Catacombs (16 page)

There was silence in the room, except for a buzz of flies around the table, the hoot of a freighter's horn in the channel. Koshar took out a platinum tin of snuff and placed a pinch of it in one cheek. Only a slightly accelerated pulse at one brown temple betrayed his fury.

"Pay him," Belov said.

Clarke, pleased with himself, turned and looked Belov in the eye.

"It's that big, is it?" he said, this time in reasonably good Russian.

Belov cocked his head a little to one side, and smiled noncommittally.

"For the work I did with the Provos," Clarke told him, "I went to school in Moscow. And as you can tell, I have an ear for language. It's the KGB, is it not? I've had some practice in identifying you gents."

"Mr. Clarke," Belov said, his smile now indicating a certain amount of favor, "there's no doubt in my mind that you're a man of rare ability."

"That's the truth," Tiernan Clarke said earnestly. He spat particles of tobacco from the tip of his tongue, then threw the soggy cheroot on the floor of the storeroom. "How about buying me a decent smoke to seal the bargain? This one's had it."

VON KREUTZEN'S SHOOTING PALACE

Bekele Big Springs, Tanzania

May 7

A
lone in a great bronze bed-ship, with dirty clouds of sail luffing around her, rocking gently and sometimes sickeningly whenever she moved a muscle, Erika Weller felt as if she were adrift on the blinding tide of the incoming sun, about to leave the confines of smoke-scarred walls and float through the windows.

But she sensed there was something different about the windows since she had last been conscious of them, as ragged frames for stars; they were no longer just empty space in the walls which admitted everything with wings, from tsetse flies to bats. Opaque glass had been installed, or something like glass, but her eyes were too vulnerable, it made her head ache to look directly at the windows.

Usually about this time, after a few minutes of growing awareness of herself and her surroundings, of lucidity and the desire to think, Erika would lose consciousness or sink back into that agreeably gray state of mind where pain seldom intruded. But this morning–or was it morning?–as she began to dim out, she writhed and gasped for air, then whined at the impact which these small efforts made on her tortured body. She realized that she was urinating, uncontrollably, in the bed.

It happened without discomfort and, despite the fact that she had no reliable sense of her own muscles, Erika felt a certain satisfaction in knowing that she was functioning humanly, normally, although in a most primitive way. Afterward she couldn't feel the wet. She clenched her thighs, flexed, and was aware of soft binding cloth.

She lifted her head and was dizzy almost at once. She bit down on her crusted, dry underlip and finally felt the pain, tasted fresh blood. The spell passed. Erika saw that she was covered to just above the knees with a drab but neatly folded blanket, then swaddled, in some wide strips of a clean absorbent material, like an infant. Her hollowed belly was bare. From what she could tell she had on nothing else but a torn white football shirt with grass stains. When she tried to touch her face she was shocked to find that she was securely tied to the frame of the bed.

She moved her body again, experimentally: The bed swayed beneath her. She rested her head, on some sort of improvised pillow, and scratched with her fingers at the surface she was lying on. Loose cloth; beneath that, a rubbery plumpness, like a raft-size air mattress.

Erika breathed deeply and raised up, head and shoulders off the bed. Springs creaked loudly. The light swarmed; her heart began to pound frighteningly. But she took a determined look around.

Not much to see. Her point of view was obscured by mosquito netting, the sails of her dreams of freedom. Sunlight speared down, as if from small chinks in the roof. The netting was splattered with guano. The bed itself was a monstrous curiosity, a bronze replica of a sailing ship, with tall masts fore and aft.

Where was she, and how had she come to be here? Erika felt suddenly demented, ablaze with the unreality of her predicament. She cried out; it was the weak petulant voice of a starving bird. Her eyes filled with tears.

When she blinked to clear her vision, turning her head again, she saw the black man beside her bed, nodding ecstatically, grinning, as if he were overjoyed to find her conscious. She was startled, but not afraid.

