We actually spent that whole day together. I remember he was wearing this Bugs Bunny tie, you know, with Bugs peeking out from behind the paisley. It was the first thing we talked about when we met for breakfast.
“Don’t you think that’s a little weird for a Muslim country?” I’d said.
He laughed it off. It was like college — we had these sort of running bits — and Bugs would be a new one, I could tell.
“Freedom,” he said. “We invented it.”
That was another one of his bits.
It’s funny how you remember the details better. I probably never would’ve remembered any of this if it had gone differently for him. But now I remember every last thing about that day. It’s not just the bad stuff. He had a waffle with chocolate sauce for breakfast. We were waiting to meet with this French graduate student who was doing research for her Ph.D. She thought we were assholes, probably even before she met us, but she was a cousin of some friend of the Ambassador’s, so it was our job to talk with her. You could tell that she didn’t like the Circle, which is where we met her. She was the type who’d rather eat beans and sheep for breakfast in one of the local places. I used to think that was an age thing, but this girl was probably in her early thirties. Further proof that’s it’s not about age, it’s about arrogance. Pete and I had talked about it the day before. Fuck it, we figured, she wanted a meeting, she could come where we ate. I had scrambled eggs.
Tell you this though, she was a pretty girl. Blond hair, baby face, good body. Pete and I looked at each other as she walked up. Breath of fresh air in mailbox town — you know, the slot you can see their eyes through, like the mail slot. It was actually Pete who said to me that just eyes through the slot could really get you sometimes, give you a real complicated idea about what was underneath when all you could see was a black sheet.
Anyway. She had a lot of questions, all printed out and highlighted. Had some sort of color-coding system for her notes. Pete was a real nerdy guy that way, liked office supplies, so he liked that part of her. We both saw what she was driving at right away, even though she saved the questions about U.S. policy until the second half of the talk. Like she thought she was going to soften us up with a bunch of questions about the ‘situation on the ground’ first. She’d probably never even be back in the country.
“What will the U.S. do if Bashir is indicted by the ICC?” That was the question she thought was really smart. Bashir was the President of Sudan then — and a true bad guy, yes — and the ICC is the International Criminal Court. The question behind the question was about the U.S., because we didn’t recognize the ICC, in spite of all the pressure. Point was that if the ICC indicted the sitting president then all the other embassies — like the Brits — would pack up and leave. Because you don’t do diplomacy with a war criminal. So she lights a cigarette and pushes the issue. Would we leave too? Or would we stay and be the only assholes hanging with the war criminal? Maybe this would force the U.S. to recognize the ICC?
“We’ll stick to the playbook,” Pete told her. He was grinning when he said it, and though I can’t be sure, I think he glanced at her tits. He probably did it on purpose. He was a funny fucker.
But what else was he gonna say? Pete didn’t have any idea what we would do. I certainly didn’t know, and I bet no one in the damn embassy knew. She accused us of being inflexible at the end of breakfast, which is fucking funny. Because what the hell is more flexible then not knowing what your boss might say the day after tomorrow and dealing with everything in a situation like that? We were the most flexible embassy in Khartoum.
Part Two
We ate sandwiches for lunch. The aircon was crapping out in Pete’s office, so he came over to mine, bitching about the crumbling building and fantasizing about the new one. When the new embassy is done it’ll be the biggest in Africa. As Pete often said: “even going to have those Aeron chairs.” This was his bit about the new embassy. “Just like an office back home.”
We both had to be writing reports all afternoon, so we took a while with our sandwiches. The big crisis of the week before — that Stanford kid who was trying to raft down the Nile — seemed to be under control. Prison visit, the whole bit, and Nafie — who was the top cop — had agreed to loose the kid at the end of the next week, although not without a lot of pompous consideration bullshit with us in his office. Nafie ali Nafie, of course, is not someone you want to fuck with, I don’t care what your passport says. Pete’s bit about him was coffee. “The best coffee in the whole country! Where does he get it?”
It was true. The Sudanese do not understand coffee. Got to get it pouched over, or you’ll be drinking instant — nowhere to get the real stuff. But the couple times we went to Nafie’s office, he had the best coffee, like we were in Ethiopia and not Sudan. Must have had it shipped in from somewhere.
So we had been in Nafie’s office, had a cup of coffee, and cleared the whole Stanford thing up. No one lost face, with the exception of the judge, Mohammed Saleh Baraka, who had sentenced the kid. We had lucked out: for whatever reason (and we were trying to figure it out) Nafie had it in for Baraka so was happy to overturn his ruling. Which had been, of course, completely nutty. Forty strikes of the cane for what amounted to resisting arrest. Not a good judge, but not the worst. Definitely an asshole, and we were happy to be done with whole mess.
