by Robin Winter
"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 shou
ld 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.
The snow ended, clouds breaking when the sun set in the early afternoon. Wilton watched it from her room, looking out over the porch with its white painted columns and the drift of snow that lay unevenly across the top of the stone wall at the end of the garden. A motor started, then she glimpsed the nose of an elegant gray car as it turned and moved down the driveway. Sedate and respectable.
The gardener came out and walked all over the thin snow of the side yard, poking into the bushes at the verge of the open area, then traveling in a random pattern that went some distance into the trees of the woods before circling back. He walked as if his feet hurt, as if the shoes did not fit him. Late for him to work, with everything outside gone blue.
She waited, turned on her table lamp as the darkness intensified. The automatic lights came up and cast yellow ovals on the trodden snow. In a little while a knock came at her door, then the buzz of the lock disengaging. She heard the door open and close, waited for the buzz to stop, but it didn't. She turned then.
Doctor Lowenstein stood by the door, his hand resting on the door frame, his blue eyes wide as if he'd seen something frightening. She felt the tension in him, the tightness.
"Wilton, Gilman warned me. She was right. A man came for you today, asking that I release you to him. He's Nigerian. He has a name, but I don't believe the one he uses is real. I said he needed other papers than the ones he had. He'll return with what I requested. There's nothing wrong with his procedurals, so I'll have to let you go with him if you're here in the morning."
He stopped, swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing under the skin. She wondered how it would look to cut the skin there, then slant the blade up to deepen the cut at the jugular.
Gouts of blood all over the floor, her hands and the pillows with their neat print of flowers and ferns. Layers of pinkish tissue in the throat after the blood had spurted and ebbed. The tissue of the voice box would look whitish, cartilaginous.
"I have four thousand dollars in cash divided between a wallet and an envelope that Gilman left for you. Put them in different places, some bills in your shoes so if you're robbed, you'll still have resources. I am putting these on the table. I hung my minus-twenty down jacket on the holly bush against the west side of your wing. You have good shoes, I see. Here's a small knapsack. Take your warm things. I have a water bottle in the knapsack and some candy bars in the pockets for energy.
"I'm sure they're watching. The man left too easily. So if you choose to go, you must go alone and on your own. On Route 101 you have a good chance of getting a ride hitchhiking, especially on a night like this. I'll deactivate your door sensor so it looks like it got a bug. Awfully coincidental, but there's no help for it."
He pulled a screwdriver from his pocket and set to work on the door. Wilton saw his hands tremble. She took the knapsack and packed it fast, but with each part folded and tucked in, no loose ends.
"I'll try to contact Gilman, but her landlady isn't reliable. I'll try the London hospital too, but there aren't any guarantees I'll get through."
She nodded to Lowenstein as the buzzer stopped. He saw she did not want to pass close to him, so he stepped back away from the door. Out of the door and down the corridor with sure feet, hardly a sound.
Hours later, each step cost. Wilton couldn't feel her feet except as a jolt when one struck ground. She imagined them as stumps now they were beyond pain, long past the pins and needles, long steeped in the bitter cold, a sensation like wetness in the socks. She couldn't tell whether or not the damp was real, but other than a distraction, an amusement for her brain, it didn't matter.
But she wouldn't fall. She must not. Wilton tried to stay on the plowed surface, less effort than plunging through the snow, but the way was packed with slippery ice. She'd fallen once. It seemed like hours ago. No clock, no time, no change in this fierce night cold.
Lights, and her heart pounded. Headlights. She moved back a step from the road and put up her hand, waving her numb arm. If only this was someone she did not know.
Chapter 106: Gilman
December 1971
London, England
The ward lay quiet tonight. Time to head back to dinner and sleep. Gilman shrugged on her raincoat, put up the collar and tucked her scarf ends in. The ward light reflected in drops of rainwater on the darkened windows. She crossed the ward and hurried down three flights of stairs to the ground floor, out into the wet wind of a cold London night.
She strode along the evening streets toward the Euston Square underground station, past the lowering and sooty facades of the now-deserted university buildings. Traffic was sparse. The splash of her footsteps rang on the wet pavement. She passed the hospital administrative offices, drew up, and listened. An electric rush of adrenaline shot through her veins and she strained to hear.
For five weeks now, Gilman had felt she had a shadow. From the hospital one night, to her door the next. When she stopped to listen, the sound vanished. She never saw anyone in the drifting evening mists around the hospital or the winding alleys near her flat.
Hastening toward the lights of Euston Square, her foot slipped on a soggy bit of newspaper. She flinched. Paranoia. There's no one there. There's no crime in London. A woman can walk anywhere alone at night in perfect safety. Even Jantor would agree. Believe it. Battle fatigue, that was it. You've been in the jungle too long. You're jumpy from lack of sleep.
Gilman reached the lobby of the station, where she pumped two shillings into the ticket machine. She snatched the yellow card from its slot and hurried to a descending escalator.
She hated the steep moving wooden stairs whose creaking descent into the city's underground tunnels took several minutes. If only she could walk instead of balancing trapped on the escalator, but the subterranean passages where the trains came and went burrowed so deep that the station's long and treacherous staircases were barricaded, for emergency use only.
Gilman rode down to the train platforms. She thought for the hundredth time of the London blitz, when thousands of citizens abandoned their homes to the mercy of the Luftwaffe and swarmed into these tunnels to escape the bombing. She stared at the posters that adorned the subways displaying rows of huddled forms sleeping on the train tracks. People burying themselves alive to elude death.
In a way the blitz was the best of times, the old Londoners told her. Camarade
rie shared by strangers in the streets. Maybe, but she wondered about the old people's stories. The legend of the blitz, of transcendence and comradeship had led her to Nigeria, in search of the best in herself and her friends. A time of war, of heroism—she blinked against the harsh lights of the escalator passage. Now she wondered if rats on a sinking ship ever pulled together, whether London overcame the bombing or merely survived it.
Gilman found the tunnel to the Westbound's stop where a busker was packing his violin. Quiet save for a cluster of young people who seemed to all know each other. Gaily dressed people returning from the theater. A drift of perfume in the dank air. She shifted her stance, stifled a yawn. The later it grew, the further apart the trains ran. Gilman welcomed the approaching rumble of the westbound Baker Street line.
She stepped aboard the train and selected a seat by the back window. Then a flash of odd movement in the rear car caught her eye, the gesture of an arm, like a phrase spoken in another tongue. Gilman glanced through the small windows between the cars. She recognized the stance of the short muscular man boarding the train, and distinctive facial scars. Yoruba tribe. She jerked upright. His woolen muffler had slipped. Now he rearranged it over his mouth and chin. The doors hissed shut, and the train surged into motion.
Gilman told herself thousands of Africans lived in London. Africans with tribal scars. It didn't work. She knew someone followed her, knew she hadn't seen the man on the broad expanse of platform. He'd concealed himself until the last possible moment. The train rushed and swayed through the black tunnel.
Warren Street, Great Portland Street. She felt in her pocket for the revolver she no longer carried.
The train slowed for Baker Street. Christ. If she got off…Had the man followed her for days? Weeks? Did he know where she lived? If he knew that she'd finally seen him, he'd have to make his move.