He was tall and standing on one foot, the other foot braced against the inside of his locked knee, a nomad's untiring stance. Her first impression was that he had scarcely enough skin to cover his bones–they seemed about to pop out everywhere. He had a pet mongoose on one shoulder and wore a Scottish tam and a tarnished old stethoscope around his neck. His face was kind. There was a lump or wen near the center of his forehead, like a mound of intuition, or an unrealized third eye.

He held up the stethoscope and waved it while hopping around in a stork-like circle. The mongoose went sinuously from one shoulder to the other, pausing to stare at Erika with its glittering eyes.

Abruptly the black man ceased celebrating, put his other foot on the floor, and padded over to the bed. He spread the netting and put four fingers on her forehead lightly, as if he were testing the heat of a griddle. He grinned to find her cool. This close she noticed how scarred he was, and how dusty. There was fine dust everywhere in his hair, on his nondescript clothes. But his hands were clean.

"No more fever," he announced. "I making you better. Me."

"Doctor?"

"I? No. At the Jo'burg mines, helping doctor." He showed the stethoscope again, shy and proud. "Many accidents. Good helper, I."

"Must–get up."

"No, no. Wait. Coming back, I." He turned and disappeared from her view.

Erika drew a tremulous breath. From outside she heard the emphatic, derisive blare of a bull elephant.

She closed her eyes and saw herself, in a panic, fighting to keep the single-engine airplane in the air over dark
miombo
woodland. Piece of cake, she heard Chips Chapman say. In her ringing ears his voice sounded so close, and comforting, that she looked up, expecting to see him in the room with her. Then despair grabbed her like a wave of the ocean and thrust her deep down into some rolling, suffocating depths. No, he wasn't here. He was there. Way back there and dying, with all of the others.

Erika smelled something hot and savory and opened her eyes again.

The black man had reappeared, minus his mongoose, and was busy by the side of the bed. Looking at his face, she made another, fever-distorted memory connection, seeing him hopping around like a maniac, a lighted torch in one hand, smoking up the walls and ceiling as he drove the bats away. The memory was so small and flickering it might have come from a month ago, or childhood.

Fear licked through her like a rasping tongue. She tried to sit up and almost knocked the bowl from her benefactor's hand.

"How–long?" she groaned, still unable to clearly speak her mind, to articulate more than a few words at a time.

"No, no."

"I was– Plane crashed. Did it?"

Nodding, he held her head up with one big hand so hardened by calluses it seemed armored, and made her drink a slightly bitter but not unappetizing broth.

"Each day I think, tonight digging hole for her. Me. But you fooling me. You want to live, so bad. Okay. Drinking more, now you be better."

"I–"

"Drink, mum. You no strong yet."

"What's–"

"Oh, digging some roots, I. Boiling them. Killing the
houma
, before it kill you."

"No more."

He put her gently down. He had brought more strips of clean cotton batting. He undid the soiled cloths between her legs, bathed her with a courteous professionalism and changed her. Erika kept her eyes closed.

"Let me up now," she said, when he had finished.

"Oh, no. Rest yourself. Two or three steps, that is all, then you falling down." His knees quaked realistically. "Same this house. She shake like anything." He chuckled.

"What is–whose house–?"

He pantomimed the aiming and shooting of a rifle. "Very old. Safaris, they coming here."

"A hunting lodge."

"Tomorrow, the next day, you will see. Getting up then."

"But I–my friends need help." She tried to plead with him, and was made aware again of her tied hands, the wrists cushioned to prevent chafing with collars of sponge rubber so old it crumbled easily.

Erika began to sob. "You don't understand. Please. Why do you have me tied like this? Untie me."

He looked wary, as if there were a threat in this request. He came back to test the bindings.

"No, mum. Not safe yet. You falling out of bed, hurting yourself."

