The Tiger King Excerpt

He had ordered her hobbled. She could run like a colt.

"Get her up."

Cholo pulled the girl up. The beam of the flashlight made her blink. She had slept on the cave floor. Dirt stuck

to drool on her cheek. The rope binding her ankles left a red rash.

He wrote at the rough table. In the night, she had urinated on herself. The smell was oddly sweet. A memory

from something he had read long ago led him to wonder: diabetic?

"Comrade." He signed the last order and handed it to Osvaldo. "To the secretariat at once."

For the first time, he met her eyes: dull as old shell casings. As yet, she had but the beginnings of breasts. The girl

had uttered not a single word since her arrest. "You know the charges," he said to her.

Something about her was familiar. The defiance? He massaged his eyebrows. His mind played tricks. "It won't

change your fate. But a confession would clear your mind. You are confused. Confusion is an enemy as dangerous as a

soldier with a loaded gun. Comrade. I am like a father to you. Please take this as a heartfelt piece of advice."

Was it last year's offensive when he first saw her? Children were hard to remember. Fighting whittled their bodies

and often prompted early puberty. They transformed, like nestlings into birds. Or they died. He put them in the front

line, as reliable as dogs. Their shots, often wayward and mistimed, yet served the better fighters as warnings. Soldiers

got too confident. They pressed on, too fast and without caution. They assumed this was the best the Tiger could do.

That his reputation was inflated. That he had lost his touch.

How often he proved them wrong.

This one. Had he taken her after Concordia, that disaster? Or La Honda? Perhaps he should tell Osvaldo to

photograph new recruits, especially the children, to keep a visual record.

Kirk / THE TIGER KING / 1

In the army's hands, photos would be a liability. He didn't need to remember who they were. That was old

thinking, bourgeois thinking. Still, these habits haunted him. The past. What use did he have for it?

"It is time," he said.

In the meadow below, his fighters waited for morning inspection. Up by 4 am, they had already eaten a gruel

prepared by the cooks. As the Tiger descended, he saw how mist caught like hair in the bromeliads anchored in the

rock face. Flame-rumped tanagers rustled and sang, their triple chirp a counterpoint to the drag of the girl's feet along

the path. Dew lay heavy on the huts of the hostages. They were asleep at this hour, clinging to the freedom of their

dreams.

The Tiger stood before his fighters. "Bring the boy."

Over night, the boy had been staked behind the storage tent, with the mules. This was only fair. He was the

mastermind. Like the girl, he was slender. A few hairs curled on his chin and upper lip. Was he thirteen? Ten? From

his days as a medical student, the Tiger recognized the type: a survivor, resilient. Injured, he would beat the odds.

Not this time.

Cholo had wound rope around the boy's wrists, then had bound the wrists to the boy's waist. Strips of cloth, stiff

and the color of old wine, wrapped around the boy's right foot. As yet, the foot did not stink.

"We're losing time."

The Tiger drew his reading glasses from the front flap pocket of his shirt. Irritating, but necessary. With his

thinning hair and paunch, the wire rims completed what he knew was a look of creeping decrepitude. He compensated

with actions, to show that he was not weak.

Osvaldo handed him a folded paper.


"The revolutionary council has reached its verdict," he said. "Comrade Alejandra!"

Cholo half-pulled and half-carried the girl forward. Alejandra didn't seem to realize what was happening. This

was more than insulin deprivation, the Tiger realized. Was she drugged? Who would have given her a pill? He felt his

heart skip with anger. Maybe that sweetness was something else. Morphine tablets had no odor. Was it cough

medicine?

"You have been found guilty of contributing to the cowardice of a fellow comrade. On the night of the birthday of

our glorious founder and the wellspring of revolution, you used a weapon to shoot Comrade Benjamín in the foot. Your

dark purpose, as is well known, was to injure him severely enough to send him home and later abandon our national

army of liberation. This is treason and conspiracy. The punishment is severe."

"Comandante," the boy said. He shivered, but his eyes were steady. This one, the Tiger thought. This one was

strong.

"My sister had no choice. Comandante, I forced her. I threatened her. She did it for me, for the love of me.

Comandante, I beg you..."

"Silence!" The Tiger removed his glasses. Emotion is the enemy of reason. Reason is the motor of

transformation. The way out of the petty concerns of the self. He sacrificed for the good of the people. The people were

more important than any one person. These emotional ties had to be severed for their to be true and lasting change. So!

Comrade Benjamín's punishment would be quite a lesson for everyone.

"Comrade Alejandra, the verdict is clear."

Through half-lidded eyes, Alejandra stared at the ground. He smelled licorice. Of course! Alcohol, the peasant's

oblivion. She reeked of it, in fact. Perhaps it was for the best. He heard Osvaldo ready his pistol. Then he unholstered


his own.

"Untie her," he said to Cholo.

Military discipline was the responsibility of the revolutionary council, which consisted of the highest-ranking

fighters: himself, Comrade Osvaldo and Comrade Blanca. The Tiger never liked to reveal the council's final verdict

before it was to be applied. This left his mind clear. Unbound. At the moment the punishment was to be announced,

he could be moved by mercy or, depending on the crime, the need for example. When he looked into the eyes of the

accused, the correct path sometimes came to him as an image in the corneal tissue. This image often surprised and

delighted him. Once, he saw a Venetian gondola, black and shining, rocking on the water of the Grand Canal. He

had only seen this in photographs or movies, yet the image spoke to him of vistas to be experienced. The accused was

pardoned.

Another time, a tree burst into flame. Calamity in the future: the accused paid with his life.

Occasionally, the image had something to do with her: her hair, the curve of her shoulder. The first moment he

saw her. Or the last.

On that fuel, he was capable of anything.

The folded paper Osvaldo handed him was blank. The paper was always blank. The revolutionary council trusted

him absolutely.

"The verdict is left to the discretion of the commander," the Tiger shouted. "Therefore, I pronounce it before you

all, to demonstrate the will and the resolve of our glorious revolution. We are not cowards. We do not tolerate them.

We despise traitors and deal with them severely. Conspirators. Worse than cockroaches. They merit no mercy. The

business of the people is life or death. We cannot delay. We cannot overlook such heinous acts against the people!"


Benjamín wept openly. The Tiger saw that fury fed his tears, not self-pity. Loosed, the boy would not run. The boy

would kill him with his bare hands.

So like him! He felt admiration and a little regret. The boy was a worthy fighter. In time, he would be a real

asset. But he loved his sister. Perhaps these feelings could be harnessed to something greater, just as his own had been.

He had loved once. Then he turned his love to the people and the great cause they were winning, the people's revolution.

How noble was this sacrifice! It almost brought tears to his own eyes. He pinched the bridge of his nose, to compose

himself.

Perhaps he should spare the boy, as a gesture. He, too, had been a boy once. Who had made his mistakes.

But how could he? The boy was dangerous. As he had been.

The Tiger remembered now. The boy and girl were twins. Three months earlier, they had been struggling with an

old bicycle laden with palm fronds when he and Osvaldo and the security detail approached in the Land Cruiser. They

needed a guide, so invited the children to come with them and point out the narrowest spot in the road. The army

would pass soon, part of an annual spring offensive. He wanted to be prepared.

The children were eager. His men loaded the bicycle and palm fronds on the roof of the Land Cruiser. The boy

sat in front, between him and the driver, to guide. The girl, bright-eyed and shyly smiling, sat in back. Several times,

his eyes met hers in the rear-view mirror. With a little encouragement, he could recruit them both, he knew.

The boy boasted, as boys do, of his skill with a rifle. They lived with their mother, a widow. Someday, he said, he

would be a soldier.

"And you?" the Tiger asked, as his eyes found the girl's.

She blushed.


"Don't listen to her," the boy said dismissively. "She wants to be on television or maybe sing. Her head is full of

nonsense."

They found their spot, then ate at the next village. As the Tiger sat down to beans and fried plantains, the girl

ran to a store to buy beer. Her legs were long and brown. Like a colt's, he remembered thinking. Someday, she would

steal hearts.

The Tiger offered to send money to their mother if the twins agreed to join the revolution. Their lives would be

filled with hardship and danger, he warned. But they would be working for the good of the people. They would be

heroes.

The boy's reaction was immediate. His sister hesitated. "My mother will miss us," she said.

"We'll rot if we stay at home," he answered hotly. "There's nothing for us there. She'll understand. Besides, we

would be doing something good. She will be proud."

Was she? Of course, he had never sent the money. He never did. But how were they to know? Contact between

families was forbidden. As the Tiger examined the boy's eyes, a picture formed: flames and collapsed walls and the

dust of pulverized glass. A great victory. But one that had cost him dear.

The Tiger handed the girl his pistol. "Shoot him," he said.

She looked up.

"Shoot him," he repeated, more gently. "That's an order. Or Osvaldo will shoot you."

For the first time, the Tiger touched her. He placed the back of his hand against her cheek. Soft as a lamb.

Then the Tiger stepped back. Osvaldo pressed the muzzle of his pistol to the girl's temple.

"Shoot him," the Tiger repeated.


Comrade Alejandra closed her eyes.

Now, thought the Tiger. She is mine forever.


Chapter One

Rome, Italy

Samuel Moreno woke without prompting. His room faced east, as he had requested, and

overlooked the Borghese Gardens. Before retiring, he had opened the heavy curtains closed by the

maid, so that the sun would reach him in his bed. Without its warmth, he knew he would wake late

and out of sorts, as if a cold were lurking behind his cheekbones.

He turned on the BBC news channel and did the exercises Siv had chosen for him, part yoga,

part Pilates, part old man puffing and creaking as he got the world's tidings. It was the same dose

everywhere. Only details changed. The market goes up and down and down some more. There is

violence and speeches and girls on red carpets. Who could comprehend it all? Samuel tried to make

his breath deep and easy, just as Siv could. But as he did a bend from the waist, he found himself

holding his breath, as if guarding from a bad smell, then letting the breath out in ragged bursts.

There was rarely news from home. He did not wish for it. The news could only be bad.

Thirty minutes of exertion brought the relief of a shower and shave. By 9 am, Samuel had his

tie knotted, sports jacket buttoned, semi-brogues polished and double-knotted, a bag over his

shoulder, his cane in hand and a straw fedora cocked on his head. From beneath the brim, his hair

feathered out white and thick and slightly too long. He was retired, after all. So often in the company

of balding men and a few balding women, he allowed himself a bit of vanity about his abundant,


glossy white hair.

Thus attired, Samuel strolled from the hotel to the café he favored, near the Spanish Steps. On

the way, he delighted in the music school he passed. At this early hour, the older students were in

choir, and the sweet notes spilled into the street like another harbinger of morning.

By now, the second week of his exile, the waiter at the café knew him and seated him next to the

electric heater. The waiter served Samuel without asking: a double espresso, a glass of water with no

ice, a cup of steamed milk and two pastries. On the white plate, their sugared crusts glistened with

oil. Dark beads of jam dangled at the punctures where they had been filled.

Normally, the jam was berry, though once Samuel had been surprised to bite in and discover

apple. The waiter had apologized. Samuel waved the words off. He was not angry, just set in his

ways. Waiters and desk clerks seemed to expect this of old people. They accommodated him. Some

parts of Samuel's day were vulnerable to chance, inevitably. His morning routine was not. He had

been forced to leave his country. Far from his wife and children, his bones ached with the dampness

of Rome. But he would not wake to a shrieking alarm, forsake his daily stretch or eat an apple

pastry.

Samuel sipped the water, then laid out the implements of his morning tasks. There was his

cellular telephone, a gift from his son, Marco. There was his pad of white, lined paper. In his pocket

were two packets of Splenda, taken from the box in his suitcase and meant for the espresso. Samuel

promised Siv that in Rome he would do his best to drop the few pounds she believed kept his

cholesterol high and slowed his walk. As a rule, he gave himself an hour for breakfast. At 10 am, he


had a phone date, every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, with Marco.

But for the espresso, it was the breakfast of a child. Siv – who kept her figure with swimming

and yoga and the denial of, in his opinion, most things worth eating – would have exchanged the

pastries for something whole grain or consisting entirely of fruit. In Bogotá, where Samuel ate eggs

seven days a week, Siv had instructed the cook to prepare for him a papaya or mango and for

herself bran, dried fruits and yogurt.

Samuel tried Siv's mixture once, to please her. The taste was woody and the texture like shavings.

Perhaps an ailing mare might benefit. But to Siv, he remarked only that his stomach could not digest

it, the result, he said, of a lifetime of eating his native cuisine.

Although Siv was convinced that she knew better than Samuel about most things, she did not

meddle with foibles, his or those of their children. As long as the foibles were not life threatening,

she opted for gentle advice. For instance, Siv would remark that there was little nutritional value in

the sugar, oil and white flour of the pastries and less still if he paired them only with the jolt of

caffeine in the espresso and Splenda, with who knew what long term effect on his tissues.

