An Expensive Education E-Book

Nick McDonell

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 332

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

An army roadblock. An American intelligence agent. A jetlagged afternoon on the Somalian plain. Michael Teak is not afraid of mercenaries. Life here comes at a price and as a CIA operative, Teak is holding the money. On the back seat of his car is a suitcase stuffed with narcotics; in the front, a gun and an envelope of US dollars. And then a bomb explodes. Thirty innocent victims. An entire village of women and children - all dead. And just like that, Michael Teak does not know anything for sure. Was he the target, or the scapegoat for mass murder with an international fallout? Abandoned, perhaps betrayed, by his employer, Teak is in the wind with nowhere to turn. Even his old sources are caught up in the media bloodbath back at his alma mater. These events have to be connected. Someone, somewhere, has all the cards and for a man running right down to the wire, the rules of the game are becoming dangerously blurred.

Leseprobe

An Expensive Education

Nick McDonell was born in 1984 in New York City. A graduate of Harvard University, he is the author of two previous novels, Twelve and The Third Brother.

An Expensive Education

Nick McDonell

Atlantic Books

London

First published in the United States of America in 2009 by Grove/Atlantic Inc.

First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic Ltd.

This electronic edition published in 2009 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright © Nick McDonell, 2009

The moral right of Nick McDonell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978 1 84887 395 7

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd Ormond House 26–27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ

Despite the use of some real names, this is a novel. I have distorted institutions, tribes, languages, and geographies.

Dedicated to THCM and in memory of GAP.

"Did you believe it?"

"Not all of it. They haven't left us much to believe, have they?—even disbelief. I can't believe in anything bigger than a home, or anything vaguer than a human being."

"Any human being?"

—Our Man in Havana Graham Greene, 1958

PART I

Boston, Massachusetts, 200X

The large Victorian is dark and cool, silent in the autumn night. Professor Susan Lowell lets herself in and carefully closes the front door behind her. Upstairs to check on the children she catches her reflection in the mirror in the dark hall and almost nods to herself in the silence. She is frowning. Not even midnight and they are all asleep, daughter, son, even husband. She grows slowly angry with them for this, and lets the feeling wash over her and recede.

Downstairs she picks up the remote and finds a muted news channel on the wall-mounted television. Her hair is down but she is still in her suit and heels. She knows some of the players, and a smile turns the corners of her wide mouth when she sees her own image. She wonders if the pleasure she feels at this moment is finer than all the pleasures to come. She has won a Pulitzer Prize, and her husband doesn't know yet.

One thing at a time.

She walks to the kitchen, opens a bottle of red wine, and takes a delicate glass from the cupboard. Back in the living room, she lowers herself onto the cloth couch, watches the muted news, drinks. When the bottle is half empty she goes upstairs, strips, and has her husband inside of her before he is fully awake. She tells him about the prize after she comes, before he comes. They talk afterward, but not for long. And then, cooling and finally tired, before she drifts into sleep, she thinks, Why am I afraid?

1

Kenya-Somalia Border, 200X

That morning a young American named Michael Teak drove north through the rolling scrub on a mission for his government, which was at that time the most powerful in the world. A kite, hunting on well-traveled winds from the Indian Ocean, floated overhead as his Land Cruiser bumped slowly over the remote track. Teak was in no hurry to reach the village under the white sun of the afternoon. Evening would be cooler and, he hoped, calm.

It was a simple mission, really. Deliver some money and a cell phone to a rebel named Hatashil, take a look around. Too good to be true had been Teak's first thought when he finished reading the file on Hatashil. Hatashil was a freedom fighter. An autodidact orphan warrior. A humanitarian and a leader. Teak was trained to be wary of those words, as if promise too bright was never fulfilled, ultimately betrayed. Daylight on colonial brick.

