what most of the owners do, brand them with the same brands they use on their cattle. It’s always under the left eye. If you look closely, you’ll see the brands are different. That way each owner knows who belongs to who. How many?”
“Fifty-eight.”
Quinette backed away, trying to imagine what that felt like. A branding iron in your face. She wasn’t ready for this.
“Takes some getting used to,” said Jean, giving her a maternal pat on the arm. “But you don’t ever want to get too used to it.”
She and Mike had counted a hundred and fifty-one, so that made two hundred and nine all together. The Arabs had “delivered the merchandise,” as Mike indelicately phrased it. He was a paramedic, with a wrestler’s torso and a streetwise toughness about him, and Quinette wondered if his wife was thinking of him when she warned about getting “too used to it.”
Now it was time to pay the retrievers. Ken passed the bricks of Sudanese pounds to the Arabs, who licked their thumbs and counted, slowly, carefully. When Phyllis’s crew moved in for a close-up, they stopped, the clean-shaven one ducking behind a pair of windowpane sunglasses, Bashir masking himself with a length of his turban. Mike, who was standing just behind them, lit a cigarette. Both men flinched and whirled around, wadded bills falling from their laps.
“Jumpy as long-tailed cats in a room full of rocking chairs, that’s what my dad would’ve said,” Quinette murmured to Ken. “What’s the matter with them?”
Ken laughed his cold, enigmatic laugh and said they must have mistaken the click of Mike’s lighter for the cocking of a pistol.
“They’re worried we’re going to rip them off?”
“No. They’re playing a dicey game. If the government found out they’re dealing with us, they’d be shot or thrown into a ghost house. That’s what they call the jails in Khartoum, and for damned good reason.”
Phyllis jumped in, practically hitting Ken in the teeth with a thrust of her microphone. She looked rough and disheveled, swollen half-moons beneath her eyes.
“It’s a dicey game that pays pretty well, isn’t it?”
A note of distaste was folded into the question, and for once Quinette found herself sharing the reporter’s sentiments. The gold rings, the watches, the sheen of greed on the retrievers’ lips as they counted the money and stuffed it into canvas sacks stirred feelings of shame and taint, as if she were watching something she was not supposed to see. She wished this part would end; it had the trappings of a drug deal.
“If I understand the economics right, your retrievers pay around fifteen bucks a head, and you pay them more than three times that,” Phyllis went on. “Pretty hefty markup.”
“They take big risks, rounding up these people, so I have to pay them a risk premium.”
“That’s what you call it?”
“You’ve got ideas for a better word, put it in the suggestion box. Look, I don’t particularly like these guys. They’re a necessary evil, and maybe not an evil. The Dinka respect them. Without them—”
“Right, right,” Phyllis said impatiently. “But my information is that if this slave trade were left to—to—ah . . . market forces, it would just disappear. Goes like this. The Arabs who own them have to feed them, house them somewhere. It’s trouble and expense. And if the owners want to sell them back to their families or to some other Arabs, what they would get out of the deal is a few bucks at most, a couple of goats, a cow. Not worth the trouble of capturing them in the first place.”
“The question, Phyllis? Oh, hell, you don’t have to ask it. You’ve talked to the UN people in Kenya, right? They don’t like what we’re doing any more than Khartoum does. Just leave the slave trade alone, and it’ll go away—that’s the UN party line. By buying freedom for these people, are we promoting the trade instead of ending it? That’s the question?”
“It’s the UN’s criticism. What’s your response?”
He turned on her, a quick snap of his head, and snatched the mike from out of her spindly fingers and held it close to his mouth, like he was about to sing a tune.
“Bullshit!” He handed the mike back to her. “See if that gets on the air.”
“Think you could explain your response?”
“I already told you,” he said, a weariness in his anger. “This is politics. Economics has nothing to do with it. You’re making me sorry I asked you along.”