by Jeremy Bates
“You are writing a story?”
“Sure.”
Whether Fitzgerald was or wasn’t was a moot point. The man just wanted to get their stories straight in case someone asked why he was transporting a civilian.
“You know,” General Deshepande said, nodding thoughtfully, “I believe there is room on the flight tomorrow for a journalist covering the humanitarian crisis. The flight leaves at 7:55 a.m. Be at Jules Nyerere at seven. You will find me in the departures lounge.” He smiled a pudgy smile. “And it would be most convenient if your generous donation could be made in small denominations.”
CHAPTER 22
Scarlett’s dreams were fleeting and unsettling and bizarre. Dreams of big black spaces connected by tightropes. Dreams of a ship rocking in a stormy ocean, of men wearing masks that were not really masks at all, of falling and falling and never hitting the ground. During the most recent one she came awake with a start, a lurch in her stomach, perspiration beading her skin, her heart pounding.
She couldn’t see. Panic squeezed her lungs. Why couldn’t she see—?
The blindfold.
It all came back. She was a hostage on a boat controlled by a band of terrorists. When that cold reality sank in, the panic became despair, and it squeezed tighter. She began to hyperventilate. But slowly—one minute? Five?—she got herself under control. Still rocking like a loony in a straightjacket, but under control.
Her arms, tied behind her back, were numb from a lack of proper circulation. They felt like another person’s limbs. She shifted her position on the floor and rolled her shoulders to get some feeling back. She had no idea of the time, but it was cold, which meant it was still nighttime—or, depending on how long she’d slept, even early morning.
Her mind slipped into the past because there was nothing except blindfolds and darkness in the present to think about. The previous afternoon had gone by very slowly. After Sal had returned from his interrogation, Joanna had gone up, followed by Miranda, and finally Thunder. They were given water and allowed to use the bathroom. They were asked the same mundane questions. And they all agreed that Jahja was one world-class prick. At some point after that one of the gunmen brought down a bowl of maize meal and another of water for them to share. Because they were tied up, if they wanted to eat or drink, they had to stick their faces in the bowls like animals at a trough. Scarlett drank some of the water, but she refused to eat any of the food. It was a foolish protest, dangerous even. She needed the calories. But she was unable to sink to that level of desperation. If she did, she would be heading down a road from which there would likely be no coming back.
Shortly after eating the meager dinner Miranda had thrown up. The wet, retching sounds made Scarlett sick as well. But she had already emptied her stomach out from the embassy, and there was nothing more to come up. Sometime after that exhaustion overwhelmed her, and she drifted into a nearly comatose sleep full of those awful dreams.
And that was that. A day in the life of a hostage.
Scarlett maneuvered herself into a sitting position, propped her back up against the wall, pulled her knees to her chest. “Anyone have a guess at the time?”
No one answered.
“Hello?”
No answer.
Was she alone? she wondered with a reinvigorated burst of panic. Had the others been taken during the night? God, she hated this stupid blindfold! The not knowing and the continued blackness were too much. Like Chinese torture. Drip-drop, drip-drop, you’re going insane. Nevertheless, Scarlett forced herself to relax. Everybody was here. Of course they were here. They were just sleeping, that was all. Where else would they be? On the top deck, working on their tans? She laughed softly to herself, and to her dismay it sounded like the cackle of the homeless she’d often seen camped out on Sunset Boulevard or Beverly Wilshire.
She bit her top lip to shut herself up.
In the gloomy silence the old riverboat creaked and settled and rocked gently. Water sluiced against the hull. Mosquitoes whined and bit. Scarlett found herself wondering if escape was still possible, as Thunder had suggested. She didn’t think so. Ditto with being rescued or released. Which left the unenviable fate behind door number four. Death. As much as she wanted to write that one off as well, she couldn’t lie to herself. What was the point? It was impossible, like trying to forget your name. So if they were going to be killed, how would Jahja and his cronies do it? Decapitation? Starvation? A bullet in the head? Would she be first or last? Or would everybody be executed together?
