Colonel Candy

Colonel Candy

Pleasure and Progress--Chapter 4

Tom Bass

His head’s a pear and his penis a plum. Toby's a strange bruised fruit when the times comes for his agitated removal from London. But the strange muted world soon gets better as swings in the arms of his mother, disembarking from the aircraft in Benghazi, blasted by a tangy heat scented with the smoke of cooking fires.

A large placard of Colonel Candy greets the Pleasure family at the Benghazi aerodrome. He’s grinning upon the bodies of four lynched men, martyrs from Omar Mukhtar’s premature rebellion against Italian occupation, a reminder of the sacrifices he expected from his countrymen. “Partners not wage earners,” is splashed in strong type. Candy has multiplied in their absence. He’s a canny politician and wily strongman, neither the maddest nor the worst.

Re-exposed to Candy’s cult of personality, Wyatt and Noemi smile nervously at one another. They expect a message, a welcome, a bouquet, but nothing. No one greets them and Wyatt struggles with the set of matching brown Samsonites until a porter comes to his aid. The pork and pastes remain safe, undetected by the officials who just wave them past.

Sweet and succulent, Candy’s everywhere. He’s smiling on the shirts of the ground staff, swinging like a saint from the taxi’s mirror on the way home, grimacing on the banners across the highway, hanging from the lamp posts, smiling from the murals on the housing estates, waving from petrol stations with strangely long queues, painted on the sides of tents that have sprung in some parts of the city, screened on the clothes of the populace, blowing their noses in Candy handkerchiefs, drinking from Candy tea cups, smoking Candy cigarettes. Candy’s a brand, a pharaoh. The Colonel understands very well. A new federal state needs an identity and an unselfish, unmerciful volunteer like himself to lead it.

The Libyans fawn to please Toby, the firstborn Pleasure son. They promptly put down Colonel Candy’s preaching and warnings about capitalists and come to stroke him and Noemi’s embarrassed by all the attention. The congratulations and blessing on her accomplishment flow in a reliable stream. It’s so unusual; no one has ever congratulated her on anything. Their kindness touches her, often more than she wants. Charms are offered by the handful. She diligently puts the witchcraft in a box next to her side of the bed where it had all started with Wyatt after one too many gin and tonics. Like a pincushion, she imagines the box can catch all evil and it serves a therapeutic purpose. Like most of her emotions, she thinks she can put the charms out of sight.

A crumpled letter from Momma Empire is on her writing desk. It suggests an itinerary.


Dear Child,

I’m most terribly afraid that I’m going to have to ask a favour of you since I’m indisposed to do what I propose due to a terrible attack of gout. As you undoubtedly know, I have many important friends abroad, some of whom you’ve had the privilege of meeting at my home and I have an itinerary in mind. If you would be so kind when in Alexandria, as to visit the Metropolitan of the Coptic Church and give him a good old rah-rah and rap round the knuckles. Also, for the sake of diplomacy, the Sufi order in Khartoum, I’d be very grateful if you’d say hello to my masters. If they have any new books or recordings, do splurge and I’ll reimburse you later. And once in Ethiopia, please pass my kind regards to Prester John. Please have them all get in touch through the usual channels. I hope Toby’s better, I’m positive he’ll enjoy the trip, and do pack a mosquito net.

Love,

Momma Empire xox

NB. Please bring 35-spice mixture for tajine on your way home. Without too much rose, please!

NB2. Tell Mr. Pleasure that the oil is in Chad, a tip from the Lloyds peers in my Oedspensky group.

It’s utter rubbish. Momma Empire’s obviously deluded. Noemi isn’t going to Khartoum, much less Alexandria, even if Wyatt might have suggested that it’s a nice weekend visit where they could shoot the breeze on the Cornish and watch the world eat ice cream. Khartoum’s the last place she wants to go. No matter that it’s the juncture of the Blue and White Niles, it’s the site where Momma Empire ran off and left Daddy Empire, when she raised her anchor and steamed down the Nile with a new man. The divorce is Noemi’s epicenter, the tricky fault that continues to quake in her emotions of betrayal and loss. Noemi knows that she’s in the wrong place, far too close for comfort to the interior of doubts that she harbors about her mother and home. She isn’t into catharsis. That would be too personal to release all the genies from her box. The Sufis would not convince her that love could conquer betrayal, and everything else too, though she had been very impressed by their desert dancing. Most salubrious.

Alone in the house, Wyatt in the field, her help gone, she struggles with her reservations. Battutu’s disappearance shortly after their return has upset her greatly. He’s instrumental to getting things accomplished in the garden and also reliable company. She misses the dates and pomegranates brought by the old man, and the garden reflects the loss of its horticultural genius. But she senses something else is wrong. The house seems disturbed.

