when you’ve got the big mo, you keep it rolling.”
“The big what?”
“Momentum.” He paused. “Try hard, Fitz, with those logisticians.”
Fitzhugh caught the subtext—he was being given the green light to offer commissions. Thinking, This is how we speak now, this is the language of the aid entrepreneur, he plopped himself down on the edge of the big steel desk. “Block time. Block speed. Per kilo rates. Lease fees. Momentum,” he said. “And commissions—kickbacks. Is this what we’re all about? Is this what we came here to do?”
Douglas frowned and made more weaving movements with the pencil. “Nope. It’s what we have to do to keep doing what we came here to do.” He got up suddenly and clutched Fitzhugh by both shoulders. That need of his to press the flesh, as though his words might not be heard without the amplification of his touch. “Fitz, my man! We’re not a nonprofit organization. If we weren’t in business, those Dinka in Bahr el Ghazal would be dying, the Nubans would still be rubbing sticks together to light their fires, that German doctor would still be slicing people open to find out what’s wrong with them. Did we cause the drought? We’re not firemen who turned arsonist to give themselves a paycheck. We’re fighting a fire someone else started.”
Douglas let him go and stood looking at the schedule board, with its grease pen notations on airstrip conditions. “Okay, assuming we get our hands on the Antonov, we’ll have a fleet with a total capacity of—” With the grease pen, he wrote “17” on the board. “And we can deliver those seventeen tons faster than Pathways, and faster means cheaper, and cheaper means the agencies come to us first.”
Tara again. All conversational roads led back to her.
“The Sudanese get food, they get their lives back, and the agencies save money, and we make it and stay in the game,” Douglas went on in an overcaffeinated rush. “Everybody benefits. It’s win-win, Fitz. Win-win all around.”
Steering Knight Air’s company car, a Toyota pickup with worn shocks and a pitted windshield, down a Loki side road, Fitzhugh felt a tad splenetic. Fitz, my man. Well, he was Douglas’s man, wasn’t he? The brown boy running an errand for the white boy, the Bahss. To keep the lid on his bubbling resentment, he reminded himself that the American, like it or not, was the Bahss and that it was part of his job as operations manager to negotiate agreements with NGO logisticians.
A few enterprising Turkana were peddling handicrafts outside the UN compound’s bright blue fence of corrugated steel. Wedging the pickup between two uniformly white Land Cruisers, he got out, conscious of the bulge in his midriff. He’d come back from the Nuba as lean and hard as he’d been in his soccer days, but the tailor of his appetites had since altered the Ambler into the man nearly everyone in Loki called “Big Bear.” I should have walked here, he thought. I should walk a mile every day and play more volleyball.
Well, he’d been doing his share of legwork today. There were forty agencies enlisted under the UN banner, and he intended to visit as many as he could. Going up a lane fenced by whitewashed rocks, past signs bearing inspiring slogans—DEFEAT AIDS, LET’S CONQUER POLIO IN SUDAN—he recalled that his old boss, the one who’d told him he possessed an insufferably Hebraic soul, had once termed the situation in Sudan “a permanent crisis.” The base’s appearance underlined the accuracy of that near-oxymoron. Everything here suggested perpetuity: buildings instead of tents, streets instead of paths, even street signs. The recolonization of Africa by the imperialism of good intentions.
He strode into the office of a small Dutch NGO, confident and commanding, dressed for the occasion in pressed khaki trousers instead of rumpled shorts, shoes instead of sandals, and in place of his usual T-shirt, a dark green polo displaying Knight Air’s name and emblem over his heart.
Appearances weren’t enough to persuade the Dutch to switch carriers; nor was his sales pitch. He also failed with CARE, Catholic Relief Services, World Vision, and the Adventist Development and Relief Agency. It appeared that Knight Air wasn’t so irresistible after all, but he pressed on, agency to agency, extolling the virtues of the G1C and the Hawker over Tara’s sluggish Andovers. He made no offer of commissions, hoping to persuade his prospective clients through force of personality and the promised quality and economy of his company’s services. As he rattled