Heat of Passion

by Harold Robbins

  “You can throw in nasty pests, terrible diseases, insufferable living conditions—hell, I am going to pack!”

  The two women laughed.

  “It’s discouraging,” Marni said. “I need a bath, a cool glass of lemonade, dinner with a man who doesn’t smell as badly as I do, maybe a few tender moments with him between pure white sheets—”

  “You can have my vibrator!”

  “I’d prefer your husband next time he’s in town.”

  “He’s never around, that’s why I have a vibrator.”

  Michele’s husband was a helicopter pilot who ferried aid workers and supplies into isolated areas.

  Marni wiped the sweat on the back of her neck with a handkerchief. “It was so different where I went to school in California. Reading about the misery in books, watching documentaries, talking to people who’d been in the field, it just doesn’t prepare you for the reality.”

  Michele nodded. “You never know how terrible things really are until you see a child with AIDS being eaten alive by flies, or having to teach someone whose arms have been cut off how to wipe themselves after they’ve gone to the toilet. But you’re being too hard on yourself. You’ve only been in Angola a couple months and you already have a reputation for getting the job done and refusing to budge, whether you’re up against lazy workers or corrupt officials.”

  “What amazes me is that we all continue to function in the face of threats and chaos. You just told me that some of our coworkers were murdered a few hundred miles from here. But other than shedding some tears if we knew any of them personally, we will continue to function and get the job done.”

  “Qui, we will.”

  “And you and your husband have been doing this for years.”

  “We will die in the saddle, as your cowboys say. Hopefully, not for many years from now. My only wish is that when the time comes, my husband and I will go at the same time. Very quickly.”

  “God, don’t talk like that.” Marni shivered.

  “It’s a fact of life. Anything can happen when you’re working in a war zone.”

  “Sometimes it seems so hopeless. Distributing food, getting people vaccinated, you see instant results. I wonder if we’re having any effect at all, if it’s possible to have an effect in this sea of misery.”

  “Ce n’est pas la mer á boire.”

  “It’s not the sea to drink,” Marni said, translating Michele’s favorite expression. “Okay, it’s not impossible, but maybe we’ll drown in human misery.”

  Michele squeezed her arm. “You’re so sensitive, so idealistic, maybe too much. You came here to save the people of Angola but you found out a lot of people aren’t worth saving because they’re part of the problem. And the rest of them are so downtrodden, so broken and beaten, they can’t help themselves and often become part of the problem because they bite the hand that feeds them.

  “My skin is thicker,” Michele went on, “my ideals are buried deeper. I’ve been at this for over twenty years, in the Congo, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Bosnia and the Palestinian camps. I know I can’t save the world and I don’t try, I just help as many people as I can today and hope that it makes a difference in the long run. Besides, the job pays well.”

  That got Marni laughing so hard she started coughing. “The pay stinks,” she gasped, “and the working conditions suck, but I think you’re one part Mother Theresa, one part Joan of Arc, and a little Simon Legree.”

  “Simon Legree?”

  “A plantation overseer, literally a slave driver. He’s a character in a book. Now teach me some more of that Umbundu profanity that gets the workers to shut up and do their jobs.”

  Just then an aid worker, a woman Marni’s age, waved and yelled as she came by before walking out to the road.

  “I see Rita is wearing her uniform of the day,” Marni said.

  Michele glanced at the woman’s miniskirt with distaste. “I’ve met a Rita at every aid mission I’ve been on. There’s always one who’ll wear short-shorts and a tank top without a bra underneath to the marketplace, confirming to Third World men, all of whom are pigs when it comes to women, that Western women are all whores.”

  “She gave me graphic details about the male parts of the Angolan military commander she’s sleeping with. She calls it a black mamba. I’ve seen the commander driving around with a couple local whores in his jeep. I’d say Rita’s risking it.”

