The Laughing Monsters (13 page)

She put a bag on the bed and started filling it like a pit.

“Hold up for a bit. Will you? Okay?” She didn’t. She kept packing. “Davidia. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Well, you did scare me. I’m scared—of you.”

“I got crazy. I don’t want to make you crazy too.”

“Too late.”

“Have I forced you into this decision? Because I didn’t mean to put you in a corner. Wait a minute.” She didn’t pause. “Stop packing for a second.”

“I’m going with Michael now, and I think you’d better take me to him.”

“Are you sure? Are you sure?”

“Yes!”

“All right, fine. Just a minute. Look at me.” She settled down. “I shouldn’t have said what I said.”

“I agree.”

“I’m crazy.”

“I said it first.”

“So we agree on that too. So will you keep all this quiet?”

“Quiet?”

“Don’t tell Michael.”

“I’ve promised Michael I won’t talk to anybody, now I promise you I won’t talk to Michael—is that what you’re saying?”

“Let me be the one to come clean with him, that’s all.”

“When?”

“Not right away.”

“How long do I have to betray him, then?”

“Not long.”

“How long exactly?”

“Two days exactly.”

“Forty-eight hours.”

“Correct.”

“Promises to him, promises to you, and everything is secret from everybody else. This is what we call a situation.” She seemed to see some humor in the thing.

*   *   *

To make ourselves more visible I lit the headlamps. Nobody else did such a thing, none of the bikes or vehicles set themselves apart.

Davidia said, “This is blood, isn’t it? How badly is he hurt?”

“He needed quite a few stitches.”

“Where’s the hospital?”

“Actually it’s back that way.”

“Then why go this way?”

“Couple of errands.”

For these conditions I drove too fast. It was nearly 4:00 p.m. I had no idea how late the Catholic communications center might be open. Nevertheless I stopped at a vendor’s shack and bought all his hundred-milliliter packets of spirits. Then I stopped at another vendor, and I did the same thing. Still I had less than a couple of liters. Before I left the hotel I should have gotten the biggest bottle of rum, or tequila, whichever had the bigger proof. Baboon Whiskey, if that’s all they had. But I’d forgotten.

On the way up the long hill in the middle of Arua I nearly stopped again for another such transaction, but the sight of the towers at the top lured me on. “I’m stopping up here at a place with internet,” I told Davidia. She said nothing.

Across the road from the gates, I turned off the engine and said it again. “If you have someone you want to communicate with, here’s the place to do it.”

“Just hurry up. I’m worried about Michael.”

“You can wait with the guard.”

“I’m fine right here.”

When I got out, I went around to her window. She didn’t roll it down. “Will you be all right?”

“Will I?”

“If you get uncomfortable, lock the doors.”

I heard them locking even as I turned away.

*   *   *

I had two e-mails, the first from Hamid:

Firm and final offer is cash funds 100K US for you.

If your answer is yes, we meet same place same hour.

Cash takes time.

Your share 100K US. Final offer.

I liked his figure. I didn’t like his next one:

Will meet 4 weeks following date last meeting.

Not 30 days. 4 weeks exactly. No fallback. One chance.

On the one hand, the money was set, and it was good money. But with his other hand he’d ripped two days from the calendar. I closed my eyes and set about composing a comeback, a counteroffer, and then scotched it. I had nothing to offer.

I opened the second e-mail: several hundred angry words from my boss at NIIA. Before I’d read half, I deleted it.

I banged at the keys: “Hello, you idiotic shits. Are you waiting for my report? You can wait till Hell serves holy water.”

I pressed
DELETE
.

Again I banged on the keys, this time at some length:

Goddamn you. You smiled sweetly while slipping a rocket up my ass and lighting the fuse. Now you want to dress me down?

Would you cunts please explain what British MI is doing at my hotel?

Would you cunts care to describe Mossad’s involvement in—what shall we call it—this affair? Investigation? Cluster-fuck?

All of you, go fuck yourselves. Fuck each other.

I hold the rank of captain in the Army of Denmark. What has any of this got to do with Denmark? What has any of this got to do with me?

Why have you put me in a position to be murdered?

For three seconds, four seconds, five, my finger hovered over the
DELETE
key, and then I pressed
SEND
.

