Night Must Wait (29 page)

Gilman saw then, like a photograph thrust before her, how she could have been. Sitting at a table in a pastel living room in some suburb, John at her side, a roast in the oven. Lindsey and some vague-faced suit by her side. Cocktail glasses and a game of bridge laid out. Pastel paper pads and baby pencils for scoring. She shuddered.

"Someone walking over my grave," she said in response to Jantor's glance.

Later that evening, Allingham sauntered into the mess and sat down opposite her at the table. Gilman, Sister Catherine and a visiting journalist had barely finished eating. Gilman gave up scraping her bowl and pushed it aside.

"Good evening," he said to everyone. "Doctor." He nodded at Gilman. "How's our mercenary patient?"

"Fine, thank you," she said. She noticed that the journalist cocked an interested ear in their direction.

Allingham was all innocence. "I understand he's sleeping it off on the cot in your office."

"Yes," Gilman said.

Allingham smiled, staring at her.

"Beds are always scarce around here," Sister Catherine said to the journalist, who nodded, still watching Allingham and Gilman. "Often the doctors sacrifice their personal space to the patients."

Allingham leaned across the table and whispered.

"Is he as hot a fuck as the other one?"

Gilman flung her coffee in his face. Allingham leapt up from the table with a shriek of pain, knocking over his seat. He mopped at the scalding liquid running off his face.

"You shit." He grabbed the collar of her lab jacket and yanked her from her chair. At white heat, Gilman slapped his inflamed face with all her strength and jerked back.

"Sweet Jesus." Sister Catherine leapt up.

Allingham, apparently remembering the journalist barely in time, lowered his drawn fist. In a flurry of white skirts the nun ran between and grabbed Gilman by the wrists.

"Let go." Gilman yanked at her hands, but even in rage she couldn't hurt Sister Catherine.

The door opened and Jantor walked in. Gilman tried to divest herself of Sister Catherine's grip. She could only imagine how it all looked.

There was Allingham panting, red faced and coffee stained, and the intrigued journalist, riveted with delight. Gilman saw Sister Catherine shake her head at Jantor, trying to catch his attention. Jantor banged the door, then the others looked over at him too.

Allingham turned visibly paler at the sight of the tall mercenary clad in full combat gear. Gilman felt the fight run out of her. She gave Jantor a guilty look, begging him not to ask the obvious question. Sister Catherine let Gilman go and stepped back.

"What's going on?" Jantor asked.

No one spoke. Sister Catherine considered Allingham and smiled.

"Doctor Allingham, I don't know what you said, but
now
seems like an excellent time to apologize."

Allingham took one look at Jantor and swallowed. He nodded once at Gilman, and she could see it came hard.

"I'm sure I'm sorry if I said anything to offend you, Doctor."

She gave him her best attempt at a smile, and nodded. Speech felt impossible.

"I'm sorry," Sister Catherine explained to the journalist. "We're always under siege and the long hours are hard on our tempers. It's been a long day."

"Yeah," the journalist said. "Jesus."

Chapter 59: Gilman

January 1969

Uli, Biafra

The latest inrush of patients crowded every room and hallway. Nurses hurried to make pallets and bring in a few more cots. Surgery had ended for now. Later they'd organize things better, after the less acute patients had been stitched and bandaged too. After some had died.

"Dead?"

Gilman heard the word not because it was uncommon—God knows it was one of the most frequently spoken words of all in this time and place—but because Sister Catherine's whisper suggested it wasn't meant to be heard by her.

"Who is it? Who died?" Gilman said, making her way across the room to where Sister Catherine bent over a soldier wounded in the neck and shoulder. Sister had stopped the bleeding and the man now lay propped up against the wall of the ward.

Gilman saw Sister Catherine gesture, but the drugged soldier lolled his head against the painted surface to meet her questioning look.

"Oh, he is dead, madam doctor, my friend is dead."

"I'm sorry," she said, on automatic. She tried to make it sound like she cared. She didn't want to show her quick relief.

