by Cari Z
“I make an excellent handler, which is practically the same thing.”
Alex had gotten a similar treatment, although his preparations included going over the contents of a bag full of illegal weapons—well, illegal in France at least. I wasn’t sure what their status was in Burkina Faso and I hoped I wouldn’t have to find out. If we were stopped by the wrong fonctionnaire, if the police or border guards decided to look more closely….
Well, we’d deal with it when we had to. Don’t borrow trouble, I reminded myself, taking a deep breath as we settled into our seats on the plane. Enough of it is going to find you without your imagination helping things along. I had no illusions that this next phase was going to go perfectly smoothly—we were trying to steal the scepter out from under Corday’s hands while she met with a passel of gangsters, after all—but I hoped we’d manage it without bloodshed.
I fell asleep ten minutes after takeoff—didn’t even last long enough to collect my complimentary beverage or bag of pretzels. When I woke up, hours later, we were already descending into Thomas Sankara International Airport, in Ouagadougou. I lifted my head off Alex’s shoulder, then blushed when I realized I’d probably been sleeping on him for the past eight hours.
“Oh, I’m—I’m sorry about that. It can’t have been comfortable for you.”
He smiled at me. His face looked better today—still colorful, but the swelling was almost gone, and the little cuts were all scabbed over. “If I didn’t like it, I would have tilted you the other way, Mal.”
He wasn’t just tolerating it, he’d liked it. My ridiculous heart wanted to make more of that than it should, pounding in my chest so loudly I was sure Alex would be able to hear it. I cleared my throat. “That’s good to know.” I glanced out the window, hoping it would distract me, and it absolutely did.
The landscape below was a vast cityscape, broken here and there by rich, reddish-brown roads and bright green vegetation. The buildings themselves were almost uniformly rectangular, at least from above, except for one, which looked to be shaped vaguely like a pyramid.
“That’s the parliament building,” Alex told me when I pointed it out. “It’s pretty new.”
“It’s gorgeous.” The whole city was fascinating, warm and inviting-looking in a way not even Marseille had managed.
“Hold on to that mindset,” Alex advised me. I didn’t question what he meant until we stepped out of the plane, and—
The heat hit me like an anvil, hot enough to take my breath away. “My God,” I gasped. “How hot is it?”
“A little over a hundred degrees, I think.”
“How hot in Celsius?”
“Forty degrees.”
“But it’s only May,” I protested. “I thought it was supposed to be rainy here right now!”
Alex chuckled. “The rain doesn’t lower the temperature all that much. We’re not that far from the Sahara Desert, you know.”
I’d known that intellectually, of course, but it was another thing entirely to be thrust into it face-first. Americans might rave about the desirability of a “dry heat,” but it felt like my eyeballs were evaporating.
“This is actually a great time to visit,” Alex said as we made our way with the rest of the passengers to the baggage claim. “It’s cooler during the harmattan, but the dust is a killer.”
“I’ll have to take your word for it.”
By the time we retrieved our bags and managed to remove ourselves from the airport, it was nearly noon. We were supposed to meet our ride at his hotel in… five minutes. “He won’t leave without us, will he?” I asked, trying to keep my anxiety in check.
Alex shook his head. “Based on what Carter said, we’re more likely to be prying this guy out of bed or away from the bar than making him wait for us. Trust me, we’re fine.” He looked at the line of taxis in front of the airport and moved toward the yellow ones. “The green are shared rides,” he explained. “We want something private.” He waved down a taxi driver in a brightly patterned pagne shirt, who trotted over to us and took my bag with a pleasant smile.
“Bonjour, messieurs. Où allez-vous?”
“À l’Hôtel Avenir, s’il vous plaît,” Alex replied. “Ҫa fait combien?”
“Eh.” The man looked us and our baggage over. “Deux milles.”
Alex shook his head. “Mille francs.”
“Mais monsieur, c’est hors de mon chemin. Mille cinq cents.”
Alex shook his head. “Ya nassara damba raaba ligidi.”