  “I always wonder if it’s really a sex thing when I see a European woman like Rita jump into bed with the local men in countries I’ve worked, from the Balkans to the Far East. I suspect the men back home never gave Rita the respect she needs—probably because she was too easy. The Ritas of this world look for fulfillment in a man’s bed. It’s not there, regardless of who the man is. And here, she’s putting her whole life on the line.”

  Marni shook her head. “It’s pretty sad, but she’ll learn there are two things you can’t get vaccinated for—stupidity and AIDS.”

  After the truck was unloaded, Marni went into the long tent where the food and medical supplies were stored before distribution. With Venacio, her Angolan assistant, she began a count. Auditing aid was half her job, the easy part. Trying to get as much of it as possible into the hands of the people it was intended for was the tough part. Food and medicine would mysteriously disappear from the warehouse overnight, trucks would arrive with less aid than it had started with. Even worse than common thievery was the blatant theft by corrupt government officials, rebel warlords, black marketeers, and gangs of hijackers.

  Countries are like people, Marni thought. They develop personalities and emotional distress, just as individuals do. They can go schizo like Germany did under the Nazis, paranoid like Russia under Stalin. Angola she saw as a beaten child, whipped and starved, raped and tortured, until it no longer knew what a normal existence was. Traumatized, the whole country acted psychotic, often hurting itself and those who were extending a helping hand.

  They should audit the misery, she thought, and gather it up and shove it down the throats of the companies and people feeding the war frenzy with oil and diamond dollars. Starvation, disease, deaths and injuries from bombing, shelling, and land mines, looting, hijackings, ambushes, rape, kidnapping, murder—it would be an audit of hell, she thought.

  “Menina,” Venacio said, addressing her with the Portuguese word for Miss, “I just counted eighty-six bags of wheat and you wrote down rice.”

  “I’m sorry, my mind is somewhere else.”

  “Your mind is so full of your many duties, you don’t have room for your own thoughts.” He took the clipboard from her. “Go for a walk, go for a dinner and movie.”

  They both laughed at the joke.

  “Okay, I do need some air. Finish up the counts. When you tell me how much was stolen between the airport in Luanda and here, lie to me so that I can feel better about the world.”

  She left the tent and the small UN encampment, walking along the dirt road that ran beside the river. Women offered food—oranges, ears of corn, sticky balls of yam—and polluted drinks to the drivers of the trucks and busses using the road. She knew that some of the women offered more carnal pleasures, too, and that AIDS was not just a deadly disease to these people, but a fact of life. So was poverty, crime, and murderous warfare.

  Yet so many of these women had easy smiles and took delight at the littlest things. And often she saw acts of generosity and kindness. The only noticeable malice was in the arrogance of the men who carried automatic weapons and acted more like bandits than soldiers.

  Under the shade of an eucalyptus tree, she paused and watched garimpeiros working the river for diamonds. An altercation broke out between river miners as one man used a piece of wood to drive back others from what he considered to be his claim. There was more shouting and splashing than bloodletting.

  She turned away from the dispute and watched a boy helping his father search for diamonds in a deeper part of the river. The older man dove down with a bucket in hand and a pla
stic tube in his mouth. The boy pumped on a bellows connected to the tube, sending air into the line. Or at least, that was the theory—the driver came up frequently, gasping for air, so she wondered how well the improvised air line worked.

  But for the grace of God go any of us, she thought. She had picked up the expression from her grandfather, Jack Norton, on her mother’s side, a man she had only met as an adult. He used it whenever he saw someone less fortunate than himself.

  “An accident of birth,” she said aloud to herself. That’s what kept her from being one of the women in the river hunting for diamonds in the murky water with a baby strapped to her back, or lying on her back in a shanty along the road, earning food money for her children by satisfying the sexual needs of a truck driver—while she slowly and painfully died from disease. She thanked God she wasn’t one of them.

