Page 35 - Labelle Gramercy, Detective

Road Kill

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In these memoirs of an American career diplomat during and after
the Cold War, I have recorded many extraordinary occurrences in our
nation’s overseas affairs, but few remain in my mind with the
vividness of the events I am now about to relate. The incident did
not, thank God, appear in stateside newspapers, so the State
Department was able to avoid a potentially embarrassing inquiry and
consequent scandal. The isolation of Jolibana contributed to that lack
of publicity at least as much as did official reticence; I don’t think a
North American journalist sets foot in that arid landlocked African
nation but once a decade, and then only to write a “Travel and
Leisure” piece on the romance of thousands of square miles of
savannah inexorably desiccating into desert every year.
It was, however, that very isolation and desolation which drew an
unusually diverse cast of characters into the foreign community of
Falidougou, the capital of Jolibana. Years of drought and decades of
infrastructural degeneration had brought an endless stream of experts
and consultants from abroad, flush with millions of dollars and
grandiose development schemes. Few of these projects, regardless of
scale, were appropriate to local conditions, and were doomed to
failure—but not before Jolibanan officials had skimmed a healthy
percentage of the allocated funds for their own uses. An entire
suburb of half-built villas for the visiting dispensers of useful cash
and useless technology sprang up on the northeastern edge of
Falidougou, each progressing toward completion at a rate
commensurate with the arrival of foreign money in the pockets of the
property owners, all of whom were part of the same military-
bureaucratic complex.
Several European countries felt the need to donate resources,
impelled in most cases by genuine concern for the ecological disaster
grinding the lives of poor Africans in the Sahel. One could almost
predict, oddly enough, that the smaller participants in this quixotic
venture (like the Dutch or the English) would have better success
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