Sudan: A Novel (41 page)

The call had come right after Dan confirmed his family’s tickets on the noon flight home to Indiana. He and Chad Mattingly had been listening for the third time to the gripping interview Rupert Olford had sent, when Dan’s secretary buzzed in that Alonzo Washington wanted to speak to him.

Could Dan come right now to the conference room at the end of the hall on the second floor of the Senate Office Building? The Black Caucus had convened a private session to talk about his bill, and the group hadn’t been that divided since Justice Clarence Thomas’ appointment to the Supreme Court.

“I’ll be there in ten minutes.” Dan hung up the phone and sat very still, thinking. Then he looked at Chad.

“Son, you know a whole lot more about this kind of thing than I do. Is there any way to get this interview, what this kid is saying, out of there,” he pointed to Chad’s laptop, “and to this meeting in a form I can use, that people can hear?”

“I can do that for you, sir. I’ll edit out most of the tribal language, too.”

Dan looked dubious. “Can you do it in 10 minutes?”

Chad responded with the two words Dan wanted to hear: “Yes, sir!”

Representative Washington met Dan at the conference room door and whispered as he led him into the room. “Remember, this meeting never happened. We’ve already been here for over an hour, and it’s been brutal! As soon as somebody stops shouting long enough to take a breath, I’ll throw you to the wolves.”

“Thanks a bunch, Alonzo.”

Dan glanced at his railway-flag watch, the birthday gift from Ron to commemorate the electric train the two of them had as boys—the one that ran on tracks spread from one end of the manse to the other. He smiled when he thought of his brother, then did the time zone math—six hours difference, 9:00 a.m. here, 3:00 p.m. there. He wondered what Ron was doing in the middle of this Friday afternoon in Sudan.

Ron couldn’t stifle a groan when the soldiers threw him down on the hard clay tiles at Faoud’s feet. The slave trader had waited patiently on his patio while the guards half dragged, half carried the bruised, bloody American down the stone pathway from the jail.

Faoud was seated in a rattan chair with wide arms, a high back and bright-orange cushions. It rested in the shadow of a canvas awning that stretched over the patio to protect it from the flaming midafternoon sun.

“Welcome,” Faoud said. In English.

He caught the look of surprise on Ron’s face and smiled broadly.

“You do not know that I speak English, Mr. Wolfson?” he asked in feigned surprise. “Ah, but you will find that there is much you do not know about me. With languages, as with everything else in life, it is always wise to pretend to know less than you do. You find out many things that way.”

Faoud turned and gestured through the patio doors into his house.

“I am sorry that I could not invite you inside, but you are not,” he paused and wrinkled his nose at Ron’s condition, his raw, bruised back with bits of straw and dirt stuck to the caked, dried blood, “fit to go into my home as you are.”

His voice darkened. “An infidel is never fit to go into the home of a follower of Mohammed, may his name be praised.”

Then the expansive hospitality returned to his tone. “So I will make you as presentable as possible and entertain you here.”

He clapped his hands once and an African in a white robe appeared out of nowhere. “Clean him up,” he told the African.

The African disappeared into the house and returned shortly with a large basin of water, a pitcher and towels. With a gesture of his head, he summoned the guards who stood beside the patio door. They grabbed Ron by the arms, picked him up off the floor and shoved him into a kneeling position. The African stepped behind him and began to pour water over his bruised and lacerated back. It felt cool and soothing on his inflamed skin. But it was not soothing when the African scrubbed away the straw and dried blood with the dry towel. The pain was excruciating; it felt like acid had been applied to his back from his neck to his hips. Ron sucked in great gulps of air and gritted his teeth not to cry out. The servant repeated the procedure twice.

Then the guards picked Ron up and deposited him roughly in a chair opposite Faoud. Ron instantly leaned forward so his lacerated back would not touch the chair back, and for the first time, was on an eyeball-to-eyeball level with Faoud. He made a quick assessment. The man, undoubtedly the ugliest human being he had ever seen, was either drunk or high on something.

The slave trader nodded his head unconsciously up and down, as if he were very slowly saying yes, yes, yes. His small eyes were open too wide, and they were coal black, the pupils fully dilated. It seemed to take an effort for the fat man to focus on Ron, to pull his attention from some fixed point over Ron’s left shoulder. When Faoud spoke, his speech was slow—not slurred, but carefully articulated, the way a drunk cautiously puts one foot in front of the other during a sobriety test.

“I would offer you a smoke,” the fat man said, and for the first time Ron noticed a bong on the floor beside Faoud’s chair, and the thin pipe from it in the man’s hand, “but I know that you will want your wits about you because I am about to give you your heart’s desire.”

Ron figured it probably wasn’t tickets on the first flight out of Sudan or even the Big Mac he’d dreamed about last night. In fact, it was a pretty safe bet that whatever the man had to offer, he wouldn’t like it.

The slave trader smiled a vacant smile and continued, “As a gift, from me to you, I will grant the last wish of a man about to die.”

That hit Ron in the belly. He understood clearly that his life lay in the palm of this man’s hand. The Arab with the squinty eyes, the pig nose and the pockmarked face would determine how many moments his life would have and when they would run out.

