The Laughing Monsters: A Novel Read online

  230K dollars US.

  50-50 split.

  Currently in transit.

  Will return to site of previous meeting when we have a deal.

  Suggest date exactly 30 days following previous meeting.

  Sample product: Basement Elvis Documents Freetown.

  NIIA safe site. Check and see.

  Don’t answer until the answer’s yes.

  Having suggested a date, I heard the clock start ticking. Today was October eleventh—I’d have nineteen days to wrap things up with Michael and find my way back to Freetown. An easy schedule. But Africa wipes its mess with schedules.

  I opened the communiqué from my boss:

  Let’s not overlook opportunities for filing. Check in daily. I don’t add “when possible.” Check in daily.

  No amount of detail is too great. Err on the side of inclusiveness. Give us an abundance to sift through and ponder each day. Every day. Daily.

  From this point forward, consider that a mission imperative.

  I replied:

  Nothing to report.

  —and closed the window.

  * * *

  The rain came hard. The dining room’s fine vaulted ceiling apparently leaked profusely, and when Michael and Davidia and I entered that evening looking for dinner, the maître d’ came at us with a push mop, driving a minor flood before him out the doors. On a hoarding on the step, a list of the cocktails on special—“Safe Sex in the Forest,” mostly vodka, and one called “The Pussycat,” whose main ingredient was identified as Baboon Whiskey. Time to lift the drinks moratorium? My thirty-dollar Timex watch said not even close.

  The musical fare had changed—today, fifties pop, specifically “Smile” as rendered by Nat “King” Cole. Nothing else. Just “Smile.” Over and over. “Smile” … “Smile” … “Smile” …

  Michael had turned up two hours before, dangling a set of car keys. “Toyota Land Cruiser. Four-wheel drive. Full of petrol.”

  At dinner Davidia wanted to know when we’d go riding. “Soon. It’s all ours.”

  I wasn’t so sure. “Where did you get it?”

  “From Pyramid Environments.”

  “Pyramid? Who’s that?”

  “Pyramid Environments. Security. I know all those guys. The manager’s office is in Arua. I know him from Fort Bragg.”

  “Bragg? I thought you were at Fort Carson.”

  “And Bragg—I told you that. At Bragg I trained Colombian commandos. The US assists them in going after the drugs racket down there. Everything was done through translators. Let me tell you something you already know … working in simultaneous translation is exhausting. It’s like walking everywhere on your hands, and never your feet.”

  “So you’ve told me many times,” Davidia said.

  “I don’t like the situation over there,” Michael said, meaning the situation at another table. “These guys don’t look right. They’re up to something.”

  “Doctors Without Borders.”

  “Then why don’t they go someplace and play doctor? First we see them at lunch, and now at dinner.”

  “Good lord. Is it possible we’re following them?”

  “Perhaps we should be.”

  Davidia glanced at me as if to say Help.

  “Nobody’s spying on you,” I told Michael.

  “Wait a minute. That one is Spaulding. Remember Spaulding?”

  “I remember. That’s not Spaulding.”

  Michael got up and went over to them.

  “I hope he’s not about to be rude,” Davidia said.

  “He’s just being Michael.”

  “He’s getting pretty crazy, Nair.”

  “You know what? I think he’s right. It’s Spaulding.”

  “Who’s Spaulding?”

  Spaulding possessed a great mop of platinum hair. I wouldn’t have guessed such a thing, and I hadn’t recognized him. As it happened, I’d never before seen the top of his head.

  Michael brought him over. Spaulding didn’t sit down. Pretty soon Michael would tell us he’d been the one to give Spaulding his very first sight of death. He’d told me this story many times.

  “Here’s Spaulding.” To Davidia: “Spaulding is MI6.”

  Spaulding didn’t mind. “He introduces everybody as some kind of spy.”

  “Have you chucked your turban?” I asked Spaulding.

  “A turban’s all right in Afghanistan, in the winter.”

  “So you were never actually some kind of Sikh?”

