Harlan Coben

by The Best American Mystery Stories 2011

A second later the cheetah won. The gazelle turned in the wrong direction, and the cat brought it down. A cheetah is not strong enough to break the neck of its prey, so it kills by suffocation, biting the throat and crushing the windpipe. The Tommy struggled, then went limp. The cheetah’s eyes glittered. So did Ga’s.

  Beaming, he threw an arm around my shoulders. He said, “Wonderful, eh?”

  I smelled the food and wine on his breath, felt his excited heart beating against my shoulder. Then, without a good night or even a facial expression, Ga turned on his heel and, surrounded by his snake sweepers and his gun bearer, marched away and disappeared into the palace. The evening was over. His guests had ceased to exist.

  We lost no time in leaving. Minutes later, as we rolled toward the wakening city in Benjamin’s Rover, I asked a question.

  “Is he always so hospitable?”

  “Tonight you saw one Ga,” Benjamin said. “There are a thousand of him.”

  I could believe it. In this one evening I had seen him in half-a-dozen incarnations: Mussolini redux, gourmet, Joe College, tender friend, zoologist, mythologist, and a fun-loving god who stage-managed animal sacrifices to himself.

  The Rover purred along a smoothly paved but deserted road, bush to the left and right, the sticky night dark as macadam. Headlights appeared behind us and approached at high speed. The sergeant switched off the Rover’s lights and pulled off the road. The tires bit into soft dirt. Benjamin and I were slammed together hip and shoulder. We were being overtaken by a motorcade. A Cadillac, the lead car, swept by at high speed, then a Rolls-Royce, then another Cadillac as chase car.

  “The president,” Benjamin said calmly when the Rover stopped bouncing. “He always has a woman or two before the sun rises. He is quick with them, never more than fifteen minutes, then he goes back to the presidential palace. He never goes to the same woman twice in the same month.”

  “He keeps thirty-one women?”

  “More, in case one of them is not clean on a certain night.”

  “How does he choose which one?”

  “Each woman has a number. Each month Ga receives from somebody in St. Louis, Missouri, what is called a dream book. It is used in America to play the numbers game. He uses the number in the dream book for the day.”

  I said, “So if you want to find him on any given night, you match the woman’s number to the number for that particular day in the dream book.”

  “Yes, if you know the address of every woman, that is the key,” Benjamin said.

  He smiled and placed a hand on my shoulder, pleased as a proud father with the quickness of my mind.

  For the next several days there was no sign of Benjamin. I was not locked up, but as a practical matter this meant that I was confined to the safe house during daylight hours. There was nowhere to go at night. Like any other prisoner I invented ways to pass the empty hours. Solitude and time-wasting did not bother me; I was used to them; both were occupational hazards. I was concerned by the lack of exercise, because I did not want to run out of breath in case I had to make a run for it. This seemed a likely outcome. How else could this situation end?

  I jogged in place for an hour every morning, and in the afternoon ran the 100- and 220-yard dashes, also in place but flat out. I did pushups and sit-ups and side-straddle hops. I punched and karate-chopped the sofa cushions until I had beaten every last mote of dust from them. I jitterbugged in my socks to cracked 78 rpm records I found in a closet: Louis Armstrong, the Harmonica Rascals, the Andrews Sisters. Satchmo’s “Muskrat Ramble” and the sisters’ “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B” provided the best workouts.

  The sergeant stopped by every day to cook lunch and dinner and wash up afterward. He brought quality groceries, and he was a good cook, specializing in curries and local piripiri dishes loaded with cayenne pepper that made the heart beat in the skull. I asked him to bring me books. He refused money to pay for them or the groceries—apparently I was covered by a budget in secret funds—and came back from the African market the next day with at least one Penguin paperback by every writer I had named and a few more besides. The books were dog-eared and food- and coffee-stained, and most were missing pages.

  I was in bed, reading a W. Somerset Maugham short story about adulterers in Malaya, when Benjamin finally showed up. As usual he chose the wee hours of the morning for his visit. He was as stealthy as he had been when he visited me in the hotel, and I heard no car or any other sound of his approach.

