Acts of Faith

Douglas

They have moved from the sprawling house in the foothills to a place in the heart of town that could have been its garage. It’s not a bad house, Douglas thinks, a renovated adobe brick in a historic district not far from the University of Arizona campus. Anyway, it’s better than where they would have had to live without the loan from his grandparents.

His mother is out of the hospital now, recovered from what everyone in the family refers to as her “illness.” Why they do mystifies and upsets him. She wasn’t sick. She would have been if, after running out to see the car burning with his mangled body inside, she had not gone crazy.

Douglas has yet to cry for his father. He loved and admired him. Now he hates his memory. He hates him for leaving the family the way he did, with a legacy of debts and disgrace. He hates him, not for turning out to have been a crook, but for being a fool.

No, this is not a bad little house, but he learned something about construction from his father and can see that corners were cut in the renovations. A tap on the drywall tells him it is half-inch rather than three-quarters; the floors were sanded unevenly and were thinly varnished; the shower doors, which look like glass, are plastic. It is the shoddy workmanship of illegal immigrant labor that gives, to the uncritical eye, the appearance of quality. Its cramped rooms shout that life will be constricted from now on, that the once-limitless horizons of the future have been drawn in. The whole place smells of failure. He is glad he will be away at school, at Northern Arizona University, and will not have to live here.

During his mother’s hospitalization, he and his sisters stayed with their grandparents in Flagstaff. It was a blessing to get away from the reporters, from the neighbors, from the phone calls, from everything. His mother, who still walks around as if she’s in a trance, stands in the middle of the empty living room, looking at the packing boxes.

“Start taking things out,” she says. “I’m exhausted.”

“Okay, Mom.”

The first box is full of her bird books. She picks one up and tosses it across the floor and says, “Don’t bother with these. I won’t be using them for a good long while.”

He opens a box of linens.

“I start the new job on Monday,” she murmurs from behind him. “But we can consider every dime that comes in here found money. Do you understand?”

“Sure. I’ll have to work for tuition.”

“Do you understand, I said,” she says with a ferocity that he finds unnerving.

“Sure.”

She seizes him by the shoulders. “Don’t you ever let this happen to you, not ever. Do you understand?”

“Sure, Mom. I’ll make up for it. I’ll make up for what he did.”



Webs

THE SUCCESSFUL CAPITALIST is successful because he has no love in his heart, Fitzhugh thought, returning to his hut from a volleyball game. He has only the love of success. He devotes himself to work work work instead of to a woman loved with all his soul. He attempts to fill the hollow in his heart with the accumulation of wealth and what it buys, whether things or power or both; but wealth, things, and power fill it only for the moment, as water does the belly of a hungry man. The heart is empty once again, and its cravings drive him to acquire more; yet he is never gratified.

These musings had not been prompted by a revival of Fitzhugh’s undergraduate philosophies; he was thinking about himself. Since the breakup with Diana, he’d dedicated all his energies to Knight Air and to the object of getting rich, modeling himself after those prime examples of homo capitalistensis, Douglas Braithwaite and Hassan Adid. There was no love in their lives (Adid’s wife and family were little more than furniture). Love would have distracted them from the project of “growing the company,” as Douglas phrased it, as if the airline were an orchard or a crop. The only difference between Fitzhugh and them was that “growing the company” distracted him from thinking about Diana and his lost happiness. Finding his assigned job of operations manager not demanding enough—he could do it with his eyes shut—he took on additional tasks, asking for, and getting, a raise in salary and in his share of net profits. With its fleet grown to twenty aircraft, Knight Air had the assets to expand its operations beyond Sudan and Somalia. Fitzhugh journeyed to the Congo and Rwanda with Timmerman to assist him in negotiating contracts to deliver aid to those markets. That was what those hearts of misery and African darkness were to an entrepreneur of humanitarian aid—markets. Watching his own fortunes rise with the company’s, he didn’t know at what point he would say he had enough and cash out. He soon learned that for the successful capitalist, there is no such thing as enough. His two models taught the lesson.

Two weeks ago, at Adid’s behest, Douglas convened a shareholders’ meeting in a Nairobi hotel. As Fitzhugh entered the conference room, Douglas took him aside and whispered, “You’re going to hear some bad news, but don’t worry. You’ll be all right.”

A vinyl-bound agenda was passed out to the participants, who included, in addition to small fry like Fitzhugh, big fry like Wesley Dare and still bigger fry like the Kenyan businessmen whom Adid had cajoled into investing in the airline. Douglas made a presentation, painting a gloomy picture of Knight Air’s financial condition with the aid of flip charts. The company had grossed eight and a half million dollars in the past year, but higher fuel and operating costs had devoured a greater portion of its profits than management had expected. Now the Kenyan government threatened to take a still bigger bite. Douglas asked the investors to turn to the appendix page in their agendas and note the letter he’d received from the Kenyan Revenue Authority. It stated that Knight Air owed thirty-five percent, or more than three million dollars, in income taxes for the year. As it had done in previous years, the company could reduce the burden by deducting capital expenditures, namely the purchase of new aircraft, but the bill would still come to over two million.

Knight Air would have to be recapitalized, Douglas continued, gracing the audience with his charming gaze. He called on each investor to contribute sixty thousand dollars to help meet the company’s tax obligations and its operating expenses. Without the money, management would be forced to dissolve the airline and auction it to the highest bidder, with the shareholders paid off out of the proceeds. This was more than bad news, this was shocking news. Douglas then asked for a vote on the issue of the additional investment. All in favor raise their hands. Only one went up—Wesley’s.

Douglas, standing at the head of the table, looked flustered. “I’m surprised, Wes,” he said. “I thought you were leaving soon.”

“Hell, in for a dime, in for a dollar—or sixty thousand dollars,” Wesley responded with a crooked grin.

“Not me,” Adid announced, and everyone turned to him, the man with the biggest stake in the company. “To contribute that much money to pay millions in taxes, no, thank you. As the Americans say, it would only be throwing good money after bad.”

The others took their cue from him and voted to dissolve Knight Air Services and put it up for sale the next day. A firm Fitzhugh had never heard of, East African Transportation Limited, bought the shares at twenty-five cents on the dollar. Except for Fitzhugh and Wesley, the other shareholders were wabenzi like Adid and thus able to swallow the losses of three-fourths of their investments. Fitzhugh found his lodged in his throat. He was frantic, out not only thousands of dollars but a job as well. How could Douglas have assured him that he would be all right? He was miles and miles from being all right, and he could not find Douglas to ask for an explanation.

