The Laughing Monsters (3 page)

Having nowhere else to be, I arrived an hour early at the Scanlon, a hotel more central to Freetown than the better ones. When the region had drawn journalists, this was where many of them had lodged, a four-story place sunk in the diesel fumes and, when the weather was dry, in the hovering dust.

Inside the doors it was mute and dim—no power at the moment please sir—but crowded with souls. In the middle of the lobby stood a figure in a two-piece jogging suit of royal purple velour, a large man with a bald, chocolate, bullet-shaped head, which he wagged from side to side as he blew his nose loudly and violently into a white hand towel. People were either staring or making sure they didn’t. This was Michael Adriko.

Michael folded his towel and draped it over his shoulder as I came to him. Though we had an appointment in an hour, he seemed to take my appearance here as some kind of setback, and his first word to me was, “
What
-what.” Michael often uses this expression. It serves in any number of ways. A blanket translation would be “Bloody hell.”

“Thanks for meeting me at the airport.”

“I was there! Where were you? I watched everybody getting off the plane and I never saw you. I swear it!” He always lies.

He put out his monumental hand and gave mine a gentle shake, with a finger-snap.

“For goodness’ sake, Nair, your beard is gray!”

“And my hair is still black as a raven’s.”

“Do ravens have beards?” He had his feet under him now. “I like it.” Before I could stop him, he reached out and touched it. “How old are you?”

“Too close to forty to talk about.”

“Thirty-nine?”

“Thirty-eight.”

“Same as me! No. Wait. I’m thirty-seven.”

“You’re thirty-six.”

“You’re right,” he said. “When did I stop counting?”

“Michael, you’ve got an American accent. I can’t believe it.”

“And I can’t believe you bring a lovely full beard to the tropics.”

“It’s coming off right away.”

“So is my accent,” he said and turned to the waiter and spoke in thick Krio I couldn’t follow, but I got the impression at least one of us was getting a chicken sandwich.

I asked the clerk if a barber was available, and he shook his head and told me, “Such a person does not exist.”

I asked Michael, “Do you still carry your clippers?”

Smiling widely, he caressed his baldness. “I’m always groomed. Send the sandwich to my room,” he told the clerk. “Two three zero.”

“I know your room,” the clerk said.

“Come, Nair. Let’s chop it down with the clippers. You’ll feel younger. Come. Come.” Michael was moving off, calling over his shoulder to the desk clerk, “Also bottled water!” Looking backward, he collided with a striking woman—African, light-skinned—who’d tacked a bit, it seemed to me, in order to arrange the collision. He looked down at her and said, “
What
-what,” and it was plain they were friends, and more.

It didn’t surprise me she was beautiful, also young—not long out of university, I guessed. Such women succumbed to Michael quickly, and soon moved on.

She wore relief-worker or safari garb, the khaki cargo pants and fishing vest and light, sturdy hiking shoes. On this basis, I misjudged her. Really, that’s all it was—I judged her according to her clothes, and the judgment was false. But the first impression was strong.

Michael looked put out with her. “Everybody’s here at once.”

“Not for long—I’m off exploring.” She sounded American.

“Exploring where?” He was smiling, but he didn’t like it.

“I’m looking for postcards.”

I said, “You’ll have to go to the Papa for that.”

“Yes, the Papa Leone Hotel,” Michael explained, “but it’s too far.”

“All right, I’ll take a car.”

Michael sighed.

“Don’t pout,” she said. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

“Wait. Meet my friend Roland Nair. This is Davidia St. Claire.”

“Another friend? Everybody’s his friend.” Davidia St. Claire was speaking to me. “Did he say Olin?”

“My given name is Roland, but I never use it. Please call me Nair.”

“Nair is better,” Michael informed her. “It’s sharper. Look,” he went on, “at the Papa, get your nails done or something, kill some time, and let’s all meet at the Bawarchi for dinner—early dinner, six p.m. We all should know each other, because Nair is my closest friend.”

I said, “He saved my life.”

“Oui?” Her eyebrows went up.

Michael said, “C’est vrai.”

“More than once,” I said.

“Three times.”

“He kept me alive on a daily basis,” I said, and his woman looked me over—as if I explained something she’d wondered about, that kind of look, and I didn’t understand it. I said, “Are you Ivoirian?”

