A Dancer in the Dust - Hardcover

Cook, Thomas H.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802122728 ISBN 13: 9780802122728

Verlag: Mysterious Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Twenty years ago, Ray Campbell, now a cautious risk-management consultant, was a well-intentioned aid worker dedicated to improving conditions in Lubanda, a newly independent African country. He is forced to reconsider that year of living dangerously when a friend from his time in Lubanda is found murdered in a New York alley. Signs suggest that this most recent tragedy is rooted in the far more distant one of Martine Aubert, the only woman Ray ever truly loved and whose fate he’d sealed in a moment of grievous error: “In Lubanda, twenty years before, I’d rolled the dice for a woman who was not even present at the table, and on the outcome of that toss, a braver and more knowing heart than mine had been forfeited.”

Martine Aubert was a white, native Lubandan farmer whose dream for her homeland starkly conflicted with those charged with its so-called development. But Ray's failure to understand Martine’s commitment to her country had placed a noose around her neck, one tightened by a circle of vicious men, cruel taunts, and whistling machetes. It is Ray's return to the passion he’d once felt for Martine that makes A Dancer in the Dust the enthralling and moving story of two loves: Ray’s love for Martine Aubert, and Martine’s love for a homeland that did not love her back.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Thomas H. Cook has been nominated for seven Edgar Awards in five different categories. He is the recipient of the Best Novel Edgar Award for The Chatham School Affair, the Martin Beck Award of the Swedish Academy of Detection, the Herodotus Prize for Best Historical Short Story, and the Barry Award for Best Novel for Red Leaves. His most recent novel was the critically acclaimed Sandrine’s Case.

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A Dancer in the Dust

By Thomas H. Cook

Grove Atlantic, Inc.

Copyright © 2014 Thomas H. Cook
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8021-2272-8

CHAPTER 1

"Hello."

My tone was wary because for a professional risk assessment and management consultant calls are never welcome, since they are usually from people terrified that they have made the wrong choice and now must face the consequences. The simple, contradictory fact of life is this: human beings, victims, as they sometimes are, of sudden misfortune, easily lured into misadventure, and in all things bound by time, nonetheless dream of certainty even as they roll the dice.

"It's Bill Hammond. It's been a long time, Ray."

The tenor of his voice was considerably more somber than I remembered, and coming from so far in the past, it had the alarming effect of a board cracking beneath me.

"It has, indeed," I said.

Bill had never been one to come slowly to his point, so I added, "What's on your mind?" "A murder."

Murder.

The word itself is unnerving. Like bankruptcy or default, it suggests a hard road ahead for the simple reason that a line that should have been avoided at all cost has instead been crossed. For that reason, I felt that simultaneous sense of tightening and emptying that accompanies any mention of an act whose consequences, though surely serious, remain for the moment unclear.

"It's someone from the old days," Bill added. "When you lived in Tumasi."

Tumasi was the name given to the vast savanna that stretched east to west across central Lubanda, as well as the village that rested near its center and served as its primary market. I'd lived in the village there for almost a year, but I hadn't heard its name spoken in a very long time. Even so, I'd often thought of the place, along with the winding red dirt road that connected it to the capital in Rupala. I had driven down that road in joy and sorrow, and once with a mind animated by a purpose I never should have had, and whose result was far different and more serious than I'd been able to predict.

"Seso Alaya," Bill said.

Seso would have been a middle-aged man now, I calculated, but I recalled him as a youth of eighteen, thin, wiry, his smooth skin so black that in high sun it had given off a blue sheen. He'd had the keen eye of a boy who'd lived by his wits. Early on I'd noticed that everything he looked at, he immediately sized up in the starkly unforgiving way of the wild: Do I eat it or does it eat me? Those supported by family money or social guarantees do not feel the insistent pinch of this particular kind of fear. Come what may, in boom or bust, they will not go hungry or without shelter. But for those who must support themselves or fall to ruin, deep worry is a life companion. Seso was of this latter estate. For him a job was not just a job; it was a lifeboat in a storm-tossed sea, and for that very good reason he had gone about his service to me with determined care, shining shoes that would only track through dust, heating stones to warm my bed on those few chill nights, rising immediately when I approached him, his keen eye to these tasks and gestures not at all slavish, but rather, a manly attempt to survive in a country where survival of any kind was not guaranteed. To think it otherwise, as Martine had once observed, was but one of the many errors into which foreigners like me, people who had come to help Lubanda, inevitably fell not because we did not know the people we wished to aid, but because we could not know the depths of both good or evil in their hearts. We could and did romanticize them, as Martine once pointed out, and we could and did cut them all kinds of slack, which, she said, was just another form of abuse. But we could not know them.

