Monday morning came and it was time to meet Andre. I drove over to his hangar, which also housed his office. It was good to see Paterson walking out of the hangar toward me.
“Hey boss!” he said. We shook hands in the Liberian manner.
“How are things going, Paterson?”
“I started work yesterday. It good to have a job, suh. Yes indeed.”
“What do you think of Andre?”
He hesitated for a moment. “He is a man of few words, sir, a man of few words. Well, it’s good to see you suh. We will be working together again. Dat is good.” Paterson extended his hand once again. We shook and I watched as he walked away. A man of few words probably meant the same thing in Liberia as it did in the US—someone who knew where he was going, knew what he wanted, and what to expect.
I walked into the hangar, taking a few moments to notice the aircraft being serviced, then knocked on Andre’s office door.
“Entrez!” he said in a loud voice without shouting.
He was standing facing a large blackboard—the scheduling board. On it was scribbled all of the pertinent information about the day’s flights. I introduced myself.
“Yes, yes, I know who you are. Honorable Williams has informed me. Have you seen our aircraft?”
“Only the ones on the ramp and in the hangar.”
“Are you checked out in any of them?”
“Yes.”
“Good, that will save us some time. Most of our work is related to the diamond trade but we also have other clients. Occasionally we work with the Peace Corps as well as some private charters—the same work you did at African Air Services. We have also acquired many of their clients. Oh, and by the way, if Honorable Williams or anyone in his family wants to fly somewhere, they fly. Understand?”
I said that I did.
“I don’t have anything for a couple of weeks,” Andre said. “But what I do need right now is a good mechanic. I’m told that you are qualified in that area too?”
“Yes,” I said, “but I thought you had a good mechanic—the boy from the Tourneau Mission, the old Texas Company.”
“You’re right. Charles. He was good. Apparently too good.”
“What happened?”
“He got to be, as I said, really good. They had trained him well up at the mission and he knew what he was doing. He was a real entrepreneur, Charles was. He ended up buying a taxi and hired one employee; and he found a real nice girl he was planning to marry.
“Well, then the military airplanes started falling apart, so what did the military do? They drafted him into their army. He was a Liberian, so they could do it. Then he changed. It was like night and day. They were paying him nothing, maybe twenty, thirty dollars a month. He lost his taxi, his girlfriend left him, and then he went AWOL. Of course they caught him. And then they would chain him up in the hangar at night and make him work on the airplanes during the day. This went on for a while until one night he went berserk. He tried to burn down the hangar and he took a sledge hammer to the airplanes. So, of course, they sent him off to prison. Never saw him again. So, as you can see, I still need a good mechanic.”
“I understand,” I said, “but I did come here to fly.”
“You will fly,” he said. “You’ll fly so much you’ll be begging me to stop. But no one flies if the machines are broken. I have been asking around, but for the moment, I need help.”
“I don’t have my own tools,” I said.
“We have tools.” He said. “Come with me. I’ll introduce you and show you what we have.”
I followed him into the hangar. Andre looked more Vietnamese than French. He was a small man. He walked very fast, and he had coarse black hair that seemed to constantly fall into his face. He introduced me to Koto, his only working mechanic. Koto was from Sierra Leone. He was very thin and looked more like a Somali. Most of his teeth were gone but that did not affect his willingness to smile.
“Koto,” Andre said, “this is Boss Ken. He is one of our new pilots and he is also a mechanic from the United States.” Koto looked unfazed. “He will be the boss. You do what he says.”
Had we been in a maintenance shop in the US, this kind of speech and introduction would have caused instant resentment and led to numerous labor conflicts. Koto, however, smiled his near toothless smile, nodded his head in agreement, and said, “Yes boss, I unnastan. He know sheenery. He know sheenery mo dan me.”
Andre rolled the shop’s tool chest over to me. One of the qualities of good mechanics is that he handles and cares for his tools like a surgeon handles and cares for his surgical instruments. These tools were a jumble of metal objects covered in dirt and grease.
“I can’t use these,” I said. “They’re a mess. They are all going to have to be cleaned and organized according to function and size. It’ll take a day at least, maybe two.”
“Then get one of the boys—” Andre said.
“No,” I interrupted. “I’d better do that myself.”
Andre nodded and started back for his office. I followed.
“Yes?” he said, turning to face me.
