four hundred and twenty people required two bags, but now he needed to open only one, from which he counted out twenty-four hundred dollars—the price for forty-eight people. And so things proceeded to step five—paying off the retriever, who in this case was an Arab Quinette had never seen before, a shabby-looking man with none of the ornaments displayed by traders like Bashir with his rings and gold Rolex and Italian loafers.
Recording the captivity narratives was the final step. Manute chose ten people at random while Ken set up his tape recorder and Quinette sat on a camp stool with her laptop. It wasn’t easy, with the reporters circled all around, pointing cameras, jabbing with microphones. The interviews went on for an hour. The final one was a woman in her mid-thirties who told a lurid tale of being repeatedly whipped on the back for refusing to have sex with her master. A French TV correspondent interrupted, asking her to show her scars for the camera. It was just the sort of disgusting, shameless request Quinette had come to expect from the press. Manute passed it on to the woman. A frightened look clouded her face. She turned to Manute, making a mute appeal. He spoke sharply to her. She shook her head. Quinette was appalled when Ken, desperate to salvage some dramatic moment from this failed exercise, encouraged her to do as asked. Again she shook her head, muttering almost inaudibly.
“She will not,” Manute explained. “The marks are very ugly. She is ashamed.”
“Nice, Ken,” Quinette remarked in an undertone, closing the laptop. “Like these people are in a freak show?”
Ten minutes later, while Jean and Mike were giving the former slaves medical exams, the French reporter came up to her and said, “She is not so ashamed now.” He cocked his angular chin at the woman, standing with the back of her dress unbuttoned, while the nurse examined her with a stethoscope. “They do not always tell you the truth, these people?” the Frenchman asked. Suddenly Manute’s furtive glances and the slaves’ silent indifference to her speech made sense. So did the discrepancy she’d found in the records. Feeling vaguely sick and angry at the same time, she approached Ken, who was giving an interview to the L.A. Times. When he was finished, she said, “I need to talk to you. Not here, not now. When we get back to Loki.”
On the return flight, she argued with herself which of the two topics on her agenda to bring up first. Should she lead off with her suspicions, or show him Michael’s letter and ask for permission to go to the Nuba? God helped her make up her mind. The right thing to do was not to think of herself first but to show Ken that he was being taken advantage of. Not only was that right, it was smart—he would be so impressed with her detective work that he’d grant her wish. There was one thing she needed to do first, however. Leaving him to clean up and change clothes, she bicycled to her office, turned on the computer, and opened to the registry of abducted persons. They were organized chronologically and by location. Turning to the list of names from today’s mission, she began to check them against those in the register. She was finished by the time Ken appeared, showered, shaved, and clad in a fresh khaki outfit that made him look like a tourist trying to look like a safari guide.
“All right, what’s the top secret?”
She sat with her knees together and her hands folded in her lap and her back straight. “That woman who said she’d been whipped? Who wouldn’t show her scars? There was a reason why not. She didn’t have any. I saw her, and so did that French reporter. Not a mark on her.”
“You’re saying what?”
“I’ll bet she never spent a minute in slavery. I’ll bet none of those people did.”
“Whoa, Quinette. Whoa.”
“Please, look at this.” Ken leaned over her shoulder and peered at the screen. “Take this kid, Akol Yel. He says he comes from the town of Manyel and that he was taken in 1995. I checked the list of people reported to have been seized from Manyel that year. He’s not on it. I checked ninety-four and ninety-six, just in case he got the year mixed up. Same thing. I’ve gone through all the people we redeemed today. Same thing again. No record of any of them being captured.”