  She turned from the river and leaned against the tree, looking down the row of shanties lining the dirt road. Down the road, a man vented his anger at a woman selling oranges. Probably his wife, she thought, as the man yelled at the woman. She knew enough of the language to realize it had something to do with money, probably the money the woman had collected from the sale of the fruit. Her knowledge of an Angolan tongue had not been as beneficial as she’d thought it would be. Language differed, almost from village to village.

  As Marni watched the angry man’s lips moving, she got an image of her own father. And her mother.

  She was born in San Jose, the capital of California’s Silicon Valley, an hour’s drive south of San Francisco. Her father had been an aerospace engineer who retrained himself into a computer engineer when the defense industry imploded and the computer industry exploded.

  Her father’s name was Brian. Her mother’s was Rebecca. There was a time when her mother was called Becky, but after they were married, her father insisted that her mother only be called by her proper name.

  Their marriage took place in Salt Lake City. The capital of the Mormon world.

  35

  Salt Lake City, 1961

  Jack Norton, the father of the bride, waited outside the Mormon Temple in downtown Salt Lake City. The temple was the biggest and most prestigious in the Mormon world. Jack was a lifelong Mormon, born to parents who themselves were the children of Mormon Utah pioneers. Despite his birth pedigree, he was not permitted into the temple to participate in or observe the wedding. His daughter Becky, the bride, was standing a little apart from him, with her mother, nervously awaiting the call to enter. Marital problems with his wife kept the distance between them.

  His daughter broke away from her mother and came over to Jack. She kissed him on the cheek. “I’m sorry, Daddy, I wish you could come in the temple for the ceremony.”

  “I wish I could too, only because I want to be with you and watch my baby on the most important day of her life.”

  “If you had only—”

  “That’s over with, Becky, I am what I am. I try to be a good person. If that isn’t good enough for my family and my church . . .” He hunched his shoulders. “What can I do?”

  She put her fingers to his lips. “You promised not to call me Becky.”

  “Oh, I forgot, it’s Rebecca now.”

  “Brian says nicknames are for children, that I’m a woman now.”

  Jack only smiled but he had a few opinions of his own, mostly about the dictates of his very soon-to-be son-in-law. He was more than twice Brian’s age, and hated the feeling that he had to get up and salute when the young man entered the room. Brian had that kind of personality, treating people around him like he was a Boy Scout leader and they were Cubs. Jack took it with tight jaws for the sake of his daughter.

  There was an expression about people with steel-trap minds, the implication being that, like the jagged jaws of an animal trap that clamps onto an animal’s leg and can’t be shaken off, some people latch onto ideas that they won’t budge on, no matter what others say or how wrong they are. Brian Jones was that type—about almost everything. He was locked into his view of the world. And what he saw was a sloppy world that needed its ducks to be lined up—in the order he prescribed. He was neat and orderly to an extreme. Fresh out of engineering school, he seemed to lead his life and planned to lead Jack’s daughter’s life as if he was guided by the markings on a slide rule.

  As Becky left her father to greet friends arriving for the ceremony, her mother came over to speak with Jack. She was angry and didn’t hide her feelings.

  “Do you realize what an embarrassment you are today? I don’t mind you embarrassing me, but you have humiliated your daughter because you can’t be with her in the temple on the most important day of her life.”

  “Funny thing,” Jack said, “that I can’t be with my own daughter in my own church. I don’t drink to excess, don’t smoke, haven’t killed anyone or stolen anything, I can’t think of anything of the list of sins that would make me a bad person.”

  “You know what you did, I’m not going to stand here and argue with you. And you do drink alcohol.”

  “I drink a little wine, yes. I figure that if it was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me.”

  “Oh, yes, I know, when the offering of bread and water is made in church, you told Rebecca that Jesus turned water into wine and the only miracle of Mormonism is that they managed to turn wine back to water.”

  “While you’re thinking about all my imagined sins, have you thought about the guy you’ve pushed your daughter into marriage with?”

