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By Root 554 0

glare. The Royal sat on one of the peninsula’s remotest points, a cheap concrete shell with a nice beach and a crumbling veneer of tropical luxury. No one touched the pool for fear of cholera; weeds and debris were overtaking the neglected grounds, and mold billowed over the walls in complex swirls like countries on a sprawling fantasy map. The Royal was, however, possibly the safest place in Freetown, and certainly, to Jill’s mind, the most degenerate, the hotel of choice for the louche community of foreigners who viewed Sierra Leone as an opportunity. A clutch of coal black whores sat on a couch near the bar, boldly eyeing every white man who walked through the door, while a few more girls were trolling the terrace. Last year the front line had been a few miles south, and though the rebels had been driven out months ago shooting could still be heard at night, the U.N. skirmishing with the holdouts or freelance gangs. In the mornings bodies occasionally washed up on the Royal’s postcard-perfect beach.

“Rum-cola, Miss.”

“Thanks, padi.”

The news segued from the American presidential campaign into a story on the wealth effect, the triumphant affluence that the U.S. was enjoying thanks to its high-tech genius and the long bull market. Jill felt discouraged, if only briefly; she’d let the greatest money-grab in history pass her by, though even if she’d been living in the States all this time, she would have done her best to ignore it. She had a congenital distrust of money and luxury, her militant asceticism further aggravated by a very low tolerance for boredom. How did you get the money from there to here? First of all you had to care, and caring, as far as Jill could see, was an accident of birth, just as her own predilection was an accident, a random number that came up. Her father cared about money, very much so; she’d grown up more than comfortably on Connecticut’s gold coast. She had a brother at Salomon Brothers who apparently cared, and an entrepreneur sister who was getting rich off the software she cooked up in a Tribeca loft. So much on the one hand, so little on the other; often she wondered what kept the world from going up in flames. Do you think they’d cut my funding if white people were dropping dead? She’d written that to her mother, who’d written back: Come home. We have hungry people in America too.

She turned on her stool and caught Starkey’s eye; he was deep in conversation with a glistening black man, but not so deep that he couldn’t manage a little irony for Jill, a smug shadowing around the corners of his lips. They were talking diamonds, probably, though it could be anything, palm oil, bauxite, shrimp, titanium, rubber—for a country with a ruined economy, there were an awful lot of deals around, and Starkey, who’d lived here on and off for years, seemed to have a paying role in most of them. And he made it look so easy, a revelation for Jill, who’d always viewed the getting of money in terms of hassle and guilt. “Don’t work hard, work smart,” he told her in his plummy English voice, and that was part of it, the mellow, cheerful voice that made the things he said sound so reasonable. He gave people hope, he made them feel close to something real, this in a place that kept threatening to slide past zero.

Presently he excused himself and came over to the bar. Physi cally he wasn’t much, a short, thick-legged man with a blunt, fleshy face and thinning hair dyed an improbable midnight black. He had an embarrassing taste for gold accessories, and most days dressed for business in shorts, espadrilles, Hugo Boss golf shirts—resort-wear, here in one of the world’s genuine hellholes. Shed of his clothes he was worse than she’d expected, his body pale and soft as a mitt of dough, shot through with a vestigial stringiness. What had surprised Jill as much as anything was how little all this mattered to her.

“How’s the time, Bazzy?”

“Eh boss, I manage small-small. You want Sassman’s?”

“As long as you’re pouring.” Starkey brushed Jill’s hand, a gesture that managed to be both casual and intimate. “So what