Sudan: A Novel (40 page)

Faoud sat on the patio, where a servant had just brought him a second pot of mariamia tea to go with his breakfast of
mammoui,
date-filled cookies. He smiled, chuckled under his breath, in fact. Today was going to be an enjoyable day, he thought—yes, indeed, a most enjoyable day. Then the servant returned and announced that Leo Danheir wanted to see him.

“Most noble Faoud, I know you are a busy man,” Leo fawned. “I have come to you with more information,
new
information to sell.”

Faoud’s eyes narrowed. He liked small, quick facts, not the long story he suspected he was about to hear from Leo. “Explain.”

“I rented a bed last night in the al Jubari Lodge.” The name clicked instantly with Faoud. That was where he’d found the American and his Arab friend.

“And while I was there, I saw a man from the south who weeks ago had tried to hire me to find his daughter. She’d been carried off from some village by...” Leo paused for effect, “a black-robed man named Hamir riding a white horse. You have a captain who fits that description, do you not?”

Faoud nodded, and Leo plunged breathlessly ahead. “And this farmer was willing to pay me a lot of money to find this girl, take her from her owner and bring her back to him.”

Leo cast a glance at Joak and grinned. “Of course, I took the fool’s money and left. I did not think I would ever see him again.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I am saying that this--Leo pointed to Idris with contempt--“farmer could not have found his way from Bentiu to Kosti all by himself.”

Faoud looked at Idris, and the tribal returned his look with an icy stare. All of these men, including the fat one—no,
especially
the fat one—were as evil as puff adders, and Idris refused to be cowed by evil.

Leo was right, Faoud thought. This was a simple tribal. Somebody must have brought him to Kosti. And who might that be? Who might be helping this farmer find a slave, one Faoud’s men had taken and Faoud had sold?

Leo continued to prattle on. When he said something about the American, Faoud held up his hand for the mercenary to be silent. He wanted to process this information. Leo was suggesting that this tribal was in some way connected to the American. How could that be? Why would the American help him? He had come to Sudan to take pictures of slaves, not to help some farmer find his daughter. But
somebody
brought the tribal to Kosti, and he was staying in the same lodge the American had stayed in.

“I am tired of guessing who is helping this farmer look for his daughter. We will get him to tell us, and then we will not have to guess anymore.”

He clapped his hands, and two guards with automatic weapons appeared like ghosts out of the shadows.

“Take him,” he indicated Idris, “to Ahkmad. Tell the jailer to find out...” He stopped and turned back to Leo. “What tribe is he?”

“Dinka.”

“Do you speak Dinka?”

“No, but my man here does.” Leo pointed to Joak.

“Then your man will be the interpreter.” Faoud turned back to continue his instructions to the guards. “I want to know who brought this villager to Kosti. I want to know everybody who is involved in any way. Everybody.”

He addressed Leo, “I am going to kill the American and the Arab tomorrow morning. I will kill this man, too, and anybody else who dares to interfere in my business. And when these men die, I want all my problems to die with them.”

The guards grabbed Idris and headed down a stone walkway that led from the patio to the rock wall; Leo and Joak trailed after them.

From his vantage point in the woods, Omar watched fatigue-clad guards put Idris in the jail, just as he thought they would. Two of them, along with the two men who had kidnapped Idris, came out the gate in the wall and knocked on the door. Someone let them in, and the guards came right back out. The others remained—the two troublesome strangers and the tribal who’d insisted on coming along on this quest. Well, Omar had warned him not to sign up for this adventure.

The mercenary shook his head and whispered softly under his breath, “I told you, father, that I might have to use you as bait.”

W
hen footsteps sounded in the stone passageway outside their cell, Ron and Masapha froze, instantly terrified. But the men who came through the ancient dungeon door had no interest in them.

There was scar-face, the jailer who moonlighted as an enforcer for the Arab Gestapo; a crippled, toothless, black man in a flowered shirt; an Arab whose nose looked like it had been hit with a baseball bat—more than once--and two guards escorting a tall, thin tribal between them.

The guards dragged the tribal across the cell to the far wall where the manacles hung, clamped his hands in the shackles and left.

Ahkmad turned to Ron and Masapha and said something in Arabic.

“He says we are to get from the way so he can work,” Masapha told Ron.

The two of them exchanged a look and moved their injured bodies carefully into a far corner of the cell.

The two other men got out of his way as well when the jailer unfurled his whip and swished it around in the straw on the floor before he reared back and slashed the tribal’s bare back with it. The man jerked forward into the wall, grimaced in pain, but made no sound.

“Joak, tell him he can save himself a whole lot of grief and pain if he just tells us what we want to know right now,” the smashed-nose man said, and the weird-looking man translated what he had said into Dinka.

Masapha leaned over and translated it quietly for Ron.

“Tell him he will answer our questions eventually anyway,” the man continued. “Why not do it now before we have to hurt him, why wait until we break him? And we will break him.”

Joak spoke to the man who hung on the wall, and the man said nothing.

Whap!

The whip ripped a new canyon of agony down the tribal’s back. Again, he jerked forward soundlessly.

“Tell us how you got to Kosti,” Leo said. “Who helped you?”

