Tongues of Fire

by Peter Abrahams

  Krebs was the number-two man in the Middle Eastern section. When the computer in Virginia had dredged Isaac Rehv up from the past he decided to assign himself to the case. “You don’t have time for that stuff,” everyone had said. And besides, it wasn’t important anymore. Most of the Israeli refugees were quiet now. They were working, raising families, in jail, or dead. Sometimes there was trouble—a bombing or a hijacking or someone shot on the streets—but it was nothing like the trouble they had with the Filipinos. There were some people who thought that a mistake had been made. Oil prices had fallen, but they soon started rising again; and the Palestinians had never stopped shooting: Now they shot at each other. But Americans were importing so little oil that it hardly mattered anymore what the price was; and they had much more leverage in the Middle East than before. They had lost nothing. And gained a little.

  Krebs knew that Isaac Rehv was no longer important. But at the same time he knew that he was doing the right thing. It was right for his reputation as a man who never quit. Isaac Rehv had beaten them long ago. Krebs wanted to see the look on his face when he finally caught up with him.

  He looked out the window and saw green and blue. He focused on the faint reflection of his face in the glass. Then he slipped one hand under his jacket and pinched himself around the middle. He didn’t like what he felt. A few more pinches didn’t make it any better.

  “This is it,” the RCMP man said. They flew in low toward a lake that at first was blue like others but grew grayer as they approached. Krebs saw a Zodiac rubber boat at the southern end of the lake. There were three men in it. They looked up. Ahead he saw a long narrow point that almost divided the lake in two. Near its tip a wooden dock stuck out into the water. There was a cabin almost hidden in some spruce trees. The helicopter hovered for a few moments over the cabin and then settled slowly down on the narrow pebble beach. The pilot shut off the motor and the electrical systems. It was very quiet.

  “This is it,” the RCMP man said again. “Lac du Loup. That’s Wolf Lake in French.” He opened the cabin door and held it for Krebs. Krebs took his briefcase and stepped onto the ground. Something bit him hard on the top of his head, where there hadn’t been any hair for a few years.

  “Jesus Christ.” He smacked it. It bit him on the hand.

  “Blackfly,” the RCMP man said. “They’re hungry this year.” He gave Krebs a piece of tissue to wipe away the blood.

  They walked up a dirt path that led to the cabin. A big man in a blue uniform was standing in front of the door, picking his teeth. “This is Corporal Derlago,” the RCMP man said, trying to maintain a pleasant tone of voice, and failing.

  The big man took his hand out of his mouth and offered it to Krebs. “You’re the one who took those prints,” Krebs said, shaking it.

  “What there were of them,” the RCMP man said.

  Derlago looked down at his big black shoes. “It’s a good thing you got them,” Krebs said. “They were all we needed.” Derlago showed a mouth full of ugly teeth and gave the RCMP man a defiant look. Krebs realized he had gone too far. “Of course it would have been nice to have the man too,” he added. It didn’t make the big man look at his shoes again, but at least he stopped smiling.

  “You can say that again,” the RCMP man said.

  They went inside. “It’s just the way it was,” Derlago said. “No one’s touched a thing.” They looked around. “Course there’s not much to see,” Derlago went on. “It’s just like any of the other lumber cabins in these parts. Except for the books maybe, and those pictures of Arizona.”

  Krebs glanced at the black-and-white photographs that hung on the walls. “What makes you think it’s Arizona?”

  “He told me.”

  “Who?” the RCMP man asked.

  “Reeve. Or whatever his name was.”

  The RCMP man snorted. He walked across the room and peered closely at one of the photographs. “I’ve been to Arizona, and that’s not Arizona. It’s Texas.”

  “So what?”

  Krebs knew it wasn’t Texas either. Israel, maybe. He looked at the books in the crude wooden bookcases that lined the wall opposite the fireplace. Most of the titles were in Arabic, which he had learned to speak a little, but could not read. “Is there any way these books could be packed and sent down to me?”

  “Certainly,” the RCMP man said. “I can radio for supplies right now.” He went out.

