Night Must Wait (36 page)

"There you are," Lindsey said. "Bet you could use a drink."

"Lindsey," Sandy said.

The waver in her voice snapped Lindsey out of her weariness.

"What?"

Sandy's face was shock white.

"Are you all right? Sit down," Lindsey said.

"Shit." Sandy lurched for the nearest chair.

"What's wrong? Let me see," Lindsey said, frightened by how fast Sandy responded. Sandy never was obedient.

Sandy pulled up her striped pajama leg, winced, her gray eyes dilated.

Already her left leg had swollen to the knee, puffed around two sets of purple puncture wounds. It took Lindsey a moment to realize what she saw. Not much like a leg. Horror surged in her.

"Jesus."

Lindsey ran to the closet, snatched down the first aid kit from the high shelf. When she turned, she saw Sandy lift her head with a strange look of defiance, gesturing her back, but they'd wasted time already. Too much of it. Tourniquet whipped into place, Lindsey knelt to steady her razor over the first bite. She cut and cut again, felt rather than heard the gasp that escaped Sandy. She applied the rubber suction bulb, remembering with passionate gratitude how Gilman had drilled her in this procedure so many years ago. Only then did Lindsey remember to shout for the bodyguards.

"Get Dr. Yinka—meet us at Saint Elizabeth's Hospital. Tell him snakebite—bring antivenin." When the men raced out, she looked at Sandy.

"Quit," Sandy said. "Hold up. Fucking stop. Lindsey I'm trying to tell you. It's no good, all this. I'm allergic to horse serum."

The words left her breathless. Sandy leaned back, bracing herself on the chair arms. Lindsey's bloody hands dropped. She forced her own voice past the constriction of her throat.

"No," was all that came out.

Lindsey's hands came up and clutched Sandy's arms as if she would shake her, smearing the striped cotton with lurid streaks.

Sandy drew back. "I'm not a fucking fool. Her voice cut as final and as certain as a knife. "Gilman gave me a diphtheria series long ago before we came to Nigeria, and I nearly checked out. That's how I know."

Lindsey straightened, staring at her pajama-clad friend with her thick braid of russet hair pulled over one blood-spattered shoulder. She thought of doctors, of jets to Europe, and read the answer in Sandy's wise and frightened eyes.

Sandy shook her head.

"Lindsey." She pushed to her feet. "I think it's time to get out of here. The hospital has morphine."

In the hospital room Lindsey watched Sandy's fever mount and nausea set in. Sandy vomited for hours, even after she was empty. Her lips cracked from stomach acids and her eyes suffused with blood. She began the characteristic bleeding, from nose, mouth, eyes and ears, until she could no longer even swear.

The doctors came and went, dulling the edge with morphine, holding Sandy alive with intravenous fluids. The swelling progressed, the doctors shifting the tourniquet, incising the leg repeatedly in an effort to extract poison from the engorged tissues. They put on restraints, buckled bands of canvas, explaining that she might convulse.

At last Lindsey could bear no more. She realized the doctors kept trying in order to impress her, not in hope for the patient. She could not imagine this intolerably swollen thing ever becoming Sandy again. Lindsey kicked out the professionals and watched in silence while violent muscle cramps wracked her delirious friend.

Chapter 80: Oroko

March 1969

Ibadan hospital, Western Region, Nigeria

Oroko pushed the hospital door open. The room stank. Lindsey sat a few paces from the bed, leaning against the chair back as he had never seen her lean before.

"Leave," Oroko said to Lindsey. "I can watch for you."

She shook her head. He walked over to look down at Sandy's panting shape. Seeing her like this, smelling the decay, turned the easy comfort of his own body into a sin. Her face bruised and puffed to moonlike roundness, her eyelids blackened with burst blood vessels. Her arms and legs stuck stiffly out like a doll's, and when he lifted the sheet with a delicate touch he saw how the leg had swollen until it burst the skin, gangrenous patches sloughing, seeping. The tubes hooking deep into her mouth and running from her arms, dripped and gurgled.

Oroko glanced again at Lindsey, but she had closed her eyes though she sat upright. He brought his right arm out from the side of his body, syringe ready. He bent over Sandy and kissed her once upon her hot freckled forehead. Oroko slipped the needle into her throat, his body shielding what he did from Lindsey.