Wesley, on the other hand, took his losses with equanimity, an odd reaction for a man so pugnacious. Later, in the hotel bar, Fitzhugh asked why he wasn’t mightily upset.

“If a goat was tied up in front of a leopard, you wouldn’t get upset when the leopard jumped on the goat and tore its windpipe out, would you? You’d expect it. Hassan’s the leopard. I’ve been expectin’ somethin’ like this for a long time.”

“Hassan?”

“He owns East African Transportation,” Wesley said. “It’s a subsidiary of his conglomerate, the Tana Group. So Knight Air is a subsidiary of the subsidiary, except now it’s got a new name—Knight Relief Services—and new management. The pres-i-dent is Hassan Adid but Dougie boy Braithwaite is still the managing director.”

Fitzhugh almost slapped himself on the head for being so stupid, for not seeing the sleight of hand. Hadn’t he warned Douglas months ago that Adid intended to take over the airline? His only mistake had been in thinking that Douglas would be a victim of Adid’s machinations, the leopard’s prey. He was instead the leopard’s partner. Never enough, he thought. The fortunes earned by the Tana Group were not enough for Adid—he had to acquire the airline and at a fire sale price. The profits earned by Knight Air had not been enough for Douglas; he wanted the financial muscle and the political clout—always handy in Kenya—that would come from being a province in Adid’s empire. The American and the Somali had had a meeting of appetites. They were a hunting pair.

“Y’all will be happy to know that you’re still on the team, operations manager and junior partner,” Wesley said.

Fitzhugh wasn’t exactly happy. He was relieved, grateful to Douglas for thinking of him, for offering those words of assurance, and somewhat ashamed of himself for feeling so grateful. If he had the integrity Diana had expected of him, he would walk away now; otherwise, he would be a junior partner in what amounted to a multimillion-dollar hustle.

“You’re sure?” he asked Wesley. “How did you find out?”

“Just did a little detective work,” Wesley replied and motioned to the bartender for another drink, whiskey neat. “That bullshit about owin’ three million in taxes. Shitfire, Hassan could of made that bill go away with one phone call to the finance ministry. What him and Doug did was to scare those others with the idea of payin’ out all that money, throwin’ good money after bad.”

“But why did you offer to kick in the sixty thousand?”

“Just to let Hassan and Doug know I’d figured out the scam, just to make them a little nervous,” said Wesley, with another grin out of one side of his mouth. “Did y’all notice how some of them shareholders almost raised their hands after I raised mine? If they’d voted to recapitalize, that would of f*cked things up but good for those two. Don’t you wonder what happened to all that money?”

“Higher fuel and operating costs,” Fitzhugh answered. “That much was true.”

“Kinda half true. They weren’t that much higher.” Wesley gave a derisive snort. “I’ll bet if I did a little more detective work, I’d find an offshore account somewhere.”

“Then why don’t you?”

“On account of I don’t give a shit. Remember, back when we formed Yellowbird, when I said that there was a better-than-even chance those shares wouldn’t make good ass-wipe? That’s how come I got Dougie boy to sign a contract for that airplane. I intend to hold him to it.”

In making that arrangement, Dare had perhaps overestimated his own cleverness.

After Knight Air’s death and resurrection, Fitzhugh went on another journey to the Congo with Timmerman, to work out a contract for flying UN security people into that country’s multiple flashpoints. Catching up on paperwork after he returned, he noticed that Tony Bollichek was back on the roster of pilots flying out of Lokichokio, reassigned as Douglas’s first officer. No one had replaced him on the Somalia runs; nor were flights scheduled in Somalia for the next week. Why not? he asked Rachel—the secretary had been handling the schedules in Fitzhugh’s absence. It turned out that there was no plane to fly in Somalia. Tony had been in an accident, landing short of a runway somewhere out in the desert. Though he wasn’t hurt, an accident investigator had declared the G1 a total loss.

That evening Fitzhugh was drinking by himself in the compound’s bar. Thoughts of Diana had mugged him, and he was soothing his emotional lumps. Douglas and Tony, back from a late flight to Sudan, joined him. He was pleased to have company. They were into their second round when Wesley walked in, ordered a pitcher of beer, and sat at their table, wearing a smirk.

“Don’t think I heard an invitation,” Tony said.

“Makes two of us. Welcome back to Loki. For a man who survived a right bad prang, y’all are lookin’ well.”

“Heard about it, did you?”

“Word gets around. Reckon you were lucky to walk away.”

“Yeah.”

“Y’all are a good pilot, and in the old days, you and me must of made twenty landings at that airstrip. How did you manage to come in short?”

“Bugger off,” Tony said, bunching his rugby-wing shoulders. “And while you’re at it, bugger Mary, now she’s all yours. I seem to remember she bloody well loves it up the arse.”

Dare ignored this remark and turned his attention to Douglas, who said, “I was going to let you know.”

“Right nice of you. Claim filed?”

“Yup.”

“Insurance company’s way off in Houston. Gonna take time, and I ain’t got much left in Africa. So what y’all can do, what y’all are goin’ to do, is transfer half a mil from the company account to my personal account. Pay yourself back when the claim comes in.”

“Wes, you know that’s impossible,” Douglas said. “Look, this isn’t the time or the place.”

Wesley filled his glass from the pitcher. “It sure as hell is.”

“Like Tony said, there was no invitation. We can discuss this later.”

“We’re gonna discuss it right goddamned now, rafiki.” Douglas flinched as Dare reached across the table to grip his bicep. “Don’t get nervous in the service, I’m sympathetic. You got yourself into a bind. Hassan makes himself pres-i-dent, which means he’s gonna pay a lot closer attention to things than when he was just the bankroller. ‘How am I gonna explain to the company pres-i-dent that I signed a contract to turn over a company asset worth half a million bucks to Wesley?’ That’s what y’all were asking yourself.”

Douglas licked the sweat from his upper lip. It was one of the rare times Fitzhugh had seen him sweat. “You can wait till the claim is paid,” he said. “You’ll have to.”

Dare shook his head. “I’ve got a little yellow bird singin’ to me that I’ll never see that money. Guess where I was just this morning?”

