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02:30
Can't sleep.
It's usually like this the night before a hit, but tonight I seem to have a touch of fever. Can't be malaria. I haven't missed taking a Paludrine tablet since I got back to Africa. Has to be nerves. At twenty-eight, I've been in the business too long.
This afternoon I found a decapitated cat on my bed. A trail of fat red splotches led across the white bedspread to the nightstand and an opened sardine tin. Inside was the cat's head. Muzzle tied shut with tiny bandages. Both eyeballs punctured by rusty nails.
The landlord apologized, cleaned up, and gave me a crazy story about his new maid being fresh out of the holy forest. It gives me the willies thinking about an ignorant girl from the boonies making sacrifices to the voodoos in my room. But since this is my last night here, I decided not to press the issue and asked him not to fire her.
The mud walls of the house suck in cool ocean smells. My silk camisole and panties feel damp and clingy. Uneven clay tiles chill my feet as I walk to the veranda. There, a silver stripe of moonlight slashes the sleeping Atlantic and points an accusing finger at the city of Dakar and at me.
My assignment is Charlotte Abiola Kikelomo Jumake Adekunle, a Nigerian, Princess of the Yoruba, and heir to one of the world's greatest oil fortunes. I try not to think of her, but I can't stop myself. Tonight, she sleeps in the Club Mediterranée's ultra-modern complex on the Pointe des Almadies. Tomorrow my librarian will stalk her through the market stalls of Dakar as she tries on silly hats with her aunts and her maids. It's not my fault her family has decided to marry her to Claude M'Bengue.
It's just . . . God, I hate this job. Ending a life is so personal. It should be done by family and friends, or by oneself, not by a stranger carrying a Heckler and Koch PSG1 with infrared image converter.
Heckler and Koch PSG1 is a simple tool. I call my rifle the librarian. Once my rifle closes a book, though, it can never be read again. Memories -- the smell of a Sunday roast, the babbling of an infant son, the speech that rallies a nation to war, the screams of a soldier just before he agrees to cooperate -- my H&K collects and ends them all.
Even the ending of my most notorious assignment, Abu Nidal, was sad and impersonal, although I was able to twist it to my advantage. It's nasty of me, but I'm rather proud of how I was able to make it look as if he'd been executed by the Iraqi military. Score one for my mother and for Sissy.
Charlotte Adekunle's book will be a short one. She's just eighteen, only three years older than Sissy.
Charlotte's skin is translucent brown. Like the tea the Senegalese shove at you in every little bistro and dibiterie of the Medina, Dakar's `African quarter' behind the Grand Mosque.
Watching the waiters pour tea from enormous heights into tiny glasses relaxes me. It's so hypnotic, the waiters imagine I'm flirting with them as they empty the tea back into the pot and then pour it into the glasses again. Back and forth until the sugar dissolves and white froth tops each amber-filled glass. Amber is the color Sissy's skin would be, if she weren't kept indoors all the time.
My own skin is black. Whether I stay inside or outside makes no difference. It stays as black as my father's. I like it, except when I'm back in Enterprise, Alabama, where Dad's family lives, or when I'm in West Africa.
Giggles mingle with the sound of the surf rolling onto the beach. A teenaged boy and girl, children of the fisherfolk that live in this part of Dakar, shyly hold hands and walk across the sand. That's the way it should be for Princess Charlotte, I think. She should be left alone to fall in love with some local boy back in Lagos, not forced into this marriage with a stranger. A marriage so upsetting to the powers that be, in general, and the pharmaceutical industry, in particular, that a contract has been placed on her life.
This job stinks.
Once more, I tell myself. Once more, and Uncle Sam can kiss my black ass good-bye. After this assignment I'll finally have enough cash to buy Sissy back. My bare feet pad back into the house. I close the louvered doors to the veranda.
Subh. First prayers of the morning. From the small mosque at the corner the muezzin calls the faithful. It's still dark when I walk outside. The bath house is across the courtyard from my room. Very African, this having to leave your room to shower, but the fixtures are modern and the water is hot, and I can blend into the background in this neighborhood. A black woman at Club Med still sticks out, unless she's a maid, or a princess.
On my way back to my room, I pass my landlord's legba, the concrete guardian of this compound. His face and head are smeared with blood that dribbles down onto his stubby feet. There, a ritual iron holds a freshly killed chicken head. The gods will transform themselves into birds and eat the offering throughout the day.
It's all so strange. To think I once entertained romantic notions of emigrating to Africa. I'm suddenly hot again. The fever is returning.
A gris-gris hangs from my door knob. My landlord is concerned for my safety because I have been angering the gods, and even worse, the voodoos, with all my questions about his and his maid's religion. He's right, I think as I pull the charm from the knob. I should mind my own business and get on with my job, but I can't resist unwrapping the gris-gris. Inside the little red and white checked cloth, I find a raw egg, two feathers, and a white powder that smells like pine needles. I wrap it in yesterday's newspaper and pitch it into the wastepaper basket.
I tie an ankle-length blue and white striped cloth over my western style khaki skirt and knot a yellow scarf with brown and green flowers around my head, trying to make the ends stick out at odd angles the way the African women do. I achieve an acceptable result. Not too fetching. Not too different. Don't want to catch someone's eye. I have on a touristy-looking beige silk blouse that I cover with a gaudy buba made of the same material as my headtie. Boubou, I correct myself. I'm in Senegal now, not Nigeria. Use the Senegalese word.
I'm posing as Nigerian. Growing up in Europe has left my French good enough that I can be mistaken for a Nigerian cloth trader with a Senegalese parent. In Dakar that's good enough for me to fade into the background.
