“It’s pretty cold,” Max said. “You talk to Dalumi?”
“Yes,” I answered. “But he had nothing of value to say.”
“I’m not surprised,” Max said. “Okay, so the only new development since I talked to you is that we found where Seso got that tattoo. A parlor on Twenty-first Street. Other than that, we’re at the same dead end we usually reach with these sorts of killings.”
“So still no idea what Seso was doing here?” I asked.
“Nope. You?”
“Nothing.”
Regal mentioned another case, a murder near the Shabazz market in Harlem. It had nothing to do with Seso, as far as I could tell, just another “African killing” that would go unsolved. I let him talk, then asked him to keep me in the loop with regard to Seso’s death. He said he would, and that was the end of it.
Gail came into the office just as I hung up.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Yes, why?”
“Just that look on your face,” she said.
That was enough to spur me forward. “Cancel my appointments for the rest of the day,” I told her.
Gail said something in return, but by then I was far enough away that it didn’t matter. I simply wanted to be out of the office and walking in the open air, beyond the awesome complexities, if we ever can be, of risk management. Certainly I had no destination in mind when I fled my office. I’d needed to think, that’s all, to think, but more important, to feel Martine again, and by that very act, put something fearfully at risk. And a risk it surely was, particularly given the fact that in thinking of her I had to accept the awesome truth that I was doomed to live without she who had most warmed and informed me, whose presence had most lifted and enlightened me, and whose fulsome joys and sorrows had lent a fearful beauty to my life.
A path need not be a destiny, of course, and yet, as I closed in on the tattoo parlor Max Regal had mentioned, I felt myself following a trail that would perhaps lead me to a different place than the one I’d sought and found and accepted after leaving Lubanda. E. M. Forster had once written that the tragedy of unpreparedness is well-known; it is the tragedy of the well-prepared, of those who thought things through, made all the right decisions, and yet despite all their careful preparations came to ruin, that is the deepest one in life. Surely that had been Martine’s tragedy, I thought, for she’d done everything she could to avoid the fate that overwhelmed her. Perhaps, in that way, she’d proved just how truly Lubandan she’d actually been.
It was the dark nature of that concluding supposition that had pressed itself deeper into my mind as I’d walked the streets that day. Some years before, a young female aid worker had been murdered in South Africa. Her parents had later forgiven their daughter’s killer in a great display of Western “understanding” that Martine would have despised. That was what had made her unique, that she was genuinely a daughter of her country, without a trace of condescension toward her fellow Lubandans, and incapable of making excuses for them in the sickening way of Westerners, who, even as they make these excuses, seed them with the unspoken and unspeakable sense that, Well, what do you expect? We’re dealing with savages here.
No one had known this aspect of Martine better than Seso, though during all the time we’d been together in Tumasi he’d actually had very little to do with her. Indeed, he’d seemed wary of having any connection to her at all. And yet, he’d told Dalumi that he’d been working for her.
But what work could this have been? Posing that question, I decided to pursue the only slim lead left to me with regard to Seso’s activities in New York.
The shop had no name. The sign over the window simply said “Tattoos” and left it at that. Its front window hadn’t been washed and so it was through a film of accumulated dust and grime that I looked at the various tattoos that were offered. There were the usual dragons and sea monsters and arrow-clutching eagles. A few vaguely Satanic offerings were also prominently displayed. Inside I could get rock band tattoos and musical instrument tattoos, along with a sketch of John Lennon’s face.
I nodded when the tattoo artist came through the curtain and faced me from behind a small counter. He was small, but with the thick body of a former wrestler. His face had a battered look that reminded me of Rodin’s famous sculpture of a pugilist at rest. He had the same cauliflower ears as that figure, and the same slightly flattened nose. But Rodin’s statue had portrayed a man captured by a certain curiosity, if only to know if he’d been judged the winner of the fight. The man behind the counter had the dead eyes of one who no longer posed questions.
“I’d like a tattoo,” I told him because nothing else occurred to me and it seemed too soon to launch directly into my purpose.
