“What’s the matter, Freeman? Don’t like where this is headed? Or just worried we’ll keep you up too late? What’s on your agenda for tomorrow? Goat herding? Chopping firewood? Trimming the grape arbor? Nothing that can’t wait—not for this, anyway.”
Black plucked a sheet from the envelope and, without missing a beat, began to read aloud.
“August twelve. You’re promoted to chief programme officer. Interesting the way they spell ‘programme’ with the extra ‘M’ plus the ‘E’ on the end, like the British. As if they’ll do anything possible to distance themselves from the taint of America. Or maybe I’m hypersensitive. One of those knuckle-dragging ‘America Firsters.’” He smiled broadly. “On August twenty you make your first big supply requisition, ordering through a contractor in Kigali known as”—he pulled out a second sheet that looked like an old invoice—“Consolidated Aid Enterprises, Mr. M. Charles Mbweli, proprietor. Possibly a front, possibly the real thing.”
“More possibly a bloodsucker, in Mbweli’s case.”
“So you admit that now?”
“Now? I never had any illusions about Mbweli. None of us did. Whether he was stealing from his own people or shooting them in the back.”
In a way, it was a shame they didn’t have a slide of Mbweli, because he was quite a sight. Piratical beard, huge biceps, big belly. Wore dark green camouflage and an undersized maroon beret, which was always tilted at forty-five degrees. In the wake of the Rwandan genocide he had waded into the local chaos from neighboring tribal lands and carved out a commanding presence as a local supply broker. It was not a matter of serving the public. It merely meant he had seized control of key roads and transport in the supply corridors vital to our mission. A fan of American action movies, Mbweli kept a collection of bootleg Schwarzenegger, Stallone, and Van Damme videos in a huge, clattering pile that he would rummage through noisily whenever he needed a dose of adrenaline. To emulate his heroes he pumped iron and was always in the market for new weaponry. Firearms rode his body like remoras on a shark, a symbiotic relationship that kept him moving through dangerous waters. That made him pretty much like everyone else of influence at that particular time and place. But it was the gun he had aimed at Mila, figuratively speaking, that I remembered best. Yet another story for later, because it was clear Black wasn’t in the mood for excuses.
“Bad apple or not, you chose to do business with him.”
“Choice had nothing to do with it.”
“In any event, you ordered enough food, tents, plastic sheeting…” He paused to consult the paper. “Blankets, water purification chemicals, et cetera, et cetera, to feed and shelter one hundred thousand desperate souls for up to three months. Then, just like that, you let Mbweli raise the bar to one hundred and
twenty
thousand before you forwarded the bill to New York. At fifteen dollars per person, per month, the cost of that extra freight came to a total of…”
“Is this really necessary? A litany of UN fuckups and bureaucratic expedience? If we could have shot the bastard, we would have. But in our business we have to play by rules, even when the other side is making them up. If you’ve got a problem with that, then maybe I can save everybody a lot of time by pleading guilty on behalf of all of us.”
“You know it wasn’t that simple.”
“Actually, it
was
that simple. You go along with the locals, even the thugs like Mbweli, or no one gets fed. That’s how it works in the field, especially when you’re up against the deadline of a famine or a flood, or you’re facing three divisions of a revolutionary army that’s pushing a million head of human cattle before them, right toward a camp where you and maybe a dozen people have to get everything up and running within a few days. Or else. Every day of delay and another hundred people are going to die. It
is
that simple. And when it’s time to requisition supplies there’s almost always somebody like Mbweli standing in your way, with one hand out and the other one on an AK-47. It’s the same in every country. Warlords and thugs demanding a piece of the action just to get your trucks through. But they make you spread it around, of course. They force you into the system, to buy everyone’s silence.”
“
Force
you? Like this, you mean?” He slid the Tyvek envelope across the table. “Take a look inside. Then we’ll talk about who forced who.”
I won’t bore you with the gory details. Suffice it to say that the envelope was stuffed with invoices and eyewitness accounts, some of them almost certainly coerced, or otherwise dubious in origin. And none of it came even close to explaining what had really happened in Africa that summer, or in the terrible years since.
