Night Must Wait (15 page)

On to the West and Lagos, with urgent information for Lindsey. The rebels planned to invade the West. She'd have to find a way to cross over from the former Eastern Region, now Biafra, into the Federal Government territories of Nigeria and reach Lagos.

One more wristwatch left. She'd made her passage cheaply. Most of the roadblock soldiers hadn't challenged her. But soon that would pass when the war gained reality. She, like the other travelers who dared the roads, would have to submit to searches of car and person, and the filching of any goods the soldiers desired. Grace of God, and the devil's luck, an appearance of poverty and piety would get her through.

The problem was petrol. She wondered if that cave under the riverbank west of here still harbored the tins of gasoline she'd cached a year ago.

"Get out, please, ma'am."

Wilton obeyed, her legs quivering from the long hours in the car. Lots of soldiers here, and an air of professional efficiency. They all seemed busy in this clearing in the forest, moving boxes from trucks toward a group of low buildings tucked among the trees. How much of that professionalism would prove real? The voice that ordered her to put her hands on the car had the precision of a good English accent. Fingers flat against the car's rain-washed hood, she endured the frisking of hard palms and brisk fingers then turned to face the tall Igbo soldier. He held his head with the kind of arrogance that made her doubt.

"Who are you? Where are you going? What is your business? Where have you come from?"

"Professor Kate Wilton, American citizen…"

The wind rose, gray clouds colliding overhead with a grumble of thunder. She heard engines, as if of numerous trucks, and a distant barking of orders.

He asked his questions faster than she could answer them, always with impatience, with a curtness, that suggested that he didn't care what she said. Lovely British accent. He had her identification and now stepped back to read it, gesturing for another soldier to cover her. She noted the Federal uniforms, with improvised Biafran badges sewn over the old insignia.

These men trained in the army years ago for the Federal Government of Nigeria. They must have split away on tribal lines to join the defense of their homeland, like Robert E. Lee resigning from the US Army to serve his native Virginia. Biafra rises indeed. No question about this man's ability to read. He clapped her passport shut and gestured to the soldier who covered her.

"Where are you taking me?" She let her voice shake a bit. Acting the belligerent American would only bring her trouble here. Scared was better.

He didn't bother to answer, smiling a quick secret smile. Perhaps in the past some American or English woman had lorded it over him and now he enjoyed the reversal. He jerked the submachine gun and she obeyed, walking through the red mud toward what looked like a secondary-school building. Clouds thickened and the air seemed to darken with imminent rain. The bubuls among the trees made short flights now, a sure sign that the weather would break in a moment.

"I am a foreign national," she said to her escort. "An American citizen, trying to reach an operative airport and go home."

"All airports in Biafra are operative," the first soldier said. He repeated the public statement she'd heard so many times.

"I haven't been able to obtain a seat on any airplane," she said, cursing the propaganda that had this Biafran believing everything worked just as well if not better after the revolution. Then she caught another glimpse of his face, and she knew he was no more deceived than she.

"Where are you taking me?" She had to decide within the next minute whether she should go along or not.

"For interrogation."

He paused before the open door of the school, where she saw more soldiers within. Not all so well dressed, but they were trying to look like members of an army, the Biafran emblem stitched on shirtsleeves of many hues. Reassured by the presence of many, Wilton went in. She saw a familiar face, Ephraim, a former servant from her father's days. He looked instantly aside as if her gaze would mark him. It would, she realized, her throat seizing.

Down the grubby unornamented hallway to a classroom with a closed door. The soldier holding her passport knocked, then swung the door open.

"Sir!" he said, saluting.

"Yes?"

"A suspected foreign spy, sir."

The officer at the scarred wooden teacher's desk was a heavy-set man, perhaps in his fifties, with frost in his hair and moustache, a settled patience on his broad face. His chair creaked. He scarcely looked at Wilton, but nodded to her escort.

"Leave her passport and papers here. Very good, Corporal Emmaus. Dismissed."

Wilton felt the wave of protest that came from the soldier holding her passport. But he said nothing. He deposited the booklet on the desk, then saluted, spun on his heel and left the room, the other soldier retreating with somewhat less snap. The door closed behind him, sharp as a rebuke.

