Johnson Denis - The Laughing Monsters

Don’t forget to let me know if you hear from Sec 4.

— and felt I was hitting the thing too hard and deleted the last line and wrote:

I thank you from the bottom of my scrotum for the glimpse of your beauties. I hope I can assume they’re yours.

Nothing from Hamid. I’d expected nothing. It was my turn to talk.

I switched to my own keyboard. As he’d suggested, I didn’t use the American Standard. For a lark I used PGP, and in accordance with Hamid’s wishes I rotated my proxy after every fifteen words:

230K dollars US.

50-50 split.

Currently in transit.

Will return to site of previous meeting when we have a deal.

Suggest date exactly 30 days following previous meeting.

Sample product: Basement Elvis Documents Freetown.

NIIA safe site. Check and see.

Don’t answer until the answer’s yes.

Having suggested a date, I heard the clock start ticking. Today was October eleventh — I’d have nineteen days to wrap things up with Michael and find my way back to Freetown. An easy schedule. But Africa wipes its mess with schedules.

I opened the communiqué from my boss:

Let’s not overlook opportunities for filing. Check in daily. I don’t add “when possible.” Check in daily.

No amount of detail is too great. Err on the side of inclusiveness. Give us an abundance to sift through and ponder each day. Every day. Daily.

From this point forward, consider that a mission imperative.

I replied:

Nothing to report.

— and closed the window.

* * *

The rain came hard. The dining room’s fine vaulted ceiling apparently leaked profusely, and when Michael and Davidia and I entered that evening looking for dinner, the maître d’ came at us with a push mop, driving a minor flood before him out the doors. On a hoarding on the step, a list of the cocktails on special—“Safe Sex in the Forest,” mostly vodka, and one called “The Pussycat,” whose main ingredient was identified as Baboon Whiskey. Time to lift the drinks moratorium? My thirty-dollar Timex watch said not even close.

The musical fare had changed — today, fifties pop, specifically “Smile” as rendered by Nat “King” Cole. Nothing else. Just “Smile.” Over and over. “Smile” … “Smile” … “Smile” …

Michael had turned up two hours before, dangling a set of car keys. “Toyota Land Cruiser. Four-wheel drive. Full of petrol.”

At dinner Davidia wanted to know when we’d go riding. “Soon. It’s all ours.”

I wasn’t so sure. “Where did you get it?”

“From Pyramid Environments.”

“Pyramid? Who’s that?”

“Pyramid Environments. Security. I know all those guys. The manager’s office is in Arua. I know him from Fort Bragg.”

“Bragg? I thought you were at Fort Carson.”

“And Bragg — I told you that. At Bragg I trained Colombian commandos. The US assists them in going after the drugs racket down there. Everything was done through translators. Let me tell you something you already know … working in simultaneous translation is exhausting. It’s like walking everywhere on your hands, and never your feet.”

“So you’ve told me many times,” Davidia said.

“I don’t like the situation over there,” Michael said, meaning the situation at another table. “These guys don’t look right. They’re up to something.”

“Doctors Without Borders.”

“Then why don’t they go someplace and play doctor? First we see them at lunch, and now at dinner.”

“Good lord. Is it possible we’re following them?”

“Perhaps we should be.”

Davidia glanced at me as if to say Help.

“Nobody’s spying on you,” I told Michael.

“Wait a minute. That one is Spaulding. Remember Spaulding?”

“I remember. That’s not Spaulding.”

Michael got up and went over to them.

“I hope he’s not about to be rude,” Davidia said.

“He’s just being Michael.”

“He’s getting pretty crazy, Nair.”

“You know what? I think he’s right. It’s Spaulding.”

“Who’s Spaulding?”

Spaulding possessed a great mop of platinum hair. I wouldn’t have guessed such a thing, and I hadn’t recognized him. As it happened, I’d never before seen the top of his head.

Michael brought him over. Spaulding didn’t sit down. Pretty soon Michael would tell us he’d been the one to give Spaulding his very first sight of death. He’d told me this story many times.

“Here’s Spaulding.” To Davidia: “Spaulding is MI6.”

Spaulding didn’t mind. “He introduces everybody as some kind of spy.”

“Have you chucked your turban?” I asked Spaulding.

“A turban’s all right in Afghanistan, in the winter.”

“So you were never actually some kind of Sikh?”

“Just keeping my head warm,” Spaulding said.

“What’s your religion, then?” Michael said.

“Lapsed Catholic.”

“I myself,” Michael said, “am a lapsed animist. This is Davidia, my wife-to-be.”

“Congratulations, then, the two of you.”

“Davidia — Spaulding is with MI6.”

“I don’t hang out with MI6,” Spaulding said, smiling. “They’re all homosexuals.”

Michael said, “I showed Spaulding his first dead body. In Mogadishu.”

Spaulding said, “It was more like two hundred dead bodies. All laid out neatly side by side in the street. Fresh-cooked.”

“Remember the dust devils? Two kilometers high. That’s where the legends of genies come from.”

“You couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen. Your voice hadn’t changed.”

Michael produced a soprano: “Ayeeeeee! — My voice will never change,” he went on in his man’s baritone.

“I didn’t meet Spaulding till Afghanistan,” I said.

Spaulding studied me. “Really. Have we actually met?”

“Here comes our food,” Michael announced. “None for Spaulding.”

“Have a lovely evening,” Spaulding said, mainly to Davidia, and rejoined his table.

Davidia said, “Jesus Christ. You people!”

I looked at Michael — looking back at me. “And there you have it,” he said. “It’s already time to leave town.”

* * *

The White Nile Palace Hotel had proved in one respect far too proper for my taste, but that afternoon, as I sat at a table near the bar trying to make sense of the hamburger I’d just been served, a little brown slut with a wig of short red hair came in and stood within reach of my arms and started wrapping and unwrapping the skirt that covered her bathing suit as she queried the bartender, ignoring me and inflaming me, and I thought, Thank goodness, at last, a reasonable woman. I got her to sit down with me and asked her name. It was Lucy. She was friendly enough. I felt us on the brink of striking an arrangement.

The PA played “Jingle Bell Rock.” Two American-sounding women swam up and down the pool with gentle strokes, side by side, conversing about the Bible and God and spiritual challenges.

Michael Adriko turned up at the pool’s far end. He wore black bathing trunks. I supposed he could swim, but I’d never seen him at it.

He was talking to a Euro, a white man. It was rare to see Michael looking serious, rare to see him listening intently. I wished I could read the man’s lips. He was of middling height and middling all around, mid-thirties, with thinning, colorless hair. Rimless spectacles, a short-sleeved dress shirt tucked into dark corduroys and come untucked at the back — a civil servant sort, he seemed to me, except that he wore the shirt half unbuttoned to display a thick gold necklace.

I moved to the bar and tried to catch Michael’s eye, wondering if I should be introduced. I didn’t catch his eye. I wasn’t introduced.