The Guyana Contract
Copyright © 2015 by Rosalind Kilkenny McLymont
No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. The characters portrayed are the products of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to anyone living or dead is purely coincidental. Actual places and events are used fictitiously.
ISBN: 978-1-4951-5829-2
Published by The Network Journal Communications Inc.
39 Broadway, Suite 2430
New York, N.Y. 10006
www.tnj.com
First ebook edition
Cover design by:
Brian P. Walker of BW Designs
To the entering class of 1961
at The Bishops’ High School, Georgetown, Guyana.
I will eternally cherish your warm embrace.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
PROLOGUE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
EPILOGUE
About the Author
PROLOGUE
Marseille, France August 1985
Terror tore through the woman’s body as the man with ink-black eyes and boil-infested skin dug his thumbs into her shoulders and slammed her into the wall.
The back of her head struck the rough stone wall with a sharp thwack. A tornado of white-hot pain swirled behind her eyes.
Blood ran from her head in warm rivulets that tickled her neck and spread across the back of her white blouse.
She was going to die.
She knew it now, just as she knew her name.
For a few moments she tried to determine which was the worse terror. The certainty of death.
So dark. So final.
Or a slow torture at the hands of the man whose hot breath scorched her face with a fury not unlike the tornado behind her eyes.
All of a sudden she wanted to laugh.
Imagine! A sliding scale of terror. How droll!
The man saw the flash of amusement in her eyes. Wrathfully, he whipped his forearm across her throat and held it there, trapping her against the wall. His thick brown lips curled back from his teeth in a malevolent sneer as the woman fought for air.
She struggled wildly, instinct her only defense. Her fingers found the soft flesh of the man’s forearm and she sank her nails into it. Deep, until they would sink no further. Then, with all the strength she could muster, her frantic gasping suddenly transformed into an angry growl that began in the depths of her throat, she clenched her fists, ripping the flesh apart.
The man felt the fiery bite of the wound. He looked down and saw the blood. He stared at his mutilated flesh, eyes wide, disbelieving, unable to accept what they saw.
Silently, he eased the arm away from the woman’s throat and brought it toward his mouth. His movements were slow. Lethargic. To the woman, it was like watching a heroin addict on a high trying to feed himself.
The man seemed transfixed by the crater of hair and flesh and blood on his arm. He slid out his tongue and licked the wound, making a slow trail from one end of the gash to the other, pausing every now and then as if to savor the taste of his blood.
He raised his eyes to the woman’s, hooded obsidian orbs that, for the first time since he had caught her, said nothing.
The woman stared back at him, her own eyes mirroring the emptiness of his. She could breathe without a struggle now, and she sucked greedily at the air, all the while recording the glaze in his eyes and the trancelike way he drew his tongue along his bloody wound. Instinctively, she knew. He would kill her when he reached the end of his trail.
That’s when the thought crept into her head.
The thought moved cautiously, stealthily, as if it dared not startle her and make her betray its presence.
Run! Now! Right now!
It would take a few seconds for him to react, the thought said. Precious seconds. Enough to get you out into the street. Among people. To freedom. The woman blinked, but she willed her eyes to remain empty.
Someone will come to my assistance, she told herself. Surely my screaming and all the blood on my blouse will draw someone’s attention. Surely someone will notice and come to my aid.
Her heart slammed harder and faster against the walls of her chest. Her skin seemed to contract. Every nerve in her body screamed.
Go!
A bloodcurdling scream pierced the air. At that very moment, in that infinitesimal breath of time, when her mind and her body became one in rebellion against death in a nameless, fetid alley, the murderous sound tore through the air.
It was a primal sound that sprang from the man’s throat.
He had seen the faint clench of muscles at the base of her throat, the telltale twitch that gave advance warning of movement of some sort.
The man was trained to read such signs.
The woman froze. Before her mind could register what was happening, the man was slamming her against the wall again.
Again her head exploded.
The man brought up his knee with every ounce of force he could summon and jammed it into her groin.
Once. Twice.
She cried out. Her legs gave way, but she willed her strength to stay. To stand her upright.
She would die with the dignity of resistance.
She stared at him, wanting him to see the scorn in her eyes. She thought she laughed. She could not tell.
She was beginning to feel light, as though death’s imminence were filling her with air, liberating her body from its torturous bondage in the dark, foul-smelling alley into which she had fled, believing it a refuge.
She was drifting now, toward a place beyond all fear, beyond all pain. She thought she laughed. She could not tell.
