Chapter 10: The Anvil

They left Timbuktu in the dark, three days after the break-in, by a road no one had been told they would take.

Boubacar had arranged it as one arranges a funeral procession, with a great deal of quiet and no explanations. The vehicles were loaded in the Traoré courtyard at two in the morning. They went out through the southern lanes, not the northern, and crossed the river by a ford that Ibrahima’s cousin knew, and looped back toward the Araouane road only after sunrise, from a direction that no one watching the usual gate would have expected. Julian’s field notebook and the tube of maps had traveled in Hawa’s sewing box to a neighbor’s house, and the notebook with the coordinates, as always, was against his ribs. Amina had said very little. When he asked whether she was all right, she said that she was a woman who had spent a night in a house that had been opened by a stranger, and that she would be all right when she had slept in a place that was not a house.

She had slept, for two nights, under the stars on the stony plain, with her back against a wheel. Julian had lain awake both nights and said nothing about it.

It was Issa who found the leak, and he found it, as he did most things, without comment.

It was midafternoon on the fourth day. The vehicles had stopped to rest the engines in the lee of a low rock outcrop that the guides called the Anvil, a flat-topped ledge of dark stone with a sheltered shelf beneath it, big enough to park the trucks and cook a meal out of the wind. Issa had gone around to check the lashings on the fuel truck, as he did at every stop, and he stood for a long time looking at one of the steel drums in the rear. Then he fetched Boubacar.

The drum was dry on its upper surface and stained on the underside, a dark crescent where the diesel had run down the seam and soaked into the sand. A hairline crack, a finger’s width long, ran along the weld. Boubacar crouched, and touched it, and sniffed his fingers.

“How much?”

Issa shrugged. He dipped a long stick into the bung. It came up wet to a hand’s breadth below where it should have been. “Sixty liters. Perhaps seventy.”

“Since when?”

“Since the river crossing. The drum was full.”

Boubacar was silent. He ran his thumb along the seam. The metal was rusted along most of its length, as one expected. But at one end, where the crack began, the edge was bright, as though it had flexed recently, or been struck, or flexed on a rock at the ford, or had been simply waiting for the ford to be the last thing it could stand.

“Bad weld,” said Issa.

“Yes,” said Boubacar. “Perhaps.”

He did not say what else it might be. He stood up, and looked at the horizon, and at the stain in the sand, and calculated in his head the distance to the next fuel and the weight of the load and the cost of the sixty liters that were gone. He did the sum twice, slowly. The answer was the same.

“We stay here tonight,” he said. “I will think.”

Julian understood the problem the way he understood most practical problems, a beat late and in the abstract, until Boubacar drew it for him in the sand with a stick: a line for the distance they had planned, a second, shorter line for the distance the remaining diesel would carry them, and a gap between the two that had not been there at breakfast.

“I can take us to the white-belly hill, and I can take us home,” said Boubacar. “I cannot take us to the hill, and to the next halt beyond it, and home. Not without a cache. And the cache I know is a salt-trucker’s halt, seventy kilometers east, on the track the lieutenant told us to avoid.” He tossed the stick aside. “So we must decide. And I cannot decide by looking at a hole in the sand.”

“What do you need?”

“Height. Distance. Quiet.” He gestured toward the ridge that rose a kilometer to the north, a long dark spine of ironstone. “I will take Issa, and the radio, and the maps. We will look at the ground from the top, and I will make a call to a friend who drives for the salt company, who may know whether the cache is still there. We will be back after dark, or at first light. You will stay by the vehicle.”

“Boubacar,” said Amina.

“What?”

“You said, no one walks alone.”

“I said no one walks away alone.” He regarded her, perfectly serious, and Julian had the oddest impression that he was holding something back, and had decided not to. “There are two of you. You will be together, and I will be able to see your fire from the ridge. I will keep watch, as I would anyway. Nothing will happen that I cannot see.”

“That is not what I meant.”

“I know what you meant,” said Boubacar. He shouldered the radio, and signaled to Issa, and went away up the slope at his steady, unhurried pace, a broad figure in an indigo robe against the ochre light, and did not look back.