The man started laughing. “Bon, d’accord. Pour vous deux, mille deux cent cinquante.”
“Bon, ça va. Merci.”
The driver nodded. “Pas de problème,” he said as he led the way over to his cab. The taxi’s seats were brutally hot from the sun, but at least they were fabric and not fake leather. We took all our bags into the back seat with us, and a moment later the driver pulled into the airport traffic and headed away from the city center.
I wanted to get a better look—it was my first time in Burkina Faso, I’d never been farther south than Morocco before—but I was exhausted and felt like I was still trying to catch my breath. We got onto a highway and I rolled my window down a bit. It was like being stuck in front of a hair dryer but slightly better than smoldering in stillness.
“Here.” Alex pressed a cool bottle of water into my hands. I took it gratefully, snapping off the cap and downing half of it in one long swallow.
“Where did that come from?” I asked once I’d gotten my breath back.
“The plane, a few minutes before you woke up. I thought you might be feeling dry.” He nodded toward the bottle. “Feel free to finish it. If you don’t stay hydrated here, you’ll pay for it. Sickest I ever got was a bout of heat stroke after being in the sun all day. I was out of action for a week. Carter never let me hear the end of it.”
I snorted. “Not to be impolite, but your friend is an arsehole.”
“Yeah, I know.” He sounded fond, somehow. His phone buzzed, and he took it out of his pocket and glanced at it, frowned, then shoved it back again without answering.
“Who was that?”
“Nobody important.”
That was clearly not the whole truth, but I chose not to press. Instead I looked outside with a bit more vigor now that I wasn’t on the verge of boiling out of my skin.
The buildings on my side of the street were mostly large, commercial things, painted in light colors to combat the penetrating heat of the sun. We passed a shopping mall, then turned left. A few blocks down, a beautiful big hotel rose up on the left-hand side of the street.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” Alex said as he followed my gaze. “There’s no way the US is paying for a Peace Corps employee to stay there.” Sure enough, not a block later we turned right, stopping in front of a three-story, peach-colored building trimmed in white. HOTEL AVENIR, the sign above the entrance read. The parking lot held mostly motorcycles—motos, they were called here—and one black SUV with the symbol of the Peace Corps on a sticker on the back window.
“Right place,” Alex murmured. He got out of the cab first, taking two bags and leaving just one for me before walking around to the driver. “Merci encore, monsieur,” he said, handing over one note and a handful of change.
“De rien, de rien.” They chatted a bit more in French while I worked my way off the seat and into the open air, closing the door tentatively—it looked like it was held on by rust and hope as much as anything else. Once I was out, Alex led the way into the hotel.
“Carter said this place didn’t have a restaurant, but it does have a—ah.” He turned to the right and entered a small, and thankfully, air-conditioned bar. There were a few people sitting at tables, drinking and eating from Styrofoam containers as they watched a football match on the television, but only one of them was a white guy, and he was at the bar, knocking back a glass of whiskey. He was about my height but heavyset and mostly bald, wearing a suit but no tie, and sporting a few days’ worth of whiskers
on his face. He looked… rough, was the best way I could think of putting it.
Alex didn’t hesitate, just sat down beside the man. “Mr. Klein?”
The drinker glanced his way. “You Alex Tucker?”
“That’s me. This is my companion, Professor Armstrong.”
He glanced back at me, and now I could see the redness in his nose and eyes, and the odd paleness in his cheeks. He looked… well, he looked like he was about to keel over. “Great,” he grunted. “Hope you don’t mind makin’ a lot of pit stops on the way south, because I’ve got a case of the runs that won’t fuckin’ quit.”
“You need some Imodium?” Alex offered.
“Nah, then I won’t go for a week, and with my luck the little fucker living in my guts will lay eggs and make my life even more of a living hell.”
“You have a parasite?” I blurted. “Shouldn’t you see a doctor, then?”
The man—Mr. Klein, apparently—eyed me blearily. “You’re new, aren’t you? He’s new,” he said accusingly to Alex. “Carter told me you guys had experience down here.”