But Teak had been comfortably in-country for a year and a half and also thought that maybe it didn't have to be that way. Or at least he didn't have to be that way. He wasn't sure. This was his problem and as he drove deeper into the green and brown landscape he felt disconnected from his surroundings, and then alienated too from his car, his gun. It occurred to him that finally on the right kind of mission, he might be the wrong kind of guy. He chalked this up to nerves and drove on, which was what, he understood at age twenty-five, a professional did.

There were five suitcases in the backseat. Cheap luggage for poor travelers, inelegant, plastic. They were Teak's second cover. He stopped the truck and consulted his phone, checking his position against the village coordinates. On track, on time.

As he shifted back into gear, Teak noticed movement on the horizon. Through a gap in a stand of acacias far down the track, a dust cloud. It was the first dust he had seen in over a hundred miles and he resumed his drive at a faster pace. He lost sight of the cloud, caught sight again as it rose over the trees. At best a lunatic safari, at worst—Teak briefly recalled the tortures that had befallen to one of his predecessors, his jellies scooped out, his abdomen cut to bits on rusty blades. Tied to a tree and left to die. No reason to waste a bullet.

Three vehicles. They stopped, lined up across the track. Teak stopped too, a mile out, and looked at them through his monocular. A white minivan, of the sort that usually safaried Japanese tourists, and two rusted pickups. Teak watched the men riding in the back of the trucks jump out and pull a metal gate off the roof of the van. All armed.

Shifta, Teak thought, tensing. In Amharic the word meant social bandits. A whole story distilled into a single word. Wrongdoer. He drove toward them.

* * *

The shifta, twenty-two of them by Teak's count, waited for him. They were younger than he expected and rich, with the van and that gate, which they had set up across the track. Might be a particularly shrewd crew, Teak thought.

Two men stood directly in front of the gate. One wore camouflage pants and a T-shirt with the D.A.R.E. antidrug logo. The other wore mesh shorts and a khaki safari shirt. Both carried Kalashnikovs. The man in shorts also wore a leather shoulder holster.

"Hello," said Teak, sticking his head out the window as he slowed. Best to use English, lingua idiota.

"Checkpoint," said the man in the antidrug shirt.

Teak stopped and let the Land Cruiser idle. He looked off to the sides of the track. He could drive around them but then they might chase him, shoot at his tires, probably miss, but maybe break his windows. Maybe worse. Better to talk. A boy holding a cleaver sat cross-legged on the side of the track, staring at Teak. Strange. Usually no children with the shifta. Teak winked at the child but the child just stared.

"Checkpoint?" said Teak, in his best baffled colonial, "on whose authority?"

The two men in front looked at each other. Mesh Shorts theatrically drew an old .38 from his shoulder holster. "Authority of General Hatashil," he said, tapping the rear door of the car with his pistol. "What's here?"

"Shit," Teak said for their benefit, putting his head in his hands.

They opened the doors, pulled the suitcases out onto the dirt, and ripped one open.

"You know, there's a zipper on that you could use," said Teak.

A cheer went up when they saw that grey-green khat filled the case.

Teak shook his head.

"You have a problem?" asked the shoulder holster boss.

"No," said Teak, suddenly brightening and extending a hand out the window. "I'm Teak."

"I am Commander Moalana," said the man in mesh shorts, surprised, briefly taking Teak's hand in a kind of half shake. Teak smiled at him and Moalana began to stroke his chin. He was almost gleeful, toying with Teak for his men, extremely grateful that this lone man with his bags full of drugs had crossed his path.

Moalana's men had been frustrated that morning. But then, Moalana reflected, they're frustrated all the time. He could take the car, too, but orders were orders. Restraint, Hatashil had said. After they had killed that last man as a spy, Hatashil had been angry. "We do not leave our allies tied to trees!" Hatashil had calmed down quickly, though, and delivered a lecture. "Misunderstandings happen," he had concluded, "but always restrain yourself." Moalana had been grateful for Hatashil's understanding in the face of so great a blunder.

Moalana offered Teak a bit of khat. Teak accepted and began to chew. He did not enjoy the bitter taste, like cabbage. "Can I keep one?" he asked.

"One bag," Moalana laughed for the benefit of his men, "how will you keep one?"