  “Just keeping my head warm,” Spaulding said.

  “What’s your religion, then?” Michael said.

  “Lapsed Catholic.”

  “I myself,” Michael said, “am a lapsed animist. This is Davidia, my wife-to-be.”

  “Congratulations, then, the two of you.”

  “Davidia—Spaulding is with MI6.”

  “I don’t hang out with MI6,” Spaulding said, smiling. “They’re all homosexuals.”

  Michael said, “I showed Spaulding his first dead body. In Mogadishu.”

  Spaulding said, “It was more like two hundred dead bodies. All laid out neatly side by side in the street. Fresh-cooked.”

  “Remember the dust devils? Two kilometers high. That’s where the legends of genies come from.”

  “You couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen. Your voice hadn’t changed.”

  Michael produced a soprano: “Ayeeeeee!—My voice will never change,” he went on in his man’s baritone.

  “I didn’t meet Spaulding till Afghanistan,” I said.

  Spaulding studied me. “Really. Have we actually met?”

  “Here comes our food,” Michael announced. “None for Spaulding.”

  “Have a lovely evening,” Spaulding said, mainly to Davidia, and rejoined his table.

  Davidia said, “Jesus Christ. You people!”

  I looked at Michael—looking back at me. “And there you have it,” he said. “It’s already time to leave town.”

  * * *

  The White Nile Palace Hotel had proved in one respect far too proper for my taste, but that afternoon, as I sat at a table near the bar trying to make sense of the hamburger I’d just been served, a little brown slut with a wig of short red hair came in and stood within reach of my arms and started wrapping and unwrapping the skirt that covered her bathing suit as she queried the bartender, ignoring me and inflaming me, and I thought, Thank goodness, at last, a reasonable woman. I got her to sit down with me and asked her name. It was Lucy. She was friendly enough. I felt us on the brink of striking an arrangement.

  The PA played “Jingle Bell Rock.” Two American-sounding women swam up and down the pool with gentle strokes, side by side, conversing about the Bible and God and spiritual challenges.

  Michael Adriko turned up at the pool’s far end. He wore black bathing trunks. I supposed he could swim, but I’d never seen him at it.

  He was talking to a Euro, a white man. It was rare to see Michael looking serious, rare to see him listening intently. I wished I could read the man’s lips. He was of middling height and middling all around, mid-thirties, with thinning, colorless hair. Rimless spectacles, a short-sleeved dress shirt tucked into dark corduroys and come untucked at the back—a civil servant sort, he seemed to me, except that he wore the shirt half unbuttoned to display a thick gold necklace.

  I moved to the bar and tried to catch Michael’s eye, wondering if I should be introduced. I didn’t catch his eye. I wasn’t introduced.

  I took up my cell phone and asked Lucy to excuse me, I had to make some calls. She said, “Maybe you need to call your boyfriend,” and went to the bar to pout and say nasty things about me.

  The two men each sat on the edge of a recliner, heads bent toward one another. I took a stroll around the pool pretty much in the manner of someone who had no idea what he was doing, passing behind them in order to—what? Smell what might be brewing—hostility? Conspiracy? Conspiracy, I thought.

  I walked past them an
d out the back gate onto the grounds, and I took note again of the man’s heavy necklace, which had tainted his neck’s flesh with a greenish collar. I walked around a bit, then came back past the pool and through the bar, heading for the restaurant.

  “Just give me a minute,” I said to Lucy as I passed her. “I won’t be two minutes.”

  I took a table in the restaurant and kept an eye on Michael and the other. Again the PA was playing “Smile” and had been playing it, I realized, for quite some time.

  After one more full turn through the song, the man got up and came toward me through the patio door, staring at me hard. He looked no more dangerous than a mathematics instructor, but my face flushed, I felt it—he passed me by and went out the front way. I watched out the window as he left the grounds by the gate, waving to the guard.

  Michael was coming into the place.

  “Join me for one second,” I said.

  He glanced around strangely, apologetically, and I realized that in his swimming shorts, he felt undressed.

