Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [67]
Starkey turned to leave, but Jill caught his arm.
“Stay,” she murmured, tightening her grip. “Don’t mind him. Just stay.”
Dennis blanched; Jill wondered what it meant that for once she felt no pity for him. He turned away, then looked back as if he couldn’t help himself. “Screw you guys,” he finally muttered, and left.
“Oh dear,” Starkey fretted, watching Dennis make his way across the terrace. “I do hope I didn’t spoil anything for you.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Jill smiled and pulled him onto the stool next to her. She almost laughed; for the first time in months she felt clear about things.
“If you can get your guy down to Bomi,” she said, “I’ll bring those diamonds in for you.”
“Get out. How would you manage that?”
“We’ve got some trucks going up-line next week, we’ll be in Bomi one of those days. If your guy can meet me there I’ll get your diamonds.”
“Really, Jill, you have no idea—how would you get past the checkpoints?”
“You think they ever mess with me?”
He acknowledged this with a thoughtful nod. “You know the U.N.’s not the only risk.”
“So pay me. Pay me for my trouble.”
He looked at his drink.
“This is business, just treat it like a business deal. What’s the going rate for something like this?”
Starkey hesitated. “Three percent.”
“Which comes to?”
“Quite a bit, if Petrik’s got what he says he’s got.” He looked up from his drink. “This is for your project, isn’t it, your sewing shop. For Christ’s sake, just let me give you the money.”
“If you had it to spare, but you don’t. And I wouldn’t take it anyway.”
“Say I agreed to let you go—what would you do for security?”
“I’ll have the trucks and crews, just like always. Anything else I’d just draw attention to myself.”
Starkey looked bleak, like a man imagining his own funeral. “What about your moral objection to all this?”
“Like the man said, it’s never clean.”
Starkey chewed the inside of his cheek for a moment. It occurred to her that he must be desperate to consider this; either that, or the challenge appealed to him, the sheer balls of letting her go alone.
“I’ll need to hop down to Joburg for the cash, which you’d have to ferry in. So you see, you’d be on the spot both ways. With no security to speak of.”
“I’ll be under the radar, look at it that way.” She laughed and squeezed his hand, wondering how much the rum had stoked her mood. “I can handle it, okay? I’ve done lots and lots of really hard things in my life, I don’t see why I can’t do this too.”
“Well,” he said a bit sadly, lifting the glass to his lips, “no one ever said you lacked potential.”
It began, as it always did, with rumors—they started several days before she left Freetown, hints of movement, something stirring upcountry, the stories rippling through the capital in barely perceptible waves. The rumors swelled and took shape as the trucks began their swing through the southeast, and soon she was hearing it on the radio news: the RUF had surrounded peacekeepers in Magburaka and Makeni, effectively holding the towns hostage, and more peacekeepers were turned back on the road to Bendu, faced down by a bunch of kids with automatic weapons. Testing, prodding, seeing how far they could push before the U.N. pushed back—that was Jill’s rationalist take on the situation, though at the depot in Kabili the Irish priest’s explanation was like a slap in the face: “The devil is hungry again.” The devil, or whatever psychopathic gods lived out there—Jill was beginning to hate them all. The news became something else she was responsible for, along with her drivers’ morale, the insane logistics, the neverending drama of flats and breakdowns. The strategy she’d developed over dozens of these trips was simply to keep going until something made her stop, and when the Ghanian officer confronted her at the Falla depot she thought that perhaps the time had come. She thought she was busted—he was that formal, that menacing with his small squad in tow, and Jill was spacey from the