"You went back to Lubanda some years ago, didn't you, Ray?" Bill asked.

"Ten years ago," I told him.

It had taken nearly two days to make it halfway to Tumasi, where in a seizure of spiritual cowardice, I'd turned back toward Rupala. There'd been the expected ruts and washouts that bedeviled Lubandan travel, but to these inconveniences there'd been added thirteen separate roadway stops, all of them manned by khat-chewing thugs, often armed with nail-spiked clubs, or pangas, the country's ubiquitous tool, a wide-bladed, wooden-handled machete, light and easily wielded, but still heavy enough to lop off a man's head or a child's arm.

During my last journey up Tumasi Road, the thugs, usually paramilitary gangs armed by Mafumi's Revolutionary Army of Lubanda, had called their stops "border inspections," but the only border was a chain stretched across the road, motionless as a puff adder, until a vehicle neared. Then, two "customs inspectors" would lift the chain waist high and wait, either grim-faced or with sinister smiles, as the car approached.

"That's dangerous travel, Ray," Bill said. "Why'd you go back?"

"To visit the scene of the crime," I answered flatly. "I thought it might be good for my soul."

"I see," Bill said quietly. He was clearly reluctant to venture further into the moral minefield of this subject. "Anyway, it was dangerous in Lubanda when you made that trip."

Indeed it had been dangerous, though I'd had only one tense moment on the road. It had occurred at one of those thirteen criminal customs stops. This time a couple of burning tires had been dragged into the road, and there'd been ten or so "inspectors" whose ages had ranged from early to late teens, years when simmering maleness easily boils into sudden, annihilating violence.

"Where you from, bwana?" the Kalashnikov-wielding leader of this band asked me as he peered about the interior of the Jeep I'd rented in the capital.

The malignant glimmer in his eyes made it clear that the "bwana" was meant as mockery. In Ethiopia it might have been farangi and in Kenya it might have been mukiwa, but universally it meant you were the pale-faced enemy, the destroyer of some idealized precolonial paradise that had never in the least existed. By this reckoning, you and you alone were responsible for the derelict world whose mad contortions were now so extreme they could only be addressed by swinging clubs and hacking pangas.

"New York," I answered.

His grin revealed teeth sharpened to a point. The Wagogo in Tanzania did this, and the Congolese pygmies; others too, perhaps, but I'd never seen it in Lubanda, and so I assumed it to be some new badge of terror, man merged with crocodile.

"You see Lion King, bwana?" he asked.

From a few feet away, a knot of boy-men laughed and the skinniest of them slapped his panga against what had clearly once been a much larger man's boots.

"No," I answered.

"Where you going, bwana?"

"Up Tumasi Road," I answered.

"How far up?"

"To the end."

He looked surprised, and a little suspicious. "There's nothing up Tumasi Road," he said.

"There once was," I told him.

This was true, for Tumasi had once been a thriving village, its market stocked with locally grown produce. I'd seen mounds of sweet potatoes and jars of honey, along with stalls selling various local grains and cured meats and pots fashioned from the local clay. There'd been wooden carvings for sale, and kindling gathered from the savanna, and everywhere, stacks of cassava. Such had been Tumasi from time immemorial, its fundamental needs met by fundamental means.

"It is a long drive to Tumasi, bwana," the man said. "Bad road. Hard on the body." He pronounced bad "bahd," and body was "buddy." He nodded toward a pile of pillows and blankets, some of which were stained with...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Mysterious Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0802122728
• ISBN 13: 9780802122728
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar