The Amateur Spy

by Dan Fesperman

  “No. I don’t see. I’ll lose credibility and maybe my job. No can do.”

  He rapped the gun barrel twice on my desk.

  “You are wrong! Yes can do!”

  He never actually pointed the gun at me. For Mbweli it was more of a business tool, his version of a BlackBerry. But it still looked threatening, propped there a foot or two from my face. I mustered the remnants of my dwindling fortitude and said, “I really am sorry, Charles. But this goes higher than me.”

  Mbweli let out a deep sigh and rose slowly like a boiling thunderhead. For a moment I thought he might shoot me and have his men cart me away on a UN stretcher. But I suppose he realized how bad that would have been for business, so he tried a new approach that showed he had some brains to go with his brutality.

  “Then I no can do security guarantee for your Feeding Station Blue.”

  Feeding Station Blue was a magic location on my list of our outposts. Mila ran it, and somehow Mbweli had found out.

  “They are on the fringe, you know,” he continued. “Bad guerrilla country there. A lot of shooting and raids. No guarantees there. No can do for security. You see?”

  I could have moved her, of course. I had enough authority to engineer it. But his mind had already considered the same possibility.

  “If you move her,” he said, “I will find out where. So no tricks with me, you see? You make deal or I make tricks with you and your woman. Station Blue or wherever else. You see?”

  Maybe I was tired. Or maybe I thought he just might do something foolish like having one of his men kill or kidnap Mila. Whatever the reason, my resolve crumbled on the spot. Mbweli got his money, we got our supplies, and most everyone who got wind of the shaky arrangement dismissed it as the price of doing business in a landscape of guns and chaos.

  Mila eventually heard a few details of the dirty deal—complaints about Mbweli were rampant in those days—but I made sure she never learned of the threat that sealed it. And I figured that with any luck, next time I wouldn’t be operating within range of Mbweli.

  But three years later there he was, back on my doorstep with his hand out. We had set up shop just down the way from Rwanda in the borderlands of Tanzania, this time to await a surge of refugees fleeing the Republic of Congo.

  Frankly, I was surprised to see him so far afield. One’s sphere of influence in such matters generally depended on connections with local clan leaders and village elders, and I knew Mbweli had few such contacts in Tanzania. Furthermore, he had a powerful rival in the local marketplace, a fellow named Paul Uwase who was willing to ease the provision and delivery of the goods for only a few small bribes, and nothing even approaching the 20 percent cut demanded by Mbweli. We had also recently fortified security at all our feeding stations.

  Yet he demanded the same arrangement as before. So I told him no. He raged for a few minutes, uttered a vague threat or two, and then departed. End of story.

  Or it would have been, if not for the well-meaning actions of my wife.

  As I mentioned, Mila had been a vigorous interventionist ever since her disaster in Sarajevo. She took advantage of every chance to right bureaucratic wrongs, or tweak the system to ease suffering, even if she had to skirt the rules. This practical brand of zeal was almost always a plus, and whenever we set up shop somewhere new Mila cultivated local sources to help circumvent corrupt officials and opportunistic thugs. She was particularly effective in connecting with women, whose potential influence was often overlooked, and in Tanzania that fall she quickly developed ties with the wives and concubines of the local elders. In fact, Mila was my initial source for the knowledge that Uwase, not Mbweli, was the prevailing local power broker.

  So it was that when she heard through her women’s grapevine of Mbweli’s visit to my office, she set her network into action. I suppose she feared I might cave in otherwise, based on what had happened before, although at the time we never discussed it. We were somewhat out of touch during those crucial few days. The roads were unsafe and in terrible condition, radio communication was patchy, and Mila had been dispatched temporarily to a location several hours away. That meant I didn’t hear about her actions until days later, from an indignant Uwase himself, and by then it was far too late to repair the damage.

  As best as I’ve been able to determine, the events unfolded something like this:

  Mila, hoping to stop Mbweli in his tracks, spread the word through her network that Mbweli was trying to cut in on Uwase’s action. If allowed to succeed, she warned, he would insist on a rapacious 20 percent cut, and everyone would suffer. This news filtered back to Uwase the day after he and I struck a deal. By then, Mbweli was out of the picture.

