Slave Safari td-12

by Warren Murphy

  The first bar was air-conditioned cold, and he felt the sweat on his body dry almost immediately as he stepped inside the door. It was a sailor's bar. A white sailor's bar. The tavern was filled with seamen, their clothes, their tattoos, the leathery but still un-tanned look of their faces and hands giving away their occupation. Heads turned toward him as he stood in the doorway, realizing he had made a mistake and this was not the bar he was looking for, but determined to brazen it out as a free man, first looking along the bar, then toward the tables, scanning faces.

  "Hey, you," the bartender called. "This is a private bar."

  "Yassuh," Butler said. "Jes' looking for somebody, boss."

  "Well, you won't find him in here."

  "Not a him, boss. A her. You see her, maybe? Big blonde woman with big titties. Wearing a little, short, red dress, way up high around the nice, fine, warm ass," He grinned, showing teeth.

  The bartender sputtered.

  Butler said, "Never mind, boss. She ain't here. But if she come in, you tell her to get her white ass home, 'cause her man gonna whomp her good iften she don't. You tell her, she don't get right home, and she ain't getting no more of this good stuff right here," Butler said, stroking the groin of his trousers.

  There were a few muzzled mumbles. The bartender's mouth still worked, getting ready to talk, but before he could speak, Butler turned and walked out into the street, letting the heavy wood and glass door swing shut behind him.

  He stopped here on the sidewalk and laughed, a full, roaring laugh that only a trained, intelligent linguist's ear could tell was punctuated by the Loni throat click of anger.

  Then Butler turned and walked away down the block. It didn't feel so oppressively hot anymore. The heat felt good on his skin.

  The second tavern was uneventful, but empty and he found his man in the third saloon he entered. The man sat in the back, his face cafe au lait light against the dark blue of his crisp tailored gabardine uniform. Despite the heat, he wore his braided jacket and his braided duck-billed cap, with the gold string work across the crown and bill.

  The bar was noisy with black sailors and no one looked up when Butler came in or paid any especial attention to the black dude in the light blue suit. He was twice offered drinks by sailors as he walked the length of the bar and turned them down with what he hoped was a gracious shake of his, head, and finally reached the table where the ship's officer sat, drinking alone, a bottle of Cutty Sark scotch in front of him.

  The officer looked up as Butler eased into the seat.

  "Hello, Captain," Butler said.

  "Why, Colonel Butler," the man said. "What a pleasure to see you." His tongue was a little thick in his mouth; he had been drinking too much, Butler realized with distaste. "It's been a long while."

  "Yes," Butler said, "but now I have need of your services."

  The ship's officer smiled softly as he filled his old-fashioned glass to the brim with Cutty Sark. He sniffed the smoky scotch, lifted it to his mouth, and then began to swallow it smoothly, slowly.

  He stopped when the glass was half empty. "Why, of course," he said. "Same arrangement?"

  Butler nodded.

  The same arrangement meant $5,000 in cash for the captain of the Liberian-registered tanker. At least that was the polite fiction that Butler and the ship's captain maintained. The full truth was that the "same arrangement" meant that the captain's wife and mother and children who lived in Busati would continue to live there and not turn up dead in a ditch. This point had been made clear at Butler's first meeting with the captain ten months before; it had never been raised again since there was no need for it. The captain remembered.

  "However," Butler added, "there will be a slight difference this time." He looked around the room to be sure no one was watching or listening. The small bar reverberated with the soul-screeching of the jukebox. Reassured, Butler said, "Two women."

  "Two?" the captain said.

  Butler smiled. "Two. But one will not complete the trip."

  The captain sipped his drink, then smiled again. "I see," he said. "I see." But he did not see why he should carry two women for the same price he was paid for carrying one. Yet, neither did he see how he could raise the subject to Butler without risking serious trouble. Again, he said, "I see."

  "Good," said Butler. "When do you sail?"

  The captain glanced down at his watch. "Five o'clock," he said. "Just before dawn."

