A Dancer In the Dust

by Thomas H. Cook

  Martine smiled. “If you are drunk, you can leave the road and sleep under the stars. No one will bother you.” She pointed across the room to shelves that lined the wall, laden with scores of books and what looked to be official reports of one kind or another.

  “My library,” she said. “Come.”

  We walked over to the shelves and Martine stood silently while I perused them. There were around a hundred books, most of them in French, a few novels, mostly Balzac and Stendhal. But the great preponderance of her books appeared to deal with African history, much of it recent. True, she had several volumes having to do with the “scramble for Africa,” the history of its colonization. But most of her histories chronicled the continent’s varied struggles for independence, the achievement of nationhood, then what had happened after it had either been gained or granted, the grim narratives of Zimbabwe and Uganda, Kenya, and the like.

  “Have you read much about Africa?” Martine asked.

  “Just some preparatory stuff,” I told her. “And I just got a packet of material from the agency—the Lubandan Constitution and a few other government documents. Back in college I read Mary Kingsley’s book about coming to West Africa.” I laughed. “It was quite funny in places. I remember how she is told to make quick contact with the Wesleyans because they are the only ones with feathers on their hearses.”

  “Hmm,” Martine breathed in that vaguely meditative way of hers.

  “And that book of useful African phrases she reads,” I went on. “I remember that one of the useful phrases was, ‘Why is this man not yet buried?’”

  I’d expected Martine to be amused by these little anecdotes, but instead she shook her head at their absurdity.

  “It is hard to be a foreigner,” she said. “I would never want to be one.”

  She smiled briefly, then became quite solemn and in that mood took a book from the shelf and handed it to me. “This book is a history of the Force Publique.” She watched me silently for a moment, her gaze quite penetrating, as if trying to discover if this meant anything to me. “My grandfather did very bad things in Congo when he was a member of the Force.” She nodded toward the book. “You should read it as a warning of the evils foreigners can do.”

  “Well, foreigner or not, I intend to do good things,” I assured her.

  She looked at me somberly. “Of course you do.” She glanced toward the open front door, where Fareem suddenly appeared. “Now we can have dinner,” she said. “I hope you like goat.”

  I had never eaten goat, but found it quite tasty. The table talk that went with it was mostly about farming in Tumasi, an area of Lubanda that had little water. At that point, since I was in search of a project, I seized upon the idea of irrigation, a suggestion neither Martine nor Fareem appeared to find particularly noteworthy, though neither offered any reason for this.

  Still later, we talked a little about President Dasai—his popularity in the West; the fact that with his administration now running Lubanda, the country would likely be the beneficiary of a steady stream of aid.

  “That will make Lubanda ripe for the picking,” Fareem said.

  I looked at him quizzically.

  “Bad people will suddenly have an interest in Lubanda,” he explained.

  “Bad people?”

  “Warlords, you call them,” Fareem said. “They will see all these foreign things coming in, and they will think, Hmm, I could take all that. It could all be mine.”

  Martine placed her napkin on the table in a gesture that was almost violent. “Dinner is not for politics,” she said, then rose and walked out onto the porch, leaving Fareem and me alone at the table.

  “She is afraid,” Fareem told me.

  “Of what?” I asked.

  “The future,” Fareem answered. “What will happen in Lubanda.”

  He looked at me with the anxious gaze of a man who had much to protect. “She may need a foreign friend,” he confided in a tone I found unexpectedly intimate. “Will you be that friend, Ray?”

  I looked out toward the porch, where Martine stood alone, leaning against one of its wooden posts. There was no way I could have imagined ever betraying her or causing her the slightest harm. And so with full confidence, I turned back and looked straight into Fareem’s passionately inquiring eyes.

  “Yes,” I said. “I will.”

  5

  It was Gail’s voice that broke through this recollection.

  “Mr. Douglas is here,” she said.

  I nodded, and on that signal she escorted him into my office, where we exchanged pleasantries, then got down to business. The shakiness of the Eurozone had put my client into a sweat. He wanted reassurance that one of the world’s largest economies wasn’t about to crumble. Unfortunately I could offer him no such certainty.

  “Some events are too large to predict or evaluate,” I told him. “The fall of the Soviet Union, for example, or the attacks on 9/11.”

  I would normally have supported this statement with up-to-the-minute references to this book or that paper, a show meant to demonstrate that I was fiercely in the moment when it came to the latest research. One aspect of risk reduction has to do with trusting your source, and in my field, I’d long ago discovered that there is nothing like a dazzling display of citations to shore up the confidence of a skittish client. But honesty is also important in risk management, and the starkest and most obvious of all life’s truths is that its course cannot be reliably predicted. One afternoon, while drying off from a swim in the pool, you notice an unslighlty blemish. Six months later you’re dead. Such, as the fabled Australian criminal Ned Kelly declared in his final words from the gallows, is life.

  “The simple fact is that world-transforming events can never be factored into a risk assessment,” I told my client, “save to posit the possibility of their sudden and unexpected arrival.”

  “So, what am I paying you for, Ray?” Walter asked half-jokingly, though undoubtedly with a keen eye to my fee.

  “You pay me for reassuring you that you’ve done all you could do to protect yourself against the unexpected,” I answered truthfully. “That no matter what happens to your assets, you can’t be blamed or accused of malfeasance. You pay me to protect your soul from moral hazard.”

  Walter looked at me oddly, as if he’d suddenly glimpsed a fissure in my rock-solid character.

  For that reason I should have stopped, taken a breath, and gotten back on track. But something in me would not be held in check.

  “The greatest risk anyone runs is to be found wanting, inadequate, not up to the job,” I added, the pace of my voice quite measured, almost stark, a one-man Greek chorus. “It is reducing the risk of that kind of ultimate, end-of-game failure that we all seek.”

  Something in Walter’s gaze deepened.

  “Where did you learn about risk assessment?” he asked, almost warily, as if I’d changed shape before him.

  In Lubanda, I thought, but I didn’t say this to Walter. Instead I got ahold of myself and nimbly shifted to my studies at Wharton, where I seized a few anecdotes about the professors I’d encountered there, the risk management tidbits of wisdom they’d dispensed, all of it designed to regain his briefly endangered sense of my personal and professional solidity, as well as to secure the illusion that this get-together was mostly a matter of reaffirming our hail-fellow-well-met companionability. It worked, and a few minutes later he was chuckling at some joke of mine or nodding appropriately when I made a point. This was followed by a farewell handshake, and I was once again alone in my office, staring silently out my window, seeing not Manhattan beyond the glass, but the arid reaches of the savanna that spread out on either side of Tumasi Road, recalling that upon arrival I’d known nothing of the place beyond what I’d read in a pamphlet published by Hope for Lubanda, its pages adorned with pictures of cheerful Lubandans singing and dancing. “The hope of Lubanda is in the hearts of its people,” the pamphlet had proclaimed in its ludicrously inspirational final line, “and you ar
e here to help them realize that hope.”

  Even so, it was true. I had, indeed, come to help, though with few skills anyone could have considered useful, unless a certain acquaintanceship with classical literature might prove vital to building a school or sinking a well or growing maize among a people who would ultimately resist its introduction as a staple crop, this because, as it turned out, and as Martine had later written in her Open Letter, “The minds of we Lubandans are neither as open nor as malleable as you imagine them to be.”

  How true this had proven to be, I thought, and instantly found myself in the village again, returned to my first day in Tumasi, watching Martine make her way up the road, walking with a basket on her head, Fareem strolling beside her. I could no longer say just how long I’d peered down the road, focused upon and oddly mesmerized by Martine as she continued on and on. I knew only that I’d watched until the horizon had at last consumed her, and she was gone.

  The vision of her vanishing lingered throughout the day as one client followed another. In fact, it trailed me into the afternoon, by which time I felt as if I were being carried on a wave that was determinedly bearing me ever more deeply into the past, back to Martine and Fareem and Seso, to that long-ago trial by fire that had, in different ways, seared us all.

