The Laughing Monsters (5 page)

“And after that,” Michael said, “Afghanistan.”

“I was an idiot there as well.”

“I can vouch for that,” he told Davidia. “That’s where I found him after a year’s separation, in Jalalabad, driving a stolen UN car.”

“You people!” she said.

“What a baby I was. I thought I was Colonel Stoddart or somebody.”

“Stoddart?”

Michael said, “He got beheaded in Afghanistan.”

“In the nineteenth century,” I said, to dispel her shock.

“Oh, Stoddart—yes—”

“Thirty-five years old. Almost like me!” Michael said.

“To be clear,” I said, “Michael was driving the stolen car.”

“All the UN did was cower in their compound in Kabul, and get drunk, and watch people steal their equipment.”

“Were you doing fiber-optic cable there too?”

“No.”

“Nobody realizes this,” Michael said, “but the US military has its own internet. They have their own self-contained system of cables all over the world. And communications bunkers everywhere.”

“Bunkers? Like bomb shelters?”

“Technology Safe Houses,” I said. “The ones in West Africa are probably rotting in the earth. Nobody cares about this place.”

Davidia was drinking wine, which I wouldn’t have recommended, but she’d chosen something Italian, and she seemed to like it. Every time she took a sip, Michael and I stopped talking and watched.

“Michael,” she said, “you’ve never explained what you were doing in Afghanistan.”

“Michael was my bodyguard.”

He took offense. “I had many duties there. I transported a lot of prisoners.”

“What about now, today,” I said, “our duties now? Somebody please tell me. Are we here for a wedding?”

Davidia said, “Yes.”

“So, Michael, this trip has nothing to do with business.”

“Well, while we’re traveling—we’ve always got our noses open for the smell of business.”

Davidia laughed, and I said, “That came out wrong. But I get the message.”

Michael said, “Davidia will be married wearing shoes of pure gold. And she’ll keep them the rest of her life.”

“All this meets with your approval?”

Davidia only said, “Yes.”

“Are we really going to Uganda?”

Michael said, “We’ll fly to Entebbe next week, is that all right? Can you come? Because in Uganda, they really know how to put on a wedding. I wish it could be a double wedding.”

“You want two wives?”

“Be serious! Two brides and two grooms. I told Davidia you’re engaged.”

“On the brink of engagement,” I said.

“Aren’t we all!” Davidia said. “What does she do?”

“She’s an attorney, but she works for NATO in Amsterdam—for your lot, actually. For the Americans.”

“Nair met her in Kabul,” Michael said.

“He’s actually correct about that. But Tina and I weren’t involved over there—just acquainted. She was a prosecutor for the UN, and Michael and I both knew her a bit.”

“A bit? She wasn’t one of Michael’s, was she?”

“You think everybody’s my girlfriend. Do you think I have unlimited time for sex?”

“That’s exactly what I think.”

“Before the UN,” I said, “she served as a prosecutor in Detroit. Once she took part in a drugs raid and carried a machine gun.”

“So she’s dangerous. Is she beautiful?”

“Yes, but she’s a little too smart for that. She keeps herself a bit plain. I prefer it.”

Davidia said to Michael, “You’d parade me around nude, if you could.”

“Nude except for sexy platform shoes. You’ve got it, so flaunt it.”

“Sometimes,” she said, “you have a thirsty face like a little boy.” She laughed. She was tipsy by now. I hoped she’d do something stupid, something to break the beautiful image. She caught me looking. “You don’t sound the least bit like Georgia. How much time have you spent there?”

“Very little. My father raised me in Europe, mostly Switzerland. I don’t think he had legal custody—I think I was kidnapped.”

“Is he still alive?”

“Both mother and father are living.”

“When do you see your American family?”

Just the kind of question I like to deflect. But I found I wanted her to know. “I’ve had no contact with my mother or her family since I was eight years old.”

“But you, you—” She was flustered. “You see your dad, right?”

“We get together every so often. He lives in Amsterdam too.”

Michael was staring at me. “These are things I never heard about.”

Davidia told him, “Maybe that’s because you talk more than you listen.” She said it with affection. I thought I was done, but she kept at me—“What line is your father in?”

“He’s a physician at a teaching hospital. More teacher than physician, in other words. I’m afraid he’s a little crazy.”