Not Jantor then. Another soldier, another friend out of all the hundreds. Thousands. She couldn't keep track. She didn't know most of them one from another. His black face gleamed with sweat in the ill-lit room, the whites of his eyes showing how he tried to focus on her.

"Rest," Sister Catherine said. She patted his hand, and it seemed to Gilman that she patted too hard as if she wanted to distract him from Gilman.

"American bastard. Put his revolver to Samuel's head and blam."

He rocked his head back and forth against the thick paint like ice cream that coated the wall.

He repeated the blam, thoughtful, blinking.

"Who?" Gilman said. "Which Samuel?"

Sister Catherine straightened up and stood between the patient and Gilman.

"Sergeant Samuel Asika. Don't ask him any more. I've administered a sedative. It should help."

"Which American?"

"He said Jantor executed Samuel about some problem. It's one of those. We won't know the truth for hours, if then. Men say many things."

"It's some mistake," Gilman said, looking at the nun's quiet triangle of browned face in the white shape of her wimple and cap. Sister wasn't meeting her gaze, her blue eyes preoccupied as if this wasn't important.

"Sergeant Samuel and Jantor got along."

She found herself looking at Sister Catherine's back when the nun bent down again to check the patient.

"Finally heard something that makes you think twice?"

She recognized Allingham's voice from behind her, the habitual sneer of it, and the lift of his satisfaction.

"Go back to work, dickhead," she said, "before I turn around."

Gilman smelled the cigarette first, a good one, so it had to be an officer. She wasn't ready to see Jantor but walked on around the corner of the hospital building from the deep shade to the full blinding sun of the afternoon in the open yard.

There was her love, leaning against the trunk of a jacaranda tree whose feathery shade made the yard's sunlight tolerable. Waiting for her. She moved under the edge of the patterned shadow. He offered her a cigarette, but she hesitated.

"Where's Samuel? Your sergeant?"

"Dead."

"How?"

"Executed. Firing squad."

"That's not what I heard."

"Shouldn't believe all you hear."

"No, I shouldn't."

He stood straight now, no longer leaning against the tree trunk. Gilman could see nothing in his face even in this bright place that suggested regret. Jantor took another long drag on his cigarette and then put the pack away. He was as handsome as ever, wasn't he? Or did his eyes seem a little too close set, his face as innocent as only a pathology can make it? She still wanted to touch him, to pull herself against his familiar warm body. To take him to the secrecy of her bed, and feel the pace of loving overcome everything that the day had held and all the fears and doubts that extended this afternoon into an eternity.

"What crime did Samuel commit and when was he tried? I would have spoken for him," she said.

"He disobeyed orders. Civilians don't testify at a court martial. Not at one I convene."

"Yours."

"Yes. Mine. Command isn't up for discussion."

He let the smoke drift from the corner of his mouth. Familiar mouth. She knew how it felt. Knew how it could change from an ask to a demand. Had loved those lips any way he chose to make them, until now.

"Did Samuel kill a prisoner?"

"Do you want to know? Really?"

"Yes," she said, though she doubted even as the word came out.

"No, honey, you don't," he said. In spite of the endearment there wasn't any inflection, merely a flat statement. "Goodnight," he said and walked away.

Chapter 60: Wilton

January 1969

Umuahia, Biafra

You can't stop. Wilton knew that.

Surgery or swallowing or cutting a chicken's throat, once you start, you're committed. There's no taking it back or putting it off for another day. And if the thought crosses your mind, then you have to move faster, harder, more sure, more clear about the end.

Wilton stood still in the sunlight and pulled her straw hat into place. She could feel the thickness of bills in her money belt under her loose dress. The gun in its holster on the belt she wore over the dress. Awkward.

"But you can't stop," she said.

No one near enough to hear. She'd meet Christopher down by the cloth section of the marketplace sometime after noon and warn him. Now was the time to move out. The Nigerian Federal Government would start bombing rebel civilian targets in two months. She had Lindsey's word on that. Russian bombers with Egyptian pilots, English bombs. A quota of proven hits to make.