“I have been considering what your small friend told my man in the jail cell about your purpose here in Sudan,” Faoud said. “You have apparently gotten all of the story you wanted, except one part. It was your desire to talk to a slave trader, was it not?”

Ron was surprised that Masapha even remembered the remark he’d made in the jeep after they’d escaped from the slave sale in the oil fields.

“I have decided to fulfill that desire,” Faoud said.

He leaned toward Ron and even from across the table, Ron could smell the rancid odor of his breath, mixed with the stench of whatever he smoked.

“You will interview me, Faoud Abdul al Bashara, the greatest of all the slave traders in Sudan! You will have a story like no other journalist has ever had.”

He paused and the hard, angry edge replaced the fake joviality in his voice. “You will not live to tell the story, of course, but you will hear it because I want you to hear it. You wanted to see my world? Then I will show it to you.”

Faoud clapped his hands again, and the mystery servant appeared out of nowhere again. He said something to the man in Arabic, and he returned a few moments later with a glass of liquid that he set in front of Ron.

“Drink it,” Faoud said.

Ron looked at it fearfully, and when Faoud saw his expression, he burst into a real, full, belly laugh.

“There is no poison in it, you stupid American!” he sputtered, genuinely amused. “If I wanted to kill you right now, I could do it in any one of a dozen different ways. I certainly would not have to trick you into drinking poison. It is water, you fool. If your throat is dry, you cannot speak, and I want you to speak. Drink it.”

Ron picked up the glass, turned it up and let the cool liquid course like a fresh stream down his throat. Faoud had not lied; it was just water.

Ron drained the glass and set it back down on the table in front of him.

“Thanks,” he said.

Faoud’s smile widened, and there was merriment in his glassy eyes. “You are welcome, my American friend. Anything else I can do to make you comfortable?”

Ron could think of about 50 different things.

“No,” he said. “I’m good.”

“Splendid! So we will begin, yes?” 
Then he sat with an expectant look on his face. 

Ron was a little confused. 
“You want me to... ?”

“Interview me! You are a reporter. That’s what reporters do, isn’t it? You may ask me any question you like.”

Ron was nonplussed, but he understood that he couldn’t refuse to do what the slave trader wanted; that wasn’t an option. He shook his head and tried to focus. He didn’t bother to point out that if this were a real interview, he would have a notepad or a tape recorder. He concentrated, tried to pretend it was just like any other interview.

“OK. Tell me how you got into the business.”

Faoud smiled and leaned back in his chair. For five minutes, he described his work as a paid assassin, that he’d learned how to kill silently, quickly, or slowly and painfully, whatever he was assigned to do. It was easy, really; he was smarter than the men he killed. But it was obvious that he was smarter than the men who hired him, too. And the ones with the pockets full of money and the big houses all were slave traders.

Over time, he’d figured out how to buy slaves cheaper than the other slave traders and where to sell them for more than his competition, and his business flourished.

Buy low, sell high. The guy could have been an American stockbroker, Ron thought.

Occasionally, Ron stopped Faoud to ask a question or clarify a point, and the fat man positively beamed at the attention. He continued to take drags off the pipe attached to the bong and grew just a little less focused as time went on.

Ron asked how many slaves he had bought and sold over the years, where they came from and where they went. Faoud told him whatever he wanted to know. The man had a keen mind for numbers; he either had amazing recall or was running a good bluff. Ron asked how much money he’d made and what he had done with it, did he have dealings with other slave traders or the government in Khartoum, what did he think his business would be like in a year? In five years? When the Arab responded, Ron paused for a moment, trying to get his mental arms around such mind-boggling numbers.

Faoud was impatient.

“What is your next question? What else to you wish to know from this slave trader?”

The reporter in Ron leapt out before he could grab it. “I want to know how you can do it, how you can steal children away from their parents and sell them like cattle--”

Faoud didn’t let him finish.

“Oh, but they
are
cattle. They are animals.” He sneered, “You Americans act like they are people, human beings. They are livestock.”

“They are livestock,” Dan said. His eyes searched the faces of the legislators seated around him. “The tribals of southern Sudan are nothing more than animals sold to the highest bidder.”

He’d spoken to the members of the Black Caucus for 15 minutes, answered the same questions, got the same response. It was time to play the only card he had left.

“I can sit here for the rest of the morning and give you facts and figures, and still not convey the horror of life for hundreds of thousands of people,” he said. “So I won’t tell you all the stories, I’ll just tell you one. It’s the story of a 15-year-old boy named Koto Manut, and it’s in his own words.”

Dan explained where the interview they were about to hear had come from and that Chad had cut much of the Lokuta dialect so they didn’t have to listen to long stretches of it. Then he nodded to Chad and leaned back in his chair to listen.

Koto’s voice filled the conference room—the mouse that roared. Though the members of Congress couldn’t understand his words, they could not mistake the intensity behind them. Soon, Masapha spoke, translating the boy’s story—the raid by uniformed government troops, bombs blowing up his village, watching his father die, his own capture and the sight of his eight-year-old twin brothers, Isak and Kuak, being tied up and hauled away.

And they heard his voice crack before Masapha translated the last part of the story.

“He said his mother was in the road lying there, and they had shot her leg and her head,” Masapha said. “And he said his baby sister, Reisha, was there on the road beside her...at least he thought it was his baby sister. The little body of the baby had been blown apart.”