“None of your business.”
Templeton was turning the machete in the firelight. The blade flashed. “Have you asked yourself who you are acting for?”
The names sounded in Finn’s brain. Boni, Jonah, Fatima. “Because Wicks doesn’t understand what’s at stake.”
“What’s at stake?”
Myself, Finn thought. Because by not acting, I have continued my father’s work. But again, he said nothing.
“A godfather can have many uses,” Templeton said, gripping the machete in his hand. The knife made him look stronger, younger even. “He can teach and protect. With you, it seems I have failed at both. But tonight I will try to change that.” When the light of the fire died, he rose. “Would you like to come?”
Templeton moved noiselessly toward the construction site, his white shirt disembodied from his brown legs and arms, the long knife hanging at his side. The moon glinted off the machete blade and Finn felt the beginnings of anxiety stir inside him. He followed Templeton as he headed in the general direction of Wicks’ sleeping shelter. What was he going to do—scare Wicks into compliance? Finn slowed his pace and watched the white shirt fade into the night. His knife, his act, had been taken from him. The germ of his resolve had been lifted and transplanted and now belonged to another man.
Templeton stopped a few yards away from Wicks’ shelter and waited for Finn. “I gather you were going to kill him,” he whispered. Finn stared at him in the darkness in confusion. “Here’s the first lesson, then,” Templeton said under his breath and then slid away. Finn reached out, but it was too late. He stood in numb suspension and watched as the white shirt approached the open-air sleeping shelter.
Finn saw the blade go up and come down. He closed his eyes and against blackness listened to the sound of contact between steel and flesh, the resistance of the bone being met and overcome. A terrible moment of calm was pierced by a harrowing scream. Then a gun fired—once, and again. Templeton was back by his side, his breathing heavy. “Done,” he said.
“What’s done?” Finn whispered. More shots were fired. Templeton’s hand closed around Finn’s arm. A paroxysm of bullets and the unrecognizable sound of a human voice convulsing in hysteria.
“Come with me,” Templeton said, putting his hand on Finn’s shoulder. As the older man’s weight came down on him, Finn realized he had been wounded. He grasped Templeton’s waist to give him more support.
“It wasn’t necessary to kill him,” Templeton told him as they limped inland. “A hand was enough.”
“You cut off his hand?”
“Part of getting older,” Templeton explained, “is that you understand the cost of things. You learn not to overpay. I think it’s what he owed.”
CHAPTER
31
A Conversation with God
Stanley had been sleeping with his gun since Boni had lost his hand. Along with a snifter of Armagnac, he swallowed one of Daisy’s Dalmanes to help himself relax. With the drink, he would crash like a broken elevator into unconsciousness and enjoy a kind of simulated rest. In the morning, he’d feel like he’d been hit in the head with a mallet, but he preferred this to the dreams his brain had been manufacturing for the past month.
That night he was especially grateful for his new sleeping formula. At another time, he might have been stricken by the day’s events and tormented for hours by insomnia. Even before he had swallowed his second Dalmane, he had been able to dismiss the encounter with Finn. The world was conspiring against him and while he had never felt so alone, he had also never felt so strong, so free of doubt.
He woke with a shock that made him think of the sudden systemic failings that occurred as the body aged: heart attacks, strokes, aneurysm. One of these frightful things had happened to him, a relatively young man. He tried to think of what to do when something unimaginably horrendous like this happened all at once, like a stone falling from the sky onto your head. Should he lie down, run, cover his skull? His father had survived a mild stroke and Stanley had witnessed the progression of thoughts in the moments and hours following. After the shock came the questions, rattling now like loose bolts in his own head. Where did the stone come from? Did God throw the stone? And if so, why did he want you on your knees at that particular point?
