The town announced itself the way towns did out here: first the cell tower, then the mosque, then the smoke.
It was two hours of road from the place they had slept, and Emeka drove it with the windows down and a talkativeness that Jason had learned, in three days of the man, to read correctly — Emeka talked when he was easy and talked more when he was not, and this morning he ran through the town’s history, its two markets, its one football club, the price of cement, like a man laying planks over a hole one board ahead of his own feet. Where the road became street, he stopped talking. He threaded the truck through handcarts and motorbikes stacked three high with yellow jerricans, past the mouth of the big market — noise and shade cloth and bright cloth and commerce roaring away at full ordinary volume, half a day’s drive from the graves they had stood at yesterday — and turned down a street of metal-roofed lockups, and stopped where the street bent, and set the brake.
“There,” he said, without pointing. His hands stayed on the wheel. “The tea stall with the blue kettles. You will sit, and you will drink the tea, and you will not ask for anything. A boy will come. You will say to the boy that you are looking for Alhaji Musa, that you are friends of nobody — say it exactly, friends of nobody — it means you come to trade and not to talk. Then you will go where the boy goes.”
“Numbers,” Jason said.
“For what you want — ” Emeka’s mouth thinned; this was the fourth time this morning he had come up to this line and each time he crossed it it cost him — “a rifle, if it has been kept decent, is two hundred American, and he will begin at four hundred fifty because of your face. Do not pay past two-fifty or you are marking yourself as a man with a bag of money, and that mark does not wash off in this town. The machine gun, if he shows one, is a car. A used car. Ammunition is where he will make his real money on you, everyone forgets to count the ammunition.” He recited it flatly, a clerk reading another man’s ledger, and then he took his hands off the wheel and turned and looked at Jason, and drew his border one last time, and drew it complete.
“I will be at the mosque end of the street, under the neem trees, facing away,” he said. “Me and the truck and the sergeant and Allie. If it goes wrong, you will not run to me — you will walk to the big market and be lost in it and come out at the fuel depot on the far side, and I will find you there at the top of the hour. But hear me.” His voice did not harden; it leveled, which was worse. “I do not know that room. My mouth has never said that man’s name until yesterday and it will not say it again after today. I buy rice. I buy roofing nails and chalk and diesel. The day this town says the mission’s man buys guns, every door I can still open closes, and then I am worth nothing to you, and worse than nothing to him.” Him had only one referent in that truck, and it was not the Alhaji. “You take the room. I keep the doors.”
“You keep the doors,” Jason said. “We take the room.”
Eli was already out of the truck.
The tea was good and the wait was seven minutes and the boy, when he came, was about ten, with a wall-eye and a shirt from a European football club three owners past new, and he heard friends of nobody with the boredom of a toll collector and took them back through the lockups by a route that never once crossed open street — which Jason noted, and approved of professionally, and filed under the general heading of what this town was.
The room, when they reached it through a yard of stacked tires and a curtain of bottle caps, was cool and dim and smelled of gun oil and cardamom. Rugs on the floor. A ceiling fan turning at the speed of thought. Along one wall, wooden crates with rope handles, shut; along another, an open rack under a hung blanket that the Alhaji drew back the way a man opens his shop shutters — without ceremony, at the start of business, because it was morning and this was the trade.
Alhaji Musa was sixty and shaped like a director of a bank, in a white robe of great cleanliness, with a trader’s smile installed under eyes that had no acquaintance with it, and he took one look at the two of them in the doorway — the lean one and the silent one, dusty, unarmed, unafraid — and said, in English, “Ah. The friends of nobody,” in the voice of a man saying the shipment of Wednesday, and put his hand over his heart, and invited them in, and Jason understood the first true thing about the room: they had been expected. Word had come ahead of them up some wire of boys and tea stalls. The clock he had assumed would start when they walked out of this room had in fact started when they walked into this town.
There was tea again, which could not be refused, and three sentences of nothing, and then the Alhaji said, “You are buying for a journey,” in a tone that had no question in it anywhere, and Jason said, “We are,” and the trade began.
Jason had bought weapons in rooms like this on three continents, on a government’s money, with a government’s backstop, and the difference this morning was total and clarifying: every dollar in the envelope had a woman’s name on it, and nobody was coming behind them. He priced accordingly. The rack held Kalashnikovs the way a used lot holds cars — a couple of cripples dressed to move, a row of honest workhorses, one or two with stories — and he and Eli went down the row without a word between them, the division of labor arriving on its own: Jason talked, Eli touched. Eli picked up each rifle like a man picking up a chisel that might or might not hold its edge, worked the action slow with his ear down close, thumbed the bore toward the lightbulb and looked through it for the shine of the lands, and set his choices apart, muzzle to the wall, and set the Alhaji’s opening suggestions back on the rack with a gentleness that said everything a haggler could say at a fraction of the labor.
