He decides to cross the avenue. Addis Ababa is a beehive of activity. He walks between two cars, their shock absorbers so worn down that the bumpers practically touch the ground; he immerses himself for a moment in the chaos of traffic, then comes out on the other side of the sluggish flow of vehicles. The Americans are in position. He has spotted them. Two outside the building. A third one a bit further along. There must be a few up on the roofs. There is surely a car somewhere, ready to intervene. They are there, the trap is set, and the statue of the lion of Judah looks down on the endless stream of cars and the conspiracies of man with equal indifference.

 

Addis Ababa is jubilant. He enters his city with Wingate by his side. Behind them march the triumphant men of the Gideon Force: Ethiopians, Sudanese, Kenyans, all mingled together, all in rags, but the crowd can’t see that, all destitute, but the crowd cheers them wildly. This war that surrounds them, this war that is causing the world to tremble: the Second World War is offering them victory. The Italians have withdrawn and once again Addis Ababa has its king of kings. They marched from the little village of Um Idla to Mount Belaya where the Gideon Force has its headquarters. They marched and their ranks swelled with each village they passed through, rousing the countryside. They marched to restore the dignity that the League of Nations had stolen from Ethiopia, and today the throngs in the streets are cheering for their Negus, home again at last.

 

The gloom in the building is restful. Two young boys are sitting on the stairs, avidly exchanging notes or photographs. Scarcely looking up, they let him go by. He goes up the stairs. It is not as hot in here. The men from the commando will follow him before long, that much is certain. They will tell the two boys to go and play somewhere else—which they will do, scrambling to pick up their meager treasure. He knows all this. He has experienced similar moments so many times, in other cities. The car will park opposite the building, engine running, door open. The only thing he doesn’t know is whether it will be to take Job away, or to erase all trace of the men who have killed him.

 

The crowd cheers as he goes by. The city is jubilant. Haile Selassie is back in Addis Ababa, and when he left a few years ago it was being ransacked, Addis Ababa that lived through the occupation and tried to fight back, as on that day when nine grenades were thrown at Graziani, nine grenades that should have killed him nine times over, but it is difficult to kill men who live by blood, and fate is oddly considerate sometimes. Graziani got to his feet, and Addis Ababa, which had been holding its breath, had to bow its head again. Today the city is singing, exulting in the passage of its emperor, with Wingate by his side—and he wonders what a victory is, when no battle has been won. It is thanks to the British that he has come back. He did not put the enemy’s armies to flight. Addis Ababa is cheering him but he can still hear the Italian journalists’ insults in Geneva: “Pickaninny!” The country may be celebrating the victory, but he feels as if some part of the defeat at Maychew was never effaced, nor will it ever be. Perhaps it was only by blood that he might have truly avenged the affront? Perhaps he will only truly smile the day Mussolini is hung by his feet on Piazzale Loreto in Milan, like a pig about to be slaughtered? He marches through the streets of Addis Ababa. The crowd screams with joy as he goes by. Now he will reign, he will recover his prerogatives, his court, his people, his power. He will no longer be a fugitive hiding in caves or an exile in the rain of Bath, he will live in grandeur and enjoy the respect of his subjects, and so he is trying to savor this city that is his once again, the warmth surrounding him and that he has missed so much. People everywhere are chanting his name, but he can feel no victory inside, or nothing in any case that is equal to the defeat he suffered, nothing to erase the humiliation at the League of Nations or the endless waiting in Bath, as if defeat always weighed more than victory, as if in the final analysis there could be nothing left in the hearts of men but defeat.

 