It is not the sustenance I crave, Samuel would reply, but the pleasure of that sip of cool water

followed by the searing espresso and the sugar-crusted bite of fried dough, still warm from the heat

lamps, and then the explosion of berry jam, all of the heat of summer and its sweetness in one bite.

I do not live on this, he would say, I live for it.

In Rome, Samuel could go from place to place without bodyguards or a bullet-proof car, which

tinted the world a tired, Picasso blue. Several times already, he had spent the morning without saying


a single word to anyone as he observed the behavior of the birds in the city's piazzas and parks.

With his Collins guide, he had identified wrens, nuthatches (Sitta europaea, he reminded himself),

starlings, blackcaps, Sardinian warblers and, once, as he rested against a boulder on the Appia Antica,

a pair of kestrels sat like carnivorous angels on a ruined wall.

Yet how could Samuel be happy? Each night, he examined the four photographs he kept in a

foldable leather frame next to the hotel bed. One photograph showed Marco and Claudia, his

children, when they were small and vacationing at the ranch. The administrator had brought two

ponies for them to ride. Claudia, soft-hearted, had named hers Princess (though both were male). A

more recent photo showed Marco standing in front of the ranch's essence distillery, his new

business venture. A third captured Claudia at her university graduation, in a black mortarboard and

gown and looking down and away, to some point that lay beyond the frame. Even in the gown, you

could see that she was too thin: bony wrists, a neck appearing too slender for her head. All in the

past, he would think. Thank God.

The last photograph was of Siv at their wedding. She did not have a perfect face, as Siv herself

could readily point out. There was a bump on her nose from a childhood fall from a toboggan. A

half-moon scar curled at the outer boundary of her left eye, from a childhood dog bite. Age spots,

the color of coffee with milk, stained the opposite temple. Around Siv's eyes and mouth were lines

no surgeon could entirely erase.

And why should he try? Samuel found Siv as riveting as any painting in Rome's churches and

museums. Samuel was not a small man, but Siv was taller, her lips at precisely the height necessary to


kiss his forehead. When they first met at a reception given to celebrate the visit of President Arturo

Blondell to Washington, where Samuel served as Blondell's ambassador, he saw her from across the

room. She looked sleek as a heron, his love of birds from that moment intertwined with his

admiration for the woman who would become his wife.

He asked an aide for her name: Siv Svanquist. The name fit and was agreeably hard to

pronounce. Siv Svanquist, Siv Svanquist he said to himself. The sound was like waves on ice. Siv

Svanquist was a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, on leave from the United Nations

Department of Peace Keeping Operations, "Dipko," the aide added. He knew Samuel liked to learn

the vocabulary of diplomacy and speak it like an insider. Ms. Svanquist specialized in conflict

resolution, the aide said.

A disorderly issue for such an ordered-looking person, Samuel thought. Siv Svanquist, the aide

continued in Samuel's ear, was the lover of a freshman senator who had dazzled Washington with

his movie star looks. The senator was considering a run for president. But the city's leading

hostesses agreed that Siv was not an appropriate choice for future first lady. She was European,

principally. She was Swedish, unhelpfully, and divorced from a black man. "Ghanaian," the aide said

apologetically, "and now the Finance Minister. But still. You know these Americans."

She was not religious, another strike against her. And, the aide finished matter-of-factly, she was

old. She looked mid-forties, but was likely past fifty. "Good bone structure. Healthy. But focus

groups prefer a political couple with children," the aide said. Decidedly plural. No singletons, too

easily dismissed as bred for political advantage. For the average, undecided voter, two or more


naturals – no bastards, no steps and no late-in-life Third World adoptees -- insured that politicians

had a check on their ambitions, some link to the voters' world of obligation and disappointment.

The senator could still marry a staffer and get her pregnant before the Iowa caucuses, the aide

finished.

Samuel found himself disliking the senator intensely. Pilar, Blondell's wife, insisted he be invited.

Apparently, the senator dated actresses. The reception, Pilar said to Samuel, needed pizzazz, though

her accent made it sound like piss-ass. "It wouldn't hurt for you to bring someone to the state

dinner," Pilar said to him, offering the name of an actress from a Mexican soap opera he had never

heard of. The dinner was the culmination of Blondell's visit and his final attempt to seal a friendship

with the American president, known to respond generously to the world leaders he liked. The actress

would fly up, Pilar promised, and maybe even stay awhile.

"As tempting as that sounds," Samuel dryly responded, "I think I'll go alone."

The day of the state dinner, Samuel accompanied President Blondell to the National Press Club

(the room was packed) and meetings at the World Bank and International Development Bank

(Colombia paid its debt and was considered a model credit customer). On his way to the reception,

Samuel had quarreled with the White House protocol chief, who wanted to coordinate the evening

gown Pilar de Blondell planned to wear with the first lady's, to ensure what she described as a

"harmonious shot" for the next day's papers. What the woman really wanted was to get Pilar to

avoid a dress that displayed too generously the breasts that had been lifted and plumped during the

most recent Americas summit in Caracas. Americans liked cleavage in their movie stars, not their


first ladies.

Samuel would gladly negotiate a trade treaty or aid package or joint declaration, sufficiently

strapped down with "Whereases" and "Be it resolveds." But Pilar de Blondell was decisively beyond

his political skills. Of course, he did not say this to the protocol chief. Instead, he feigned a poor

connection. Afterwards, his secretary ordered a placatory bouquet and selection of Colombian

coffees to be delivered to her office the day Blondell returned home.

"Is there a vote?" Samuel asked his aide, since the senator had not yet appeared at the reception.

What he really wanted to know was if the senator and Siv were still together.

The aide shrugged. The senator had a talent for grand entrances. Probably, he would arrive just

before President Blondell, to extract maximum benefit from his presence at an international event

while investing the least amount of time. Samuel calculated that he had perhaps fifteen minutes to

make his way to Siv. Once Blondell arrived, Samuel would have to steer the president to key guests,

the appropriations committee chairman and the incoming SouthCom general, a jowly Marine

considered too slow for a truly important regional command, and the Washington Post editorial page

editor, who sipped wine as he scanned the room impatiently for guests worth his attention. Samuel's

job was to ensure that the volatile Colombian president and his wife avoided the guests the embassy

was obliged to invite, but were problems: the businessman rumored to invest in questionable arms

sales, the human rights nags, the professor-bores.

Siv's hair was boy-short, gray. Girlish freckles danced across her nose. Samuel shook her hand. It

arched like a feather. "I understand you have been working on the standby arrangements system," he


said. "This has been a topic of discussion in Colombia. Excuse me." He cleared his throat. "Samuel

Moreno. My pleasure."

Siv later confessed that she was surprised the ambassador knew her.

Samuel insisted. Had she felt something immediately? Was it love at first sight?

She was too practical to believe in such things. After all, she pointed out, she had seen him at

other functions and he had taken no notice of her.

"This cannot be," he protested, "perhaps I merely glimpsed your shadow. You were my love

from the first moment I really saw you."

She relented. As she later told him, the senator's charm had by then revealed itself as a veneer of

sociability over a whirling turbine of ambition. Samuel's evident infatuation charmed her. At the

reception, she allowed, perhaps there was something unusual. "Sincerity, I suppose. You seemed

eager as a boy."

Samuel invited Siv to a conference that the embassy was sponsoring, on what he could no longer

remember.

Unfortunately, she said, she would be in Brussels.

"How about lunch Friday?" Samuel blurted, having glimpsed the senator's arrival. President

Blondell would not be far behind. "Say yes," he said, too warmly.

Siv considered him. In her blue eyes, he saw that he was not handsome or dashing or dangerous.

Like no one she had ever been with before.

"Yes," she said.


Everyone moved toward the senator except Siv and Samuel. In the flash of sequins and

Champagne flutes and the photographers' lights, his life took an unforeseen and entirely splendid

direction.

#

After their first lunch, Samuel invited Siv to dinner, then dinner again, then a weekend at the

horse farm of a partner in the law firm that represented his country's interests in Washington. They

spent the morning riding on a private bridle trail.

At an overlook that opened onto a shallow valley daubed with orange and red leaves and strung

with the smoke of wood fires, they dismounted. Together, they unpacked the saddlebags prepared

for them by their host's chef: baguettes spread with goat cheese and stuffed with roast vegetables, an

orzo salad, pickled baby carrots and four finger-length éclairs. Siv spread the green- checked cloth

that served as their table while Samuel uncorked the wine, an Italian prosecco he considered a bit

summery, but certainly refreshing. He poured into small crystal flutes that came in a velvet box.

Samuel told Siv that he had never planned to be a diplomat. His parents had a small coffee

farm. As the eldest boy, Samuel had been expected to study for a profession that would earn him

enough money to put his nine siblings through high school and set the girls up in a marriage and the

boys in a trade. The wisest choice was engineering, so he had become an engineer. But everything

changed when his wife, Blanca, died during their ninth year of marriage. She was pregnant with their

third child, a boy, who died with her. At the time, Samuel worked for her father's company, G.


López, S.A., one of the largest in Colombia.

As he talked, Samuel realized that he had never told anyone, even Blondell, so many private

details. Of course, Blondell had lived most of them with him. After Blanca's death, Blondell asked

Samuel to manage his campaign for the office of mayor. It was Arturo's way, Samuel told Siv, of

distracting him from grief.

Blondell's backers had protested. They saw in the gesture an admirable, but misguided attempt

to help a friend who was a political novice. To everyone's surprise, Samuel had an aptitude for the

work. The skills he had honed in construction paired with his natural calm translated well to the

back door dealings of a campaign. Once Blondell won the mayor's office, Samuel felt as if he had

built a bridge or a dam, something to serve millions and improve their lives. In other words, he

believed in Arturo, he told Siv. Blondell was good for Colombia. "Then Blondell ran again, this time

for governor. Well, we won. That very evening, Arturo told me of his plans for the presidency. I

doubted him! But it was all he ever wanted."

"And you?" Siv asked.

"Well!" No one had ever asked him that question. So bold! Instead of talking over his stunned

silence, she waited for his answer. To serve was a great honor, a prize, the culmination of a life, he

thought. But of course, this was no reply. He felt his cheeks redden. He settled the half-empty flute

on the grass and it tipped, spilling the wine. "I tell you, it seemed as if I had no choice. Blanca's

death, my children. Really, Arturo saved my life. I was grateful. What would have become of me?

There have been rewards – you know, the travel, accomplishing something, living abroad. But I have


wondered what I would have become if things had gone differently. If we had never tried for

another child."

"Perhaps we would never have met," said Siv. She took his hand.

Samuel touched her cheek. "I have not been this happy in a very long time."

His reward for helping Blondell win the presidency was the Washington embassy. There, he had

a large and capable staff, with schedulers and advisers and bodyguards and drivers and secretaries

and protocol specialists. "Perhaps I am too old," he confessed. "But I am tired. All the scheming and

the crisis, the hubbub. Sometimes, I will have my driver take me to the river where I walk and think.

Not great thoughts, please! Just everyday thoughts about my life, my children. I think about birds,

about the seasons. And whether my season has passed. Whether I should make way for the next

generation."

He stroked Siv's hand as he talked, but could not look her in the eye. Perhaps he had followed

too blindly the aspirations of others. "I am talking too much. So how did a person such as yourself

come to tackle the world's ills?"

Behind them, the horses pulled at grass. Siv told him that her mother was a nurse who worked

with the underground during the war. Once, she smuggled a wounded British spy to safety by

driving him, beneath the floorboards of a school bus, to a small fishing village near Helsingborg,

where he could be rowed to an American submarine. Her father, son of a fisherman, did the rowing.

"So romantic!" Samuel said. "They married?"

"Briefly. My father became a diplomat. My mother hated convention. I guess she was never


happier than during the war. The life of a Swedish trade representative didn't suit. While my father

was posted in Malaysia, she left him for a French rubber merchant. I was in boarding school by then.

My father called us citizens of the air. When he died, I had to ask his new wife where he wanted to

be buried. I should have guessed. She scattered his ashes off Gotland, where he had a summer

house."

The United Nations hired Siv straight out of Oxford as a management specialist. She found her

calling organizing relief shipments. Her travels sounded like a modern version of Dante's Inferno:

Cambodia, Honduras, Iraq. At Brookings, she was writing a manual for relief specialists. The idea

was to try and foresee what kinds of crises would face the international community in twenty years.

"By that time, the manual and I will be thoroughly obsolete," Siv said.

"You have some of your mother's adventurous spirit. As well as, I imagine, your father's call to

serve."