  Derlago led him through the bedrooms, one by one. In the first bedroom there was nothing but a bunk bed and a wobbly bedside table. “They didn’t use this one,” Derlago said.

  “Is this where you slept that night?”

  Derlago glanced at him warily. “Yes.”

  “You didn’t hear anything?”

  “Nope. There was one hell of a storm. Blew the whole night. Besides, the nearest road is two hundred miles from here.”

  That hadn’t stopped them. “I wouldn’t have done anything different in your place,” Krebs said. Derlago rewarded him with another display of his rotting teeth.

  They went into the middle bedroom. “The boy slept here,” Derlago said. The bed was neatly made: An inspecting sergeant could have bounced a quarter on it. In one corner of the room stood a paddle and a pair of worn snowshoes.

  “They must have frozen in the winter.”

  Derlago shrugged. “People get tough up here,” he said. “Or they don’t last.”

  Against one wall was an old pine chest of drawers. Krebs opened every one. He found socks, long underwear, plaid shirts, jeans, woollen gloves, leather mitts. As he turned to leave the room he saw another photograph taped to the inside of the door. It looked like the others. “Why would he say it was Arizona if it wasn’t Arizona?” Derlago said.

  Krebs didn’t answer. It was always better than saying, “I don’t know.” Carefully he pulled off the tape and put the photograph in his briefcase. “What was the boy like?”

  Derlago thought. “A boy,” he said finally. “Quiet, kind of.” He thought some more. “Except,” he added, pausing to choose the right word, “he was colored.” Derlago took him into the last bedroom. “Reeve wasn’t colored. He was dark, but not colored, if you know what I mean.”

  It was a simple room like the boy’s. A single bed, unmade. A chest of drawers full of clothes. Snowshoes. Boots. And on the floor under the bed, two books. One in Arabic, the other in English. Krebs picked up the one in English. The cover was falling off; the glue was cracking along the spine; the pages were loose. Either it had been read many times, or it had been thrown around a lot. Geology and Geography of the Western Sudan, by F. McG. Stilton, professor of geology, Middlebury College. He put it in his briefcase.

  They went outside. The Zodiac was tied to the dock, and a man in a full wet suit was coming up the path. “We got it,” he called to Derlago. “Some of it, anyway.”

  “Le’s see,” Derlago said. They walked down to the dock. Krebs glanced over at the helicopter on the beach and saw the RCMP man sitting beside the pilot, talking on the radio. They got into the Zodiac. The man in the wet suit pulled the starter cord of the little outboard. Two trails of mucus had hardened on his upper lip. Derlago made a face. “Do something about your nose,” he said over the noise of the motor.

  The man in the wet suit wiped his nose with his rubber sleeve and dipped his arm over the side. “Occupational hazard,” he said, grinning at Krebs.

  The little boat sped over the water. A big brown fish jumped into the air close to the starboard side. “Like fishing?” Derlago shouted to Krebs.

  “Never done much.”

  “Too bad. This is great country for fishing. And hunting. We still get moose up here.”

  “What?”

  “Moose,” Derlago bellowed.

  At the southern end of the lake a seaplane had been dragged up onto the shore. Once it had been red. Now most of the paint was scraped off. So were the rudder, the propeller, and one of the wings. The nose casing lay on the ground, and two men were looking at the engin
e. The man in the wet suit brought the Zodiac gently up to the beach. Krebs and Derlago stepped out and went over to the plane.

  One of the men had reached deep into the engine. He felt around inside it for a long time. Then he took his hand out, looked at the other man, and shook his head. The other man turned around and punched a tree, very hard. Derlago laid his hand softly on the man’s shoulder. “It was insured, wasn’t it, Wes?”

  “That’s not the point,” the other man said. He was crying. Derlago patted his shoulder.

  They rode back across the lake. The sun shone, there was no wind, but the air felt very cool. Krebs fastened all the buttons of his suit jacket and turned up the collar. “Winter’s coming,” Derlago said, glancing up at the sky. It was the middle of August.

