SLEEPING DOGS
Here are chapters one and sixteen of the novel, which was inspired by:
- an assassination attempt on my family in Tunisia,
- an accident in which a diplomat ran over a toddler while ranting at men who were tailing him,
- and decades of sharing a meal-a-day and my home with a dear friend named Ted Joans, who was a spell-binding African-American jazz poet and collagist.
The resulting story is a pinball machine in which a brilliant black writer ricochets amid power plays when a spy chief uses him as a decoy in an Arab country. The headstrong artist’s reaction to being manipulated by an almost equally mischievous man catalyzes such an explosive avalanche in the unstable region that both characters are forced to confront their consciences.
A reader for the large French film studio, Gaumont, had this to say about the dark comedy, spy novel, and tale of a flailing genius, which he called the finest idea for a film (which was never made) that he’d read in his ten years at the firm:
“Originality is the hallmark of this probing and often very funny treatment of a serious subject as its complexity is playfully unraveled. Refined diplomatic dialogues are juxtaposed with a zany universe skidding out of control. Poetry is offered to people who think of nothing but the next coup d’état. – Speak about china in a shop full of elephants!
“The concept remains within this precise approach: at once funny and serious. In order to successfully deal with the extraordinarily complicated history of North Africa and the Middle East, the author has brilliantly developed an intrigue in which economic and religious interests, and, most importantly, personal ambitions interpenetrate and collide. He has pulled off a long shot.”
(Gaumont Reader’s Report 2261).
I hope you agree.
Please write me at caldwellnd(at)aol.com if you're a literary agent or publisher and would like to invest yourself in publishing the book.
© 1991, 2010 Duncan Caldwell
SLEEPING DOGS
A Novel
In the simpler world of 1989
Chapter 1
A small dusty car stopped just long enough on a boulevard curving around the top of a rich suburb overlooking the Mediterranean for a pair of men to get out among families taking their evening constitutionals. Leaving the road, the older man led his sidekick up the brushy hillside overlooking the houses towards a shepherd squatting among his sheep. Although both men from the car were wearing Western cast-offs, the younger one was so conscientious about protecting his more stylish jacket and jeans by avoiding prickers that he only arrived after his boss and the old watchman had already started exchanging the formulaic greetings used in North Africa, and was almost left out of the formalities as his superior handed the shepherd a pack of cigarettes. Taking them as if they were his due, the watchman remained on his haunches as he lit up and began punctuating observations about the villas below with smoke rings.
He informed them that the nearest house, which was practically a palace, with masonry domes and tiled benches on the roof, was the residence of a crony of some of OPEC's top leaders. In fact, he explained, the oilman who lived there had found “hot water” in Libya with a dowsing rod and even taught their leader, Gaddafi, how to use one. The executive worked out of several offices, including one in the American Embassy, where he coordinated a consortium’s efforts to find petroleum and pressurized water. But he was basically just a harmless eccentric, and since their leader either liked him or owed him a favor, he’d been declared off-limits.
“Choose your angle well,” the spotter warned. “You don’t want to shoot the wrong man. Your target is the CIA chief who ran that operation against us in Khartoum – the American’s ‘first secretary’ who lives in the next house downhill. Keep our leader’s pet out of the line of fire – that’s his own order!”
After completing his analysis of the home’s schedules, room arrangements, and personnel, the supposed shepherd flicked his butt towards the villas, and bade farewell to the senior assassin while giving his underling with the pomaded hair a mere nod as they turned to go back downhill. All they had to do was peek through hedges while ambling down the street, so nothing was likely to go wrong at this stage. But the old lookout still scanned everyone in sight for signs of interest in the pair as they picked their way through the garbage-strewn brush and cut between clusters of strollers going both ways along the road. Despite his near certainty that the coast was clear, he almost leapt to his feet and yipped when he suddenly spied a peddler with a tray of flowers homing in on them. He had momentarily thought the man might be a plainclothesman, but then realized the jumped-up beggar was just preying on strangers. Although the mistake was almost laughable, he still winced, since he’d seen plenty of plans go awry over smaller glitches.
Down below, the gunmen were cutting between an extended family and a bulwark of young women walking arm-in-arm, with a pack of waggish suitors in tow, when the peddler stepped in the pair’s path and insisted on foisting sprigs of jasmine on the “father and son.” It was no use making a spectacle of themselves by being ingrates or saying they were unrelated, so the boss simply accepted the blooms and walked on. He’d hardly taken a step, though, when the peddler wailed accusingly, “Don’t you have anything for me in return?!”
Seeing heads begin to turn, the older assassin handed the huckster a coin, but the fellow was such a practiced extortionist that he merely peered at it wide-eyed and roared in Arabic, “What a pittance!” They tried to leave, but the pest just skipped around them and backpedaled in their faces, sniffing at his tray of blossoms as he swooned, “Have you no love of perfume and flowers?”
