City of Saints & Thieves

by Natalie C. Anderson

  Instead I wait until everything goes silent, until the insects pick up their interrupted song, until I hear Boyboy say my name softly. Then I look at the man on the ground. He stares up at the sky, still and finally harmless.

  FORTY-TWO

  Sister Dorothy assures Michael that his father’s surgery went well. They are used to dealing with bullet wounds and worse at the clinic. “We didn’t even have to put him under,” the sister says. “He was on a business call almost the entire time.” She shakes her head, clearly not understanding that Mr. G’s call with Bug Eye was one negotiation that couldn’t wait. “You can go in to see him in just a moment,” she says. “How is the arm?”

  “Fine,” Michael answers. They’ve put a cast on his wrist.

  “That was quite a break,” she says. “It sounds like you are all very lucky to be alive.” And with a little squeeze to my shoulder she’s off to check on a baby that was born this morning.

  Life, even in the middle of all this death, is persistent.

  General Gicanda had been the one to sweep us up from the carnage in the field, rolling in with a small army of Rwandan special forces only moments after Omoko was dead. At first I thought it was the militia, but then Mr. Greyhill shouted at us to put down the guns we raised at them. General Gicanda attended to Mr. Greyhill himself, carrying him to the helicopter and laying him beside a trussed-up, still-unconscious Ketchup. On the way to the hospital, he pointed out the militia camp. Or what was left of it.

  It turned out that Mr. G had got Boyboy’s messages after all, but had decided not to take any chances. Gicanda’s strike on the camp came after Mr. Greyhill radioed in the coordinates. They were supposed to come to Mr. G’s aid sooner, but taking out the militia took longer than the general had anticipated.

  If anyone at the hospital is surprised to see Rwandan troops this deep in Congo, they give no indication. The soldiers set up watch in the corridors. In contrast to the militias, their uniforms are spotless and pressed, and their guns and boots shine with oil. They are tall and healthy looking, standing at attention and gazing out over the heads of the nurses and nuns bustling around them. Three are stationed around Ketchup’s bed, even though he’s now under heavy sedation.

  The nuns say it’s too soon to know if he will have any permanent damage from the fracture in his skull, but there’s not much swelling and he’s stable, and once they stop feeding him sedatives, he should wake up within twenty-four hours. Mr. Greyhill has told the nuns to spare no expense in making sure he stays alive. He knows what Ketchup’s life is now worth.

  A different nurse sticks her head around the door of the surgery room, where Mr. G is resting. “You can go in now,” she tells Michael and me.

  We both jump up and hurry into his room. Boyboy waits in the lobby. When we burst in, Mr. G doesn’t look up from his phone and his face is as unreadable as ever. There is a red stain the size of a bottle cap on the dressing on his leg.

  “It’s done,” Mr. Greyhill says, finally putting his phone away. “Come in, close the door, sit. She’s safe and I have assurances she’ll stay that way. Your associate is pleased with the payment I’m offering in addition to his brother. He’s promised me you won’t be harmed. Everything’s been arranged for the handoff to occur as soon as we touch down in Sangui.” He looks at his phone again. “We’ll leave within the hour. The general will escort us to the border.”

  I am so relieved that I can’t even speak for a few seconds, and I melt into a chair.

  “Tomorrow I’ll have my assistant start working on getting her visa arranged.”

  I look at Michael, but he seems just as confused as me. “Visa?”

  “She’ll go back with Michael.”

  “Back where?”

  “Lucerne, Switzerland.”

  I jump up and come around the bed to face him. “Switzerland!”

  “I should have done it years ago,” Mr. G says. “I thought the convent school was safe enough, but obviously I was wrong.”

  “You paid for her to go there?” Michael asks. “You knew where she was?”

  “Of course.”

  How did I not figure that out before? He must have come looking for Kiki once we left, and found her at the church he knew Mama went to. I try to hide my shock. “You can’t just send her off to some foreign country without asking me!”

  He regards me with infuriating patience. He still looks polished and in charge, even sitting in a hospital bed. “You’re what, sixteen?”

