Acts of faith (31 page)

Dare flashed the figure-blackened notepad, thinking, Christ almighty, I sound like some telemarketer, plugging a great new long-distance plan.

“And a wizard with numbers you are, and I’ll not be arguin’ with them or with you.” Dare’s pulse rate rose, like a telemarketer when he’s closed a sale. “But I will ask you to put ’em all in writing and fax me a proposal, and I’ll ring you up soon.”

The call came a little over a week later, but it wasn’t from Barrett. Dare was lying on the sofabed in his apartment on Milimani Road, reading a month-old copy of
Shotgun News,
when the phone rang. The voice announced a name that sounded kind of British, but it was a distinctly American voice, in which Dare detected southwestern inflections subtler, softer than the steel-guitar
wa-wa
of his own West Texas. Douglas Braithwaite further identified himself as managing director of Knight Air, and Dare asked if that was supposed to mean something to him.

“You were talking to John Barrett not too long ago, right? He mentioned us.”

Braithwaite sounded peeved, so Dare decided to strike first.

“Yeah, the name of your outfit slipped my mind. So what about it? Y’all gonna tell me to lay off tryin’ to steal your business? Got news for you, buddy boy. That’s how free enterprise works.”

“I don’t need lessons on capitalism,” Braithwaite said after a silence. “I think we can work together. We’re in town the next couple of days. If you’re interested, let’s talk.”

At Dare’s suggestion, they met at the Red Bull in central Nairobi. It was done up like some Swiss chalet, but it served steaks that didn’t taste like warmed-over racehorse. He deliberately showed up ten minutes late. The restaurant wasn’t crowded, and the two men were easy to spot: a big Kenyan guy going prematurely bald and a slim young American wearing a starched khaki shirt, pressed Levi’s, and brown western boots—cheap Tony Lama’s, Dare noticed when he sat down. Shoving his chair away from the table, he flung one leg over the other to better display his own pair of Rio of Mercedes, custom made in Fort Worth of python skin.

There was the usual let’s-get-acquainted small talk, and then they ate, the Kenyan devouring his steak like a starving lion. Halfway through the meal, he said in a stage whisper that he and Braithwaite would appreciate it if Dare kept their conversation to himself. Flying aid into the Nuba was a risky business.

“What we’re doing is not for public consumption, yes?” he added.

Braithwaite said, “We’ve been at it a few months. The Nuba is really hurting. Fitz and I saw for ourselves. Spent nearly three weeks on the ground in those hills. We saw guys making hoes out of bomb fragments, rubbing sticks together to light their cigarettes—”

“Listen,” Dare interrupted, “I’ve got a bleeding heart too, and it mostly bleeds for myself. I’d be obliged if y’all would come to the point, if you’ve got one.”

Braithwaite, clasping his hands on the tablecloth, looked at him with such attentiveness that Dare temporarily lost awareness of everyone else in the room.

“We need you,” he said with an undertone of entreaty.

“What for?”

“We need another pilot and another plane, and if everything we’ve heard is accurate, you’re it.”

“Barrett showed you that stuff I faxed him?”

“Yeah. But it was a couple of people who’ve flown with you who convinced us. Tony Bollichek and Mary English. Tony’s been with us from day one, and we hired Mary last week. They’ve been alternating as my first officer.”

“Yeah. I guess where Tony goes, Mary is sure to follow,” Dare said.

“They told us you’re one helluva pilot,” Braithwaite said. “Last month we did twenty-one turnarounds. It’s hard on the airplane and on us, so here we are, talking to you.”

“Y’all gonna offer me fringe benefits? A good dental plan? Hey, I run my own show. I don’t wage-ape for anyone.” Dare censored himself from adding,
Especially for a kid who hadn’t got his first hard-on when I was flying gooney birds over Laos.

“I’m talking partnership, Mr. Dare. We run the show together, split the net down the middle.”

“I like the sound of that a whole lot better. Okay, facts and figures.”

Braithwaite took a moment to compose himself, or rather, to transform himself from bleeding heart into managing director.

