The Laughing Monsters: A Novel Read online

  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 se
rvice 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.”

  * * *

  Having nowhere else to be, I arrived an hour early at the Scanlon, a hotel more central to Freetown than the better ones. When the region had drawn journalists, this was where many of them had lodged, a four-story place sunk in the diesel fumes and, when the weather was dry, in the hovering dust.

  Inside the doors it was mute and dim—no power at the moment please sir—but crowded with souls. In the middle of the lobby stood a figure in a two-piece jogging suit of royal purple velour, a large man with a bald, chocolate, bullet-shaped head, which he wagged from side to side as he blew his nose loudly and violently into a white hand towel. People were either staring or making sure they didn’t. This was Michael Adriko.

  Michael folded his towel and draped it over his shoulder as I came to him. Though we had an appointment in an hour, he seemed to take my appearance here as some kind of setback, and his first word to me was, “What-what.” Michael often uses this expression. It serves in any number of ways. A blanket translation would be “Bloody hell.”

  “Thanks for meeting me at the airport.”

  “I was there! Where were you? I watched everybody getting off the plane and I never saw you. I swear it!” He always lies.

  He put out his monumental hand and gave mine a gentle shake, with a finger-snap.

  “For goodness’ sake, Nair, your beard is gray!”

  “And my hair is still black as a raven’s.”

  “Do ravens have beards?” He had his feet under him now. “I like it.” Before I could stop him, he reached out and touched it. “How old are you?”

  “Too close to forty to talk about.”

  “Thirty-nine?”

  “Thirty-eight.”

  “Same as me! No. Wait. I’m thirty-seven.”

  “You’re thirty-six.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “When did I stop counting?”

  “Michael, you’ve got an American accent. I can’t believe it.”

  “And I can’t believe you bring a lovely full beard to the tropics.”

  “It’s coming off right away.”

  “So is my accent,” he said and turned to the waiter and spoke in thick Krio I couldn’t follow, but I got the impression at least one of us was getting a chicken sandwich.

  I asked the clerk if a barber was available, and he shook his head and told me, “Such a person does not exist.”

  I asked Michael, “Do you still carry your clippers?”

  Smiling widely, he caressed his baldness. “I’m always groomed. Send the sandwich to my room,” he told the clerk. “Two three zero.”

  “I know your room,” the clerk said.

  “Come, Nair. Let’s chop it down with the clippers. You’ll feel younger. Come. Come.” Michael was moving off, calling over his shoulder to the desk clerk, “Also bottled water!” Looking backward, he collided with a striking woman—African, light-skinned—who’d tacked a bit, it seemed to me, in order to arrange the collision. He looked down at her and said, “What-what,” and it was plain they were friends, and more.

  It didn’t surprise me she was beautiful, also young—not long out of university, I guessed. Such women succumbed to Michael quickly, and soon moved on.

  She wore relief-worker or safari garb, the khaki cargo pants and fishing vest and light, sturdy hiking shoes. On this basis, I misjudged her. Really, that’s all it was—I judged her according to her clothes, and the judgment was false. But the first impression was strong.

  Michael looked put out with her. “Everybody’s here at once.”

  “Not for long—I’m off exploring.” She sounded American.

  “Exploring where?” He was smiling, but he didn’t like it.

  “I’m looking for postcards.”

  I said, “You’ll have to go to the Papa for that.”

  “Yes, the Papa Leone Hotel,” Michael explained, “but it’s too far.”

  “All right, I’ll take a car.”

  Michael sighed.

  “Don’t pout,” she said. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

  “Wait. Meet my friend Roland Nair. This is Davidia St. Claire.”

  “Another friend? Everybody’s his friend.” Davidia St. Claire was speaking to me. “Did he say Olin?”

  “My given name is Roland, but I never use it. Please call me Nair.”

  “Nair is better,” Michael informed her. “It’s sharper. Look,” he went on, “at the Papa, get your nails done or something, kill some time, and let’s all meet at the Bawarchi for dinner—early dinner, six p.m. We all should know each other, because Nair is my closest friend.”

  I said, “He saved my life.”

  “Oui?” Her eyebrows went up.

  Michael said, “C’est vrai.”

  “More than once,” I said.

  “Three times.”

  “He kept me alive on a daily basis,” I said, and his woman looked me over—as if I explained something she’d wondered about, that kind of look, and I didn’t understand it. I said, “Are you Ivoirian?”

  It made her laugh. “Who, me?”

  “I thought because of the French.”

  “That’s just for fun. I’m a Colorado girl.”

  “I’m half American myself,” I said. I offered my hand. She laid two fingers on my wrist and seemed to watch my face as if to gauge the effect of her touch, which stirred me, in fact, like an anthem. She looked very directly into my eyes and said, “Hello.”

  And then, “Goodbye.”

  * * *

  In room 230 I noticed a rollerbag I judged not quite in Michael’s style, but nothing that clearly said the woman Davidia slept here.

  Michael flipped the wall switch. “Still no power!” He went to the dresser, opened a drawer, and turned to me gripping a braided leather whip about a meter in length, knotted at the narrow end. He grasped its handle and pulled out a dagger. “Nobody will know about my blade!”

  “But, Michael—they’ll know about your whip.”

  “Well, let them know at least something. It’s fair to be warned. Look how sharp. I could shave your beard with this.”

  “Show me to the clippers, please.”

  While I ran down the battery on his clippers at the sink, doing my best by the light through the small window, Michael cleaned his teeth, working away with a brush from whose other end a small spider dangled and swung.

  There was another toothbrush sticking out of a water glass, and a tube of facial cream, and two kinds of deodorant. “Tell me your friend’s name again.”

  He spat in the sink and said, “I’ve got a million friends,
” just like an American. “Look!” he cried. “It’s Roland Nair emerging from the bush.” He resumed his brushing—still talking, foaming at the mouth. “You have gray in the beard, but not on your head.”

  “A couple of days with you should fix that.” I spoke to his reflection, side by side with my own.

  I am Scandinavian but have black hair and gray eyes, or blue, according to the environment. If I wanted my appearance to impress, I’d stay away from the sun and keep a very white complexion to go with my raven locks, that would be my look. But I like the sun on my face, even in the tropics.

  Michael has handsome features, a brief, aquiline nose, high cheekbones, wide, inquiring eyes—like one of those Ethiopian models—and as for his lips, I can’t say. You’d have to follow him for days to get a look at his mouth in repose. Always laughing, never finished talking. A hefty, muscular frame, but with an angular grace. You know what I mean: not a thug. Still—lethal. I’d never seen him being lethal, but in 2004 on the Kabul–Kandahar road somebody shot at us, and he told me to stay down and went over a hill, and there was more shooting, and soon—none. And then he came back over the hill and said, “I just killed two people,” and we went on.

  Once he showed me a photograph, a little boy with Michael Adriko’s face, his hand in the hand of a man he said was his father. Michael’s father had Arab blood apparent in his features, and so Michael—well, there’s a dash of cream in the coffee, invisible to me, but obvious to his fellow Africans. Sometimes he introduced me to them as his brother. As far as I could tell, he was never disbelieved.

  He stroked his teeth with vigor. The spider whipped around on its strand. He rinsed his brush and the spider was gone.

  Now he watched me comb my hair. I think it fascinated him because he was bald. He laughed. “Your vanity doesn’t make you look more lovely. It only makes you look more vain.” At that moment, the ceiling fixture flickered to life. “Power’s back. Let’s see the news.”