God Is Dead (2 page)

“As we speak, units of the Sudan People's Liberation Army are scouring the region for Thomas. Once he is returned to his sister in good condition, then, and only then, can we be assured that the Sudan government is not merely continuing its campaign of
denial
and
avoidance.
Only then can we be assured they are no longer trying to
obfuscate
and avoid any consequences.

“Thank you,” Powell said, rising from his seat. “That's all for now.” The mass of reporters rose with him, waving their hands and clamoring as one attention-starved organism. The official rushed in, screaming, “No questions! No questions!” Powell put an arm around God, held the pose for several seconds while the cameras flashed, then turned and offered his hand to Ismail. For a moment Ismail merely stood and regarded the hand as one regards a dead squirrel or a fresh pile of dog feces, but gave it a limp, spiteful shake when Powell fixed him with the Samuel Jackson stare. Then, flanked by his entourage, he turned and strode out of the tent.

The official turned to Powell as the Secret Service agents began herding reporters out into the arid night. “Due respect, sir,” he said, “are you insane? We're scheduled to be in Indonesia tomorrow. Sir, it's
already
tomorrow in Indonesia.”

“Indonesia isn't going anywhere,” Powell told him.

“Besides which,” the official said, “besides which, sir, and forgive me if I'm out of line here, but our function is not to
order
foreign governments around. Our function is to
persuade
and
convince.
”

“Fuck that,” Powell said. “I'm a general, don't forget. And generals give orders. Like I'm giving you an order right now: Leave me alone.”

The official's satellite telephone rang, a shrill, angry sound. He clawed at his jacket, found the phone, and clutched it to his ear with both hands.

“Yes?” His face blanched. “Yes, sir…sir, I don't know…this is as much a surprise to…I have no idea why the secretary has turned off his telephone…sir, let me…let me assure you that I remain a faithful servant of the admin…sir, perhaps you'd like to speak with…yes sir, he's right here.”

The official thrust the phone at Powell. “It's the president.”

Powell waved him away. “Take a message,” he said.

The aide seated next to Mustafa Osman Ismail in the back of the Land Rover hadn't noticed that morning how rough the road was between the refugee camp and El Fasher, where they were staying during the Americans' visit. Tonight, though, as they drove across dried mud plains under the silver crescent of a new moon, it seemed the minute vibration of every crack and pebble was amplified a thousandfold in the freshly broken bones of his forearm.

The young aide had learned, in the few seconds it took for Ismail to coolly and expertly snap his right radius into two distinct pieces, a few lessons:

1. Ismail's famous smile was the equivalent of a smile on a shark.
   
2. Ismail's slender build belied tremendous physical strength.
   
3. It was not wise to speak to Ismail when he'd just been humiliated by a foreign diplomat, especially one from America.
   

Pain instructs. The aide had assimilated these lessons so completely that he dared not make a sound now. Even as the vehicle rattled and bucked, rubbing raw jagged bone on bone, he didn't so much as whimper.

Ismail himself finally broke the agonized silence.

“I want you to call Rahman,” he said to the aide. “Tell him his men have until tomorrow noon to find this boy.”

The aide considered asking if he should issue a specific threat along with the order, but then decided, based on his recent experience, that a grave threat indeed was probably implicit.

“Yes, Doctor,” he said through gritted teeth.

“We'll deliver the boy to Powell,” Ismail said. “He will be satisfied, and he will go away. But the moment the wheels of his plane leave the runway, I'll take the leash off the Janjaweed. And I won't put it back on until every Dinka in that camp is dead.”

“I've never questioned any of my decisions,” Colin Powell told God. “Not as a kid, not in Vietnam, not as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Plenty of opportunities to wonder if I was doing the right thing. Sixty-seven years, a skyrocket of a career—I never once doubted any decision I made. Then, on the plane here, I get a phone call—a simple phone call, lasted maybe three minutes—and suddenly I'm certain, absolutely
certain,
that every choice I made before today was wrong.”

Powell sat cross-legged on the dirt floor of the conference tent. God lay on a cot Powell had ordered brought in after telling the senior State Department official they would not be returning to the hotel in El Fasher. Outside, beyond the ring of Secret Service agents standing guard, they could hear the quiet conversations of Dinka families, the pop and hiss of campfires, the sigh of a steady plains wind.

“Except for marrying Alma,” Powell said. “That was the right decision. But other than that.”

Despite an acute awareness of his responsibility for the circumstances that had led to Powell's crisis of confidence, God was exhausted, sick with both guilt and a blood infection from the gash on his leg, and he found himself wishing Powell would be quiet so he could sleep.

Still, the guilt won out, and God asked, “Who was the phone call from?”

Powell shifted his bulk and sighed. “A woman named Rita, who I knew a long time ago, when we were children. Her brother Keith and I were friends. Keith was killed, and I was the only person who knew what had happened. But I never told.”

For a moment neither of them spoke.

“Rita's at a retirement home in South Carolina now, dying of liver cancer,” Powell said.

“Did you tell her?” God asked.

“Yes.”

“And how do you feel now?”

Powell looked up. “Terrible,” he said.

“I'm sure Rita is grateful,” God said. “To finally know what became of her brother.”

“I ask myself, finally,” Powell continued, “how does a man become the first black assistant to the president for national security affairs? How does a man become the first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs? How does a man become the first black secretary of state? And then I answer myself: by behaving, in every possible manner, like a white man.”

God said nothing. Instead he did what he always did, all he was allowed to do: sympathize, sympathize.