But there was none of the disorientation or vague surprise of a mild stroke. A very pronounced sensation was moving through him like a high-speed train, starting at his left hand. I’m having a heart attack, he thought. God has struck me down. It was his last thought before he transformed into something incapable of thought, a wild animal defending itself. He could see nothing and hear less because now he was screaming, a bloodcurdling sound that seemed to be coming from somewhere else. That he knew the scream was coming from him made him scream louder. His other hand had assumed an intelligence of its own and was firing a gun. One shot after another. Stanley watched his hand in amazement. He himself was finished but his hand wanted to keep fighting. Where was the enemy? Was it God, the rock thrower from above? Would his hand start firing into the sky? Then God sent him a sign: a light, and in the light a gleaming target. God was not the enemy after all. God was directing him toward the real enemy: a man.
Mohammad stood in front of him with his arms outstretched. Stanley did not understand the outstretched arms or the pained expression. He did not understand anything and understanding itself seemed to belong to another world. What Stanley saw in Mohammad was a symbol of everything that had gone wrong. A glowing bull’s-eye, his nemesis in this life and who knew how many others. Stanley experienced an instant of ecstatic release as his right arm, still intelligent and calm, took aim at Mohammad’s hairless head and pulled the trigger.
Stanley’s gunshots woke Nelson on Tarkar. He had dozed off, a glass of brandy balanced on his belly, when the startling sound of gunfire bolted him out of bed, spilling the brandy and shattering the glass. He hoisted himself up to the deck and positioned the spotlight on the shore, scanning the beach with the beam. It was empty. But he could hear some sort of commotion inland.
Suddenly, from out of the trees, stumbled a figure. In the yellow circle of light, Nelson found Stanley careening toward the water. He was doing something with his hands. Nelson lurched toward the driver’s seat and started the engine, yanking the radio from its roost while fixing Stanley in the light and sounding the horn. As he maneuvered Tarkar recklessly close to the shore, Nelson saw that Wicks was holding his own hand, that it was not attached to anything. He immediately began shortwaving Nairobi, an emergency wavelength to the British Consul. Wicks had given Nelson the code in case of “dire circumstance.”
“I think he’s lost his hand,” Nelson shouted into the radio, edging the boat slowly around a sandbank.
To get a plane from Nairobi would take four hours, maybe longer. They had to find a pilot and it was the middle of the night. Nelson told the man on the other line that money was no object. He read the coordinates of Kitali and then kicked the first-aid chest out from under the bench. In it, thank heaven, were five vials of morphine.
By the time Nelson reached the shore, Stanley had lain down on the beach. He was calm and disturbingly quiet. Nelson realized he had gone into shock. He carried Stanley into the water and heaved him aboard where he sprawled like a drunk. Stanley was mumbling, nearly unconscious now. “You see, God is on my side after all. He is. He is. I’m sorry I don’t go to church. I’m sorry my son doesn’t. He was baptized, you know. You must have known that, of course, you were there. I must start praying. I will start praying now.” Stanley began reciting the Lord’s Prayer. When he had finished that, he started on the few graces he knew. Nelson wrapped Stanley’s wrist tightly with a kikoi to stem the flow of blood and then put the severed hand in a cooler. Before covering him with a blanket, he stuck a vial of morphine into his arm and listened while Stanley continued, more slowly now, his conversation with God.
The night was cool and starry. A night, Finn thought, like any other night. Strangely still now.
Templeton leaned heavily on him, silent with pain. Every few minutes they stopped so the older man could catch his breath. Beneath Finn’s arm, Templeton’s shirt was damp with sweat. He was leading them somewhere, he said, his face glistening with strain. It was not far now. They had already walked a mile or so inland, following the stream.
A single voice pierced the quiet night. Another joined in, a lamentable wail. Templeton cupped a hand to his ear as other voices joined in the collective howl of grief. “Mohammad’s dead,” he said. “The bullets after I was gone were for him.”
“How do you know?”
“I understand this howl. You understand it too. I will have to go back.”
For a moment, Finn stood perfectly still and listened. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said stiffly.
“Not now,” Templeton protested weakly. “Later.”