It made her laugh. “Who, me?”

“I thought because of the French.”

“That’s just for fun. I’m a Colorado girl.”

“I’m half American myself,” I said. I offered my hand. She laid two fingers on my wrist and seemed to watch my face as if to gauge the effect of her touch, which stirred me, in fact, like an anthem. She looked very directly into my eyes and said, “Hello.”

And then, “Goodbye.”

*   *   *

In room 230 I noticed a rollerbag I judged not quite in Michael’s style, but nothing that clearly said the woman Davidia slept here.

Michael flipped the wall switch. “Still no power!” He went to the dresser, opened a drawer, and turned to me gripping a braided leather whip about a meter in length, knotted at the narrow end. He grasped its handle and pulled out a dagger. “Nobody will know about my blade!”

“But, Michael—they’ll know about your whip.”

“Well, let them know at least something. It’s fair to be warned. Look how sharp. I could shave your beard with this.”

“Show me to the clippers, please.”

While I ran down the battery on his clippers at the sink, doing my best by the light through the small window, Michael cleaned his teeth, working away with a brush from whose other end a small spider dangled and swung.

There was another toothbrush sticking out of a water glass, and a tube of facial cream, and two kinds of deodorant. “Tell me your friend’s name again.”

He spat in the sink and said, “I’ve got a million friends,” just like an American. “Look!” he cried. “It’s Roland Nair emerging from the bush.” He resumed his brushing—still talking, foaming at the mouth. “You have gray in the beard, but not on your head.”

“A couple of days with you should fix that.” I spoke to his reflection, side by side with my own.

I am Scandinavian but have black hair and gray eyes, or blue, according to the environment. If I wanted my appearance to impress, I’d stay away from the sun and keep a very white complexion to go with my raven locks, that would be my look. But I like the sun on my face, even in the tropics.

Michael has handsome features, a brief, aquiline nose, high cheekbones, wide, inquiring eyes—like one of those Ethiopian models—and as for his lips, I can’t say. You’d have to follow him for days to get a look at his mouth in repose. Always laughing, never finished talking. A hefty, muscular frame, but with an angular grace. You know what I mean: not a thug. Still—lethal. I’d never seen him being lethal, but in 2004 on the Kabul–Kandahar road somebody shot at us, and he told me to stay down and went over a hill, and there was more shooting, and soon—none. And then he came back over the hill and said, “I just killed two people,” and we went on.

Once he showed me a photograph, a little boy with Michael Adriko’s face, his hand in the hand of a man he said was his father. Michael’s father had Arab blood apparent in his features, and so Michael—well, there’s a dash of cream in the coffee, invisible to me, but obvious to his fellow Africans. Sometimes he introduced me to them as his brother. As far as I could tell, he was never disbelieved.

He stroked his teeth with vigor. The spider whipped around on its strand. He rinsed his brush and the spider was gone.

Now he watched me comb my hair. I think it fascinated him because he was bald. He laughed. “Your vanity doesn’t make you look more lovely. It only makes you look more vain.” At that moment, the ceiling fixture flickered to life. “Power’s back. Let’s see the news.”

He sat on the bed and punched buttons on the television’s wand, pushing the device toward the screen as if to toss the signal at it. “News. News. News.” Al Jazeera had sports. The soccer scores. He settled for Nigerian cable, some sort of amateur singing competition, and then he untied his very clean red jogging shoes and kicked them off and set about massaging both feet, each with one hand. Vivid yellow socks.

“Michael—”

Michael laughed at the television.

“Michael, it’s time you told me something. You contact me, you get me down here—”

“You contacted me! You said, What’s going on, I said, Come down to SL and I’ll show you a plan.”

“Don’t
show
me the plan.
Tell
me the plan.”

But I’d lost him. He watched the screen with his mouth half open, his hands clutching his feet. The commercial ad from Guinness, the two black brothers, the bus ticket out of the bush … By the power brewed into this drink big-city brother frees his sibling from a curse that neither of them understands, and side by side they set out for the Kingdom of Civilization. Michael’s eyes glistened and he smiled a wide, tight smile. I’d often seen him driven to tears—this was what it looked like. Something had caught him by the heart. Brother for brother, reaching for greatness. Michael was moved. Michael was weeping.

