5

I think about them all the time. It’s stupid. When they were alive, I never thought about them enough. My life was miserable. I was working day and night. The chases, the arrests, the adrenaline, all that bullshit. The other narcs and I, we thought we were the only ones living like that. We thought we were in a league of our own outside the society we protected. So we took some liberties. It was only normal. We had our share of fun, all right: booze, drugs, whores, seedy motels and sweaty sheets, bloodshot eyes and hangover mouths. The next morning, her eyes would look heavy and wounded, while I’d stare at the floor.

In reality, I was the one who killed them—never being there, never doing anything the way it should’ve been done, thinking only about myself. She wanted to fly to the moon. I didn’t. My life was that piece-of-shit job. Now I’m lugging around my guilt like a suitcase I can’t get rid of. Sometimes I can forget about the throbbing pain, but it’s always lurking. It keeps me from burying them once and for all.

It’s my punishment.

This morning, for the first time, I was hardly thinking about them. I had a meeting with Farah Tebessi. When I showed up at the Laïco Hotel, she was sipping juice by the pool, wearing pumps and a khaki dress that hugged her elegant silhouette. My father liked to say that shoes revealed everything about a woman’s personality. What these shoes revealed had me wiping the drool off the corner of my mouth. As we shook hands, a waiter came over. I ordered what she was drinking, even though I would have preferred something with more of a kick. She didn’t want to discuss my negotiations with Guino or the money I had saved her. We chatted for a few minutes, and she handed over the payoff for Guino and half of my fee. She reassured me that she’d be giving me the rest as soon as her sister was freed. That wasn’t what we had agreed on, but I didn’t care. I could sense that she wanted to cut our encounter short and that the stories of corruption in Mali—now that her problems were almost solved—were weighing heavily on her. I figured I’d have another opportunity to see her again. So I got up and said good-bye.

Later that day, I gave Moussa Guino his money. I waited a good fifteen minutes as he painstakingly counted the bills to make sure it was all there. Once he was satisfied, he thanked me cordially, and we parted on good terms.

I returned to my office to tackle overdue paperwork before meeting with a new client: a rather large woman who came in wheezing after her climb up the outside stairs. She smelled like sweat and patchouli, and I had to restrain myself from cracking open a window. As she noisily blew her nose into a tissue, she asked me to check on her husband, a rich businessman. Some of their mutual friends had told her that he intended to take a second wife—a younger, thinner, more fertile woman was already his mistress. The woman’s blubbering was giving me a headache, and after she left I poured myself a glass of Scotch and then another, as my skull was still pounding. My new client had deposited a wad of oily bills on my desk, even though I hadn’t asked for an advance. Long after she was gone, I stared at the money, not having the energy to actually count it.

I spent the last part of the afternoon tailing the husband but didn’t learn anything the wife hadn’t already told me. I decided to go home. I live in the residential neighborhood of Badalabougou on the right bank of the river. When my dad died four years ago, he left me his house on Rue Thirteen and a nice sum of money that keeps me comfortable. It’s a charming structure, although during flood season it occasionally gets wet. The house and the money are all that’s left of the old man’s wealth. My half-brothers and half-sisters long ago squandered the rest.

My dad had met my mom in the seventies, when he was a student in France. She was a bourgeois Parisian from the sixth arrondissement. Their relationship caused quite a few disagreements in their respective families, especially my mother’s. At the time, their marriage was said to be against nature. What a term that was. After their initial passion cooled, their cultural differences were all that remained. There was constant cheating on one side and glacial distrust on the other. Bamako was the last straw. My father made it a point to return as frequently as possible, while my mother abhorred the “vile city that stank like an open sewer.” On top of that, he sent a large amount of money made during his career as a French commercial banker to the country she detested. They split up and then played tug-of-war over me from their respective homes—Africa and Europe, Third World and First World, black and white. My father remarried and had a bunch of kids at a ripe old age, while my mother sank into bitter resentment. They still loved each other, but their differences won out. For both of them, I represented their dashed dreams. When a relationship is cross-cultural—and especially interracial, as we stupidly call it—one person always has to make a sacrifice by giving up their heritage. My heritage was at the end of a dirt road.

I honked, and Drissa, my gardinier—that’s what Bamako residents call someone who tends the grounds and garden—opened the gate to let in my old Toyota Land Cruiser, which my father had also left me. He opened the squeaky driver’s-side door and gave me a warm welcome.

“Evening, boss. How was your day?” he asked, as he had every evening for years.

I replied with the usual “it went well,” and after looking through the mail, I took a seat on my patio, which faced the river. Meanwhile, Drissa prepared two glasses of Scotch in the living room. I opened my box of cigars on the small rattan table and took out a Cuban robusto that a Lebanese client had given me as a thank-you for a service I had provided. I heard ice cubes clink as I lit the cigar. I waved the match to put it out and took a puff of the rich, lush tobacco. Drissa came back, carefully carrying the filled-to-the-rim glasses. He was more than sixty years old. His eyesight was declining, and his hands trembled from a lifetime spent drinking—even though he was Muslim—but he never spilled a drop of my Scotch. Drissa had principles. I loved his weathered-like-old-leather face, his watery eyes, and his white wooly hair, which attracted blades of cilantro and basil when he cooked. I had encouraged him to retire on several occasions, but he stubbornly refused, often asserting that he had served my father before me, and he would serve my son when the time came. I didn’t get upset with him about that. He didn’t know the pain it reawakened in me. I understood that nothing was awaiting him outside this home. His family lived in Burkina Faso and had forgotten him long ago. He would die the day he was no longer of service to anyone. So we took care of each other.

He sat down beside me and lit a contraband cigarette. After clinking our glasses, we drank in silence.

By the water, fishermen were casting their nets. Upriver, the sun was disappearing in a bed of unlikely colors.

I sure do love a good sunset.