  Seso.

  Thinking of his murder brought to mind one of the central truths of risk assessment, namely, that the correct calculation of a risk rises in proportion to the accuracy, variety, and scope of obtainable information. It is for that reason that any risk assessment worthy of the name must rest upon a multitude of sources.

  With regard to Seso’s death, however, I had only one source, Rudy Salmon, a Wharton classmate who’d landed a job at One Police Plaza, then risen in the department’s administrative ranks. He now held one of those posts that adhere like barnacles to the great lumbering ship of New York’s municipal bureaucracy.

  I knew no one else in the Police Department, however, and so it was to Rudy I made the call.

  “Seso Alaya,” Rudy said slowly, so that I knew he was writing down the information I’d given him, namely the victim’s name, the location of the murder, the fact that a friend of mine’s name and telephone number had been found in the dead man’s room, and that my friend had been visited by the police as a result.

  “Got any idea who paid this visit?” Rudy asked.

  “A detective named Max Regal.”

  “And this was a homicide two days ago, at the Darlton Hotel on East Twenty-seventh Street.”

  I could hear the tap, tap, tap of Rudy’s computer. “There was a homicide in that hotel, yes,” he said after a moment, “What’s your interest in this guy, Ray?”

  “He had something he wanted to show to a client of mine,” I answered. “Naturally, with Mr. Alaya now having been murdered, my client would like to know what he had.”

  “We’re not talking guns, drugs, something of that sort, are we?” Rudy asked. “You can’t say African without thinking contraband.”

  “I think the risk is very low of it being contraband,” I answered truthfully.

  “Okay,” Rudy said. “Give me a few minutes. I’ll call you back.”

  And he did.

  “Well, Max Regal is still handling the case,” he said. “Max and I go back a long way. He’d be more than happy to fill you in on what he knows—which isn’t much, by the way.”

  “It’s a start,” I said. “Thanks, Rudy.”

  “Max can meet you tonight.”

  He gave me the name of a bar on Ninth Avenue, the old Hell’s Kitchen, now one of the city’s hot neighborhoods, its streets filled with young people, all of them distractedly texting as they walked, and thus quite oblivious to the risk of running into a fellow pedestrian.

  Max Regal was seated at a table in a back corner. He was short and round, and had the tired look of a man who’d take the first deal he was offered for early retirement. His suit wasn’t new, but it was less worn than his shoes. But spanking new wouldn’t have mattered because Regal had the sort of disproportionate body that defeats off-the-rack tailoring, and for that reason he would always look as if he were wearing someone else’s clothes. The good news was that the risk of appearing shabby appeared never to have occurred to him. He had an air of physical self-confidence, of being able to face a man, even a larger man, and make him blink.

  “So, you’re an amateur sleuth,” he said with a vaguely cop-land swagger, as if to say, You have no idea, my friend.

  “Not exactly,” I said with a friendly smile. “But perhaps close enough.”

  I’d had little to do with policemen after leaving Lubanda, perhaps because that particular experience had been so fiercely troubling that I’d avoided all further contact with law enforcement of any kind.

  “Thanks for seeing me,” I said.

  Regal nodded, then immediately got down to business. “Seso Alaya,” he said. “We figured he was just another African trader who’d pissed off the competition. Then we found a name and a phone number in the squat where he was living, and the name turned out to be a big shot. Rudy tells me that this big shot is your client?”

  “Both a client and an old friend,” I said.

  “Well, as it turned out, your ‘old friend’ couldn’t help us very much,” Regal said. “Just told me that he’d gotten a call from the dead man, and that the dead man had something to show him.”

  “That’s as much as he told me,” I said.

  “So what are you after?”

  “Mr. Hammond thought I might be able to find out what Seso Alaya had to show him,” I answered in my best professional voice, cool but cooperative.

  When Regal said nothing, I added, “So, I’m just curious as to whether you have any leads.”

  “A couple,” Regal said. “For one thing, we found some kind of pin in his mouth. The sort of thing you might stick in your lapel. Two swords crossed over each other. Any idea what that might mean?”