On the bureau is a Canon Sure Shot, a nice inexpensive little camera, along with a somewhat pricier Seiko sportswatch. Bribes, just in case there's trouble. For a day or two at least, the greedy landlord should hold off calling the police to investigate the missing cloth seller.
Lying on a hand mirror next to the camera is a brooch. A two-inch long, gray lump of man-shaped clay. Not quite representational, but about as good as my clumsy fingers are capable of. I call him Jan. Jan Sikorski, my death doll. He's been with me a long time. Since the Frankfurt debriefing after my very first action. Grossed Dad out when that old African custom was explained to him. Don't know that I myself really believe that Jan's soul is contained in the doll or that it's anywhere at all, but Dad's from the South. He was raised with a lot more religion than I was.
Actually I think Dad was relieved when Jan was killed. He never liked him. Said he wasn't about to let no commie marry his little girl. I never believed Dad's accusations. I mean, Jan's job at the Polish Embassy in London was to help Polish expatriates reclaim property that had been appropriated by the communists. Why would a communist involve himself in something that negated everything he believed in?
I pack my basket. Today the librarian's five-round magazine, action, and plastic stock rest on the wicker bottom covered by a length of blue-green paisley challis. I add a layer of garish, red-flowered cotton. On top of that, the barrel, freshly cleaned with a nylon parachute cord and oiled just last night, and the YAG laser scope coupled with the infrared image converter. Day or night, I can pick the time to close Charlotte's book.
In with my collection of thimbles, scissors and embroidery hoops, are two Winchester 308 cartridges which I have reloaded with less powder so the librarian will let them fly with only a subsonic pop and not a supersonic boom. The librarian rarely requires more than two cartridges for an assignment. Even Abu Nidal went down easy, with the first one.
In the beginning I used the suppressor my Uncle Sam supplied me, or else I made my own. But you don't drill your own holes in the barrel of an H&K PSG1. I went to Jordan in full chador and met with an Israeli gun trader just over the border. My mother, the woman's libber, would have died to see me like that, walking around in a black tent, but how many black women have you seen walking the streets of Tel Aviv?
Stay invisible, stay alive.
I open the door to my room and walk outside. The canvas bag I sling over one shoulder contains a Canadian passport with my picture in it and a pair of hiking boots. It's also big enough to hide the librarian once my assignment is over. A rented Peugeot jeep waits for me in the parking lot at the railway station. By this evening I hope to be off to Mali, beginning my own Paris-Dakar rally, only in reverse.
The cab I called is an ugly Citroën with wooden bumpers. A crumpled left fender makes its slant-eyed headlights look crossed.
"Avenue Albert Sarraut," I tell the driver. Charlotte is meeting her future mother-in-law at the Novotel for breakfast. The hotel's view of the island of Gorée is said to be incredible. Gorée was the place where Dad's ancestors were loaded onto a slave ship and sent to America. I'd love to see it, but a four-star luxury hotel isn't the kind of place where Nigerian cloth sellers eat.
The cab winds through alleyways of white stucco-walled houses. I can almost forget I'm in Africa. Mismatched brown and red clay tile roofs with concrete patches remind me of western Poland where many of the buildings were also built by the French. Huguenots who found freedom from religious persecution in Pomerania. I spent my last weekend with Jan in Poland in a little clay-tile-roofed village north of Pila. Jan! I suddenly remember the death doll lying on the dresser back in the hotel.
It's stupid to waste time going back there now, I think. And Dad will be happy that I've finally stopped carrying it around. But then I think of the cat's head and of the voodoo girl using my room for sacrifices. I don't believe all that mumbo jumbo about souls, but the voodoo girl will recognize the brooch as a death doll. I can see her gloat already, thinking she has some power over me, forcing me to be more respectful of her gods.
That little lump of clay and I have been through a lot. I warn myself that I can't afford sentiment and that no one can hurt Jan. Not anymore. But I can't stand the thought of the voodoo girl touching him.
I reach forward and tap the driver on the shoulder. "Retournez chez moi. J'ai oublié quelque chose." He wheels the Citröen around and heads back to the my rest house.
When I get back to Europe, I'll drive out to Poland and bury Jan in the grass in a sunny birch forest. The Citröen lurches to a stop. I grab my basket and yell, "Attendez!" at the driver, then run into the courtyard. The basket is awkward, but I can't take a chance leaving it with the driver.
The door to my hotel room is cracked open. The maid doesn't start work until eight. Instead of crossing the dusty courtyard directly, I walk along the veranda where I can remain hidden. I put my basket down on the concrete walk next to the door and pull my body flat against the wall listening for movement inside the room. I hear drawers being pulled open, but it's too dark to see inside. Then I get a break. Metal hangers squeak and scrape as they're being pulled back and forth across the steel bar in the closet. If the intruder is in the closet, I can get into the room without being seen.
I kick the door open with my foot so I won't be blinded by the sudden dark. He fills the closet alcove. I stare at his back and think, Christ he's big. If only I'd taken the time to pull some ribbons from my basket. With a garotte I'd have half a chance. Too late.
I jump up behind him and get lucky. He trips over a shoe on the floor losing his step long enough for me to get my arms around his head and twist. Three more seconds and I'll have his head at the angle I need to finish the job. A shorter man would be dead already. Then it gets weird.
He starts crying. A grown man. I lose my cool. This is either the dumbest thief in Dakar or the smartest spy in the world. Meantime he's bellowing like a cow needing to be milked. I hear the landlord yell to his wife as he runs across the courtyard. It'll blow my cover if they see me with a death grip on the guy's head, so I let him go and pick up the wastepaper basket, the lamp, the telephone and throw them, one after the other at the thief.