Maybe going out on Laurel Canyon Boulevard would have been best after all, she thought darkly. Maybe that had been her real fate, and now God was trying to right the wrong, first with the lioness, now with this.
Maybe, maybe, maybe! Dammit, I don’t want to think about maybes. I just want to go home, go home, go home. . .
Scarlett was nodding off to sleep again when she heard movement on the top deck. She jerked awake and listened. Definitely movement. Then something much louder. The anchor being raised? The engines started up with a roar like a rudely woken dragon. The entire ship rattled and shook.
She heard the others stir.
They were here.
Of course they were, she chided herself.
“Wonder what’s for brekkie,” Thunder said.
“How do you like your eggs?” she asked in jest, happy to have someone to speak to.
“Sunny, please.”
“I’d die for some coffee,” Joanna said, groggy.
“Pancakes,” Miranda said.
The small talk was good. It was normal. To keep up the charade, Joanna asked Miranda questions about her family. Miranda told her she had a pit bull named Iggy.
Thunder jumped in, saying he’d had two dogs, a six-year-old dachshund and a fifteen-year-old golden retriever, but when the dachshund died unexpectedly of a heart attack last year, the retriever died a few days later, apparently of a broken heart.
Scarlett told them she was a cat person and got promptly booed.
Sometime later, long after the fake-happy conversation had tapered off and the gloom and doom returned, the engines slowed. The riverboat began chugging along at what seemed like half the previous speed.
“Did you hear that?” Sal said suddenly. He’d been mostly quiet since waking.
“What?” Scarlett said.
“I think it was a foghorn.”
She listened, but didn’t hear anything except for her own breathing. She brushed along one of the walls until she found a window. She pressed her ear against the grubby glass, but still didn’t hear anything. Maybe Sal was imagining things. She wouldn’t blame him. You went a little batty when you were blindfolded for this long. God knows she had.
“Lettie,” Thunder said. “Try to pull down my blindfold.”
“My hands—”
“Use your teeth.”
They found each other in the middle of the room. Scarlett raised herself on her tiptoes, bit the cloth near Thunder’s temple, and tried to tug the blindfold down. It didn’t budge. She bit the cloth over the bridge of his nose and tried again, still to no avail.
“Let me try you,” Thunder said. She felt teeth pinch the blindfold, then he started tugging down.
“Wait,” she said. “Try to pull up.”
Thunder resumed his effort. The blindfold moved a centimeter or two but got caught on the ridgeline of her brow. “No go,” he said.
“No, you had it,” she encouraged him. “Try again. Don’t worry about hurting me.”
He gave it another shot. Once more it got caught on her brow.
“Keep pulling,” she said, trying to keep the pain from her voice. The cloth dug sharply into her eyelids.
He kept at it, jerking like a dog trying to get at something, and finally the damn thing started to slip over the bony protrusion.
“It’s working!” she said.
Then, all of a sudden, she could see. She let out a small cry of joy.
“It worked?” Sal said.
“Yes!”
Scarlett looked around the barren room, their prison for the past day or so. It was a dump. Rat droppings were everywhere. Chewed newspapers were piled in corners like nests, while stringy gray cobwebs dusted the low rafters. Three small porthole windows lined both the port and starboard sides of the cabin. The door and a large window faced the stern. Joanna and Miranda were standing beside each other. The vice consul looked ten years older than she had the day before. The passport clerk seemed deflated. Sal stood off by himself. His face was haggard, his jaw thatched with dark stubble, but his back was straight, his head held high.
Thunder was right next to her, seeming none the worse for wear except that his neat lawyerly hair was now a mess. The cut on his forehead was red and angry looking and had started to bruise. She found it an odd sensation to be able to see when no one else could. It was a little voyeuristic, like being the Invisible Man.
“The room’s empty,” she told them. “Just us.”
“What about outside?” Sal said, the iron timbre back in his voice. “Are we still in the middle of that lake?”
She went to one of the starboard windows. She gasped.
“What is it?” Thunder said.
“We’re on a river. Going through a town or city.”
“Tell me everything you see,” Joanna said quickly. “Maybe I’ll recognize something.”
Scarlett gave a running commentary. The river was a few hundred yards wide, the banks silted. Beyond the scattered banana trees and coconut palms, derelict buildings and billboards with faded advertisements rose up against the misty-pink morning sky. A little ways ahead a bridge spanned the river. People were walking along the pedestrian carriageway beneath the road.
“Any ideas, Joanna?” Scarlett said when she’d finished.
She was shaking her head, a frown on her face. “Not without better landmarks, I’m afraid.”
“Dammit,” Thunder said.
“Keep your eyes peeled,” Sal told her.
Scarlett said she would and went to a different window. The orange sun rose higher in the sky, which gradually brightened to a crystalline blue. The air warmed. The buildings became sparser until there was nothing to see but virgin land. She went to the stern window for a change of scenery. It offered a panoramic view of the river behind them. The river remained on average two hundred yards across, sometimes wider, sometimes narrower, mud brown, slithering this way and that like a long, still snake. The wake churned the mocha-colored water a bubbly white, which fanned away from the stern and washed up against the tussocks of grass, lily pads, and water hyacinths that suckled the shore. The spiral staircase she had climbed the day before was directly to the right of the door. From her vantage point it was impossible to see up to the top deck. Thankfully that worked both ways. She didn’t know how the great Jahja would react if he glanced down and saw her peering up at him.
Every now and then someone would ask her what she saw, and each time she would tell them the same thing: nothing new. Eventually they stopped asking altogether. For the next while the land rolled past flat and unexceptional until, quite abruptly, the riverbanks steepened.
Tall reeds, papyrus, and trees of every shade of green rose to form impenetrable walls on either side of the riverboat, broken only by occasional drainage passages that cut deep scars in the red earth. So hypnotic was the passing landscape Scarlett almost missed the village spread out on a riverfront clearing. When her brain registered what her eyes were seeing, she immediately snapped to attention. She hurried back to the starboard window. Her eyes widened. The huts were perched high on stilts, likely to avoid seasonal flooding. The walls were made from sunbaked mud, the roofs from grass and palm fronds. Fishing nets had been hung out to dry. Several pirogues—dugout canoes—lined the shores. Two African men stood at the edge of the water, watching the riverboat pass. They had perfectly black skin, scruffy Western T-shirts and shorts, and no shoes. One of them held an egg-beater fishing rod, the kind you find in any American sporting store.
“There’s a village,” Scarlett said. “Two men are watching us pass. Tribal people.”
Joanna sighed. “We’re going to need more than a couple of natives to pinpoint our location, unfortunately.”
The excitement in the cabin quickly died down. Silence and frowns returned.
Scarlett, however, would not be deterred and kept post. Time dragged. Hours, maybe. Her eyelids became heavy. Her mind wandered. Her knees began to ache. Just as she was considering sitting down, a second village appeared. Children ran along the shore, pointing at the riverboat. Women stood before big cooking fires, dirty clouds of smoke billowing in the air.
Four men jumped in two pirogues, two in each, and began paddling to the center of the river, where they waited, like the pace car on a racetrack. The riverboat chugged past, and Scarlett saw that one pirogue was filled with plastic bottles of what might have been palm oil while the other was stacked with cassava, bread, fruit, fish, and meat. She stared into the eyes of the four men. They stared back at her impassively.
Then they were gone from view.
“Um…” she said uncertainly.
“What is it?” Sal said, turning his head toward her.
“I think we’re about to be boarded.”
Sal and Thunder and Joanna and Miranda all started talking at once, asking questions she couldn’t answer. She hurried to the stern window. The Africans were now paddling furiously to catch up, bobbing and dipping in the churning wake. The man standing at the bow of the lead pirogue leapt, grabbed the stern deck railing, and tied up with a rope made from woven vine. He was tall and agile, his muscles lean and powerful, his skin wet and glistening like oil. Given his physique and grace, Scarlett thought he likely could have made the NBA had he grown up in the US instead of Africa, making millions of dollars a year playing ball.