"Rest well, my friend." He looked away when he felt her go limp under his hands. There came a sour taste in his mouth. He did not want to remember her like this. He left the room without glancing back.

"Madam," Oroko said, making his voice low, "you must not sit in front of the window."

"What? Oh, Oroko." Lindsey got up. The brown eyes in her face looked bewildered, but she was as ever impeccably dressed and controlled. In white, like a nun.

"I am sorry," he said.

She nodded. She came across the bedroom to her desk and sat down in the straight-backed chair.

"I have news," he said. "We have the man. They found him back in Lagos trying to buy a ticket for Madrid."

She lifted her head at that, her features seeming to sharpen in the half-light, the pure lines of a saint's profile, cut in marble.

"I could not adequately explain to myself how a large spitting cobra would have entered your home," Oroko said. "The screens and windows were closed and locked when I came on the scene, with the sole exception of your hallway, where I found the window open. There was a pillow case by the window on the inside."

"Bring him in, at once," Lindsey said, and her face was terrible.

"He is dead."

She gestured as if to say that did not matter, so Oroko went to the door and gave orders.

A guard stood in the doorway, all spit and polish, exuding a catlike pride.

"I killed him personally, Madam."

"I wish you had not," she said, and Oroko found something appalling in her look.

The guard ducked to one side. Two men came in, hauling a bloody sagging body between them. They dumped it on the carpet, face up.

Lindsey stepped forward to look.

"Oroko," she said on an indrawn breath. "You have seen this man before?"

He stared. One idea slid after another and locked in place. Sandy would have been so unbelieving.

"Yes," he said. No ifs or maybes—he had an excellent memory for faces, even after the transformations of torture and death.

"Where?"

"He came with Doctor Gilman when she first arrived at your office a week ago. Later, when the doctor departed, he awaited her outside. They conversed, then separated. She gave him money. His name is Paul."

"You have had him searched?"

"Yes." Oroko stepped to the once-proud guard and took the things from him.

"Traveling papers, an airline ticket to São Tomé via Madrid, open booking, and foreign currency."

He held out a packet of American bills.

"How much?" Lindsey asked.

"Five hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills. Taped."

She did not seem to notice when he had the body removed. Oroko stood by the door and watched her.

Chapter 81: Lindsey

March 1969

Ibadan, Western Region, Nigeria

Every time Lindsey closed her eyes, she saw Sandy. She remembered how Sandy tried to get her to go out to a bar the weekend before Wilton arrived. Lindsey said no. It wasn't safe. Oroko would have scolded them for carelessness.

A bar. The smell of beer and nuts, the pepper sauce and deep-fried chickpeas closed around her for a second—throbbing music and voices raised over it. She could see the laughing faces, hear the offers of free beer from people she didn't even know. That's what it was like the last time she went with Sandy. How long ago? God, it must've been years. Why hadn't Sandy given up asking?

She should have had Gilman handcuffed the minute she stepped on Federal Nigerian territory. Cuffed and shuffled off to some jet aimed for New York. Sent home like a bad dog. Could have saved her from herself. Could have saved Sandy.

Or would the murder plans still have gone forward? Gilman might have sent Paul on his own, primed to kill. The soiled pillowcase in the hallway near the open window told its part.

Lindsey laced her fingers together, as if the deliberate nature of the gesture would focus her thought. She'd trusted Gilman for all these years. Disliked her, found her abrasive, foolish, but still trusted her. Now a horde of questions arose.

If she'd trusted Gilman, she knew full well that Gilman hadn't trusted her. Not even in the old days, not even in little matters of truth and fiction and jest. Small things, but he who is faithful in small things will be faithful in great.

Gilman wouldn't have known that Lindsey would give her bedroom to Wilton, so this assassination was aimed at Lindsey.

How stupid. Did Gilman imagine Lindsey so powerful? All by herself? Or was it personal between them, about control and jealousy? But what poison was poured in Gilman's ears by this mercenary lover? Who knew what the slow torture of days and nights in Biafra had done to a mind that Lindsey had always found erratic and temperamental?