Before Teak could answer, Moalana cut him off. "Not one," he said, and his men began loading the cases into the trucks. The boy sitting cross-legged, Teak noticed, had become distracted from robbery and was drawing in the dry dirt with his cleaver. An older boy called to him as the rest of the shifta put the gate back on top of the van and lashed it in place.

Moalana waved his hand once from the window of his truck as it passed.

Teak spat the khat out and watched them disappear down the track. The whole encounter had taken less than five minutes. The khat cases had worked. He was still in no hurry.

Miles down, hours later, off a track off the track, the scrub dissipated into rocky plain, but first, a blessed stream. On the bank a crooked date palm, a dozen huts, goats, and naked children like miniature guardian angels. Teak liked the look of it. He parked a hundred yards from the village so as not to further disturb the corraled livestock. A few tattered goats bleated at the Land Cruiser.

From his pocket, a key, and Teak unlocked the glove box, took out a sealed FedEx envelope. He stepped out of the car and stretched his legs, reflecting on the temperature as he put on the wrinkled jacket of his khaki suit. He wore the same thing everywhere, and it was cooler now. Not that he minded the heat. His pale skin had a permanent burn but that was fine with him. A short lifetime of New England winters had been enough. He checked the SIG P220 in his waistband, tucked the FedEx envelope under his arm, and walked to meet the children approaching him through the dry crackle of the burnt grass. Behind them, leaning mothers, knowing disdain.

Then the most curious of the children was at his knee, looking up at him. Teak greeted the child in the local dialect, and the child was not old enough to find this strange.

"Riddle!" said Teak, grinning whiter teeth than the child had ever seen in a grown-up.

"Riddle me!" said the child.

"My house has no doors," said Teak. It was an easy and famous riddle about an egg, but the child was so young that Teak guessed it could be new to him, and he was right. The child ran back to commiserate with his fellows.

As Teak entered the village everyone stared. Two teenage boys waved antique Enfield rifles at him. One asked Teak his business, in English.

"Come to see Hatashil," said Teak cheerfully, surprising them with their own language.

The boys looked at each other and pretended to consider the situation. Puffing up, they told Teak to follow. They walked down to the stream. Under the date palm three men sat on a thick but worn rug, sipping from small bowls of fermented camel milk. Two in full camouflage, one, whom Teak immediately picked for Hatashil, in a white djellaba. They rose when Teak approached. Hatashil, also the shortest of the three, was heavyset, almost fat. He was also vaguely lighter skinned, Teak noted, and had sharper features. He carried a walking stick topped with some kind of skull, Teak couldn't tell what species. He looked at Teak with heavy, recessed eyes and dismissed his associates, who walked down the stream with the two rifle boys. When they were beyond hearing, Hatashil gestured Teak to the rug.

They exchanged greetings and sat down. Teak complimented Hatashil on the rifle boys' English capabilities.

"If only mine were better," responded Hatashil, "but thank you. They are good boys. At the camp, we have even better."

A smiling, grasshopper-thin woman brought a tray of dates, goat cheese, and two cans of Fanta. Cans instead of bottles, thought Teak. That's new. Bowing, the woman put the tray on the rug between Teak and Hatashil. Hatashil smiled at her and she might have blushed.

Out of politeness, Teak ate a piece of the cheese. After that, neither man touched the food. Hatashil described to him the number of men, weapons, horses, and vehicles he had in a nearby camp. He pointed across the stream to where his own truck was parked. It was a Toyota pickup with a 12.7 millimeter machine gun mounted in the bed.

Teak opened the FedEx envelope with a folding knife and passed it across the tray to Hatashil. Hatashil looked inside and saw, to his satisfaction, many American dollars.

"Twenty-five thousand," said Teak. Then he reached into his pocket for a black cell phone, which he also handed over.

"Will I be talking with you?" asked Hatashil.

"No. You'll be talking with my colleague."

"It is too bad to make agreements with men who might be good men and then never to see them again," said Hatashil, sliding the phone open and turning it on.