“Couldn’t care less,” Tony said.

“Wasn’t talkin’ to you. At Wilson airport, having lunch at the Aero Club with a man interested in my Hawker. I looked out the window and what do I see but a Gulfstream One gettin’ some work done on her. After lunch, I strolled on over for a closer look. This airplane has got new props, she’s got new nose gear, she’s got a new nose cone and a new paint job. And there’s a fella puttin’ on new registration numbers. A real nice job, but I recognized my old airplane.” Dare looked around the table, bestowing a grin on everyone. “And I saw another thing—the hand of Hassan Adid. Got his fingerprints all over it. You couldn’t figure how to get out of your fix without him knowin’ about it, so you went to him and ‘fessed up and asked him, ‘How do I get out of this deal?’ Don’t reckon you told him why we signed that contract—Hassan would of thrown a shit fit if he knew what we’ve been doin’ these last six, seven months. You made somethin’ up. Y’all are good at makin’ things up. I reckon he threw a shit fit as it was, but then he showed you the way out.”

“Wes, nobody here is interested in your fantasies,” Douglas said.

“Showed you the way out and how to get an airplane and half a million bucks as a bonus,” Dare resumed, as if he hadn’t heard. “First off, Hassan says that this here contract doesn’t read, ‘Douglas Braithwaite agrees to’ and so forth, it reads ‘Knight Air Services agrees to’ and so forth. But Knight Air Services is no more. Next off, Hassan says, we’ll make the airplane disappear. So when old Wes comes callin’ for it, we say sorry, the plane was in a wreck, a total loss. But Wes will ask for the insurance money, and then we say, Knight Relief Services isn’t responsible for any of Knight Air Services’ debts. So Wes is up the creek—he’s owed an airplane that doesn’t exist from a company that doesn’t exist. Next off, Hassan says, we fix the plane in the field, good enough to fly her back to Nairobi, where we’ll finish the repairs, give her a new paint job, and change her registration. Five Yankee Alpha Charlie Sierra becomes Four Alpha Papa Yankee, registered to Knight Relief Services. Then we sit back and wait for the insurance money. Five hundred grand, and out of that we deduct expenses—kickbacks to the investigator and to the pilot for such a fine job of crashing the plane just enough to make it look good.”

Tony poked Dare’s shoulder. “You’re saying I faked it?”

“The Houston Casualty Company is gonna be real interested in my fantasies, “ Dare said, ignoring Tony. “Make that transfer first thing tomorrow.”

“I asked you a question, you f*cking wanker.”

“A good pilot could do it, and y’all are good, Tony.”

The Australian got out of his seat, hooking a thumb. “Get your fat wanker ass out of here.”

“Soon as I finish this,” Wesley said, hoisting his glass.

A new episode in the Legends of Loki was written in the next two minutes. Bollichek grabbed Wesley’s collar, and as he jerked him out of the chair, Wesley tossed beer in his face, then bashed his skull with the pitcher, removing him from the action. The table went over, Douglas fell on his back, and Wesley on him, throwing a punch that missed and another that connected. Fitzhugh wrestled him off and pinned his arms. For an old man, he was a handful.

“Got no quarrel with you, Fitz,” he gasped.

“You will if you try to hit him again.”

Fitzhugh let him go. Bollichek lay unconscious, bleeding from the head. On his knees, Douglas cupped his shattered nose with both hands. There was in his eyes the hurt, stupefied look of a spanked child.

Rubbing his knuckles, Wesley looked at him with something approaching pity. “Never been cut before, have you, Dougie boy? Never been hit hard in your whole sorry-ass life.”

Fitzhugh drove the casualties to the Red Cross hospital. Douglas was released with his nose swaddled in gauze, but Tony was kept overnight—he had a concussion and possible skull fracture. On the drive back, Fitzhugh inquired as to how fantastic Dare’s fantasies were.

“You’re getting in the habit of interrogating me,” Douglas replied, sounding a bit like Adid when his sinuses acted up.

“Because so many people are in the habit of accusing you of things.”

“We’re on solid legal ground. Knight Relief Services doesn’t owe Wes a damned thing.”

For Douglas, this passed as a frank admission.

“Very solid ground, with so many judges in Hassan’s back pocket,” Fitzhugh said, more in sadness than with sarcasm as the last drops were drained from his well of respect and admiration.

“Wes won’t go to court anyhow,” Douglas predicted. “He knows better.”

“But he will go to the insurance company. How solid will the ground be under insurance fraud?”

After a lengthy silence, Douglas said, “I’ll understand if you want to quit me.” That was how he put it—not quit the company, but quit him. “You can leave tomorrow, and no hard feelings.”

Fitzhugh wasn’t in a position to quit. It wasn’t lack of money so much as lack of occupation—the prospect of idle hours, idle days—that held him to the job. Mistaking necessity for loyalty, Douglas vowed to “make it up” to him. Precisely what was to be made up, and how, wasn’t clear. The only way he could “make it up” would be to become the man Fitzhugh had thought he was; but the illusion had been Fitzhugh’s fault. From real clay, he had molded a false image. It was unrealistic and, in a way, unfair to expect Douglas to live up to it. At any rate, he was no longer the American’s “man.” He never had been. He’d been the man of someone who never existed.

The smuggling of arms was the one soft spot in Douglas’s otherwise hard business head. Shortly after Quinette’s visit, he asked Fitzhugh to join him on a trip to Kampala, to meet with Ugandan bankers and bureaucrats to sew a new veil replacing the one formerly provided by the defunct Yellowbird. As before, this veil would conceal the gun-running operations not only from the UN and the Kenya government but from Adid as well. Fitzhugh wanted no part of it and declined to go. He had that now, the firmness to refuse Douglas whenever he saw fit. He said that Dare had been right—Adid as president was paying much closer attention to the airline’s day-to-day affairs than Adid as investor. Douglas might get away with it for a while, but Adid was bound to find out, and when he did, whoever was involved would be sacked so quickly he wouldn’t have time to clean out his desk.

“I told Quinette I wasn’t going to leave them in the lurch, and I’m not going to,” Douglas said.

“All the same, I think you should let Hassan in on it,” Fitzhugh advised. “And if he vetoes it, which I’m sure he would, then you should forget it. Whatever you do, the less I know about it, the better.”

