Johnson Denis - The Laughing Monsters

“We met at Fort Carson.”

“Were you in the military?”

“No.”

“Good.”

Michael said, “When I met Nair here in 2001, he was with NATO.”

“NATO? Here? This isn’t exactly the North Atlantic.”

“NATO had people here two weeks after nine-eleven,” I said.

“Are you still with them? What do you do now?”

I handed her a business card from my wallet. “Budget and fiscal.”

“Who’s ‘Technology Partnerships’?”

“We crunch numbers for corporate entities interested in partnering on large projects with the public sector. In the EU, that is. We’re not quite global. It’s dull stuff. But I get around quite a bit.”

Michael said, “When we met, Nair was with NIIA.”

She waited until I said, “NATO Intelligence Interoperability Architecture.”

“A spook!”

“Nobody says spook anymore.”

“I just did.”

“In any case, I wasn’t one. I sent cables in plain English. Just comparing the project to the schedule, so they could revise the schedule to fit the project and go home winners every weekend.”

“And what was the project?”

“Boring stuff.”

“Nair had something to do with laying fiber-optic cable for the CIA.”

“NATO doesn’t deal with the CIA,” I said.

“It was American stuff you were putting in the ground, don’t try to fool me.”

“All I did was wander around Sierra Leone like an idiot.”

“And after that,” Michael said, “Afghanistan.”

“I was an idiot there as well.”

“I can vouch for that,” he told Davidia. “That’s where I found him after a year’s separation, in Jalalabad, driving a stolen UN car.”

“You people!” she said.

“What a baby I was. I thought I was Colonel Stoddart or somebody.”

“Stoddart?”

Michael said, “He got beheaded in Afghanistan.”

“In the nineteenth century,” I said, to dispel her shock.

“Oh, Stoddart — yes—”

“Thirty-five years old. Almost like me!” Michael said.

“To be clear,” I said, “Michael was driving the stolen car.”

“All the UN did was cower in their compound in Kabul, and get drunk, and watch people steal their equipment.”

“Were you doing fiber-optic cable there too?”

“No.”

“Nobody realizes this,” Michael said, “but the US military has its own internet. They have their own self-contained system of cables all over the world. And communications bunkers everywhere.”

“Bunkers? Like bomb shelters?”

“Technology Safe Houses,” I said. “The ones in West Africa are probably rotting in the earth. Nobody cares about this place.”

Davidia was drinking wine, which I wouldn’t have recommended, but she’d chosen something Italian, and she seemed to like it. Every time she took a sip, Michael and I stopped talking and watched.

“Michael,” she said, “you’ve never explained what you were doing in Afghanistan.”

“Michael was my bodyguard.”

He took offense. “I had many duties there. I transported a lot of prisoners.”

“What about now, today,” I said, “our duties now? Somebody please tell me. Are we here for a wedding?”

Davidia said, “Yes.”

“So, Michael, this trip has nothing to do with business.”

“Well, while we’re traveling — we’ve always got our noses open for the smell of business.”

Davidia laughed, and I said, “That came out wrong. But I get the message.”

Michael said, “Davidia will be married wearing shoes of pure gold. And she’ll keep them the rest of her life.”

“All this meets with your approval?”

Davidia only said, “Yes.”

“Are we really going to Uganda?”

Michael said, “We’ll fly to Entebbe next week, is that all right? Can you come? Because in Uganda, they really know how to put on a wedding. I wish it could be a double wedding.”

“You want two wives?”

“Be serious! Two brides and two grooms. I told Davidia you’re engaged.”

“On the brink of engagement,” I said.

“Aren’t we all!” Davidia said. “What does she do?”

“She’s an attorney, but she works for NATO in Amsterdam — for your lot, actually. For the Americans.”

“Nair met her in Kabul,” Michael said.

“He’s actually correct about that. But Tina and I weren’t involved over there — just acquainted. She was a prosecutor for the UN, and Michael and I both knew her a bit.”

“A bit? She wasn’t one of Michael’s, was she?”

“You think everybody’s my girlfriend. Do you think I have unlimited time for sex?”

“That’s exactly what I think.”

“Before the UN,” I said, “she served as a prosecutor in Detroit. Once she took part in a drugs raid and carried a machine gun.”

“So she’s dangerous. Is she beautiful?”

“Yes, but she’s a little too smart for that. She keeps herself a bit plain. I prefer it.”

Davidia said to Michael, “You’d parade me around nude, if you could.”

“Nude except for sexy platform shoes. You’ve got it, so flaunt it.”

“Sometimes,” she said, “you have a thirsty face like a little boy.” She laughed. She was tipsy by now. I hoped she’d do something stupid, something to break the beautiful image. She caught me looking. “You don’t sound the least bit like Georgia. How much time have you spent there?”

“Very little. My father raised me in Europe, mostly Switzerland. I don’t think he had legal custody — I think I was kidnapped.”

“Is he still alive?”

“Both mother and father are living.”

“When do you see your American family?”

Just the kind of question I like to deflect. But I found I wanted her to know. “I’ve had no contact with my mother or her family since I was eight years old.”

“But you, you—” She was flustered. “You see your dad, right?”

“We get together every so often. He lives in Amsterdam too.”

Michael was staring at me. “These are things I never heard about.”

Davidia told him, “Maybe that’s because you talk more than you listen.” She said it with affection. I thought I was done, but she kept at me—“What line is your father in?”

“He’s a physician at a teaching hospital. More teacher than physician, in other words. I’m afraid he’s a little crazy.”

“And your mother?”

“As I’ve said — no contact. I choose to believe she’s happy.”

“Then I’ll believe it too,” she said.

Now a beggar dressed in rags came out of the dark and wrote swiftly on the floor with white chalk: MR. PHILO KRON / DR. OF ACROBATICS. He started doing cartwheels in place while holding a platter of raw rice, never spilling a grain. He repeated the trick, now holding a glass of water, also without spilling.

The staff, the patrons, everybody ignored him, but Davidia said, “Michael, give him something.”

Michael only offered him a scowl and said, “Don’t encourage these people.”

Davidia smiled and met the acrobat’s eyes, or one of his eyes — the other’s socket was scarred and pinched shut — and this inspired him to talk, or to signal his thoughts by a series of squeaks, as he seemed to be missing, also, one of his vocal cords. “Sometimes it’s feeling like the Prophet was just here,” he told Davidia, kneeling before her, touching her hand, trembling with the intensity of his message, “the Prophet himself, on this spot, and he went around that corner of the building there, and see, there, the dust still stirred up by the motion of his garments.” Satisfied with that, Dr. Kron took himself and his piece of chalk back into the night, and one of our waiters came quickly with a rag and wiped away his title and his name.