Would you cunts care to describe Mossad’s involvement in — what shall we call it — this affair? Investigation? Cluster-fuck?
All of you, go fuck yourselves. Fuck each other.
I hold the rank of captain in the Army of Denmark. What has any of this got to do with Denmark? What has any of this got to do with me?
Why have you put me in a position to be murdered?
For three seconds, four seconds, five, my finger hovered over the DELETE key, and then I pressed SEND.
I logged out, plugged in my own keyboard, and went to PGP. I wrote back to Hamid:
Sold.
THREE
[OCT 15 11PM]
All right, Tina. The chief captor, the witch doctor, the general, the jailor or kidnapper or whatever he is, has just showed me my favorite thing in East Africa, a plastic baggie that would fit exactly in a shirt pocket, and shows me the label, “40 % Volume Cane Spirits 100ml,” before biting off the corner and sucking it dry, explaining, “It’s for the cold,” and tossing it aside, and I notice, right now, that the dirt floor of this big low hut we’re in is littered with similar packets sucked empty and tossed aside — paved with them—“Rider Vodka” and “ZAP Vodka” and the Cane Spirits. I’m familiar with these packets, in fact many of these empties were mine-all-mine as recently as one hour ago, when they stole them, yet I don’t perceive any gratitude in the black lacquer faces of these drunken soldiers all around us. What I do perceive is that this place smells powerfully of unwashed humans.
I just saw a single firefly flash upward. Or a capillary exploded in my brain. The truth is I’m a little drunk too. And this won’t be one of those pitiful attempts to explain “how I got into this mess,” because there’s no sense calling it a mess until we see how it all turns out. Sometimes you just get stuck. That’s Africa. Then you’re on your way again without any idea what happened, and that’s Africa too. And while you’re stuck, if they give you a pen and paper? — you might as well.
As to why I have no computer, it isn’t because they took mine away from me, but because as Michael and Davidia and I headed toward the Congo border in a Land Cruiser borrowed, now stolen, from Pyramid Environments, with our guide or abettor, a Congolese whose name I didn’t catch, Michael stopped the car on a bridge over some tributary of the White Nile River and said, Here we’ll toss our communications, and threw his phone out the window. Davidia chucked hers as well, and I was glad to get rid of everything (although my laptop and second keyboard were guaranteed GPS-untraceable, and my phone was already a replacement. I didn’t want the weight of them anymore, that’s all). It was sunset. Below us people washed their vehicles in muddy water up to the axles, the drivers splashing the red dirt off their rumpled pocked and sagging Subarus and such. Davidia said only one thing: “How long do you have the car for?”—“What?”—“When do you have to return this vehicle?”—“Oh — it’s flexible,” Michael said with a wide smile, as if describing his mouth, “it’s quite flexible.”
My friend and your friend Michael Adriko, that is, and his fiancée, Davidia St. Claire. You knew I went to Freetown on a hunt for Michael. I found him all right, with Davidia on his arm, and I’ll catch you up on all the rest as time allows. To put it in shorthand, Michael’s enthusiasms, let us say, had us leaving Uganda in a rush for DR Congo on Oct 13, just a couple of days ago. We’d jumped from Freetown to northwestern Uganda, a town called Arua, where I last heard from you by e-mail and where I last saw your breasts, and I wish I’d downloaded them … Earlier, at Kuluva Hospital in Arua, while getting his flesh stitched together after a fight it’s pointless to explain, Michael had enlisted a guide to show us a hole in the border, because none of us had Congo papers. When Davidia and I got to the hospital, Michael introduced this man, a skinny little guy in bright blue trousers and a T-shirt that said, I Did WHAT Last Night? and told me to give him one hundred dollars. — When he’s got us through to Congo, I said. — Fair enough, Michael said.
Daylight was almost gone as we got near the border, a good circumstance for people smuggling themselves, and we passed among groves of tall eucalyptus, Michael driving like an African, far too fast for the crumbling red-dirt surface, I mean fast, 90 or 95 KPH mostly, scaring the bikes to the side by means of constant beeping, using the horn much more than the brakes, oblivious to the children, goats, ducks, trucks coming at us, the overloaded busses appearing around road bends, leaning on two wheels, and women walking down the road balancing burdens on their heads, mostly basins full of “white ants”—centimeter-long termites they sell in the market as snacks. I’ve never tried them, but it’s a comfort to realize that every couple hundred meters or so across this land, a chest-high berm teems with nutrient morsels. One of these women crossed our path, her right hand raised to steady the pan on her head, blocking half her sight, she couldn’t have seen us, she kept walking into the road, Michael tried to veer, and we hit her, we struck her down, I heard her say “uh!” in a way I’ve never heard it said, never, and the jeep swerved, bounced, straightened, and kept on … I looked back, she was flung down on the clay pavement in the dusk, she looked lifeless. Davidia said, “Michael! Michael! She’s hurt!”—“She wasn’t watching!” he said angrily, going faster now. His shoulders hunched as he pushed the accelerator hard, and we were racing away from — what? A murder, perhaps. We’d never know. “Michael, Michael,” Davidia said, but Michael said nothing, and she said, “Go back, go back, go back, go back,” but we wouldn’t go back, we couldn’t — not in Africa, this hard, hard land where nobody could help that poor woman flopped probably dead in the road and where running away from this was not a mistake. The mistake was looking back at her in the first place.
No words among us now, just Davidia’s sobbing, and then her silence. Michael drove a bit more soberly as we skirted the border, heading north. If we didn’t find our hole soon we’d come to South Sudan. The surface got terrible. I’m not sure it was still a road. We came into a village, and the guide muttered in Michael’s ear, and we went quite slowly now. Michael switched off the headlamps — he was only using the parking lights anyway—“Let’s enjoy the moon!” It was just past half-full, with that lopsided swollen face, that smile at the corner of its mouth. People strolled around under its strange orange glow. Kids played tag as if it were daytime. We went slower than the pedestrians through this crowded twilight, this thickly human evening. Sudden laughter from a hut, like a soprano chorus. What have they got to laugh about? Bikes without headlights floating out of the dimness. A man leans against a shack, cupping the tiny light of a cell phone to his ear.
The guide said, “Stop.” He got out, shut the door, walked around to Michael’s window and spoke low.
Michael told me, “Give him fifty.”
“Not till we’re in Congo.”
“We’re here. This is Congo.”
“I thought you said one hundred.”
“He’s quitting early. Just fifty.”
I handed Michael a bill. The man folded it up small, then turned away and walked toward a hut, crying softly, “Hallooo.”
“Who’s coming up front — Nair?” Michael asked.
“I guess I am,” I said more or less to Davidia. Her face was invisible. For the last two hours she’d said not a word. We left the village behind and lurched along a half kilometer farther and stopped.
Michael said, “The main road’s over that way, but we’ll never find it till we have some daylight.” He fiddled with his watch. “Set your time backward one hour. We’ve crossed into another zone.”