As quickly as the ad was over he leapt into the bathroom, splashed his face at the sink, blew his nose into the hand towel, loomed in the doorway.

“Here’s the plan: I am a new man, and I plan to do what a new man does.”

Now he stood in the middle of the room, offering me tomorrow in his two outstretched hands. “Do you want a plan? I’m just going to give you results. You’ll live like a king. A compound by the beach. Fifty men with AKs to guard you. The villagers come to you for everything. They bring their daughters, twelve years old—virgins, Nair, no AIDS from these girls. You’ll have a new one every night. Five hundred men in your militia. You know you want it. They dance at night, a big bonfire, and the magic men come and stretch their arms to the length of a python, and change into all kinds of animals, and drums pounding, and naked dancers, all just for you, Nair! We want it. That’s what we want. And you know it’s here. There’s no place else on earth where we can have it.”

“This land of chaos, despair—”

“And in the midst of it, we make ourselves unreachable. A man can choose a valley, one with narrow entrances—defensible entries—and claim it as his nation, like Rhodes in Rhodesia—”

“I can’t believe I hear a black man talking like this.”

“We’ll have the politicians kissing our feet. Every four years we’ll assassinate the president.”

“The same president?”

“It’s term limits! We’ll be the ones controlling that.”

“How many men with AKs?”

“How many did I say? A thousand. Nair, I’ll come around on my launch on Sundays. Run it up onto the sand of your protected beach. Our children will play together. Our wives will be fat. We’ll play chess and plan campaigns.”

“You don’t play chess.”

“You haven’t seen me for seven years.”

“Man—you don’t play chess.”

He looked at me, wounded. So naked in his face. “That’s why it has to be you. You’re the one who knows those games.”

“And your games too, right?”

“It has to be you.”

I said, “This better not be about diamonds.”

“Not diamonds. Not this time. This time we concern ourselves with metals and minerals.”

“And aren’t diamonds actually minerals?”

“This is why I can never make a point,” Michael said, “because you query the details like some kind of master interrogator.”

“Sorry. Is it gold, then?”

“I tell you now: Stay away from the gold here, unless I say otherwise. The gold around here is fake. You’d see that the minute you looked at a kilo bar of it—but by the time they give you a look, you’re already in a dark place with bad people.”

“I’ll wait for your signal.”

He sat beside me on the bed and placed a hand on my shoulder. “I want you to understand me. I have this mapped from point A to point Z. And, Nair—point Z is going to be marvelous. Did I ever tell you about the time I saved the Ghanaian president’s life?”

It made me uncomfortable when he sat so close, but it was just an African thing. I said, “Michael, what about the girl? Who is she to you?”

“She’s American.”

“She told me that herself.”

“I heard her telling you.”

“Who is she, Michael?”

“More will be revealed.”

This was his style, his tiresome, unchangeable way. Information was an onion, to be peeled back in layers.

“What about you? What’s your passport?”

“Ghana,” he said, and he didn’t look happy about it. “Ghana will always welcome me.”

I shrugged away his heavy hand and got up. “Enough of Michael’s nonsense. Let’s get a drink.”

“Prior to sixteen hundred,” he said, “I drink only bottled water.”

“As they say, it’s sixteen hundred somewhere.” I checked my phone. “Here, as a matter of fact.”

“I stink! Get out while I shower.”

Looking down at him now—“Final question: What about Congo gold?”

“Nair!—you’re so far ahead of me.”

“If I was ahead of you, I’d know what I’m doing in Freetown instead of Congo, where all the gold is.”

“The important thing is that you came without knowing why.”

“I know why I came.”

“But not why I asked you. You came without an explanation.”

“You’d only lie to me, Michael.”

“For security purposes, perhaps. Yes. For your protection in transit. But we’re friends. We don’t lie to each other.”

He believed it.

*   *   *

As I made for the elevator, the lights died in the hallway. I took the stairs. Candles at the front desk, in the lobby, the big dining room. In the bar, the smell of burning paraffin, the stench of cologne overlying human musk. Voices from the dark—laughter—candlelit smiles. I ordered a martini, and it tasted just like one.