“How come you put that bad thing on Vivian’s mouth so she can’t open it or breathe?” said Junior Wurman . . . whose name, Julia had learned, was actually Thomas.
Julia glanced over at his accusing face.
“A muzzle isn’t really a bad thing, and Viv can breathe through it just fine,” she said. “Greyhounds are used to wearing them when they race, and I’ve only put it on now to make sure Leona doesn’t get hurt in case she’s snapped at.”
Thomas looked mistrustful. “But you told us that wasn’t gonna happen.”
“I said it probably won’t,” Julia said, and offered a reassuring smile. “We need to be careful, ’kay?”
A halfhearted nod from Thomas. He wedged himself back against his seated parents, still regarding Julia with critical mistrust.
She returned her attention to the adults, feeling a bit like Cruella DeVille. With vampire fangs.
“If all goes well, our next step is to see whether Vivian shows overly possessive traits when one of you holds the cat,” she said. “Some jealousy’s normal between them, and no different, really, from human sibling rivalry. Viv might show it by starting to whimper or getting down in a play position to catch your eye. If that happens, you need to be aware of it, spread around the affection, and everybody’s going to be happy. But it’s important to realize we’re talking about a big, muscular seventy-five-pound dog that can sprint almost as fast as a Thoroughbred horse, compared to an animal that weighs maybe a tenth as much, and is also a whole lot smaller. A cat that gets caught in a dog’s jaws is in serious trouble, and we want to help spare you that kind of unhappy incident—”
“Can I hold Leona when we do it?” Thomas said. Which made it twice now that he’d interrupted.
Julia looked at him. Hadn’t she mentioned she’d take questions after her explanation was finished?
“I think it’s best we leave it to your mom or dad,” she said. “To be on the safe side—”
“But you said that thing’s supposed to be on Vivian’s mouth to stop her from biting anybody!”
“That’s true.” Julia was wishing the kid’s mother or father would chime in and help her out here. “She can jump at Leona, though, and you might get a little startled—”
“What’s startled mean?”
“Ah, a little upset, in other words—”
“Won’t you have her on a leash?”
“Well, yes—”
“Why’d I be upset if Vivian’s on a leash and can’t bite anybody—?”
“It’s okay with us if Thomas wants to hold the cat,” said Papa Wurman, whose first name was Stanley. He put a hand on his son’s shoulder and gave it a doting squeeze. “Desmond, that’s our house cat, belongs to him. And Vivian’s going to be his new best friend. So how about we let him make the choice.”
Julia looked at Stanley. This was not quite the brand of parental mediation she’d had in mind. In fact, the euphonious cosmic vibe Julia had thought she detected in the air earlier was starting to seem more and more like a wild-flying spray of sour notes. She was thinking her emotions might have led her into the very sort of pitfall Rob had warned against—namely getting too enthusiastic about the prospect of finding a home for one of their rescues.
She was quiet a moment. It was Rob who made the final call in a dog’s placement. Standard operating procedure was for Julia to consult with him at the windup of every orientation she supervised and give her positive or negative impressions of how it went. Any doubts she might have about people would measure significantly into his own evaluation, and if need be he’d play the stern heavy, explain why a greyhound wasn’t a suitable pet for them, and send them on their merry ways. But Julia hadn’t completely ixnayed the Wurmans, not yet, and saw no harm in going ahead with the cat test. Nor was there any hard-and-fast rule to prevent the kid from being the cat bearer. Assuming the test got that far, the way he conducted himself might even figure into her recommendation.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s get started.”
Vivian passed step one of the test with flying colors. Her eyes anxious circles, her long tail tucked between haunches still bald and rash-inflamed from crate burn at the track, Vivian stiffened with resistence as Julia led her over to the slumbering Leona’s bed and acquiesced only after some soothing words, a pat on the head, and a couple of firm but gentle tugs of the leash. When Julia unwound the leash from around her hand to give it extra slack, Vivian opted to retreat from the bed rather than approach any farther. When Julia pulled her closer to it, and Leona stirred to give the grey a dozy, half-lidded, let’s-get-this-drill-over-with-so-I-can-get-back-to-my-catnap look, Viv shied off again, turning her head slightly to avert her gaze.