“Andre, I don’t work just for the privilege of working.”
“Since you are a US certified A and P mechanic, I’ll pay you fifteen US an hour.” Fifteen US dollars an hour was very good money. “Koto gets three fifty. Maybe you can inspire him to get a certification.”
I walked back into the hangar, found a large plastic sheet, spread it out on the floor next to the tool chest and dumped the tools out onto it. Koto looked at me, amazed and puzzled. “Wat you do, oh?”
I explained my mission of cleaning and sorting. He shook his head, and walking away, he said, “I got no time fo dah.”
I found a bucket of Varsol and spent the day cleaning, sorting and arranging the tools in the proper order. I then cleaned the tool chest inside and out and put clean lining made from tightly woven aircraft floor matting material in the bottom of each drawer.
Toward the end of the workday Andre came out onto the hangar floor. He motioned for me to follow him. He stopped in front of a rather badly battered Cessna 185.
“Charlie Fox has a cracked cylinder. Can you change it tomorrow?” I didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t. I didn’t expect any work from Beizell for another week.
Paterson was outside with one of his boys changing a tire on one of the airplanes. The boy looked up at me and smiled.
“I know you from Mike’s operation,” I said. “I’m Mista Ken. Do you remember me?”
“Oh, sho do, boss. Sho do. Ma name is Jonathan.”
“That’s a good name. You know how Paterson got his name?”
“Ya, ah do. Iss da name of some place in Amerika.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Paterson, New Jersey. That’s right near New York City.”
“Oh, I heard o’ New Yor Cetty. So, boss, how bee is New Yor Cetty?”
“Oh,” I said, “it’s huge! It’s big way past Monrovia.”
“No!” He laughed. “It can’t be big past Monrovia!”
“Oh yeah, it is. They have big skyscrapers.”
“Skyscrapers. Wassa skyscraper?”
“Skyscrapers are buildings that go up so high that you can’t see the top. They are said to touch the sky.”
“Noooo, boss, not possible,” he whispered. “No place big past Monrovia.”
“Okay, Jonathan, it’s big past Robertsport.”
Jonathan smiled and exhaled.
Belinda and Barry were both out that evening, so I sat by myself on the porch, gazing out at the ocean. I had a growing apprehension about our planned trip to Ouagadougou for the music festival. Driving to Ouagadougou in that old station wagon? Was I crazy? What if it broke down seven hundred miles short of our destination? We would be out in the middle of nowhere. We would be SOL. No, I would be SOL! Were they even who they said they were?
I had a copy of all the keys, so I went into their room. I found their passports in a dresser drawer along with some newspaper clippings and other papers. Belinda did have a Canadian passport, and Barry had what appeared to be an Australian passport. However, tucked under the newspaper clippings, I found three other passports. Two of them were men, and another belonged to a woman. They were Dutch passports, and one of them had a large, dark brown smear all over a couple of pages. The owners of these documents all appeared to be in their twenties. I hurriedly replaced the passports and left the room, making sure to lock the door on my way out.
I had seen all that I needed to see. I had seen old, dried blood before and didn’t need a forensic analysis to tell me what it was. I suspected that the Oldsmobile station wagon had belonged to one of the Dutch passport holders and that they were probably dead. How, or by whom? I did not want to venture a guess. I did know for certain that I didn’t want to spend any time alone with Barry and Belinda and especially not out in the bush.
According to their passports, they had been in Morocco, Mali, and Guinea. They had then come in from Sierra Leone (a smugglers’ route), which meant that they could have been up to anything.
When they came home that evening, I approached them. I wanted to tell them face-to-face that I wasn’t going with them. I wanted to see how they would react. They became very agitated and upset and kept asking me why. I simply told them that something important had come up, and that I couldn’t go. I thought things might get violent, so I locked the door to my room and left to go to the Gurley Street Bar. As I had suspected, they were gone when I returned, along with all their belongings.
I thought of going to the Dutch Embassy and reporting it, but that would associate me with them, and once the police got the scent of something, they would destroy things and people for miles around trying to follow their leads—I didn’t want to be listed as collateral damage. I decided to push it to the back of my mind—chalk it up to experience and congratulate myself on a lucky escape. I convinced myself, naively perhaps, that if my suspicions were right, justice would eventually catch up with them.