"Do you suppose such things are genetic? Sometimes, I wonder if everything can be explained

by proteins." Siv passed him an éclair. "But I think of myself more as a creature of circumstance. I

met my husband, Matthew, in the peacekeeping office. And so my work gravitated to more than just

emergencies. Emergencies in the midst of war. Trying to fix dinner while everyone is throwing

plates. That's how I explained it to my son, John, when he was small. John is also a citizen of the air,

though he flies from concert to concert. A drummer," Siv said wryly, "not a professional

humanitarian like his mum."

That evening, their hosts gave a cocktail party and dinner in their honor. By eleven, Samuel was


paying for the riding with throbbing knees and a sharp twinge in his lower back that threatened to

leave him prone for days. Excusing himself, he retired to his room and Vicodin and the heating pad

in his roll away. This is age, he thought to himself. Thinking with such eagerness about a pain pill

and silence, the feel of the heating pad's flannel cover against his aching disks.

After he swallowed his dose and positioned the pad, Samuel waited for the pain to ebb. His

thoughts were of Siv. Since Blanca's death, he had been with women. He enjoyed the company of

women, more than the company of men. Women held his eyes, they saw things that escaped him,

they rarely blustered. In politics, the definition of maleness was bluster, he had come to learn.

But no one had moved him like Siv. He could feel her hand in his. And he felt dizzy with

longing.

Then the door opened: Siv, her lean thighs and waist illuminated by the hall light behind her and

visible through her nightgown. She reached the bed and kissed him. She tasted of the cognac from

their evening digestif and something else, a late fall flower. He kissed the curve of her breast. With

his lips, he found a hollow at her breast bone, and she trembled. Samuel had never felt so alive.

When he entered her, he felt the wetness of her pleasure and lost himself. No words, only caresses.

After she returned to her room, he wondered if she had been there at all. Of course she had -- her

smell clung to his skin.

For his birthday, they spent a weekend in New York City. For Christmas, they booked a suite at

the Hotel Eden. That was the first time Samuel has awakened to a weak sun over the Borghese

Gardens, birds trilling in the top branches of the trees. Over coffee and pastries – and Siv's healthy


cereal – he proposed.

"You've given me new life," he said to her without preamble, "and I cannot go back to the way I

was before I knew you. I can't bear another day without you."

Siv agreed, on one condition. She would live with him anywhere he liked as long as she could

come and go as her duties demanded. Though Samuel often thought about retiring, she had many

years to go. Perhaps she would never retire, she said. "There is nothing else I want to do," she told

him, "professionally, at least. No guilt, Samuel, no second thoughts. As long as we understand each

other, I would be thrilled to be your wife."

"I'll agree to that condition, and what's more, I'll say this," said Samuel. "We can live in the

desert, if you want. We can live in the shadow of the U.N. in New York or in a refugee camp. Only

be my wife. That's all I ask."

In the end, the sky was their choice: a penthouse in Bogotá and Siv's Upper East Side condo, on

the eighth floor. A family of red-tailed hawks nested in a specially-built nest one floor above, and

over breakfast they often watched the parents come and go with food for their young. Siv owned her

father's cabin on Gotland, but that was much too isolated for a permanent home. Nevertheless,

Samuel made her promise to take him there some day and show him where she had spent her

summers as a child. There, he would work on his life list of birds and even learn a little bit of

Swedish. With her, he felt in charge of his life, perhaps for the first time. No longer the passenger

of obligation, he chose his direction. And it was at her side.

For the wedding in Bogotá, Pilar de Blondell filled a Club Country ballroom with cream-colored


roses. She insisted on a Champagne selected by her sommelier, to be served in flutes with emerald

stems and the presidential seal. Siv's wedding dress, a pale pink cashmere jacket over a matching

floor-length silk skirt, was considered the fashion high point of the year's social events. Together,

they chose their rings. Hers was a band of platinum mounted with a green emerald encircled by

diamonds. His was a thicker band, with emeralds and diamonds laid like a miraculous pathway to

happiness. The cold north matched to a stone extracted from his native mountains, enhanced by the

African diamonds that to him symbolized Siv's work and her northern ancestry and his thrill at

having her, at winning her, the treasure that was a second chance at life.

There were surprises. Until they prepared the invitation list, he had not known that Siv's mother,

the nurse, was also a countess. Siv was allergic to oil of bergamot, contained in citrus fruits, so could

not drink the cocktails served at the wedding brunch. She was indifferent to pets. She preferred

Chardonnay over Cabernet and cool jazz over classical. She loved grape lollipops. She kept them in

the inner zip pocket of her briefcase, for when she was alone.

Samuel had his own surprises. He was an accomplished dancer, chef and backgammon player.

He loved dogs, but loved her more; there would be no pets in their new life. He disliked sports, but

cultivated a knowledge of soccer and bicycling, so that he could converse with his colleagues over

cigars or on the golf course, a game he loathed but played, for much the same reason. When alone,

he often sang, in a reedy, though tuneful voice. He had a sharp memory for lyrics, but only up to the

1970s. He loved children, but feared them, a little. They were too frail, in his opinion, and had an

altogether unreasonable power to cause happiness or great sadness, at times in quick succession. As


a lover, Samuel was generous and playful, as much committed to her pleasure as his own. Early on,

they established an easy compatibility in bed. Gone were the insecurities, the silences and vanities

and the resentments that bedevil young lovers. Samuel studied her and learned; she was not perfect,

but was perfectly herself. He loved every angle and dip. To her, his body was solid and joyful, and

responded readily to her lips and hands and tongue.

On all things having to do with the wedding itself, they came to speedy agreement. The wedding

itself was performed by the judge who chaired the Constitutional Court. Only their children, the

Blondells and Patricia, Blanca's sister, attended. Instead of a wedding dinner at the Museo Nacional,

as Pilar had urged, Siv chose an afternoon reception to follow the ceremony, with her son's jazz

band playing on the Club Country's broad lawn. That day, not a single cloud threatened the

festivities, unusual for that time of year.

President Blondell offered the first toast. "You may have imagined," he said, "that the reason for

my last state visit to Washington had to do with important and highly secret matters of state and not

the love life of my dear friend. But Samuel Moreno is a man who has earned his happiness."

The Swedes mixed merrily with the Colombians. The assembled diplomatic corps, in saris and

African head dresses and shalmar kameezes, gave the festivities the air of an international summit

on some happy theme, like the end of poverty or universal literacy. John, Siv's son, even convinced

Samuel's shy daughter to dance. From their table, Samuel and Siv, holding hands, watched his

dreadlocks bounce as Claudia blushed and laughed and pushed up the bridge of her glasses to better

see him do a twist. The reception was featured in ¡Hola! magazine. A columnist later referred to it as


a high point of Blondell's term, when a bit of the world's glamour lent a glow to a country too often

written off as violent and corrupt. In the photographs, the people looked happy, full of hope. There

was life beyond the day's cruel headlines, the spread seemed to suggest. His was a life anyone might

be pleased to call their own.

#

For Blondell, the honeymoon did not last. Within a month, a rebel offensive in the south

dominated the headlines. A reporter discovered that an army unit deployed as part of the

counteroffensive carried spoiled food and guns that jammed in the heat. Half of the soldiers died of

food poisoning and the other half became the rebels' prisoners. The general in charge of

procurement had, it turned out, spent Blondell's special war tax on whiskey tastings and strippers.

The scandal spread when the general confessed to hiring his mistress's twin brother, a known drug

trafficker, to provide the ready-to-eat meals. The meals were expired lots sold on the black market.

The brother was found to have invested the war tax in a new fleet of minisubmarines that ran

cocaine into the United States.

And then September 11 arrived, that secret locomotive that knocked them all flat. Of course,

there was no jihad in Colombia. The country faced the same scourges on September 12 as they had

on September 10: poverty, drugs, inequality. Colin Powell, scheduled to arrive in Bogotá that day,

instead flew home. Many of Blondell's hopes and Samuel's with them evaporated in Powell's jet trail:

a more balanced relationship, investment in free trade, some perspective on the drug war. The great

eye that was Washington and its coterie of media blinked , then focused elsewhere. Samuel could


almost feel the ground heave as the great beast of a fresh war hatched beneath the concrete and

grass of Dupont Circle.

This world was no longer his to shape. The world had bested him. In defeat, what he wanted

was Siv. Perhaps he could have peace and someday grandchildren, too. And his birds, They never

failed to cheer him. He wrote his resignation in long hand. Personally, he tucked the envelope,

addressed to "Arturo, Palacio Nariño," into the diplomatic bag.

For his old friend, the worst was yet to come. His son, born the same month as Marco, was

arrested aboard a yacht that ran aground on a popular beach near Barranquilla. A hotel waiter

reported the cruiser as it lolled just shy of the outdoor dance floor, built on pilings over the surf.

Below deck, police found empty vodka bottles rolling around the bodies of men sleeping in each

other's arms. And boys, recruited from town. One of the men was Eduardo Blondell. Pale and

chubby, at twenty-eight already balding, Eduardo left the local police station in an explosion of

television lights. Several frames made the lead story of ¡Hola!: Eduardo hunched and with one shirt

tail loose as he walked barefoot from the police station; Eduardo boarding a black sedan, his

presidential bodyguards waving the cameras away, yet with smirks on their faces; Eduardo, puffy-

faced, being rushed into the VIP area at the airport, before boarding a Miami flight.

Perhaps only Samuel noticed the timing. The story about Eduardo was published six months to

the day after Samuel's wedding to Siv. As Samuel later learned, Eduardo took a taxi from the Miami

airport to the penthouse he shared with his wife and two children, shut the still-packed roll-away in

the closet, then leapt twenty stories to his death.


For three days, Blondell refused to leave his private office. The Venezuelan Defense Minister, in

Bogotá for a meeting to calm perennial border tensions, left the presidential palace in a fury after

waiting an hour for the president to emerge, as previously arranged, to hold a joint press conference.

Though the Defense Minister was a known hot-head who had once punched a palace protocol aide,

the incident threatened to tarnish Blondell's legacy and boil into a skirmish between the two armies,

with who knew how many casualties. With Eduardo's funeral scheduled, Pilar asked Samuel to come

to Bogotá and get her husband moving again.

Samuel borrowed a jet from G. López, S.A. He flew from Washington at the suitably secret hour

of 3 am. In the palace, he kissed Pilar. She was dry-eyed. Eduardo was her stepson.

"This is no time for hysterics." Pilar wore a sequined red dress with a low neckline. Her new

breasts preceded her like jellied desserts. She smelled of cigarettes and make up. "He needs to call

Caracas. He needs to prepare for the summit, for God's sake. Sam, he needs to get up and be a man

or Fernández will be eating his balls for breakfast!"

Fernández was a popular governor running for president against Blondell's hand-picked

successor.

In Arturo's private office, cigar smoke lay in thick coils on the desk. A case displayed the antique

wind-up toys that Arturo had started collecting as a teenager. The jewel was a merry-go-round that

lit up and played Bavarian waltzes. Samuel had seen Blondell, in the midst of the chaos of his

political campaigns, wind the merry-go-round and stare as the fantastical giraffes and elephants and

zebras orbiting the central axis, sprockets silent on a skin of machine oil.


"Old friend." Samuel sat heavily. He did not have a single word prepared beyond their usual

greeting. Samuel heard, faintly, car horns from beyond the palace gates.

"Maricón," said Blondell, as if spitting a seed. The lines in his face looked chiseled from stone.

"Faggot."

"Arturo. You are not yourself."

Blondell peered at Samuel through the smoke. "My son was a filthy faggot."

"Eduardo was a good boy."

"Don't ever say that name to me again."

Blondell crushed his cigar on the desk top. Without another word, he walked out.

At the Roman café, Samuel doodled on a napkin as he recalled his wedding day. It had been a

wonderful ceremony, a wonderful reception and a wonderful honeymoon. Siv took to Colombia

with an openness that left him surprised and relieved. When she pronounced herself charmed, he

laughed out loud.

Was that his mistake, to display so openly his happiness? Before his marriage to Siv, he had been

a public figure, of course, known for his closeness to Blondell. But his private life had never been so

on display. As he sipped espresso, Samuel wondered if it would have been wiser to marry in

Stockholm or Washington. Then the reception would have merited perhaps a line in the "Diplomatic

Dispatches" column in the Washington Post. A mention in the International Herald Tribune, which only

his fellow "citizens of the air" read. Not ¡Hola! Not the lead story on the night's news and a special

report during a Sunday variety show and full spreads in the newspapers, not just the serious ones,


but the ones whose every day headline was a naked woman. Not articles read by every bored

teenaged girl and scruff-bearded would-be terrorist south of the Panama Canal.

In the photos, Siv looked elegant and serene and he looked like a man who had just realized his

most cherished dream. The U.S. Ambassador and her husband attended along with the chief

executive officer of the country's largest soft drink company (Samuel's cousin by marriage to

Blanca), a former Miss Colombia, several soap opera actors (Marco's friends), political leaders and

the publisher and editor-in-chief of the country's most influential newspaper.

