The official thrust the phone at Powell. “It’s the president.”
Powell waved him away. “Take a message,” he said.
The aide seated next to Mustafa Osman Ismail in the back of the Land Rover hadn’t noticed that morning how rough the road was between the refugee camp and El Fasher, where they were staying during the Americans’ visit. Tonight, though, as they drove across dried mud plains under the silver crescent of a new moon, it seemed the minute vibration of every crack and pebble was amplified a thousandfold in the freshly broken bones of his forearm.
The young aide had learned, in the few seconds it took for Ismail to coolly and expertly snap his right radius into two distinct pieces, a few lessons:
Ismail’s famous smile was the equivalent of a smile on a shark.
Ismail’s slender build belied tremendous physical strength.
It was not wise to speak to Ismail when he’d just been humiliated by a foreign diplomat, especially one from America.
Pain instructs. The aide had assimilated these lessons so completely that he dared not make a sound now. Even as the vehicle rattled and bucked, rubbing raw jagged bone on bone, he didn’t so much as whimper.
Ismail himself finally broke the agonized silence.
“I want you to call Rahman,” he said to the aide. “Tell him his men have until tomorrow noon to find this boy.”
The aide considered asking if he should issue a specific threat along with the order, but then decided, based on his recent experience, that a grave threat indeed was probably implicit.
“Yes, Doctor,” he said through gritted teeth.
“We’ll deliver the boy to Powell,” Ismail said. “He will be satisfied, and he will go away. But the moment the wheels of his plane leave the runway, I’ll take the leash off the Janjaweed. And I won’t put it back on until every Dinka in that camp is dead.”
“I’ve never questioned any of my decisions,” Colin Powell told God. “Not as a kid, not in Vietnam, not as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Plenty of opportunities to wonder if I was doing the right thing. Sixty-seven years, a skyrocket of a career—I never once doubted any decision I made. Then, on the plane here, I get a phone call—a simple phone call, lasted maybe three minutes—and suddenly I’m certain, absolutely certain, that every choice I made before today was wrong.”
Powell sat cross-legged on the dirt floor of the conference tent. God lay on a cot Powell had ordered brought in after telling the senior State Department official they would not be returning to the hotel in El Fasher. Outside, beyond the ring of Secret Service agents standing guard, they could hear the quiet conversations of Dinka families, the pop and hiss of campfires, the sigh of a steady plains wind.
“Except for marrying Alma,” Powell said. “That was the right decision. But other than that.”
Despite an acute awareness of his responsibility for the circumstances that had led to Powell’s crisis of confidence, God was exhausted, sick with both guilt and a blood infection from the gash on his leg, and he found himself wishing Powell would be quiet so he could sleep.
Still, the guilt won out, and God asked, “Who was the phone call from?”
Powell shifted his bulk and sighed. “A woman named Rita, who I knew a long time ago, when we were children. Her brother Keith and I were friends. Keith was killed, and I was the only person who knew what had happened. But I never told.”
For a moment neither of them spoke.
“Rita’s at a retirement home in South Carolina now, dying of liver cancer,” Powell said.
“Did you tell her?” God asked.
“Yes.”
“And how do you feel now?”
Powell looked up. “Terrible,” he said.
“I’m sure Rita is grateful,” God said. “To finally know what became of her brother.”
“I ask myself, finally,” Powell continued, “how does a man become the first black assistant to the president for national security affairs? How does a man become the first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs? How does a man become the first black secretary of state? And then I answer myself: by behaving, in every possible manner, like a white man.”
God said nothing. Instead he did what he always did, all he was allowed to do: sympathize, sympathize.
“The highest-ranking, most powerful house nigger in history,” Powell said. “That’s me.”
Later that night, however—after the fires had burned themselves down and filled the air with the thick honeyed scent of smoldering cinders, after the conversations had faded one by one and were replaced by the gentle sound of forty thousand people dreaming the same dream under a sequined sky, after God had gone into a fevered sleep and even a few of the Secret Service agents had begun to flag and slump outside the tent—Powell had to admit that he’d committed political suicide today not just for the sake of a belated racial pride, but for something simpler and more tangible: a chance at redemption.
Because it had not been gratitude that he’d heard in Rita’s voice. No. What had been converted from sound into electrical signals, traveled through thousands of miles of telephone wire, uplinked and bounced from one satellite to another, then transmitted to his telephone and converted back into sound was pure, unalloyed grief. Fresh grief at Keith’s death, yes, but more than that, the grief of finding out too late for things to be set right.
And now, here was this strange, beautiful girl, this Sora, who wanted nothing but to find her brother. Powell, at least for the time being, had the power to help her do that. And he’d be damned if he wasn’t going to try.
Weeks later the senior State Department official (who had never been well liked precisely because his need to be liked was so transparently desperate) would find himself invited to every cocktail party and cigar lounge bull session in the Beltway, and he would relate, time and again, his insider’s version of the ex-secretary of state’s meltdown.