Beep.

High above them, in one of the random afternoon cumulus formations, an alarm went off and a pilot adjusted his course.

Teak heard the slow drone of an Antonov as he was walking back to his Land Cruiser. He should have noticed it approaching from farther off, but he hadn't. Aerial ordinance. And then he was concussed forward through the air onto his face. Dazed, he rolled as a wave of heat blew over him. The date palm was splintered. The wooden corral was gone, only a crater left behind. The air was thick with dust. Belly-down in the dirt, Teak saw Hatashil's truck speeding away from the stream. He forced himself to his feet and ran to the Land Cruiser, where he retrieved the first aid kit from under the backseat. Teak was all training. He didn't look at the dead as he ran back into the village; he looked for the almost dead. The spot fires repeated the heat of the midday sun in the dusk.

He heard the grind of Humvees arriving from the east and saw a chalk of paramilitaries bearing down on what was left of the village. One of the Enfield boys ran toward the Humvees and they shot him down. The other had run in the opposite direction and one of the Humvees was chasing him.

Teak ducked into one of the charred huts. The woman who had brought him the cheese and Fanta lay facedown. A trail of blood led from the door to the thin pallet where the woman had dragged herself. An adolescent girl sat next to her, rubbing at her own ears, trying to restore her hearing. Teak knelt down beside them. Turning the woman over he saw, in the shiny gash across her neck, that it was too late for her.

He was reaching for the girl when he noticed at his feet a mug, the sort that he had received in his alumni package when he had graduated from college four years before. It was crimson, with the Harvard shield on it and, in white letters, the word Veritas. Teak did not have time to think about this before he heard the crack of M4s and felt the whistle of a bullet through the hut. Teak threw himself over the girl.

2

Jane had been in Deadalus a million times but never at this time of day. She couldn't remember the last time she had been up this early. All the volunteering at the homeless shelter was in the afternoon, and so were all the political round tables about abortion and the fate of the African Union and so on, and meetings at the Crimson, the school newspaper. And she drank, of course, prided herself on it. So she was never up before eleven. Sometimes she drank scotch, because that's what those boys at the Kennedy School of Government drank, but she liked screwdrivers better.

She sat with David at the empty bar. They ordered salmon eggs Benedict, a weekly treat for him. She coffee and bloody mary, he only orange juice. Sometimes, when they were out, she wanted him to drink more because he didn't drink, at least not like the rest of them. But he made up for it. He was six-four, almost six-five in the four-hundred-dollar Prada boots she had given him for his birthday. And black. And she was so white and blonde. And she said it was no thang, ha ha, when they had started dating. He never brought it up. Last night she had been out with her girlfriends.

"Thanks for getting up," said David. He was always thanking her for things. His voice had the low drip of British colonial schools. It drives me wild, Jane told her mother.

"Such a geek," she laughed. "Glad you can fuck."

David, even after seven months, didn't know how to respond when she said things like that. But he liked it.

She ran her hand over his back. He wore thrift-store shirts. This one, thin and yellow, had someone else's monogram on the pocket.

"So, why are we up so early?" she asked.

David pulled an envelope out of his backpack. She liked the shirt but wished she could just buy him a good bag, like the leather Varvatos satchel her mother had bought her father. David had this Eastpak backpack that he had brought with him from home. He handed her the envelope. The paper was heavy and cream colored. His name was handwritten in black ink. On the back, a red wax seal had been broken. The seal had been the head of a pig.

"This came under my door last night."

"The Porcellian punched you," said Jane as soon as she saw the broken seal. She grabbed the card. Another pig face was embossed on the paper, in green. Handwritten again: The President and Members of the Porcellian Club request your presence for cocktails at … the invitation continued with the address of a building just off campus. Eight o'clock, the next Tuesday.

"Hilarious," said Jane, slapping the heavy invitation on the bar.

"Here, be careful," David reached for it.

"You're actually thinking about doing this?" Jane held the card away from him.

