A Dancer In the Dust

by Thomas H. Cook

  I gave no hint of the inward shudder that went through me at that moment, but instead maintained what I hoped would seem a wholly professional demeanor.

  “You are familiar with this tragic episode in Lubandan history, I believe,” Beyani said.

  The word “incident” struck me as a political choice, proof enough that even after all these years, this crime was still reverberating through the governmental halls of Rupala.

  “An outrage like that,” Beyani said, “it gives a terrible impression. That we Lubandans are animals. Especially when the victim is a foreigner.”

  “Martine Aubert was not a foreigner,” I told him.

  Beyani shrugged. “Anyway… white.”

  “What could Seso have had to do with what happened on Tumasi Road?” I asked. “He was nowhere near the place where it happened.”

  “This is so,” Beyani said. “Alaya did not, as we say, draw blood. His role was to provide information.” He watched me closely for a moment before he added, “Seso Alaya was a spy.”

  Spy. The word itself seemed to darken the air around us.

  “His job was to inform on the white woman,” Beyani added.

  “To whom?” I asked.

  “Mafumi’s people, of course,” Beyani said. “The ones who had already infiltrated various villages in Tumasi. And for his work, he was later given a position in the archive.”

  “Why would Mafumi have needed someone to spy on Martine?” I asked in as clinical a tone as I could manage.

  “Because he needed to prove that he was an enemy of white rule.”

  “Martine didn’t rule anything,” I told him. “She was just a farmer.”

  “She was white—that was enough,” Beyani said. “To do such a thing to a white woman, it gave Mafumi—what is the phrase here?—‘street creds.’” He shrugged. “Besides, as you know, he immediately took credit for it.”

  “He also took credit for the moon landing, which, by the way, happened before he was born,” I reminded Beyani.

  Beyani laughed. “Mafumi had a somewhat exaggerated sense of himself, as we all know. But in the case of what happened on Tumasi Road, it was indeed Mafumi’s men who did this harm.”

  “I thought it was Gessee’s men,” I admitted. “He hated Martine, after all, and he’d tried lots of things to intimidate her.”

  I recalled the steps by which Gessee’s intimidation had grown ever more threatening, as well as the consequences of Martine’s refusal to give in to it, memories too painful to think about, as Beyani clearly saw.

  “Gessee had nothing to do with what happened on Tumasi Road,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “He was a schoolteacher before he became agricultural minister. He would never have been capable of such savagery.” His gaze hardened. “What happened to that woman was… uncivilized.” He watched me for a moment, then said, “I am aware that Miss Aubert was a friend of yours, and that it is hard for you to hear of such things, to have them returned to you in this way.”

  When I said nothing, Beyani peered at me coolly, but with some effort, like a man trying to read a book in a language he only partially understood.

  “Seso Alaya fled Lubanda because he knew we were closing in on him,” he said. “But he knew he would need a bargaining chip to stay here. Something that would buy him safe harbor. This is what he had for your client.”

  Again I remained silent, the ploy that almost always works to keep someone talking.

  “The names,” Beyani said starkly. “The names of the men responsible for the attack on Tumasi Road.”

  I labored to absorb this in the calm, unflappable way of a seasoned risk analyst, the greatest risk always being that you uncover your own error. For surely, I felt, my name, by any reckoning of responsibility, should appear among those other names, perhaps at the head of the list.

  The terror of that judgment must have glittered in my eyes, because I saw a certain hint of unexpected sympathy come into Beyani’s.

  “I know that this is a difficult matter for you to discuss,” he said, “and I also know that it is difficult for you to believe what I have told you about Mr. Alaya. It is always hard to admit that one has been betrayed.” There was that ever-changing smile again, a little jagged this time, and not quite a match for the look in his eyes. “Especially by a servant.”

  “He was a friend,” I corrected.

  “No, he was not,” Beyani responded firmly. “He was a spy who gave information that led directly to the Tumasi Road Incident, and had he not fled here, he would almost certainly have been arrested in Lubanda.”

