“What, you think I broke into his house?” I scoff, ignoring Michael’s twitch. “I’m good, but I’m not that good. Somebody hacked it for me. You sure you don’t know her?”
“When was this taken?” Donatien asks, looking back at the smiling girls. “Your mother’s young.” He glances at Michael, still suspicious of him. “They’re in school uniforms. It was taken before I met her.” He pushes the photo back to me and I carefully tuck it away.
I wait until he’s working on another big mouthful of fish before pressing my luck. “I keep wondering something. How did Mama know what she knew?” I go on, even though Donatien is giving me a warning look. “How does a nurse come to know someone like . . .”
“Tina . . .”
“. . . like you-know-who?”
Donatien’s hand creeps to the scar on his neck. “You want to talk, Christina, your new buddy has to scram.”
I look at Michael and jut my chin toward the door. He scowls, but stands up and makes his way through the restaurant and out the door, leaving us alone. Donatien watches him go.
I lean in. “Donatien?”
He runs his fingers along the little hash marks on his collarbone where the flesh was sewn back together. “You trust him? You gotta be careful who you talk in front of, Tina.”
“I know. You’re right. Don’t worry. He’s just some wet-behind-the-ears ’fugee. I don’t know why I let him tag along.” I wait until Donatien has another swallow of beer in him and then say, “So? How did she know Mr. Greyhill?”
Donatien sets the beer down slowly. Flies cluster around the eyeball of his fish, but he doesn’t seem to notice. “What are you doing, Tina? Why all the questions?”
“I just . . . Why won’t you tell me how she knew what Extracta was doing?”
I’ve tried this tack before, with little luck. Donatien will talk all day about the rebels who sell gold dug by slaves, and shady mining companies like Extracta who sell weapons to them, but any time I ask more about Mama herself, why she was willing to talk to him, or how she found out about the deals Extracta was making with militias, he goes all tight-lipped.
“It’s not my place to tell you,” he says.
“So I have to wait until I’m dead to ask her?”
He winces. “It doesn’t matter how she knew. She just did.”
I can see a twitch in the corner of his mouth, like something wants to come out. I wait. And just as I’m about to give up, he rubs a hand over his face and says, “She should never have agreed to help me.”
It’s not the answer to my question, but still, it’s something. I lean forward. “Because Greyhill found out and almost killed you?”
He’s told me about that day back in Kasisi, right before we left. Mama was supposed to meet him at his hotel and take him to the place in the jungle where the gold-for-guns deals were made. He was going to hide and take photographs. When the knock on his door came that night, he opened it, thinking it was her. Instead, it was a couple of guys with sharpened pangas, big long knives used for hacking through brush. Or flesh. Donatien’s told me multiple times how many pints of blood they had to pump into him (two) and how many stitches it took to close him up (forty-three). How he never heard from my mother again until she reached out to him the day before she was murdered, five years later.
Meanwhile, Mama and I were having our own problems.
But I don’t want to think about that right now. I want to know more about Mr. Greyhill. “Why would he wait all that time to finish her off, Donatien? And why would she come here to him at all if his militia friends were the ones who chased her out of Congo?”
He studies me.
“Come on, Donatien. I’m not a kid anymore! I can handle it, whatever it is you don’t want to tell me!” I lower my voice. “You can tell me, or I can go and ask him. I’m tired of being in the dark. Don’t think I won’t.”
I can tell he’s running a thousand different things through his head, but in the end all he says is, “It might not have been him who ran her out.”
I wait for more. But he’s silent. “I don’t understand. Who else would have . . .”
“Other people were involved in the deals. Greyhill didn’t make the exchanges himself.”
“What? But you said—”
“I said your mother had seen the exchanges, and that’s how she knew that gold was being traded for money and weapons. But when I asked her if it was a white American guy making the buys, she said no. I’m the one who told her I thought Roland Greyhill was the mastermind behind it all.”
Donatien won’t look at me. Why is he being so cagey about this part? “So she never met him in Congo? Who exactly was making the exchanges?”
Donatien’s mouth pinches into a flat line. “She didn’t say. Just that the main one was a Kenyan guy.”
“Did you find out who he was later?”