Catacombs

by John Farris

  "I don't know. I just don't remember. The pain was bad. He had to carry me. He must have walked all night. The next thing I knew I was in a flying medic's plane, on the way to Dar."

  "Do you remember the location of the Catacombs?" Gibson asked.

  "Yes. By that I mean I couldn't locate it on a map. But I could find the place again. I'm bush trained. I have a photographic memory for terrain."

  "You're not going," Jade said.

  Raun stared at him. Her voice, when she spoke again, was low but fierce.

  "Then you won't either."

  "Miss Hardie," Gibson said, "there's a great deal we can do for you. But you have to try to be reasonable–"

  "I don't think I have to talk to either of you again if I don't want to! Go ahead. Put me in deadlock. Bright lights, I can't use the john without somebody watching. The way I've been feeling lately, I'll go berserk in about a week. What good will that do any of us? Reasonable. Huh. First I was poisoned this morning, then I nearly had my throat slashed. I was lying naked in a pool of blood with about sixteen men milling around staring at me. They told me this was an easy place to do time. Friendly white-collar criminals. Your choice of wallpaper in your room. Just like a Howard Johnson's. I've done one year and it went down like thirty. We've been snowbound for seven goddam m-months."

  Raun began to cry. She was one of the rare women for whom tears were an enhancement. Her eyes looked larger, softer, her pasty skin took on a compensating glow.

  "I want a presidential pardon. Then I'll lead you to the–the Catacombs, if that's what you call it. You'd better decide in a hurry. One hour. Then I'll never say another word, never!"

  She looked stubborn; she looked as if she meant it. Jade thought of the long trial she'd endured, stoical months under intense examination. In different circumstances he would have admired her toughness of spirit. Now he took pains not to show his exasperation.

  "Boomer available this afternoon?" he said, turning to Gibby.

  "He can be reached."

  "Let's you and I have some conversation," Jade said, and he smiled at Raun Hardie as they left.

  The rain had abated; they walked across the rec grounds, Gibby backing against the wind as he tried to light a cigarette.

  "Maybe it's a hoax after all."

  "No," Jade said. "Hardie made his discovery. But he didn't let his daughter in on it. He might have been afraid to."

  "Why?"

  "Archaeologists don't lead such dull lives. They're prey for certain types of entrepreneurs, those who deal in black-market artifacts. Some of them could be depraved enough to grab a fifteen-year-old kid who wasn't discreet and set fire to her toes until she spilled what she knew about daddy's latest discovery."

  "So Hardie was protecting her. But he jotted down a few notes. What's your gut reaction?"

  "Everything Raun was telling us is true. But she's careful about what she says."

  "Meaning?"

  Jade kicked apart a waterlogged clump of snow.

  "I get the feeling that somehow I'm being used. I don't like that feeling."

  "She offered to take a lie-detector test."

  "Sure–we'll hook her up to a polygraph, and also run her by a couple of your best interrogation teams. She'll make out just fine. No inconsistencies. The work she used to do was close to that of an investigative reporter; and she spent three months in the dock handling some very tough cross-examination. She's had the course."

  "Do you want to take her with you?"

  "Do I want two left feet? This must be my lucky day. Except I know damn well it isn't. Will Boomer give her that pardon?"

  "On your say-so."

  Jade stood staring at a line of blue sky near the horizon. A muscle in his jaw was working hard.

  "Let's do it then."

  Chapter 13

  DAR ES SALAAM

  Tanzania

  May 14

  Miss Sunni Babcock, of Basking Ridge, New Jersey, awoke shortly after daybreak in the suite at the Kivukoni Five-Star Hotel suffering from what she would have described as a "bad body" had anyone been there to listen to her complaints. She had a low-grade fever, an upset stomach, a feeling of having been insistently pounded on, like a badly dented fender, with a rubber mallet. Being alone again–Toby had left her alone much too often lately, she thought–gave her a touch of homesickness and dark, dark melancholia. She was crazy about Toby Chapman and would follow him to the ends of the earth, but she missed her mother and father and little brother and her championship jumper Moody's Gate, and when she finally got home she was going to kill Ernie if he had let the horse go to pot.