"So," Wilton said, relief weakening her knees, "discipline is not quite perfect yet?"

She spoke in Ibibio and the major rose from his chair and nodded to her.

"How are you?" he asked in the same tongue. "It has been long since we shared a meal. How is it your husband did not tell you to stay home?"

Wilton could not stop herself from smiling.

"What, you still refuse a husband?" He shook his head. "Will you make me reconsider educating my daughters, if such behavior is the wisdom education brings to you?"

She tensed.

His hands hung still by his sides, without welcome. "What are you doing here?"

"Going to friends." Wilton straightened, echoing his formality.

"Don't make me shoot you." He switched back to English, his voice so low she could barely make it out against the patter of hard rain on the long windows.

"I've friends in the Umuahia area," she said. "A Doctor Gilman and the Sisters of the Holy Ghost. Foreign nationals working in the Biafran hospital."

"But you're no doctor. You have binoculars and a camera in your car. My boys tear your car seats out while we speak. What will they find?"

"Birds," Wilton said. "Stuffed specimens packed in silica sand and arsenic. Notebooks of sketches and behavior. Lists. Paintings. I hope they don't get the paintings wet."

"Lists." The major sat back down, his forehead lined. "We don't like lists. I knew your father. He taught me all those years ago to speak the Queen's English. I don't want to shoot his daughter."

"You will do your duty," Wilton said. "But I think you won't shoot a student of birds. An American student of birds."

"Thank God, that neither you nor your father ever gave up American citizenship. But you could be deported."

"Almost as bad." She felt the relief she dared not show weaken her knees.

"You look like you're headed away from Umuahia," he said.

"A side trip." Wilton glanced again at the windows scribbled with rain, glimpsing the shadows of passing men. "Do you remember that my father had an old friend, Frederick Brown, a little southwest of here?"

Brown had taken on his former master's name. Not an uncommon happening in past times.

"Yes." He continued to frown.

"Nothing bad happened to him or his family? You frown, do you have news?"

"I can't afford to believe you," he said. "Miss Wilton, you cannot be so naïve as you say and I knew your father. You told my men you want only to leave Biafra, so you contradict yourself from the start."

A rattle on the door and at the major's acknowledgement Corporal Emmaus came in, his arms full of two stacked boxes, followed by two other men with more. They laid their finds upon the floor.

"What have we here?"

"Evidence," the corporal said. "And dead birds."

The major tilted his head agreeing.

"She is an ornithologist," he said. "I knew her father and he encouraged her in this study. What else besides dead birds?"

"Papers, sir. Notebooks, camera, films and glasses." He indicated the binoculars, the prize in his collection.

At the major's gesture Corporal Emmaus lifted the largest box to the desk and opened the top. An indrawn breath and Wilton tightened another degree. The major reached in and drew out a full sheet of meticulously painted bird feet, about three times life size, all colors, each claw and scale lovingly delineated. Next, a purple turacou, painted among the branches of a fruit tree, its smiling beak agape as though with laughter.

"My God," the major said. "Miss Wilton, you can surely paint."

He pulled out another, rising to his feet so that he could look into the bottom of the box. One by one he drew the paintings out, a few spotted with rain, but most in perfect condition, the birds in lively poses, feeding, courting and quarreling on the paper. Orioles, Seedeaters, Storks and Weavers. Corporal Emmaus's breath hissed between his teeth.

"What is your reading, Corporal?" the major asked.

"There is no lie about the birds, sir," Corporal Emmaus said, at attention again. He glanced at her as if now he saw a human being.

"What about the camera, the glasses?"

"We impound, sir, develop the films, check the nature of the photography."

"And the woman?"

"Imprison until the films are developed, sir."

"Very good then," the major said. "Let us make it so."

After the door closed, the major sat back down. "I've wasted enough time on a stray expatriate ornithologist for one day." He smiled. "You will let me keep the painting of the large violet bird for my fee?"

"Of course, sir," Wilton said. "The Lady Ross's Turacou. It would be my pleasure."