  All the same I felt his presence before he materialized out of the darkness. He seemed to be alone. He carried a battered leather valise, the kind that has a hinged top that opens like a mouth when the catch is released. The valise seemed to jump in his hand, as if it contained a disembodied muscle. I rationalized this by thinking that he must be trembling for some reason. Maybe he had had a bout of fever and was not quite recovered. That would explain why I hadn’t seen him for a week.

  Then, at the instant when I realized that there was something alive inside the valise and it was trying to get out, Benjamin held the bag upside down over my bed and pressed the catch. The bag popped open and a huge blue-black mamba uncoiled itself from within. It landed on my legs. With blinding speed it coiled and struck. I felt the blow, a soft punch but no sting, on my chest just above the heart. I knew that I was a dead man. So apparently did the mamba. It stared into my eyes, waiting (or so I thought) for my heart to stop, for the power of thought to switch off. No more than a second had passed. Already I felt cold. An ineffable calm settled upon me. The laboring air conditioner in the window was suddenly almost silent. My hearing seemed to be going first. Next, I thought, the eyes. I felt no pain. I thought, Maybe after all there is a God, or was a God, if the last moment of life has been arranged in such a kindly and loving way.

  Dreamily I watched as Benjamin’s hand, black as the mamba, seized the snake behind the head. The serpent struggled, lashing its body and winding itself around Benjamin’s arm. The sergeant appeared, stepping out of the darkness and into the light of my reading lamp just as Benjamin had done. It took the combined strength of these two powerful men to stuff the thing back into the valise and close it. They did so without the slightest sign of fear. In the half-light, with their faces close together, they looked more than ever like brothers. How strange it was, I thought, that this surreal scene in this misbegotten place should be the last thing I would ever see. Benjamin handed the valise to the sergeant. It jumped violently in his hand. The sergeant produced a key and with a perfectly steady hand locked the valise. His eyes were fixed on me. He was grinning in what I can only describe as total delight. Make that unholy delight.

  To me, an unsmiling Benjamin said, “You must be wondering why you are not dead yet.”

  He was not grinning. The sergeant, watching me over Benjamin’s shoulder, did it for him, big white teeth reflecting more light than there seemed to be in the room.

  Up to this point I had not looked at my fatal wound. In fact, I had not moved at all since the snake had struck me. Something told me that any movement might quicken the action of the venom and rob me of whatever split seconds of life I might have left. Besides, I did not want to see the wound that I imagined: twin punctures made by the mamba’s fangs, perhaps a drop of two of blood, and, most horribly, venom oozing from the holes in my skin. Finally I found the courage to glance at my chest. It was unmarked.

  I leaped out of bed, dashed into the bathroom, and examined my sweating torso. I stripped off my boxer shorts, the only garment I was wearing, and twisted and turned in the stingy light, looking for what I still feared was a mortal wound. But I saw no break in my skin, no bruise even. The symptoms of death I had been feeling—the lightheadedness, the shortness of breath, and a sense of loss so intense that it felt like the shutdown of the heart—went away.

  Without bothering to put my shorts back on, I went back into the bedroom.

  “Look at him!“the sergeant cried, pointing a finger at me.

  At first I thought h
e was making fun of my nakedness. I had spent time on a beach in South Africa, and the part of me formerly covered by my shorts was dead white. I soon realized that he was laughing at something other than my tan line. I was the victim of the most sadistic practical joke since Harry Flashman was kicked out of Rugby College, and these two were the jokers. There is no mirth like African mirth, and both Benjamin and the sergeant were doubled over by it. They howled with laughter, their eyes were filled with tears, they gasped for breath, they hugged each other as they danced a jig of merriment, they lost their balance and staggered to regain it.

  “Look at him!” they said over and over again. “Look at him!”

