Tongues of Fire

by Peter Abrahams

  On the back seat was a small suitcase. Inside he found some clothing and a suede toilet kit. He opened it and saw her toothbrush, her toothpaste, soap, suntan oil, sunscreen. And a hard plastic tube with a picture of an apple on the cap and words written on the side. Walden’s All-Natural Apple Deodorant it said.

  Leaving everything as it was, he stepped back from the jeep and bumped into someone behind him. He wheeled around. Neimy.

  “She was a spy,” he said.

  Neimy took his hand. They walked back to the camp.

  In the morning he wrote a message on a sheet of paper and gave it to a cousin of Neimy’s to take to the telegraph office in Muglad. He addressed it to the general at the head of the government in Khartoum. “Send me Bokur. The Mahdi.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  He stared at his feet. They were ugly. Too long. Too narrow. Too dirty. What he needed was a pair of golf ball socks to put on so no one could see.

  He got off the bed and began to search for them. He didn’t have to look under the blankets or the sheets because there were no blankets or sheets: only a thin mattress, stained and worn, on an iron frame. That made the search a lot easier. He lifted the mattress off the frame. No golf ball socks. He knelt on the floor and looked under the frame. They weren’t there either. It meant one of two things. Either the golf ball socks were inside the mattress or … Or what?

  He could not remember the second thing it meant. Kneeling on the floor, he thought as hard as he could. Shadows stretched across his cubicle. Slowly darkness fell. It was no use. He couldn’t remember.

  Still, he might as well search the mattress. He stuck his finger into one of the little holes in the cloth and started pulling out the straw. It was slow work. After a while he stuck another finger in the hole and ripped the cloth to make the hole bigger. Not much, just enough so that it would go faster. It went faster. Soon he had run all the straw through his hands and turned the cloth inside out. No golf ball socks.

  That meant it was the other thing.

  What was it? What? What? What?

  Someone had stolen them.

  He had remembered.

  He laughed a triumphant laugh. Lights flashed on all around him. He stepped out of the cubicle into the hall. It was a long wide hall, lined with cubicles. Some of them had curtains you could hide behind. Not his. At one end of the hall was a toilet. It had no cover, no seat, and there was never any water in the rusty flush tank on the wall above. You could pull the chain a hundred times, but it made no difference. The toilet wouldn’t flush. He hated when he had to go there.

  At the other end of the hall was a steel door. Beyond that steel door was another steel door. Beyond that he didn’t know. Baby-Finger always closed one before he opened the other, and dropped the long key into his pocket. Baby-Finger sat on a chair in front of the steel door. He called him Baby-Finger because he had no baby finger on his right hand—just a little yellow stump as hard as bone. His right hand held the stick. He hated that stick even more than he hated the toilet.

  At the moment Baby-Finger wasn’t sitting on his chair. He was walking toward him down the hall with his rolling seaman’s stride. Baby-Finger was big and dark. All he wore were dirty black shorts. He had another pair of dirty shorts he didn’t wear as often. They were gray.

  Baby-Finger kept coming. Now he could see his little eyes. The white part was always yellow, and when you looked very closely you could see the swollen red veins crisscrossing the surface. His teeth were yellow too, but you hardly ever saw them because Baby-Finger did not have much to say.

  Baby-Finger came closer. There was a lot of straw on the floor. Baby-Finger kicked at it. Straw rose in the air, glided a little way, and settled back down.

  Someone in one of the cubicles shouted, “What is it?” Everyone in the cubicles spoke Arabic. So did Baby-Finger, when he talked. They spoke a careless singsong Arabic that was very unpleasant.

  “The Turk,” Baby-Finger said. They called him the Turk. He didn’t object. After all, he called Baby-Finger Baby-Finger. Fair was fair.

  “Fair is fair,” he said to Baby-Finger. The red veins in Baby-Finger’s eyes were more swollen than he had seen them for a long time. “Fair is fair.” He repeated it a few times, trying different languages. Up went the stick. And down.

  Blackness.