He charges head first at the door, knocking the landlord flat on his ass. I scream and act shaken. I offer to pay for the broken lamp, but the landlord won't take any money. He's embarrassed that the thief, if that's what he was, got by him.
All I can think about is getting out of the hotel room and out of Senegal. Princess Charlotte must have been alerted somehow. I decide to find Charlotte immediately, if the mission has been compromised and she's hired a bodyguard, I'll have the cab take me straight to the train station.
I pin the death doll onto my boubou. Then I notice that the Seiko watch is missing. I can relax. The man was a thief afterall. The landlord talks about calling the police. No, no, forget it, I tell him, the thief didn't get anything. The landlord looks relieved. It would look very bad for his rest house if he had to file a complaint with the police.
A few blocks away from the Novotel hotel, I get out of the cab, hoist my basket onto my head and walk along the tree-lined avenue. Thick white-washed tree trunks make the avenue seem quite bright even though the sun is just rising. In spite of the episode back at my hotel room there's no hurry. Mrs. M'Bengue is a devout Muslim and will be busy a while longer with morning prayers.
Charlotte will have a difficult time with the dawn prayers. She is a sleepy Anglican who keeps a few fetishes in her rooms at Club Med, but like all dutiful African wives, she will make her husband's religion her own. Compared to Sissy, she is lucky. The practice of female circumcision; the cutting away of the clitoris, has almost died out in West Africa. Both Muslims and Fetisheurs have abandoned it.
I shake my head and almost tip my basket. How easy it is to forget that after tonight there will be no Charlotte.
On the curb in front of the Banc du Sénégal, a group of vendors ready their trays and carts for the breakfast crowd of bank and embassy employees. I order a lamb brochette and lemon grass tea while I wait.
Charlotte drives up in a vintage Karman Ghia that any collector on the streets of Stuttgart would envy. The hotel valet opens the door for her maid. Charlotte gets out before the valet reaches her door. Good. She and the maid are alone. There is no bodyguard. The silver crucifix around Charlotte's neck glints in the sunlight as she turns and hands the valet her car key. She stops under the Novotel awning to brush the creases out of her pale yellow worsted silk dress. Her head tie matches her dress exactly. Something her mother picked out, no doubt. Hardly the sort of thing Charlotte goes in for.
The white Mercedes belonging to the M'Bengues pulls up a few minutes later. The driver waves off the valet and opens the door for Mrs. M'Bengue himself.
Fifteen minutes later, twenty-year-old Claude arrives on a bicycle wearing a grass-stained soccer jersey with the number eleven on it. He is followed by a small crowd of his fellow soccer-players who tease him about his breakfast date with his future wife. Claude blushes appealingly as he loads his bicycle into the trunk of the Mercedes and takes a dove gray suit from his mother's driver.
It does no good to wish that Claude could have been my assignment. He's just as sweet and appealing as Charlotte and he has five older brothers, anyone of whom could be forced into a marriage with Charlotte. Charlotte is an only child. When she dies her fortune will be divided among the various branches of her family and will cease to threaten African stability. Claude's family, on the other hand, would use Charlotte's oil money to take their counterfeit drug company legit. AIDS and polio vaccines, malaria prophylactics, penicillin, birth control pills -- American drug companies stand to lose a fortune, if the African pharmaceutical industry takes off.
It's the M'Bengues' other business that worries Uncle Sam, though. Two of their factories, one in Dakar and another up north, in St. Louis, are involved in biological weapons development. With Charlotte's money, Claude's father and uncle will be able to buy delivery systems for the biologicals. In two to three years the CIA expects M'Bengue missiles armed with biological warheads to be positioned in Zimbabwe, Libya and Mozambique.
I learned the hard way to trust the company analysts when they assign wet work. Back in Poland, too many people died because I tried second guessing the analysts.
I rest my hand on the cloths covering the librarian as I sit on the curb sipping another lemon grass tea.
I'm saving the world.
This job still stinks.
The M'Bengues get into their Mercedes. Charlotte and her maid join them. They head west toward the Place de l'Independence. Good. I hail another crunchmobile and follow them. There's nothing strange about a Nigerian cloth merchant heading in the direction of the Sandanga Market. I decide to take the driver into my confidence and order him to follow the Mercedes.
"Back in my country, mademoiselle has much money," I say.
This doesn't seem to interest my driver one way or the other. "Mademoiselle hasn't picked out the fabric for her family's wedding clothes. I will give you 300 French francs if you don't lose her." The driver grins at me in the rear-view mirror and speeds up.
Somewhere along the Avenue Georges Pompidou, my taxi turns left and follows Charlotte into the colonial section of Dakar. Red bougainvillea drapes ivory walls. Paint on the old stucco mansions is peeling away from the walls exposing darker tan patches. The faded elegance of this quarter smacks of refinement. Like Mrs. M'Bengue and Claude. Claude's flashy father and uncle seem out of place here. The Mercedes pulls into a black-iron-gated drive. My taxi pulls over to the curb and waits. The driver tries to talk to me. I ignore him.
The expatriate section of Kuwait City where my parents had their house was so modern it looked like an exhibit at a convention of Miami architects. Mom and Sissy were home when the Iraqis invaded.
Sissy had just entered the first grade in the local school. Dad had named her Yasmin and for years he'd planned for her to be his Arab specialist, just like I had become his European specialist.