But Battutu does come back, a few days later, haggard, kowtowing, begging for forgiveness, swallowed in a great wool coat with the mortarboards and insignia of the old Italian occupiers. It’s embarrassing to watch and the conclusions are uncomfortable.

“O Begum Pleasure, Colonel Candy has arrested my brother,” he implores, on his knees, his hands clasped together under the sleeves of the great coat. “He’s only a student engineer. I’ve been trying to get him out since the demonstrations.” He looks pitiable, with none of the spry energy that usually sparkles in his eyes.

“Well, we’re not having any of that.” Her sense of justice is aroused to fight Colonel Candy’s campaign against the student unions that she’s read about in the Italian papers.

She gathers Toby, who she regards as her open sesame, and fires up the Beetle. She hates cars but this is too important. She passes the baby to Battutu who holds him in his lap and whispers fairytales in his ear. She’s filled with motherly purpose as the car wiggles through the sandy streets to the district police office. Traffic wardens moving like dolls capped with blue fezzes direct the traffic from their stools perched in the centers of the main intersections. A herd of corgi-like camels trespassing in town charm her momentarily, but her sense of justice is too strong to abort her mission due to pretty livestock. That’s Wyatt’s weak spot, not hers. She parks at the edge of a square darkened by strips of palms and doesn’t bother to lock. Her friendship with Battutu is at stake.

There is no glass in the windows of the district police office. A group of men are drinking teas in the courtyard. A typewriter pocks in the background. The walls are stained blue.

“Salaam aleikum,” she says to the guard, who bows. She gathers her breath for her Italian as the inspector waddles forward, wiping his brow with a handkerchief. Toby cradled in her arms, she addresses him: “What have you done with Battutu’s brother?” she asks in a loud voice.

Inadvertently she combines her French into her Italian, but the inspector didn’t mind her slaughtering the old occupier’s language.

Noemi equivocates: does this gesture mean she’s good and has a conscience? Or is she meddling and imperiling her dear servant Battutu?

A portrait of the Colonel hangs askew on the wall, his eyes shaded by Ray-Bans, his hair tight and curled, his jaw long and rugged, his handsome, rectangular face cramped into the determination of an autocrat carefully plotting to secure his kingdom. He’s patronizing and dangerous, especially at this stage in his career, when everything has to be done. He grips a switch.

It smells of sweat and cockroaches.

“This man’s brother!” she says loudly.

The inspector is paralyzed with genuine astonishment

His colleagues guffaw in the courtyard. Who’s this white whore? Who’s the cowed agent at her side?

She points at Battutu and they cluck at him in Arabic.

“Who you ask for is not here,” the inspector says. “We do not have Battutu’s brother.”

Kafir meddling would only make it worse for Battutu’s brother, the inspector concludes.

For the first time, Noemi notices Battutu’s blackened, torn fingernails and looks with horror at the misdeeds spelled out on his hands that have nervously emerged from his coat.

The inspector gestures for her to inspect the cells and she dares not go through the dark doorway, so strong in its aspect to be both grave and anus. Nothing more is needed to intimate violence.

Noemi and Battutu are shooed away, it being the end of her Agatha-like moment, and she almost topples into the street from the steps. She’s pelted with insults like rotten eggs as she leaves the premises. Bolshy in deportment, determined in agency, she settles in the Beetle and urges Battutu to get in. It’s a very convenient car and refuge, even if it’s German.

The British Embassy is in Tripoli. She could write a very polite letter to them to sort it out.

After, both of them slurping watermelon and pistachio gelato she buys in consolation, Battutu thanks her for her help.

“I will find another way to get my brother, Begum” he says, shaking her hand and saying goodbye.

Likely fearing for his safety, tarred with the brush of collaboration, Battutu doesn’t return to the house again, no matter how much he wants to return to savor the ways of the foreigners who brought only trouble to the Maghreb.

Wyatt hears her report when he’s back from the desert. Her actions seem a little irrational to him. His principle is not to fool around with Arab affairs. It’s best to let them divide themselves. Jeremy had told him that. Poseidon advises it, too.

“Write the letter?” he asks. Why had he encouraged her to learn to drive?

“Of course,” Noemi says. “And I sent a copy to Colonel Candy.” Her secretarial skills were still quite useful. “Would you like to read it?”

He shakes his head. Deliberately or not, she’s thwarting his plans. The baby strategy is backfiring. She’s at least as stubborn and full of bluster as Momma Empire, if not more so. “Let’s not make a diplomatic incident,” he says firmly.

“Please ask the company to sort it out, Wyatt. I do miss Battutu. He told such good stories.”

