Acts of faith (100 page)

Douglas

They have moved from the sprawling house in the foothills to a place in the heart of town that could have been its garage. It’s not a bad house, Douglas thinks, a renovated adobe brick in a historic district not far from the University of Arizona campus. Anyway, it’s better than where they would have had to live without the loan from his grandparents.

His mother is out of the hospital now, recovered from what everyone in the family refers to as her “illness.” Why they do mystifies and upsets him. She wasn’t sick. She would have been if, after running out to see the car burning with his mangled body inside, she had not gone crazy.

Douglas has yet to cry for his father. He loved and admired him. Now he hates his memory. He hates him for leaving the family the way he did, with a legacy of debts and disgrace. He hates him, not for turning out to have been a crook, but for being a fool.

No, this is not a bad little house, but he learned something about construction from his father and can see that corners were cut in the renovations. A tap on the drywall tells him it is half-inch rather than three
-
quarters; the floors were sanded unevenly and were thinly varnished; the shower doors, which look like glass, are plastic. It is the shoddy workmanship of illegal immigrant labor that gives, to the uncritical eye, the appearance of quality. Its cramped rooms shout that life will be constricted from now on, that the once-limitless horizons of the future have been drawn in. The whole place smells of failure. He is glad he will be away at school, at Northern Arizona University, and will not have to live here.

During his mother’s hospitalization, he and his sisters stayed with their grandparents in Flagstaff. It was a blessing to get away from the reporters, from the neighbors, from the phone calls, from everything. His mother, who still walks around as if she’s in a trance, stands in the middle of the empty living room, looking at the packing boxes.

“Start taking things out,” she says. “I’m exhausted.”

“Okay, Mom.”

The first box is full of her bird books. She picks one up and tosses it across the floor and says, “Don’t bother with these. I won’t be using them for a good long while.”

He opens a box of linens.

“I start the new job on Monday,” she murmurs from behind him. “But we can consider every dime that comes in here found money. Do you understand?”

“Sure. I’ll have to work for tuition.”

“Do you understand, I said,” she says with a ferocity that he finds unnerving.

“Sure.”

She seizes him by the shoulders. “Don’t you ever let this happen to you, not ever. Do you understand?”

“Sure, Mom. I’ll make up for it. I’ll make up for what he did.”

Webs

T
HE SUCCESSFUL CAPITALIST
is successful because he has no love in his heart, Fitzhugh thought, returning to his hut from a volleyball game. He has only the love of success. He devotes himself to work work work instead of to a woman loved with all his soul. He attempts to fill the hollow in his heart with the accumulation of wealth and what it buys, whether things or power or both; but wealth, things, and power fill it only for the moment, as water does the belly of a hungry man. The heart is empty once again, and its cravings drive him to acquire more; yet he is never gratified.

These musings had not been prompted by a revival of Fitzhugh’s undergraduate philosophies; he was thinking about himself. Since the breakup with Diana, he’d dedicated all his energies to Knight Air and to the object of getting rich, modeling himself after those prime examples of
homo capitalistensis,
Douglas Braithwaite and Hassan Adid. There was no love in their lives (Adid’s wife and family were little more than furniture). Love would have distracted them from the project of “growing the company,” as Douglas phrased it, as if the airline were an orchard or a crop. The only difference between Fitzhugh and them was that “growing the company” distracted him from thinking about Diana and his lost happiness. Finding his assigned job of operations manager not demanding enough—he could do it with his eyes shut—he took on additional tasks, asking for, and getting, a raise in salary and in his share of net profits. With its fleet grown to twenty aircraft, Knight Air had the assets to expand its operations beyond Sudan and Somalia. Fitzhugh journeyed to the Congo and Rwanda with Timmerman to assist him in negotiating contracts to deliver aid to those markets. That was what those hearts of misery and African darkness were to an entrepreneur of humanitarian aid—markets. Watching his own fortunes rise with the company’s, he didn’t know at what point he would say he had enough and cash out. He soon learned that for the successful capitalist, there is no such thing as enough. His two models taught the lesson.