  So it was the middle of May, springtime in Basking Ridge, and she lay there naked in the tangled bed that was damp from night sweats, thinking about the cool green lawns around the Japanese-style ranch house on Loring Lane, the collie dogs and the cats, the lilacs and fruit trees coming into bloom. In Dar es Salaam (which she thought of as "Turd Town" in her grimmer moments) it was dust and heat and socialists who couldn't say enough bad things about America, even your high-type socialists at the embassies, where you just had to put up with the badmouthing because they had the only decent food and parties available.

  Could they really have been here for six weeks? And when was Toby going to give up?

  Sunni sniveled and tried to get comfortable, but almost immediately she was sorry for the thought: How would she feel if it was her father who hadn't turned up for months and months, and no one was willing to give her a straight answer about what could have happened to him? Beside herself with anxiety, that's how she would feel. Worried sick.

  It was really amazing that Toby could hang in there, day after day, waiting hours to see the minister of this or that, spending a fortune on bribes, and not lose his temper and bash somebody. Well, he'd come close a time or two: It was interesting to see him getting red from the neck up, like a thermometer with all the hot mercury shooting into the bulb. But he'd never taken his frustrations out on her. That was the really beautiful thing about Patrick Tobias Chapman. He was as considerate, mannerly, and loving as he'd been from the day they'd spotted each other on the Quai d'Orsay–and just sort of drifted together through the Sunday strollers, irresistibly attracted, smiling at each other. When they were still two or three feet apart (hadn't spoken, eye contact only), she'd felt exactly as she had once upon a time in physics lab, doing the experiment with a high-voltage Tesla coil, her skin tingling wildly and every hair on her body quivering upright. It was as lush as any orgasm she'd experienced to date. Talk about turned on. They'd scarcely skipped a night of lovemaking since October, and right now, queasy as she felt, she could get a ripple going in her groin thinking about those bashful chestnut eyes and his crazy English cowlick. It was real. it was meant to be.

  But where was he so early, and why hadn't he told her he was going out? She quickly gave Toby the benefit of the doubt. He was depressed and scarcely slept anymore; probably he'd gone for an early walk around the brassy, scum-edged harbor that lay across from the hotel.

  Sunni felt a threatening dry tickle in the back of her throat; her compact body was slicked all over, as if greased, and sooner or later she was going to upchuck. Might as well get it over with. She eased out of bed and went into the bathroom and knelt, then erupted with more violence than she'd anticipated, and at both ends, which made her feel nasty and childish and disconsolate. Her bowels had been nothing but water for days. When she had cleaned up as best she could she crept into a tepid shower and bawled her heart out

  Toby was sitting on the side of the bed when she came out of the bathroom, cleaner but a little wobbly and short of breath. Her neat round tummy still looked bloated. His large hands were knotted between his knees; he was staring in a funk at the brown tile floor. Sunni slipped an arm around his waist and rested her head against him.

  "I'm not feeling so great, Tobe."

  "You're rather warm."

  "I know it. Maybe I picked up a dudu at that Pakistani restaurant last night."


  "Why don't I ring the hotel doc?"

  She made a face. "His clothes aren't very clean and his breath smells bad, like, I don't know, chickenshit. Maybe I'll get better after I have some coffee, you think?"

  "I hope so."

  "Where'd you disappear to so early?"

  "Airport. Trying to find that bush pilot, Dodds. You know, the one that the other pilot said might have seen something down Mbeya way." He sighed. "No luck."

  "Oh well." Sunni tightened her grip on him and tried to sound cheerful. "Something's going to break for you. Any day now. I feel it in my bones."

  "Yes. Must keep plugging away, that's all. It's what Dad would do." His smile was the saddest thing she'd ever seen. There were lines of strain in his twenty-year-old face, a heaviness of self-doubt in the sunken eyes. No appetite, little sleep, he was getting too skinny for his six-foot three-inch frame. Sunni was smaller, almost petite, but her arms would easily go all the way around him.

