“So it’s my fault. Should of seen that he was thinkin’ way ahead. All right, Joe knows we’re gonna be takin’ the airplane out of the country in a little while, so what he must of done was make copies of all that documentation, then took it to an airplane broker. Any broker in the world will de-register a plane for you in one country and register it in another one. Costs you about thirty grand. A crook might charge another ten for forging the registration. Then I reckon he cut the DCA in on what he was doin’, he’d want her on his side in case of a problem. Figure he paid her a thousand, and what he’s paying William wouldn’t even be walkin’-around money. Half-a-million-dollar airplane, four-fifty pure profit. Pretty good for a day’s work.”
“You think he wants it to sell it?” Nimrod asked. “Not take over our business?”
“Our business ain’t worth it. Hell yes, he’s gonna sell it. Probably needs to raise cash quick, and this is the quickest way he can think of. Sellin’ assets, even if they ain’t his.”
“And so he sent Gichui, number one, to put you on official notice and make sure the plane goes nowhere. Number two—”
“A fishin’ expedition,” said Dare, completing the thought, “to see if we’ve got anything, any damn thing at all, to make a case in case we go to court. He’s got to figure on that contingency. And that’s what we’re gonna do, rafiki.”
“Go to court?” Nimrod scoffed, as if that were the most ridiculous course of action possible. “He will have the judge paid.”
“I know that. I just want to get into the courts to tie things up for a while, buy a little time for us to come up with a better idea. I’ll shoot that son of a bitch before I let him walk away with my airplane. It’s all I’ve got.”
Man of All Races
THEY WERE BY the pool, drinking beer and talking while Turkana women passed down the dry riverbed in front of them, beyond the barbed-wire fence. The tribeswomen wore long skirts of brown cloth or cowhide and bead necklaces stacked to their chins. Fitzhugh enjoyed watching them, striding boldly, balancing bundled sticks on their shaved heads, their backs so straight they looked like exclamation points in motion, their gazes fixed on the path ahead, as if they couldn’t stand to look at the tents, warehouses, and bungalows sprawling alongside the riverbed. An eyesore crowded with pink-faced strangers.
Tara Whitcomb’s compound, where Fitzhugh and Douglas were staying, occupied one small corner of the vast encampment, and a cushy neighborhood it was, its guest tukuls built to resemble Turkana dwellings, with amenities no Turkana could have dreamed of, like electricity and running water and concrete floors swept daily by maids in starched outfits. The place looked like a luxury safari camp. Its occupants were doctors from Médicins sans Frontières, aircrews from Douglas’s former employer, PanAfrik, volunteer aid workers from religious NGOs, most of whom were American evangelicals whose homogenous wholesomeness made them look more or less identical, like soldiers in uniform. Last night, sitting outside the tukul he shared with Douglas, Fitzhugh overheard a few of these pilgrims reading scripture aloud in the neighboring hut, after which they beseeched God to bless and protect their Sudanese brethren. He was touched by their fervor, their heartfelt expressions of solidarity.
It seemed to him that he needed some of what they had—the calm of an abiding conviction. He wasn’t getting cold feet, but he felt a slight chill down there in his soles. Lacking religious impulses, he knew he couldn’t undergo a sudden conversion. If not faith, then what? An outlook? A philosophy? An attitude? At any rate, some sort of inner resource that he could draw on. He had gotten out ahead of himself, enlisting in Barrett’s cause in a moment of enthusiasm before he’d had time to prepare himself, psychologically and emotionally, for the trial ahead. Tara had painted a picture of the Nuba for Douglas and him at least as grim as Diana and Barrett’s. The war had made it a wilderness once more or, more accurately, a wasteland, as near a thing to a terra incognita as you were likely to find this late in the twentieth century.
“I’m actually hoping for bad weather, though we’re not likely to get it this time of year,” she was saying now, sitting erectly at the head of the table, sunglasses cocked over her forehead, reading glasses,