He weighs the choice. Interference isn’t his job: he’s simply to extract as much oil from the Libyan sands as geopolitics allows. No more. Fraternizing is taboo. But passing the responsibility for this onerous task to the company seems like a good tactic, he admits, giving him time to petition Colonel Candy himself. Poseidon could ask about Battutu’s disappeared brother, if Poseidon still had any sway.

“I’ll try,” he says without enthusiasm; he knows the answer: Colonel Candy would have them know Libya is the happiest, safest country in the world, the face of a new revolution in Arab and African affairs. He hesitates because he avoided principles so far.

The corporation is ruthless and Wyatt is its satrap, well paid to keep his codebook and the nature of his work confidential. No longer is he in jeopardy of spilling the beans in Benghazi, when whisky and braggadocio might mislead him into sharing his ideas with an industry mole mining for information about the prospecting under the desert. He’s the last cool-handed gambler in Libya and he feels very sexy, part of the political and economic whirlwind that’s oil, so vital that he’s needed here, not in Vietnam. Yet he couldn’t guess what Poseidon’s removal from Libya means for him. He needs a backup plan for that eventuality. Could he return and work for the Colonel if he presented the royal baby, the moniker for his pet project? He’s careful.

Soon after, Noemi’s letter reverberates through Colonel Candy’s lock-like administration, and a roadblock appears at the end of the street. Getting in and out became troublesome; the police often were belligerent, maybe drunk. Wyatt couldn’t figure out where they got the alcohol. He certainly couldn’t get any of the arrak brewed by the Copts, given precious religious freedom to surmount the prohibition. Circumspect by nature, knowing the threat to their lives to be ancient and consequential, they had closed their shops and stopped selling publicly. What was the loss of business when one could lose everything?

Wyatt spruces up the Beetle, parked under the date palms, which in the shortage of booze, he now regards as a potential source of moonshine. He adds a leather-framed picture of the great brother to the rearview mirror,, as if that would save them from the security clampdown. He’s also grown a mustache in a nod to the trend, but the gesture’s transparent: he’s still a foreigner, a parasite.

Questioned and put on the spot one night by the police, it seems the name of their street has changed. Rue D’Annunzio has been decreed Rue Arafat in honor of the Palestinian Liberation Organization office to be opened down the street. Their Libyan IDs are for the old address, invalid.

They point to Toby Pleasure, asleep in Noemi’s lap.

Wyatt hands over a few piasters, a mix of coins stamped either with Candy or his predecessor, Idris.

They do their best to adapt to the pressure as the community of ex-patriots and their help vanished around them. The lawn grows in fits and it’s up to Noemi to do the watering and gardening. She misses Battutu’s company, with his tall tales of traveling to Timbuktu and Xanadu delivered in a garbled Italian that she had great difficulty understanding. She had gathered that he must be very old though he had proved to be a vigorous gardener, guard and batman, most often willing to please. She envies the dates hanging alluringly in the sky, she unable to scale the palms rustling in the evening breeze. She’s worried too: without Battutu, anyone could slip a hand through the gate and enter the yard. She doesn’t feel very safe with the foul-tempered gander in the garden for protection, even when Wyatt’s home.

Wyatt responds by filling the house and garage with more junk from the souk, a collection of copper and brass objects from the metal merchants, sometimes even annealed bars of iron and neat croissettes of red copper, remnants of trade. He found tarnished European pewter, upon examination sometimes stamped with makers’ marks that indicated origins in Bristol or Liverpool. He’s astounded, holding what amounts to the price of a slave in his hand.

But the souk changes radically, filled with everything left from the foreign evacuations. To him it seems the influx of everyday goods is an opportunity to refit entire buildings, the contents sacked from the Italian and Maltese premises that no longer have habitants or customers: sheets, china, silverware, tiles, fittings, beds, scattered like the remnants of defeat. Folly tempts him to buy it all, export it, and make what he reckons to be a handsome profit.

Noemi marches into old Benghazi most evenings. Toby’s strapped to her back in a native cloth tied in two places, the pair of them protected from the inordinate evening sun by a large umbrella. Noemi wraps up in local garments, too, signaling that she’s willing to play by the rules of Colonel Candy’s country. She likes the gown and trousers, sandals and scarf. The rhythm of walking makes both feel better, especially once mother and infant arrive at the sea wall to watch the legions of people. It’s a taste of freedom, therapy from her isolation.

Toby behaves immaculately. Comforted by the Arabic and overjoyed by the heat, the calls of the muezzin make his infant heart soar. He’s back in his domain.

Yet no one will look her in the eye, not even the men, a very grave sign. She wants to look and feel good again, though there aren’t anymore new Italian clothes to look good in. The city had been psychedelically brightened by Puccini, then replaced with aboriginal browns, creams and blues.

