Acts of faith (49 page)

“He’s someone you do trust?” Fitzhugh asked.

“Hell, no”—pulling the word
hell
like it was made of taffy. “Put it like this. He won’t stab you in the back, he’ll stab you in front with one hand and be shakin’ your hand with the other, and he’ll do it so quick, y’all won’t know you’ve been stabbed till you see the blood. I trust him in that sense.”

“What’re you saying, Wes? That we shouldn’t talk to him? We should? What?”

“He might be more disposed to go to bat for me if we did. I sure as hell would like to get that airplane back.”

They took a Kenya Airways commuter to Nairobi. On the way down Dare offered an informal background briefing on Hassan Adid, whom he described, with his usual disregard for Fitzhugh’s origins and sensibilities, as “way above, light-years away from your average bush-baby African hustler.” A one-man conglomerate, the cultivation and exportation of mirra was just one of his many enterprises, which included mining precious stones like tanzanite and tsavorite, construction, and cattle, Adid having inherited from his father one-third ownership of the Tana ranch—a million and a half acres of grazing land near Tsavo National Park. “A kind of African cowboy, you might say.”

In the 1970s and 1980s the Adid family had tripled its fortune in the illegal ivory trade. Somali poaching gangs had been trespassing on the ranch for years, using it as a base for their raids on the park’s elephant herds. Unable to keep the poachers off their sprawling property, the elder Adid and his two Arab partners decided to employ them and to turn their disorganized forays into an efficient industry.

“They brought Hassan into it after he got out of school. He got a fleet of trucks to haul out the ivory instead of havin’ it carried out on foot,” Dare said, standing in the aisle beside Douglas and Fitzhugh’s seats, his head bent under the small plane’s ceiling. “Must’ve needed the trucks to haul the money out. Those days ivory was goin’ for six thousand U.S. a kilo. Shoot one big bull carryin’ forty, fifty kilos in each tusk, and you’ve grossed half a mil to six hundred thousand and change, and those boys they had workin’ for ’em was shootin’ dozens, hundreds. Wouldn’t have been one elephant left if it wasn’t for Dick Leakey, y’know, the son of that famous scientist, some sort of ologist.”

“Paleontologist,” Douglas offered helpfully.

“Yeah, it was his son, Dick Leakey, who put a crimp in their operations when he got put in charge of the Kenya Wildlife Service. He formed up those antipoaching commando teams, and they and the gangs had them a regular war goin’ on down there in Tsavo. Then Leakey lobbies for a worldwide ban on ivory, and he gets it, and pretty soon the Adids are back in the cattle business. I met Dick once. He was a pilot, y’know—”

Fitzhugh interrupted, saying that yes, he knew, and that one day Leakey’s plane developed mechanical trouble in midair and crashed, and some said it was no accident.

“Yup. Crippled up Dick Leakey for life. He had him a helluva lot of enemies, and the Adids were at the top of the list. Anyhow, the old man sent Hassan to graduate school in the U.S. Hassan got him an MBA from—the University of Florida, I think it was—and after the poaching party was over with, he went legit, bought a couple hundred thousand acres near Mount Kenya, and went into the mirra trade, ivory to dope, and then he got into everything else.”

Adid’s degree was from the University of Miami, not the University of Florida. He must have been proud of it; it was the sole object on the wall behind his desk, positioned to catch the light from the window overlooking traffic-fumed Kenyatta Avenue. It appeared that he treasured his privacy and liked to keep a low profile. A simple plastic sign reading
THE TANA GROUP
hung on the door to a spare reception room, where a stout woman announced the three visitors on an intercom, then led them through two doors with electronic locks and into Adid’s private office, which was smaller and more modestly furnished than the lavishly appointed acreage Fitzhugh had pictured. The man himself, studiously casual in open-neck shirt and raw silk sport jacket, looked to be in his early forties. He was a little under six feet tall, with coat-hanger shoulders, a slender, almost delicate frame, a small head, and very dark, very piercing eyes—miniature black holes that took everything in and let nothing out.

He was an ardent soccer fan, and when he learned that Fitzhugh was
the
Fitzhugh Martin, he spent several minutes tossing him bouquets of praise and reminiscing about the Ambler’s glory days on the Harambe Stars.