  Krebs walked into a room full of rocks. There were rocks in glass cases, rocks on shelves, rocks in boxes on the floor, and rocks on the long table in the middle of the room. A sinewy old man with long soft white hair stood beside the table. All he wore were khaki shorts and sandals: Years of sun had dried his skin to brown leather. He had a mound of pink rocks in front of him and he was sorting them into five piles.

  “Come in,” he said without looking up, “once you’re in.”

  “Sorry. I knocked.”

  “Didn’t hear you. It’s the goddamned football practice. Every afternoon while I’m trying to get something done. They’ve deafened me.”

  Krebs listened hard and thought he heard someone shouting far away, and perhaps the thudding sound of leather being kicked. He went across the room and stood on the opposite side of the table. The old man held up a pink rock. “Eeeny meeny miny mo,” he said, and dropped it into one of the piles. All the pink rocks looked the same to Krebs.

  “Professor Stilton?”

  “Present.”

  “I wonder if you could tell me anything about this.” Krebs slid the photograph onto the table.

  The old man glanced at it and then looked closely at Krebs. He had eyes as blue as the sky on a perfect day. They glittered in his wrinkled brown face. “You wildcatters,” he said. “You just never quit, do you?”

  He picked up a magnifying glass and peered through it at the photograph. After a few seconds he frowned and set the magnifying glass aside. His eyes got ready to be less friendly. “I don’t get it,” he said.

  “You’ve never seen anything like it before?”

  “Oh, I know what it is, all right. It’s goz. Nothing unusual about that.”

  “Goz?”

  “Stabilized sand dune country with vegetation cover—coarse grasses, acacia, that kind of thing.”

  “Where is this goz?”

  “That’s the point. There was another fellow in here a while back full of questions about the same area. Except he knew a lot more about it than you seem to.” The old man picked up the photograph and handed it to Krebs. “I told him the same thing I’m telling you. There’s no oil there. Not one drop. And even if there was you couldn’t get at it. They’ve been fighting a war there for the past two years, or haven’t you heard?”

  “Where?”

  “Christ. The western Sudan. Kordofan. Darfur. Don’t you know anything?” He reached into a pocket and pulled out a little pink rock. “Jurassic,” he snapped and tossed it onto one of the piles. Krebs counted the pockets in his shorts. There were eight.

  “When was this other man here?”

  “About a week ago. Two weeks. Why? Your partner run out on you? That’s it, isn’t it? He’s the field man, you’re the money man. I’ve seen it a thousand times. I can tell by looking. There’s you in your three-piece suit, twenty pounds overweight. And him strong and sunburned from spending his life outdoors. Am I right?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe? What do you mean, maybe?” The old man picked a rock out of the mound. “What the hell is that doing here?” It was pink like all the others. He threw it into a box on the other side of the room. “Students,” he said. “They’re idiots. Every damn one of them. I don’t know why they don’t expel the whole damned bunch. Then I could get something done around this place.” To make up for lost time he increased the tempo of his sorting, moving with the speed of an assembly line worker in a silent comedy. After a minute or two the mound was gone. Five pink piles circled the space where it had been. “Where was I?”

  “‘What do you mean, maybe?’”

  “Right. You’re not so stupid after all.” He bent down and picked up a box. It was full of rocks but he lifted it quite easily. He dumped them on the desk. They were pink. “Your partner. He’s about your height, but younger looking? And dark. Jewish, maybe?”

  “That’s him.”

  “Of course that’s him. I told you in the first place.” He started sorting the rocks, but interrupted himself almost immediately. He brandished a rock at Krebs. “If you catch up with him tell him I want my maps back.”

  “Maps?”

  “Sure They won’t do him any good. There’s no oil there. Zero. Zilch. But what’s the use? You guys never believe anybody. You probably think I’m trying to gobble up every damned drop myself.”

  “What kind of maps do you mean?”

  “Maps I made eight or nine years ago. Spent about six months over there. I didn’t get to finish. They started shooting at each other and I had to get out. This was the government before last. Or maybe the one before that. They weren’t so bad as governments go over there. They actually paid me for some of my work. Of course by the time I got back here and had anything ready to show, they were all dead or in jail, so they never did get any results. And it might have done them some good, the way this drought’s been going on.”

