The Laughing Monsters

by Denis Johnson

  “I have an ocean. I’m actually assigned to a ship.”

  “In the Indian Ocean? African Atlantic?”

  “Well, it moves around. It has propellers.”

  “A carrier?”

  “Naw. A command ship. Floating office complex. Just about a luxury liner. USSOCOM.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “USSOCOM? US Special Operations Command. The ship is the regional command center.”

  “For this region.”

  “Yes.”

  “Meaning—DR Congo? East Africa?”

  “For AFRICOM. Africa. The whole continent.”

  I felt, suddenly, in love. I leaned closer to study his face. “Who are you?”

  “I’m the person who can deal.”

  “You still don’t have a name?”

  “The name I have is Susan Rice.”

  “You’re not black enough to be Susan Rice.”

  “Plus, she’s a woman.”

  “I was getting round to that.”

  “I’m the closest thing to Susan Rice.”

  She was the current national security advisor in the White House. The queen, in other words, of the secrets and the dark.

  He placed his hands on the desk before him. He liked this part. “Well, Captain Nair, you’ve rubbed the right lantern.”

  * * *

  Patrick Roux and I sat on our sandbag wall observing a gang of men creating more sandbags—not all men, actually. We often saw women wearing US uniforms. And of course we saw women among the white-garbed African prisoners. Never any kind of female civilian. Never Davidia.

  In the motor lot I counted twenty-two Nissan pickups with canopy shells. One dozen Humvees. Four Stryker fighting vehicles, each worth millions. The helicopter hangar probably housed a chopper big enough to devour them all.

  I said to Patrick, “This was more amusing when it was science fiction.”

  He appeared not to comprehend.

  The sandbag detail worked in three-person teams—the digger, the sacker, the stacker—filling bags from a heap of dirt and loading them onto a flatbed truck. I remembered reading, as a child, during the first Gulf War, that in order to supply such sacks for their emplacements the Yanks were shipping thousands of tons of American sand across the seas to the Arabian Desert.

  Within our perimeter we had a chemical port-a-potty and a vestibule containing a proper shower that ran hot water up from under the ground. Always hot. You couldn’t run it out.

  The mess served excellent fare. Real eggs, real potatoes, American meat. In the mornings we smelled the pastries baking.

  We had two sets each of the red pajamas, underwear, bedsheets, and towels, and our laundry was collected by enlisted personnel and returned clean eight hours later. That we made our own beds began to seem unreasonable.

  * * *

  For nearly an hour I sat alone. When my host arrived he didn’t sit down, hardly entered his own office. “I’ve gone over the transcripts in detail.”

  “Very good,” I said, but he’d already left the room again.

  In five minutes he returned, shut the door, and occupied his desk. I waited for an offer of coffee. He plunged into a period of meditation in the manner of Sherlock Holmes, elbows on the table, fingertips on his temples.

  “What makes you think we’d pay you off and let you stroll out of here?”

  “You’ll have to help me figure that out.”

  Silence.

  “I’ll need a convincing story.”

  Silence.

  “But if I turn up with a good enough story, and if I’ve got a bag of money to vouch for it, then the thing is in motion again, and the direction of that motion is toward something that has to be taken extremely seriously. Don’t you think?”

  “We’re taking it seriously. No matter how unlikely. This shit story from Michael Adriko—Adriko? Or Adriko.”

  “Accent on the second syllable. Adriko.”

  “A ton or more of HEU. You’re really alleging that?”

  “I can only personally vouch for the existence of two kilos, approximately—judging by its weight in my hand.”

  “You held it in your hand.”

  “I did so. Yes.” He was silent. “I don’t know anything about nuclear devices or their manufacture.” Silent. “I’m wondering, though, if a couple of kilos wouldn’t go a long way.” I wished I’d stop talking, but his silence was working on me. “I mean in terms of explosive capability. I have no explosives training. But possible damage. Destructive potential.” Still silent. “So even if two kilos is all he’s got—”

  “Would you submit to a polygraph?”

