A Dancer In the Dust (6 page)

I brought the Land Cruiser to a halt, creating a cloud of red dust that drifted, then curled over and fell back to earth. Even this seemed strange, as if the dust had been unaccustomed to such violent disturbance and had quickly returned to its ancient rest.

The door of the house was open, but I saw no one inside.

I tapped at the door. Still nothing.

Suddenly, Martine came around a corner, carrying a basket of grain on her head.

“So you have arrived,” she said.

“It was easy, since there’s only one road,” I told her.

She took the basket from her head. It had no handles, so she held it in her arms.

“Please, come in,” she said as she stepped up on the porch and gestured toward the door.

It would be too late before I fully understood the meaning of Martine’s house, how completely it had both mirrored and expressed her character. In fact, my first thought was no more complicated than the simple observation that she was the opposite of a hoarder. There were a few chairs and a couple of small tables. Two cots, one of which had been done up to serve as a sofa, rested on opposite sides of the farmhouse’s single room. A gray cord made from sisal hung just below the ceiling, and a curtain had been fashioned that could be drawn across the length of the room, presumably for privacy. To these Spartan furnishings, Martine had added a clay oven, and beside it, a stack of wood. All light came from candles, and the only bathroom, as I learned later, was an outhouse whose contents Martine and Fareem emptied by turns.

In fact, there was only one exception to the spare nature of these furnishings: an old gramophone with a black crank.

“Does it work?” I asked.

Martine nodded. “It is the one thing my father brought with him from the Congo. Not the only thing, no. There are some records. Most of them cannot be played on the machine anymore. The heat is bad for them. And the dust. But with a few, it is possible.”

“Do you ever play them?”

“Not so much,” she answered, then turned back toward the center of the room. “Would you like a drink? I make it from fermented honey that comes from the hives. It is strong.”

She walked through the back door of the house, then returned with two bottles of a thick, amber liquid.

“So, how did you happen to come by this farm?” I asked after the first sip.

“My father was the first to come here,” Martine answered. “He was very young. For some time, he worked in Rupala, in the coatroom at the French consulate. While he was in Rupala, he learned a few Lubandan dialects, as well as English. In fact, an Englishman had told him about this farm. None of the whites had wanted to stay in Lubanda. They had come for gold and other mythical riches that didn’t exist. With no natural resources of value, land in Lubanda was cheap, particularly in the savanna. He bought the farm with the little money he had saved, and settled it with a Belgian girl he had met one day in the park.

“My guess is that she had red hair,” I said airily.

“No, my father did,” Martine said. “It is he who raised me.”

She appeared quite pointedly to avoid any further discussion of her mother, and so I didn’t make any further inquiry in that direction.

She shook her head, then took a sip of her home brew. “Do you like it?” she asked with a nod toward the bottle in my hand.

I did. It was sweet, but the kick was strong.

“Another glass of this and I wouldn’t make it back to Tumasi,” I said.

Martine smiled. “If you are drunk, you can leave the road and sleep under the stars. No one will bother you.” She pointed across the room to shelves that lined the wall, laden with scores of books and what looked to be official reports of one kind or another.

“My library,” she said. “Come.”

We walked over to the shelves and Martine stood silently while I perused them. There were around a hundred books, most of them in French, a few novels, mostly Balzac and Stendhal. But the great preponderance of her books appeared to deal with African history, much of it recent. True, she had several volumes having to do with the “scramble for Africa,” the history of its colonization. But most of her histories chronicled the continent’s varied struggles for independence, the achievement of nationhood, then what had happened after it had either been gained or granted, the grim narratives of Zimbabwe and Uganda, Kenya, and the like.

“Have you read much about Africa?” Martine asked.

“Just some preparatory stuff,” I told her. “And I just got a packet of material from the agency—the Lubandan Constitution and a few other government documents. Back in college I read Mary Kingsley’s book about coming to West Africa.” I laughed. “It was quite funny in places. I remember how she is told to make quick contact with the Wesleyans because they are the only ones with feathers on their hearses.”