He laughed. “Bullshit.”
When I said nothing, he looked me over doubtfully. “Where you want this tattoo?”
I couldn’t tell if this was his actual question or code for a different one, so I said, “What are my options?”
He shrugged. “I can put it on your balls if that’s where you want it.”
“The chest will do,” I said. “Right in the middle.”
“The area will have to be shaved,” the man told me, once again with an odd look, half conspiratorially, half uncertainly, as if we were partners in a dance whose steps neither of us knew. “Unless you’re a waxer.”
“I’m not.”
“You got a design in mind?”
I decided that the moment had come. “An oyster shell,” I answered pointedly. “You recently gave one to another customer, I believe.”
I couldn’t be sure that this was true. He might well not have been the man in the shop when Seso came here. For that reason, I added a chip to the pile. “He ended up dead.”
Now something registered in the tattoo artist’s eyes, and so I took the risk of capitalizing on the hint of recognition I saw in them.
“The tattoo was exactly like this one,” I said as I drew the photograph of Seso from my jacket pocket and showed it to him. Quickly I added, “I’m not a cop. I’m sure the cops have already been here.”
The tattoo artist’s gaze settled upon me like the tip of a spear. “What you want from me?”
“I’m looking for whoever it was who killed this man,” I said.
The tattoo artist said nothing, but I’d seen the look in his eyes before. It was part suspicion, but that wasn’t the whole story. There was a force behind the suspicion, a hard-shelled capacity for taking what cops call a “trimming,” meaning a very tough interrogation, and with every threat growing more determined to keep his mouth shut.
I returned the photograph to its now familiar place in my jacket. “The cops want to find out what happened to him because it’s their job to do that,” I said quietly. “I want to find out what happened because he was my friend.” I offered my hand. “Ray Campbell.”
I had hoped this would work, and I saw that it had when the man took my hand. “They call me Idi. They say I look like him, that crazy fucker. You know who I mean?”
If this was a simple test of my familiarity with modern African history, I was ready for it.
“I’d guess you mean Idi Amin,” I said. “He’s the only Idi I know.”
“You think I look like him?” he asked.
“I can see the resemblance, yes,” I answered.
“Because I am Kakwa,” the man said. “Amin’s tribe.”
He did not say “African” or even “Ugandan,” and here, in a nutshell, was one of life’s grim truths, the simple, irreducible fact that we are all tribal.
“Maybe the only Kakwa in New York,” he said.
Unhappiness sometimes provides a way into someone, and quite suddenly I saw this displaced Kakwa tribesman’s unhappiness and sensed that it worked that way in him, that his wound, whatever it was, remained open, and thus was a door.
“The man’s name was Seso,” I said. “And if the cops told you he was a drug dealer or a thief or something low like that, then they told you wr
ong. Seso was a good man, a family man.” I let this sink in before I added, “He came to New York for a reason. It took a lot of effort, and a lot of courage, and probably the last dime he had, and so I believe that the reason was important.”
Idi watched me silently for a moment. He was obviously trying to make up his mind about me. In another face I might have seen fear or some secret calculation of potential profit, but in this one I saw moral quandary, a soul working to do right, but unsure what that might be.
“Seso was Lutusi,” I added. “He was probably the only one in New York.”
Now this other lone tribesman stepped around the desk, walked to the door, and turned the “Open” sign around to “Closed.” Then he returned behind the counter and parted the curtain that led to the back of the shop. “Back here,” he said.
I followed Idi into the back room, where there was a bed and a chair, both of which matched the room’s general squalor.
“Take off your shirt,” Idi said in a tone of complete command, so that I began to imagine him as the real Idi Amin, the brutal tyrant who’d designated and equipped torture rooms in Kampala’s most upscale hotel, rooms that had often been quickly mopped so that he could subsequently use them for assignations with his whores.
“I don’t want a tattoo,” I told him. “I’m sure you figured that out.”
