A Dancer In the Dust

by Thomas H. Cook

  “Mafumi was a child of violence,” Fareem tells me. A vague sadness settles over him. “A man is made by the violence done to him, Ray. Mafumi’s parents were both slaughtered right before his eyes.”

  “I thought that was just part of his made-up biography.”

  We have reached the door at the end of corridor. Fareem opens it and waves me inside, where I take a seat in front of a small desk.

  “No, that part of Mafumi’s life is true,” Fareem assures me. “We figured it was this scene of parental massacre that had so deranged him.”

  “We?”

  “The people around him, I should say.”

  “You’ve met people who were around Mafumi?”

  “Only when they were shooting at me,” Fareem says with a dismissive shrug. “Or trying to run me down in a car.”

  “That’s hardly a place where such information would be exchanged,” I say.

  Fareem now appears slightly tense, as if accused of something, under interrogation.

  “What do you mean by that, Ray?” he asks.

  I lift my briefcase, place it on my lap, open it, and draw out a photograph. “Do you know this man?” I ask as I hand it to him. “He’s standing directly to your left.”

  Fareem glances at the photograph, then says. “We were in Janetta, to commemorate the massacre. That’s Nullu Beyani.”

  “What is his position?” I ask.

  “He’s the head of the National Police,” Fareem answers. He hands the picture back toward me. “Why do you ask?”

  “He visited me in New York,” I tell him. “He told me he’d come there to investigate the murder of Seso Alaya.”

  Fareem is clearly not surprised to hear this. “That is true. I sent him there myself.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Seso worked under Mafumi,” Fareem tells me. “In the archive. He may have known state secrets, and when such a person flees the country, and is then murdered… I’m sure you understand why we needed to get to the bottom of it.”

  “Did you know that Beyani went to Sura before Seso’s murder?” I ask.

  Fareem looks genuinely surprised to hear this.

  “Why would he have done that?” he asks.

  “He went there to talk to Seso’s old friend Bisara. Do you remember him?”

  “I met him a few times, yes. He sometimes came to visit Seso.”

  “They tortured Bisara,” I inform Fareem. “Beyani and his thugs.”

  For the first time, Fareem appears disturbed. “Why would they have done this to Bisara?”

  “Because they were looking for whatever Seso had to show Bill Hammond,” I said. “You remember Bill, I’m sure.”

  “Of course,” Fareen says. “He’s now head of the Mansfield Trust.” He looks confused. “What did Seso have for Bill?”

  “Something important,” I answer, then permit a dramatic pause to lengthen tensely before I add, “And so Nullu Beyani and some of his agents came to New York and they tortured Seso, but he wouldn’t tell them where he’d left what he wanted Bill to see.”

  Fareem merely stares at me.

  “He left it with someone Beyani would be unlikely to think had anything of worth,” I add. “In the first place, someone who was not Lutusi. In the second place, a woman.”

  “Not Lutusi,” Fareem repeats with a hint of self-accusation, as if this possibility should not have escaped him, but clearly did, a dreadfully unexpected turn in a plan he’d thought successful before now. “A woman.”

  Still, he only smiles. “Seso was always quite smart.”

  I let my gaze fall to the briefcase, consider my next move for a moment, then make it. “Anyway, I found what Seso wanted Bill to see.”

  Fareem watches me silently… and waits.

  I take out the envelope in which Seso had sealed its contents and place them on Fareem’s desk. “The pictures were taken many years ago and put away in some forgotten corner of Mafumi’s archive. You might say they’re part of the historical record.”

  “The historical record of what?” Fareem asks as he reaches for the envelope.

  “The Tumasi Road Incident.”

  Fareem’s hand snaps back from the still unopened envelope as if from a serpent, and stares at me silently. Then, as if in response to a dare, he picks up the envelope and spills the photos across his desk.

