by Robin Winter
"I'll walk to the motorcar. There's food and water bottles in the back. We'll head for Otukpo. If you have other needs, I'll wait in the vehicle."
A few hours earlier Wilton had considered filling the car with her servants. They'd hide this man if she asked, but if stopped, if they met a mob, her people would become victims too. She had the protection of her white skin, but however much her servants believed in her, she might fail them. Best that she and this man travel alone.
She eased open the door of the Citroën and listened. In the warm dark, sound traveled. Somewhere off in the distance an ancient blunderbuss boomed, breaking this night in the 1960's with a wide-mouthed bellow from another century. Those old guns could explode like grenades, shattering the hands that held them, scarring the faces of the crowding villagers. Old weapons in excited hands and old grudges awakening.
Voices nearer than she liked, then an engine racing, small and light—a motorbike perhaps. The rear door of her vehicle swung open and again she heard the sob of her passenger's breath. Wilton slipped into the driver's seat, the cracked plastic cover catching against her skirt. She disengaged the clutch.
She hated to drive without headlights. Wilton first learned when one of the servants brought her home from the airport back in peacetime. She'd protested.
"It saves the petrol," he promised her, smiling in the blue twilight.
Of course, it didn't, but she remembered how to hang her head out the window and scan for motion in the dusk, straining for the throb of other vehicles. If only the insects made less noise.
Her passenger prayed terrified, translated words of comfort from the Qur'an.
Now her fear sweat rivaled his. They ground along and she didn't dare hug the shoulder because in some parts of this road a ditch wavered alongside, deep enough to break a man's leg, deep enough to hold the rushing rains of the wet season.
The man sat on the back seat, now silent. The water bottle glinted as he drank. Who directed him to her compound? A whisper through the crack in a door, a voice in the shadow? How far did he walk, or run, dodging angry villagers who saw him as a Northerner? A Muslim torturer, rapist, murderer of their kin.
The Citroën lurched, tire catching on a rock and Wilton centered them on the crown of the road.
"If we're stopped, you are Sunday, my gardener. I won't remember your family name. Americans never do. You have a twisted gut that needs immediate surgery. It's dreadfully painful. You won't have to speak." Naming sons after weekdays was common practice in the South of the country.
"Sunday," he said. "It is a good joke."
Sunday would head north into Muslim territory while Southern Christians fled massacre through the same black night to reach Igboland. Decent people in lands turned enemy. Trading places across the darkness, running in opposite directions from the same night fear.
The car pulled to the left again. Wilton stopped and got out. She felt watchful eyes, but surely she imagined them. She scanned the darkness, the bushes on either side of the road. Her hand slid over the dusty surface of the right tire. No hot spot, no bulge.
The call of a long-tailed nightjar whirred. Wilton slid back behind the wheel.
She took another deep breath. "Is your family safe?"
They bounced along, the road filled with potholes from the annual floods. Of course. That's why the tires rode so rough.
"I pray so," he said, voice jolting between whisper and speech. "I left them with my father near Kano. When the troubles began."
Nights ago, under a bare sliver of moon, she'd transported a family of seven crammed in the car, stick-limbed children stacked like chairs in the back seat. Terror thick enough to taste. Even now her hands slipped on the steering wheel. She wiped them in turn on her skirt.
"We're halfway now," Wilton said. She strained her eyes at the faint glow ahead. Kerosene lanterns and torches. A roadblock. Only a matter of time, but she'd hoped they wouldn't be organized yet. Christian Southerners targeting Muslim refugees. People with torture, rape, murder to repay.
"Roadblock ahead," Wilton said. She braked, letting in the clutch. A rear door opened. The car swayed and Sunday tumbled free. She hit the gas. The back door closed and caught. She switched on her headlights.
God grant he landed well.
The headlights flickered. With a quick glance over her shoulder, she saw the backseat clear, water bottles and woven raffia bag of bread gone. The men at the roadblock would have heard her engine by now. She must go on. She pulled her leather briefcase from under the front seat and set it on the passenger side.
