Acts of Faith

THE SKY WAS clear all around, an eggshell of blue.

“Well now, that was like what that Yogi Berra guy said—déjà vu all over again. At least they didn’t get my prop this time. Pair of shoes is all.” Switching to autopilot, Dare lit a cigarette. He figured recent events entitled him to increase his ration.”Goddamn! If I could figure a way to refuel in midair every day, I’d stay up here.”

“What happened?” Mary’s face was flushed, her voice a little breathless, but not in a way that suggested fear. She belonged to the breed who was stimulated by being shot at and missed. There was a quickness about her, a tense alertness in her eyes that he recognized; he had seen both in the crack special operations teams he had dropped over Laos, way back when Mary English was a toddler.

“Got no idea what that was all about,” he said in answer to her question. “Some clan feud. Maybe a few thugs from Mogadishu out for a Sunday drive in their Technicals. Got bored, decided to raise a little hell.”

“Abdul cheated Abdullah on a business deal, that’s my guess,” Tony said. “Or Abdullah cheated Abdul. Or Abdul caught Abdullah making eyes at one of his three hundred sheilas. Or was it Abdullah’s sheilas Abdul was making eyes at? Crazy Somali bastards.”

He motioned at the pockmarked windshield, and because the unsteadiness in his hand was obvious, Dare could not help but observe the difference between his copilot’s reaction to the experience and Mary’s. Tony had done damned well, and he made the observation without judgment, though the mere making of it might have been a kind of judgment in itself.

“So you guys don’t think it was us they were after?” Mary asked.

“Ever roll a ball in front of a cat and see what it does?” Dare said. “One of those firefights gets to goin’, and they’ll shoot at anything that moves just ’cause it’s movin’, and we were the biggest thing in motion out there. Four legs and claws, two legs with a gun, a predator is a predator.”

A puzzled frown from Mary, as if she wasn’t sure what to think about this bleak assessment of the human animal. She changed the subject slightly, complimenting him on his flying. Pretty fancy work, the way he’d cleared the dunes, then dropped down below them.

“Defilade, it’s called,” Dare explained, surprised to discover that he enjoyed being flattered by her. “Learned it contour flyin’ in Laos. Clip the treetops, put a ridge, a hill, anything you can between you and the bad guys.”

“Bum one?” She gestured at his cigarette.

“Didn’t know you smoked.”

“I decided just this second to say yes to nicotine.”

“After today I’ll bet you’re gonna sign up for another hitch of milk-run airdrops.”

He turned partway around to give her a light. She held the cigarette awkwardly between puckered lips, blew out the smoke without inhaling, her mouth a perfect little O.

“Not likely. Not bloody likely, as Tony would say. If I wanted to play it safe, I would have stayed in Canada, flying sportsmen to wilderness lodges.”

“Aw hell, don’t tell me y’all came here for the adventure.”

“Sure. Partly. Mostly it’s the money. I can make three times what I could back home.”

“That’s a whole lot better. I trust folks who do things for the money. “

“And we’ll be making a pile in less than a month,” Tony said, referring to the six-month contract Dare had signed recently to fly Laurent Kabila and his people in the Congo. “Can’t come soon enough, far as I’m concerned.”

“Yup, African Charter Services is gonna be the official airline of the Congolese rebels.”

“The Congo’s pretty dicey,” Mary said.

“Right. Not like good old safe Somalia.”

Dare conducted a brief debate with himself. Had she brought them bad luck or good this morning? Bad they had been shot at, good they hadn’t been hit. Maybe the god of fortune had been neutral about her presence. He’d started the argument because he was considering hiring her. She and Tony could fly the G1 on some runs, giving him a break. Mary’s nerves were certainly right for working the Congo. That left three things to be resolved: her flying abilities, his ability to afford her, and his troubling attraction to her, which could, under the right circumstances, undermine his loyalty to his copilot and lead him to do something he would regret. Taking the last problem first, he recalled that he had worked closely with a woman only once in his career, the year he flew deliveries for Federal Express. His first officer, Sally McCabe, had been smart, fairly good-looking, and single, but he discovered that the closeness of their association and the routine practicalities of flying a 727 together dissolved her feminine mystery, which had the same effect on his romantic impulses as he hoped khat did on the Somalis’ sex drive. Sally became one of the boys in a female body. It could go the same way with Mary; of course it also could go the other way; was it worth the risk?