  "I'll be there," Butler said. He rose from the table.

  "Join me in a drink, Colonel?" the captain asked.

  "Sorry, no. I never drink."

  "Too bad. I should think you would. It makes life so much easier."

  Butler put his big hand on the table and leaned forward to the officer. "You don't understand, Captain. Nothing could be easier than my life is now. Or more pleasurable."

  The captain nodded. Butler paused a moment, almost challenging a comment, but when none came, he pushed away from the table, turned and left.

  Butler's next-stop was a motel on the outskirts of the city, where he rented a room under the name of F. B. Williams, producing identification in that name, paying cash and rebuffing efforts by the motel clerk to engage him in conversation.

  Butler checked the room. The door locks satisfied him. He tossed his small travelling bag on the bed and returned to the car.

  For an hour, he cruised the streets of Norfolk, looking for a person. It had to be a special kind of person.

  Finally, he found her. She was a tall willowy blonde with ashen hair. She stood on a corner near a traffic light in the time-honoured fashion of whores everywhere—ready to cross the street if a police car came along, but willing to stand there forever if the fuzz didn't come, or at least until the right kind of man came along in the right kind of car.

  Butler saw her, quickly drove the rented Buick around the block, then timed it so that he rolled up in front of her as the traffic light turned red.

  The girl looked at him through the windshield and Butler pressed the button that unlocked the car doors. The heavy, clicking sound was another universal signal. The girl came over, leaned on the door and stuck her head inside the open window, carefully glancing into the back seat first. She was just about the right size and age, Butler guessed. The coloration looked about right also.

  "Want to party?" she said.

  "Sure," Butler said.

  "Go down for $ 15, straight for $25."

  "You go all night?" Butler asked. He thought it odd that the words and phrases of the street came back to him so easily, almost as if they had never left his mind.

  "Naah," the girl said. "All night's a bummer."

  "Three hundred dollars make it more pleasant?" Butler asked, knowing that the figure was outrageous and could have hired the best efforts of any three girls on the block.

  "You got three hundred?"

  Butler nodded.

  "Let's see it."

  "Get in and I'll show you."

  The girl opened the door and slid into the front seat next to Butler. The light was green and he turned the corner and pulled up into a spot near an all-night bookstand.

  Butler reached his wallet from his pocket and took out three one-hundred-dollar bills, making sure that the girl got a look at the remaining fat wad of bills in the wallet. He held the three up in front of the girl.

  "Payment in advance," she said warily.

  "Two hundred now," he said. "You can stash it. The other hundred after."

  "How come you're so eager?" she said.

  "Look. I'm no freak. No whips, none of that shit. I just like white women. If you're good to me, there's another hundred in it that nobody has to know about."

  She looked at Butler's face again, hard this time, obviously trying to fit him into one of her danger categories of fuzz, freaks and fighters, but he didn't match. "Okay," she said, "wait here. I'm going to drop off the two hundred and I'll be right back."

  Butler nodded. He wouldn't trust a prostitute out of sight f
or any reason but money, so he had made a point of showing her all the cash in his wallet and her little brain already was working overtime, he knew, trying to figure out how to get more out of him than the four hundred dollars already promised. She would be back as soon as she gave the two hundred to her pimp.

  Three minutes later she returned and as she slid into the front seat she grabbed him.

  "My name's Thelma," she said. "What's yours?"

  "Simon," he said. "I've already got a room." He snapped the door locks shut and drove off.

  Ten minutes later, they were in Butler's motel room. Twenty minutes later, she was tied, gagged, drugged and lying on the floor behind the bed, not visible from the window and out of reach of the telephone. The last was an unnecessary precaution because she would be out for the rest of the night

  Butler looked at her one more time before leaving the room and he was satisfied. The size was right; the hair colouring about right. It wouldn't be perfect; it certainly might not fool anyone for too long, but it should do. It would buy enough time.

  He whistled as he drove out through (the hot city into the rolling fox-hunting hills of rich-bitch Virginia.

