Indigo (16 page)

But before Charlotte could speak, Jerry understood that once again it was Marge, and that realization plunged him into a deeper despair than any he felt from the complications of his real life. “Goddamn it, Marge,” he said, and he was suddenly across the room, standing at the enamel bench. He took Marge by the neck and shook her until the violence of the shaking woke him up. It was sometime after midnight and Marge had turned into Louis, who was kneeling at his side.

“Come,” said Louis. “We must be quiet and obey.”

Louis had Parker with him but it was left to Jerry to wake Pamela, to pass the message on.

Elwood gave them coffee and the others trooped about, but it took Jerry a moment to shake that awful dream. And then, as was the case with every dream he'd ever had, it was so completely gone that he would never remember it at all.

They left Smart's hideout very shortly after that, and when they did so Smart put a hand on Jerry's shoulder. “You and Pamela ride with me,” he said. “Louis and Parker have their own work to do.”

They walked up the front tunnel and unlocked the back door of the appliance shop. When they reached the monkeys, there was an excited stirring, small faces pressed to wires, small eyes following their movement as they passed.

At the edge of the outside street they stepped into two waiting taxis, dark yellow Peugeots but with Smart's men behind the wheels, and when the doors were closed the taxis drove away, not turning on their lights until they hit a main road.

The taxis moved through the back Lagos streets, weaving their way past the ever-present police checks, young soldiers with machine guns sleeping at the side of the road, and finally onto Ikoyi Island, taking only twenty minutes to get to the parking lot of the Ikoyi Hotel. Smart told Jerry and Pamela to wait with the driver, then he got out and walked through the hotel lobby with Parker and Louis, who had emerged from the other cab. Was this, Jerry wondered, his best chance to escape? Could he not step out the door and simply run into the surrounding night? But the driver had his eyes on him in the rearview mirror, so he looked down and sat still. And though he sensed that Pamela would speak, in the end she, too, let the quiet surround them, taking up all the remaining space in the car.

They sat that way for half an hour until Louis finally came out. He wasn't hurrying, and he opened the front door of the cab, getting all the way in before turning to face them. “Everybody's waitin' in room 512,” he said. “Les go see what they want.”

Jerry got into the hotel elevator, and once the elevator's doors were closed and the noisy thing began its climb he turned to Louis and said, “What should I do, Louis? Should I meet with these people, should I follow you along, or should I take my chance now and get away?”

It would be easy to run. Louis Smith-Jones, though thirty years younger than Jerry, was a small man and Pamela would only try to stop him with words. He could simply get off on a lower floor, run down a stairway, then find his way out of the building and into the night. There would be a marine guard at the embassy and once inside he would stay there. He could act on his own behalf now, all he had to do was push the elevator button.

But Louis Seemed to read it all and said, “Oga, please, give de evening its one chance,” and that somehow stayed Jerry's hand, though the elevator moved past each floor in a slow and surreal way.

The elevator stopped on the fifth floor but the door opened only about halfway before sighing and stopping, making the three of them walk out single file. Louis tried to close the door, and then he tried to push it all the way open, but it stayed where it was, unmoving, oblivious to the call button, which they could all hear impatiently buzzing, five stories below.

Room 512 was down a long hallway and as they walked over the worn carpet Jerry took up the rear. He imagined dropping away, stepping into one of the other rooms and out of this thing, but when they got to room 512 Louis opened the door too quickly to satisfy Jerry's sense of the dramatic, and Pamela ushered him inside.

“Ah,” said Smart. He then told Louis to stay outside, to knock if anyone came down the hall.

As Louis closed the door again Jerry looked around. The room was larger than he'd thought it would be, and it was cleaner. The wallpaper was faded, but its rose pattern was still visible, though the seams had parted here and there to let the bare wall through. There were two beds in the room and there was a round table with chairs. Smart was in one of the chairs and Parker was in the other, leaning against an ivory-handled walking stick. Pamela had gone over to stand against the bathroom door, and on the second bed sat a man whom Jerry didn't know. This man wore jeans and a T-shirt. He was athletic-looking though he wasn't young, and Jerry believed that he was somebody's bodyguard.