  And so there it rests, fully exposed, the stages of Martine’s torment, pictures taken from a distance but which nonetheless record with awful clarity the terrible choreography of her ordeal. In the first of these pictures, she stands alone as a noose of jeering men draws in around her. The pictures fully reveal the awful terror that gripped her, the ihahamuka she had so dreaded. The men are pointing at her, dancing around her. Like hyenas they rush in and yank her hair, then dart away, rush in and slap her, poke her with their crude spears, nip at her with the blades of their pangas, then retreat laughing. It is hard to say how long this goes on before the real assault begins, after which she tries to run, staggers, at last drops to the ground, where they fall upon her, ripping at her clothes, hitting her with stones, slashing her with pangas. The final photograph is a close-up of her barely recognizable face, the distinguishing feature of which remains the flaming red hair that must have given Mafumi all the proof he needed that the witch was dead. Like all the others, it is a perfect picture, save for one thing.

  “Do you recognize that starburst crack in the lens, Fareem?” I ask.

  He looks up from the photographs, and although there is a terrible acknowledgment in his eyes, I see also that he remains true to the risk he took.

  “You will never understand Lubanda,” he says, as if I were still the young man he’d so thoroughly deceived. His gaze is still and steady. “You will never understand my situation.” His smile is rueful. “You could return to America, Ray, which is what you did,” he reminds me darkly. “But I was stuck in Lubanda. Stuck with Lubanda… as it was then.”

  It strikes me that there are moments so desperate and hopeless that practicality merges with criminality so seamlessly and completely that it becomes all but impossible not to join the devil’s brigade.

  “And so you made your deal with Mafumi,” I say.

  It does not surprise me that Fareem makes no attempt to deny this. In Ovid’s world of myth, it is possible to change. People turn into trees, animals, even mountains. But outside that classical world, we remain to the end the thing we were at the beginning. Martine, despite the risk, remained Martine, fighting for her dream. It is the same with Fareem. He was, at heart, a survivor, and as such, he’d keenly perceived the extreme risk of his situation, caught as he was between Gessee and Mafumi. I have little doubt that he must have tried everything he could to avoid the deal he made, but in the end, like an adept risk manager, he’d figured the odds and made his choice.

  “It was never meant to go that far with Martine,” Fareem tells me. “She was only to be frightened. I was to take pictures of it because that’s the kind of proof Mafumi needed. I thought it would force Martine to leave Lubanda, which she had to do, because she was doomed here. You know that, Ray. You yourself tried to force her to leave, remember?”

  I nod.

  Fareem’s gaze returns to the photographs. “But it got out of hand.”

  “It always does,” I tell him gravely.

  Fareem looks stricken. “I couldn’t stop it,” he tells me desolately. “I couldn’t even stop taking the pictures. Mafumi wanted them, and so I had to do it. Later, when I tried to keep my camera, they beat me up and took it. That’s when I got out of Lubanda, and after that I did nothing but oppose Mafumi.”

  It is certainly possible that all of this is true. Fareem may indeed have wanted to stop Martine’s torment, but knew he couldn’t, that the beast would have blood, and that he would have to make a record of it. It is also possible that he turned against Mafumi at that moment, fled to Europe, then watched with fear and trembling as the other members of his government-in-exile were stabbed or
shot or beaten to death. Or he might never have broken with Mafumi and, instead, conspired with his agents to carry out these same murders. I have no way of knowing. At the heart of all risk management, I remind myself, there lies the ineradicable X of human behavior.

  “And now, as president, I want to help Lubanda,” Fareem assures me. He takes a deep breath. “Especially the orphans—most of whom, by the way, are Lutusi.”

  I cannot know what is in Fareem’s heart at this moment. Perhaps he does, in fact, want to help Lubanda. But I do know that in the matter of the orphans, he is lying.

  “The Lutusi don’t have orphans,” I say. “The word itself, ‘Lutusi,’ means ‘family.’ All the men are your father and all the women are your mother.”

  I watch as Fareem leans back slowly, his gaze very still.

  “The Lutusi children in your camps aren’t orphans, Fareem,” I tell him bluntly. “You round them up and truck them into Rupala. It’s just one of your tricks.”