You can imagine our surprise when Baraka showed up at the embassy that afternoon. We had never thought of Baraka as a particularly smooth operator, and that afternoon he came off like an idiot. First of all, he didn’t make an appointment, so of course security held him downstairs for a while before they even let the phone call go up, and then the call went to Pete’s office, and he was with me having a sandwich. So Baraka had been waiting, and Judges don’t like to wait.
But he tried to make nice in the beginning. He asked us if we knew how frustrated some of his constituents were with the imminent release of the Stanford kid. We said we didn’t. They are so frustrated, Baraka told us, that his own honor, as one who dispensed the justice of God, had been called into question. Simple release was totally unacceptable. One of his aids had even suggested, by way of compromise, that they cane the American like a woman, using only the forearm to swing the cane,.
“Madness,” said Baraka. That was the word he used to sum things up.
Pete, of course, rolled his eyes. “I’m sorry, this has nothing to do with us,” he said, “our hands are tied.”
At that point, Baraka lost it and became really pissed off. He’s a foamer, when he gets going.
“I know you went to Nafie,” he said, and pointed his long finger. “You yourself,” and he jabbed his finger in the air at Pete three times, I remember.
And then Pete goes, “on the topic of Nafie, actually,” and he pauses, just a moment. He’s leaning against my filing cabinet and says, totally deadpan, something like: “Do you know where he gets his coffee?”
Baraka did not think this was funny. And the truth is, neither did I. I wasn’t in the habit of criticizing Pete, but I did say, when Baraka had left and we’d had our laugh, that probably he could’ve handled it better.
“What could we possibly do about it?” he said back. “He wants to cane a Cardinal.”
Part Three
The French graduate student showed up at dinner that night. I was a little embarrassed or something, breakfast wasn’t sitting quite right with me, but Pete seemed downright happy to see her. He asked her if she wanted to go swimming. I wasn’t surprised that she declined. She had a way of being polite without being polite, if you know what I mean. We were at the British Embassy, and we all watched Pete swim his slow breast stroke from the garden balcony while we had our before dinner drinks.
The Brits do dinner a little differently than we do. For one thing they have their waiters in old fashioned uniforms. Way colonial, and another one of Pete’s bits but, of them all, probably the least funny. He didn’t go there at dinner, but he was on. He sat down a couple minutes after the rest of us — the Brits wouldn’t touch their food until he got there, of course, and I remember being hungry and wishing he would hurry up.
His hair was still wet from the shower when he finally sat down. And then, just as everyone started to eat, his cell phone rang. The French graduate student looked, like, profoundly disgusted. She even said something under her breath. So Pete looks at the phone, and then looks at her, and says, “excuse me, it’s the missus.”
Then — and this was one of the strange things about Pete, I swear I never understood it in the whole year I worked with him — he opened his phone and said: “this is Pete Jones.”
Now, if you know it’s your wife calling, why would you say: “this is Pete Jones?” It still sort of eats at me, and I wish I’d asked him about it.
Anyway, like I said, Pete was on that night. He had the Baraka story to tell, and everyone at dinner had a good laugh about that, partly because, frankly, Baraka made everyone a little nervous. He always seemed to be connected, somehow, to whatever the latest bad shit was. And that’s part of why Pete’s story about that afternoon, in which he emphasized his coffee line, was so amusing for the Brits.
And then everyone seemed to have a Baraka story. The best one was from the Brits’ econ guy, who I always liked. Before Baraka was a Judge, he was an MP, and the econ guy happened to be in Parliament one day when Baraka was running a session for, of all things, the Rule of Law Committee. This Dinka MP, a huge guy, kept trying to take the floor, and Baraka kept ignoring him, and eventually even said something out loud to one of his cronies like, “did you hear something?” As if to say that the Dinka wasn’t even really a person. So the Dinka MP is so pissed off that he stands up and grabs Baraka, who is a little skinny guy, and drags him to the window up there on the third floor of the parliament building and dangles him out. The other MPs, hamdilallah, har har, intervened. And the joke at the end of the story, of course, was what the econ guy said to the Dinka guy outside: “No one would mind you dropping him out a window, just not the window of the Parliament building!”
That was when Pete’s phone rang again. Maybe it was the French girl’s muttering, or who knows, maybe he was feeling paranoid — once in a while we turn off at meetings or meals to prevent tapping — but he just turned it off without even looking at the number. I’d never seen him do that before. He was too organized.
Part Four
There’s not really a culture of political assassination in Sudan the way there is in other African countries. I don’t know why, but people just don’t assassinate each other as often, even though, not to be too flip, other countries don’t have as much genocide. There really is something to the character of a country. This was one of my bits, not Pete’s, and as you can see it’s not that funny. He was always the funny one.