Noemi Pleasure takes a moment to be honest on the promenade, not sure what to do, certainly not watercolor even if her vision is decorated with boats, reflections and feet. She’s tired of the greedy bugger who’s her charge, his hot face needling in for suckle; she’s glad to be wrung out and curdled by the hot spring sun.

A local wetnurse would be a solution, she thought, but how would she make her case at the hammam: a Libyan breast was surely better than Italian. But her inopportune requests for help would surely be turned aside by the local women, well kept, informed, educated in Rome or London, often speaking English, by now utterly hesitant. Everything has changed.

Sitting inert like a toad, she remembers Iris, who had left with her husband, a Poseidon VP, and been reassigned to Jakarta. She wonders who’s in charge where Wyatt’s concerned.

Signs with slogans from Candy’s administration have sprung up along the boardwalk.

Wage earners, however improved their wages may be, are a type of slave.

The cars glide by. The palms rustle overhead. The sails of the dhows are aloft, the boats nosing to shore to sell their catch from the black-blue sea.

Sometimes she imagines Wyatt would join her.

Sharing a mango shake with him, decorated with a sprig of mint, she complains, increasingly tired from the long walk to the marina. “Will you buy me a Vespa?” she asks. “I don’t like the car.”

He refuses the request; she’s a klutz.

“There’s no need to enrage the Libyans,” he adds. “They don’t even want you to ride a bike.”

He secretly agrees: women are distracted too easily and honor is everything.

“I’ll buy Toby a pram if you like.”

That comes as a jolt to her, the abrupt ending of childhood that is the birth of Toby Pleasure. This is what it’s like to be an adult. Noemi had trouble accepting that, her emotional growth so long stunted by Momma Empire’s conviction that she could only ever be a child.

Wyatt grows paranoid as Colonel Candy’s regime stamps his imprint on the country, spouting garbage about killing capitalism when Libya is wholly dependent on Poseidon’s revenues. Candy has it easy: he doesn’t need to develop an economy as such. Sure, the Colonel could make perfect sense and deserves to be heard, but Wyatt has begun to question the wisdom of staying for the perks of his position and bonus. He need not torture his wife. He knows Poseidon’s has a few more breaths in Libya, but Candy is poised, his chariot prepared for war.

He’s in a pickle. No backslider, still he wonders, “What to do? What to be?” But to be isn’t a question for Wyatt, all nose and oil.

The meeting with Colonel Candy is stalled. Rightly, Wyatt suspects that it’s a game of cat and mouse. But they’re ready for the moment, the Pleasure family’s clothes ironed neatly by Wyatt and a bag of baby supplies packed by Noemi. He’s polished his cowboy boots, too.

Wyatt frets that Noemi’s letter has sabotaged the invitation and earned Candy’s disfavor, until the bell to the gate rings in the middle of one spring night when the wind brings Europe’s alpine cold across the Mediterranean.

“Here they come,” he thinks, opening the gate, correctly expecting to be bundled out in the night, no longer protected by company or passport. No point in hiding.

A Cadillac is waiting in the street, its green fins extending into the red darkness lit by the brake lights, its engine chugging like a throat.

“Get your family,” says the messenger, pointing to the El Dorado.

“Now?” Wyatt asked.

“Yes, the Colonel awaits you, Mr. Pleasure.”

He’s prepared them and Noemi knows what to do as she wipes the slumber from her eyes. Her outfit’s in the closet. She’d given the fabric great thought. She’s swabbed in minty green silk like an imam.

Wyatt pulls on a suit, its pockets stocked with sand. He tucks in what he regards as his lucky lilac gingham shirt.

Toby is buttoned up in a jumpsuit of pale blue terrycloth.

Wyatt shoulders the baby bag of nappies and creams, carries his son to the car and holds Noemi close. She’s trembling.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “He’s just eccentric.”

“Erratic,” she says. She senses no fear.

The car has a cream interior with red trim. It’s a Cadillac? She does like roomy American cars. They breeze past the neighborhood roadblock and don’t turn into town but drove away from the green lights of the city along the coast where the desert abruptly hit the shore. The single headlight beam pierces the darkness like a sharp finger and the Cadillac glides into the night.

Wyatt chinks the window, thick, made of multiple layers of glass, and smokes. Noemi is bunched in the other corner of the armored car.

The adversity, real or imagined, makes them feel close. Libya’s for lovers, Wyatt thought, smiling to himself. Toby, oblivious, gurgled.

“Brega?” he asks.

“No, Sirte,” says the messenger.

It’s a huge distance along the Bay of Sidra. Wyatt and Noemi would have time to sleep on the pillows conveniently provided, at some point before dawn the car stopping, the air sweet with the tang of cedars.