Just the thought of that time in our lives could still fry my brain with its flashbacks of horror and exhaustion. Unbearable suffering had unspooled before us like tales from the darkest passages of the Old Testament. Entire towns and provinces felled by plague, famine, and misfortune, and then we watched as the survivors were descended upon by blowflies, opportunists, and more aid workers, the only three species for miles around that managed to stay fully nourished.
For me, all this had come in the wake of four years of war and upheaval, and somewhere inside me the damage must have been accruing like interest due on a delinquent loan. So I suppose I was too worn out to consider the possibility that any fresh mistake could have consequences for anyone but me.
I would have explained all that to Black if I had thought he was in the mood to listen. But he was already off and running, ticking off the highlights of the materials I was viewing and making pointed references to certain authorities in New York and Geneva who he said might be interested in knowing all about it. To my mind it was nonsense, and I decided it was time to force the issue.
“Enough,” I said, closing the envelope. “I could offer you the truth about all this, but you’ve obviously made up your mind. Why don’t you just tell me what you’re after?”
He seemed almost disappointed it had been this easy.
“Very well. Mr. Gray, skip ahead to slide number seven.”
Gray’s fingers tap-danced across the keyboard, and Omar al-Baroody reappeared on the screen, except this shot was more recent. Omar sat in a nice restaurant before a linen tablecloth. Smiling and sunlit, a rather posh lunch. He appeared to be speaking to someone out of the frame. The tops of the heads of other diners loomed in the foreground, giving you the distinct impression that Omar hadn’t known he was being photographed.
I was momentarily captivated by his changed appearance. A fleshier face, hair receding at the temples and flecked with silver. But the smile remained the same—confident without being cocksure, generous to a fault. Omar always took his time in deciding whether he liked people, but once he made up his mind there was no turning back, and there was probably no sin he wouldn’t forgive in the name of loyalty. Judging by the look on his face, whoever was sitting on the other side of the table had definitely made his A-list.
“As I said earlier, he has a new venture now. Humanitarian aid, same game as yours. Only we’re not sure how much money is involved, or where it’s coming from. More to the point, we don’t know where it’s going, although we have our suspicions. Which is where you come in. Omar has just posted a job opening. A position you’d be perfect for.”
“I’m retired.”
“Director of programs. Omar even spells it the American way. And he could really use a Western face to front for him, especially with the Euros, who’ve gone a little skittish about bankrolling anything Arab, given the climate.”
“Or given people like you.”
“Valid point. All the more reason he’d happily hire someone with your pedigree.”
“If I was in the job market.”
“We’re only asking for a few months. Three, tops.”
“I haven’t seen him in years. He’d probably think of me as an old burnout. Which I am. For all you know, he’s already got somebody lined up.”
“There
is
a preferred candidate, in fact. A fellow who got in touch only yesterday.”
Black slid me another sheet of paper. It was a printout of an e-mail from me to Omar, a chatty message saying I’d happened to hear about the opening and, seeing as how I’d quit the UN but wasn’t quite ready to hang up my spurs…And so on. The eerie part was that the breezy style was just like mine, as were the salutation, sign-off, bad punctuation, and missing capitalizations. They had me cold.
“Pretty good, don’t you think? Our man spent the better part of a day studying your technique.”
“Has Omar answered?”
“Gray?”
“Coming right up, sir.”
Gray fiddled again with the laptop until an e-mail from Omar appeared on the screen. It was his reply. Omar was ecstatic. The job was mine if I wanted it. Come to Amman and we’ll “talk turkey,” he said. He had always been proud of his mastery of American idioms.
“Would’ve printed it for you, but it arrived just this afternoon,” Black said. “While we were all riding the ferry.”
My palms were sweating, so I wiped them on my pants.
“What does he call his organization?”
“The Bakaa Refugee Health Project. Its stated goal is to secure construction of a hospital for the Bakaa refugee camp.”
“There are a hundred thousand people at Bakaa. They could use one.”
“No doubt. But his NGO won’t be building it. He’s just trying to squeeze enough juice to get the Jordanian government to do it.”
“Is that so bad?”
