“She is?”
“She and Zacharias and Mortimer. I hear you wiggled your way into Zion.”
“Briefly,” Klein said. “I saw Sybille. Briefly.”
“Unsatisfactorily. So once again you’ve followed her here. Give it up, man. Give it up.”
“I can’t.”
“Can’t!” Gracchus scowled. “A neurotic’s word, can’t. What you mean is won’t. A mature man can do anything he wants to that isn’t a physical impossibility. Forget her. You’re only annoying her, this way, interfering with her work, interfering with her—” Gracchus smiled. “With her life. She’s been dead almost three years, hasn’t she? Forget her. The world’s full of other women. You’re still young, you have money, you aren’t ugly, you have professional standing—”
“Is this what you were sent here to tell me?”
“I wasn’t sent here to tell you anything, friend. I’m only trying to save you from yourself. Don’t go to Zanzibar. Go home and start your life again.”
“When I saw her at Zion,” Klein said, “she treated me with contempt. She amused herself at my expense. I want to ask her why she did that.”
“Because you’re a warm and she’s a dead. To her you’re a clown. To all of us you’re a clown. It’s nothing personal, Klein. There’s simply a gulf in attitudes, a gulf too wide for you to cross. You went to Zion drugged up like a Treasury man, didn’t you? Pale face, bulgy eyes? You didn’t fool anyone. You certainly didn’t fool her. The game she played with you was her way of telling you that. Don’t you know that?”
“I know it, yes.”
“What more do you want, then? More humiliation?”
Klein shook his head wearily and stared at the tablecloth. After a moment he looked up, and his eyes met those of Gracchus, and he was astounded to realize that he trusted the hunter, that for the first time in his dealings with the deads he felt he was being met with sincerity. He said in a low voice, “We were very close, Sybille and I, and then she died, and now I’m nothing to her. I haven’t been able to come to terms with that. I need her, still. I want to share my life with her, even now.”
“But you can’t.”
“I know that. And still I can’t help doing what I’ve been doing.”
“There’s only one thing you can share with her,” Gracchus said. “That’s your death. She won’t descend to your leveclass="underline" you have to climb to hers.”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“Who’s absurd, me or you? Listen to me, Klein. I think you’re a fool, I think you’re a weakling, but I don’t dislike you, I don’t hold you to blame for your own foolishness. And so I’ll help you, if you’ll allow me.” He reached into his breast pocket and withdrew a tiny metal tube with a safety catch at one end. “Do you know what this is?” Gracchus asked. “It’s a self-defense dart, the kind all the women in New York carry. A good many deads carry them, too, because we never know when the reaction will start, when the mobs will turn against us. Only we don’t use anesthetic drugs in ours. Listen, we can walk into any tavern in the native quarter and have a decent brawl going in five minutes, and in the confusion I’ll put one of these darts into you, and we’ll have you in Dar General Hospital fifteen minutes after that, crammed into a deep-freeze unit, and for a few thousand dollars we can ship you unthawed to California, and this time Friday night you’ll be undergoing rekindling in, say, San Diego Cold Town. And when you come out of it you and Sybille will be on the same side of the gulf, do you see? If you’re destined to get back together with her, ever, that’s the only way. That way you have a chance. This way you have none.”
“It’s unthinkable,” Klein said.
“Unacceptable, maybe. But not unthinkable. Nothing’s unthinkable once somebody’s thought it. You think it some more. Will you promise me that? Think about it before you get aboard that plane for Zanzibar. I’ll be staying here tonight and tomorrow, and then I’m going out to Arusha to meet some deads coming in for the hunting, and any time before then I’ll do it for you if you say the word. Think about it. Will you think about it? Promise me that you’ll think about it.”
“I’ll think about it,” Klein said.
“Good. Good. Thank you. Now let’s have lunch and change the subject. Do you like eating here?”
“One thing puzzles me. Why does this place have a clientele that’s exclusively non-African? Does it dare to discriminate against blacks in a black republic?”
Gracchus laughed. “It’s the blacks who discriminate, friend. This is considered a second-class hotel. All the blacks are at the Kilimanjaro or the Nyerere. Still, it’s not such a bad place. I recommend the fish dishes, if you haven’t tried them, and there’s a decent white wine from Israel that—”
Eight
“—Israeli wine,” Mick Dongan was saying. “Well, I’ll try anything once, especially if there’s some neat little irony attached to it. I mean, there we were in Egypt, in Egypt, at this fabulous dinner party in the hills at Luxor, and our host is a Saudi prince, no less, in full tribal costume right down to the sunglasses, and when they bring out the roast lamb he grins devilishly and says, ‘Of course we could always drink Mouton-Rothschild, but I do happen to have a small stock of select Israeli wines in my cellar, and because I think you are, like myself, a connoisseur of small incongruities, I’ve asked my steward to open a bottle or two of’—Klein, do you see that girl who just came in?” It is January, 1981, early afternoon, a fine drizzle in the air. Klein is lunching with six colleagues from the history department at the Hanging Gardens atop the Westwood Plaza. The hotel is a huge ziggurat on stilts; the Hanging Gardens is a rooftop restaurant, ninety stories up, in freaky neo-Babylonian décor, all winged bulls and snorting dragons of blue and yellow tile, waiters with long curly beards and scimitars at their hips—gaudy nightclub by dark, campy faculty hangout by day. Klein looks to his left. Yes, a handsome woman, mid-twenties, coolly beautiful, serious-looking, taking a seat by herself, putting a stack of books and cassettes down on the table before her. Klein does not pick up strange girls: a matter of moral policy, and also a matter of innate shyness. Dongan teases him. “Go on over, will you? She’s your type, I swear. Her eyes are the right color for you, aren’t they?”
Klein has been complaining, lately, that there are too many blue-eyed gals in southern California. Blue eyes are disturbing to him, somehow, even menacing. His own eyes are brown. So are hers: dark, warm, sparkling. He thinks he has seen her occasionally in the library. Perhaps they have even exchanged brief glances. “Go on,” Dongan says. “Go on, Jorge. Go.” Klein glares at him. He will not go. How can he intrude on this woman’s privacy? To force himself on her—it would almost be like rape. Dongan smiles complacently; his bland grin is a merciless prod. Klein refuses to be stampeded. But then, as he hesitates, the girl smiles too, a quick shy smile, gone so soon he is not altogether sure it happened at all, but he is sure enough, and he finds himself rising, crossing the alabaster floor, hovering awkwardly over her, searching for some inspired words with which to make contact, and no words come, but still they make contact the old-fashioned way, eye to eye, and he is stunned by the intensity of what passes between them in that first implausible moment.