Acts of faith (26 page)

Ken chewed his lip. “If they don’t, I’ll hold you to your promise,” he said.

Manute made a movement with his head; it might have been a nod, it might have been a reflexive twitch caused by the flies, which were everywhere.

Santino hefted the airline bag onto the table. Out came the American currency in one-hundred-dollar denominations; in went the Sudanese pounds while Manute and the officer flipped through the greenbacks, then stacked them side by side to make sure they were the same height. Quinette focused her camera on the men’s hands and the piled bills—
click
—and wondered what she would say about this picture when she gave her presentation. She hadn’t considered the economic practicalities of God’s holy work; they made it seem less than holy. All of Manute’s talk—
“nine or ten thousand for one . . . a big profit”
—like he was discussing cattle prices.

After Manute and the officer left, Quinette observed Ken throw a brusque, sidelong glance at Phyllis, who looked back at him with her quick green eyes. She straddled the bench across the table from him and drew her notebook from her pocket as if it were a gun.

“A little bush-league currency arbitrage?” she asked.

Ken said nothing. A couple of dozen flies made tiny polka dots on the back of his shirt.

Phyllis had taken her hat off, and the light slicing through a gap in the trees exposed the gray streaks in her reddish hair and the whisker-thin wrinkles etched into her papery skin. The woman might have owned a certain pale, gaunt beauty when she was younger, but now, with the honed planes of her high cheekbones raked alongside the blade of her nose and her chin tapering sharply below taut lips, her face had so many points and edges that Quinette imagined it could cut you anywhere you kissed it.

She stood aside and listened, somewhat baffled by the conversation that followed. Phyllis said, “So they’ll take the ten grand and exchange it at the Nairobi rate and pocket the fifty-seven thousand difference,” and Ken replied, “Fifty-seven thousand pounds comes to about a hundred bucks.”

“A hundred bucks goes a long way in a country with a per capita income of about five hundred. And if these guys from the SRRA do skim a hundred or two every time you come out, then they’re making themselves, oh, say about a grand a year.”

“Think I’ll grab something to eat and set up my tent before it’s dark. Hate doing that job by flashlight.”

This from Jim, rising stiffly.

“Good advice for everybody,” Ken said. “Unless you’re interviewing me, Phyllis, and if you are, just what is the question?”

“Do you think you’re getting ripped off, and if you do, how do you feel about it?”

“We’re talking human lives here, human rights, and you’re talking petty change, even if what you’re insinuating is true, which I don’t think it is.”

“Not what I heard in Nairobi.”

“What did you hear in Nairobi?”

“Rumors that this slave redemption program is a cash cow for some people.”

“From skimming nickels and dimes off a currency exchange?” Ken shook his head to highlight the absurdity of Phyllis’s suspicions.

“Then how about the redemption money?” she asked, unfazed. “What happens to the dollars after you turn it over to them? What do they do with it? A total of a hundred grand so far, isn’t that what you told me on the plane? So let’s forget their skimming the cream and talk about the whole pail of milk. A hundred grand isn’t nickels and dimes, is it, Mr. Eismont?”

Ken flinched—he’d picked up on her change to his last name.

“It goes back into the SRRA’s accounts, to repay for the withdrawals of Sudanese pounds for the redemptions.”

“You’re sure about that? In Nairobi I’ve seen movers and shakers from the SRRA in new suits, driving new cars.”

“Better follow Jim’s example. Get your tents set up. You know how it is in this neck of the African woods. Not much twilight. It’s light, then it’s dark.”

“We’re staying in a hut. We don’t need tents.”

“All kinds of critters in these roofs. Spiders, snakes. They drop down at night. You wouldn’t want them crawling all over you. Or would you?”

Phyllis snapped her notebook shut, picked up her hat by its chin strap, and swung it onto her head, tucking her hair underneath. “Don’t take things so personally, Ken. Only doing my job.”

“Y
OU SLIP THE
poles through the sleeves, then fit the ends into the bottom pockets and the thing pops right up, like this.”