Two weeks ago, at Adid’s behest, Douglas convened a shareholders’ meeting in a Nairobi hotel. As Fitzhugh entered the conference room, Douglas took him aside and whispered, “You’re going to hear some bad news, but don’t worry. You’ll be all right.”

A vinyl-bound agenda was passed out to the participants, who included, in addition to small fry like Fitzhugh, big fry like Wesley Dare and still bigger fry like the Kenyan businessmen whom Adid had cajoled into investing in the airline. Douglas made a presentation, painting a gloomy picture of Knight Air’s financial condition with the aid of flip charts. The company had grossed eight and a half million dollars in the past year, but higher fuel and operating costs had devoured a greater portion of its profits than management had expected. Now the Kenyan government threatened to take a still bigger bite. Douglas asked the investors to turn to the appendix page in their agendas and note the letter he’d received from the Kenyan Revenue Authority. It stated that Knight Air owed thirty-five percent, or more than three million dollars, in income taxes for the year. As it had done in previous years, the company could reduce the burden by deducting capital expenditures, namely the purchase of new aircraft, but the bill would still come to over two million.

Knight Air would have to be recapitalized, Douglas continued, gracing the audience with his charming gaze. He called on each investor to contribute sixty thousand dollars to help meet the company’s tax obligations and its operating expenses. Without the money, management would be forced to dissolve the airline and auction it to the highest bidder, with the shareholders paid off out of the proceeds. This was more than bad news, this was shocking news. Douglas then asked for a vote on the issue of the additional investment. All in favor raise their hands. Only one went up—Wesley’s.

Douglas, standing at the head of the table, looked flustered. “I’m surprised, Wes,” he said. “I thought you were leaving soon.”

“Hell, in for a dime, in for a dollar—or sixty thousand dollars,” Wesley responded with a crooked grin.

“Not me,” Adid announced, and everyone turned to him, the man with the biggest stake in the company. “To contribute that much money to pay millions in taxes, no, thank you. As the Americans say, it would only be throwing good money after bad.”

The others took their cue from him and voted to dissolve Knight Air Services and put it up for sale the next day. A firm Fitzhugh had never heard of, East African Transportation Limited, bought the shares at twenty-five cents on the dollar. Except for Fitzhugh and Wesley, the other shareholders were wabenzi like Adid and thus able to swallow the losses of three-fourths of their investments. Fitzhugh found his lodged in his throat. He was frantic, out not only thousands of dollars but a job as well. How could Douglas have assured him that he would be all right? He was miles and miles from being all right, and he could not find Douglas to ask for an explanation.

Wesley, on the other hand, took his losses with equanimity, an odd reaction for a man so pugnacious. Later, in the hotel bar, Fitzhugh asked why he wasn’t mightily upset.

“If a goat was tied up in front of a leopard, you wouldn’t get upset when the leopard jumped on the goat and tore its windpipe out, would you? You’d expect it. Hassan’s the leopard. I’ve been expectin’ somethin’ like this for a long time.”

“Hassan?”

“He owns East African Transportation,” Wesley said. “It’s a subsidiary of his conglomerate, the Tana Group. So Knight Air is a subsidiary of the subsidiary, except now it’s got a new name—Knight Relief Services—and new management. The pres-i-dent is Hassan Adid but Dougie boy Braithwaite is still the managing director.”

Fitzhugh almost slapped himself on the head for being so stupid, for not seeing the sleight of hand. Hadn’t he warned Douglas months ago that Adid intended to take over the airline? His only mistake had been in thinking that Douglas would be a victim of Adid’s machinations, the leopard’s prey. He was instead the leopard’s partner. Never enough, he thought. The fortunes earned by the Tana Group were not enough for Adid—he had to acquire the airline and at a fire sale price. The profits earned by Knight Air had not been enough for Douglas; he wanted the financial muscle and the political clout—always handy in Kenya—that would come from being a province in Adid’s empire. The American and the Somali had had a meeting of appetites. They were a hunting pair.

