Acts of faith (101 page)

“Wes, you know that’s impossible,” Douglas said. “Look, this isn’t the time or the place.”

Wesley filled his glass from the pitcher. “It sure as hell is.”

“Like Tony said, there was no invitation. We can discuss this later.”

“We’re gonna discuss it right goddamned now, rafiki.” Douglas flinched as Dare reached across the table to grip his bicep. “Don’t get nervous in the service, I’m sympathetic. You got yourself into a bind. Hassan makes himself pres-i-dent, which means he’s gonna pay a lot closer attention to things than when he was just the bankroller. ‘How am I gonna explain to the company pres-i-dent that I signed a contract to turn over a company asset worth half a million bucks to Wesley?’ That’s what y’all were asking yourself.”

Douglas licked the sweat from his upper lip. It was one of the rare times Fitzhugh had seen him sweat. “You can wait till the claim is paid,” he said. “You’ll have to.”

Dare shook his head. “I’ve got a little yellow bird singin’ to me that I’ll never see that money. Guess where I was just this morning?”

“Couldn’t care less,” Tony said.

“Wasn’t talkin’ to you. At Wilson airport, having lunch at the Aero Club with a man interested in my Hawker. I looked out the window and what do I see but a Gulfstream One gettin’ some work done on her. After lunch, I strolled on over for a closer look. This airplane has got new props, she’s got new nose gear, she’s got a new nose cone and a new paint job. And there’s a fella puttin’ on
new registration numbers.
A real nice job, but I recognized my old airplane.” Dare looked around the table, bestowing a grin on everyone. “And I saw another thing—the hand of Hassan Adid. Got his fingerprints all over it. You couldn’t figure how to get out of your fix without him knowin’ about it, so you went to him and ‘fessed up and asked him, ‘How do I get out of this deal?’ Don’t reckon you told him why we signed that contract—Hassan would of thrown a shit fit if he knew what we’ve been doin’ these last six, seven months. You made somethin’ up. Y’all are good at makin’ things up. I reckon he threw a shit fit as it was, but then he showed you the way out.”

“Wes, nobody here is interested in your fantasies,” Douglas said.

“Showed you the way out and how to get an airplane and half a million bucks as a bonus,” Dare resumed, as if he hadn’t heard. “First off, Hassan says that this here contract doesn’t read, ‘Douglas Braithwaite agrees to’ and so forth, it reads ‘Knight Air Services agrees to’ and so forth. But Knight Air Services is no more. Next off, Hassan says, we’ll make the airplane
disappear.
So when old Wes comes callin’ for it, we say sorry, the plane was in a wreck, a total loss. But Wes will ask for the insurance money, and then we say, Knight Relief Services isn’t responsible for any of Knight Air Services’ debts. So Wes is up the creek—he’s owed an airplane that doesn’t exist from a company that doesn’t exist. Next off, Hassan says, we fix the plane in the field, good enough to fly her back to Nairobi, where we’ll finish the repairs, give her a new paint job, and change her registration. Five Yankee Alpha Charlie Sierra becomes Four Alpha Papa Yankee, registered to Knight Relief Services. Then we sit back and wait for the insurance money. Five hundred grand, and out of that we deduct expenses—kickbacks to the investigator and to the pilot for such a fine job of crashing the plane just enough to make it look good.”

Tony poked Dare’s shoulder. “You’re saying I faked it?”

“The Houston Casualty Company is gonna be real interested in my fantasies, “ Dare said, ignoring Tony. “Make that transfer first thing tomorrow.”

“I asked you a question, you fucking wanker.”

“A good pilot could do it, and y’all are good, Tony.”

The Australian got out of his seat, hooking a thumb. “Get your fat wanker ass out of here.”

“Soon as I finish this,” Wesley said, hoisting his glass.

A new episode in the Legends of Loki was written in the next two minutes. Bollichek grabbed Wesley’s collar, and as he jerked him out of the chair, Wesley tossed beer in his face, then bashed his skull with the pitcher, removing him from the action. The table went over, Douglas fell on his back, and Wesley on him, throwing a punch that missed and another that connected. Fitzhugh wrestled him off and pinned his arms. For an old man, he was a handful.

“Got no quarrel with you, Fitz,” he gasped.

“You will if you try to hit him again.”