Tabling that question for the moment, he calculated that he could pay her seven thousand a month for the six months. It was only a bite out of the seven hundred thousand he figured to gross. Then he decided to test her skills. He took his headset off, got out of his seat, and maneuvered his bulky frame out of the cockpit, telling Tony to take over as captain.

“Mary, you’re first officer. Let’s see how well you do.”

And she did fairly well, considering her unfamiliarity with the plane. The G1 being a more supple, responsive aircraft than the Buffalos she was accustomed to, she tended to horse it a bit, a little too much rudder here, a little too much yoke there. They reached the Tana river and commenced their descent, encountering turbulence. Mary handled it with ease. Approaching Nairobi, Dare cautioned her to steer clear of the hills to the south, far beyond which he caught the faint white blaze of Kilimanjaro’s peaks. That old legend about the dead leopard found up there—what was it doing, nineteen thousand feet above sea level, in the ice and snow? Getting away from the bullshit on the ground, that’s what.

Tony took over for the landing. Overall Mary’s performance wasn’t stylish—workmanlike, he judged—but workmanlike would do for now. He would have to sit down with Nimrod, go over the books and the numbers before making any commitments. And then sit down with himself and argue that other business through.

Tony parked in front of the hangar and shut down. Nimrod took his clipboard and flight reports and went to the office in back, Dare to his car for the old pair of sneakers that had been lying in the trunk for weeks. Reshod, he took Tony and Mary to the Aero Club for lunch. She had never seen the inside of that shrine to early African aviation, and the venerable atmosphere captivated her. Old wood, wainscot, varnish. She dawdled by the antique Spitfire engine mounted on a pedestal in the hall as if it were a museum exhibit and gazed at the black-and-white photos of long-dead fliers standing beside long obsolete planes, at the wooden propeller hung over the bar, and was it the same bar where Beryl Markham had drunk her gin?

“Think so,” Dare said. “She died only about ten years ago. Eighty-odd years old. Probably still be alive, if she didn’t like that gin so much.”

He was charmed by Mary’s wonder, like she was a kid at Disneyland, but her sightseeing annoyed Tony.

“C’mon, love, we’ll do the tour later,” he said. “We’re hungry, and we’ve got another trip this afternoon.”

They passed through the serving line, Kenyan girls in starched dresses dishing out spicy beef stew from chafing dishes, and sat next to a table occupied by a Russian crew, one of whom saluted Dare with a raised beer glass.

“Vesley! How are you? Good trip?”

“A daisy, comrade.”

“Think I’ve seen him out at Loki,” Mary said, and blew on a spoonful of stew. “Know him?”

“Name’s Alexei somethin’ or other. Antonov pilot.”

“Bloke blasted us with prop wash couple of months ago,” said Tony. “Wes gave him what for, he walked over to our plane, I guess to make something out of it. Wes told him, ‘You all step under the wing of my airplane, I’ll hit you so hard it’ll hurt your mama in Moscow.’ ” Tony had done his best to mimic Dare’s accent. “Bloke didn’t understand Texas English, stepped under the wing. Wes decked him. They’ve been best of mates ever since.”

“On account of we rescued his sorry ass a couple of weeks after that little incident,” Dare elaborated. “He pranged up in Somalia, flyin’ medicine to Baidoa for World Vision. Same place, same do-gooders we’ll be flyin’ for this afternoon. Them Russians are always crashin’. Good pilots, but their planes are about held together with Krazy Glue and thumbtacks.” He chewed, swallowed, washed the food down with iced tea, and added in an undertone: “Tell you another thing the Russians do. They sign up for three-month contracts, flyin’ hu-manitarian aid. Get a month off in between hitches. Know where some of ’em go on their vacations? Khartoum, to fly Antonovs for the Sudan air force. I’m talkin’ the Antonovs that have been converted to bombers. They stack the suckers in the cargo bay and just roll ’em out when they’re over the target. One day it’s bread, next day it’s bombs. It’s kind of a—what’s the word? Somethin’ that stands for somethin’ else.”

“Metaphor?” Mary ventured after thinking for a moment.

“Right. Now I ain’t sure what that metaphor stands for, bread and bombs, but a metaphor it is, sure as hell.”

Nimrod came in, frown lines layered on his forehead—cat scratches on ebony. A real worrier, Nimrod was.

“Bad news, Captain Wes. World Vision canceled this afternoon. There is fighting in Baidoa again.”