"Try it all, once," he said. She had said that to him many times.

"Yeah, but not this. This is the worst, paternalist, classist, homophobic, old boy bullshit." This was her boyfriend, damn it, not a final-club boy. She took a breath, "God, I sound like a sociology grad student. But really, David."

"I don't have to join just because I go."

"They're just glorified frats. You don't need this bullshit. You've got enough steam on your own. Don't they have any idea where you're from? Most of the boardroom assholes who engineered your country onto page twenty-six of the Economist were probably in the Porc. What do you think Hatashil would say about that fucking club?"

"I think you shouldn't swear so much," said David quietly, self-righteously. "I also think my country is more complicated than that. And how am I to know what Hatashil would say? He says that we should educate ourselves."

"Forget the world, just on campus they're assholes." Jane could not stop talking. Her bangles jangled as she reached down near the hem of her flowery skirt and picked up her vintage purse. She took out a Moleskine notebook, ripped out a page, and drew a diagram as she went on.

"So, okay, there's the Porc, the most secret, secret blue-bloody weirdness. Make you jack off into Geronimo's skull like Skull and Bones. Or you could join the Fly and pop your collar and blow coke like you have to swim to Gatsby's green light. Or you could pop your collar with the A.D. and play lacrosse and funnel beer till you vomit all over the working class. Or the Phoenix. They have some black people, princes of Nigeria and like that. Maybe the Spee? They even have a Jew or two."

"Jane—" David interrupted. But Jane was riffing now, cracking herself up.

"Or, why join a final club? If you want to self segregate you might as well join the Asian American a cappella club, or some other wing of the silent majority. You work all the time anyway, you could just disappear into ballroom dancing and stop drinking entirely, like the half of people we never see here. Or laugh when you fart and become a real alcoholic and disappear into the Lampoon and never leave the castle? Maybe play football? You've got the body for it. But then I suppose they're all in the Delphic, Owl, or Fox. Can't have one without the others."

Jane took a breath and a long suck from her seven-dollar Bloody Mary.

"Wasn't your father in a final club?" David looked at the incomprehensible mess of lines and boxes on Jane's sheet of paper.

"Yes, he was." Jane sighed. "The Porc." She took her drawing back. "Look, babe, you're just too good for all that stuff. Look what you've done already. You walked out of the desert."

David found this patronizing. It wasn't desert, it was scrub. And he hadn't walked the whole way but she always liked to say it like it was some great trek. Especially around other people. He had just walked part way to town, once, from his cousins' village. People did it, if they didn't have a car or a camel or a horse. It was a long road, but the shifta didn't bother you if you had nothing for them to steal. Or at least, that's how it was when he was a boy.

But David said nothing. He liked being her hero and the story seemed to make her happy. He knew it must seem almost supernatural to her. And his heart warmed when she called him babe. It was so sunny and sexy and strange, so American. Once, in Annenberg, the freshman dining hall, waiting for a chickwich, he had heard another girl talking about Jane. She had called Jane a Beacon Hill bohemian. The girl hadn't said it nicely, but David thought it sounded pretty good.

"Several American presidents were members of the Porcellian," said David. He knew this would set her off.

"They're criminals. The CIA came out of Skull and Bones and there. Are they idols of yours, too? And half of that stuff is probably myth anyway. It's all just flip-cup played on mahogany."

They ate their eggs and salmon. "You know what," Jane said finally, "do what you want to do. Why not? They have events where you bring a date. Make the first cut and I'll come to the one where you need a date and we'll have a few drinks. Or at least I will."

"I would just like to get as much as I can out of this place. I mean," David felt foolish as he said it, "it is Harvard."

"Harvard is bullshit," she said.

3

That same morning on the other side of campus, Professor Susan Lowell found her office full of roses. In vases precariously balanced on her crowded shelves, in bouquets high on cabinets, on the stacks of books around her desk. Like the other offices in the Knafel building, hers was decorated in matte metal and tan wood. Light poured through her window, which looked out to the gray Gothic spire of Annenberg, where the freshman stumbled in to their breakfast. The roses—red, yellow, white—struck her as both well-illuminated and alien. Which was, more or less, how she was feeling that morning. The day before, she had won the Pulitzer.