“Bottom line is, thirty to thirty-five net. Fifteen to seventeen-five per month for each of us.”

“I just finished up a contract in the Congo. Seven hundred fifty thousand in six months,” Dare said, shading the truth. “You’re talkin’ chump change, you’ll excuse my sayin’ so.”

“We’re planning to step up operations, planning to expand.”

“Planning or hoping?”

“Planning, Mr. Dare. Planning to start flying routes into southern Sudan beside the Nuba. I’m talking the no-go zones, for independent NGOs.”

“You’ve got contracts with these NGOs or are you betting on the come?”

“We’re going to get them,” Braithwaite said in the tone of card-counter who knew, just
knew,
he was going to hit blackjack on the next deal.

“Lemme have one of those,” Dare said to the Kenyan, who’d pulled out a pack of Embassies.

“I was about to offer,” he said, shaking a cigarette loose.

“You were bein’ too leisurely about it.” Then, turning back to Braithwaite, Dare said, “Still sounds like it’s on the come.”

“Mr. Dare”—Dare considered telling Braithwaite to call him by his first name but decided he preferred the deferential sound of
Mr.
—“in two years, Knight Air is going to be as big as Pathways and maybe bigger.”

“What’s Pathways?”

“Our competition. It’s run by a woman named Tara Whitcomb.”

“Yeah. Think I’ve heard her name around.”

“We’re offering you a shot at getting in on the ground floor, and in the process, you’d be doing a helluva lot of good for a helluva lot of people.”

To avoid wincing, which might have offended Braithwaite’s sensibilities, Dare canted his head back and blew smoke at the ceiling.

“The part I like best is thumbin’ your nose at Khartoum. I like that part. I never did care for askin’ for permission.”

“I can’t say we
like
it,” Braithwaite said solemnly. “It’s something that has to be done. I expect you’ll want to think things over?”

“Sure will,” Dare declared.

“We’ll be at Barrett’s place till noon tomorrow. It’s hard to get hold of us in Loki, so—”

“Let you know tomorrow morning.”

Double Trouble was singing to him as he pulled through the gate into his apartment compound and parked under a bottlebrush tree, between a rust-pitted van and a hibiscus bush whose blossoms looked plastic in the parking-lot lights. Double Trouble—“DeeTee” for short—was Dare’s pet canary; he’d named it after Stevie Ray Vaughan’s band. DeeTee lived in his head, and it warbled infallible warnings whenever something or someone did not look, sound, smell, or feel quite right. Its senses were capable of detecting the faintest trace elements of falsehood or fraud, the slimmest cracks in a man or woman’s character, the smallest potential for danger or disaster in any given situation. DeeTee’s acuity, coupled to its absolute loyalty to its master—it never, ever lied to him—had made it indispensable. It was the partner of Dare’s luck. Without DeeTee, he reckoned he would now be dead, languishing in some third-world prison or putting up his feet in a homeless shelter. Conversely, if he’d listened to DeeTee every time it sang a premonitory song, he would now be living out his dream as a gentleman rancher in the sweet Texas hill country, driving around in a new Cadillac convertible, as LBJ used to do along the Perdenales, and basking in the warm assurance of a peaceful and prosperous old age. He listened most times, but now and then one of his many vices or flaws caused him to pay no heed to the faithful bird.

Lust.
DeeTee had tipped him off that his first wife was going to make him miserable before he married her, but Margo’s tits, which approached Dolly Parton’s in shape and volume and were besides the first pair of white tits he’d set eyes on after years of gazing at tits of color in Laos, flipped his canary override switch. Over the next three years Dare was stunned by the accuracy of the bird’s forecast, and a very traditional divorce toted up the cost of ignoring it.

Greed.
When Joe Nakima had asked for the papers for the G1, DeeTee chittered loudly, “Don’t let him get his hands on them!” But with a contract to run mirra into Somalia at stake—nine to ten grand gross a week!—Dare plugged his ears. He was still living with the consequences of that willful deafness, and they had produced other consequences, in a kind of ripple effect, and the ripples had washed him into the Red Bull tonight.