“It was a sudden, out-of-the-blue thing,” he told a group of young State Department attorneys during happy hour at the Hawk and Dove. By now he was so well rehearsed that he didn’t need to think about what he was saying, and could simply enjoy the undivided attention of all these people (and in particular that of one willowy blonde who was still young enough to chain-smoke with listless indifference and who, he would discover later that night, bore a vaguely Pentagon-shaped birthmark behind her left knee). “It started without warning on the flight to Sudan. Powell got a call from some old bat he’d grown up with. The whole thing started,” the official said, “with a phone call.”
The group let out a collective groan of disbelief. Several took advantage of this break in the narrative to sip their microbrews and cosmopolitans.
“How in the world did she get through on a secure line?” the blonde asked.
“Powell’s wife pushed the call through,” the official said. “Apparently this woman called his home first.”
Another groan. Glasses clinked. Cigarettes flared.
“Give me a break,” someone said.
The official raised his eyebrows and shrugged.
A lawyer whose vulpine features seemed vaguely familiar to the official chimed in. “You’re trying to tell us that the man who could have snapped his fingers and been the first black President was derailed by a call from his childhood sweetheart?”
The official smiled. “I’m trying to tell you that the day after he took that call was the first time he called me a no-good honky motherfucker. But certainly not the last.”
Dawn broke torrid and clear over the camp and found God hunched in the entryway of the conference tent, wrapped in a military-issue wool blanket. Infection hummed in his blood. Shivering with fever, he watched as women dressed in brilliant reds and greens shuttled water in plastic buckets atop their heads. Others sat in a food queue that stretched out of sight into the dense congregation of lean-tos. These women stirred and rose to their feet as Powell appeared, flanked by the senior State Department official and two Secret Service agents. A wave of chanting an
d clapping followed Powell as he approached the conference tent. God could see he was smiling.
“Sora,” he said, clasping God’s hands in his own. “They found Thomas.”
Practically underfoot, two young boys giggled as they crouched and bathed one another with water from a dented tin can marked BEANS.
Powell gave God’s hands an urgent squeeze. “Sora? They found your brother. They’re on their way here.”
Over Powell’s shoulder God saw a scrawny cow being led by a teenage girl. The cow struggled to keep pace. Its ribs strained the skin with each step. Greenish foam blossomed at its nostrils, and its udder dangled like an empty glove. As God watched, the cow took half a step forward, staggered back, and died on its feet. For a moment it remained standing. Then it began to collapse with terrible slowness, as if it remembered gravity but did not agree with it. The front legs folded at the knee, and the rear end listed to one side, dragging the rest of the body down into the dust.
In an instant flies swarmed around its mouth and eyes. The girl stared at the carcass with the stunned indifference of a catatonic. Over the chanting of the women in the food queue and the giggling of the boys rose a high, steady sound, a single note of distilled grief which God knew came from the girl, but even as she threw herself down and wrapped her arms around the dead animal her face remained still and expressionless.
The giggling and chanting and splashing and clapping went on and on. God felt with certainty and relief that he, too, was dying.
“Sora,” Powell said. The smile was gone; he peered into God’s face with concern. “You should lie down. Thomas will be here soon.”
God allowed himself to be led back into the tent by the Secret Service agents. They eased him onto the cot and draped another blanket over him.
Powell’s telephone rang from within his rumpled suit. “I want you to find someone from the medical tent,” he told an agent as he searched his pockets for the phone. “Get them in here as soon as possible.”
Powell lifted the phone to his ear and turned away. “Yes,” he said. There was a pause. “Well I’m afraid you can’t fire me. Because I quit.”
“I must be dumb as a brick,” Powell said. He’d left the tent to avoid upsetting Sora and now strode angrily and without direction through the camp, shouting into the telephone, trailed by a Secret Service agent and a steadily growing crowd of Dinka admirers. “Because I actually thought your stupid ass might be capable of seeing that in this instance the right thing to do is also the smart thing to do, politically speaking.”
Pause.
“I said stupid ass.”
Pause.
“Smart politically because if you got behind what I’m doing here people would see a president transcending the rhetoric of diplomacy and acting for once. Doing something good, no matter how small.”
Pause.
“Don’t give me delicate and complicated. What am I, some bright-eyed Georgetown undergrad, gonna change the world? It’s only delicate and complicated because we make it delicate and complicated.”
Pause.
“What happened to me? You want to know what happened to me?”
Pause.
“All right. Let me give you a hypothetical. Pay attention, because there will be a quiz at the end.”
Pause.
“Let’s say you’re a black kid growing up in the Bronx. Imagine it’s the hottest summer you’ve seen in your eight years, and the war’s over and everyone in the neighborhood has lost their job because all the white men have come back from Europe and the Pacific looking for work themselves. And so everyone’s packed in on everyone else, every day, in the heat. Then say someone’s had enough and they pick up a rock and break a window. Who knows why? Maybe they’re anarchists; maybe they’re union agitators; maybe they’re just bored. For a week after that you smell tear gas every morning when you wake up. A third of the buildings on your block burn to the ground.
