WHEN IS IT TIME to flee your country? “When they shoot your dogs,” is what people say. There was no warning — there seldom is — not even the sound of a car or truck pulling up at the high, chain-locked gate. The dogs barked once, more in surprise than fear or anger, a yelp of astonishment, then a rapid set of gunshots, six or seven, and the two Rottweilers were dead. Andy and Beemus — Woodrow’s pride, his beautiful black thugs imported from Zimbabwe, goofy, meat-eating playmates for his children and fierce protectors of his household — lay in the driveway between the rear of the Mercedes and the iron gate, large mounds of bleeding black dirt, as four helmeted soldiers carrying automatic rifles opened the gate as if they had the key — wait, they did have the key: in the dark we saw that one of the soldiers … no, it was a civilian with them, a man wearing a navy-blue suit and tie, looking as if he’d just come from a board meeting, a man whom both Woodrow and I recognized at once, in spite of the soft gloom that surrounded him, when he looked across the yard at us and dropped the key in a showy way into the breast pocket of his suit jacket, at which point Woodrow and I heard a truck rumble to a stop on the street beyond the gate and wall, and a second later the yard was filled with soldiers.
As many as twenty, I would later recall, but to do so I had to concentrate on where in the driveway and yard, patio and house the soldiers had positioned themselves, which was difficult for me afterwards, because mainly I remembered first the dogs’ being shot dead in a single burst of gunfire, Woodrow leaping from his chair and knocking the wine bottle onto the tile floor, where it smashed into tiny green slivers, and my realization that the boys were barefoot.
“Stay inside!” I shouted to them. “Don’t come out here!” I wasn’t as frightened yet of the stone-faced young soldiers as of the broken glass that could cut my babies’ tender, pink-bottomed feet. “Don’t come out here till I sweep!” I yelled, when Woodrow and I were suddenly surrounded by these men, Samuel Doe’s own personal security force. I noticed that much, but since they were with, possibly led by, our friend and Woodrow’s colleague, Charles Taylor, then the soldiers had no imaginable reason to be here.
I remember feeling oddly distant from them and unafraid, in spite of what I knew about these men, their cold-blooded brutality and sadism, their fearful capacity for murder, rape, torture, and worse. The stories I’d heard — rumors is all they were — of drug-fueled ritual dismemberments, amputations, cannibalism, were of a savagery beyond anything I’d ever read or heard of before and still I had not yet decided whether to believe them. One couldn’t believe those stories; human beings just don’t act that way. Anyhow, this wasn’t happening to me. It was as if I were watching a movie, an amateur movie staged as some sort of training exercise made for new recruits from the countryside. This is how you bring in an important man for questioning by the leader. You kill his dogs first. Then with a key obtained earlier from the man’s caretaker — who may well be his nephew or brother-in-law, but not to worry, the man will know the consequences if he refuses to turn over the key — you simply open the gate and quickly seal off all means of escape from the compound. You place the important man and his white American wife under guard with four of your men, the same four who shot the dogs and were the first to enter the compound, while the others round up the three terrified little boys in their pajamas, their useless, hysterical nanny, the sleeping maid — the children and the servants to be kept under guard in a room of the house well out of sight of the mother and the father, preferably a room without windows, the utility room at the back. All this is to take place in thirty to forty-five seconds, during which time you slap handcuffs on the important man. Treat him roughly, as if he were a goat going to slaughter. And keep between him and his wife. Push her against the outer wall of the house. Don’t look at her eyes, her strange, pale blue eyes. Everyone, even including the civilian in charge of the operation, Charles Taylor, who will be known personally to the woman and the important man, will speak only in Liberian, so she won’t understand what is happening or else she’s likely to interfere and complicate matters. Her husband, the important man, will understand all too well.
I remember that their eyes locked, Woodrow’s and Charles’s, and I realized that one of the two had betrayed the other, or perhaps not yet; but both knew that, if it hadn’t happened yet, the betrayal was coming. It was a strange, fierce exchange of gazes between the two men, the minister and the man who had been sent to fetch him by the leader, that illiterate ex-sergeant, Samuel Doe, the master of the coup that had executed the previous president and his cabinet three years earlier. I knew him; we all did. Liberia is a small country, and we all knew what kind of man he was. His paranoia and secrecy and penchant for torture had kept the country loyal out of fear of him, starting with his ministers and judges in particular, but the small men in government as well, all the way down to the non-commissioned officers in his personal security force, the enlisted soldiers in the army, customs officers, cops in the street, the private guards at the banks, even the caretakers and watchmen. The leader’s cruelty and greed and his limitless lust for power in his petty kingdom had corrupted his subjects from top to bottom, including the two men facing each other here on the patio, my husband and his friend, two minor ministers in the cabinet, one evidently sent to arrest the other by the leader himself, who, in his enormous, white, limestone house on Mamba Point was at that moment probably swilling fifty-year-old Napoleon brandy and crowing with delight, because, as I soon learned, he was convinced that the two of them, Charles Taylor, the Gio, and Woodrow Sundiata, the Kpelle, both of them clever village boys, American-educated college boys, had been stealing from the president’s personal cache of millions of dollars originally sent to Liberia as American foreign aid. The leader knew this was true. The Americans had shown him the proof. The leader was a shrewd judge of character and circumstance and no doubt believed that Sundiata was the weaker of the two ministers, weak because he was married and had children, and therefore would betray his friend Taylor very quickly, very easily, probably by midnight, especially if Taylor were the one sent to arrest him. And then the leader would have both thieves in his grasp, instead of only one, as would have been the case if he’d chosen to arrest Taylor first. That man, Taylor, was too angry and too strong inside to confess or incriminate anyone else. Taylor would have let the leader’s men torture him to death — not to protect Woodrow, whom he felt superior to, like all the Gio, but to infuriate the leader, whom he loathed and whose power and wealth he coveted.
Charles and Woodrow spoke in Liberian pidgin, and I could barely understand them. Even so, right away it was clear that something much more complicated and dangerous than a mistaken or false arrest was taking place, for Woodrow seemed to understand very well why the Minister of Public Services, his good friend and longtime colleague, had invaded his house, shot his dogs, terrorized his family, and clapped him in irons. And Charles — I knew him well enough now to call him Charles, I’d danced with him and shared fond reminiscences with him of Massachusetts, where he’d attended Bentley College — seemed disgusted with himself, as if he’d fallen for an old trick, as if he knew that somehow Woodrow was not the prisoner here, he was. Woodrow spoke too quickly for me to translate, but I knew that he was making a plea. Yet he was not exactly pleading. He was asking Charles to be sensible.