“He’ll leave you alone if you pay him fairly,” a paterfamilias in a white gown counseled as he passed with his entire household.
“But he said it was a gift,” the younger gunman said.
His boss turned back and confronted the huckster. “There,” he declared, forking over a small bill.
“Oh-oh-oh! Libyans!” the peddler proclaimed when he heard their accents. He handed back the bill reproachfully, “My Arab brothers! This isn't even worthy of infidels!”
“Our country doesn't have the alcohol and adulterous women!” the younger gunman shot back.
“That’s what you think,” his boss snapped under his breath. “Ignore him.”
The peddler dogged them as they hurried past. “But brothers! This!” he threw the coin clattering among their feet. “You’d take my blossoms for nothing? Act like kings and God will reward you! You're richer than Americans now! Give in proportion to your glory! You’re no longer dirty country people living with goats - You,” he picked at the older man’s sleeve.
The boss swerved. “Beware,” he warned, “Treat visitors with respect.” He reached into his jacket, but only came out with his wallet. He threw down another bill. Bystanders guffawed at the huckster as he turned with a sloppy grin and a curtsey. He picked up the coin and second bill, straightened the paper as if he were preening feathers, and then walked a few paces behind the pair, caricaturing their walk to general hilarity and wiggling his fingers overhead in a cock's comb, before he veered around, and sidled back to his cart, crying his wares.
Feeling ridiculous with his stupid sprig, the younger assassin tossed it aside, causing some of the strollers to cluck and hiss. His boss took in the locals’ disapproval and the way each man was sporting jasmine buds in front of an ear, and ordered the younger man to pick up his nosegay and copy him as he put his in place. Then he slowed the pace to let everyone who’d witnessed their humiliation lose interest and move on. Stopping beside a tunnel through the foliage around the oilman’s garden, he leaned against the low wall at its base. “The weather’s changing,” he announced so dully, he might have been trying to kill a conversation.
A pack of dogs was coming over the ridge above the lookout from the capital’s smoldering dumps, which were hidden on the worthless land over the crest that didn’t have views. The older assassin watched them as they descended, sniffing and zigzagging through the thickets, where they’d end up lying in wait till it was dark enough to safely roam the streets and scour for feral cats and garbage. He smirked as the shepherd leapt to his feet, shouting and flailing at the mongrels, who began cowering, scurrying and barking around him and the milling flock. The entire hillside was coming alive as gusts sent trash sailing over the scrub and turned plastic bags snagged on the branches into whipping flags and balloons.
“Look at our babysitter,” the older man said, patting the wall, which served as a seat. “What a clown.” As the younger man settled against the barrier, his boss stepped away from it and faced him so he could peer past him into the garden while apparently doing nothing more than pausing to chat in the shade.
The grotto through the hedge was filled with shadow, but the garden and house inside were Edenic in the rosy light. An adolescent with an Asian cast and books beside him was writing at a masonry table between domes on the palatial roof - even though his pages were flapping in the wind. A girl of 11 or 12 was leaning over the balustrade of a lower patio, trading insults with someone downhill. A gardener was working his way around the inside of the hedge, rinsing dust off leaves and flowers with a hose. Suddenly, the gates between columns topped with marble lions on the far side of the yard creaked opened to reveal a Land Rover in a lane lined by cypress trees.
The men checked their watches as the car drove in. Coming to a halt near them, a driver with a rubbery face and white hair rolled up the window as he chided and teased a big, black, foreign dog, which was barking and cavorting at the car door. So here was the oil consultant.
They watched as he leaned over to check himself in the rear-view mirror, took off his sunglasses, swiped back his mane, and, catching himself in the act, suddenly contorted his rumpling face in self-mockery and pathos. Then he got out, slammed the door, realized he’d locked his briefcase inside and had to fumble with the keys, reopen the door, and lean back in to retrieve it. The ecstatic hound kept jumping on his butt, so that he had to slap it away as he grabbed the briefcase. Finally, he was able to back out of the car and head for the house while still dancing and dodging the dog.
The older assassin grimaced - the shepherd was right: the man was clearly a harmless farceur.
The hit men passed to the next house down the road curving around a series of homes on gardened ledges. Two boys were in the yard screaming “Chink!” at the girl on the oilman's patio uphill. Suddenly he appeared beside his daughter with his Asian-looking wife biting her lip and holding back tears.
“What's that you said? Repeat that, I said repeat that!” the oilman yelled.
“We didn't - we didn't say anything,” the chubbier boy cried. “It was just a joke.”
“Where's your mother? Don't you brats move! I'm coming down.”
“Oh, please - we didn't mean it!” the boys bleated, one over the other.
