The audience wouldn’t stop chanting until the stagehands appeared and started packing up the equipment. Only then did the crowd begin to disperse.
Rutherford and I met up with Cassidy and West backstage, where our principals were having their egos stroked by Colonel Firestone and Colonel Biruta.
‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ I said, stopping Ayesha as she wandered past. I looked into her almond eyes for the first time. She wore tinted contact lenses to make them a bright blue, a striking contrast to her coal-black skin and white close-cropped hair. ‘Have you seen Captain Ryder anywhere?’
‘Calling me “ma’am” makes me sound like my grandmother,’ she said with a smile. ‘You can call me Ayesha.’ She touched my body armor with her finger. ‘As for Duke, yes, he’ll be out in a minute. Hey, I saw what you did out there — quick off the mark.’
‘That’s ’cause I gave him a shove,’ Rutherford told her.
She smiled at us flirtatiously, then walked over to Leila. I noticed that Firestone had pulled Travis to one side, and the two were involved in a heated conversation. Firestone waved some papers at him.
‘Man, what a rush!’ said Ryder, who came up behind us.
His eyes were the size of dinner plates. One of them was still edged with black makeup and beneath his left ear was a patch of white he’d missed. I wanted to be mad at the guy, but he’d come here straight from a seat behind a battery-operated pencil sharpener at Andrews and probably didn’t know any better.
‘They pay you?’ I asked.
‘I did it for free. Why?’
‘I was going to ask for my cut.’
‘Can I have everyone’s attention, please?’ It was Travis, and he was standing on a box backstage. Everyone stopped what they were doing to listen. ‘I know it’s late and everyone wants to hit the hay, but Colonel Firestone has asked us all to assemble at the mess hall in ten minutes.’
‘You know what this is about?’ Rutherford asked me.
‘Nope,’ I said, but I had a suspicion that when I did find out, I wouldn’t like it.
‘So, if you could all make your way over there now…’ Travis said.
Cassidy, West, Rutherford, Ryder, and I formed the standard loose diamond around the principals and their companions and headed over to the mess.
‘You care to give us a preview?’ I asked Travis when we caught up with him.
‘There might be a change of plan,’ he said.
‘There might?’
‘Okay, there will.’
‘Surprise, surprise,’ I said. ‘Give it to me.’
‘Sorry, Vin, but you’ll have to hear it from the colonel — orders.’
Firestone was waiting with Biruta, Lockhart, and the two men from the Mercedes and their bodyguards. The tour arrived pretty much en masse, and then split into either Camp Leila or Camp Fo.
‘The civilians with Firestone and Lockhart,’ I said to Travis under my breath. ‘What’s their story?’
Before I could get an answer, Firestone held up his hands and said, ‘People… can I please have everyone’s attention?’ He waited until the room had quietened down. ‘A couple of items. First of all, congratulations to everyone for putting on such a wonderful show. It was a huge morale booster for the men, knowing that people of your caliber were prepared to come all the way to Africa just to entertain them. So, again, on behalf of the whole camp, thank you.’
A short round of self-congratulatory applause followed. I noticed that neither Twenny Fo nor Leila was clapping.
‘Second, we’ve had a request from the French. Now the French — the folks who brought you in on their choppers — provide the lion’s share of the UN peacekeeping force across the border in the Democratic Republic of Congo. They’ve formally asked if you would be prepared, on your way home, to delay your trip by just one evening,’ and he held up an index finger to underscore the point, ‘to give a performance to their peacekeepers in Goma.’
Everyone looked at each other for a reaction.
‘This has been on the cards from the beginning, hasn’t it?’ I whispered to Travis.
‘Not as far as I knew,’ he replied.
I stared at him.
‘Okay, I apologize.’
‘Not accepted.’
All I could do was shake my head. Arlen had assured me that PSO security issues would transcend all others. In this instance, a higher-up who spent most of his time with his lips on the rim of a cocktail glass had made a promise or repaid a favor and, if Fo and Leila agreed to the diversion, there was nothing I could say to stop it.
‘The request has come through proper channels,’ Firestone continued. ‘And it’s been given the green light by Washington and your respective management, but the decision is up to y’all, of course. Unfortunately, though, we must have your answer within the hour so we can pave the way with the French MONUC forces.’
The stagehands and dancers were mostly shrugging or nodding as they discussed it, their body language saying, ‘What the hell… Why not?’ I glanced at Leila. Her arms were folded, and there was a frown on her face. Seemed, for once, we were on the same page.
‘Well, I’ll leave y’all to talk it over,’ Firestone said. ‘And once again, thank you so much for the fantastic show.’
‘What do you think?’ Travis asked me.
‘You know what I think.’ Then I turned to Cassidy, West, Rutherford, and Ryder and said, ‘Feel free to agree or disagree, but I say no.’
No one said yes.
‘What’s the problem?’ asked Travis.
‘There are only five PSOs providing protection for thirty people,’ I answered.
‘That’s a big consideration, obviously.’
‘Though not big enough, obviously. Leaving the numbers aside, we have no appreciation of what the situation is like in the DRC.’
‘True,’ he said.
But I knew he didn’t care what I had to say. The only people he wanted to hear from were Leila and Twenny Fo. I was sure about Leila’s position. Twenny Fo was the variable. My take on him was that he actually wanted to be here for reasons I didn’t fully understand. Question was, did he want to be here longer?
The rapper turned and faced Leila, and once again their courtiers and hangers-on lined up against each other for a showdown.
‘I have scripts to read, an album to cut. I’m leaving,’ said Leila, loud enough to be heard throughout the room.
Twenny Fo walked over to her. ‘C’mon, Leila. One day extra,’ he said, ‘That’s all they askin’.’
‘No,’ she said, her weight on one leg, arms folded tightly across her chest.
‘When we was together, we promised ourselves we would give some-thin’ back to our fighting boys,’ Twenny pleaded. ‘Come to Africa, make a contribution, and see where we come from. We were gonna tour, remember? And then our managements got involved, and it got whittled back and whittled back again, and then it was down to one concert. Now we got t’ opportunity to do one more. It’s jus’ one more. The people here are makin’ a sacrifice. What sacrifice we makin’?’
I was starting to wonder about Twenny Fo. Just maybe all the bad boy crap was record company marketing and there was more to Fo than he was prepared to admit in public. And then there was Peanut — the guy standing behind Twenny, chewing on a Mars Bar, barely engaged with the situation. The kid was plainly a float short of a raft, yet the rapper had taken him in and was looking after him.
Leila eyed her ex-boyfriend. ‘Maybe if you hadn’t got with that bitch from Electric Skank, or whatever they called, we’d have had us a different story here,’ she said.
Shaquand said, ‘Uh-huh.’
Ayesha said, ‘You know it.’
‘I didn’t get with no one,’ Twenny said, palms face up. ‘You’re talkin’ about photos in a motherfuckin’ magazine. They made somethin’ innocent into somethin’ else, you feel me? You know what they like.’