  “Oh. Well. Where—here? When?”

  “It wouldn’t be hard to arrange. Can I arrange it?”

  “Of course. If it amuses you, fine, sure, but I mean—I can tell you now, you’ll get an Inconclusive. I mean to say—I’ve been telling so many lies and listening to so many lies until I don’t know what’s true and what’s false. And we’re in Africa, you realize”—shut up shut up, I told myself, shut up—“and you realize it’s all myths and legends here, and lies, and rumors. You realize that.” I bit down on my tongue, and that worked.

  He waited, but I was done.

  “All right. Excuse me for just a minute. Help yourself to coffee. Ten minutes max.” He left the door halfway open behind him.

  The coffee urn waited within my reach. I drew myself a cup—yesterday’s, room temperature. I couldn’t form a useful thought. I kept tasting the coffee, expecting it to turn hot and fresh. Without a watch I could only guess, but it seemed rather closer to thirty minutes than ten.

  When he came back in, he drew himself a cup too and sat behind his desk, sipped once, said, “Jesus,” and then went silent.

  He interrupted his thoughts only once to say, “No polygraph.”

  He got up and went to the door and called out, “Clyde?” and sat down behind his desk again. “Take these cups, will you?” he said to the private who arrived. “And bring us a fresh service. Not the whole bucket. Just a carafe or something, okay? Leave the door open.”

  The silence resumed. I had the impression nothing in the world could happen until we had coffee.

  “I’m authorized to tell you Davidia St. Claire is on her way home.”

  “Oh…”

  “You can assume she’s been debriefed. Queried. Meticulously.”

  “You mean she’s already left?”

  “Let’s concentrate on the people in this room.”

  “Just tell me—is she gone?”

  “If she’s not, she will be soon.” The private took a step into the room and paused. “Thank you, Clyde. Is it Clyde?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Thanks. Pull the door shut as you leave.” To me he said, “I want to hear you say it.” He let the carafe languish on his desk. Poured no coffee. “I want to hear exactly what you’re proposing.”

  “Well, just what you said a few minutes ago, what you suggested.”

  “Which is?”

  “That you pay me off and let me stroll out of here. And I get back to what I was doing, and see if the deal is still in motion, or if the deal can be started up again, and see if we can bring the parties together as arranged.”

  “The parties to this proposed, this alleged, this fucking unprecedented criminal conspiracy.”

  “Yes. Those parties.”

  “You, and these Israelis, and the people Sergeant Adriko represents. If such exist.”

  “That would be the objective.”

  “A sting operation.”

  “That sounds,” I agreed, “like the applicable terminology.”

  “I think we’ve already deployed the applicable terms, fairy tale, for instance, and bullshit, what else, God,” he said, “there’s not a shred of doubt in my mind. You are fucking with us.”

  “And yet—here we are.”

  “I can’t deny it. Since nine-eleven, chasing myths and fairy tales has turned into a serious busin
ess. An industry. A lucrative one.”

  “Are we talking price now?”

  “What a silly, silly man.”

  “But if we were.”

  “Then I suppose this would be the moment when you say a number.”

  “They want two million.”

  “Cash? Or account?”

  “Gold.”

  “They expect gold?”

  “Would that be possible?”

  “Gold. What’s the price of gold these days?”

  “Around forty-five a kilo, US.”

  “Forty-five thousand. So, forty-some kilos. Forty-four plus.”

  “Call it forty-five.”

  “Forty-five kilos of gold.”

  “Could you do it?”

  The look in his eyes made me sorry for him. “Do you want to hear the truth?”

  “Yes.”

  “We can do anything.”

  * * *

  Early afternoon. I lay on my bed. I heard the sound of a helicopter coming down.

  The walls of the tent rippled. Then they convulsed. I determined to stay inside and avoid the dust, but I was visited with an intuition. I knew. I went outside.

  I stood by the sandbag hedge and watched the man I still believe to have been Colonel Thiebes, now in officer’s dress, heading for the chopper as it swayed in its descent, a duffel grip in his left hand, his right hand cupping the elbow of Davidia St. Claire.

