Dirty Wars and Polished Silver by Lynda Schuster

Author:Lynda Schuster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2017-07-18T04:00:00+00:00

Credit 9

CHAPTER EIGHT

LIBERIA, 1989

Five days before our wedding, I’m obsessing over last minute preparations when Dennis calls from the embassy. We talk about the party, then he adds, “Oh yeah, and about a hundred rebels apparently crossed the border from the Ivory Coast a day or two ago, killing some customs officials.” Normally something like this would, at the very least, prick up my ears. But we’ve been here for a few months, and I know enough about the geography to shrug off the incident—the obvious tragedy of the deaths notwithstanding. We’re in Monrovia, on the coast; the incursion occurred upcountry, in an impossibly remote area. Figuring out the number of chicken breasts for the wedding dinner seems more pressing at the moment.

In the evening, though, when Dennis returns from the embassy, he tells me a second rebel group also entered Monrovia itself. This gets my attention. The conspirators, wearing new blue sneakers to identify themselves, had arranged to meet at the downtown army barracks where disaffected officers were to give them guns and ammunition to attack the president in the Executive Mansion. A potential defector must have tipped off his superior: loyal soldiers were waiting in the market at the appointed time and arrested twenty men sporting blue shoes.

“Were they suede?” I ask.

“I don’t understand,” says Dennis.

“The shoes. Were they blue suede shoes?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“It’s a joke, Jett. So is this serious?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“I don’t know.”

“Seems pretty amateurish to me.”

“Lynda,” Dennis says slowly, as though I’m a non-native English speaker, “the government isn’t saying anything, so it’s hard to tell what exactly is happening.”

It’s remarkable how the rest of the world ceases to be important when you’re getting married, how willing you are to gloss over events that might otherwise trigger alarms, to accept explanations that would normally set you howling —just so you can get back to focusing on what truly matters. Like whether to wear nylons in the sweltering tropical heat. Or if the whalebone-ish thing built into the bodice of your strapless dress is really going to hold your breasts in place.

We’re getting married at our residence, which was the Dutch embassy until about a decade ago. That’s when the current president—a lowly master sergeant at the time—jumped the fence of the Executive Mansion one night and, along with some army buddies, disemboweled the then-president in his bedroom and declared himself head of state. The Dutch government found the coup d’etat rather distasteful and pulled out of the country, selling its property to the US embassy. The structure served as both chancery and residence for the ambassador who lived, as it were, above the shop. It’s ludicrously large for just two people: downstairs is a maze of former offices that we use for guests and storage; upstairs, the living and dining rooms have all the charm of airplane hangars. But there’s a wall of windows and French doors that open onto a terrace with a stunning view of the Atlantic Ocean.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.