A Dancer In the Dust (17 page)

“I am sorry,” she said. “I have heard this word, but I do not know what you mean.”

“That you feel guilty for what your grandfather did,” I said. “And so you’re trying to make up for it.”

“Why do you say this, Ray?” she asked.

I realized that I’d reduced her to a stereotypically guilt-ridden liberal, but I saw no way out of the hole which I’d dug for myself. “I just mean that I know how much you want to help Lubanda.” I shrugged. “The same way I do.”

She shook her head. “Not at all like you,” she said. She plucked one of her carved oyster shells from the basket beside her chair. “Here,” she said as she offered it to me. “I want you to have this.”

I put out my hand, but she didn’t place the shell in it.

Instead she nodded toward my hand. “Look at your hand, Ray. The palm is up, but more important than this, your hand is under my hand. It is this way because the giver always has the upper hand.” Her look was piercing. “The Bantu have a saying: ‘
The hand that gives, rules
.’”

She started to add something to this remark, but suddenly stopped cold, her gaze at first curious, then troubled, then darkly resigned as she stared out into her fields. “That is Farmer Gessee’s latest move, by the way,” she said.

I turned in the direction she indicated and saw eight or nine men walking, one behind the other. They were quite far away, but even so I could see that they were carrying pangas.

“They are walking my property line,” Martine said. “They have been doing this every night for the last week.” She watched them closely, like one following a serpent’s slithering approach. “They will be careful not to cross it.” Her eyes drifted over to me. “In Rupala they think I am selfish because I want to do as I wish with my property, but what will happen to Lubanda when none of us can do what we wish with our land? What power will be left but the one held by the big men in Rupala?” She shook her head. “Power is even more greedy than money, Ray, and because of that, we should fear it more.”

Fareem came out of the farmhouse, his expression very grave as he stared at the distant line of men. “Gessee’s people,” he said. “We should go out there and tell them we know this.”

Martine shook her head. “If we confront them, they will say we provoked them.” She smiled in a way meant to ease Fareem’s distress. “It is a beautiful evening. Quiet. Good for talk, so let us just talk.”

And so we did, though even as we spoke of other things, we continued to watch the men as they slowly paced back and forth along the farm’s property line. From time to time they would stop and face the farmhouse, hold in that position for a moment, then move again. They never raised their pangas and shook them in the air, nor made any other threatening gestures. It was their presence that threatened, the simple fact that they knew where Martine was and could come for her at any time.

There is nothing more forbidding than men awaiting orders. This was the truth I learned that night as the three of us watched darkness fall, the men still in the distance, parading back and forth, stopping to pose, then marching again, always in a straight line, as if to provide yet more grim evidence that they would do whatever they were told.

“How far do you think they might go to make you grow coffee?” I asked behind the mask of being on her side rather than one who listened, recorded, noted, and informed upon her. “Gessee and the others in Rupala?” When she didn’t answer, I asked, “What are you thinking?”

She let her head loll backward and ran her fingers though her hair. “That I like the wild sounds. The animals and the insects.” With that she rose and walked into the house, leaving Fareem and me alone beneath the tree.

“She’s very afraid now,” Fareem said after a moment. “She tries not to show it, but she’s scared to death.” A pause, then, “Last night she was talking about Patrice Lumumba, the way he was beaten over and over again before they killed him.” For the first time, he seemed curiously defeated, like a man in a card game he knows is stacked against him. “It wasn’t enough just to shoot him and throw him in a hole.”

For a time we sat silently as the darkness deepened and thickened, turning the air into a solid brew.

“There’s something I don’t understand,” Fareem said finally. He was still looking at the short column of men. “How do they know so well Martine’s land line? There are no clear boundaries.” He watched as the men continued to make their way single file along what appeared a straight line. “Martine walked them with you, didn’t she, the boundaries of the farm?”

I stiffened a bit, at least inwardly, and wondered if he’d somehow gotten wind of the conversation I’d had with Early and now suspected that I’d even gone so far as to feed him technical information about Martine’s farm.

