Fletch, Too

by Gregory Mcdonald

  “Right.”

  “Was not the man Louis Ramon came to meet. Whoever killed Louis Ramon did not know he was carrying one hundred thousand dollars in hard currency on him. You can’t tell me someone’s willing to do murder and not willing to stoop over and pick up one hundred thousand dollars if he knows it’s there.”

  “Dan thought that point interesting.”

  “Was Dan interested in why you called?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Carr, in calling Dan Dawes, you’re showing a lot of interest in a case which has nothing to do with you. Aren’t you afraid of making him, and the police, suspicious of you?”

  “Oh, I see. Well, in a small place like Nairobi, we all love the gossip.”

  “Yeah? How many other people have called Dan Dawes for inside information on this case?”

  “I didn’t ask him. And he didn’t say.”

  “Sorry, but I’m afraid you’re tipping our hand.”

  “Didn’t realize we’re playing poker.”

  “I’m waiting to hear the official charges against my father. Was the man he slugged a policeman or not? I’d appreciate knowing that as soon as possible.”

  “Is this all you’re thinking, young Fletcher?” Even in the dim light shed by the hanging lanterns of the lodge’s patio, Carr’s face was without shadows.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what I mean.”

  Surprising warmth flooded through Fletch’s body. “Well. I don’t know my father.” He shook his head. “It would have been natural for him to meet us at the airport.” He shook his head again. “I don’t know. I may be mistaken.”

  Carr tipped his head back and finished his beer. “You’re thinking something, at any rate. That’s a relief.”

  “My, my,” said Carr. “What have we here? A crippled Sheila …?”

  “…being held up by Juma!” Fletch yelled.

  “What happened?” Barbara leaned forward and looked out Fletch’s window.

  Flying low over the camp, everything was visible. Sheila was hobbling down from the tents to meet them. A homemade crutch was under her right arm. His arm around her waist, Juma supported her from the left side. Sheila’s right leg was in a long cast. They were both looking up at the airplane, laughing. Behind them hurried Raffles with a pitcher of lemonade and glasses on a tray. Sheila tripped on a tuft of grass. She and Juma nearly collapsed on the ground, laughing.

  Carr landed the plane wheels perfectly on the slightly uphill track. “The old dear’s splintered her drumstick.”

  Fletch banged the cockpit door open and held it up.

  “Poor Sheila,” said Barbara.

  Fletch said quietly, “And no Walter Fletcher.”

  Raffles was first to the airplane.

  Sheila and Juma were rollicking down the slope, holding on to each other, laughing like two roisterers in the wee hours.

  Fletch got out of the plane, then Barbara. They jumped off the wing.

  Carr emerged from the cockpit just as Sheila and Juma arrived.

  “All’s right here,” Sheila called out. “All’s right with you?”

  Standing on the airplane’s wing, arms akimbo, Carr said, “Clearly, all’s not right here!”

  “But it is!” Sheila waved her crutch. “Juma’s a hero! At least, to me!”

  “How did you crack your kicker?” Carr demanded.

  “The bloody corkscrew tipped over on me! There I was, alone in the jungle, as they say, leg broken, full weight of the corkscrew on me, no more able to move than Buckingham Palace, while three snakes were exploring closer to me, thinking nasty thoughts, I’m sure, while also hearing hyenas laughing at a few ripe ones not far off, and out pops Juma from the flora like a Masai moran, spear in hand, to stigmatize the snakes, notify the hyenas the show was over, make me as comfortable as possible, run for the Jeep and men to get the bloody corkscrew off me with high alacrity—generally, to save my sanity and my life, in that order!”

  “‘Spear in hand’?” Fletch muttered.

  “Darling Juma!” Hand around his shoulder, Sheila grabbed him to her and planted a kiss on his ear.

  Juma was laughing merrily.

  From his elevation on the airplane wing, Carr was studying Sheila’s cast. “Simple or compound?”

  “Compound,” Sheila said proudly.

  “Juma set it for you?”

  Holding up her encased leg, Sheila said, “Juma did a first-class job!”