He sent me to school in Germany. Not an on-base American school with other Army brats, a full-fledged German school. He outfitted me just like the German kids. A knapsack packed with a hard roll and butter on my back and in my arms a two-foot high foil cone filled with candy. Later, he sent me to school in Holland, France and Greece.
When the Iraqis came, Dad, a retired U.S. army colonel, was on a consulting job in Alexandria, Virginia. His best friend had to sucker punch him and hide his car keys. That kept him off a plane to Riyadh until I was able to get leave and fly down from West Point where I was a sophomore cadet.
Mom was a nurse at a Kuwaiti hospital, and she reacted to the invasion as if she were a smartass from Berlin and not the shy daughter of a penniless refugee from Breslau.
That's not fair. I'm sure if Mom had known Sissy would be taken from her, she would have gone into hiding right away.
Watching the execution of children in the streets of Kuwait made her snap. You'd think she would have thought of Sissy then, but in her mind things like that didn't happen to American kids, or German kids. At least they hadn't for a long time. I think she was already a crazy woman when the Iraqis moved into her hospital and shot the chief obstetrician and two pediatric interns.
She hauled out Dad's cellular phone, called Dad's friend in Saudi Arabia, and arranged for an uplink to CNN. If she wasn't sleeping or finding food for Sissy, she was talking on that damn phone trying to tell people what was going on in Kuwait. I heard her German-accented English on CNN myself. So did the Iraqis.
They kept her even after they released the other women and children. We allowed our hopes to rise when Saddam Hussein announced the release of the human shields, but Mom and Sissy were not among them despite numerous protests from the German and American chargés in Baghdad.
Dad never saw Sissy again, but three weeks into the war, Mom appeared on Baghdad TV. Her blond hair was hidden under a white scarf. Her face was swollen and her nose off-center. She called on the Coalition soldiers to lay down their weapons and stop their unlawful aggression against the peaceful people of Iraq.
Dad cried. Two days later he left for Saudi Arabia. I didn't argue.
Since the Red Cross brought her out of the theater of war, Mom hasn't been the same. She can't stand to be indoors where everything reminds her of Sissy.
Mom spends spring and summer with Dad in the little A-frame house Dad built just outside of Cody, Wyoming. She's taken a job at the local hospital helping out during tourist season, but she doesn't care about anything anymore. Even the furniture in the house, bought to replace what was lost in Kuwait, was all picked out by Dad.
Fall is spent in Enterprise, helping Dad's mother can her tomatoes and okra. Winter, she spends with her own mother in Nüremburg.
Christmas is the toughest on Mom. Late in the afternoon of each December twenty-fourth, she leaves her mother's apartment and walks the streets of Nüremburg until noon the next day.
Charlotte and her maid follow Mrs. M'Bengue back into the Mercedes. They head north to the Medina. My cab follows. Charlotte turns around and looks long and hard at my taxi. At least I think it's Charlotte. It seems a little ridiculous, though. She's only eighteen and full of smiles and giggles; too naive to suspect anyone would be following her.
The car stops at the Tilène Market. I thank my driver and let him go. A market is a good place for a hit, and there is nothing unusual about dropping off a cloth seller there. If I don't find an opportunity here, I know from her telephone conversations that Charlotte plans to tour the Grand Mosque at fourteen:thirty. I can catch a bus. It's on the main line.
The Tilène Market is very African. Only the boubous of the flower mongers can dim the masses of garish blooms. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that more than one of the women had a death doll or two wrapped in the handkerchiefs pinned to their blouses. Only in West Africa a death doll usually contains the soul of a child who didn't survive babyhood, not the soul of a former lover like Jan.
Haggling shoppers drown out the official French bartering with the easy music of Wolof and Fula. Crude wooden stalls offer unglazed pottery, twig baskets, and exotic vegetables such as plantain and baobab leaves. The odor of sun-dried fish blends with the stench of sweat from the crowd. It sharpens the perfume of the floral bouquets stinging my nostrils.
Charlotte walks to a large stall at the end of the main aisle. Row upon row of mummified monkey paws stretch out at her feet. Wings of owls are arrayed with hundreds of little gray parrot carcasses. Goat skulls hang from the stall's roof like a bumper crop of grapes just before harvest.
In the center of the stall is a small table where wooden gods sit smoking cigarettes. Voodoos. Their skin bleached white during their sojourn across the Atlantic. At their feet are ritual offerings. Bottles of Charlie and Estée Lauder perfume. Red and white packs of Marlboros. They demand tribute in the currency of the lands where they became cruel and evil.
Stacked around all four sides of the altar are open burlap bags containing ampules of penicillin, birth control pills, steroids; all available without prescription, the source of the M'Bengue's modest fortune.
Two dogs tied to a corner post whimper as if they know they will soon be sacrificed to Ougoun, the Yoruba god of blacksmiths, hunters and motorcars.
The woman selling the magic charms and medicines smiles at Charlotte and kisses her hand. She pulls Charlotte further into the stall and places a necklace of cowrie shells around her neck. Charlotte leaves a little offering on the altar.
I'm curious to see what Charlotte has given the gods, so I wait for her to leave the market and walk to the stall. It's a relief when the slight, sweet aroma of decaying flesh from the little parrot corpses finally conquers the reek of the flowers.
A woman grabs my elbow and demands to see my samples. I smile at her and shake my head. "C'est pas pour vous," I tell her, but she won't leave me alone. People are staring.
I put my basket down and the woman bends to rummage through the folded material. Before she can find the librarian, I pull out a brightly embroidered cloth and name a ridiculously low price. The woman looks at me in disbelief, then smiles slyly and hands me some Senegalese francs. She bends again hoping to find another bargain to match the first. "La prochaine fois." Next time, I tell her, and snatch the basket away, placing it back onto my head. She seems disappointed, but not enough to bother me again.
