* * *
He woke up with a mild headache. There was still light pouring in from the small window. He felt his body ache from all the exertion of the night before. He checked his wristwatch; it was almost four in the afternoon.
He vaguely remembered seeing a strange dream. The one thing he was certain about was that the dream hadn’t been a nightmare. Curiously enough he remembered it had something to do with James. He itched in various places; he scratched reflexively and noticed the bites: mosquitoes. He washed his face and scrubbed some of the muck and dirt away, feeling a bit freshened and somewhat cleaner. He put on his clothes and tied his shoes with the usual haste of a professional soldier.
He picked up his key and his camera along with the press card and closed the door behind him. He went over to Nicole’s room and knocked, but she didn’t reply. He knocked again. He decided not to shout for her; she might be still sleeping, he thought, and went down the stairs.
The hotel manager was serving coffee to some clients that looked quite foreign, blond-haired and red-faced. Evidently he was the sole proprietor, manager, and waiter. Probably no-one else worked here anymore. He had simply, like others in the city, decided to stay, despite the war. Curiously enough, there was still money to be made even at a time and place such as this one. The manager took notice of him and waved from the table he was serving. He told him with a smile:
“Letter for you Mr. Owls, from Ms. Heurgot. A moment.”
Ethan nodded and smiled thinly, thinking it strange Nicole had already left without waking him up. He noticed the foreigners, a man and a woman, looking at him vaguely but they quickly resumed sipping their coffee silently. The hotel manager went behind his flimsy-looking counter and unlocked a cabinet. He then gave Ethan a small envelope. Ethan was about to ask for a letter opener, when the manager promptly offered a simple kitchen knife which did the job just as well.
There was a small note inside the envelope; the note said that Nicole had to get in touch with a certain valuable contact of hers. She had written down a list of people and places where he should start asking questions. He immediately felt shut out, as if running errands on her behalf. Maybe it was less time consuming that way, or maybe she had other, work-related priorities. The Agency. What kind of operation where the Yanks really running down here? He had little idea about how these things worked. He decided he’d ask her some really hard questions about all this business when they met later that night at a place called ’Queen Madimba’.
“Is there some place I can make a call in private?”
The manager rolled his eyes for a moment, then said with slight apprehension:
“For you, it is probably possible. You’d need to get over to Victoria Square, talk to whoever’s in charge there. All landlines go through the military, you see.”
Ethan nodded and smiled, before adding:
“I would like to know my way around. Is there a map I could use? I wouldn’t want to end up in a minefield or something now, would I?” he said and smiled, while the manager found the joke lacking and simply gave Ethan a shoddy, trodden piece of paper that was a rough drawing of the relative locations of the hotel, the river, the city center and the harbor.
“Victoria Square is in the city center. Ask around if you need anything else. And I would like that back when you’re done,” said the hotel manager before adding:
“I lost my wife to a mine, only last year. It is no laughing matter.”
“Certainly. I was just… Right, thank you,” said Ethan and walked out onto the street, which was mostly empty. Apart from the heat and the nearly debilitating moisture in the air, there was little to do other than peddle foodstuffs and alcohol to passing troops and patrols, either on or off duty. Kids would invariably pop in and out of sight, some playing catch or football, others trying to sell something they’d fished in the river.
The town seemed subdued; poor, but still living. Hurt, but not destroyed. His walk took him through a few streets he could barely tell apart. Some of those were in his list, others were in fact nothing more than alleys or dirt paths. He decided to grab a bite at a stall selling fried fish.
While he ate, he noticed the peculiar silence. This was a city at war, in the front lines, but nothing other than the presence of the military reminded him of that. There was no shelling, no gunfire, no sound of engines revving up and armor clamoring by. A city under siege, without walls or trenches, nothing but the river as a moat. It seemed like nothing would ever force the people to abandon it, except perhaps the river drying up.
He then made his way straight to Victoria square where he could see a lot more soldiers, jeeps and trucks. It looked like every other building around the square had been taken over and turned into barracks, warehouses or command centers. The congregation of so many soldiers in one place looked like a staging area. Perhaps some kind of operation was about to begin.
As he approached a small tent near a guard post, a soldier shouted at him something in Yoruba, without bothering to aim him with his rifle. Ethan held both hands high, one of them holding the press pass. The soldier squinted at it and called one of his superiors, a sergeant by the looks of his stripes. The sergeant looked at Ethan with puzzled disbelief:
“Reporter man?”
Ethan nodded and said:
“Richard Owls, London Times. I could gladly use a phone.”
“A telephone?”