“The highest-ranking, most powerful house nigger in history,” Powell said. “That's me.”

Later that night, however—after the fires had burned themselves down and filled the air with the thick honeyed scent of smoldering cinders, after the conversations had faded one by one and were replaced by the gentle sound of forty thousand people dreaming the same dream under a sequined sky, after God had gone into a fevered sleep and even a few of the Secret Service agents had begun to flag and slump outside the tent—Powell had to admit that he'd committed political suicide today not just for the sake of a belated racial pride, but for something simpler and more tangible: a chance at redemption.

Because it had not been gratitude that he'd heard in Rita's voice. No. What had been converted from sound into electrical signals, traveled through thousands of miles of telephone wire, uplinked and bounced from one satellite to another, then transmitted to his telephone and converted back into sound was pure, unalloyed grief. Fresh grief at Keith's death, yes, but more than that, the grief of finding out too late for things to be set right.

And now, here was this strange, beautiful girl, this Sora, who wanted nothing but to find her brother. Powell, at least for the time being, had the power to help her do that. And he'd be damned if he wasn't going to try.

Weeks later the senior State Department official (who had never been well liked precisely because his need to be liked was so transparently desperate) would find himself invited to every cocktail party and cigar lounge bull session in the Beltway, and he would relate, time and again, his insider's version of the ex-secretary of state's meltdown.

“It was a sudden, out-of-the-blue thing,” he told a group of young State Department attorneys during happy hour at the Hawk and Dove. By now he was so well rehearsed that he didn't need to think about what he was saying, and could simply enjoy the undivided attention of all these people (and in particular that of one willowy blonde who was still young enough to chain-smoke with listless indifference and who, he would discover later that night, bore a vaguely Pentagon-shaped birthmark behind her left knee). “It started without warning on the flight to Sudan. Powell got a call from some old bat he'd grown up with. The whole thing started,” the official said, “with a phone call.”

The group let out a collective groan of disbelief. Several took advantage of this break in the narrative to sip their microbrews and cosmopolitans.

“How in the world did she get through on a secure line?” the blonde asked.

“Powell's wife pushed the call through,” the official said. “Apparently this woman called his home first.”

Another groan. Glasses clinked. Cigarettes flared.

“Give me a break,” someone said.

The official raised his eyebrows and shrugged.

A lawyer whose vulpine features seemed vaguely familiar to the official chimed in. “You're trying to tell us that the man who could have snapped his fingers and been the first black President was derailed by a call from his childhood sweetheart?”

The official smiled. “I'm trying to tell you that the day after he took that call was the first time he called me a no-good honky motherfucker. But certainly not the last.”

Dawn broke torrid and clear over the camp and found God hunched in the entryway of the conference tent, wrapped in a military-issue wool blanket. Infection hummed in his blood. Shivering with fever, he watched as women dressed in brilliant reds and greens shuttled water in plastic buckets atop their heads. Others sat in a food queue that stretched out of sight into the dense congregation of lean-tos. These women stirred and rose to their feet as Powell appeared, flanked by the senior State Department official and two Secret Service agents. A wave of chanting and clapping followed Powell as he approached the conference tent. God could see he was smiling.

“Sora,” he said, clasping God's hands in his own. “They found Thomas.”

Practically underfoot, two young boys giggled as they crouched and bathed one another with water from a dented tin can marked
BEANS.

Powell gave God's hands an urgent squeeze. “Sora? They found your brother. They're on their way here.”

Over Powell's shoulder God saw a scrawny cow being led by a teenage girl. The cow struggled to keep pace. Its ribs strained the skin with each step. Greenish foam blossomed at its nostrils, and its udder dangled like an empty glove. As God watched, the cow took half a step forward, staggered back, and died on its feet. For a moment it remained standing. Then it began to collapse with terrible slowness, as if it remembered gravity but did not agree with it. The front legs folded at the knee, and the rear end listed to one side, dragging the rest of the body down into the dust.

In an instant flies swarmed around its mouth and eyes. The girl stared at the carcass with the stunned indifference of a catatonic. Over the chanting of the women in the food queue and the giggling of the boys rose a high, steady sound, a single note of distilled grief which God knew came from the girl, but even as she threw herself down and wrapped her arms around the dead animal her face remained still and expressionless.

The giggling and chanting and splashing and clapping went on and on. God felt with certainty and relief that he, too, was dying.

“Sora,” Powell said. The smile was gone; he peered into God's face with concern. “You should lie down. Thomas will be here soon.”

God allowed himself to be led back into the tent by the Secret Service agents. They eased him onto the cot and draped another blanket over him.

Powell's telephone rang from within his rumpled suit. “I want you to find someone from the medical tent,” he told an agent as he searched his pockets for the phone. “Get them in here as soon as possible.”

Powell lifted the phone to his ear and turned away. “Yes,” he said. There was a pause. “Well I'm afraid you can't fire me. Because I quit.”

“I must be dumb as a brick,” Powell said. He'd left the tent to avoid upsetting Sora and now strode angrily and without direction through the camp, shouting into the telephone, trailed by a Secret Service agent and a steadily growing crowd of Dinka admirers. “Because I actually thought your stupid ass might be capable of seeing that in this instance the right thing to do is also the smart thing to do, politically speaking.”

Pause.

“I said
stupid ass.
”

Pause.

“Smart politically because if you got behind what I'm doing here people would see a president transcending the rhetoric of diplomacy and
acting
for once. Doing something good, no matter how small.”