Elvis?”

“Elvis? I forget.”

“But you remember me. And I remember you.”

He looked sad, also frightened, and made his face smile. White teeth, black skin, unhealthy yellow eyeballs. He wore a white shirt, brown slacks cinched with a shiny black plastic belt. Plastic house slippers instead of shoes.

“What’s the problem here, Mohammed? Your store smells like a toilet.”

“Are we going to quarrel?”

I didn’t answer.

Everything was visible in his face — in the smile, the teary eyes. “We’re on the same side now, Roland, because in the time of peace, you know, there can be only one side.” He opened for me a folding chair beside his desk while he resumed his swivel. “I might have known you were in Freetown.”

I didn’t sit. “Why?”

“Because Michael Adriko is here. I saw him. The deserter.”

“You call Michael a deserter?”

“Hah!”

“If he’s a deserter, then call me a deserter too.”

“Hah!”

I felt irritated, ready to argue. Mohammed was still a good interrogator. “Listen,” I said, “Michael’s not from any of these Leonean clans, any of the chiefdoms. I think he’s originally from Uganda. So — if he left here suddenly back then, he didn’t desert.”

“Can’t you sit down to talk?”

“Bruno Horst is around.”

“I do believe it. So are you.”

“Is he working for one of the outfits?”

“How would I know?”

“I don’t know how you’d know. But you’d know.”

“And who does Roland Nair work for?”

“Just call me Nair. Nair is in Freetown strictly on personal business. And it really does stink in here.”

“Who do you work for?”

I shrugged.

“Anyone. As usual,” he said.

I wasn’t a torturer. I’d never stood ankle-deep in the fluids of my victims … “I can’t imagine how you ended up here,” I told him. “You’re all wrong for this.”

“Holy cow! All wrong for what?”

“You’re a dirty player.”

Mohammed had lost his smile. “I hear the pot saying to the kettle, ‘You are black.’ Do you know that expression?”

He had a point. “All right,” I said, “we’re both black,” and it struck me as funny.

Mohammed found his smile again. “Nair, I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot after so long a time, honestly — because it’s almost the moment when you take me to lunch!”

“Lunch isn’t out of the question,” I said. “But first give me a few minutes with your computers.”

“None of them are working.”

“The computers downstairs.”

“There’s no downstairs.” He was a terrible liar. I stared until he understood. “Bloody hell!”

“Let’s have a look inside your closet.”

“Every day brings new surprises!” He looked as if he’d eaten something evil and delicious. “You’re with NIIA?”

“Let’s follow the protocol.” The protocol called for his getting out of my way.

He sat back down and busied himself with a pile of receipts, bursting with a silly, private glee, while I went across the space to his mop closet, which stood open and which also served as a toilet, with a slop-bucket covered by a wooden board and a roll of brownish paper on the floor beside it. That accounted for the stench in the place.

I consulted the readout on my coder, a unit that fits on a key chain. The eight-digit code changes every ninety seconds. I entered the closet and shut the door behind me, and by the glow of my Nokia I moved aside a patch on the rear wall and keyed the digits into the interlock and pushed the wall open and went down the metal stairs as the panel clicked shut behind me without my assistance.

Here the four lights were burning.

I’d entered this sunken place more than once, long ago. It had been built to American standards, not in meters, but in feet: ten by sixteen in area, with concrete walls eight feet in height, and one dozen metal stair steps leading down. A battery bank in a wire cage bolted to the concrete floor, an electric bulb in another such cage in each of the concrete walls. A desk, a chair, both metal, both bolted down. On the desk, two machines — much smaller units than we’d used a dozen years before.

I sat down and took from my carrier-kit an accessory disguised as a cigarette lighter, a NATO-issued device similar to a USB stick, with the algorithms built in. It actually makes a flame. I held it to my face and scanned my iris and stuck it into the side of the machine in front of me and powered up and logged on. Through the NATO Intel proxy I sent a Nothing To Report — but I sent it twice, which warned Tina to expect a message at her personal e-address. For this exchange Tina would know to shelve the military algorithms. We used PGP encryption. As the name promised, it’s pretty good protection.

I logged off of NIIA and attached my own keyboard to the console and went through the moves and established a Virtual Private Network and sent:

Get file 3TimothyA for me. Your NEMCO password will work.

Nothing now but the sound of my breath and the prayers of three small cooling fans. The fans cooled the units, not the user. I wiped my face and neck with my kerchief. It came away drenched. My breath came faster and faster. My Nokia’s clock showed a bit after 1300—noon in Amsterdam. I hadn’t allowed time for getting lost. Tina might have gone to lunch. It irked me that I couldn’t slow my breath.

But Tina was at her desk, and she was ready. I sent: “I’m ready for those dirty pictures.”

Within two minutes it was done.

I believe that by making this transaction the two of us risked life sentences. But only one of us knew it. Like anyone in the field of intelligence, Tina asked no questions. Besides, she loved me.

I came up the stairs and into Elvis Documents with my kit clutched against my chest, as if it held the goods, but it didn’t. A Cruzer device snugged in the waistline seam of my trousers held the goods.

Mohammed waited in his broken chair, his gaze fixed studiously in another direction.

“Let’s eat,” I said.

* * *

We ate down the street at the Paradi. Decent Indian fare.

During the late nineties and for a few years after, when this place had drawn the interest of the media, Kallon had worked as a stringer for the AP and as a CIA informant, and then the CIA had levered him into the Leonean secret service to inform from down in the nasty heart of things, and he had hurt a lot of people. And now he’d got himself a job with NATO.

That the CIA once ran Mohammed Kallon was, I acknowledge, my own supposition, prompted merely by my sharp nose for a certain perfume. Snitches stink.

I let Kallon order for both of us while I went to the men’s lavatory. I slipped shut the lock and took my passport from my shirt pocket and the Cruzer from the seam in my trousers. I felt desperate to be rid of it. Cowardly — but the situation felt all too new.

Normally I carry my passport in a ziplock plastic bag. I removed the passport from the bag and replaced it with the Cruzer, wound the Cruzer tightly in the plastic, and looked for a hiding place.

The toilets, two of them, were set into the floor, each with a foot pedal for flushing. I examined the tiles on all four walls, fiddled with the mirror, ran my fingers around the windowsill. I tried lifting the posts of the divider between the two toilets — one came loose from the floor. With my finger I scratched a delve at the bottom of its hole, dropped the tiny package in, and replaced the post to cover it.

For the sake of realism, I pressed the pedal on one of the toilets. It didn’t flush. The other one sprayed my shoe. I washed my hands at the sink and rejoined Mohammed Kallon.

Over lunch we talked about nothing really, except when I asked him outright, “What’s going on?” and he said, “Michael Adriko is going on.”

* * *

Having nowhere else to be, I arrived an hour early at the Scanlon, a hotel more central to Freetown than the better ones. When the region had drawn journalists, this was where many of them had lodged, a four-story place sunk in the diesel fumes and, when the weather was dry, in the hovering dust.

Inside the doors it was mute and dim — no power at the moment please sir — but crowded with souls. In the middle of the lobby stood a figure in a two-piece jogging suit of royal purple velour, a large man with a bald, chocolate, bullet-shaped head, which he wagged from side to side as he blew his nose loudly and violently into a white hand towel. People were either staring or making sure they didn’t. This was Michael Adriko.