“I’ve got more than enough for both of us,” Alex said. “Now, if we could—”
Mr. Klein rounded on me again. “What’s a doctor gonna tell me to do, huh? Just put me on drugs that won’t let me drink, and I’m not ready for that level of bullshit yet. Alcohol is all that makes these roads bearable.” He stared morosely down into his empty glass.
“They seemed quite nice to me,” I said.
“Yeah, ’cause we’re still in Burkina. Wait till we get to Togo.” Without bothering to explain further, he heaved himself up off his stool and laid some money on the counter. “Might as well get going,” he said with a sigh. “I’m gonna stop by the crapper one last time, though.” He lumbered out of the bar, and I stared at Alex.
“This is the expert who’s going to get us past the border with no one the wiser?” I exclaimed as quietly as it was possible to exclaim.
“Yeah. He’s perfect for it.”
“For God’s sake, how is he perfect for anything?”
“He’s a wealthy, tired, sick American in a private car who’s too ill to be bothered with formalities, which means he’s willing to pay a little extra to get special attention. That’s going to fly, trust me. If he looked more official, the border guards would feel more like they had to do their due diligence. As it is, they’re just going to take his money and wave him, and us, through.”
“Oh.” It made a certain, horrifying kind of sense. “But what if we were terrorists?”
Alex shrugged. “As soon as we’re over the border, we’d be Togo’s problem. And these folks are used to seeing Peace Corps volunteers around, Mal. They won’t blink, trust me.”
“But we’re not volunteers!” Admittedly, I didn’t know much about the program but I’d seen pictures, and it seemed like everyone was a fresh-faced, optimistic-looking young person just out of university, ready to change the world.
“They don’t know that. There’s no age limit, Mal, and besides, we’re not pretending to be something we’re not, we’re just… catching a ride with a friend and being quiet about who we actually are. It’s fine.”
It seemed like a very dubious proposition, but if Alex thought it would work, then I would trust him. He glanced at the bar, a speculative look on his face. “I’m going to go talk to Klein’s driver and see if he’s got a cooler on board. When Klein reappears, just… get him moving in the right direction, okay?”
“Sounds delightful.”
Alex grinned at my dry-as-dust tone and headed outside. I watched a little of the match—two Tunisian teams who were going at each other hard—before I noticed Mr. Klein weaving toward the bar again. I got up and redirected him.
“Let’s head to your car, shall we?” I said, turning him toward the exit with both hands on his massive shoulders.
“I don’t know, I—” He belched against the back of one hand. “Maybe I should stay another day here, just to rest up.”
Oh no, that wouldn’t do at all. “Nonsense, it’ll be cooler and more comfortable in the back of your lovely vehicle,” I said firmly, pushing him ahead of me. The kind-faced woman from the front desk opened the door for us, and I gratefully merci’d her as I oriented Mr. Klein toward his car.
Alex was already there, chatting in French with a dark-skinned man wearing a blue and pink set of pagne shirt and trousers. “This is Koffi, Mr. Klein’s driver,” Alex introduced us as we got close. We shook hands, and then he took over the care and maintenance of Mr. Klein, opening the rear door for him and ensuring he made it into the very back, where three large seats were barely enough to support the big guy’s head and torso. Mr. Klein grumbled about it, but he simmered down as soon as the air conditioning was going. By the time we were back on the road and Ouagadougou was behind us, he was asleep and snoring to wake the dead. I didn’t even care—it was too cool and lovely in here to mind it.
Ours was definitely the nicest car on the road. I hadn’t expected that. I mean, it was good, but it wouldn’t pass for a luxury vehicle back home, not by a long shot. But everything else we saw was either small sedans, usually loaded down with anywhere from five to ten people, vans that looked like moving mushrooms with the enormous piles of goods packed on top of them, or huge trucks with foldable cots tied to the back of the cab.