She was becoming nothing. She was breaking up and floating away in tiny, formless wisps.
Up, up and awaaaay.
From way up high, she heard it.
The sharp click of a blade snapping to attention.
How well she knew that sound. The metallic carnivore made ready to sink its teeth into its prey.
Behind her eyes she saw the knife. It was the defining weapon of the man’s ancient clan. Its ivory handle, golden amber from the passage of time, was rubbed smooth and shiny by generations of loving hands.
She saw the feline upcurve of the gray-black steel.
Makes it easy to cut the heart out, the man had breathed into her ear when they had brought her back from her first escape.
H
e had caressed the knife as if it were a woman.
The second time he had started to show her how easy it was. She could not even remember the pain.
Third will be final, he had whispered then. She was nothing now.
Again she thought she laughed.
This was third now. Her third and final escape.
A bittersweet victory for the ones she had left behind.
She was almost with the wind, now. Soon she would be free. The blade would encounter nothing.
§
“Tabatha!”
I am with the wind.
“Tabatha!”
It was a whisper among the wisps. “Tabatha! Tabatha!”
The sound of her name.
A voice she knew. Voices she knew. Trying to pull her from the wind. “It’s okay, Tabatha. They can’t hurt you any more. We’re here now.”
“Stay with us, Tabatha. Dear God, please make her stay with us.”
“It’s over, Tabatha. They’ve gone. We’re here now.”
She thought she smiled. She could not tell.
1
August 20, 1986
The train from Rome pulled into Gare de Marseille Saint-Charles just after eight in the morning.
“Reveilles-toi, Mademoiselle. Nous sommes arrivées.” Wake up, Miss. We’ve arrived.
Dru felt the insistent tug on her sleeve and opened her eyes. The old woman’s face, wrinkled and smiling, was just a few inches from hers.
“Allons-y. On est là.” The woman’s voice was gentle. She peered into Dru’s eyes with amusement. Let’s go. We’re here.
Dru blinked, smiled back, and squinted into the daylight beyond the window. They had shared the compartment all the way from Rome. The woman had spent a month in a small town just outside the city with her daughter and grandchildren, and she had talked about the visit for most of the journey.
“A whole month in beautiful Italy with my beautiful grandchildren,” she sighed.
She had been visiting them every year for the past ten years, ever since her first grandchild was born. There were four of them now. Her daughter had married a rich Italian, a man twenty years older than she was.
The woman laughed. It was a full laugh that gathered itself from the bottom of her belly. “And my daughter was not that young when she married, mind you. Yes, he was old. But I had no problem with that at all. Her own father was twenty-five years older than I was. A man like that is comfortable with himself and so he can give more of himself to a woman, much more than someone your age would give.”
Of course, they wanted her to live with them. But she wouldn’t hear of it. After forty years in the shadow of her husband, now that he was gone she was having the time of her life. She owned the land on which she lived and she grew most of the food she needed. She was in excellent health. Strong, she said with pride. And she pulled up her sleeves and lifted her skirt to show off the firmness of her arms and legs.
Her friends, “those who are still on this earth,” were a short walk away from where she lived. And her other children and grandchildren came often to see her.
“Being alone is not the same as being lonely. I am very happy, mademoiselle, because I love and because I know love in return. I hope you will be happy like me in your America when you reach my age.” Her eyes shone.
Dru had listened with genuine interest, intrigued as much by the woman’s stories as by the way she moved her hands and cocked her head when she spoke, how she puckered her thin lips when her tongue kissed the roof of her mouth and made that tut-tutting sound Europeans made. Her infectious giggles.
And the shadows that scampered between the wrinkles every now and then.
Dru gazed at her, enthralled. Now there’s a woman who has lived! Then she told the woman about her own life in America, and about the journey she was making across Europe by train. The woman had reacted in a strange way, speaking in a troubled, faraway voice.
“Traveling across Europe, that is a very worthy and exciting thing to do. But I must warn you to be careful. There have always been bad people in the world, but the bad people today are so much more evil.”
She had grown silent after that, her face closed, the light in her eyes gone. Dru didn’t press her, realizing that the woman was in a private place in her past, where some awful thing refused to die, refused to stop hurting her. Neither knew when the other fell asleep.
“Merci. Merci beaucoup. J’étais en plein sommeil,” Dru said to the woman now, as she stood up and stretched. I was sound asleep.
“Pas de quoi, mademoiselle. Tu fais un long trajet. Bonne chance!” You’re welcome, Miss. Your journey is long. Good luck.