The woman in the medicine stall smiles at me and beckons with both hands. Her face is scarred by sinister geometric patterns, but her smile is all fresh air and sunshine. "Love potion?" she asks in Wolof. "Cure for a toothache?"
I shake my head and pretend to be interested in the vendor's statuettes, miniature Catholic saints ringed by eight-armed Indian gods. Many of the African gods and fetishes are familiar from my days at the University of London, when I still hoped to emigrate to Africa. Cheap ivory-colored, plastic crucifixes are jumbled together with garishly painted European mermaid dolls that are used by the Mami-Wata cult. Bata, the god of smallpox, has his brown skin dotted with white paint. Standing next to Bata are Edan, the snake god, who can send a snake to kill an enemy and Akiti, a particularly malicious fetish who causes mental illness.
The wooden crate next to the gods is filled with thunderstones, created when the metaphysical heavenly forces hurl lightening bolts down onto the physical world of man. They symbolize the union of heaven and earth, the ordinary and the divine. Neither can exist without the other. Both form one-half of a whole, I was told by one of my Nigerian classmates in African studies at U. of London. But this union has no place for slaves, or the descendants of slaves.
I'd never understood why the Africans in my classes never talked with me, or why they turned me down each time I asked them to go out for coffee. It was the Nigerian in my Shona sculpture class who finally told me why. Her smile remained friendly as she patiently explained, as if she were talking to a very stupid child, that descendants of slaves have the souls of slaves. By definition they cannot be human. "Would you invite a screwdriver out for coffee?" she asked me. "Or a bicycle? Surely not."
My parents were relieved when I quit African studies and accepted an appointment to West Point. They had been against my emigrating to Africa, but I had been so determined. My mother would get angry and ask why I couldn't go to Silesia, after all I'm just as much German as African-American, but what can I say? When I look in the mirror, I don't exactly see Heidi.
"A ceremony?" the voodoo woman asks me. "A woman like you should be having three children already. 10,000 francs and Mamissa will help."
I thank her, but no. Then she sees the death doll pinned to my boubou and clucks. "Next time you are pregnant, you come to Mamissa. She will keep the evil spirits far away from the little one."
I hardly listen as I shake my head. Charlotte has left something small and silver. An earring. My earring! A disc of beaten silver my friend Liz made for me in an art class years ago.
My heart feels like it wants to jump out of my chest. Like a voodoo animal about to be sacrificed. Calm down, I tell myself. Hadn't I lost one of my earrings? Yes. That day on the beach watching the fishermen dry their catch. But still. That's my earring!
It's suddenly very hot in the market. I feel ill again. The voodoo woman spills a smelly powder on me and my basket. Her grin grows wider, almost a leer. She acts like it was an accident. "Pardon, pardon. Comme je suis une folle," she apologizes, and begins brushing away the powder with her hands. I remember enough of my African studies to know that the woman is a witch and that she has cast a spell over me.
It won't work. Descendants of slaves aren't human beings. Her magic has no hold over me. Not when it's compared with the magic of the librarian. I push her hands away and leave her stall. I rush down the market aisle towards the exit, shoving gawky shoppers out of my way.
At the end of the aisle I trip over a rolled up rushwork mat sticking out of a stall. I try to keep my basket from spilling the librarian over the market floor, and almost succeed, scraping both knees in the effort. My embroidery basket spills anyway. Agonizing seconds tick by before my black hand can dull the brassy gleam of the two Winchesters rolling across the concrete floor.
Lemon yellow pumps stop next to my basket. Hands reach under my left elbow to help me up. I know without looking, it's Princess Charlotte. At first, when I thank her, I think I see recognition in her eyes, but no. Her eyes glaze over and I'm just another cloth seller again.
But the earring!
You lost it on the beach. Remember, Stupid?
I have to get control of myself.
Oh God. She smells so clean. Like vanilla.
Suhr. Prayers again. I'm riding the bus to the Grand Mosque. The windows next to my seat have been broken out. When the bus moves, the heat, thick as honey, becomes bearable. I can't forget my earring lying there with the perfume and cigarettes for the gods. How did Charlotte get it? What does she know?
I should leave Dakar, but Sissy is so close now. This last hit, and I'll finally have enough cash. I tell myself I'm being silly. My imagination is running away with me. I saw a bit of silver, but it wasn't an earring. It could have been a coin. Yes, that's what it was, a coin.
I walk into the alley behind the empty house I checked out a couple of weeks ago. Cardboard boxes and rubbish barrels are piled in such a way that I can climb to the flat roof of the house. From here, I can see the forecourt of the mosque and look up at the minaret. An acacia tree grows over the roof, providing shade and camouflage.
The librarian snaps together with a reassuring series of clicks and hums as the computers and micro-motors realign the barrel and sights into the stock. The built-in collimator blinks green. I look through the sight and wait.
Sissy was adopted in Baghdad. We found out that much from the propaganda films. Saddam awarded a medal to a Muslim fundamentalist for adopting the child of the infidel and showing her the way to God.
After prayers, Charlotte and her entourage appear on the tower's little balcony and look down at Dakar. The crucifix is gone. In its place is a small brown pendant which Charlotte picks up with the fingers of both hands.
I load the modified Winchesters into the librarian's magazine. Charlotte is a dead woman no matter what. If I don't do it, someone else will be sent, and they'll get the money that could have been used to help Sissy.
