Johnson Denis - The Laughing Monsters

“You might decide to get in touch.” He licked the point of his pen and took the card for a minute and handed it back with an e-address written on its blank side. The domain was dot-UK. “Only if you want to honor the original agreement,” he said.

“Sure.”

“Don’t use the twenty-five.”

He meant the AES-25 encryption standard, known as the American Standard. “Of course not,” I said.

“And rotate your proxy every fifteen words.”

“Sure. I hope English is all right.”

“English, French, Dutch. I don’t care. But choose your words — no red flags.”

I tore a page from my notepad and borrowed his pen. “Here’s mine. Maybe we can exchange ideas and reach an understanding.”

He stared down at my e-address, but he wasn’t reading. I waited. “All right,” he said. “Where’s the harm? Think about your price and let me know later.”

And then I felt smug and thought: Of course, he can’t pass this up. Not when it includes Mali.

“Send me your sample,” he said. “Maybe I’ll consider, that’s all I promise. But you can trust my promise, because let me tell you,” he said, “I’m not a liar.”

Ending it on such a note, I didn’t offer to shake his hand. I went out to the beach again. The heat matched my blood, both were beating, simmering. I walked the shoreline toward other restaurants visible up ahead, where cars for hire congregated.

I took off my sandals and wet my feet in the shallows, and I watched the ocean swell and shrink and listened to it sigh.

Here the sea is warm, like a bath. It’s dark, not so blue, more like black, a lustrous black.

You wade out into it until you can’t. You swim out farther until you can’t. Then it takes you.

* * *

At a table outside the Quonset hut from which the drunken Russian pilots administered their charter airline — with its fleet of one, a commuter jet — we dealt with a young Leonean man who spoke faultless English, and as he held Michael’s passport, I tried to sneak a look at it. Davidia was peeking too — at mine as well as Michael’s. “It’s US,” I told her. “I have a Danish one too, but I never use it.” Davidia’s was American.

Davidia wore her safari garb, while Michael was dressed in a wrinkled suit and gray snakeskin boots. His outfit looked at first pink, but closer it was white linen with thin red stripes.

When Michael got his passport back, he let me have a look at it — a wilted Ghanaian document. “I told you I saved the Ghanaian president.”

“A couple of times. At a minimum.” I gave it back to him. “It’s got less than two months left on it, Michael.”

“Never fear. I’ve got family in Uganda, and just as many in Congo. One of those places will claim me. I’ll make the necessary inquiries.”

We weren’t at the Freetown airport, but at an airstrip well east of the city and next to the ocean. Our aircraft waited in a field of tall grass. I said to our young man, “That’s a Bombardier Challenger, isn’t it? The Royal Danish Air Force uses them for cargo.”

“Not this kind,” he said. “This is the 600, discontinued from 1982.”

Davidia shaded her eyes with a hand and squinted. “Are you saying that plane is thirty years old?”

“The one you’re looking at is a couple of years older,” he said. “But it’s a very good aircraft, so long as you don’t overload it.”

Michael said, “Nair — remember the Russian airline? The Freetown — Monrovia run during the war? Something Airlines? — something Russian?”

“It wasn’t an airline. It was a renegade charter, just like this one.”

“They were the only ones bold enough to fly to Monrovia.”

“You mean crazy enough. Eventually they crashed, didn’t they?”

“That’s right, but not on the Monrovia run. That time the plane was coming from a secret rendezvous, loaded with processed uranium.”

The clerk disagreed. “That’s unsubstantiated, and in fact quite false.”

“Were you there at the crash site?” Michael said. “If you were there, you were five years old.”

“Processed uranium?” Davidia said. “You mean enriched?”

“Exactly right. The plane was overloaded with HEU stolen from Tenex.”

“HEU?” Davidia said. “What’s HEU? Who’s Tenex?”—and as she seemed to be talking to me, I shook my head, and she said, “Where did it go down?”

“That’s the beautiful part,” Michael said.

“It’s never been found,” the clerk said. “But factually, it only had some inconsequential cargo aboard.”

“U-235? Do you call that inconsequential?” But Michael couldn’t expect to be heeded. He looked like a species of gangster in his pinstripe suit.

I tried a guess: “Highly Enriched Uranium.”

“Nothing like that aboard,” the clerk said. By his expression, he seemed to have taken a special dislike to Michael.

The runway was visible once you walked on it, packed red dirt hidden under tufts of beach grass.

The aircraft would be booked to capacity — otherwise the Russians would postpone, and that’s why the weekly charter never flew weekly. With a couple of dozen other passengers, African, Indian, Arab, a few white Euros, we waited beside the terminal, a rusty ship’s cargo container open at one end, nothing in it but a row of four theater seats. Nobody would have sat inside — the heat it gave off was startling. Clouds blanketed the sky, but it was bright, and the sea reflected it so viciously you couldn’t look at the water.

A white Honda Prelude arrived at the Quonset hut and stopped, and nobody got out. I recognized the backseat passenger. I said to Michael, “Look there. It’s Bruno Horst.”

“Bruno, at our point of departure. Well — nothing funny about that!”

“I can’t make out the man riding shotgun, but I don’t doubt it’s Mohammed Kallon.”

I waved. Only the driver waved back. I recognized him too. It was Emil, who’d carried me to the Papa Leone my first day in Freetown.

Everything I’d touched, they were touching.

The clerk called our flight. As the others gathered their things I wandered over to the shore with my phone in my hand and, when the water stopped me, I opened the device and pried loose the SIM card and flicked it into the waves. If NATO Intel had a trace on it, let them trace.

On second thought, I didn’t want the device, either. I made a wish and tossed it as far as I could out into the sea. I wished for magic armor, and the power to disappear.

I rejoined our group. As we boarded, a young fellow in an olive uniform ran a wand around each passenger’s outline, fondling us in the places where it squeaked — that is, the men. He didn’t touch the women. We climbed onto the craft up metal treads salvaged from old passenger busses and welded into a crooked stairway. Ahead of us a frail person, an African so ill as to seem genderless and colorless and weightless, was being carried up the steps like a bolt of cloth on the shoulders of two young men. “Going home to die,” Michael said.

I sat against the window overlooking a wing and one of the two jet engines. Michael and Davidia took the seats one row behind and across the aisle. After the engines started, one of the crew — I assumed there were two — a blond man wearing denims, white T-shirt, and flip-flops, came out of the cockpit and wandered down the aisle, saying, “Is English okay? Okay, let’s try it. I want to warn you of the safety features of this aircraft. Has everybody got the seat belt buckled? It’s your choice, I’m not your mother. Okay,” he said, “it’s a trip of sixteen and one-half hours, stopping once at Kotoka International in Accra and once more at Yaoundé, and the final stop will be Entebbe. You’d better have a visa for Ghana or else for Cameroon if you think that’s where you’re going. If you need to get a visa for Uganda, it’s all right, they can fix it at the airport without a big problem. Wherever is your destination, I think you can expect the customs to be serious. They’re always serious with our passengers. They’re too serious.” He waved goodbye and re-entered the cockpit and closed and locked the door, leaving behind him an atmosphere of vodka.