It would not be difficult for him to break out of here, he said. The inmates had considerable freedom of movement. He explained that the left field of the baseball field backed up to the section of the chain-link fence that was farthest from the watchtowers. The fence was ten feet high, with six strings of barbed wire at the top. Beyond the fence was a thicket of trees, and beyond the trees Route 1, the old coastal highway, which led south towards Cape Cod and north to Boston. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning, beginning at ten o’clock, there was a baseball game between the two main cell blocks, A and B. Charles was the regular left fielder for the A team. There were always plenty of arguments and now and then a bench-clearing brawl that ended the game and got the players and the inmates watching the game sent back to their cells.
Charles would arrange to have his team’s pitcher deliberately, flagrantly hit a batter and initiate a brawl, and while everyone, including the watchtower guards, was distracted, he would scale the fence. It would be at least half a day before his absence would even be noticed, he said. “They don’t check every cell till nine o’clock at night, an’ by then I be long gone.”
“Where will you go?”
“I’ll be on my way to Libya,” he said. “If you does your job right.” He wanted me to wait in a car out on Route 1, parked at the side of the road, headed north. He wanted Zack with me. “White woman alone with a black man attracts attention. Nobody notices a white couple with their black friend in the back seat.” I was to provide Charles with a U.S. passport, a thing Zack had told him I was skilled at forging, a small carryon suitcase and change of clothes, five hundred dollars in cash, and a plane ticket to Cairo. Once Charles got to Cairo, he’d simply present himself at the Libyan embassy, and the next day he’d be in Tripoli, a guest of Mohamar Ghaddafi. At a coastal training camp east of Tripoli, half a thousand armed Liberian fighters were waiting for him to arrive and take command. “In twelve months’ time, we’ll be back in Liberia. In eighteen months, we’ll be in Monrovia, an’ Samuel Doe will be a dead man.”
I said, “I understand why you want me to help you. But why bring Zack in? Any white man would do, right? Zack’s only willing to do this for the money. Which he says you promised him. The money you and Woodrow stole from the people of Liberia,” I added.
“Stole it from Samuel Doe, you mean. He the one stole it from the people. And now it’s circulatin’ back to ’em, since it’s gonna help pay for weapons an’ transport an’ such, whatever Ghaddafi don’t wanna give us. As for our friend Zack, the freedom fighter,” he said, smiling, “I tol’ him I’d turn the money over to him if he helped break me outa this place. But that was before you come around. So now, if I don’t use him in the breakout and he finds out before it’s done an’ I’m outa the country, he’ll be mad enough to screw us both up. Zack’s a main-chance man, y’ know? Very opportunistic.”
“So you don’t intend to give him the money? Even if he helps you escape?”
Charles looked at me as if I were stupid. “Hannah, please. That money belongs to the people of the Republic of Liberia.”
“Dawn.”
“Right.”
I pushed my chair back and stood. “I’ll come back as soon as I know when everything will be in place. The passport is the hard part, but it shouldn’t take more than a few weeks at most.”
“Can do it any Monday, Wednesday, or Friday morning. When the prisoners play the all-American game of baseball.”
He stood and put his arms around me and kissed me on both cheeks. I liked his smell. It may have been the first time in my life that a man had smelled right to me. No, not the first time. My father always smelled right to me. No other man. Until Charles. And none since.
TWO WEEKS LATER on an overcast Friday morning, Zack and I drove out from New Bedford on Route 1 in my mother’s car. I pulled over and parked on the gravel shoulder of the northbound lane. It was late August, unseasonably cool and threatening to rain, the trailing edge of a New England summer passing through. The leaves of the roadside oak and maple trees in the copse beyond had turned their dry undersides up, shifting the late summer morning light from pale green to silver. It was a little after nine.
Zack lighted a cigarette and looked nervously back and forth along the highway. Morning traffic was thin; Cape Cod weekenders from the Boston suburbs hadn’t started their pilgrimage to the sea yet. On the floor of the backseat was a small nylon carry-on bag. Inside the bag was a tan, tropical-weight suit, size forty-two, and a dress shirt and tie from Filene’s Basement. Inside the breast pocket of the suit jacket was an envelope with five one-hundred-dollar bills and a one-way Egypt Air ticket for the 1:05 p.m. flight from Boston to Cairo — everything drawn from my going-away gift from Samuel Doe, an irony that was not lost on me.
Also inside the jacket pocket was a U.S. passport in the name of Charles Davis. The photo was of a round-faced black man who resembled Charles only slightly, but close enough that a white man would think it was an exact likeness. This took place some fifteen years ago, remember, when it was safe to assume that Charles’s face and passport photo would not be examined by a black man in uniform until he got to Egypt. Also, back then, before Americans started seeing anyone whose skin wasn’t pink as a potential suicide bomber, security was light and the technology of surveillance was slow and unreliable.
Getting a passport for Charles had been a simple matter. I’d driven Carol to the Federal Building in Boston, where for the first time in her life she applied for her passport. Ten days later it arrived in the mail, and that evening I doctored it with Whiteout and a photo-booth head-shot of one of the cooks at The Pequod, a handsome black man named Dick Stephens, divorced and lonely, Carol said. I’d pretended to have a crush on him, had spent a day in Provincetown with him, and had asked for a picture for my wallet, so I could memorialize the lovely day and had promised with lowered eyes future payment for the favor. We snapped four pictures each; I gave him mine, and he gave me his.
Carol had been uneasy with what Zack and I were up to, especially after I assumed ownership of her brand new passport, which represented to her in tangible form the power and authority of the United States government. But by then she and Zack were once again sleeping together without me, and I had assumed the leadership position among the three of us and had made my mission the only important one. Zack happily complied. He believed that when I completed my mission, he would assume ownership of at least half, possibly more, of Charles’s million-dollar cache in some secret Caribbean bank account. According to Zack, well before we saw Charles off at Logan Airport, we’d stop at a Shawmut Bank branch in the suburbs, where Charles would arrange the transfer of the funds from his account to Zack’s little checking account at the New Bedford branch.
I asked him how he could be sure Charles would be willing and able to do that.
“No way Charlie won’t deliver the goods. Until he walks into the Libyan embassy in Cairo, we can always get him busted by the feds.”
“Not without busting ourselves.”
“We can drop a dime on him, and the feds’ll greet him when he lands. He’s connected to Ghaddafi and the fucking Libyans, man. He’s an escapee from an American prison. The Egyptians’d give him up in a minute.”
“Zack, you do that, and I swear I’ll kill you.”
He laughed. “Yeah. Sure. Suddenly you’re Weather Underground again. A revolutionary. A true believer. C’mon, you just want to fuck the guy.”