Acts of Faith

Redeemer

SHE’D BECOME SOMETHING of a celebrity, a minor-league heroine, what with her media friends interviewing her about what happened in the Nuba mountains and relief workers from every agency in Lokichokio asking to hear the story firsthand. Quinette didn’t think she’d done anything heroic—she’d survived, nothing more—but she obliged them. After a while she had the tale down to a routine, like a stump speech or a nightclub act, the narrative flowing seamlessly, with dramatic pauses thrown in at the right moments, until she could go through it without feeling a thing except hatred for the criminals who’d murdered her friend and dozens of people in their hospital beds. She asked Jesus to forgive her for disobeying His commandment to love her enemy (and those Muslims were her enemy, the bombing had made her a naturalized citizen of this war); she prayed to Him to show her if there was anything more she could do, for she felt a keen desire to do more than she was. Her work didn’t seem to be enough. She wished to be called to take bold, direct action, as Doug and Fitz had been. If she could fly a plane, she would have joined them tomorrow and soared to the Nuba with rifles and rockets for Michael Goraende’s army.

Her thoughts often turned toward him. How gallant he had been, throwing his body over hers as the bombs fell. She recalled little things as well, like the way his head leaned a little to one side when he smiled, and the memory of their kiss flooded her mind at random moments, with such vividness that it wasn’t a memory but a reliving, a kind of poignant flashback. She didn’t know what to make of that kiss. Was it nothing more than the brief cleaving together of two people in desperate conditions? Two people, from places and cultures so alien to each other that they might as well come from different planets. We are literally black and white, she thought, then heard her friends back home questioning her in the crudest terms. You kissed a nigger? She was appalled to feel a flash of shame, and to realize that she was really asking that question of herself. Quinette did not like to think she was narrow-minded, but you could not grow up as she had without absorbing some of the prejudices that still prevailed in the rural Midwest. To overcome that part of herself, to repudiate it and the world from which she’d come, she determined to nurture her nascent attraction to Michael.

One night she tried to communicate with him telepathically. Those mental transmissions proving unsatisfactory, she wrote him a letter by flashlight, confessing that she wanted to see him again. It would be difficult, she wrote, and suggested he could help by sending an official request for her presence. She could show it to her boss, who was coming to Kenya soon in preparation for another redemption mission to Sudan. There was no mail service to rebel-held territory. Her intention was to have the letter hand-delivered by the next Knight Air pilot flying to the New Tourom airstrip; but on the way to the airline’s offices the next day, she had second thoughts, tore the letter up, and went to her office.

The compound where she worked, an oasis of cleanliness and order amid Loki’s squalor, was a mile and a half down an unpaved road from the one where she lived. Behind a thornbush fence, under the green umbrellas of tamarind trees, two stone bungalows faced each other across a dirt yard brightened by rosebushes and raked daily by an old Turkana gardener who looked as thin as his implement. She rode there on a one-gear bike she’d bought from Tara Whitcomb for ten dollars. The tall mzunga who dressed like an African had become a familiar sight to the shopkeepers and townspeople. “Jambo, missy!” they called to her, and she called back, “Jambo sana! Habari ya asubuhi?” pleased to hear herself speaking Swahili so fluently.

The compound housed the offices of logisticians for several Catholic dioceses in Sudan and of the South Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Agency. From the latter, Ken had sublet a small room for Quinette’s use. With its wooden schoolteacher’s desk, its wood swivel chair, its dented metal file drawers, black desk fan, and straw mats covering the cement floor, it possessed the chaste, ascetic appeal of a convent cell. The attraction that Africa had awakened in her, to the spare, the austere, the basic, had deepened, and so had her abhorrence for the world she’d left behind, consumed by consumption, choking on its own excesses. The only object from that world to invade her cloister was the IBM desktop Ken had furnished. Brand-new twenty months ago, it was probably now as obsolete as the manual typewriter she used when the generator conked out.