“And your mother?”

“As I’ve said—no contact. I choose to believe she’s happy.”

“Then I’ll believe it too,” she said.

Now a beggar dressed in rags came out of the dark and wrote swiftly on the floor with white chalk:
MR. PHILO KRON / DR. OF ACROBATICS
. He started doing cartwheels in place while holding a platter of raw rice, never spilling a grain. He repeated the trick, now holding a glass of water, also without spilling.

The staff, the patrons, everybody ignored him, but Davidia said, “Michael, give him something.”

Michael only offered him a scowl and said, “Don’t encourage these people.”

Davidia smiled and met the acrobat’s eyes, or one of his eyes—the other’s socket was scarred and pinched shut—and this inspired him to talk, or to signal his thoughts by a series of squeaks, as he seemed to be missing, also, one of his vocal cords. “Sometimes it’s feeling like the Prophet was just here,” he told Davidia, kneeling before her, touching her hand, trembling with the intensity of his message, “the Prophet himself, on this spot, and he went around that corner of the building there, and see, there, the dust still stirred up by the motion of his garments.” Satisfied with that, Dr. Kron took himself and his piece of chalk back into the night, and one of our waiters came quickly with a rag and wiped away his title and his name.

*   *   *

Later, as we hailed a car in front of the place, Davidia took my arm and said, “What does a prosecutor prosecute in Afghanistan?”

“You mean Tina? Everything. It was right after the invasion. For a little bit there, the UN was the only law. She specialized mainly in crimes against women.”

“
Was
she one of Michael’s?”

“Are you jealous?”

“Are you?”

“Listen, whoever his other women were—you’re not like them.”

“Thank you,” she said, and kissed me briefly on the mouth.

Michael said, “Are we taking this fellow to bed with us?”

“I bet he wouldn’t mind.”

“Look what you did, Nair—you got her ready for me.”

I saw them into a car and said good night and strolled home down the beach, drunk, under such a multitude of stars they gave me light to see. The small action of the waves made a rushing, muttering kind of rhythm. The moon hadn’t risen yet. Occasionally a school of phosphorescent flying fish swarmed upward out of the darkness offshore.

The Papa lay about a kilometer along from the Bawarchi. I arrived still drunk and looking forward to several hours of dreamless rest, but no such luck.

The power was off, the lobby dim. The night man napped in a plush chair by the door. I got him going and he handed over my key and a handwritten message, folded in two:

I missed you on Tuesday.—H

This meant I had a date for tomorrow afternoon, Thursday, to negotiate the sale of the contents of my Cruzer. I would meet my contact, Hamid, at the Bawarchi—only by coincidence, as we’d arranged these details weeks ago, in Amsterdam.

I took the stairs upward three at a stride, quite suddenly and miserably sober. I rigged my portable hammock on the balcony and lay out in the sea breeze, and came inside in the wee hours when it rained. I lit the candle and opened my laptop. No internet. Off-line I wrote to Tina—

I’m having a bad night. I miss you and even at moments your old cat and her monstrous ugly sister the dog. I don’t quite yet pine for your Mrs. Landlady—what’s her name? Mrs. Rimple?—but I’ll probably even reach that point too before it’s over.

Just tried a bite of a sandwich, and it was stale. It’s only been out of the bag for two minutes. Goddamn this climate, nothing gets dry but the bread, the miserable bloody

—and heard the whining in the tone and stabbed
DELETE
.

*   *   *

As soon as day came I checked out of the Papa Leone and moved over to the Scanlon, third floor, almost where I could stomp my shoes and rock Michael’s ceiling in room 230 below. Not that I’d have roused him, even if he were home. I’d had the maximum of Michael Adriko lately. And I’d only been on the continent thirty-six hours.

I stood in my room wondering how much I should unpack, not knowing the length of our stay, and deciding I’d give it all an airing—

I jumped as my door was flung open. I hadn’t turned the key in the lock.

The manager stood there. Short, stocky, Arab. He looked as shocked as I must have. “I’m searching for the cleaner,” he said.

All I could think of to say was, “You mean the housekeeper?”

“Yes. That’s right.”

“She’s not here.”

He shut the door and left.

