We shook left hands. “I am Moses,” he said.
I had to smile at that and thought of Nana. She would have smiled too and patted him on the back.
Show me the way, Moses.
Chapter 55
I WAS ON the job now, definitely working the case I had come here to solve.
The walk into town took about an hour. Moses told me a lot on the way, though he said he’d never heard of the Tiger. Could I believe him about that? I couldn’t be sure.
Diamond trading for oil, gas, weapons, drugs, and any number of illicit goods was no secret around here. Moses knew that it went on the same way everyone knew that it went on. He’d been a diamond miner himself as a teenager and in his twenties. Until the civil war.
“Now, they call us ‘san-san boys,’” he said. I assumed he meant those who could no longer do the work, like him.
At first I was surprised at the man’s apparent openness. Some of his stories seemed too personal to share with a stranger, especially one who might be an American journalist, or maybe even CIA. But the more he spoke, the more I realized that talking about what had happened to him might be all he had left.
“We lived over that way.” He pointed abstractly in a direction without looking.
“My wife sold palm oil at market. I had two fine sons. When the RUF soldiers came to Kono, they came for us like the others. It was at night, in the rain, so there were no torches. They say to me, if I watch them kill my boys, then they will spare my wife. And when I did as they told, they killed her anyway.”
The RUF was the revolutionary force responsible for the death of thousands. He was devastatingly matter-of-fact about it – a terrible family massacre, not unlike the ones in Washington, I thought.
“And you lived,” I said.
“Yes. They put me on a table and held me down. They asked if I want short or long sleeves for after the war. Then they cut my arm, here.” He pointed, though of course it was obvious what had happened.
“They were to cut the other arm, but then an explosion came from the next house. I don’t know what happened after that. I fell unconscious, and when I woke up, RUF soldiers were gone. And my wife too. They left my murdered sons. I wanted to die, but I did not. It was not yet my time.”
“Moses, why do you stay here now? Isn’t there anywhere else for you to go?”
“There is nowhere else for me. Here at least sometimes there is work. I have my friends, other san-san boys.” He smiled at that revelation for some reason. “This is my home.”
We had walked all the way into town by now. Koidu was a sprawling village of dirt roads and low buildings, still recovering from “the war” six years ago.
I saw a half-finished hospital as we walked, and a mosque in decent shape, but other than that, I found mostly abandoned buildings, burned-out husks of small homes, everywhere I looked.
When I offered Moses money for his trouble, he said he didn’t want it, and I knew not to force it on him.
“You tell the story I’ve told you,” he said. “Tell it to America. Still, there are rebels who would like to kill all of us from the war. They want to make it so no one can see what they did.” He held up what was left of his arm. “So maybe you tell people in America. And they tell people. And people will know.”
“I will, Moses,” I promised. “I’ll tell people in America and see what happens.”
Chapter 56
THE HALL IN town was named, incongruously, Modern Serenity. The name was scrawled in blue on an old wooden sign out front, and it made me think of an Alexander McCall Smith novel, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.
Maybe the building had been a church once. Now it was an all-purpose sort of place – one large, dingy room with tables and chairs that started to fill up as the sun went down.
Someone turned on a boom box, and the guy who showed up with a keg of Star Beer dispensed it into previously used plastic cups and took money.
Moses and his friends wouldn’t come inside and let me buy them a drink. They said they’d be kicked out if they couldn’t pay for their own beer. Instead, Moses told me, he’d hang out with some other men around an open fire, singing and talking, not far from the hall, and he pointed in the direction where he’d be.
I spent the next few hours casually asking around and mostly getting nowhere. Even the few people who would talk to me about mining shut up as soon as I moved my questions anywhere else… such as to the subject of the illegal diamond trade.
Twice I noticed men in camos and flip-flops licking their palms. Diamonds for sale, they were saying. You need only swallow them to get them out of the country. Both of them stopped and spoke with me, but just long enough to figure out I wasn’t selling or buying.
I was starting to think this night might be a washout, when a teenage kid came over and stood next to me against the wall.
“I hear you lookin’ for someone,” he said, loud enough just for me. Busta Rhymes was doing his thing on the boom box at high volume.
“Who do you hear I’m looking for?”
“He’s already gone, mister. Left the country, but I can’t tell you where he is. The Tiger.”
I looked down at the kid. He was maybe five foot nine, muscled, and cocky-looking. Younger than I’d first thought too – sixteen or seventeen maybe. Barely older than Damon. Like a lot of teenagers I’d seen on the continent, he wore an NBA jersey. His was a Houston Rockets jersey, an American basketball team that had once featured an excellent player from Nigeria named Hakeem Olajuwon.
“And who are you?” I asked the boy.
“You wanna know more ’bout anything, it’s a hundred dollars American. I’ll be outside. It’s dangerous to talk in here. Too many eyes and ears. Outside, mister. We talk out there. One hundred dollars.”
He pushed off from the wall and pimp-strutted toward the front door, which was wide open to the street. I watched him drain his cup of beer, drop it on a table, and leave the hall.
I had no intention of letting him get away, but I wasn’t going to walk outside the way he wanted me to either. It was his accent that told me what I needed to know. Not Sierra Leonean. Yoruban. The boy was from Nigeria.
I counted thirty, then slipped out the back of Modern Serenity.
Chapter 57
SURVEILLANCE. I WAS decent at it, always had been good at keeping a step ahead of an opponent. Even, hopefully, some as tricky and dangerous as the Tiger and his gang.
I worked a wide perimeter around to the front. When I got to the corner of the neighboring building, I had a pretty clear view of the town hall entrance.
The kid in the red Houston Rockets jersey was standing off to the side with another, younger boy. They were facing different directions, surveying the street while they talked.
An ambush? I had to wonder.
After a few minutes, the older one went back inside, presumably to look for me. I didn’t wait to make my next move. If he had half a brain, he’d go exactly the way I’d just come.
I skirted the dirt intersection and changed position, moving to a burned-out doorway on the opposite corner of the street. It was attached to the black concrete skeleton of whatever the building had once been, possibly a general store.
I pressed back into the empty door frame and hung there out of sight, watching, doing the surveillance as best I could.
Considering that I was working on Mars.
Sure enough, Houston Rockets came out a minute later, then paused right where I had been standing before.
His partner ran over and they conferred, nervously looking around for me.