The two men pray hypnotically, then they resume the journey.

The stones crackle under the car’s tires. Wyatt doesn’t rouse Noemi and Toby, curled together under a blanket, thinking it best to save her business with Colonel Candy and the matter of Battutu’s brother to the end. It’s cold and harsh. His breath’s frosty. He has business here, nowhere near Sirte.

The tents flaps in the dawn wind. The rising sun puckers behind hard, sour clouds. Sentinels, Candy’s Revolutionary Guard, squat on cairns of rock scattered in clumps over the dry plain free of bush.

The messenger bids, “This way.”

The chauffeur’s already greeting the guards. “Humdillilah,” he says.

“Inshallah,” answers a group of men, removing a teapot from the cute stove, a large can of what had been sardines lined with concrete. It burns with a hot orange flame. The barrels of their guns point into the sky and sand.

The camp’s arranged in a crescent, almost a kraal, anchored against the wind by guy wires. The messenger gestures to a large field tent, the flap on one side drawn over the roof. Straw mats cover the sharp pebbles of the desert and a fabric of repeating green, red, black and beige decorate the canvas walls. The roof’s low and a slit of light and wind emerge from the back. A wide white leather chair is in the background, next to a table, cleaned of everything.

The messenger unfolds three chairs. “I’m your translator,” he said. “In all confidence.”

Wyatt’s certain Colonel Candy spoke English, having been trained by the English in the mid-1960s as a young military officer, but the translator insists: Colonel Candy will speak through him.

“O, Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Great Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution!”

He bows and Wyatt follows suit. He’s going to tell him what he wants to believe.

Colonel Candy radiates a command and charisma that hurdles through their eyes straight into their souls. There will be no pretence here, no deception, no games. His authority is his unpredicatibility.

“Welcome, Mr. Pleasure,” the Colonel says, “Welcome to my country.” His hands swoop over the rocky soil and he points to the sun. “Congratulations on your new family.”

“Thank you,” says Wyatt. It’s genuine, not a threat, but he does turn to reassure himself just as Noemi emerges from the Cadillac to calm a group of children who wanted to play with curious Toby. They’ve agreed: he’ll talk first.

“Firstborn?”

“Yes,” says Wyatt.

“Now the only milestone left in your life is death.”

Wyatt swallows. Candy’s very cryptic.

Candy wears a brown fatigue shirt and light blue cotton pants rolled up over his calves. His hair is relaxed and unstyled; he has no cap or hat, no jewelry, no adornment whatsoever standing in the desert next to his God. He studies the horizon, his hands on his kidneys.

He grips Wyatt’s hand and touches his heart. But he does not hug or kiss him as he would a brother.

Likewise, Wyatt follows custom and protocol, by now flawless.

“You know some of our ways, Mr Pleasure?” he asks.

Wyatt nods.

“You must accept my sorrow at the delay.”

“Most humbly,” Wyatt replies. “May I too express my joy at our meeting. It’s a great honor to give your consent. I have written many letters and appeals.”

“I get much correspondence from the United States,” he says.

“I apologize for the arrogance of the people in power,” says Wyatt. He’s rehearsed that gem. American mistakes are too many to tally, a view that has developed during his career overseas. He allows Colonel Candy to settle on grievous thoughts of Israel or Vietnam.

“Yes, yes, I understand,” he says in English. “But this is over.”

Candy’s voice is very soft and charming as he begins to explain his ideas. He flexes his legs, bats his knees together. The translator is his mouthpiece, the young man’s face filled by a light scruffy beard that did not match his strange demonstrative voice, his notebook filling with scripts.

“According to Jesus, and to what’s happening now, there’s evil and there’s good. There are tremendous potentialities. Used for evil purposes they will be destructive. Used for good of humanity, it would be tremendous.”

Colonel Candy plays with a clay pipe with a long velvet-wrapped stem ornamented with a few cowry shells as he talks. He also has a whisk next to his chair and a small fridge by his side.

“The struggle on the earth now all depends on whether or not the will to good overpowers the will to do evil. And the first evil is capitalism. Capitalism must be destroyed. The rich class is very destructive and must be done away with. If socialism was to be realized all over the world, then good will would prevail.

“Wars and the manufacture of weapons of destruction are all instigated and encouraged by the capitalists out looking for profit. Even at the expense of others, even at the expense of the dead bodies of millions. Therefore, we must fight against capitalism. And the solution is socialism. Not the Russian or the Soviet Union or the socialism of China. This is a socialism that has not been applied yet. I mean the socialism advocated by the Green Book. If it is, then we will be heading for good with whatever potentialities we have. People must be convinced that capitalism means war, inflation, economic crisis, unemployment and exploitation. People must be convinced that these evils are the outcome of capitalism.”

