Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 (16 page)

           
He remembered. He remembered that
body from before, when he’d first seen it, slender and muscular with its
bathing suit bands, when all of that beauty and strength had been only for
him,
to enclose and engulf
him.
He had been away from women so long
that the first look of her had been like the jolt of a drug, a sudden
hollowness in his stomach as though the sight of Helga had burned him empty,
seared him, and left him trembling but pure. Touching her, smelling her,
pushing into her...

           
But not now: “Wake
up!
Don’t spoil it all!”

           
“I’m awake, I’m awake.” He struggled
upward, mind reeling, and looked around the small cabin in the amber light for
his clothes.

           
She stood over him, washing her
hands. “I’m sorry, Kwan,” she said. “I don’t blame you, we both fell asleep,
but you have to hurry.”

           
“Yes. Yes.” He’d had yet another
drink with her in this room, and then perhaps an hour’s sleep; brain and hands
were equally numb, thick, uncertain. But he got into his clothes, and she
peeked out the slightly open door at the corridor, and said, “It’s all right.”

           
They pressed together for just a
moment in the doorway, she still naked, his left hand sliding down the
wonderful slope of her spine. This body...

           
She saw it in his eyes, and
responded, her own eyes gleaming, mouth softening. But then she shook her head.
“I’ll see you tomorrow night,” she murmured.

           
“Till then,” he whispered, knowing
he would never see her again, and had to bite the inside of his cheeks to force
back the tears. He had never felt so cheated, so depressed, so sorry for
himself in his life. This was what he was
supposed
to have. An easy life, lovely women, the rewards of his class and education and
looks and brains. She gently pushed him out, and shut the door.

           
What have I sacrificed, to become a
creature of politics? But at the same time he knew, he knew even now, that all
the rest of it could never be more than joy for the moment, that he
was
a creature of politics, that his
devotion to the democratic cause was as intense as his craving for Helga’s body
but more lasting, that a sacrifice wasn’t something you did to prove your
worthiness but something that was done to you as an inevitable result of your
commitment. There would be Helgas and Helgas, there would always be Helgas.
Would there ever again be a chance for him to help break the stranglehold of
the ancient murderers?

           
Stumbling along the endless
corridors—but wider up here and better illuminated—Kwan realized he was drunk
and lost and probably in a great deal of trouble. If he didn’t find his way
back, if he wasn’t in his position at that deep sink by eight in the morning,
he would have done the worst thing he could do: he would have attracted their
attention. The ship’s officers would have cause to study his papers, to study
him,
to learn about him, to decide
whether to turn him over to the regime of the ancient murderers or merely boot
him off the ship in some other hellhole, nearly as bad.

           
“Outside,” he told himself. If he
could find the deck, the clear air should clear his head, and then he would
find the
right
deck, the promenade,
and the ladder. That it was the ladder down to hell wasn’t important; what was
important was that he find it and use it.

           
He did soon stumble across a
bulkhead door leading to the deck, but he was wrong about the outside air
making him less drunk; in fact, it seemed to make him drunker than before. He
reeled to the railing and clung there a few moments while the world looped and
swung around him, wondering if he would throw up.

           
No; not quite. At last he could lift
himself and look around and decide which way was aft. He went that way,
staggering, alone on the deck, the moon now high above him to the left and
ahead, throwing his shadow back at a long narrow angle diagonally across the
deck behind him.

           
He was already on the promenade
deck, which he discovered when he came finally to the rounded stern, and there
below him, gleaming palely in the moonlight, was his own empty oval deck. And
between here and there, shimmering and seeming to move in the moon’s bright but
uncertain light, were the ladder rungs.

           
He had to go over the rail. Somehow,
he had to attach himself, first his feet and then his hands, to those wet metal
rungs, and then descend them, as they swayed back and forth with the ship’s
progress, in the deceptive moonlight, with his head full of cotton batting and
his arms and legs as uncertain as stuffed toys. But he had to do it; no choice.

           
He began. Eyesight in and out of
focus, fingers made of wood, he bent to duck beneath the railing, and a voice
in perfect Mandarin said, with some shock,
^cc
Wait a minute! What do
you think you’re doing there!
¹
”

           
So startled he nearly fell
overboard, Kwan managed to fall the other way instead, landed painfully on his
hipbone on the deck, and stared up at a short, skinny, bald Chinese man dressed
as a room steward, who pointed over the side and severely said, “Are you trying
to get down there? You’ll never do it.” Amazed to hear Mandarin at this time in
this place, but drunk enough to answer literally, Kwan said, “I have to.”
^cc
Where
are you from, the kitchen? Snuck up here, did you?” The steward smirked,
letting Kwan know he was a naughty boy but the steward didn’t really mind.
^cc
Well,
you’ll never get down there,” he said. “Believe me, you’ll miss a rung, you’ll
go overboard, you’ll drown out in the sea, nobody will even see you go.”

