“I didn’t want to drive my car.”
“How come?”
“It’s kind of acting up.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“The . . . motor sounds funny.”
“Let me take a look at it.”
“I’ll take it in tomorrow. No big deal.”
“Hey, you never know. Maybe it’s something simple. I’ll take it for a spin.”
She had painted herself into a corner. If the intention of the scene was to avoid his finding out that there was nothing wrong with her car and that she took a taxi with Didier Onyekachukwu for some other, compromising reason, she wasn’t accomplishing it. She dredged down into the improv well and came up dry.
Marcy got her car keys, handed them to Sammy, and watched him head off toward the parking garage. “Thanks,” she called after him.
Then, as he disappeared into the elevator, she remembered that she had left Evelyn Duboff’s name and address on a Post-It note on her glove compartment. JB INVESTIGATIONS: DISCREET, RELIABLE, REASONABLE.
Okay. There were a number of reasons one could consult a private detective besides investigating other people’s assets. Right? She poured herself a glass of cranberry juice and sat down to come up with a plausible reason for why she had seen the detective.
She worked up a scenario. Research for a movie role she had been offered. A female private detective movie she was up for—a kind of modern film noir. Opposite Russell Crowe—no, Jimmy Caan, more age-appropriate. Warner Brothers. Shooting in Rancho Cucamonga, maybe Fullerton, in December or November, depending on locations. Soderbergh was supposed to direct, but they were talking to Ang Lee. . . .
All this because Didier Onyekachukwu didn’t own a car.
Sammy didn’t ask when he returned with her keys. Instead he told her that she needed a tune-up.
“Your plugs are dirty.”
Tomorrow she would take her car in for a fucking tune-up, she promised. She would sneak out early before the African was up so that she wouldn’t have to explain why her car was no longer malade.
Four hundred and fifty-nine dollars later, her car was running beautifully. They found a couple of other “little problems” in addition to her dirty spark plugs that needed to be taken care of. Shopping for a man was getting more expensive. Marcy was up to fifteen hundred dollars and counting.
A week later, the detective called and suggested she come into the office.
This time Marcy skipped makeup and wardrobe. She wore a lightweight tracksuit and had her hair tied up in a ponytail. More Diane Keaton incognito at the dry cleaner’s than Barbara Stanwyck with a private eye.
Evelyn Duboff was eating a tuna sandwich at her desk, which was littered with file folders. “Sorry,” she apologized. “I missed lunch today. What’s with the schleppy wardrobe?”
“I just didn’t feel like dressing.”
She leaned back in her swivel chair and said, “You got some taste in men, darling.”
What the hell did that mean?
“I don’t know quite how to put this but, well, neither of these guys are who they’re supposed to be. Let me rephrase that. They have both gone out of their way to disguise their true identities. I can’t prove this, but I’d bet my bippy that Sammy Dee and Didier Whatchamacallit are not the names they were born with.”
“How do you know that?”
“I’ve been doing this long enough to develop a seat-of-the-pants feeling about this kind of thing, and let me tell you, my backside is ringing off the hook. You’re dealing with a couple of real shifty characters here.”
Marcy slumped into her seat. This was not what she wanted to hear. She had come to this woman for reassurance, and it looked as if she were getting anything but. Was she going to have to start auditioning all over again?
“Let me give you an example. Sammy, the Jewish one? First of all, if he’s Jewish, I’m Mormon. Some people have, what do you call it, gay-dar, you know, they can tell if a man is gay. Well, I got Jew-dar. And, you ask me, this guy is about as Jewish as the Pope.”
“He said his father changed their family name on Ellis Island.”
“Maybe on Staten Island. Dee is a Polish Ellis Island name. Sandra Dee? Her real name was Sandra Cymboliak. There’s no will. No divorce records, no next of kin anywhere. What kind of Jew has no family anywhere? Jews have families, even if they don’t like them. No ex-wife? Really? Guy’s not a faygeleh and he’s pushing seventy, there’s got to be at least one, if not a couple of women, in his past. Zero women? Please. Cement business? Pretty squishy, if you’ll pardon the expression. Most of the cement in this country comes from Mexico. Wait, it gets better. Did you know he was getting into the art business?”