“It’s an honor to meet you, truly it is.”

Fitzhugh squirmed in his seat and made a dismissive gesture.

“But I see I must be embarrassing you. You’re a man who is humble about his achievements. Would it embarrass you more if I asked for your autograph? I would like to give it to my son. He plays with a club.”

Fitzhugh replied no, it would not embarrass him, for it wasn’t the laudatory comments that made him uncomfortable but Adid’s gaze, which seemed to bore through his skin. There was a weird disconnect between it and what he was saying. While the tongue flattered, the eyes studied, and Fitzhugh got the disconcerting impression that Adid knew everything about him, or at least as much as he needed to know. He’d been sized up.

A pen and notepad were pushed across the desk. He wrote, “To Hassan Adid, My Very Best Wishes,” and signed his name, adding “The Ambler” as a flourish.

“Thank you, my son will be thrilled,” Adid said in his low, adenoidal voice, then turned his attention to Douglas and apologized for wasting time.”You didn’t come all this way to listen to us talk about soccer,” he said, and spread his hands on the desktop, his long fingers like the ribs of a fan. “So I think I could be of some benefit to you, and of course you to me. I’m always looking to diversify.” He gestured at the photographs on a side wall, showing the many facets of the Tana Group: an office building under construction, a mining operation, a sloping field abloom with mirra. “And lately I’ve taken an interest in aviation. Actually, it’s an old interest of mine. I took some flying lessons when I was in the U.S. There are some excellent flight schools in Florida. Where did you learn, Mr. Braithwaite?”

“The U.S. Air Force.”

“You can’t ask for a better school than that. What did you fly? Were you a”—he mimed a pilot jockeying a joystick—“top gun?”

“Not quite. I flew A-tens. Warthogs.”

Dare did a theatrical double-take and said, “All this time and you never mentioned you were a Hog jockey.” It was also the first time Fitzhugh had heard anything specific about Douglas’s military career.

Responding to Adid’s puzzled frown and looking pleased to display his technical knowledge, Dare explained that a Warthog was a ground attack plane. “It’s used mostly to bust up tanks and armored vehicles.”

Adid turned back to Douglas. “And did you, ah, ‘bust up’ any tanks?”

“Yeah. In the Persian Gulf. Iraqi convoys, too. The last day of the war, when the Iraqis were pulling out of Kuwait—they were in commandeered taxis, city buses, dump trucks, private cars, anything that had wheels and gas in the tank, making off with the stuff they’d looted—my squadron blew the shit out of them. There were guys on fire running out of the vehicles, and we strafed them with cannon fire. They never had a chance. Sometimes I think that’s why I got into what I’m doing now, flying humanitarian aid. We weren’t shooting up an army but a rabble, and it wasn’t war, it was bloody murder. It made me sick.”

This speech—which sounded more like something that would be said in a bar after one too many, and which was so off the point and so unlike Douglas, who hardly ever revealed anything about his past—left everyone speechless.

Leaning over to slap Douglas’s knee, Dare broke the silence. “My partner’s got him a bleeding heart, Hassan. It had been me, I’d have shot the shit out of those Eye-raqis and gone lookin’ for more.”

Adid said nothing, perplexed by the outburst. So was Fitzhugh. Why pick such an inappropriate moment and setting to tell a stranger what you’d withheld from your friends? He thought Douglas had disclosed more about himself than he should have, for all the while, Adid was subjecting the American to his CAT scan gaze, as if he were making exposures of his psychic interior, pinpointing his strengths and weaknesses, the places where he was sound, the places where he was unsound, soft, vulnerable. Douglas too was being sized up. Someone who’d cut his baby teeth in the world of commerce by selling contraband ivory must have learned how to make quick judgments about other people, and make them accurately.

“Perhaps we should turn to what you’re doing now,” Adid said finally. “I have a few questions.”

“This ought to tell you what you need to know.”

Douglas removed from his briefcase a financial statement that Rachel had typed up on the desktop. The one-man conglomerate read it carefully, a finger moving down the columns of assets and liabilities, and said that he hadn’t expected so thorough an accounting of Knight Air’s condition.

“I guess I learned a few things from my father,” Douglas said with a shrug of modesty. “I worked for him a couple of summers in college. He was my business school.”

