Tongues of Fire

by Peter Abrahams

  “Are you the doctor?” Rehv asked.

  The tall man frowned. “I’ll ask the questions,” he said, looking coldly at Rehv. Rehv stared back.

  “Then ask,” he said finally.

  “I won’t listen to rudeness.” The tall man remained calm. The guard’s hand tightened around the billy. “Rudeness is a sign that you are not ready to leave.” He turned to go.

  “But I am ready. Let me go. Please let me go.”

  The tall man walked away. Over his shoulder he said, “You’re not ready. You’re still rude. What’s more, you took off your identity band. We’re not blind, you know.”

  Rehv strained against the cold wet sheets. They did not give at all. “But it wasn’t me. I’m not Quentin Katz.”

  The tall man turned and came back. “Do you see?” he said, shaking his head. “You don’t even know who you are. That’s one problem. Another is that you’re a masochist. I’ve seen the reports. We’ve never had anyone who needed to be hit as much as you. It means you enjoy it.”

  “I don’t.”

  “The literature is unassailable.”

  “I’m not a masochist,” Rehv shouted.

  The guard glared at him. “Just a few hours ago I caught him beating his head against the floor.”

  The tall man pursed his lips. “Two more years,” he said. “At least.”

  Rehv inhaled deeply to force his anger back inside him. “I’m not a masochist,” he said quietly. “And you’re not a doctor. No real doctor would have anything to do with a place like this.”

  The doctor’s calmness dropped away like a skin that no longer fit. He spoke angrily: “I am a doctor. I trained in America.”

  “Then let me go,” Rehv said in English. “I’m an American.”

  In Arabic the tall man said, “Ah. You speak English. So do I.” He leaned over Rehv. “Two years,” he said in English; his accent was very thick.

  He turned and walked away. The guard followed him. Rehv listened to their footsteps as they went down the hall, and heard the key scrape in the lock. As the door opened he called out: “You didn’t graduate, did you? You failed and they sent you home. That’s why you’re running this snake pit. You’re a fraud.”

  The door banged shut. Rehv waited for the guard to come running and hit him with the billy. But the guard did not come: He heard the creaking of wooden joints as he settled in his chair. He realized that he had spoken English, and the guard had not understood. The doctor had probably not understood either.

  They kept him wrapped in the sheets until dinner. He ate the soggy millet and drank the sour milk. Then he slept. The squeezing of the sheets always made him tired.

  In the morning he heard the guard turn the long key in the lock and open the steel door. Then he heard the wheels of the laundry cart rolling across the floor. He got up and watched the wiry little laundryman pushing the cart from cubicle to cubicle, collecting dirty clothes and soiled bedding. Rehv had nothing to give him. The laundryman left the cart at the entrance to his cubicle and went into the next one.

  Rehv glanced down the hall. The guard was sitting tilted back in his chair, looking at the ceiling. Quickly Rehv climbed into the laundry cart and hid himself under the linen.

  He could see nothing. What little air there was stank in his nostrils. He felt a soft thump on his back: more linen. The cart began to roll. Almost immediately he thought how stupid his impulse had been: He had no plan, no idea what lay beyond the steel doors. And surely the laundryman would notice the added weight.

  But he didn’t. The cart rolled along the floor. It stopped. He felt more soft thumps on his back. The cart started. It rolled. The laundryman whistled a little tune.

  The cart stopped. “All done?” he heard the guard ask.

  “All done,” the laundryman replied. “But the Turk is in the cart.”

  “Again?”

  Rapid footsteps. The stick. On his back. His shoulder. His head.

  When Rehv awoke, he felt the sheets around him again. It was very quiet, as quiet as night. But it could not be night because the insides of his eyelids were pink. He kept his eyes closed. He would keep them closed until the pain in his head went away. He knew that the pain in his head would go away after a while; that made it different from the pain in his back. It was quiet.

  Suddenly he heard a soft whisper, almost in his ear. “Snakes are biting me.” He opened his eyes. The snake man stood beside him, holding a long knife. “Snakes are biting me,” he repeated. He touched Rehv’s chest with the knife. Rehv could feel the point through the sheets.

