Night Must Wait (2 page)

Sandy glanced across at Lindsey's face and saw conversion.
Oh my God, you're shitting me, really? You're kidding, Lindsey. Africa?

"You want to be a doctor, Gilman?" Wilton said. "Why not a miracle worker? A God on earth? Toss out the insurance forms, the lawyers, administrative approvals. Imagine tropical medicine under a sky as wide as you make. You could do anything. Surgery, internal medicine, orthopedics, even epidemiology.
Everything
. They'd embrace you for your medicine, compete for you even if you sometimes kill a patient. Terror and adventure. You could walk an alien earth, stride through Africa with healing hands."

Sandy leaned back on her elbows and watched her three friends framed in darkness. Gilman's blue eyes clouding with the visions that Wilton painted, Lindsey silent, almost smiling.

The promise felt possible beyond dreaming. They'd never have to grow up. This freedom to be with friends, out from under the watchful eye of hometown and relations, might go on and on beyond the short four years of college. Eternal comradeship as real as those African lands humming with heat. Wilton lifted the vision before them, true and beautiful as this room of friends on a winter night.

Chapter 2: Wilton

December 1966

Nsukka, Eastern Region, Nigeria

Shadows pooled under the dusty cashew trees and the lone oil palm by the window of Wilton's study. Hot light thinned to gray, then blue. Inside, Wilton painted a fire finch. She glanced from the small limp bird lying on the porcelain plate to the image on paper and swept down another precise line.

The air stirred. She sensed a presence in the study. Her brush paused above the creamy white surface. She looked up at the tall black youth standing by her elbow.

"After curfew, go out and watch," she said.

Christopher's face sharpened, his large eyes questioning, but he remained straight and still.

"Please be silent," she said. "Be sure. I depend on you always."

"Yes, Professor." He switched on her desk lamp, as though she would have forgotten it without him, and left.

The brush touched the paper. She stroked a curve of soft coral paint, guided by her penciled sketch. Next, the feathered cheek framing the bird's bright eye. An alien eye, alert and questing. No projection of humanity. She rinsed her brush in the glass of cloudy water.

In her alien role, she needed to look without emotion, hear and act. During these past few months, rage between tribes and regions surged into violence. Rape, torture, murder.

All week her servants whispered secrets in Igbo and Ibibio. Raised in Nigeria, she understood them. Tonight, like so many other nights, displaced people across Nigeria would break cover with the dusk and flee for distant homes. On Christopher's signal, she'd slip into darkness and place herself between hands reaching for blood.

Wilton blended the gouache. Sienna for the bird's round head, blood carmine along the top of its beak, delicate olive for the scaled legs. She remembered the cool knobby feet against her palm, fragile and frantic.

Painting on suspense-filled nights centered her, steadied her hands and mind. Discipline let her forget everything except the process and concentrate only on color and form.

Was that motion and light? She glanced though the screen hung with humming insects. Christopher's kerosene lantern flickered in the humid air. Three distinct flashes. She covered the dead bird with a glass bell. He could return it to the refrigerator. She opened the door, the hinges grated. She flinched. If this night went wrong, there would be no forgiveness.

Wilton curled her toes in her sandals, aware of every grain of sand, every stiff blade of grass. She stilled herself at the tickle of an insect's claws on her foot. Centipede? The black night shimmered. She feared scorpions and snakes, legions of diseases and parasites. Never the Nigerians. In her they saw an American woman, a guest in their land
and they would do her no harm.

She made herself no more than a shadow, a slight thing, a small difference under the stars.

Wilton heard the stranger breathe. She smelled the acrid musk of fear on him. She would never shame him by speaking of it, nor tell him how the outline of his face, pearled by beads of sweat, caught the faint starlight. A proud man far from home needed to hold his own image clean in his mind.

She listened to the catch and gasp of his breath over the constant shrilling of night wasps, crickets and frogs. Some small animal rustled in the bushes by the driveway. The man stopped breathing, then burst forth again, rough as ever.

At last his panting softened, falling below the insect chirr until she no longer heard him. She took one more breath herself.

"Sir. I'm Professor Kate Wilton. I'm here to drive you North," she said in English. Formal to remind him of his Oxford education, his civilization—his family, his dignity. These would give him control. "I knew you were on the way."

His profile jerked at the first sound of her voice, his hand spidered against the pale wall of the house. Even in his speechless panic he must recognize the American accent and the safety she promised.

"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 started 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.