In the tukul’s dim interior, Phyllis demonstrated the technique, Quinette mortified that she, a country girl, couldn’t figure out how to erect her tent. Phyllis had hers up in half a minute and went outside. Quinette assembled the sections of the poles and felt a sense of accomplishment when the shapeless folds of mesh and cloth ballooned into a dome, just big enough to accommodate one person. Like Phyllis’s, hers wasn’t exactly a tent but a mosquito net with a sewn-in ground sheet. Side by side the two shelters resembled giant soap bubbles, risen out of the hard-packed dirt floor. She dragged her sleeping bag and air mattress into the bubble. Probably she wouldn’t need the sleeping bag—the air inside the windowless tukul, smelling like damp hay too long in the barn, was stagnant and hot. She lay down for a moment and, looking up through the mesh, searched for snakes and spiders in the thatch ceiling. Her head began to swim again; she felt herself teetering on the brink of sleep, the desire to fall into it checked by the grumbling in her stomach. She rummaged in her pack for a PowerBar and a bag of trail mix and went out with the food and her water bottle. Phyllis was sitting on a camp stool, her back bent as she gazed into a hand mirror propped against a rock at her feet and rubbed her face with cleansing cream.

“Thinking of entering a beauty contest?” Quinette said, peeling the wrapper off the half-melted PowerBar.

“In my business, every goddamned day is a beauty contest.” Phyllis’s eyes peered through a white mask. “Got to keep the crone at bay. A lot of cute patooties about your age would love to have my job. Think they want it, anyway. One day like today, walking ten miles in hundred-degree heat, sleeping in some native shithole, and those darlings would be whining to be sent back to the air-conditioned studio.”

She was speaking again in her natural voice, stone grinding on stone. Quinette held out the bag of trail mix.

“Thanks. I’ll be dining on my own delicious stuff in a minute.”

Phyllis pointed at a can under the camp stool. Quinette was dismayed to see that it was a can of beans.

“Like some tea with your gourmet granola?”

“Sure. Okay.”

The reporter set the jar of cream aside and looked toward the soldiers, squatting in a circle around the steaming pot on the campfire. Holding two fingers in a V she called out,
“Tungependa mbili chai, tafahadli.”

The soldiers turned toward her with blank faces. Matthew was with them.

“Forgot, these characters don’t know Swahili,” Phyllis muttered, then called out again, “
Ideenee etnayan shi, minfadlik.
And if you don’t understand Arabic either, I’d like two cups of tea, pah-leese.”

“This is not safari, you know, and we are not camp boys,” Matthew said, the smile on his lips absent from his voice.

“But you are gentlemen, aren’t you?” Phyllis shot back. “And I did say ‘please,’ in three languages.”

Quinette asked, “So what is your job that all those cuties want it?”

Phyllis looked at her askance. “Hello? Where have you been all day? I’m a foreign correspondent for CNN, Nairobi bureau chief.”

“ ‘Only doing my job,’ you said to Ken. That’s what I meant. I didn’t think you were being fair, digging at him like that. So is that your job?”

“If you saw me when I’m in a mood to be unfair, then you’d know I was being anything but.” Phyllis contemplated herself in the mirror, turning her head one side to the other. With a tissue she carefully wiped off the excess cream from her forehead, her nose, the arrowhead of her chin. “Varnish removal, that’s my job,” she said, facing Quinette. “People put a high gloss on things, layers of it. I rub it off, get down to the bare wood, because nothing is ever what it appears to be, and nobody is what they make themselves out to be.”

“Wait a minute. Are you saying you think Ken . . .”

“Nah. Your Ken . . .”

“He’s not mine,” Quinette interrupted. “What did you suppose, that I’m fucking him?”

Phyllis drew back, in a burlesque of shock. “Doesn’t sound like language from a good Christian girl.”

“I wasn’t always.”

“Bad girl gone good? Listen, don’t be so damned defensive. That’s the last thing I’d think, you and him in the sack. I was going to say that he strikes me as straight and earnest as they come. A true believer in what he’s doing, and maybe that plays into the agendas of some of the people he deals with.”

