‘Doe’s cabinet ministers,’ said John Doe.
Jimfish stared at the bodies. ‘How can you be sure?’
‘They follow a pattern, these coups — and I can read the signs real easy. God knows we’ve backed enough of them.’ With a casual toe the American turned over the victims. ‘See their thousand-dollar suits and Italian shoes? The sparkly stuff — Rolexes, rings, ear-studs — that’s been stripped. I’d say all government people are being wasted. That tells me they’re at stage two of the coup.’
‘More bloodshed?’ Jimfish wondered.
‘Blood’s done. Next comes electioneering,’ said John Doe. ‘Coups get legal heft by calling out the voters. Turns the killing kosher. Let’s head for Party Headquarters. Have you noticed: the fighting’s stopped?’
Jim was aware of the eerie silence. ‘That’s good.’
The American shook his head. ‘I like gunfire. That way I know what the bastards are up to.’
‘How do we find the President?’ Jimfish asked.
‘We follow the corpses,’ said John Doe.
The bodies of ministers in their fancy suits pointed the way like broken arrows. As they passed the headquarters of the opposing factions Jimfish was fascinated by the posters plastered on the walls touting election promises and platforms. Charles Taylor was running on his record and his message was simple: ‘I KILLED YOUR MA. I KILLED YOUR PA. VOTE FOR ME OR I’LL KILL YOU TOO!’ Brigadier Bare-Butt’s posters depicted the man himself, wearing only his signature boots and AK-47, above his election promise: ‘GIVE ME YOUR SON. GIVE ME YOUR DAUGHTER. I TURN THE ENEMY’S BULLETS TO WATER!’ Prince Johnson, by contrast, seemed refreshingly modest. He ran no posters, made no promises. But then he did not need to. In the street outside his headquarters, stripped naked on a steel bedstead and stretched out on his back, lay the body of President Samuel Doe. Both his ears were missing. Around him a ring of grinning soldiers, waving automatic weapons, were posing for photographs.
To Jimfish it was the quintessential portrait of the times: preening soldiers pointing bayonets at a dead man. He was struck by the need to record these things on film, to get your commemorative, take-home party snap while posing beside a human being you’d stripped, shot, mutilated and tortured. To frolic around a corpse in rollicking good spirits, as if you were at a party or a picnic. If this was what happened when the rage of the lumpenproletariat turned to rocket fuel, then Jimfish felt less and less sure he wanted any part of it.
Across the street from the earless, naked ex-President on the iron bedstead was a makeshift cinema fashioned from tarpaulin and corrugated iron; people were watching a movie that must have been shot earlier, because it showed Samuel Doe still very much alive, stark naked and in a state of some distress, which was not particularly surprising since his right ear was missing. Prince Johnson, the rebel commander gave an order and a soldier sawed off President Doe’s left ear, while a nurse from the warlord’s team, suspecting her chief might be under some strain, gently massaged Prince Johnson’s neck, while he sipped a beer. The audience loved the ear scene. Very much as the crowds in the Budapest Square had been transfixed by the execution of Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu, these lookers-on in a street cinema projected themselves into the movie of a murder and could not get enough of it.
But then, Jimfish asked himself, was he much better? Hadn’t he shot dead an American secret agent, as well as a Minister of Education, without so much as blinking? He longed to be able to talk to Soviet Malala and to ask him: ‘Isn’t it this joy, these wild good spirits we feel in cruelty, rather than rage or the dream of landing on the right side of history, that marks out our singular species for what we are: homicidal apes who kill their own kind with delight and afterwards write moral commandments? And which is more disgusting — the gleeful killer or the guilty sermonizer?’
‘I guess there’s a symmetry to this,’ his American friend remarked. ‘After all, when Samuel Doe rubbed out his predecessor President Tolbert he also felt he had to bump off everyone who had worked with Tolbert. Looks like history is repeating itself. Anyone close to that naked guy on the bed is for the chop.’
But Jimfish did not want to hear about symmetry or history. He wanted Lunamiel back. He wanted to ask Soviet Malala what good anger served if it made people cut off the ears of their presidents, drop villagers down mine-shafts or toss a good man like Jagdish into the hell of the Chernobyl reactor.
In despair he closed his eyes. ‘Everything I touch crumbles. Everywhere I go, the worst happens.’
‘Don’t you believe it, boy, you’re a marvel,’ said his American friend. ‘Back at my office in the US we have a name for what happens when you turn up some place — we call it the Jimfish Effect. We ran your file and we were amazed.
‘Back six years ago, in 1984, you were just a fishy fellow in this little port on the coast of South Africa. Adopted, acquired, borrowed — who knows? — by some old fisherman. Next you get to meet your new President, Piet the Weapon, and wham-bam! there are bombs going off in churches and bars and supermarkets across your country and funerals all the time. Seems South Africa is set for a big fat race war.
‘But you’ve moved on. It’s 1985, you’re in Zimbabwe where Bob Mugabe is the liberator, redeemer and dear leader. Except, that is, in Matabeleland, where Bob’s boys, taught to kill by Kim Il-sung, are shooting the locals at a steady rate and dropping them down mineshafts.
‘A year later, 1986, you hit Uganda and, just as you steam into town, President Milton Obote is on his way out. Second time around. He got booted out by Idi Amin first time round. Then he came back when Big Dada got the chop, but now Milt’s headed south again. Only this time he takes every last cent in the Ugandan treasury with him.
‘On you zip to Ukraine, where the Chernobyl nuclear plant blows up and the Soviets go damn near broke putting a lid on it. All this in the same year! Then Moscow packs you off to a Siberian prison camp for being an American spy. If only! Our agents were predicting Soviet power still had decades to go when the place was actually on its last legs.
‘After a few years in the gulag, the Russians send you to East Berlin. Bad move. It’s November, 1989 — and guess what? When Jimfish flies in, the Berlin Wall falls down. Job done, you head for Romania and before you can say “the Genius of the Carpathians” Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu get their careers conclusively concluded.
‘Do you stop there? Not a damn. In 1990 it’s Zaire, where you blow away the Minister of Education, along with one of our guys for good measure. You scoot pretty fast, but your effect lingers. The Great Leopard suddenly turns democrat. And it’s all down to how you helped him see things, when the Ceauşescus got it in the neck. Instead of killing his opponents, Marshal Mobutu suddenly lets opposition parties set up shop. Everyone gets to vote, one party replaces the other, but it makes next to no damn difference in the end because the Great Leopard takes all. We’ve tried for years to get him to learn that trick.
‘And now, here you are in Liberia. And what’s happening? President Doe and his ministers are toast, and crazy civil war is tearing the place to bits. How do you do it, Jimfish? You’re a force of history. A one-man weapon of mass destruction. Why not work for us? We could use a little of whatever it is you’ve got.’
Jimfish said, politely but firmly, that he was done with history, with blood and violence.
But John Doe would not take no for an answer. ‘Not sure history is done with you. President Doe is dead. The hunt is on for those close to him. You could be next.’
‘I never knew him,’ said Jimfish.
‘It’s who you hang out with,’ said John Doe. ‘Samuel Doe always pushed and promoted his own Krahn tribe. You’ve been an honoured guest in his village. Get out fast or you’re dead meat.’