Acts of faith (47 page)

“The big what?”

“Momentum.” He paused. “Try
hard,
Fitz, with those logisticians.”

Fitzhugh caught the subtext—he was being given the green light to offer commissions. Thinking,
This is how we speak now, this is the language of the aid entrepreneur,
he plopped himself down on the edge of the big steel desk. “Block time. Block speed. Per kilo rates. Lease fees. Momentum,” he said. “And commissions—kickbacks. Is this what we’re all about? Is this what we came here to do?”

Douglas frowned and made more weaving movements with the pencil. “Nope. It’s what we
have
to do to keep doing what we came here to do.” He got up suddenly and clutched Fitzhugh by both shoulders. That need of his to press the flesh, as though his words might not be heard without the amplification of his touch. “Fitz, my man! We’re not a nonprofit organization. If we weren’t in business, those Dinka in Bahr el Ghazal would be dying, the Nubans would still be rubbing sticks together to light their fires, that German doctor would still be slicing people open to find out what’s wrong with them. Did we cause the drought? We’re not firemen who turned arsonist to give themselves a paycheck. We’re fighting a fire someone else started.”

Douglas let him go and stood looking at the schedule board, with its grease pen notations on airstrip conditions. “Okay, assuming we get our hands on the Antonov, we’ll have a fleet with a total capacity of—” With the grease pen, he wrote “17” on the board. “And we can deliver those seventeen tons faster than Pathways, and faster means cheaper, and cheaper means the agencies come to us first.”

Tara again. All conversational roads led back to her.

“The Sudanese get food, they get their lives back, and the agencies save money, and we make it and stay in the game,” Douglas went on in an overcaffeinated rush. “Everybody benefits. It’s win-win, Fitz. Win-win all around.”

Steering Knight Air’s company car, a Toyota pickup with worn shocks and a pitted windshield, down a Loki side road, Fitzhugh felt a tad splenetic.
Fitz, my man.
Well, he was Douglas’s man, wasn’t he? The brown boy running an errand for the white boy, the Bahss. To keep the lid on his bubbling resentment, he reminded himself that the American, like it or not, was the Bahss and that it was part of his job as operations manager to negotiate agreements with NGO logisticians.

A few enterprising Turkana were peddling handicrafts outside the UN compound’s bright blue fence of corrugated steel. Wedging the pickup between two uniformly white Land Cruisers, he got out, conscious of the bulge in his midriff. He’d come back from the Nuba as lean and hard as he’d been in his soccer days, but the tailor of his appetites had since altered the Ambler into the man nearly everyone in Loki called “Big Bear.” I should have walked here, he thought. I should walk a mile every day and play more volleyball.

Well, he’d been doing his share of legwork today. There were forty agencies enlisted under the UN banner, and he intended to visit as many as he could. Going up a lane fenced by whitewashed rocks, past signs bearing inspiring slogans—
DEFEAT AIDS
,
LET
’
S CONQUER POLIO IN SUDAN
—he recalled that his old boss, the one who’d told him he possessed an insufferably Hebraic soul, had once termed the situation in Sudan “a permanent crisis.” The base’s appearance underlined the accuracy of that near-oxymoron. Everything here suggested perpetuity: buildings instead of tents, streets instead of paths, even street signs. The recolonization of Africa by the imperialism of good intentions.

He strode into the office of a small Dutch NGO, confident and commanding, dressed for the occasion in pressed khaki trousers instead of rumpled shorts, shoes instead of sandals, and in place of his usual T-shirt, a dark green polo displaying Knight Air’s name and emblem over his heart.

Appearances weren’t enough to persuade the Dutch to switch carriers; nor was his sales pitch. He also failed with CARE, Catholic Relief Services, World Vision, and the Adventist Development and Relief Agency. It appeared that Knight Air wasn’t so irresistible after all, but he pressed on, agency to agency, extolling the virtues of the G1C and the Hawker over Tara’s sluggish Andovers. He made no offer of commissions, hoping to persuade his prospective clients through force of personality and the promised quality and economy of his company’s services. As he rattled on about block times and block speeds and per kilo rates, his tongue on automatic, his spleen bubbled up again. He bore Tara no ill will, and so long as he earned a decent living, he could not have cared less if Knight Air played Avis to Pathways’s Hertz till the end of time. Why, then, was he talking himself hoarse to help Douglas realize his ambition? Because he couldn’t let him down, that was why. As much as he might resent his role as Man Friday, he realized that it was perfect casting. There was something in his character that suited him for the work of the deputy, the same something that made his father an effective hotelier. He was born to oblige, to cater to others’ wishes, to be of service.