  He drove the road three times before he found the cut-off to the long winding drive that led to the Butler estate. With his headlights out, and after sitting in the dark for a moment, he could see the main house high up on a hill, two hundred yards from the road. He decided not to drive up; the roadway was probably hooked up to an alarm. He cruised slowly down the highway for another hundred yards, found a deep shoulder off the road covered by an overhang of trees, and drove in.

  He closed the car up, checked his pockets to make sure he had his materials and then set across the razor-cut lawns of the Butler estate toward the big house on the hill, keeping close to the line of trees at the property's northern end.

  As he loped, he glanced at the luminous dial of his wristwatch. Cutting it close, but still enough time.

  The grass oozed up a damp coolness that enveloped him as he moved, and he imagined himself in an earlier day, trudging barefooted along these hills, dressed perhaps in a monkey suit, bringing drinks to Massa on the patio. When had it happened? When had he come to hate so?

  He moved in a rhythmic trot, his giant athlete's body swinging free and easy, the way he used to on the grass covered fields of football, when he performed in the big open-air cage for the whites lucky enough to have a friend who could help them get season's tickets.

  No matter when he started to hate. He hated. That was enough of an answer, but then he remembered. King Kong was why he hated.

  Butler had had a particularly bitter argument with his sister, had gone out into the New York night, and somehow had wound up listening to a free lecture on racism ~ at the New School for Social Research.

  The lecturer was one of that roving band of non-teaching teachers who make a headline with one interesting, if erroneous, statement and then milk it for lecture fees at campuses for the next twenty years. The lecturer began to talk about racism in the films, drawing unsupported conclusions from unsubstantiated data, to the growing applause of the two hundred people, mostly white, in the audience.

  Then the house lights dimmed and film clips from the old King Kong classic began to be shown on the screen. There were five minutes of the giant ape terrorizing Fay Wray in the jungle, then climbing the Empire State Building with her in his giant hand, then standing there atop the building until he was gunned down by the fighter planes.

  The speaker seemed to want to match the auditorium darkness with the lack of light in his own analysis.

  King Kong, he said, was just a thinly veiled attack by while filmmakers on black sexuality, a pandering-to the redneck's fear of the potent black man. The leering expressions of King Kong as he lifted the white girl up in his giant black hand; his mindless, headlong, unswerving search for her which typified the mythical lust of black men for white women; and the cheaply symbolic end where King Kong was shot down while hanging on to the building's phallic symbol of a tower, thus signifying that the black man would be done in by his erect phallus—all these were cited as proofs by the speaker.

  Butler looked around the auditorium at the heads nodding up and down in agreement.

  And these were the liberals, he thought, the best hope of blacks in America—and not one of them questioned, for even a moment, their own willingness to equate a giant movie monkey with a black man. Didn't they teach anthropology in the schools any more? Didn't they teach anything? The ape was hairy, and blacks were hairless. Blacks had thick lips, but apes had no lips at all. And yet these looney-tunes could believe that people would find blacks and apes interchangeable. Why could they believe that of others, if they didn't really know it of themselves?

  And they were supposed to be the best America had to offer.

  Butler had left the auditorium convinced by the speaker of just one thing: his sister had been right and he had been wrong. It would take confrontation and possibly violence to get what the black man deserved in America.

  Butler tried. Then came that visit to the Lord village, when William Forsythe Butler had known that he had come home. He heard the legend of the Loni and knew that he—he alone—could be the redeemer of that legend, that he could use the Loni to take over power in Busati and show what a black man could do with a government if given half a chance.

  He was at the house now. It was dark and silent. He was glad there were no dogs. Willie Butler was afraid of dogs.

  He paused close to the wall of the house, looking around him, remembering the floor plan that had been outlined to him by a researcher, who had found it in the Library of Congress, under Historical Homes of Virginia. The girl's room would be second floor front right He looked up. Latticework, buried under vines, covered the front of the big building. He hoped the thin wood would hold his weight.