I logged out, plugged in my own keyboard, and went to PGP. I wrote back to Hamid:

Sold.

THREE

[OCT 15 11PM]

All right, Tina. The chief captor, the witch doctor, the general, the jailor or kidnapper or whatever he is, has just showed me my favorite thing in East Africa, a plastic baggie that would fit exactly in a shirt pocket, and shows me the label, “40% Volume Cane Spirits 100ml,” before biting off the corner and sucking it dry, explaining, “It’s for the cold,” and tossing it aside, and I notice, right now, that the dirt floor of this big low hut we’re in is littered with similar packets sucked empty and tossed aside—paved with them—“Rider Vodka” and “ZAP Vodka” and the Cane Spirits. I’m familiar with these packets, in fact many of these empties were mine-all-mine as recently as one hour ago, when they stole them, yet I don’t perceive any gratitude in the black lacquer faces of these drunken soldiers all around us. What I do perceive is that this place smells powerfully of unwashed humans.

I just saw a single firefly flash upward. Or a capillary exploded in my brain. The truth is I’m a little drunk too. And this won’t be one of those pitiful attempts to explain “how I got into this mess,” because there’s no sense calling it a mess until we see how it all turns out. Sometimes you just get stuck. That’s Africa. Then you’re on your way again without any idea what happened, and that’s Africa too. And while you’re stuck, if they give you a pen and paper?—you might as well.

As to why I have no computer, it isn’t because they took mine away from me, but because as Michael and Davidia and I headed toward the Congo border in a Land Cruiser borrowed, now stolen, from Pyramid Environments, with our guide or abettor, a Congolese whose name I didn’t catch, Michael stopped the car on a bridge over some tributary of the White Nile River and said, Here we’ll toss our communications, and threw his phone out the window. Davidia chucked hers as well, and I was glad to get rid of everything (although my laptop and second keyboard were guaranteed GPS-untraceable, and my phone was already a replacement. I didn’t want the weight of them anymore, that’s all). It was sunset. Below us people washed their vehicles in muddy water up to the axles, the drivers splashing the red dirt off their rumpled pocked and sagging Subarus and such. Davidia said only one thing: “How long do you have the car for?”—“What?”—“When do you have to return this vehicle?”—“Oh—it’s flexible,” Michael said with a wide smile, as if describing his mouth, “it’s quite flexible.”

My friend and your friend Michael Adriko, that is, and his fiancée, Davidia St. Claire. You knew I went to Freetown on a hunt for Michael. I found him all right, with Davidia on his arm, and I’ll catch you up on all the rest as time allows. To put it in shorthand, Michael’s enthusiasms, let us say, had us leaving Uganda in a rush for DR Congo on Oct 13, just a couple of days ago. We’d jumped from Freetown to northwestern Uganda, a town called Arua, where I last heard from you by e-mail and where I last saw your breasts, and I wish I’d downloaded them … Earlier, at Kuluva Hospital in Arua, while getting his flesh stitched together after a fight it’s pointless to explain, Michael had enlisted a guide to show us a hole in the border, because none of us had Congo papers. When Davidia and I got to the hospital, Michael introduced this man, a skinny little guy in bright blue trousers and a T-shirt that said, I Did WHAT Last Night? and told me to give him one hundred dollars.—When he’s got us through to Congo, I said.—Fair enough, Michael said.

Daylight was almost gone as we got near the border, a good circumstance for people smuggling themselves, and we passed among groves of tall eucalyptus, Michael driving like an African, far too fast for the crumbling red-dirt surface, I mean fast, 90 or 95 KPH mostly, scaring the bikes to the side by means of constant beeping, using the horn much more than the brakes, oblivious to the children, goats, ducks, trucks coming at us, the overloaded busses appearing around road bends, leaning on two wheels, and women walking down the road balancing burdens on their heads, mostly basins full of “white ants”—centimeter-long termites they sell in the market as snacks. I’ve never tried them, but it’s a comfort to realize that every couple hundred meters or so across this land, a chest-high berm teems with nutrient morsels. One of these women crossed our path, her right hand raised to steady the pan on her head, blocking half her sight, she couldn’t have seen us, she kept walking into the road, Michael tried to veer, and we
hit
her, we struck her
down
, I heard her say “uh!” in a way I’ve never heard it said, never, and the jeep swerved, bounced, straightened, and kept on … I looked back, she was flung down on the clay pavement in the dusk, she looked lifeless. Davidia said, “Michael! Michael! She’s hurt!”—“She wasn’t watching!” he said angrily, going faster now. His shoulders hunched as he pushed the accelerator hard, and we were racing away from—what? A murder, perhaps. We’d never know. “Michael, Michael,” Davidia said, but Michael said nothing, and she said, “Go back, go back, go back, go back,” but we wouldn’t go back, we couldn’t—not in Africa, this hard, hard land where nobody could help that poor woman flopped probably dead in the road and where running away from this was not a mistake. The mistake was looking back at her in the first place.

