Free The Lunatic Express by Carl Hoffman Page A

convoy.”
    We had another round and Fechner started to talk, to loosen up. He’d led a routine life in Switzerland, a solid middle-class citizen. Then he’d become obsessed with business books. He couldn’t put them down. And one thing stood out to him: “The most successful businesses never paid taxes!” He liked that idea. He loved it so much, in fact, that he went to an accountant and asked, “How do I make money and never again pay any taxes?” The accountant told him to start an import company in one country and an export company in another, and to live in a third. Fechner bought a motorcycle and shipped it to Durban, South Africa, and ended up on Zanzibar, where he opened a dive shop in 1983.
    He paused, sucked down half a sixteen-ounce White Cap, scanned the veranda. “This is the only place a respectable man like me can drink in Mombasa. Not seven hundred feet from here is the Casablanca. It’s got the worst prostitutes in all of Kenya!”
    On Zanzibar he became rich. “But then I lost it all! Every penny!” He laughed. “I’ve been a multimillionaire at least twice, but I have never, ever paid any taxes!” It was his life’s biggest accomplishment. For the past decade he’d been importing used food-processing equipment from Germany into Africa, mostly the Hobart brand. “They think it’s English and they pay more for it used than they would for new stuff from Korea or Japan.” Before he came to Africa he spent four years in New York City. “You know what I learned in America? Five words that transformed my business: ‘Take it or leave it.’ I learned to say those five words and they work in every business deal anywhere in the world. You must do your research, you must know your customer’s bottom line, but then you have to say those words to get the deal done.
    “Oh, the tales I could tell you!” He nodded toward an African man sitting alone, impeccably dressed in a dark blue, pinstriped suit, a leather briefcase at his feet. “Those men,” he said, “we call them ‘headhunters’ and ‘air businessmen.’ They are here looking for a mark. They have nothing but a briefcase and the clothes on their backs. You must be careful of them or they will take you. I know, because I learned the hard way.
    “And Zanzibar. You know who lives on Zanzibar? It is filled with American mafia. There are hotels there that never have guests.”
    As dusk came and went and the night got black, Fechner’s Conradian tale unfolded. Men like him lived in unlikely holes all over the world, in war zones and turbulent cities and jungle outposts. They lived remarkable lives of tremendous risk and adventure, and once they’d tasted it they couldn’t live without it. They knew it, were aware of it, reveled in it, but were also isolated, lonely, and they would always be lonely. I understood Fechner because I was a little like him. I, too, craved adventure and even risk, and loneliness was its by-product. Usually they weren’t braggarts—boastful men didn’t prosper in the twisting, labyrinthine worlds in which they dealt—but when they found an appreciative listener, their stories could spill out with the force of a gusher of oil.
    Half a dozen White Caps in, Fechner rattled me with his sadness. “I spent three years in Uganda before coming to Kenya, and those were the best three years of my life,” he said. “In Kampala I met a woman. It is the only time I have been in love. She was thirty-five, from the Rwenzori mountains. She couldn’t read or write, but she was a born trader. She knew it deep in her blood. And she was beautiful. She said, ‘Give me two thousand dollars.’ I did. She traded in charcoal, and every night she arrived with a pile of Ugandan money on my table.” As he talked I pictured the pale, overweight Fechner in the dim light of a Kampala apartment, admiring the piles of tattered, dirty banknotes, and I could almost feel his admiration and strange love for her; it was such an African