by Dan Newman
Mathato says he found it, too. His ability to speak English landed him a job as an interpreter at BEDCO—the Basotho Enterprises Development Corporation—where he played the middleman role of translator between expatriate aid workers and locals. BEDCO is a business development project, set up with money from a number of foreign governments. The Americans, Swiss, Germans, Canadians, Brits, and Danish all have nationals working at BEDCO, trying to help get small, local businesses off to a healthy start. Lebo worked there for two years, all the while honing his English and learning everything he could from the white men from far away.
He returned home twice, bringing money and food for his family, along with wonderful stories of the world he had joined in Maseru. On his second trip home, he told his mother that he had been offered a chance to go to America and start a new life, but his mother did not understand. She had never heard of any of the towns he spoke of, and could not fathom the kind of distances he said he would have to travel to get there. He told her everything he had heard about this fascinating new world: about the trees, the forests, the houses, and the cars that everyone drove. He told her about winter and snow, which Mathato was glad about, as it was one thing she could nod to, and say, Yes, snow. I know it. Lebo had smiled with her, at this small common ground between them in this expansive idea called America. Indeed, it does snow from time to time in the mountains of Lesotho, but by all accounts it’s just a dusting. It was a small handle on a big idea, but one that fit the palm of his mother’s hand nicely.
He left her after that visit, promising to return again and that she should expect letters from far away. Nearly another year passed without word from her son, until the letters began, hand delivered in bundles of five or six, passed from hand to hand, family to family through the mountains, until they arrived at the corrugated shed in Thaba-Tseka.
She beams at this point in her story, pitches forward on her bucket and speaks with real pride about her boy in America, about how he left this tiny village, how he made something of himself. Her daughter translates as best she can, but the idea, flowing so easily through smile and tone, is undeniable in any language.
Then she says something that catches me like a fish on a fully swallowed hook. She speaks it first in Sotho, and it’s clear by her daughter’s reaction and the quick sidebar they have in Sotho that the daughter is having a hard time translating it. Finally, she says to me, in clipped, halting English, that her mother believes her son was not a fortunate man—which I find odd, as he seemed to have done so well for himself. My facial reaction must convey my thoughts, because the daughter immediately raises her hand and says, “No, I mean…mother say…Lebo make his own luck.”
Lebo, however, is currently dead, buried a mere three feet down on a rocky hillside in Maseru—five hours from his home, and his mother, in Thaba-Tseka. He died in Maseru—although “he died” implies some passive departure where he perhaps rolled over in bed and exhaled quietly for the last time. This was in fact far from the case; it’s more accurate to say that he was torn violently from this life, and what was left behind was done as much for the statement it would make as it was for the result. And without the benefit of refrigeration, modern morgues and barrels of embalming fluid, getting his corpse into the ground was a priority. As a result, his mother has never been to his grave and only learned of his fate about a month ago.
At the end of my last interview with her, I ask if she would like to go to Maseru and visit his grave, but she declines, saying only that he is not there. And so, after accepting her offer of a simple meal of pap (a kind of cornmeal prepared in a piokikos—a black three-legged cast-iron pot straddling an open flame), she holds both my hands and smiles goodbye with a nod. I leave her with nothing more than she had before I got there, and I spend the five-hour trip back wishing I had given her all the cash I had in my pockets—which would have been a small fortune to her. I didn’t do that because I thought it would somehow cheapen the moment, reduce it to a simple business transaction. But who was I really protecting that moment for? I know the answer, and, distasteful as it may be, I make it right with myself. After all, in my list of sins, this is but a tiny indiscretion.
23
There have been wonderful dinners, walks after work, a romantic harbor cruise and a few movies, but right now there’s just the awkward way that Donna is fidgeting with the Starbucks coffee cup in her hand. She’s looking everywhere except at me. Our conversation is stilted, wooden, and now that we’ve gone over my trip to Lesotho (which ended a mere twelve hours ago), there seems to be nothing else to say, which is odd, given that what Donna really wants to talk about is how the trip came about.
