The Laughing Monsters (2 page)

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.

It was October, with temperatures around thirty Celsius most of the daytime, not unbearable in the shade, as always very humid. Right now we had a cool sea breeze, a few bright clouds in a blue sky, and a white sunshine that by noon would crash down like a hot anvil. The only other patron was a young American-looking guy in civilian clothing with a tattoo of a Viking’s head on his forearm.

The power was up. American country music flowed through the PA speakers. I took the latter half of my coffee to a table near the television to catch the news on Chinese cable, but the local network was playing, and all I got was a commercial message from Guinness. In this advertisement, an older brother returns home to the African bush from his successful life in the city. He’s drinking Guinness Draught with his younger brother in the sentimental glow of lamps they don’t actually possess in the bush. Big-city brother hands little bush brother a bus ticket: “Are you ready to drink at the table of men?” The young one takes it with gratitude and determination, saying, “Yes!” The announcer speaks like God:

“Guinness. Reach for greatness.”

*   *   *

After breakfast I went out front with my computer kit belted to my chest like a baby carrier. Sweat pressed through my shirt, but the kit was waterproof.

The only car out front had its bonnet raised. A few young men waited astride their okadas, that is, motorcycles of the smallest kind, 90cc jobs, for the most part. I chose one called Boxer, a Chinese brand. “Boxer-man. Do you know the Indian market? Elephant market?”

“Elephant!” he cried. “Let’s go!” He slapped the seat behind him, and I got on, and we zoomed toward the Indian market over streets still muddy and slick from last night’s downpour, lurching and dodging, missing the rut, missing the pothole, missing the pedestrian, the bicycle, the huge devouring face of the oncoming truck—missing them all at once, and over and over. On arrival at the market with its mural depicting Ganesha, Hindu lord of knowledge and fire, I felt more alive but also murdered.

The elephant-faced god remained, but Ganesha Market had a new title—Y2K Supermarket.

“I’m waiting for you,” my pilot told me.

“No. Finish,” I said, but I knew he’d wait.

I left the Boxer at the front entrance and went out by the side. I believe in the underworld they call this maneuver the double-door.

Outside again I found a small lane full of shops, but I didn’t know where I was. I made for the bigger street to my left, walked into it, was almost struck down, whirled this way by an okada rider, that way by a bicycle. I’d lost my rhythm for this environment, and now I was miffed with the traffic as well as hot from walking, and I was lost. For forty-five minutes I blundered among nameless mud-splashed avenues before I found the one I wanted and the little establishment with its hoarding:
ELVIS DOCUMENTS.

Three solar panels lay on straw mats in the dirt walkway where people had to step around them. The hoarding read, “Offers: photocopying, binding, typing, sealing, receipt/invoice books, computer training.”

Inside, a man sat at his desk amid the tools of his livelihood—a camera on a tripod, a bulky photocopier, a couple of computers—all tangled in power cords.

He rose from his office chair, a leather swivel model missing its casters, and said, “Welcome. How can I be of service?” And then he said, “Ach!” as if he’d swallowed a seed. “It’s Roland Nair.”

And it was Mohammed Kallon. It didn’t seem possible. I had to look twice.

“Where’s Elvis?”

“Elvis? I forget.”

“But you remember me. And I remember you.”

He looked sad, also frightened, and made his face smile. White teeth, black skin, unhealthy yellow eyeballs. He wore a white shirt, brown slacks cinched with a shiny black plastic belt. Plastic house slippers instead of shoes.

“What’s the problem here, Mohammed? Your store smells like a toilet.”

“Are we going to quarrel?”

I didn’t answer.

Everything was visible in his face—in the smile, the teary eyes. “We’re on the same side now, Roland, because in the time of peace, you know, there can be only one side.” He opened for me a folding chair beside his desk while he resumed his swivel. “I might have known you were in Freetown.”

I didn’t sit. “Why?”

“Because Michael Adriko is here. I saw him. The deserter.”

“You call Michael a deserter?”

“Hah!”

“If he’s a deserter, then call me a deserter too.”

“Hah!”

I felt irritated, ready to argue. Mohammed was still a good interrogator. “Listen,” I said, “Michael’s not from any of these Leonean clans, any of the chiefdoms. I think he’s originally from Uganda. So—if he left here suddenly back then, he didn’t desert.”

“Can’t you sit down to talk?”

“Bruno Horst is around.”

“I do believe it. So are you.”

“Is he working for one of the outfits?”

“How would I know?”

“I don’t know how you’d know. But you’d know.”

“And who does Roland Nair work for?”

“Just call me Nair. Nair is in Freetown strictly on personal business. And it really does stink in here.”

“Who do you work for?”

I shrugged.

“Anyone. As usual,” he said.

I wasn’t a torturer. I’d never stood ankle-deep in the fluids of my victims … “I can’t imagine how you ended up here,” I told him. “You’re all wrong for this.”

“Holy cow! All wrong for what?”

“You’re a dirty player.”

