“Women are embarrassed, Michael, not warriors,” Sayeed said. “I wanted to see for myself the illusion you flash on the wall. No, I am not embarrassed. I have seen what I came to see, and dismiss it, and you, from the corners of my mind.”
“I guess I’ll have to try to forget you, too,” Michael said.
“One day, Michael, I will surprise you!” Sayeed sat down. “You will hear your doorbell ring, and when you answer it, I will be standing in front of your home with a smile on my face. Look at me. I know you are thinking that we are just another of your petty favelos. We know how you like them—brave little bands of struggling kids that you can dismiss from your mind. Play your songs as they disappear into the sunset. How romantic! We’re not like them. We have an army, the weapons, and enough fuel to reach you wherever you hide. Wherever you hide. And now, because I hate being bored, I will call this meeting over. Go home, and close your eyes, and enjoy your fantasies.”
Sayeed stood and his crew stood with him. More theatrics. They stalked out trying to look angry. I felt myself relaxing. We hadn’t been killed.
I looked over at Mei-Mei. Her brow was shiny with sweat. Interesting. Drego was quiet. I looked at Tristan. Calm. At least on the outside.
Through the streets, back to the hotel. It was dark and the streets glistened with rain. Javier was at the controls and Michael was describing to him what had happened at the meeting.
“It was very short,” Javier said.
“He just wanted to impress us,” Michael said. “He knew what he was going to do and say before he ever got there.”
“You thinking he’s just selling wolf tickets?” Drego.
“Yeah, more or less,” Michael said. “In the long run, he’s still in North Africa and there’s not a lot he can do to be effective against C-8. That’s the important thing. And they don’t really need him.”
“They came out and got into two limousines,” Javier said. “The first had Sayeed and three guys, and the second had guys with suspicious-looking bundles. Probably weapons.”
“You could tell which one was Sayeed?” Anja asked.
“All he needed was a drum roll,” Javier said. “He announced himself pretty well.”
Michael asked Anja what she had made of Sayeed.
“I think he was bragging about a lot of things,” she said. “But he believed most of what he was saying. The figures might have been off, but it wasn’t all lies. At least that’s what I got from him. That and a coldness. It was as if he didn’t have regular feelings.”
Michael said he thought Sayeed was mostly about bravado, and Drego agreed. Tristan just kind of grunted, and Mei-Mei rubbed Drego’s arm.
“Dahlia?” I could see just the outline of Michael’s face as we passed the London Hilton on Park Lane Hotel.
“I haven’t figured out why he came to the meeting yet,” I said. “I need to think about it more.”
“Did you think Sayeed was seriously thinking about slitting our throats?” I was back at the hotel, and Anja was on the phone.
“No,” I lied.
“You’re lying,” Anja said. “I thought so, too.”
In bed, trying to decide if I liked London or not, when the phone rang again. I thought it was going to be Anja, but it was Tristan.
“Where were you going with that stuff about the airport?” he asked. “That was just something to say, or …?”
“I was just trying to get at who was financing Sayeed,” I said. “Flying takes money. Or did he drive the distance? It would take about two and a half days to drive, but it would be cheaper. I’d just like to know.”
“You didn’t say anything to Javier,” Tristan said.
“Okay,” I answered.
“You going to?”
I felt like he was confronting me, and I didn’t like it. But I said I would in the morning.
“Maybe tonight?”
“Yeah.”
“I think it might be the only thing we came away with,” Tristan said. “He was defensive about it.”
Tristan hung up.
I had been fishing when I’d asked the question about flying, and I didn’t really know what to say to Javier. I called him and told him that Tristan thought I should mention it. Javier said he would check the flights out of Marrakech.
“There’s not a lot of traffic from that airport,” he said.
12
Going home! I had been away for eighteen years! Or was it less than a week? At the airport. Victor and two cool-looking guys in turtleneck sweaters met us for breakfast. Tristan ran down the meeting with Sayeed and said we didn’t believe his numbers or his organization.
“I tend to believe him,” Victor said. “And he scares me. He’s just ambitious enough to launch an attack anywhere in the world. He starts spouting history, stupid stuff mostly, and places himself squarely in the middle of some great adventure. People like that have a different sense of their mortality than we do.”
“What do you know about his connections with C-8—are they real?” Michael asked.
“C-8 has real connections with everything in the freaking world,” one of Victor’s guys said. “I don’t think his bragging about him having access to money means anything. In your country, somebody from the Ku Klux Klan can say he had a connection with Martin Luther King because he tried to firebomb him.”
“Sayeed’s very much like the Sturmers,” Victor added. “He doesn’t have much going on outside the fame he gets from being a butcher, so he’s going to stay with it. The thing that bothers me is he’s getting louder, and C-8 is acting out of character, but they are still predicting economic growth.”
“You mean that they’re going to steal more!” Mei-Mei said.
“Whatever you want to call it,” Victor said. “It’s puzzling. We’ll keep working on it and sharing information with you. I hope we can rely on you to do the same?”
“Yes,” Michael said.
On the plane.
