A Dancer In the Dust (11 page)

“I’m here to visit one of your guests,” I said. “Herman Dalumi.”

“You a cop?”

“No.”

“You with Immigration?”

“I’m a consultant,” I said to quickly shorten the long list of unwelcome officials I might be. “I have nothing to do with any government, foreign or domestic.”

“You can’t go up,” the woman said curtly, the queen of this dilapidated kingdom. “Herman will come down.” One eyebrow arched upward like the back of an aggressive cat. “If he wants to.”

“I understand.”

The woman nodded toward one of the chairs. “Wait over there.”

I did just that, watching silently as the denizens of the Darlton Hotel wandered in and out. They were mostly African traders, just as Max had told me. I’d seen them throughout the city, selling T-shirts and baseball caps, pocketbooks and backpacks, along with the usual array of knockoffs and counterfeits, everything carried in blankets that could be gathered up quickly and hauled away at first sight of a cop. In that way, they struck me as the opposite of the nomads Martine and I had once watched move with such unencumbered grace at the far horizon, erect, dignified, carrying what they owned, a poor people under Western eyes, certainly, but not a desperate one.

“You are looking for me?”

He was a man of around forty, I guessed, short, but with powerful arms and legs. The features of his face blended flatly, like a chocolate bar left out in the sun. Only his eyes had any sparkle, though it was the sparkle of alertness rather than of love or pleasure or even curiosity, save for what might await him at the dark end of a street. Here, I thought, is a man accustomed to high risk.

“Herman Dalumi?” I asked.

The man nodded. “I told Nasar I’d pay him on Wednesday,” he said. “I’m good for it. I never run away. He don’t need to send a man to make threats. He insults me doing this. He is lucky I don’t pull the rag from his head and strangle him with it. You can tell him this.”

“I don’t know this Nasar,” I assured him. “I’m here about the man whose body was found in the alley behind the hotel a few days ago.”

Something played in Dalumi’s eyes, though I couldn’t tell what it was, save that it wasn’t fear. He’d already sized me up and found me harmless. Whatever I’d come for, it wasn’t to break his bones over an unpaid debt.

“His name was Seso Alaya,” I said. “I knew him a long time ago. He worked for me when we both lived in Lubanda.”

Dalumi said nothing, but he didn’t have to. Even his silence was calculated. He clearly considered words dangerous, as people unaccustomed to speaking freely inevitably find them. To have license with language is a rarity on earth, a pleasure Dalumi seemed never to have enjoyed.

“Do you have any idea how he was supporting himself?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“Is it a matter of money?” I asked bluntly, “Is that what you want?”

He shrugged again. “A man does not feed the animal that eats him.”

This was no doubt a home-country saying, but its meaning was clear: I was not his friend. He owed me nothing, least of all a favor.

I reached for my wallet, but Dalumi grabbed my hand, brought it forward, clearly expecting that I’d reached for a pistol or a knife.

“I’m unarmed, if that’s what’s bothering you,” I assured him.

He reached around, plucked the wallet from my back pocket, then released me.

“I must be careful,” he said. He added nothing else as he went through my wallet, first checking for ID, then taking out a few bills, which he waved in my face. “I will take only this much,” he said like a man demonstrating how reasonable he was, the amount of his theft, he seemed to feel, hardly thievery at all.

When I offered no argument, he shoved the bills into the pocket of his shirt.

With the terms of this business transaction now met, I took the photograph of Seso’s body from my jacket pocket and handed it to him. “Do you have any idea who did this?” I asked him flatly.

Dalumi stared at the photograph, then shook his head. “He was always alone. Sitting in the lobby. Sometimes we talked.”

“What did he talk about?” I asked.

“Are you asking if he had gold, diamonds?” He laughed, then took a single cigarette from his shirt pocket and lit it. “He was a gloomy one.” The laugh devolved into something less mirthful. “As we say in my country, such a man sometimes speaks of his goats, but only to tell you they are dead.”

“Gloomy or not, he had something I’m looking for,” I said.

“Uranium?” Dalumi said, a question that appeared to turn a small key inside him, open a tiny door. “Those Chinese fuckers are taking all of it out of Niger. Building a road to it with their own little yellow prison slaves, so there is no work for us.”