           
“You’ll see me,” Kwan objected, with
drunken clarity.

           
“Never mind me,” the steward said,
being severe again. “You’re too important to lose like this.”

           
Kwan stared, almost shocked into
sobriety. “You recognize me?”

           
“Yes, of course.” The steward
reached down to grasp Kwan’s arm and yank him upright, surprisingly strong for
such a little man.

           
“You have a role to play,” he said.
“Come with me.”

           
“Where?”

           
“A safer way,” the little man said,
and led Kwan inside, and down one flight of carpeted stairs and along another
corridor to another door. “You can’t use this ever again,” he caudoned Kwan.
“Normally it’s locked.”

           
‘Thank you,” Kwan said. “Thank you.”
Because he understood through his fog that the litde man had saved his life.

           
“Yes, yes,” the litde man said,
gesturing Kwan through the doorway. “Just be more careful from now on,” he
said, as testy as though Kwan were his personal responsibility.

           
Teetering but safe, Kwan made his
way down the steep stairs to the kitchens, and along the yellow corridor to his
room and his bunk.

           
And next day, at the sink, did he
pay for it.

           
The excitement boiling within her
was so great when she actually set foot on the airplane that she wobbled on her
new shoes and smiled like a stupid up-country child at the stewardess, who
offered a more professional smile as she reached for Pami’s boarding pass;
studied it; returned it: “Just down this aisle, in the fourth cabin.”

           
“Thank you .” The words came out a
whisper. Her clogged throat, full of emotion, wouldn’t even make words. But it
didn’t matter; the stewardess’s attention was already on the next passenger.

           
Each person has a special seat. Pami
understood that, but wasn’t sure just how each person
found
his special seat. She wandered down the aisle, carrying her
new large plastic purse, past people stowing luggage and removing coats and
moving back and forth, and when she came to another uniformed stewardess she
mutely extended the boarding pass. “Next cabin,” the woman said, pointing. “On
your right.”

           
Nothing to do but keep going
forward. Past the next partition—so probably into the next “cabin”—she went,
her heart fluttering, her eyes panic-stricken with the problem of finding the
right seat but her mouth still uncontrollably beaming, showing her poor teeth.
Arrived in the right cabin, she just stood there in the narrow aisle, bag in
one hand and boarding pass in the other, and waited. People pushed past her,
unswervingly drawn to their own seats, and she began to hope that eventually
there would only be one unoccupied place left along the right here, and it
would be hers.

           
I’m going away, she thought, and smiled
so hard her cheeks hurt. I’m going away. I’m flying.

           
The second stewardess reappeared,
looked at Pami, assessed the situation, and soothingly said, “Having trouble
finding your seat? May I see your boarding pass?”

           
Pami showed it. She felt like a
litde girl handing a flower to her mama.

           
“Oh, yes, you’re right here,” the
stewardess said, returning the pass and gendy touching Pami’s elbow to move her
on down the aisle. “The middle seat right there, next to that gendeman.”

           
Pami’s heart leaped when she saw the
blond man in the aisle seat. He looked so like the Danish man! But of course he
wasn’t, he couldn’t be, and when the man looked up she saw that he was probably
twenty years younger than the Danish man, and was in much better physical
condition.

           
Oh, could he be the Danish man’s
son? That would be so bad, so bad...

           
But then the man smiled and got to his
feet, saying, “This seat yours?” and he was absolutely an American. And he
didn’t really look like the Danish man at all. Just the blond hair and the
smooth white face, that’s all, and being tall and big-shouldered.

           
Pami took her place, between the
blond man on the aisle and a small dark man in a turban in the window seat, and
the stewardess went away, satisfied. Pami sat with knees together, plastic bag
clutched in her arms, looking straight ahead, and after a minute the blond man
said, “Excuse me, but they’ll want you to put your seat belt on.”

           
“What?”

           
He repeated the statement, then
showed her how to fasten the seat belt, demonstrating by unfastening and
refastening his own. She watched carefully, found the ends of the two straps
somewhere beneath herself, and clicked them together. But apparendy a huge fat
person had sat in this seat last; laughing, the blond man showed her how to
tighten the belt. Doing so, she confessed, “I never been in a plane before.”

           
“Don
^’
t worry, your part
is easy,” he assured her. “The pilot has the tough job,”

           
He was so pleasant and calm that she
began to be calm herself. It didn’t even bother her too much when the
stewardess came by again and said she couldn’t keep her bag on her lap during
takeoff, but had to put it on the floor under the seat in front of her. She did
it because she had to, but she kept her eyes and one foot on the bag, because
it contained sixty dollars in green American bills, and eight hundred dollars
in traveler’s checks, all that was left of the Danish man’s money.