The oilman burst out of a small gate through the wall around the hedge, brushed past the astonished hit men, and wrenched open the driveway gate into the lower garden. Leaning into a gap in the foliage, the chief gunman cocked a thumb in the direction of the rampaging oilman and flapped his hand in grudging sympathy for his victim.
The oilman was drilling the button at the front door, when a station wagon drove up to the half-opened portals, and the driver, whom the hit men recognized as their target, saluted the oil executive by honking. The man spun around, just as the door to the house opened, and his neighbor’s wife tried unsuccessfully to hold back vicious dachshunds.
“Oh, hi! What brings you down? Have the boys -?” she asked. Her two dogs nipped and barked at the furious oil consultant. In the meantime, her husband got out of the car and exchanged a brief uncomprehending glance with his would-be assassins - who practically blushed when they realized he’d seen them peering into his yard - before rushing to break up the skirmish between his visitor and the mutts. Despite being seen, the hit men were so overcome with curiosity that they allowed themselves to lean back into the bald spot and gape as their target and his wife ran around stooping and swiping apologetically at their yapping beasts.
“Did you know your sons were taunting my daughter again with racist epithets?” the oilman yelled. “Did you? I heard the whole thing! Cindy even told them she wasn't Chinese, but your brats were jeering ‘Chink, Chink’! I want it to stop! And I want to know what you intend to do about it!”
“Why can't I come home without all hell breaking loose?!” the culprits' father shouted as the dogs took evasive action and scurried for safety. “How do you get such ideas in your heads? How! Have you ever heard your mother or me talk like that? Have you!? Answer me! How many times have we told you your skin, hair or freckles don't change a thing inside? Now apologize from the heart. What do you say?”
“He started it,” the chubby boy cried.
“They were both having a grand time! I saw everything,” the oil consultant shouted.
“We're sorry,” the other boy whined. “Are we getting punished?”
“Is that all you care about!? You go to your rooms and think about it! Oh, I'm so sorry, really I am. The horrible thing is children pick on any differences to choose sides - to give themselves a sense of belonging. And boys seem to have war in their blood. We wouldn't let them play with toy guns till they chewed their bread into pistols. It's such an up-hill battle. But I promise this will never happen again. Do you understand that? Do you realize what a terrible and embarrassing thing you’ve done? May we invite you guys in for tea or drinks –”
“Americans are such racists,” the older hit man remarked matter-of-factly as his sidekick took a surreptitious snapshot, only to be caught in the act by the oilman’s gardener who’d appeared through the leafy gap.
“You! Who gave you permission? You get out of here!” the gardener yelled in Arabic, startling the pair. “Stay away from this house!” he shouted as he sent water jetting through the hedge.
It all happened so fast. The older assassin barely had time to realize what his subordinate had done, when they were both doused and his sidekick began to sputter, humiliated and enraged all over again. “Imbecile!” the younger man roared through the hedge, only to be answered by another shower lofting over the barrier. His boss grabbed his wet sleeve and yanked him away, spitting an order. They cut their losses and beat a semi-dignified retreat.
Chapter 16
But a night’s sleep only made things worse. Perhaps it was just jet lag, but Angelica couldn’t help but feel that there was a difference between taunting authorities from the safety of cafés, bookshops and universities in a succession of countries, and provoking the same ones on their home turf day in and day out, for months. There was also something unsettling about hearing Manny natter on optimistically about unleashing a surrealistic revolution in a place as resistant to Uncle Remus’s jive or Uncle Walt’s body electric as a tense corner of the Arab world. Thank God their first outing was going to be one of their oldest rituals and ways of touching base in strange cities, which was to pay homage to whatever examples of Manny’s totem animals lived in the local zoo. She knew from experience that the menagerie was likely to be a run-down colonial relic built as a haven for by-gone Europeans, but she still looked forward to a reprieve before she had to expose herself again, as a western woman, to lewd harassment and misogynist glares or face the implications of being viewed as a conspirator.
The road to the zoo was a four-lane highway with crumbling curbs down a colonnade of ragged palms growing out of dusty rhododendrons. Angelica kept seeing glints from a stagnant lagoon without sails on the far side while smelling smoke from smoldering stubble and trash heaps in a shuffle of fields and huts on the other. After a while, the reek of pollution and swamp gas became so over-powering that they had to raise the windows and depend on the air conditioning to filter the air somewhat – not that it really helped. The closer they got into town, where Hamedi’s car tailgated them through increasingly dense traffic and the odor grew even worse under flare stacks, the more she worried that this wasn’t going to be like their other trips to Africa, when Manny had alighted just long enough to provoke everyone, before flitting out of harm’s reach. Not only were they “stationed” here now, but they were stuck with watchers like the pair, who were practically playing bumper car with them. Pulling down the sun visor to look into the mirror, she spied them back there with such a shudder and jolt that she flipped it back against the ceiling, looked straight ahead, and recoiled from her depressive thoughts – splitting her mind in two, as it were, so she could continue to be a sounding board for Manny’s sallies while standing watch over them both.