“Fine by me. One firefight per day is my limit. So is that all? Lookin’ at you, I think your mama died.”

“My mother died some time ago,” Nimrod said formally. “There is a man from DCA wishes to speak with you. He’s in the office.”

Dare set his fork down, feeling a sudden loss of appetite. A personal visit from the Department of Civil Aviation—that was the bad news. Or could be.

“Who and what about, or didn’t he say?”

Nimrod, reading from the man’s business card, said his name was William Gichui. He had not disclosed the purpose of his call; that was to be made to Dare himself.

“What do you think? The boss wants more cookies?”

“That would be my best guess, Captain Wes. I don’t understand—” Nimrod did not finish the thought, shaking his head with a look of distress.

“Well, we ain’t gonna find out what he wants sittin’ here,” Dare muttered, rising. Then to Tony and Mary: ” ‘Scuse me, y’all. Got the feelin’ we worked for taxes today.”

The tin-walled shed that he rented as an office, mostly so he could say to clients, “Call me at my office,” and thus claim their trust and respect, was attached to the rear of the hangar, like a shabby afterthought. Inside, two small desks, one for him and one for Nimrod, faced each other across a lane barely wide enough for someone to walk through. A phone, a fax, a laptop, a typewriter for use when the power went out, as it now did every day—another symptom of the country’s slow disintegration. Vinyl-bound volumes of Jepps aviation maps were scattered on the desktops. Hanging askew from one wall was a schedule board smeared with grease-pencil scrawl. Observing the expression on Gichui’s face made Dare embarrassed. The appearance of the place declared that African Charter Services was a fly-by-night operation, of no importance to anyone; that is, it could not be relied upon as a source of further under-the-table cash. Dare knew he would have to change that impression.

“Hey, Mr. Gucci! Habari ya mchana. Hujambo?” he said, extending his hand. Lay on the Swahili, let him know I’m not a baby who got here day before yesterday. “Jina langu ni Captain Dare.”

“It’s Gichui,” said Gichui, a pleasant-looking middle-aged man with a plump waist and a pompadour that reminded Dare of James Brown’s. “Sijambo asante. Wewe je?”

“Nzuri,” Dare replied, taking a moment to size the man up. White shirt, frayed but immaculate. Gray trousers, shiny from wear but neatly pressed. Cheap tie but with a Windsor knot. The most middling of midlevel civil servants, underpaid yet concerned about appearances and maintaining a certain dignity and decorum. A bagman who would not appreciate the blunt approach. “Yeah, I’m doin’ right well for a man about got shot out of the sky this mornin’. Business has been good, and it’s gonna get better. Have a seat, tafadhali.” He rolled his own swivel chair from behind the desk.

Gichui declined, stating that his business would not take too long—a polite way of saying that he had the leverage and was not about to sit while Dare remained on his feet.

“So what is your business? How can I help you?”

“By clearing up a few details.” Gichui withdrew a folder from his briefcase and glanced at one of the papers inside. “Just to make sure, you are the operator of a certain aircraft, a Gulfstream One, identification number Five-Y-ACS?”

“Owner and operator.”

Gichui lay the folder on Nimrod’s desk and put on a little stage business, thumbing through the documents. “It seems we have no record of issuing an AOC to you,” he said, and raised his eyes to regard Dare with an expression of studied neutrality. “Perhaps that is our fault. You have a copy you could show me?”

Dare leaned against the door, reached for a cigarette, remembered his rule, and pulled out his sunglasses instead. Twirling them to give his hands something to do, he glanced sidelong at Nimrod, who had taken the chair and looked like a suspect undergoing an interrogation. Dare was not encouraged.

“The problem of the air operator’s certificate was resolved with the director some time ago,” Nimrod said with a confidence he did not feel, judging from the way he was nervously fidgeting with a pen. “I saw to it myself.”

“With the former director?” asked Gichui.

“And with the present one,” said Nimrod. “I made sure to call on her after she took over. To inform her of—arrangements we made with her predecessor. She is very fond of cookies.”

“Yes. Chocolate chip, I believe?”

“She asked me to bring her some peanut butter cookies. There is a kind made in the United States that she likes very much.”

“And of course you did.”

“Of course,” Nimrod affirmed, seeming now to feel surer ground beneath him. “A large box of peanut butter cookies to, you understand, welcome her to her new post.”

“A gesture,” Gichui said.

“The very thing. She appreciated it. I think if you speak to her, she will tell you what you need to know about the AOC.”