The international desk is what Donna wants, it’s what she’s always wanted, and here I am just back off my first trip, internationally, for the paper. She’s aching to ask how that is, and I am aching to avoid the subject altogether. I don’t have the job at the International Desk yet, not officially anyway, but it’s starting to look awfully good. And I know it’s killing Donna. I can see it in that tight muscle in the corner of her jaw. I can also see that she’s torn; part of her wants to be happy for me, and the other part is jealous, perhaps even a tad resentful. But at this moment everything about it—the International Desk appointment and my recent trip—is still ephemeral, vaporous, unclear in its genesis and with nothing set in stone. Somehow we both know that whoever brings it up first actually loses something. Asking the how of it, now, before anything actually exists for certain, will somehow sully the asker. No, that question will have to wait, but it hovers around us like a foul odor. And so the coffee break drags on and the conversation pleads for its life. Finally the awkwardness ends with Donna smiling meekly and saying, “I’m glad the trip went well.” And then she’s gone.
• • •
Carroway looks up from the page and nods. “I like it.”
At first, I can’t tell if he’s serious or sarcastic. He flicks the page with a finger and it floats onto his desk and the bumper crop of paper being raised there. “What about the kid? Her son. You don’t go into how he died.” He looks at me as if he already knows: “Related?”
And it is. I tell him Lebo’s story—a story only hinted at in the draft on his desk. I spent a fourth day in Maseru after the interviews with his mother, digging around in the details of his death. It was remarkably easy to uncover, starting with a cousin who buried him, and corroboration of sorts from almost everyone I spoke to. Admittedly, it was all based on hearsay, but fact committed to paper in some official capacity is simply unheard of. The least helpful people were the expatriates at BEDCO, all of whom regarded me with suspicion. The local US embassy refused to comment and the American BEDCO expat, with whom Lebo had worked to set up his immigration, had long since been rotated out of the country. Only a subsequent application to USAID (the United States Agency for International Development) under the Freedom of Information Act garnered me a name, a Mr. Bob Carling.
“The story at his end—Lebo’s end—is that he was offered a chance to emigrate for a set dollar amount. His cousin told me that one of the Americans at BEDCO—Bob Carling, a USAID employee—said he could arrange it, but that Lebo had nothing even close to the kind of money he wanted. Apparently either Lebo or Carling suggested a fee in diamonds, and a month later Lebo produced a bagful of raw stones.
“Most of the mines in Lesotho yield industrial-grade diamonds, although some are of gem quality. What was in the bag is unknown, but his cousin says he made a payment arrangement with someone in the unofficial diamond trade, agreeing to send foreign exchange back to cover the debt. Once the story broke and the illegal immigrants were repatriated, Lebo had no hope of making his payments. His cousin claims he was beaten in the street, had a tire placed around his neck. It was filled with gas and set on fire—what they call a ‘necklace’ in that neck of the woods.”
Carroway looks at me the way a man looks at his recently constructed house of cards as a breeze picks up—with a mix of horror and fascination.
“And how’s that make you feel, Roly?”
I snap back, surprised at the venom his comment so quickly summons up in me. “Makes me feel like a grade-A asshole, thank you very much. My breaking the story ultimately led to his murder.”
“Easy, tiger,” he says. “Remember, you’re the storyteller, not the story.”
“It’s a kind of blurry line on this one,” I say, thinking more of Chloe than Lebo. Somewhere in my conscience, I am stacking corpses like cordwood.
Carroway continues. “And the USAID guy, this Bob Carlton?”
“Carling.”
“Right.”
“There’s nothing on paper. Nothing that can be traced back to him, and the expat community is a pretty tight bunch. No one was talking, at least not to me. All I can confirm is that he was there and that he was posted to Asia shortly after the story broke.”