Julia moved away from the bed and the nervous grey eagerly joined her, shivering a little, leaning against her legs for reassurance.
“As everyone could see from her body language, Viv’s reaction to Leona fell somewhere between timid and downright afraid,” Julia said. She stroked the dog’s neck and flank to calm her. “Obviously, that beats aggressive. Now Thomas—”
“Do I get to hold the cat?”
Julia looked at him, bit the inside of her lower lip.
“Yes,” she said, whooshing out a breath. “You get to hold her. What I’d like you to do is carefully pick Leona up, then trade places with one of your parents so you can sit and cuddle her on your lap. When I bring Viv over to you, pretend not to notice us. Just keep petting and talking to Leona. Sound good?”
Thomas responded with one of his impatient, borderline rude half-nods, bent to lift the cat out of her basket, and then sat with it as Mama Wurman—introduced as Ellen—vacated her chair.
Julia shot Thomas’s father a glance. She wasn’t sure why she’d expected Stanley to be the parent to stand up, but he remained glued to his seat, arms crossed over his chest. And though it had nothing at all to do with their eligibility for greyhound ownership, Julia couldn’t help but note that chivalry wasn’t a point of emphasis for the Wurman brood.
She stepped forward again, letting out the leash, guiding Viv toward Thomas.
The kid was a natural for the role of animal provocateur, she had to give that to him.
“I love you, kitty-cat,” Thomas cooed. He nestled Leona in his arms, scratched behind her ear, buried his face in the thick fur of her nape, and gave her a series of smoochy lip-smacking kisses. “I love you best of all, love you so, soooo much—”
All in an instant Vivian launched forward, straining at the leash. She was growling, her teeth gnashing inside the muzzle as she thrust her long snout at the cat. Before Julia could yank her away from him, Thomas screamed and flinched back in his chair, slamming it hard against the wall. Hissing, spitting, her fur on end, Leona took a defensive swat at Viv. Then she sprang out of Thomas’s arms to the floor, went scrambling wildly across the room, and bolted out the doorless entry to the storefront with a loud mewling screech.
“The lady tricked me!” Thomas hollered. His face red, tears bursting from his eyes. “She knew the dog was gonna be bad and she tricked me!”
“Thomas, I’m sorry you got frightened, but that’s not true.” Julia had pulled in the leash, straddled Vivian between her legs, and could already feel her subsiding. “I told you there was a chance—”
Thomas leaped to his feet, and the chair fell over with a crash. Ellen swept him into her consoling arms.
“No you didn’t!” he bawled. He’d clenched his hands into tight, white-knuckled fists and was shaking them at his sides. “You’re a liar! A mean, mean liar!”
Stanley rose from his chair and looked across the room at Julia.
“Under the circumstances, given how my son’s been traumatized—”
“A mean liar lady with a bad, stupid dog . . .”
“—I feel it’s best we reconsider this adoption,” Stanley said.
Julia somehow managed to arrest her smile.
“Mr. Wurman,” she said, “I have to admit those were exactly my thoughts.�
�
Macie Nze had done his best to mark the 4×4’s route, and by that guess its general destination. The sounds and smells coming through the open front windows made it apparent that he’d been taken into the bush. Deep into the bush to judge from the long, punishing drive, which already seemed to have gone on for half the night. Though his eyes were covered by a canvas hood or sack, he was convinced his captors had headed south for dozens of kilometers, and then east for dozens more, putting him somewhere near the Wonga-Wongé Preserve, if not within its actual boundaries.
Nze had fought to hang on to his wits, stay alert to surrounding noises, keep track of turns the vehicle had made . . . lefts, rights, curves wide or sharp. Orienting himself hadn’t been easy. Wherever he’d been brought and held for many hours after his abduction was clearly within the city limits, but he’d been forced to wear the hood the entire time and gotten only a vague sense of his starting point. Yet neither his negated eyesight, his fear, nor his constant discomfort—and occasionally dreadful pain—had stopped Nze from being able to tell when the 4×4 was crossing bridges or stopping at intersections. Or when its tires had left Port-Gentil’s paved streets and thoroughfares for the outlying bush country.