Suddenly booted footsteps thumped down the staircase.
Everyone stopped talking.
Scarlett stepped away from the window and sat down, her back to the door, her chin snug against her chest so her hair fell down over her raised blindfold. She listened as words in Arabic and some falsetto tonal language shot back and forth. When the bartering or whatever they were doing finished, the door to the cabin opened and something heavy was tossed inside, landing with a thud on the floor. The door closed. The lock clicked.
Scarlett waited several minutes to make certain the men outside had returned to their pirogues and the top deck respectively before brushing the hair from her eyes and turning. A canvas sack lay on the floor, the top open, spilling out overripe fruit.
“Lunch time,” she announced.
All at once Sal and Thunder and the embassy women crawled purposely toward the food. Sal—who owned a walk-in closet full of thousand dollar suits and who cut his toast and egg into bite-sized pieces—bumped a mango with a knee, found it with his mouth, and tore into it, juice dribbling down his chin. Miranda, unable to peel the skin from a banana with her teeth, squished it with her elbow and licked the meat of the fruit off the floor. Thunder and Joanna chomped back yellow-skinned grapefruit. It was, Scarlett thought, an incredibly depressing sight. Nevertheless, unlike the day before, she knew she could no longer hold out. If she did, she would die. It was as simple as that.
She swallowed her pride—her dignity—and got on her knees. She ate.
CHAPTER 23
Friday, December 27, 9:55 a.m.
Kalemie, the Congo
The airstrip Fitzgerald touched down at was officially called a UN military installation, but it was nothing more than an open, unfenced area overgrown with weeds and low brush. MONUC had set up several prefabricated, air-conditioned housing units to serve as an arrivals gate. Inside one, a woman in a blue-and-gray uniform with a Greek flag on her nametag checked his name off the manifest, then he got on a shuttle bus out front with the six other passengers from the flight. An infantryman wearing a powder-blue helmet and flak jacket drove them along a sandy road into Kalemie.
Fitzgerald got off in the center of town while the bus continued on to the UN headquarters, which was located in some abandoned cotton factory.
Kalemie had been one of Belgium’s first colonial settlements in the Congo. In honor of the Belgian king at the time, Albert I, it had originally been called Albertville. It had also been called the Pearl of the Tanganyika because it was the Congo’s most important inland port, shipping all of the country’s vast natural resources—cobalt, gold, diamonds—across Lake Tanganyika to what was currently Tanzania, and from there, to the rest of the world.
Today Kalemie resembled a ghost town populated by sad souls who had no better place to go. The buildings were broken, the corrugated iron roofs rusted, the brick walls crumbling. The people were subdued and quiet. Many were drunk. As Fitzgerald walked down the high street, ragtag peddlers tried to hawk him bottles of soda and knock-off batteries and other junk made in China. Women offered him salted fish wrapped in banana leaves. He told them all to piss off.
No one could afford cars or motorbikes, so the only wheeled traffic was kids on aged bicycles. Sometimes the kids rode close to him and yelled shit, likely trying to spook him into doling out some money. He ignored them but remained vigilant. Desperate people did desperate things, and a public tussle was the last thing he wanted. He didn’t think the locals would react kindly to seeing a white bloke beat the snot out of several black kids. It could start a lynching, and he would be the lynched man.
Eventually he came upon a bar named Circle des Cheminots, which was French for “Railwaymen’s Club.” He stopped out front and tried to imagine the sagging, ramshackle building as it might have been sixty years before, filled with sophisticated people and sophisticated laughter, a Mercedes Benz 220S parked out front, chrome fenders gleaming. But he couldn’t do it. The reality was too far removed from the ideal. It was like looking at pictures of Hiroshima or Nagasaki hours after the bombs were dropped and trying to imagine what the cities looked like days before.
He pushed through the front door. The interior was roughly the same size as the pubs back home in Ireland, the major difference being in an Irish pub you could hardly hear the bloke next to you, whereas here you could hear a pin drop.
