A Dancer In the Dust (7 page)

“He had something he wanted to show to a client of mine,” I answered. “Naturally, with Mr. Alaya now having been murdered, my client would like to know what he had.”

“We’re not talking guns, drugs, something of that sort, are we?” Rudy asked. “You can’t say African without thinking contraband.”

“I think the risk is very low of it being contraband,” I answered truthfully.

“Okay,” Rudy said. “Give me a few minutes. I’ll call you back.”

And he did.

“Well, Max Regal is still handling the case,” he said. “Max and I go back a long way. He’d be more than happy to fill you in on what he knows—which isn’t much, by the way.”

“It’s a start,” I said. “Thanks, Rudy.”

“Max can meet you tonight.”

He gave me the name of a bar on Ninth Avenue, the old Hell’s Kitchen, now one of the city’s hot neighborhoods, its streets filled with young people, all of them distractedly texting as they walked, and thus quite oblivious to the risk of running into a fellow pedestrian.

Max Regal was seated at a table in a back corner. He was short and round, and had the tired look of a man who’d take the first deal he was offered for early retirement. His suit wasn’t new, but it was less worn than his shoes. But
spanking
new wouldn’t have mattered because Regal had the sort of disproportionate body that defeats off-the-rack tailoring, and for that reason he would always look as if he were wearing someone else’s clothes. The good news was that the risk of appearing shabby appeared never to have occurred to him. He had an air of physical self-confidence, of being able to face a man, even a larger man, and make him blink.

“So, you’re an amateur sleuth,” he said with a vaguely cop-land swagger, as if to say,
You have no idea, my friend.

“Not exactly,” I said with a friendly smile. “But perhaps close enough.”

I’d had little to do with policemen after leaving Lubanda, perhaps because that particular experience had been so fiercely troubling that I’d avoided all further contact with law enforcement of any kind.

“Thanks for seeing me,” I said.

Regal nodded, then immediately got down to business. “Seso Alaya,” he said. “We figured he was just another African trader who’d pissed off the competition. Then we found a name and a phone number in the squat where he was living, and the name turned out to be a big shot. Rudy tells me that this big shot is your client?”

“Both a client and an old friend,” I said.

“Well, as it turned out, your ‘old friend’ couldn’t help us very much,” Regal said. “Just told me that he’d gotten a call from the dead man, and that the dead man had something to show him.”

“That’s as much as he told me,” I said.

“So what are you after?”

“Mr. Hammond thought I might be able to find out what Seso Alaya had to show him,” I answered in my best professional voice, cool but cooperative.

When Regal said nothing, I added, “So, I’m just curious as to whether you have any leads.”

“A couple,” Regal said. “For one thing, we found some kind of pin in his mouth. The sort of thing you might stick in your lapel. Two swords crossed over each other. Any idea what that might mean?”

“Not swords, crossed pangas,” I said. “Under its last ruler, a tyrant named Mafumi, they were the symbol of Lubanda. They were on the flag. It was Lubanda’s version of a swastika.”

“Where is this Mafumi character now?” Max asked.

“He’s dead,” I answered. “Lubanda has a new president now.”

“So why would somebody put this pin in Alaya’s mouth?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose it’s possible that Seso was killed by a Mafumi agent. They don’t just go away, the people close to a dictator.”

“Could the pin have belonged to Alaya?”

“It’s possible,” I said. “Under Mafumi everyone in the government had to wear a crossed-pangas pin. It was part of the uniform. And since Seso worked for the government, he would have had a pin.”

“What did he do for the government?” Regal asked.

“He worked in the archive,” I said. “Sorting through old records.”

“What else do you know about him?”

“He once worked for me,” I answered. “In Lubanda years ago.”

“When was the last time you heard from him?”

“We met in Rupala ten years ago. Nothing since.”

“So you have no idea why he was in New York?”

“Other than to give my friend whatever it was he had for him, no.”

“What was his connection to your friend?” Regal asked.

“I’m sure you asked him that,” I said.

“Yeah, but it’s always good to have another source, right?”

“We were all in Lubanda together. But until that call, Mr. Hammond hadn’t had any contact with Mr. Alaya for over twenty years.”