  “Guard,” Rehv called, not loudly, because he did not want to frighten the snake man. “Guard.”

  “He’s gone,” the snake man whispered. “Everyone’s gone.”

  “Guard.” Rehv listened. There wasn’t a sound.

  “Gone. Everyone’s gone.” The snake man looked at Rehv. His lower lip trembled. “You told me I deserved it,” he said. He pressed a little on the knife.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He tried to keep his voice calm. Reasonable.

  “Yes you do. The biting. You said I brought it on myself.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You did.” He pressed harder.

  “It wasn’t me. It was the guard.”

  The snake man shook his head. “No. It was you. You said I made it happen when I, when I …” His lower lip trembled. He pressed a little harder on the knife.

  Rehv felt sweat rising through his pores, despite the cold wet sheets. “I never said anything like that. I’m the one who wants to help you get rid of the snakes. I can get rid of them for you.”

  The snake man shook his head. “No one can.”

  “I can. I’d like to do it. They’ve been biting you long enough.”

  The snake man’s eyes grew watery. “They have.” He stopped pressing on the knife.

  “Let me get rid of them.”

  “All right.”

  “First you’ll have to get me out of these sheets.”

  “All right.” The snake man pressed gently on the knife and began drawing the point down Rehv’s chest.

  “Don’t do it like that. Just unwrap me.”

  The snake man smiled. “This will be faster. Don’t worry. I’m very good with knives, and this one is sharp.” In one motion he sliced through the sheets. The point did not touch Rehv’s skin.

  He stood up. “Let me have the knife. I’ll only need it for a minute or two.” The snake man handed him the knife. Rehv stepped out of his cubicle, into the hall. It was empty. The guard’s chair was empty. The steel door was open, and so was the steel door on the other side.

  Rehv walked down the hall to the snake man’s cubicle. The snake man followed him. On the way Rehv glanced out the little barred window. The sea was full of ships.

  He went into the snake man’s cubicle. “Stand back,” he said. The snake man waited at the entrance. Rehv walked to the bed and began stabbing the knife into the mattress. “Die, snakes,” he shouted. He stabbed the mattress a dozen times. Then he dropped the knife into the straw and backed away. “There,” he said. “All dead.”

  “Dead? Are they really dead?” The snake man moved toward the bed. Gently Rehv took his arm and led him away.

  “It’s not a pretty sight,” he said.

  “Are they really dead?”

  “Yes.”

  The snake man began to cry. He cried so hard that he couldn’t walk. He sat on the floor and cried, holding his face in his hands. Rehv went down the hall and through the steel doors.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Fairweather, dressed like a touring golf professional in white cotton trousers and a short-sleeved cherry red jersey, reached forward and twisted a few dials on the instrument panel. Brassy marching music of the kind soldiers play on parade filled the cockpit. “You see?” Fairweather said. “Radio Khartoum. That’s all they’ve been playing. No news, no bulletins, nothing. What does it mean?”

  “I don’t k
now,” Krebs answered. He looked out the window at the yellow emptiness of the Western Desert, far below. Somewhere to the east, he knew, it ended at the Nile; to the west it stretched across Africa to the Atlantic. He slumped in the soft leather copilot’s seat. He was tired: eleven hours in the big plane to Cairo and two hours in the little plane that Fairweather had borrowed from the embassy; hours more to go.

  Fairweather switched off the radio. “And still no word from Gillian Wells.” He turned to Krebs as though expecting a reply. When there was none he tried raising his eyebrows. That made two shallow wrinkles appear on his smooth, tanned forehead, but it didn’t make Krebs say anything. Fairweather turned away, studied the instrument panel for a moment, and pulled gently on the stick. The twin jets pushed the plane a little higher in the air. “What a beauty,” he said, giving the stick a little pat.

  Krebs leaned his head against the window and closed his eyes. Under his jacket the long-nosed .45 caliber revolver dug into his ribs. It kept him awake.