Michael folded his towel and draped it over his shoulder as I came to him. Though we had an appointment in an hour, he seemed to take my appearance here as some kind of setback, and his first word to me was, “What-what.” Michael often uses this expression. It serves in any number of ways. A blanket translation would be “Bloody hell.”

“Thanks for meeting me at the airport.”

“I was there! Where were you? I watched everybody getting off the plane and I never saw you. I swear it!” He always lies.

He put out his monumental hand and gave mine a gentle shake, with a finger-snap.

“For goodness’ sake, Nair, your beard is gray!”

“And my hair is still black as a raven’s.”

“Do ravens have beards?” He had his feet under him now. “I like it.” Before I could stop him, he reached out and touched it. “How old are you?”

“Too close to forty to talk about.”

“Thirty-nine?”

“Thirty-eight.”

“Same as me! No. Wait. I’m thirty-seven.”

“You’re thirty-six.”

“You’re right,” he said. “When did I stop counting?”

“Michael, you’ve got an American accent. I can’t believe it.”

“And I can’t believe you bring a lovely full beard to the tropics.”

“It’s coming off right away.”

“So is my accent,” he said and turned to the waiter and spoke in thick Krio I couldn’t follow, but I got the impression at least one of us was getting a chicken sandwich.

I asked the clerk if a barber was available, and he shook his head and told me, “Such a person does not exist.”

I asked Michael, “Do you still carry your clippers?”

Smiling widely, he caressed his baldness. “I’m always groomed. Send the sandwich to my room,” he told the clerk. “Two three zero.”

“I know your room,” the clerk said.

“Come, Nair. Let’s chop it down with the clippers. You’ll feel younger. Come. Come.” Michael was moving off, calling over his shoulder to the desk clerk, “Also bottled water!” Looking backward, he collided with a striking woman — African, light-skinned — who’d tacked a bit, it seemed to me, in order to arrange the collision. He looked down at her and said, “What-what,” and it was plain they were friends, and more.

It didn’t surprise me she was beautiful, also young — not long out of university, I guessed. Such women succumbed to Michael quickly, and soon moved on.

She wore relief-worker or safari garb, the khaki cargo pants and fishing vest and light, sturdy hiking shoes. On this basis, I misjudged her. Really, that’s all it was — I judged her according to her clothes, and the judgment was false. But the first impression was strong.

Michael looked put out with her. “Everybody’s here at once.”

“Not for long — I’m off exploring.” She sounded American.

“Exploring where?” He was smiling, but he didn’t like it.

“I’m looking for postcards.”

I said, “You’ll have to go to the Papa for that.”

“Yes, the Papa Leone Hotel,” Michael explained, “but it’s too far.”

“All right, I’ll take a car.”

Michael sighed.

“Don’t pout,” she said. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

“Wait. Meet my friend Roland Nair. This is Davidia St. Claire.”

“Another friend? Everybody’s his friend.” Davidia St. Claire was speaking to me. “Did he say Olin?”

“My given name is Roland, but I never use it. Please call me Nair.”

“Nair is better,” Michael informed her. “It’s sharper. Look,” he went on, “at the Papa, get your nails done or something, kill some time, and let’s all meet at the Bawarchi for dinner — early dinner, six p.m. We all should know each other, because Nair is my closest friend.”

I said, “He saved my life.”

“Oui?” Her eyebrows went up.

Michael said, “C’est vrai.”

“More than once,” I said.

“Three times.”

“He kept me alive on a daily basis,” I said, and his woman looked me over — as if I explained something she’d wondered about, that kind of look, and I didn’t understand it. I said, “Are you Ivoirian?”

It made her laugh. “Who, me?”

“I thought because of the French.”

“That’s just for fun. I’m a Colorado girl.”

“I’m half American myself,” I said. I offered my hand. She laid two fingers on my wrist and seemed to watch my face as if to gauge the effect of her touch, which stirred me, in fact, like an anthem. She looked very directly into my eyes and said, “Hello.”

And then, “Goodbye.”

* * *

In room 230 I noticed a rollerbag I judged not quite in Michael’s style, but nothing that clearly said the woman Davidia slept here.

Michael flipped the wall switch. “Still no power!” He went to the dresser, opened a drawer, and turned to me gripping a braided leather whip about a meter in length, knotted at the narrow end. He grasped its handle and pulled out a dagger. “Nobody will know about my blade!”

“But, Michael — they’ll know about your whip.”

“Well, let them know at least something. It’s fair to be warned. Look how sharp. I could shave your beard with this.”

“Show me to the clippers, please.”

While I ran down the battery on his clippers at the sink, doing my best by the light through the small window, Michael cleaned his teeth, working away with a brush from whose other end a small spider dangled and swung.

There was another toothbrush sticking out of a water glass, and a tube of facial cream, and two kinds of deodorant. “Tell me your friend’s name again.”

He spat in the sink and said, “I’ve got a million friends,” just like an American. “Look!” he cried. “It’s Roland Nair emerging from the bush.” He resumed his brushing — still talking, foaming at the mouth. “You have gray in the beard, but not on your head.”

“A couple of days with you should fix that.” I spoke to his reflection, side by side with my own.

I am Scandinavian but have black hair and gray eyes, or blue, according to the environment. If I wanted my appearance to impress, I’d stay away from the sun and keep a very white complexion to go with my raven locks, that would be my look. But I like the sun on my face, even in the tropics.

Michael has handsome features, a brief, aquiline nose, high cheekbones, wide, inquiring eyes — like one of those Ethiopian models — and as for his lips, I can’t say. You’d have to follow him for days to get a look at his mouth in repose. Always laughing, never finished talking. A hefty, muscular frame, but with an angular grace. You know what I mean: not a thug. Still — lethal. I’d never seen him being lethal, but in 2004 on the Kabul — Kandahar road somebody shot at us, and he told me to stay down and went over a hill, and there was more shooting, and soon — none. And then he came back over the hill and said, “I just killed two people,” and we went on.

Once he showed me a photograph, a little boy with Michael Adriko’s face, his hand in the hand of a man he said was his father. Michael’s father had Arab blood apparent in his features, and so Michael — well, there’s a dash of cream in the coffee, invisible to me, but obvious to his fellow Africans. Sometimes he introduced me to them as his brother. As far as I could tell, he was never disbelieved.

He stroked his teeth with vigor. The spider whipped around on its strand. He rinsed his brush and the spider was gone.

Now he watched me comb my hair. I think it fascinated him because he was bald. He laughed. “Your vanity doesn’t make you look more lovely. It only makes you look more vain.” At that moment, the ceiling fixture flickered to life. “Power’s back. Let’s see the news.”

He sat on the bed and punched buttons on the television’s wand, pushing the device toward the screen as if to toss the signal at it. “News. News. News.” Al Jazeera had sports. The soccer scores. He settled for Nigerian cable, some sort of amateur singing competition, and then he untied his very clean red jogging shoes and kicked them off and set about massaging both feet, each with one hand. Vivid yellow socks.

“Michael—”

Michael laughed at the television.