  “So?”

  “And you’re in a gang?”

  I ball my fists. “Your point?”

  “You’re hardly in a position to offer alternatives.”

  I open and close my mouth, trying to think how to respond. He was the one who kept my sister safe and in school. He paid for her to go there. But he kept her out of his home too. He left her living like an orphan; all he did was pay off his guilty conscience. “You never even came to see her,” I finally say.

  At this, his smooth forehead wrinkles. “I went once. But . . .”

  “It was inconvenient.” I fold my arms over my chest. “Or were you afraid someone would see you and wonder why you’re visiting a mixed kid who happens to look an awful lot like you?”

  He doesn’t answer. From the corner of my eye I can see Michael watching his father silently, his face hard and unforgiving.

  A lesson of some sort has started on the lawn outside, and I can hear a chorus of young women’s voices slowly reading phrases out loud in French.

  “Why can’t we leave now?” I ask. My relief at knowing Kiki really is safe and that she’ll be back with me soon is fading quickly. She’s still not here, now, with me. I need to see her.

  “Believe me, we’re getting the choppers refueled and ready to go as fast as we can. I’m anxious too. Sit, Christina, you’re not doing her any good wearing a hole in the floor.”

  I had hardly even noticed I’d started pacing again. I slow, turn to face him. “All right, well, if we can’t leave yet, I have questions.”

  He folds his hands in his lap and waits.

  I glance at Michael. “Why did my mother come and find you?” I ask. It’s the question Omoko partially answered for me, but I want to hear what Greyhill has to say.

  He keeps his eyes leveled on me for a beat, like he’s trying to decide if he really wants to tell me anything. Finally, he says, “Because she knew I could help her. I was probably the only person in the world who could.”

  Almost against my will I sink into a chair beside Mr. Greyhill’s bed and lean forward, hungry for this explanation. “She told you he was stealing from you,” I say. “That’s why you helped her?”

  Mr. G looks from me to his son, who is waiting for answers as well.

  “Mr. Greyhill,” I say, “I know you think I’m just a kid, but I killed a man to save Michael today. I deserve to know exactly what happened.” I feel myself trembling. “Michael does too.”

  Greyhill blows a long breath out his nose. “She had proof that Omoko had been stealing gold from me—a very detailed ledger of how much he siphoned off from each transaction with the militia. But in exchange for giving it to me, she wanted protection. She asked for a job in my home, behind my gates and guards.”

  Michael frowns. “So you do buy gold from these monsters.” He walks to the window and looks out, his bandaged arm held to his chest.

  “Do you know how she got the ledger?” I ask.

  “She said she had been a prisoner for a while and was able to steal the documents.” Mr. Greyhill’s eyes drop to his hands. “It was later she told me what he did to her.”

  “She told you what happened to her?” I hate the note of jealousy that creeps into my voice.

  Mr. Greyhill hesitates. “Your mother and I were . . . close.”

  “Close? You had a kid with her,” Michael says, his back still to hi
s father.

  Mr. G looks up. “I’m not perfect.”

  “That’s maybe the understatement of the century,” Michael growls. He turns around. “Did you love her?”

  I suck in a breath. I don’t know what I expect Greyhill to say. Maybe to deny it, to say it was just an affair. But he lifts his chin and looks his son in the eye. “Yes.”

  Michael pushes off the windowsill. He starts for the door, anger stiffening his frame.

  “Michael . . .” I stand up and try to catch his arm, but he shakes me off. I’m about to go after him, but Mr. G says, “Let him go. He needs time.” He watches his son’s angry back disappear through the door as I sink slowly back into my chair. “We’ve never talked about Anju . . . but we will. Later.” He closes his eyes. “I thought she would be safe in my home, Tina. I thought all of you would be. I truly did.”

  I grip my hands in my lap. “I thought you killed her. I saw you, both of you, in the garden the night before she died. You told her you’d kill her. You were trying to strangle her.”