“Take off your shirt.” Idi repeated sternly when I hesitated. “If the boss comes you say you was getting a tattoo, but you got scared and changed your mind.” He looked at me as if I were a fellow conspirator. “I got to cover my ass, you know?”
I nodded “I understand.”
I took off my jacket, folded it over the back of the chair, then removed my shirt and undershirt and folded them.
Idi nodded toward the bed. “On your back.”
“Does it hurt, a tattoo?” I asked for little reason other than to keep the conversation going.
“The pain is worse for some than others,” Idi answered in a matter-of-fact way that suggested he’d learned this in something other than a tattoo parlor.
I lay down on the bed, then noticed the mirror attached to the ceiling.
“Some people like to see the work as it goes along,” Idi explained when he stepped over to the bed. He looked down at me, and under his gaze I felt entirely helpless. He was younger and stronger and although I might put up a fight, I knew it would be futile.
I suddenly imagined the grimmest of possibilities, that it was here, on this table, that Seso had been strapped down, a gag stuffed into his mouth, his shoes and socks removed, exposing the soles of his feet and their clusters of tender nerves; that it was here, in this back room, that his captors had applied the metal bars.
“To make it look real, I got to do some things,” Idi said. “The boss is no fool, so it’s gotta look real.”
He stepped away and out of sight, though I knew he was at the little table I’d seen when I came into the room. It was located only a few feet beyond where I lay, so that I could hear the tiny, metallic sounds of what he was doing—sharpening the needles, assembling the tattooing gun. Shortly, I heard him open the door of the autoclave I’d also noticed, then the sound of a metal tray being placed inside it.
“It takes a little over twenty minutes to sterilize the needles,” Idi said like a man giving a tour of his workplace. “Sometimes, when they are waiting, they are the most afraid.”
It struck me that the psychology of the torture chamber didn’t require much sophistication. There is the actual pain, but before that, there is the waiting, as the instruments are assembled, sharpened, heated according to their subsequent functions. Once, in Mexico City, I’d come across the strangest version of Christ’s Crucifixion I’d ever seen, a wooden carving of the Son of Man not yet hung upon the Cross, but sitting on it, his feet nailed but not yet his hands, his lacerated back curled toward his bent knees, his head falling into the nest of his hands, his blood-matted hair in his fingers… waiting.
“I saw on TV, these two cons did their eyes,” Idi said above the continual tinkling of metal. “Tattooed the whites, I mean. One did red. One did blue.”
“Why would anybody want the whites of their eyes tattooed?” I asked.
“To be different, maybe,” Idi answered.
“That’s an easy way to be different,” I said, “much easier than actually accomplishing something.”
Idi shrugged. “The world’s full of crazies, eh?”
I suddenly noticed that a Liberian flag hung from two thumbtacks on the wall.
“I thought you were Ugandan,” I said.
“The guy who owns the place, it’s his flag,” Idi said indifferently.
“It’s a terrible place,” I said. “Boy soldiers wearing wedding dresses and female wigs while they hack people to death.”
Idi said nothing.
“And then there was General Butt Naked,” I added in my best old-chum voice, just a guy talking to a guy.
“Who’s that?” Idi asked, though with little sense of actual interest.
“He was the leader of a wild Liberian soldier gang,” I answered. “They thought being naked would protect them from bullets.”
Idi glanced at the flag. “They were slavers, you know, those fucking Liberians.”
I heard the door of the autoclave open, then more tinkling, and at last the sound of a small motor.
“So tell me, what else do you know about Africa besides this naked general?” Idi asked at one point.
“Not much, I’m afraid,” I admitted starkly, now thinking both of my time in Lubanda and of all the years since I’d left it. “Not much at all.”
I noticed Idi looking at me bleakly. Then, before I could ask my first question, he said, “There were two of them. They stood by while I did the tattoo.”
“Africans?”
Idi nodded. “They wanted an oyster shell. Your man, he didn’t say nothing at all. He was drugged, I think.”