“Michael, it’s time you told me something. You contact me, you get me down here—”

“You contacted me! You said, What’s going on, I said, Come down to SL and I’ll show you a plan.”

“Don’t show me the plan. Tell me the plan.”

But I’d lost him. He watched the screen with his mouth half open, his hands clutching his feet. The commercial ad from Guinness, the two black brothers, the bus ticket out of the bush … By the power brewed into this drink big-city brother frees his sibling from a curse that neither of them understands, and side by side they set out for the Kingdom of Civilization. Michael’s eyes glistened and he smiled a wide, tight smile. I’d often seen him driven to tears — this was what it looked like. Something had caught him by the heart. Brother for brother, reaching for greatness. Michael was moved. Michael was weeping.

As quickly as the ad was over he leapt into the bathroom, splashed his face at the sink, blew his nose into the hand towel, loomed in the doorway.

“Here’s the plan: I am a new man, and I plan to do what a new man does.”

Now he stood in the middle of the room, offering me tomorrow in his two outstretched hands. “Do you want a plan? I’m just going to give you results. You’ll live like a king. A compound by the beach. Fifty men with AKs to guard you. The villagers come to you for everything. They bring their daughters, twelve years old — virgins, Nair, no AIDS from these girls. You’ll have a new one every night. Five hundred men in your militia. You know you want it. They dance at night, a big bonfire, and the magic men come and stretch their arms to the length of a python, and change into all kinds of animals, and drums pounding, and naked dancers, all just for you, Nair! We want it. That’s what we want. And you know it’s here. There’s no place else on earth where we can have it.”

“This land of chaos, despair—”

“And in the midst of it, we make ourselves unreachable. A man can choose a valley, one with narrow entrances — defensible entries — and claim it as his nation, like Rhodes in Rhodesia—”

“I can’t believe I hear a black man talking like this.”

“We’ll have the politicians kissing our feet. Every four years we’ll assassinate the president.”

“The same president?”

“It’s term limits! We’ll be the ones controlling that.”

“How many men with AKs?”

“How many did I say? A thousand. Nair, I’ll come around on my launch on Sundays. Run it up onto the sand of your protected beach. Our children will play together. Our wives will be fat. We’ll play chess and plan campaigns.”

“You don’t play chess.”

“You haven’t seen me for seven years.”

“Man — you don’t play chess.”

He looked at me, wounded. So naked in his face. “That’s why it has to be you. You’re the one who knows those games.”

“And your games too, right?”

“It has to be you.”

I said, “This better not be about diamonds.”

“Not diamonds. Not this time. This time we concern ourselves with metals and minerals.”

“And aren’t diamonds actually minerals?”

“This is why I can never make a point,” Michael said, “because you query the details like some kind of master interrogator.”

“Sorry. Is it gold, then?”

“I tell you now: Stay away from the gold here, unless I say otherwise. The gold around here is fake. You’d see that the minute you looked at a kilo bar of it — but by the time they give you a look, you’re already in a dark place with bad people.”

“I’ll wait for your signal.”

He sat beside me on the bed and placed a hand on my shoulder. “I want you to understand me. I have this mapped from point A to point Z. And, Nair — point Z is going to be marvelous. Did I ever tell you about the time I saved the Ghanaian president’s life?”

It made me uncomfortable when he sat so close, but it was just an African thing. I said, “Michael, what about the girl? Who is she to you?”

“She’s American.”

“She told me that herself.”

“I heard her telling you.”

“Who is she, Michael?”

“More will be revealed.”

This was his style, his tiresome, unchangeable way. Information was an onion, to be peeled back in layers.

“What about you? What’s your passport?”

“Ghana,” he said, and he didn’t look happy about it. “Ghana will always welcome me.”

I shrugged away his heavy hand and got up. “Enough of Michael’s nonsense. Let’s get a drink.”

“Prior to sixteen hundred,” he said, “I drink only bottled water.”

“As they say, it’s sixteen hundred somewhere.” I checked my phone. “Here, as a matter of fact.”

“I stink! Get out while I shower.”

Looking down at him now—“Final question: What about Congo gold?”

“Nair! — you’re so far ahead of me.”

“If I was ahead of you, I’d know what I’m doing in Freetown instead of Congo, where all the gold is.”

“The important thing is that you came without knowing why.”

“I know why I came.”

“But not why I asked you. You came without an explanation.”

“You’d only lie to me, Michael.”

“For security purposes, perhaps. Yes. For your protection in transit. But we’re friends. We don’t lie to each other.”

He believed it.

* * *

As I made for the elevator, the lights died in the hallway. I took the stairs. Candles at the front desk, in the lobby, the big dining room. In the bar, the smell of burning paraffin, the stench of cologne overlying human musk. Voices from the dark — laughter — candlelit smiles. I ordered a martini, and it tasted just like one.

Tina strayed into my mind. I drank quickly and ordered another.

Why hadn’t I simply loaded the goods into my Cruzer in Amsterdam, and left Tina out of things? That seemed simple enough — now. But I’d been sent here to Freetown on an NIIA errand, and I had no idea what sort of last-minute scrutiny the powers might have authorized. Anything at all seemed possible, including my being called aside at airport security and confronted with a couple of NIIA comptrollers donning latex gloves. Afraid of some kind of search, I’d made Tina some kind of patsy.

After I drained the second glass and ate the second olive — really, all would be well. Many people keep watch. Nobody sees. It takes a great deal to waken their curiosity. NATO, the UN, the UK, the US — poker-faced, soft-spoken bureaucratic pandemonium. They’re mad, they’re blind, they’re heedless, and not one of them cares, not one of them.

I could have reasoned all this out from the start. But I’m a coward, and I couldn’t bear living alone in the abyss. Therefore Tina, unaware, lived in it beside me.

Perhaps Tina and I would be married on my return, after I’d met my contact and sold the goods and made money enough for several honeymoons, and after I’d been relieved of my current duty, which was to report on the activities and, if possible, the intentions of Michael Adriko.

* * *

From half the distance down into my third martini, I heard Michael’s voice in the lobby—“What happened to my sandwich?”

The desk clerk followed him. “It’s coming to the room, sir.”

“Send it to the bar, will you?”

He took the vacant stool beside mine and ordered a Guinness. I said, “Really? Guinness?”

“Guinness is good for you. Let’s sit alone.”

I joined him at a table with my martini. Two more sips, and I was ready to take him on.

“Talk to me, Miguel. Talk, or I walk.”

“I’m here to talk,” he said. “We’re talking.” But all he did with his mouth was pull on his beer.

“This place is a dump. What’s wrong with the Papa Leone?”

“Too many people know me there.”

“Right. You’re broke.”

“I’m on a budget. Is that dishonorable?”

“It’s troubling.”

“Why trouble yourself? Is it really your problem?”

“It is if I’m in business with you, because I’ll end up living in this hovel. I can’t run back and forth.”

“That’s your choice, Nair. Don’t blame me.”

“Am I in business with you?”

“That’s also your choice.”

I took a breath and counted to five. I released a delirious sigh. “What about the girl? Is she with us?”

“I met her in Colorado.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thanks. I’m a lucky man.”

“Who is she?”

“More will be revealed.” A lighter flared across the room, somebody starting a cigarette in a group of five white men. Michael cocked his head in that direction, not looking there, his face full of conspiracy. “Now, who are these fellows?”