His arms are crossed, then he gestures, chop-chop. He pulls up, leans forward, furrows his brow, wipes his lip with his thumb.

“Capitalism needs these evils.”

Wyatt stretched forward in his suit. “I worry about my country,” Wyatt said. “They don’t care. They don’t care about partnership.”

“What do you propose, Mr. Pleasure?”

He’d been thinking the same thing, about royal baby, and at that moment the tea arrives in a brass pot and is poured, black, onto many lumps of sugar, from a long scimitar-like spout.

He’s collated his maps from London into what he thought would interest the Colonel. Hardball.

“Permit me, Colonel Candy, to say that you’re in an ideal position. Build yourself a top notch refining and processing and shipping terminal and you’ll be the envy of the Mediterranean and guaranteed high income for years. The Tunisians don’t have it. Nor the Egyptians. Only the Israelis and the Italians. To finance this, your reserves are strong. More are inevitable. Build the pipelines and infrastructure to bring it to market. Beyond your borders are vast reserves. I can smell it.”

Wyatt points to his maps. Sure enough, parts of Sudan, Chad and Niger, even the Central African Republic, are dotted with stickers, his careful work with the nose that cares neither for borders or consequences. The rocks of Africa emit an irresistible perfume of oil and other countless resources. The obstacles could be overcome if he can trust his new false friend, Colonel Candy, ally of nonaligned oddballs and pariah states, a benevolent man of solidarity.

“Colonel, sir, it may sound like a death sentence, but I’d advise you to make the most of your position and take the assets, like you’ve said in your broadcasts, and make Libya the number one driller of petroleum in the Sahara, Sahel and offshore. You’ve got the money for schools, engineers, geologists and managers, so why not? Don’t sell the crude raw and cheap like that fool Idris. The oil, it’s so close, in physical and geological terms, and Libya’s at the epicenter.”

“And water?” Candy asks with supreme calm. He has another prerogative, to turn Libya into paradise.

Wyatt addresses it in a professional tone. “We have found many aquifers. We call it fossil water. We use it to push out the oil from the old wells. There’s plenty and the potential is unlimited in our assessment.”

Candy harrumphs. He’s fantasized about a river running under the sands in order to feed crops and people. Everything this overdressed man is saying sounds feasible. Nonetheless, he appreciates the respect he’s shown. Indeed, he’s surprised by how far he has gone, a self-made head of state, feted and esteemed.

“Beat that old god Poseidon at his own game, yeah?” Wyatt is being very informal but this was the time to prove his worth. “But maybe you can’t do it alone?”

“Allah akbar,” says Colonel Candy.

The phrase echoes from the lips of the great revolutionary leader to his men.

Wyatt mimes the words too.

“Partners, not wage earners.”

“That’s what I’m talking about. The whole world’s corrupt. What you’re talking about is employee stock ownership, huh? Well, Poseidon does that too, but not everyone’s an owner.” He doesn’t expect to betray his employer with such easy complicity. It feels numbingly good, nearly as good as revenge. He hopes Candy won’t recognize him for what he is: a capitalist rat.

“Twenty years,” he adds. In Libya, there aren’t any clauses limiting Colonel Candy’s powers. “And you have water.”

In his excitement, Wyatt doesn’t notice the microphone boom that slip between them as they sit on their diner-like chairs, the tent snapping occasionally as the sun begins its journey to the meridian and pulls the wind with it, murmuring with the children in the camp.

Who’s recording?

Why’s there a camera on a tripod?

When did that happen?

What has he said?

“People rule themselves by themselves” is Candy’s mandate and he intends to exploit their gullibility from the top as their sole partner. A few Libyan brains could be sacrificed for the better of the country. And as long as the Americans and British drive cars, he will be rich. He can afford to issue puzzling edicts and warp diplomacy through meddling and proxy wars, especially if what Wyatt Pleasure has testified is as extraordinary as he suggets.

“Do you think me a good man?” he asks, gesturing to the translator and camera crew that time’s up.

“Quite the opposite,” replies Wyatt, “I admire your sense of guile and playboy good looks. You’re quite an opponent.”

They rise from their chairs and Colonel Candy says with a calculating air,

“Report to Ali Baba at the National Oil Corporation with your details.”

Wyatt pauses, smiles. “It’s rare to find someone more helpful when it comes to the future of Libya, who knows so little and so much.”

Colonel Candy laughs, shakes his head at the idea of nincompoop, cinches Wyatt by the arm and escorts him into the desert. What had been purple that morning has quickly washed to a rough brown then bleached to an eye-numbing gray as the sun progressed. Candy’s a connoisseur of deserts. They make his soul soar. He likes the hammada because it’s unremarkable.