A waiter approached. Regal ordered a beer. I had a white wine.

“So,” Regal said as the waiter stepped away. “Here’s what I know about the case.”

There wasn’t much, and Regal went through it routinely and with surprisingly little attention to order, mentioning this or that as the mood struck him, sipping at his beer, pausing to tell a joke or make a comment on whatever came to mind. But disorganized though Regal’s narrative was, a few spare facts came through: A janitor had found Seso’s body in the alley behind the hotel where he lived. He’d obviously been murdered, but not before he’d been tortured. Regal had no idea where either the murder or the torture had occurred.

“The Africans have places where they do things,” he said. “Places where blood feud grievances can be settled, for example. Their own courts. So I’m guessing they have special places for hurting people.”

This might have as easily been urban myth as not, I thought, but it pointed to the fact that as far as Regal was concerned, Africans existed at a different place on the immigrant spectrum, their habits as unknowable as their motivations.

“They’re never really
here,
you know?” he added. “They’re always back
there
.”

“What else do you know about Seso?” I asked.

“Well, the autopsy showed that there were no drugs in his blood,” Regal answered. “And we couldn’t find any prior criminal activity.”

As to the reason Seso had been murdered, Regal hadn’t found it.

He shrugged. “It could be anything from screwing someone else’s woman to owing money.” He sat back and stared at me pointedly. “You met him in Africa, I take it.”

“In Lubanda,” I answered. “I’d gone there to make some improvements in an area around the village of Tumasi. Seso was assigned to me. He was my translator, but he also did whatever needed to be done. Cooking. Odd jobs.”

“It doesn’t look like he ever improved his lot,” Regal said. “Wrinkled pants. Ragged shirt. He could have been any of those traders you see around town.” He paused briefly before offering his final assessment of the case. “We almost never get to the bottom of any of these killings. You got family feuds and tribal feuds, all kinds of stuff we know nothing about. I hear the Somalis are the worst when it comes to tribal murders.”

“Seso wasn’t Somali,” I reminded him.

“Anyway, from Africa,” Regal said, dismissively shrugging off the entire continent.

It was a grim assessment, but in terms of Africa’s recent history, I couldn’t entirely contradict it. As Martine’s
Open Letter
had enumerated, in nation after nation the trajectory had been remarkably similar. The struggle for independence had first lifted the great father figures: Nkrumah, Kenyatta, and the like. These had been followed by the Amins and the Bokassas, the Mugabes, the Mobutus, rulers so psychopathic, their tyrannies so operatically over-the-top, they’d brought a funhouse mirror into Hell.

“I presume you canvassed the hotel,” I said.

“Did you get your knowledge of police procedure from television or do you have some experience on the job?” Regal asked with a slightly mocking smile.

“Strictly television,” I answered. “Did anybody talk?”

“One guy,” Regal answered. “He lived across from the victim, and they had a few talks here and there, but according to this guy, Alaya was very closemouthed.”

“Would you mind giving me this man’s name?” I asked.

Regal hesitated. “You know, dipping your toe into a murder investigation could be dangerous. I presume Rudy told you that.”

“He wouldn’t have to,” I said, “but I’ll take my chances.”

Something in the tone of this answer seemed to convince Regal that I’d figured these risks and accepted them. He took a notebook from his shirt pocket and flipped through it before he found the man’s name.

“Dalumi,” he said. “Herman Dalumi. Room 14-A.”

“Thank you.”

Regal closed the notebook and returned it to his pocket. “There’s one more thing.” He drew a paper from his jacket pocket and handed it to me. “It’s a picture of the tattoo we found on the victim’s back. The ME said it was done right before the murder.”

I looked at the photo and suddenly felt not nostalgia, but its chilling opposite, not a sweet or even bittersweet return of old feelings, but a wrenching, aching one.

“Is the tattoo some kind of symbol, like those machetes?” Regal asked.

“I don’t know,” I answered softly.

“It seems to strike a chord,” Regal said. “Like you recognized it.”

