Sudan: A Novel (49 page)

The toothless man was stunned and terrified. Where was Leo? He had waited for his partner to come back with Faoud, waited for his share of what Faoud owed them. What had gone wrong?

Faoud lumbered into the house and mumbled under his breath as his guards grabbed Joak and threw him into the back of the truck. “He sold slaves; let’s see how he likes being one.”

Lars Bergstrom slipped quietly into the office where Ron sat hunkered over the desk, and set a cup of steaming tea down beside him.

Ron mumbled, “Thanks,” but continued to write.

Bergstrom looked at Ron’s back and winced. Many of the cuts already were infected. They needed medical attention. But Ron also needed to eat something and lie down and get some rest, and that wasn’t going to happen either. He wouldn’t do anything until he finished his stories—the American had made that patently, abundantly clear.

When the jeeps had roared into the feeding center in the middle of the night, it had taken Bergstrom less than ten minutes to hide the vehicles and provide shelter for the occupants in the back three rooms of his house. He and several helpers quickly treated the wounds of the tribal and the Arab, and prepared hot food for all of them, particularly the starving little girl. But the American wanted only one thing. He wanted paper and a pen—no, lots of paper and more than one pen. He said he had stories to write. And he’d sat down at the desk in Bergstrom’s office six hours ago to do just that.

He wrote frantically, nonstop, scribbled as fast as he could. He scratched out, wrote over, marked through—and kept writing, so concentrated he was not aware of his injuries, his surroundings or anything else.

The only time he’d stopped writing was when he spoke to Masapha. The Arab had ridden to Chumwe in the jeep with Omar, Idris and Akin. The father had cradled his little girl in his lap while she sobbed out her story. The forced march. Tied under a tarp next to the latrines. Bug bites, scorpion bites, spider bites. Days of labor with nothing to eat but scraps. Beaten by the headmistress. And Shontal’s gruesome suicide. She cried the hardest when she talked about Mbarka. That first night in camp when the teenager had been raped by her master, Sulleyman, and how she had been dragged away every night after that to the soldiers’ tents. She described the clitorectomy and told her father Mbarka was pregnant. She sobbed bitterly as she spoke, her heart broken. Mbarka had been her friend, her protector—and tomorrow her master would take her and all his other property north to his home, where Mbarka would vanish forever into a lifetime of human bondage.

Ron had listened intently to the story, took a few notes and then went back to work. Bergstrom had never seen anybody so totally focused.

Ron was in his own world. He had gone there as he raced through the night across the desert toward Chumwe—as the cold wind kissed his face and cooled the raging fire on his back, the white orb of the moon in the charcoal sky lit his way, and fear, gut-gnawing fear, raced along behind.

Faoud was back there somewhere, Faoud with his little rat eyes and pockmarked face. The slave trader who planned to behead him, who raped women and children and massacred innocent villagers. Faoud was back there, and Ron was running from him like a man in a nightmare.

Somehow he had to communicate that terror. Somehow he had to make the world see what it was like to live in a country where monsters in white robes swooped down on you with machetes and guns, burned your home, raped your wife, kidnapped your children and hacked your friends and neighbors apart.

Somehow he had to tack words onto the kind of closed-throat terror he had felt when he stood at gunpoint in the blinding glare of headlights, when the scar-faced jailer swished the whip around in the straw before he pulled it back, when Faoud smiled his evil smile and said he would chop off his head, when he lay in the dark in a stone dungeon and tried to figure out how to die like a man. Nobody should have to live with that kind of fear! But for a tribal in southern Sudan, fear was the canvas on which every day of his life was painted.

Ron had to find the right words to describe that reality. He had to make the world understand. He had to drag his fellow Americans into the nightmare and rub their noses in the horror.

Unless his mind was completely fried, today was Saturday. Dan’s bill would come up for a vote on Tuesday—that’s what the slave trader had said. Perhaps there was still time for his story to make a difference.

Shortly after noon, Ron put the pen down, leaned back in the desk chair—and jerked instantly upright again as soon as his mangled back came in contact with the slat back of the chair. He’d returned to the real world, and the pain he had ignored slammed into him like a freight train made of broken glass. He picked a cup of tea up off the desk, cold now, and sipped it, as energy wheezed out of him like air out of a bald tire.

“Ron?” Bergstrom stood in the doorway.

Ron rubbed his eyes. He tried to turn around. “Lars, listen, I...”

But the pain of turning was so intense he moaned, and Bergstrom was instantly at his side. He looked with compassion down at the American and asked, “Will you let us help you now?”

Ron managed a smile. “Not yet. Not until you tell me you can have this,” he nodded to the pile of scribbled papers, “and this,” he leaned his weight over on one side, dug his hand deep into his pants pocket and fished out a film cassette, “on a plane to Asmara in...”

“How’s 10 minutes?” Bergstrom beamed. “The pilot has been waiting for hours.”

“Lars, thanks!”

Ron would have wrapped the surfer-dude aid worker in a bear hug if he could have. But it was all he could do to sit upright without swaying.

“I’m so zonked I’m probably not making any sense at all. I just hope what I wrote does.”

“I have no doubt it will,” Bergstrom said. “Neither does Rupert.”

“Olford? You and Olford are on a first-name basis?”

“Our communication system here at the center is never reliable—you don’t know from one minute to the next if it will work. We haven’t been able to send or receive anything at all for more than a week—until last night when you arrived. It worked perfectly then, and I could tell Rupert what was coming.”

Bergstrom smiled. “I told you—faith is what makes us tick, remember?”

Ron remembered.