“What now?” Jerry asked.

With one exception these were all people he knew, and suddenly Jerry understood that nothing would come of their plans for a coup and that, very likely, the only victim would be him. No one had answered his question, but before he could speak again, noises came from the bathroom and Pamela was jolted from her place against its door.

“Ouch,” she said, and as she stepped out of the way Nurudeen's father came into the room, glowering around and focusing on Jerry Neal. Parker stood out of the chair, quickly handing the man his cane. When he had it he leaned against it hard, as if it were truly necessary for walking.

“Nigeria is failing on all fronts,” he said. “We have brought you here to try to convince you to stand trial with enthusiasm, to join us in what we are trying to accomplish for our land.”

Jerry laughed, imagining himself smiling from the dock. He didn't like this man, but at least the conversation was direct. “Here I am,” he said. “Looks like I'll stand trial whether I'm enthusiastic about it or not.”

“Let me try again,” said Nurudeen's dad. “We want you to take an active part in proving how absurd the charges are. We want you to put your best energy into it until it becomes transparent how corrupt a government must be if it has to stoop to such stupid tricks.”

Jerry sat down on the edge of the nearest bed and spoke quietly. “I really think that there is every possibility I will be found guilty and sent to prison. I think, in fact, that the only outcome of all your efforts is likely to be that. Why would I not take an active part in trying to see that it doesn't happen?”

Nurudeen's father glanced at Smart and Pamela and then took his weight off the cane, folding it under his arm like a baton. “We want more than that,” he said. “We want you to join us in condemning the current regime. Is that clear enough? We want your help. You were not chosen as randomly as you suspect. You have a reputation at your school for being hard but fair, a reputation for good discipline, and we want that reputation for ourselves. Our countrymen need pluralism, respect, and involvement from all sides, and we're going to give it to them.”

Jerry had been prepared to speak sarcastically, but he did get some small satisfaction in listening to Nurudeen's father speaking to him that way, as though, for once, he were an equal. He even suspected, somewhere in the distant reaches of his mind, that he might have hoped for their success had they approached him in an honorable way, without all this trickery. As it was, of course, he was only biding his time, understanding the enemy so that he could better defeat him when the time came.

Smart, however, seemed to view Jerry's thoughtful pause as consideration and he said, “No, listen. If we had not set that fire it would have happened sooner or later anyway, and they would have gotten away with it, just as corrupt officials always do. But to bring you into it brings in the outside world, which is precisely what we need to allow us to move. And if we succeed then we will admit this small duplicity later, that much we promise, though most Nigerians won't believe us even when we say it.”

Jerry had intended to remain cool, but he turned on Smart, raising his voice. “Small duplicity? You call it small when you have committed such acts as these? What about the secretary? What about what you've done to my life?” He remembered the slow-moving elevator and the chance he'd had to escape, to be away from these people and on his own, and he held up his hands, as if surrendering everything he'd just said. If he got another chance he wouldn't pass it up, so there was nothing to be gained by speaking so directly.

He looked at Pamela. “Anyway, this is it?” he asked. “After this there are no more surprises?”

Pamela nodded, but at that moment Nurudeen's father spoke again.

“Do not ask the tail what the head is thinking,” he said. It was such a stunning remark. Jerry was about to say, “I am asking the person that I think most trustworthy,” but he quickly thought better of it, saying instead, “All right, I'm asking you.” It would have felt good to speak curtly in the face of such astounding arrogance, but he did not want to cut himself off from any information. And up until now he hadn't had a single thought that he'd kept to himself. He'd have to remedy that.