The prizes had been delayed that year, so there was even more attention on them than usual. She had been stopped and congratulated four times on her way to the office. Now, she closed the door behind her and slumped into her Aeron chair. Before she could clear the roses from her desk and pull up the New York Times on her laptop there was a knock at the door. She told whomever it was to come in but did not look up, busying her hands with the roses. It was her habit to always be doing something else while she took meetings with students, especially the young men who arrived first thing in the morning and tried to make soulful academic eye contact. Not that she wasn't paying attention.

"I had a long celebration in your honor last night."

Susan's head snapped up at the flat, British voice. She knew those cadences. An old friend, Razi Farmian, stood just inside the door. A day of stubble shadowed Razi's pointed jaw, and the dark-skinned Iranian wore a rumpled tweed suit. Finally, she thought, someone she wanted to congratulate her. She came around the desk and then leaned down to hug him. She was nearly six feet tall, he five-seven. He smelled of gin and yesterday's Marlboro Reds. She of Jean Louis Scherrer perfume.

"You smell rich," Razi said. She was famous among the students for her chic suits, height, and waspy blonde good looks. And the Chanel sunglasses, and for being a hard-ass. She was thirty-six.

"Where did you sleep?" she asked, looking at her old friend's battered leather briefcase. She remembered him carrying it around the Ogaden, even. Sometimes there was nothing in it but a clean shirt.

"Wherever," he said, clearing roses from a chair and sitting down. "I'm sober, and I have three pieces of information."

Susan's BlackBerry buzzed. It was her husband, Harry, with annoying news. Their nanny, Sheila, was in New York, remember? and the deal he was working on was stretching out, so it would be hard for him to pick up the kids. Susan rubbed her eyes and agreed to deal with it. Either she would ask another mother to take the kids for a play date or she would pick them up herself. She hung up and looked at Razi.

"First," said Razi, ticking off a finger, "President Randolph is going to announce a cocktail party in honor of the two faculty Pulitzer winners."

"That's customary."

"Second, my fellowship is being jeopardized by a gray-eyed sophomore who wants me to fuck her like a goat. Do you think there's a rule against Nieman Fellows and undergraduates?"

"Ha ha."

There was another knock on the door, but before Susan could answer, Professor Henry Rose leaned in. Chair of the history department, Rose was immaculate in his three-piece pinstripe suit with pocket silk. Perhaps the reason he and Susan had always gotten along was their mutual appreciation of good clothes. It certainly wasn't politics. He had been a special foreign policy advisor to the Reagan administration and was a cofounder of a small but powerful think tank embraced by the so-called New Right. Rose raised his well-trimmed white eyebrows when he saw Razi, whom he knew both as a journalist and one of the Shah's many cousins.

"Excuse me," Rose said, "I didn't realize you were in a meeting."

Susan looked at him without smiling as he congratulated her and explained that President Randolph would be hosting a cocktail party in her honor and also in the honor of Tudo Denman, the English professor whose novel had won a Pulitzer. "Just wanted to let you know before the deluge," he said, nodding at the hallway. "A gathering storm of respect." He nodded to Razi and then turned out the door on his bench-made heel.

Susan followed him out into the hallway where she found four undergraduates, students in her lecture course, hoping to drop in. They all said congratulations at once. She thanked them for understanding how swamped she was, especially now, and told them to please e-mail for an appointment or come by during office hours on Monday. She closed the door not quite in their faces and turned back to Razi, who was toying with one of the roses.

"So, what's your last piece of news?"

"It has to do with your prize-winning account, I'm afraid," he said, putting the rose down. His voice went flat. "A couple days ago I ran into sainted humanitarian Roger Knustle, propping up the bar at the Cellar. He's back and told me that you, since the book, are still very much persona non grata."

"What's he doing back here?"

