“I will let you take all your fish back to America for this.”
“The fish aren’t that valuable,” Sarafina said.
“We could bust you for trafficking in endangered species. I could be promoted. Gabon will improve its reputation with French and German Greens.”
“You’ll give me the fish if I sleep with you?”
“We Africans can be such liars. But what choice do you have?”
Sarafina said, “Do they want to watch?”
“Pubic hair would suffice.”
“I could just snip it off.”
The skin and face muscles shifted into something that looked like a smile again. “No.”
“Why not?”
“The passions of Europeans are most curious.”
“It’s an odd proposition.”
“Do you want to see your fish? Before you cooperate with me.”
Sarafina thought that would give her time. “Yes.” Postpone this, refuse if the fish are dead.
The smile cut deeper into the lieutenant’s face. “Very good. You’re entertaining the notion.” The accent here seemed subtly different, as though he were quoting an American he might have propositioned in such a manner over some other sort of smuggling.
When Sarafina rose from the metal chair, she felt more battered than she had when the border guards had first thrust her into the lieutenant’s office. The bruised muscles seemed to have glued themselves into cramped positions. She knew that her face was dirty, and could feel the blood crusted around her nose. I need to see if my nose is broken.
The lieutenant walked Sarafina though the modernistic airport, filled with fruit vendors and weavers selling kente cloth to African Americans, then outside to a long cinder block building covered with galvanized steel. The roof had been painted lumpy with many coats of silver paint. Two soldiers guarded the entrance, but smiled and stepped aside when they saw the lieutenant. He unlocked the door and snapped on an electric light. The Aphyosemion ogoense pyrophore in the plastic shipping bags seemed heat-stressed, gills flaring as they hung at the water surface. But alive.
“Let’s get them back to your office where it’s cooler,” Sarafina said, wincing at her tone as soon as she spoke, senior lab researcher to glassware washer. She didn’t know if she planned to comply to save the fish or to save herself from being even more brutally raped. The sex to come would still be a rape, no matter how much she cooperated, inevitable whether the lieutenant let her and her fish live or not.
“Certainly,” the lieutenant said. “And we can change the water. I haven’t sent the reverse osmosis filter to my wife yet.”
“Doesn’t she live in Libreville?”
“I would not have my wife live in a city,” he said.
“Not even a European city?”
“Especially not a European city,” the lieutenant said.
And she would never spread her legs to save some silly fish seemed to be the subtext. Sarafina said, “Libreville seems more like a European city than I’d expected. Can I wash my face?”
“Yes, we now have air conditioners, fax machines, and criminal gangs without tribal affiliations who control the drug trade. Don’t you want to help your fish first?”
“Your crew must have thought they’d caught a drug smuggler at first when they found the bags in my luggage. Were they disappointed?”
“No, they thought you were a drug smuggler when you attacked them. Can I help you change the water on your fish?”
Sarafina knew he wanted her to quit stalling. Her hands trembled as she filled the R/O tank, pressurized it. “It will take a while for the water to come through.” She checked the fish again. They seemed less sluggish in the air-conditioned room.
“What happens to you in Africa isn’t real, is it? You will go home, and our bush life will be a colorful part of your African adventure that our progress has contaminated. Did you attack my people because you wanted to be beaten? Or because Africa is hot colors, passion, and corrupt police?”
He was embarrassingly right. “I didn’t want anything to happen to my fish. You can keep all the money I have. Just let me keep fifty dollars to pay for the cab from the airport.”
The lieutenant found her purse among the items that his men had brought in, opened her wallet and pulled out her gold card. “We also have automatic teller machines in Librevillle.”
“What do you really want? To humiliate an American?”
“Seduce me into letting you keep your fish.”
“You won’t be satisfied with me just lying down and spreading my legs, will you? I need to wash my face.”
“I’ll wash your face first, then you will seduce me.”
“I thought we’d agreed that if I let you fuck me, you’d let me take the fish back with me.”
His English seemed tainted more by skinhead than by any African dialect. “I won’t be fooled by a fish whore.”
At that, Sarafina knew that she had to kill Thomas when she got home. But whatever she did to Thomas in the future, if she lived, the lieutenant had absolute power over her now. Or was that her fantasy? Perhaps this African lieutenant was merely making sport on a boring day with a silly white woman obsessed with fish too tiny to eat.
“Bring me some liquor,” she said.
Unsmiling, he opened his drawer and pulled out a half-filled bottle of a single malt scotch, poured her a large shot in a chipped water glass.
Sarafina said, “That’s a cruel abuse of Glenfidditch.”
The lieutenant said, “I got it cheap,” meaning probably that he’d confiscated it from some tourist too confused to realize he wasn’t in an Islamic county and too scared to ask why he was losing his bottle. The lieutenant pulled out a single malt tasting glass, for his own shot. He said, “You think you’re special? Fucking a white woman is like fucking plastic-wrapped meat.”
“I’m a science researcher,” Sarafina said, putting a semiotic distance between herself and all that was coming. She gulped the glass of whiskey, shuddered.
“Pity I don’t have access to some of our more exotic drugs. We have one that is reputed to be quite the aphrodisiac.” He poured some of the reverse osmosis water on a paper towel and wiped away the blood under her nostrils.
“Yohimbe, I think,” Sarafina said when he pulled the towel back. “Is my nose broken?”
“No. Aphrodisiacs are mostly placebo effect,” the lieutenant said. He put the bottle and the single malt glass back in the drawer and locked it. He watched her.
“I need to go to the bathroom.”
“Do you need any of your things?” the lieutenant asked.
“No.” Condoms. Sarafina wondered if she dared ask. She could squeeze with her vaginal muscles, fake orgasm.
He followed her to the bathroom at the end of the corridor. His men watched both of them. Sarafina closed the bathroom door, but there was nothing in the bathroom, not a window, not a mirror. He could be lying about her nose not being broken. She thought for a second of drowning herself in the toilet, but that seemed extreme for the situation. She was no virgin, and could fake orgasm with the best of women.
She came out, put her arms around the lieutenant’s shoulders, trying to conceal a shudder. Give him this in front of his men. He tried to look into her eyes, but she couldn’t face him directly.
So they went back to his office. Sarafina kissed and stroked the lieutenant, ground her hips against his thigh, fondled his stiffened cock, and felt less and less aroused. The scotch made her muzzy, not erotic. He stripped her, kicked off his pants, put her down on the floor, and forced her legs wide.
Sarafina felt bludgeoned from the inside. When they were done, she closed her eyes against tears. Water hit her, along with wiggling fish bodies. She opened her eyes and saw the lieutenant, fully dressed again, with an empty fish bag in his hand. He’d poured fish all over her body. Sarafina wondered if the knife he’d used to slit the fish bag would slit her throat next.