  Davidia and her protector stopped and let the red cloud overwhelm them while the machine completed its landing. It was a utility helicopter, but not a Black Hawk, something smaller, I don’t know what kind. Davidia leaned toward its skis as they felt for the ground. She concentrated on that vision. No backward glance. The chopper had hardly touched down before they were in motion toward it.

  I ran to overtake her. I called her name. She couldn’t hear me for the roar of the blades. I called again—“Davidia!” I screamed it many times over.

  I gave up running and turned my back against the dust. In a few seconds the wind fell off and the noise got smaller. The craft must have been traveling low, because when I looked around again I could hear it, but I couldn’t find it in the sky.

  I went back into the tent and closed and zipped the flap and sat on my bed, blinking my eyes and beating the dirt from my hair hand over hand.

  * * *

  I felt a touch on my shoulder, and I woke up frightened. It was dark, quiet—very late.

  Patrick Roux said, “These are your clothes.”

  He sat there in our only chair. I could see he held something in his lap. “It’s time to get dressed.”

  He was speaking Danish.

  “What?”

  “It’s time to go. Right now the way is open.”

  “Wait. Wait … what?”

  “It’s time to go. Just take some items for grooming. What you can fit in your pockets. Here’s your wristwatch back.”

  Great joy powered me out of bed. “You fucker,” I said. “I knew it.”

  “You prefer English?” he said in English.

  “Or German,” I said. “I went to Swiss schools. The truth is I hardly speak Danish at all. Is this my shirt? I went to English-speaking schools.”

  “We have six more minutes.”

  “They’ve shrunk my shirt.”

  “Let’s be prompt.”

  * * *

  When I’d kicked my pajamas aside and dressed and was all ready to go, we delayed, I on my bed, Patrick in the chair, with nothing to do, it seemed, but listen to the rumble of the generators and the giant buzzing of the floodlights outside. He peered at his wristwatch. My own watch, the cheap dependable Timex, read 1:15 a.m.

  After two minutes he said, “Now we’ll go.”

  We stepped into the orange glare and a soft, glittering rain. Patrick zipped the tent’s fly behind us and we walked across the grounds and right through the open gateway, passing without a challenge between two gunnery emplacements, five soldiers on each, in their helmets and night goggles and armor. The gate rolled shut behind us and we entered the dark.

  The rain let up, but still we had no moon. For thirty minutes we walked along the road without flashlights, going north, feeling with our feet for the ruts and the boggy soft spots. We didn’t talk. The din of the reptiles and insects, our steps and our breaths, that’s all we heard.

  Headlights came up on the road far behind us. Shortly afterward, we heard the engine.

  We stepped to the side, and the headlights stopped fifty feet short of us, and Patrick went to the vehicle, a Humvee, I thought, but I couldn’t really see, and in a minute his silhouette came toward me and then disappeared as the car turned around and accelerated back the way it had come.

  Now Roux directed our steps with a small flashlight. I could make out a sizeable package dangling from his arm. He slung it over his shoulder. As we walked it gave out a kind of clicking and muttering.

  For quite a while the vehicle’s aura remained visible behind us. I would have expected them to run blackout headlights, but they didn’t seem to care.

  When they were well away, Roux said, “We’ll get off the road here, and take a rest.”

  “Let’s not drown in a mudhole.”

  “No, it’s good ground.”

  He found a spot he liked, laid out a handkerchief, and sat with his back to a tree. Between his knees he set down the package, a canvas haversack. He unbelted the flap, and I knelt beside him while he unpacked the contents by the beam of his penlight—it showed eerily on his eyeglass lenses, like two sparks in his face.

  On top, a large manila envelope, inside it a map of the Democratic Republic of Congo. And cash. US twenties. “This is my money.”

  “Your funds when you arrived. It’s all there.”

  No wallet, no cards of any kind. “Where’s my passport?”

  “You don’t need it.”

