Tongues of Fire (32 page)

“Muglad?”

“That's right. Muglad. Take me to Muglad. I'll pay you. Money. Felouze. Much felouze. Just take me to Muglad.”

“Muglad?”

The wet hand touched his thigh. The man turned him over on his stomach and buggered him. Krebs was too weak to do anything about it. “You fucking goddamned shit,” he yelled, but the sounds he made were not very strong.

It hurt. When it was over he fell asleep. He slept for a long time.

He heard a car coming. Two cars. They came very close and stopped. Their engines died. A woman said something. She was speaking Arabic, but he thought he knew her voice. The man answered. Car doors opened and closed. People entered the tent.

“Oh, my God,” Gillian said.

Two soldiers carried him outside and laid him in the back of a jeep. Gillian covered him with a blanket. “Oh, God,” she said gently.

“Don't give him any money.”

“I'm sorry, I can't hear you.”

“Don't give him anything.” Through his eyelashes, through a wet smear, he saw her open her mouth to say something. “Nothing,” he repeated. She nodded.

On the way back to Muglad Gillian sat by his head. She gave him water, salt tablets, and bits of bread, and wiped his face with a damp cloth; but her voice had lost its gentleness.

“I'm sorry about the other night,” he said.

Gillian sighed. “Don't worry about it,” she said. “It happens all the time.”

He believed her.

The white door swung open. Fairweather's head poked inside the room. “Hey! What's all the fuss? You look great! Great for you, that is.” He strode briskly across the floor and hopped up on the foot of the hospital bed.

“I feel fine,” Krebs said.

“I can see that. How about a margarita?” He flipped open a briefcase and took out a large Thermos. “Wait till you taste this. It's the real thing. Hors d'âge, as they say, although they don't say it about tequila, come to think of it. Smuggled it in from Mexico myself.”

“I can't have anything alcoholic. It's dehydrating.”

“Nothing alcoholic?” Fairweather said, filling two paper cups. “How do you ever expect to get out of here?” He handed one of them to Krebs. “Drink up.”

“I really shouldn't.”

“Drink. Otherwise I'll feel deeply insulted.”

Krebs took a sip. It was horrible.

“Well? Muy bien? Right?”

“It's very good.” Krebs set the cup on the bedside table.

“I knew you'd like it. Don't worry. The worm's still inside the bottle. I checked.” Fairweather drank and shook his head in admiration. “Those Mexicans: They sure know how to have a good time.”

Krebs let his head sink into the pillow. Through the window he could see the top of an elm tree; the edges of its leaves were beginning to turn yellow. It was a perfect fall day. The sky was silvery blue and the little white cumulus clouds were in no hurry to cross it. The sun shone, but it wasn't the kind of sun that turned skin to blisters. The air wasn't full of dust, and if you were thirsty you turned a tap and water came out.

“Did you bring the files I asked for?” Krebs said.

“Got them right here.” Holding his drink carefully in one hand, Fairweather tried to manage the open briefcase with the other. Files came sliding out onto the bed. Some of them fell to the floor. “Oops,” Fairweather said, and got off the bed to pick them up. He had collected a few when he suddenly stopped. “Oh. I almost forgot: They found that jeep.”

“Where?”

“Port Sudan. Down at the docks. It had been there for a while, apparently—it was totally stripped, doors, tires, seats, engine, everything, even the license plates. But the serial number checked out.”

“Did anyone see him?”

“Who?”

“Rehv, for Christ's sake.”

Fairweather looked embarrassed. “No,” he said. “Not so far.”

“What about the boy?”

“Nothing about him either.”

“What about the Saudis?”

“They have no record of anyone entering at Jeddah or anywhere else with a U.S. passport in the name of Quentin Katz.” Krebs thought he heard a hint of challenge in Fairweather's tone.

“That doesn't mean a thing,” he said. “He could have slipped across in a dhow and landed somewhere up the coast. Keep checking with the Saudis.”

Fairweather gazed out the window. “Okay, but—”

“But what?”

“Don't get mad.”

“But what?”

“Are you sure it was him? That's all. I mean it's been a long time since you've seen him, and you've had a lot of time to think, and maybe—”

“It was him.”

