The Coup (19 page)

down the shimmering metal stairs. Shadows below her eyes, emphasized by dents near the bridge of her nose, testified to the fatigue of her just-endured journey and perhaps to her recently suffered grief. This was Angelica Gibbs, whom I had widowed. For all her fatigue, she gave off, in my vision of this encounter where I was absent, that American freshness which never ceased to delight my eyes on the McCarthy campus, that air of headlong progress, the uptilted chin cleaving gaily through the sub-arboreal shade, a freshness born of fearlessness born in turn of inner certainty of being justly blessed with health and love. She winced but would not wilt in the brightness of Kush- a constant lightning, an incessant noon. She shook hands with Ezana, Kutunda, and the (among his other titles) Acting Chairman of the Board of Tourism. Her manner was polite, timid, tired, tentative. Not so the manner of the man with her, a short plump man with heavy lids, liquid and lively brown eyes, a hairline mustache waxed to two thornlike points, and graying hair parted as centrally as his mustache. His limbs were short and his center of gravity seemed low, so that nothing could topple him, not even the uproarious embraces of Michaelis Ezana as the two joked like spiritual brothers at last corporally united, Klipspringer (for it was he) egging the hilarity on with his farcical Arabic and worse Sara. Kutunda was enchanted into guttural giggles by the apparition, out of the tinny-voiced telephone, of this magical man who had libraries in his pocket and who pretended the world was round as an orange. Mrs. Gibbs, her youthful face prematurely consigned to a widow's watchful sobriety, and the young Acting (among other responsibilities) Minister of the Interior, were the most reserved, but were willing, even they, to pin the enthusiasm of hope to this sun-swept intermingling, as the giant turbines of the 727 died, whined to a silence, and the less prestigious passengers-shabby Moroccan merchants carrying carpetbags, black chieftains as languidly scornful as rock stars, waxen-faced alcoholic Belgian mercenaries on their furtive way south, Japanese salesmen of telecommunication components, nationless agents of the hydrocarbon cartels, plump disaster bureaucrats from the UN, Jehovah's Witness missionaries from New Zealand, and other motes of the mer- cantile and messianic riffraff that has always drifted across the monotonously unanswered question our continent poses-poked their heads from the plane, squinted, and tumbled down the stairs. "Welcome to the People's Republic of Kush," said Ezana in his Oxonian English accent. "Looks like the country north of Vegas," Klipspringer told him. "My sinuses feel better already. Washington's a freezing swamp this time of year." He spoke with the pith of memos. "God!" He rapturously inhaled. "Heaven!" He smoothed back his already smooth hair and beamed toward the aluminum fence, behind which children fought rats for morsels. There was no such thing as garbage in refugee camps. Klipspringer's black counterpart, as if dancing for his life, which in a way he was, for he had arranged this meeting on sufferance of my interim appointees, made expansive ushering gestures toward the black official Cadillac which had been specially borrowed from the running dogs of Sahel for the occasion. The Mercedes was shadowing me, and the old official Citroen had ceased to go up and down on its pneumatic springs and rattled worse than a Dahomey taxi. "In my country," Ezana told him, "there once were two seasons, dry and rainy. Now there is one." "Where is the poverty?" Mrs. Gibbs asked Kutunda. Kutunda looked toward Ezana to decipher the gibberish. "Nowhere," he prompted her in Sara. Presiding above this friendly confusion was the serene oval face and sleek fez of the Acting Co-ordinator of Forests and Fisheries, who now, having been rehearsed in some ceremonial English, bowed above the short, pink, hopeful, jet-lagged Americans and said with exquisite intonation, "Good-bye." "Hello, he means," Ezana interjected. "A greatly gifted administrator, a superb student of the Koran, but untrained in your language, which is an exotic one to most of our people." Hearing the word "Koran," this Chief of the Bureau of Transport amended his greeting, "Also-Salamu "Alaykum," and at the touch of these satin syllables Angelica Gibbs thrilled. Dear lady, why are you one of this quintet gathered, in the haze of my mind's eye, to make alliance against Colonel Ellellou, who wanders more kilometers away than there are footprints on the moon, seeking to isolate the germ of the curse on his land? Can he who follows the guidance of his Lord be compared to him who is led by his appetites and whose foul deeds seem fair to him? I "zero in" on your face, dear Mrs. Gibbs, you mother of fatherless sons, you trekker through endless supermarket aisles and gargantuan consumer of milk and gasoline. How can you hate me-me, a fatherless