Northern Exposure
Page 35
“I am very happy for Hugh and Madeleine, though I wish the hell he’d get her back here.”
“Is it the Alzette woman? Marie-Claire?”
“Will you stop this, Freddy?”
“She was your first woman. I killed my first woman in 1944.”
“Drink up, Freddy. We have to go. The Central American boys are coming in the morning.”
“It didn’t trouble you to shoot her? To look into her eyes and shoot her?”
“Freddy.”
“It bothered me, with that German woman. But there were so infinitely many Abwehr about, and Admiral Canaris had ordered them to be very beastly to us, to put up a good front for the Führer. So when I discovered she had doubled. No, tripled. Well, I had no choice. I was very clumsy at it, though. All that blood during dinner …”
“You’ve told me all about it, Freddy. At least twenty times.”
“Is it because the White House won’t fire Max Diehl?”
“No.”
They both drank, then sat silent, but for Thatcher’s drumming of fingers on the table edge.
“Would you like some narcotic?”
“Bourbon is fine.”
“Look upon the bright side, William. You and the deputy made certain that the vice-president has a copy of everything. Our dear director is now a stroke patient in Pompano Beach. Canada is still Canada. Trudeau is prime minister for the third time. That wretched Sebastien is now fish food. The French have a Basque revolt in the Pyrenees on their hands. The Republicans are going to win the next election. So many happy endings. Don’t you think the Central Intelligence Agency should be ruling the world?”
Thatcher stared at the ceiling light glittering in his glass.
Mendelsohn lifted his sherry glass and peered over it, with his eerie grin. “Aren’t you glad that we do?” he said.
The beach was long, stretching west to east from hazy horizon to hazy horizon, like the beach at Capitola in California, looking south and west toward the sunset, though lapped by waters much warmer. The beach was of a very light brown sand, and steep, with several of the thickly growing dark green trees leaning outward toward the sea, whose warm waters were being pulled to the east by the tide, the warm and steady breeze from the southwest causing only the slightest ripples. The birds were screeching with the approaching night, a familiar sound.
The beach was perfectly empty. The nearest village was five or more miles distant; the coast road that wound by Lagune Aby and led on to Ghana came to within a mile of this beach, but no closer. The man and woman who had come here had left their Toyota jeep in a clearing just off that road, as they always did, and walked through the semirainforest to the ocean, as they frequently did in the hours between working time and the dark fall of night.
He sat in the sand, in khaki shorts and shirt, his feet bare and knees brought up near his chin. She had removed her pink dress and was wading into the ocean nude, swimming when she found enough depth. He watched her happily. He held no glass or bottle in his hand, no longer missing them. The sea, the sunset, the scent of the forest, and the bird sounds more than sufficed. The sight of her rising to stand hip deep in the water sufficed above all.
It is often said by white man to white man that, if one must be in Africa, it is best to be in the Ivory Coast. It has a hot but tolerable climate in the coastal lowlands, and a quite pleasant one in the broad highlands beyond. It has a stable and diverse economy based on coffee, cocoa, cotton, rice, sugar, pineapples, palm oil, bananas, fish, diamond mining, and petroleum. Three times the size of Ireland, it has only twice the population, and unlike the north of Ireland, no tribal rivalries of any political consequence. A former French colony, it is a republic that happily, voluntarily, and consistently has voted 99.99 percent for its president, a gifted philosopher, for more than twenty years of elections. The president is both wise and pragmatic, and also a good philosopher. It is often said by French-speaking black man to French-speaking black man that the Ivory Coast is the happiest of places.
She indulged herself in the warmth of the sea until it began to make her feel somewhat guilty. She rose and returned to him, striding out of the water with her long, easy gait, standing before him in the sand for a long while to let the breeze dry her.
The sun was lowering, but they lived on the outskirts of Grand Bassam, which was not far. He had been that day in the capital, Abidjan, a sprawling city of more than one million, stopping to change at home from his rumpled, tan poplin suit, the only one he now owned.
She knelt before him and pulled on her dress, then turned and leaned back against his chest, her hair fragrant in his nostrils. “I feel so clean, Toby.”
“Moi aussi, madame. Toujours, maintenant.”
“Do you mind being married to me?”
He laughed, and reached to put both of his hands on her breasts.
“Do you mind that we married as Catholics?” she said.
“It was the safest, but it has an advantage beyond that. It’s very hard to get out of Catholic marriages.”
She leaned her head back against his shoulder, and lifted her left hand to stroke his left cheek. “That telephone call finally came through,” she said. “It was from Wendy Parker, in St. Tropez. She would like to meet me sometime soon in Morocco. I suspect she has messages from my father. And money.”