  “I’m not sure what kind of maps you’re talking about.”

  “Wouldn’t interest you,” the old man said. “Nothing to do with oil, if you can imagine such a thing. They’re water maps.”

  “Water maps?”

  “Stop echoing everything I say. Christ. Don’t you think I get enough of that from freshmen?” He flung another rock across the room. “And the jerkasses will be back in a few weeks.”

  “I’m interested in what you mean by water maps,” Krebs said.

  “That’s smart of you. Because it is interesting. See, I had an idea that there might be certain water-trapping Maestrichian deposits quite deep under the surface, much deeper than they normally dig their wells. I won’t tell you the details. They’re way over your head. So I went over there and sunk a few boreholes. And found out I was onto something. But I didn’t have time to do much more than make note of a dozen or so likely spots before the shooting started. I only ended up covering a little bit of territory down in southwestern Kordofan and over into Darfur.” He picked up a rock and looked at it closely. “Why do people shoot each other when they haven’t even got enough water to wash their faces in the morning? Answer me that.”

  That was easy. Because people like shooting at each other. Krebs knew that by now. He said: “Why did you give him the maps?”

  The old man put the rock down on the table in a pile all its own. “I didn’t give him the maps. The bastard stole them. I’d been showing him the maps. Naturally he lost interest pretty quick. Nothing to do with oil, you see. Then he asked about some samples I had upstairs. When I came back down he was gone, and so were the maps.”

  “I’ll send them to you if I can.”

  “That’d be very obliging of you. They won’t do you any good. There’s no oil there.”

  “You never know.”

  “You guys. You’re something else.” The old man threw back his head and laughed. He laughed until his sky-blue eyes grew watery and stopped glittering. “You guys.”

  Krebs walked across the campus. Flowers grew neatly in their beds; the grass was trim and immaculate. There were no students lying on it smoking dope, drinking beer, or writing home for money. It had a few more weeks to flourish in peace.

  Down on the practice field a football flew end over end through the air, not very high, not very far. A s
kinny young man caught it with some difficulty and ran a few steps to his right, then back to his left, then to the right again. Other young men dove at him. After a little more of this he slipped and fell down. Others fell on top of him. A man with a beer belly and a whistle in his mouth ran across the field. “Is that what you call hitting?” he screamed at a big boy who was picking himself up from the pile, uniform soaked with sweat, chest heaving. “Is that what you call hitting? A thalidomide baby hits harder than that. I want you to hit. Hit. Hit, hit, hit, hit, hit.” He demonstrated with his palm against the earhole of the big boy’s helmet.

  But first you’ve got to catch them, Krebs thought. He was worried. It was supposed to have been a simple mopping up of a little mess left over from the past. Now he wasn’t sure.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Fairweather met him at the airport. He was wearing a green and white seersucker suit, a pink shirt, and a red tie. He hurried across the arrivals lounge, waving and smiling broadly, as if they were friends. Maybe he thought they were.

  “How was the trip? Hook any big ones?”

  “No,” Krebs said, trying to remember how he had been saddled with Fairweather. He felt tired; and his eyes were sore—the stale air in the plane had dried his contact lenses.

  “Too bad,” Fairweather said, taking Krebs’s bag and wafting the smell of sandalwood through the air. “The fishing’s great. When I was a kid we had a summer place up in the Laurentians. Trout, bass, pike—you name it.”

  “I wasn’t anywhere near there.”

  “No? Oh well.”

  Fairweather led him across the parking lot to the little electric car. “Hop in. It’s open.”

  Fairweather got in behind the wheel. Krebs sat beside him. “Did you bring the notes I asked for?”

  “In the glove compartment,” Fairweather replied.

  “You left them in the car?”

  “Oops.”

  They drove toward Manhattan in morning traffic that sounded like an army of golf carts. Fairweather kept pointing out all the empty buildings. “Boy oh boy. Before you know it you’ll be able to buy up the whole town for a song. That’s what my old man says. He’s already started.”