Gichui replied, without a crack in his bland look, “I would not be here if I had not spoken to her first.”

Nimrod said nothing for several moments; then, his newly won assurance crumbling, he asked what the upshot of that conversation had been.

“Precisely what I stated,” Gichui said. “Captain Dare is an air operator without a valid AOC, according to our records. So once again, if our records are incomplete, you could perhaps show me a copy?”

The nature of the game was becoming clear, though not as clear as Dare would have liked. He shook his head, both to tell Gichui that he did not have a certificate, valid or invalid, and to signal his weariness with the way things were done in Kenya. Though he had never expected even a semblance of integrity from the country’s officials, it did not necessarily follow that he had ceased to believe, or hope, that there was an end to their double, triple, and quadruple dealing. Most places you paid your bribe, and that was that. Not here, where bribery came on the installment plan.

“Captain, the penalties for—” Gichui began.

“Yeah, I know.” Dare pushed away from the door to sit on a corner of the desk, sunglasses spinning in his hand. “Anybody ever tell you you look like James Brown?” He was stalling for time and trying to put Gichui off balance. “The soul singer? Y’all look like him. The way you wear your hair.”

“I don’t know this James Brown.”

“I flew James Brown on tour for a spell. Had a company back in the States, flew big-name rock-and-roll acts. Brown. Stevie Ray Vaughan. Now there was my main man! Stevie Ray Vaughan and the Double Trouble band.”

“I know none of these people.”

“Stevie Ray autographed a couple of old-time vinyl albums for me. He died on tour. Plane crash. Not my plane, of course.”

“I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“No?” Dare gave him a crocodile’s grin. “Well, I’ve got a good idea what you’re talkin’ about. You’re about to tell me that you do have a record of an AOC issued to a Kenyan guy, Joseph Nakima. Right?”

“I don’t know him, either.”

“Oh, sure you don’t. Like you don’t know that he used to be with Kenya Airways, been a businessman for the past few years. Aviation mostly, but construction, real estate, import-export, most of it aircraft parts. Like you don’t know he’s my silent partner. Silent and invisible. Seen him but once the past two years. He’s got wires into all sorts of places, and I was told that it would be a good idea to take on a Kenyan partner when I got here, and that Joe was a good bet. He helped me incorporate this outfit. Fact is, he’s the president. I’m telling you in case you don’t know that either. Would of taken me forever and three days if I’d tried to go through channels. That left the AOC. Well, it would of taken another forever and three days to get one on my own, so we made a little arrangement. That I would fly under his certificate, which I’ve been doing, and the director knows about it, and last I checked, it was all right with her. Or is that another thing you don’t know?”

Gichui sat on the opposite corner of the desk, and the two men faced each other, like bookends.

“That is highly irregular.” Long practice had given him the ability to feign shock with a good deal of credibility.

“Sure is. And I reckon it’s irregular that every month, my friend Nimrod here sends a share of our gross profits to Joe. We’re leasing his AOC, you might say, twenty cents per mile, a commission sort of. It ain’t cheap, but it’s cheaper than scratchin’ all the backs I would of had to scratch and greasin’ all the palms I would’ve greased if I was to try for an operator’s certificate on my own. Anyway, it was all set up, so what’s the problem?”

Gichui’s brows knit. The slang—scratching backs, greasing palms—appeared to confuse him.

“I’ll put the question a different way. What does the director want me to do?”

“To show that you have a valid certificate. If you cannot, then you will not be permitted to operate an aircraft in our country.”

He had dropped the pose of pleasant impartiality, becoming deliberately, maddeningly obtuse, as if to tease Dare for his own amusement. How could he be made to reveal what the demand was?

“All right, fine, then I reckon I’ll have to operate it in some other country,” Dare said, playing the only card he had, and it wasn’t much. “Which is what I’m fixin’ to do in just about three weeks.”

“How would you do that, captain?”

“By flyin’ the goddamned thing out of this sorry-ass country, that’s how. We’ve got a contract for—”

Experiencing a flood of sudden and painful light, he stopped himself, sprang from his seat, squatted in front of the safe, opened it, and pulled out the Gulfstream’s certificate of registration and ownership.

“That’s a Sierra Leone registry,” he said, waving the document in Gichui’s face. “You’ll notice that my name’s on it.”

“Yes, I see that.”

“Y’all mind if I take a look at what you’ve got in that file?”