His family gathers around him. Colonel Candy has plenty of children, some of whom he introduced with funny names like Prophet, Sword, Favorite Wife, Henna or Elephant.

Wyatt is surprised that Candy’s so public with his affection, a father, a role Wyatt is having trouble adapting too, preferring to never be there rather than sometimes be there. He finds himself mumbling about world peace.

Wyatt beckons for Noemi to be introduced. She’s chatting with a group of women in a disk of shade. She’s had some refreshments. Toby’s thrashing in her arms.

“I’m honored,” she says, curtseying and then shaking Colonel Candy’s manicured and very large hand. He touches Toby Pleasure, too, strokes him on the cheek.

Warm and smooth, the leader’s hand smells like frankincense. Toby feels the great, ominous power of the man, his fingers sweet like honey and petrol. His cool magnificence oozes from his skin.

“What’s his name?” he asks.

“Tobias,” Noemi says, and remembering what Jeremy had said, she adds, “In Hebrew it means, God is great.” 

“Allah akbar,” the Colonel says automatically. He has a quizzical expression in his eyes. “A Jewish gift for Libya?”

She shakes her head and waits, quite unafraid,

Toby grins blankly at the Colonel, a Lego-like face smudged by a curly mushroom of black hair.

“So you want Battutu’s brother, the engineer, is that correct?” Colonel Candy asks.

“Why yes,” she says. “You received my letter?” She finds the mole in the crease between his lip and nose very alluring.

“Other than you and your husband, I receive many such appeals.”

“It’s rude not to write back,” she says, pushing a hip forward, juggling Toby on her waist.

Colonel Candy recognizes the danger of Noemi publicizing the case. He says without pause, “Battutu’s a very bad man, spreading foreign lies along with his brother, but for your sake, and his, let it be done.” He wafts his hand at her, ignoring what she thought of his manners. In an aside, he bids the translator take special note of his administrative decision.

Noemi issues a sigh of relief. She’s saved Battutu’s brother! She, Noemi Pleasure, who has never done much of anything. Her appeal to the benevolence of Colonel Candy surely proves that the rumors of ruthlessness are untrue. Autocracy’s a cure for injustice in its way, she thinks, such a shame England has abandoned such a favorable model of rule.

She begins to muse on the idea that she likes saving people. If only she could save her self too.

“Thank you, Colonel,” she says. “You’re so kind.”

He nods sagely. “Your car.”

The sun leeches the landscape of color and feature. The earth seemed to disappear into the mirage. The Cadillac’s air conditioner is defunct and the journey back to Benghazi tortuous as the heat blew through the car, dehydrating everyone.

Somehow Wyatt has fallen asleep, but Noemi is far too intoxicated from her meeting Colonel Candy. She thinks, if not a leader, he would have made a wonderful doctor. Noemi pins together a shelter of shade inside the car from her lime green scarf to protect Toby before the wind sucks it out. She sees it stick to a bush, looking no different than a goat.

A long cone of dust rises from the back of the vehicle passing the wrecks of the war scattered among the jackpumps nodding in tribute, slicing at the buttery ground like knives.

She doesn’t both to stop the car. Noemi isn’t going back, no matter how pleasant beaches along the road to Benghazi. Yet she could imagine one last day before they went to Goshen, Wyatt’s home. The water's so unspoiled.

Some days later Noemi’s crusade to convince Wyatt to take a day off succeeds—no calls, no emergencies. 

They park at a beach. The weather hasn’t collaborated, but there they are, rolled onto the sands.

Along the road are a few white-washed houses. The massif's dark green, striated in places with white rock. From its base, the fields come right to the road, dotted with small palms, new work that’s part of Colonel Candy’s cleaner Libya. Wyatt scowls at the beach from inside the Beetle. Noemi sits next to him and Toby’s in her lap. Windblown waves knock the beach. It’s stormy. They kiss.

“Well,” she says, “other people are trying it.” She points at the dots, maybe bottles or sponges or sausages bobbing on the waves. Sometimes she sounds like her mother. Frightful.

“I’d hardly call them people,” replies Wyatt.

Today, there’s no one. They change in the car. No one wants to muck about too long on the beach on a day like this.

The Libyans are mostly easy-going about trunks or bikinis. Rarely do they receive a censorious look, certainly not from the sand carried off the empty beach and across the road that’s cut into the massif and guarded by the ramparts of an abandoned Italian fort facing Rome.

She fastens up Toby in his floats.

“Careful,” she says. “It’s little nasty out there, Toby.” It doesn’t look like anything he couldn’t handle.