Douglas responded with the peculiar, dull look he put on whenever he was told something he didn’t want to hear.

The adventure, the thrill of the forbidden, and the conviction that he was going to change the course of the war conspired to send him off to Kampala. There he’d created a new shell company, Busy Beaver Airways. To further protect Knight in case something went awry, he’d concocted a scheme to lease a company plane to Busy Beaver. As the lessor, Knight could not be held responsible for the cargo carried by the lessee. Tony was put in charge, under the same terms as Dare had enjoyed—he got to keep half the charter fees, effectively doubling his former income.

That was far more than Fitzhugh wanted to know. He removed himself from the administrative dirty work, leaving it to Douglas to decipher Michael Goraende’s messages and to invent clients to hide the source of the arms flights’ income; nevertheless, he knew what was going on and was in the peculiar predicament of pretending not to know it. This mental trick might have been easier if he continued to believe that rifles, rockets, and bullets were going to make a difference.

Now, in his hut, he stripped off his sweaty volleyball clothes and stood under the combined gazes of Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X, and Bob Marley. Mandela’s pricked his conscience—The rifles, rockets, and bullets are making no difference whatsoever except to add to the body count, and there is blood on your hands as surely as on the hands of those who pull the triggers—while Marley’s struck at his sense of self-preservation—Dot white boy gwanna get caught, mon, and you gwanna get caught wid him, den you be out flat on your brown ass. Malcolm X was silent on the issue.

Fitzhugh flopped onto the bed. Oh, Diana, Diana, Diana. If I quit him today, would you take me back? Of course she wouldn’t. It wasn’t his association with Douglas that had killed her feelings for him; it was the mortal wound of his words. That one word—parasite. He hugged his pillow, seeing in his mind’s eye her old-young face looking up at him. If she had died, he would not feel this unending ache, this persistent longing. He sprang up, against the temptation to lie down for the rest of the day, the rest of the month, the rest of his life. It felt the way he imagined the approach of death would feel—an icy paralysis creeping up from his toes.

He had better get ready for this afternoon’s interview. CNN was doing a story about Knight for a newsmagazine show. The maverick airline that defied Khartoum’s blockade, that was the angle. A towel around his waist, plastic clogs on his feet, he shambled to the showers, his bad knee throbbing. The Knight volleyball team had narrowly defeated Doctors Without Borders, Fitzhugh spiking the ball for the winning point. Coming down hard, he’d aggravated his old injury. Yet it strengthened his hope that he would learn to live with his other injury, the tear in his invisible ligaments.

Bathed and changed, looking his professional best in khakis and a polo shirt sporting the company’s new color and logo, he went to the office. The reporter and crew had arrived ahead of schedule and were setting up when he came in. The office was cleaner and tidier than he’d ever seen it. Rachel, in a uniform like his, was seated behind the desktop; Douglas was at his desk while the soundman fixed a small microphone to the collar of his white captain’s shirt. Fitzhugh recognized the reporter, a red-haired American with slicing green eyes, but he didn’t recall her name until she introduced herself.

“You flew with us into the Nuba a couple of times,” he said.

“Yeah, I did.”

The soundman clipped a tiny box to Fitzhugh’s belt, then ran the wire under his shirt and fastened the mike to the V in his shirt. Phyllis Rappaport sat in front of him and Douglas. She had the X-ray body of an aging fashion model or a diet fanatic. Crossing her legs, a legal tablet in her lap, a pen in her bony fingers, she began with easy questions. How long had the airline been in business? How many planes in its fleet? How many employees? How much money did it make? That led to a somewhat harder question: What did they say to the accusation, often made, that they were exploiting Africa’s misfortunes to make a fortune? Douglas, rubbing the scar on the bridge of his nose, looked into the camera with his artfully artless gaze. “If bringing food to starving people and medicine to sick people and clothes to naked people is exploitation,” he answered smoothly, “then, yeah, we’re guilty as charged.”

“What about guns?” She tried to make the question sound offhanded but didn’t quite bring it off, her voice driving it like a nail.

“What about them?” Douglas asked serenely.

“Khartoum claims that aid pilots are running guns to the rebels. Any comment?”

“Sure. Khartoum needs to discredit us, and not just us—this whole relief operation. It’s propaganda. I’m surprised you’d give any credence to it.”

“A kernel of truth in everything, even propaganda,” she said. “Some fairly advanced stuff has been showing up in SPLA hands, like shoulder-fired missiles. A lot of people, not just the Sudan government, are wondering where they come from and how they get there. Rumors are, they’re being smuggled on relief planes.”

“And I’m surprised you’d give any credence to rumors.”

“Rumor isn’t always wrong, to quote Tacitus.”

Turning from the camera to Phyllis, Douglas caressed her with his gray and candid eyes. “Well, I can assure you, categorically, that this airline has never delivered any weapons to the rebels.”

Sounds rehearsed but very good, Fitzhugh thought. He lies without lying. He tried to imitate Douglas’s composure when Phyllis asked him how the pilots evaded the blockade. False flight plans? Other methods? He replied that he couldn’t comment. Then, abruptly switching topics, she wanted to know if International People’s Aid was a major client of the airline. Yes—in fact it had been Knight’s first client. Phyllis put her pen down and folded her hands on the legal pad, suggesting that she was off the record. Had he or Douglas met Calvin Bingham, and what was their impression? Fitzhugh said the name meant nothing to him.

“He founded IPA,” she said. “Interviewed him last week. He was in Nairobi on a visit. Thought you might have met him.”

“Our dealings have always been with John Barrett. You spoke to him?”

She nodded. “An interesting piece of work, but not as interesting as Bingham. A kind of mystic. He’s into gematria. It’s kind of the Christian kabala. The idea is, you can dig out hidden meanings in the New Testament with numbers and geometry. An odd philosophy for an oil tycoon.”

“So that’s what he is?” Fitzhugh asked, wondering if there was a point to this digression.

“CEO of Northwest Petroleum. Canada’s second-biggest oil company. A few years back Northwest was in the bidding to partner up with Sudan’s state oil company to develop the fields and build the pipeline, but they lost out to Amulet Energy. Kind of intriguing.”

“Actually, I don’t see what’s so intriguing,” Douglas said. “Are we still being interviewed?”