“So was mine. What does your father do, Mr. Braithwaite?”

“It’s what he
did,
and make that Douglas or Doug. He died when I was in college. Heart attack. He was a developer. Golf courses, condominiums, that kind of thing.”

“Did your father teach you about business plans?” Adid asked. “One thing I don’t find in here is a business plan. I assume you have one?”

“Sure. It’s to stay in business.”

A pause.

“If that’s it, you won’t,” Adid warned, sharply. “Grow or die, the fundamental axiom. The most valuable lesson I took from there.” He motioned at his degree. “So you could perhaps tell me the prospects for growing, the impediments? Do you have competition, and who are they, and what’s their share of the market, and what’s yours? Do you have a vision of where you’d like your company to be in two or three years? My thought is to invest in it, but naturally I need some idea of what the prospects for a return are. I’m not a charity.”

“We aren’t either.”

“Yes. You fly for charitable organizations.”

“I wouldn’t call it that. We’re not just any old cargo haulers. There’s a point to what we’re doing. Beyond just making a few bucks is what I’m saying.”

“Of course.
Of course.
But could you tell me please something about the making of the few bucks?”

Business plans. Grow or die. Market share. Whatever Hassan Adid had learned from his ivory-poaching father, it wasn’t this. This argot had come straight from his graduate school days in the United States. Fitzhugh, feeling that he and Dare were more eavesdroppers than participants, listened to Douglas describe Knight Air’s prospects for growth, its present share of the market, and his vision of its golden future: a fleet of twenty planes, flying aid not only into Sudan but to Somalia and the Congo and other African basket cases as well. It would provide a shuttle service for relief workers traveling between Nairobi and Lokichokio; and in the unlikely event that the Sudanese civil war ended, it would be on hand to deliver materials and workers for the country’s reconstruction.

Adid occasionally jotted on a legal tablet, his round chin in his free hand, his expression betraying nothing of his thoughts. Suddenly he grimaced and, throwing his head backward, pinched the bridge of his nose. Douglas fell silent.

“Forgive me,” Adid pleaded as he removed a bottle of nasal spray from a desk drawer. He squeezed it into both nostrils. “A sinus condition. Please, continue.”

Douglas did, and when he was finished, Adid solemnly shook hands and suggested they reconvene at dinner that evening.”How does the Tamarind sound? The best seafood in town. If you like seafood.”

“I’m a brown food man,” Dare said, “but I’ll go along.”

Under a thin layer of gunmetal clouds, they walked back to the Norfolk Hotel. Douglas had insisted they stay there, despite the rates, or rather because of them. He didn’t want Adid to think they were required to accept budget accommodations. He asked Dare what he thought—the one-man conglomerate was a hard guy to read.

“Sure is. Askin’ us to dinner, that’s a good sign. But count on it, if he does bet on us, it won’t be a helluva lot. Hassan’s got it to burn, but that doesn’t mean he likes to burn it. He’s no gambler, strictly a percentage player.”

They crossed Kenyatta toward Muindi Mbingu. Sooty pythons coiled from buses, cars, garishly painted matatus, and secondhand London taxis to slither through the palms lining the middle of the boulevard. Toxic as it was, mile-high Nairobi’s air felt bracing after Loki’s empyrean noons.

“If you ask me, I think we should stay away from him,” Fitzhugh said, pausing to contribute to a band of village kids who were singing and drumming, their begging bowls set out. J. M. Kariuki, the great Kenyan socialist, had predicted this years ago—a country of ten millionaires and ten million beggars. “I don’t like him.”

“What don’t you like?”

“He’s what we used to call a
wabenzi.
That was a word for fat-cat profiteers who drove Mercedes-Benzes.”

“Who the hell cares what he drives?” Dare said.

“He’s out of our league, yes?”

“The idea is, he helps us get out of the league we’re in.” Erect, confident, ball cap pulled low over his forehead, Douglas strode through the crowds swarming around the pungent city market: an English lord in nineteenth-century Bombay, a Roman in some provincial Gallic town. “With an outside investor backing us, we can expand a lot faster than we ever could out of cash flow. Another lesson from my dad. Never do with your own money what you can do with someone else’s.”