  Greyhill seems to deflate. He rubs a hand across his face. “I thought that might have been you. I-I don’t have an adequate excuse, Christina. She had every right to be angry with me. I’d told her I would stop working with the militia, but I hadn’t. It was too hard to reverse by that time. So when she threatened me, I got angry with her. I didn’t know how to . . .” He sighs.

  “So you were trying to hurt her.”

  “I would never have done it . . .” he says, his voice full, nearly cracking. “I was angry. I didn’t know how to deal with your mother sometimes. I loved her, but what happened to her out here—it was beyond what any person could possibly be expected to bear. I don’t think she ever really recovered from it. She told me once that dying would have been so much easier. Sometimes she wasn’t herself. She would rave and scream, threaten me, or drift away. That night I became frustrated.”

  I have to dig my nails into my palms to keep myself together. I knew those dark places she would retreat to. “That’s no excuse for what you said to her.”

  “I know.” He looks at me, his eyes glassy. “I’m not proud of what I said, or how I treated her. Sometimes it feels like it was me who killed her.”

  I feel, more than hear, his words, like a tiny knife, cutting away the last abscess of anger I have for him. I feel it slip free from where it’s been lodged inside me. I realize that maybe this was what I had always wanted: not so much Mr. Greyhill’s money or his blood, but an admission of his guilt. Something that would let me put her to rest peacefully. “But it wasn’t you,” I say.

  Greyhill’s face darkens. “I should have killed Omoko the day your mother started working for me. But we had been friends once, Omoko and I, and I let him go. At that point I didn’t . . . care for her so much. By the time I understood what he had done to your mother, he was gone. Disappeared. We thought he might have left the continent. He killed her in my home because he wanted to let me know he could still get to me. He hadn’t been seen in years at that point. And all the while he was underground, growing stronger, just biding his time.” He snorts. “He paid off my head of security to get in, the bastard. That guy I did have killed.”

  “David Mwika?”

  “Waste of bone and breath.”

  I wonder if that’s what the payments to First Solutions that Boyboy found were all about. Not payments to Mwika, but payments to have him killed, maybe even by one of his coworkers.

  “He opened the mokele-mbembe door for Mr. Omoko,” I say.

  Mr. Greyhill frowns. “The what?”

  “The secret tunnel that goes to your office.”

  “Know about that, do you?”

  I lean forward. “But you must have known that’s how he got in and out. How could you not catch him?”

  “I didn’t figure that out until it was too late,” Mr. Greyhill says, his face pained. “I was in shock.”

  The look on his face says he’s thought long and hard about this, how it all must have happened. Suddenly I see the murderer underneath the polished exterior, the man who realized he’d been betrayed and hired someone to hunt Mwika down in a dirty bar in Congo and kill him. Someone who probably instructed the killer to whisper regards from Mr. Greyhill into Mwika’s dying ear.

  “How did you know it was Mr. Omoko who killed Mama?”

  “The gun he shot her with—he left it for me. I had given it to him years earlier. It was engraved to him with a Roman numeral two. He hated that name, Number Two. The engraving was supposed to be a little joke.” He chuckles mirthlessly. “No one would have noticed it. It was subtle. It was a message just for me.”

  “Number Two,” I say quietly. I can picture the gun in Greyhill’s drawer, the engraving like he said, next to PIETRO BERETTA MADE IN ITALY: a little NO. II in the same script. I slump back. “Why didn’t you kill him after that?”

  “I tried. Several times. But by then he had become much more powerful. He had surrounded himself with a small army. Your Goonda friends. He was anticipating it. He was never off guard.”

  Greyhill’s right. Mr. Omoko’s bodyguards were always there, like shadows. But I could have got to him if I’d known. The image of his dead face, eyes open wide to the sky, ripples through me, and I shudder. He’s gone, Tina, he’s gone.

  I look up to see Mr. Greyhill watching me.

  “Why are you even here?” I ask. “How can you keep doing it? Trading with the militias? If you cared about her, I mean? I’ve seen your records. You never stopped buying gold from them, even after she was dead.”

