Russell Banks - The Darling

I knew I had only a little time before he grew impatient with the occasion and had me removed. “President Doe, what are the conditions of my husband’s release?”

His eyebrows rose into his forehead, then lowered, and his round face darkened from brown to nearly black. I half-expected smoke to blow from his nostrils and ears, his eyes to glow red as coals, and I drew my children closer to me. “You in naw place fe’makin’ demands, Missy!” he told me, lapsing into pidgin, speaking rapidly, almost losing me. Because I knew the subject and could read his emotions from his face, I was able to follow him adequately and look for openings. He told me that my husband was a traitor and a thief. A bad man, top to bottom. Not fit to be the father of these beautiful boys or the husband of a nice lady like me.

“Me curse de name of de man!” the leader of Liberia declared, and he spat on the vast Oriental carpet.

My sons grabbed the folds of my dress and moved tightly against me. They knew now that I had lied to them last night. Papa was not the friend of the leader after all. I’d probably lied about the dogs, too. And much else. I calmly stroked their heads and waited for the exhibition, for I knew that’s what it was, to run its course. The man ranted, he roared, he glowered and lowered his voice to a weird whisper, then roared again. This was his theater, his play, too, and he loved it.

I began to catch the gist of his complaint. Over one million dollars had been secretly extracted—“Em- bezzled! ” he kept repeating, as if he’d just learned the word. The money had been taken from funds allocated to the General Services Agency by the State Department of the United States of America. It was money that had been embezzled, therefore, from the generous citizens of the United States. And did I know who was in charge of the Liberian General Services Agency? Did I? Of course I knew! Charles Taylor, my husband’s closest friend and ally, was in charge of the General Services Agency! Over one million dollars, one-point-four million U.S. dollars, to be exact, were missing from the books, gone, fled the country, probably in Switzerland in a secret bank account in the name of Charles Taylor and Woodrow Sundiata, waiting to be wired back to each of their separate accounts here in Monrovia as soon as they thought no one was looking for it anymore!

“But dat naw goin’ t’ happen,” he solemnly declared. “It naw goin’ fe’ take place,” he said, and then suddenly returned to speaking English and was calm again, as if the two languages determined his emotions rather than served them. “You want your husband freed, Missus Sundiata?” he asked.

“I do. Of course.”

“No problem.” He strode to his wide, mahogany desk, an ornate Victorian box, its top entirely free of paper, with a box of Cuban cigars, a chrome martini shaker, and a red telephone on it. He picked up the receiver and without dialing said just two words, “Release Sundiata.” And hung up. “See? No problem,” he beamed.

“Then why … why did you arrest him?”

“To flush out the bad man, Charles Taylor. His co-conspirator.” He kissed the word.

“And…?”

“Your husband a good boy. Too bad me didn’ think t’ grab him sooner, though, because ol’ Charles Taylor, him gone out of the country now. Skee-da-delled. Wal, not quite. He be halfway ’cross the ocean now. But when him land in New York City,” the president said, smiling broadly at the thought, “there be a big surprise waitin’ for him.”

“Aha!” I said. “That’s why Mister Clement was here.” I pictured Sam Clement calling his superiors in Washington, ordering the arrest and detention of a Liberian national arriving from Monrovia this afternoon at JFK. I said, “You are a sly fox, Mister President. And my husband? What about him?”

“Nuttin’. He give me what me want. Now me give him what him want.”

“Which is…?”

He herded me and my sons towards the door. “You ask him yourself, missus, when he come home today. G’wan home now, or him be there before you. G’wan home,” he said. “An’ pack your suitcase,” he added and closed the door solidly behind me.

WOODROW AND I were alone for the first time all afternoon and evening. Finally. He stood in his shirt and loosened necktie and white undershorts and socks, carefully placing his suit jacket and slacks on hangers and into the closet, a tumbler of scotch and ice on the dresser next to him. I sat on the bed, brushing out my hair, and watched him slowly, delicately, almost lovingly, remove and hang his clothes — a man of bottomless vanity. He’d been holding court with relieved friends and neighbors in the living room for hours and was a little drunk. The boys were asleep in bed, Jeannine and Kuyo were back, and except for the dogs, everything seemed to have returned to normal. Throughout the day, since his release, friends and relatives had been dropping by, as if on a casual, neighborly visit, to verify the truth of what they had heard, that Woodrow Sundiata had been arrested by the leader, held for a night, and released unharmed, a sequence almost unheard of in Liberia in those years. Even more unusual, he had kept his old position as minister. The leader was telling people he’d made a mistake. Woodrow was a good boy; Charles Taylor was the bad man, and him the Americans had arrested in New York, caught fleeing the country. Unfortunately, millions of dollars were still missing from the General Services fund, and only Charles Taylor knew where the money was hidden.

That was not true, of course, and no one believed it. Samuel Doe owned Woodrow now, just as he owned the one-point-four million U.S. dollars that, according to Woodrow, Charles Taylor had siphoned off the General Services fund, transferred to the Barclay’s Bank on Grand Turk in the Turks and Caicos Islands, then carried back in cash in a ministry briefcase when returning to Monrovia from a Caribbean holiday with one of his lady friends. He’d stashed the cash in a safe-deposit box controlled by Woodrow and Charles at the Barclay’s in Monrovia. Now, thanks to Woodrow, President Doe had the cash in his safe deposit box, and Charles Taylor would soon disappear into an American prison. My husband, I knew, would henceforth be like one of the president’s pet bonobo apes, only a little bit free, with a short chain clamped to his thin ankle. I could not believe his stupidity.

“So, you did steal the money. You and Charles.”

“No, no, not at all. Charles did that. Charles was the culprit,” Woodrow said and gently bit his lower lip, as if his mind were elsewhere. He picked up his glass and took a sip of his drink. “I was merely looking into the General Services budget for a little help from the American aid for my own programs. Help I need and deserve, but that the Americans never see fit to provide. They prefer roads to medicines, you know.”

“Yes, Woodrow, I know.” I didn’t believe him. I studied his hairless legs and wondered anew why they were so scrawny, almost as if he’d had a terrible, wasting disease as a child that he refused to tell me about. And he’d grown thick and soft around the middle in the last few years, making his legs seem even skinnier than they were. I was sure that he and Charles had schemed together to steal as much as they could for as long as they could — it was part of a Liberian government minister’s job description, practically. And I knew that, once arrested, Woodrow had betrayed Charles, who had skee-da-delled. Then Woodrow had purchased his own release by turning over the stolen U.S. funds, now safely in cash currency and part of Samuel Doe’s burgeoning secret treasury, his French Riviera retirement fund. I figured that the leader’s original plan, to have Charles and Woodrow betray each other, hadn’t quite worked. Charles must not have implicated Woodrow, or they’d both be either dead or lying battered and broken in some hut in the bush. Charles, uncharacteristically for a Liberian, had refused to play by the rules of the game. But it had all turned out fine for the leader, since he’d ended up with the money in one pocket and the health minister in the other and Charles, the bad one, the hard one, the dangerous one, tucked away in an American jail many thousands of miles from Liberia. Better than killing them.