son? I am so little. Your face is vast; powder has silted into the pores; years have gently webbed your beauty; disillusion has subtly dimmed the once-blue lakes of your eye-whites, the sensitive black of your pupils; there is a girlish, anxious tousle to your hair. I want to hide amid its ruddy roots, from shame at having caused you distress, at having displaced your far-flung arrangements with the world, all the filaments of your careful socio-economic compromise at a blow wiped away. Your great face, conjured from afar by the mystery of your unctuous, scrambling husband's death, turns a moment, before eclipse within the shadows of the Cadillac, toward the miraculously blank Kushite sky; your face is then blanched by solar fury as well as fatigue, and I, your invisible enemy, see, beneath your lifted upper lip, halfway down one of your splendid American incisors, a tooth bared by a vagary of thought and incandescent in the sun, a speck, no bigger than a bi, no bigger than the dot on a hi, a speck of lipstick, a clot of blood. As, both on foot now, amid the lengthening shadows of the hour of sunset prayer, we moved upwards to the domed cave, Sheba surprised me by talking. "My lord, my husband: must this be?" "My dear Sheba, we have travelled to the verge of death so we may arrive at this point." "So you say; but perhaps the travelling, our hardships and our survival of them, was what was necessary for my lord's purpose: to purify his life and redeem his land." "If that were so, then rain would be falling." "Rain in the Balak would be empty noise on stone: perhaps beyond the southern horizon, where the savanna waits to be green again, rain falls." "When rain falls in Kush, my blood will know it." "My blood, too, talks. It tells me to be afraid." "What could my Sheba fear? Her President is with her, and the Mercedes follows always behind, with Mtesa and Opuku and their machine guns." "My President, I think," the girl said, her coiffure restored and her necklace resplendent yet the normal elastic sway of her walk still hobbled, as she made her way with bent, reluctant steps, "has no cause to fear. He does not love his life, and such men travel enchanted through the adventures they bring upon others. But I, I have not lived two decades, and am a woman, and my life is of the earth; though I have given my blood to the earth, it has not yet given me a child, and such peace as I have must come in the chewing of kola nuts and khat, and in the music which lifts one's soul a little free of sadness." "I am sorry you are sad. A thousand girls in Istiqlal would exult in the honor of your position." "The honor has been empty, but I embrace it still. My lord is the touch of Allah to me. Even when my tongue was so swollen I feared I would choke, I adored him. But here, amid these strangers, at the mouth of this artificial wonder, we enter an area of transgression. I wish I were back on the streets of Hurriyah, digging the scene and thinking of nothing." "You sense this is a trap. But I have no choice but to enter it. I am the key that must dare to lose itself in the lock." "Forgive me, but I do not fear for you, but for myself. That raid by the Tuareg, I was not so dazed I did not wonder if it was not for me they had come. And then those Tuareg that gave us water, I felt their lust. Our caravan driver said, the Yemenis are starving for slaves. I have value, else my lord would not have stolen me from the streets." Her shoulders gave a limp doleful shrug as I hugged her. "How foolish and conceited my little queen has become! Always thinking of herself! Anyway, the Yemenis keep their slaves now in little air-conditioned ranch houses, with kitchenettes, door chimes, and a rumpus room with a dartboard!" Yet, though I tried to tease her fear to nothing, her fresh self-expressiveness-her attempt to become an independently anxious and defensive individual-sexually excited me, so that, that night, my member, adamant as an adolescent's, penetrated the gently resistant darkness of a woman, troubled and palpable in her fear. My explosion of seed felt engendering, as her hips heaved to receive me deeper, on the oversoft, antiseptic motel bed, and then rolled, instantly, into sleep. For an hour, I caressed Sheba's shoulders, sheathed shoulder blades, and relaxed buttocks as if tenderly to seal a pledge into her body. Of the events that followed none more enduringly torments me than my never knowing if my instinct was correct, and whether or not a little Ellellou, wrinkled, innocent, and indignant, nine months later bubbled into this world's scorching atmosphere out of my fourth wife's beautiful blue-black loins. We had to spend the night because the cave was closed. Indeed we were lucky to find a room in the shabbily constructed tourists" lodge, with its paper-thin partitions and dubious desk clerk. As we had made the last turn on the golf-cart path through the lengthening lavender shadows, the matching frocks and mocking glances of a