His wedding to Siv, not his role as ambassador, made him a figure of new interest in Colombia,

he was sure of it. After Samuel retired, he resumed his duties as CEO of G. López, S.A., the firm

founded by Blanca's father. He put Marco in charge of the family ranch. Marco began test-

marketing extracts taken from certain trees native to the plains, for beauty products. One he

marketed to perfumers as "Siv," a citrus-like extract that did not contain oil of bergamot. Marco

switched the cattle to grass feed and imported Canadian semen that produced a variety of lean beef

prized by fine restaurants. The plan was, within five years, for Samuel to retire fully and for Marco to

assume control of the firm.

Then the letter arrived.

That day, Evelia, Samuel's secretary, knocked on his office door. Samuel worked on the top floor

of the Banco Litoral, the jewel of G. López, S.A. At that moment, a thunderstorm was receding to

the west. Lightning bolts flashed against a black curtain of rain. At his feet, the city looked washed

and people crowded the streets. A red-tailed hawk flew near enough for Samuel to make out


something clutched in its talons: a grey pigeon.

Evelia handed him an express delivery marked "Personal."

The letter read:

SAMUEL ELÍAS MORENO CAMPO:

It is our desire that this communication finds you well. We address you on behalf of the 53rd Front of the People's Army. In 2002 the People's Army implemented Law 002, which requires all Colombians with assets over U.S. $1 million to pay a TAX FOR PEACE. The war that the government is waging on the people is the cause of this demand. That war is paid for by multinational corporations and Yankee imperialism. Therefore, we must have money in order to guarantee the objectives of the New Colombia. You will be contacted by our representative who will give instructions on how to deliver this TAX FOR PEACE. Any attempt to contact the authorities will result in a RETENTION and an increase in the TAX FOR PEACE. Do not think of leaving Colombia. We know where your family is.

With respect,

Comandante Tigre, 53rd front, People's Army"With Bolívar, for peace and national sovereignty"Mountains of Colombia

"Díos mío," said Samuel, sinking to a chair. "Call Franco, my dear."

The Tiger was the rebel commander who ruled the heights above the capital. He specialized in

kidnapping and extracting fat ransoms from the families of his hostages, used to buy what the rebels

needed to wage war. Immediately, Samuel's thoughts leapt to the press coverage of his marriage. He

had made a spectacle of himself. He had preened. Siv was as luminous as an angel. Now, they

wanted to make him pay.


Franco arrived. The head of security, he was a retired army colonel with a square, deeply lined

face pinned in place by a rectangular mustache. The mustache shape was unfortunate, Hitlerian, but

unavoidable. During one fight with the rebels, Franco had been splashed with flaming propane from

a homemade bomb. Hair no longer grew on his face except where a broken chin strap from his

helmet had shielded his upper lip.

After reading the letter, Franco asked for authorization to bring in four new people – a woman,

Delia, to accompany Siv, two additional bodyguards for Samuel and Danilo, a new driver for

Samuel's car. Danilo was an expert in defensive driving and had once worked for Exxon's Colombia

office.

"If we must," Samuel said.

"That is just for today," Franco replied. "By tomorrow, I will have a more complete plan."

"What more can we do?"

"Comandante Tigre does not make idle threats. He took Julia Rivera, whose father owns

Postobón beverage company. That cost $2 million, I heard. He took Senator Loiaza, may he rest in

peace. Prevention is our best strategy."

"I'm not paying the son of a whore," said Samuel. "They'll just come back again, to get more."

"Correct. Then we must have a plan."

As ambassador, Samuel had given dozens of speeches about how Blondell's government was

defeating the rebels. Although the pain of the families of hostages grieved him, he would say, there

could be no ransoms paid to criminals. Only by working together, as Colombians, could they end


this scourge, he would conclude (to great applause, generally).

What he said was hypocritical, but unavoidable. Once rebels took a hostage, people paid.

Everyone knew this.

"Cock suckers," Samuel muttered. For once, his life had been his own. No criminal would rob

that from him.

Marco agreed to curtail his trips to the ranch. Claudia had just started working for the U.N.

World Food Program in Sierra Leone and was therefore beyond the Tiger's grasp. Siv agreed to a

bodyguard. But Samuel saw that this development frightened her.

"This is temporary," he told her, "a precaution."

Franco, who had come with Delia, did not correct him.

At first, Franco's plan seemed to work. There was no unusual activity around the apartment or at

Samuel's office. Marco made a single, well-protected visit to the ranch, to fire an administrator who

was stealing calves. Marco already knew who he would bring in as a replacement: Abram, the son of

the former ranch administrator and the boy Marco had always played with when Samuel brought his

children there in the summers. At the apartment, Siv wrote the relief manual. In the evenings, she

and Samuel dined at home and read, mercifully free of the social engagements that once dominated

their schedules. The isolation was not a burden; solitude drew them closer. They were happy.

Samuel teased that it took a calamity like a kidnapping threat to get her to travel less. This was

the closest he ever came to violating the agreement not to pressure her to curtail her trips and spend

more time at home.


"Don't make light," Siv said. She was looking at the police car now permanently parked at the

corner of their cul-de-sac. The cul-de-sac had been a safety feature touted by their real estate broker,

but Siv had never imagined that it was a serious consideration.

Her Chardonnay sat untouched on the drinks cart. "My darling." From behind, Samuel kissed

the nape of her neck. "This cannot last."

#

Once a month, Samuel spoke on the telephone with his daughter. He told her nothing of the

threat or Franco's plan. What would be the point? Their conversations were difficult enough, with

silences and descriptions of the weather. She arrived during the harmattan, she told him, which blew

African dust as far west as Brazil. She was fine, she told him. Work was fine.

In her tone, he searched for evidence of illness. Several months after September 11, Claudia

suffered a breakdown while studying in New York. The city was in shock, of course. Also, she may

have felt abandoned by Marco, who was preoccupied by business affairs. Samuel had his new wife.

A week after Claudia stopped answering the telephone, Samuel asked Siv to join him to go see

his daughter.

At LaGuardia, a blackened rind of snow along the freeway was all that remained of a blizzard.

In the taxi, Samuel tried to picture his daughter amid a pile of papers and books in her kitchen, too

busy to answer the telephone. Or out of town with a lover. Or house-sitting for a friend. Marco had

his mother's looks, and Claudia her passions, which could drive her into black moods. How curious,

thus portioning out of traits, like slices of pie! Her lips were her grandfather's, old López himself.


On him, his lips, full and deeply bowed, became symbols of great appetite, for meat and rum and

fruits just at the point of ripeness. But the same shape on Claudia worked differently. Bitten and pale

lips meant inner strife. Red meant joy. She knew this, so used lipstick not to accentuate her mouth,

but to mask it, concealing her true feelings.

A student let them into her building. The halls reeked of old laundry and disinfectant and tortilla

chips. Claudia lived on the 15th floor.

There was no answer when Samuel knocked. He tried again and again, then did not pause. A boy

with uncombed hair peered out of the apartment next door. "She won't come out," he said sleepily.

Music thumped from his apartment. "I have the manager's number, if you want. He's a cripple. He's

usually home."

The building manager limped toward them with a ring of keys jangling on his belt. Samuel

recognized the accent: Belfast. The manager's face had been burned so badly that he no longer had a

nose or ears. "Normally," he said, "I would need authorization. But the lads have been talking. No

one has seen the lady for a week."

Inside, the rooms had a stale, stifled smell. Indian-print bed covers were stapled over the

windows. The rooms were suffused with light filtered through their dyes: indigo, maroon and a deep,

hunter green. In the shadows, Samuel saw two folding chairs, a table and couch.

"¿Hija? Soy tu papá. Hija mía, ¿Dónde estás?" My daughter, where are you?

On the couch, a heap of what looked like laundry shifted. At least, that was Samuel's impression.

Like tendrils of a vine, Claudia's arms rose. Her forearms were scored by angry red lines, some


scabbed and others still moist with blood. Her eyes were hooded, her hair a dense, dull mat. And her

lips? Drained and cracked, like husks.

The building manager called 911.

The emergency room doctor reported that Claudia weighed ninety pounds. She was severely

dehydrated. And the cuts, Samuel asked. What disease could possible produce them?

The cuts she had made herself, the doctor answered. "Ritual cutting," he called it, like part of

some obscure religion. The ailment was found especially among young women. "Self-mutilation,

related to low self-esteem. Not unknown," he added, clicking his pen. The good news was that the

cuts were shallow and not infected. He prescribed an I.V. and a sedative. Later, she would see the

psychiatrist.

An attendant wheeled her gurney into a hallway to await a room upstairs.

Samuel encircled Claudia's head with one arm as she slept. He stroked her cheek. She had

plucked and shaved her face clean of hair, from her eyebrows and eyelashes to the beautiful bow of

her upper lip, almost white and with only the merest suggestion of color. She looked, in fact, like a

store mannequin, oddly beautiful and serene. Cold air pushed at the sheet that covered her

emaciated legs. They too were hairless, like sticks. Claudia shivered and moaned.

Siv laid her overcoat over Claudia's legs. There were purple scars on the insides of her thighs –

healed but still visible, like the lashes of a tiny whip.

Afterwards, when Claudia was well again, Samuel probed for an explanation. He got only a shake

of the head. She would not look him in the eye, but kissed his cheek and squeezed his hand. "It's


past," she said, "and over. Nothing to worry about, any more."

In matters of the heart, his daughter was a foreign country to him. Let her have her secrets, he

thought. Of course, he had his own.

#

Delia, the bodyguard Franco hired to protect Siv, reminded him a bit of Claudia. Like her, she

was petite, black-haired, not striking but pleasant to look at, someone you might notice at a party

and want to meet. Though Delia was clearly skilled, she also had a way about her, an ease, that

disguise her true function.

Samuel remarked on this to Franco. A casual observer might mistake Delia, who now

escorted Siv to and from the vehicles that had to take them everywhere, for a niece or devoted

student.

"Delia may seem like a girl," Franco said, "but she is the best on our team. As a police officer,

she brought in some of the most dangerous pistoleros in the south. One of her superiors was selling

them information. He set her up. She almost died. I met her in the rehabilitation center when I was

recovering. She'd been shot in the hip and needed a replacement, among other things. She can never

have children."

Delia was the first to notice small changes around the apartment building. A new fruit seller

seemed less interested in papayas than taking notes when Samuel's car came and went. The same taxi

driver cruised the street, never picking up a fare. A couple unknown to the doorman posed for

photographs at the apartment entrance, then walked on.


Franco hired two more guards. Increasingly, Samuel stayed at home, trusting Evelia to run things

at the office. Then came the evening when Samuel and Siv were to meet friends for dinner at the

Club Country. Three blocks from the apartment, a Ford Explorer cut in front of their Mercedes.

Then it stopped, blocking the street. As the Explorer's passenger doors opened, Danilo gunned the

Mercedes over a median strip. The vehicle shot into oncoming traffic. Car horns blared and two cars

hit each other as they veered, missing the Mercedes by centimeters. Danilo wrenched the steering

wheel, and the Mercedes sped into a side street.

While this was happening, Franco, in the passenger seat, pulled the shotgun from the mount,

cocked it and aimed at the Explorer. But there was no time to fire. When they reached the nearest

police station, Franco discovered a flattened bullet lodged in the shattered socket of the passenger

side mirror. None of them had even heard the shot.

That evening, Samuel, Siv and Franco spoke at the apartment. Siv was grim-faced.

"The options are these." Franco ticked them off on his fingers. "Increase the security detail

again, this time with outriders for yourself, your wife and Marco. You must also curtail your activities

and cancel travel outside the city or to locations other than the bank or the residence or the Club.

There can be no fixed schedule. There can be no public appearances. Two, leave the country. Of the

two options, only the second is guaranteed."

Samuel did not want to leave Colombia. Fleeing felt like cowardice or disloyalty, neither one, he

felt, vices of his. "And Marco?"

"He should leave, too. And of course, Mrs. Moreno," Franco added, meaning Siv.


"How long?"

Franco shook his head. "Truthfully, it may be a period without a defined end. That is, return will

be a matter of judgment, not certainty. We must lower your profile and lower that of your family.

Return is a matter of risk evaluation. When is the risk acceptable?"

The next day, Samuel, Siv and Marco met for an early lunch at the Club Country. Samuel and Siv

arrived in a new, bullet-proof Suburban lent by the American ambassador, with Franco again in the

passenger seat. Two bullet-proof Explorers preceded them and two pick up trucks carrying police in

full battle gear followed.

Marco drove his red Lexus LX470. He arrived without bodyguards.