  “Good for Juma!” Carr said. “We all thank you, sir.”

  As they were drinking lemonade, Sheila chatted, “When Juma discovered me in the bush, he moved with such speed, brain, and brawn, I was put to right in no time at all!”

  Carr shook his head. “Can’t leave you alone for a minute.”

  “Oh, rot,” said Sheila. “Next you’ll tell me I spoiled your plans to go dancing tonight!”

  “I don’t know, though, Peter.” Over coffee after lunch under the stretched canvas, Sheila looked around at the less than luxurious campsite, walls of jungle three sides, the derelict-looking Jeep, the sluggish river, the corkscrew lying on its side on the riverbank. “Perhaps it’s time to pack it in.”

  Carr picked a cracker crumb out of his lap and put it on the table. “Been thinking the same thing, old dear. Enough gets to be enough.”

  Still looking around, Sheila said, “Enough is enough.”

  Carr, Barbara, and Fletch had flown from the Masai Mara early that morning. They had left the two hôtelières in Nairobi and refueled.

  Awaiting them at the camp had been a mother with a baby whose back had been burned, whom Carr tended as well as he could, and an old man being blinded by cataracts Carr had to send away.

  Lunch at the campsite was late, bigger than usual, slower. Sheila’s broken leg had prevented her starting the day’s digging, and thus it never did get started. They even had sherry before lunch while Sheila and Juma regaled them again, laughing, about Sheila’s pain, terror, near death in the jungle; Juma’s appearing from the jungle like a moran, slaying the snakes with his spear, dispatching the hyenas, reappearing driving the Jeep, engineering the corkscrew off Sheila quickly and painlessly, then setting her compound fracture and creating a beautiful, smooth cast for it.

  “I’ll be damned if I sell airplane number two over this project,” Carr said. “I already sold one airplane to finance this.”

  “The one your father used to fly,” Sheila said to Fletch. “The one your father now has.”

  “Did he finish paying for it?” Barbara asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Carr said. “He had that profitable year flying the Uganda border, while the rest of us were refusing to do so.”

  “And the house in Karen,” Sheila said. “We sold the house in Karen.”

  Juma came and sat at the table with them.

  “Hello, hero,” Fletch said.

  Juma grinned. “Now it’s a bigger story than almost any other.”

  “It wasn’t all that much of a house,” said Carr.

  “No. Not that much of a house. But it was ours.”

  Juma was looking quite fondly at Sheila. “Sorry you lost your house.”

  “With two airplanes flying,” Carr said, “in a few years we should be able to afford another house. With only one plane flying, I’d expect to be an apartment dweller from now until my dotage.”

  A man Fletch recognized came out of the jungle toward them. He walked rapidly with a homemade crutch, heeling-and-toeing across the rough ground.

  Sheila said, “You do like your peace and quiet.”

  “Yes.” Carr looked around the camp and smiled. “I do.”

  “Still,” Sheila said. “Enough, as you say …”

  “Also the matter of the lost income. I’m not making money while I’m mucking about down here …”

  The man on the crutch approached the table. The front of one foot was bandaged. One toe was in a splint. Two other toes Carr had removed with a garden shears a few
days before.

  In the man’s hand were his two toes still wrapped in the gauze.

  “A few more days,” Carr said. “Well give it to the end of the month. If we don’t find anything encouraging by then, I guess it’s back to Nairobi to find an apartment.”

  Carr looked up at the man on the crutch. “Habari leo?”

  Leaning toward Carr, the man spoke softly in a tribal language. He held out the bloody gauze with the toes in it.

  Juma grinned. He put his head down, near Fletch, and said, “The man wants to know where his toes are.” Speaking in Swahili, Carr pointed to the gauze in the man’s hand. “Carr says, ‘There are your toes.’” Grin widening, Juma said, “‘No, no,’ the man says, ‘I mean where are the spirits of my toes?’ Carr asks him what he means. The man says, ‘My toes still pain me, but not the toes in my hand, the toes which are no longer on my feet.’”

  “Oh, I see,” said Fletch. “That happens. Nerves still signal pain to the brain from a severed appendage.”

  “Now the man wants Carr to cut off the spirit of his toes, so the pain will stop.”

  Fletch said, “That makes great sense.”

  Carr’s face was looking as if he had just been told he had buried someone who wasn’t dead. Clearly, he did not know how to answer the man.

  There was a long silence while Carr looked at the man, the toes in the man’s hand, the man’s bandaged foot, to Sheila, and back to the man.

  Juma said, “Witch doctor.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Carr. “Witch doctor. Only a witch doctor can remove spirits …”

  Carr launched into a long, gentle instruction to the man as to how he must now go to a witch doctor to have the spirits of his toes removed.

  “Listen,” Juma said to Fletch. “In three days someone is coming by in a truck. He is going to Shimoni. I would like to take you and Barbara with me to Shimoni in the truck. It is on the coast. We can camp there, and swim, catch fish …”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  “Do you want to go?”

  “Very much.”

  “And Barbara will want to come?”

  “I think so. I’ll ask her.”

  “It won’t be such hot work as here.”

  “Of course, we’d like to help out Carr and Sheila, for as long as possible.”

  “We’ll only go for a day or two.”

  “Sounds good.”

  Apparently satisfied, the man on the crutch was heeling-and-toeing it back along the jungle path.

  Carr sighed. He looked at Sheila. “I don’t know, old dear. Maybe we won’t last the month, what with one thing and another …”

  “How do you know this truck is coming?” Fletch asked.

  “It is coming.”

  “Can you hear it?”

  “No.”

  Before dawn, Barbara, Juma, and Fletch went out to the jungle track west of Carr’s camp and waited. They stood silently in the dew almost an hour, hearing the jungle noises turn from nocturnal to diurnal. They had one knapsack among them, which Fletch kept on his back. After a while, Barbara sat down on the dry track. Fletch lowered the knapsack onto the grass. Only after Fletch sat down did Juma.

  After the sun was well up, they moved into the shade. Fletch left the knapsack in the middle of the track.

  “Thirsty,” Barbara said.

  Juma disappeared into the jungle. He returned with two grapefruit, which they shared.

  “It will come,” Juma said.

  “You sure you have the right day?”

  No vehicle came along the track.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s almost noon,” Fletch said. “We could have walked to the coast.”

  “Yes,” Juma allowed. “We could walk to Shimoni.”

  Juma, Fletch, and Barbara had put in two more long days of clearing brush, digging holes, looking for Carr’s lost Roman city. Muscle-weary, tired of being slick with sweat, tired of being thirsty, even Fletch had begun to believe, to wish that there was an ancient Roman city underfoot, that some evidence of a different time, a different people, a different civilization would surface. To himself, as he worked, he marveled more and more at Sheila and Carr selling their house, selling an airplane, a part of Carr’s business, and devoting eighteen months rooting about in the bush on just hope.

  They had started out that morning clean and cool and fed. Watching the birds and the monkeys sporting about near and across the jungle track, they were again glistening with sweat, even in the shade. They were developing a hunger and thirst grapefruit slices did not address.

  Fletch said, “I feel guilty just sitting here. I feel we ought to be back helping Sheila and Carr. They said they’re going to give up their search soon.”

  “The truck will come,” Juma said.

  Fletch said, “Juma. You seem to have become fond of Sheila.”

  “Yes.” Juma’s eyes danced in his head. “Nice lady. Good-spirited.”

  Barbara asked, “Did you actually talk to this friend of yours with the truck?”

  “He’s not a friend. Not an enemy, either, I don’t think.”

  Fletch sighed. “Are we friends?”

  Juma smiled. “Well see.”

  “Did you talk to whoever this is who is supposed to be coming by in a truck?” Barbara asked.

  “No.”

  “Then how do you know he’s coming?”

  “He is coming.”

  “Do you know the driver at all?” Fletch asked.

  Juma said, “I don’t know. Probably.”

  “‘Probably’?”

  “Then what are we doing here?” Barbara asked.

  “Waiting for the truck,” Juma said. “There is nothing to decide about.”

  About one-thirty, a diesel truck carrying bags of cashews ground its gears slowly up the track. Juma asked the driver if they could ride to Shimoni with him.

  Of course they were welcome.

  Lying on the bags of cashews on the back of the truck, they jounced along to the coast. The truck generated a little breeze, and the cashews smelled good.

  Fletch never did know if that was the truck for which they had waited all morning. It was a truck. Eventually, it had come along the track. It did pick them up. It did transport them to Shimoni.

  Fletch wondered how to ask Juma if it was the right truck.

  After wondering a long time, Fletch found himself asking himself the question, What does it matter?

  “What do you think, Juma?” From their table at the roofed, wall-less restaurant on the crown of Wasini Island, Fletch looked across the ocean at mainland Africa. “Is it possible there is a lost Roman city in East Africa, or are our friends just wasting their time and money?”

  Juma shrugged. “How can you decide, until you know?”

  Barbara said, “Carr said some documentary evidence exists in London. The appearance and military traditions of the Masai are a kind of evidence, I suppose.” She smiled. “And then there’s what the witch of Thika said …”

  “She was right about one thing,” Fletch said. “I sure am carrying a box of rocks.” Under the table, Fletch stretched out his legs.

  Juma studied Fletch’s face.

  Barbara fingered crab meat into her mouth. “I sure would like to help out Sheila and Carr.”

  “I don’t know.” Fletch shook his head. “There are a lot of little things, impressions, things I’ve heard, rattling around inside my head. I haven’t quite sorted them out, focused on them yet.”

  “Are they helpful?” Barbara asked. “What sort of things?”

  “I don’t know,” Fletch answered. “I won’t know until I sort them out.”

  In midday, Juma was eating steamed crab with them. This was a special picnic, in a special place, Juma had arranged for them.

  The afternoon before, the cashew-bearing truck had stopped for them to climb down onto the road outside Kisite/Mpunguti National Park. They walked the fifteen kilometers into the park, past the ruins of the district commissioner’s
house. Fletch carried the knapsack. They had to pay a few shillingi to enter the park.

  Originally just a fishing camp, still there was little evidence of tourists there. Tents were sparse, well hidden, virtually invisible. The few visitors were so acclimated to the jungle, the beach, the sea, they did not jar the landscape, seascape. The few officials were casual, unobtrusive, helpful. And the commercial fishermen were still curious about, kind to, these visitors to their world.

  Immediately upon arrival, Barbara, Juma, Fletch jumped into the Indian Ocean. It being almost as warm as they were, it welcomed them easily, held them a long time.

  Later in the afternoon, they stood upon the lip of the cave, Shimoni, the hole-in-the-ground, and looked down. Fletch and Barbara did not know what they were seeing. To them, Shimoni was a hard-packed mud descent into darkness. Something, not a sound, not a smell, something palpable emanated from the cave.

  “Do you wish to enter?” Juma asked.

  Fletch glanced at Barbara. “Why not?”

  “Going down is slippery.” Juma looked at the knapsack on Fletch’s back.

  Fletch put the pack on the ground.

  “There are bats.” Juma looked at Barbara’s hair.

  “It’s a cave,” Fletch said.

  “Is it a big cave?” Barbara asked.

  “It goes along underground about twelve miles,” Juma said.

  “What am I feeling?” Fletch asked.

  Juma nodded.

  He led the way down the slippery slope.

  They stood in an enormous underground room, partly lit by the light from the entrance. Barbara remarked on the stalactites, then giggled at the hollow sound of her voice.

  Fletch noticed that all the rock, every square centimeter of floor, all along the walls two meters high, had been worn smooth. Even in imperfect light, much of the stone looked polished.

  “What was this place used for?” Fletch said.

  A bat flew overhead.

  “A warehouse,” Juma said simply. “For human beings. A human warehouse. People who had been sold as slaves were jammed in here, to await the ships that took them away.”

  Only the slow drip of water somewhere in the cave punctuated the long, stunned silence.