“Like rats from a sinking ship…”
I nod in agreement and the required reverent silence lasts for mere seconds before Carroway packages it all neatly for business. “Prep it, have Deane edit it, and we’ll run it tomorrow.”
It’s the closest I’ll come to a well done, and I wonder if Lebo and Chloe understand the real value of the sacrifices they made. No sooner is the thought through my head than I am repulsed by it. I mentally spit and scrape the tongue of my internal narrative, then realize that the very act of thinking it, of spinning these events in such a self-centered act of rationalization, means that I can think that way. What that says about me, about who I really am, is the real source of my disgust. Surely only real bastards can bend logic so perversely? This seems an apparent truth to me, and so I begin the process of accepting—just a little bit—that I may just be one of those bastards.
Let’s face it, at some level Lebo knew—he must have—that a bag of diamonds passed surreptitiously across a table in a roadside café in Lesotho is not the way citizenship comes about. Once he made that deal, once he crossed that particular bridge, he was complicit. He lost his status as the innocent guy, and became a player in a game that either pays dividends or consumes all—money, people, entire lives, heck, even entire families.
Already I can see that Lebo is lingering too long in my head. He needs to be slotted, carefully classified and filed away. Maligning him doesn’t seem to be working, so I take a new tack. At some level, Lebo and I are very much alike, or at least enrolled in the same exclusive club: folks who have decided to go out and get what’s not being handed to them. For some, the result is favorable, for others, not so much. And so I settle on seeing him with respect—a man after my own heart, willing to do what was needed to get ahead. Too bad for Lebo things just didn’t work out. Tough break, bad luck, unfortunate timing. The clichés all fit and gradually, without too much objection, Lebo’s corpse fits comfortably into its slot.
24
The week after my article on Lebo runs, I look up from my desk and find Dave Barret staring at me from across the room. I don’t know what it means, but I’ll be damned if I’ll give him the satisfaction of asking. I’m sure it’s a threat of some sort. I ignore him, focus on my work, and he soon disappears.
The light on my voicemail is on. I stab at the keys—a little harder than is really necessary—and retrieve yet another message from Warren. He’s left three in all: the first two calling to catch up and go for a beer. This latest one is a little more direct, saying he has some of my shit and I need to come get it or he’s going to pitch it. I know he has nothing of mine, but my mind flits back to the Barton cottage: late night, cold beer, loose thinking. And so I disregard the message and move on.
Warren is a genuinely good guy, but he is too closely connected to the whole Chloe affair and speaking to him—thinking of him—just brings it all up again. And of course I have this ridiculous thought that he’ll somehow put two and two together and connect my inquiries about Chloe with the subsequent tragic events. Even now I can feel the tension building—ever so slightly—at the thought of him connecting the dots. And in all fairness, he’d have to at least consider it, wouldn’t he? After all, I asked about her, then a few weeks later she’s dead and I’m bang smack in the middle of it? It had to look suspicious. But before I spiral out of control and start dishing out gangland-style gag orders, I remember the central journalistic tenet of Context. And for Warren, context says I’m the good guy, the would-be hero. I try to leave it at that.
In the last year and half, since the unfortunate business with Chloe, Warren and I have crossed paths less and less. Of course, there was the trip to his cottage, and we’ve met up a few times for beer and wings, and a couple more for coffee. While I do regret it, I recognize that Warren and the history he drags along need to be held at arm’s length. Besides, he’s so close to being an actual friend that it makes him a liability; I can’t afford to be around someone so compassionate that I might actually think of confiding in them. It’s just another sad reality of my path, and I grit my teeth and accept it for what it is.
The Lebo story is well received—not groundbreaking, not here’s-your-trophy-can-you-start-with-your-syndicated-column-tomorrow? stuff—but noted by a few who count on the upper floors as a competently written piece. A week later, it’s further confirmed by a call from Sheila Copperhead, who tells me that a position has opened up at the international desk and would I be interested in hearing about it? I don’t really know Sheila well, save the one brief pitch I did on seeking approval for the Lebo story, and I make a pathetic preinterview impression by gushing my enthusiasm over the phone unchecked. “Fuck yes, I’m interested!”