When I increase the magnification of my scope, I see that Charlotte's pendant is a miniature brown hand, a monkey paw. She presses it onto her lips, then onto her forehead. Her maid gives Charlotte a small hand mirror which she uses to reflect light onto the various buildings surrounding the mosque.
I watch the light flit over store fronts, houses, workshops, trees and parked cars. When it gets to my house, the light freezes for a few seconds, then floats upward until it hovers in the leaves of the tree above me.
Through my scope, Charlotte kisses the monkey paw three times and says something which her maid answers. The laser locks onto Charlotte's forehead.
I feel the librarian get warm. And warmer. The plastic heats up like a metal car roof in the African sun. "Shit!" I scream, and let the rifle fall onto the baked mud roof.
I don't know what's wrong with me, letting mumbo-jumbo with a monkey paw get to me like that. This is for Sissy, I tell myself. Once more and Sissy will be free.
Asr. I hop a bus for Yoff that passes by Club Med. Charlotte will return to dress for dinner, as she has every night these past three weeks.
The bus drives by the tidy Muslim Cemetery. With its plain stone graves, all pointing to Mecca, it is very different from the City of the Dead in Alexandria. The mausoleums and catacombs of the City of the Dead have become a housing project for the increasing numbers of homeless poor in Egypt.
About three years after the war began, I was with Special Forces. Somebody needed a wife for an action in Ethiopia. On our return to Europe, Saad, one of our Egyptian operatives told us of a light-skinned black girl who spoke fluent Arabic with an Iraqi accent living in the City of the Dead in Alexandria. Sissy would have been nine. I couldn't pass up the opportunity. While the American contingent continued on to Frankfurt for debriefing, I headed for Alexandria. An unauthorized leave, but as it fell on a weekend, one that might go undetected.
For two days, I searched through catacombs and tramped into tombs, trading pieces of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit Gum for information about a little girl in a wrinkled photo. I walked down the steps and entered the little mausoleum where three months before she had lived with eight other children. I saw the empty coffin shelf where she had slept at night. I placed my hand over turquoise hand prints running up the white stone walls and onto the ceiling. Hand prints, the other children told me, made by Sissy to ward off the evil eye.
A Palestinian had left her there, the other children told me. Sissy spent months with them, begging. Because she was very beautiful and still spoke a few words of English, the tourists gave her much money, which she shared with the other children. When the man returned for Sissy, the children told her not to go. The boy, Ismail, had heard stories. 'He will put you on an airplane,' he told Sissy. 'And he will give you a pretty yellow radio and when you get up in the air, the radio will blow up and you will be killed.' But it was what the girl, Nazli had warned her about that came to pass.
Two months went by before I could get back to Alexandria. Saad insisted on helping with my search. My Arabic was poor at best, and the elaborate compliments Egyptians pay each other with even the most simple greetings meant that I would be perceived as rude or worse.
The house that Nazli led us to made me glad I hadn't confided in my parents. At first, I hadn't wanted to give them false hopes, but now I don't tell them where Sissy is, because it would kill my mother to know the truth.
A trail of small blue hand prints led across the white- and beige-painted face of the house. The woman inside listened to my story with sympathy and offered the usual apologies for her profession. She made Saad angry, the way she made herself sound like a social service agency. If it hadn't been for her, she claimed, all twenty-three of the young boys and girls working the cubicles of her house would be sleeping in the City of the Dead and eating garbage.
Yes, she told us, Sissy had been there, but only for a few weeks. She was already too developed for the tastes of her clientèle. And there was another problem. They tried to hide it, but I could tell that Saad and his friend were horrified by what she told them.
Saad, because he didn't know the English word for it, told me how during Sissy's captivity in Iraq, those parts giving a girl pleasure as she becomes a woman, had been cut away. Then, he blushed as he explained to me how sensual Egyptians are, and how unlike other Arabs, they mistrust a houri without all of her sexual parts. Certain surgical modifications had become necessary in order for Sissy to practice her profession.
The woman just grinned placidly, as if Saad were explaining how to clip the tail and ears of a champion schnauzer. I wanted to murder her. What had she done to my sister?
"What surgical modifications, Saad?"
He ignored me. His friend took my hand.
"Tell me!" I screamed at them. "What has the bitch done to my baby sister?" I pulled my hand away and reached out to grab the woman.
Saad held me back. "Hold on. Let's try and find out where Sissy is, then you can beat her all you want."
Some man had taken Sissy to Cairo. Saad asked her very nastily how much money she was paid for Sissy. The woman just shrugged her shoulders. I stomped on Saud's foot and lunged forward when he let me go. Things would have gotten rough then, if five or six of her male friends hadn't shown up.
Out on the street, when I asked Saad again, he told me the modifications were, "you know, to make her a woman again."
We hit the bar at the Cecil Hotel and Saad's friend spun stories of E. M. Forster and Cavafy. We drank to the wrinkled picture of the little six-year-old Sissy, and Saad's friend flirted with me, telling me how Sissy and I were like Egypt. I was a dark-skinned Nubian and Sissy with her light skin was a Ptolemy. It wasn't just the ouzo that was intoxicating. But I should have seen from the way Saad was hammering down the whiskies, that he was lying. He hadn't told me everything that had been done to Sissy.
Maghrib. The sun is setting. I'm sitting on an empty metal barrel on the beach just outside the Club Mediterranée. Lighted arches from the restaurants and nightclub sparkle in dark ocean waters. The shimmering colors remind me of Berlin. Europeans and Americans in their white tuxedos and glitzy dresses laugh, drink, dance and smoke just like they do in Berlin. They play hard, totally absorbed in the game, never thinking of those who make it possible.