  After a while Fairweather said, “They must be related, don’t you think?”

  “What?”

  “Not hearing from Gillian Wells and all this closing of the border stuff.”

  “Why should they be related?”

  Fairweather squinted into blue space. “There are no coincidences in this business,” he said.

  “Who told you that?”

  “It’s common knowledge. Freddy was saying it just the other day, at lunch.”

  “Who’s Freddy?”

  Fairweather looked at him in surprise. “The ambassador.”

  “Jesus.”

  “What’s that for?”

  “Nothing. I’m tired.”

  They flew over the yellow ocean. They saw no cities, no towns, no roads, no sign of life. It reminded Krebs of the space probe pictures of Mars.

  “Did you know there used to be elephants down there?” Fairweather asked. “Lions, buffalo, antelopes—the whole bit. Someone was telling me all about it. Makes you think.”

  They thought.

  Soon after Fairweather glanced at his watch and said, “I figure we’re there by now.”

  “Where?”

  “The Sudan.” Below them nothing had changed. An invisible boundary divided nowhere in half. Fairweather cleared his throat. “Maybe you should fill me in a bit. I’m not really sure what the plan is.”

  “Just get me to the spot where Gillian’s transmission came from.”

  “Sure. No problem. I’ve got the coordinates. But what I meant was, I don’t know what we’re supposed to do when we get there.”

  “Find her.”

  Fairweather nodded. Twice he opened his mouth and closed it. The third time he said, “Aren’t we being a bit obvious about it? What if she’s just lying low? We might upset everything. I thought the procedure was to wait for the next scheduled contact.”

  “This is a special case.”

  “Right.”

  The yellow ocean turned brown. Here and there green dots floated on it like islands. Fairweather guided the plane down a few thousand feet. Winding brown wadis appeared beneath them, showing how water would flow if there was water; and soon there were villages, little circles of mud.

  “You awake?” Fairweather asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. We’re almost there.” He bit his lip. “I’d feel better if we had some kind of cover, at least.”

  “Stop worrying. We’re not flying over Siberia.”

  “You’re right,” Fairweather said, but he did not stop biting his lip.

  “Okay,” Krebs said. “We’ll be anthropologists, if that will make you happier.”

  “Oh no.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I flunked the only anthropology course I ever took. You’ll have to do all the talking.”

  “I plan to,” Krebs said. “Go down to a thousand feet.”

  The plane dipped toward the ground. They saw a few gray green trees, patches of yellow green grass, and red brown earth. “What are we looking for?” Fairweather asked.

  “A big camp. It shouldn’t be hard to spot.”

  It was a long time before they saw anything, and when they did it was not a camp. “What’s that?” Fairweather said, pointing.

  “I don’t see anything.”

  Fairweather pushed the stick forward and let the plane descend to a few hundred feet before leveling out. “It looks liks a jeep,” he said with excitement in his voice. “Can you see it?”

  “Of course I can see it,” Krebs said. “Find somewhere to land.”

  Fairweather banked the plane in a wide sweeping circle and landed smoothly by a clump of bushes not far from the jeep. He turned off the engines; except for the ticking sound the metal parts made as they began to cool, it was silent. They opened the doors. The heat rushed in and struck them like a sudden fever. “My God,” Fairweather said softly. Krebs said nothing. He remembered the heat.

  They climbed down from the plane and started walking toward the jeep. There seemed to be a person sitting behind the wheel, a big dark brown person. He was quivering. When they were halfway to the jeep Fairweather went pale; he bent double and heaved up what was in his stomach. Krebs ran forward. He had to be much closer before his eyes could make out the dark brown vultures, and what was left of Gillian Wells.

  Krebs turned away; he saw Fairweather, in his golf clothes, on hands and knees, and beyond him the clump of bushes—where a lean dark man stood holding a spear. He thought of reaching for the revolver under his jacket. Instead he called out, “Salam alaykum.”

  At the sound of his voice the vultures rose into the air. Krebs heard the beating of their heavy wings behind him, but he didn’t look around.