Ken had told her that the next mission would be “all-important to the continuation of our efforts.” He was coming with an entourage worthy of a heavyweight champ: besides the usual team—Jim Prewitt and the two Canadians, Jean and Mike—there would be TV crews from the BBC, French Television, and PBS, as well as reporters and photographers from the L.A. Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Guardian. The reason Ken was bringing so much media had to do with the bad press he’d suffered several weeks ago, when the United Nations Children’s Fund produced a report condemning the buying back of slaves as “absolutely intolerable” and demanded an end to it. The report said that slavery in Sudan wasn’t nearly the big deal he made it out to be, and that only a comparative handful of people were seized in traditional tribal clashes, not thousands in government-sponsored terror raids. What made Ken livid was the implication, voiced by a UNICEF bureaucrat in an interview, that the WorldWide Christian Union was exaggerating the problem as a fundraising gimmick. He fought back, and the upcoming trip was part of his battle plan. Quinette had been kept busy obtaining travel permits for the correspondents and cameramen, arranging for accommodations in Loki and for flights into and out of Sudan. She’d chartered Knight Air, which had upset Tara, but Doug and Fitz had performed so courageously in the Nuba that Quinette felt she owed it to them to give them some business.

The day before Ken’s arrival, her logistical work done, she turned to her main task—compiling the massive database of manumitted slaves that would provide the raw material for Ken’s monumental tome, The Record of a Crime Against Humanity. Although it had been in the works long before UNICEF made its report public, he’d decided to use it to rebut that organization’s claims. He intended to present it to the UN Commission on Human Rights and to the U.S. Congress, overwhelming them with proof that slavery in Sudan was as enormous as he claimed, and he instructed Quinette to get it done as quickly as possible. Her job, often the purest form of clerical drudgery, was to create a dossier for every person liberated since the program began: name, age, sex, tribe, home village, date of capture, and photograph, along with the captivity narratives collected on each field mission. Sometimes she was amazed that so much pain, suffering, and degradation could be compressed onto data disks the size of her palm; she half-expected them to melt from the outrages they contained. When she returned from the field, she transferred the narratives from the laptop to her desktop and later edited the tales down to manageable length. Ken said each one should be no more than two hundred fifty words. As if it were a contest—in two hundred fifty words or less, please tell us what it was like to be enslaved.

So far the WorldWide Christian Union’s campaign had freed more than eleven thousand people. Quinette had completed dossiers for exactly eight thousand six hundred twenty-two. Once the database was finished, she hoped Ken would keep her on. The idea of going home was beyond depressing. She couldn’t imagine it, not now.

She worked most of the day, compiling twenty more dossiers, and spent the last two hours on another task: keeping the rolls of captured people up to date. Their names were submitted regularly by the local authorities in southern Sudan to the SRRA, which then passed them on to her. After each mission the identities of the freed slaves were cross-checked against the register, and their names struck from the list. When she was finished, she noticed something odd: of the one hundred and sixty captives liberated on the last mission, the names of more than thirty had never been reported as captured. True, the identity of every single person wasn’t known; often three or four in a particular group would not be listed on the register. But thirty? That was unheard of. She was pondering what could have caused the discrepancy when she was interrupted by a knock. At the door was the stocky red-cheeked Russian who flew for Knight Air, Alexei.

“I was asked to bring this to you,” he said, passing her an envelope with the emblem of the SPLA in the left-hand corner.

She thanked him, shut the door, and tore the envelope open.

HEADQUARTERS, WAR ZONE TWO

SUDANESE PEOPLE’S LIBERATION ARMY

5TH NOVEMBER.

Miss Quinette Hardin

WORLDWIDE CHRISTIAN UNION

LOKICHOKIO, KENYA

1. During your previous visit here, you told me about the work your organization does in redeeming and repatriating abducted persons in south Sudan.

2. I would be grateful if you could fly here at a time of your convenience to discuss establishing a similar program in this zone. As you know, large numbers of Nuba citizens have been seized in government raids and have been sold into slavery or are being held in internment camps.

3. Upon your favorable reply to this request, I will contact the SPLA liaison officer in Nairobi to issue you the necessary travel documents.

LT. COL. MICHAEL A. GORAENDE

OFFICER COMMANDING

An excitement beat in her chest. This was astonishing. Michael had done the very thing she’d suggested in the letter she’d never sent; it was as though her telepathy had worked, her thoughts flying through invisible wires across hundreds of miles. She read his summons again, then stuffed it into her dress and pedaled back to the Hotel California before it got dark. That’s when the bandits came out, like bats.

