The Quest: A Novel

by Nelson DeMille

  Purcell walked up to the stoutly built, low-wing craft and did a quick walk-around. Its black paint was not holding up well, and bare spots of aluminum were everywhere, except for the red-painted name of the plane—Mia. The nose wheel of the tricycle gear needed air and the plane pitched forward. Purcell noticed that the sliding canopy was pushed halfway back on its tracks, and a bullet hole was visible in one of the rear panes. He asked Signore Bocaccio, “Am I paying extra for the rocket pod?”

  Signore Bocaccio made a classic Italian shrug. “What am I to do about it? You think this is America? Italy? Here, they do what they want. There is no war today, so you can have the plane. If you fly her well, perhaps they will make you a colonel in the air force. This is Ethiopia.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “If you were not a journalist, they would not let me rent her to you at all. There was trouble as it was. I had to pay them to allow this.”

  “That’s why they make trouble.” He walked around the craft again. There were at least six bullet holes in it. “Do you file a flight plan?”

  “Yes. You must. Before the trouble they did not care. But now they insist. They think everyone is a spy for the emperor. So they want a flight plan. There are ten airstrips in the whole country. They want a flight plan. Hah!” He assured Purcell, however, “Today we are doing only the check out. So we need no flight plan, but when you go to Gondar, you must file for Gondar.”

  The flight plan was an unforeseen problem. This morning he was just logging in some flight time with Signore Bocaccio, to see if the Navion was airworthy. But when he was with Vivian, Mercado, and Gann—if he showed up—they’d be doing aerial recon, and he did not want to land in Gondar, which was Getachu’s Northern Army headquarters. He could, however, file a flight plan for Khartoum, where they could conceivably have business. He asked Signore Bocaccio, “Can I fly to Khartoum?”

  “You can if you want to get arrested.”

  “They’re not getting along with the Sudanese, I take it.”

  “They are not. Anyway, I would not want you to take Mia that far.” He tapped the fuselage where the name appeared. “Khartoum is the limit of her cruising range. But if you come upon headwinds or bad weather, you will run out of fuel.” He smiled as his hand did a nosedive.

  “All right…” Purcell informed Signore Bocaccio, “Tomorrow, or the next day, I’ll have one passenger. Perhaps two or three.” He asked, “Are the rear seats in place?”

  “Unfortunately, no.” Bocaccio explained, “I took them out for the beans.”

  “Right, but—”

  “I sometimes take samples from the plantations. I carry items to trade. And things to eat. You cannot find Italian food outside of Addis.” He added, “In fact, with the famine, sometimes you cannot find any food at all.”

  “Sorry about that. Can you replace the seat?”

  “It was stolen.”

  “Of course. Well, my passengers can sit on your bean bags.” He asked, “How does Mia handle with four?”

  “How would you handle with four people on your back?” He inquired, “Who are the others?”

  “Giornalisti.”

  “They are friendly with the government, I hope.”

  “Of course.” Purcell could see that Signore Bocaccio was having second thoughts, so he distracted him with technical questions. “When was she built?”

  “Twenty years ago. She is a young girl, but an old aircraft.” He smiled. “She is American made, as you know, and all measurements are in feet, miles, and gallons.”

  “What is her stall speed?”

  “She stalls at any speed. So go as slow as you please. She will stall when she wants. Just give yourself enough altitude to recover.”

  “What speed, Signore Bocaccio?”

  He shrugged. “The airspeed indicator is inaccurate. And the needle jumps. The airplane is, how you say in English, out of trim. The leading edge is banged up.”

  “I noticed.”

  “Well, so, the stall speed is perhaps sixty. But when she was young, she could go forty-five. But what difference does that make? You must just give yourself the altitude to recover—and why would you want to approach stall speed?”

  “I want to go low and slow. I want to make steep banks and turns. Will she do that?”

  Signore Bocaccio looked at him closely. “That is not the way to Gondar, my friend. Gondar is three hundred miles due north. There are no steep banks or turns to be made.”

  “We are looking for the war, Signore.”

  “This is not a plane for that. She knows the way to Gondar as a straight line. She does not like to be fired at.” He put his finger into a bullet hole, then patted his plane and dusted off his hands. He also informed Purcell, “The government does not want you looking for the war from the air. That is their job. If you do that, they will think you are spying for the Royalists. Or the Eritreans. Or the British or the Americans—”

  “Cruising speed? Altitude?”

  “This airfield is already at eight thousand feet. You will get the best cruising speed if you climb to perhaps twelve thousand. To go much higher would take too long. Especially with four people. As you go over the valleys you can drop down if you wish, but you must remember that at eight thousand feet, you may meet a nine-thousand-foot mountain. You understand?”

  “Si. And what will she make?”

  “Perhaps you can get a hundred fifty out of her. I make Gondar in two and a half hours, normally.”

  “How’s the prop?”

  “She wanders. Sometimes a hundred—two hundred rpm. Give it no thought.”

  “It can wander all it wants as long as it doesn’t wander off the airplane.”

  “The hub is solid. It has no cracks.”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  “Do you think I am”—Bocaccio tapped his head—“pazzo?”