It will take a defeat or a victory. That’s the way it is. Hannibal knows this. So many men have died, and they demand to know in which camp History will place them, victors or vanquished. He is about to fight a battle here on these lands he left when he was still a child. An entire lifetime has gone by since the day he took command of the Punic army and crossed the Pyrenees. Years of war and blood, years of thinking, coming up with plans, imagining new tactics. And now he is back at the point of departure: the African coast of the Mediterranean. It is here that the war will come to an end. Everything is in place. Alliances have been forged or broken. Rome has always known how to create discord. Syphax found out about the secret accord between Rome and Masinissa. He flew into a rage and changed sides. For a long time the Roman empire had been allied with the king of the Masaesyli who reigned over western Numidia, but for Scipio this was not enough. He plotted in the shadows to turn Masinissa, the king of the Massylii, and never mind if the two of them were mortal enemies, never mind if, in all likelihood, he had to promise to each of them the other man’s kingdom, never mind, even, if Syphax ended up fighting on the same side as Carthage, outraged at the fact that Scipio brought about a rapprochement with his enemy. Everything is in place and History is clamoring for its battle. Peace proposals were presented, and turned down. The time for negotiations was extended as long as possible. Hannibal met with Scipio: the two men spoke in a tent that snapped in the wind. Two hours of talk that led nowhere. Rome does not want to negotiate. And deep down Hannibal thinks that’s as it should be. He would be ashamed to sign a mediocre peace agreement. He thinks again of his brother, beheaded, and of all the dead of all the past campaigns, and he knows they would have jeered at him in his nights of insomnia. Did he go through all that simply to sign a worthless treaty inside a Roman tent? It may yet happen . . . But not before he has had a chance to fight. And so he sets out his plans with a view to battle. He will position eighty elephants in the front line. And it could be that the Romans will turn pale at the sight of the mastodons. It will remind them of the forty elephants he had when crossing the Alps, how they poured onto the plain of Ticinus. Behind the elephants he will put the Gaulish mercenaries. They are capable of anything. They proved as much at Cannae. Nothing can make them retreat. Then will come the Carthaginians. He has been thinking about it for days already. And he knows that Scipio is doing the same on his side. He saw it in his gaze when they greeted each other. They spoke, and acted as if they were conversing, but each of them was already thinking about tomorrow’s battle.

 

In a faraway hotel room in the past, Sullivan Sicoh watches as the girl gets up. She walks around the bed and goes into the bathroom, offering her buttocks and the light skin of her back to his gaze. How old is she? Twenty? He watches as she disappears, with her long blond hair. Silence fills the room. He lies there for a moment then slowly opens the drawer of the night table with one hand and takes out the bible. A faint smile passes over his lips. He leafs through the pages at random. Suddenly he freezes. There, before his eyes, he has just found the name that was waiting for him. He knows it will be his. It is so obvious. He mutters the words he has just read. He wants to hear them echo in the air of the little room that still smells of fixed-price love: “Death rather than my life.” He smiles again but his expression has changed, as if those lines had been written for him, and then he says out loud: “Job.” He pauses for a while, seems to be thinking, then gets up, takes his wallet, and goes over to the door to the bathroom. The girl inside is having a wash. It takes her a moment to hear his voice. When eventually she turns off the water, he explains that he will slide the money under the door, she mustn’t open it. She asks him if everything is all right, she sounds worried. She is probably not used to clients paying extra. He doesn’t answer and he slides the first twenty dollar bill, as he continues to explain: he wants her to stay there, in the bathroom, and call out to him, that’s all, call out several times. She asks him to repeat what he has said, she’s not sure she has really understood. He slides two more bills under the door and says again, call him by his name, that’s all, nothing else, but do it for a long time . . . Then he lies back down, folding his arms beneath his neck, in the bed that still smells of the effort of their bodies. Then the girl’s voice rings out and he closes his eyes to fill himself with it: “Sullivan . . . ? Sulli . . . ?”

 

Assem pauses on the third floor, catches his breath, tries to make the most of the ambient calm one last time. He takes the little piece of paper from his pocket and reads again: “Last door end of the corridor to the left.” He walks ahead, down the corridor. The sounds from the street have faded. When he passes by one of the first doors, he thinks he can hear the sound of a television, or a radio. He goes on, until he is outside the door at the end. He knocks, and waits. Nothing.

 

Again she says, “Sulli . . . ?” changing her tone, her voice more fearful, shrill.

 

Assem listens out, knocks again. Still nothing. So he puts his hand on the door handle and the door opens slightly. He can hear the street sounds again, traffic. He goes through the door and sees a vast room overlooking the avenue he took to come here. One of the two big windows is open. There is no one. He walks into the room. Not a single piece of furniture, either. He goes further in, to see the other rooms. Everything is the same. An empty apartment. There is just an old wall-to-wall carpet on the floor, and this open window—a sign, at least, that someone came here not long ago. He breathes calmly, allows himself to be overcome by the silence of the place.