“Sammy? No, that’s Didier.”
“That’s what I thought, too, but guess who just borrowed twenty-five grand from Wells Fargo to open an art gallery. And this is just the obvious stuff. It’s the numbers that give him away.”
“Huh?”
“Social security number and driver’s license number. A person’s social can tell you something about their age, where they were born, how long they’ve been in this country. There are sequences that have meaning, and, with the right databases, you can make certain assumptions about someone. And then there are the funny numbers. Funny numbers are computer-generated numbers that the government comes up with when they’re trying to conceal someone’s identity.”
“Why would the government want to do that?”
“I thought you were in the movie business. You never heard of witness protection?”
“You mean, like, for the mafia?”
“It’s not just for the mob. The SEC’s doing it, too. When the government wants someone to blow the whistle on some big fish, they make a deal. They set you up with a whole new life—new name, new location, new social security number, new everything.”
“You think Sammy is in witness protection?”
“Maybe, maybe not. Maybe he did it all himself. Look, there are a number of reasons someone does an identity scrub that have nothing to do with crime. Could be romantic disappointment, business disaster. It’s the modern version of the French Foreign Legion. You become Monsieur X.”
Evelyn Duboff polished off the last of her tuna sandwich, chugged some orange juice straight from the container.
“I don’t know any of this for a fact, but I’ll bet you his name isn’t Sammy Dee, he’s not Jewish, and he’s never been in the cement business. The rest, I don’t know.”
“Does he have any money?”
“Not in the bank, at least. Apart from the twenty-five grand he borrowed from Wells Fargo, which is down to nineteen as we speak. The car is a three-year lease, five-ninety-nine a month. He’s into MasterCard for over eleven grand.”
“Jesus . . .” Marcy sat there, exhaling, shaking her head slowly, as if a doctor had just given her bad news.
“You want to hear about the African?”
“I don’t know—do I?”
“Well, the good news is that I know a lot less about him. Most of the schmutz on him is in France. And it’s in French. I could get a translator involved, but we’re talking serious money. You’re already over a thousand.”
“Just tell me, is he really from Côte d’Ivoire?”
“I couldn’t find any birth records for him. But then, African birth records are a little approximate. Sometimes they forget to write things down. Ivory Coast is a former French colony, and a lot of them go to France, so I tried running the name there and came up with a match. Of course, it could be a different Didier Onyekachukwu, but with a name like that, I doubt it. He pops up in Nice in 1984, working in the—you’ll love this—fashion business. Right? This guy is giving Yves Saint Laurent a run for his money. You ask me, the fashion stuff was a front for something else. I smell drugs. Or maybe guns. But not high-class rags, that I can tell you. A straight African in the shmata business? I don’t think so.”
“He says he’s importing African art. Sculpt
ure, fertility statues . . .”
“Probably is. The thing is, do you know what’s in the statues?”
“C’mon, really?”
“Darling, I’m just doing my job here. Guy with his background in the art business? Living—no offense—in a down-market Palm Springs condo development? If he’s in the drug business, he’s not very good at it.”
Marcy sat there inhaling the soy oil fumes drifting up from below. She felt exhausted. Depressed. Defeated. And she must have looked it.
“Look, tell you what. I’ll keep looking, see if I can turn some more stuff up. Maybe I’ll find something good.”
“I can’t afford any more.”
“I’ll do it off the clock.” She shrugged and said, by way of explanation, “We girls got to stick together.”
Marcy drove home through the frying-pan heat, feeling worse than she had in a very long time. How could she have been so stupid?
What was it with her taste in men? Two dreadful husbands, a profusion of sub-standard lovers, and now, when she should have known better, was this the best she could come up with? An ex-mafioso and an African gunrunner?