  “Well, Signore Bocaccio, if you are, so am I.”

  He laughed, then looked at Purcell and said seriously, “Do not try tricks with Mia, my friend. She will kill you.”

  “Capisco.” He said to Signore Bocaccio, “Are you ready to teach me how to fly Mia?”

  He smiled. “After all I have said, you still want to fly her?”

  “If the Ethiopian Air Force can fly her, I can fly her.”

  Again Bocaccio looked at Purcell. “Whatever is your purpose, it must be important to you.”

  “As important as your coffee beans.”

  Apropos of nothing, Signore Bocaccio said, “This has become a sad land.”

  “You should leave.”

  “I will…” He smiled and said to Purcell, “Perhaps L’Osservatore Romano would like to buy Mia.”

  “I will ask.” He looked up at the cockpit. “Ready?”

  “I fly, you watch, then you fly and I watch you. Next time, you fly and I watch you from the ground.”

  “Let’s hope for a next time.”

  Signore Bocaccio laughed, and they climbed into the aircraft.

  Chapter 34

  Henry Mercado, wearing a bathrobe and undershorts, sat on the balcony of his top-floor room sipping coffee. The fog was lifting, and in the distance he could see a single-engine black aircraft rising off a hilltop airstrip. He said, “That must be Frank.”

  Vivian, sitting next to him, replied, “He said to look for him about seven.”

  Mercado glanced at her. She was wearing a short white shamma that she’d picked up somewhere, and she had obviously worn it to bed. The shamma reminded him of Getachu’s camp. The parade ground. The pole. He wondered if she’d thought about that.

  Vivian told him, “Frank said he’d do a flyby and tip his wings.”

  He supposed that meant she had to leave and get to her own room—or Purcell’s room—so that Purcell would not see both of them having coffee on Henry Mercado’s balcony at 7 A.M. But she didn’t move.

  To make conversation, he said, “This is a squalid city.”

  “It is not Rome.”

  “No. This is t
he Infernal City.”

  She laughed.

  He had developed a strong dislike for Addis Ababa in 1935, and forty years later nothing he’d seen had changed his opinion. Even the Ethiopians disliked it. It was like every semi-Westernized town he’d seen in Africa or Asia, combining the worst aspects of each culture. Its only good feature was its eight-thousand-foot elevation, which made the climate pleasant—except during the June-to-September rainy season when mud slid down the hills into the streets.

  He poured more coffee for both of them. Vivian put her bare feet on the balcony rail and her shamma slipped back to her thighs.

  He was surprised that she had accepted his invitation for coffee on the balcony, and more surprised when she came to his door wearing only the shamma and little else. Or nothing else.

  On the other hand, Vivian was of another generation. And sometimes he thought of her as a child of God: naturally innocent while unknowingly sensuous.

  He looked out at the black aircraft in the distance. It was circling over the hills and making steep, dangerous-looking turns. He said, “I hope he’s a good pilot.”

  She was staring at the aircraft and didn’t reply.

  He looked out again into the city. Like all the cities of his youth, he hated this place because it reminded him of a time when he was hopeful and optimistic—when he believed in Moscow and not Rome. Now he was burdened with years and disappointments, and with God.

  If he looked hard enough into the swirling fog below, he could see Henry Mercado dashing across Saint George Square to the telegraph office. He could hear the roar of Italian warplanes overhead. He could and did remember and feel the pleasure of making love to the nineteen-year-old daughter of an American diplomat in the blacked-out lobby of the Imperial. Why the lobby? He had a room upstairs. What if they’d snapped on the lights? He smiled.

  “What is making you smile, Henry?”

  “What always makes me smile?”

  “Tell me.”

  So he told her about having sex in the lobby of the Imperial Hotel during an air raid blackout.

  She listened without comment, then stayed silent awhile before saying, “So you understand.”

  He didn’t reply.

  “We do things when we’re frightened.”

  “We were not frightened of the air raid.”

  “We want to hold on to another person.”

  “I didn’t follow this person to Cairo.”

  She didn’t reply.

  He looked out at the Imperial Hotel. Its surrounding verandas seemed to sag. He had the nostalgic idea of checking in there instead of here, but maybe it was enough to visit once a day when he went to the press office. In fact, the places that once held good memories were best left as memories.

  The aircraft was climbing to the north, and Mercado saw that it cleared a distant peak by a narrow margin. Vivian didn’t seem to notice, but he said to her, “I hope you’re prepared to do some aerial photography in a small plane with a novice pilot.”

  “You should stay here, Henry.”

  “I don’t care if I die, Vivian. I care if you die.”

  “No one is going to die. But that’s very… loving of you to say that.”

  “Well, I love you.”

  “I know.”

  He didn’t ask the follow-up question and stared out at Addis Ababa. It was dirty and it smelled bad. Old men with missing pieces of their bodies were a walking reminder of old-style Ethiopian justice. Adding to the judicial mutilations were the wounded of recent and past wars. And then there were the deformed beggars, the diseased prostitutes, and the starving barefoot children running through donkey dung. A quarter million already dead from the famine. How was he supposed to believe in God? “How can this be?”