Fitzhugh let him go. Bollichek lay unconscious, bleeding from the head. On his knees, Douglas cupped his shattered nose with both hands. There was in his eyes the hurt, stupefied look of a spanked child.

Rubbing his knuckles, Wesley looked at him with something approaching pity. “Never been cut before, have you, Dougie boy? Never been hit hard in your whole sorry-ass life.”

Fitzhugh drove the casualties to the Red Cross hospital. Douglas was released with his nose swaddled in gauze, but Tony was kept overnight—he had a concussion and possible skull fracture. On the drive back, Fitzhugh inquired as to how fantastic Dare’s fantasies were.

“You’re getting in the habit of interrogating me,” Douglas replied, sounding a bit like Adid when his sinuses acted up.

“Because so many people are in the habit of accusing you of things.”

“We’re on solid legal ground. Knight Relief Services doesn’t owe Wes a damned thing.”

For Douglas, this passed as a frank admission.

“Very solid ground, with so many judges in Hassan’s back pocket,” Fitzhugh said, more in sadness than with sarcasm as the last drops were drained from his well of respect and admiration.

“Wes won’t go to court anyhow,” Douglas predicted. “He knows better.”

“But he will go to the insurance company. How solid will the ground be under insurance fraud?”

After a lengthy silence, Douglas said, “I’ll understand if you want to quit me.” That was how he put it—not quit the company, but quit him. “You can leave tomorrow, and no hard feelings.”

Fitzhugh wasn’t in a position to quit. It wasn’t lack of money so much as lack of occupation—the prospect of idle hours, idle days—that held him to the job. Mistaking necessity for loyalty, Douglas vowed to “make it up” to him. Precisely what was to be made up, and how, wasn’t clear. The only way he could “make it up” would be to become the man Fitzhugh had thought he was; but the illusion had been Fitzhugh’s fault. From real clay, he had molded a false image. It was unrealistic and, in a way, unfair to expect Douglas to live up to it. At any rate, he was no longer the American’s “man.” He never had been. He’d been the man of someone who never existed.

The smuggling of arms was the one soft spot in Douglas’s otherwise hard business head. Shortly after Quinette’s visit, he asked Fitzhugh to join him on a trip to Kampala, to meet with Ugandan bankers and bureaucrats to sew a new veil replacing the one formerly provided by the defunct Yellowbird. As before, this veil would conceal the gun-running operations not only from the UN and the Kenya government but from Adid as well. Fitzhugh wanted no part of it and declined to go. He had that now, the firmness to refuse Douglas whenever he saw fit. He said that Dare had been right—Adid as president was paying much closer attention to the airline’s day-to-day affairs than Adid as investor. Douglas might get away with it for a while, but Adid was bound to find out, and when he did, whoever was involved would be sacked so quickly he wouldn’t have time to clean out his desk.

“I told Quinette I wasn’t going to leave them in the lurch, and I’m not going to,” Douglas said.

“All the same, I think you should let Hassan in on it,” Fitzhugh advised. “And if he vetoes it, which I’m sure he would, then you should forget it. Whatever you do, the less I know about it, the better.”

Douglas responded with the peculiar, dull look he put on whenever he was told something he didn’t want to hear.

The adventure, the thrill of the forbidden, and the conviction that he was going to change the course of the war conspired to send him off to Kampala. There he’d created a new shell company, Busy Beaver Airways. To further protect Knight in case something went awry, he’d concocted a scheme to lease a company plane to Busy Beaver. As the lessor, Knight could not be held responsible for the cargo carried by the lessee. Tony was put in charge, under the same terms as Dare had enjoyed—he got to keep half the charter fees, effectively doubling his former income.

That was far more than Fitzhugh wanted to know. He removed himself from the administrative dirty work, leaving it to Douglas to decipher Michael Goraende’s messages and to invent clients to hide the source of the arms flights’ income; nevertheless, he knew what was going on and was in the peculiar predicament of pretending not to know it. This mental trick might have been easier if he continued to believe that rifles, rockets, and bullets were going to make a difference.