“Sure.” Frowning, she looked at her notes. “To follow up, has the SPLA ever asked you to run guns for them?”

“Are we back to that? Okay, sure they have. They ask just about every pilot and air operator who flies into Sudan.”

“And?”

“And what?” Douglas was getting a bit edgy, but he managed to forge a smile.

“Have any of them agreed to, if you know.”

“I don’t. You’d have to ask them, if you know who they are. Why are you obsessed with this gun-running stuff?”

“It’s persistence, not obsession,” she said. “A while ago rebels shot down an Amulet Energy plane with a missile and killed eight foreign workers. Someone got that missile into Sudan.” She shrugged, scrawny shoulders forming points, like folded bat wings. “That’s a story.”

“A story.” As was his habit when he was under tension, Douglas wove his fingers around a pencil and tried to snap it. “It’s a story to you, something else to us. Lives are at stake. Our pilots’ lives. You go broadcasting insinuations about gun-running, do you think Khartoum is going to make distinctions? They’ll shoot down any aid plane they feel like and then say it was carrying arms.”

“Nothing of mine that goes on the air is an insinuation, it’s a fact,” Phyllis retaliated. “I’m a pro, Mr. Braithwaite. You needn’t have any worries about your pilots’ lives, not from me.”

Dropping the pencil, Douglas counterfeited a relaxed pose, rolling his chair backward to rest his head against the window ledge. Through the dusty pane above, the African glare fell on his hands, spread on the desk, thumb joined to thumb. “I know you’ll be responsible,” he said. “Hey, you’re CNN! But you should think about something, ask yourself a question. Would it be illegal, would it be wrong for anyone to arm the rebels?”

“Right, wrong, legal, illegal, it would be a story.”

“What I mean is, Khartoum is hammering the southerners and the Nubans like the U.S. Cavalry hammered the Indians at Wounded Knee. If I’d been around back then, I would have sent rifles and Hotchkiss guns to the Sioux just to give them a fighting chance, and I wouldn’t have seen anything wrong about it.”

A look of excitement passed over Phyllis’s face as she glanced at her cameraman and soundman to make sure they’d caught the comment. Not content with her assurance that she would never air insinuations, Douglas had to try to convert her.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said. “We need to do some filming in the Nuba. Shooting exteriors. Any flights going up there soon?”

“I’ve got one tomorrow,” Douglas answered. “But I’m loaded to the max.”

“Couldn’t make it tomorrow anyway. I was thinking early next week.”

“Fitz, what have we got Monday or Tuesday?”

Fitzhugh checked the schedule. “Two on Tuesday.”

“They’re overloaded, too, aren’t they?”

He got the cue and said they were. Douglas wasn’t a complete fool. Whatever this woman’s reason for going to the Nuba mountains might be, it wasn’t to film landscapes.

“I’ll check back with you next week. Can’t do it, I’ll find someone else. Thanks for your time.”

“There goes a real cunt,” Douglas said after she and her crew left. “Oh, sorry, Rachel.”

The secretary acknowledged the apology.

Fitzhugh stepped outside, motioning to Douglas to join him. “You were an idiot for making that remark about sending rifles to the Indians,” he scolded. “You practically incriminated yourself.”

“Oh hell, what’s she going to do with it?”

“Use it to decorate the cake she’s baking.”

“That riff about the oil guy, what was his name? Bingham? What was that all about?”

“I don’t know,” Fitzhugh said, looking toward the southeast, where the weather was erecting thunderheads—white towers rising to flat black roofs in which lightning flashed, like a gigantic welder’s torch. “But it is obvious what this story is all about. We aren’t the first people she’s talked to. She’s had a word with Tara. I hate to say I told you so, Douglas, but I told you so.”

“Don’t go wet on me now.”

He thought Douglas was the one “going wet.” He was plainly anxious, if not scared.

“I had better tell Tony not to talk to her,” Douglas said further. “Better tell all our people not to give her the time of the day, and no one, but no one, gives her a lift anywhere. Then there’s Wes. He stands to lose as much as we do.”

“No, he doesn’t. He has nothing to lose.”

“Yeah, he does. He’s planning to leave soon. A story like this breaks, some people might ask him to stick around for a while for questioning. He won’t talk to me, but he’ll listen to you. He’s got to keep his mouth shut.”

Gangsters, Fitzhugh thought. We are talking like gangsters. “I told you,” he said, “I want no part of this.”

“Fitz, what you want and what you are are two different things.”

 

THE MAKUTI SHELTER had sprung a leak, and rain dripped onto the tent canvas with a steady, irritating tap-tap-tap.

“One thing’s for sure, I’m not going to miss living like this,” Mary said, looking up from her camp chair. “A real roof over my head, not canvas and grass.”

Dare did a deep knee bend; then, both arms outstretched, he opened and closed his hands. “Y’all are gonna be in tall cotton.”

“You really think so?”

“Well, I don’t really know. Never picked cotton myself.”

“You-all know what I’m sayin’,” she mimicked. “You’re sure we can still do it?”

He repeated the knee bend and the flexing of his hands, trying to assure himself that the growing rigidity in them was not rheumatoid arthritis. Then he got his notebook, opened it to a page of figures, and stood over her. “We been over this before, but let’s do it again. Here’s what we netted from Yellowbird, here’s what we’ll get for the Hawker—”

“If the guy buys it,” she interrupted.

“If he doesn’t, someone else will. Here’s what you got saved from when you were flyin’ before Yellowbird, here’s what we’ll need to put down on a loan for a Gulfstream Two, and here’s what’s left over. Ain’t what I hoped for, but a pretty good stake.” He leaned forward and kissed the top of her head. “Thanks for stickin’ with me. I sure did screw up. Saw that scam with the company shores comin’ a long time ago, but that hustle with the airplane—I did not see that a’ tall.”

And the injury to his pride still stung, almost as deeply as the loss of the money. He hated to think of himself as an easy mark, but that’s what he had been. His one consolation, and it wasn’t much, was that he’d been swindled by a master like Adid. Had snot-nose Doug been the author instead of the accomplice, Dare could not have looked himself in the mirror.

“No one could have seen it coming,” Mary said. “Who would have thought Doug would do this to you?”

“Wasn’t much point to bustin’ his nose, but damn, it sure did feel good. Enough of this talk. How about a dancin’ lesson? If you’re gonna live in Texas, you’ve got to learn the Texas two-step.”

