let Nakima have his day in court and rule on his countersuit, and then maybe, maybe the plane’s all mine again. Trouble is, the judge is in Nakima’s pocket, the idea being to keep delayin’ the thing till I wear out and quit. So I figured, as long as I was down there, to pay me a call on Hassan. He knows half the MPs and judges in this sorry-ass excuse of a country. Reckoned he might take the one on my case out to lunch, say a few words on old Wesley’s behalf.”
“Who the hell is Hassan?” Douglas asked.
Dare blew the foam off his beer. “I used to fly mirra for him.”
“What about helping you out with the G1? We could use that airplane, Wes.”
“Watch the ‘we,’ rafiki. I get the plane, we have the same arrangement with it as we got with my Hawker. I lease it to the company.”
Douglas frowned. “About time for you to develop a little trust, isn’t it?”
“Don’t take it personal. Half the time I don’t even trust myself. Anyhow, me and Hassan got to shootin’ the shit, he asked me what I was up to these days. I told him, and he said he’d like to talk to us.”
Fitzhugh swiped a finger across his damp forehead. “What does your court case have to do with us?”
“Not a damned thing, but I got the idea he might like to put some money into Knight Air. Kind of a venture capital thing.”
Douglas, who’d been bird-watching the hour before dinner, fanned the pages of the book lying on the table, Birds of East Africa—a show of disinterest that meant he was interested. “And he’s got the capital?”
“I think that Somali would need one of them supercomputers to count his money.”
“He’s a Somali?”
Dare’s glance made one of its sidelong, downward casts, as if he were embarrassed, though it was hard to imagine him embarrassed by anything. “I wouldn’t call a man a Somali if he wasn’t one. He’s not from Somalia. He’s what they call here an ethnic Somali, from eastern Kenya. Same difference, but he’s about the only Somali I care to deal with.”
“He’s someone you do trust?” Fitzhugh asked.
“Hell, no”—pulling the word hell like it was made of taffy. “Put it like this. He won’t stab you in the back, he’ll stab you in front with one hand and be shakin’ your hand with the other, and he’ll do it so quick, y’all won’t know you’ve been stabbed till you see the blood. I trust him in that sense.”
“What’re you saying, Wes? That we shouldn’t talk to him? We should? What?”
“He might be more disposed to go to bat for me if we did. I sure as hell would like to get that airplane back.”
They took a Kenya Airways commuter to Nairobi. On the way down Dare offered an informal background briefing on Hassan Adid, whom he described, with his usual disregard for Fitzhugh’s origins and sensibilities, as “way above, light-years away from your average bush-baby African hustler.” A one-man conglomerate, the cultivation and exportation of mirra was just one of his many enterprises, which included mining precious stones like tanzanite and tsavorite, construction, and cattle, Adid having inherited from his father one-third ownership of the Tana ranch—a million and a half acres of grazing land near Tsavo National Park. “A kind of African cowboy, you might say.”
In the 1970s and 1980s the Adid family had tripled its fortune in the illegal ivory trade. Somali poaching gangs had been trespassing on the ranch for years, using it as a base for their raids on the park’s elephant herds. Unable to keep the poachers off their sprawling property, the elder Adid and his two Arab partners decided to employ them and to turn their disorganized forays into an efficient industry.
“They brought Hassan into it after he got out of school. He got a fleet of trucks to haul out the ivory instead of havin’ it carried out on foot,” Dare said, standing in the aisle beside Douglas and Fitzhugh’s seats, his head bent under the small plane’s ceiling. “Must’ve needed the trucks to haul the money out. Those days ivory was goin’ for six thousand U.S. a kilo. Shoot one big bull carryin’ forty, fifty kilos in each tusk, and you’ve grossed half a mil to six hundred thousand and change, and those boys they had workin’ for ’em was shootin’ dozens, hundreds. Wouldn’t have been one elephant left if it wasn’t for Dick Leakey, y’know,