Samuel was furious. Siv stayed at the table as he led his son to the outdoor patio. Black grills sat

shrouded in plastic to ward off the clinging mist. A security guard with a German Shepherd

patrolled among the eucalyptus trees that grew on the hillside shielding the club from the shanties

beyond. His son's resemblance to Blanca was striking. Her high cheekbones and green eyes rimmed

in black. The dark eyebrows and perfect nose, which took his face beyond handsome into stunning.

Her ease and confidence. Her arrogance.

Marco lit a cigarette.

"What do you mean by this?" Samuel said through clenched teeth. "How careless! If not for

yourself, then for your family. ¡Por dios! We spend a fortune on security. Must we also spend a fortune

giving these criminals money to rescue you?"

"Papá," Marco said, "please calm yourself. I gave the guards the day off, that's all. I drove from


the office to the club. It's the best-guarded road in Colombia. Nothing will happen."

"Are you mad? Do you not read the newspaper? Did you not hear what happened to me?"

Samuel could recite case by case how people had been snatched from cars, beauty salons, church.

They were pulled from their bodyguards – or carried over their dead bodies. They were taken from

their beds. As Samuel looked at his only son, so self-assured, he felt a wave of nausea.

"We must treat this as a business issue," Samuel said, willing himself to speak calmly. "This is an

issue we must resolve as partners. What is the best course? There are serious financial implications

that I expect you to recognize from a business point of view."

Suddenly, Samuel found himself regretting his wedding to Siv. Not the pledge, but the ceremony.

A slap in the face, a challenge. He steadied himself against a grill. Now, he was paying the price.

Marco agreed, again, to follow Franco's orders. He would go to Miami, stay in the company

apartment. They embraced. Yet Samuel knew that his son could not be trusted on this. He would

simply more carefully hide his risky behavior. Samuel realized that what he and Franco could do to

protect his son was limited. Ultimately, he had to trust in Marco's judgment. He had raised the boy

to be a man. Now, he would see what sort of man Marco had become.

"You have been working too hard," Siv said to Samuel when he and Marco joined her at the

table. "Why not make a return trip to Italy? Miami is too crowded this time of year. You talk about

Rome, but never make the time to go. This is providential. You could spend some time there,

perhaps drive to the ocean. You could start your memoirs."

Musicians played in the private dining area. The guitars filled Samuel with nostalgia. He did not


run from danger. Never! But there was his family to consider. Why not Italy? He could manage his

affairs long distance. Evelia did much of the day-to-day work, anyway. Marco was ready to move up.

As long as his family was safe, perhaps he should see this as an unexpected gift.

Siv had already accepted a spring residency at the Carter Center in Atlanta, where she would

complete the manual revisions. Then she would join him. Her aunt, the countess, had left her a

palazzo in Venice, which she wanted to sell. If they tired of Rome's heat, they could live there for a

time. Like so many writers before him, Samuel could find inspiration in the city's twisting

passageways, a metaphor for a full and well-spent life.

The approach was vintage Siv: to take something awful and examine it carefully, find what was

not so bad and then work it until the awful thing had been robbed of its curse. Samuel had a

different approach to adversity. He ignored it, until it was too late and had somehow changed his

life, for good or for ill. He preferred not to dwell at what was wrong but hope for the best. He relied

on fate; she drove it, like a sailboat set to the day's winds.

While waiting for Siv in Rome, he had plenty of time to mull their differences. He came to see

this as preparation, for the opening chapter of his memoirs. "A Colombian Education," he thought

of calling his book, or "A Colombian Abroad." Suitably literary, but not quite right. As he walked

the streets with his Collins guide, he tried to order his memories and think back on the decisions that

had shaped his life. The birds, with their foraging and clownish antics, created in him a kind of

peace. The central event in his life, at least as an adult, was clear: Blanca's death. He was left bereft,

with two small children. Like a wind, her death propelled him into politics. Or an earthquake? That


was more of a Colombian metaphor, since the shaking of the Andes was a frequent motor of

events. He would have to think more about metaphors. Patricia, Blanca's eldest sister, took charge of

the children, choosing their nannies and boarding schools. Perhaps a better way of describing this

period in his life was a storm, since it was large and had contrary, confusing winds. So much of what

had happened only came clear to him much later, revealed across a clearing horizon.

He made a note of these thoughts on his pad of paper: storm, winds, earthquake, clearing.

These were images that would help him connect with readers.

After making his scheduled call to Marco, Samuel planned to walk across the gardens to the Villa

Giulia and visit its Etruscan art collection. He was fascinated by the Etruscan aesthetic, those stark

faces, all planes and squares. They had none of the softness or tonality of the Renaissance. For

lunch, he was to meet the Costa Rican ambassador, Garrido, a friend.

Samuel finished the espresso, then pressed the key that automatically dialed Marco's apartment.

The answering machine picked up. Marco normally answered on the first ring. Samuel tried the cell

phone. There was a click, then a recorded voice. The customer was not available. Samuel redialed the

apartment. This time, he heard a whistling sound, as if the call had been launched into space. He

tried the cell phone again and left a message. Samuel stared at the telephone. Perhaps Marco was

sleeping in.

He signaled for the check.

Samuel took a long and pleasant stroll through the Borghese Gardens. He rested occasionally,

taking out the Collins guide and leafing through it, as if trying to identify the birds pecking the


stones before him. This was a ruse. The birds were common as dirt. But old men with books could

observe others without causing offense. Samuel watched courting couples and mothers with their

children and anxious tourists and office workers, telefonino pressed to their ears. When had these

devices become so necessary, Samuel wondered. Only old people and the smallest children seemed

to notice the birds, miracles of energy and persistence. Certainly, in his former life, he would never

have paused to examine them.

At the Etruscan museum, Samuel became so absorbed that he arrived late at Ferrara's for lunch.

Arriving, he saw Garrido's black sedan parked at the entrance.

"Morenito!" Despite the March chill, Garrido sat at a table in the back patio. Once handsome

and fit as a tennis player, he had softened with age, like a smudged portrait of himself. A lock of

black hair – dyed, though Garrido was still a youngish man – curled over his forehead. "I thought I

had lost you to the pleasures of this temptress city."

"Old bones," Samuel said. He knew Garrido from various summits and conferences,. He

considered him a protégé. "They move slowly. Garrido, how is the family?"

"Expensive." Garrido ordered a Scotch to replace the one he finished. Samuel ordered mineral

water.

Garrido had news. He was finishing his tour. Rather than return to San José, he was resigning

and planned to accept a job at a Washington lobbying firm. His wife and four girls were already

installed in Chevy Chase. "I can't afford public service, my friend. It's got me by the fucking balls.

Marlena's father," he said, lowering his voice, "had to lend me money for girls' tuition. He'll take his


payment in blood."

Samuel remembered Garrido's wife, Marlena, a plump woman who bore her husband's

infidelities without complaint. Garrido would not leave her; he couldn't afford it. The girls were

carbon copies of their mother: soft and plump as meringue cookies.

"So Washington! Tell me something. Did the gringos drive you mad?"

"There is much to admire there and much to fear," Samuel answered. "The problem is not so

much what they do, but when they choose to do nothing. They are a great baby, full of promise and

energy, but greedy and unaware of the harm they do. They shit where they shit. Someone else cleans

up. Getting them to listen, to pay attention. That will be your challenge."

Samuel ordered pasta tossed with squash flowers. Garrido sipped the Scotch.

"You are not eating?"

Garrido patted his belly. "No lactose, no gluten, no red meat. The cook makes broth."

With Johnny Walker? But Garrido was not his child. Samuel asked after mutual friends. They

spoke of the things that preoccupied the Latin diplomatic corps – trade talks, shifts at the

Organization of American States, a recent upheaval in the Mexican cabinet. Divorces and new

liaisons.

The waiter delivered Samuel's pasta.

"What do you know about Fausto?" Garrido asked.

Fausto had been a vice-minister of agriculture before Blondell sent him as ambassador to Italy.

The day Fausto presented his credentials, however, the Guardian published an article purportedly


linking his family to a massacre. The article asserted that Fausto's ranch administrator had hired

gunmen to force squatters from a family ranch. Several adults were beheaded, apparently a message

to the other squatters to flee before they suffered the same fate. A prosecutor filed charges, accusing

Fausto of paying the gunmen in cattle and cocaine. Then the prosecutor was murdered.

"Bad business," said Samuel, shaking his head. The squash blossoms were especially pleasing,

still firm and bright orange. "Blondell knew nothing."

"Of course. But is it true?"

"I prefer to let the justice system pronounce."

"¡Coño! It's me you're talking to! Is it true what they say? About the drugs?"

Garrido's face had a sickly sheen. Was that his third Scotch? During the exhumation at Fausto's

ranch, police discovered air strips apparently used to land planes that flew cocaine into the United

States. Fausto denied any knowledge, but Samuel knew that the Americans were upset.

Bad business! Samuel steered clear of such things. So many people he knew had dipped into this

poisoned well, thinking they would be the exceptions, they would elude the consequences. They took

precautions, or so they thought. At least, he could say with a clear conscience that he had never been

tempted. He kept his nose clean.

That was the way to put it to Garrido. "You have to keep your nose clean, Garrido. It's the best

advice I can give you."

"Coño," Garrido repeated, this time in a whisper. Cunt. His elbow bumped the poached pears

Samuel had ordered as dessert. The plate smashed to the red stones of the patio. Samuel glanced up


to see if others had noticed. But he and Garrido were alone.

The waiter cleaned up the mess. Alone again, Samuel grasped Garrido's shoulder. "Panchito,

what is the matter?" Garrido's faced was greenish. Sweat beaded between his brows. Samuel handed

him a napkin. "Hombre, are you unwell?"

"It's just that I have some interests. Some business. If the fucking gringos find out. Fucking

gringos!"

"Garrido, tell me you haven't made investments." That was the code, a share of a cocaine

shipment. Garrido couldn't have been that stupid, Samuel thought.

Garrido covered his face with his hands. "It was the money! The fucking private school, the

orthodontist, the riding lessons, the house at Mal País. Sidwell fucking Friends, Morenito! And then

there was Marlena's fucking by-pass."

"Her heart?"

Garrido wiggled his empty Scotch glass at the waiter. "The fat operation, where they staple your

stomach. She's a fucking cow, my friend. A $24,000 cow, that's the least of it. First, I was the

authorized sperm donor for the familia Azuleta, S. A. and now I'm a bloody cash machine."

"Garrido, you must take care."

Garrido shook his head. "Too late! Her father will have my balls for this."

"Her father? This could mean an American prison, my friend."

Tears slid down Garrido's cheeks, thick as oil. "Help me. You must make some calls. Find out

what they have. Fucking gringos! It will be my balls!"


"We must get you cleaned up."

"Promise, Morenito."

Samuel had no intention of making calls. If Garrido was involved, he had to pay the price.

Samuel could not risk his own reputation. After all, it was one of the most precious things a man

could leave his children.

"Listen, I have to go." This was a lie, but he wanted to get away from Garrido. He would have to

tell Evelia never to accept another appointment with the man. What if Interpol already had him

under surveillance? Samuel again scanned the patio. The winter chill had confined diners to the

restaurant's warm interior. But the windows were polarized. He could not see inside. Who watched

them?

Samuel called for the bill and an espresso for Garrido. "Your best bet is to approach them first,"

he said, putting on his hat.

"Impossible, Morenito. Think of the scandal. My girls." Samuel feared he would weep again, but

Garrido was dry-eyed. "The things we do for them! How is Marco, by the way?"

"Fine, busy." Samuel snapped his credit card on the bill tray without looking at the amount. A

quick exit was worth any overcharge.

"Thanks be to God." The waiter returned with the espresso. Garrido sipped it. Then he began to

nod, as if coming to some conclusion. "I saw him recently, you know. In Panama. He looked well."

"Panama?" Marco hadn't mentioned a trip.

Samuel stood. He embraced Garrido with a brisk pat on the back.


"My friend," said Garrido, "my apologies. I did not intend."

"Think no more on it," Samuel interrupted. "My best to Marlena."

They walked together to Garrido's car. The driver had the heater on high. A man's reputation

was more precious than diamonds, Samuel thought. That was also something he often said to Marco.

He softened a bit toward his friend. The man was in trouble, after all. In the morning, Samuel would

ask Evelia to set up a call with a friend at the Justice Department. The least he could do was tell

Garrido that they might be willing to cut a deal. And that would be the end of it, at least as far as

Samuel was concerned. As he waved at the receding tail lights, Samuel decided: I will wash my hands

of the man.

He hailed a taxi. Marco in Panama, how curious. Had Garrido meant to suggest something,

some business? He could not mean that Marco had also made investments. He had no need to. The

essence business was booming.

Just then, his telephone vibrated. Marco's number. Samuel would ask him about Panama.