They had reached a clearing with a tent that glowed silver in the moonlight. A fire pit had been dug into the ground and nearby were a wooden table and a folding chair. “My second home,” Templeton explained, releasing Finn’s shoulder and collapsing beside the tent. On the ground next to the tent was a pile of wood and a washbasin filled with water. “There’s some iodine inside,” he said feebly. “Along with a bottle of whiskey. Little medicine bag in the corner.”
Finn tried not to think of Mohammad as he bent over this man who was responsible for so much. Wicks’ bullet had bored into the lower part of Templeton’s thigh. Finn made a tourniquet from his shirt and tied it above the wound. “Here’s your balance. A hand for a hand,” Templeton grimaced. “And a leg for a leg.”
“Whose leg besides yours?”
“Ingrid’s.”
Finn cinched the tourniquet until Templeton yelped. “And Mohammad’s life?”
“Leaders are sent from God to mend the tears between men,” Templeton said. “Mohammad wasn’t meant to die.”
“Is that right?” Finn left to lay wood for a fire. He spoke to Templeton over his shoulder because he could not yet bear to look at him. “Mohammad was the best man I knew.”
“Everything has a purpose, Finn. You must trust that there will be another such man.” Finn broke a branch over his knee. “If you have patience, I think life may still surprise you. I know this about you.”
“If you know me so well, you might have known not to take the knife from me.”
“And have you incarcerated for murder? No.”
“Why did you think I was going to kill him?”
“Because your father and I were old friends. While you’ve been putting up admirable resistance, I think you are partially if not wholly propelled by his rage.” Templeton lay back on the sand. “I couldn’t bear to see the first act driven by that rage be your last. Rage can create as well as destroy. It can be beautiful, poetic. It can be just. You haven’t seen that yet.”
“And your rage, is it beautiful? Just?” Finn said, going to the basin to wash his hands. “Anyway, those are not qualities I associate with my father.”
“As a young man, he blazed with them.”
“So what happened?” Finn asked.
“Time.” Templeton said, grimacing as Finn straightened his leg. “Time is the answer no one can wait for.”
“I think you’re as crazy as he was,” Finn said.
“You’re entitled to your own beliefs. But I don’t think my first act as a godfather was unsuccessful. I think it was well worth the wait.”
“I never intended to touch Wicks,” Finn said quietly. “Just his property.”
Templeton considered this. “And would that have been enough?”
“We are fighting different wars, you and I.”
Finn boiled water over the fire to sterilize his pocketknife and then examined Templeton’s leg, pushing and prodding the inflamed lip of the wound while blood oozed thickly down his leg and pooled on the sand. “It’s not a splinter, for God’s sake,” Templeton protested. “You can’t squeeze it out.”
“Drink your whiskey.” Without warning, Finn poured a little iodine on the wound.
“Jesus!” Templeton exploded.
“Hold still, will you? I think it went through.” Finn raised Templeton’s leg until he could see the other side. Templeton howled. Finn held a piece of wood to his mouth. “Bite this,” he said. Templeton dug his teeth into the wood. His brow was damp with sweat. “You’re not drunk enough.”
When Finn had finished his exploration, Templeton lay in exhausted repose. The bullet had passed straight through his leg, and seemed not to have hit an artery or shattered the bone. Finn fed him whiskey from the cap until Templeton held his hand up misty-eyed, and, Finn realized, drunk. “You know,” Templeton began. “I remember you as a boy.”
“Do you?” Finn asked, gently cleaning the wound.
“I also remember being as young as you are now and looking into the eyes of age and seeing what was to come. And I remember trying then as I am trying now to feel not terror and disbelief, but comfort. We all join together in the end. In the end, isolation is the dream and the merging of all matter is what is real.”
Finn eyed his patient skeptically. “I forgot how drink makes you talk.”