The sergeant said something to the soldier and they broke down in laughter. Despite the complete lack of courtesy, the sergeant pointed at the small tent and said:
“Try the Captain,” and resumed what must have been a keen joke between himself and the guard on duty.
Ethan approached the tent where a rather small-set man with the insignia of a Captain was studying maps and a few sheets of reports, sitting down in a fold-up garden chair. On the small table, his service revolver lay in pieces, ready to be cleaned. Ethan cleared his throat and announced himself:
“Captain? Richard Owls, London Times. I’m sorry to bother you, but I do need to phone my office.”
The Captain looked up from his work briefly and barely registering Richard he pointed to a hand-crank magnetic phone. He told him then:
“Ask for Operations. Tell them to connect you to an outside operator and give him the number.”
“Right, thank you. Terribly sorry, really. I hadn’t expected this kind of lock-down.”
“Makes you wish you hadn’t left the office, doesn’t it?”
The captain smiled broadly and Ethan replied with a nod. He asked for the operator and after giving the number, there was a small pause and then some more silence before the silky voice of a woman came on the phone:
“Who would you like to speak to?”
Ethan hesitated for a moment before asking the captain:
“Captain, would you mind? It’s a sensitive call.”
“It’s my phone. I do mind. Get on with it or hang up, I don’t care.”
Ethan nodded and having no other option went ahead:
“Ian Ruthers, please. Tell him it’s from the Nigerian desk.”
The voice on the other end sounded puzzled:
“Sir, do you know were it is you are calling?”
“I bloody know very well, get me Ruthers, just mention my name: Richard Owls. And I’ll hold.”
There were a few moments of silence and then some hiss and the sound of lines mingling and connecting. Finally, after almost half a minute Ian could be heard on the other side:
“Have you lost your mind? Calling from half-way around the world on an insecure line! What do you think this is, Whitehall?”
“I’m in a tent, borrowing a phone from a Nigerian captain. Listen, I need you to run a check. Nicole Heurgot, says she works for Virginia.”
“What the hell, Ethan? What’s with her? You don’t mean Langley, Virginia.”
“The one and the same. Listen, just let me know when you find out. A yes or no will do.”
“I guess I’ll ha
ve something by tomorrow night. Listen on the BBC, tomorrow at 10. God, the paperwork you’re putting me through alone could kill me.”
“Right… How will I…?”
“Right, well. Off the top of my head and I’m not saying we do this all the time, we’ll use the `Top of the Pops’ opening song. I know you hate the Beatles, so… If it's the Beatles, then as far as we can tell she's full of it. There's a new single out, `Hey Jude’. It seems fitting. Remember, opening song. And Ethan, I don’t know why exactly you’re asking this but it doesn’t sound good at all.”
“I know. I just hope I’m wrong.”
Dead men can’t dance
The old man drained the last of the beer from the keg, and brought the bottle to Ethan’s small table. There was some beer foam right at the mouth of the bottle, which the old man blew away with a wheezy puff, before settling it down on the table. He then looked at Ethan with wide, almost hazy, glassy eyes and said:
“He can smell you are trouble.”
Ethan shook his head and his stilted smile had the look of tasting salt about it. He drank another gulp of beer and asked the old man, “I didn’t know trouble has a smell of its own,” trying to sound nonchalant, unconvincingly enough.
“It doesn’t. It’s the smell of shit!” blared the owner with an almost accusing stare and suddenly broke down in laughter. The other two men followed suit, showing off hollowed out mouths and wrinkled, leathery faces worn through a life-time of being used to hardships of all kinds.
“And you’re full of it, Englishman. Who dem asking for trouble, days like these, but dem trouble, no?” said one of the two, while the owner chimed in himself again, “You can’t hide a pile of shit if you paint it gold, mister. It still smells, so do you. Your man, whoever he is, won’t be coming. Hope he didn’t take your money first.”
Ethan couldn’t manage a reply. Taken by surprise by their straightforward manner, he barely managed a grin while acceding to having being played like a fool:
“He did. I’m that transparent, aren't I?” he said, while all three men smiled and nodded. The one who hadn’t even spoken a word said then, “You dem English” smiled, shrugged and sipped his beer. The owner was sitting behind his counter, and tapping his hand with each word he said to Ethan, “What’s a white man doing in the middle of a war?” and added with a rather grim face, “It can’t be fishing now.”
Ethan took the hint, nodded almost reverentially, drank another gulp of beer, left another five pounder on the table and got up. As he stepped outside the door, he began to realise there was a lot more to what the old man had just said.