  I said, “Michael. What-what?” He sat down across from me and I said, “Who was that guy?”

  “Well, he’s a businessman.”

  “Are we in business with him?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Do you want to tell me what it is?”

  “Right. Things are in motion. It’s time for full disclosure.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Come to my room in ten minutes.”

  I nearly exploded in his face. “If now is the time, why ten fucking minutes?”

  “What’s your hurry?”

  “There’s a girl I want to talk to.”

  “This is slightly more important.”

  “Why ten minutes?”

  “Davidia’s napping. I’ll kick her out.”

  After he’d gone, I went back to the pool after Lucy—she was lying in the big rope hammock cuddling with a fat African fucker.

  * * *

  At the Palace the rooms occupied circular bungalows modeled after the local huts, but a great deal larger and roofed with rubber shakes, not straw; four rooms to a bungalow, each room a quarter circle, each with a verandah, a door, a bathroom, two windows side by side. This one had a bed, a desk, a TV, and a standing electric fan, just like mine. A couple of shelves and hangers on a rod—no closet.

  I looked around for evidence of Davidia. The room had been cleaned, and everything was stowed, or hanging. It didn’t look as if anybody could have been napping here.

  “Full disclosure.”

  Michael unfurled a black shopping bag and dumped the contents on the bed: bright yellow electrician’s tape wrapping a package the size of an American softball.

  “Pick it up.”

  It was heavy for its size. “Feels like a couple of kilos.”

  He went hacking at the tape with a penknife and soon laid out before me a shiny lump of metal no larger than my thumb, on a rag of odd-looking material.

  It looked like gold. I assumed it was gold. I prayed it was gold.

  “What’s this stuff it’s wrapped in?”

  “That’s a bit cut from the smock you wear when you get an X-ray. It’s lead-lined.”

  “Oh, shit,” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Uranium.”

  “Very correct.”

  “U-235?”

  “No. It’s polished, but it’s just ore. As long as it fools a Geiger counter … Superficial authenticity, that’s all we’re looking for. It comes from southern Congo. The Shinkolobwe mine.”

  “Not from a crashed Russian cargo plane.”

  “No.”

  “You don’t actually have a planeload of enriched uranium.”

  “I told you—full disclosure. There’s nothing else. Have you heard of the Manhattan Project?”

  “Sure.”

  “The uranium for that came from the same mine, there in Shinkolobwe.”

  “Looks as if a dog just squeezed it out its ass.”

  “A little lump can make a very big bang.”

  “If I touch it, will I get cancer?”

  He laughed. I held it in my hand.

  “I’m in the process of parlaying that bit of dog business into one million dollars US.”

  As if he’d opened a gash in me, all the tension ran out. I dragged the chair away from his desk and sat down. “So it’s a scam.”

  “Of course it is. Do you think I’m running around with enriched uranium? If there was any U-235 on the market, New York City would be nothing but a crater already.”

  “And who’s our friend, with the fake gold necklace?”

  “Fake?”

  “Didn’t you see his neck? He’s probably poisoning himself with gold spray-paint. I didn’t like the way he came at me in the restaurant.”

  “He’s calling himself Kruger, probably because he’s South African. He saw you cruising around us. And Nair, it’s genius. The minute he saw you, I improvised something: you’re the bad scientist.”

  “I’m the mad scientist?”

  “The bad, the bad, the bad. You’re the renegade engineer who recently examined the crash site for the Tenex corporation. You reported to Tenex there was nothing there. No uranium material. But you lied. It’s there. You kept the truth to yourself, and you’re selling the crash site’s coordinates. Just a few numbers on a piece of paper. For one million cash US. It’s too brilliant, Nair.”

  He paused for my reaction.

  I couldn’t see where to begin. A bit of rain started on the roof above and the leaves outside, and we listened to that for a while.

  “You’re the verification,” he said. “We meet with Kruger and his partner, who’s bringing a Geiger counter. We give them this shiny radioactive object as proof of possession, and you verify what I say about the crash site. Then on to the big swap. One million.”