Manny, on the other hand, seemed oblivious to the shadows as he prattled on about all the wonders awaiting them at the zoo. Why, it was probably the only one north of the Sahara that had a pangolin because of the difficulty of finding them enough termites. The official reason he’d postponed his pilgrimage to see the shy mammalian dragon from the dinosaur era was that paying homage to such wonders was something they’d always tried to do together. But Manny’s unspoken reason was that he wanted Angelica to be there when he put the crowning touch on his campaign to persuade his minders that he couldn’t be anything but a poet, since his tour de force was going to embrace a bevy of bards and the whole animal kingdom!
When they reached the first enclosure inside the park gates, which was for baboons, Angelica was surprised to see Manny reach in his shoulder bag full of cookies, which she thought they were taking to the Center, and extract a handful.
“I hope you’re not going to gobble those like junk food,” she warned, “after we slaved over them all night! I thought they were for readings?”
“They are – wherever we can find an audience! Look at Thoth hanging on our every word,” Manny cried, pointing out an alpha baboon who was reading their movements as carefully as a tennis player watching an adversary and positioning himself to grab their offerings. “Let’s toss him just a few since he was the gods’ scribe!”
“But won’t paper make him sick?” Angelica worried as Manny sprayed his target with the pastry envelopes.
“I don’t think the zookeepers will give him a chance to swallow a word!”
“Okay, that’s enough,” Angelica cut in as the maned monkey, who had hogged the manna, slipped a couple of tidbits in his maw. “Let’s not be profligate. Maybe I should carry the bag from now on.” The baboon paused in his chewing as he sensed something amiss, diffidently extracted first one mangled snippet, then another, and pondered the cryptic wads, before tossing them aside; whereupon his subordinates, who were wheeling around him, squealing in protest, fell upon, tasted and spat out the morsels just as a pair of men ran into the enclosure.
“Well, what do you know – the reading committee’s arrived!” Manny exclaimed.
“So that’s what you’re up to! Teasing them again!”
“Just spreading the good word. Perhaps the only way to get your words to Olympus is to cast pearls before swine - oops, monkeys. My, what do we have here? That’s better: Porky Pine Pig!” he enthused, showering an African ground porcupine with cookies, three of which got snagged in the giant rodent’s quills. “Words from on-high!” he cawed.
“How could you,” she guffawed. “He’ll never get them off!”
“Oh, but he will – in about a second. Here come the auxiliaries again!” And sure enough a boy burst into the pen and began sweeping the beast’s back with a broom. “Look at how many readers we have already,” Manny nodded back to the monkey house, where their tails were orchestrating keepers into fetching pearls of wisdom from the cage, before they could be eaten. As soon as one of the keepers threw Hamedi, who was standing on the edge of the enclosure, the first trophies, he smashed one and found his first uncoded text! “Oh, my God, he’s found the Rosetta Stone! It’s time for the lions,” Manny suggested, leading the way to their pit.
“No, you wouldn’t!”
“Why stop now?” he asked, throwing cookies into the heart of a dozing pride. What a lark! Angelica couldn’t help but laugh in amazement at the havoc he was wreaking. Manny was right, he had the world by its tail. The government just didn't know what it was up against - the unleashed power of imagination itself! Its agents would be run ragged being so paranoid, literal-minded and fatuous, unless they all came to their senses and realized he was innocent.
“They’re too funny, you’re too funny,” she cried, as she clung to him. “But what if they get mad? Shouldn’t we stop while we’re ahead?”
“I intend to. There’s a method to my madness. The next step is to ask the Cultural Minister to requisition all the snippets and be my judge! You remember our friend Jaffar Shakir – that quiet little man we met at the Lagos and Addis festivals? The one who writes Alexandrine verses about the sea and ruins and yearning? He darn well knows I’m the real thing – a poet to the bone like him. He’ll see through the lunacy immediately and vouch for me just like I would for him.”
“Oh, I hope so! I didn’t realize you had a friend so high up. It would be so wonderful if he could persuade the government to leave you alone and even laugh at your antics! Oh, my God, they’re going to get eaten!” she squealed with mixed glee and terror as a posse actually entered the lion den with pitchforks, making the felines swirl and snarl as they backed towards the wall at their feet. It was crazy, but, maybe by going too far, Manny had actually pulled the trick.
“I can’t wait to share this with a real poet!” he exclaimed, taking a photograph of the absurd hunt as a lioness with a twitching tail crouched as if she were going to spring.