  Breakfast didn't help. As usual they waited three quarters of an hour to be served. During their first week at the Kivukoni Five-Star Hotel, Sunni had been infuriated to the point of tears by the staff, all of whom were so vague and distant and inefficient they seemed to be sleepwalking. But she and Toby had learned that most of the blacks in Dar were like that, and it had nothing to do with your stereotyped lazy black African. Too many of the people in this pockmarked paradise were half starved: Famine, kwashiorkor, and intestinal parasites had been facts of life for generations, and as a result their brains didn't work very well.

  Once they had their food, Sunni couldn't choke anything down; but she did sip a little tea. Toby was so preoccupied he didn't notice her lack of appetite. He was analyzing a fistful of messages from strangers responding to the offer of a reward he had posted in public places around Dar.

  The English-language Daily Mail and the Swahili weeklies had refused to run his ad, for rather hazy reasons. It was the official position of the government of Tanzania that the explorers were missing in a largely unexplored, inhospitable region of the country, and despite the fact that the government had more urgent problems to deal with, reasonable efforts were being made to locate them. The attempts of individuals to find the explorers could be interpreted as criticism of the government, which was always met with stringent censorship.

  Toby had become expert at sorting out the sly cranks and con artists from possibly legitimate sources of information. This morning there were no possibilities to follow up on.

  And it had lately occurred to Toby that the police were sifting through his mail and messages before he received them. From time to time he was rather obviously followed by plainclothesmen. They could have chucked him out of the country at any time. But he sensed that the polisi preferred to have him here, severely restricted like all other foreign nationals from travel to outlying districts, than in England or the States broadcasting his suspicions that the government of Tanzania was implicated in the disappearance of his father.

  After breakfast Toby grimly stuck to his routine, driving a rented Fiat with valve problems and almost no shocks left; the streets, even in the best areas, were in wretched condition. First they visited the British embassy to see if there had been any replies to Her Majesty's Government's latest official inquiries. They were in the midst of a move to the new capital in Dodoma, but the embassy staffers were sympathetic and helpful. Still, they were at an impasse. The first secretary told Toby and Sunni that there was nothing new on the cocktail-party circuit, just the same stale speculative gossip: The explorers had drowned in Lake Tanganyika; they had inadvertently strayed across one border or another to be slaughtered by soldiers and piled in a mass grave; they had perished in a cave-in or earthslide.

  From the embassy they drove to the National Museum, to an office of the Antiquities Division of the Ministry of Education, where Toby had long since worn out his welcome. Today no one cared to see him. They called on a few correspondents and stringers for the news magazines and dailies of six countries, none of whom were anxious to become too inquisitive about the Chapman/Weller mystery.

  Two of the correspondents had attempted to send cables to their publishers, suggesting that there was a story here worthy of the talents of important journalists; but the cables had been returned to them by the police, with the advice that they keep in touch with Jumbe Kinyati's press secretary for the latest word on the search for the explorers.

  "I thought journalists were supposed to have guts," Toby complained as they drove down Independence Avenue toward Barclay's Bank. "If we could break just one major story in the world's press, that might prompt some action by the UN. Then the government here would have to change its tune."

  "Tobe, don't you think–I mean, couldn't you accomplish more if you were back home? Honestly."

  He braked hard to avoid a clerk in shirt sleeves cutting blithely into traffic on his Vespa.

  "No. I'm staying here. Because my father is here, and I know he's in trouble. It's just a matter of–of finding someone who's willing to stick his neck out, and not worry about the consequences."

  "I wonder," Sunni said abstractedly, staring out the window at a glimpse of rainless clouds and Russian freighters in the harbor a block away. "I wonder if–now I wish you'd gone with me to the reception for the Indonesian dance troupe yesterday. I met a man there–he knew Daddy when Daddy was chief of protocol in Washington. His name is Lundgren, and somebody told me he owns a magazine in Sweden, or was it Denmark? Anyway he's very impressive. The women flock around him."

  "Really?" Toby said, with a slight curling of his lip.

  "If he owns a magazine, it might be worth talking to him."

  "All right, luv."