  “How can what be?”

  “This.” He swept his arm over the city.

  She thought a moment, then replied, “It’s good that you still care.”

  “I don’t care anymore.”

  “You do.”

  He said to her, “Sometimes I think I’ve been around too long.”

  “I think you told me that once before.”

  “Did I? What did you say?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  But he did. She’d said to him, “How can you say that when you have me?”

  He looked at her and his heart literally skipped a beat.

  The aircraft was now directly over the city, making tight banking turns as they’d have to do when they were shooting photographs of the ground. He thought she should leave before Purcell decided to do a flyby. But she just sat there, her feet on the rail, with her legs parted too wide, sipping coffee, watching her lover fly. Finally he said to her, “You should go to your own balcony. Or his.”

  Again, she didn’t reply.

  Mercado stood, but did not go inside.

  The sun was coming over the eastern hills, burning off the last of the ground mist. The capital of the former empire was a straggly city of empty lots with gullies and ridges everywhere. The few high-rise buildings were separated by miles of squalid huts that sat in clusters like primitive villages. Banana trees and palms shaded the corrugated metal roofs of the huts from the blazing sun. Vermin and insects swarmed through the city, and at night hyenas howled in the surrounding hills. Whatever hope there had been for this city and this country under the emperor’s halfhearted reforms was now drowned in a sea of blood. A long night was descending on this ancient land, and if a new dawn ever arrived, he would not see it in his lifetime.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “I see things more clearly now. And I am feeling sorry for myself, and for these people.”

  “You’re a good man, Henry.”

  “I was.”

  “We will find that good, happy, and optimistic man. That’s why we’re here.”

  He nodded. This was the last quest. He hoped for salvation, but was prepared for the final disillusionment.

  He looked down into the square dominated by the city’s only beautiful building, the octagonal Cathedral of Saint George. The square was filled with beggars by day and prostitutes by night. To further desecrate the great Coptic cathedral, it had been built by Italian prisoners of war captured at Adowa during the first Italian invasion of 1896. He found that an irony of sorts, or maybe a great cosmic joke.

  Vivian said, “Here he comes.” She pointed.

  The black aircraft was coming in from the east so that the pilot’s side would be facing the hotel as it passed by. Mercado noticed the aircraft was flying dangerously low and slow as it approached the hotel. If he stalled, he had no altitude to recover.

  Vivian seemed not to understand the danger, and she was smiling and waving.

  Mercado could not take his eyes off the aircraft, expecting it to nosedive any second. What was Purcell thinking? That’s what happens when you show off for a woman, Mercado thought. You die. And if Frank Purcell died… He looked at Vivian.

  She was standing on her toes now, waving wildly. “Frank! Over here!” She jumped up and down.

  The aircraft dipped its wings about a hundred yards from the balcony, indicating he’d seen them. Mercado gave a half wave, and as the plane passed by he could see Purcell’s face, looking at them.

  Vivian shouted, “He saw us! Did you see him, Henry?”

  He didn’t reply. Mercado watched the aircraft as it gained speed and continued west. He expected that Purcell would come around for another flyby, but he continued on and disappeared against the background of the tall western mountains.

  Vivian remained standing at the rail, looking at the fog-shrouded hills.

  Mercado was going to ask her to leave now, but he didn’t. Finally he said, “I trust this will not cause a problem.”

  She turned her head toward him. “We had coffee. Waiting for Frank.”

  He nodded.

  She turned and put her back against the rail. “You were not the jealous type.”

  “No.”

  “We all ba
thed together.”

  “Yes… well, bathing together and sleeping together are different things.”

  “One is a prelude to the other. And you knew that.”

  “Don’t try that argument on me, Vivian.”

  She walked past him into his bedroom.

  He stood on the balcony for a few seconds, then went through the sliding door.

  She was lying on his unmade bed, her shamma still on, but pulled back, revealing her jet black pubic hair.

  He looked at her, but said nothing.

  She said to him, “This will make everything right between us.”

  He understood what she meant. This was her way of saying, I’m sorry. I’m giving you back your pride. I’m taking away your anger.

  He dropped his robe to the floor, then slipped off his shorts and got into the bed. He knelt between her wide-spread legs, bent forward, and started to pull off her shamma, but she said, “No. Like this.”

  He looked at her.

  “Like this, Henry. You understand.”

  He nodded.

  She reached out and took his hard penis in her hand and pulled him toward her. He lay down on top of her and she guided him in, then wrapped her legs around his buttocks and pulled him in tighter.

  He began thrusting against her tight grip, and within a minute she climaxed and let out a long moan—the same moan he’d heard that night hanging from the pole. He kept thrusting inside her and she climaxed again, then he felt himself coming into her.

  They lay side by side, holding hands, gazing at the paddle fan spinning slowly on the ceiling.

  She asked him, “Do you understand this?”

  “I do.”

  “And you understand that this is between two friends.”

  He didn’t reply.

  “I hurt you, and now I feel better, and I want you to feel better. About me. And about… all of us.”