As she drove in to Purgatory Gardens, she saw Didier at the pool playing Scrabble with Tuuli. Or was it Majda?
He waved. She didn’t wave back. She went inside, curled up with Klaus, and had herself a good cry.
III
DIDIER
When he was Minister of Economics and Finance for one of Burkina Faso’s unelected presidents, Didier Onyekachukwu (née Koffi Gbadabo, a.k.a. Blaise Gbadabo) had managed to make a number of people rich, including himself. Not bad for a young man from the bush of Upper Volta, the seventeenth child of a yam farmer with three wives, an earthen-walled house with an ostrich egg on the roof, a scrawny goat, and a patch of reluctant soil.
In spite of the poverty, it wasn’t an unhappy childhood in Gouya. Koffi and his brothers and sisters had the run of the village. There was no electricity or running water, and no school to speak of—except the Muslim religious school, which his father, because of his fondness for palm wine, spared his children from attending. Before he was old enough to help in the fields, Koffi was allowed to run free, swim in the stream, torment the dogs, and climb the baobab trees.
All this bliss came to an end when his father decided to send him to a missionary school in a neighboring town. Koffi had to leave his happy home to learn about the Stations of the Cross. The adjustment wasn’t easy for an eight-year-old who had never worn shoes or eaten with a fork. The monks were intolerant of any divergence from “le chemin au ciel.” As far as Koffi was concerned, he had already been on the path to heaven, splashing in the stream, dropping baobab nuts on old men passing underneath, happily playing with his budding penis. Now he wasn’t allowed to touch it except to pee, which he had to do in a ceramic bowl instead of in the fresh air, competing with his friends to see who could arc the stream farther.
Koffi did well in school. He grasped the cold beauty of the Pythagorean theorem, as well as the imperfect subjunctive of irregular verbs. The monks gave him a new name—Blaise, after the seventeenth-century French philosopher.
By the time he was thirteen, he barely resembled the little savage who had arrived at the school five years before in a pair of torn shorts. He could solve quadratic equations, list the kings of France from Charlemagne all the way to Louis-Philippe, and quote large portions of the gospel according to Luke.
At the same time he began sneaking out the window to visit the village girls at night after the friars had locked the dormitory door. After he impregnated a fourteen-year-old girl, the friars hustled him off to complete his education in their school in Ouagadougou.
The capital resembled a dusty French provincial town, with open sewers and enough eclectic European architecture to give it delusions of grandeur. Blaise Gbadabo, as he was now known, became a student at the Lycée Voltaire, earning his room and board by washing dishes in the refectory kitchen.
Blaise finished fourth in his class at the Lycée Voltaire, and he was offered a scholarship to attend the Sorbonne. He didn’t hesitate. Two months before his eighteenth birthday, he was on an Air France flight to Le Bourget Airport in Paris, carrying nothing but a cardboard suitcase with two pairs of trousers, a half-dozen shirts, and the bible that the friars had given him as a graduation present.
As soon as he got off the bus at the Gare de Lyon, young Blaise was overcome by the energy, the color, the smells of food, perfume, and wine. And women. All those women in their cotton dresses, legs exposed, eyes and mouths made up alluringly.
What he loved most about Paris was the feeling that, at any given moment, anything could happen. Life swirled around him on the streets, in the cafés, on the métro. He was convinced that on every street there was an adventure awaiting him. All he had to do was turn the corner.
Blaise walked the streets of the city, soaking it all in—the architecture, the history in every stone, the blur of color. He loved sitting in a café for hours with nothing but a three-franc cup of coffee, watching the movie of life around him. He loved the rich subtlety of the language, the ability to find meanings within meanings, to discover what he thought in words. He loved the food—the complexity of its textures and sauces—and the variety of wines, each one a little different from the other.
But mostly, he loved the women. Unlike in Ouagadougou, where if you looked at a French woman too pointedly you risked getting rebuked (or worse), here the women returned your look.