The Alhaji watched him work with the first genuine expression of the morning.
“Your friend has done this,” he said.
“My friend has done everything,” Jason said. “Four of those. Slings, cleaning kits, and every magazine you have that he approves, and he will not approve the ones you painted.”
“Painted,” the Alhaji said, wounded, delighted, and the trade rolled. He began at four-fifty a rifle. Jason came in flat at one-seventy-five, insultingly educated, and watched the man reprice the entire morning behind his eyes — they know the numbers; someone local loves them; who — and let him land at two-twenty-five and feel it as a defeat that was actually a courtesy. The machine gun the Alhaji floated — there was one, Russian, older than both of them, under the third blanket — Jason declined without looking at it, which hurt the man visibly more than the haggling had. Ammunition, as forecast, was where the knife came out, and Jason paid the knife with a straight face, because Emeka had been right, and because a rifle without ammunition is a walking stick, and because you always pay full price for the thing that is actually the thing.
They were counting it out — Eli loading magazines from crates with a loader’s speed, round counts running in his lips like psalms — when the boy with the wall-eye came through the bottle-cap curtain and said four words in Kanuri.
The room changed.
Nothing in the Alhaji’s face moved, which was itself the movement — the trader’s smile stayed installed and everything living evacuated from behind it. He rose without hurry, said, “You will drink more tea; I have a small matter; the counting continues,” and to the boy a short sentence that sent him back out at a run; and then he crossed the room, and drew the hung blanket back across the rack — closing the shutters, mid-morning — and stood facing the door.
Eli’s hand had stopped over an open crate. Not to the rifles, Jason noted, later, when there was time to note; the rifles were empty and everything in the room that was loaded lay in pieces across a rug. His hand had simply stopped, and his whole self had gone to some register below quiet — the porch register, the register of a man becoming part of the standing timber — and with his eyes he indicated the side wall, and the second doorway hung with cloth, and the storeroom beyond it, and Jason moved there with him, and they stood in the dark among stacked tires and sacks of chalk while the yard filled up with voices.
Customers. Four, five. Loud, in the way of men who are never contradicted in this district — young voices, one older one, boots and sandals mixed, and a mood in them Jason knew before he had parsed a single word: the specific ugly ease of men shopping on a payday. The Alhaji’s voice went out to meet them with a warmth indistinguishable from the warmth he had spent on Jason, friends, friends, and the yard talked, and laughed, and haggled — diesel drums, from the ring of struck metal; batteries; some argument over a belt of ammunition resolved in shouting and then in more laughter — and through a gap where the storeroom’s cloth had frayed from its nail, Jason watched a slice of the yard, one man’s back and half of another man, a slung rifle swinging foreshortened through the gap, close enough to read the wear on its handguard. Close enough, had the frayed gap been a window and the window open, to reach through and touch the sling.
Beside him in the dark, Eli listened with his eyes shut. Afterward, in the truck, he would say the only thing he said all morning — that his Hausa was fifteen years old and the voices had used it only in scraps, that they were not local men by their sound, and that they had been in no hurry about anything, and Jason would mark that: in no hurry. But in the storeroom there was only the listening, and the fan turning somewhere, and the payday laughter three steps of dirt away, and inside Jason, level and cold and utterly unhelpful, the arithmetic he could not stop his trade from running: five of them, two of us, the rifles are bought and the bullets are on the rug in the next room. He put the arithmetic down. He stood in the dark and did the other thing, the thing he had been relearning for two years, and it had no words in it this time at all; it was just a kind of leaning, the full weight of a man set quietly against a door only God could hold.
The yard laughed last at something, and diesel drums rang, and an engine that had been idling the whole time — he only heard it now by its ceasing to idle — took load and pulled away, and a second engine after it. Commerce concluded. The bottle-cap curtain clicked in the wind of their leaving.
The Alhaji drew back the blanket from his rack and resumed the counting mid-number, and his hands were steady, and he offered no explanation whatsoever — except that at the end, when the envelope had been opened and its contents gravely diminished, when the crates were roped and the boy sent for the handcart, he looked at Jason for a moment with the smile finally uninstalled.