The feel of the unimproved roads he’d traveled ever since had held their own clues to his direction. Even a newcomer to the land could have differentiated between highway macadam and rutted wilderness path, and except for his four years abroad at university, Nze, who was a month shy of his fiftieth birthday, had lived in Gabon his entire life. He could identify the type of surfaces over which he’d been driven, whether coastal sand or laterite, a soft, iron-rich earth that was typical of inland marshes and lagoons, and would hold moisture through all but the harshest dry seasons. For a while now the laterite had been sucking at the vehicle’s wheels, causing it to pitch and yaw, repeatedly bogging it down in claylike red muck.
That continuous rocking was bad enough for Nze, but the jolts he took in the 4×4’s cargo section whenever it was pushed out of a bog were far worse, and had wrung stifled groans of agony through the thick band of duct tape over his mouth. After the abductors walked him from his temporary holding place—hooded, gagged, and at gunpoint—they had forced him to squat on his knees in the 4×4’s cargo section, and then bound his wrists and ankles together from behind with electrical cord. The first rattling bump had knocked Nze off balance onto his left side, flinging his body against a heavy tire stowed in back with him . . . presumably a spare. He’d remained there since, unable to pull himself up, the grooved pattern of its treads stamping into him through his clothes. Movement just worsened the abominable strain on his neck, back, and legs. And those sudden forward lurches of the vehicle, mon Dieu, they were almost unendurable.
And so the drive stretched on. Nze believed daybreak was fast approaching—for whatever it was worth, the coarse, heavy fabric over his face had not completely blocked his perception of light and darkness. Much earlier, before the 4×4 slipped out of the city, he’d distinguished the glow of traffic signals, streetlights, even the occasional glancing headlamp beams of other motor vehicles. Now he had discerned a faint lifting of the black outside the windows, coupled with the sounds of an awakened jungle. He could hear the discord of overlapping birdsong, and had thought he’d recognized a mangabey’s shrieky primate cry behind him on the forest road.
Part of Nze’s mind yearned for an end to the torturous ride. Another part of him, however, understood how insane a desire that was, what its fulfillment would likely mean for him. He had tried to ignore these emphatic inner warnings, banish them from contemplation, but they had persisted anyway.
Assistant Minister Macie Nze was a man of some fair reason, a trait that would not allow reality to be denied.
If only his capacity for logic and common sense had guided his recent actions, Nze supposed he would never have gotten into this wretched spot. But greed was an imbecilic spoiler that could overcome a person’s best instincts. In his case, it had happened once too often.
As the car rolled on over the dirt roads, Nze’s thoughts suddenly backtracked to when he’d been taken outside his home all those hours ago . . . and then reversed themselves a little further, to the very moment he was lured into the trap.
The call came shortly after eleven o’clock on what was now the previous night. Seventeen minutes past eleven, to be exact. There was a Berthoud clock on his living-room bureau, and Nze recalled having looked at the antique timepiece as he had reached for the phone, setting down his late-evening glass of wine.
“Bonsoir, Macie.” The voice in his handset had belonged to Etienne Begela. “Ça va?”
“Bien, merci.”
Nze had waited. Begela’s cordial tone had thrown him off guard, as it had at the hotel earlier that night. His superior in the Office des Postes et Telecommunications, and a Beti Fang of maternal family linkage, Begela had not spoken a word to Nze for weeks before the reception . . . not, in fact, since their tense conversation aboard the Avirex flight out of Libreville after the National Assembly voted its approval of the UpLink licenses. Begela alternately accused Nze of being a bungler and double-crosser for having withdrawn his opposition. Nze countered that political exigency had left him with no choice except to launch a strategic retreat. The Americans’ support among the PDG’s most formidable and senior members was overwhelming, he’d insisted. Continued challenges would merely label both of them obstructionists to their future sorrow.