The landscape was red with dirt, brown with rock, and green with trees and fields, broken here and there by concrete-block buildings or traditional huts topped with tin sheets or grasses. I saw herds of hump-backed cows with long horns, the shade of their hides matching the dun-colored sand, and every village or town we passed through seemed to have at least one goat or chicken that flirted with danger by straying too close to the road. Women laid grains out to dry at the edges of the pavement, and vendors hawked their wares at every stop along the way.
It was beautiful, and I didn’t even realize that three hours had gone by until suddenly we were at the border between Burkina Faso and Togo, in a town called Cinkasse. We stopped at an enormous, round building, where every door led to a different government branch. Our driver greeted the customs and immigration officer who came out to meet us, and after a brisk conversation and a disbursement of some cash, we had new visas in our passports and were waved over the border. They didn’t even bother to look at Mr. Klein’s papers.
“I told you,” Alex said, sounding a little smug. “They know him, and Koffi seems to know everyone.”
“Yes, yes, your network is a thing of wonder, lo and behold,” I replied, but in truth I was rather impressed. “The capital is, what, six hundred kilometers away now? That’s not so bad.”
“It all depends on the road. We’ll probably stop for the night in—Kara?” He addressed the last word to Koffi, who nodded his agreement and added something, probably the name of a hotel. “Kara, which means we might get to Lomé by noon if we leave by, oh, six in the morning, maybe.”
I lowered my voice. “Will that be enough time?” I asked. Tomorrow was the day Corday was holding her auction for the scepter, after all.
“Robert’s been keeping me updated,” Alex said quietly. “He’s got people on site keeping track of where she is and what she’s doing. The local cops are on standby, just in case we can’t get there in time—and that’s a worst-case scenario, trust me,” he added, looking grim around the mouth for a moment, “but I think it’ll work out.”
“Why is involving the police a worst-case scenario?” It seemed rather sensible to me, given that we were looking at more people than just Corday and her partner, who were bad enough all on their own.
Alex sighed. “Police means bureaucracy, and bureaucracy means everyone trying to take credit for something before it even gets done. Plus, if they get their hands on the scepter, it’s just as likely to be claimed by them as it is to be returned to us. Remember, we have no legal documents proving that it belongs to Mr. Ashad. Getting it back would be a nightmare, and we’d almost certainly miss our deadline.”
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“But we wouldn’t get shot,” I pointed out.
“We’re not going to get shot anyway. Guns aren’t as easy to come by down here, and Corday is an idiot if she lets her potential buyers in to see her without confiscating their weapons. It’ll work out.”
I thought that was rather optimistic of him, considering how very not well things had worked out already, but it wasn’t as if I had a better idea at the ready. “If you say so.”
We headed south along the highway, the sole road that ran the length of Togo, as far as I could tell. It was just two lanes for the most part, and there were significant stretches of it that weren’t paved, or were so covered in potholes that they might as well have not been paved. Koffi knew how to get around, though, and the drive was as smooth as could be expected.
Klein woke up as we entered the city of Dapaong, and he immediately groaned about the rumbling in his guts and insisted we pull over so he could relieve himself. It was crowded on the roads and the street—“jour de marché” according to Koffi—but he pulled the car over at the end of a long, rather lovely street next to what looked like the local post office and helped Mr. Klein out of the back.
“Stretch your legs?” Alex offered, and I nodded. We stepped outside and were almost immediately surrounded by women from the nearby market, some of them carrying platters or baskets on their head, some of them holding veritable bouquets of skewers in their arms. “Mouton! Soja! Vrai viande, monsieur, c’est vrai viande.” A few of them held up toys or sported clear sachets full of bright red liquid.
“It’s a drink made with hibiscus syrup,” Alex said when he caught me staring. “Do you want some?”
“Is it safe to drink?” I asked, tempted but not willing to end up like our fellow traveler.
“Probably, they boil it to make it.” He bought two of them for fifty francs, handed one to me, then bit into the end of his own and sucked it down in a few seconds. I made to follow suit, but didn’t get quite as good a seal with my lips and ended up dumping half of the sachet down my front.
The woman who’d sold it to us clapped her hands and shook her head, then held out another two sachets toward Alex. “Encore, monsieur.”