Pete had had more than usual to drink at the dinner — the more I think back on it the more I think that French girl was getting under his skin somehow. Anyway he was clearly buzzed and had this sort of bravado about him. Not that we were doing anything that needed bravado, we were just walking out to the cars. And he turned his phone back on.
“Shit,” he said, “Look at this.”
I was pretty damn surprised at what popped up as a missed call: “Nafie’s Office, Private.”
So, of course, I asked him: “Is that a private Nafie number?” See, I had thought we only had the one.
“Guess so,” said Pete. He sort of sighed then, and stuck his hand out for me to shake. It was one of the things he did when he’d had a couple drinks, start shaking hands more. We shook, and he said see you tomorrow and I said the same. The whole thing was a little bit wacky but I didn’t press him. I figured it would all be clearer the next day, if there was anything up. Which there might not have been.
In retrospect I wonder what I might have done differently, but tell you the truth I can’t really think of much. He got into his car and I watched him unbutton his collar, take off the Bugs tie and toss it on the dashboard. Then he drove himself away. His driver was off that night.
The next day, when we went down to where it happened, three different sets of uniforms were milling around. There was even a truck load of riot-geared Popular Defense Forces, waiting around in the sun. They’d all been there for a while, but you could tell Nafie’s people were winning the argument with two other police units about who would run the investigation.
There wasn’t much to see. Glass on the ground, probably a dozen shots in the passenger side, and two in the windshield. Blood on the seat. They’d taken the body already. I’m not ashamed to say, when I got back in my car, I started crying myself. Fucking Bugs Bunny tie was still on the dashboard.
Part Five
We all had drinks at the Ambassador’s residence that night. Not only was everyone sad, and stunned, we were tired because we’d spent all day dealing with fallout. There was talk of our own investigation, and even, at one particularly heated moment, the suggestion that somehow we’d get the FBI over, or something. All of which was ridiculous.
The French graduate student was staying with the Ambassador, so she was around for the grief drinks. There’s really only one way to behave at something like that, sad and sympathetic, but she seemed like she really meant it all. She even was wearing black. I went out on the verandah for some air and bumped into her smoking, She put it out quickly, like she didn’t want to be smoking when she offered her condolences.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” she said to me. I actually liked her a lot better after that night.
The journalists all commented, correctly, on the infrequency of violent street crime in Khartoum, raising the appropriate suspicions. We put out something that started like “terrorist groups continue to seek opportunities to carry out attacks against U.S. interests.” But they weren’t gonna get much more from us, since the investigation was, and remains, ongoing. And they got almost nothing from anyone inside, so there wasn’t much more they could do with the story. Someone, not one of Nafie’s people, issued a statement that Pete had been the victim of a random armed robbery, even though someone else in another department had gone on record that the attack was “well planned.” After they got all that, the journalists went to Pete himself. Born Palo Alto, resume with the service, quote from his brother about how he loved Africa and the work. Survived by wife and daughter. And one of the papers wrote about one of our most recent projects, which was a mosquito net distribution scheme that Pete, to his credit, had been implementing pretty damn well.
The second day after, one of Nafie’s weasel assistants called my office. The Stanford Kid was now to be released immediately, and the weasel made it sound like I should have been more grateful for the favor. I wasn’t really in the mood. And frankly, I didn’t care if the kid stayed in that cell for another week — which was a private cell, not that bad. But good news is good news, right, and Pete would have had some line about relationship progress or how the kid getting out early would make us look really smart in front of the Ambassador. So I headed off to the police station where he was going to be processed out.
As I was walking to the car, the French Student, who was hanging around the embassy that day, saw me and asked where I was going. Then she asked if she could come along for the ride and, just because I didn’t feel like taking her, I said no. I don’t know that this particularly makes me an asshole, since there was nothing to see at the station. And especially since when that Stanford kid got back to the embassy he and the French girl ended up fucking each other for couple days before we got him on a plane back home. So that was that story.
You never really know the people you work with I guess. Maybe you think you do, but probably what you think you know comes from your own expectations. I remember vividly the look on the Stanford kid’s face when I got there to pick him up. It was like he couldn’t believe it was just me to pick him up, not some delegation, like suddenly his being locked up for a few days wasn’t the most important thing in the world. And I guess, I know, I wasn’t being very friendly that morning. You know. But I was doing my job.
And then, as we were walking out of the station, past the security checkpoint, Baraka is walking in. The Stanford kid was shaking already, and when he sees his old friend the judge, he actually takes two steps back behind me. Baraka, though, doesn’t even look at the kid, he just looks at me. Shakes his head, slowly, like he’s real sorry.
“I was very sorry to hear about your colleague,” he says to me.
“Thanks,” I said, and turn to get the hell away from him.
But he touches my shoulder to stop me. We’re standing there right in front of the metal detector, and he takes this little step closer to me. And then he says, ah, “Nafie. His coffee? It comes from Kenya.”