  It was all the fault of the woman in the sable coat. She had hidden Sergeant Levy’s leg. Did she think it was going to be easy for Sergeant Levy, swimming all the way with only one leg? Or for him? Because if they were going to make it, he would have to tow Sergeant Levy. He knew it. Sergeant Levy knew it. The woman in the sable coat knew it. So she was trying to kill them. She hated them because they no longer believed in the Americans. She clung more tightly to the Americans than to life itself.

  But he could not be angry at her. Even before he and Sergeant Levy stumbled into the water he had heard the steel insects singing in the air. He knew that the woman would close her ears to them, but finally she too would hear them, if they had not bitten her first. Then she would follow them into the water, and her sable coat would pull her to the bottom. So there was no sense feeling angry at the woman in the sable coat.

  He lay in the bottom of the boat. One of the sailors bent over him and looked in his eyes. “Hurry up with that blanket,” he called to the other sailor. “The bastard’s turning blue.”

  “Never mind the blanket,” he said to the sailor. “There isn’t time. Sergeant Levy’s still out there.”

  “I think he’s trying to say something,” the sailor said.

  They couldn’t hear him. It must be the roar of the sea, drowning his voice. But the sea had not been rough when he was swimming in it. The weather was changing. He listened, and heard the roar. He would have to speak more loudly. He took a deep breath and screamed, “Never mind the blanket.”

  The pain hit him then. Pain like he had never felt, in the small of his back. He cried out. It hit him again, and jerked him up off the bottom of the boat. Gasping, he clung to the gunwale. Wetness ran down his legs. Warm sticky wetness. Something had bumped him in the back. When? When he was swimming. What? Something.

  It hit him once more. He cried out again. Across the black water Israel burned. The little white house on the hill was burning too. And the grave he had dug behind it: all in flames. He screamed: “No. No. No.” He would not let it happen.

  Lights flashed on.

  “What is it?”

  “The Turk.”

  He saw swollen red veins on dirty yellow eyes. Up went the stick. And down.

  It was wet and very cold. That meant he was still swimming. No problem. He was a good swimmer. He loved the water. He felt Lena resting on his back, heard Naomi and his mother swimming along beside him. Sergeant Levy must be far ahead by now—he was a big, powerful man. Much stronger than Baby-Finger.

  Or had something happened to Sergeant Levy’s leg?

  “Sergeant Levy? Still swimming? Sergeant Levy?” He could hear nothing but the sea. “Naomi? Lena? Mother?” The sea. Wet and very cold.

  He opened his eyes in the darkness. Someone was muttering softly in Arabic, “Snakes are biting me, snakes are biting me.” He kept saying it over and over. Each time the words grew slightly louder. After a while footsteps passed nearby. “Snakes are biting me.” He heard a hollow crack. The stick. The snakes stopped biting.

  Footsteps passed the other way. The cold wet sea held him tight.

  In the morning he found that he was lying on his back on the iron bed frame. His whole body was wrapped in sheets. They were no longer very cold or very wet, but they were so tight he could not move at all. He lay still. There was no use struggling. He knew that. He waited for the sacrifice. It was just. Everyone sacrifices someone else. Once he had sacrificed someone. He tried to remember who. He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t. He couldn’t.

  He waited, but there was no sacrifice. Waiting was the sacrifice. When it was over, Baby-Finger came and freed him from the sheets. He stood
up, light and dizzy. “What’s for breakfast?” he asked Baby-Finger.

  “Pigeon eggs,” Baby-Finger replied. That was what he always said. They never had pigeon eggs. Breakfast was stale bread and sour milk. Lunch was pasty millet. Sometimes they poured brown water on it, sometimes they didn’t. Dinner was stale bread and sour milk. Of course some of the others ate better than that—they had relatives outside to bring them food. The snake man, for example. He had lamb, beef, oranges, chocolate, tea. But the snakes got him at night.

  Baby-Finger was looking at the iron bed frame. “Now you don’t even have a mattress,” he said.

  “Can’t I have another one?”

  Baby-Finger laughed and went away.

  Slow and not very steady, he walked along the hall to the toilet. He had to use it badly. He had held on because he had had enough of pissing and shitting in the cold wet sheets and then lying there all night. And sometimes the next day too.