  Butler tested it by reaching up, grabbing a piece of wood with his right hand, and lifting his feet off the ground.

  He hung there suspended by his right hand momentarily; the wood was anchored and strong. He grunted softly to himself and then began climbing the latticework like a ladder. The window to the second floor bedroom was unlocked and open slightly at the top. Inside he could hear the faint whirring of central air conditioning breathing coolness into the room.

  The night was black as a railroad tunnel at midnight, and the inside of the bedroom seemed to be brightly lighted by the small lamp built into the light switch near the door.

  In the bed, under a shiny sheet, he could make out a woman's form. That should be Hillary Butler.

  Holding onto the latticework with one hand, Butler inched the bottom window up until it was fully opened. Then he carefully stepped into the room, his shoes sinking deeply into the plush velvet carpet that covered the floor. He paused, sipping his breath carefully through his nose, trying to make no sound, then moved toward the bed, the foot, around the side. He could see the girl's face now. It was Hillary Butler, sleeping the dreamy sleep of the peaceful-with-the-world. That she slept in this air-conditioned room under that satin sheet because her ancestors had carted men and women and babies across an ocean in the hold of a stinking rat-infested ship, did not seem to intrude on her sleep at all. Butler hated her.

  He stepped back and from his pocket took a small foil-wrapped packet. Carefully he pinched the top to break the air-tight seal.

  The characteristic smell of chloroform rose from the package into his nostrils. From the packet, he pulled out a heavy gauze pad soaked with the drug, and carefully put the foil back into his jacket.

  Quickly he moved forward. He stood alongside the girl and transferred the chloroform pad to his right hand. Then he reached down and covered the girl's nose and mouth with the pad. Hillary Butler bolted upright in bed, and the big man dropped his body on hers to hold her still. She thrashed for a few seconds, her eyes wide open and shocked, trying to see her attacker, but only able" to see the glint of light reflecting off a golden chain-link ring on the hand th
at covered her face. Her thrashing slowed down. Finally, she was still.

  Butler stood up and looked down at the unconscious girl. He left the pad on her face and methodically began to search the room.

  He carefully went through a clothes closet that ran the length of one wall, looking at dresses and rejecting them until he found one, a blue and white jersey shift with a hand-made label from an exclusive New York City couturier. He made sure the other garments were hanging neatly before he closed the closet. On a dressing table, he saw a polished ebony wood jewellery box. He reached inside and grabbed a handful of jewellery, carried it to the room's little night light, and inspected it He took an engraved golden charm bracelet and a pair of gem earrings. The rest he returned to the box.

  Butler rolled up the blue and white dress and stuck it under the belt of his trousers. The jewellery went into an inside jacket pocket.

  At the bed, he pulled the chloroform pad off the girl's face, put it back in his pocket, then lifted the girl up in one muscled arm, carrying her under his arm like a rolled up set of blueprints and went back to the window.

  With ease that surprised him, he carried the girl down. Still holding her under one arm, he moved toward the line of trees and headed back for the roadway where his car waited.

  He dumped the little rich girl on the floor in the back of the car, covered her with a blanket and then drove off quickly. He didn't want to be stopped by any policemen wondering what a black in a rented car was doing in this section of the county at almost three o'clock in the morning.

  After parking in the motel lot in front of his room, Butler placed a fresh chloroform pad near Hillary Butler's face, then went inside his room where the prostitute was still unconscious.

  He dressed her in Hillary Butler's blue and white dress, then put on the stolen jewellery. The charm bracelet engraved on the back. "To Hillary Butler from Uncle Laurie." Earrings. They were made for pierced ears. The whore's ears were not pierced. Butler swore under his breath. Damn, just like a white bitch, not to have holes where you wanted her to. He rammed the point of one earring through the fleshy lobe of the unconscious girl who did "hot even stir, even though drops of blood ran down her ear from the small hole. He clipped the earring in back with the small squeeze lock attachment, then fastened the other earring in the same way.