Charles told him to shut his fucking mouth. I understood that. Then in English, Charles said to me, “It’s all right, he’ll probably be home by morning. But you stay here, stay with your children and your people. Don’t let anyone leave the house until Woodrow returns. You understand me, woman?”
I nodded, and Charles walked quickly away, followed by Woodrow and the four soldiers who held their guns on him as if they expected him to make a run for it. Then all the soldiers left, but one, who took up a position at the gate. When the truck was gone and Charles’s black ministry car had rolled into the darkness behind it, the lone soldier strolled into the house and returned with a bottle of Woodrow’s whiskey. He lighted a cigarette from a fresh pack of Woodrow’s Dunhills, squatted down by the gate, and took a long pull from the bottle. The soldier saw me watching him from the patio and extended the bottle, offering me a drink. I shook my head no, no, no, and hurried inside to my children.
It all happened so fast that it hadn’t fully registered with me, until, halfway across the living room, my legs suddenly turned to water. The room spun, and I tipped and nearly fell to my knees. I reached out to break my fall with one hand on the cold tile floor, when from the tiny, dark laundry room at the rear of the house, Jeannine, trembling, gray faced, her eyes darting around the room, led the boys out.
They saw me and let go of Jeannine’s hands and tumbled towards me like baby birds falling from a nest. I caught them in my arms and pulled them close and stroked their heads, the four of us on the cold floor, tossed together in a tangled heap the same way we sometimes played mamma lion and her cubs in the cave, except this time, for the first time, the boys were terrified and crying, all three of them, and I was struggling not to cry myself, saying in a low, crooning voice, as if all four of us and also Jeannine had been wakened by the same nightmare, “They’re gone now, the soldiers have gone away, they’re gone and won’t be back, my darlings.”
The twins were quickly comforted and settled themselves peacefully against me, the nightmare over, but Dillon pulled away and, looking over my shoulder and around the room, said, “What about Papa? Where’s Papa?”
“He’ll be fine, Dillon. Don’t worry about Papa.”
“Why did the soldiers take him away?”
“He’ll be back soon. The leader wanted to speak with him, that’s all. Your papa is such an important man that the leader wanted to see him and couldn’t wait for tomorrow, that’s all, so he sent some of his own special soldiers to fetch him.”
Dillon looked at me with his steady, skeptical gaze. He knew I was lying, but accepted it, so as not to further frighten his younger brothers. I knew that, had we been alone, though barely seven years old, Dillon would have pushed me for the truth, or else a more complex and believable lie. That was his way. And possibly mine. Children are usually more concerned with justice than truth. And a strong lie sometimes gives as much strength to the one being lied to as to the liar.
The twins merely wanted comfort, not the truth. That was their way. Jeannine, too, wanted comfort, and accepted my reassurances with evident relief, clasping her hands together as if in prayer, although she surely knew that Woodrow, her uncle, her employer, her sometime lover, the man whose power had brought her out of the tribal village into this magically softened life in the city, the person on whom she depended utterly for safety, physical comfort, nourishment, even health, was in danger of losing all his power, possibly his life, and that therefore she, too, was in grave danger.
I disentangled myself from the boys and stood and helped them to their feet, tugged and straightened their pajamas, and kissed them each and in as normal a voice as I could manage told them to hurry along to bed now, it’s very late. “When they’re in bed, Jeannine,” I told her, “there’s broken glass on the patio.”
“Yes, m’am,” she said, and drew the boys to her and led them down the hall towards their bedroom. Then I remembered the dogs. Good Lord, the poor dogs! I walked to the door and looked out at their black bodies between the car and the gate, where the soldier squatted and drank Woodrow’s whiskey and smoked his Dunhills. If I left the house, I’d have to negotiate the space with him somehow. As long as I stayed inside, he’d stay outside. Better to send Jeannine for Kuyo tonight and ask him to come over to the compound right away and remove the bodies of the dogs and hose the blood away before the boys got up in the morning and, when they asked where are the dogs, Mammi? I’d have to lie again and say that Mr. Doe had admired them and wanted them to guard the presidential palace, and Papa had decided that it would be a nice thing to give the dogs to him. Wasn’t that nice of Papa?
All at once I seemed to be living a wholly different life from the one I’d been living barely an hour ago, with different rules, different intentions, and utterly different strategies for survival. I flopped down on the sofa, exhausted. What should I do? What could I do? I glanced at the telephone squatting on the table beside me and instantly decided to call Charles Taylor. It wasn’t exactly the next logical step, but I had no idea what was. Maybe Charles would say something that indirectly indicated where I should turn next; or maybe he would even tell me outright what I should do to save my husband. He surely was still Woodrow’s friend. My friend, too. Whatever he was doing tonight, it was against his will. He was acting on the leader’s orders, that’s all.
A quick search of Woodrow’s rolltop desk in the cubicle off the living room, and I had Charles’s home number. After a dozen rings, a woman picked up.
“Mist’ Taylor, him na home,” the woman whined, as if wakened from a deep sleep. One of Charles’s harem girls, I supposed.
“Fine, fine,” I said. “Ask him to call Mrs. Sundiata as soon as he returns. No matter how late,” I added, although I knew at once Charles would likely not get the message and, even if he did, would not call, not yet. I shouldn’t have called him. A mysterious and scary business was unfolding, and Charles was no mere messenger boy for the leader. There was more to come, surely. He owed me nothing anyhow. He was possibly in danger himself, and my call might have made things worse for him. At that time, I rather liked Charles Taylor. Of all Woodrow’s friends and colleagues, he was the most worldly and congenial, and in his relations with me he was downright charming. A ladies’ man, I’d decided, even before I learned of his harem, a claque of teenage girls and very young women, most of them from the backcountry, beautiful, interchangeable parts in Charles’s domestic life and rarely appearing with him outside his compound and never at a government function. I’d seen them mainly at his home, when visiting with Woodrow for drinks and dinner. They were gorgeously plumed birds kept in cages, nameless, for Charles never bothered to introduce them to me. One doesn’t introduce one’s servants to one’s dinner guests. Actually, they were more like groupies than servants. Charles had a rock star’s charisma and presence and generated a sexual force field that made him glow and allowed him to treat those who warmed themselves at his fire with benign neglect.
I’m not sure how benign it really was, though. Each time Woodrow and I visited Charles’s compound out on Caret Street, the girls I’d seen there previously had been replaced by new, younger girls, and I wondered what happened to the caged birds they’d replaced. Set free, flown back to the country? Not likely. More likely they’d become prostitutes, and were possibly now among those who entertained Woodrow and Charles and their friends and colleagues on those increasingly frequent nights when Woodrow didn’t come home from the ministry until dawn. I knew, of course, what went on. A wife always knows, and besides, this was Liberia, not Westchester County. After a while, when new birds appeared and boredom with the old ones set in, Charles probably just recycled the girls by passing them down the chain of command — first to the Assistant Minister of General Services, then to the Administrative Officer for the Ministry of General Services, on to the Director of the Office of Temporary Employment of General Services, all the way to the lowest clerk in the ministry, who could not afford to house or feed anyone but himself and family, and so the girl would turn to the soldiers or hit the streets, which amounted to the same thing.