Three days later, it was my turn to try to leave, but I couldn't get out. Ostensibly, an embassy official informed me, the situation was improving, but the transport chaos was inversely related to the country's political stabilization. I left the embassy not entirely convinced. I went looking for Linke among the hundreds of residents roaming the grounds and couldn't find him. I ran into a new party of journalists who had just arrived from Freetown, and several who, God knows how, had reached Monrovia by helicopter from somewhere in Ivory Coast. Most, like me, were already thinking of leaving and stopped by the embassy each day to look for a berth on one of the ships to Sierra Leone.

It was then, when there was nothing left to do, when we had already written and photographed everything imaginable, that someone proposed that a few of us take a trip to the interior. Most, of course, turned down the offer. A Frenchman from Paris Match accepted. So did an Italian from Reuters, and me. The trip was organized by one of the guys who worked in the kitchen at the Center and who, besides making a few bucks, wanted to have a look at his town, which he hadn't been back to in six months, even though it was only fifteen or twenty miles from Monrovia. During the trip (we were in a dilapidated Chevy driven by a friend of the cook, armed with an assault rifle and two grenades) the cook told us that he was ethnic Mano and his wife was ethnic Gio, friends of the Mandingo (the driver was Mandingo) and enemies of the Krahn, whom he accused of being cannibals, and that he didn't know whether his family was dead or alive. Shit, said the Frenchman, we should go back. But we were already halfway there and the Italian and I were happy, using up the last of our film.

And so, without crossing a single checkpoint, we passed through the town of Summers and the hamlet of Thomas Creek, the Saint Paul River occasionally appearing to our left and other times lost from sight. The road was bad. At times it ran through the forest, what may have been old rubber plantations, and at times along the plain. From the plain one could guess at more than see the gently sloping hills rising in the south. Only once did we cross a river, a tributary of the Saint Paul, over a wooden bridge in perfect condition, and the only thing presenting itself to the camera's eye was nature, nothing I would call lush, or even exotic, so I don't know why it reminded me of a trip I made as a boy to Corrientes, but I even said as much, I said to Luigi: this looks like Argentina, saying it in French, which was the language in which the three of us communicated, and the guy from Paris Match looked at me and said that he hoped it only looked like Argentina, which frankly disconcerted me, because I wasn't even talking to him, was I? and what did he mean? that Argentina was even wilder and more dangerous than Liberia? that if the Liberians were Argentinians we would've been dead by now? I don't know. In any case his remark completely broke the spell for me and I would have liked to have it out with him then and there, but I know from experience that kind of argument gets you nowhere, and anyway the Frenchman was already annoyed by our majority decision not to go back and he had to let off steam somehow, not being satisfied by his constant grumbling about the poor black guys who just wanted to make a few dollars and see their families again. So I pretended not to have heard him, although mentally I wished him a monkey fucking, and I kept talking to Luigi, explaining things that until that moment I thought I'd forgotten, I don't know, the names of the trees, for example, which to me looked like the old Corrientes trees and had the same names as the Corrientes trees, although they obviously weren't the Corrientes trees. And I guess my enthusiasm made me seem brilliant, or in any case much more brilliant than I am, and even funny, to judge by Luigi's laughter and the occasional laughter of our companions, and it was in an atmosphere of relaxed camaraderie, excluding the Frenchman Jean-Pierre, of course, who was increasingly sulky, that we left behind those ever so Corrienteslike trees and entered a treeless stretch, only brush, bushes that were somehow sickly, and a silence split from time to time by the call of a solitary bird, a bird that called and called and received no answer, and then we started to get nervous, Luigi and I, but by then we were too close to our goal to turn back, and we kept going.

The shots began soon after the village came into sight. It all happened very fast. We never saw the shooters and the firing didn't last longer than a minute, but by the time we came around the bend and were in Black Creek proper, my friend Luigi was dead and the arm of the guy who worked at the center was bleeding and he was whimpering quietly, crouched under the passenger seat.

We too had automatically dropped to the floor of the Chevy.

I remember perfectly well what I did: I tried to revive Luigi, I gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and then CPR, until the Frenchman touched my shoulder and pointed with a trembling, dirty forefinger at the Italian's left temple, where there was a hole the size of an olive. By the time I realized that Luigi was dead there were no shots to be heard and the silence was only broken by the air displaced by the Chevy as it drove and by the sound of the tires flattening the stones and pebbles on the road into town.

We stopped in what seemed to be Black Creek's main square. Our guide turned and told us that he was going to look for his family. A bandage made of strips of his own shirt was tied around his wounded arm. I supposed that he had made it himself, or the driver had, but I could hardly imagine when, unless their perception of time had suddenly diverged from ours. Shortly after the guide left, four old men appeared, surely drawn by the noise of the Chevy. Without saying a word, they stood there looking at us, sheltered under the eaves of a house in ruins. They were thin and moved with the parsimony of the sick, one of them naked like some of Kensey and Roosevelt Johnson's Krahn guerrillas, although it was clear that the old man was no guerrilla. Like us, they seemed to have just woken up. The driver saw them and remained sitting at the wheel, sweating and smoking and occasionally glancing at his watch. After a while he opened the door and made a sign to the old men, who responded without moving from under the protection of the eaves, and then he got out of the car and started to examine the engine. When he came back he launched into a series of incomprehensible explanations, as if the car were ours. Basically, what he was saying was that the front end was as full of holes as a sieve. The Frenchman shrugged his shoulders and shifted Luigi so that he could sit beside him. I thought he was having an asthma attack, but otherwise he seemed calm. Mentally, I thanked him for it, because if there's anything I hate it's a hysterical Frenchman. Later an adolescent girl appeared, looked at us, and kept walking. We watched her disappear down one of the narrow little streets that ran into the square. When she was gone the silence was absolute and only by listening as hard as we could were we able to hear something like the glare of the sun on the roof of the car. There wasn't the slightest breeze.

We're fucked, said the Frenchman. He said it in a friendly way, so I pointed out that it had been a long time since the shooting had stopped and probably it was only a few people who had ambushed us, maybe a couple of bandits who were as scared as we were. That's bullshit, said the Frenchman, this village is empty. Only then did I realize that there was no one else in the square and see that it wasn't normal and that the Frenchman was probably right. Instead of being afraid, I was angry.

I got out of the car and urinated lengthily against the nearest wall. Then I went over to the Chevy, took a look at the engine, and didn't see anything that would prevent us from getting out of there the same way we'd come. I took several pictures of poor Luigi. The Frenchman and the driver watched me without saying anything. Then Jean-Pierre, as if he'd considered it carefully, requested that I take a picture of him. I did as he asked without protest. I photographed him and the driver and then I asked the driver to photograph Jean-Pierre and me, and then I told Jean-Pierre to photograph me with Luigi, but he refused, saying he thought it was the height of morbidity, and the friendship that had begun to grow between us was shattered again. I think I swore at him. I think he swore at me. Then the two of us got back in the Chevy, Jean-Pierre next to the driver and me next to Luigi. We must have been there for more than an hour. During that time Jean-Pierre and I suggested more than once that we should forget the cook and hightail it out of there, but the driver refused to listen.