If she traveled back to the beginning, maybe she could see Gilman as she really was. Not the Gilman Wilton edited and pruned and presented to Lindsey, nor even the Gilman Lindsey once thought she knew. Not the bright young woman with curling gold hair and an anxious look who had run across the fields late for class at Wellesley while Lindsey laughed at her. Abruptly she recalled how Gilman had said one day, "Oh, of course we doctors
know
the world revolves around us. We have to be egomaniacs to survive our crimes."

Possibly Gilman hadn't picked a snake as the murder weapon. Maybe she'd simply paid her man and turned her back. Indeed if Lindsey had been the one bitten, antivenin might have saved her, though the statistics had never been great. But if Gilman paid Paul for Lindsey's death with Sandy's money, it scarcely mattered what means she'd told him to use. She had responsibility.

Gilman killed Sandy. By torture. Now there was no one there when Lindsey turned, no one ready with jokes or a comment filled with understanding and memory. How could she face this? She couldn't see past what was missing.

"Oroko."

"Yes, madam."

"I need orders sent East. There's a mercenary white soldier operating in the Uli area with the Fourth Commando Brigade. His name is Major Thomas Jantor. An American. Best, have him captured. Tortured. I want to know if he made Gilman try to kill me. If capture proves impossible, have him shot. I want proof of his extermination. If there are complaints or obstructions, tell the Federals that I hold proof of their trafficking with the enemy, which I will lay without hesitation before Gowon himself. I know about the cross-lines traffic and have countenanced it for my own reasons, but I can shut them down. "

Oroko nodded and was gone.

Lindsey sat on the edge of her bed in her room. Tonight, like the past two nights, she couldn't rest. Her covers sprawled tossed and twisted on the bed, the pillow damp. Lindsey felt her arms and legs throb with exhaustion, but she dismissed the thought of sleep with terror. She wrenched herself together.

She went to Wilton's room, finding the light on and the sleepy hired nurse watching her friend. Lindsey gestured to dismiss the nurse, and took the woman's place by the bedside. She looked at the knapsack lying at Wilton's side on the bed. Wilton never seemed to let go of that knapsack, bulging with a cardboard box. Lindsey wondered what it might contain.

"Wilton."

But Wilton traveled now beyond her reach, drugged. Half-lidded eyes, sagging cheeks, slack lips. A shine of saliva wet a thin trail down Wilton's chin. God, Wilton shouldn't remain in Nigeria any longer. An object of pity, derision, and jeopardy if she ever recovered enough to talk.

Wilton held secrets. Lindsey folded her hands together in her lap and considered. In any top-flight American institution, the doctors would start fishing, finding things in Wilton's memory. Too many stories. Names, deaths. No one knew, not even Oroko, what the extent of Wilton's knowledge might be.

Lindsey rose to her feet with care not to startle. Where could she safely send Wilton? She took another assessment of the drooling stupid face and shuddered.

Wilton would be better off dead. Immediately she felt shame. According to Gilman, Wilton might recover. But the night Sandy died left Wilton maimed in some deep way. Even in the long term, how could she become whole? Gilman was a sentimentalist, anyway.

There were state institutions for the hopelessly insane, where all Wilton's physical needs would be tended. In time maybe some natural healing might happen. If that transpired, Lindsey could reconsider then. Reevaluate. There would be a time for that, if it happened.

Lindsey walked to the door. By the end of the week, she'd have Wilton home-bound on a jet to the USA and safety.

She could go too. Release all that she controlled and go back to the States. Leave Sandy's death behind. Lindsey felt her stomach clench at the idea. To limp home beaten, to give her old enemy Gilman such a triumph. No. Never. Running would make it worse. She didn't want to see America again. A place of powerlessness. Of loss.

Chapter 82: Oroko

March 1969

Lagos, Western Region, Nigeria

Lindsey surprised Oroko when she spoke.

"I can't take Wilton to America myself."

She hadn't moved in over an hour, while Oroko stood by the shuttered window wishing he'd taken up smoking.

But habits betrayed. They became tipping points, something that erased the mind. If habits gave positive feelings, as he'd heard smoking did, so much the worse, so much deeper the fracture down where the roots of distraction could anchor.