  “Do you know who killed him?” I asked. “You had a picture, I believe.”

  “The men in that photograph killed Mr. Alaya to silence him, as well as any others who might be tempted to expose them,” Beyani said. “But in doing this thing, they only confirmed what we already suspected.” He sat back haughtily, a little man puffed up by this recent accomplishment. “They are now in Lubanda, as I told the Kakwa. We will soon find them, and when we do, they will be brought to justice.” A dark irony glittered in his eyes. “And at that point, thanks to Mr. Alaya’s many treacheries, the case opened by the Tumasi Road Incident can, at last, be closed.”

  Suspicion is a spade that never tires of digging, and so I suddenly found myself recalling all the times Seso had found it convenient to straighten my desk, where my letters to Bill Hammond lay open and available to his eyes. The last one had been short. He could have read it at a glance: M.A. to Rupala, via TR, and by which he would have known that Martine was on her way to Rupala by means of Tumasi Road.

  “I would never have suspected Seso of working for Mafumi,” I admitted. “And certainly never of betraying either me or Martine Aubert.”

  “Yes, well, you should keep in mind that Mr. Alaya was Lutusi,” Beyani said by way of explaining Seso’s treachery. “They are a rootless people, wanderers who live by trade, and, as we know, traders are by nature deceivers.” He seemed suddenly to see the two of us as old comrades in arms, equally shaped by the dark forces of Lubanda. “Stay safe,” he said, as he rose and offered his hand.

  I shook it like one sealing a friendship. “Thank you.”

  He turned and left my office as quietly as he’d entered it, leaving me alone to sit and think. There was a lot to absorb in what he’d told me, a lot to consider and put into order, a procedure in which I was well trained. Return to first principles, I reminded myself. The devil is, indeed, in the details, so examine them carefully.

  The process that followed took only a few minutes, but at the end of it I felt sure I’d covered the ground and come to a reasonable conclusion.

  Point one was that Beyani had given a credible account of both himself and Seso. The motive he’d given for Seso’s being in league with Mafumi, for example, was entirely believable. Men had betrayed others for far less cause, after all. What was it that Zhivago’s brother says? That he has killed men far better than himself with a small pistol. Surely it was possible that Seso, anticipating that Mafumi might well take charge in Lubanda, had been enticed into providing information to his local agents. He had probably had no idea that such harm might flow from his betrayal of Martine. He had simply passed information on to a higher source, which was no different—at least at the beginning—from what I had done. Later, with Beyani closing in, he’d tried to make a deal with the only real power he knew, Bill Hammond. The names had been his last chips in a desperate game, and he’d gambled that Bill would not pay dearly for them.

  Such were the salient details of Beyani’s story, and as I reviewed the risks of believing it, I could find only one false note. It had sounded at the very end of our meeting, and yet its faint echo had continued to ring in my ear:

  The Lutusi are by nature deceitful.

  Seso was Lutusi.

  Therefore Seso was deceitful.

  The problem was that the truth of the third, concluding proposition could not be inferred, because the first one was false.

  I knew
this because of a chance encounter I’d had while traveling north of Tumasi. By then I’d given up the idea of a well, and was now exploring the notion of creating “nomadic schools,” as my later proposal called it, to be manned by a troupe of traveling teachers. It was an absurd idea, patterned on my romantic understanding of the way medieval actors had roamed from village to village, put on their shows, then departed for the next village. It could not have been more ridiculous, as Seso must have known, and yet he’d given no hint of how he felt as he’d traveled with me on this occasion, translating my proposal to a group of Lutusi elders.

  The elders had listened silently, then asked what they should give in return, and when I’d replied, “Nothing,” they’d briefly talked among themselves, then walked away.

  It was one of the few times Seso had shuffled off the gloom that usually surrounded him and broke into a smile. “They think the school you offer is worthless,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because you ask for nothing in return,” Seso explained. “It is only nothing that is worth nothing in return, so they think you are dishonest in what you offer them, that you are a deceiver, and they will not associate with such people.”

