of good will.” He gave the boy’s head a knuckle rub. The movement was stiff and awkward. “C’mon. Let’s get settled in. Big day tomorrow.”
She joined the procession, holding each kid by the hand, their mother walking alongside on bare, dust-reddened feet and chattering away.
“This woman,” Matthew translated, “she wants for you to stay in her house this night.”
Quinette hesitated, looking to Ken. He shook his head and said the local commander already had designated places for them to stay. He wanted them all together, for security reasons.
She was disappointed—it would be interesting to see how a Dinka woman lived—yet her heart beat quickly with a secret excitement. Here she was, a stranger, and the woman had invited her under her roof with hardly a word exchanged between them. Why was that? Now that she thought about it, why had Matthew offered her a ride and not Phyllis and Jean? A spontaneous harmony seemed to develop between her and these towering coal-black people.
The parade ended at a compound enclosed by a straw and branch fence. The soldiers wouldn’t let the townspeople inside. Quinette let go of the children’s hands and followed Ken and Jim through a rickety gate. The soothing shadows of fruit trees striped the bare ground and climbed low tukul walls to spread a tracery of leaves and branches on the grassy slopes of the roofs. Fallen mangoes lay here and there like big ochre eggs, giving off a sharp, ripe odor just short of rotten. The place would have had the sad, romantic atmosphere of a neglected orchard if it had been uninhabited, but there were quite a few people around: a couple of soldiers stirring a blackened pot over a fire, a few more playing some sort of game with stones, two others raising on makeshift poles a canvas enclosure about the size of a phone booth—“that’ll be the ladies’ room,” Jean said in her singsongy Canadian accent. An SPLA officer in a red beret and a civilian wearing a baseball cap sat at a table in front of a small whitewashed bungalow, with a sign over the door reading SOUTH SUDAN RELIEF AND REHABILITATION AGENCY, the name of the indigenous NGO that cooperated with Ken on his missions.
The soldiers who had been carrying the rucksacks went off to drop their burdens at the doors of the tukuls, and Quinette noticed, with a sinking feeling, that she and Phyllis were going to be roommates. Ken and Jim approached the table. The two men seated there stood up and shook hands with the Americans. Ken introduced Quinette, and when he mentioned that she had raised half the money, the civilian in the baseball cap, whose name was Manute, enveloped her hand in both of his and thanked her “on behalf of the people of southern Sudan.” She knew it was just a phrase; all the same, she felt a tingling in her chest, picturing a forest of bony black arms lifted up in gratitude.
During the flight from Loki, Ken had briefed her and Phyllis on the procedures for redeeming captives. The retrievers—the men who had bought the slaves back from their owners—were to be paid in Sudanese pounds, which were supplied by the SRRA. Now it was time for a currency exchange. Manute went inside the bungalow and came out with a metal file box, from which he drew bundles of crisp multicolored bills. He made some calculations on a pocket calculator, then turned it around so Ken could read the numbers.
“What rate did you use?” Ken asked.
“The one our Loki office gave me. I called them on the radio just this morning.”
Santino, in the meantime, began counting the Sudanese money, the airline bag with the dollars at his feet.
“It’s not what the bank quoted in Nairobi,” Ken declared. “Look, the retrievers will be expecting twenty-nine thousand four hundred a head.” He paused to tap the calculator keys. “Six million one forty-four total. I’ll be coming up fifty-seven thousand short with the rate you’re using. Fifty-seven thousand buys two people. What do I do? Pick out two and tell them, sorry, better luck next time? Do I pay for them out of my own pocket?”
“Of course not! I will make up the difference if it comes to that.” Manute pulled out his wallet for emphasis. “But it won’t. The retrievers will use the same rate like me. If they insist on the other, we can tell them, ‘Take it or leave it.’ They will take it. You