He put a tape in the cassette player, and out came the voice like no other, heartbreaking, clear, every note flawless and true. Poor Patsy Cline, another singer doomed to die in a plane crash. Holding Mary close, he led her around the small space in the front of the tent. “The woman goes backward, the man forward,” he said. “One-two back, one-two back, then turn, one-two . . . All there is to it.”

She laughed. “Except a two-step is out of step to this song. It’s too slow.”

“Don’t matter.” He drew her to him, his left hand in her right, his opposite arm around her waist, and sang along.

“Too slow and too damned sad,” Mary insisted. “Find something that doesn’t sound like an empty bar at three A.M.”

He ejected Patsy Cline. While he rummaged in his cassette organizer—an empty cooking-oil tin—he heard someone approaching the tent. Footsteps in the mud, the squeak of a wet shoe on the shelter’s cement floor. Mary looked at him, not alarmed but alert. Tony Bollichek, the man who forgot everything and learned nothing, including the lesson Dare imparted with a beer pitcher, had been harassing her. He had plenty of opportunity, now that he was operating out of Dogpatch for some outfit called Busy Beaver—Yellowbird’s successor, Dare and Mary surmised—and shared the same hangar with them. Whenever Dare wasn’t near, Tony whined and pleaded for her to come back to him, or whispered obscenities, or made threats—depending on the state of his brain chemistry at the moment. Dare had warned him that if he continued, he would suffer another skull fracture and if he ever laid a hand on her, more serious damage. “I’m going to take that seriously,” Tony had replied, “so watch your back, mate.”

“Who the hell is it?” Dare called to the person outside.

A female voice answered. “I’m looking for Captain Dare. Do I have the right address?”

He opened the flap. The woman, in a hooded slicker, was standing under the eave formed by the makuti roof. She extended a hand with chicken-claw fingers. “Hi. Phyllis Rappaport. Sorry for showing up at this hour, but I couldn’t find you earlier. I’m with CNN. May I come in?”

Without waiting for an answer, she stepped inside and removed the hood, releasing a mass of flame-colored hair.

“Another red-headed stepchild,” Dare said, rubbing his rusty curls. “Y’all been lookin’ for me for what?”

A flight to the Nuba mountains for her and her crew, she answered. When? Early next week preferably, but if he couldn’t make it then, later in the week would do. He glanced at Mary, who jerked her shoulders to say, Why not?

“This here is my first officer, Mary English. Also my fiancée.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Phyllis said. “So you can do it?”

“If y’all can go the fare. Passengers only, it’ll be six grand to cover fuel costs and pay for our time. No checks, money orders, or credit cards. Six thousand cash.”

“We can do that.”

“Any particular place in the Nuba? There’s only two airstrips operational right now.”

“New Tourom.”

“That one’s in shape. They fixed it since it got bombed. But if it’s raining and the runway’s mud, we can’t land. One other hitch—our airplane’s being overhauled right now. Should be ready by Monday, but we’ve got a customer wants to buy it comin’ then. He decides to take it, it’s gone and so are we, and y’all will have to find another pilot.”

“All right,” Phyllis said. “Any suggestions for an alternative? I’ve already checked with the people at Knight, and they can’t do it.”

“Only one I can think of . . .” He paused, cocking his head toward the flap. “Did you hear somebody outside?” he asked Mary. She shook her head. “Must be that,” he said, pointing at the wet spot on the ceiling, where the rain dripped. “I was sayin’, only one I can think of is Tara Whitcomb. Is there some hot story that you’re so anxious to get there, or is that none of my business?”

The reporter looked momentarily at nothing in particular—the pensive stare of someone who had misplaced a set of keys or a pair of glasses and was trying to remember where she’d put them. “You used to be Braithwaite’s partner in Knight—”

“Used-to-be in capital letters, in italics, in goddamned neon,” he interrupted.

“Right. I heard you had a falling-out.”

“Done your homework.”

“More like picking up local scuttlebutt. Everybody talks about that fight you had. I also heard you’re planning to leave this fabulous part of the world.”

“Like I said, as soon as the plane is gone, we’re gone.”

“I’d like to talk to you. Now, if you’ve got a minute. Or tomorrow morning. After that I’ll be back in Nairobi till next week.”

“I ain’t runnin’ for office. I don’t give interviews.”

Phyllis mimed pulling out empty pockets. “No camera crew, not even a notebook. Strictly off the record. What we call deep background, meaning I tell no one I talked to you. But it’s a two-way street. You don’t tell anyone you talked to me, and if you f*ck me, I’ll turn around and f*ck you”—she gave him an ironic smile—“metaphorically speaking.”

“Glad to hear that,” Mary said, returning the smile. “Let’s hear what you’re fishing for first.”

The reporter helped herself to a chair—like she owns the place, Dare thought. “I’ve heard that Knight has been running guns to the SPLA, weapons disguised as humanitarian aid. There’s the fish. I don’t like to waste time, so what do you think? Keep fishing or cut bait?”

“Cut bait,” Mary answered without hesitation. “It’s an urban legend.”

Phyllis said, “I’m all for female solidarity, sister, but he’s the captain. So what about it, Captain Dare? Urban legend or no?”

Dare lit a cigarette. He couldn’t remember if it exceeded his five-a-day ration. “Deep background, that’s what you said?”

She nodded.

Dug-lass Negarra! Wes-lee Negarra! The shouts of Michael’s troops on that day the gunship was downed reverberated in his brain. Negarra—blood brother. A man should be prepared to lay down his life for his negarra. It was another word for loyalty, for a solemn contract between two men, and Douglas had broken it. “Here’s the deal—y’all don’t use anything I tell you before we’re out of here.”

“Wes!”

He turned to Mary: “Lyndon Johnson had a sayin’—Don’t get mad, get even. I got mad, now I’m gonna get even.” And then to Phyllis: “Soon as the airplane gets sold and we’re out. Could be a week, could be two. You don’t use it till then.”

The reporter paused for a beat, then said, “Fair enough. I’ll need a couple of weeks to put it together anyway.”

“And if y’all f*ck me on that, I won’t f*ck you back—I’ll make you sorry you ever drew a breath. I know some folks who would be happy to run your skinny butt over on a Nairobi street just as a favor to me.”