But the voice was not his son's. "Ambassador, I saw your number on Mr. Moreno's telephone."

Franco, from Bogotá.

"Yes?"

"There has been a development. Marco is alive."

"What?"

"There was an incident." This was Franco's term for something that was no accident. "He was

returning home after a late dinner. He was in the Lexus. Alone. He chose not to use a driver. We


followed him."

"Dios mío."

"I saw them cut him off. The operation was well-planned. The street was narrow and he could

not turn. They had been waiting. Señor Moreno often took that route."

Routine, Franco had repeatedly told them, was lethal as a bomb. "Sir, I was able to intervene. But

Marco was hit."

"How badly?"

"Sir, he is through the worst. A bullet grazed his heart. Another broke his shoulder. He's pretty

scraped up. He lost a lot of blood, but we were able to get him to the clinic in time."

"Is he conscious?" Samuel heard a muffled sound as Franco lowered the telephone to his chest.

He spoke with someone. Then his voice became clear again.

"Sir, he is not conscious. They sedated him. The doctor says he is under observation while they

plan the next surgery."

"I will be on the next flight," said Samuel. "Evelia will let you know. Please meet me at the

airport."

"Sir, it is not wise."

"How many were there?"

"Five. Four men and a woman."

"A woman?"

"She was with him earlier. In the hotel."


"Dios mío." Samuel's thoughts raced. Claudia would insist on returning to Colombia to be with

Marco. Her presence would only whet the Tiger's appetite. The Tiger had made his move. Now

Samuel would make his. He had to protect his family. But how?

"Ambassador, I must repeat. It is not wise," Franco was saying.

"The decision is made. Were any caught?"

"We got two."

Siv would have to go to Claudia. He was asking a lot, but Siv would understand. Under no

circumstances was she to go to her brother. Only in that way could he keep her safe. "And the two?"

"A woman and one of the pistoleros. A boy by the looks of it."

"And?"

"Sir, the situation was resolved on the spot. There won't be any questions. Self-defense, returning

fire."

"Good," said Samuel savagely. Franco was a man he could trust.


Chapter Two

Freetown, Sierra Leone

Before anyone else arrived at the office, Teresa Turay wiped the night's dust from the desks and

chairs and books and bound reports and the fax machine and the plastic-shrouded printer and the

computer monitors and their keyboards. Since Advent, the harmattan had come twice. Filled with

Sahara sand and street grit, the winds closed the city under a lid the color of an old pan. When her

pastor told Teresa that men came from dust and to dust would return, she wanted to shout, "We are

dust, we women. Picking up after you, laboring to keep you fed and clean! Arranging for you and

doing for you."

She didn't, of course. Speaking that way in a house of worship was unseemly, even if she spoke

God's truth. Teresa prayed as hard as anyone. When the time came to sing, she did not hold back.

She clapped and danced, loving God. At these moments, letting her body and voice loose on the

world, she felt closest to Him.

How she longed for the rains! Teresa measured out coffee. Claudia liked a cup first thing in the

morning. Claudia Moreno was Teresa's fifth office director, sent by New York to administer feeding

programs. The directors tended to be young, idealistic, full of energy. At first, at least. It was as if

they had never realized before the breadth of the world's misery. Or evil's grasp. Idealism is the

locomotive that drags behind it outrage, then frustration (at the powerful, at the immensity, at their


supervisors and underlings and finally at the very people needing help), then despair and finally

detachment, the soothing caboose. Some left international work, others sent fresh recruits to fill

their old jobs in the field. Their idealism was ash, the sauce-specked dregs of the fire. How could she

explain it? They thought the world should be made for them, for their ease. Eventually, they turned

petulant as toddlers and anxious for home.

"Titi," she whispered as she filled the carafe with purified water. This was her nickname, thought

up by her father when she was small. A scrap of hair and skin and bone, her aunt told her, weak as a

chick. Titi, the sound a ground thrush makes tidying its nest. Today, she was bitter as yesterday's

brew. The office director before Claudia, Michel, arrived bursting with energy and ideas, a great

locomotive of plans and promises. He had a long, angular face and grey hair. When he looked at her,

she felt like a secret garden of delights. He had not come to Sierra Leone for lamentations, but to

grab up the world's choice offerings. So what if they came sunk in the stink and the muck of

Teresa's country? Food tasted better, the water was sweeter, the air perfumed. Or so Michel said as

he seduced her.

All of what he seemed to want lay within her skin. He called himself a treasure-hunter, a

connoisseur of pleasure. When he kissed her, she tingled to her fingertips. She was fascinated by

them together, his pale, freckled skin against her sleek blackness. Teresa kept her hair in long, thin

braids glossed with spray. She would put one body part next to him as he slept – a knee beside his

leg, a finger on his shoulder, one braid coiled on his white belly, roast plums on a butter crust. When

they made love, Michel would not release her eyes. She wondered if he believed that with his gaze he


could grasp the pearl of her soul, then take it for himself. No, her soul had not been so hard then.

With him, her soul had been soft as a rose, a fragrant black rose, rarest of the rare. Teresa would

urge him deeper, where she felt her own pleasure rising. Against her thighs, his sweat glistened as if

the very color of his skin rubbed off.

He said that sweat made her look like a marble statue. Venus, he called her. Goddess.

"Hmph." As the coffee brewed, Teresa allowed herself a shrug. She was a goddess, perhaps, but

one with a low opinion of men. By the time Michel told her he was leaving Freetown for New York,

she no longer slept with him. Even during their affair, Teresa had no illusions. She could not leave

her home. Michel would not stay. What she had first admired in him, his hunger for pleasure, was in

the end poison between them. Now, Michel was a voice and a face she occasionally heard on the

telephone or saw on the television or heard on the radio. He was an adventurer, her Aunt Princess

said. A pursuer of untasted fruits. The he tossed the rinds.

Even as Teresa felt her irritation with Michel rise on its track, like one of the ski lifts she had

once glimpsed on holiday, she saw it for what it was, frustration and loneliness and the knowledge

that, without her, he would not have received his promotion to New York. He had used her like a

donkey to do the heavy lifting. What had she expected of him, anyway? Not a husband, certainly,

nor a friend. Perhaps it was only that Michel had gotten the better of her. He won their peculiar

contest.

Once a month at least, Michel had left her for conferences on subjects like "challenges and

strategies," "talking across communities," "contradictory or complementary?" Once, he attended a


conference on Islamic fundamentalism and its effect on Sierra Leone, a topic that made Teresa

sputter with irritation.

"Poppycock!" she said after reading the agenda. The conference was in Florence, at a private villa

that advertised a heated pool, 24-hour masseuse and three-star restaurant.

He rubbed her feet as they lay in bed. The heat seemed to pull the very breath from her lungs.

She had not a stitch on. "It's a real issue, Teresita. Everything has changed."

"What is outside this window is remarkably like it was the day you arrived," said Teresa testily. "I

never knew you to be a man of fashion. The four horsemen ride these streets as hard as they have

since the first slave ship docked at Bunce Island."

"Things have changed in New York," Michel insisted.

"I see. They've changed, in other words. So we must. Thus has it always been written."

Teresa tried to rise from the bed, but Michel pulled her back, kissing her hand and then her

elbow and then the curve between her shoulder and neck. "This is simply a vacation that is paid for

by money that should go to those who suffer."

"Terry, it is my job."

His job description said nothing about Tuscany. She knew; she had written it. "Palaver. That's

what Princess would say."

"Princess, palaver, poppycock," replied Michel. "How I miss my pasta, Terry! I would take you

with me if I could."

"That is not what I want." Was it? No, she said to herself. It had never been what she wanted.


For a time, she believed she wanted him. She wanted what she was with him, a woman whose

pleasure was his particular interest. A woman of the world. A woman with prospects. As she looked

at his face, she realized that she had lost her taste for him entirely. He had left her behind, a husk

peeled of its sweet, black fruit. "Go to your conference and eat your pasta."

When he returned, their affair was over.

#

Teresa had never wanted to make her life in Sierra Leone. Even as a girl, she read her history

books like guides to the most fascinating and beautiful places to live. In high school, she won a

scholarship to study nursing in Ireland. While there, she settled on Florida as her eventual home:

warm, with beautiful beaches and hotels and a high demand for nursing professionals. She could

write her own ticket. A month before graduation, a Miami plastic surgeon offered her a signing

bonus of $10,000. She returned the contract via express mail the very same day. That night, Teresa

dreamed that she lived in one of those apartments featured in airport magazines, with modern

furniture and calla lilies in long glass vases and glass walls looking over a blue sea.

Not the muddy mangroves of Freetown. Not surf bubbling with filth, the roots of the

mangroves gnarled and coated in slime. The first thing she planned to buy with that $10,000 was a

pair of Louboutin high heels. When she closed her eyes, she could see and hear herself walking on

the smooth surfaces of America's health care establishments: with a click click click and the bottom

of the heels, as anyone who kept up with fashion knew, a bright, blood red.

But the day Teresa graduated, her Aunt Princess called. Esther, Teresa's mother, had suffered a


stroke. Instead of Miami, Teresa flew to Freetown. Her mother needed her; that was that. Her plans

were postponed. A week later, she interviewed with the World Food Program. The director hired her

on the spot.

There were no high heels in her closet today. Teresa wore khaki slacks that hid stains and thick-

soled shoes that could be scrubbed of the muck that packed the tread. To think she had once

imagined herself in lime green and tangerine, in skirts that had never formally met her knees! Tops

that left bare her arms, toned now by lifting sacks of corn-soya blend. Teresa's job was to get food

deliveries off the ships (including during the frequent dock worker strikes), released from customs

(with bribes to her cousin's husband, who ran the head office) and onto the trucks (paid with sacks

of salt and rice and drums of cooking oil skimmed from the shipment and recorded as "lost in

transit").

During the day, Princess fed and tended Esther. On the nights that she was home, Teresa pushed

her mother's wheelchair to the television set. The rabbit ear antennae, over time adjusted and

adorned with aluminum foil and paper clips, worked like charms to draw a signal. Together, Teresa,

Princess and Esther watched the news and then 'Atunda Ayenda,' a soap opera. After that, Teresa

bathed her mother and massaged her and bent her legs, willing movement back.

But her mother's limbs were dry reeds. She would not dance again. She would not walk again.

Esther weighed less than eighty pounds. A sack of rice. Two jumbo cans of vegetable oil.

The daughter of a permanent chief in Masimera, Esther had met Momodu, Teresa's father,

during one of his political campaigns. She served him sweet tea and biscuits. Momodu stared at her


brown skin and Asian eyes. The chief told him that Esther had been born to his son and a Filipina

woman in Dubai. On their flight home with the infant, the plane crashed. Esther was the only

survivor. A looter found her swaddled in a blanket on saw grass bordering the Mabole River. For

Teresa's grandfather, this was a sign. He canvassed his friends for the right name for the baby, since

his son had never told him what she was called. An Iranian businessman suggested Esther, which in

Persian is linked with the word for star. She fell from the stars, the man said, and into your arms.

With Momodu, Esther had three children: Jonas, Harvey and Teresa. Jonas died of cerebral

malaria at five. The week after his high school graduation, Harvey was crushed by a truck with a

snapped steering cable.

Teresa was her mother's solace, the cup that contained her grief.

After tidying the office, Teresa collected the faxes that arrived during the night. A food program

delegate from Rome was due to arrive in Freetown the following week to conduct a biannual

evaluation. That meant Teresa needed to make arrangements for lodging, transportation and trips to

field offices. Bad weather in Antwerp had delayed a food shipment. A professor wanted answers to a

survey on the religious customs of the World Food Program staff. Teresa crumpled the fax into a

ball and threw into the trash.

Teresa went to her desk to place the morning calls to field offices. Sylvester in Kenema told her

that the shipping delay was not serious so long as it did not extend more than three days. Peter, in

Port Loko, did not pick up. Sally, recently arrived in Kailahun, told Teresa that she had heard rumors

of a clash in Fenga, likely Liberian rebels who periodically crossed the border to loot. Sally


mentioned reports of cholera, but she had not confirmed them.

The week before, there had been rumors of cholera in Freetown. After investigating, Teresa

learned that the real cause of the diarrhea and vomiting that filled the emergency rooms was the

merchants who mixed cheap fillers into the cooking oil they sold. Could Sally's rumors indicate an

outbreak of greed? One of Teresa's cousins, Mervine, owned a barber shop in Kailahun. A

basketball fan, he called it "the Barber Shaq." Teresa told Sally to talk to Mervine, who would know

everything going on in the town.

Perhaps, Teresa thought, she could take the visiting delegate to Kailahun? She would need a gift

for Mervine. Teresa sent an email to the visiting delegate requesting that he bring a fifth of Johnny

Walker Red. Personally, she preferred Absolut. Neat.