  “But, Michael, have you thought this through? Or thought even a little? How would this scam work? Take me through it, step by step. What are the steps that lead to the moment when the money’s out on the table?”

  “By the time the money’s on the table, we’ll have a lot of guys to help us. After our meeting with Kruger and his partner, we’ll have twenty-five K US as our payment for proof of possession. With some of that money, we’ll get a squad together. Congo is full of brigands. M23, Lord’s Resistance—plenty of warriors, and nothing to do all day.”

  “And then what? Cowboys and Indians? The money’s on the table, and a bunch of guns come out?”

  “I’ll handle that part. You’ll just handle the oily parts, because you’re good at that. But the answer is yes. Armed robbery.”

  “You skipped over my real question. How do you get the money on the table?”

  “When we meet with Kruger and his partner, we’ll tell them that as soon as they have the big payment prepared, we’ll be prepared to turn over another X kilos, say five kilos, and that’s all we could carry from the crash site. We promise them the coordinates to the rest.”

  “And for telling them this fairy tale they’ll give you twenty-five K?”

  I heard him say, “Twenty-five,” and then the rain outside came harder and washed out his words. I said, “What? What?”

  “Twenty-five K immediately, Nair. In our pockets. Then we go from Arua to Congo and we find my villagers, my family. A beautiful wedding takes place. Then we make arrangements for the final contact and the rest of the payment. It’s going to be a big payment, Nair, very big. Big.”

  “Right. One million. You already said.”

  “I haven’t said it to them yet. Maybe I’ll say two.”

  “Who’s going to let you string them along all that way with just this little piece of dogshit?”

  “The question to ask is—who could pass it up? Who could say no? If the claim is at all credible, they have to give it the full treatment.”

  “Credible? It sounds completely and obviously false, Michael—can’t you see that? What words can I use? Nonsensical. Impossible. Out of
keeping with reality.”

  “Reality is not a fact.”

  “Around here it certainly isn’t. God.”

  “Reality is an impression, a belief. Any magician knows this.” Like a cartoon villain, he rubbed his hands together. “Oh my goodness, Nair, you just tickle them in their terrorism bone, and they ejaculate all kinds of money. If you mention the name of one of the Muslim Most Wanted—boom, they put on a circus for you.”

  “You’ve skipped another question, haven’t you?”

  “What. What’s the question?”

  “Who is this ‘they’? Are they a fantasy too?”

  “Of course not. Kruger works for them.”

  “Who? Who are we dealing with besides this Kruger? Do you even know?”

  “We’re dealing with the Israelis.”

  If I’d had to stand up from my chair at that moment, I’d have failed. I was that shocked, and that much afraid. “Then you’re dealing with the Mossad.”

  “Their involvement is likely.” And he seemed proud of it. He smiled with all his teeth.

  “You’re scamming Mossad.”

  “They know me. If I say I have it, they’ve got to take me seriously and get together the cash.”

  The rain roared, or it was my head, but in any case the sense of things rushed away on a flood. “Michael … Michael…”

  “Nair. Nair.” He got his face close to mine as if he thought I couldn’t hear. “I know those people. You know I know them. I was trained by them.”

  “Michael, be quiet.”

  “Let me tell you about it.”

  “No. I’m feeling bewildered. Please shut up.”

  He complied. I didn’t say a word. In the silence, which was nevertheless quite loud, his folly bore down on us like a tremendous iceberg. Its inertia was irresistible. In this room, in Africa, reasonable arguments were just mumbo jumbo.

  “Is that enough quiet? Can I talk now? Because I want to explain one thing: I’ve got contacts, I know Mossad—ever since my training in South Africa. I can call them anytime that we want to cancel, and the whole thing’s canceled. Never happened.”

  “Well, Jesus Christ, man—call them now, and call it off. Cancel everything. Mossad? You’re insane.”

  “All right. I’ll cancel if you say so.”