Night Must Wait (45 page)

"But which side were you on?" he said as if couldn't stop himself.

"Both," she said. "The war had to end, sooner not later, and that was all I worked for. Peace requires death." She smiled at him. "Maybe you can't believe me, can you? Well, that will be far more entertaining."

She looked out of the window again, becoming still. There was Leviticus, bundled up against the chill, raking up leaves, only his black face showing how exotic he really was here.

She wanted Lowenstein to think a little, reflect on what she had said and let it lodge deep. When he moved slightly, she looked back at him.

"There's no need to be so slow," she said, and she used again the British schoolmarm to inform her voice and the crispness of her consonants. "Let's get on with the next story."

He pulled out a page with two great tawny hawks upon it.

"Ah," Wilton said. "I loved these black kites.
Milvus migrans parasitus
. One of the loveliest sights of my life was to see them winging mere inches from the slope of a rounded green African hill, snatching insects from the air. A hatch of termites, I believe. Oh, not those pitiful things you call termites here. These as long as a joint of your finger, with wings glittering like glass in the air. The famished birds swooped near, playing tag with their own racing shadows. I have always wanted to describe that to someone."

Chapter 102: Gilman

November 1971

London, England

Gilman flipped a patient's chart, smiling at the intern beside her. His red hair and freckles made her imagine how he would sunburn when he hit the tropics.

"Great stuff, these new antimalarial drugs. When you get to Africa, when you need them the most, you won't have them. The fever won't fall overnight like this. You'll be wrapping your patients in cold wet sheets to keep them from burning up—if you can get water and maybe ice to do it. But evaporative cooling's a great thing. Even without ice you can save lives."

In his face she read her past youthful longing for the adventure. To visit an alien and savage land and try one's hand against the most primitive medical conditions—to be medicine man, shaman, high priest to a desperate people. A wave of nausea washed over her, beading her forehead with a cold sweat. She turned aside and nodding goodnight, made her way blindly to the doctor's cloakroom.

She leaned against the doorway to the cloakroom, pressed her face against the cool mahogany frame.

"Doctor Gilman," the young intern called. "Are you all right? You look ill."

"I'm fine, David, fine. Just a bit tired. It's been a long day."

She stood straight and smiled at him until he turned back on his way, but a sea of nightmares rocked her stomach. Jantor standing stone faced at the foot of her cot. Explosions and screams in the deep and dripping bush beyond the frail lantern light. Wilton…don't blame yourself, Jantor said. How funny. A mercenary learning all the doctor's book of soothing and trite expressions. All the medicines in the world couldn't have stopped the loss of Wilton's incredibly fine mind. And Sandy, who died so terribly…Stop it, I could have stopped it. Stopped all of it, from the beginning.

Gilman groped for her raincoat in the cloakroom. Pull yourself together. She steadied her hands with an effort, knotting her thick hair at the back of her neck and tying a scarf over it. You could have played bridge in a New York suburb.

She buttoned her raincoat and stared out over the ward. The warmth of the aged wood of the teaching hospital in the soft yellow glow of the night lighting steadied her. She looked along the frayed and shiny green cloths hanging from the bed screens, the lofty ceilings, the row of beds, and their sleeping occupants. The ward had become home.

London was free of associations. Since leaving Wilton in Dr. Lowenstein's care six months ago, she'd plunged herself into working the wards and giving lectures at the London Institute of Tropical Medicine, sixteen hours a day, seven days a week.

When she left the hospital at night she retired to a pub in Baker Street for a late meal and two pints of draught beer, tossed off like medicine to induce sleep. Then to her apartment in a shabby mews, where on good nights she slept a fitful five hours and on bad read medical journals until dawn. But tonight when she reached her flat, a little drowsy from the beer, a note was stuck to her door.

"Dr. Lowenstein called. Said you weren't answering your own telephone. Please return call. Says you have number. Don't have your friends call on my telephone in future."

She did a fast conversion in her head of time zones then shrugged. If something were wrong, she had to know.

He wasted little time on pleasantries.

"She's all right. Gaining ground in fact. But I had a few questions," Lowenstein said.