“Hmm,” Martine breathed in that vaguely meditative way of hers.

“And that book of useful African phrases she reads,” I went on. “I remember that one of the useful phrases was, ‘Why is this man not yet buried?’”

I’d expected Martine to be amused by these little anecdotes, but instead she shook her head at their absurdity.

“It is hard to be a foreigner,” she said. “I would never want to be one.”

She smiled briefly, then became quite solemn and in that mood took a book from the shelf and handed it to me. “This book is a history of the
Force Publique
.” She watched me silently for a moment, her gaze quite penetrating, as if trying to discover if this meant anything to me. “My grandfather did very bad things in Congo when he was a member of the
Force
.”
She nodded toward the book. “You should read it as a warning of the evils foreigners can do.”

“Well, foreigner or not, I intend to do good things,” I assured her.

She looked at me somberly. “Of course you do.” She glanced toward the open front door, where Fareem suddenly appeared. “Now we can have dinner,” she said. “I hope you like goat.”

I had never eaten goat, but found it quite tasty. The table talk that went with it was mostly about farming in Tumasi, an area of Lubanda that had little water. At that point, since I was in search of a project, I seized upon the idea of irrigation, a suggestion neither Martine nor Fareem appeared to find particularly noteworthy, though neither offered any reason for this.

Still later, we talked a little about President Dasai—his popularity in the West; the fact that with his administration now running Lubanda, the country would likely be the beneficiary of a steady stream of aid.

“That will make Lubanda ripe for the picking,” Fareem said.

I looked at him quizzically.

“Bad people will suddenly have an interest in Lubanda,” he explained.

“Bad people?”

“Warlords, you call them,” Fareem said. “They will see all these foreign things coming in, and they will think,
Hmm, I could take all that. It could all be mine
.”

Martine placed her napkin on the table in a gesture that was almost violent. “Dinner is not for politics,” she said, then rose and walked out onto the porch, leaving Fareem and me alone at the table.

“She is afraid,” Fareem told me.

“Of what?” I asked.

“The future,” Fareem answered. “What will happen in Lubanda.”

He looked at me with the anxious gaze of a man who had much to protect. “She may need a foreign friend,” he confided in a tone I found unexpectedly intimate. “Will you be that friend, Ray?”

I looked out toward the porch, where Martine stood alone, leaning against one of its wooden posts. There was no way I could have imagined ever betraying her or causing her the slightest harm. And so with full confidence, I turned back and looked straight into Fareem’s passionately inquiring eyes.

“Yes,” I said. “I will.”

It was Gail’s voice that broke through this recollection.

“Mr. Douglas is here,” she said.

I nodded, and on that signal she escorted him into my office, where we exchanged pleasantries, then got down to business. The shakiness of the Eurozone had put my client into a sweat. He wanted reassurance that one of the world’s largest economies wasn’t about to crumble. Unfortunately I could offer him no such certainty.

“Some events are too large to predict or evaluate,” I told him. “The fall of the Soviet Union, for example, or the attacks on 9/11.”

I would normally have supported this statement with up-to-the-minute references to this book or that paper, a show meant to demonstrate that I was fiercely in the moment when it came to the latest research. One aspect of risk reduction has to do with trusting your source, and in my field, I’d long ago discovered that there is nothing like a dazzling display of citations to shore up the confidence of a skittish client. But honesty is also important in risk management, and the starkest and most obvious of all life’s truths is that its course cannot be reliably predicted. One afternoon, while drying off from a swim in the pool, you notice an unslighlty blemish. Six months later you’re dead.
Such,
as the fabled Australian criminal Ned Kelly declared in his final words from the gallows,
is life.

“The simple fact is that world-transforming events can never be factored into a risk assessment,” I told my client, “save to posit the possibility of their sudden and unexpected arrival.”

“So, what am I paying you for, Ray?” Walter asked half-jokingly, though undoubtedly with a keen eye to my fee.