“I mind very much,” Gichui said. “It’s an official file.”

“Right. Y’all don’t have a Freedom of Information Act over here. But hell, I don’t need to see it to tell you that’s there’s two pieces of paper in there, one de-registering the plane in Sierra Leone, and another one re-registering it in Kenya—under the name of Joseph Nakima. What do you say? Right or wrong?”

Dare’s seeming clairvoyance upset Gichui’s equilibrium, and he stammered that he had not looked through the entire file, so he couldn’t say one way or the other.

“Why don’t you take a peek, then? Go on.”

“That won’t be necessary.” Recovering himself, Gichui slipped the folder back into his briefcase. “The plane’s registration is not what my business is about.”

“You oughtn’t to have asked me that, how was I gonna fly the plane in another country. That question did this.” Dare brought two fingers to his temple and mimicked turning on a light switch.

Gichui shrugged and, tucking his case under his arm, stood to leave, warning Dare that he would be prohibited from flying in Kenya. Written notification to that effect would be forthcoming from the DCA.

“Thanks. I’m gonna treasure that piece of paper. Y’know, I’ve always been dumb, but I must be gettin’ downright ignorant in my old age. Should of figured out from the get-go that y’all came here wearin’ two hats.”

“Pardon?”

“The DCA might of sent you here, but you’re really representing Joe Nakima.”

“I don’t work for any Mr. Nakima.” Gichui’s offended tone was almost believable. “I told you I don’t even know any such man.”

“That’s insultin’ my intelligence, William, so either you kiss my ass or get yours the hell out of here.”

The human comedy, Dare thought, and right now I’m the butt of the joke. He fell into his chair, at a loss as to what his next move should be. He wasn’t sure if he even had a next move. Nimrod was of no help, sitting in a silent, sorrowful daze. The hope of Africa? Trouble was, there was all of Africa and only one of Nimrod.

“Been one helluva day so far, and it’s hardly half over.”

Nimrod said nothing.

“Stop lookin’ like that,” Dare told him.

“Like what?”

“Like someone just shot you with a stun gun. It’s making me more depressed than I already am. It ain’t your fault.”

He was being diplomatic because he felt sorry for Nimrod, who prided himself on his talent for getting things done, solving problems, removing or finding ways around obstacles; a talent owed to his keen eye for spotting the straightest, quickest, and least expensive paths through Kenya’s larcenous bureaucracies and kleptocratic ministries, in particular the Department of Civil Aviation. Nimrod was smart that way, but he wasn’t clever. He thought that the deals he cut were solemn contracts to be honored, instead of shady provisional arrangements that could be discarded in an instant. His weakness was an inability to see all the treacherous moves on the board, and so he could not defend against them.

“Way back when, Joe took all the paperwork—maintenance records, airworthiness certificate, all of it—including the bill of sale and the registration. Said he needed it for the incorporation papers, and I said go ahead,” Dare continued. “So it’s my fault. Should of seen that he was thinkin’ way ahead. All right, Joe knows we’re gonna be takin’ the airplane out of the country in a little while, so what he must of done was make copies of all that documentation, then took it to an airplane broker. Any broker in the world will de-register a plane for you in one country and register it in another one. Costs you about thirty grand. A crook might charge another ten for forging the registration. Then I reckon he cut the DCA in on what he was doin’, he’d want her on his side in case of a problem. Figure he paid her a thousand, and what he’s paying William wouldn’t even be walkin’-around money. Half-a-million-dollar airplane, four-fifty pure profit. Pretty good for a day’s work.”

“You think he wants it to sell it?” Nimrod asked. “Not take over our business?”

“Our business ain’t worth it. Hell yes, he’s gonna sell it. Probably needs to raise cash quick, and this is the quickest way he can think of. Sellin’ assets, even if they ain’t his.”

“And so he sent Gichui, number one, to put you on official notice and make sure the plane goes nowhere. Number two—”

“A fishin’ expedition,” said Dare, completing the thought, “to see if we’ve got anything, any damn thing at all, to make a case in case we go to court. He’s got to figure on that contingency. And that’s what we’re gonna do, rafiki.”

“Go to court?” Nimrod scoffed, as if that were the most ridiculous course of action possible. “He will have the judge paid.”

“I know that. I just want to get into the courts to tie things up for a while, buy a little time for us to come up with a better idea. I’ll shoot that son of a bitch before I let him walk away with my airplane. It’s all I’ve got.”