“I’m not a journalist,” I repeated.
“It don’t matter nutting to Tehjan. You American, you journalist.”
Given the kind of press coverage I’d seen about these mines, the sensitivity was almost understandable.
“Is there anyone down there who will speak to me?” I asked. “One of the workers? You know any of these men? You have friends down there?”
“Maybe tonight at the hall in town,” said the first man who’d spoken to me. “After the keg comes ’round, tongues loosen up.”
“The town hall? Where would that be?”
“I can show you,” said the most talkative of the amputees. I looked at him and as he held my stare, I wondered how it was that paranoia hadn’t eaten this part of Africa alive. And then I decided to trust him.
“I’m Alex. What’s your name?”
We shook left hands. “I am Moses,” he said.
I had to smile at that and thought of Nana. She would have smiled too and patted him on the back.
Show me the way, Moses.
Chapter 55
I WAS ON the job now, definitely working the case I had come here to solve.
The walk into town took about an hour. Moses told me a lot on the way, though he said he’d never heard of the Tiger. Could I believe him about that? I couldn’t be sure.
Diamond trading for oil, gas, weapons, drugs, and any number of illicit goods was no secret around here. Moses knew that it went on the same way everyone knew that it went on. He’d been a diamond miner himself as a teenager and in his twenties. Until the civil war.
“Now, they call us ‘san-san boys,’ ” he said. I assumed he meant those who could no longer do the work, like him.
At first I was surprised at the man’s apparent openness. Some of his stories seemed too personal to share with a stranger, especially one who might be an American journalist, or maybe even CIA. But the more he spoke, the more I realized that talking about what had happened to him might be all he had left.
“We lived over that way.” He pointed abstractly in a direction without looking.
“My wife sold palm oil at market. I had two fine sons. When the RUF soldiers came to Kono, they came for us like the others. It was at night, in the rain, so there were no torches. They say to me, if I watch them kill my boys, then they will spare my wife. And when I did as they told, they killed her anyway.”
The RUF was the revolutionary force responsible for the death of thousands. He was devastatingly matter-of-fact about it—a terrible family massacre, not unlike the ones in Washington, I thought.
“And you lived,” I said.
“Yes. They put me on a table and held me down. They asked if I want short or long sleeves for after the war. Then they cut my arm, here.” He pointed, though of course it was obvious what had happened.
“They were to cut the other arm, but then an explosion came from the next house. I don’t know what happened after that. I fell unconscious, and when I woke up, RUF soldiers were gone. And my wife too. They left my murdered sons. I wanted to die, but I did not. It was not yet my time.”
“Moses, why do you stay here now? Isn’t there anywhere else for you to go?”
“There is nowhere else for me. Here at least sometimes there is work. I have my friends, other san-san boys.” He smiled at that revelation for some reason. “This is my home.”
We had walked all the way into town by now. Koidu was a sprawling village of dirt roads and low buildings, still recovering from “the war” six years ago.
I saw a half-finished hospital as we walked, and a mosque in decent shape, but other than that, I found mostly abandoned buildings, burned-out husks of small homes, everywhere I looked.
When I offered Moses money for his trouble, he said he didn’t want it, and I knew not to force it on him.
“You tell the story I’ve told you,” he said. “Tell it to America. Still, there are rebels who would like to kill all of us from the war. They want to make it so no one can see what they did.” He held up what was left of his arm. “So maybe you tell people in America. And they tell people. And people will know.”
“I will, Moses,” I promised. “I’ll tell people in America and see what happens.”