pack of Northern European schoolgirls poured past us on either side, and beyond them we saw a green steel grate inarguably drawn across the cave-mouth, saying Fermee, less-than jli*, 0, 3aKpirr. In smaller type beneath, we read, Ouvert A Heures 900-1200, 1400-1730. Billets d'entree 50 lu. At nine the next morning, therefore, having breakfasted at one of the concessionaire stands that had sprung up like fungi on the spot, vending croissants and caviar, teriyaki and chili, kebab and hot dogs from beneath a chorus of umbrellas, Sheba and I joined the polyglot, vacuously titillated crowd waiting for admission. Among its members I noticed Mtesa and Opuku, standing slightly apart in their uniforms, which appeared fresh. Under cover of the bustle as the green shutter-gate was slowly cranked upwards, and a clammy waft of cold air breathed from the mysteries within, I sidled up to Mtesa and asked, "How did you get the Mercedes up those gorges?" He stared at me almost impudently; he was growing a little mustache. "No need," he said. "Broad road up from plains. Well-marked, all tourist services. You came the scenic way." A bell rang, and the crowd pushed forward. Sheba clung to my side in the jostling, sudden darkness. Concrete stairs and ramps alleviated but did not entirely eliminate the treacherous unevenness of the cavern floor. Small spotlights illuminated noteworthy graffiti and, at one spot, a cluster of Silurian mollusc fossils whose sea bed had been gradually lifted into this arid altitude. The oracle was situated in an artfully framed recess; chains held back the curious from close inspection. La tete du roi, which as we stared slowly gathered to itself a greenish glow derived (i surmised) from the illuminatory expressionism of the Moscow Arts Theatre, seemed at first one more rough, cracked rocky protuberance among the many others that filled the recess like buds of subaqueous coral, like the polyps the electron microscope reveals in the smoothest matter. Then its details dawned. Edumu's head, so small in life, had grown larger in death. Its eyes were closed, its lips lax and drooping on one side, perhaps deformed by the force of its severance. I had never chopped off a head before, and one of the disappointments of the Tuareg capture had been my subsequent inability to check my craftsmanship. I had kept my wrists firm and paused at the top. The blow had felt smooth and well-angled, considering my state of nervous tension and the muscular inhibition it induces. A wreath of white cloth, reminiscent of the old king's lungi, enwrapped the sliced throat, and a kind of altar of Plexiglas demonstrated with its transparence that no body existed beneath the head. The head's expression was, well, drab. I was reminded of the dusty relics of grandeur in his cell, though the symbolic riband of gold on his Torehead took glitter from the rheostatted spotlight. His foolish ecstatic halo of wiry white wool had been tidied and diminished; undertakers never get the hair quite right. When Edumu's eyelids lifted, the crowd gasped and Sheba grasped my hand so hard I felt a metacarpal snap. The pain lost itself, however, in my wonder at the old king's shallow-backed eyes. The crazed pallor of the irises was unmistakably his, but these eyes saw. Rather than drifting skywards as they used to in our interviews, they focused out upon us-upon me, it seemed-levelly. Fighting down the vomitus of superstitious terror rising in my craw, I reasoned that in this detail the enemies of my state had forfeited credibility. The head's lips moved with the slight stiffness of an engine starting in the morning. "Patriotic citizens of Kush," it creakily addressed the rapt crowd, "there is great evil among you. A greatly evil man, whose name is known to you all, and whose face is known to few." He and I had chosen my name together, laughing, on an evening in the Palais when he thought the Revolution was a joke, and he would be released from detention when its first wave of bluster was by. "This man," the head continued, the mechanical action of its lips now uncannily corresponding to the drifting way Edumu had talked, as if a kind of wind blew in and out of his heart, "pretends to unite the multitudinous races and religions of Kush against the capitalist toubabs, the fascist Americans who carry forward the cause of international capitalism on behalf of the world's rapacious minority of blue-eyed white devils." Yes, his voice had slightly shifted, in the drafty chambers of my associations, to that of the Messenger, droning on softly in Chicago's Temple Two, a little brown precipitate of centuries of wrong, a gentle concentration of hate. The head kept talking, with a sudden shrill jump in the amperage of the electrical system that, I realized, was picking up and broadcasting the vibrations of the lungless voice-box. "This man, while proclaiming hatred of the Americans, is in fact American at heart, having been poisoned by four years spent there after deserting the