“Now imagine your mother, who saw much worse than this where she’s from and maybe isn’t as worried as she should be, sends you to the store. She sends you with an older boy named Keith who lives in your building. Keith is fourteen and supposed to keep you out of trouble. Except there’s nothing but a scorched foundation where the store used to be, so you have to walk sixteen blocks north, all the way to Cab’s Grocery. On your way back the milk and oranges are getting heavy and Keith wants to take a shortcut. So you duck down an alley and Keith tells you to climb this chain-link fence and he’ll pass you the food and you’ll cut through this backyard except you only get halfway up the fence before a cop grabs you by the seat of your pants and pulls you off.
“The cop slams you on the pavement and presses his boot on your neck. You smell dirt and mink oil. Pebbles bite the side of your face. You try to turn your head but the boot presses harder and the cop says, Just take it easy, boyo.
“A second cop is talking to Keith. What are you jigs up to? You going to break into this place? And Keith, who is always getting into fights he can’t win because his mouth is a lot tougher than his fists, says Fuck you. Then you hear a sound like someone hitting a side of beef with a baseball bat, over and over, and Keith is crying, then screaming, then silent.
“Jesus Christ, says the cop whose boot is on your neck.
“You’re jerked to your feet and thrown face-first against the fence. The second cop presses against you from behind. His body is trembling. He hooks his fingers through the fence and leans close and whispers in your ear. Not a word to anyone, you fucking niglet. His breath is hot and moist on your cheek, and stinks like onions.
“They let you go. You run all the way home, and your mother wants to know what happened, what’s wrong, where’s Keith, where’s the food. But you don’t tell. Your father returns from work and asks you the same questions, and you don’t tell. A few days later the police come and sit at the kitchen table and drink your mother’s coffee and ask the same questions, but their voices are all too terribly familiar, and you don’t tell.
“You keep this secret your whole life. You do such a good job of keeping it that after a while it seems like maybe it didn’t happen at all, maybe it was a story someone else told you, or maybe just a dream.
“Half a century later, you’re flying to Senegal on a diplomatic mission one night, and you can’t sleep. You watch a movie. The movie gets you to thinking about how things haven’t changed a bit, despite the fact that you’re the most powerful black man in the history of the most powerful nation on earth. You haven’t thought about Keith for years, but you do now, and it all comes back to you as real as if it happened yesterday—the wet smack of the nightstick on his skull, the smell of oranges crushed on hot pavement. Real. It happened. It was not a dream.
“And then you realize you’re the only black person on this plane.”
Pause.
“How would you feel? How would you talk? How would you behave, you silver-spoon master-of-the-universe motherfucker?”
Pause.
“Hypothetically speaking?”
A motorcade of five army jeeps and one late-model Land Rover tore into the refugee camp at noon, kicking up dust and scattering children. Powell watched as the procession ground to a halt in front of the conference tent. Angry-looking men in dirty fatigues spilled from the jeeps, assault rifles in hand. Ismail emerged from the Land Rover, followed by his aide (who wore a clumsy makeshift splint on his right forearm), and finally a tall but crookbacked boy dressed only in tattered shorts and sandals.
The three approached Powell. Ismail motioned to the boy. “Introduce yourself,” he said.
“I am Thomas Mawien,” the boy said in belabored English. He looked at Ismail, then cast his eyes to the ground. “The brother of Sora.”
“I know who you are, son.” Powell hugged the boy, then turned to lead him into the tent.
“You are satisfied, Mr. Powell?” Ismail called after them.
“Just wait here,” Powell said.
Inside was dark and cool. Motes
of sand drifted on the air, illuminated by a shaft of sunlight from the open entryway. A doctor stood beside God’s cot, adjusting the flow of an IV drip.
“Sora,” Powell said. “Thomas is here.”
God opened his eyes, blinked a few times, coughed weakly.
Powell pulled the doctor aside. “How long will the treatment take?” he asked. “We have to leave as soon as we can. Today.”
“It is not possible,” the doctor told him. “She needs three or four rounds of antibiotics. Much too sick to travel. Maybe in a week or two, with improvement. But right now, no.”
God sat up and struggled to focus on the figure at the foot of the cot, thinking that his eyes, blurred by fever, were misleading him. He took a long look while the boy shifted from foot to foot, unsure what to do.
“You are not Thomas,” he said finally, in Arabic.
“I am,” the boy said without much conviction.
“No. Your face is similar, and you are tall like him. But you’re not Thomas.”
The boy wrung his hands. “Please,” he said.
“The men who brought you here. Did they tell you to say you were my brother?”
“Yes.”
“But you’re not. You’re not Thomas.”
The boy looked toward Powell and the doctor. “No.”
“Did they threaten you? The soldiers?”
“Yes.”
God regarded him for a moment, then said, “Turn around slowly so I can look at you.”
The boy did as he was told. His wrists, ankles, and neck all bore the banded scars left by rawhide straps when they stay tied too tight for too long. His back, twisted by work and malnutrition, was crisscrossed with the rougher raised scars of the whip.
“Where do you come from?” God asked.
“Until this morning I tended goats for a man named Hamid.”