  Given the weird logic that rules in such chaotic locales, I suppose Uwase’s reaction was predictable enough. Rather than be grateful that someone had helped block the competition, he felt instead that he had been played for a fool. Outraged at having settled for peanuts when he, too, might have raked in up to 20 percent, Uwase decided to change his terms without telling me or anyone else—meaning that Mila never heard either. So he took the full payment, but when the convoys arrived with our food and supplies, they were 20 percent short of the expected load.

  I was stunned, but not overwhelmed. Shortages had occurred before on my watch, and I had always managed to overcome them. Up to that point, refugees had been reaching our area at a manageable rate, and as long as nothing unexpected happened we might still hold out fine until a supplemental order could be filled.

  Then the unexpected happened. A sudden flare-up of fighting sent tens of thousands more rushing our way. The first two days were bad enough, when malnourished children bore the brunt of the suffering. To stretch our thin supplies, we weighed all the young arrivals to determine the most urgent cases. I hoisted bony infants and toddlers onto a swing scale one by one, weighing each like some meager offering to be shrink-wrapped for a supermarket on the wrong side of town. They seldom cried. Their mothers, too, were oddly subdued, abiding the long lines with the patience of people who have been waiting all their lives. Flies swarmed every head, seeking entry to cuts, mouths, eyes, nostrils. With their boundless energy and incessant buzzing they were like jazzed electrons orbiting inert nuclei, the quantum mechanics of slow death.

  Just as we began thinking we might actually make it through with only hundreds of deaths instead of thousands, the third day brought a measles epidemic. It engulfed everyone rushing toward us and quickly spread into the camps, where, due to our shortage of tents, thousands of people were exposed all day to the brutal sunlight.

  By noon of the third day death had gained the upper hand, and by sunset the rout was on. The horror of the days that followed remains with me still, and I doubt that even a thousand sunsets on Karos could diminish its potency.

  One of my worst moments occurred when I was pressed into duty on a burial detail. Already worn out from lack of sleep, I was directing a backhoe to the lip of a trench when I stumbled over the edge, and landed with a sickening slap against the cool, soft flesh of two rotting bodies. Too exhausted to climb out unaided, I stood for several dreadful minutes before anyone could lend a hand, my footing unsteady atop flesh and bone. I averted my eyes from what my nose told me was below, but to my fevered mind the maggoty squirm of decomposition seemed palpable through the soles of my shoes, and the stench was so unbearable that I nearly passed out. I strained to raise my face above the edge of the trench as much for a fresh breath of air as to escape what had suddenly become the grave for my sanity.

  And that was not all. With food running out at our stations, hundreds of encamped refugees gave up altogether and headed overland through dangerous territory. Around noon the next day a radio flash alerted us to the consequences for one such group, which had been ambushed on a vulnerable stretch of highway.

  I arrived with three others in one of our white trucks. The only sound when we reached the carnage was the maddening buzz of the flies in the red stickiness of the butchered corpses. Bodie
s had been hacked open like sacks of ordure. Slain mothers still held children in their arms. There were probably no more than a few dozen victims, but it might as well have been a million considering my state of mind.

  Then came the final blow. A survivor, one of only three, clambered painfully to his knees to tell us that the massacre had been the work of Mbweli’s men. The news puzzled my colleagues, but not me. The brigand must have heard that Uwase got the same deal I had refused him, and then decided to take out his frustrations on the helpless.

  A colleague told me later that when it came time to leave the scene I just stood on the road with my mouth agape, one foot propped on a corpse. I was unable to utter a word or move a muscle, and the others bundled me into the truck along with the survivors. The doctors called it a combination of exhaustion, sleep deprivation, and dehydration. But it was something else, too, of course—the burden of knowing about the well-meaning deed of Mila’s that had helped set the catastrophe in motion. By week’s end I had been airlifted to the States and was back in Boston.

  In an earlier time people would have called my collapse a nervous breakdown. In today’s world it was diagnosed as a severe case of post-traumatic stress disorder, and people were fool enough to feel sorry for me.