“Yes, we walked them,” I admitted casually, as if I sensed no suspicion in his voice.

Fareem abruptly turned toward me. “Have you ever thought of becoming Lubandan?” he asked.

Such a step had never once occurred to me.

“You’d have to renounce your American citizenship and pledge allegiance to our sunflower flag,” he added quite seriously. “Which is the only way Lubanda’s fate will ever really matter to you, Ray.”

I don’t know what my reaction would have been to this, but it didn’t matter because Fareem suddenly spoke again. “Ah,” he said solemnly, his gaze directed toward the far field. “The next step.”

I stared out across the fields to where a low trail of fire began to move along the property line until all of Martine’s farm was ringed in a necklace of flame.

“It’s a traditional warning to a tribe that has intruded on another tribe’s land,” Fareem said as the fire quickly burned itself out and the fields were in darkness again. “They are saying that Martine is a squatter on their land. They are saying that she is like you, Ray, not Lubandan.”

Had I been schooled in the principles that define my profession, I would have known that a fearful measure of risk had just been added to Martine’s life.

“I was on a boat once,” Fareem said. “In Kenya. We were drifting past a village. I heard a lot of noise, a lot of yelling, and when I looked over I saw a woman, maybe thirty years old. She was running toward the river. She was naked and lots of people were after her. Men, women, children. They were chasing her and throwing things at her and she was trying to get away from them. But there was no place for her to go but into the river. Someone on the boat said, ‘She’s a witch. They’re going to skin her.’ I don’t know what happened after that. We had passed the village by the time the crowd was pulling her out of the river.” He paused, then looked at me. “You cannot let that happen to Martine.”

“I would never let anything like that happen to her,” I assured him firmly, because I believed with all my heart that it was true.

Martine came out of the house just at that moment. She was watching the distant fires, but nothing about them appeared to surprise her. It was only the next step, and I could tell that she had anticipated it.

“Men,” she said softly as she continued to stare out into the fields, where they were now jumping back and forth over the glowing embers, shouting, egging each other on, their display growing more and more crazed and violent as each worked to outdo the other. “They are such little boys.”

It was while still floating in the disturbing eddies of that memory, and perhaps urged forward by it, that I resolved to make one more effort in my investigation of Seso’s murder, called Max Regal, and asked if he’d made any progress with regard to the case.

“It’s pretty cold,” Max said. “You talk to Dalumi?”

“Yes,” I answered. “But he had nothing of value to say.”

“I’m not surprised,” Max said. “Okay, so the only new development since I talked to you is that we found where Seso got that tattoo. A parlor on Twenty-first Street. Other than that, we’re at the same dead end we usually reach with these sorts of killings.”

“So still no idea what Seso was doing here?” I asked.

“Nope. You?”

“Nothing.”

Regal mentioned another case, a murder near the Shabazz market in Harlem. It had nothing to do with Seso, as far as I could tell, just another “African killing” that would go unsolved. I let him talk, then asked him to keep me in the loop with regard to Seso’s death. He said he would, and that was the end of it.

Gail came into the office just as I hung up.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Yes, why?”

“Just that look on your face,” she said.

That was enough to spur me forward. “Cancel my appointments for the rest of the day,” I told her.

Gail said something in return, but by then I was far enough away that it didn’t matter. I simply wanted to be out of the office and walking in the open air, beyond the awesome complexities, if we ever can be, of risk management. Certainly I had no destination in mind when I fled my office. I’d needed to think, that’s all, to think, but more important, to
feel
Martine again, and by that very act, put something fearfully at risk. And a risk it surely was, particularly given the fact that in thinking of her I had to accept the awesome truth that I was doomed to live without she who had most warmed and informed me, whose presence had most lifted and enlightened me, and whose fulsome joys and sorrows had lent a fearful beauty to my life.