Torches blinded her. She shifted, braked. Kerosene lanterns moved in from three directions. She blinked like a night potto, the soft harmless tree mammal that roamed these tangled woodlands. Wilton tried to look confused, as a potto would, stranded in the light.
"I see you, my friends," she said in traditional greeting even though she couldn't make out faces. "Is there a problem with the road? Bridge gone?" She used the faulty pidgin English of an expatriate, anxious and imperious. Not a time to let them know she understood their tongue.
"You travel alone, madam?"
"Yes. Is the bridge out? I have medical samples to deliver. Most urgent. Very important. You understand?"
"You should not travel alone." An educated man's voice. Missionary school. Drunk.
"I always have," she said. "Your country is safer than America. We have too many guns."
She couldn't see their faces when they laughed. Torchlight ran along the edge of a wide-bladed machete. The men moved around. She couldn't tell how many. Maybe a dozen. More metallic glints of knives or machetes. Kerosene smoke rose in the moist night, smells of sour palm wine like spoiled lemonade and whiskey.
No one answered her. She drew an expression of annoyance onto her face. What they saw was a small, skinny expatriate. White female with brown hair. Neither pretty nor well dressed, confident as only those who lived in an alien land for years could be. Impatience pulled her dark eyebrows down, her mouth severe. All foreigners were sacred.
Best if none of them knew her. Paying a bribe would be better than being recognized. She tried all her life to remain unknown.
"Is there trouble?" she asked again.
"We look for criminals," a man explained. Another started to speak but stopped, silenced by a companion.
"You pay us transit fee," the man said.
"There should be no transit fee," she said, indignant. "There never was before."
Oh, Wilton. Pay the bribe and go. Now isn't the time. Anyone else would have shrugged, paid, and moved on. Yet protest might lower her profile as a possible human smuggler. Maybe it was the right attitude now, in the light of fire, with the machetes out.
"Then we must search your car, madam. To protect you. We must make sure no criminal is inside forcing you to drive him to his escape."
"Search the bloody car," she said. Her voice shifted a few degrees to the English diction of her earliest schooling. America peeled off her like a snake skin. The situation required more arrogance, not less. She stepped from the car and moved aside, mimicking the squared schoolmarm stance of her old principal Miss Phillips, glaring down over imagined silver-rimmed spectacles.
She had an effect. They sharpened, glancing sidelong and worried at her. Embarrassed. Not yet drunk enough to show defiance. They poked and prodded through the car to find nothing but her leather folder of medical instructions and the first-aid kit. In the trunk a covered pail packed with cold-water-soaked cloths and a selection of blood-filled glass vials. She followed their conversation with ease, the clatter-clop of speculation.
"Look here," she said. "Young men, I have work to finish. Set that bucket back in the car and don't meddle with the bottles. Blood samples from a dying patient, a man in the university hospital. I drive while the night is cool to get them to the right doctor. If you delay me, they may spoil. The patient—your countryman, your brother—may die."
A murmur of voices, but Wilton got back in the car and st
arted the engine. Their makeshift gate scraped open, the poles sliding back through the oil barrels. She pressed the accelerator, shifted, called out a good evening and drove through. They chorused back wishes for a safe journey.
A mile down the road, she drifted to a stop, turned off the engine, extinguished the lights and listened to the hum of insects and the far call of an owl.
A sharp sound far behind her in the darkness. A shot? She waited, held her breath, expecting more. When nothing happened, she got out of the car. Leaning against the warm hood, she strained into the gloom then closed her eyes as if that would help her hear. She would wait until the sun for her passenger to find her.
Dawn came up, gray lining edges of grass stems and blades, running along the twigs of the bramble bushes. Pale yellow morning. Birds erupted into a chatter of trills and chirps. The sharp notes of whydahs, sparrows and finches calling filled the air. Wilton's throat tightened. Stiff, chilled to the bone, she pulled the car door open and sat on the front seat, hands tucked under her elbows, and watched the swift sunrise. She should drive on.