“Rupert will be waiting for these papers when our plane lands in Asmara. He’ll get back to Cairo on the first flight out. He said to tell you he’ll try very hard to get the story put together before the vote on your brother’s bill.”

Ron’s face shone like a 400-watt bulb.

“But he said to warn you that he could not promise anything.”

That was Olford, all right.

“He said it is all about timing. Can he get the space he needs, the air time, on such short notice? He talked about things I know nothing about, but he said he would try.”

Ron nodded.

“And when I described to him what had happened to you...” Bergstrom’s voice trailed off as he looked at the raw wound that was Ron’s back. “He got quiet and said he would try very, very hard.”

“Can’t ask for more than that.” Ron thought of one more thing. “Oh, and get him to check the details in these stories against my notes, the ones I sent with the video and audio chips. I had to write most of this from memory.” He smiled a little, even though it hurt. “In longhand, on unlined typing paper!”

Then he wobbled in the chair. Bergstrom steadied him and called over his shoulder for help. The American had finally gotten to the end of his strength. Now, he would have to let them help him. He couldn’t stop them.

D
an rolled over, opened one eye and looked at the clock. When he suddenly sat bolt upright in the bed, he almost knocked Sherry out on the floor.

“Dan, what in the world...?”

Her husband looked around a little sheepish. “Oops, sorry. I thought I’d overslept. I saw the clock and...”

“Go back to sleep. It’s Memorial Day, remember?”

Dan smiled. Memorial Day. His favorite holiday. And he had it all planned. The Wolfson family would spend this Family Day “in Vermont.”

That was their code.

During Dan’s last year of law school, the couple was so poor they could barely pay the electric bill. But they yearned for a break, a getaway. They dreamed of a vacation—didn’t matter where as long as it was romantic. Say, in a ski lodge in Vermont!

So they had gone to Vermont—without leaving their tiny one-bedroom apartment. They had closed all the drapes on the windows, locked the door, took the phone off the hook and for three glorious days pretended to be in Vermont.

After the kids came along, the little ones joined in the fantasy.

When Dan informed them that this year they would spend Memorial Day in Vermont, even their teenager, who was way too cool for silly games, dashed around the house with his brother and sister, closed the drapes and locked the doors. Then David patiently showed his father how to unplug/unhook/turn off all things electronic—computers, televisions, radios, telephones and cell phones.

The family retreated to the basement, had a picnic lunch on the floor and played Monopoly, Pictionary, Scrabble and charades all afternoon. Dan got out his Telly, a Fender Telecaster electric guitar, plugged in his booming amplifier, and Sherry and the kids sang old rock 'n’ roll songs. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Simon and Garfunkle. He played country, too, folk songs, bluegrass—even disco. They scooted the furniture back to the walls and David did a John Travolta imitation as his father belted out
Stayin’ Alive
. That night, they cuddled together on the couch in the dark and watched old black-and-white westerns and World War II movies.

They tuned out springtime in Virginia, and for 24 hours, they ignored the world.

And for the same 24 hours, a good portion of that world was trying frantically to get in touch with U.S. Representative Daniel Wolfson.

On Tuesday, Dan didn’t even bother to check his voice mail when he got up. It would all hit the fan as soon as he got to the office anyway; why jump into the water with the piranha until it was absolutely necessary?

He drove into the congressional parking lot so early he thought it would be empty. Instead, he saw a huge phalanx of news media and wondered who they were ready to pounce on.

When they swarmed around his car as he pulled into a space, he honestly thought they must have mistaken him for somebody else. But as soon as he opened the car door, he figured out they’d found exactly who they were gunning for.

“Tell us what you think about your brother’s stories, Representative Wolfson!” That was the guy from the
Washington Post
.

The crowd of reporters gave him no time to answer, just shouted more questions, shoved microphones in his face and snapped pictures.

Is there a collective noun for reporters?
Dan wondered, as he smiled his way through them and crossed the parking lot—
like covey or bevy or school or pride? Gang was for kangaroos, but it would work for reporters, too. Gang it is.

The gang of reporters pushed and shoved and fired questions as they group-walked beside, behind and in front of Dan while he struggled to get by them and into the building.

“How did you manage to get the stories to run right before the vote on your Freedom from Religious Persecution Bill?”

“Have you talked to your brother?”

“What affect do you think these stories will have on the vote?”

News anchors, the big guns, lobbed questions at him like hand grenades.

Bam, Bam, Bam.

“Did you...?”

“Are you...?”

“Will you...?”

He did a bob-and-weave around the questions and the reporters who asked them. He finally closed his office door almost literally in their faces and had time for one huge, heaving sigh of relief before his secretary and all his aides weighed in on him in a feeding frenzy of their own.

“Tried to call you...”

“Left you nine messages... ”

“Associated Press wants to talk...”

“Sent you e-mails...”

“Rupert Olford tried to warn...”

“Hold it!”
Dan’s grand orator’s voice could have drowned out a smoke alarm.

The room went instantly silent.

“I have been away and obviously I missed a major news event that involves my brother.”

“I’ll say it was a major news event!” Chad Mattingly gushed. “Why it...”

“And I don’t have a clue what’s going on!” Dan rumbled. “I go to the House floor for the vote on my bill in less than two hours. The press is barred from this office, no calls either—understood?”

Seven voices replied with the perfect unison of a Greek chorus: “Yes, sir!”

“Chad, I want video of everything that has run on any station, all the networks.”

“Done.” Chad scurried away.

“Shelly, get me copies of all the big daily newspapers, for today and yesterday.”

“They’re on your desk right now, sir.”

Dan turned toward his private office. “Hold all calls.
All
calls for the next half hour.”

Then he went into the office and shut the door firmly behind him.