Lords of Corruption (7 page)

When he started toward it, he discovered that the bottoms of his sneakers had actually begun to melt and now made a perceptible sucking sound as he walked.

Kentucky had been hot in the summer --sometimes brutally so -- but this was different. It was like God was following him around with a magnifying glass, punishing him for all those ants he'd burned when he was a kid. He'd never given a lot of thought to why some people were black and others white, but suddenly he was envious of the Africans' excess melanin. If his last bag didn't hit the tarmac soon, he was going t
o e
nd up the color of an overripe tomato.

When it finally did appear, he retrieved it and teetered toward the only building in sight -- a small, single-story construction covered in a patchwork of faded paint and leaning noticeably to the east.

By the time he arrived, other passengers had formed into lines, waiting their turn to throw their belongings on tables manned by pissed-off-looking soldiers. Josh dropped his bags and shoved them along with his foot as the line slowly progressed, the heat and stink of sweat becoming stronger and the soldiers' moods deteriorating visibly. Above, a larger-than-life-sized mural of Umboto Mtiti kept an eye on things.

By the time he made it to the front of the line and hefted his bags onto a table, he was feeling a little light-headed -- a combination of the heat, jet lag, and the disorientation of being so far from home. He hadn't been prepared for how different it would be. The sound of the local languages' bizarre clicks and grunts, the haze of oddly scented smoke that mixed with the air, the fact that his was the only white face in the crowd.

Josh handed over his passport, and the soldier flipped through it, taking in the blank pages with eyes that were an alarming shade of yellow rimmed with red. Finally h
e l
ooked up but didn't hand it back. "Liquor?" His accent was almost too thick to decipher.

"No. No liquor."

His mouth turned down in irritation. "Books? Magazines?"

"Yes."

"What magazines and books?" Now he looked vaguely hopeful.

"Uh, I've got a National Geographic and a copy of Lord of the Flies."

His brow furrowed in a way that suggested he'd had a mental list of acceptable responses that hadn't been matched. He pointed to Josh's luggage, turned, and motioned for him to follow.

He did, but hesitated in the doorway when he saw the small, empty room the soldier was standing in the middle of.

"Come!"

"Is there a problem?" Josh asked, starting to feel disorientation turn to nervousness. "I work for a charity. NewAfrica. Someone is supposed to be meeting me here. Do you

"Come!" the soldier barked.

Josh did as he was told, clutching his bags to him like a shield as the soldier slammed the door closed. A few moments later, he was rifling through the duffels, tossin
g w
hatever didn't interest him on the cracked the floor.

"Hey, come on," Josh protested. "There's nothing in there."

It didn't take the soldier long to come to a similar conclusion, and he stood, slapping the clothes Josh had picked up from his hand and pushing him against the wall. The frisking was the fastest and most efficient Josh had ever been subject to, and before he knew what was happening, the soldier had pocketed his MP3 player and all but twenty of the five hundred dollars that had been in Josh's wallet.

This was starting to get serious. He was about to find himself standing in the middle-of-nowhere Africa with no money, no possessions, and a NewAfrica guide who had decided not to show up.

"This is bullshit! You can't do that. I came here to --"

The rest of his protest was lost in the sound of the door behind him being thrown open and slamming against the wall. The man who stalked in was probably four inches taller than his own six feet, with a shaved head and a muscular chest that glistened beneath a partially unbuttoned shirt. His skin was noticeably lighter than the soldier's, but his expression was a hel
l o
f a lot darke
r e
ven with eyes hidde
n b
ehind a pair of mirrored sunglasses.

Josh took a couple steps back, starting to wonder if he would ever leave this airport. What would Laura say at his funeral? "I told him this would happen."

But the man didn't seem to even notice him, instead shouting something in his native language at the soldier, who quickly started repacking and zipping up the bags on the floor.

"Does he have anything of yours?" the man said in easily understood English. "What?"

His jaw tightened, and he enunciated slowly, clipping off each word. "Did he take anything?"

"Uh, yeah. My MP3 player and a bunch of money. Are you the person who was supposed to meet me from NewAfrica?"

He ignored Josh's question and shouted something else at the soldier, who shook his head in what was obviously a rigorous denial.

The man's expression turned to fury, and he slapped the soldier's hat off, grabbing his hair and nearly lifting him off the ground. He clamped his free hand around the man's throat and drove him back, slamming him into the wall with enough forc
e t
hat puffs of dust were ejected from the cracks in the wood.

"Hey, it's not that big a deal," Josh said, suddenly afraid that it would be the soldier who never left this room. Four hundred and eighty dollars was a lot of money, and he liked the MP3 player, but it wasn't worth somebody getting killed.

The man had released the soldier's hair and began a search of his pockets, almost immediately finding what he was looking for. He let go of the soldier's throat and turned, holding Josh's possessions out to him and leaving the man behind him to slide down the wall, gasping for air.

"I'm Gideon," he said, impatiently shaking the money and MP3 player to entice a hesitant Josh Hagarty to reach for them. "I'm here to collect you."

"I must apologize for my countryman."

With the luggage safely stacked in the Land Cruiser's cargo area, Gideon jumped in and accelerated onto the dirt road running along the front of the airport.

"No problem," Josh mumbled.

"You're wrong. It is a problem. You don't understand the situation here. President Mtiti is a great man, and he tries to include everyone in his government, but some aren'
t w
ell-suited. Some are stupid and corrupt."

Josh wondered if that was a swipe at the Yvimbo tribe and a suggestion that Mtiti's Xhisa followers were pure as the driven snow.