  That is why the Beyani syllogism did not hold. The Lutusi were traders, but they were not deceivers. Beyani had constructed a flawed syllogism. Therefore, I could not believe him.

  But where did this doubt leave me?

  I didn’t know, save that Beyani could not be trusted, might not be at all what he purported to be, might, in fact, be one of those very men he claimed to hunt, himself one of those who’d clicked the shells on Tumasi Road.

  And if this was true, how might I find evidence of it sufficient to warn the current leader of Lubanda that there was a viper in the grass, and not a defanged one by any means, but a member of his own security force.

  I had no answer for this question, and so was left with no more lucid thought than how strange it was that after so many years, Tumasi’s shadow had once again crossed my path. I considered the little string of time that had run from my first arrival in Rupala, where I’d met Seso, then driven with him to where I’d intended to live more or less indefinitely, how on the very day I’d arrived in the village I’d found Martine fiddling with her basket, Fareem at her side, a first encounter whose grave risks I could not have guessed.

  For a moment I found it all too large to analyze. For it was a risk whose perils were still with me, the present now as fraught with danger as the past, so that for an instant I felt myself swirling in the fearful jeopardy of the moment and thus unable to grasp how the winding way of Tumasi Road had finally curled into this fatal noose, with Martine doomed long ago, Seso recently murdered, myself a scrupulous manager of risk, and now Nullu Beyani added to this fateful mix, a Cassius who might well conceal a dagger in his gown, one aimed squarely at brave, risk-taking Fareem, the merciful and perhaps imperiled new president of Lubanda.

  Part IV

  Rupala: 12:53 P.M.

  He is in his middle forties now, and time has added its layer of thickness, as well as the lines that spread from the corners of his eyes when he smiles. They are still eyes that glitter with intelligence and a keen sense of man’s capacity for evil. I would have recognized him immediately even if I had not followed his rise within the ranks of those who’d fled Lubanda, then opposed Mafumi’s tyranny from afar, a risky business if ever there was one.

  “Ray,” Fareem says as he rises, comes from behind his quite modest desk, and offers his hand in the warm way of those long-lost days. His handshake is no less firm than of old and there is something confident and reassuring in the force of his grip. Here is a man who does not fear being in charge, facing his enemies, doing what must be done.

  “So good to have you back in Lubanda,” he tells me. He tilts his head slightly to the right, and with this motion, more glints of silver sparkle in the black nest of his hair. For a moment he seems as weary as his history. Exile has added depth to his eyes, and struggle a layer of gravity to their expression. He was never frivolous, but now he seems a vessel carved from care. I had expected to see vigor, but instead I see fatigue. It gives him the air of a great statue that has been exposed to the harshest of elements, long exposed, perhaps fatally exposed, so that he seems at the beginning of a long decline.

  “Hello, Mr. President.”

  “Mr. President?”

  He laughs, but his is different from President Dasai’s laugh. It is thinner, and there is no hint of the jolly and naïve Black Santa with his fatherly chuckle. Fareem has been through too much to have so rich a laugh. He has known flight, exile, poverty, along with the awesome peril of his political responsibility. He has been stabbed, shot at, and run down by a speeding car. A limp provides the evidence for just how narrow was his escape.

  “Never call me Mr. President,” he says after a soft cough. “We’ve known each other too long for that.”

  “In good times,” I add pointedly, “and in bad.”

  “We parted angrily, yes,” Fareem admits. His voice has the tenor of a reed gently blown. “I apologize for the dreadful things I said to you. After all, none of it was your fault.” He shakes his head as if to free his mind of memories. “It was a bad time for Lubanda.”

  “For some it was worse than others,” I remind him.

  He makes no pretense that he doesn’t understand that this reference is to Martine.