I changed my mind about unpacking everything, and got out fresh socks and underwear and kept the rest in my bag.

One of my heads said to the other, He meant to search your things, and the other head said, Don’t get jumpy, people make mistakes, and the first one said, Either way, my friend, they’ve got you talking to yourself.

*   *   *

“Life is short,” Michael always says, and there’s fear in his face when he says it, because he understands it, he means it, this life ends soon.

Michael is a warrior, a knight. Higher-ups command him, and he pretends to obey. The rest of us live as squires and peasants.

—So my report might have said, my second, and final, report from Freetown. It might have said also:

For him the world consists of soft spots and hard spots and holes, it’s all terrain, and he works it, pausing only to eat, drink, shit, piss, fuck, or treat his wounds.

Michael identifies himself as one of the Kakwa, the clan of Idi Amin Dada, and his story runs thus: After Amin’s exile, when the reprisals began against the Kakwa, the boy Michael was taken to Kampala and educated by kind Christian missionaries … But missionaries don’t take a child from the village and put him in a city school. More likely he was kidnapped by a criminal gang and survived on the streets as a harlot boy.

He claims that having finished his secondary schooling, which I believe he never started, he joined the Ugandan army, entered the school for officers, and before receiving his commission was assigned to a unique training camp along the Orange River in South Africa, where Israeli agents—from the Duvdevan Unit, he sometimes says, other times he says the Mossad—instructed him in terrorist tactics.

True or false, what does it matter? Michael’s truth lives only in the myth. In the facts and the details, it dies.

And while you, my superiors, may think I’ve come to join him in Africa because you dispatched me here, you’re mistaken. I’ve come back because I love the mess. Anarchy. Madness. Things falling apart. Michael only makes my excuse for returning.

And if he thinks I’d like an army and a harem, Michael mistakes me too. I don’t want to live like a king—I just want to live. I can’t make it happen by myself. I’ve got all the ingredients, but I need a wizard to stir the cauldron. I need Michael.

—So my report might have read.

As for the actual report, I banged it out quickly in the basement of Elvis Documents. The crisscross shadows of the lights’ wire cages, the choking musk of the concrete walls, also the thought of Mohammed Kallon tiptoeing back and forth overhead, none of these things encouraged settling in for a lengthy chat. I wrote:

I’ve established contact. Changing stations quite soon. Details to follow in 48–72 hours.

“No lunch today,” I told Mohammed when I came up from his basement, only five minutes after I’d gone down.

He was already rising from his alleged chair, saying, “I’ve had my lunch. What about dinner this evening? I’ve got some news for you.”

“Dinner? No. Just tell me.”

“Very good then,” he said with clear disappointment, “I’m to explain something to you. Michael Adriko was attached to the US Special Forces in eastern Congo. There’s a unit there, you know, chasing the Lord’s Resistance Army.”

“I’ve heard about it.”

“Now he’s absent without leave—that’s what I mean when I call him a deserter.”

“All right,” I said.

And so I could have reported as well that by his secrecy, his coyness, Michael Adriko had thrown up a screen against most of my questions, in particular the first one I’d asked: If our aim was Congo, or Uganda, what on earth were we doing in Sierra Leone?

Here was the answer, from Mohammed Kallon. Michael had landed here on the run, probably settling for any destination that would admit him with a Ghanaian passport. Not a bad choice, Freetown. Anything can happen here. Traitors and deserters can evaporate before your eyes.

Mohammed said, “Let’s meet at the Papa for dinner.”

“Halfway through you’d be saying, ‘Why take me to an expensive meal? Just give me the cash.’”

“Well, certainly—I could use a little cash.”

I gave him a wad of leones half an inch thick but nearly worthless, and walked out into the noontime’s unbelievable heat.

One half block from Elvis Documents a man with a generator and a satellite rented time on his computer, and I sat in a collapsible chair, under an umbrella, beside his scrapwood kiosk, and found a Reuters report online. Its closing paragraph:

The LRA mission will belong to about 100 special operators, Pentagon sources said. They declined to say which unit will be assigned to the mission, but a media report in the Colorado Springs
Gazette
suggested that the 10th Special Forces Group, out of Fort Carson, Colorado, will be the one. This unit typically handles special operations in Europe and Africa.