On the beach they walk by me as if I were an uninteresting piece of driftwood. Perhaps my African classmates were right. Perhaps I'm not really a human being.
Saad promised to keep trying to find Sissy, but he never meant to keep that promise. I think he decided that night in Alexandria that it would be better for me and my parents, and for Sissy, to just give up the search. He never returned my calls or answered my letters and postcards.
Three years after I left him in Alexandria, I walked into a café in Faya, in northern Chad, and found Saad sitting at a table in back with some uniforms. I didn't want to jeopardize a mission, but I wasn't going to leave without finding out what else he knew.
I sat and stared at him. He ignored me, so I bought him a drink. The waiter brought it over to his table and pointed back at me. When I lifted my glass to Saad, his laughing friends slapped him on the back. He pretended to his friends he was going to hit on me with an Egyptian swagger so typical I couldn't help laughing myself. When I turned him down, his friends roared with equal good humor. But before he rejoined them, he dropped a slip of paper on my table. It read, "Café Zanzibar, Berlin."
Berlin, the New York of Europe. I should have known. Since the fall of the Iron Curtain it has once again become what it was in the past -- a marketplace of knowledge and beliefs, passion and gluttony formed as the impecunious east and the rich west collide. Not as xenophobic as London, not as conceited as Paris, Berlin's syncretism rivals that of an African capital, a Cairo, or a Dakar .
Only during the forty years of the occupation did it feel like a place in Germany. Berlin is a piece of the world that no single country can lay claim to. Now, as in the past, a high percentage of Berliners are foreigners. Berlin was a "little America" before there was an America.
I would have expected a whorehouse catering to an exotic crowd to be located in Kreuzberg with its leather-clad performance-artists, punks, and Turkish immigrants, but the Café Zanzibar is on the Lietzenburger Strasse with the other honky-tonks.
A five-hundred mark note got the bouncer to open the door. I waited as he punched numbers into the security system. Electronic locks clicked and dead bolts slid back with loud snapping. The door swung inward.
Flashing lights from the amusement-park Ferris wheel across the street shone in through the windows of the night club. The surly woman behind the bar refused to serve me, but after I bought a couple of rounds of drinks the girls were friendly enough, especially once they understood I was a customer, not a competitor. That made the barkeep even madder.
Two girls wearing matching black leather hot pants and jackets with silver studs and buckles came on to me.
"I'm looking for something, special," I said and shuffled a pack of crisp hundred-mark notes while I paid for another round.
"A friend of mine in Egypt gave me this address."
The girls giggled. The blond unzipped her jacket. An apple-sized, pink-tipped breast slipped out. A thick gold ring pierced the nipple. The other girl straightened the seam in her fish net stockings, waving her shiny leather-clad bottom at me.
I tipped them two-hundred marks each.
The blonde looked around nervously. "Madame Claudette keeps a girl up in the attic for special customers. We're not allowed to speak to her. Cook says she looks very young -- maybe fourteen. Her name is Yasmin."
Yasmin! It had to be Sissy. Two drinks and another tip later, and they took me up to Madame Claudette's apartment. Three thousand marks bought me one hour with Madame's prized courtesan.
Two guards sat playing cards at a small table in the hallway. One picked up his Uzi from the table and stood guard while the other frisked me, then punched in the security codes at Yasmin's door.
The room was decorated like a Chinese palace. From behind a black lacquer screen painted with apple blossoms, a sleepy child's voice said, "Guten abend."
Eight years, was all I could think of. I had spent eight years of my life searching for Sissy. What if it wasn't her?
I walked past the screen. A black-haired girl, wearing a red brocade robe embroidered with purple and blue flowers and green leaves lay on the bed. It was impossible to tell what color her skin was. It had been painted white, like a voodoo initiate's. Her heavy eye make-up made her features look oriental. When she flicked on the lamp next to her bed, I saw that it wasn't just make-up. Plastic surgery had extended the epicanthic folds of her upper eyelids across the inner and outer angles of the eyes.
The red lipstick on her lips stopped far short of the corners, in a surprised 'oh'. She opened her mouth to moisten her lips with her tongue. A well-practiced gesture, designed to reveal to the client the tiny white pearl piercing its tip. As she extended her tongue out further, I saw that the pearl in the tip was followed by another, slightly larger than the first, and another and another. In all, a dozen pearls formed a line bisecting her tongue as she stretched its tip to touch her chin. A prostitute's promise of pleasures to come.
This bizarre creature couldn't be little Sissy, I thought. Then she smiled and dimples appeared in her cheeks, dimples just like Mom's. "Could you bring me a basin of water from the table?" she asked.
I turned to the table in the attic dormer and poured warm lemon-scented water from a blue onion porcelain pitcher into a large bowl. The bowl was heavy. I almost dropped it when I saw Sissy pull her robe up away from her legs. Her little feet were so small, they would barely have filled the palm of my hand. "Sissy!" I whispered.
She looked up at me strangely, but not with any sign of recognition. "Put the bowl down here, on the bed," she said.
I put the bowl next to her feet, as she asked.
"Now come here." She patted the pillow next to her, then took my hand. "I understand," she said. "You've had a hard day. Lotus feet are a mark of great beauty, but that's no reason for tears." She took a tissue from her nightstand and wiped my face. "Will you help me wash my golden lilies?"
I let her, a child, order me around. I had expected to tell her stories of Mom and Dad and to call in the police to bring her home, but what I found horrified me. Police would mean press, and press would mean Mom would find out, and it would kill her, just kill her, to see her little baby play the temptress with such skill.