As Teresa finished a call, Claudia Moreno arrived. Shorter and thinner than Teresa, the new

office director wore thick glasses and a page boy haircut pulled back from her forehead with metal

clips. She used no face powder or eye makeup, but tinted her lips a dark red. The color made her

look pale and a little ill. To Teresa's eye, Claudia was not bad-looking. She had large, grey eyes and

hair so black it shone blue in the full light of day. With the proper makeup and clothing, she could

turn heads. But the woman seemed to take no pleasure in her appearance. Even in the heat, Claudia

wore long-sleeved shirts with the cuffs buttoned. When she spoke, it was always after a pause, as if

the words at her disposal had to be hoarded, lest she run out completely.

They couldn't be more different, in other words. Teresa loved to flaunt her breasts with halter

tops and clinging shirts. Princess had just rebraided her hair with new beads that caught the light and


could sometimes flash rainbows on the wall, as if she were the source of light itself. Sometimes,

Teresa felt so many words boiling up within that she dreamed she was chattering, to the winds or a

mountain or a flock of birds, it didn't matter. Neither of her parents had been talkers. Perhaps, the

words in her family had been stored in some deep genetic pool, waiting for her so they could gush

like a fountain switched on for summer.

Or, as her Aunt Princess might say, a child's top willy-nilly on the floor. Aunt Princess had words

for everything and then some. Teresa could just as easily explain herself by saying that the gift of

gab skipped like a girl in an Easter dress from her father's sister to herself, using the strands of

double-helixed DNA as a bridge.

Teresa poured Claudia a cup of coffee. "I'm off to the Education Ministry," Teresa told her. "It's

the relicensing matter, for the refugee teachers returning from the camps in Guinea. Remember, you

have three telephone meetings this morning. Diana is in charge of the calls. Shall I bring you lunch?"

Claudia nodded. Diana was Michel's secretary in New York.

Claudia was too withdrawn for the directorship, in Teresa's opinion. To date, she had expressed

no strong opinions and little interest in the office workings or daily developments in the field. She

was not a chatter, in other words. A kibitzer, as Marty, her first supervisor, would put it. To Teresa,

she was like a tourist who had overstayed her interest in a place. There seemed nothing left to do or

say.

So why did she stay? Perhaps she was looking to advance in the UN system or was holding out

for a plummier posting. Teresa also wondered if she had been hurt, somehow, perhaps in a fire.


How else to explain the long sleeves? The silences, when Teresa caught her staring at nothing at all,

in the darkness of drawn shades?

Claudia lived in the apartment assigned to office directors. They called it the Penthouse since the

rooms were on the top floor of a three-story building overlooking Tengbeh Town. Penthouse was a

fancy name for such an unremarkable space: a table and four chairs in the dining area, a bed, dresser,

side table and lamp in the bedroom, a sitting area with a worn couch and two plastic chairs

positioned around a low table. Michel never cooked, preferring to take his meals with Princess or at

the Cape Sierra Hotel. The bathroom was dank and lightless, but there was a functioning toilet and

sink. Beneath the sink was a bucket, to store water for when the power failed and the pump stopped

bringing in water from the roof cistern. During one rebel incursion the year before, gunmen shot

the cistern. Water poured out, leaving the fan on the pump motor in the sun's direct glare. The fan

overheated, then locked with a bang and puff of blue smoke. Clifford repaired the motor and

patched the cistern with metal scavenged from cooking oil cans from the United States. Now, the

cistern sparkled with silver, red and blue courtesy of the USA.

The heat and dust and long hours on the roads seemed to exhaust Claudia. In contrast, Michel

liked nothing better than to arrive at some outpost with medicines and food and journalists in tow.

An office scrapbook of press clippings included photographs of him at Pendumbu with the rebel

commander, at Freetown's famous Cotton Tree with an American movie actress and behind the

secretary-general at the National Press Club in Washington. Only one included Teresa. Her leg was

in the lower left hand corner as she walked, unaware, into the frame. In the magazine that had


published the photograph ("U.N. to extend, strengthen food aid program in Sierra Leone"), the leg

was cropped out.

There were no more great white hunters in Africa. Only great white aid workers. On her worst

days, Teresa felt like the trophy left on display; but there would come a time, she told herself, when

she would leave Freetown again. And she would never, ever return.

#

Teresa caught a poda-poda east along Old Railway Line Road. In the mid-morning bustle, the

minivan, packed with passengers, swerved among pedestrians and bicycles and carts and trucks.

With high rises on a hill overlooking the sea, Freetown reminded Teresa of a party caught up in a

great, hot wind, the decorations in tatters and the chairs and tables upended and coated in grime.

Even the newest buildings, with their imported steel and concrete facings, looked worn. And then

there were the smells: urine and rotted fruit and sweat and dust and palm wine and hair oil and

frying food and the fumes from the poda-poda. Teresa sat so close to one passenger that she could

smell the bread and mayo he ate for breakfast, carried on small burps to her nose.

Teresa got off in front of the Education Ministry. She had known the vice-minister since

elementary school. As a child, TipTop never played with others for fear of soiling her elaborate

dresses; thus the name. So of course, TipTop became the target of practical jokes. Once, Teresa

herself took a rotted egg from her mother's coop and placed it in TipTop's satchel, where it burst

with a nauseating pop. Every student save TipTop was whipped and sent home. Teresa's father,


working in the shade of the garden on his Olivetti typewriter, saw the guilt on her as clearly as if it

were a school medal pinned to her blouse.

"My daughter," he said, "the measure of our worth is how we treat the least among us. You must

go to this girl and extend to her your heartfelt apology." His eyes were red from lack of sleep. All of

her mother's efforts to keep him healthy were foiled by his nervous stomach, which accepted

nothing spicier than broth.

And so she had gone to TipTop's house, with her father as escort. TipTop listened to her

apology. Then, in that way peculiar to children, she forgave Teresa. TipTop handed her a doll. By

then, Teresa was past such toys. She preferred kick ball in the street. But she recognized a gesture of

peace. In any case, this elaborate toy fascinated her, arrayed in the same white ruffles and lace that

TipTop wore to school.

TipTop – a woman now, called Madam by everyone by Teresa, and considered a close ally of the

president – swept out of the office to greet her. To be visited by a U.N. worker was a sign of

prestige and power; she wanted the dozen secretaries and clerks and messenger boys to see. TipTop

wore a white linen jacket with a scoop neck over white linen pants, with gold braid along the

neckline and shoulders and twisted into epaulets. She looked like the buxom admiral of a child's

navy. She was fat and sleek. Diamond studs sparkled in her fleshy ear lobes and a necklace, with a

tear-shaped diamond pendant, lay as the crevasse of her broad bosom.

"Miss Bencomo, tea please," TipTop ordered. Then she led Teresa by the hand to her inner

office.


TipTop arranged herself on a broad leather couch. She patted the spot next to her. Teresa sat,

sinking into the soft cushion. TipTop took her hand and squeezed it. "How lovely to see you, my

friend! You are looking too thin, my girl. Much has been happening. Much to tell! Times could not

be more dangerous. I have been anxious to speak with you."

When the tea arrived, TipTop poured, liberally dosing Teresa's cup with sugar cubes.

"Have you heard?" TipTop grasped the pendant and rubbed it like an amulet. "They are saying

that crazy man is in Port Loko. That he arrived this morning and has many men and guns. Teresa,

for your ears only: concern is high."

For the past week, the radio had broadcast reports of a man calling himself "Bombblast," a

former boys' school headmaster who had been stirring up trouble in the refugee camps along the

Guinean border. A Christian, he said he was leading a holy war on foreigners. His name came from

an explosion he survived that revealed to him the true face of God and his angels, he said, black and

with fire for wings. He was a mental patient, in TipTop's opinion. A madman, a kook!

"This is a serious, dear Titi," TipTop insisted. "Clarence himself has been called to consult at the

presidential palace." Col. Clarence Ogomudia was the Nigerian who commanded the West African

peacekeepers. There were rumors that TipTop and the colonel were lovers, though Teresa had her

doubts. The colonel, she knew for a fact, preferred girls.

"He has no authority to pursue a lunatic like Bombblast," Teresa said. "Rebels only, not

criminals." Or kooks. Over the telephone, Michel had mentioned something about the Security

Council mandate that limited the peacekeepers to certain tasks, but she couldn't remember if he said


it was Chapter Six or Chapter Seven. Did it matter? Ogomudia was not in Sierra Leone to pursue

Bombblast. "Have you spoken to Port Loko?"

"The lines are down. Sister, I know, this is an everyday occurrence. But my brother-in-law, who

works for the army, as you know, assures me they were cut!"

This brother-in-law cooked at the officer's casino. He could get fine meats, but wasn't, in

Teresa's opinion, a good source for this type of information. She would have to call Peter again. She

would dress him down for failing to answer this morning, then press him for details.

TipTop promised to resolve the teacher licenses. Teresa headed for Government Wharf. Wesley,

the Doctors Without Borders representative, had asked her to stop by to see the new mobile clinics.

Wesley was her age, but looked barely out of high school. Thin as a post, he wore t-shirts and flip-

flops. His long hair, rarely combed, sat like a doll's messy wig on his head.

One of his units was scheduled to go with Teresa's next convoy east. Each one shipped in its

own metal container, and included a fully equipped surgical operating theater, two generators and a

stock of the drugs most commonly used in Sierra Leone: antibiotics, morphine and two potions

used to treat the phantom limb pain suffered by amputees. The stainless steel cabinets and smell of

disinfectant reminded Teresa of her Irish training, and she felt suddenly tired. This was the life she

had wanted for herself, she thought. Not what lay outside the unit's metal skin, but the cleanliness

and order that was within.

"These things do no damn good stuck here," Wesley was saying as he sucked a red lollipop.

"More delays?" Teresa asked.


"That fanatic Bombblast!" Wesley said. "They say he's on the Masiaka Road. Those incompetent

fucking Nigerians. Sitting on their asses." Masiaka was the only way out of the Freetown peninsula.

"John Wesley! He couldn't possibly do more than disrupt. Where are the units scheduled to be

installed?"

"I've already received offers on this one." Wesley shrugged. "Do you remember the guy with no

arms from Kasese?" This was a tribal chief maimed by rebels several years earlier. "He offered me a

party and the women of my choice. Women! How's that for the rewards of humanitarianism? But

this one's for the Beadles," he added, meaning the Australian missionaries at Mile 91.

She and Wesley attended the same Methodist church and lunched at Princess's after Sunday

service. Though often bleary-eyed and stinking of cigarettes and last night's beer, Wesley was a

regular worshipper. Once, they had kissed. The kiss came after a particularly brutal day, when all

Teresa wanted was a bit of human kindness. But there was nothing there. Now, Teresa treated

Wesley like the big brothers she had lost.

"We'll work out the details of the convoy over Sunday lunch," she told him. "The Beadles will be

thrilled. I'll tell Princess to prepare the chicken yassa. But you must shower before showing up, or

she will have your hide scrubbed and pinned to the washing line."

#

Teresa went next to the home of her Aunt Princess. For lunch, Princess served prawns in peanut

sauce, a specialty. A chilled mango salad dusted with ground cloves was dessert.

After eating, Teresa arranged her mother's meal on a folding table next to the wheelchair. This


was generally a protein gruel sweetened with banana or papaya, which agreed with Esther's stomach.

While she fed her mother, her aunt filled a tiffin carrier with Claudia's portion.

"How Michel liked your hottest dishes!" Teresa commented.

Princess smacked the wooden spoon on the pot. "Baby, when are you going to get a real

man? Let me set you up. I will find you a good Temne man who will warm your cockles."

"Auntie, I have no time for a man. I have my books to warm me."

"What is there in books for a young woman as beautiful as my Titi? You must have a man.

And not one of these pasty whites who up and leave. Up and leave! You must have a Christian man,

a man who will make you his queen. Like your father, I mean. A good man, a loving man."

"But like my father, there is no other. You yourself say this, Auntie. Why waste time wishing

for what I cannot have?"

Princess wiped her hands on a towel as she sat on the couch, next to Esther's wheelchair. Her

face was skimmed in steam. A photograph of Momodu, Teresa's father, hung in a place of honor

behind her. His eyes sparkled behind the thick lenses of his glasses. Teresa was tucked under his

arm, her hair in stiff pig tails. Her smile was a copy of his.

"Your father would want this for you. That is what he dreamed of in this ragged place.

Something better."

Her father died when Teresa was eleven. How could she know what he would think of her now?

Soldiers took him to prison not long after the photograph was taken. They smashed his Olivetti in

the street. A week later, Princess and Esther buried him in Kingtom cemetery, looking out to sea.