  “My white skin was a blinding light, Fareem,” I add. “I couldn’t see her for it.” When Fareem remains silent, I continue, “And the black skins of Lubanda’s people were just as impenetrable, so they couldn’t see her either.”

  Something behind Fareem’s eyes darkens and I see that Martine’s fate still casts a shadow over him. “I think of her often,” he tells me.

  “I think of her every day,” I confess.

  “Of course you do,” Fareem says gently and sympathetically. “But times have changed, so the point now is to do the right thing.”

  “The right thing?”

  “For Lubanda.”

  “Indeed,” I agree. “But it isn’t always easy to know what the right thing is.”

  “True,” Fareem says. “If it were, then nothing would ever be at risk.”

  He is tall, but no longer muscular. In fact, he is slightly stooped. There was a time when he could run and jump, when he toiled over modest crops in arid fields. He could do none of that now. Struggle and hardship age a man, but Fareem seems almost crippled by the hardships he has endured, chief among them the rigors of his own effort to return to Lubanda. He has not farmed for the past twenty years, and those decades spent in the West have altered his accent and given him a sense of gentlemanliness and sophistication, but at a considerable price. He is like a man dangling between two voids. He has neither the false grandfatherly manner of Dasai nor the psychopathic egotism of Mafumi. In that way, he appears almost to embody the moderate political policies by means of which he has pledged to lead Lubanda into the future. Even so, his smile remains fixed in sadness, making him seem very much the product of a long and painful enlightenment.

  I glance about. “Mafumi spent a great deal of money on this place.”

  “He did, yes,” Fareem tells me. “He called it his palace but I have renamed it the Presidential Residence.” He smiles that melancholy smile. “Even so, I do not live here.”

  “Where do you live, Fareem?”

  “In a small house on the outskirts of Rupala,” Fareem informs me. “Lubanda is poor, and it did not seem fitting that I live in luxury. I am not a chief, and I do not intend to behave like one.” Now his smile is so delicate it seems barely on his lips at all, and in it I can see how relieved he is that the tragedy we shared in Lubanda has not built a wall between us.

  “Normally, I would invite you to sit down,” he says. “But I thought you above all might want to see the future that is now possible for Lubanda.” His gaze is full of sympathy. “Your experience here was dark,” he adds, “and I woul
d prefer you leave us this time with some of those shadows removed.”

  “It wasn’t all dark,” I remind him.

  “No, not all,” he agrees. “There were those dinners on the farm, sitting beneath that pathetic little tree, all those many talks. All these things I remember fondly. What do you remember fondly, Ray?”

  “The way she danced in the village that night. By the fire with the other women of the village. The way she swayed and turned and lifted her arms. She was happy then, because she still had a homeland and felt certain that she would always have one.”

  Fareem appears to see this memory playing like a film in my mind.

  “I remember that evening well,” he says. “It was an Independence Day celebration and there was something that seemed immortal in the way Martine danced so slowly, as you say, with her arms lifted… like wings.”

  Before leaving New York, it had been hard for me to imagine Fareem as the president of Lubanda, a country still adrift in the wake of Mafumi’s death, reeling from the desolation he left behind, a country divided into factions, with so many old wounds still open. Such a man must have countless enemies, and to rule well he must make many more. I can hardly calculate how many of his fellow countrymen must be at this very moment plotting his fall, licking their lips at the prospect of all that can be done to him before they finally kill him. I have no doubt that Fareem has envisioned himself skinned, burned alive, hung by his heels, and filleted with box cutters.

  And yet he does not seem to be concerned that the fate of President Dasai might one day be his own. Clearly he expects to fare better than any of Lubanda’s previous leaders, avoid their mistakes, rule more wisely, and perhaps by this means ultimately become Lubanda’s version of Nelson Mandela, the true father of that very country that made an orphan of Martine.

  “Do you leave Rupala very often?” I ask him as my mind turns to the time we’d gone north with President Dasai, the attempt on that supremely naïve president’s life, that chuckling president’s obliviousness to the risks that surrounded him.