  “What did you say?” Fairweather asked weakly, sitting back on his heels.

  “Salam alaykum,” Krebs called over Fairweather’s head, more loudly than before.

  The dark man raised his spear. “Alaykum el Salam.”

  Fairweather twisted around violently. “Where did he come from?”

  Ignoring Fairweather, Krebs walked slowly toward the man with the spear, smiling in a friendly way. “We are friends,” he said in Arabic. He knew his Arabic was poor. “Friends,” he repeated, trying to pronounce it properly.

  The dark man stood perfectly still as he approached. He had a thin face, high cheekbones, and the fierce nose of a bird of prey. Krebs reached him and held out his hand. The dark man kept his hand wrapped around the shaft of the spear. His eyes were cold. They flickered toward Fairweather, then back to him.

  “Are you hungry?” Krebs asked. “Do you want food?”

  The man opened his mouth and spoke rapidly. He paused, pointing with his spear toward the east, and went on speaking. Krebs did not catch one word.

  “Did you get any of that?” he said over his shoulder to Fairweather.

  “Sorry. What language is he speaking?”

  “Arabic, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Really? That’s not the way they talk at Berlitz.”

  He stopped himself from rounding on Fairweather. “Is there any food on the plane?”

  “How can you even think of food?”

  “Answer me.”

  “Yes. A few candy bars.”

  “Get them.” Fairweather started for the plane. “He is going for food,” Krebs said to the dark man. “For you.”

  The man’s head tilted back; his fine face wrinkled in puzzlement. Then he spoke again, more rapidly and intensely than before. He pointed to the east, and ended on a questioning note.

  Krebs smiled. “I’m sorry. I speak very little Arabic. Please speak slowly.”

  As he listened, the man’s face wrinkled again. He cocked his ear toward Krebs. Understanding dawned. “You are not from Khartoum?” he said, slowly and carefully.

  “No. We are Americans.” The dark man looked beyond him at the jeep. “What is your name?” Krebs asked.

  “Hurgas.”

  Krebs felt his heart beat a little
faster. “What happened to the white woman, Hurgas?”

  Hurgas stepped back and leaned the point of the spear very slightly toward Krebs. “I didn’t touch her.”

  “Of course not.”

  Hurgas said something too quickly for him to understand.

  “Speak slowly.”

  “He did it,” Hurgas said, drawing out the words. “He said she killed herself, but he killed her.”

  “Who?”

  “The Mahdi,” Hurgas said bitterly. “He killed my father too.” He added something rapid and angry about his father that Krebs did not understand.

  “Do you think he is the Mahdi?”

  Hurgas looked at him warily. “Everyone says so.”

  “But what do you think?”

  Hurgas gazed into the distance, or into nothing at all. His eyes grew sad. “I don’t know,” he answered at last. “My father believed it.”

  “Listen to me.” Krebs gripped his shoulder: muscle and bone, and surprisingly cool to his touch. “He is not the Mahdi. There is no doubt. I know his father.”

  “His father?”

  “Did he ever say anything about his father?”

  “No. He said he was an orphan.”

  “He lied. He has a father. His father is a Jew.” The cool muscle hardened under his hand. “And his mother was …” He couldn’t think of the word for whore. “His mother sold herself.”

  “You know this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I must kill him,” Hurgas said quietly.

  Krebs nodded. “Where is he?”

  With the tip of his spear Hurgas pointed to the east. “Khartoum. They have all gone to Khartoum.”

  “Then we’ll go there too.” He turned Hurgas toward the plane.

  Hurgas pulled back. “No. That’s how he killed my father.”

  Krebs tugged at him. “There’s no danger.”

  “No. I won’t go in there.”

  Fairweather was coming toward them with candy bars in his hands. “Can we get going soon?”

  “Yes,” Krebs called to him. Trying desperately to think of a way to say “dishonor your father’s memory,” he turned to Hurgas. He did what he could with words he knew: “Are you coming? Or do you want to hurt your father, even after he is dead?”