  As he went down the hall he looked into some of the cubicles. He saw that a few of the others had been wrapped up for sacrifice during the night. They all stared at the ceiling. One had a bloody head. “Does it hurt?” he asked him in Arabic.

  The man raised his head very slightly and peered at him through the cataracts that covered his eyes. “I can fly,” he said. “I was out flying last night. I must have flown into a tree.”

  That’s not what happened, he thought. Baby-Finger hit you with the stick. But he didn’t say it.

  “Don’t say that,” the man with the bloody head shouted at him. “I told you what happened. I can fly. I hurt myself flying.”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “Liar,” the man with the bloody head shouted.

  The snake man was sitting on the toilet. His eyes were closed, and he was masturbating very slowly. “Hurry up.” While he waited he looked out the little barred window in the wall near the toilet. Outside he saw a small dirt yard. A few chickens pecked in the dust. A man slept against the far wall. It was a high wall with barbed wire strung along the top. Beyond the wall was the blue sea, calm and gleaming in the early morning sun. A few dhows, their sails heavy and drooping, drifted over the water.

  He turned to the toilet. The snake man’s eyes were still closed, and he was rubbing himself even more slowly than before. “Hurry up.” The snake man showed no sign of hearing him. He began to get angry. He had to use the toilet. “That’s why the snakes come after you,” he said to the snake man. “Because of what you’re doing right now.”

  The snake man’s eyes opened wide in fear. His hand jerked away from his penis as though it were white hot. He got off the toilet and backed slowly away. “Snakes are biting me,” he said softly.

  When the snake man was gone he used the toilet, trying not to look inside. Perhaps he had been cruel to the snake man. The snake man had erections he had to do something about. He did not have that problem.

  He walked back toward his cubicle. At the far end of the hall Baby-Finger rose from his chair, took the long key from his pocket, and unlocked the steel door. He pulled it open, went to the second steel door, and knocked on it. Then he returned to the chair and sat down, shutting the door behind him but not locking it. Soon after came the squeak of the second steel door opening on its hinges. Without getting up, Baby-Finger opened the first door. The laundry cart rolled into the hall, pushed by a short wiry man who was almost hidden behind it.

  The laundryman went from cubicle to cubicle collecting clothes and bedding. He watched the laundryman’s cart roll across the floor. He had no more bedding to give him, and no more clothes. After the laundryman had gone, he lay down on the iron bed frame. He was very tired. The sacrifice always made him tired.

  He turned onto his stomach and rested his head on his forearm. His eyes fixed on the plastic band around his wrist. On it were two words written in Arabic, but they were not words he knew. He sounded the letters. Quentin Katz was what the letters said. It meant nothing to him.

  The heat of the day descended on his naked body. He slept. Later he rolled over and stared at the ceiling.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Five o’clock.

  Everybody who wasn’t somebody had straightened the papers on his desk, locked the drawers, drawn the plastic cover over his typewriter, and gone home. The somebodies always stayed late: fighting their way to the top, already there, afraid of slipping back down, not wanting to go home.

  During his career Krebs had stayed late for all those reasons. Now it was a habit. He never left before seven; but he no longer worked during those extra hours. He sat at his desk and read the paper, or he lay on the couch gazing at the big map of the Middle East on the far wall, or he stood by the window and watched the cars far below, following each other out of the parking lot in brightly colored chains. There was no point in working. He was six weeks from retirement.

  Reaching into the bottom drawer, he found the brochures, bundled together with an elastic band. Once more he riffled through them. Porpoise Sands Yacht and Country Club, Florida. Tumbleweed Estates, Arizona. The Ranch at San Sebastian, California. They all promised a happy retirement heavily patrolled by security guards, with days full of sailing, fishing, golf, tennis, and macrame. And nights drinking alone in a condominium apartment much like the one he lived in now, but more expensive. Much more expensive if he wanted to look at the sea or a mountain or the eighteenth green while he drank. He was fifty years old, too young to retire.

  There was no choice. No one had told him he had to retire, but only because he hadn’t let it come to that. It was expected. He had reached an upper-middle level—assistant to the head of the Middle Eastern section. But he had reached it five years before, and gone no further. He had wanted to go much further.

