stepped back. “That’s happened before.”
“Sure. Maybe a few here and there. Not this many.”
He eased back another step and stood against the wall, arms crossed over his chest.
“I’m wondering if we’ve got people pretending to be slaves. And if they’re getting paid for their acting work.”
“By who?”
“My guess would be Manute, and he’s in on it with the local councilmen. They’ve heard these captives tell their stories a thousand times. They rounded up these people and—”
“Told them what to say,” Ken interrupted.
“Or maybe Manute was coaching them what to say while they gave their testimony. None of us speaks Dinka. We have no idea what he was saying to them. He’d known for weeks you were coming. He had the time. He and his buddies made themselves twenty-four hundred bucks, less whatever petty change they paid their make-believe slaves.”
“Quinette, Qui-nette,” he said in a singsong, as if she were a little touched. “They first told us, four hundred twenty. You don’t really believe they actually had that many phonies lined up but that something went wrong and only forty-eight showed up? Strains credibility to say the least.”
“I thought about that. Here’s a possible scenario. They got word from a legitimate retriever that he was coming in with three hundred and seventy-two people, real captives, but all along they’d planned to salt the mine. They knew you wanted a lot of people, so they’d recruited forty-eight folks from nearby towns to pad the numbers and make themselves some money. Then for some reason, maybe a delay en route like you said, the real slaves didn’t show up. That’s what made Manute nervous. They must’ve figured it would be easier to hide their actors and actresses in a big crowd.”
“And you’re saying this happened because I put pressure on them?”
“No!” she replied with vigorous shakes of her head. She had to watch how she put things.
“Okay, Nancy Drew, what else have you got?”
She decided to ignore the Nancy Drew remark. “The other day I was catching up on our last mission. Thirty people whose names don’t match. So there’s another fifteen hundred dollars.”
“I’d be careful, Quinette, about turning your speculations into fact,” Ken said. “You’re making an indictment on some very thin evidence. You’re not being paid to be some kind of auditor, you know. Or a private eye.”
This wasn’t going at all as she’d expected. “Well, excuse me all to hell!” she said in a flash of temper. “Excuse me for taking the time to see if we’re getting ripped off! If I’m right, don’t you think it’s pretty damned disgusting? Don’t you want to do something about it?”
“I’ll look into it.” He stood there, while above his head, as bright as a jewel in the barred sunlight piercing the window grate, an orange lizard clung to the wall. “Have you mentioned this to anyone else?”
She shook her head.
“Someone at the UN or in the press could blow a thing like this way out of proportion,” Ken said. “Like that bitch from CNN, Phyllis.”
“I’ve got a reputation around here for being discreet.”
“Don’t do anything to ruin it. The possibility that there are a few cases of fraud out of thousands doesn’t deny that there’s a huge human rights issue here and that we’re the only ones doing anything about it.”
“Right.”
“I know it’s the principle of the thing, but the amounts that we might be talking about are really small.”
The lizard had crept a couple of inches higher, its imperceptible movement creating the illusion that Ken had grown shorter.
“It would be terrible, terrible,” he went on, “if someone like Phyllis Rappaport were to blow a small problem out of proportion and damage a program that’s doing so much good.”
The bitter seed of her disappointment in him flowered into contempt, a contempt she couldn’t allow herself to show. She did need him, after all. “I’d never breathe a word to her or anyone. I’m a little surprised you think I would.”
“I don’t,” he protested, then paused. “But I can see how I gave you that impression. Sorry.”
Ken and contrition were a rare combination, which she could turn to her advantage, provided she didn’t overdo things. “I wasn’t looking for an apology,” she said, and gave him some time to think about the comment. She could almost see his mental gears turning, notch by notch. After several silent moments she realized he needed a nudge, and striving for a tone half an octave below the resentful, she said, “I put a lot of effort