“Pilots. Russian. They work for the charter outfits.”

“They don’t look like civilian pilots. They’re all young, all fit. Why doesn’t at least one of them have a beer belly? Look at the haircuts — regulation.”

“All right, very good. Who are they?”

Suddenly he stood up and strode over to their table. He spoke. They replied, and he came back with an unlit cigarette between his teeth and sat down again. “It’s a Rothmans,” he said. “Australian.”

“You’re still smoking?”

“Now and then. But everything in moderation.” He took up the candle between us and lit his Rothmans and sat back and blew smoke over my head. “Nair, I’ve got people on my trail.”

“These guys?”

“It could be anyone.”

“Are you in trouble? What’s your situation?”

“I’ll fill you in eventually.”

“Stop it! Jesus!” I was the loudest one in the room. I lowered my tone, but I leaned in to his face. “I expected you to be dealing with the big men. Moving money around. Dispensing government contracts, you know? Contracts, not contraband. Diverted aid, siphoned oil revenue, that kind of thing. Money, Michael. Money. Not pebbles and powders.”

“Don’t let your speech get so strong, mate. There’s plenty of time for plenty of developments. Let’s enjoy the moment.” He mashed his cigarette in the candle’s dish and looked away and entered a personal silence.

You had to be careful with him. For hurt feelings, Michael would stop the whole show.

I waited him out. It never took long.

“It’s been seven years since we saw each other, Nair. I’m thirty-six years old now. I’m changed, I’m different. I’m new.” He turned toward me fully and placed two clenched fists on the table as if in evidence of his newness. “I left Afghanistan four years ago. I underwent training for two years at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, after which I was transferred to Fort Carson, in Colorado. At Fort Carson I worked as a trainer for internationals, mostly from South America, sometimes from the Middle East. They were confined to the post, and whenever I was part of the training team for an international group, I was also kept on the grounds. Between groups, yes, I could go into town in civilian clothes. On the post I wore a US Army uniform with a sergeant’s hash marks. But I was not in the US Army.”

A waiter came with a sandwich on a plate. Michael ignored him. He set it on the table. Michael ignored it.

“They promised me permanent US residency, Nair. They lied. They told me I was on a path to US citizenship. They lied. They said I would enter the US Army as an officer and go as far as my talents could take me. They lied.”

He waited for comment. I provided none. The white men across the room were drinking like Russians. They laughed like Russians.

“Listen to me, Nair. I can build you a bomb. Just give me five minutes, I hardly have to move from this spot. Just bring me matches, Christmas lights, and sugar. I can shoot a man from one thousand meters. I’ve done it. I am a man of courage and discipline, and the reward for that is becoming a thug for hire. A goon, a pawn, a cog in a robot who is programmed only to tell you lies.”

“Sure. We’re all getting older and wiser. That’s sort of my point.”

“I’ve looked at every opportunity for changing my situation, and I’ve chosen the best one.”

“Give me a piece of the plan. Anything.”

“First of all,” he said, “we’ll go to Uganda for my wedding.”

“Oh, God. Should I feel somewhat enlightened, or further confused?”

“Right. I’m engaged.”

“Not for the first time.”

“But for the last. I told you — I’m a new man.”

“Is that what I’m here for? And nothing else?”

“It’s important that we keep things need-to-know and take things one step at a time. Nair, please, you’ve got to trust me. Remember — once or twice, didn’t we make a lot of money?”

“We made a lot of money for guys in their twenties. Now we’re grown-ups. We should be getting rich. Are you asking me to settle for less?”

“I’m not asking you to settle for less.” He gathered himself, so to speak, around his bottle of Guinness, and went to his depths to collect his words. “Here is my promise to you: we are going to get rich.”

His eyes were steady. I believed him. Or anyway I was tired, tired of the struggle to disbelieve. “Good enough,” I said.

“So now, let’s go. Let’s have some dinner with my fiancée.”

As we rose from our seats, I took in the group of possible Russians — now Michael had me doing it — all of them youngish, poised, and trim. I heard one say, “Are ya lovin’ it!”

Michael left his sandwich. I drained my glass and surrendered to the hour. After all, I was getting paid for this.

* * *

As soon as we’d ordered our drinks at the Bawarchi — we’d come early; Davidia hadn’t arrived — Michael started picking at a point. “Who contacted who?”

“I had your address at Fort Carson, so you must have contacted me first, or I wouldn’t have known your whereabouts.”

“Yes, yes — but after more than a year of silence between us, I had a letter from you that was forwarded from Fort Carson at the beginning of August.”

“Forwarded to what location?”

“And then I answered you, and I said, ‘Come to beautiful Sierra Leone!’”

“Maybe this time around, I contacted you first. Is any of this important?”

“Everything’s important.”

Judging by the throng of Europeans, we could expect good food here. It was a spacious Indian place on the outskirts of town, on the beach — open-air, excepting a thatched roof — with a cooling sea breeze and the surf washing softly within earshot. The beach was fine white damp sand, like table salt. In fifteen minutes it would be too dark to make it out.

Michael’s suspicions touched everyone. Now he pointed out a middle-aged Euro at the bar. “CIA. I know him.”

“I can only see his back.”

“He was the head of the skeleton staff at the embassy in Monrovia. I knew him then.”

“You? When?”

“When Charles Taylor held the East.”

“You would have been — thirteen? Twelve?”

His face came under a cloud. “You don’t know about my life.”

In an instant the day ended, night came down, and the many voices around us, for the space of ten seconds, went quiet. A few hundred meters away the buildings began, but not a single light shone from the powerless city, and the outcry coming from the void wasn’t so much from horns and engines, but rather more from humans and their despairing animals. Meanwhile, waiters went from table to table lighting tapers in tall glass chimneys.

And as soon as they’d made everything right, Davidia St. Claire entered the scene, slender, elegant, wearing an African dress. She had the usual effect of one of Michael’s women. He wouldn’t have had one who didn’t. Even in the Third World he managed to find them, at fashion shows and photo shoots, at diplomatic cocktail parties — at church. The gazes followed behind her as if she swept them along with her hands.

Standing up for her, I knocked my chair over backward. Michael, sitting, extended his foot and caught it with his toe, and I was able to set it right before it clattered to the slate floor.

She laughed. “That’s quite an act.”

“In honor of your dress,” Michael said. I held her chair for her, and he added, “Nair will hold your chair.”

“I just bought it at the shop at the Papa Leone. It’s from the Tisio Valley.” She modeled for us, turning this way and that. The dress was mostly white, with a floral pattern, perhaps red — it was hard to say by candlelight — ankle-length, sleeveless and low cut and soft and clinging. I was aware, everybody was aware, of her arms and hands, and the insteps of her sandaled feet, and her toes. She dropped her shopping bag and sat down and smiled.

“It’s almost as wonderful as you.” Michael took both her hands in his own, leaning close. “Such eyes. How did they fit such enormous eyes into your beautiful face? They had to boil your skull to make it flexible to expand the sockets for those beautiful eyes.”

He was trying to embarrass her, I guessed. She didn’t blink. “Thank you, such a compliment.”