“Don’t speak to me of sorrow,” Begela said once their plane left the Gamba airport runway. “It isn’t you who must face our backer.”
“He paid us to lobby—”
“He expected us to deliver.”
With that curt interruption, Begela had risen from beside Nze to take an unoccupied seat up the aisle, and afterward had presented him with nothing but silence and his back.
Until the 11:17 telephone call.
Last night.
Nze remembered standing quietly with the receiver to his ear for several moments after their exchange of pleasantries. Studying his ornate centuries-old clock. Noting the swing of its pendulum’s polished brass rod as droplets of light splashed over it from a chandelier overhead.
“We’ve gotten a break,” Begela had said. “I’ve met with the individual we spoke about on the plane. Things went far better than expected.”
“He doesn’t blame us for the vote?”
“Let’s say I’ve managed to raise his consciousness about the Libreville hearing, and our political system in general.”
“How so?”
“Our lack of success was a disappointment to him. As is the arrival of the UpLink advance group. But he understands the complexities we dealt with in the capital, has revised his objectives accordingly, and remains hopeful we can barter influence with our opposition, sway them to rescind their decision.”
Nze had shaken his head. “With the Americans in our country, I don’t see any chance of making inroads—”
“Hear me, mebonto,” Begela broke in, using the familiar Fang term of address reserved for members of a nuclear kin group. “Our associate still asks for our favors, and we should oblige him. He knows it does not come without ample compensation.”
Nze had paused to think. He’d reached for his glass of Clos du Marquis, sipped. Begela’s implication was plain. The foreigner had been a brimming well of profit neither of them was eager to abandon.
“Was he specific about what he wants from us?”
Begela gave an affirmative grunt.
“It’s best we discuss that in person,” he said. “I’ll send over my car to bring you to the office.”
Nze was surprised. “At this hour? I’ve just gotten settled in . . .”
“Consider it worthwhile overtime,” Begela said. “We mustn’t delay. There are steps we can take in the morning that will reassure our backer, yet are consistent with a phased approach that will satisfy your cautious inclinations.”
Nze had taken another drink from his wineglas
s, let the warm and mildly bitter flavor of the Saint Julian grape settle over the back of his tongue.
Ample compensation.
“Give me fifteen minutes to get ready,” he’d said at last.
The black Mercedes 500E coupe pulled in front of his colonial townhouse a quarter hour later on the dot, and Nze had noticed nothing unusual approaching it across the empty sidewalk. Begela’s personal driver, Andre, had whisked around to the curb, nodding dutifully as he opened the rear passenger’s side door.
Nze was leaning into the Benz when he saw the man in its backseat—a man the coupe’s double-glazed windows had at first concealed from view. In his dark coverall fatigues, he very definitely was not one of the minister’s regular employees.
For a confused, off-kilter moment, Nze had wondered if he might be an official escort of some kind. But then a scent that was at once recognizable and incongruous wafted over him from the car’s interior . . . the pungent, leafy smell of khat.
Although the stimulant drug was legal in Gabon—as it was throughout the rest of Africa—Nze knew no ministerial guard would have the effrontery to chew it while on duty.
He’d stopped halfway inside the car, hesitant, suspicion abruptly taking root inside him.
A profanity was husked in his ear: “Encule-tête!”
Powerful hands closed around Nze’s neck from behind, wrenched it backward before he could react. The hood fell over his head and was pulled down below his eyes, his face. Then Nze was shoved into the rear of the car, where his mouth was quickly wrapped with duct tape outside the sack.
Someone pressed into the car after him and the door of the Mercedes slammed shut.
An instant later, Nze heard the driver get inside.
Nze made smothered sounds through the tape, struggled to move, but could scarcely wriggle his body. He’d been crushed between the man in dark fatigues and whoever boosted him into the car.
An object jabbed into his right side. Hard. The blunt barrel of a gun.
Cutting Edge (2002) Page 12