His next stop was a group bearing the cumbersome and redundant name of Global International Aid Services. It employed a multiracial, multinational staff that served to veil, somewhat, its Washington origins and the identity of its principal donor, the U.S. Agency for International Development, which some people believed was an arm of the CIA. Global’s logistics chief was a dour Belgian known as the Flemish Phlegm, a sobriquet whose shortened version, “Flemmy,” was used so often that the man’s real name had been forgotten. He had been Fitzhugh’s main informant during his private investigation into the UN’s practice of destroying surplus food. Though he’d scrupulously kept the source of his information secret, Flemmy had suggested afterward that Fitzhugh owed him something more than the protection of his anonymity.

After he’d listened, patiently and without expression, to Fitzhugh’s spiel, he presented the bill.

Chewing on an unlit pipe, Flemmy complimented him for landing on his feet after his dismissal from the World Food Program’s staff. “But,” he added, “you seem to be still learning the nuances of your new job. You haven’t convinced me to make any changes in our present arrangements. You need to—the American phrase is ‘toot your own horn’— a little more . . . loudly? No. Not loud. More sweetly. Has anyone else pointed that out to you?”

“No, you’re the first,” he answered. That Flemmy had not flatly turned him down and had taken the time to point out the deficiency in his proposals represented progress of a sort; but he elected to say nothing more. He would feel better about himself if he left it to the other man to make the proposition.

“We have a lot of stuff to move, and you with only two airplanes—” He wagged a hand scornfully. “Why, that could delay a shipment for days, whereas your competitor has the means to deliver it right away.” Flemmy paused and tapped his thumbnail with the pipestem. “On the other hand, we aren’t contractually bound to Pathways, and you make a good case that we could save a thousand dollars per flight with you. I think I could see my way clear to . . . oh, you know, every third delivery, perhaps every other delivery.”

Fitzhugh heard the emphasis on “think” and listened to the irritating
tap-tap.
“Whatever you feel comfortable with,” he said.

“That depends upon what you feel comfortable with,” the Belgian said softly. “Just to be sure we’re clear on that.” He wrote on a piece of paper and passed it across the desk for Fitzhugh’s inspection. “I believe that follows established custom?”

Aware that he wasn’t acting under duress of circumstance, that he was making a clear, conscious choice and a compromise that could lead to further compromises, he nodded.

Flemmy tore the paper into quarters and tossed the fragments into the wastebasket. “Of course we don’t need to shake hands.”

“Of course.”

“Excellent. I’ll be in touch soon. In the meantime, may I suggest that you need not be shy about offering the full . . . the full range of your company’s services to whomever else you speak to. I think you’ll get better results.”

Fitzhugh followed that advice, and the results were more favorable. By the end of the day he’d made arrangements with three NGOs similar to the one he made with Flemmy. He might have gotten more if his discomfort hadn’t been so obvious. During the proceedings, his mind became a kind of TV split-screen; a scene from the famine was projected on one half—skeletal kids grubbing in the dirt for spilled kernels of airdropped grain—and a picture of himself negotiating sleazy deals was projected on the other. The two dissonant images produced a physical sensation, as if he were coated in some sticky substance that had drawn ants to his body. Watching him squirm and grimace, it was apparent to the logisticians that he was disgusted with himself and with them and the whole business. Fitzhugh could tell that they could tell he was acting contrary to his scruples, which caused them to wonder if he would be stricken with an attack of those scruples later on and renege on his promises. They sent him on his way. He found that success came when he told himself that he was doing a small wrong thing in order to do a big right thing—a version of Douglas’s statement “We’re doing what we have to do so we can keep doing what we came here to do.” Those words banished the sticky, crawly sensation, and he would feel more confident and sound more convincing when he proposed to his customers that they would personally benefit from an association with Knight Air Limited.