  “Brian is a respected young man, he’s already a successful engineer.”

  “They’re a match made in hell. What Becky lacks in confidence, Brian overcompensates for with arrogance. He’s going to make her life hell and she’ll suck it all in without fighting back.”

  “I’m not going to listen to you run down a fine young man. You should be worrying about your own actions, not Brian’s.”

  She left him and joined her daughter and the friends. It was time for the ceremony.

  Jack waited outside, walking along the street to pass the time. Yes, he knew what he had done, but he wasn’t thinking about that. He was wondering what was going to become of his daughter. Brian Jones was a guy with no screws loose—he had everything bolted so hard, there was no room in his head for anything but his own tightly ratcheted-down view of the world.

  As he walked around the great temple, he thought about the Church he, his wife, and his children had been raised in.

  The Mormon religious movement began in western New York state about a hundred and fifty years earlier. During a time of intense religious revivalism in America, a twenty-two-year-old farmer’s son claimed an angel called Moroni gave him “golden plates” which contained religious revelations. The plates had remained buried for fourteen hundred years. The young man, Joseph Smith, claimed that through revelations, he translated the writing on the plates into what came to be called The Book of Mormon. According to Smith, the plates were returned to the angel.

  The Book of Mormon, which is accepted by Mormons as holy scripture in addition to the Bible, relates that a “lost” tribe of Hebrews, led by the prophet Lehi, migrated from Jerusalem to America about six hundred years before the birth of Christ, over two thousand years before Columbus stumbled onto the continent on his way to India. Since the Mormons consider the American continent to be the true land of the early Bible, in Mormon tradition, the Garden of Eden is located somewhere near the present city of Independence, Missouri.

  On the ancient American continent, the Hebrews multiplied and ultimately split into two groups: the virtuous, hardworking, industrious Nephites, and the sinful, heathen Lamanites. The Nephites prospered for some time, building great cities, and were even taught by Jesus, but eventually they were wiped out in wars with the Lamanites. Over two hundred thousand Nehphites were killed in the last great battle between the two forces.

  In the Mormon tradition, it’s believed that the Lamanites, who forgot their beliefs and turned into heathens, were the ancesto
rs of the American Indian.

  Combing elements of Jewish and Christian mysticism, the Mormon movement grew with Smith periodically pronouncing more revelations.

  One of the key points of early Mormonism was the practice of polygamy. Smith himself was reputed to have married fifty wives. He was arrested after he had the newspaper press destroyed in a town he had founded after the paper criticized him. Hostility grew against the movement and Smith and his brother were taken from the jail by a mob and murdered.

  It occurred to Jack more than once that the biggest lure of Mormonism in those days was the desire of some men to have more than one wife and the willingness of some women to be domestic slaves.

  Another of his followers, Brigham Young, led a migration to the Great Salt Lake in Utah. The Mormons prospered in the desert and Utah ultimately became the only state dominated by a particular religious sect.

  A dented, smoking VW camper-van coming down the street backfired, interrupting Jack’s thoughts. The van’s rear end was plastered with bumper stickers. One caught his eye: A CLEAN DESK IS A SIGN OF A CLUTTERED MIND.

  In terms of his new son-in-law, he considered the words prophetic.

  36

  Inside the temple, Rebecca nervously accompanied her mother and friends to a room where the marriage would be solemnized. Like her parents and the man she was marrying, she had been born and raised in the purview of the Church. While she didn’t have the intense dedication to religious matters that Brian and her mother had, she tended to be obedient with a huge desire to please. Leading her life in a way that gained approval from her mother and husband-to-be was important to her. She tended to be nervous about things, to equivocate and lack confidence. That was one of the reasons she was attracted to Brian. He was completely in charge of everything around him. From the moment they met, he was telling her what to do and how to act. Besides insisting that she be called by her proper name, he had her change her hairstyle and dress more conservatively to make her appear reserved and mature.