I nodded. “It’s an oyster shell,” I told him. “There was a woman in Tumasi who used to carve shells like that out of wood. She would tie one to the other, so that they could be clicked together like castanets. She gave them to children who passed by her farm, and in return, the nomads always gave her something. A little cheese, maybe. Some goat’s milk or a gourd.”

In my mind I saw Martine on one of those scorching afternoons, a group of Lutusi gathered in the front yard of her farmhouse, the children dancing around her, clicking the wooden shells she’d just given them. An old man, wrapped in flowing orange robes, had strolled over to her with something covered in a sack. She’d taken it and bowed to him, then turned toward me. “The Lutusi do not accept handouts,” she said in that softly pointed tone of hers. “They always give something in return.” With that she unwrapped the cloth to find a small pot that clearly delighted her, turned, and spoke to the man in the Lutusi dialect.

“What did you tell him?” I asked, once he had returned to the other Lutusi lingering beside the road.

“I told him that what he gave me is useful,” Martine answered. She turned the pot in her hands. “And it
is
useful.”

A scraping sound brought me back to the present. It was Regal’s chair as he scooted it forward. “So, what was this woman to Seso?”

“He knew her,” I said. “That’s all.”

Regal looked disappointed. “So, that’s a dead end then, that tattoo?”

“Probably.”

We talked on for a time, though mostly about other cases Regal had known, odd ones he’d never solved or had solved by accident. He clearly believed Seso’s case would be one or the other. During all of this, I sat silently, my mind focused on the tattoo, the fact that it unexpectedly raised the possibility that Seso had died in some mysterious aftershock of the same quake that had shattered me.

“So you got any other ideas?” Regal asked.

“No,” I answered.

This was true. I couldn’t imagine why Seso would possibly have come so far, a trip that surely must have cost him every dime he had. Toiling in Mafumi’s basement archive could not have paid much, and even such low work would have been done under the watchful eyes of the Emperor of All Peoples’ spidery agents.

So why had Seso come to New York, and what had he brought with him? Because I had no way to answer this question, I found myself simply remembering him, fondly for the most part, his year of loyal service, and in particular, the time he’d saved my life.

I’d been in-country only a few weeks at that time. We’d been walking through a part of the savanna I was considering as a possible location for a well. There was dried vegetation all about, along with a scattering of termite mounds that looked, at least from a distance, like the ancient towers of a long-abandoned city. Such was the favored abode and hunting ground of the black mamba, the continent’s most dangerous snake.

I had no inkling that I was casually strolling a typical mamba habitat, of course. Seso knew it quite well, however. The closer we got to the mounds, the edgier he’d become, and he finally grabbed my hand when, like a little boy, I picked up a long stick and playfully began swinging it around.

“You should not do this,” Seso said. “You should put down the stick.”

“Why?”

“You are calling the mamba,” Seso said. “It does not run. It attacks. And it is very fast.”

Very fast indeed, I later read, clocked at twelve miles an hour, a snake so swift and deadly it could kill not just an occasional, unfortunate hyena, but an entire pack of them at a time.

“In my village, one of them killed five dogs,” Seso told me. Then with a forwardness very unusual for him, he took the stick from my hand and dropped it on the ground. “It is good I warn you.”

It is good I warn you.

It struck me suddenly that all during my time with Seso, he had continually warned me of this peril or that one, to avoid this place or that animal. He had warned me not to trust Gessee, and on a particular evening, when he’d seen the dreadful signs, he’d warned me not to fall in love with Martine. Looking back now, it struck me that his most important service had been to lower my risks.

If that protective impulse was still fundamental to his character, then perhaps it was for that reason that Seso had come to New York, I thought, bearing whatever he’d brought with him from Lubanda… as a warning.

Another risk management maxim occurred to me as I made my way home after talking with Max Regal. It states that the window of speculation narrows as proven facts accumulate, the final goal of risk assessment being the complete closure of that window. The problem, of course, is that indisputable facts remain open to highly disputable interpretations.

For example, the shell tattoo. The very sight of it had called up a critical element in Seso’s character, how protective he’d been of me, of Fareem, and most certainly of Martine. This had led to my speculation that he’d come to warn Bill about something, an idea I’d found quite convincing at the moment it had occurred to me, but which my training in risk assessment now demanded that I call into question.