Only a few people out here on the road where the sun lay hard over stones, but she looked ahead down the long straggling way where the old buildings clustered and thought she saw more people moving toward the market center, even if no one sold what they all needed.

The Igbo always had something for sale even if it wasn't the right thing. Cloth and trinkets, ballpoint pens with the translucent sides so you could see how much ink was left even though you couldn't tell if it was dried up. You could buy aluminum buckets, rubber shoes all in one size and color, and even purslane for greens, or sometimes a withered yam, but not meat.

Beans. She remembered genetics professors from America trying to persuade the Igbo and Ibibio that cowpeas would be a good source of protein. Cowpeas never caught on, and who now had enough expectation to rake up a patch of land, haul water to irrigate and grow beans? Human excrement aplenty—she would have used that but there were some things that tradition still forbade. Unclean. Anyway, refugees don't farm.

Before the war beef came from the North on annual migrations. Tsetse fly killed most cattle in the South so the Northern Muslim herders culled their animals into the waiting markets of the infidel Christian and pagan South. Now the old patterns had shattered like an earthen pot.

To reshape the country, that was why she carried this wad of Nigerian bills in her money belt to give to Christopher. Illegal currency worth a firing squad.

Once she'd talked with Christopher about raising rabbits as an efficient meat animal, but they too were forbidden because they ate their own excrement and acted scared of everything and might take the fire out of a man's belly.

"Nothing takes the fire out of a man's belly like starvation." She'd said that to make him laugh when none of this was serious. She'd often made Christopher laugh.

He'd been such a scared boy like a leggy rabbit himself when he first arrived at the school when her father supervised the orphanage. Christopher's father came to wheedle a price, promising that Christopher would be clean and obedient in all ways once he belonged to Wilton's father. All ways. She felt the unease with which her father looked upon the man and how he turned his back when he understood this was a sale. Finally he passed over a few shillings in payment for Christopher's labor for a month.

The man huffed off angry, believing he'd sold his son for a pittance. Christopher ran away the next day. When the older servants brought him back, they laughed when Christopher begged them to let him flee because everyone knew that the whites took boys and cut them in bits to eat raw for virility.

The first thing Wilton told the boy was that he could run. She said if he hadn't the wit to stay, no one here wanted him and he'd best be off.

"We have food and it's not from chopped-up boys nor a rabbit like you, so if you want some of the food we have, you have to work," she'd said in his own tongue. "You learn our language, you work with hands and head and we'll feed you, and once every two weeks you take shillings to your father. You'll be afraid, not of us, but of being sent away. Yes, you can run away now, but if you do, never come back."

They were all Professor Wilton's children. She never told anyone that she wasn't a natural-born daughter to Professor Robert Wilton, but one of his many strays.

By the time he died, even Robert Wilton seemed to forget that he'd found her in the Philippines as an infant and perhaps meant to pass her on one day to some family but never got around to it. But he left her his name and an American passport. Perhaps one day another minister less absentminded had told him he should leave her his legal heir. She'd faced the news with astonishment.

She looked down at the soft dust puffing about her sandals and between her pallid toes, and wondered if maybe it did not matter anymore.

Professor Robert Wilton also left her his mission—raising up a country of the future, the perfect Nigeria that he held always in his mind, like the ideal Jerusalem burning in Afrique's brazen land.

"I shall not cease from mental fight." She heard the soaring chorus of boys' voices in her mind, shrill and piercing, black and brown faces uplifted on slender necks above the pure white of stiff shirts. "Till I have built Jerusalem…" and she put his own words next. "In Afrique's green and sunstruck land…"

Once that was started there was no going back. No stopping.

She taught Christopher how to read out of children's books.
Little Black Sambo
with the crimson-lined purple slippers and illustrations of pancakes striped like little brown-and-gold tigers. Those first words Christopher's tongue formed from the marks on the page brought a look like fear to his huge eyes, as if it frightened him to do this, or as if he feared the magic might slip away between his teeth. Power filling his mouth with an outrage of sweetness like bush honey. Then he repeated the sounds and glory came into him. He could read.