Sheila ignores my apparent lack of couth. “Come to my office tomorrow at ten and we’ll talk.” I switch gears and head for the thank-yous, but I can tell from the deadened sound that she has already hung up. My watch says 4:22, and I take Sheila’s call to be a sure sign that I should go home and spend some time feeling good about myself.
It is short-lived.
• • •
I once tried out for the men’s soccer team at college and spent some time going up for headers against a six-foot-two, two-hundred-and-twenty-pound keeper. I did okay for a while, just kind of jumping with him without too much hope of ever reaching the ball with my head. After all, he had three inches on me and the use of his twelve-foot arms. Still, I let him know I was there. It all looked good until he decided he’d had enough of this Johnny-come-lately who was trying to impress the coaching staff. We went up for the ball and the keeper went to punch it away, but instead cracked me a perfect right cross to the temple. I went backward and hit the turf, and spent a few minutes confused about why the clouds, the people, and the net were all waving as if painted on a flag in a stiff breeze.
The sensation I feel now is the very same one. From my position on the ground, I can see the sidewalk stretching away from me, and wavy as it is, I can see that someone’s blood has been spattered and is pooling very close to my head. It takes a few moments but, as someone rather roughly helps me to the sitting position, I understand that the pooling blood and the spatter are in fact mine.
I look up and see a woman, about forty, dressed in her downtown office get-ahead gear, looking at me and speaking. She is leaning forward and despite my bloody nose (which I discover is the source of the blood), I can’t help myself from looking straight down her top at her rather impressive breasts. She sees me do it and I catch her face twist for a moment in indecision—is this guy concussed and deserving of some understanding for his momentary lack of social grace, or is he just a prick? The answer materializes as she stands and backs away, briefly bumping into a large man behind her.
It’s Trots and he is angry. Not screaming-bloody-murder angry, but the more vicious, silent, simmering, ever so slightly just-this-side-of-a-complete-loss-of-control angry. I understand that he will kill me, and would have already if the woman with the heaving cleavage had not appeared. Others gather round, mostly ashen-colored smokers who gather to puff at the back of the building. This puffers’ haven has been my preferred e
scape route of late, which, it would now appear, was a rather thinly devised plot to avoid Trots and his violent intentions.
As someone helps me to my feet, Trots edges away, still eyeing me intensely. He disappears, and I retreat back into the building. My rescuers say they didn’t see what happened, that they saw a black man bent over me, and then a crowd began to gather. Apparently I let out quite a yelp, which was what drew people over, and the best I can guess is that Trots hit me square in the face, laying me out on the sidewalk. I politely refuse offers of calls for ambulances or rides to the hospital, and instead I head for the front doors. I figure going out the front and flagging a taxi is the best idea; Trots will be long gone and won’t like the crowds milling outside the very front of the building.
As I cross the foyer, the pudgy guy at the security desk calls me over. “What happened to you?” he asks, wiping the remnants of a powdered doughnut from his moustache.
“Accident,” I mutter and try to push on.
“Hey, whoa. I got a box here for you.”
I glance over and think about going to get it, then realize how ridiculous I would look going back upstairs with blood oozing from my nose, both hands clasped around a cardboard box, and nary a tissue in sight. “I’ll grab it tomorrow. Thanks.”
With that, I am away, through the glass façade, out onto the street, and into the safety of a cab. Trots’s attack today has shaken me for sure, but it has done so much more. And while I don’t know it yet, meeting him at the back of the building on the eve of my move to the international desk, having my nose bloodied and my tail jammed decidedly between my legs, has set in motion what is arguably everything I deserve.
If only I had collected that fucking box.
