Chapter 56
THE HALL IN town was named, incongruously, Modern Serenity. The name was scrawled in blue on an old wooden sign out front, and it made me think of an Alexander McCall Smith novel, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.
Maybe the building had been a church once. Now it was an all-purpose sort of place—one large, dingy room with tables and chairs that started to fill up as the sun went down.
Someone turned on a boom box, and the guy who showed up with a keg of Star Beer dispensed it into previously used plastic cups and took money.
Moses and his friends wouldn’t come inside and let me buy them a drink. They said they’d be kicked out if they couldn’t pay for their own beer. Instead, Moses told me, he’d hang out with some other men around an open fire, singing and talking, not far from the hall, and he pointed in the direction where he’d be.
I spent the next few hours casually asking around and mostly getting nowhere. Even the few people who would talk to me about mining shut up as soon as I moved my questions anywhere else . . . such as to the subject of the illegal diamond trade.
Twice I noticed men in camos and flip-flops licking their palms. Diamonds for sale, they were saying. You need only swallow them to get them out of the country. Both of them stopped and spoke with me, but just long enough to figure out I wasn’t selling or buying.
I was starting to think this night might be a washout, when a teenage kid came over and stood next to me against the wall.
“I hear you lookin’ for someone,” he said, loud enough just for me. Busta Rhymes was doing his thing on the boom box at high volume.
“Who do you hear I’m looking for?”
“He’s already gone, mister. Left the country, but I can’t tell you where he is. The Tiger.”
I looked down at the kid. He was maybe five foot nine, muscled, and cocky-looking. Younger than I’d first thought too—sixteen or seventeen maybe. Barely older than Damon. Like a lot of teenagers I’d seen on the continent, he wore an NBA jersey. His was a Houston Rockets jersey, an American basketball team that had once featured an excellent player from Nigeria named Hakeem Olajuwon.
“And who are you?” I asked the boy.
“You wanna know more ’bout anything, it’s a hundred dollars American. I’ll be outside. It’s dangerous to talk in here. Too many eyes and ears. Outside, mister. We talk out there. One hundred dollars.”
He pushed off from the wall and pimp-strutted toward the front door, which was wide open to the street. I watched him drain his cup of beer, drop it on a table, and leave the hall.
I had no intention of letting him get away, but I wasn’t going to walk outside the way he wanted me to either. It was his accent that told me what I needed to know. Not Sierra Leonean. Yoruban. The boy was from Nigeria.
I counted thirty, then slipped out the back of Modern Serenity.
Chapter 57
SURVEILLANCE. I WAS decent at it, always had been good at keeping a step ahead of an opponent. Even, hopefully, some as tricky and dangerous as the Tiger and his gang.
I worked a wide perimeter around to the front. When I got to the corner of the neighboring building, I had a pretty clear view of the town hall entrance.
The kid in the red Houston Rockets jersey was standing off to the side with another, younger boy. They were facing different directions, surveying the street while they talked.
An ambush? I ha
d to wonder.
After a few minutes, the older one went back inside, presumably to look for me. I didn’t wait to make my next move. If he had half a brain, he’d go exactly the way I’d just come.
I skirted the dirt intersection and changed position, moving to a burned-out doorway on the opposite corner of the street. It was attached to the black concrete skeleton of whatever the building had once been, possibly a general store.
I pressed back into the empty door frame and hung there out of sight, watching, doing the surveillance as best I could.
Considering that I was working on Mars.
Sure enough, Houston Rockets came out a minute later, then paused right where I had been standing before.
His partner ran over and they conferred, nervously looking around for me.
I decided that as soon as they made a move, I’d follow them. If they split up, I’d stick with the older one, Rockets.