They took her to a classroom, gave her a square blanket, a sandwich of dry bread spread with Marmite and a plastic cup of water. The boredom punished her though she tried to use the time in making plans, to make the gray rainlit day plod by. Once the rain stopped, she listened for birds and identified a Senegal Coucal, a set of sunbirds and several sparrows by song.

A while later a soldier set a bucket inside with a small set of square folded English toilet tissue that resembled waxed paper. Remarkably courteous, but she waited until full dark to make use of it, ever conscious of the shadow of a soldier that slanted over the gray glass of the locked louvered window. At night she slept, surprisingly cold against the blanket and concrete, waking with the dawn at the growing chorus of small birds beyond her window. Mannikins, buntings, and too many finches to tell apart. The shadow of the soldier still hung on the glass, but she noted that he was a different height from yesterday's.

She amused herself for a while trying to dissect the seesawing sound of a copper sunbird flock from the chitter of sparrows. Finally, the door opened and Corporal Emmaus stood framed in the opening.

"You are free to go," he said. "I regret to inform you that your films are all spoilt. You seem to have overexposed them, or perhaps there is some flaw in your equipment. However, my orders are to let you leave."

Wilton could only surmise that their old servant Ephraim had volunteered for darkroom duty. Her father taught Ephraim how to develop black and whites, though he had no expertise in color. He wouldn't have guessed that every photo had birds in it, even if certain buildings and intersections featured prominently. Ephraim hadn't known, but she thought a prayer in his praise, because maybe he'd tried to help her.

Stiff from the night on the concrete she went less swiftly than she might have liked back out to her car. The soldiers had tossed the seat stuffing and cloth back onto the seating frames, but once she drew away from the grounds she breathed free at last. More care next time. Now she needed to find Brown's place to leave the Volkswagen before she went on the next part of her journey West.

She thought with a lift of her heart of seeing Sandy and Lindsey, of sharing her warning. But the hope brought back the question Gilman hadn't answered. Something different about Sandy, something that held her separate.

Something more than affection made her continually write to her parents in that little Midwestern town and made them write back, but never did Sandy make plans to go home. It was simpler this way. Wilton didn't have to worry about Sandy disturbing the balance here, but she didn't like not knowing, not understanding.
Maybe a mistake to have asked Gilman if she knew something about Sandy. Not used to making mistakes.

Chapter 25: Wilton

August 1967

In Transit, East to West, Nigeria

Two days after leaving the military post where she'd been detained, Wilton crossed the Niger to the West in a dugout canoe. The Volkswagen would wait for her in the yard of her father's old servant Frederick Brown, but it was decrepit enough that she might not trouble to retrieve it.

Gulls and terns gave plaintive cries, circling in the hazy sky. The Western shore fringed with palms loomed near, and Wilton kept nodding off, coming to whenever the dugout lurched or someone sang out warning. The canoe jerked and swayed in the strong currents until she had to rouse and swallow back her bile, fixing her gaze upon the distant greenery that crowded the shore. Could that be
Sterna bergii
flying over the muddy sands? She doubted it. There wasn't a reliable report of the great tern here and she couldn't rely on her tired eyes.

The prow grated aground on the mud amid cries of greeting. Wilton splashed over the side, legs trembling and heavy from inaction. Clutching her bag and box, she steadied herself against the dugout's rocking side, then pulled her feet free of the sucking mud to make her way past surprised riverside folk staring after her dirty white face as after an apparition.

But she had nearly three hundred miles to go before she'd reach Lagos. Her money belt was near empty. Wilton bargained for a seat on a mammy wagon to take her to a lorry park where she could transfer. She'd stitch her way across the Western Region at shillings a ride until she reached walking distance to the US Embassy.

Well, what she'd bought wasn't a real seat, but space to crouch on the open back. Wilton clung, one of the last passengers allowed on the overloaded mammy wagon. She hooked her arm around one of the stakes in the bed of the roaring vehicle. Motion and motion. So much racket and so slow. She dimly realized that the other passengers, taken aback by the presence of even so dirty a white person, had edged aside to give her all the room they could afford. One clasped her right ankle, another hooked fingers through her belt as if her companions did not trust her to stay put without help. She would not take offense this time at their uninvited touch, kindly meant and anonymously offered.