“Okay, okay. Don't take it personally.”

But Krebs knew it was personal, now. He hated Isaac Rehv. He lay back on the pillow. He had to decide whether Rehv had deliberately left him to die. If he had, it meant the Jeddah story was probably true. If he hadn't, it was probably false.

“Fairweather?”

Fairweather turned from the window. “Yes?”

“I want Gillian Wells to keep looking around Muglad.”

“But Port Sudan's a thousand miles from there.”

“Just do it, Fairweather.”

“Right.”

Fairweather went away, leaving the Thermos behind. Alone, Krebs began to brood about what he had said: “Are you sure it was him?” It was not like Fairweather to come up with an idea like that by himself. It was like the office. He thought about the office. Then he thought about Rehv.

Later a doctor came to examine him. Krebs gave him the Thermos. The doctor tasted the drink. “This is the real thing,” he said. “Thanks.”

Gillian Wells reported from Muglad: “Nothing.” Krebs sent her south to the Uganda border, and later west into Darfur, where the fighting was. She found no sign of Isaac Rehv.

The day Krebs left the hospital he arranged private instruction in Arabic.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The Mahdi lay quietly in the tent. He had grown too big for the bedstead, and at least partly because of that he no longer slept as deeply as he once had. His feet hung over the end and there was barely enough room for Neimy beside him. She pressed against him, her chin, her breast, her thigh. Her skin was hotter than his; wherever they touched, pores opened and joined their bodies in a sticky bond. It did not bother him. He was used to sweat by now. It was always with him, like the beating of his heart.

He listened to the sounds of the night. Nearby a woman murmured. A child began to cough in mounting wheezy spasms that finally died away for lack of breath. Farther away a donkey brayed. They were in the south, beyond the Goz, where sometimes a leopard came in the darkness. He listened hard for nervous sounds from the animals, but there were none. The child coughed and could not stop.

He turned over and tried to sleep. It was no use. He was waiting for Bokur, who should have come back the night before. Bokur and the other western omdas who were still loyal to the remains of the central government had been called to Khartoum to talk about taxes. Even some of the tribes that were not in arms against the government had stopped paying taxes. “We pay tax,” Bokur had said. “Maybe it won't matter if I don't go.”

The Mahdi had looked at him and seen that he was afraid. But if Bokur did not go it would mean an open break with Khartoum. He was not ready for that. “Go,” he had said. Bokur had gone, taking Hurgas with him.

He stood up, lifted the tent flap, and went outside. There was a crescent moon, lying on its rounded back. It was the driest season, and the dust in the air made the moon red: a thin red smile. The child began to cough again. He followed the sound, passing several tents until he found the one with the coughing child. The coughing went on for a long time. When it was over, the child gasped for breath, then panted and finally breathed normally. The coughing came again, harsh and dry. In the tent a woman sighed. The Mahdi walked away. The hospital in Wau was still open. He would have the child taken there in the morning.

In front of his tent he lay on the ground and looked up at the red smile. A man had walked across that smile once, or had it been two men? He couldn't remember the story very well. But his father, excited, had shown him a picture to prove it: a man dressed as a machine trying to plant a metal flag on an airless rock. “It doesn't look like the moon to me,” he had said. His father had put the picture away.

The Mahdi closed his eyes. When is the time, he asked himself. When will I be ready? It had never been discussed. When the time came his father would tell him, and tell him how to do what he had to do, and say what he had to say. But his father was dead. Or he had changed his mind and gone away. Or he had never intended to return to the railway bridge, and had planned all along that his son would decide when it was time. The Mahdi imagined his father waiting, back at the cabin on Lac du Loup. Of course it would not be that cabin and that lake, but somewhere like it; chosen perhaps even before they left. He would be there now, waiting. His father was prepared to wait.

But most of the time the Mahdi thought he was dead.

A leather sandal slapped against the sole of a foot. The Mahdi looked up and saw Hurgas coming out of the shadows. Hurgas too had grown tall, but not quite as tall as he, and not nearly as broad. He rose. Hurgas saw him and started.