Ah, so that’s it,
I thought.
We have our distrust of the Chinese in common
.

“So, you’re from Niger,” I said.

Dalumi neither confirmed nor denied this. “He was from Lubanda, this man who is dead. What could he bring from there?” He squinted as if to bring my motives into clearer focus. “How do you know he had something, and why do you want it? What was he to you, the dead one?”

“Seso called a friend of mine,” I answered. “He said he had something for him. My friend wants to know what it was. He thinks it must have been important if Seso left his family to bring it to him.”

“Seso had no family,” Dalumi said quite firmly.

“Yes he did,” I insisted. “He told me this when I last saw him in Rupala.”

“All gone,” Dalumi said with a dismissive wave of his hand, “The mother died giving birth to his son,” he added in the offhand way his life had taught him to regard the lives of others, that they were transient, fleeting, quickly snuffed out, especially the lives of women and children, since their helplessness only increased their risk. “And the boy was stolen.”

“Stolen?” I asked.

“By the Visutu,” Dalumi told me. “That is what he told me. They are a—”

“They are Mafumi’s tribe,” I interrupted. “Did Seso get his son back?”

Dalumi shook his head. “He died where the Visutu took him.”

So Seso had come to the city of dreams only after he’d had no dreams left.

“Did he mention anyone else from Lubanda?” I asked.

“Once he talked about a woman,” Dalumi answered. “A farmer, he said. He did not say a name, just that she had a farm and that she was white.”

This was obviously a reference to Martine, and so I said, “She was white, but she was Lubandan.”

Lubandan, I repeated in my mind, and suddenly remembered an evening a couple of weeks after the attempt on President Dasai’s life. Fareem, Martine, and I were sitting on the farmhouse porch when a convoy of trucks appeared. Some were civilian, some were military, but all of them had their rear beds crowded with men, women, and children.

“They are Besai people,” Fareem said. “The president’s tribe.”

“Where are they headed?” I asked.

“To the northern provinces,” he answered. “Dasai wants to move his people into that region. This is part of Village Harmony, to bring all the tribes together.”

Martine peered out at the passing trucks but said nothing. I’d noticed this quiet before, but failed to realize how very deep it was, a statue-in-the-park stillness at her core that reduced the women with whom I’d been involved during college and after it to chattering magpies. Suddenly it seemed to me that I had spent my life pursuing window-shop mannequins when all the time, here in Lubanda, there was
this.

“Dasai will end up like that Tanzanian trickster Julius Nyerere,” Fareem continued. “When he was president of Tanzania, he would listen to the weather forecasts on short-wave radio, then go out and predict the weather.”

Martine remained locked in her own inner quiet, her gaze now focused on the far horizon not like the gaze of one who dreamed of going beyond it, but one for whom it served as a completely natural border, the sky no more than the blue bowl that held the boundaries of Lubanda.

“Such things make us a laughingstock,” Fareem said sadly. He took another drink. “Moving the Besai up north will only cause trouble. The Visutu will see the clothes from the West, and the food from the West, and they will want these things, and they will come south to get them.” He followed the trucks as they grew small in the distance. “There is no way to stop it now, this… invasion.”

Martine made no argument against this dark surmise, but something in her eyes deepened. Finally, very softly, she said, “Maybe not.”

Had that been the moment? I wondered now, with Dalumi staring at me as if distantly investigating my long silence. Had that been the moment when she’d first conceived of her
Open Letter
?

“What did Seso say about her?” I asked Dalumi by way of returning myself to the present.

“That she was betrayed.”

Because I knew the risk, I dared not ask by whom.

“What else did he say about this woman?”

“He said he worked for her.”

“But that’s not true,” I said. “Seso worked for me the whole time I was in Lubanda.”

“He did not mean he worked for this woman then,” Dalumi said firmly.

“Then when else?” I asked.

Dalumi’s answer could not have struck him as oddly as it struck me.

“Now,” he said. “He said he is working for her now.”

“He couldn’t possibly have been doing that,” I told him adamantly.