Now, in his hut, he stripped off his sweaty volleyball clothes and stood under the combined gazes of Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X, and Bob Marley. Mandela’s pricked his conscience—
The rifles, rockets, and bullets are making no difference whatsoever except to add to the body count, and there is blood on your hands as surely as on the hands of those who pull the triggers—
while Marley’s struck at his sense of self-preservation—
Dot white boy gwanna get caught, mon, and you gwanna get caught wid him, den you be out flat on your brown ass.
Malcolm X was silent on the issue.

Fitzhugh flopped onto the bed.
Oh, Diana, Diana, Diana. If I quit him today, would you take me back?
Of course she wouldn’t. It wasn’t his association with Douglas that had killed her feelings for him; it was the mortal wound of his words. That one word—
parasite.
He hugged his pillow, seeing in his mind’s eye her old-young face looking up at him. If she had died, he would not feel this unending ache, this persistent longing. He sprang up, against the temptation to lie down for the rest of the day, the rest of the month, the rest of his life. It felt the way he imagined the approach of death would feel—an icy paralysis creeping up from his toes.

He had better get ready for this afternoon’s interview. CNN was doing a story about Knight for a newsmagazine show. The maverick airline that defied Khartoum’s blockade, that was the angle. A towel around his waist, plastic clogs on his feet, he shambled to the showers, his bad knee throbbing. The Knight volleyball team had narrowly defeated Doctors Without Borders, Fitzhugh spiking the ball for the winning point. Coming down hard, he’d aggravated his old injury. Yet it strengthened his hope that he would learn to live with his other injury, the tear in his invisible ligaments.

Bathed and changed, looking his professional best in khakis and a polo shirt sporting the company’s new color and logo, he went to the office. The reporter and crew had arrived ahead of schedule and were setting up when he came in. The office was cleaner and tidier than he’d ever seen it. Rachel, in a uniform like his, was seated behind the desktop; Douglas was at his desk while the soundman fixed a small microphone to the collar of his white captain’s shirt. Fitzhugh recognized the reporter, a red-haired American with slicing green eyes, but he didn’t recall her name until she introduced herself.

“You flew with us into the Nuba a couple of times,” he said.

“Yeah, I did.”

The soundman clipped a tiny box to Fitzhugh’s belt, then ran the wire under his shirt and fastened the mike to the V in his shirt. Phyllis Rappaport sat in front of him and Douglas. She had the X-ray body of an aging fashion model or a diet fanatic. Crossing her legs, a legal tablet in her lap, a pen in her bony fingers, she began with easy questions. How long had the airline been in business? How many planes in its fleet? How many employees? How much money did it make? That led to a somewhat harder question: What did they say to the accusation, often made, that they were exploiting Africa’s misfortunes to make a fortune? Douglas, rubbing the scar on the bridge of his nose, looked into the camera with his artfully artless gaze. “If bringing food to starving people and medicine to sick people and clothes to naked people is exploitation,” he answered smoothly, “then, yeah, we’re guilty as charged.”

“What about guns?” She tried to make the question sound offhanded but didn’t quite bring it off, her voice driving it like a nail.

“What about them?” Douglas asked serenely.

“Khartoum claims that aid pilots are running guns to the rebels. Any comment?”

“Sure. Khartoum needs to discredit us, and not just us—this whole relief operation. It’s propaganda. I’m surprised you’d give any credence to it.”

“A kernel of truth in everything, even propaganda,” she said. “Some fairly advanced stuff has been showing up in SPLA hands, like shoulder-fired missiles. A lot of people, not just the Sudan government, are wondering where they come from and how they get there. Rumors are, they’re being smuggled on relief planes.”

“And I’m surprised you’d give any credence to rumors.”

“Rumor isn’t always wrong, to quote Tacitus.”

Turning from the camera to Phyllis, Douglas caressed her with his gray and candid eyes. “Well, I can assure you, categorically, that this airline has never delivered any weapons to the rebels.”

Sounds rehearsed but very good,
Fitzhugh thought.
He lies without lying.
He tried to imitate Douglas’s composure when Phyllis asked him how the pilots evaded the blockade. False flight plans? Other methods? He replied that he couldn’t comment. Then, abruptly switching topics, she wanted to know if International People’s Aid was a major client of the airline. Yes—in fact it had been Knight’s first client. Phyllis put her pen down and folded her hands on the legal pad, suggesting that she was off the record. Had he or Douglas met Calvin Bingham, and what was their impression? Fitzhugh said the name meant nothing to him.