  The locked valise had been placed on the bed. The contortions of the infuriated six-foot-long muscle that was trying to escape from it caused it to skitter across the sheets. I tried to get around the helpless men, but they kept lurching into my path, so I was not able to reach the Webley, Benjamin’s gift to me, that was stashed under the mattress. My plan was to empty the revolver, if I could get my hands on it, into the pulsating valise. I was in no way certain that I could stick to this plan if I actually had the gun in my hands and this comedy team at point-blank range.

  Breath by breath, I got hold of myself. So did Benjamin and the sergeant, though it took them a little longer. It was obvious what had happened. Some juju man had captured the snake and removed its fangs and venom sac. Knowing Benjamin—and by now I felt that I knew him intimately despite the brevity of our friendship—he had commissioned the capture and the veterinary surgery. Knowing also how terrified President Ga was of snakes, I could only surmise that the defanged mamba was going to be a player in the overthrow of the tyrant. Maybe, if the coup succeeded, Benjamin would make the mamba part of the flag, as an earlier group of patriots had done a couple of hundred years ago with another poisonous snake in another British colony.

  Benjamin offered no explanations for the prank. I was damned if I was going to ask him any questions. I was by no means certain that I could control my voice. By now the joke had cooled off. Benjamin had stopped smiling. His grave dignity had returned. He made a minimal gesture. The sergeant picked up the valise.

  Benjamin said, “I will be back soon.”

  With a scratchy throat, I said, “Good.”

  The two of them let themselves out the front door. I locked it behind them, and as I tried to put the key into my pants pocket I remembered that I was stark naked. Nakedness was deeply offensive to Christianized Africans like Benjamin. Maybe that was why he had stopped laughing before the joke had really worn off.

  I reached under the mattress and pulled out the Webley and cocked it. It is a very heavy weapon, weighing almost three pounds when fully loaded, and when I felt its heft in my hand I began to tremble. I could not stop. I was afraid that the gun might go off, but I had so little control over my muscles that I could not safely put it down. Teeth chattering, my body chilling in a room where the temperature was not less than ninety degrees, I understood fully and for the first time just what a brilliant son of a bitch Benjamin was.

  Two days later, at five in the morning, he showed up at the safe house for breakfast. He said he had been up all night. There was no outward sign of this. He was fresh from the shower, his starched uniform still smelled of the iron, and he sat up straight as a cadet in his chair. However, he was not his usual masked self. There was an air of excitement about him that he did not bother to conceal.

  He ate the yolks of his fried eggs with a spoon, then touched the corners of his mouth with his napkin. “The president of the republic is very upset,” he said.

  He spoke in a low tone. It was difficult to hear him because a Benny Goodman record was playing on the phonograph—the usual precaution against eavesdroppers—and Harry James and the rest of the trumpet section were playing as if their four or five horns were a single instrument.

  I said, “Upset? Why?”

  “He has discovered the fangs and the poison sac of a black mamba on his desk.”

  “Good Lord,” I said. “No wonder he’s upset.”

  “Yes. He found these things when he came back from one of his women last night. They were right in the center of the blotter, in his coffee cup. If someone had poured coffee into the cup he might well have drunk it absentmindedly. He said so himself.”

  I could think of nothing to say. Certainly Benjamin needed no encouragement to go on with his story.

  He said, “He flew off the handle and called me immediately. He screamed into the telephone. He was surrounded by traitors, he said. How could anyone have gained access to his office in his absence, let alone smuggled in the coffee cup? How could no one have noticed this coffee cup and what was in it? There are soldiers everywhere in the presidential palace. Or were.”

  “They are there no longer?”

  “Naturally he has dismissed them. How could he trust them after this? He also ordered the arrest of the army chief of staff. His order has of course been carried out.”

  “The army chief of staff is in your custody?”

  “For the time being, yes. It gives us an opportunity to talk frankly to each other.”

  “Who is handling security if not the army?”

  “The national police. This is an honor, but it is a strain on our manpower, especially with the Pan-African festival beginning the day after tomorrow. Thousands will flood into Ndala, including twenty-six heads of state and who knows how many other dignitaries and nobodies. But of course the safety of our own head of state and government is the number-one priority.”