  Fareem makes no effort to deny this. “This ‘trick,’ as you call it, is a small price to pay in order to get the help Lubanda needs.” He studies my expression and seems to think that simply by being forthright, by denying nothing, he has found a way into me, a little door his argument can enter. “You should not punish an entire country for my mistake,” he adds pointedly. “My mistake, Ray—an error of judgment the Mansfield Trust has no need to hear of.”

  I recognize that Fareem’s strategy at that moment is a very risky one.

  And it does not work.

  “I’m afraid it’s too late for that,” I say. “I’ve already shared this information with Bill Hammond.” I take out the letter I have come to give him and place it on his desk.

  He picks up the letter, reads it, then looks up. “Nothing?” He is clearly shocked. “The Mansfield Trust is denying all aid to Lubanda?” His gaze remains fixed on the letter like one dazed by a blow. Even so, it takes only a moment for his disappointment and dismay to transform themselves into contempt for those he had presumed to be his benefactors. “This is the hope you have brought to Lubanda, Ray?” he asks sharply as he crumples the letter in his fist.

  “It is, perhaps, Lubanda’s only hope,” I tell him.

  Fareem smiles, but thinly. “Very well then,” he says coldly. “Lubanda will do just fine without your aid.”

  I stare him dead in the eye. “That is my hope, Fareem,” I tell him truthfully, “that is my one true hope for Lubanda.”

  My belief, as I leave him, is that Fareem’s hold on the reins of power will not last very long. Without aid, he will not be able to buy weapons or fill the warehouses of Rupala with the goods others like himself have so often used to bribe local chiefs and pay for private armies. I fear that in desperation, he will pit one tribe against another, but with nothing to hand out as reward to those who do his dirty work, even this strategy may fail, and with that failure, some new direction may perhaps emerge, one that no longer waits for the distorting gifts of donor hands.

  Such is my hope for Lubanda as I head back down the corridor, leaving Fareem still seated behind his desk. Admittedly it is a risky strategy, since other donors may fill the void left by the decision of the Mansfield Trust. The aid caravan is a long and complicated one, after all, and good intentions usually occupy the moral high ground regardless of the evil that they do. It will be easy to vilify our decision, dismiss it as a cruel experiment. Many noble causes have been ignobly buried beneath the murky flood of such high-minded rhetoric and this one, too, may fall victim to that drear fate.

  But at the very least, Lubanda will be Lubandan, in ways both good and bad when seen through Western eyes. Without doubt its tribal rivalries will remain as real as they were before the first foreigners came. And yet, if Lubanda is truly left alone, it is possible that the weapons of mass killing, like the money needed to buy them, will be less available. If this is so, then conflict in Lubanda will become exclusively Lubandan, its people’s evils and excesses, like ours, entirely of their own making, with no outside forces to stir the old poisons into some new and yet more lethal brew. In Lubanda, as everywhere, man will remain what man has always been, our lives, both individual and collective, eternally afflicted with the troubles we ourselves devise.

  That Lubanda’s joys and tribulations shall forever be its own is my hope for this country as I exit the Presidential Residence and move down the stairs to where one of Fareem’s drivers stands at the ready. He nods and offers the big smile he has no doubt been told to offer such people as myself, foreigners he supposes to be bearing gifts. I smile back, but rather than take his car, I glance to my left where one a private taxi idles by the curb.

  At my signal, its young driver throws the car into gear and inches toward me.

  “Where to, sir?” the driver asks as I get in.

  “The airport, please.”

  We arrive there a few minutes later.

  “Thank you,” I say as I pay the fare.

  “I hope you have a safe trip home,” the driver tells me, then briskly turns back to his work.

  In the simple nobility of this young man’s work, in his independence, in the way he does not wait for some proffered gift, I feel my deepest love sweep out to Lubanda with the same overflowing fierceness with which it had once embraced Martine.