“Fair enough again. I never did look both ways, and I don’t intend to start.”

“I’ve got records—bank transfer records, flight schedules, dates. I’ve got photographs and videos of some of the runs we made.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Wes—”

“Save the lectures for later, darlin’,” he said to Mary.

Phyllis sat up straight. “Photos? Videos?”

“All in livin’ color,” he said.

 

A WET-SEASON sunrise, today’s was a spectacle prolonged by the clouds walling the horizon—a glow like the gold in a refiner’s fire shading off to orange and pink, and then the empyrean gold again, gilding the edges of the cumulus, billowing below cirrus that resembled paint brushes dipped in pastels. An altogether glorious symphony of light and changing color. Fitzhugh’s spirits rose with the sun after a night of agitated dreams and spells of wakefulness, postmidnight arguments with himself as to where his duty lay and to whom. He’d come to a resolution, finally, and the beauty of the dawn somehow confirmed it. The red African mud clung like glue to his boot as he walked to the compound’s mess, but he felt light-footed and relieved, as though the thing he had determined to do were already done.

He ate a hearty breakfast of bangers and eggs with fried tomatoes, then, over a leisurely cup of coffee and a cigarette, rehearsed what he was going to say, anticipating Douglas’s responses, thinking of arguments to counter them. Alexei and his crew came in, closely followed by Phyllis Rappaport and hers. The cameraman and soundman were lugging their equipment in banded aluminum cases; the reporter had a valise slung over her shoulder and carried a cardboard box by the twine tied around it. She blew out her cheeks when she put it down on the bench at one of the tables. While she sat beside it, the soundman got her breakfast for her. This could have been a normal courtesy—taking care of the boss—but Fitzhugh assumed differently: She did not want to let the box out of her sight for so much as a minute. As she turned her head, facing him from across the patio, he waved. She returned the wave. He got up, topped off his coffee mug, filled another, and went to her table.

“Good morning, Phyllis,” he said, remaining on his feet. “You are catching the eight o’clock to Nairobi, yes?”

“We are.”

“So did you find someone to take you in next week?”

She hesitated before answering that she had; but she didn’t volunteer the pilot’s identity. Not a pleasant woman, but one to be trusted, Fitzhugh thought. She was keeping her word to Wesley.

“When does your story air?” he asked offhandedly. “We get CNN here on satellite.”

“I’ve got some work to do on it yet. When it airs is up to the editors. Stay tuned.”

“We will,” Fitzhugh said, and left.

In a tattered terry-cloth robe, one side of his face lathered in shaving cream, Douglas answered his knock.

“Well, there’s service,” he said as Fitzhugh handed him the coffee. “What’s up?”

“I’ll wait till you are done.”

He sat beside the bed while Douglas shaved. The tukul was luxurious, neat and homey compared with the quarters of most aid pilots and aid workers. The chairs, the nightstand, bedstead, and bureau, shipped up from Nairobi, were of carved hardwood and lent an atmosphere of permanence. Clothes hung from a bar under a shelf, shirts facing in the same direction. There were photographs on the bureau, one showing a middle-aged couple, a buxom woman and a tall man. In another the same man, years younger, looking almost like the present Douglas’s twin, was in field clothes with a gun crooked over one arm. Beside him stood a teenage boy, also carrying a gun. A dog posed in front of them. Many dead birds were spread on the ground. Mountains in the background. Recalling a comment Wesley had made some time ago, Fitzhugh found it interesting that there were no pictures of Douglas in his U.S. Air Force uniform, or of the plane he flew in the Persian Gulf War. Pilots always had photos of their planes.

“This picture,” he called into the bathroom. “With the dog. You and your father?”

“Yeah. That was taken, it must be twenty years ago.” Douglas came out, toweling his face. “My dad loved bird hunting and my mother loved bird watching. She was always arguing with him to stop shooting them. Helluva wing-shot. The man never missed, I mean, never missed.” He smoothed his tousled hair with a palm and took a chair, extending his legs with the movement that always reminded Fitzhugh of a cat, stretching. “So what’s with the crack-of-dawn visit, the coffee?”

“I went to have that talk with Wesley last night.”

“Good. I put the muzzle on Tony. What did Wes say?”

“To me, nothing. To Phyllis, everything.”

Douglas popped his lips two or three times and gestured to him to continue.

“She got to him first. I was near his tent when I heard voices inside. Phyllis’s is as distinctive as Wesley’s. I hung outside for as long as I could stand it in the rain. They were still talking when I left, but I’d heard enough.”

“Which was what?”

“I couldn’t hear every word, of course. Wesley is going to fly her to the Nuba on Monday. Just before I left, they were discussing the thirty-six thousand that Barrett paid to Yellowbird. She sounded very interested in that. I can see why. How sexy if she can prove that an aid agency’s funds went directly to pay for arms deliveries.”

“Damn it! Goddamn it! You should have talked to him earlier. Right after we talked.”

This was one of the responses Fitzhugh had anticipated. “You are not going to tell me what I should have done. It would not have made any difference anyway. You made this mess because of the things you should not have done, and you know what they are.”

Douglas said nothing, looking at the mat beside his bed. He stood, picked up a clot of mud that Fitzhugh had tracked in, and crossing the room, dropped it in the wastebasket.

“So that cunt wants to drag Barrett into this, but how does she prove it? All she’s got is Wesley’s word.”

“Considerably more, I’m afraid,” Fitzhugh said, watching him stoop to pick up more chunks of dirt. “I heard Wesley say he would tell her everything and show her everything. He had his records—the bank transfers, the flight schedules, the dates. And also photographs and videos.”

Douglas stopped housecleaning and faced Fitzhugh, hands in the pockets of his robe. “Photos and videos of what?”

“Of Yellowbird missions. He said he would give them to Phyllis, and I believe he has already. I saw her this morning at breakfast. She was carrying a box about this big”—he indicated its size—“and wouldn’t let it out of her sight. The videocassettes, photos, the records—that all must have been inside.”

“Wes took pictures? He made videos? I made a few runs when Mary was on leave, and I never saw any cameras.”

“Mary was the artist,” Fitzhugh said in a droll voice. “You’ve seen her. She takes pictures of everything. They probably were going to be souvenirs. Now they will be put to another use.”