No words among us now, just Davidia’s sobbing, and then her silence. Michael drove a bit more soberly as we skirted the border, heading north. If we didn’t find our hole soon we’d come to South Sudan. The surface got terrible. I’m not sure it was still a road. We came into a village, and the guide muttered in Michael’s ear, and we went quite slowly now. Michael switched off the headlamps—he was only using the parking lights anyway—“Let’s enjoy the moon!” It was just past half-full, with that lopsided swollen face, that smile at the corner of its mouth. People strolled around under its strange orange glow. Kids played tag as if it were daytime. We went slower than the pedestrians through this crowded twilight, this thickly human evening. Sudden laughter from a hut, like a soprano chorus. What have they got to laugh about? Bikes without headlights floating out of the dimness. A man leans against a shack, cupping the tiny light of a cell phone to his ear.

The guide said, “Stop.” He got out, shut the door, walked around to Michael’s window and spoke low.

Michael told me, “Give him fifty.”

“Not till we’re in Congo.”

“We’re here. This is Congo.”

“I thought you said one hundred.”

“He’s quitting early. Just fifty.”

I handed Michael a bill. The man folded it up small, then turned away and walked toward a hut, crying softly, “Hallooo.”

“Who’s coming up front—Nair?” Michael asked.

“I guess I am,” I said more or less to Davidia. Her face was invisible. For the last two hours she’d said not a word. We left the village behind and lurched along a half kilometer farther and stopped.

Michael said, “The main road’s over that way, but we’ll never find it till we have some daylight.” He fiddled with his watch. “Set your time backward one hour. We’ve crossed into another zone.”

We sat in the car saying nothing, thinking and feeling nothing, or trying not to, while the weather changed and the stars disappeared. The moon burned right through the overcast with a curious effect, seeming to hang just a few meters above us while the clouds lay behind it, much higher in the sky. Michael switched off the engine. We heard a multitude of insects ringing all around us like finger cymbals. The ringing stopped. Raindrops exploded on the roof and streaked down the dirty windshield.

Stupid, stupid Michael said, “Congo! Here, we’re not in any trouble.”

[OCT 16 2AM]

How much time do I have to catch you up? They won’t move us tonight, surely. The party’s over and everybody’s snoring, sleeping on top of their rifles. The only one awake with me is a radio somewhere—a DJ talking French full-speed and spinning American country music. And two or three mosquitoes making their rounds. Very few mosquitoes at these East African altitudes, though when Michael and Davidia and I came aground in the dark just inside the Congo border, he, Michael—to pick up the journey again—said, “Many voices on the air tonight,” and rolled up the windows against the insects, because as a child he suffered malaria and a mosquito is the only thing on earth, I believe, that scares him.

The car was stifling. I slept, or only suffocated—I saw the woman in the road in more detail, the wrap that covered all but her arms and shoulders in a pattern red or purple, in the dusk it could have been either, and her basin of ants rolling on its edge away from her like a toy, and she lay there as limp as her towel—the white cloth, that is, she’d rolled into a bun to cushion her head—stretched out straight beside her.

Sometime in the night came Michael’s voice: “I’m moving.”

We were both awake I’m sure, Davidia and I.

“It’s very subtle. But there is definitely movement.”

Davidia said, “Michael, quiet.”

“I’m sliding down. I’m sliding off.”

“Sshh.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to turn into once I’m on the floor.”

She: “To hell with this. To hell with you.”

“I itch all over.”

“Don’t start your scratching. Don’t scratch.”