“Y’all will be happy to know that you’re still on the team, operations manager and junior partner,” Wesley said.

Fitzhugh wasn’t exactly happy. He was relieved, grateful to Douglas for thinking of him, for offering those words of assurance, and somewhat ashamed of himself for feeling so grateful. If he had the integrity Diana had expected of him, he would walk away now; otherwise, he would be a junior partner in what amounted to a multimillion-dollar hustle.

“You’re sure?” he asked Wesley. “How did you find out?”

“Just did a little detective work,” Wesley replied and motioned to the bartender for another drink, whiskey neat. “That bullshit about owin’ three million in taxes. Shitfire, Hassan could of made that bill go away with one phone call to the finance ministry. What him and Doug did was to scare those others with the idea of payin’ out all that money, throwin’ good money after bad.”

“But why did you offer to kick in the sixty thousand?”

“Just to let Hassan and Doug know I’d figured out the scam, just to make them a little nervous,” said Wesley, with another grin out of one side of his mouth. “Did y’all notice how some of them shareholders almost raised their hands after I raised mine? If they’d voted to recapitalize, that would of fucked things up but good for those two. Don’t you wonder what happened to all that money?”

“Higher fuel and operating costs,” Fitzhugh answered. “That much was true.”

“Kinda half true. They weren’t
that
much higher.” Wesley gave a derisive snort. “I’ll bet if I did a little more detective work, I’d find an offshore account somewhere.”

“Then why don’t you?”

“On account of I don’t give a shit. Remember, back when we formed Yellowbird, when I said that there was a better-than-even chance those shares wouldn’t make good ass-wipe? That’s how come I got Dougie boy to sign a contract for that airplane. I intend to hold him to it.”

In making that arrangement, Dare had perhaps overestimated his own cleverness.

After Knight Air’s death and resurrection, Fitzhugh went on another journey to the Congo with Timmerman, to work out a contract for flying UN security people into that country’s multiple flashpoints. Catching up on paperwork after he returned, he noticed that Tony Bollichek was back on the roster of pilots flying out of Lokichokio, reassigned as Douglas’s first officer. No one had replaced him on the Somalia runs; nor were flights scheduled in Somalia for the next week. Why not? he asked Rachel—the secretary had been handling the schedules in Fitzhugh’s absence. It turned out that there was no plane to fly in Somalia. Tony had been in an accident, landing short of a runway somewhere out in the desert. Though he wasn’t hurt, an accident investigator had declared the G1 a total loss.

That evening Fitzhugh was drinking by himself in the compound’s bar. Thoughts of Diana had mugged him, and he was soothing his emotional lumps. Douglas and Tony, back from a late flight to Sudan, joined him. He was pleased to have company. They were into their second round when Wesley walked in, ordered a pitcher of beer, and sat at their table, wearing a smirk.

“Don’t think I heard an invitation,” Tony said.

“Makes two of us. Welcome back to Loki. For a man who survived a right bad prang, y’all are lookin’ well.”

“Heard about it, did you?”

“Word gets around. Reckon you were lucky to walk away.”

“Yeah.”

“Y’all are a good pilot, and in the old days, you and me must of made twenty landings at that airstrip. How did you manage to come in short?”

“Bugger off,” Tony said, bunching his rugby-wing shoulders. “And while you’re at it, bugger Mary, now she’s all yours. I seem to remember she bloody well loves it up the arse.”

Dare ignored this remark and turned his attention to Douglas, who said, “I was going to let you know.”

“Right nice of you. Claim filed?”

“Yup.”

“Insurance company’s way off in Houston. Gonna take time, and I ain’t got much left in Africa. So what y’all can do, what y’all are
goin’
to do, is transfer half a mil from the company account to my personal account. Pay yourself back when the claim comes in.”