 

TWO MILK-FED Canadians with hair the color of the boundless wheatlands where they’d learned to fly took Ken’s party on a route that Quinette now knew by heart, out over the brown Mogilla range into Sudan, skirting Kapoeta and the Didinga hills to bear northwestward above red plains polka-dotted with trees and cracked by dry riverbeds, the plains surrendering to the wild As-Sudd, a swamp so vast it took the better part of an hour to cross it by air, the Bahr el Ghazal and the Mountain Nile appearing to lie upon the marshes like golden serpents on a dark green mat, and then over the savannahs beyond, fading to yellow in this, the transitional month between wet season and dry, the landscape’s small details erased by altitude until, west of the Jur, the plane descended through broken clouds, and the beehive roofs of Dinka homesteads appeared, and cattle could be seen plodding out of smoky cattle camps, the animals scared into a trot by the plane’s shadow breaking over a palm grove moments before the wheels thumped against the runway and the propellers raised dusty cyclones that made the people waiting on the ground crouch and cover their faces with their cloaks.

“Kinnet! Kinnet!” teenage girls cried out as she stepped off the plane into the hot sun. “White Dinka Woman!” She basked in their adulation and couldn’t resist embracing them for the benefit of the television cameras. Ken got his entourage organized, and then they trooped down the same rutted road on which Matthew had given Quinette a bike ride on her first journey into these immense spaces. She wondered how he was faring. Was he nearby, hobbling on his artificial limb, singing praises to his song-ox while its bell collar chimed and buffalo-hair tassels waved from the tips of its curved horns? Was he happy, now that he didn’t have to fight? Sudan’s uncongenial soil didn’t yield great harvests of happiness. As for herself, Quinette felt vital rather than happy, with the aromas of an African early morning in her nostrils, her eyes alertly scanning the sky for danger, her ears pricked for the sound of an approaching Antonov, and her train of young admirers capering alongside, giggling, rubbing her arms to bring out the black they were sure lay beneath the white.

The mission did not go well. As a means of vindicating Ken and the WorldWide Christian Union, it was a disaster. The day before leaving Loki, he’d spoken by radio with his liaison man, Manute, who told him that four hundred and twenty slaves would be assembled—the largest number freed in a single day in the campaign’s history. Ken knew the media—get them to think they were in on something special—but he should have kept his mouth shut.

The first sign that things weren’t right came when the sweating foreigners were introduced to Manute and several local councilmen. The men had trouble making eye contact. One took Ken, Jim Prewitt, and Quinette aside and whispered, “I am afraid we have only forty-eight captives for you to redeem.” He sounded like a grocer apologizing to a customer for a shortage of bananas. Ken blinked behind his schoolmaster glasses. What had happened to the other three hundred and seventy-two? The councilman’s glance slipped sideways, then up, then down, as if the absent people had merely been misplaced. He shrugged and said he didn’t know.

Ken was furious, Ken was embarrassed, but in the end, all Ken could do was try to put the best face on things. Quinette cringed sympathetically, listening to him tell the correspondents that there had been a mix-up. He tried to buy a little time, speculating that the captives had been delayed—it happened sometimes, what with the distances they had to cover on foot. Maybe they would show up later in the day or tomorrow morning. Meanwhile there were forty-eight people to be given their freedom, and the press were welcome to observe the ceremony.

In many ways redemptions had become routine, more a scripted process than a ceremony. First a count was made; then Ken, Jim, and Quinette addressed the slaves, Jim doing a little proselytizing, Quinette delivering her set speech quoting Isaiah: “I have come to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound.” She had never tired of giving it, nor of the reaction it always elicited: the joyful clicking of tongues that was the Dinka way of applauding. This time was an exception. The four dozen people seated in the dust before her didn’t make a sound.

In step four, Ken’s “banker,” Santino, brought out his airline bag full of money and exchanged it for Sudanese pounds. For this trip, the twenty-one thousand dollars that was to have purchased liberty for four hundred and twenty people required two bags, but now he needed to open only one, from which he counted out twenty-four hundred dollars—the price for forty-eight people. And so things proceeded to step five—paying off the retriever, who in this case was an Arab Quinette had never seen before, a shabby-looking man with none of the ornaments displayed by traders like Bashir with his rings and gold Rolex and Italian loafers.