  Krebs snapped the elastic band around the brochures and dropped them back into the drawer. He went to the window. Outside, it was raining, a hard steady rain that the March wind blew across the sky at a cutting angle. He watched it fall on the almost empty parking lot below, and spread across the black pavement in shiny pools that took as many parking spaces as they liked. He thought about the moment when his rise had come to an end, for unlike many people who had been in his position he knew the exact moment: a night, soon after his last promotion, when he had answered a knock at the door of a dirty little hotel room in a dirty little town in the Sudan. He had opened that door and let in Tumbleweed Estates.

  No one had said anything at the time, but when he had finally left the hospital and returned to the office he had sensed a change in everyone’s attitude. From the director of the agency to the newest secretary, they all seemed to share an understanding. After the head of the Middle Eastern section was promoted and someone else got the job, he understood it too.

  Six weeks. Then he would start living the rest of his life on a pension, unless he found another job. That was unlikely because he wasn’t going to look. He didn’t want another job, he wanted the one he had. So he would live on the pension: more than enough, for someone who lived alone. To the pension had been added a small disability increment, although he had not asked for it. Everyone knew that his eyesight had never been the same after the Sudan.

  He turned from the window. Near the couch stood a video cassette player. He inserted a tape, sat down, and watched an old cartoon about a man who finds a singing frog. He decides to use the frog to make his fortune, but the frog will sing only for him. The audience jeers. The man lets the frog go free.

  It made him think of Isaac Rehv. Isaac Rehv, the singing frog who had pushed him into a short retirement many years ago and had pushed him into a long one now. As the day drew nearer he had begun to think a lot about Isaac Renv.

  Krebs opened a drawer of the file cabinet by the couch and took out a glass and a bottle of scotch. He filled the glass, drank half of it in a gulp, and put his feet up on the couch. Porky Pig and Daffy Duck came on the screen; later Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny. They blew each other’s heads off with shotguns, threw each other over cliffs and onto bear
traps, and laughed about it. Outside the window darkness fell. Krebs did not switch on the lights. He poured himself another drink and looked at the flickering little screen.

  On his desk the telephone buzzed. He ignored it. Daffy Duck gave Porky Pig a hot dog bun with a stick of dynamite inside. Porky Pig took a bite and was blown apart. He emerged from the explosion as a stuttering pile of ashes, shook himself, and became Porky Pig again. The telephone kept buzzing. Krebs stood up and answered it.

  “Mr. Krebs?” a woman asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Communications. We’ve got something for you that just came in off the satellite. Do you want to come down here or have it piped up there?”

  “I’ll come down tomorrow.”

  “It came in off the satellite, Mr. Krebs,” the woman said, sounding hurt.

  He sighed. “Where’s it from?”

  “Cairo.”

  “Okay. Pipe it up here.”

  He touched a button on his desk. Static whispered from the speaker on the wall. A buzz saw cut in. It grew louder, and lost itself in a hurricane. Silence. Then from Cairo came the voice of Fairweather, very clear. Fairweather had been there for a year, as liaison to Egyptian Intelligence. He was good at it: The Egyptians like him. Fairweather gave a routing code, identified himself and addressed Krebs.

  “I thought this might interest you so I’m sending it along upstairs,” he said. “It came last Tuesday at two-forty-one A.M. local time. No. Hold it a sec.” There was a pause. Paper rustled. “Okay. Forget I said that. Two-forty-one was when the message ended. It came in a little earlier, ten or fifteen minutes. I can’t seem to lay my hands on the log. Anyway, we’re eight hours different from you, ahead or behind, I can never get it straight.” Pause. He heard Fairweather, in a muffled voice, say, “What time is it in Virginia?” Another voice responded, but Krebs could not hear the words.

  “All right,” Fairweather said. “I’ve got it now. Two-forty-one A.M. is six-forty-one P.M. your time. Got that? Six-forty-one. Anyway, I would have sent you this earlier, but I just heard about it. I’ve been diving down at Sharm el Sheikh. Fabulous. Eighty-five and sunny, day after day. I bet it’s raining where you are.”