“Oh, yeah. A real prize for a TV reporter. The next best thing to being an eyewitness. Wes had to be crazy to let Mary do that. Videos!” Douglas flung an arm, knocking the coffee cup off the arm of his chair. “Son of a bitch!” He wiped up the spill, then took off his robe and boxer shorts, baring his flat, cream-colored ass, opened a bureau drawer, almost pulling it out entirely, and got into fresh underwear. “Lives, our pilots’ lives. Wes doesn’t give a shit about them, he’ll risk them just to get back at me. She doesn’t give a shit—it’s only a story to her. A cunt and an a*shole. Two cunts and an a*shole.” He went to the bar from which his clothes hung, started to put on a shirt, and then threw the hanger against a wall. “Videos, for f*ck sake!”

“Please calm yourself, my friend,” Fitzhugh said.

“Calm myself? Everything we’ve built up—a twenty-minute segment on a newsmagazine show. Know what twenty minutes is on TV? A goddamned eternity. They get CNN in Khartoum, the whole f*cking planet gets CNN. We’re talking big-time here. The papers will pick it up, and we’ll be . . .” He grabbed the shirt he’d thrown onto the bed and tossed it to the floor. “Khartoum couldn’t order better propaganda. That’s what she is, a propagandist for those bastards. Everything we’ve built up, and you’re telling me to calm myself? We’ll lose our UN contracts, the UN will boot us out of Loki, and we’ll be lucky if Kenya doesn’t revoke our license.”

Fitzhugh raised his palms. “I know what is at stake. You need not go on about it.”

Douglas put his trousers on, picked up the shirt, and buttoned it crookedly, shirttails hanging out as he paced, disheveled and distracted. Fitzhugh had never seen him like this. Facing the possible ruin of his world, he had none of Tara’s dignity when she faced the certain ruin of hers. He was almost comical.

“I have thought what you should do,” Fitzhugh said. “What you must do.”

Douglas noticed that he was in disarray. He fixed his buttons, tucked in the shirt, and in the process, collected himself. Falling back into the chair, long legs going out with a languid movement, he said, “Yeah, stop that story from getting on the air, that’s what.”

“No.”

“We have to get hold of that stuff. Without it, what does she have? Dare telling stories. Then all we have to do is deny everything and point out that Dare’s on a personal vendetta. It’ll blow over in a couple of days.”

“And how will you do that?” Fitzhugh asked. “Break into CNN’s office in Nairobi?”

“Yes.”

“And of course you know people with the required skills.”

“No, but Hassan does. Thugs in Special Branch or the Criminal Investigation Division who moonlight.”

Fitzhugh realized that he preferred the addled Douglas to this one—icy, calculating. “Which would require letting Hassan in on our little trade secret. Or would you expect him to arrange this burglary without asking the reason for it?”

Douglas said nothing.

“My thought does involve letting Hassan in on the secret, but no melodramas about break-ins, yes? You are willing to listen?”

“I’ll listen to any good idea.”

“The first thing you must do is end the gun-running operations, and you can do that right now, with one word to Tony. Then you go to Hassan, straight away, and inform him of the story Phyllis is working on. You tell all, but you assure him that Knight is no longer involved in these activities. I will go with you if you wish. And we both offer to resign.”

Douglas jerked his head forward. “Come again?”

“We offer to resign for the good of the company. Knight Relief Services should be safe from any actions from the UN or the Kenya government, because all this took place under Knight Air Services. But of course it will be noticed that the management people are the same, so we remove ourselves before the story breaks. We retain our interests in the company but not our positions. I think Hassan would want us out regardless. Possibly we can persuade him to put us on suspension and rehire us at a later date, but the offer of resignation must be made. We have some time—Phyllis hasn’t finished yet, and she herself doesn’t know when the story will be broadcast, I asked her this morning. When it is, Khartoum will react as we anticipate—call on the UN and Kenya to do something. But Hassan will be able to say that he discovered the illicit operations and put a stop to them and took action against those involved. Accepted their resignations, suspended them, whatever. Now it is possible that Kenya, to placate its neighbor, may wish to go further. It may ask you to leave the country, it may take some legal action against me. But Hassan knows everybody who is anybody in this country’s government, and I’m sure he can persuade them to go easy. It will cost him some money—this is Africa—but he can do it if anyone can.”

Douglas’s reaction was difficult to read—he looked on impassively. “You must have been up all night.”

“Most of it.”

“And what do we do with ourselves after we resign? Thought that out?”

“Not quite. If Hassan agrees to take us back on after things cool off, that problem will be solved. Otherwise we’ll just have to think of something.”

“How about the Nuba? What do those people do? Go back to chucking spears at gunships and bombers?”

“You know, for all your fine sentiments,” Fitzhugh said, “I believe that deep down in your white boy’s heart you think Michael Goraende is a dumb African nigger who cannot wage his war without you. He is a resourceful man. I am confident he’ll get on all on his own.”

“Happy to hear you’re so sure. The Nubans’ lives are at stake, too.”

Fitzhugh sighed. This redoubt of the American’s altruism, this crusader who dwelt inside the entrepreneur, could be the hardest to overcome. “I have given you my ideas. Maybe Hassan has some better ones. In any event, you must go to him and clear things up now. If you don’t, I have no choice but to quit. I’m prepared to do it immediately.”

After pondering the ultimatum, Douglas said, “There’s an old saying—when the decks are awash, follow the rats.”

This comment was predictable, Fitzhugh had expected something like it, but it was disappointing nonetheless.

“Sorry, Fitz,” Douglas said into his silence. “Sorry for that. I’m a little—I’m not myself right now.”

“Whoever you are, take my advice.”

Douglas sat in thought. A breeze sneaked through the shutters and stirred a tuft of his light brown hair; it rose shining in the slatted light and fell obediently back into place. “All right. I’ll talk to Tony right away, tell him to stand down, then I’ll fly myself to Nairobi.”

“I would prefer to go with you,” Fitzhugh said.

“Hassan is a busy guy, I might not get to see him today. I need somebody to mind the store.”

“You might need the moral support more.”

Douglas went to the mirror and brushed off his collar. In the reflection, Fitzhugh saw his knowing smile. “What you mean is, you don’t trust me to go through with it when I’m sitting there, eyeball to eyeball with him.”

“Very well. Yes, that’s what I meant.”

He turned around, the smile fading. “I got myself into this, I’ll get myself out.”