Johnson Denis - The Laughing Monsters

“What’s wrong with it?”

He pointed at my machine. “You won’t get online.”

I raised my glass to him. “So Horst is still coming around.”

“I’m still a regular. About six months per year. But this time I’ve been kept home almost one full year, since last November. Eleven months.”

The entertainment got too loud. I adjusted my screen and put my fingers on the keyboard. Rude of me. But I hadn’t asked him to sit down.

“My wife is quite ill,” he said, and he paused one second, and added, “terminal,” with a sort of pride.

Meanwhile, two meters off, by the pool, the performer had set his shirt and pants on fire.

To Tina:

I saw a couple of US soldiers in weird uniforms at the desk when I checked in. This place is the only one in town that has electricity at night. It costs $145 a day to stay here.

Hey — the beard’s coming off. It’s no camouflage at all. I’ve already been recognized.

With the drumming and the whooping, who could talk? Still, Horst wouldn’t let me off. He’d bought a couple of rounds, discussed his wife’s disease … Time for questions. Beginning with Michael.

“What? Sorry. What?”

“I said to you: Michael is here.”

“Michael who?”

“Come on!”

“Michael Adriko?”

“Come on!”

“Have you seen him? Where?”

“He’s about.”

“About where? Shit. Look. Horst. In a land of rumors, how many more do we need?”

“I haven’t seen him personally.”

“What would Michael be here for?”

“Diamonds. It’s that simple.”

“Diamonds aren’t so simple anymore.”

“Okay, but we’re not after simplicity, Roland. We’re after adventure. It’s good for the soul and the mind and the bank balance.”

“Diamonds are too risky these days.”

“You want to smuggle heroin? The drugs racket is terrible. It destroys the youth of a nation. And it’s too cheap. A kilo of heroin nets you six thousand dollars US. A kilo of diamonds makes you a king.”

To Tina I wrote: Show’s over now. Everyone appears uninjured. The whole area smells like gasoline.

“What do you think?” Horst said.

“What I think is, Horst — I think they’ll snitch you. They’ll sell you diamonds and then they’ll snitch you, you know that, because around here it’s nothing but snitches.”

Maybe he took my point, because he stopped his stuff while I wrote to Tina:

I’m getting drunk with this asshole who used to be undercover Interpol. He looks far too old now to get paid for anything, but he still sounds like a cop. He calls me Roland like a cop.

At any point I might have asked his first name. Elmo?

Horst gave up, and we just drank. “Israel,” he told me, “has six nuclear-tipped missiles raised from the silos and pointing at Iran. Sometime during the next US election period — boom-boom Teheran. And then it’s tit for tat, that’s the Muslim way, my friend. Radiation all around.”

“They were saying that years ago.”

“You don’t want to go home. Within ten years it will be just like here, a bunch of rubble. But our rubble here isn’t radioactive. But you won’t believe me until you check it with a Geiger counter.” The whiskey had washed away his European manner. He was a white-haired, red-faced, jolly elfin cannibal.

In the lobby we shook hands and said good night. “Of course they’d like to snitch you,” he said. He stood on his toes to get close to my left ear and whisper: “That’s why you don’t go back the way you came.”

* * *

Later I lay in the dark holding my pocket radio against the very same ear, listening with the other for any sound of the hotel’s generator starting. A headache attacked me. I struck a stinky match, lit the candle, opened the window. The batting of insects against the screen got so insistent I had to blow out the flame. The BBC reported that a big storm with 120-kilometer-per-hour winds had torn through the American states of Virginia, West Virginia, and Ohio, and three million homes had suffered an interruption in the flow of their electricity.

Here at the Papa Leone, the power came up. The television worked. CCTV, the Chinese cable network, broadcasting in English. I went back to the radio.

The phones in Freetown emit that English ring-ring! ring-ring! The caller speaks from the bottom of a well:

“Internet working!”

Working! — always a bit of a thrill. My machine lay beside me on the bed. I played with the buttons, added a PS to Tina:

I drew cash on the travel account—5K US. Credit cards still aren’t trusted. Exchange rate in 02 was 250 leones per euro, and the largest bill was 100 leones. You had to carry your cash in a shopping bag, and some used shoeboxes. Now they want dollars. They’ll settle for euros. They hate their own money.

I sent my e-mails, and then waited, and then lost the internet connection.

The BBC show was World Have Your Say , and the subject was boring.

The walls ceased humming and all went black as the building’s generator powered down, but not before I had a short reply from Tina:

Don’t go back the way you came.

Suddenly I had it. Bruno. Bruno Horst.

* * *

Around three that morning I woke and dressed in slacks, shirt, and slippers, and followed my Nokia’s flashlight down eight flights to the flickering lobby. Nobody around. While I stood in the candle glow among large shadows, the lights came on and the doors to both elevators opened and closed, opened and closed once more.

I found the night man asleep behind the desk and sent him out to find the girl I’d seen earlier. I watched while he crossed the street to where she slept on the warm tarmac. He looked one way, then the other, and waited, and finally nudged her with his toe.

I took an elevator upstairs, and in a few minutes he brought her up to my room and left her.

“You’re welcome to use the shower,” I said, and her face looked blank.

Fifteen years old, Ivoirian, not a word of English, spoke only French. Born in the bush, a navel the size of a walnut, tied by some aunt or older sister in a hut of twigs and mud.

She took a shower and came to me naked and wet.

I was glad she didn’t know English. I could say whatever I wanted to her, and I did. Terrible things. All the things you can’t say. Afterward I took her downstairs and got her a taxi, as if she had somewhere to go. I shut the car’s door for her and heard the old driver saying even before he put it in gear: “You are a bad woman, you are a whore and a disgrace…” but she couldn’t understand any of it.

* * *

I woke to the sound of a groundskeeper whisking dead mayflies from the walk below my balcony with a small broom. Around six it had rained hard for fifteen minutes, knocking insects out of the sky, and I call these mayflies for convenience, but they seemed half cockroach as well. Later, in the lobby, when I asked the concierge what sort of creature this was, he said, “In-seck.”

Michael had called and left a message at the front desk. I asked the clerk, “Why didn’t you put him through to the phone in my room?” and the young man scratched at the desk with his fingernail and examined his mark and seemed to forget the question until he said, “I don’t know.”

Michael wanted to meet me at 1600. At the Scanlon. That said a lot about his circumstances.

I wandered into the Papa’s restaurant twenty minutes before the ten o’clock conclusion of the free buffet, the last person down to breakfast, and I found the staff thronging the metal warming pans, forking stuff onto plates for themselves. So this is what they eat, I thought, and by turning up with my own plate here I’m sort of fishing this fat banger sausage right out of somebody’s mouth. You half-American pig. I took some fried potatoes too — the word for them is “Irish”—and then I couldn’t eat, but I ate anyway, because they were watching me. Under their compassionate gazes I ate every crumb.