"A Carr Fellowship and a book about the U.S. Special Forces in the Horn. Good story that everyone knows, hasn't been done yet, and so on."

"He is such an asshole."

"He blows hard. But once we got through all the chalk talk—Delta is 'really tearing it up on the dance floor in Addis' —he told me that Hatashil's people are coming apart, murdering each other. The 'new' position is that Hatashil's movement was no such thing and would be over by Christmas. Apparently Hatashil forgot to tell us he's a lost Saudi royal nephew."

"That's bullshit," Susan said, but this was something she had never heard and it worried her.

"Of course, you're the only one who's ever met him," Razi said, picking up the rose again. "Anyway, you're right, Roger's an asshole. But then, yesterday, I put in a call to tell Toma about your prize."

Toma Ali Mugabo was their fixer in East Africa. It was rare that a fixer would operate in several countries but as they always said, Toma was singular. He was a Rwandan national who sometimes spoke in vintage rock-and-roll lyrics. Sometimes they had found this amusing, and sometimes not. Toma had introduced Razi and Susan in a bar in the Westlands section of Nairobi when Razi was a correspondent for Time and she was researching the dissertation that would become her book. Toma had seen the potential in connecting them.

"Come on down, sweet Virginia," Toma had said, sweeping his hand toward the bar where Razi was sitting, "a friend to help you through." Razi had stood up, surprised at how pretty Susan was. He liked the lyrics that time. Then Toma had bought them a round of Tuskers and told them to drop their reds, drop their greens and blues.

Once, in dry Khartoum after they had been interviewing UN officials for two weeks, Toma had brought them up an alley staircase to the back door of an Ethiopian restaurant. The sign on the door read Infidels Bar. A bouncer in a fez at a card table had them sign papers acknowledging that their souls were lost forever and releasing the proprietors and state from liability. Toma left them at the door. Inside, they drank Dewar's and toasted Toma's health. Ultimately, Toma had arranged Susan's introduction to Hatashil.

"'Positively Fourth Street,'" said Susan. "I have to call him."

"He was very happy for you. He also said that a whole village of Hatashil's wives and their children had been killed and no one knows who did it. Thirty people, half related to Hatashil. Latest epilogue to your epilogue."

Pause. Razi shifted tone.

"I can pick up Emily and Ford," he said. He was Emily's godfather. "I don't have anything to do this afternoon."

Susan told him that would be great and what to do. They made a plan for lunch later in the week and Razi left. Susan stared out the window. She'd met some of Hatashil's wives. She wondered which were dead. As horrified as she was at the news, a part of her was relieved. Now she had something to work on. But then, for the first time in as long as she could recall, her work felt vulgar. Again, she thought, work to do. She opened the contacts on her laptop but continued to stare out the window.

4

Teak sat on the hood of his Land Cruiser and watched the diminishing smoke curl into the cooling pink sky. He wanted to be visible. He had turned the girl over to a soldier who told him not to go anywhere, and had been sitting there for close to an hour, waiting to see how they would approach him. Teak recalled the first time he had been in Africa. On safari. It had all been about the animals then.

The paramilitaries were spread out around the village, smoking. One of them walked toward Teak. A medic, Teak could see from his kit. It was about time, but then maybe it wasn't. The dropping sun cast the medic's shadow long and strange, gun and gear projecting Gothic silhouettes over the broken ground. Behind him, the Humvees were parked in a star formation around what was left of the village. The two surviving villagers sat under guard.

"My CO wants me to check you out," the medic said, dropping his kit, "you were in the blast."

"I stayed out of the way." Teak concentrated on the medic's accent.

"We noticed." English, but learned as a foreign language, probably in the States.

Teak looked over the medic's shoulder and saw someone talking on a Thuraya sat phone.

"Does he want to talk?" asked Teak.

"Do you?" No, maybe South African. But my ears are still ringing.

Teak allowed the medic to examine him. He was older than Teak, thirty maybe, brown, his face covered in grime and stubble. He produced a penlight from one of his tactical vest pockets and shone the light in Teak's eyes.

