Unlike Casablanca’s international hub, Laayoune’s tiny Hassan I, from above, looked ready to be swallowed by the Sahara. Despite the long-ago name change from Spanish to Western Sahara, the Arabic sign over the passenger terminal also read AEROPUERTO DE EL AAIÚN. Beyond, the flat, hard desert and dusty sky were ominous, and I wondered again why I had been picked for this particular mission.
The late-afternoon heat outside the airport was stifling, but I soon found a free driver smoking against a beaten-up Peugeot with functioning air-conditioning. He seemed surprised when I spoke the Hassānīya my parents had always insisted we use at home. He asked a lot of questions, wondering if I was part of the UN peacekeeping force, but I deflected with questions of my own, asking where the best meat pies could be had, the best markets, and the best cafés—subjects taxi drivers the world over can’t help but elucidate on.
Outside the car, a desert wind was picking up, but the crowded salmon-pink buildings protected the streets from sand and sun. Locals filled the sidewalks, the colors of their robes touching something in my DNA. I felt a desire to call home and describe everything I saw to Rashid, to Laura. The feeling swelled so quickly that I even took out my phone before stopping myself. Paul had made clear that this wasn’t allowed at the destination. And besides, I thought as I pocketed the phone again, the separation was probably good for us. Laura and I weren’t trapped together in a small suburban house, walking on eggshells. We could breathe again, and perhaps with a couple of days’ reprieve we would remember again why we’d chosen this life together.
That charmed feeling evaporated inside the sand-colored Hotel Parador, where the lobby was full of dozing foreigners who gave me weary looks. The MINURSO peacekeepers had brought with them the regular assortment of diplomats and carpetbaggers, and it looked like most of them had taken up residence in the Parador. Cynics and small-timers all—I’d spent a lot of my career reading reports from people like these, for whom the world was so much smaller than it really was, and I found their petty braggadocio tedious. Most analysts I knew felt this way, which was inevitable, I suppose, given our illusion of grander knowledge.
The hot water only lasted half my shower, and after washing I ate an energy bar while examining a map of the city, charting a route to the address Sally and Mel had given me before Paul sent me off to my cubicle to absorb whatever was still legible in that decimated file.
“A simple interview,” they had told me. “Just the questions on the list.”
“And if he doesn’t want to talk?”
“Find out if it’s just us he doesn’t want to talk to, or if he’s locking out the whole world.”
So why not a phone call? Why not send these questions to someone already on location? Why send me, who had spent the last fourteen years behind a desk? Their answers had been equivocal, but the sad truth was the one I had suspected from the moment I first looked into their faces: They simply had no one else who could blend in as well as Abdul Ghali, their deskbound African.
I jumped at a knock at the door. “Na-rħam?” I called, folding the map.
“It’s Collins,” said an American voice.
Collins—yes, our local friend, very loosely attached to the UN mission. Paul had explained that Collins would set me up with anything I needed, which again raised the question: Why not just ask Collins to walk across town and do the interview? No one seemed to have a good answer for that.
I let in a balding man in knee-length shorts, tennis shoes, a Texas Tech baseball cap, and a dusty, sweat-stained jacket. We shook hands, and Collins looked around the room, sniffing. “Should’ve asked for a back-facing room. Gets noisy as hell here.”
“I won’t be here long enough for it to matter.”
Collins grinned in a way I didn’t like, then reached into the cargo pockets of his shorts. “We live in hope, man.” He took out a flip phone and held it out to me. “My number’s the only one in it.” From his other pocket he took out a small semiautomatic pistol, checked the safety, and tossed it on the bed. “Colt 2000. Nine-millimeter, fifteen rounds. It’ll get you where you’re going.”
I stared at it. “What’s this for?”
“You’re going into the slums, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but I don’t … I mean, I’m not—”
“Look, kid. It’s there to make you feel better. You take that out, and whoever’s giving you trouble is going to think twice. I hope to hell you don’t pull the trigger—I don’t need that kind of paperwork. But take it. Okay?”
I nodded even though my brain was saying no. After a day of traveling in solitude, this sudden bluster was disconcerting, and the addition of a pistol made me think again of 2009, and my brother. It shouldn’t have—he’d died in another country and had only sung the praises of Laayoune—but it did. Maybe because we’d never been able to bury him ourselves. His body, we were told, lay on the outskirts of Bissau, in a cemetery only our father had had the heart to visit.
Still not touching the gun, I said, “You’re the one who found him?”
“No. And it doesn’t exactly reflect well on me that after two years in this dump I didn’t notice our little newcomer. I mean, him of all people. He apparently made a phone call to the States. Stupid slip.”
I wondered about that.
Collins furrowed his brow, eyeballing me. “Look, all you have to worry about is your twenty questions. Okay?”
“And you?”
“Me? Don’t worry about me.”
It wasn’t him I was worried about. “You’re not coming?”
“Sure,” he said. “I’m coming. But you’re not going to see me. You see me, they see me. And we don’t want to scare anyone off. HQ’s been looking months for this bastard. Let’s not lose him.”
“But if I need—”
“That,” he said, pointing to the flip phone still in my hand. “You call, I come. No more than a minute or two. And unlike you, I don’t have a problem carrying.” To prove his point, he opened his sweat-stained jacket to reveal a shoulder holster and a worn pistol grip. Then he considered me a moment, judgment all over him, and said, “You don’t need to be scared, okay? Things they say about this guy? He probably made them up himself. His dad was KGB; making up shit is in his blood.”
“What do they say about him?”
Collins opened his mouth, then shut it. “How much are you read in on?”
“Not a lot. Ties to the Massive Brigade.”
“That’s it?”
I shrugged.
He cursed under his breath and stepped away, toward the windows, flexing his fists. “They send you here without…” He shook his head, unwilling to finish the sentence, then turned back to me. Made a smile that filled me with unease. “Maybe it’s better you don’t know. Why fuck with your nerves, right? Keep your calm.”
At no point during this conversation had I felt calm about anything, but now Collins had pushed it to the emotional equivalent of nails scratching a chalkboard. So I took a baby step closer, looked him square in the eyes, and said, “Collins, I need you to tell me exactly what the hell I’m walking into here.”