“What are you doing?” Hurgas whispered.

The Mahdi heard the fear in his voice, and the anger. He wondered if the fear and anger seemed stronger to him than they really were. Most people hid emotions like those from him now. Hurgas was one of the few who still showed them in his presence. “Waiting for you,” he replied. “Where's your father?”

“Where do you think?” Hurgas said bitterly. “Khartoum.” The Mahdi looked at him without saying anything. In his eyes Hurgas saw something that made him back away slightly. When he spoke again there was less rawness in his tone. “They won't let him leave.”

“What do you mean? Have they arrested him?”

“No. It's not like that. He's at the Grand Hotel. They say they want him to stay for more talk, that's all. But there's a guard outside his room, and he can't go anywhere by himself.”

“What do they want to talk to him about?”

“The same thing they talked to him about the whole time I was there.” Hurgas lowered his eyelids a little and tilted back his head. The lower half of his face disappeared in the shadows cast by his high cheekbones. “You.”

“And what does he tell them about me?”

Hurgas looked down. “That he believes.”

The Mahdi walked slowly away, past a few tents and a tethered goat standing very still. He turned. Hurgas had been watching him; now he lowered his eyes. The Mahdi went back to him.

“They must have given you a message for me.”

The corners of Hurgas's mouth rose very slightly. “They said you would know what to do.”

“What do you think that is, Hurgas?” the Mahdi asked quietly. Hurgas's thin lips parted for a moment as though he would speak, but all he did was shrug; he kept his thought inside. “You're tired, Hurgas. Go to bed.” Hurgas turned to go. “Aren't you forgetting something?” the Mahdi asked.

“What?” Hurgas said.

“What your father told you to say to me.”

After a long pause Hurgas spoke: “‘Don't go to Khartoum.' That's what he said. The fool. The stupid old fool.” Hurgas's voice rose, and broke. He walked quickly away.

“Hurgas.” But he was gone.

The Mahdi went inside the tent and lay down beside Neimy. He could not sleep. He saw Bokur's eyes silently asking him to say what he should have said: “Don't go.” But he had not been ready. He still was not ready. He lay awake until dawn. Everyone else in the camp slept. All except the coughing child.

In the morning Neimy and a few other women walked down to the water hole with large calabashes on their heads to fetch the water for the Mahdi's bath. Because the rains had been so poor the water holes had all shrunk in only a few months to shallow ponds. The Mahdi did not want to waste water on a daily bath, but he knew it was expected. Already as Neimy carried the calabashes into the tent and emptied them into the little galvanized tub he heard the gathering outside, soft talking and shuffling feet.

He stepped into the tub and sat down, his knees drawn up almost to his chin. The water from the pond was warmer than his body. Neimy cut a few chips from a block of yellow soap and began washing him. Her hands were slow and gentle.

“Hurgas came back,” she said.

“Yes.”

“But not father?”

“No.”

Her hands, slippery with soap, slid down over his shoulders and down his back. She waited for him to say more, but he was listening to the shuffling feet and the murmuring voices all around him on the other side of the matted straw walls.

“Are you worried?” Neimy asked quietly. He felt her breath on the back of his neck. Her arms circled his chest; her hands ran over his stomach and began soaping his penis and testicles. “Don't worry.”

She squeezed him and rubbed slowly, the way she knew he liked. Little waves rose on the surface of the bath water and slapped softly against the sides of the tub. The Mahdi shifted his hips slightly forward and closed his eyes. In his mind he saw his semen drifting in the water like jellyfish. “Don't,” he said. “Stop.”

Neimy had followed his thoughts. “It's all right. No one will notice. And if they did it would make them happier.” She kept rubbing.

She was probably right but to have them drinking his bath water was bad enough. He sat up and opened his eyes. “No,” he said.

Without letting go of his penis, Neimy moved around the tub. Her broad face reminded him of Bokur's. Even her breasts, now full and heavy, touching the rim of the washtub, seemed like the kind of breasts Bokur would have if he were a woman. It was the same body: old and male, not quite ugly; young and female, almost beautiful. “You don't understand,” Neimy said, rubbing harder. “They love you.”