Troupes coloniales. He is profoundly unclean. One of his wives is American, the wife who is called the All Wrapped Up. Because of his black skin, he was subjected to discrimination and confusing emotional experiences in the land of the devils, and his political war, which causes him to burn gifts of food and assassinate those functionaries who bring these gifts, is in truth a war within himself, for which the innocent multitudes suffer. He has projected upon the artificial nation of Kush his own furious though ambivalent will; the citizens of this poor nation are prisoners of his imagination, and the barren landscape, where children and cattle starve, mirrors his exhausted spirit. He has grown weary of seeming to hate what he loves. Just as nostalgia leaks into his reverie, while he dozes above the drawing-board of the People's Revolution so vividly blueprinted by our heroic Soviet allies, so traces of decadent, doomed capitalist consumerism creep into the life-fabric of the noble, beautiful, and intrinsically pure Kushite peasants and workers." I felt the hand of a hack writer had intruded these phrases into the tape and exclaimed aloud the Berber word for still-fresh camel dung. My neighbors in the throng shushed me angrily, having been thus far held fascinated by the head's analysis of our internal difficulties. "Wrongly," the head continued, with a new decibel shift, dropping the voice into a more plaintive timbre, "was I, a harmless and cynical figurehead at worst, sacrificed to the welfare of the state. The head that should have rolled belongs to Colonel Hakim Felix Ellellou. Even as his public self puts on a wrathful show of extirpating traces of foreign contamination, his private self, operating upon the innocent vacancy of our sublime but susceptible territory, engenders new outbreaks of the disease. Even now an entire American boom town, with false fronts, brazen bubble-gum-blowing whores, and po8nbe-dispensing saloons has materialized within the Ippi Rift, above a reservoir of water stored in porous sandstone since the beginning of time against the coming of the Mahdi. Destroy this evil city, citizens of Kush! But unless you destroy its source, the repressed affections and idle dreaming of your shadowy leader, other excrescences will spring up instead, and your children will continue to harken to rock music, your wives will secretly desire to expose their ankles, and your brother, with whom you have shared your last curd of goat cheese, will succumb to the profit motive and become a soulless robot of greed and usury, a cog in a machine driven by economic forces beyond all human appeal! Citizens of Kush: Overthrow Ellellou! Overthrow Ellellou, and rain will fall!" I looked about me to see a citizen of Kush, and of course there were none to be seen, only foreigners, adventurers, curiosity-seekers whose minds had already darted ahead to the next sight, the return to the bus, the probability of finding a rest room without a long line. The head was concluding, its lips clearly out of sync, "This has been a vision vouchsafed to me in Paradise, where the veil is lifted from the eyes of men. It comes to you courtesy of Soviet technology. Thank you for your attention. Feel free to wander about the cave, only do not touch the prehistoric Saharan art work, which the moisture of your breath is gradually eroding. For your further entertainment a slide show depicting the Kush national heritage will be shown on the wall behind me." The President, all later accounts agree, had endured the diatribe with dignity. Only when the slide show began did he forcefully intervene. Gad, remember, in the tattered galabieh of a desert wanderer-an assistant musician, a sideman -Ellellou stepped over the chain while the first slides exploded from the projector: Kodachrome fixations of dunes, of peanut pyramids, of the hydroelectric dam beloved of Michaelis Ezana, of feathery tribal dances along the muddy Grionde, of pirogues, of shambas, of a camel ruminating and a muffled Targui glowering before the unexpected background of Isti-qlal's East German skyscraper. Taking abruptly distorted fragments of these images on his back and writhing shoulders, he ripped the head by its fleece from its roots of color-coded wiring cleverly threaded through the top sheet of Plexiglas, which was perforated two-ply. Sparks-green, orange-flew. Fear and astonishment made a momentary circle of peace around the desecrator. Edumu's head shocked Ellellou's haptic sense with its weight, far less than when filled with watery brains and blood, and its texture, which combined those of paper and wax, dead in such different ways. The skull had been enlarged, to receive so much mechanical and electronic apparatus: another Soviet-ism, the dictator reasoned-forwith their superior miniaturization techniques the Americans could have fitted all this into the skull of a mole. Yet, despite the small distortion of scale, Ellellou, hugging the head to his