I was unpleasantly shocked. I asked Kross if he was sure we could get away with an illegal entry plus many hours of driving around, visless, in a country that had specifically declared a Kross embargo. He said yes, he was G.o.dd.a.m.n sure, that"s why he wanted to do it that way.

Kross told me at least one lie that evening. He"d said that I needed to be ready by eight; the vehicle he"d bought, a four-wheel drive Toyota, was "being fixed" and wouldn"t be ready before then. But I was woken up by the chirping phone just before dawn: the inky darkness in my room was beginning to turn grey.

"Get your a.s.s out of bed, Oscar," he said. "Be ready to leave by six thirty. Pack lightly. Leave the suitcase, just take an overnight bag." He hung up.

I replaced the receiver and turned the hotel-issue radio alarm around. The glowing digits said five forty-five. I picked the phone up again, ordered breakfast, and went to wash. I could see why he"d lied to me the previous evening about the departure time: he was being Mr. Security. Reveal nothing, move before anyone expects a move, and all that. He would"ve probably done the same thing even if he trusted me completely, which he didn"t, not after the f.u.c.kup with Tad.

Well, I didn"t trust him a hundred percent either. I felt it strongly when we met in front of the elevators at six thirty one. He was carrying a single sausage-like bag he must have had packed in his suitcase. I asked him about the luggage arrangement and he revealed casually that the rooms were ours for the week and that they were free of charge. What had stopped him from telling me that earlier? It was the kind of thing other people would boast about.

When I asked him why he had kept the arrangement secret, he shrugged and said it wasn"t really relevant. He added the room wasn"t entirely free of charge either; in accordance with the local code of manners he had been obliged to present a thank-you gift - five hundred dollars. This in turn led to another thank-you gift - two hotel hookers personally selected by the hotel manager. This was a first for me. I didn"t feel complimented. It"s good not to look a gift horse in the mouth because there are always teeth missing.

The four-wheel drive Toyota was a small pickup truck. It stood in the hotel parking lot, engine running. I noticed instantly that it had been freshly painted a dark olive green. The paint had a very new look, and smelled fresh too - I stood by the truck and inhaled the tarry aroma while Kross settled things with a tired-looking, elderly African gentleman in a white shirt and sharply creased tan slacks. The Toyota"s engine emitted a steady, rea.s.suring meaty rumble.

The pa.s.senger door was unlocked, and when I opened it I saw that the truck had been grey until very recently. It seemed in good shape inside; the dials on the dashboards sparkled. It had three gear shift levers of varying height, and they all shook gently in rhythm with the throbbing engine. I put my two bags behind the seats, noticing a couple of cigarette burns in the process. The odometer showed the truck had traveled just over eighty one thousand kilometers, but odometers can be misleading. They don"t show what"s truly important - the mileage that"s still left.

The driver"s door squeaked open and Kross climbed in. He was wearing a pair of aviator sungla.s.ses - it was the first time I saw him in those, and he looked strange. He swung in his big sports bag inches from my face and deposited it next to my stuff. He got into his seat and pulled on a pair of string driving gloves; it appeared he took driving very seriously.

He shut his door and let his hand drop to the topmost of the three trembling k.n.o.bs. He glanced at me, and said:

"Excited?"

"I"m beside myself, I"m beside myself," I said, and we drove off.

He handled the truck surprisingly gently: I could have poured a cup of coffee while he was braking without spilling any. We followed a broad two-lane road for maybe a minute, then turned into a wide six-lane avenue decorated with billboards advertising Flag beer, Nido chocolate drink, and several brands of exotic cigarettes. They all were basically big product shots, most often with a a big dark hand holding out the appropriate package as if it were a torch of liberty; the Nido billboard featured the happy, well-nourished face of a young girl.

The architecture we pa.s.sed was somewhat uninspiring. Many buildings were tall variations on the concrete cube theme. We did pa.s.s a group of ambitious high-rises, paint blistered and peeling from their white sides as if they too suffered from sunburn; and at one point the road ran along what appeared to be a golf course. At one point I stole a glance at the speedometer and was surprised to see we were doing around a hundred and ten kph. Sitting relatively high above the road made everything flow by at a falsely sedate pace.

Eventually the six lanes narrowed down to four, then to two: by that time the city had dwindled to thin rows of shabby, small houses with corrugated iron roofs. The gaps between the buildings began to grow; the vacant lots became increasingly overgrown with shrubbery; and suddenly there were no more houses at all, just tall, savage-looking yellow gra.s.s that swayed triumphantly. Here and there, a lucky seedling had sprouted into a full-grown bush or tree; occasionally there would be a cone-shaped tower of red mud erected by the local termites - a couple I saw were higher than me, with long spindly minarets rising from the sides. But otherwise it was a sea of gra.s.s, tall enough to hide a man.