“It’s fine. It’s lovely. But it’s not where his money’s going. Not the big dollars, anyway.”
“Omar would never front for anyone. Or not for a bunch of bomb makers.”
“Maybe you don’t know him as well as you think. He’s gotten religion, your old friend.”
“Is that why there’s a beer bottle on the table in the photo you just showed me? Because he’s such a stern and observant Muslim? Too bad he forgot to grow a beard.”
“Not that kind of religion. He still eats full-course lunches all through Ramadan as far as we know. Still likes Johnnie Walker Red, too. Maybe you should take him a bottle. I was referring to his politics. His donors. His fellow travelers. All the wrong sort of people. They disturb us, to say the least.”
“And you know this how?”
“From a man inside.”
“Then you don’t need me.”
“Our man was director of programs. Omar fired him.”
“After catching him spying?”
“Stealing. Once our boy saw how easy it was for Omar to divert money, he figured why not divert a little for himself. Yet another lying Palestinian.”
“Then how do you know he wasn’t lying to
you
? Telling you what you wanted to hear for a few extra bucks. It wouldn’t be the first time you people have been taken in by a bad source, from what I read in the papers.”
“This isn’t Iraq, and there’s no political agenda.”
“There never is.”
“This operation is being run from the bottom up, not the top down. And none of what we produce will be acted upon without verification.”
“Assuming you can get verification.”
“That’s where you come in. You’re going to find out everything for us.”
“Spying on an old friend isn’t what I had in mind for this month, thank you. And the more I think about this pile of so-called evidence against me, the weaker it looks. It’s an indictment of the system, for sure, but I was a pretty small cog in that machine.”
“So is ‘no’ your final answer?”
“Is this a game show now? Do I win a million if I say yes?”
Black sighed.
“I was afraid of this.” He turned toward his partner. “Knew we shouldn’t have cut short the entertainment portion, Gray. Why don’t we return to the previous section. The stunning climax.”
Two keystrokes later my image replaced Omar’s e-mail on the screen. This time I was standing in a broad plain of red dirt. It was a place I knew all too well and had hoped never to revisit, even though I did so almost daily in my memory.
“Tanzania.” Black sounded like a judge pronouncing a death sentence. “July of ’99.”
“Stop.”
“And of course this time you played it on the straight and narrow.”
“I said stop.”
“Not because you had a sudden pang of conscience, of course, or because everyone had eaten their fill at the trough.”
“This really isn’t necessary, you know.”
“Not necessary? Not even the part about how you might possibly face real legal action, if it were only known that—”
“Enough!”
My shout finally stopped him. Less by its volume than its tone of desperation. Perhaps Black sensed, rightly, that if he pushed me off this precipice I might never climb back. That’s certainly how it had almost gone in July of ’99.
But what he couldn’t have known was that there were secrets that even he and his friends hadn’t yet uncovered, items that for me were still worth protecting from prying eyes at almost any price.
For a moment he said nothing. Merely made some marks on his pad, as if tallying the final score. I tried to collect myself while his gaze was averted, but first I dared a last glance at my image on the screen. The man up there was six years and an entire lifetime removed from the one I’d become. Just look at his smile—comfortable and knowing, completely ignorant of what was to come.
Most people go into the aid business because they feel they owe it to the world. After a few years in the field some begin believing that the world owes them—if not its riches, then at least its attention. That’s why so many of us are such crashing bores at Stateside parties or weddings, cornering our relatives with horror stories and sneering at everyone’s easy comfort. We take old acquaintances by the lapels and implore, “Take heed of the world!” when of course what we’re partly saying is “Take heed of me! Noble warrior on the dangerous frontier!”
This attitude makes it all the harder to endure yourself once you’ve run up a debt greater than your contribution. And that is exactly what happened in Tanzania in July of ’99, for reasons that I would never let Black, White, or Gray learn. Lives were lost, quite a few of them, and I indeed played a role.
But when it came time to parcel out the official blame, some was never placed in the correct places. Based on what Black had already said, he was convinced that my greatest fear was further culpability, and I was glad to let him think so. Had he known the real story, he would have had even more leverage. The sooner I got him off this dangerous subject, the better.