  Because Mila and I weren’t yet married, it took her nearly a week to arrange a visa to be at my side. So for a while I was alone. I spent a few days in a hospital and then moved to my parents’ house. In retrospect it is appalling how unhelpful they were initially, although it shouldn’t surprise me. They had been deeply disappointed when I gave up a career in law to go gallivanting around the world, and the way they saw it I had now bungled even that modest vocation. The idea of facing not only an in-house audit but also a therapist or two was just the sort of messiness they would never be able to explain to their friends.

  Fortunately, Mila’s arrival changed everything. She became my ambassador-at-large to my parents, and also to my sisters and cousins, a tireless shuttle diplomacy that eventually yielded love and, almost miraculously, a measure of respect for what I had endured. She then plugged into my old network of friends and wisely spirited me away to a pal’s vacation home in upstate New York, where I watched cows graze and leaves fall between lengthy naps and marathon viewings of cable television.

  It was during this interlude that she really came into her own. Mila was my nurse, my lover, and my confessor, abidingly ready to hear every thought and doubt—except, of course, the one crucial item that I could never tell her. Having seen how shattered she had been in Sarajevo, I knew that the truth of what had happened in Tanzania might crush her beyond repair.

  All the same, there were times when I was tempted to unload the burden, especially when I had to face a UN board of inquiry to explain how we had botched things so badly. I went down to Manhattan to prepare for that fiasco, thinking that I was ready, only to fall asleep in a deputy director’s office while waiting for a midday appointment. He found me snoring on a couch, and no one had the heart to wake me until the office closed at five. I went to my hotel room and slept for two days more, until the manager knocked on the door to make sure all was well.

  Mila helped me through that spell, too, and when the investigators finally got down to business I might have spilled everything if not for her care and compassion. As it was, I shouldered as much blame as I could. Fortunately some of the paperwork had gone missing, and my cover story was that I had blown it by underestimating our need for supplies, and then Uwase had compounded my error by skimming some of the goods as favors for his warlord allies.

  They bought it, for the most part. And at the time they never learned about the earlier irregularities with Mbweli in Rwanda, which planted the seeds for the disaster. It would be left to Black, White, and Gray to make that connection. So I survived with only a demotion.

  Besides, the world at large had never come pounding on the UN’s door to demand an explanation. Everyone in Europe and the United States had grown so accustomed to grim news out of Africa that no one raised a cry, or even an eyebrow. Hardly surprising, since not a single foreign correspondent had visited our camp during that horrific week. The only filmed record of our catastrophe is the fuzzy one that is forever unspooling in my head.

  It was while Mila and I were awaiting reassignment that it occurred to me that perhaps I could give her the life she wanted, after all. I, too, now wanted to wall myself up in some safer location, and what better place to do that than on an island, with an entire sea for a moat?

  The ultimate irony was that we were able to afford our house on Karos thanks partly to the money that Mbweli had transferred into my account three years earlier. At the time it occurred it would have been too complicated and would have raised too many questions to simply disburse it elsewhere. My intention had always been to someday dispose of it in a charitable manner. But after Tanzania it seemed almost like justifiable compensation—with “almost” being the key word—for the price of my silence. Protection money to keep Mila’s secret safe forever.

  After a few more months of filling in at various desk jobs around the UN’s warren of Manhattan offices, we both went back into the field. This time I was at a lower pay grade, which I welcomed because it meant I no longer had the burden of responsibility for deciding how much was enough.

  A year after that we were married, and began planning our eventual escape. Mila knew it had taken something terrible to change my outlook, but with each passing year I was able to bury the secret that much deeper. And if Black, White, and Gray had not come along, I’m sure it would have been concealed forever.

  So now you know my main mission in this assignment. Not just to give my employers the secrets they crave, but to conceal the very ones that could destroy Mila and me. That’s why, despite having flown the coop from Athens, I knew I would eventually return to the chase. Come what may, my work had to be completed, if only because the consequences of failure were unthinkable.

  My lunch arrived, and I was suddenly ravenous. From my vantage point in the café I saw that the clouds had moved farther down the valley. By now I was the only customer left, and the road was still quiet. I paid my bill and left.

