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“I would prefer that you not look at that,” Butterworth said. “Nothing in it is related to your investigation.”
I began turning the pages. Each was as stiff as cardboard. The backdrop was obviously Africa: wild animals grazing on grasslands backdropped by mountains capped with snow, army six-bys loaded with black soldiers carrying AK-47s and Herstal assault rifles, arid villages where every child had the same bloated stomach and hollow eyes and skeletal face. I could almost hear the buzzing of the flies.
“Which countries were these taken in?” I asked.
“Many of these places don’t even have names,” he replied.
“The guys in those trucks look like friends of Gaddafi and Castro,” I said.
“They’re friends of whoever pays them,” he said.
The next page I turned was pasted over with an eight-by-ten color photograph that slipped in and out of focus, as though the eye wanted to reject it. The huts on either side of a dirt road were burning. A column of troops was walking into a red sun, some of the men looking at bodies strewn along the roadside. A withered and toothless old man wearing only short pants and sandals was sitting with one leg bent under him, his arms outstretched, begging for mercy. The bodies of a woman and a child lay like broken dolls next to him. A soldier stood behind him, a machete hanging from a thong on his wrist.
I held the page open in front of Butterworth. “You had a hand in this?”
“Did I participate in it? No. Was I there? I took the photograph.”
“Did you try to stop it?”
“My head would have been used for a soccer ball.”
“Who was the commanding officer?”
“An African thug who was a friend of Idi Amin.”
“What was your role?”
“Adviser.”
I closed the book and dropped it on the bed. “Get up.”
“What for?”
“You need to be in a different place.”
I walked him through the living room and out on the deck, my fingers biting into his arm. I unlocked his cuffs and hooked him around the rail, the sun beating down on his face, his eyes still dilated and now watering. He was clearly trying not to blink. “Why are you doing this?”
“I don’t like you. How often do you shoot up?”
“Sorry, I won’t discuss my private life with you.”
“Did you shoot up Lucinda Arceneaux?”
“Alafair told me your friend Purcel fought on the side of the leftists in El Salvador.”
“What about it?”
“He never told you what went on down there? The atrocities committed by the cretins your government trained at the School of the Americas?”
“I’m going to leave you out here for a few minutes, and then we’ll be taking you to the jail. In the meantime I think it would be to your advantage if you shut your mouth.”
“You don’t know why you hate and fear me, do you?” he asked.
“What?”
“I symbolize the ruinous consequence of America’s decision to abandon the republic that the entire world admired and loved. You see me and realize how much you have lost.”
I wanted to believe he was mad, a sybaritic, narcotic-fueled cynic determined to transfer his pathogens to the rest of us. With his hands cuffed to the deck rail, the wind flattening his clothes against his body, he looked like the twisted figure in the famous painting by Edvard Munch.