Joak translated the question, and the man who hung on the wall replied in pain-filled Dinka.

“No one helped me. I came on my own. I got information from farmers who had seen the raiding bands on the move, and I followed after them. I worked in the fields to support myself. I came with no one.”

“Liar!” Leo roared, and Ahkmad went to work again.

Over the course of the next hour, Ron and Masapha pieced together what the men named Leo and Joak wanted to find out from the tribal. But the tribal stuck to his story. And he never cried out. Not once. Ahkmad hit him again and again, and he never made a sound.

Idris believed with all his heart that his daughter’s life depended on his silence. Over the course of the past weeks, he’d become convinced that against all odds, defying all logic, Omar could find Akin,
would
find Akin. But the mercenary would not have the chance if these men found out about him. They would kill him.

As the lash ripped his thin back, the Dinkan farmer focused on his little girl.

Whap!

Her dimpled smile.

Whap!

The sound of her voice.

Whap! Whap!

The pain was so excruciating that Idris began to pray desperately 
to die. He begged God to take him away from the agony. He would go and be with Abuong and trust that the man named Omar would find Akin and take her home.

After 16 lashes, Idris slipped into unconsciousness. Leo was disgusted. He stalked out of the cell, and Joak limped along behind him. The jailer unlocked the shackles and let the tribal’s limp body fall to the floor. As soon as the cell door slammed shut, Ron and Masapha did what little they could for the injured African. They washed the wounds on his back with the remaining water from the bucket the jailer had given them the preceding day to wash their own shredded flesh.

“This is one tough tribal!” Ron said, as he picked pieces of straw off the man’s slashed back. “He’s a better man than I am.”

Ron knew that if he’d suffered the beating Idris had taken, he’d have told the jailer anything he wanted to know.

“He is protecting someone,” Masapha said. “And that someone means more to him than does his own life.”

Leo and Joak stood outside the jail as the late morning sun began to fry the day.

“I don’t think he knows anything,” Joak said. “The jailer said most men buckle and talk after half as many lashes. He didn’t say a word.”

Leo said nothing. He was thinking.

“I don’t know of a man alive who wouldn’t talk after a beating like that,” Joak prattled on. “If that won’t make him talk, what will?”

“His daughter,” Leo said quietly.

“What?” Joak had no idea what Leo meant.

The big man sighed. Joak was so stupid you always had to draw him a picture. And even then, sometimes he still didn’t get it. “He’s a father, right?” Leo said. Joak nodded. “He sold everything he had to find his little girl, came all this way. Do you follow me?”

Joak nodded his head again. “He hired somebody to help him find his daughter, just like he tried to hire us. You could beat this man to death, and he’ll never tell you who it is. If he’d die to protect his daughter, he’d die to protect whoever is looking for her.”

“So what do we do?”

“What if we found his daughter?” Leo said. He spoke the idea as it popped into his mind and he liked the sound of it when he heard it. “Don’t you think he’d spill his guts all over the floor to keep us from hurting her?”

“But how can we find his daughter?” Joak was mystified again.

“We know this dung-toting farmer’s name is Idris Apot, and his daughter’s name is Apin, or Aleen or Akin... something like that. That’s what he told us, isn’t it?” Leo asked.

Joak nodded and smiled in agreement; in truth, he had forgotten the farmer’s name as soon as he heard it.

“And Faoud’s man Hamir raided this guy’s village. It’s a long shot, but maybe Faoud knows who bought the slaves from that raid.”

Leo was proud of his own deductive prowess, eager to impress Faoud with how smart he was.

“Let’s go find out,” he said, turned on his heel and headed toward the gate in the rock wall.

Omar saw their conversation from his hiding place in the woods. He was close enough to the jail that he could hear the kidnappers’ voices, but not close enough to make out what they said. He suspected it likely had something to do with Idris, so he continued to watch and wait.

“You’re in luck!” exclaimed Faoud. “Instead of five hundred haystacks to look through, you only have two.”

Leo eyed Faoud warily. The big man was far too accommodating. It made Leo nervous. It was possible he had been smoking the narcotic drug, quat. Leo couldn’t tell for sure. But he knew the slave trader’s moods could change faster than a cobra could grab a mouse.

“I remember the raid on Mondala because my captain, Hamir, remembers it. The villagers killed five of his men and injured seven others in that raid. I do not know how many captives he took—but all the captives from that area were sold at sales in the oil fields. And most were purchased by customers who are here in Kosti or nearby.”

Faoud looked up and gave Leo a crooked smile.

“The boys—fifty or sixty of them—I sold to a brick-maker who needed workers. I sold two different groups of girls to camel herders who do a lot of business here. Hadim Raja Shad bought a large group; Sulleyman al Hadallah bought only a few.”

Faoud paused to finish the remainder of his tea. Then he picked up a set of keys off the woven reed stand beside his chair and tossed them to Leo.

“Take my jeep,” he said. “My man Sadiq downstairs will give you directions to the camel camps.”

Leo grinned happily; even Joak could tell this was good fortune.

“I don’t know if you’ll be able to find the camel herders,” Faoud said. “They may be gone already. Some of them have already broken camp and moved back to the north.”