We drove in silence, Kross smoking cigarettes that stank vilely, much worse than usual. I picked up the packet from the top of the dashboard. It was a soft paper pack, red, with a big black hand displayed front and back. The hand resembled an ill.u.s.tration in a Victorian book on palmistry; it only lacked cutouts pointing out the Line of Life, Mount of Venus, and all that bulls.h.i.t. The cigarettes were called Schwarze Handel. They were German. I was puzzled, then remembered the hotel shops stocked everything; I"d even spotted a fur coat on display.

It started getting hot around nine. By that time, the traffic had thickened: there were always two or three other vehicles in view - mostly j.a.panese-made minibuses, Peugeot 504 taxis, juggernaut trucks, and plenty of light two-stroke motorcycles. The helmet-less bikers all rode right on the very edge of the tarmac, so they weren"t a problem; all other traffic tended to bunch up behind the trucks, and overtaking always meant pa.s.sing more than one vehicle. Before very long I was clutching the dashboard grab rail and wishing I"d strapped myself in after all.

There was one particularly hairy moment when Kross was overtaking a couple of minibuses behind a very long tanker truck. The tanker was spewing black smoke from the exhaust and trailing a grounding chain that struck dangerous-looking sparks from the road. When we drew level with the tanker"s six rear wheels, its driver accelerated. Kross swore and floored it himself. We hit a very large pothole and the Toyota skittered like a startled horse. My face was so close to one of the huge wheels that I could smell the hot rubber through the black smoke.

A truck appeared round the curve ahead, close enough for me to make out the three-point Mercedes logo on the radiator grille. Kross flicked the lights on and put his elbow on the horn and the driver of the Merc slowed down enough to let us cut across the tanker"s snout, prompting a deafening blare from its horn. I let go of the dashboard grip and rubbed the fresh sweat from my face.

"That was exciting," I said. Kross reached for a cigarette and lit it.

"f.u.c.king a.s.shole," he said, blowing smoke through his nose.

That was the extent of our conversation for the next couple of hours. I remember waving the smoke away from my face and looking at an artist driving a motorbike one-handed while holding onto a crate of Fanta Orange balanced on his head. Well, he couldn"t really put it anywhere else: his wife rode right behind him with an infant strapped to her back, and he had two small kids sitting in front of him - one on the gas tank.

The daylight had an odd reddish tinge to it, and the sun was orange as if it was preparing for sunset. It was nearing noon by my watch. When I looked at the landscape, I had the impression that everything was covered with rust.

I nudged Kross with my elbow and asked:

"Why am I seeing red?"

"Harmattan," he said. "Wind from the desert. We"re nearing the end of the dry season, so it"s pretty mild." I cleared my throat and said:

"You mean desert air is red?"

"Yes. It"s dust. Finer than talc.u.m powder but very abrasive. This stuff gets everywhere and stays there. You"ll be finding it a year from now in your things."

Hearing this made me happy. Kross had just put my life expectancy at twelve months or more! It seemed he didn"t mean to shoot me in the head in the immediate future. I felt encouraged.
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A few minutes later, we had to pull to a stop and wait as a couple of teenage boys drove a herd of cattle across the road, savagely beating the animals" skinny flanks with switches. The cattle were huge, white, and skinny, with ribs showing plainly under the short white fur; they also had big curved horns that would have made me afraid to hit them with anything short of an a.s.sault rifle. But the boys slapped and whipped them with impunity, maybe because the cows seemed immune to pain; they trotted across unhurriedly, ignoring the blows.

I turned to Kross and asked:

"Are we getting close?"

He was silent for a moment, probably busy computing a.s.sorted probabilities and security risks. Then he said:

"Another couple of hours. Maybe more than that. Depends on developments." He pointed to the cattle with his chin, and added:

"We"ll be driving through Boundoukou in a while. Mireille"s town. Keep your eyes open and your head down, and maybe we"ll visit her on the way back."

"What would happen if she saw us? French paratroopers? The Foreign Legion?"

Kross shrugged. He said:

"Who knows. I don"t know and I don"t care. What I do care about is going through unnoticed, so just keep your head down as requested. Please." He frowned at the dashboard and tapped a dial with his finger.

"Invisibility meter all right?" I asked. He lit yet another of those f.u.c.king cigarettes. The last couple of cows moseyed across the road, one of them squirting a burst of liquid s.h.i.t on the road right in front of us.

"I"m glad you"re in a good mood," Kross said, and put the Toyota into gear.