Teresa remembered studying her father as he slept in the back room of their home, with the

shades drawn and the fan whirring. He stayed up night after night at political meetings, and would

return home unexpectedly, so exhausted that he would sleep in his sweat-stained clothes. Teresa

would creep into the room with a book and find a spot where the light shafted through the space

between the window and the shade. It was as close as she dared get.

Teresa dabbed sauce from her mother's chin. "Would he not value what I do, dear Auntie? This

was his dream, to save his country."

"Precious girl. On that I have no doubts. Your father would let his pride show to the world, as

he did on the day you won the spelling medal. But what will you have when the last crumbs are

eaten? Who will stand with you when you have given all? This is what I know about my people,

Teresa. They are takers. They take and take and take. They took my brother. They will take you. That

would kill her, you know. Sure as a dagger. Think of yourself, girl, and your mother, not always of

these malcontents."

When her mother finished, Teresa got the bottle of lotion. She used it to work her mother's

muscles and joints. Princess claimed that she could make a lotion three times as good with the herbs

in her garden. This was what she called the tangle of plants toward the back of her plot, poking

through the car scrap and broken chairs and legless children's toys. Sometimes, Teresa smelled

Princess's concoction on her mother, essences and powders and mashed leaves that soured in the

heat. Teresa would sponge it off and recoat her mother's skin. The lotion did her mother good. But


the smell of roses also reminded Teresa of elsewhere.

That was her name for it now – elsewhere, somewhere other than where she was, anywhere

other than here. When her office mates traveled, they always asked Teresa what she wanted. She

wanted the same thing: rose-scented lotion.

She had seen her first rose garden near Dublin, the Sunday that she and her class mates visited

the sea. Roses, Teresa decided, were the smell of God. On Judgment Day, there would be fire and

ash, as the Bible promised. But Jesus himself, in his infinite love, would descend in the perfect

bloom of a rose, with angels holding the edges of his robe. Nothing in the Book of Common

Prayer said this; this was what Teresa believed in her heart. She also knew that it would not be long

before her mother died. Teresa would put her to rest beside her father, looking west. So that they

could both see her Elsewhere, after she kissed Princess goodbye and left Freetown forever.

Teresa was no saint; she was not her father. Would he forgive her this weakness? She would

know when she next saw him clasped in roses and borne on the sweet and forgiving breath of the

Lord.

#

Teresa returned to the office with the tiffin carrier. She found Claudia reading old SITREPS in

the small room they used as a library.

"Have there been calls?" By now, Port Loko should have checked in.

Claudia shook her head. "Problems?"


Teresa told her the news about Bombblast. "Clifford is due back from Waterloo soon. We must

wait and consult. He will have fresh news."

As Claudia ate in her office, Teresa began to work on the situation report. The shorthand was

SITREP, a summary of what had happened with the food program and the war. The report was

then sent via secure email to the regional headquarters, combined with other reports, then circulated

throughout the UN system. Michel had been the first director to delegate its preparation entirely to

her.

Teresa began to type.

SIERRA LEONE HUMANITARIAN SITUATION REPORT Period covered: 9-13 March This report has been prepared by the office of the United Nations World Food Program in Freetown, Sierra Leone.Amid extraordinary tensions and a highly precarious security environment, humanitarian agencies have continued to reach tens of thousands of war-affected populations with life-sustaining interventions. Activities however continue to be limited to areas under government control.

This was how Teresa had started every SITREP for the past several months. The editor in her

wanted to ask why she continued to use the word "extraordinary" for something that was

commonplace. "Precarious" presumed that one would do one's best to distance oneself from such

danger. Yet here she sat!

Teresa continued:


Fighting and harassment of civilians by armed groups in the Eastern and Northern parts of the country continue to result in both internal and external displacements. According to the OCHA database, the new caseload (since January) now exceeds 300,000 (see attached update), while UNHCR has registered nearly 15,000 newly arrived Sierra Leonean refugees in Guinea during the same period.

Teresa had learned to write this abbreviated language quickly. It wasn't that different from how,

as a nurse, she had filled out patient charts. So much medication, so many tests, done in such a way.

Except countries never died, exactly. The file was never completely closed, "patient deceased."

OCHA was the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. IDP meant internally

displaced person, a refugee, in essence, who had abandoned home but did not cross an international

border. UNHCR was the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees, which administered

the camps sheltering families that had managed to cross into Guinea. The rebel practice of hacking

off limbs had turned these camps into showcases for the depths to which human beings would go

to make a point. Or, worse, no point at all, only a will to destruction.

Since returning to Sierra Leone, Teresa had seen things that defied imagination--raped babies,

women branded on their breasts with gang letters, men with the arms they needed to work and feed

their families severed above the elbow. What could keep her nursing school mates from thinking her

mad? Except it was her country. They expected her to know what lay beneath the violence like a

poisonous root. Teresa felt as ignorant as a flea. Nothing in her bloodline made it any easier. What

corpuscles, what fluids, would bring wisdom in these matters?


If her father had lived, Teresa imagined that he would find himself just as amazed. Or as

shocked. Everything he had done and had worked for was for something other than this. But this--

what was happening in his country--was the measure of how completely his work had been in vain.

She continued:

Given the worsening humanitarian conditions in many parts of the country, agencies are re-directing resources towards meeting emergency needs while continuing to support rehabilitation programmes as best possible. Meanwhile, relief organizations consolidate strategies and mechanisms to improve the response in key sectors of concern. The new initiative involves setting up a standing security assessment team and a cross-sectoral emergency response team to make informed recommendations for action.

What did this mean, really? Teresa pursed her lips. We are doing the best with what we have.

There was no budget for the new tires Clifford said the Land Rover needed, no money to give more

than palliative care to children deemed too damaged to recover. No money to add bakeries, no

money to repair generators. There was no money, no money, no money. Since September 11, their

budget had been cut by a third. The war on terror, Michel said to her. In comparison, the war on

want seemed old as last season's paisley prints.

Faced with a reduced budget, Teresa could not throw up her hands and write literary things like

human beings have an unknowable capacity for evil. Therefore, we need money. Or that this

behavior lay well beyond anything that anyone, even a born Sierra Leonean, could comprehend. Or


that people in far-away Berlin or Madrid or Chicago would choose to know. While the world's finest

armies beat the bushes for terrorists, the beast of greed and senseless violence still stalked Sierra

Leone. Adorned with new weapons, to be sure. Its carapace studded with diamonds. Or oil or drugs

or girls or gold. Whatever commodity brought a good price in the bazaars of the global masters.

"Do they think we are such animals?" she once asked Michel. "That they, with their hospitals and

safety belts and metal railings at every sheer drop, have not reaped the benefit of centuries of slave

labor and colonial domination? That our poverty is made just as surely as a car or a kitchen

blender?"

Michel stroked her arm. "If you could, you would take the world like a rug and shake it clean.

Teresa, you should be our delightful queen, looking after us and making sure we behave."

She turned on her heel and left his office. Sometimes, Michel could be an ass. Though she

walked in sensible shoes, she imagined her steps sounding with the tap of stilettos. Oh, the

inappropriate shoes! The livid colors and the impossibly pointed toes! How she coveted them, like a

bright light in the darkness. Like hope itself.

In the SITREPS, she had to pretend the believed in strategy. A plan for the unplannable.

Bollocks, Princess would say, a firm believer in the staying power of chaos.

Teresa had inspected the amputee camps that were like an alternate universe where everyone,

even the babies and the little girls, were missing body parts. There would be one left unscathed, she

would think, until the person turned or sat, and Teresa would see it, the missing ear, the scar carved

on the skin to show that the rebels known as the RUF--R under the right shoulder, U over the collar


bone, F under the left shoulder--had left their mark.

The nurse in Teresa wondered if such a thing were curable, if a skin graft or sanding procedure

would erase the marks. In Hollywood, actors could excise age like a bothersome mole. Why not cut

off suffering and terror, and make, once again, something beautiful?

Bollocks again. That was Irish Teresa thinking, of course. Miss Spelling Bee champion, Miss

Top-of-her-class. Not Freetown Teresa. Not the Teresa who sent two tons of powdered protein east,

knowing that she was two tons short of the bare minimum needed. Such wounds were never

removed here. There was not the money or the will, but that was the least of it. To the man or

woman or child marked in such a way, there was not the concept, the idea, that such a thing could be

reversed. People did not mistake prosthetic arms for the ones that had been taken from them.

Marked, they lived as marked.

Titi continued:

In Port Loko and Kambia districts, the forced recruitment of children continued. Looting and raiding of villages in many parts of the country by the West Side Boys are occurring on a daily basis. There continue to be reports of killings along the Freetown-Masiaka road. The WFP team witnessed the March execution by West Side Boys of two civilians, an unidentified man and woman.

She sipped her tea, now cold and skimmed with dust. The incident on the Freetown-Masiaka

Road had taken place the week before. With Clifford and Wesley, she had been returning from a site


visit when they got caught in a jam on the Freetown-Masiaka Road.

Teresa sat in the passenger seat. Wesley was in back. As usual, Clifford drove.

The West Side Boys were robbing vehicles. Dressed in street clothes and an array of baseball

caps, vests and scarves, men forced the drivers to unload what they carried onto waiting trucks.

Passengers from a poda-poda lined up with their belongings.

"Commot! Commot!" the men shouted. Come out.

The women passengers wailed at losing their sacks of vegetables, meant for market. The wailing

grew keener.

Suddenly, a West Side Boy grabbed a girl of about seven by her braids.

A woman – her mother? -- groaned. The groan became a scream. She lunged for the girl's hand.

The man and the woman began a tug-of-war. The girl began to cry.

Teresa opened the car door. Quickly, Clifford reached across her lap, grabbed the handle and

shut it.

"There is nothing to be done, miss," he said. "Miss Teresa. Please close your eyes and stopper

your ears."

She could not. "Clifford."

"Miss Teresa. I insist. Your safety cannot be guaranteed. These thieves are crazy men. They have

no respect. Miss Teresa, this vehicle is white and there are two letters on it, U and N. But you are

not. The minute you leave it, you are no more to them than that girl. And they could kill you or

carve the letters on you. It would not matter a whit to them."


The West Side boys began to laugh. The mother screamed. The girl cried. Their comrade,

growing angry, hauled her by the hair. One man--the girl's father, perhaps, or a relative--stepped

forward, perhaps to plead.

An automatic weapon ripped the air. The mother crumpled. She released her daughter. One of

the West Side Boys stepped up to the man and lifted his machete. The blow landed on the man's

neck with such force that that his head popped up like the cap of a beer bottle.

The man who had pulled at the girl fondled her flat chest, grinning.

Wesley threw up in his chips bag. Teresa handed him the bottle of water she had been drinking.

There was no question of stopping to identify the dead man and woman. The woman's blood

stained the dirt a dark maroon. How unfortunate, she remembered thinking, that the rains were

weeks away.

Then Teresa remembered. After the killings and after the other passengers and the children were

taken away, some of the West Side Boys sat under a thorn tree to await their next victims. As a West

Side Boy waved Clifford past, a man grinned at Teresa. He pressed his hand to his groin. On his

chest was a thick silver cross on a thick chain. At the time, she had not given the cross a second

thought.

By then, the West Side Boys must have already gone over to Bombblast. Bombblast must have

preached to them that their faith in God protected them from their enemies. She had assumed –

what had she assumed? That these animals would not know the cross. That to them it was but a

bauble. How could these animals truly believe?


At the office, the phone rang. "Port Loko at last," Teresa said, raising her hands in the air. "Once

I know they are well, I will tell tem a thing or two. Calling late. Inconsiderate! They'd better have a

fine story."

But it was not Port Loko. A faraway voice asked for Claudia.

She took the call in her office. When she emerged, her face was even paler than usual.

"Bad news?" Teresa turned from her keyboard.

"My father's secretary," Claudia said slowly. "She told me his wife is coming to Freetown. To see

me."

"Here?" Teresa's thoughts raced. With the evaluation team on its way, they had urgent tasks at

hand. Escorting a relative was an unexpected burden. Perhaps the wife could stay with Princess

during the day. They had to book a room, get a driver. Her mind raced. She would ask Clifford to

call his cousin. What a bother! What on earth would bring a wife all the way to Sierra Leone?

"What is the purpose of this visit?" she asked

"Something has happened. She is coming to tell me something bad. She wouldn't say."

"My word," said Teresa.

Claudia looked at her watch. "She lands in an hour. Where is Clifford?"

At that moment, the office lights dimmed. Then they surged, dimmed again and flicked out.

Teresa heard a distant explosion. The colors on the computer screen faded to black, like paint

washed down a drain. Her SITREP! She heard soft pops, like rain. But the sun shone brightly.

Bombblast, Teresa thought. That kook. It couldn't be. But her gut told her differently. She thought


of the silver cross and the blood in the road. He was not in Port Loko. He was in Freetown.

<<<<>>>>

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The Tiger King Excerpt