They parted company, embracing tenderly, the way two people do when they know they will never see each other again, but know, also, that at times they will recall this moment when their lives intersected.
It didn’t matter that they would not remember each other’s name. They would still see each other’s face. Still feel the delight of their time together.
§
Dru stepped onto the platform and deftly moved aside so as not to block the passengers alighting behind her. She stood still for a long moment, looking around.
Her eyes seemed to pierce every person and every object they fell on.
A smile played at the corners of her mouth, the spillover of an excitement that bubbled up from deep down inside her.
No one was there to meet her. She knew no one in Marseille. She was in a new place at a time in her life when the world was boundless and she was like a bird on a breeze with no destination.
She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, filling her lungs, expanding the breath until it billowed inside her, all the way up under her shoulder blades. Then she exhaled slowly. She, Drucilla Durane, native of East Flatbush, Caribbean capital of Brooklyn, New York, was now standing on a railway platform in one of Europe’s oldest and most famous port cities.
History books tell that Greeks founded Marseille in the sixth century B.C.; that the city had flourished since then as a center of trade. It still is a city where races collide and passions boil.
There had been times when war and destruction were as common as the sunshine in Marseille. No other city in France, Dru thought as she reflected on the city’s history, could have produced the fighting song that became the national anthem of France.
She imagined the five hundred volunteers during the French Revolution setting out from Marseille to Paris to bring down the monarchy. She could almost hear their voices, deep and resonant, rousing their compatriots along the way to revolutionary glory with the song known today as “La Marseillaise.”
Americans call Marseille “the New Orleans of France.” Never having been to New Orleans, Dru could not draw all the parallels. She knew that both were port cities, that both were steeped in French history, and that in both blazed the red-hot soul of the Creole.
And here she was now, in this very city.
She yearned to know what it was like, being here. She wanted each of her senses to communicate to her the differences between here and Brooklyn. And between here and Madrid. And Cádiz, and Rome, and Florence, and Venice.
She wanted to distinguish its scents and its sounds. The timbre of its voices. The fall of its feet. The touch of its air on her skin. The taste of its spices.
She recalled the words of the writer Alexandre Dumas, scion of a French marquis and an African slave from Haiti. Dumas had written that Marseille was “the meeting place of the entire world.” And indeed, here, at this port on the Mediterranean Sea—“the sea in the middle of the earth”; the dividing line between the north world and the south world and the east world and the west world—was where Europe, Africa, and the Middle East converged.
Opening her eyes, Dru could see that convergence in the people around her. No matter what the Greeks, Italians, Portuguese, and Spanish thought of themselves, this was where the stroke of the tar brush began, she thought. Or ended, depending on which way you were traveling.
Hey, cousin! she said to each of them under her breath.
Chuckling, she picked up her bags and fell in with the crowd as it made its way to the station.
She was twenty-two, traveling alone across Europe on a one-hundred-dollar Eurail Pass, armed with instincts to which she paid serious attention, and a fourth-hand copy of Arthur Frommer’s Europe On 5 Dollars A Day that she had found in a musty corner of an old musty bookstore in Greenwich Village in New York.
From 1957 when it was first published up until the 1970s, Europe On 5 Dollars A Day was the bible of low-budget travelers. Dru had bought a copy on the advice of Susan Palermo, an Italian girl in one of her French classes who crisscrossed Europe every summer. “My mother turned me on to it,” Susan had said. “She used to be a hippie and did Europe on the cheap every summer with my dad, right up to the year I was born. Prices have gone up since then, of course—the latest edition is Europe on $25 a Day—but the advice and tips in that first edition are still good and many of the places to stay and places to eat are still around, run by the same families even. Europe isn’t like America, you know. They build things to last over there.”
Susan’s mother was now a big-shot executive on Wall Street. This was Dru’s first trip to Europe.
Why Europe?
She must have answered that question a thousand times, it seemed, to skeptical family and friends who had genuinely wished her well once she explained that it would help her get into graduate school. When she had explained it to two of her favorite professors, not only had they cheered her decision but they had also voiced their envy of her courage. And one Thursday, during club hours, she had bumped into the president of the Black Students Organization and told him about the trip.
She remembered that day well, talking to Chalmers Freeman, all excited but still a little guilty about going off to Europe instead of to a Third World country.
She was going to the University of Madrid to bone up on her Spanish so she could follow the courses on Latin America that she planned to take in graduate school, she had told him. And after that she would travel across the continent “just for the experience,” she had added, barely able to control her excitement.
The Guyana Contract Page 1