“He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy people could take advantage of. Seems pretty smart to me.”

“He is, but you know how it is with true believers.”

“No. How is it?”

“Their belief gets in the way of their brains.”

“If you believe in something, then you’re stupid?” A sudden wind blew through Quinette, and it wasn’t the wind of the Holy Spirit but the Enemy’s wind, rousing her to anger. Realizing that she was being tested, she silently beseeched God to help her contain her temper and to feel, if not a little Christian love for this harsh woman, then at least a little Christian forbearance.

“Not stupid, no—” Phyllis began.

“Madame.”

It was Matthew, looking sullen as he held a calabash of hot water and two tea bags. He dropped the bags into two cups the women had retrieved from their bags, then filled the cups from the calabash.

“
Asante sana, shukran,
and thank you,” Phyllis said.

Matthew turned on his heel and went back to his comrades. The smoke from their campfire rose in a pale gray pillar that leaned to cross a band of sunlight, shooting almost horizontally over the tukul’s roof. Phyllis picked up where she’d left off.

“Not stupid. Belief is a virus, and once it gets into you, its first order of business is to preserve itself, and the way it preserves itself is to keep you from having any doubts, and the way it keeps you from doubting is to blind you to the way things really are. Evidence contrary to the belief can be staring you straight in the face, and you won’t see it. No, not stupid. True believers just don’t see things the way they are, because if they did, they wouldn’t be true believers anymore.”

The Lord answered if you called on Him with an honest and contrite heart. Belief a virus, faith a disease that blinded you? Awful words, yet Quinette was able to listen to them without the least bit of anger.

“So you don’t believe in anything, not even in God?” she asked, not completely sure she wanted to hear the answer. She’d known sinful people in her trailer trash period, but she’d never met a real atheist before, at least not an atheist willing to admit he was one.

“Read much of Ernest Hemingway?”

The reporter raised one knee and clasped her hands around it. From up in the trees, where the campfire smoke split into delicate tendrils, a bird sang a soft, plaintive note, while off in the distance somewhere cowbells rang.

“In high school,” Quinette said. “We read a couple of his short stories.”

“He once said that a writer needs a built-in, shock-proof bullshit detector. That goes double for a news correspondent, triple for a news correspondent working in Africa. I guess I believe in that. In skepticism. When you’re in the varnish-removal business, that’s the active ingredient. My apologies if that offends you, but you asked.”

“No offense taken. I think I feel sorry for you, and I’m going to pray for you,” Quinette said with brittle calm.

“Make it from the Old Testament. I’m Jewish.”

She didn’t know any Old Testament prayers.
How did you pray for a Jew anyway?
she asked herself, taking her Bible from her rucksack. She walked to the edge of the compound, and there, with the wide yellow plain stretched out before her, she opened her Bible. It was small, designed for travelers, and difficult to read in low light. Straining, her eyes fell on Psalm 115: “Wherefore should the heathen say, Where now is their God? But our God is in the heavens. . . . Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands.” The answer was right there—her hand must have been guided to it. Phyllis was a kind of idol-worshipper, and her idol was her skepticism. Quinette closed the book and asked God to show Phyllis the falseness of her beliefs, prayed for help in learning to love Phyllis the sinner while hating her sin. Oh, she could feel the love beginning to course through her, as if she’d been transfused with warm honey. The wonderful thing about being saved was that it made you feel better about other people because it made you feel better about yourself. You couldn’t love your neighbor if you didn’t love yourself first, the way God loved you, without condition. That was how a father was supposed to love his children. Her own father had loved her like that, even when she was bad, and how she missed his all-forgiving embraces and the way he would call her “Quinny” while holding her in his lap as he drove the John Deere through the hayfield, the mower tossing golden dust into the air and the rows of chopped grass waiting to be bundled into the cylindrical bales that looked so lovely, like huge butternut cakes, in the autumn meadows.