"Gilman, you said Wilton's collapse stemmed from losing her friend and servant Christopher."

"Absolutely—she felt as responsible for him as for a child of her own."

"Did anyone speak of what happened to her immediately before you brought her out of Biafra?"

"Yes, Masters, a soldier, said she tried to rescue an American minister from the rubble. She damaged her hands horribly trying to dig him out."

"No. Gilman, she murdered him. She pulled down the ruins to bury him alive. She injured herself killing him. "

Gilman could not speak. She felt dizzy, as if he'd spun her around. She looked around the apartment, its cozy English crowded comfort suddenly as alien as Mars.

Chapter 103: Oroko

November 1971

Lagos, Western Region, Nigeria

Oroko went immediately to the Lagos office when he arrived at six o'clock in the evening. He knew Lindsey would be back from the party at Katsina's place as soon as she could extricate herself.

Two years since Sandy's death. Lindsey tried not to talk to him except for giving orders, avoided any approach that would put him in Sandy's place. But he knew a time must come when she would have to talk. Maybe to Wilton, possibly Gilman, no one else but those two, and him.

He sat in the waiting room and ate the meat and onion sandwich he'd brought with him. He drank a warm Coke out of the bottle. In the back of his mind he heard Sandy jeering about the Coke.

"I'm on duty," he heard himself say. "A beer would be inappropriate."

"Fuck that," Sandy said and he jerked his head around at the sound of the door. No, not Sandy, of course. Lindsey, still dressed for the party in pale-green linen with a gold chain delicate at her throat. She nodded to him and crossed the waiting room to her office, opening the door. Oroko wadded up the napkin and touched it to his lips before he tossed it into the waste can and followed her.

"What time will you go?" Lindsey asked him.

"The eight o'clock flight, Madam."

Oroko stood as was his habit, by the shuttered window, watching Lindsey move a few papers on her desk. She sat and pulled open the drawer, drew out a bone paper cutter fashioned into a crocodile. He could see the rounds of its surprised eyes. She turned it over in her hands, her profile like that of a carving. He waited.

"I can't remember," Lindsey said. "I miss Sandy. Or I think I do. I remember her red hair and how she liked beer and poker, but she's become like a photograph. She mattered more than I knew to me. I should've left when she died."

"No," Oroko said. "You aren't well, madam, to talk like that. Have you a fever?"

"I should have chased Gilman down while I still
felt
what she'd done."

"The doctor suffered more this way."

"You think so?" she put the crocodile down. "I thought I served progress, order—that gave me focus. I dreamed I would serve Wilton's cause, and justify her sacrifice."

"You were her sacrifice." He stepped closer to the desk. "You, yourself."

"I don't know now what she wanted."

"Was Sandy herself willing to come to Nigeria? Did she come for you?"

"She was happy here. I never understood why she was so happy but God knows, so long as she could go off on her expeditions into mining country and prospecting…but the war took that away."

Oroko remembered too well.

"No," she said, correcting herself. "I took her freedom. She became a risk I wasn't willing to take. I chained her to Lagos."

Oroko watched her.

"A person who gives herself to another tribe is a special kind of fool. She can approximate what's right, fight for it, idealize, but shaped by her own past she'll never become a part of her adopted land. So she's stuck in the role of mother, one who can't afford for the child to grow up away from her influence, or she becomes an embittered prophet. Both sick, both damned by the same self-sacrifice. Do you see it, Oroko? How can you—"

"I don't belong here either," he said, and waited.

"Do you honestly think I did anything? Can you believe that I changed the war? I wanted to stop the deaths, come to an end as fast as possible. To save lives.

"It didn't work. I don't believe I shortened that war by one day. It had its half-life like one of Sandy's radioactive ore samples and nothing Wilton or I did was going to make it slow down or speed up for all the wishful thinking and interfering in the world.

"We spent twenty years believing in ourselves because Wilton said we could do anything. But what's come of all that?"

Oroko's old anger with Lindsey faded. He listened.