Nurudeen's father's expression was drawn across his face like a machete slash on the side of a coconut. “Look at it this way,” he said. “The military, four or five army generals to be precise, is about to stage a coup d'état. If that happens things will be predictable. The new ruling generals will announce that civilian elections will be held after stability has been achieved, say in five or six years. During the tenure of their administration there will then be a series of other coup attempts, and if any of these attempts succeed then another announcement of civilian elections will be made, for some date even further down the line. In other words, if there is a military coup it will be years, perhaps decades, before we can try democracy again. We are attempting to avoid all that. Believe me, I know these generals and I have their ear. Maybe we have made mistakes, but the heart of the matter is as I've just stated it, and it is a good heart.”

Nurudeen's father's coconut face was pained by the vision of how long it would be before civilians ran the country again and he stopped speaking for a moment. He then offhandedly added, “Surely yqu realize by now that Nigeria is really nothing like the West.”

It was a surprising comment, and one that made Jerry suddenly see that, despite what he thought he knew, there was still a gap. Maybe they could succeed. He really didn't understand the man or the country or the situation at all. Smart, however, took away the chance for him to bridge that gap by speaking practically again.

“The agreement we have with those generals really is a reliable one. Even they want civilian rule to work if Beany is in charge. So if we can stage our coup during your trial, the army will give us one good year, and by that time we will have the best men everywhere—I'm talking about the ones who are truly corruption-free, the ones with Beany's idea of discipline within them.

“And so your trial is pivotal,” Nurudeen's dad continued. “To have an outsider involved was a dangerous idea all along, but one we had to try. The international press will now be on hand, don't you see? The international community will now take an interest in what is going on. And if we can proceed correctly, then the military boys will have more reason than ever to remember their promise because the whole world will be watching them.”

Jerry wanted to say that he didn't think the whole world gave a damn, that he was sure, in fact, that his trial would get only slight notice in the American press, but he held his tongue. And since everyone else did too, the meeting seemed to be coming to an end. After a moment Nurudeen's dad looked at his bodyguard and said, “Phone down now. Tell them I will be along.”

Though no one had called him, Louis opened the outside door just then, and Nurudeen's father walked halfway to it before stopping in front of Jerry Neal.

“No doubt you feel used,” he said sadly, “but we had hoped you would take the long view, perhaps even understand it as some kind of privilege, a chance to expand yourself, broaden your horizons, so to speak.”

“Some privilege,” Jerry said.

Nurudeen's father was quiet for a time, standing there leaning against his cane. He then said, “I wanted to play a part in this myself; that is why I allowed my younger son to become involved, that is why I came to your school, and that is why I ordered his mother to visit you as she did. I believed that an American, full of the democratic tradition, would be moved by what we are trying to do, by such a long shot, by such grand nerve.”

“But you didn't ask me,” said Jerry. “All you did was set me up.”

Nurudeen's father nodded and said, “It is certainly true that you have to open your eyes wide if you are ever to see what is before you here. I guess that must be it.”

Smart was standing too, and both men were about to pass through the door when Jerry once again saw the form of the minister's secretary in his mind's eye, her swollen face, her body partially covered by those forlorn little pieces of cardboard. He said, “If I don't do it no one is going to talk about the secretary, isn't that right?”

“Her death was an accident,” said Smart. “When the fire began she was asleep at her desk. Who would think that she would fail to awaken, what with the alarms and the sound of the flames….”

Was that enough for them? To say that it was an accident, to say that her sloth had caused her death? Jerry looked at Parker and Pamela. Surely one of them shared his outrage, his opinion that what had been said was not nearly enough. But though he looked at them he couldn't read them. Pamela's face was bemused, and Parker seemed not to have been listening at all.

Nurudeen's father was at the door, but he turned fully around. Jerry was sure that he was on the verge of mentioning the woman, on the verge, perhaps, of saying something profound, but after a long moment he turned back again and passed through the doorway, out of sight and into the hall, Smart and his bodyguard soon joining him there.