So what was the vice this time?
Pride.
He hated the position he now found himself in, peddling his services door to door like an encyclopedia salesman, begging his lawyer to give him another week or another month to pay his fees, suffering bouts of acid reflux when he looked at his bank statements. It was undignified, it offended his sense of who and what he was. Becoming partners with a Gen-X crusader didn’t exactly fit his self-image either, but he couldn’t see an alternative.

The problem was, DeeTee was sending negative signals about the fair-haired managing director of Knight Air Services Limited: “There’s something wrong with the guy, and no good will come from getting mixed up with him.”

“So what’s wrong with him?” Dare asked, crossing the lot to his door. Sometimes, when he was alone, he spoke out loud to the canary. “You’re gonna have to be more specific.”

He entered his apartment—it was furnished in the minimalist style of a man used to clearing out of places in a hurry—pulled a Tusker out of the refrigerator, and sat on the sofabed, staring at a blank wall like a nursing-home patient at a TV during a power blackout.

“Start with the way he was dressed,” DeeTee said. “That starched shirt, those creased Levi’s. You gotta watch out for guys who put creases into their blue jeans.”

“Still ain’t good enough. Nowhere near.”

“If it comes to a choice between leaving somebody in the lurch and saving his own ass, guess which way he’ll jump?” DeeTee twittered. “And how about that look he gave us? So frank, so open, so empathetic. And that high-flown speech he made, that crap about you doing a whole lot of good for a whole lot of people.”

“You’re sayin’ he didn’t believe a word of it. He’s a phony.”

“I’m saying he believed every word.”

“Gotcha.” He gulped the can dry and went to the fridge for another. “How about the business end of things? Bullshit too? He sure can talk the talk, sure sounds like he knows what he’s doin’.”

“He was giving you the straight skinny, that’s my judgment. If we could take him out of the picture, look at this purely as a business venture, it’s okay, the best you’re likely to find under present circumstances. But we can’t take him out of the picture, can we? He
does
know what he’s doing. A true believer and a smart businessman at the same time. Double Trouble says that’s double trouble.”

Dare crunched the empty, shot a three-pointer into the wastebasket, opened the new can, and leaned against the refrigerator, looking at the floor with the same expression he’d fixed on the wall.

“Think Pat Robertson,” chirped DeeTee. “Think Jim Bakker and any other televangelist you can name. Just oozing sanctimonious sincerity, one eye on the Bible and the other on the bottom line, and twenty-twenty vision in both. Praise the Lord and pass the collection plate, brothers and sisters!”

“I’ll be sure to have everything in writing, every
i
dotted, every
t
crossed.”

“You know what paper is good for over here.”

“Goddamn it, you said yourself it’s the best I’m likely to find.”

“All right,” DeeTee warbled wearily. “Your mind’s made up. But do me one favor? Keep the Hawker in your name. Don’t go fifty-fifty on that. You know what happens when you don’t listen, so listen to me on this one little point, please?”

When Dare phoned the next morning to accept the offer, Braithwaite sounded like an excited boy. “That’s great!” he said, and in short order offered to buy a half share in the Hawker and to incorporate it into what he grandiosely called Knight Air’s “fleet.” Dare kept his promise to DeeTee and replied, “No deal. I lease the plane to the company.”

“But Wes,” said his new partner, dropping the
Mr.,
“we’re supposed to be equal partners.”

“Y’all want that plane and me, those are the terms,” Dare said.

“All right,” Braithwaite said, disappointment in his voice. “I’ll have a contract drawn up.”

“Another part of the deal. There’s a loadmaster worked for me, name of Nimrod, Kenyan fella. He comes with me, ’cause I don’t trust anybody else to load my planes.”

“Okay again. Expect to see you and the Hawker in Loki—when?”

“Give me a week.”

In fact, it took only five days for him to clear out of his apartment with his meager belongings, to inform his lawyer of his new address, to sell his clapped-out Mercedes and buy a used motorcycle—more practical than a car for getting around in Lokichokio—and to ferry the plane and Nimrod to their new place of work.