He reported the outcome to Douglas that night in the Hotel California bar. It was the beginning of their transformation into co-conspirators, for they spoke in conspiratorial tones—three other customers were sitting at a nearby table, Quinette and her Irish roommates.

“You came through, knew you would,” Douglas said.

The compliment brought a delight that momentarily overcame Fitzhugh’s doubts about his actions, while the delight, like a pretty yacht towing a garbage barge, dragged into the harbor of his self-esteem a mortifying awareness that his friend’s opinion of him had a direct effect on his opinion of himself.

“I had to offer incentives,” he confessed reluctantly. “I tried to think of it as a marketing tool, yes?”

“That’s exactly what it is.”

“I’m not sure how to tell Rachel how to handle these arrangements on the books.”

“I’ll take care of that.” With his Coke glass, he clinked Fitzhugh’s can of Tusker. “To the big mo.”

Three days later Douglas concluded the lease agreement with the owner of the Antonov-32. Soon afterward, with a decal of a green knight straddling an airplane pasted to her nose, she flew her first delivery into Bahr el Ghazal.

As that cruel dry season advanced, misfortune continued to be Knight Air’s ally. A very bad piece of bad luck was suffered by the crew of a Pathways Andover, flying sorghum and Unimix to a village near the Jur river. SPLA guerrillas surrounded the plane at the airstrip and began to offload its cargo onto lorries while the villagers watched helplessly. It was the third or fourth incident of rebel army theft since the famine struck, and the Andover’s captain—it was Tara’s senior pilot, the Ethiopian named George Tafari—was fed up. He told the rebel officer in charge that if his men didn’t turn over the food to the civilians, he was going to report the banditry to UN authorities. In the account that would later be given by the copilot, the officer replied that his troops were starving too and couldn’t be expected to fight on empty bellies. George persisted. The overstrung commander then drew his pistol and instructed George to speak not one word more and to clear out immediately.

The Andover wasn’t five hundred feet off the ground when the guerrillas opened fire with assault rifles and machine guns. A bullet through the head killed George instantly, and a Kenyan relief worker on board was wounded in the arm. The copilot, a devout Somali, would later say that the hand of Allah saved the plane from crashing; the hand of Allah kept his hands on the controls and gave him the strength and presence of mind to fly the crippled aircraft a thousand kilometers back to Loki, with the relief worker screaming in the back, the pilot-side windows blown out (making it impossible to pressurize the cockpit so that he had to fly the entire distance at six thousand feet), and with blood and brain matter sprayed all over the instrument panel.

Fitzhugh had monitored the distress calls on his own radio, and when he heard the Andover coming in, he went to the Pathways terminal to see if he could be of any help. He was inclined to believe the story of divine intervention after the Somali, bleeding from the fragments of George’s skull embedded in his cheek and temple, described what had happened. It also seemed miraculous that the man hadn’t taken leave of his senses.

Tara lost her composure when a Red Cross ambulance crew pulled George’s body from the cockpit. To see that iron woman fall to both knees beside the stretcher and weep would have moved Fitzhugh to tears himself if he hadn’t been struggling so hard against a wave of nausea.

Tara declared she was suspending Pathways flights into the stricken province until the SPLA high command assured her that George’s murderers would be found and punished and that every measure was being taken to prevent a similar incident.

Sudan, Sudan, Sudan, Fitzhugh thought as all this unfolded. Woe to the land beyond the rivers of Ethiopia. The rebels were the best friends Khartoum could ask for.

Knight Air, having the field entirely to itself, was still flying. Clinging to the belief that the quality of one’s actions was affected by the quality of one’s motives, Fitzhugh struggled to stop thinking about what this would mean for the company’s revenues, and he was aided in this endeavor by the return of the old Douglas, defiant and impassioned. It appeared that events had summoned him out of hiding. At breakfast, on the morning after Tara announced her decision, he told Dare and Fitzhugh that he was going to try to talk her out of it.