I sat up, pulled on my briefs, and said sullenly, “Don’t worry about it.”
“Fine! I won’t worry. But we did have a meeting scheduled. I trust you won’t mind too much if I express some concern over the fact that you fucking failed to show up!”
I buckled my belt, shrugged into my shirt. “Just go easy,” I said. “I’ve had a rough day.”
“Oh, really? Yes, I suppose you have. Few of life’s difficulties compare to the arduous nature of an evening spent drinking and whoring.”
It was amazing, the amount of loathing I felt toward him—this bloated blond bug in his signature golf shirt and chinos, with his political dabbling and his tight-ass fiancée, who was he to berate me? “I don’t think,” I said tightly, “that my information has been degraded by tardiness.”
“Degraded,” he said. “Interesting choice of terms, that.”
I finished buttoning my shirt; behind me, Elizabeth struggled into her dress. “Gee, what crawled up your ass, Jimmy? No, don’t tell me. I bet the lovely Helen has something to do with it. What’s the problem? She having trouble prying her knees apart?”
“You bastard!” He glared at me, puffed up with anger. “Here I throw you a bone for friendship’s sake, and what do you do? You…”
“A bone?” I said. “I’m not your fucking dog, Jimmy. I’m your boy. Whenever you get into trouble, you come running to rub my nappy head for luck. You did it at Oxford, and you’re doing it now. Trouble with a Classics exam? Hey, Michael! Mind coming over and letting me knuckle your head bone? I’ll stand for the drinks.”
Rawley composed himself—he was above all this, he refused to get down in the gutter with me. “I’m not going to hold this against you. You’re drunk. We’ll talk in the morning, when you’re capable of reason.”
With a worried glance at me, Elizabeth squeezed past Rawley and vanished into the bar.
“Let’s talk now,” I said. “In the morning I’m gone.”
He appeared to take this as a surrender, an admission on my part of wrong-headedness. “Very well. But let’s go back to the hotel. We might be overheard here.”
“It’s your game,” I said. “We might as well play on your home court.”
“Can we stop this?” He spread his hands as if to demonstrate he was holding no weapons. “Christ, Michael. We have ten years of history together, and this isn’t the first time we’ve fought. If you want me to apologize for breaking in on you and the girl… I apologize. I’ve been under so much pressure, perhaps I haven’t been sensitive to the fact that you’re under pressure, too. If so, I apologize for that as well.” He stepped forward, extending the hand of friendship. “Come on, man. What do you say?”
I had always been a chump for his diplomatic side, even though I knew it was entirely tactical, and that it came as easily to him as eating bananas to a monkey. I took his hand, I accepted his clumsy embrace, but I knew in my heart that we were finished.
“No problem,” I said.
I bought a bottle of yellowish brown poison from the bartender, and we set out toward the hotel. The rain had diminished to a drizzle, and as we crossed the pitch-dark flats, Rawley shined a flashlight ahead to show obstacles in our path, the beam sawing across broken glass and stumps and once a scurrying rat. I was very drunk, but my drunkenness was cored by a central clarity, and though my coordination was not good, my mind was charged with a peculiar energy that permitted me to think and speak with no sign of affliction. Between pulls on the bottle, I told Rawley about my conversations with Buma, the dreams, Mobutu’s curse, and my encounter with the crocodile, the odd behavior of the crocodiles I had witnessed on the day of my arrival in Mogado. I gave it to him flatly, as if it were all plain fact, with no mention of my self-doubts or any other of my reservations.
“That’s absolute nonsense,” Rawley said; then hurriedly, not wanting to risk—I supposed—reinstituting an adversarial atmosphere, “I mean it sounds like nonsense.”
“Like you said—Buma’s impressive. He’s obviously expert at mind-fucking people. Whether or not there’s something more arcane behind that… it’s not really important. Your problem is to decide whether you can successfully prosecute him. My feeling is that you can’t. Imagine what he could do with a jury. Or with the court, for that matter.”
Two young men passed us in the dark, walking in the opposite direction; they shielded their eyes against Rawley’s flash and offered a polite greeting.
“I may have no choice,” Rawley said. “I’m getting increasing pressure from Kinshasa. My ultimate problem may lie in trying to shift the blame for his acquittal away from me and onto the court.”
“Why is this important? You’re going to England. One trivial defeat won’t spoil your entire record.”
“My family will still be here. These bastards are capable of anything. If they get all in a twist about Buma, they might threaten our business interests. They might do more than that.” He swung the flashlight in a short arc, the beam whitening the trunk and upswept branches of a dead tree, making it look for an instant like the skeleton of a strange animal, frozen forever in an anguished pose. “God, sometimes I hate this country.”
We walked in silence a few paces; finally I said, “If I were you, I wouldn’t mess with Buma. Suppose he’s acquitted. Let’s not even talk about whether he used to be a crocodile. Let’s just say that he’s a member of a cult, and once he’s acquitted, the cult gets a lot of ink. A lot of power. He could be more dangerous than your friends back in Kinshasa.”
“Unfortunately,” Rawley said, “you’re not me. And I’m not you. I have responsibilities I can’t dodge.”
And fuck you, too, I thought; I hope the son of a bitch bites you in half.
We were passing a point parallel to the rock where I had been trapped by the big crocodile. I mentioned this to Rawley, suggested he might want to have a look.
“Why not,” he said.
We angled toward the river, walked along it for a minute or so, then Rawley’s flash picked out that tooth of dark rock extending out over the Kilombo.
“No action tonight,” said Rawley as he stepped out onto it. I remained on the bank. “Not a sign of a fucking croc,” he went on. He swung the flash across the surface of the water and laughed. “Buma must have given them marching orders.”
The clouds broke, and a thin silver moon like a fattened hook sailed up from behind them. Rawley came back onto the bank, shot me an amused glance. “Are you sure you weren’t drunk?”
“You know me, boss,” I said coldly. “I can’t scarcely see nothin’ ’less I’s drinkin’.”
In the weak silvery light, with a blond forelock drooping over his forehead to touch an eyebrow, his face looked oddly simple, childlike. “We have a few things to work out, don’t we?” he said. “I understand that, Michael. God only knows who we were back at Oxford. I can’t even remember those people, except that they were complete fucking idiots. But I’m certain they weren’t you and me. They weren’t us the way we are now.” He twitched the beam of the flashlight off along the bank. “Despite the shit people do to one another, we’ve stuck it out together. Perhaps not always for the purest of motives. But we have done, and I can’t help but believe there’s some good reason we’ve come this far. Don’t you think that’s a possibility worth exploring?”
His words were so unexpected, I couldn’t muster a response; but I was, against my will, touched by them. Embarrassed, he turned toward the town and swept the flashlight inland; as the beam traveled across the ground, the light reflected off what appeared to be a row of yellow-orange jewels set atop a semicircle of dead logs. Logs with wrinkled, leathery bark and weird turreted structures atop their narrow snouts. Rawley let out a little gasp, as if he’d taken a playful blow to the belly, and focused the beam on the log closest to us. A crocodile. Not a very big one, maybe eight feet long. But some of its friends were bigger. There must have been fifteen or twenty of them, maybe more. Just sitting. Watching. Forming a barrier in every direction except one.