  “Not swords, crossed pangas,” I said. “Under its last ruler, a tyrant named Mafumi, they were the symbol of Lubanda. They were on the flag. It was Lubanda’s version of a swastika.”

  “Where is this Mafumi character now?” Max asked.

  “He’s dead,” I answered. “Lubanda has a new president now.”

  “So why would somebody put this pin in Alaya’s mouth?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose it’s possible that Seso was killed by a Mafumi agent. They don’t just go away, the people close to a dictator.”

  “Could the pin have belonged to Alaya?”

  “It’s possible,” I said. “Under Mafumi everyone in the government had to wear a crossed-pangas pin. It was part of the uniform. And since Seso worked for the government, he would have had a pin.”

  “What did he do for the government?” Regal asked.

  “He worked in the archive,” I said. “Sorting through old records.”

  “What else do you know about him?”

  “He once worked for me,” I answered. “In Lubanda years ago.”

  “When was the last time you heard from him?”

  “We met in Rupala ten years ago. Nothing since.”

  “So you have no idea why he was in New York?”

  “Other than to give my friend whatever it was he had for him, no.”

  “What was his connection to your friend?” Regal asked.

  “I’m sure you asked him that,” I said.

  “Yeah, but it’s always good to have another source, right?”

  “We were all in Lubanda together. But until that call, Mr. Hammond hadn’t had any contact with Mr. Alaya for over twenty years.”

  A waiter approached. Regal ordered a beer. I had a white wine.

  “So,” Regal said as the waiter stepped away. “Here’s what I know about the case.”

  There wasn’t much, and Regal went through it routinely and with surprisingly little attention to order, mentioning this or that as the mood struck him, sipping at his beer, pausing to tell a
joke or make a comment on whatever came to mind. But disorganized though Regal’s narrative was, a few spare facts came through: A janitor had found Seso’s body in the alley behind the hotel where he lived. He’d obviously been murdered, but not before he’d been tortured. Regal had no idea where either the murder or the torture had occurred.

  “The Africans have places where they do things,” he said. “Places where blood feud grievances can be settled, for example. Their own courts. So I’m guessing they have special places for hurting people.”

  This might have as easily been urban myth as not, I thought, but it pointed to the fact that as far as Regal was concerned, Africans existed at a different place on the immigrant spectrum, their habits as unknowable as their motivations.

  “They’re never really here, you know?” he added. “They’re always back there.”

  “What else do you know about Seso?” I asked.

  “Well, the autopsy showed that there were no drugs in his blood,” Regal answered. “And we couldn’t find any prior criminal activity.”

  As to the reason Seso had been murdered, Regal hadn’t found it.

  He shrugged. “It could be anything from screwing someone else’s woman to owing money.” He sat back and stared at me pointedly. “You met him in Africa, I take it.”

  “In Lubanda,” I answered. “I’d gone there to make some improvements in an area around the village of Tumasi. Seso was assigned to me. He was my translator, but he also did whatever needed to be done. Cooking. Odd jobs.”

  “It doesn’t look like he ever improved his lot,” Regal said. “Wrinkled pants. Ragged shirt. He could have been any of those traders you see around town.” He paused briefly before offering his final assessment of the case. “We almost never get to the bottom of any of these killings. You got family feuds and tribal feuds, all kinds of stuff we know nothing about. I hear the Somalis are the worst when it comes to tribal murders.”

  “Seso wasn’t Somali,” I reminded him.

  “Anyway, from Africa,” Regal said, dismissively shrugging off the entire continent.

  It was a grim assessment, but in terms of Africa’s recent history, I couldn’t entirely contradict it. As Martine’s Open Letter had enumerated, in nation after nation the trajectory had been remarkably similar. The struggle for independence had first lifted the great father figures: Nkrumah, Kenyatta, and the like. These had been followed by the Amins and the Bokassas, the Mugabes, the Mobutus, rulers so psychopathic, their tyrannies so operatically over-the-top, they’d brought a funhouse mirror into Hell.