Erika didn't believe him. She wondered, fleetingly, if she was a prisoner again, if he was other than the benefactor he seemed. But she was beginning to float, warmed and lulled by the swallows of strong broth. She saw him fading away, toward a door.

"Wait–tell me. Your name."

"
Ijumaa
," he said. "Oliver. Me."

"Oliver. And I–I'm Erika. Merci.
Mon ami
Oliver."

He grinned at the unfamiliar pronunciation of his name, dancing a little in place, delighted. Erika remembered then that
Ijumaa
was the Swahili word for Friday. She smiled wanly at him and went to sleep.

I
n her dream time she crawled through one of the Swiss-cheese walls of the Catacombs and encountered Oliver again, in a moony chamber of preserved priests. He was like a long splinter of ebony within the crystal tomb, but he looked different, forbidding, enchanted by status. She wondered again how the ancient people had achieved such a purity of preservation, without a single patchy flaw of decay–they all looked ready to breathe upon resurrection.

The wen between his eyes had enlarged and reddened. Dream time flickered and she was back in the hunting lodge, bound in the huge floating boat-bed as he came through the doorway. His third eye was a bloodstone. It seethed brilliantly as his body froze, lifelessly, upright. Within the red diamond she saw movement, like the blur of a tornado. The bloodstone flew apart and from Oliver's forehead gushed a full-sized cheetah, leaping down to join her on the bed, the journey.

They were on a river now, a river flowing backward, leaving the giant-sized icon of Oliver behind. She felt the terror of immobility. The cheetah sat in profile at her feet, weightlessly, and its jaws parted in a licking yawn. Then the head turned and the eyes, a riled orange, appraised her. She stared back in fascination and dread. Why was he displeased? And where was she going?

Her vision blurred; the face of the cheetah was enshadowed, simplified to tones of light and dark. A straitened mask, then a barred gate, then the strokes of a pictograph; a language she had labored to learn.

But now her knowledge failed her. Was it a warning, or a summons?

Her heartbeat awakened Erika. She was aware of odors, earth sounds at night, the faint husking intonation of a big cat prowling in the near dark of her room. The spoor of the animal was unmistakable, frightening. She turned her head in time to see him, high in the haunch and with dappled nape, the glowing orb of an eye as he strode through the doorway on his way out. She opened her mouth to scream but had no voice. She lay then in the chilly night of the veld with nothing closer to listen to than her heart, wracked by tremors, wondering if, when she closed her eyes again, the cheetah would return and do something terrible while she slept.

CHANVAI,

Momela Lakes, Tanzania

May 7

I
n the early afternoon Jumbe, discreetly supervised by Dr. Robeson Kumenyere, devoted an hour and a half to affairs of state. He spent much of this time on the telephone cajoling or lashing nervous members of Chama Cha Mapin-duzi, Tanzania's ruling party, and his military high command, who had allowed a section of the Tazara railroad near the southern border to be slightly damaged in an air raid. He spoke soothingly to certain other heads of African states, and to the British foreign secretary, a long-time admirer. He was, repeatedly, reassuring about the state of his health.

When the telephone link between Chanvai and the seat of parliament in Dodoma failed, almost a daily occurrence, Jumbe dictated a memo rejecting a "strongly worded protest" from Pretoria in response to an affirmation of hostility and call to arms quoted in the
Tanzania Daily Mail
and subsequently picked up by the world news services. The remainder of his time he allotted to a delegation of Scandinavian bankers who had waited at Chanvai for two days to see him. Jumbe had begun to tremble from exertion, but he calmly told the bankers that Tanzania would rebound from the effects of the long drought and the expensive military "police action," and would resume interest payments on existing loans within a year's time. He used this piece of projected good news to extract a pledge for additional millions to bolster the trouble plagued highway and port facility construction programs.

"A good day's work," Kumenyere said, when the bankers had left for the airport. He gave added support to Jumbe's hand as the president held a match to his meerschaum pipe.