  Toby wedged the Fiat into a space near the bank. They got out. Sunni took two steps on the crumbling sidewalk and paused. The festering bazaar of the port city, the fumes, the humid salty air, seemed to have stagnated into something quite unbreathable. She touched her chilly forehead, watching an unexpected fog blight downtown Dar, and let her fingers trail down one side of her face. She smiled when Toby turned to see what was keeping her, a dear foolish smile. And keeled over against him as he hastened back, falling out from under her woven hat with the big lazy brim. Toby, with the aid of a passerby, carried Sunni into the cool silence of the bank, where the manager, Mr. Mukome, waved them into his office. Sunni came around lying on a settee with a cold cloth on her forehead.

  "What happened?" she said.

  When she was sufficiently revived, Toby drove her to the Kialamahindi Hospital in the Upanga District of Dar. Sunni didn't protest too much. The fact of fainting scared her. She'd only done that once before in her whole life. And she was still feeling woozy.

  Sunni was routed to a treatment room by a nurse who requested that Toby wait elsewhere. He wandered outside, remembering that he had left his camera bag in the trunk of the Fiat, which was too easy to pry open. He retrieved it and walked around the palm-shaded grounds. The hospital, recently built, consisted of half a dozen white coral block-and-concrete buildings in the Moorish style. It was set amid pools and gardens which had remained pleasantly green despite the prolonged absence of the monsoon. Everything was neat and well maintained, which in Tanzania usually meant Chinese funds and administration.

  A shell path took him past one-story offices, the kitchen and a cafeteria, a helicopter landing pad, and a massive building out of character with the rest of the architectural scheme. It was modern, windowless, an inverted flat-top pyramid with a moat around it

  Some sort of laboratory. Beyond this large building there was a small private area, secluded behind a screen of thriving croton plants and with a wire fence and locked gate. Above the tops of the green-and-red plants he glimpsed the tiles of two bungalow roofs.

  Toby yawned; he was bored and depressed and fidgety about Sunni's fainting spell. He went to the creeper-covered gate and peered into the compound. He heard low voices, one of them English. A man's voice.

  The bungalows were
on opposite sides of a courtyard; the verandah of the nearest bungalow was set at an angle to the gate and there was some kind of flowering vine growing around the mangrove posts, so he had an unobstructed view of only a small part of the verandah. A wicker basket swing made slow quarter turns on a squeaking chain.

  As it turned toward him Toby had tantalizing glimpses of a slim black nurse in a hospital uniform, curled up shoeless in the deep scoop of shade afforded by the basket. She had unbuttoned the dress and her youthful breasts were exposed. She played with one of them, like a tired puppy with a favorite ball. She spoke in Swahili, which Toby didn't understand, her statement ending in a pealing laugh.

  A man came momentarily into view. Sixty-five or so, wearing un-pressed drill shorts, his legs hairless, his kneecaps shocking as snow in the wavering heat. He placed a cold glass between her breasts and she shuddered deliciously.

  Toby held his breath, squinting a little. Lately he'd become just nearsighted enough to know he should consider glasses. The gray-haired man turned his head sharply toward Toby, as if to avoid a darting insect, and his face was cast into the sunlight.

  Toby recognized him immediately. He could not be mistaken. It was Dr. Henry Landreth, late of the Chapman/Weller expedition, obviously in decent health and well accommodated.

  More than a year and a half ago Toby, down from Cambridge for the weekend, had been introduced to the notorious physicist aboard his father's yacht in Fowey harbor. Landreth was shaky, threadbare, seething with secrets. He clutched a sort of diary, covered in soiled green cloth, which he had unearthed in a used-book shop in Dar. It was the key, he claimed, to the most fabulous archaeological discovery of the ages.

  Toby stepped away from the gate, his heart giving a sudden lurch of happiness. But caution overtook him like a swiftly moving shadow.

  If Dr. Landreth was alive and apparently flourishing, what had happened to the others? Why not a word from this man in more than six months? What did anyone really know about him, except that he'd once betrayed England–a fact his father had been able to stomach only with the greatest difficulty, even though Landreth had come to him with an apparently dazzling proposition, potentially the most daring adventure in a career of celebrated achievements.