“Seso wasn’t conscious?”
Idi shook his head. “His eyes opened and closed, but there was no light in them.” He turned, walked over to the sink, and began to wash his hands, his back to me.
“So Seso never said anything to you?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Idi answered. “It was just before I closed when they showed up. There were two of them, like I said. They told me the man, the one who ended up dead, they told me he was drunk. They made like it was all a big joke, getting a tattoo. They said he would wake up, see the tattoo, and be in big trouble with his wife, shit like that. It was all supposed to be just a couple of guys pulling a trick on another guy, you know?”
I smiled. “Men are such… little boys.”
Idi nodded. “I didn’t believe any of that shit, but I didn’t have no choice.”
From here, Idi narrated a tale of being forced to tattoo Seso. He’d refused at first, he said, but the men who’d brought Seso into his shop had made it clear that they would brook no objection.
“They did not say why they wanted this particular tattoo,” Idi told me. “But they asked for it. The little one did. A shell, he said. So I did the tattoo he wanted and when I was finished, they took a picture of it. The smaller one, he had a phone, and he took a picture with the phone. And I think he sent this picture to someone, because he fiddled a little with the phone, and then he said to the tall one, he said, ‘Okay, it went.’ But he didn’t say it in English. That’s what scared me even more. He said it in Ululu. You know what that is?”
As it happened, I did. “That’s the Visutu dialect,” I said, thinking how unlikely it would be to find it spoken anywhere but among that tribe, Mafumi’s tribe. “How did you know it was Ululu?” I asked.
“I used go through the northern part of Lubanda,” Idi answered. “The Visutu area. This was when Mafumi was in power. If you spoke English, or some other dialect other than Visutu when you were in the north, they cut out your tongue.”
I knew that this was true, and that because of such extreme measures the Visutu
had been thought of as the Khmer Rouge of Lubanda, bent upon ridding the country of every vestige of any culture but their own.
“So the men who had Seso, they were Visutu?” I asked.
Idi shrugged. “They spoke Ululu so I wouldn’t understand them. And I didn’t let on that I did.”
For the first time I began to wonder if the new Lubandan government might have entrusted Seso with a secret mission that had, in turn, been thwarted by men still loyal to Mafumi. The new president had initiated a policy of reconciliation patterned after that of South Africa under Nelson Mandela. The risk of such a policy, of course, was that it allowed the criminals of the old regime to gather strength and with that strength seek once again to regain their lost power. Mafumi had been a cult figure, ardently worshipped. At his funeral, people had gathered in great throngs, weeping and fainting as his coffin passed through the streets of Rupala. The ghost of such a man—like his evil—lives after him, of course, and because of that, I thought it quite possible that members of Mafumi’s ghost brigade had followed Seso across half the globe, beaten his feet, then strangled him, all in an effort to discover whatever it was he’d brought here.
But what could Seso have had that would have mattered to any of Mafumi’s old guard?
“One more thing,” I said quietly. “If anyone else comes here, those two or anyone else, people asking about Seso, I mean, be sure to tell them about me.” I reached for my wallet, plucked out one of my business cards. “Tell anyone who shows up that I know what Seso brought with him,” I added as I handed it to Idi, “then tell them where I am.”
“That is very risky,” Idi said, but he took the card.
Risky, yes, I thought, and thus an unusual step for me. And yet, the possible gain seemed worth it. For although we may get a second chance to make back the money we squandered, we rarely get the chance, however inadequately, to address a wrong, much less one done long ago, in a distant land, to one who never knew we did it, nor would ever know.
14
Not long after moving to New York, I came to realize that a city of dreams can only grow from soil enriched by broken ones, and that by that measure, New York has the richest soil on earth. You see the still breathing corpses of these old dead dreams everywhere: crowding the bars, walking the side streets, sitting idly in the park. It was impossible for me to imagine Seso as ever being such a person, however, and for that reason I felt certain that he’d not come as a refugee from Mafumi’s tyranny, nor ever planned to stay here.