Mohammed had lost his smile. “I hear the pot saying to the kettle, ‘You are black.’ Do you know that expression?”

He had a point. “All right,” I said, “we’re both black,” and it struck me as funny.

Mohammed found his smile again. “Nair, I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot after so long a time, honestly—because it’s almost the moment when you take me to lunch!”

“Lunch isn’t out of the question,” I said. “But first give me a few minutes with your computers.”

“None of them are working.”

“The computers downstairs.”

“There’s no downstairs.” He was a terrible liar. I stared until he understood. “Bloody hell!”

“Let’s have a look inside your closet.”

“Every day brings new surprises!” He looked as if he’d eaten something evil and delicious. “You’re with NIIA?”

“Let’s follow the protocol.” The protocol called for his getting out of my way.

He sat back down and busied himself with a pile of receipts, bursting with a silly, private glee, while I went across the space to his mop closet, which stood open and which also served as a toilet, with a slop-bucket covered by a wooden board and a roll of brownish paper on the floor beside it. That accounted for the stench in the place.

I consulted the readout on my coder, a unit that fits on a key chain. The eight-digit code changes every ninety seconds. I entered the closet and shut the door behind me, and by the glow of my Nokia I moved aside a patch on the rear wall and keyed the digits into the interlock and pushed the wall open and went down the metal stairs as the panel clicked shut behind me without my assistance.

Here the four lights were burning.

I’d entered this sunken place more than once, long ago. It had been built to American standards, not in meters, but in feet: ten by sixteen in area, with concrete walls eight feet in height, and one dozen metal stair steps leading down. A battery bank in a wire cage bolted to the concrete floor, an electric bulb in another such cage in each of the concrete walls. A desk, a chair, both metal, both bolted down. On the desk, two machines—much smaller units than we’d used a dozen years before.

I sat down and took from my carrier-kit an accessory disguised as a cigarette lighter, a NATO-issued device similar to a USB stick, with the algorithms built in. It actually makes a flame. I held it to my face and scanned my iris and stuck it into the side of the machine in front of me and powered up and logged on. Through the NATO Intel proxy I sent a Nothing To Report—but I sent it twice, which warned Tina to expect a message at her personal e-address. For this exchange Tina would know to shelve the military algorithms. We used PGP encryption. As the name promised, it’s pretty good protection.

I logged off of NIIA and attached my own keyboard to the console and went through the moves and established a Virtual Private Network and sent:

Get file 3TimothyA for me. Your NEMCO password will work.

Nothing now but the sound of my breath and the prayers of three small cooling fans. The fans cooled the units, not the user. I wiped my face and neck with my kerchief. It came away drenched. My breath came faster and faster. My Nokia’s clock showed a bit after 1300—noon in Amsterdam. I hadn’t allowed time for getting lost. Tina might have gone to lunch. It irked me that I couldn’t slow my breath.

But Tina was at her desk, and she was ready. I sent: “I’m ready for those dirty pictures.”

Within two minutes it was done.

I believe that by making this transaction the two of us risked life sentences. But only one of us knew it. Like anyone in the field of intelligence, Tina asked no questions. Besides, she loved me.

I came up the stairs and into Elvis Documents with my kit clutched against my chest, as if it held the goods, but it didn’t. A Cruzer device snugged in the waistline seam of my trousers held the goods.

Mohammed waited in his broken chair, his gaze fixed studiously in another direction.

“Let’s eat,” I said.

*   *   *

We ate down the street at the Paradi. Decent Indian fare.

During the late nineties and for a few years after, when this place had drawn the interest of the media, Kallon had worked as a stringer for the AP and as a CIA informant, and then the CIA had levered him into the Leonean secret service to inform from down in the nasty heart of things, and he had hurt a lot of people. And now he’d got himself a job with NATO.

That the CIA once ran Mohammed Kallon was, I acknowledge, my own supposition, prompted merely by my sharp nose for a certain perfume. Snitches stink.

I let Kallon order for both of us while I went to the men’s lavatory. I slipped shut the lock and took my passport from my shirt pocket and the Cruzer from the seam in my trousers. I felt desperate to be rid of it. Cowardly—but the situation felt all too new.

Normally I carry my passport in a ziplock plastic bag. I removed the passport from the bag and replaced it with the Cruzer, wound the Cruzer tightly in the plastic, and looked for a hiding place.

The toilets, two of them, were set into the floor, each with a foot pedal for flushing. I examined the tiles on all four walls, fiddled with the mirror, ran my fingers around the windowsill. I tried lifting the posts of the divider between the two toilets—one came loose from the floor. With my finger I scratched a delve at the bottom of its hole, dropped the tiny package in, and replaced the post to cover it.

For the sake of realism, I pressed the pedal on one of the toilets. It didn’t flush. The other one sprayed my shoe. I washed my hands at the sink and rejoined Mohammed Kallon.

Over lunch we talked about nothing really, except when I asked him outright, “What’s going on?” and he said, “Michael Adriko is going on.”

*   *   *