“I’m an old man now, Finn. Look at this face!” Templeton patted his hands over his cheeks. “The past is written here, and here, written in patterns unrecognizable to the young. Your father is in these lines.” Templeton stroked his cheeks. “I recognize the people in these patterns, like mandalas that are not quite fully erased. I can still make out the outlines of the ghosts who have stayed with me, of what was important. I can see it long after it has been destroyed and is nothing more than a pile of colorful sand. It’s all there, you see, just arranged differently.” Templeton reached for more whiskey. Finn moved the bottle out of his reach.
“I have to get to Uma,” Finn said. “There’s a first-aid box. We need morphine and clean bandages.”
“You’re a good boy, Finn. I don’t know if your father ever told you.”
Ingrid had left the island. She was far away, dreaming from her room in Michigan. The night beyond her dream was white with snow. She was with Jonathan, floating above campus, naked and cold and then, in another beat, she was alone under a hard, bright sun that did not warm her. Finn was there, his face replacing the sun, his features painfully clear. She willed the face closer and realized with a dreamlike lucidity that if she were struck down tomorrow, it was this face she would see: the brown of the skin, the blue of the eyes, the silent mouth. How long it had taken her to know these features. The understanding of this face had changed her.
The dream traveled on in the peaceful world of this single face, bringing her to something else; the memory of love’s arrival as a total surprise, like lightning, like a slap. Then they were meeting for the first time. She came to him differently this time. She came understanding more; she knew about the other women, and the God that allowed him these women and then, almost as an afterthought, gifted him with the strange peace of the sea.
Ingrid watched him with the women. He slept with his back to them. He felt them fingering the marlin tattooed on his shoulder. He feigned sleep and shrugged at their questions. It was a fish he liked to catch, a fighting fish.
Then Ingrid was in his sea, her hair still long and covering her like a shawl. Underwater, she could see everything, even the sky. His fish swam all around her. He was so near now. All she had to do was wait.
CHAPTER
32
The Final Journey
Finn made his way quickly to the beach where Gus kept his motorized skiff. Shoving the boat off the sand, he pulled the starter cord so forcefully that the engine surged out of the water. A gaseous cloud formed in the darkness as the noise of the engine reverberated through the night.
Finn cranked the handle to top speed. He did not try to comprehend the length of the endless night; he would not think about what had happened until morning, and maybe not even then. There was a weightless inevitability to the events, and now that t
hey had happened, now that the violent adjustment had been made, he felt strangely numb. He supposed he would feel, at some point, anger. Then maybe something more painful. Mohammad was dead; the island would never again be the same.
Finn tied the skiff to Uma. The sky had taken a pale step away from night. Soon the muezzin would carry to his ears the first call to prayer: another day beginning. He clambered on board, clumsy with exhaustion and oblivious to the huddled form curled under the fishing seat. His initial thought was that it was one of the island boys hiding out as they sometimes did from their parents after a first beer, a first woman, a first betrayal. But this body was wrapped with bits of kikoi and, even in the darkness, he could see the skin was white.
He went to her quickly, kneeling down and feeling her faint breath with his hand. He spoke her name and when she did not answer, he touched her cheek. She was cold. He picked her up and cradled her to him, putting his hand over her cropped head, as if to seal in the remaining heat. The deepness of her sleep frightened him. “Wake up,” he said. “Wake up now.”
He walked with her around the deck, trying to warm her. When she finally opened her eyes she looked up at him as if he were the latest apparition in a long dream she no longer cared about. He sat down and held her close to him, pressing his warmth into her.
The sky over Tomba was growing light with the dawn when she began to stir against him. “We have to go now,” he said into her ear. “We have to get you dressed.” He set her down and looked back before lowering himself to the galley. Her face was fragmented with uncertainty. He brought her hot tea with honey and crackers, and put his own shirt over her raised arms and found her another kikoi.
“Are you okay?” Ingrid asked, studying Finn’s face.
“I’m tired,” he said.
“I took the pills you gave me.” She shivered, holding the warm cup.
“And then you went for a swim?”
“No. I looked for you. I wanted to say good-bye, and to thank you.” Finn watched her recoil after burning her tongue on the tea. “Then Abdul locked me out.”
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