chest to break the last stubborn connections, found tears smarting in his eyes, for in life this head, mounted atop the closest approximation to a father the barren world had allowed him, had never been held by him thus, and the act discovered the desire. They had been two of a kind, small cool men more sensitive than was efficient to the split between body and mind, between thought and deed. The king had prepared him to rule, though it had meant his own ouster. "A king must be a stranger," he had told his ambitious attache. "His function is to take upon himself the resentment of his people for their misery." A king must be a stranger: this truth, peculiarly African, rustled in Ellellou's own skull while the desecrated other pressed its little fig of a nose, rubbery in reconstruction, against his hushed heart. Then the affronted electronic engineers, and a motley guard clad in indigo Tuareg robes and green soldiers' uniforms, burst from their hidden places and encircled him with intent to kill. Russian, Wan), Arabic, Tamachek were shouted; Ellellou's galabieh was rudely tugged and Edumu's head was torn from his arms, though the riband of gold, the dwindled veil of a sacred presence, remained in his fist. His captors, pressing close about him, had terrible breaths: not only vodka but the spoiled yeast of native beer and the sourness of millet porridge licked from dusty fingers mingled fiercely in the captive's face, along with an unaccountable distant sweet tang, of barbershop hair-oil. "Je suis Ellellou," he said, repeatedly, for his first assertion was not heard, or else his accent was not understood. He was struck beside the ear; a scarlet numbness overspread his face from that portion; he was spat upon, mistily; his arms were pinioned and his wrists twisted as an unseen other struggled with his fingers for the golden headband. The pressure ceased, the uproar was quelled. Opuku and Mtesa had stepped forward, gleaming in the nakedness of power, Opuku's machine gun a beautiful mitrailleuse after a design by Berthier, oiled like a Nubian whore, and Mtesa's.44 magnum scarcely less enchanting. A patriotic poster was unfurled beside Ellellou's face; the crowd of tourists, comprehending little and cowering back from the violence, applauded as if this comparison were part of the show, of the Kush national heritage. Indeed, the slide show had automatically continued throughout, planting a Berber grin squarely upon the grimace of a furious technician, and the next instant projecting upon our struggle the pastoral peace of a herd of sheep overgrazing the Hulul Depression. Due to the poor photogravure of the poster, my identity was unsettled until one of the Soviets came forward and shook my hand; I recognized, amid the cocoa-paste of his absurd disguise as a nomad, the shallow, tilted, alert, hunted yellowish eyes of his race. "Colonel Ellellou," he said, "je presume." "Colonel Sirin," I remembered. "Death to the people's enemies and revisionist counterrevolutionaries wherever they may be found," he said, through his translator, who had appeared at his side in the baggy costume of a bespectacled Maoist sightseer. "Just so," I said, and nodded toward the dreary relic of Edumu IV where it lay on the cavern floor, one more piece of debris, debunked, inoperative, a prop at the back of the stage. "Have you asked yourself," I asked the colonel, "if your perpetration of this charade does not constitute a serious breach of the treaties between our two great democratic nations?" The" colonel shrugged and talked at Russian length, words that were translated as, "It is very boring, in the bunker. As part of detente, our government has instructed us to mingle more freely with the local populations." "There was no population here, until your contraption attracted it. Even so, the audience is composed of day-trippers from Zanj, with whom our border will be henceforth closed. Your plot has served to put a little profit into old Komomo's pocket, but has left the loyal citizens of Kush unmoved." "Not quite unmoved, Comrade; for the First Citizen of Kush has personally come far to attend to the oracle, as we knew he would." The colonel was shedding his shamed face and costumed unease, and his affectation of omniscience rankled in conjunction with the recalled ordeal of his bunker hospitality-his drunken toastmaking, his materialist cliches, his atheistical mockery. The Koran says, Woe to those who debar others from the path of Allah and seek to make it crooked. And the king had once advised me, Enemies are a spiritual treasure, allies a practical burden. In his swinish Slavic fashion my ally, confident that the joke of his devious interferences was now shared, debonairly lit a Kocmoc cigarette, that went ill with his rags and his paint. It came to me that in addition to closing the Zanj border I should abrogate the missile treaty, as Ezana had often advised: thus I was thinking fondly of Ezana at the very moment, give or take a minute, when