Recording the captivity narratives was the final step. Manute chose ten people at random while Ken set up his tape recorder and Quinette sat on a camp stool with her laptop. It wasn’t easy, with the reporters circled all around, pointing cameras, jabbing with microphones. The interviews went on for an hour. The final one was a woman in her mid-thirties who told a lurid tale of being repeatedly whipped on the back for refusing to have sex with her master. A French TV correspondent interrupted, asking her to show her scars for the camera. It was just the sort of disgusting, shameless request Quinette had come to expect from the press. Manute passed it on to the woman. A frightened look clouded her face. She turned to Manute, making a mute appeal. He spoke sharply to her. She shook her head. Quinette was appalled when Ken, desperate to salvage some dramatic moment from this failed exercise, encouraged her to do as asked. Again she shook her head, muttering almost inaudibly.

“She will not,” Manute explained. “The marks are very ugly. She is ashamed.”

“Nice, Ken,” Quinette remarked in an undertone, closing the laptop. “Like these people are in a freak show?”

Ten minutes later, while Jean and Mike were giving the former slaves medical exams, the French reporter came up to her and said, “She is not so ashamed now.” He cocked his angular chin at the woman, standing with the back of her dress unbuttoned, while the nurse examined her with a stethoscope. “They do not always tell you the truth, these people?” the Frenchman asked. Suddenly Manute’s furtive glances and the slaves’ silent indifference to her speech made sense. So did the discrepancy she’d found in the records. Feeling vaguely sick and angry at the same time, she approached Ken, who was giving an interview to the L.A. Times. When he was finished, she said, “I need to talk to you. Not here, not now. When we get back to Loki.”

On the return flight, she argued with herself which of the two topics on her agenda to bring up first. Should she lead off with her suspicions, or show him Michael’s letter and ask for permission to go to the Nuba? God helped her make up her mind. The right thing to do was not to think of herself first but to show Ken that he was being taken advantage of. Not only was that right, it was smart—he would be so impressed with her detective work that he’d grant her wish. There was one thing she needed to do first, however. Leaving him to clean up and change clothes, she bicycled to her office, turned on the computer, and opened to the registry of abducted persons. They were organized chronologically and by location. Turning to the list of names from today’s mission, she began to check them against those in the register. She was finished by the time Ken appeared, showered, shaved, and clad in a fresh khaki outfit that made him look like a tourist trying to look like a safari guide.

“All right, what’s the top secret?”

She sat with her knees together and her hands folded in her lap and her back straight. “That woman who said she’d been whipped? Who wouldn’t show her scars? There was a reason why not. She didn’t have any. I saw her, and so did that French reporter. Not a mark on her.”

“You’re saying what?”

“I’ll bet she never spent a minute in slavery. I’ll bet none of those people did.”

“Whoa, Quinette. Whoa.”

“Please, look at this.” Ken leaned over her shoulder and peered at the screen. “Take this kid, Akol Yel. He says he comes from the town of Manyel and that he was taken in 1995. I checked the list of people reported to have been seized from Manyel that year. He’s not on it. I checked ninety-four and ninety-six, just in case he got the year mixed up. Same thing. I’ve gone through all the people we redeemed today. Same thing again. No record of any of them being captured.”

Ken stepped back. “That’s happened before.”

“Sure. Maybe a few here and there. Not this many.”

He eased back another step and stood against the wall, arms crossed over his chest.

“I’m wondering if we’ve got people pretending to be slaves. And if they’re getting paid for their acting work.”

“By who?”

“My guess would be Manute, and he’s in on it with the local councilmen. They’ve heard these captives tell their stories a thousand times. They rounded up these people and—”

“Told them what to say,” Ken interrupted.

“Or maybe Manute was coaching them what to say while they gave their testimony. None of us speaks Dinka. We have no idea what he was saying to them. He’d known for weeks you were coming. He had the time. He and his buddies made themselves twenty-four hundred bucks, less whatever petty change they paid their make-believe slaves.”