           
The three weeks since the talk on
the roof had been frightening, bewildering, exhilarating. At every step, she
was unsure what she was about, afraid she’d be caught somehow, that by actually
doing something with the Danish man’s money instead of keeping it as a kind of
fetish, a magic keepsake, the law would find out and suddenly throw her in jail
for murder. She was scared the whole time, every step of the way, but after
that talk on the roof she’d known she had to make the try, she couldn’t just go
on living as before.

           
I don’t want to kill myself, she
kept telling herself during that time. I know I won’t live many more years
anyway, but I want them, I want every day I got coming. I don’t want my life to
get so bad I’ll want to throw it away.

           
So she had to make the attempt. She
had to at least try. And the thing was, every place she went, to a dress store,
or a suitcase store, or a bank, or the American embassy on
Wabera Street
, everywhere, somebody always turned up that
was helpful, that knew the ropes and could give her advice or keep her from
making stupid up-country mistakes. It was as though somebody was watching over
her, holding her hand as she went about doing all these things. She believed in
the spirits of the air and the spirits of the water and the spirits of the
trees, and one of these spirits must be near her, protecting her, that’s what
it had to be. Maybe the Danish man had been a very evil man, and when she
killed him she made a spirit happy, and it was repaying her. Or maybe some
relative from home had died and was now a spirit, and was seeing the world
through her.
Something
was with her
now on her journey through life, something that had never been there before.
She could feel it.

           
When the plane began to move, she
became extremely nervous and felt she had to relieve herself right away, but
she was hemmed in by the blond man and the man with the turban, and the seat
belt was around her middle, and nobody was supposed to stand up in the airplane
at this time, and she was still afraid of drawing attention to herself. She clenched
all her muscles, she held everything in, and the plane moved, stopped, moved,
stopped, moved, rushed, and
took off!
Openmouthed, she stared past the sullen-looking man in the turban and watched
the tan ground fall away, and then saw nothing but sky. “Ohhhh,” she said, and
lost her nervousness, and didn’t have to relieve herself any more.

           
After a while, wonderful food was
brought around, a separate tray for everybody. Far too much food for Pami to
eat; she did her best, and then put in her bag the cake wrapped in clear
plastic. Then she napped a litde while, coming down off the high of three weeks
of tension, and when she woke up, feeling a little stiff and cramped, there was
a movie starting to be shown on the front wall of the cabin. It was called
Angels Unawares,
and you could buy
earphones to listen to it, but Pami didn’t need to listen to it. She watched
the people move on the wall, and dozed, and felt
Kenya
fall away behind her. All up over
Africa
the plane would fly, and sail high above
the
Mediterranean
Sea
, and soar over
France
, and glide, and turn, and come down at
Heathrow
Airport
in
London
in
England
. There she would get on another plane that
would take her over the
Atlantic Ocean
to
New
York City
. Great huge strides across the world!

           
The movie ended, and she slept some
more, and awoke because something was wrong. Something tense was in the air,
near her. She looked around, tasting the badness in her mouth, and beside her
the blond man was frowning, gripping the armrests, looking surprised and angry.
“So that’s it,” he said.

           
Pami looked up at him like a mouse
peering out of a grainsack. “What? Mister?”

           
He didn’t answer; he was waiting for
something. She waited, too, and suddenly from somewhere near the front of the
plane came a burst of screams, men and women screaming. Wideeyed, Pami cowered
in her seat. The screams stopped abrupdy, as though a switch had been turned
off, and then a voice came over the loudspeaker:

           
“Ladies and gendemen, this is
Captain Cathcart again. I’m instructed to inform you that this aircraft is now
in the control of representatives of the International League of the Oppressed.
I’m instructed to inform you that all passengers should remain quiedy in their
seats and no harm will befall them.”

           
The pilot’s voice went on, sounding
flat, all emotion rigidly suppressed, and Pami saw the man come striding down
the aisle. His head and face were wrapped in an olive-and-black- patterned
scarf, and he wore dark sunglasses as well. He was dressed in boots and blue
jeans and a black shirt and a brown leather jacket, and he carried a machine
pistol. He looked exacdy like the photos on the magazine covers, showing the
terrorists.

           
The pilot went on with two or three
more sentences of what he had been instructed to say, and the terrorist came
down the aisle and stopped next to the blond man. Ignoring the blond man,
holding the machine pistol with its barrel aimed upward, he pointed with his
other hand at Pami and said, “You come with me.”

           
Pami shrank back into the seat,
smaller and smaller. The blond man, sounding very strong, said, “You can’t have
her.”

           
The terrorist looked at him with
scorn: “Do you know who I am?”

           
“I know what you are,” the blond man
said.