“Victor told me that Sayeed was flashing all over the net about his meeting with us,” Michael said. “He didn’t have anything good to say about it, but just his flashing it is significant. He thinks he did all right.”
“Well, we certainly didn’t look good,” Mei-Mei jumped in. “They set the place and the time, and they controlled the conversation. We ate grapes and listened.”
“I’m thinking we should give ourselves a chance to analyze it,” Michael said.
“That’s French for ‘make stuff up.’” Drego. He and Mei-Mei were getting to be an act.
We were in a cabin that used to be called first class, when it held two people rich enough to afford it when they flew across the ocean. Now it was called cram section, because we were all crammed into it.
“The Brits called the meeting to assess what was going on in the world,” Michael said. “They have the best intelligence—”
“—which they aren’t sharing with anyone,” Drego reminded us.
“Which they aren’t particularly sharing with us,” Michael said. “But so far, it’s been the best. If all Sayeed has to celebrate is how he talked to the Americans, then we did all right.”
“Michael, let me ask you this.” Drego wet his lips. “How do you know that Victor isn’t making alliances? How do you know he isn’t looking ahead and getting his people ready to team up with a group of fighters? Like Sayeed.”
“I don’t know it,” Michael said. “But if I can’t know everything that’s going on, I’d better be damned sure I know who my friends are.”
Drego and Mei-Mei shut down. I had wanted to talk over my models, but I didn’t want to do it if Drego and Mei-Mei were shaky. And they were shaky.
Anja was reading British newspapers and business magazines. When she got up to get snacks, she asked me if I wanted anything. I went with her to the tiny kitchen between the cabins. They had freshly baked cookies and little paper cups of some kind of delicious custard.
“I think Javier wants to talk to you,” Anja said.
“About what?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but he keeps looking over in your direction.”
I decided that Anja was some kind of psychic. Really weird, but I liked her being on my side.
When we got back, Mei-Mei saw what we had gotten to eat and, predictably, went and got food for her and Drego. Michael had fallen asleep, and I went over and sat next to Javier.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“Okay,” he said. “I checked the airport—Menara, and found that Natural Farming booked flights to London around the same time that Sayeed came. It can’t be a coincidence that a C-8 corporation is leaving Menara the same time Sayeed is. I figured they must have booked the flights for him.”
“That’s deep,” I said, “but I don’t know where to go from here. What the hell are they up to?”
“I bet there’s going to be some stink to it,” Javier said.
“Ya think?” I said.
“Yeah, it was a good pickup,” Javier said.
He didn’t seem excited about it or anything, and I didn’t know if I should run to Michael with it or not. The thing was that Mei-Mei and Drego seemed to be going their own way, and I didn’t know if they were even going to stay with the group. I knew Michael wanted to give everybody a chance to do their thing, but I was getting a real bad feeling about things. What the hell was I missing?
I knew it wasn’t real, but I thought I smelled some of Mrs. Rosario’s stew. Maybe some time at home would clear my head.
We landed at Newark Liberty, breezed through customs, and started saying good-byes. I wanted Michael to do or say something that was cheerleading or at least comforting, but he didn’t.
Tristan’s dad, a veteran who had lost his legs in some war a million years ago, was there to meet him.
“We’ll regroup at my place as soon as possible,” Michael said. “If everybody made reports about what they felt went down in London, it would be useful. We need to fill in as many gaps as we can.”
Anja, Drego, and Mei-Mei started walking toward the taxi stand. I followed them.
Clearly, Michael needed some space. Mei-Mei and Drego had shaken his confidence big-time. Or maybe the times had just gotten to us all. We had gone to the conference because C-8 was kicking our collective ass. It was still kicking ass and making new plans, and we were still in the dark.
Over the next few days the underground blogs carried stories about their versions of what had gone down at the conference. Stupid headlines, like “Dodging the Doldrums in Dullwich,” ran over superserious pictures of the delegates looking glum. Most of the papers carried the same message: that nothing had been accomplished, and that our message wasn’t clear. There was at least one reference in each story to the Occupy movement of twenty years earlier.
In the Bronx.
On a whim, or the breeze stirred up by a whiff of nerve, I texted the Brit kid who did their computer work and asked him to send me any computer models he had done as a result of the conference.
“And I will send you mine, of course.”
His text reply was shorter than my message. It read, simply, “No.”
I ran my models again and again, looking for anything I could report. The 2-percent “growth” meant that C-8 was on the move, and the world was holding its breath to find out what that move was.
Me lying on the bed, understanding crawling through my body like the flu. I was hot and sweaty and a little sick, but I was beginning to understand more than I ever had before. We had traveled all the way to England, had talked our asses off, and nothing had changed. Drego and Mei-Mei weren’t just creeps—they had to feel the same way I did. Discouraged. Hopeless. Shitty. What I had been seeing all around me for years were people who had just given up, who had just “stopped singing.” Now, maybe, it was my turn to shut up and close my eyes.
I thought about Morristown, about how my friends could visit me if I lived there. You just didn’t get on a bus anymore. You figured who was headed in your general direction, how much you could trust them, and how little information you could pass along. Morristown was surrounded by Gater communities, so once you got within five miles, you were relatively safe from roving favelo squads. There was a lot of old, smart money in towns like Madison and Maplewood, and they had built their little fortresses early. I wasn’t going to let a little risk keep me from the meeting.