“I sell to everyone,” he said. “It is why I am alive, and it is why you are alive this morning, and I will tell you the free thing, because you paid the ammunition without crying.” He tipped his head a half-inch toward the yard, toward the departed engines. “Men like those are my customers for six years. This month they are buying like men who have been paid. Last month they were buying like men who were owed.” He let that sit exactly as long as it needed to. “A trader notices when the money arrives. What arrived, I do not ask. Go well, friends of nobody.”
They came out through the lockups pushing the handcart like laborers, which is to say invisibly, and they were one street from the neem trees when Jason saw the truck.
It sat outside a fuel depot with its bed to the street, taking on drums: a Toyota gone gray-green under paint and dust and years, and where its tailgate should have been, nothing — a naked bed-lip polished by loading, the two hinge stubs standing like cut bone. Bitrus had said it, at the mission, holding his own elbow: the green one with no tailgate. Emeka had said it. And here it stood in the eleven o’clock sun with a man asleep in its shade and another man paying for diesel, ordinary as Tuesday, the truck that had been in the yard — that yard, the swept one, with the graves outside the east wall — and Jason stood with his hands on a cart of rifles he could load in ninety seconds, and looked at it, and had one of the oldest conversations of his life with himself in the space of a breath.
Follow it. You did not get handed the enemy’s own truck twice. It would run home to the compound by the dead river and prove the diesel man’s word and put eyes on the objective by sundown —
— or it would run four hours the wrong way to some other hole in this hurting country, dragging behind it a white man pushing a handcart who had been burned into every retina in that market since nine o’clock, and the first phone call from the first motorbike that passed him on an empty road would spend the only thing they had, which was that nobody knew they were here. He had run that play with helicopters and a nation behind him. He had exactly neither.
“We know where they sleep,” Eli said, beside him, very quietly — the whole debate attended, adjudicated, and closed in five words — and Jason let a breath go, and with it the truck, and pushed the cart.
But he marked one thing more, walking away, because his eye would not release it: the drums. Six of them, big ones, going up onto that bed one after another, on ropes. Men buy diesel to run generators. Men also buy diesel to go somewhere. Buying like men who have been paid, the Alhaji said in his head, and Jason set it — all of it, the yard voices in no hurry, the money that had arrived, six drums riding a truck with no tailgate — on the pile he was not thinking about, and noted that the pile had gotten a voice lately, and pushed the cart toward the neem trees where his people were.
They test-fired at sundown, far out on a pan of cracked earth Emeka chose for having no witnesses and no echoes, each rifle given three rounds and its say — one throwing wild until Eli bedded the sights, tapping the drift pin with the back of the folding knife, unhurried, a man truing a spokeshave — and then the pan went quiet and they worked by lantern in the walled yard of the night’s compound, and the work had the rhythm Jason had been part of a hundred times and never once tired of: the liturgy of the night before. Magazines loaded in threes and taped. Slings fitted to bodies. Bear built out the aid bags one more time and staged them by door, by vehicle, by man, narrating none of it. Allie copied the route onto two cards in her draftsman’s hand — primary and rally, one for Jason, one for the dash of the truck — and if her thumb woke her phone twice an hour, the town having signal where the mission had none, she did it facing the wall, and nothing came, and she told the wall nothing, and the wall kept it.
Emeka sat apart, on an upturned basin by the cook fire, and did not touch the rifles, and nobody asked him to, and it was understood by every soul in that yard that this was not fear or daintiness but a man keeping the one tool that was his — the doors, the name, the mission’s clean hands — oiled and dry and ready, same as they kept theirs.
Jason walked the yard last with the lantern down low, checking knots that did not need him, and came to rest at the tailgate where the crates rode under burlap, and stood there. Two hours north and east, by a dead river, behind a wall like all the walls of this country, a man in his late fifties with his daughter’s face was — if the diesel man had it right; if, said the pile, in its new voice, and Jason breathed once and set the if back down — sitting against mud in the dark, fourteen nights deep in the belief that no one on earth was coming.
“Tomorrow,” Jason said to him, quietly, across the thornbush and the dark, man to man, the way he had said it once already to a small boy with a tin cup. “Hold one more night, old man. We’re the something that’s coming.”
They rolled out at four, running dark, three rifles riding muzzle-down between the knees of three men who had checked them twice, and the last stars still standing over the thornbush, and every heart in that truck — every one, each for its own reasons, each with its own arithmetic — believing that by the time those stars came back, they would have him.