Davidia wore her hair short and almost natural, but not all the way, not tightly kinked, rather relaxed into close curls. She was of medium height, more graceful than voluptuous. She had a face I’d call the West African type, a wide face, sexy, cute, with a broad nose, full lips, soft chin, a child’s big eyes, and she looked out from deep behind them with something other than a child’s openness.

Michael took over and ordered for us all, a little of everything, more than anybody could have eaten. Two youthful waiters both wanted the honor of serving us — serving Davidia — competing for it with a kind of stifled viciousness. Davidia seemed to accept this as her right.

As striking as she was, she had an unformed, girlish quality, and I was surprised to learn she’d interrupted her pursuit of a PhD to put in time at the Institute for Policy Studies, and more surprised to learn she’d interrupted all of that for Michael Adriko. I counted back, and this was the fourth fiancée he’d introduced me to. He didn’t ask them to marry him. He asked them to get engaged.

Michael and I both talked a lot during dinner — competing to show off, I suppose, like our waiters. Michael volunteered nonfacts from his store of misinformation. “Nair has family in South Carolina.”

“Georgia,” I said. “Atlanta, Georgia.”

“Family?”

“Everybody but me and my father.”

“His father is Swiss.”

“Danish,” I said. “I’m half Danish.”

Michael was about to speak, but Davidia said, “Quiet, Michael,” and then, “I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody from Denmark.”

“Denmark is misunderstood. I’m not sure I understand it myself.”

“I don’t know what that means,” she said.

“How did you and Michael meet — may I ask?”

“We met at Fort Carson.”

“Were you in the military?”

“No.”

“Good.”

Michael said, “When I met Nair here in 2001, he was with NATO.”

“NATO? Here? This isn’t exactly the North Atlantic.”

“NATO had people here two weeks after nine-eleven,” I said.

“Are you still with them? What do you do now?”

I handed her a business card from my wallet. “Budget and fiscal.”

“Who’s ‘Technology Partnerships’?”

“We crunch numbers for corporate entities interested in partnering on large projects with the public sector. In the EU, that is. We’re not quite global. It’s dull stuff. But I get around quite a bit.”

Michael said, “When we met, Nair was with NIIA.”

She waited until I said, “NATO Intelligence Interoperability Architecture.”

“A spook!”

“Nobody says spook anymore.”

“I just did.”

“In any case, I wasn’t one. I sent cables in plain English. Just comparing the project to the schedule, so they could revise the schedule to fit the project and go home winners every weekend.”

“And what was the project?”

“Boring stuff.”

“Nair had something to do with laying fiber-optic cable for the CIA.”

“NATO doesn’t deal with the CIA,” I said.

“It was American stuff you were putting in the ground, don’t try to fool me.”

“All I did was wander around Sierra Leone like an idiot.”

“And after that,” Michael said, “Afghanistan.”

“I was an idiot there as well.”

“I can vouch for that,” he told Davidia. “That’s where I found him after a year’s separation, in Jalalabad, driving a stolen UN car.”

“You people!” she said.

“What a baby I was. I thought I was Colonel Stoddart or somebody.”

“Stoddart?”

Michael said, “He got beheaded in Afghanistan.”

“In the nineteenth century,” I said, to dispel her shock.

“Oh, Stoddart — yes—”

“Thirty-five years old. Almost like me!” Michael said.

“To be clear,” I said, “Michael was driving the stolen car.”

“All the UN did was cower in their compound in Kabul, and get drunk, and watch people steal their equipment.”

“Were you doing fiber-optic cable there too?”

“No.”

“Nobody realizes this,” Michael said, “but the US military has its own internet. They have their own self-contained system of cables all over the world. And communications bunkers everywhere.”

“Bunkers? Like bomb shelters?”

“Technology Safe Houses,” I said. “The ones in West Africa are probably rotting in the earth. Nobody cares about this place.”

Davidia was drinking wine, which I wouldn’t have recommended, but she’d chosen something Italian, and she seemed to like it. Every time she took a sip, Michael and I stopped talking and watched.

“Michael,” she said, “you’ve never explained what you were doing in Afghanistan.”

“Michael was my bodyguard.”

He took offense. “I had many duties there. I transported a lot of prisoners.”

“What about now, today,” I said, “our duties now? Somebody please tell me. Are we here for a wedding?”

Davidia said, “Yes.”

“So, Michael, this trip has nothing to do with business.”

“Well, while we’re traveling — we’ve always got our noses open for the smell of business.”

Davidia laughed, and I said, “That came out wrong. But I get the message.”

Michael said, “Davidia will be married wearing shoes of pure gold. And she’ll keep them the rest of her life.”

“All this meets with your approval?”

Davidia only said, “Yes.”

“Are we really going to Uganda?”

Michael said, “We’ll fly to Entebbe next week, is that all right? Can you come? Because in Uganda, they really know how to put on a wedding. I wish it could be a double wedding.”

“You want two wives?”

“Be serious! Two brides and two grooms. I told Davidia you’re engaged.”

“On the brink of engagement,” I said.

“Aren’t we all!” Davidia said. “What does she do?”

“She’s an attorney, but she works for NATO in Amsterdam — for your lot, actually. For the Americans.”

“Nair met her in Kabul,” Michael said.

“He’s actually correct about that. But Tina and I weren’t involved over there — just acquainted. She was a prosecutor for the UN, and Michael and I both knew her a bit.”

“A bit? She wasn’t one of Michael’s, was she?”

“You think everybody’s my girlfriend. Do you think I have unlimited time for sex?”

“That’s exactly what I think.”

“Before the UN,” I said, “she served as a prosecutor in Detroit. Once she took part in a drugs raid and carried a machine gun.”

“So she’s dangerous. Is she beautiful?”

“Yes, but she’s a little too smart for that. She keeps herself a bit plain. I prefer it.”

Davidia said to Michael, “You’d parade me around nude, if you could.”

“Nude except for sexy platform shoes. You’ve got it, so flaunt it.”

“Sometimes,” she said, “you have a thirsty face like a little boy.” She laughed. She was tipsy by now. I hoped she’d do something stupid, something to break the beautiful image. She caught me looking. “You don’t sound the least bit like Georgia. How much time have you spent there?”

“Very little. My father raised me in Europe, mostly Switzerland. I don’t think he had legal custody — I think I was kidnapped.”

“Is he still alive?”

“Both mother and father are living.”

“When do you see your American family?”

Just the kind of question I like to deflect. But I found I wanted her to know. “I’ve had no contact with my mother or her family since I was eight years old.”

“But you, you—” She was flustered. “You see your dad, right?”

“We get together every so often. He lives in Amsterdam too.”

Michael was staring at me. “These are things I never heard about.”

Davidia told him, “Maybe that’s because you talk more than you listen.” She said it with affection. I thought I was done, but she kept at me—“What line is your father in?”

“He’s a physician at a teaching hospital. More teacher than physician, in other words. I’m afraid he’s a little crazy.”

“And your mother?”

“As I’ve said — no contact. I choose to believe she’s happy.”

“Then I’ll believe it too,” she said.

Now a beggar dressed in rags came out of the dark and wrote swiftly on the floor with white chalk: MR. PHILO KRON / DR. OF ACROBATICS. He started doing cartwheels in place while holding a platter of raw rice, never spilling a grain. He repeated the trick, now holding a glass of water, also without spilling.