“Quinette, Qui-nette,” he said in a singsong, as if she were a little touched. “They first told us, four hundred twenty. You don’t really believe they actually had that many phonies lined up but that something went wrong and only forty-eight showed up? Strains credibility to say the least.”

“I thought about that. Here’s a possible scenario. They got word from a legitimate retriever that he was coming in with three hundred and seventy-two people, real captives, but all along they’d planned to salt the mine. They knew you wanted a lot of people, so they’d recruited forty-eight folks from nearby towns to pad the numbers and make themselves some money. Then for some reason, maybe a delay en route like you said, the real slaves didn’t show up. That’s what made Manute nervous. They must’ve figured it would be easier to hide their actors and actresses in a big crowd.”

“And you’re saying this happened because I put pressure on them?”

“No!” she replied with vigorous shakes of her head. She had to watch how she put things.

“Okay, Nancy Drew, what else have you got?”

She decided to ignore the Nancy Drew remark. “The other day I was catching up on our last mission. Thirty people whose names don’t match. So there’s another fifteen hundred dollars.”

“I’d be careful, Quinette, about turning your speculations into fact,” Ken said. “You’re making an indictment on some very thin evidence. You’re not being paid to be some kind of auditor, you know. Or a private eye.”

This wasn’t going at all as she’d expected. “Well, excuse me all to hell!” she said in a flash of temper. “Excuse me for taking the time to see if we’re getting ripped off! If I’m right, don’t you think it’s pretty damned disgusting? Don’t you want to do something about it?”

“I’ll look into it.” He stood there, while above his head, as bright as a jewel in the barred sunlight piercing the window grate, an orange lizard clung to the wall. “Have you mentioned this to anyone else?”

She shook her head.

“Someone at the UN or in the press could blow a thing like this way out of proportion,” Ken said. “Like that bitch from CNN, Phyllis.”

“I’ve got a reputation around here for being discreet.”

“Don’t do anything to ruin it. The possibility that there are a few cases of fraud out of thousands doesn’t deny that there’s a huge human rights issue here and that we’re the only ones doing anything about it.”

“Right.”

“I know it’s the principle of the thing, but the amounts that we might be talking about are really small.”

The lizard had crept a couple of inches higher, its imperceptible movement creating the illusion that Ken had grown shorter.

“It would be terrible, terrible,” he went on, “if someone like Phyllis Rappaport were to blow a small problem out of proportion and damage a program that’s doing so much good.”

The bitter seed of her disappointment in him flowered into contempt, a contempt she couldn’t allow herself to show. She did need him, after all. “I’d never breathe a word to her or anyone. I’m a little surprised you think I would.”

“I don’t,” he protested, then paused. “But I can see how I gave you that impression. Sorry.”

Ken and contrition were a rare combination, which she could turn to her advantage, provided she didn’t overdo things. “I wasn’t looking for an apology,” she said, and gave him some time to think about the comment. She could almost see his mental gears turning, notch by notch. After several silent moments she realized he needed a nudge, and striving for a tone half an octave below the resentful, she said, “I put a lot of effort into this that I didn’t have to. I wasn’t playing Nancy Drew because I was bored. I thought I was looking out for your interests, the organization’s interests.”

He got it, finally, and to cover up his chagrin, he made a comic show, hunching his shoulders, wincing, turning up his palms. “Okay. I get the same complaint in Geneva. I don’t give my staff the credit they deserve. I stand corrected. You showed a lot of initiative and concern, and I’m grateful. I’ll put you in for a bonus.”

“You don’t have to go that far,” she stated, and while he was still feeling that he owed her something, she handed him Michael’s letter.

“What’s this?”

“It’s in the initiative department.”

“You don’t have enough on your plate already?” he asked when he’d read it.

“Ken, this is a whole new area we could call attention to. I’d like to go up there and make an assessment.”

“We sent you up there once to make an assessment and you damned near got yourself killed.”

“I can’t imagine anything like that would happen again. And the last time I was with a whole bunch of people. I hardly had a chance to talk to him. Didn’t even scratch the surface.”

“What would you get if you went back?”

“Facts, figures, an overview. What problems we’d have setting up a program there.”

He set the letter down on the desk and looked at it pensively. “All right, but make it a brief visit. You’ve got plenty to do back here.”