Toby crawls out as soon as she opens the door and he scoots along the sand. His knees and hands divot the beach. The floats squeak pleasingly against his skin.

Wyatt struggles in the wind to light the cigarette he’s been waiting to have since leaving Benghazi for the cool retreat of Jebel Akhdar. He locks the glove compartment that stores the old Italian pistol that he recently purchased in the souk.

He doesn’t want to pay attention to the rumors but he’s worried about their safety, especially on what he had been reminded had been Barbary. The Bedouin in the south had warned him not to trust the coastal Arabs and there’s truth in the warning. Poseidon’s now paying a ransom to Colonel Candy in an effort to staunch the inevitable loss of its business and assets in Libya, hardly different from the tribute paid to the corsairs for the privilege of trespass and trade upon their waters and lands.

A female cry pierces the air, then passes.

“Dido?” Wyatt wonders, squinting at the burly sea, finishing locking the car.

The steely weather catches Noemi off-guard, reminding her of the wind, sands and tides of the Gower, a bittersweet, sore memory of a rare visit from her astray parents, reconciled for a horrible, argumentative weekend intended to make up for the time Momma and Daddy Empire were away. Then, Noemi had to pretend that she wasn’t hurt when she was, very much so, a wounded, rejected little girl. Of course, they buy her love with cod and sweets, and she complies in order to see them together.

Noemi casually notices the waves are much bigger up close.

Toby follows the rope that leads right into water.

Gulls. Shells. Froth. Waves.

Toby tumbles at the steep lip of the beach and the waves reach for him, pulling him down face first. He somersaults down the edge of Africa into the slurry of sand.

The water bites him. It mashes him down into the bank, locks him into the matrix of pebbles, sand and wood, and then abruptly sweeps him away, he his very own raft. Death wants Toby in Paradise, and he’s mushed, whalloped, flattened and abraded.

Wyatt sprints after the ragged glimpse of Toby Pleasure vanishing into the waves.

Noemi stands on the beach, biting her hands, puffing. What good are the charms?

Wyatt is in before she can stop him.

She wades in, too, helpless, the water sucking great pits around her legs. A wave reaches for her hands, slips off her Taureg silver bracelet and tosses it in the foam. She curses, plunges her arm into the water, too slow.

Wyatt holds some sash of color and movement, from what she can see over the tops of the waves. She gulps. They’re quite far out. The beach appears hostile and desolate. No one to alert. No traffic. No goatherds. No fishermen.

It’s cold for June. The currents change everything.

Toby panics and pushes Wyatt down. He’s whimpering and frightened. “Daddy, daddy, daddy,” he says. Toby moans. Then assumes a high-pitched wail as Daddy pushes him with the breakers.

“Show Daddy how long you can hold your breath, Toby. Show me you’re a big boy,” Wyatt says as the pair of them launch into an oncoming wave, swelling and snearing, spitting them further down the beach than he expects.

A few Arabs sit on their haunches, as disguised as stones. How had he missed them? They’re cunning. Why don’t they help? But he knows the answer: they didn’t know how to swim. He can’t quite focus on the drama but one of them has accosted Noemi.

He can’t protect her, not stranded in the cold waves with his little boy. With an enormous thrust he gets to a sandbar. He could just push off the sands with his feet, keep them floating.

The mountain rises above them. Its narcotic, fertile smell reached over the disturbed salty air of the sea.

Wyatt’s exhausted from the struggle. He calculates, waits for a wave big enough to jettison them on the beach, from where they might scramble away.

They dunk and roll and are troubled by the undertow. They are going every direction but towards the beach. Wyatt makes his peace during the monumental effort to get to shore. He never would have expected he could die like this. Decapitated by equipment in the field or disemboweled in a traffic accident is a death he can understand, even what he expects, not these waves that disguise their violence with their beauty.

Toby hiccups and burps water that’s sticky with bile, his floats deflated, what he imagines as walnuts or barbells.

“Once more, Turtle,” his father says, showing Toby to hold a big deep breath.

They skid down the face of the wave as it collects them. They tumble over the bottom of sharp broken shells and are at last deposited in a mash of sand and stinging water. Wyatt jumps up, on his feet now, and runs up the slope, runs as the next waves stretches for them, his legs singing with pain. He vaults past the reach of the tide with Toby on his back, coughing furiously, Daddy, daddy, daddy, daddy.

He doesn’t feel like a hero but he is, at least to Toby and Noemi on that day. She never could have done it.

“Oh, there you are,” she says, when she finds them far down the beach. Wyatt’s crying with relief.

An Arab follows. He doesn’t say anything, just looks at the sopping, shivering man on the beach and the woman hugging the child. 

Up next: Land of the Braves