"Gilman saved lives. Maybe she justified Wilton's dreams. How many of those lives she saved then got lost in the war? There are nights I see Wilton when I close my eyes and she has the face of Satan. I was on the tower with her and I chose the kingdom. Lucifer son of morning, glorious as the new day. Ironic that Biafra represented itself by a half sun—a setting sun not a rising one, Sandy used to joke."

"Beautiful enough to lead us all on," Oroko said.

"And why? Wilton offered us what?"

"Wilton made you feel powerful," Oroko said.

"And now I shall kill the only one of us who might possibly have done something good. But I close my eyes and I see Sandy in that hospital bed. Death by torture, explosion of living cell after cell. Morphine hardly touched it. She never harmed anyone."

"Except by dying."

She stared down at the desk.

"I would like to be alone, Oroko."

"Yes. But madam…there is tomorrow after tomorrow, and you have more ahead, powerful because you count no cost."

"Go, Oroko."

Chapter 104, Oroko

November 1971

Massachusetts, USA

Oroko sat down at the doctor's invitation, easing the elegant wool of his brown suit pant over his knee. The cloth had the subtlest line of blue in it, less than a stripe, the softest suggestion of color. Beyond the deep-set window of the study early snow fell, blurring the shapes of bare trees, and the curves of hill and meadow that led in a long smoothness down to a fuzzy blur of woodland. White like paper, this land. Colorless and comfortless.

"Beautiful day, isn't it?" the doctor said. "You already know who I am, but I am at a loss beyond the simple fact that you're Richard Scott from…"

Oroko gave a smile he'd chosen for the occasion, a friendly amused one, like the smile of a man who holds a hostage and admires his host's pretense of normality.

"From Lindsey Kinner," he said. "She hasn't the leisure to come herself. Business presses. However she delegated me to come for her friend, Katherine Wilton, sometimes known as L. K. Wilson, who is in your care."

He reached into his jacket, drawing forth two envelopes, offering them to Doctor Lowenstein, and noted how the man hesitated a fraction before accepting them. As though the paper were tainted.

It wasn't a matter of race. This man sensed what kind of human Oroko was. Lowenstein saw through the brown wool suit, the linen-and-cotton blend of his pure white shirt with the cuffs showing the perfect quarter inch beyond the jacket sleeves. Saw something maybe in the eyes? Or mouth? Or had Gilman warned him to look for one like Oroko? Now Lowenstein would pretend to find fault with the documents, stall for time.

"For your patient, I dare say it is a wonderful day," Oroko said. "Miss Wilton will be overjoyed to return to her own country."

"Excuse me?" Dr. Lowenstein said, frowning at the letter he'd unfolded.

"Her country," Oroko said. "You must be aware that she does not belong here. My principal only agreed that she should come to America for medical treatment because you have the best doctors."

Lowenstein glanced at him then away. Was he thinking of the institution in which he'd found Wilton? Oroko knew what custodial care meant. He hadn't questioned Lindsey's judgment then. What he doubted was the wisdom of letting this man tamper with Wilton's mind as if it were an expensive watch to rebalance.

Chapter 105: Wilton

December 1971

Massachusetts, USA

"There is a man with papers. He's freeing you."

The snowflakes clung to the black groundskeeper's jacket, only a few drifting, now that the sky lightened. Wilton looked down from her cold seat on the edge of the swept porch, her eyes meeting his for one instant before she turned her head away.

"He's in the front office. I heard him talking when I went to ask about the snow blower at lunchtime. I thought you might be glad to know. He's a black man. Nigerian, but I cannot tell his tribe. He has papers. He carries himself like a lord."

She nodded. Wilton rose slowly, her body clenching, the inside of her nose crinkling with the frozen air, and went back into the house. Her attendant locked the porch door behind her and walked away on the icy outside path. Wilton moved through her rooms, taking items out and placing them in order on the bed. She took off her clothes and pulled on the long winter underwear she'd used when she first came to Lowenstein's hospital. She had better weight on her now, more stamina. Wool slacks. Double socks, the ones with a pattern of color about the tops. Shirt, then sweater. She pulled on the stout shoes with good side support, ones she'd used when her legs and ankles were so uncontrolled in the early days of living here.