“You pay me for reassuring you that you’ve done all you could do to protect yourself against the unexpected,” I answered truthfully. “That no matter what happens to your assets, you can’t be blamed or accused of malfeasance. You pay me to protect your soul from moral hazard.”

Walter looked at me oddly, as if he’d suddenly glimpsed a fissure in my rock-solid character.

For that reason I should have stopped, taken a breath, and gotten back on track. But something in me would not be held in check.

“The greatest risk anyone runs is to be found wanting, inadequate, not up to the job,” I added, the pace of my voice quite measured, almost stark, a one-man Greek chorus. “It is reducing the risk of that kind of ultimate, end-of-game failure that we all seek.”

Something in Walter’s gaze deepened.

“Where did you learn about risk assessment?” he asked, almost warily, as if I’d changed shape before him.

In Lubanda,
I thought, but I didn’t say this to Walter.
Instead I got ahold of myself and nimbly shifted to my studies at Wharton, where I seized a few anecdotes about the professors I’d encountered there, the risk management tidbits of wisdom they’d dispensed, all of it designed to regain his briefly endangered sense of my personal and professional solidity, as well as to secure the illusion that this get-together was mostly a matter of reaffirming our hail-fellow-well-met companionability. It worked, and a few minutes later he was chuckling at some joke of mine or nodding appropriately when I made a point. This was followed by a farewell handshake, and I was once again alone in my office, staring silently out my window, seeing not Manhattan beyond the glass, but the arid reaches of the savanna that spread out on either side of Tumasi Road, recalling that upon arrival I’d known nothing of the place beyond what I’d read in a pamphlet published by Hope for Lubanda, its pages adorned with pictures of cheerful Lubandans singing and dancing. “The hope of Lubanda is in the hearts of its people,” the pamphlet had proclaimed in its ludicrously inspirational final line, “and you are here to help them realize that hope.”

Even so, it was true. I had, indeed, come to help, though with few skills anyone could have considered useful, unless a certain acquaintanceship with classical literature might prove vital to building a school or sinking a well or growing maize among a people who would ultimately resist its introduction as a staple crop, this because, as it turned out, and as Martine had later written in her
Open Letter
, “The minds of we Lubandans are neither as open nor as malleable as you imagine them to be.”

How true this had proven to be, I thought, and instantly found myself in the village again, returned to my first day in Tumasi, watching Martine make her way up the road, walking with a basket on her head, Fareem strolling beside her. I could no longer say just how long I’d peered down the road, focused upon and oddly mesmerized by Martine as she continued on and on. I knew only that I’d watched until the horizon had at last consumed her, and she was gone.

The vision of her vanishing lingered throughout the day as one client followed another. In fact, it trailed me into the afternoon, by which time I felt as if I were being carried on a wave that was determinedly bearing me ever more deeply into the past, back to Martine and Fareem and Seso, to that long-ago trial by fire that had, in different ways, seared us all.

Seso.

Thinking of his murder brought to mind one of the central truths of risk assessment, namely, that the correct calculation of a risk rises in proportion to the accuracy, variety, and scope of obtainable information. It is for that reason that any risk assessment worthy of the name must rest upon a multitude of sources.

With regard to Seso’s death, however, I had only one source, Rudy Salmon, a Wharton classmate who’d landed a job at One Police Plaza, then risen in the department’s administrative ranks. He now held one of those posts that adhere like barnacles to the great lumbering ship of New York’s municipal bureaucracy.

I knew no one else in the Police Department, however, and so it was to Rudy I made the call.

“Seso Alaya,” Rudy said slowly, so that I knew he was writing down the information I’d given him, namely the victim’s name, the location of the murder, the fact that a friend of mine’s name and telephone number had been found in the dead man’s room, and that my friend had been visited by the police as a result.

“Got any idea who paid this visit?” Rudy asked.

“A detective named Max Regal.”

“And this was a homicide two days ago, at the Darlton Hotel on East Twenty-seventh Street.”

I could hear the tap, tap, tap of Rudy’s computer. “There was a homicide in that hotel, yes,” he said after a moment, “What’s your interest in this guy, Ray?”