“Then he was a liar,” Dalumi said with an indifferent shrug. “You want to see his things? They are still in his room.” He nodded toward the woman behind the desk. “You will have to pay her,” he added. “But maybe in the room you will find what you are looking for.”

In every discovery, as I well knew, there is risk. Discover this, and you will withdraw your bet. Discover that, and you will increase it. Most such discoveries are technical, and few are profound. But the deepest discoveries are those that alter the prevailing colors of the moral spectrum, reveal that what seemed right was wrong, and what seemed wrong was right. It is these gravely transforming discoveries we avoid, I had long ago discovered, and yet, without them, I decided now, we forever roll the same stone up the same heartbreaking hill, and then, with heads hung low, follow it down again.

“I’ll pay her,” I said.

Dalumi looked pleased. “Okay… boss,” he said in the way of one whose only power was disdain.

I walked over to the woman behind the desk, and quickly struck a bargain.

She grasped the bills with fingers that seemed more like talons, then nodded toward the elevator. “Go under the crime scene tape,” she told me firmly. “Don’t rip it. If you do, the cops will give me shit.”

“I won’t touch it,” I assured her. The police had taken no such investigative precautions on Tumasi Road, I instantly recalled, had made no effort to preserve the scene from contamination nor discover and subsequently apprehend the criminals involved. Nor had any marker ever been erected to note what happened there. It was this failure to memorialize the “Tumasi Road Incident” that now struck me as an added measure of injustice. For the stark truth remains that there are those who shoulder the cross and those who don’t, and that it is those who bear its splintery burden who hold the heart of the world and by that means provide humanity with its only claim to glory. For that reason, something should have stood in commemoration of Martine’s sacrifice, I thought, even if no more than her name etched into a stone.

“You ready?” Dalumi asked by way of returning me to the present.

I nodded.

“Okay, let’s go,” he said, and on that command jerked his head upward, toward the ceiling, his expression fiercely reluctant, dreading the journey, as if he believed what those fiery red Tumasi sunsets had later come to suggest: that hell hung above us, rather than yawned below.

On the way up to the fourteenth floor of the Darlton Hotel, I considered how strange it was, Seso’s remark about working for Martine.
How could he have thought himself working for her? He had never worked for her, and certainly was in no position to do so now.

Even so, I couldn’t help considering the curious thing Seso had said to Dalumi. In my usual style, I went through this spare information looking for some sort of linkage. This process got me nowhere save, by an unpredictable twist of mind, to another memory of Martine, the way she’d once remaked, “Once a classicist, always a classicist.” This thought brought Hecate to mind, how her name meant “will” in Greek, and the way in which she’d often been described as a sorceress of inordinate power, having an infinitely far reach through space and time. I knew that Martine would have been amused by this strained comparison, though completely typical of the classical education I’d evidently considered sufficiently preparatory to my efforts in Lubanda.

She’d walked into the village a week or so after we’d lounged on her porch, watching the trucks loaded with Besai families move north. Fareem had been with her, and once again, as I watched them stroll into the village, it seemed to me that they shared a private vision of some sort.

I’d been sitting on the steps of my house, honing my proposal to dig a series of wells along the route the nomads traveled across Tumasi, when I’d seen Martine and Fareem, and it struck me that they might know the best location for these wells.

“The market is charming, isn’t it?” I said cheerfully as I approached them.

“Yes,” Fareem said with a curious smile. “Charming.”

For a moment, Martine seemed reluctant to speak, then as if compelled to do so, she said, “Do you want to learn about Tumasi, Ray?”

“Of course.”

She didn’t appear entirely convinced of this, but she turned and pointed to a stall where various cuts of meat hung in the open air. “The Lutusi sell their animals to the people here in the village.” She nodded toward other stalls, some with mounds of beads, others selling grains, cassava, bolts of hand-woven cloth. “The nomads buy from those stalls with the money they get from the meat vendors.” She turned to face me. “This is what you would call the ‘economy’ of Tumasi. I am sure you find it very simple.”

“Well, isn’t it?” I asked with a small laugh.

“Of course it is,” Martine said. “But it is fragile, too, and changing it would not be simple.”