The PA played “Jingle Bell Rock.” Two American-sounding women swam up and down the pool with gentle strokes, side by side, conversing about the Bible and God and spiritual challenges.
Michael Adriko turned up at the pool’s far end. He wore black bathing trunks. I supposed he could swim, but I’d never seen him at it.
He was talking to a Euro, a white man. It was rare to see Michael looking serious, rare to see him listening intently. I wished I could read the man’s lips. He was of middling height and middling all around, mid-thirties, with thinning, colorless hair. Rimless spectacles, a short-sleeved dress shirt tucked into dark corduroys and come untucked at the back — a civil servant sort, he seemed to me, except that he wore the shirt half unbuttoned to display a thick gold necklace.
I moved to the bar and tried to catch Michael’s eye, wondering if I should be introduced. I didn’t catch his eye. I wasn’t introduced.
I took up my cell phone and asked Lucy to excuse me, I had to make some calls. She said, “Maybe you need to call your boyfriend,” and went to the bar to pout and say nasty things about me.
The two men each sat on the edge of a recliner, heads bent toward one another. I took a stroll around the pool pretty much in the manner of someone who had no idea what he was doing, passing behind them in order to — what? Smell what might be brewing — hostility? Conspiracy? Conspiracy, I thought.
I walked past them and out the back gate onto the grounds, and I took note again of the man’s heavy necklace, which had tainted his neck’s flesh with a greenish collar. I walked around a bit, then came back past the pool and through the bar, heading for the restaurant.
“Just give me a minute,” I said to Lucy as I passed her. “I won’t be two minutes.”
I took a table in the restaurant and kept an eye on Michael and the other. Again the PA was playing “Smile” and had been playing it, I realized, for quite some time.
After one more full turn through the song, the man got up and came toward me through the patio door, staring at me hard. He looked no more dangerous than a mathematics instructor, but my face flushed, I felt it — he passed me by and went out the front way. I watched out the window as he left the grounds by the gate, waving to the guard.
Michael was coming into the place.
“Join me for one second,” I said.
He glanced around strangely, apologetically, and I realized that in his swimming shorts, he felt undressed.
I said, “Michael. What-what?” He sat down across from me and I said, “Who was that guy?”
“Well, he’s a businessman.”
“Are we in business with him?”
“Exactly.”
“Do you want to tell me what it is?”
“Right. Things are in motion. It’s time for full disclosure.”
“Tell me.”
“Come to my room in ten minutes.”
I nearly exploded in his face. “If now is the time, why ten fucking minutes?”
“What’s your hurry?”
“There’s a girl I want to talk to.”
“This is slightly more important.”
“Why ten minutes?”
“Davidia’s napping. I’ll kick her out.”
After he’d gone, I went back to the pool after Lucy — she was lying in the big rope hammock cuddling with a fat African fucker.
* * *
At the Palace the rooms occupied circular bungalows modeled after the local huts, but a great deal larger and roofed with rubber shakes, not straw; four rooms to a bungalow, each room a quarter circle, each with a verandah, a door, a bathroom, two windows side by side. This one had a bed, a desk, a TV, and a standing electric fan, just like mine. A couple of shelves and hangers on a rod — no closet.
I looked around for evidence of Davidia. The room had been cleaned, and everything was stowed, or hanging. It didn’t look as if anybody could have been napping here.
“Full disclosure.”
Michael unfurled a black shopping bag and dumped the contents on the bed: bright yellow electrician’s tape wrapping a package the size of an American softball.
“Pick it up.”
It was heavy for its size. “Feels like a couple of kilos.”
He went hacking at the tape with a penknife and soon laid out before me a shiny lump of metal no larger than my thumb, on a rag of odd-looking material.
It looked like gold. I assumed it was gold. I prayed it was gold.
“What’s this stuff it’s wrapped in?”
“That’s a bit cut from the smock you wear when you get an X-ray. It’s lead-lined.”
“Oh, shit,” I said.
“That’s right.”
“Uranium.”
“Very correct.”
“U-235?”
“No. It’s polished, but it’s just ore. As long as it fools a Geiger counter … Superficial authenticity, that’s all we’re looking for. It comes from southern Congo. The Shinkolobwe mine.”
“Not from a crashed Russian cargo plane.”
“No.”
“You don’t actually have a planeload of enriched uranium.”
“I told you — full disclosure. There’s nothing else. Have you heard of the Manhattan Project?”
“Sure.”
“The uranium for that came from the same mine, there in Shinkolobwe.”
“Looks as if a dog just squeezed it out its ass.”
“A little lump can make a very big bang.”
“If I touch it, will I get cancer?”
He laughed. I held it in my hand.
“I’m in the process of parlaying that bit of dog business into one million dollars US.”
As if he’d opened a gash in me, all the tension ran out. I dragged the chair away from his desk and sat down. “So it’s a scam.”
“Of course it is. Do you think I’m running around with enriched uranium? If there was any U-235 on the market, New York City would be nothing but a crater already.”
“And who’s our friend, with the fake gold necklace?”
“Fake?”
“Didn’t you see his neck? He’s probably poisoning himself with gold spray-paint. I didn’t like the way he came at me in the restaurant.”
“He’s calling himself Kruger, probably because he’s South African. He saw you cruising around us. And Nair, it’s genius. The minute he saw you, I improvised something: you’re the bad scientist.”
“I’m the mad scientist?”
“The bad, the bad, the bad. You’re the renegade engineer who recently examined the crash site for the Tenex corporation. You reported to Tenex there was nothing there. No uranium material. But you lied. It’s there. You kept the truth to yourself, and you’re selling the crash site’s coordinates. Just a few numbers on a piece of paper. For one million cash US. It’s too brilliant, Nair.”
He paused for my reaction.
I couldn’t see where to begin. A bit of rain started on the roof above and the leaves outside, and we listened to that for a while.
“You’re the verification,” he said. “We meet with Kruger and his partner, who’s bringing a Geiger counter. We give them this shiny radioactive object as proof of possession, and you verify what I say about the crash site. Then on to the big swap. One million.”
“But, Michael, have you thought this through? Or thought even a little? How would this scam work? Take me through it, step by step. What are the steps that lead to the moment when the money’s out on the table?”
“By the time the money’s on the table, we’ll have a lot of guys to help us. After our meeting with Kruger and his partner, we’ll have twenty-five K US as our payment for proof of possession. With some of that money, we’ll get a squad together. Congo is full of brigands. M23, Lord’s Resistance — plenty of warriors, and nothing to do all day.”