  “You are investigating, of course.”

  “Oh, yes,” Benjamin said. “Suspects, some of them of very high rank, are being interviewed, quarters are being searched, every safe in the nation is being opened, information is being gathered, fingerprints and other physical evidence have been assembled, all the usual police procedures are in place, but on a much larger and more urgent scale than usual. The presidential palace is off-limits to everyone except the president and the police.”

  He was in complete control of his voice and his facial muscles. But underneath his unflappable behavior, he glowed with joy. He was within reach of something that he wanted very much indeed.

  “The fangs and so on are not all that we have to worry about,” Benjamin went on. “The president for life has also received an anonymous letter, mysteriously placed under his pillow by an unknown hand, stating that a sample of his bodily secretions has been given to a famous juju man in the Ivory Coast.”

  This was momentous news. Playing the naif, my assigned role in this charade, I said, “Bodily secretions?”

  “We believe they were obtained from one of Ga’s women. He is deeply concerned. This can only mean that a curse has been put upon him by an enemy. The curse can be reversed only if we can find the culprit who hired the juju man.”

  Imparting this news, he remained impassive. No smile, no equivalent of a wink, no expression of any kind came to the surface. Benjamin himself had, of course, engineered everything he was reporting to me—the fangs, the venom, the anonymous letter with its chilling message. But he described these things as if he had no more idea than the man in the moon who was responsible for tormenting President Ga.

  The juju curse was the keystone of the plot. I had known Africans, one of them an agent of mine who possessed a first-class degree from Cambridge, who had withered and died from witchcraft. The bodily secretion was the vital element in casting a juju spell. Some product of the victim’s body was needed to invoke a truly effective curse—a lock of hair, an ounce of urine, a teaspoon of saliva, feces. The more intimate the product, the greater its power. Nothing could be a more effective charm than a man’s semen. No wonder Ga was beside himself. And no wonder that he was now in Benjamin’s power.

  By now more than thirty African heads of state had flown into Ndala for President Ga’s Pan-African Conference. This was the day on which they would all ride through the city in their Rolls-Royces and Mercedes-Benzes and Cadillacs,
waving to the vast crowd that had been assembled to greet them. Whether any of these spectators had the faintest idea who the dignitaries were or what they were doing in Ndala were separate questions. Whole tribes had been bused or trucked or herded on foot into the city from the interior. Many were dancing. Chiefs had brought warriors armed with shields and spears to protect them against enemies, wives to service them, dwarves to keep them entertained. Every single one of these human beings seemed to be grunting or shouting or singing or, mostly, laughing, and the noise produced by all those voices, added to the beating of drums and the sound of musical instruments and the tootling of automobile horns, made the air tremble. Palm wine and warm beer flowed, and the spicy aroma of stews and roasting goats rose from hundreds of cook fires.

  At last the sergeant found the exact spot he had been looking for, an empty space in front of the parliament building, and parked the car in the shadow of a huge baobab tree. A couple of constables were already on hand, and they cleared away the crowd so that we had an unobstructed view.

  “They will come soon,” the sergeant said.

  It was a little before five in the afternoon. The parade was already about ninety minutes behind schedule, but there was no such concept as “on time” in Ndala or any other place in Africa. Maybe forty minutes later, we heard the faraway warped sound of a brass band playing “The British Grenadiers.” The music grew louder and the band marched by, drum major brandishing a baton that was as tall as he was, every musician’s eye seemingly fixed on the Austin as the marching men turned eyes left on the parliament and the flags of the African nations that flew from its circle of flagpoles. A battalion of infantry then marched smartly by, drenched in sweat, arms swinging, boots kicking up powdery dust. The infantry were followed by several tanks and armored cars and howitzers. Finally came a platoon of bagpipers, tartan kilts and sporrans swinging, “Scotland the Brave” splitting the sun-scorched air. If the Brits had taught these people nothing else in a century of colonialism, they had taught them how to organize a parade.