The brush along the side of the road rustled. Sunday stumbled from the dew-hung scrub, scrambled across the road and made his way into the backseat, tucking his body low.
"Injured?" She knew the answer before Sunday spoke, recognizing the taste like sweet rusty meat on the back of her tongue, the hot smell in her nostrils.
"Yes. It will be all right. Please," he said. "We can go?"
A stain spread across his brown shirt. A slow bleed, the fabric now adhering to his skin. It would have to wait. That much blood, the wound must be deep. A knife? Thirty miles until they reached the missionaries outside of Otukpo. Possibly too far on these bad roads.
"Put your hand on the wound. Press down hard. We will be all right. I'm taking you to my friend, Doctor Gilman. Only an hour more."
Gilman would give them refuge. Her heart warmed at the thought of her friend's dependability, that American pose of carelessness masking both skill and affection. Wilton should have visited Gilman long ago, but no matter how many months it had been, Gilman would take them in, glad that Wilton finally needed her. She knew Gilman. She'd reaffirm the friendship, test Gilman's commitment and ready her friend for the hard times coming. Efficient, actually.
A check of the grassland flushing gold and she slipped back into the car. The cold engine hesitated, coughed and caught.
Wilton aimed the Citroën east, down the road flaming with white sunlight.
Chapter 3: Lindsey
December 1966
Lagos, Western Region, Nigeria
A short walk away from the white concrete building of the US Embassy in Lagos, Lindsey Kinner stood at her office window and gazed on the street below. Most Americans hated the nervous walk down the street and around the corner from the Embassy to the Records Building, where all the paperwork got finished. Sometimes she watched them struggle past the eager reach of street merchants and beggars, ducking lurching bicycles, hunched against the cacophony of careening motorcycles and taxis, the air filled with voices, each straining to dominate over the rest. The Americans shrank from open-sewage ditches bubbling with refuse. Once the disorder, smell and noise had assaulted her too. Now it was part of the adventure.
Lindsey smiled and cranked the louvers shut on her fourth-story window. The hum of fans and the click of typing soothed. Every day after a morning of argument and chatter, the small square building where she worked emptied as the lunch crowd headed home or to favorite roadside vendors who sold bush meat on skewers or deep-fried chickpea dough balls. She could get some planning done in this quiet time before her friend Sandy Hemsfort came by to share cold sandwiches and Cokes.
Lindsey sat back in her metal chair and looked at the papers she held. Her mind shifted to ideas far from the information in her hands. Around her the other small rooms along the hallway stood quiet except for the steady tap of keys from Gene Asika's office. He always showed up on time and worked late. An exception to the unwritten rules of this sideshow building of the US Consulate. Passing the Foreign Service Exam and meeting the assistants in the Lagos office didn't teach her a fraction of what she needed to know. Wilton had tried to prepare her for Nigeria, but being here in Lagos was the real education.
Not working was the first principle she'd picked up from the Nigerians. She wouldn't copy, but she watched. As soon as you landed a permanent job with the Consulate, you started to push the limits to see how much time you could spend obstructing. Reminded her of Dickens's Office of Circumlocution. She tired of the repeated excuse "He's not on seat" when she went to see administrators. By contrast to most of her fellow workers, the Eastern Nigeria Igbos like Asika looked obsessive about work. Unbalanced.
Igbos had ambition. Like Chinese and Jews they seized education and advancement with greed. Asika stayed at his post when the massacres erupted in the North and though many of his fellow Easterners fled Lagos and the West, he remained, trusting in the Federal Government's assurances of protection. He grew less cheerful, more hunched, deeper lines drawn in a face that lightened when she greeted him. He returned her good mornings with too much pleasure.
Asika rattled on. A good typist, the best in the pool. Not only did he finish assignments, he was fast. Since he had no friends, he worked through his lunch hours. Most weekdays only the two of them remained on this floor at noon.