Back to the computer. Assembling and disassembling the models. Making small adjustments, forcing myself to answer the same questions again and again.
What did I know? That C-8 never did anything that wasn’t in their interest. Now they were acting as if they wanted to change a little, but still boasting about a 2-percent increase in growth. We knew most of C-8’s actions and we sensed—really we knew—that they hadn’t changed. We saw the similarities, but where were the differences?
I looked at the models I had constructed about the Nigerian oil business. The Brits had controlled Nigerian oil at one time, and there was plenty of data on income and barrels produced. Once C-8 had taken over control, the income had been steady and the expenditures went down. The fuckers were efficient. The question was why were they giving up a percentage of their projected revenue to the Nigerians? My old Epson printer had spit out pages of multicolored graphs that looked enough alike to make you go blind. I typed in the question again. Where was the difference?
The other part of the equation was a C-8 company’s connection to Sayeed. It wasn’t like them to connect to anything negative, and I couldn’t find anything in the news files that made Sayeed look even vaguely positive.
Anxiety dream. Me and Mei-Mei have an argument and I get into her face. She’s good with words, spits her rap like she been practicing, but I get to her by grabbing her by her throat and pushing her against the wall. Pure ghetto. Then Drego punches me in the face and I wake up. Lousy dream. Close my eyes. Wake up. Close my eyes. Wake up. Check the clock. It was only twelve-thirty, which means I probably wouldn’t get a bunch of sleep all night.
Switched my night dream to a daydream. Me punching out Mei-Mei and then punching out Drego. It wasn’t going to happen, but I liked the daydream better. I reminded myself that Mei-Mei and Drego were not the enemy. They just didn’t deal with their frustrations well.
In the morning, Mrs. Rosario knocked on my door and asked if I wanted to have some aguaji. It was just what I needed.
“You look more skinny!” she said. “How was England?”
“Interesting,” I answered. “I think they’re more comfortable with their lives than we are.”
“They don’t have little towns with gates around them like we do?” she asked.
“They have them, but it’s like okay with them or something,” I said. “The English are a little cold, I think.”
“Take the soup.”
The sliced plantains were pale in the clear broth, and the tiny flakes of cilantro and chilies were inviting. And sooo warm going in.
Rafael showed up wearing his wifebeater undershirt, walking in without knocking as per usual, and sat down next to me.
“Mrs. Rosario and I were looking in books about England when you were gone. I saw some places I wanted to see when I was young. You know, I was almost in England once,” he said. “When I was twenty—maybe twenty-two. I almost went.”
I liked the idea that Mrs. Rosario had been following my trip. I liked being home again, too.
“If any of us ever get rich, we should all go to England for a few weeks.” Something to say.
“I’ll never get rich,” Rafael said. “It’s not good for you. You get rich and you lose your insides, the stuff that makes you real.”
Mrs. Rosario got on Rafael’s case about him not being ambitious enough to get rich, and he defended his status as a poor man. It was the wisdom of the DR and, along with the aguaji, comforting.
13
Lying on the bed. It was narrower than I remembered, and firmer. Why is it harder to remember things I am so familiar with? Weird. I was more tired than I s
hould be, I thought. Everything was suddenly a choice. Did I want to change into a nightgown or lie here in my jeans and T-shirt? What I wanted was a simple life. Eat. Sleep. Work. Look for hope. In a C-8 world it was even simpler. See what they have given you to eat. See where they let you sleep. Wonder what there is to hope for. My phone buzzed, I picked it up and saw there is a text message from Anja.
A: Dahlia, I am sooo hungry but tooo lazy to even cut up a melon. How are you doing?
D: Not bad. Feel a little like ive been running on a treadmill for fifty years
A: #Got that# When I first met up with Michael, I thought it was all going to be fast track to glory, or whatever.
D: How did you run into him?
A: At a fair trade conference. Everybody was talking about getting a good deal for the small farmers in Colombia. Idealistic stuff. You know it. After the meetings, people broke up and had drinks (maybe fair trade cocktails for the small bartenders in Pittsburgh—LOL). Anyway, the whites were sitting with the whites and the mightys were sitting with the mightys, and I was talking to some of the women who worked the farms. That’s where M found me. I kind of blend in with people, I guess, and he liked that.
D: You blend in big-time, but that’s like your gift, right? There are people I couldn’t blend in with. Like M-M. Or Drego.
A: D—You blend in if there’s a math path.
D: Some people don’t have math parts, or maybe they just don’t recognize them. What are you thinking about eating?
A: I have a cantaloupe in the fridge. Then there’s some containers of Greek yogurt that might not have gone bad. Problem: if I eat something, maybe my brain will start working again. Now, do I want my brain working again or do I just want to veg out?
D: We’re running out of things to think about, anyway. I got nothing out of the Dulwich set—a lot less from the friggin’ Sturmers, and zilch plus minus zilch from Sayeed. There was such a sneer on his face, it looked like his face was going into convulsions.