"Anything you could do for any of them?" asked Teak.

The medic looked at Teak unhappily. "No," he said. Teak still couldn't place the accent. He could have been from anywhere.

"Have they found any uranium back there?" asked Teak, with an edge. But the guy was well-trained and said nothing. "Well, where you from?" said Teak. Light now, easy, friendly.

The guy smiled at him and walked away. American? Teak wondered where the medic had been last month.

In the center of the village the CO on the Thuraya walked a wide circle around the two survivors, who were under the guard of a black paramilitary in wrap-around Oakleys. The survivors were one of Hatashil's nephews, now relieved of his Enfield rifle, and the adolescent girl Teak had covered. Everyone else had either died in the blast, or taken up arms and been killed.

Then Teak saw the nephew make a run at the guy on the Thuraya. He had some kind of blade in his plastic-cuffed hands. The adolescent girl leapt for the black guard at the same moment. Teak watched the rest unfold in the elastic time that stretches and contracts around gunfire. It seemed to take forever for the guard to line up the nephew and then wheel back around on full automatic and hit the girl. But it had taken no time at all, Teak had only just jumped to his feet.

"Fuck," yelled the CO, throwing his arms up in the air, the Thuraya still in one hand. American.

5

David walked into Randolph Court to report to work. Randolph Court was a dormitory, part of Adams House. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had lived there. David thought about this as he picked up a mop and a bucket of chemicals from the basement. FDR had said his greatest regret in life was not getting into the Porcellian Club. At least that's what David had heard in the dining hall. And that Teddy had gotten in.

Back in the first week of school, David had joined dorm crew to make extra money. Dorm crew cleaned dormitories every other week, to supplement the maintenance staff. It was made up almost exclusively of international students on financial aid because, according to their student visas, they couldn't work for anyone except the university. The introductory meeting looked like an abbreviated European Union of reluctant janitors. A Scottish piano virtuoso, two Irishmen, half a dozen girls from Eastern Europe who were either short and stout like potato balls or tall and thin like dune grass on the Baltic. There was a Norwegian and an Israeli, both of whom had fulfilled their required military service before coming to Harvard and liked to talk about it. The Eastern European girls argued with the Israeli about which Web site was the best for buying Klubowes and Gauloises, yessmoke.com or internationalpuff.com. To his surprise David was the only African.

When they had been paired off, David's partner was the Scot. David, and everyone else, knew who the piano virtuoso was because the Crimson had run a profile of him after he had played the freshman talent show. He was a great, hulking young man, the color of the moon, almost albino. He looked more like a spiky haired rugby player than a pianist. His hands covered close to Liszt's two octaves. His name was Robert.

"Cleanin' up after rich wankers," he had said gruffly, "that's our job."

That morning, in Randolph Court, they started on the top floor. The first room had a sign on the door, Magic Marker and glitter on pink construction paper. It read:

The not-so-humble abode of Prithee, Margo, Olympia, Carol

The girls' rooms were usually cleaner. David made it a point not to scrutinize the rooms he cleaned. Dorm crew was responsible only for the bathrooms, so he tried to stay in the bathroom, do the job, and get out. Robert, however, took an anthropological interest.

"Everyone in this place is identical," he shouted to David, who had gone directly into the bathroom. He rapped his knuckles on the wall through a Belle and Sebastian poster. The rooms in Adams House had dark wood floors, sepia walls, and exposed brick around fireplaces that the students were no longer allowed to use. And futons, televisions, books, posters. A certain kind of student, from Darien maybe, or Dubai or Los Angeles, bought an entire set of leather furniture and a plasma screen TV but most were less extravagant. Everywhere the digital detritus of the American upper middle class.

"Maybe that's a good thing, if we're all the same," said David, scrubbing out the tub. The ammoniac chemicals made his eyes water. "Maybe we're all the same so we'll get more done."

Robert came in to scrub out the sink. "We've always been the fockin' same and look where it's gotten us."