But right now, she wasn't competing. A promotion promised, she needed to think about her own affairs and positioning. In her private life Lindsey bought up debts across the city, using her inheritance. Good investments when she picked the right obligations, even if half never paid on time. She didn't expect money out of those loans, but rather payment in kind. A vote in the finance committees when it counted, the approval of a contract she preferred. Sometimes, easy passage for a load of goods.
Influence meant she could change this world and this government by increments. Wilton's fight to make a better world here could be achieved. Everything an equation, Lindsey only needed the data.
Asika stopped typing. Broke off, not as if he'd reached the end of a sentence. Lindsey straightened, chilling. A strange sound. Was someone choking?
"Gene?"
Lindsey stood, tugged her skirt into line. Someone in the hall. Certain it wasn't Gene, she didn't want to move. Dread tightened her throat. A soft thud from the quiet hallway. Strange how bad a sound that was in the office on a Monday near noon.
Lindsey slipped out from behind her desk, lifting the metal chair and setting it back without a sound. She wasn't officially important enough for a phone. Only a filing cabinet and metal desk and chair. She even had to borrow a stapler when she needed it. A Smith Corona in the center of her desk, the small stack of paper beside the typewriter, nothing that would help her now.
All this was deliberate, ensuring she looked as unimportant as possible. How could a mere woman who needed to ask for paper by the sheet and a stapler on loan possibly be on contract with the CIA? Maybe she should have played this another way. She picked up the bone paper cutter shaped like a crocodile with its surprised eyes peeking up. The tail was sharp, the head angular and hard to grip. Still it made her feel better.
She moved toward the door. If someone was in the hall, there was no place to hide. Lindsey poked her head through the doorway.
Along the bare narrow corridor most doors were closed, louvered glass windows shut. Pale sunlight diffused through hazy panes. She heard a faint rasping sound and a repeated tap, like a finger upon a pad.
Then two bare-footed men burst from Asika's office and crossed the end of the corridor. Both dressed in dark clothes like pajamas, with flat caps. Different from the pressed white short-sleeved civil servant garb Gene wore.
Lindsey caught the flash of startled eyes in black faces and then they disappeared. A door slammed.
Lindsey's mouth tasted of iron. She moved down the corridor in her silly sling backs. Barely noon and not hot yet, but her blouse stuck to her back. At Asika's door she g
ripped the crocodile harder and looked inside.
She couldn't see his face. It had been pushed down into the maw of his typewriter, where the keys have play. The body of the machine gleamed wet with blood that slid out between the pieces of mechanism and moved in slow snakes across Asika's typed papers and desk to spill upon the linoleum floor. Not a tapping. Now that Lindsey saw it, she heard dripping.
Someone had slit his throat from behind. What possessed him to set his desk with his back to the door? Hadn't he seen any Westerns?
A door opened in the outer office. Lindsey moved fast away from Asika into the main reception room, though she didn't like turning her back on the sound of his blood. No place to hide. Were his killers returning? For her?
Sandy strode in and let the door slam. Khaki pants and shirt, her geologist's uniform. She carried two cold-beaded Cokes in her fists, set them down on the reception desk and shrugged, flipping her long red braid over her shoulder.
"Sorry I'm late." Sandy stopped. "Linsday, what's gotcha? Cripes. You okay?"
"I need a phone." Her voice felt slow and thick. "Men came and killed Asika. With a knife."
"Shit."
Lindsey reached for the receptionist's black telephone and dialed. Funny what certainty Sandy's presence brought. She felt calm, quite normal now. In English, she overrode the Yoruba-speaking voice on the other end. Sound professional, organized.
"No, I am not mistaken, sir. He's dead."
Sandy walked toward Asika's office then stopped. She swallowed hard—her freckles seemed to darken, then Sandy retreated across the reception room to the windowsill.
Chapter 4: Gilman
December 1966
Hospital at Ezike, Eastern Region, Nigeria
The muggy clinic shrilled with voices. Dr. Katherine Gilman looked out of her exam room into the waiting room and saw blood, vivid splashes on the man slumped against the wall bench.