"It seems like you've figured out how to handle it," Josh said, remembering the terror on the young soldier's face. He'd been pissed about getting ripped off, but Gideon's reaction had been something he hadn't experienced before. Sure, there had been some guards in prison who had been complete sons of bitches, but there was always a sense that things were under control. That they would only go so far. He hadn't felt that way back at the airport.

"These behaviors cannot be tolerated," Gideon said. "If you do -- even just onc
e t
here will be no future here."

From what Josh had seen, the future seemed a long way off no matter what Gideon did. So far, Africa was poorly maintained planes, crooked soldiers, unbearable heat, and air that swallowed everything less than a few miles away in a yellowish haze.

As they entered the city, Josh's list got longer. The transition from desolate countryside to a claustrophobic crush of humanity seemed to happen in an instant. Suddenly there were people everywher
e m
illing around in the street, crammed into outdoor markets erected in front of brightly colored colonial-era buildings, hanging out of windows, and filling open doors. Gideon didn't slow, piloting the vehicle through the crowd as though the people rushing to get out of their path didn't exist.

Josh looked out the window at countless shacks, wired together out of what looked like garbage, clinging to steep hills west of town. It seemed that the slightest rain or breath of wind would send them and their inhabitants crashing back to earth.

Gideon skidded the truck down a side street, and Josh fixated on a giant wall mural, visible only because the building next door had collapsed. It depicted President Mtiti patting a child on the head while doves flew around them. Inexplicably, a large, neatly printed caption read, "Lo Be Thy Name."

When he sat back, he saw that Gideon wasn't watching the road so much as watching him. His face was a blank, and his eyes were invisible behind his glasses, so it was impossible to know exactly what he was seeing.

"Why do you come to my country?" "What?"

"Why do you come here?"

It was an interesting question. He'd been asking himself the same thing since his plane's wheels had touched ground. "To help people."

The answer didn't register on Gideon's face, but it was enough to get him to start looking at the road again. Josh did the same, taking in the unidentifiable food cooking on oil-barrel grills, the tiny trucks and vans packed to triple capacity speeding along the dirt road. And the continued lack of white faces.

He'd never considered himself in the least bit racist, but it was impossible to not feel his uniqueness and wonder if this was how the few blacks in his classes had felt every day.

They broke out of the city, and he felt a wave of relief at the empty road climbing steeply ahead of them and the clearing air that had the distant mountains gaining sharpness and turning green.

Josh pulled a bottle of pills from his pocket and shook one into his mouth.

"What are those?" Gideon shouted.

It was hard to hear. The radio was blasting African music, which was actually kind of appealing, but even that was barely audible over the tires and suspension being brutalized by the road.

"Malaria pills."

Gideon smirked.

"I once read that half the people who ever lived probably died of malaria," Josh yelled. "Fascinating, don't you think?"

It was clear that he didn't -- or at least it wasn't as compelling as what was in his rearview mirror. Josh twisted around and saw another vehicle coming up fast from behind. It was identical to the one he was in, except most of the roof had been cut away to make room for a mounted machine gun. The man standing behind it eyed them from behind glasses similar to Gideon's as they passed. On the vehicle's door, the Save the Children logo was still visible beneath a thin coat of white paint.

"How much farther?" Josh said, facing forward in his seat again and watching the makeshift military vehicle recede in front of them.

"Not far. The roads are paved."

It was hard to know exactly what he meant by that. They were driving in the dirt, ten feet to the left of pavement so potholed that it was virtually undrivable even in a four-by-four.

"Are you from around here, Gideon?" "Not far."

"Not far" was starting to look like th
e u
niversal measure of distance in Africa. "Family?"

"Yes. Why wouldn't I have a family?"

The conversation went on like that for another few minutes until Josh got the hint and shut up. The humid air poured through his open window, not having much of a cooling effect but keeping things bearable as long as their speed stayed over fifty kilometers an hour.

The villages they passed were nothing more than collections of small, round buildings spaced out over green hills and surrounded by farmland. Kids chased their vehicle, shouting, laughing, and holding out their hands for a gift they seemed to know they wouldn't get. Josh wondered if they did that to everyone who drove by or if it was his pale skin that attracted them.

The only buildings with any permanence seemed to be the bunker-like funeral homes. It had been one thing to read about the thirty percent AIDS rate but another to see the cinder-block monuments to the virus dotting the otherwise beautiful countryside.

Gideon slowed as they came to a village of concrete-and-thatch houses. Two were on fire, sending black smoke rising into the still air. The former Save the Children vehicle that had passed them earlier was parked a
t t
he edge of the road, with the man in back covering twenty or so soldiers as they dragged people screaming from their homes. Josh turned around in the seat, but in a few moments, the village was lost in the distance and smoke. Like it had never existed.

"What the hell was that all about?"

"Rebels."

"They looked like farmers."

"And what would you know of this?"

Josh fell silent again, staring out at the increasingly remote countryside, thinking about what he had just seen and, for the second time in his twenty-six years, pondering death. It was a subject that had been so efficiently swept under the rug in Americ
a a
s though it were a rare disease that would someday be conquered.

After only a few hours in Africa, hints of death's presence seemed to be everywhere. In fact, it was hard to see anything else.

Chapter
8.

Over the course of the punishing seven-hour drive, the landscape had transformed. The dry, open plains had been taken over by jagged, grass-covered hills that rose hundreds of feet into a sky that had turned nearly black with clouds. What sunlight remained was slipping in sideways from the distant horizon, causing the endless carpet of vegetation to glow an otherworldly shade of green.