“Do you want to see her?”
“Yes, very much. But not yet. Not for a couple of years, maybe. Toby. You saw somebody besides the commissioner in Abidjan.”
“Yes.”
“You saw the president.”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“He wants me to leave the game refuge, and come work for him as an advisor.”
“Doing what?”
“He didn’t exactly say. He rambled on somewhat about wanting me to help him with the development of Yamoussoukro, his home village. It has only fifteen thousand people, but I think more street lights than Abidjan. I have a different assumption, though. I think he wants me around to talk about philosophy. Every day.”
“And do what else?”
He shrugged. “Probablement, rien.”
The lowering sun caught a long series of white-capped waves out beyond the shallows, coloring them gold, then pink, then purple, then blue again.
“Does this bay have a name?” she asked.
“Yes. I’ve never asked about it though.”
“Don’t. We’ll give it our own name. We’ll call it Joyce Bay.”
“A good idea.”
“Do you suppose he would like it here?”
“I think he would prefer it in Abidjan.”
She smiled.
“Do you know enough about philosophy?”
“I know the contemporary French philosophers. Camus. Sartre. Antoine de Saint-Exupery. I have a little Kirkegaard and Aristotle I might throw in as well, in French. I know something of Fuller, but not in French.”
“Do you like the president?”
“A very intelligent and engaging man, better than some of the American presidents I’ve served under, if you will tolerate that lack of patriotism.”
She ran a hand along the golden hairs of his tanned leg. “It could be dangerous, if you worked in the palace. You’d be exposed to the diplomatic corps, and all the trouble that means. There are so many French in Abidjan.”
“Yes.”
“It could be very dangerous.”
“Yes.”
“You’re not afraid?”
“I’m afraid only that we might have to leave here.”
“We will, in a few years.”
“I don’t think that far ahead. It’s one of the joys of this freedom.”
“I don’t want to leave.”
“Are you sure?”
“Teddibly, teddibly. And more than I’ve been sure about anything.”
“And if I were to be killed? If there is a revolt in the Republique de la Côte d’Ivoire, like so many places?”
“Oh, bosh. When
you die at the age of eighty-nine like your grandfather, I will be seventy-four, just the right age to move to St. Petersburg, Florida.” She sat forward, then eased herself to the side, and lay back, pulling him down beside her.
There was the slight splash of a wave, one wandering off from the tidal course of the waters.
“Will you still carry Felicity Stuart’s ring around wherever you go?”
“Yes. Please don’t mind.”
“I try not to. Will you still cry sometimes because of her?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. She is the only part of your past you’ve brought with you.”
“She is dead.”
“Not in all ways.”
A seabird flew calling along a cresting wave.
“You are my passion, Alixe. I sometimes cry for you, when you are away, in places like Morocco. I fear you won’t come back.”
She stroked his hair. “I will always come back. I won’t go to Morocco again; not without you.”
He turned and held her close, in the sand, his chest tight against hers.
“Does it bother you that I sometimes cry? Do you think that unmanly?”
“I’ve never met a man as brave as you, or as gentle. I accept the paradox.”
Another large wave heaved ashore, the southerly breeze increasing.
“What if I told you that it wasn’t Wendy Parker who called?” she said. “That it was Hugh Laidlaw, and that he’s guessed about your move to Abidjan, and doesn’t want you to do it?”
“I would kiss you,” he said, doing so. “And I wouldn’t listen.”
“Toby. It was Hugh Laidlaw.”
She walks in beauty, like the night
of Cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellow’d to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
They spent all of that night on that beach, and they never saw Hugh Laidlaw again, which was in time pleasing to him, because there proved to be no need.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted to a great many Canadians—in and out of government—for their assistance in the preparation of this book. Though they might sharply disagree with some of the political observations and assertions herein, they contributed generously and immeasurably to my understanding and appreciation of their extraordinary and quite wonderful country.
I am also grateful to my friend and fellow author Jack Fuller, for his encouragement and counsel regarding Albert Camus and French existentialism.
No writer could ask for better editors, and friends, than Tom Dunne and Ashton Applewhite of St. Martin’s. I thank the happy fates that provided them, and also Dianne Rowe, for her help and support.
My wife, Pamela, is the person without whom none of my books would be possible. I am grateful to her as only she can know.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1983 by Michael Kilian
The last stanza of “I Dreamed That I Was Old” is from The Poems of Stanley Kunitz 1928–1978. Copyright © 1930 by Stanley Kunitz. By permission of Little Brown and Company in association with the Atlantic Monthly Press.
Cover design by Mauricio Díaz
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1923-1
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