  An hour or so later, as my plane rises over Rupala, I recall the visit—or was it a pilgrimage—I’d made to Martine’s farm after my talk with Ufala, by then carrying the heavy burden of what Seso had wanted Bill Hammond to see.

  The ancient air had been aglow in one of the region’s fabled sunsets by the time I’d walked out into the field where her ashes had been scattered. There was no grave, but a rough-hewn, wooden marker had been sunk into her native earth. It was hand-painted and it had once borne her full name, but the windblown sand had by then reduced it to Martine A.

  I don’t know how long I stood with my hands reverently folded in front of me. Perhaps a few minutes; perhaps a little longer. But I do remember—and always will—that at one point a gust of wind had swept the field and on its wings a delicate cloud of red dust had lifted and turned and danced, like a woman around a village fire. Some of those tiny particles had risen from where Martine’s ashes had been scattered, and so it seemed to me that some part of her was actually held within the folds of that natural pirouette. I knew that they would float awhile, these particles, then return to earth, then be lifted again and returned, and lifted and returned, in a rhythm that would never end, Martine forever a dancer in the dust.

  More than anything, I’d thought as I’d watched the slow twirl of that delicate red cloud, it was to be inseparably and eternally Lubandan that had been the dream of Martine A.

  And now, at last, she was.

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  The verdict hardly mattered. I knew what I’d done, and how I’d done it.

  And by what means I had tried to get away with it.

  From the outside, the marriage of Sandrine and Samuel Madison was both untroubled and enviable: jobs at the same liberal arts college, a precocious young daughter, and a home filled with art and literature.

  But when Sandrine is found dead in their bedroom, the coroner reports an overdose of pain medication and alcohol, and Samuel finds himself on trial for her murder.

  From Edgar Award-winning author Thomas H. Cook, Sandrine is a powerful novel about the evil that can lurk within the heart of a seemingly ordinary man, and whether love can be reawakened, even after death.

  Part I

  The Coburn College community is in mourning today for the untimely death of Sandrine Madison, a much-loved professor of hi
story. Dr. Madison, who earned her advanced degrees from the Sorbonne in Paris, France, had taught at Coburn College for the last twenty-two years. She is survived by her husband, Samuel Madison, also a professor at the college, and their daughter, Alexandria.

  Coburn Sentinel

  November 16, 2010

  Day One

  Opening Argument: The Prosecution

  Lost hope conceals a rapier in its gown, Sandrine wrote in the margins of her copy of Julius Caesar. Strange, but of all the things she’d said or written, this was the line I most wrenchingly recalled on the last day of my trial. Life should fill our ears with warning, I thought as I remembered how she’d penned this little piece of marginalia alongside one of Cassius’s melancholy speeches, but it falls silent at our infant cry.

  Such was my conclusion as the jury foreman rose to render a verdict in my case, thus the moment when I would either hear, or not hear, the creak of a gallows floor. To some extent, their decision hardly mattered anymore. I knew what I’d done, and how I’d done it, and by what means I had tried to get away with it. Regardless of the verdict, my trial had exposed everything, and from it I’d learned that it is one thing to glance in a mirror, quite another to see what’s truly there.

  On the first day of my trial, however, I’d been quite beyond so naked an understanding of murder, or of anything else, for that matter. All great revelations are hard won, Sandrine once told me, perhaps as a warning. But until the ordeal of my trial, all my revelations had been small, and none of them had been hard won.

  In fact, only one truth had seemed certain to me on the day my trial began: Harold Singleton, the prosecuting attorney, was out to get me.

  “You’re the proverbial ham sandwich any public prosecutor can indict, Sam,” my lawyer, Mordecai “Morty” Salberg, had told me on the day I was charged with Sandrine’s murder. Despite certain admittedly incriminating evidence, we’d both been surprised by my indictment, and for a moment, as I’d sat in his paneled office, I’d recalled a moment, weeks before, when Detective Alabrandi had leaned forward, his dark eyes as menacing as his voice, and said to me, You’re not going to get away with this.