A Dancer In the Dust Read Free Page B

he’d become the chief instrument of terror throughout the country. He’d also been quite ingenious in his methods. An Amnesty International report had made a good deal of the fact that he’d had vents dug from the Security Police’s basement torture chambers to street level so that the cries of those belowground could clearly be heard by anyone passing by. One scream, he was reported to have said, can shut a thousand mouths.
    “But now Mafumi, too, is gone,” Bill said.
    With that reference to recent changes in Lubanda, I returned to the actual content of his call. “So, tell me, what do you know about Seso’s murder?”
    “At the moment, it’s pretty much a blank,” Bill said. “He just turned up dead, you might say.”
    “Turned up where?”
    “Here in New York,” Bill answered.
    “I presume you don’t know what he was doing here? How he was making his living, for example.”
    “Correct,” Bill said.
    “So it’s possible his murder was purely random,” I said.
    “Oh, come on, Ray,” Bill said. “I mean, what would be the chances of that?”
    “Around one in two hundred and fifty thousand,” I answered in the matter-of-fact voice of a seasoned risk assessor. “That’s admittedly a very low risk, but random killings do occur.”
    “Seso’s murder wasn’t random,” Bill told me firmly. “That’s the one thing I’m sure of.”
    “Why are you sure of it?”
    “Because he was tortured,” Bill answered. “On his feet. With bars. What’s the word?”
    “ Bastiado, ” I said.
    “Right. So can you meet me tomorrow, Ray?” Bill asked. “I need a… risk assessment.”
    His request suddenly sounded more urgent, something important clearly at stake.
    “All right,” I said.
    “The Harvard Club, nine A . M .?”
    “Okay.”
    “Thanks, Ray. See you then.”
    The click of Bill’s phone as he hung up was loud and oddly jarring, like a pistol shot.
    A murder, I thought, and suddenly felt somewhat like Fowler, the jaded British journalist, when he learns that Alden Pyle’s body has been found floating in the Saigon River. The Quiet American had been one of the books I’d read on that first plane ride to Lubanda, and I’d so reveled in its exotic atmosphere that its warning about the risks of inexperience, of entering, even with the best of intentions, a country one knows nothing about, had drowned in the waters of my youth and naïveté.
    Those risks had long ago made themselves clear, however, and so for a moment, I went back over the conversation I’d just had with Bill. It was a habit of mine, going over things again and again, putting one piece of data with another. Risk assessment is mostly connecting the proverbial dots.
    Someone from the old days, I heard Bill say again. When you lived in Tumasi.
    The old days, when I’d been young and fiercely determined to do good, and nothing, least of all my soul, had seemed at risk.
    I thought of my first meeting with Seso, how I’d found him standing alone in a small, airless room not far from the capital, the way he’d introduced himself very formally as “Mr. Seso Alaya.” He’d stood extremely straight, and though the collar of his shirt had been frayed and his pants too short, he’d had the dignity the great explorer Richard Burton had found in those who’d served him in India, made yet nobler, as he’d said, by their raggedness.
    Seso informed me that he’d been assigned to be my translator and general assistant, and with that he’d reached for my bag, which I’d refused to give him because to do so would suggest that I was his master; and I’d come to help the Lubandan people, not to rule them. Seso had read this gesture for what it was, and smiled. “It is my job to be of service,” he told me. “I am not ashamed to work.”
    Thus had ended the first exchange I’d had with Seso. After it, he’d taken my bag and followed me to the white Land Cruiser that was to be at my disposal for as long as I remained in Lubanda.