  Also, a manila folder—the one I’d seen on the desk of the man from USSOCOM—holding, as far as I could tell in the dark, printed copies of my e-mails, as well as my handwritten pages, and not copies, but the originals themselves. “They’re dusting their hands of me completely, aren’t they? I bet they’re burning my pajamas too.”

  Roux made no answer while I looked at some items wrapped in a hand towel. A metal fork and a spoon. A folding knife with a single blade. A penlight. “But what about a cell phone? How will I stay in contact?”

  “They’ll be able to locate you.”

  “Of course they will.”

  At the bottom of the sack rested two one-liter bottles of water, and at the very bottom, a cloth bag. Roux set the bag on the ground and opened it and trained his light on a lot of metallic lozenges, each wrapped in tissue paper.

  I held my light in my teeth and unwrapped one. Considering its heft, it was small. Three fingers would have covered it.

  A kilo of gold.

  I said, “Goddamn! Goddamn!” and the light dropped from my mouth.

  “Captain Nair, listen to me. In the first place, these are only twenty kilos.”

  “That’s still a million dollars’ worth. Goddamn!”

  “Stop saying Goddamn.” Roux set down his penlight and paused to polish his glasses on his shirttail. Squatting over my pile of riches. “In the second place, these are not genuine.”

  “Well, then, fuck. Fuck and Goddamn. Not genuine?”

  He unwrapped another, shone his light on it, turning it in his dirty fingers. “The plating is copper and nickel, with some gold. Inside it’s only lead.”

  “Who’s going to fall for crap like this?”

  “Nobody. It works only with complete amateurs—you know, drunken tourists lured in by pimps, that kind of thing. It’s not for serious ruses, it won’t pass any kind of knowledgeable inspection. It’s something you can flash, nothing more. It’s just for you to flash.”

  “This is outrageous.”

  Roux laughed and said, “I laugh because you’re entertaining. I’m going back now.” He scooped up the contents and fastened
them inside the pack and stood up. He seemed in a rush. “Yours to carry.”

  I donned the pack. The load was heavy, but it was good equipment. Thick straps. I could probably hike a long way without chafing my armpits.

  Facing him I understood, only now, that he was perhaps as tall as I. But he had a tininess of personality, and a sparrow’s face, also tiny. So then even his size was an illusion. His Frenchness, his bag of gold, his lost wife—all fake.

  “I’m instructed to tell you to get physically close to certain parties, keeping this material with you.”

  “That was my understanding.”

  “They’ll maintain a fix on your location at all times. Remember that.”

  “Is this a drone operation?”

  “I’m not aware of such a thing.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m only a messenger, but I can assure you personally you won’t be harmed. We don’t fight like that, harming our own people.”

  “Sure. Except when you do.”

  He said, “Don’t worry. Never worry. And don’t drop your mission.”

  “I wouldn’t consider it.”

  “If you do,” Roux said, “if you drop out of contact—you’ll be in an unacceptable situation. A kind of hell. Always hunted. Never resting. Nobody who tries it can last very long. You know it, don’t you? Nobody ever lasts.”

  * * *

  The US Army kept their garrison well out of the way. I had the road entirely to myself. By the fragrance, I guessed it cut through a forest of eucalyptus. The sack’s contents clicked rhythmically and with every step I said yes, finally, yes, at last: I’m done with you all, done with your world, done with you all, done with your world.

  Twenty kilos of nonsense on my shoulders. How many pounds? Better than forty. More like forty-five. How many stone? Something like three. Right around seven hundred ounces. Yet the pack felt weightless, until my giant excitement gave way to the question why I wasn’t getting rid of it. Some item among the contents called out uninterruptedly to a global positioning satellite, a chopper full of Special Ops, a Predator drone, a fleet of drones—called out, after all, to the people who would either bring order to my affairs in a prison or murder me and solve my life.

  I trudged for five hours, covering in that interval only a few miles. The dawn had begun—as always this near the equator very gradually, and even doubtfully—before I spied any huts among the trees.