  Mr. Greyhill’s brows furrow. “You’ve been on my computer.”

  “I’m with the Goondas, remember? I broke into your home and stole the memory off your hard drive. That’s how Michael found me. He caught me in your office.”

  “You copied my data? Did Omoko get it?”

  “Yes, but I’m sure the computer with all your dirt on it is destroyed,” I say. “Your buddy the general didn’t spare much when he bombed the camp.” I don’t mention the backup copies I know Boyboy has. I’m not quite sure I’m ready to play that card yet.

  Mr. Greyhill starts to breathe again, which infuriates me. “You’re no better than Omoko,” I say.

  He shakes his head slowly. “No. I’m trying to do better. We’re exploring new sites, trying to dig enough minerals on our own. But it’s hard. The militia groups have so much territory under their control. I’ve been working with General Gicanda to try to clear them out, but then there are all these political considerations . . .”

  “It’s hard,” I sneer. It’s all I can do not to spit at him. “Don’t you see all those women out there?” I wave toward the window. “Ask them if they care if it’s hard.”

  Mr. Greyhill lowers his eyes. “We are trying to do better, Tina. With the other minerals, there are new international laws now. Monitors. Sanctions. For tin and coltan we’ve got good mines. Safety protocols, unions. Ask anyone. Extracta wouldn’t be able to sell these volumes otherwise.”

  “But gold . . . ?”

  “Gold is another story. We’re offering higher prices to mines that can show they’re not using slaves. But it’s not easy to shake the militias—they’ll attack mines like that, take them over. The government’s no help; they’re running slave-labor mines too. And even if it’s not Extracta who buys the gold, there are others—smugglers who are ready to take our place. They love gold. You can smuggle out one briefcase of it and get the same price as for five truckloads of tin ore. That’s part of the reason why Omoko had it out for me. He wanted to be a buyer again.”

  I think of the weapons Omoko brought, the gold Boyboy had seen exchanged. It was true.

  Greyhill goes on, “In exchange for Michael, he wanted both money and room to operate. And he would have been happy to keep letting the militias use slave labor. He could have bought gold at a cheaper price that way. Fo
r him it was about the bottom line, getting as much as he could in the short term. It’s about the bottom line for me as well, but in the long term I think having good mines will be the more profitable strategy.”

  “So it’s just business. All of this.”

  He looks tired all of a sudden. “I never said it was anything else.”

  A nurse bustles in and checks the IV on Greyhill’s arm and gives him a cup of water. She ticks something on his chart and then she’s gone again. The lesson outside continues, a slow chant of numbers and phrases that makes me want to close my eyes.

  “It’s still all so messed up,” I say, shaking my head at him. I go to stand by the window, drawing the curtain back. There are about ten women out on the lawn, reading from exercise books. I recognize a woman in pink from the first night we came to the hospital. She’s one of the three that was brought in that day. She smiles shyly at something the teacher says, and her teeth flash as white as the bandage crowning her head.

  I make a decision. I let the curtain fall and turn around. “Mr. Greyhill, I’m grateful for what you’re doing to help me keep my sister safe. I really am. But I know you’re not doing that for me. And that’s fine. You don’t owe me anything. But you do owe my mother. And I intend to make sure you settle that debt. I may not be a Big Man. I’m small. Tiny. But please don’t make the mistake of underestimating what I can do when I really want to. I will be watching you. I will be watching what happens here. For my mother. For those women out there. You say you’ll do better, but it’s difficult for a leopard to change its spots.”

  I walk toward Greyhill and place my hands on the rail at the foot of his bed. “Listen carefully. Soon, after we get back and Kiki is safe and you’re getting back to your life, a large sum of money is going to vanish from your accounts.” He opens his mouth to protest, but I put a finger up to stop him. “And a little while later you may receive a thank-you note from this hospital. You will be gracious about it and agree to fund all of their operations for the foreseeable future. Anything they ask for, you’ll give, even if it’s a new school or roads or maybe even a new maternity wing.”