The staff, the patrons, everybody ignored him, but Davidia said, “Michael, give him something.”

Michael only offered him a scowl and said, “Don’t encourage these people.”

Davidia smiled and met the acrobat’s eyes, or one of his eyes — the other’s socket was scarred and pinched shut — and this inspired him to talk, or to signal his thoughts by a series of squeaks, as he seemed to be missing, also, one of his vocal cords. “Sometimes it’s feeling like the Prophet was just here,” he told Davidia, kneeling before her, touching her hand, trembling with the intensity of his message, “the Prophet himself, on this spot, and he went around that corner of the building there, and see, there, the dust still stirred up by the motion of his garments.” Satisfied with that, Dr. Kron took himself and his piece of chalk back into the night, and one of our waiters came quickly with a rag and wiped away his title and his name.

* * *

Later, as we hailed a car in front of the place, Davidia took my arm and said, “What does a prosecutor prosecute in Afghanistan?”

“You mean Tina? Everything. It was right after the invasion. For a little bit there, the UN was the only law. She specialized mainly in crimes against women.”

“Was she one of Michael’s?”

“Are you jealous?”

“Are you?”

“Listen, whoever his other women were — you’re not like them.”

“Thank you,” she said, and kissed me briefly on the mouth.

Michael said, “Are we taking this fellow to bed with us?”

“I bet he wouldn’t mind.”

“Look what you did, Nair — you got her ready for me.”

I saw them into a car and said good night and strolled home down the beach, drunk, under such a multitude of stars they gave me light to see. The small action of the waves made a rushing, muttering kind of rhythm. The moon hadn’t risen yet. Occasionally a school of phosphorescent flying fish swarmed upward out of the darkness offshore.

The Papa lay about a kilometer along from the Bawarchi. I arrived still drunk and looking forward to several hours of dreamless rest, but no such luck.

The power was off, the lobby dim. The night man napped in a plush chair by the door. I got him going and he handed over my key and a handwritten message, folded in two:

I missed you on Tuesday.—H

This meant I had a date for tomorrow afternoon, Thursday, to negotiate the sale of the contents of my Cruzer. I would meet my contact, Hamid, at the Bawarchi — only by coincidence, as we’d arranged these details weeks ago, in Amsterdam.

I took the stairs upward three at a stride, quite suddenly and miserably sober. I rigged my portable hammock on the balcony and lay out in the sea breeze, and came inside in the wee hours when it rained. I lit the candle and opened my laptop. No internet. Off-line I wrote to Tina—

I’m having a bad night. I miss you and even at moments your old cat and her monstrous ugly sister the dog. I don’t quite yet pine for your Mrs. Landlady — what’s her name? Mrs. Rimple? — but I’ll probably even reach that point too before it’s over.

Just tried a bite of a sandwich, and it was stale. It’s only been out of the bag for two minutes. Goddamn this climate, nothing gets dry but the bread, the miserable bloody

— and heard the whining in the tone and stabbed DELETE.

* * *

As soon as day came I checked out of the Papa Leone and moved over to the Scanlon, third floor, almost where I could stomp my shoes and rock Michael’s ceiling in room 230 below. Not that I’d have roused him, even if he were home. I’d had the maximum of Michael Adriko lately. And I’d only been on the continent thirty-six hours.

I stood in my room wondering how much I should unpack, not knowing the length of our stay, and deciding I’d give it all an airing—

I jumped as my door was flung open. I hadn’t turned the key in the lock.

The manager stood there. Short, stocky, Arab. He looked as shocked as I must have. “I’m searching for the cleaner,” he said.

All I could think of to say was, “You mean the housekeeper?”

“Yes. That’s right.”

“She’s not here.”

He shut the door and left.

I changed my mind about unpacking everything, and got out fresh socks and underwear and kept the rest in my bag.

One of my heads said to the other, He meant to search your things, and the other head said, Don’t get jumpy, people make mistakes, and the first one said, Either way, my friend, they’ve got you talking to yourself.

* * *

“Life is short,” Michael always says, and there’s fear in his face when he says it, because he understands it, he means it, this life ends soon.

Michael is a warrior, a knight. Higher-ups command him, and he pretends to obey. The rest of us live as squires and peasants.

— So my report might have said, my second, and final, report from Freetown. It might have said also:

For him the world consists of soft spots and hard spots and holes, it’s all terrain, and he works it, pausing only to eat, drink, shit, piss, fuck, or treat his wounds.

Michael identifies himself as one of the Kakwa, the clan of Idi Amin Dada, and his story runs thus: After Amin’s exile, when the reprisals began against the Kakwa, the boy Michael was taken to Kampala and educated by kind Christian missionaries … But missionaries don’t take a child from the village and put him in a city school. More likely he was kidnapped by a criminal gang and survived on the streets as a harlot boy.

He claims that having finished his secondary schooling, which I believe he never started, he joined the Ugandan army, entered the school for officers, and before receiving his commission was assigned to a unique training camp along the Orange River in South Africa, where Israeli agents — from the Duvdevan Unit, he sometimes says, other times he says the Mossad — instructed him in terrorist tactics.

True or false, what does it matter? Michael’s truth lives only in the myth. In the facts and the details, it dies.

And while you, my superiors, may think I’ve come to join him in Africa because you dispatched me here, you’re mistaken. I’ve come back because I love the mess. Anarchy. Madness. Things falling apart. Michael only makes my excuse for returning.

And if he thinks I’d like an army and a harem, Michael mistakes me too. I don’t want to live like a king — I just want to live. I can’t make it happen by myself. I’ve got all the ingredients, but I need a wizard to stir the cauldron. I need Michael.

— So my report might have read.

As for the actual report, I banged it out quickly in the basement of Elvis Documents. The crisscross shadows of the lights’ wire cages, the choking musk of the concrete walls, also the thought of Mohammed Kallon tiptoeing back and forth overhead, none of these things encouraged settling in for a lengthy chat. I wrote:

I’ve established contact. Changing stations quite soon. Details to follow in 48–72 hours.

“No lunch today,” I told Mohammed when I came up from his basement, only five minutes after I’d gone down.

He was already rising from his alleged chair, saying, “I’ve had my lunch. What about dinner this evening? I’ve got some news for you.”

“Dinner? No. Just tell me.”

“Very good then,” he said with clear disappointment, “I’m to explain something to you. Michael Adriko was attached to the US Special Forces in eastern Congo. There’s a unit there, you know, chasing the Lord’s Resistance Army.”

“I’ve heard about it.”

“Now he’s absent without leave — that’s what I mean when I call him a deserter.”

“All right,” I said.

And so I could have reported as well that by his secrecy, his coyness, Michael Adriko had thrown up a screen against most of my questions, in particular the first one I’d asked: If our aim was Congo, or Uganda, what on earth were we doing in Sierra Leone?

Here was the answer, from Mohammed Kallon. Michael had landed here on the run, probably settling for any destination that would admit him with a Ghanaian passport. Not a bad choice, Freetown. Anything can happen here. Traitors and deserters can evaporate before your eyes.

Mohammed said, “Let’s meet at the Papa for dinner.”