he was falling in love, over cocktails and freeze-dried peanuts, with Mrs. Gibbs, her brassy hair playing Ping-Pong with points of light in Mr. Klipspringer's freely administered bourbon. The wires leading into my head were as many as those into the dismantled king's. I told the smirking colonel opposite, "And the oracle spoke a great deal of facile, impudent, and traitorous nonsense, in the style of that messiah of bourgeois self-seeking, the Zionist Sigmund Freud." "The oracle spouted not only psychology, but geography as well-did you not notice?" "The rumor of the metropolis in the Ippi Rift I take to be as phantasmal as the gadget's analysis of the President's neurotic sublimations." "Not a metropolis, but a small industrial city, of the type you call-was Consultation with his translator finally produced the word, "upstate." "With variegated housing and charming recreational sites," the translator added. "Not an encampment of beggars could exist there," I told them, "but that the Minister of my Interior would have informed me. In our sublime vacancy even the birth of a camel makes vibrations." The colonel smiled, and flakes of cocoa-paste fell from his cheeks. "The Minister of your Interior you have judged, correctly, to be a traitor. Also he is a man who dislikes friction. Your Soviet friends, however, remain true to the Revolution. In alerting you to danger, we have gone to some lengths to avoid your official channels, which are rotten with revisionist spies." Ellellou saw that truly he must travel on, westward to the Ippi Rift; but as this new leaf of adventure unfolded before him he felt only an exhaustion, the weariness of the destined, who must run a long track to arrive at what should have been theirs from the start: an identity, a fate. His trip to the Balak had been, in its wantonness, its simplifying hardships, freedom; his trip down from the Massif, by the unscenic highway, in the air-conditioned Mercedes, without his beloved Sheba, heartsick duty. Sheba had vanished in the tumult that had surrounded his uprooting of the head; in what shadows and by what hands she had been seized remained mysteries. The Russians, anxious to dispel the suddenly hysterical President's threats of abrogation and anarchy, had assisted in the furious search. Every cranny of the cave was probed; the apparatus of audio-visual illusion was overturned; the technicians' lockers were ransacked, even the refrigerators in the cafeteria, even the caviar barrels. She was not in the cave. She had been taken outside, then. The clefts of the rocks were searched, while pigeons wheeled overhead and Ellellou in an agony of remembrance relived running his fingers along the clefts of her body, recalled amid the mineral wilderness the wistful thin melody of her anzad, the rounded perfection of her glossy shoulders and blue-black thighs, the velvet caress of her lips on his indifferent member, her stoned docility and soft intermittent plea that there must be a better life than this. The taste of her, Ellellou remembered, the kola in her kisses and the salt of her female secretions that mixed with the alkaline dryness of borax when, on the dirt beneath the stars, he would perform cunnilingus. The fast food and soft drink stands were one by one overturned and smashed as at Ellellou's command the Kushite soldiers the Soviets with usurped authority had enlisted joined the frantic search. Divorce me, she had begged, after telling him, You make what 1 do seem very little. The tourist buses, wheeling in the parking lots with their squealing loads of curiosity-seekers from Dorset and Canton, were halted, and the passengers made to stand with their arms above their heads in the now-vicious noonward sun, as small in the sky as a pea, as a white-hot bullet. "Beat them," Ellellou commanded. "Rape them!" The soldiers, bewildered teen-agers fresh from the peanut fields and the fishing villages, attempted in their innocence to obey, but the beatings were feeble and the objects of rape, withered and twittery in their long-sleeved English gardening dresses and floppy rose-gathering hats, were unappetizing. Russian engineers, galvanized by Ellellou's fury, went through the buses with measuring tapes and hand computers, hoping to deduce a space where the priceless bride might be concealed. Tires were slashed, windshields smashed. The drivers, detrib-alized Zanjians preening hitherto on their trousered power to steer machines bigger than elephants, were pummelled for the fun of it. "Destroy!" the dictator cried, to the consternation of the Soviet colonel. "Destroy everything in this vicinity not created by the hand of God!" "But the concrete walkways-was "Shall be reduced to rubble. All this was imposed without my authority; by my authority all traces of desecration shall be removed." "We obtained permits," the Russian sputtered. "The new head of the Department of Forests and Fisheries-all forms in order-a boon to future travellers-Eurodollars." His