I watched Sissy take off her little black shoes. They were embroidered in many colors and so small they would have been too large for the doll Sissy had left behind in Kuwait City. She made me unwrap the two-inch wide bandages. Ten feet of bandage wrapped each foot. The toes were fat white caterpillars bent around underneath the arch and suckling at the heels. Her left foot was bleeding. The nail from her middle toe had cut into her heel. I sponged her feet with perfumed water, then dried them with thick, soft white towels.
She took my hand and slipped it into her robe, onto her naked breast. I tried to pull away, but then I remembered the City of the Dead in Alexandria, and how frightened and hungry she must have been. When she showed me how to rub and kiss her feet, I tried to leave. The tears in her eyes reminded me of what the Alexandrian whore had said. People don't trust houris without all their sex parts. Sissy's loneliness was an icy desert wind that made me shiver.
Her tears worked. I watched her painted, rosebud lips part with pleasure, as I licked and sucked her feet and tried not to think.
It only mattered that she was safe, that I had found her. She would never be used by strangers again.
Isha. The final prayers of the day. I watch Charlotte give alms to the beggars at the entrance of the Club Med parking lot. She will make a good Muslim, if she is allowed to keep a few fetishes. Claude looks on indulgently and chats with Charlotte's aunt.
What am I doing? Charlotte is so normal, so good. She has every chance to lead a full life. Should she die to buy freedom for an emotional and physical cripple? No matter what happens, Mom must never know what happened to Sissy. And Dad couldn't keep from telling Mom if he knew.
The small house I bought for Sissy is finally ready for her. It's in a little village called Appeln about 20 minutes from Bremerhaven. I like to imagine Sissy walking outside in the sunny garden, showing off her koi pond to the neighborhood farm kids.
After I retire, she will be safer in a small place. I have nightmares of someone using Sissy to force me out of retirement. The villagers will notice if someone hangs around watching the black lady with the tiny feet.
My psychiatrist has warned me not to expect too much. She may never learn to read well. Normal relationships are beyond hope, but I can't stop hoping. Each time I have visited Sissy since, she tries to seduce me, but things have never gotten out of hand like they did that first time, when the shock of what had been done to her knocked me off-balance.
I've followed the psychiatrist's advice and paid outrageous sums of money to take Sissy (along with Madame Claudette and two armed body guards) for an hour or two to the zoo or to the Ku'dam shopping. Things that normal teenagers do.
My greatest fear is that Madame Claudette will find out that Yasmin is my sister. I don't know what I'd do if she increased her price beyond my means. I've had to leave her in that place too long already. Planning an action in Europe is much more complicated than one in Africa. My friends in Special Forces, German as well as American, would help. I only have to ask. But during the past three years, I have already killed too many people to win Sissy's freedom. And there's always the chance, in an action, that Sissy would be hurt.
An elderly Turkish couple fluent in Arabic, that I've hired as housekeepers and tutors, already lives in the house in Appeln. Sissy'll learn to read Arabic first, then German, maybe even English. Perhaps we can get her a wheelchair so she can study at the university, the way Dad would have wanted.
Quit stalling, I tell myself. I need to get on with this. Princess Charlotte has had everything given to her. My sister has had nothing. Not even a mother, a father, or a sister. It isn't my fault Charlotte's family has decided to marry her to Claude. They should know better. Claude's family's shady business dealings are well known.
Claude's driver opens the door of the white Mercedes for them. I flag a taxi and pretend I'm looking for a friend whose address I can't quite remember. I will be back in Dakar and in another cab before the first cab driver realizes we are following the Mercedes.
After two taxi changes, the Mercedes parks by the Gorée ferry, an enormous bit of good luck, since my Peugeot is at the railway station just a few blocks away. Claude, Charlotte and the aunt get out and walk with the tourists along the sea wall, towards the station.
At the end of the west dock, next to the railway station, is a kola nut warehouse. The second story is rarely, if ever, guarded. I make my way through the crowd of drink vendors and travelers to the warehouse.
The librarian's computers hum. As the micro-motors click the action into the stock with cool precision, the metal barrel catches the last glimmers of the setting sun. The YAG laser picks Princess Charlotte out of the crowded square in front of the station and locks onto her forehead.
I feel warm again. Heat washes through my body like a wave, up from my feet and into my head where it lies trapped. My hands are shaking. I must be coming down with malaria. Paludrine just isn't doing the trick any more. I wipe the sweat from my face with one of the cloth samples in my basket.
Steady, old girl. The heat is deadly. I lock onto Charlotte again and squeeze the trigger.
The red neon Coca-Cola sign at the café across the street from the station explodes in a shower of yellow sparks. A white-aproned shopkeeper runs out and chases two boys whom he thinks have smashed his light with stones. The laughing crowd turns to watch and cheers the shopkeeper on. All of them, except Charlotte.
She turns around to face me, then laughs, as I watch her through my scope. Laughs and waves her monkey paw at me. She is making me angry. Both my hands are shaking now and the sweat is pouring down my face. It's not malaria, I suddenly realize. It's her, Charlotte! How is she doing this to me?
The words of my Nigerian classmate ring in my ears. Descendants of slaves have no souls. They are not human. Is that how Sissy has been able to survive, because she is not human? My mouth is dry with heat. I need to get this over with. I turn my basket upside down and brace my arms on it to stop them from shaking. I find Charlotte's laughing face in the cross hairs and let the librarian close the book of Charlotte Abiola Kikelomo Jumake Adekunle.
Die, little princess, die. Sissy's coming home.
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