“Halfway through you’d be saying, ‘Why take me to an expensive meal? Just give me the cash.’”

“Well, certainly — I could use a little cash.”

I gave him a wad of leones half an inch thick but nearly worthless, and walked out into the noontime’s unbelievable heat.

One half block from Elvis Documents a man with a generator and a satellite rented time on his computer, and I sat in a collapsible chair, under an umbrella, beside his scrapwood kiosk, and found a Reuters report online. Its closing paragraph:

The LRA mission will belong to about 100 special operators, Pentagon sources said. They declined to say which unit will be assigned to the mission, but a media report in the Colorado Springs Gazette suggested that the 10th Special Forces Group, out of Fort Carson, Colorado, will be the one. This unit typically handles special operations in Europe and Africa.

Despite the heat I walked to the Scanlon. I was angry. Not with Michael, as I might have been, but with Mohammed, because it was simpler.

Along my way I stopped at the Ivory Castle Hotel to talk to the baffling, inscrutable West African men who pretended to manage the air service piloted by the drunken Russians. We had to resort to the Russians because no genuine airline would take us aboard without Ugandan visas, although Uganda would issue them to arrivals at Entebbe without any problem — so Michael had assured us. I asked about the fares and schedule. The managers seemed not to understand why I would even want to know. I presented them with the white European’s suffering weary smile, the only alternative to murder. Ultimately they revealed to me the prices and the times. Michael, Davidia, and I would get out of here in less than forty-eight hours.

* * *

At three in the afternoon I once again entered the Bawarchi. The patronage was light, the place was quiet. At first I thought my contact hadn’t come, and when I located him, seated at one of the smaller tables, nothing before him but a pair of sunglasses, I thought he must be someone else, because I’d only seen him in business suits. But he was Hamid, the one I’d talked to several times in Amsterdam.

He waved me over and I sat down with him. He gave the impression of being middle-aged and fond of comfort, in a loose white linen outfit with a tunic, more Arab than Euro, except for his eyes, which weren’t brown, but a washed-out gray. He had his sleeve pulled back as he checked his Rolex Commander wristwatch. He wore six jeweled rings, three on either hand.

“Exactly on time.”

He handed me his phony business card, and I handed him mine.

“Do you want something to eat?” he said. “A snack of some kind?”

“Nothing, thanks. Have you ordered?”

“Won’t you join me for some tea?”

“If you haven’t ordered—”

“Not yet.”

“Good. Why don’t we walk on the beach?”

“Nobody hears us. We can talk.”

“I’m nervous indoors,” I said.

“Come on, don’t be silly. Just tell me what you’ve got.”

“You know what I’ve got.”

“I want to know what I’m buying.”

“Let’s walk. I don’t like it in here.” I wanted us out of the public eye, because I couldn’t be sure of his reaction to a bit of news I had for him. “Do you mind?”

He sighed, and then he picked up his sunglasses.

I donned my own as well, and we passed from under the roof and into a hot, steady breeze while the sunshine crashed onto our heads. Through the soles of my sandals I felt the beach burning. In our sinister shades, the only figures in view, I suppose we looked like nothing so much as a couple of crooks plotting mischief.

When we got near the water’s edge, he stopped. “Now, before we get a stroke or dehydration or something — what have you got?”

“Exactly what I told you I’d have. Maps of the US military fiber-optics cables throughout seven West African countries. Mali is one of them. Also I have a list of the GPS coordinates for twelve NIIA Technology Safe Houses.” Including, I might have added, the safe house in the basement beneath Elvis Documents.

“You’re definite about Mali.”

“Mali. Yes. That’s definite.”

Mali was the current hot spot. With Mali I had him hooked. Talk about a thirsty face.

“Let me establish something with you,” he said, “and please forgive me: Do you know what can happen to a party who sells false product?”

“I would expect to be assassinated.”

“Your expectation is precise.”

“I’m not worried. It’s very good product.”

“What about the transfer?”

“A push of the button. I have things stored away.”

“We can do it all digitally?”

“Correct. You never have to touch the goods.”

“Do you still stipulate cash payment?”

“Correct. Cash only.”

“And the price is twenty thousand US.”

“No,” I said, “not twenty thousand. That’s no longer correct.”

This was the bit I didn’t like.

He started a retort, but stifled it. He must have been counting ten. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“The price is no longer twenty thousand. For you, out of your own pockets, the cost will be nothing — because we go in as partners.”

“Partners for what?”

“We’ll be equal partners in the sale you’re making. I’m providing the product, and you’re providing the client.”

He bunched his mouth in an ugly way and made a sharp noise with his tongue. “It’s completely unacceptable.” He raised his sunglasses. “What are you thinking? You know nothing about my business.”

“I think I do. The Chinese are all over this continent, and they’re paying ridiculous sums. If they’re not the people you’re selling to, you’re an idiot.”

He replaced his dark glasses over his eyes. “I don’t like this conversation. You’re too forceful. You use a personal tone.”

“I’m being emphatic, but only for the purposes of business. It’s nothing personal. I’m just saying the Chinese will pay plenty for something good. And this is good.”

“It was agreed. Twenty thousand US. It was agreed.”

“We’re beyond that point now. We’re talking about a partnership. This is excellent product with long-term potential. Very long-term. The loss of this material will never be detected.”

He clicked his tongue again and turned his back and walked toward the restaurant, leaving me by the shore.

A dozen meters along he called out over his shoulder, “You’re a liar!” After that he didn’t look back.

My head roared. Switching the price had felt like a bold move in a sport without rules, but what was bold, and what was stupid?

I took a look at his card. CREATIVE PRODUCTIONS / Film Plus Internet / Hamid Faisel / Managing Director.

In Amsterdam he’d had a different last name but had still been Hamid. He’d been chatty, sociable, kind of fun. We’d gone to a film together, Zero Dark Thirty, in English, the Hollywood action movie about the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Afterward Hamid made jokes about the great martyr. “It wouldn’t be so funny to my relatives in Lebanon,” he said. “But why should I care? Because I’m not really Lebanese. My mother is French, my stepfather also. I was raised in Marseilles. I am French. France is a happy country. Lebanon has turned into shit.”—As I say, chatty. Today, in Freetown, neither of us had any jokes to make.

I gave him time enough to get lost, if that’s what he wanted, and then I went through the restaurant toward the cars out front. Hamid was sitting at a table near the entrance with a cup and a saucer before him. I headed for the front without looking at him.

“One moment, one moment. Come on.” He waved me in and I sat down with him once again. He had a pen in his hand. “How can I believe anything you say, when you’re a liar?”

“You’ll have a small sample to work with, enough to understand that this represents an ongoing intelligence mother lode to anyone who taps into the cables.”

“What have they got to detect such tapping?”

“Nothing remarkable, unless there’s been an upgrade in the last ten years. And there hasn’t been.”

“Give me back my business card, please.”

“If you say so.”

“You might decide to get in touch.” He licked the point of his pen and took the card for a minute and handed it back with an e-address written on its blank side. The domain was dot-UK. “Only if you want to honor the original agreement,” he said.

“Sure.”

“Don’t use the twenty-five.”

He meant the AES-25 encryption standard, known as the American Standard. “Of course not,” I said.