Blaise was tall and slender and moved with natural grace. He got invitations to dances, to picnics in the Bois de Boulogne, to swim at the Piscine Deligny—the public pool beside the Seine where women sunbathed topless—and often to girls’ rooms late at night. He would arrive at these small chambres de bonne, walking up the six flights of stairs, to be greeted at the door by Brigitte, by Marie-Louise, by Agnès, in a pair of American blue jeans and a tight sweater, which he would soon have the pleasure of removing.
When Upper Volta became the autonomous République de Haute-Volta in 1960, Blaise decided it was time to go home. There were too many opportunities for a young man with a degree in economics from the Sorbonne. Four years after he had left, he returned, this time with a Louis Vuitton suitcase containing silk underwear, cashmere sweaters, and a bottle of Yves St. Laurent cologne.
Back in his village, there was a feast in his honor, with roasted goat meat, manioc, cassava, and palm wine. The drums beat under a harvest moon, and Blaise danced until he collapsed. In the middle of the night, he was visited by his father’s youngest wife, a comely girl named Afia from a neighboring village, and nine months later his stepmother made him a father for the first time.
By that time, his own father could no longer keep track of whom among his wives he was sleeping with and when, so the child was assumed to be his. The result was that Blaise’s son was also his stepbrother, but in rural Africa these distinctions didn’t count for much.
In Ouagadougou, he found work as an uncertified accountant for a cotton dealer. Moussa Doukabe, a former schoolmate at the Lycée Voltaire, offered Blaise a job helping him run the business. Moussa knew cotton, but he didn’t know numbers, and he needed the Sorbonne graduate and his knowledge of economics.
It was both an exhilarating and dangerous time to be in West Africa. Africans were running their country for the first time, learning on the job how to do the things that the French had always done for them. There was a great deal of both idealism and corruption. The fault lines of tribal differences, smoothed over by the colonial powers, reemerged and replaced meritocracy with favoritism.
It didn’t take long for the young Sorbonne graduate to get noticed. By his second year in Ouagadougou, he was a man about town, spending his days making money and his evenings in the city’s nightclubs, dancing the High Life and going home with his pick of pretty young women.
A year and a half into his work with Moussa Doukabe, Blaise was offered a government job. He would be making less money than he had
been exporting cotton, but he realized he could acquire two things that, at his stage in life, were worth even more than money—contacts and influence. So he left Moussa and went to work in the Ministry of Economics and Finance.
At the Ministry he saw firsthand how influence was peddled, how money was channeled to friends and family, siphoned off by those who knew how to disguise what they were doing. While the vast majority of the people of Upper Volta remained mired in poverty, a small cadre of them became rich. They lived like feudal lords, driving Mercedes, keeping mistresses, and treating their servants worse than the French had.
Ouagadougou in 1960 was like Dodge City a century earlier. You needed a big gun and a bigger set of balls. Blaise Gbadabo had the latter, and he compensated for his lack of family connections with audacity and brains. The Sorbonne had taught him how to read the market fluctuations, and his vantage point in the Ministry of Economics and Finance enabled him to exploit this knowledge. He knew who to pay off, how much to give them, and how to tap dance around the repressive tax laws enacted by the legislature.
It was soon clear to his superiors at the ministry that this young man was worth knowing. Undersecretaries came to him for advice, gave him money to invest, and rewarded him with promotions. Two years in, he was working directly under the deputy minister, Etienne Tsadeko, a fun-loving man with a similar taste for good living. At night, the two young bachelors prowled the bas fonds of Ouagadougou, returning to Etienne’s house in the wee hours with a bottle of Remi Martin and a couple of young women to help them drink it.
Etienne told Blaise that the military was planning a coup, that the young, French-trained colonels could be running the country within a year. Accordingly, Blaise began to cultivate the men in the stylish, Paris-tailored uniforms and sunglasses. They, too, had a taste for women and money, and Blaise knew how to provide them with both. It wasn’t long before the young man with the Sorbonne degree was speculating successfully on the cotton market for his new friends.
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