 

“Sulli . . . ?” On she goes, conscientiously doing what she has been paid to do, calling again and again, changing her tone even when she must be in the process of getting dressed. “Sulli . . . ?” This is what he wanted to hear, in this soulless room to which he will never return: his absence. “Sulli . . . ?” He hears the void he will leave when he has left his life.

 

The apartment is empty. Assem goes over everything he will not have to do: the false dialogue with Job, the moment he should have used the pretext of making a phone call or smoking a cigarette out on the balcony in order to alert the men waiting downstairs. All of that has just been scrubbed. Job is not here; perhaps he never even came to Addis Ababa. He is thumbing his nose at them. At him. At the men from the intelligence services who are trailing him. He will continue along his path of folly, and Assem is glad that it has turned out this way. And so he smiles, wipes his hand across his face to remove the sweat, leans out the open window, and gazes at the lion of Judah across the way, reigning with the immobility of a pharaoh over a nation of automobiles. He makes a sign with his hand for the men to come, and they come. He can already hear them climbing the steps four at a time, still believing there is a mission, when in fact there is nothing more than an empty apartment.

 

“Sulli . . . ?” There is nothing left of Sullivan Sicoh, nothing but the name still uttered by the girl out of nowhere who will soon fall silent, the name echoing once, twice more, then nothing. And he knows in that instant that everything has truly been erased, that he has managed to escape from who he was.

 

He leaves. No one is waiting for him anymore, and the Americans won’t need his feedback for their meeting this evening at the embassy. When he steps back out into the street, the heat outside seems to grab him by the cheeks. The air is so thick that it is almost hard to swallow. He heads toward his hotel when suddenly, behind his back, a voice calls to him: “Sir . . . Hey, sir . . . ” Initially he pays no attention. “Sir . . . ” Eventually he turns around: it is a handicapped man in a wheelchair that must be a hundred years old, with rusted armrests and creaking wheels. The man’s feet are atrophied, thin and twisted like a sickly wood. “Sir!” He is about to turn back and walk away, to leave the crippled man to follow him a few more steps then give up, but something in the man’s eyes stops him. Something like complicity, an initiated look. He walks up to him, takes out a banknote and hands it to him. The crowd pays no attention, sees no more in the scene than a white man giving money to a beggar. The man gives a broad smile. He doesn’t say thank you. He stares him right in the eye and says, in English, “Tripoli. Hotel Radisson. June 27 at nine P.M.” And he adds, as a sort of strange signature, these words that he even finds hard to say: “So lamely and unfashionable/That dogs bark at me as I halt by them  . . . Why I . . . Have no delight to pass away the time/Unless to see my shadow in the sun,” then he smiles at his truncated quotation, because he managed to say it in spite of everything. He senses that Assem has just understood, and that he will be entitled to claim the money he was promised for this errand. Time stands still. Assem can no longer hear the street around him. He is rooted to the spot, gripped by the words. Job is there between them, invisible, speaking through the mouth of the crippled man. Job is there, playing with Richard III and an Ethiopian paralytic, mocking the men from the US intelligence services. He recognizes his voice, even if it is coming from the lips of the disabled man, who does not know in whose name he is speaking, who probably never even met Sullivan Sicoh in his entire life, has done this simply for the cash they’ve promised him, but Assem knows these words come from Job and that the appointment is genuine. They will meet again. He will be able to ask him the questions that have been haunting him since their last meeting: What have we achieved? What are we obeying? He smiles, and suddenly feels good, in this stifling city amid this chaotic traffic. He will go to Tripoli. Did Job deliberately set this meeting in Libya? Does he want to test him, see if he has the nerve to go back there? Not because the country is at war, but because of the memories of an angry crowd and a dictator with a swollen face. It’s no mere coincidence. Is he taking him to Libya so that he, Assem, will be in a place where he is fragile? Perhaps he wants to see him naked, out of this world, confronted with the memory of his limits, the way he was out of this world in the helicopter taking him back from Abbottabad with his comrades screaming for joy as they looked at bin Laden’s body there at their feet, in that moment when he felt the irreconcilable split from the other men, perhaps that is what he wants . . . Wants him to agree to meet him in the place where something snapped inside him. Only then will they speak. And perhaps only then will Assem understand what it is that gives Job that fascinating gaze that is both feverish and cheerful, as if he thought the blazing world was ever so amusing, because he had penetrated its secrets.