“And rotate your proxy every fifteen words.”

“Sure. I hope English is all right.”

“English, French, Dutch. I don’t care. But choose your words — no red flags.”

I tore a page from my notepad and borrowed his pen. “Here’s mine. Maybe we can exchange ideas and reach an understanding.”

He stared down at my e-address, but he wasn’t reading. I waited. “All right,” he said. “Where’s the harm? Think about your price and let me know later.”

And then I felt smug and thought: Of course, he can’t pass this up. Not when it includes Mali.

“Send me your sample,” he said. “Maybe I’ll consider, that’s all I promise. But you can trust my promise, because let me tell you,” he said, “I’m not a liar.”

Ending it on such a note, I didn’t offer to shake his hand. I went out to the beach again. The heat matched my blood, both were beating, simmering. I walked the shoreline toward other restaurants visible up ahead, where cars for hire congregated.

I took off my sandals and wet my feet in the shallows, and I watched the ocean swell and shrink and listened to it sigh.

Here the sea is warm, like a bath. It’s dark, not so blue, more like black, a lustrous black.

You wade out into it until you can’t. You swim out farther until you can’t. Then it takes you.

* * *

At a table outside the Quonset hut from which the drunken Russian pilots administered their charter airline — with its fleet of one, a commuter jet — we dealt with a young Leonean man who spoke faultless English, and as he held Michael’s passport, I tried to sneak a look at it. Davidia was peeking too — at mine as well as Michael’s. “It’s US,” I told her. “I have a Danish one too, but I never use it.” Davidia’s was American.

Davidia wore her safari garb, while Michael was dressed in a wrinkled suit and gray snakeskin boots. His outfit looked at first pink, but closer it was white linen with thin red stripes.

When Michael got his passport back, he let me have a look at it — a wilted Ghanaian document. “I told you I saved the Ghanaian president.”

“A couple of times. At a minimum.” I gave it back to him. “It’s got less than two months left on it, Michael.”

“Never fear. I’ve got family in Uganda, and just as many in Congo. One of those places will claim me. I’ll make the necessary inquiries.”

We weren’t at the Freetown airport, but at an airstrip well east of the city and next to the ocean. Our aircraft waited in a field of tall grass. I said to our young man, “That’s a Bombardier Challenger, isn’t it? The Royal Danish Air Force uses them for cargo.”

“Not this kind,” he said. “This is the 600, discontinued from 1982.”

Davidia shaded her eyes with a hand and squinted. “Are you saying that plane is thirty years old?”

“The one you’re looking at is a couple of years older,” he said. “But it’s a very good aircraft, so long as you don’t overload it.”

Michael said, “Nair — remember the Russian airline? The Freetown — Monrovia run during the war? Something Airlines? — something Russian?”

“It wasn’t an airline. It was a renegade charter, just like this one.”

“They were the only ones bold enough to fly to Monrovia.”

“You mean crazy enough. Eventually they crashed, didn’t they?”

“That’s right, but not on the Monrovia run. That time the plane was coming from a secret rendezvous, loaded with processed uranium.”

The clerk disagreed. “That’s unsubstantiated, and in fact quite false.”

“Were you there at the crash site?” Michael said. “If you were there, you were five years old.”

“Processed uranium?” Davidia said. “You mean enriched?”

“Exactly right. The plane was overloaded with HEU stolen from Tenex.”

“HEU?” Davidia said. “What’s HEU? Who’s Tenex?”—and as she seemed to be talking to me, I shook my head, and she said, “Where did it go down?”

“That’s the beautiful part,” Michael said.

“It’s never been found,” the clerk said. “But factually, it only had some inconsequential cargo aboard.”

“U-235? Do you call that inconsequential?” But Michael couldn’t expect to be heeded. He looked like a species of gangster in his pinstripe suit.

I tried a guess: “Highly Enriched Uranium.”

“Nothing like that aboard,” the clerk said. By his expression, he seemed to have taken a special dislike to Michael.

The runway was visible once you walked on it, packed red dirt hidden under tufts of beach grass.

The aircraft would be booked to capacity — otherwise the Russians would postpone, and that’s why the weekly charter never flew weekly. With a couple of dozen other passengers, African, Indian, Arab, a few white Euros, we waited beside the terminal, a rusty ship’s cargo container open at one end, nothing in it but a row of four theater seats. Nobody would have sat inside — the heat it gave off was startling. Clouds blanketed the sky, but it was bright, and the sea reflected it so viciously you couldn’t look at the water.

A white Honda Prelude arrived at the Quonset hut and stopped, and nobody got out. I recognized the backseat passenger. I said to Michael, “Look there. It’s Bruno Horst.”

“Bruno, at our point of departure. Well — nothing funny about that!”

“I can’t make out the man riding shotgun, but I don’t doubt it’s Mohammed Kallon.”

I waved. Only the driver waved back. I recognized him too. It was Emil, who’d carried me to the Papa Leone my first day in Freetown.

Everything I’d touched, they were touching.

The clerk called our flight. As the others gathered their things I wandered over to the shore with my phone in my hand and, when the water stopped me, I opened the device and pried loose the SIM card and flicked it into the waves. If NATO Intel had a trace on it, let them trace.

On second thought, I didn’t want the device, either. I made a wish and tossed it as far as I could out into the sea. I wished for magic armor, and the power to disappear.

I rejoined our group. As we boarded, a young fellow in an olive uniform ran a wand around each passenger’s outline, fondling us in the places where it squeaked — that is, the men. He didn’t touch the women. We climbed onto the craft up metal treads salvaged from old passenger busses and welded into a crooked stairway. Ahead of us a frail person, an African so ill as to seem genderless and colorless and weightless, was being carried up the steps like a bolt of cloth on the shoulders of two young men. “Going home to die,” Michael said.

I sat against the window overlooking a wing and one of the two jet engines. Michael and Davidia took the seats one row behind and across the aisle. After the engines started, one of the crew — I assumed there were two — a blond man wearing denims, white T-shirt, and flip-flops, came out of the cockpit and wandered down the aisle, saying, “Is English okay? Okay, let’s try it. I want to warn you of the safety features of this aircraft. Has everybody got the seat belt buckled? It’s your choice, I’m not your mother. Okay,” he said, “it’s a trip of sixteen and one-half hours, stopping once at Kotoka International in Accra and once more at Yaoundé, and the final stop will be Entebbe. You’d better have a visa for Ghana or else for Cameroon if you think that’s where you’re going. If you need to get a visa for Uganda, it’s all right, they can fix it at the airport without a big problem. Wherever is your destination, I think you can expect the customs to be serious. They’re always serious with our passengers. They’re too serious.” He waved goodbye and re-entered the cockpit and closed and locked the door, leaving behind him an atmosphere of vodka.

I’d spent five days in Freetown and learned nothing — except that I could have landed in Uganda to begin with.

The craft took off over the sea, made a tight, nauseating turn, and came in so low it bent the grasses in the field beneath. We had a close-up view of the highway heading north, and one last snapshot of Freetown: an accident on the road — a farmer talking with both hands, a twitching bloody goat at his feet, a car with all four doors open, a sign stuck inside its rear window — SPLENDID DRIVING SCHOOL.