Russell Banks - The Darling

“This here,” he said and patted his pocket, “is a telephone number and a man’s name. When I board my plane for Cairo, I’ll give this paper to you. Then all you got to do is say your name to the person who answers and tell him the man whose name I wrote down gave you permission to arrange for the transfer of Charles Taylor’s funds. This telephone is in Washington, D.C. It’s a secret contact number only I know about, and the name on the paper is a name only I use. My code name. No one else knows both these things. Whoever answers at that particular telephone number and hears that particular name, he’ll know the instructions are comin’ straight from me. He’ll know to give you what you want, no matter what it is, no questions asked.”

“Why can’t we stop at a pay phone and make that call now?”

“Not enough time, Zack. Don’t want to miss my flight. Only one a day, y’know.”

“Sounds a little funny to me,” Zack said. “Can I trust you?”

“‘Course you can trust me, man. It’s what I owe you.”

We reached the airport at 11:45. I parked the car in the first empty space I saw, which put us on the third level of the parking garage, and the three of us raced down the stairs and into the international terminal, Charles loping along ahead of us as if he’d made this run many times before. When we arrived at the gate for Egypt Air, they had already begun the boarding procedure. A knot of first-class passengers, men in business suits with briefcases, an old lady in a wheelchair, and two couples with small children were already passing into the access way. Charles handed his ticket and passport across the counter to the young woman attendant, who hurriedly punched out his boarding pass and went back to calling out the rows. Charles turned around and faced me and Zack.

“Well, my fellow freedom fighters, we at a parting of the ways.” He reached for me and kissed me firmly on the lips, more a promise than a thank you. He released me slowly, then stepped away in the direction of the passengers lined up to board.

“Wait a minute!” Zack said sharply. “That little piece of paper in your pocket is mine, I believe.”

“Oh, sure, almost forgot,” Charles said and handed the paper over. “All the excitement of departure, I guess.” He smiled again, then quickly moved into line and walked through the gate and disappeared from sight.

Zack stared down at the piece of notepaper.

“Is it what you wanted?” I asked.

“I hope the fuck it is. It’d better be.”

“What’ll you do if it isn’t? What if the money never left Monrovia? It’s possible Samuel Doe has it by now, you know. It’s even possible the U.S. government has it.”

“Charlie knows I can still get to him, man. He won’t fuck me over. I know people, man. African people.”

“Oh, Zack.” I started walking back towards the main terminal. Quickly Zack caught up and touched my elbow and asked if he could have five dollars. I gave it to him, and he crossed to a newsstand and made change while I waited.

He stopped at the bank of phones just inside the main terminal. I moved next to him and stood there while he fumbled with the quarters and dialed. I glanced over my shoulder and saw a uniformed cop watching us. On a bench next to him two men with briefcases read newspapers as if they wanted to be seen reading newspapers. A maintenance man with a dustbin and push broom came to a meaningless stop twenty feet away and looked straight at me.

“Zack, I’ll be outside,” I said and walked with careful nonchalance through the door into the parking garage. No one appeared to follow me. The elevator crawled to the third level, and as soon as I was free of it, I ran for the car. I jumped in and started the motor and raced, tires squealing, for the exit, down the ramp to the second level — still no one following in the rearview mirror — and on down to the first level, and there was Zack crossing into the garage from the terminal, looking for me. He saw the car and ran towards it, his face angrily bunched, and I jammed on the brakes and stopped. He got in and slammed the door hard, and I hit the gas and exited the garage, stopping barely long enough to pay the parking fee, then drove full bore towards the tunnel under the bay and downtown Boston beyond.

Zack said, “I thought you’d pulled out on me, man. Why the hell would you want to do that?”

“I was just bringing the car down to meet you.”

“Oh,” he said, glum and downcast. He still held the piece of paper in his lap and studied it as if it carried a message difficult to read.

“Well? What happened?” I glanced at him. He looked like a child ready to cry putting on a big man’s face to hide it.

“You’re right about me,” he said.

“How?”

“I’m an asshole,” he said. “I fucking hate myself.” He turned away from me and toward the window so I couldn’t see his face.

“Was it a working number?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“And…?”

“It was the number of the Liberian embassy in Washington, for Christ’s sake.”

“Oh, dear,” I said, not very surprised. “So you just hung up?”

“No, I didn’t,” he said. “I didn’t just hang up. I should have. But I followed instructions. I told the guy, who had this fucking British accent, I told him my name and gave him the name of the guy that Charles wrote down. I said this guy was supposed to transfer the money being held for Charles Taylor into an account that I had the number for.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing at first. Then he asked my name again, and I told him. And then he laughed like hell. And hung up.”

We were silent for a few seconds. It had stopped raining, and the clouds were breaking up, and patches of blue sky behind them skidded south ahead of us. I asked Zack, “What was the name of the man who was supposed to do this, transfer the money into your account?”

“Sam Clement,” he said. “Who the fuck’s Sam Clement? You ever heard of him?”

“No,” I said. “I never heard of him.”

WHEN ZACK DECIDED to move out of the apartment we weren’t disappointed. His presence had become confusing and burdensome to Carol, who preferred my authority to his, although I don’t think it mattered to her which of us she slept with. In a strange way, Carol was never less present and accounted for than in bed; she was merely accommodating there, blandly accepting other people’s needs as if they were her own. Carol’s mentality was that of a permanent servant, ingrown and generations old, and what she liked and needed most, what she understood best in the world and in all her personal relationships, was authority. My apparently principled control of Charles’s breakout and flight and Zack’s humiliation by Charles’s million-dollar promissory note had deflated Zack’s ego and made his male bluster sufficiently defensive and obnoxious to put me in charge of our little family.

We live in packs as much as dogs or wolves, it sometimes seems, and like them need to be clear at all times about who’s the alpha dog. It’s a practical matter. For Carol, as long as I was in the pack, Zack’s ongoing presence only confused the question of authority. He didn’t announce his departure or even discuss it with us and didn’t leave a note behind to explain or say goodbye. Simply, one morning, a week after Charles’s breakout, Zack and his few possessions and clothes were gone.

“I guess he felt crowded here,” Carol said and shrugged. That same night I moved from the living room sofa to Carol’s bedroom, and the next morning at breakfast, Bettina said to me, “I like it better now, with you and Mommy together and him gone.” Bettina had learned early, practically from infancy, to be scared of men. It had always been men who took her mother from her, stuck her with her aunt or her grandmother while her mother behind closed doors did mysterious, private business with the men. Or if, like Zack, the men stuck around, they talked too much and treated her as if she were an inconvenience. They were too large, had rough cheeks and hands, loud voices, and were often drunk or high on drugs. Even Zack, who to his credit did try on occasion to pay attention to Bettina, because she was diffident as a cat and withdrawn around him, grew quickly bored and turned his attention elsewhere. With me she was only slightly less suspicious and distant, but I warmed to it; I knew it was merely a self-protective affect that probably resembled mine. Our innate shyness had a hostile edge to it, and she seemed to recognize and like the similarity as much as I, and soon we were like a favorite aunt and favored niece. I was still living off the money Samuel Doe had slipped me for leaving children, husband, and home with minimal fuss, so I didn’t need a job yet and was usually at the apartment when Bettina came home from school and took care of her nights when Carol was at The Pequod.