Johnson Denis - The Laughing Monsters

I gave up running and turned my back against the dust. In a few seconds the wind fell off and the noise got smaller. The craft must have been traveling low, because when I looked around again I could hear it, but I couldn’t find it in the sky.

I went back into the tent and closed and zipped the flap and sat on my bed, blinking my eyes and beating the dirt from my hair hand over hand.

* * *

I felt a touch on my shoulder, and I woke up frightened. It was dark, quiet — very late.

Patrick Roux said, “These are your clothes.”

He sat there in our only chair. I could see he held something in his lap. “It’s time to get dressed.”

He was speaking Danish.

“What?”

“It’s time to go. Right now the way is open.”

“Wait. Wait … what ?”

“It’s time to go. Just take some items for grooming. What you can fit in your pockets. Here’s your wristwatch back.”

Great joy powered me out of bed. “You fucker,” I said. “I knew it.”

“You prefer English?” he said in English.

“Or German,” I said. “I went to Swiss schools. The truth is I hardly speak Danish at all. Is this my shirt? I went to English-speaking schools.”

“We have six more minutes.”

“They’ve shrunk my shirt.”

“Let’s be prompt.”

* * *

When I’d kicked my pajamas aside and dressed and was all ready to go, we delayed, I on my bed, Patrick in the chair, with nothing to do, it seemed, but listen to the rumble of the generators and the giant buzzing of the floodlights outside. He peered at his wristwatch. My own watch, the cheap dependable Timex, read 1:15 a.m.

After two minutes he said, “Now we’ll go.”

We stepped into the orange glare and a soft, glittering rain. Patrick zipped the tent’s fly behind us and we walked across the grounds and right through the open gateway, passing without a challenge between two gunnery emplacements, five soldiers on each, in their helmets and night goggles and armor. The gate rolled shut behind us and we entered the dark.

The rain let up, but still we had no moon. For thirty minutes we walked along the road without flashlights, going north, feeling with our feet for the ruts and the boggy soft spots. We didn’t talk. The din of the reptiles and insects, our steps and our breaths, that’s all we heard.

Headlights came up on the road far behind us. Shortly afterward, we heard the engine.

We stepped to the side, and the headlights stopped fifty feet short of us, and Patrick went to the vehicle, a Humvee, I thought, but I couldn’t really see, and in a minute his silhouette came toward me and then disappeared as the car turned around and accelerated back the way it had come.

Now Roux directed our steps with a small flashlight. I could make out a sizeable package dangling from his arm. He slung it over his shoulder. As we walked it gave out a kind of clicking and muttering.

For quite a while the vehicle’s aura remained visible behind us. I would have expected them to run blackout headlights, but they didn’t seem to care.

When they were well away, Roux said, “We’ll get off the road here, and take a rest.”

“Let’s not drown in a mudhole.”

“No, it’s good ground.”

He found a spot he liked, laid out a handkerchief, and sat with his back to a tree. Between his knees he set down the package, a canvas haversack. He unbelted the flap, and I knelt beside him while he unpacked the contents by the beam of his penlight — it showed eerily on his eyeglass lenses, like two sparks in his face.

On top, a large manila envelope, inside it a map of the Democratic Republic of Congo. And cash. US twenties. “This is my money.”

“Your funds when you arrived. It’s all there.”

No wallet, no cards of any kind. “Where’s my passport?”

“You don’t need it.”

Also, a manila folder — the one I’d seen on the desk of the man from USSOCOM — holding, as far as I could tell in the dark, printed copies of my e-mails, as well as my handwritten pages, and not copies, but the originals themselves. “They’re dusting their hands of me completely, aren’t they? I bet they’re burning my pajamas too.”

Roux made no answer while I looked at some items wrapped in a hand towel. A metal fork and a spoon. A folding knife with a single blade. A penlight. “But what about a cell phone? How will I stay in contact?”

“They’ll be able to locate you.”

“Of course they will.”

At the bottom of the sack rested two one-liter bottles of water, and at the very bottom, a cloth bag. Roux set the bag on the ground and opened it and trained his light on a lot of metallic lozenges, each wrapped in tissue paper.

I held my light in my teeth and unwrapped one. Considering its heft, it was small. Three fingers would have covered it.

A kilo of gold.

I said, “Goddamn! Goddamn!” and the light dropped from my mouth.

“Captain Nair, listen to me. In the first place, these are only twenty kilos.”

“That’s still a million dollars’ worth. Goddamn!”

“Stop saying Goddamn.” Roux set down his penlight and paused to polish his glasses on his shirttail. Squatting over my pile of riches. “In the second place, these are not genuine.”

“Well, then, fuck. Fuck and Goddamn. Not genuine?”

He unwrapped another, shone his light on it, turning it in his dirty fingers. “The plating is copper and nickel, with some gold. Inside it’s only lead.”

“Who’s going to fall for crap like this?”

“Nobody. It works only with complete amateurs — you know, drunken tourists lured in by pimps, that kind of thing. It’s not for serious ruses, it won’t pass any kind of knowledgeable inspection. It’s something you can flash, nothing more. It’s just for you to flash.”

“This is outrageous.”

Roux laughed and said, “I laugh because you’re entertaining. I’m going back now.” He scooped up the contents and fastened them inside the pack and stood up. He seemed in a rush. “Yours to carry.”

I donned the pack. The load was heavy, but it was good equipment. Thick straps. I could probably hike a long way without chafing my armpits.

Facing him I understood, only now, that he was perhaps as tall as I. But he had a tininess of personality, and a sparrow’s face, also tiny. So then even his size was an illusion. His Frenchness, his bag of gold, his lost wife — all fake.

“I’m instructed to tell you to get physically close to certain parties, keeping this material with you.”

“That was my understanding.”

“They’ll maintain a fix on your location at all times. Remember that.”

“Is this a drone operation?”

“I’m not aware of such a thing.”

“Sure.”

“I’m only a messenger, but I can assure you personally you won’t be harmed. We don’t fight like that, harming our own people.”

“Sure. Except when you do.”

He said, “Don’t worry. Never worry. And don’t drop your mission.”

“I wouldn’t consider it.”

“If you do,” Roux said, “if you drop out of contact — you’ll be in an unacceptable situation. A kind of hell. Always hunted. Never resting. Nobody who tries it can last very long. You know it, don’t you? Nobody ever lasts.”

* * *

The US Army kept their garrison well out of the way. I had the road entirely to myself. By the fragrance, I guessed it cut through a forest of eucalyptus. The sack’s contents clicked rhythmically and with every step I said yes, finally, yes, at last: I’m done with you all, done with your world, done with you all, done with your world.

Twenty kilos of nonsense on my shoulders. How many pounds? Better than forty. More like forty-five. How many stone? Something like three. Right around seven hundred ounces. Yet the pack felt weightless, until my giant excitement gave way to the question why I wasn’t getting rid of it. Some item among the contents called out uninterruptedly to a global positioning satellite, a chopper full of Special Ops, a Predator drone, a fleet of drones — called out, after all, to the people who would either bring order to my affairs in a prison or murder me and solve my life.