  Halfway down the mountain, on the long, narrow downgrade to Megalopoli, I overtook the rain clouds. The downpour slanted into the windshield, and I slowed to a crawl before nearly being blown off the road by a passing dump truck, just as three small memorials beckoned from the right shoulder.

  “Next time,” they seemed to say.

  I pressed the accelerator to the floor and didn’t look back.

  For the next two hours I fought my way through rush hour around Kalamata and stuck to the coastline. By then the sun was sinking into the hills across the Gulf of Messinia, and I was tiring. That was when I spotted a sign for a small resort along an empty stretch of roadway, and braked just in time to turn left into a broad driveway up the hillside. It was a cluster of new but simple cottages, and the only other car in sight was parked at the office. The innkeeper seemed happy for some off-season business, and we quickly settled on a cut rate of twenty-five euros, plus another euro for a beer from the office fridge. I paid in full, whereupon he announced he was heading home, meaning I would have the place to myself and could leave as early as I liked the next morning.

  I parked the car well out of sight of the highway, and after dropping my bag I threw open a shuttered French door onto a stone patio with a stunning view across the bay. The only sound was the chirping of crickets.

  I poured the beer into a bathroom glass and slouched into a patio chair. Just as I was entertaining the idea of perhaps holing up here for a day longer, a flicker of movement to my right told me I had company—a cat, of course. Even here there was no escaping them, and he yowled for a handout. I vowed to depart in the morning.

  An hour later I, too, was hungry, so I drove toward the nearest lights on the horizon, which turned out to be a coastal village a few miles south. There was a single taverna on a spit of rocky land above the sea. Th
e proprietor had lowered a sheet of clear plastic around the terrace to ward off the chill, but you could still see the bright lights of Kalamata lining the shore to the north.

  It was a dreary place, with slow service and a blaring television mounted on the wall next to the register. An older German couple to my right barely made a peep as they ate, and the only other customers were a noisy couple, probably local, who seemed comically mismatched. She was a platinum blonde in her early twenties, wearing a dress with a low neckline. He was at least fifty, with a huge belly and a scratchy but roaring baritone—Don Corleone on steroids. He kept calling the waiter over to refill her wineglass from a large carafe.

  As my meal arrived, a tough and stringy cutlet, limp fries, pale tomatoes, and an Amstel—the only warm item among them—the TV blared an ad for an old James Bond film, one of the early ones with Sean Connery. Dubbed clips showed beautiful women in casinos, and then Connery in a tux uttering his signature line, the same in any language—“Bond. James Bond”—as he slid a stack of chips across a roulette table.

  I smiled, wondering if Bond had ever settled for such a leathery strip of meat while shivering in his anorak in a drafty off-season café, feeling lonely and out of sorts. No gorgeous blondes here, unless you counted the bimbo snuggled with the town blowhard. This was the real life of a spy, I supposed. Injecting cinematic drama would have required the Germans at the next table to suddenly leap to their feet and reveal themselves as confederates of Herr Doktor Krieger. They would brandish their cutlery in a martial arts pose and convey me to a waiting car.

  This got me thinking about Krieger. What had passed between him and Omar? Money, apparently, but had there been something more? A blueprint of a U.S. military installation, for instance? Marching orders for some atrocity? I smiled again, this time at the absurdity of such ideas, which seemed more Bond-like than realistic. The better possibility was that the German had given Omar a few snapshots of his grandchildren.

  Yet here I was, in the middle of nowhere, having gone on a one-day lam after convincing myself the stakes were too high and the players too lethal. I felt foolish, and I resolved to return to Athens first thing tomorrow. I would visit Mila, put my mind at ease, and set us back on course. Then I would take the ferry out to Karos to retrieve my things, catch my scheduled flight back to Amman, and finish the job. Because what was I really up against, after all, except an elderly German, a genial old friend from my days on the West Bank, some lowlife from Jersey, and three blandly efficient Americans who obviously had too much time and government money at their disposal. Young toughs in Bakaa could be avoided. Hotheads on motorcycles eventually drove in another direction. I would be fine.