A path need not be a destiny, of course, and yet, as I closed in on the tattoo parlor Max Regal had mentioned, I felt myself following a trail that would perhaps lead me to a different place than the one I’d sought and found and accepted after leaving Lubanda. E. M. Forster had once written that the tragedy of unpreparedness is well-known; it is the tragedy of the well-prepared, of those who thought things through, made all the right decisions, and yet despite all their careful preparations came to ruin, that is the deepest one in life. Surely that had been Martine’s tragedy, I thought, for she’d done everything she could to avoid the fate that overwhelmed her. Perhaps, in that way, she’d proved just how truly Lubandan she’d actually been.

It was the dark nature of that concluding supposition that had pressed itself deeper into my mind as I’d walked the streets that day. Some years before, a young female aid worker had been murdered in South Africa. Her parents had later forgiven their daughter’s killer in a great display of Western “understanding” that Martine would have despised. That was what had made her unique, that she was genuinely a daughter of her country, without a trace of condescension toward her fellow Lubandans, and incapable of making excuses for them in the sickening way of Westerners, who, even as they make these excuses, seed them with the unspoken and unspeakable sense that,
Well, what do you expect? We’re dealing with savages here.

No one had known this aspect of Martine better than Seso, though during all the time we’d been together in Tumasi he’d actually had very little to do with her. Indeed, he’d seemed wary of having any connection to her at all. And yet, he’d told Dalumi that he’d been working for her.

But what work could this have been? Posing that question, I decided to pursue the only slim lead left to me with regard to Seso’s activities in New York.

The shop had no name. The sign over the window simply said “Tattoos” and left it at that. Its front window hadn’t been washed and so it was through a film of accumulated dust and grime that I looked at the various tattoos that were offered. There were the usual dragons and sea monsters and arrow-clutching eagles. A few vaguely Satanic offerings were also prominently displayed. Inside I could get rock band tattoos and musical instrument tattoos, along with a sketch of John Lennon’s face.

I nodded when the tattoo artist came through the curtain and faced me from behind a small counter. He was small, but with the thick body of a former wrestler. His face had a battered look that reminded me of Rodin’s famous sculpture of a pugilist at rest. He had the same cauliflower ears as that figure, and the same slightly flattened nose. But Rodin’s statue had portrayed a man captured by a certain curiosity, if only to know if he’d been judged the winner of the fight. The man behind the counter had the dead eyes of one who no longer posed questions.

“I’d like a tattoo,” I told him because nothing else occurred to me and it seemed too soon to launch directly into my purpose.

He laughed. “Bullshit.”

When I said nothing, he looked me over doubtfully. “Where you want this tattoo?”

I couldn’t tell if this was his actual question or code for a different one, so I said, “What are my options?”

He shrugged. “I can put it on your balls if that’s where you want it.”

“The chest will do,” I said. “Right in the middle.”

“The area will have to be shaved,” the man told me, once again with an odd look, half conspiratorially, half uncertainly, as if we were partners in a dance whose steps neither of us knew. “Unless you’re a waxer.”

“I’m not.”

“You got a design in mind?”

I decided that the moment had come. “An oyster shell,” I answered pointedly. “You recently gave one to another customer, I believe.”

I couldn’t be sure that this was true. He might well not have been the man in the shop when Seso came here. For that reason, I added a chip to the pile. “He ended up dead.”

Now something registered in the tattoo artist’s eyes, and so I took the risk of capitalizing on the hint of recognition I saw in them.

“The tattoo was exactly like this one,” I said as I drew the photograph of Seso from my jacket pocket and showed it to him. Quickly I added, “I’m not a cop. I’m sure the cops have already been here.”

The tattoo artist’s gaze settled upon me like the tip of a spear. “What you want from me?”

“I’m looking for whoever it was who killed this man,” I said.

The tattoo artist said nothing, but I’d seen the look in his eyes before. It was part suspicion, but that wasn’t the whole story. There was a force behind the suspicion, a hard-shelled capacity for taking what cops call a “trimming,” meaning a very tough interrogation, and with every threat growing more determined to keep his mouth shut.

I returned the photograph to its now familiar place in my jacket. “The cops want to find out what happened to him because it’s their job to do that,” I said quietly. “I want to find out what happened because he was my friend.” I offered my hand. “Ray Campbell.”