“Are you waiting for someone?” he mutters, shaken.
“No.” The smile again, far less tentative. “Would you like to join me?”
She is a graduate student, he discovers quickly. Just got her master’s, beginning now on her doctorate—the nineteenth-century East African slave trade, particular emphasis on Zanzibar. “How romantic,” he says. “Zanzibar! Have you been there?”
“Never. I hope to go some day. Have you?”
“Not ever. But it always interested me, ever since I was a small boy collecting stamps. It was the last country in my album.”
“Not in mine,” she says. “Zululand was.”
She knows him by name, it turns out. She had even been thinking of enrolling in his course on Nazism and Its Offspring. “Are you South American?” she asks.
“Born there. Raised here. My grandparents escaped to Buenos Aires in ’37.”
“Why Argentina? I thought that was a hotbed of Nazis.”
“Was. Also full of German-speaking refugees, though. All their friends went there. But it was too unstable. My parents got out in ’55, just before one of the big revolutions, and came to California. What about you?”
“British family. I was born in Seattle. My father’s in the consular service. He—”
A waiter looms. They order sandwiches offhandedly. Lunch seems very unimportant now. The contact still holds. He sees Conrad’s Nostromo in her stack of books; she is halfway through it, and he has just finished it, and the coincidence amuses them. Conrad is one of her favorites, she says. One of his, too. What about Faulkner? Yes, and Mann, and Virginia Woolf, and they share even a fondness for Hermann Broch, and a dislike for Hesse. How odd. Operas? Freischütz, Holländer, Fidelio, yes. “We have very Teutonic tastes,” she observes.
“We have very similar tastes,” he adds. He finds himself holding her hand.
“Amazingly similar,” she says.
Mick Dongan leers at him from the far side of the room; Klein gives him a terrible scowl. Dongan winks. “Let’s get out of here,” Klein says, just as she starts to say the same thing.
They talk half the night and make love until dawn. “You ought to know,” he tells her solemnly over breakfast, “that I decided long ago never to get married and certainly never to have a child.”
“So did I,” she says. “When I was fifteen.”
They were married four months later. Mick Dongan was his best man.
Gracchus said, as they left the restaurant, “You will think things over, won’t you?”
“I will,” Klein said. “I promised you that.”
He went to his room, packed his suitcase, checked out, and took a cab to the airport, arriving in plenty of time for the afternoon flight to Zanzibar. The same melancholy little man was on duty as health officer when he landed, Barwani. “Sir, you have come back,” Barwani said. “I thought you might. The other people have been here several days already.”
“The other people?”
“When you were here last, sir, you kindly offered me a retainer in order that you might be informed when a certain person reached this island.” Barwani’s eyes gleamed. “That person, with two of her former companions, is here now.”
Klein carefully placed a twenty-shilling note on the health officer’s desk.
“At which hotel?”
Barwani’s lips quirked. Evidently twenty shillings fell short of expectations. But Klein did not take out another banknote, and after a moment Barwani said, “As before. The Zanzibar House. And you, sir?”
“As before,” Klein said. “I’ll be staying at the Shirazi.”
Sybille was in the garden of the hotel, going over that day’s research notes, when the telephone call came from Barwani. “Don’t let my papers blow away,” she said to Zacharias, and went inside.
When she returned, looking bothered, Zacharias said, “is there trouble?”
She sighed. “Jorge. He’s on his way to his hotel now.”
“What a bore,” Mortimer murmured. “I thought Gracchus might have brought him to his senses.”
“Evidently not,” Sybille said. “What are we going to do?”
“What would you like to do?” Zacharias asked.
She shook her head. “We can’t allow this to go on, can we?”
The evening air was humid and fragrant. The long rains had come and gone, and the island was in the grip of the new season’s lunatic fertility: outside the window of Klein’s hotel room some vast twining vine was putting forth monstrous trumpet-shaped yellow flowers, and all about the hotel grounds everything was in blossom, everything was in a frenzy of moist young leaves. Klein’s sensibility reverberated to that feeling of universal vigorous thrusting newness; he paced the room, full of energy, trying to devise some feasible stratagem. Go immediately to see Sybille? Force his way in, if necessary, with shouts and alarums, and demand to know why she had told him that fantastic tale of imaginary sultans? No. No. He would do no more confronting, no more lamenting; now that he was here, now that he was close by her, he would seek her out calmly, he would talk quietly, he would invoke memories of their old love, he would speak of Rilke and Woolf and Broch, of afternoons in Puerto Vallarta and nights in Santa Fe, of music heard and caresses shared, he would rekindle not their marriage, for that was impossible, but merely the remembrance of the bond that once had existed, he would win from her some acknowledgment of what had been, and then he would soberly and quietly exorcise that bond, he and she together, they would work to free him by speaking softly of the change that had come over their lives, until, after three hours or four or five, he had brought himself with her help to an acceptance of the unacceptable. That was all. He would demand nothing, he would beg for nothing, except only that she assist him for one evening in ridding his soul of this useless, destructive obsession. Even a dead, even a capricious, wayward, volatile, whimsical, wanton dead, would surely see the desirability of that, and would freely give him her cooperation. Surely. And then home, and then new beginnings, too long postponed.
He made ready to go out.
There was a soft knock at the door. “Sir? Sir? You have visitors downstairs.”
“Who?” Klein asked, though he knew the answer.
“A lady and two gentlemen,” the bellhop replied. “The taxi has brought them from the Zanzibar House. They wait for you in the bar.”
“Tell them I’ll be down in a moment.”
He went to the iced pitcher on the dresser, drank a glass of cold water mechanically, unthinkingly, poured himself a second, drained that too. This visit was unexpected; and why had she brought her entourage along? He had to struggle to regain that centeredness, that sense of purpose understood, which he thought he had attained before the knock. Eventually he left the room.
They were dressed crisply and impeccably this damp night, Zacharias in a tawny frock coat and pale-green trousers, Mortimer in a belted white caftan trimmed with intricate brocade, Sybille in a simple lavender tunic. Their pale faces were unmarred by perspiration; they seemed perfectly composed, models of poise. No one sat near them in the bar. As Klein entered, they stood to greet him, but their smiles appeared sinister, having nothing of friendliness in them. Klein clung tight to his intended calmness. He said quietly, “It was kind of you to come. May I buy drinks for you?”