“And I’m elected.”
“I hate to risk you on something this speculative, Evan.” He rarely called me Evan. Only when he was feeling very paternal or when he was conning me. “But this would be a good one to pull off. The situation in Modonoland is troubled. We may yet find a political use for the Retriever. And as for Bowman, well, he’s been a tremendous asset to us. Actually, to get down to cases, he’s our best black operative. In fact-”
“Yes?”
“Well, he’s our only black operative.”
“Oh.”
“Not because of policy. It’s just happened that way. I had been wanting to take on some Negroes for ages. It was still all right to call them Negroes then. In fact when I first wanted to hire one, they preferred to be called colored. I wonder what the word will be after black? I shouldn’t be surprised if things come full circle, don’t you know, and they insist upon calling themselves niggers.” He replenished his scotch, and mine as well. “Hmm,” he said. “Point is, we don’t run recruiting ads, do we? So with one thing and another, well, we never did take one on. Until Sam Bowman came along, and he couldn’t have been better, you know, and now it looks as though I’ve lost him. There are times, Evan, when a black operative has a distinct advantage.”
“At night,” I suggested.
He didn’t appear to have heard me. “In the Modonoland affair, for example. And in other situations as well. God alone knows where I would get another one.” He sipped his drink. “So I’m asking you to go to an unholy haystack and search for a needle that very probably isn’t there. I’d prefer to paint you a rosier picture, but in all conscience – well. What do you say?”
“I’ll go.”
“You will?”
I nodded.
And so I went to the post office and told them to hold my mail and went to Brooklyn and boarded Minna with Kitty and her grandmother and tied my money belt around my waist and put my passport in my pocket and went away. I caught a Sabena flight to Brussels and another Sabena flight to Leopoldville. I flew Central African Airways into Nairobi, where I knew some people. They arranged for the necessary papers, and I got a slot as a deck hand on a Portuguese freighter that got me to Griggstown in five days.
It would have been easier to fly directly to Griggstown. Almost directly, anyway, via either Capetown or Salisbury. But I felt it wouldn’t be a good idea to let the Modonoland officials see my name on an incoming passenger list.
Modonoland and I go back a ways.
The opium, for example. It was largely my fault that it was growing there. Once upon a time I’d been talking to Abel Vaudois, a Swiss who lives in Bangkok, and I guess I gave him the idea of growing opium in Africa, and he subsequently made the deal with Knanda Ndoro.
So I had felt responsible, and when Abel sent me a bank draft as payment for the idea, I gave a large portion of it to the MMM. And if it hadn’t been for the MMM there would have been no white supremacist coup, and if it hadn’t been for me I don’t suppose there would have been much of an MMM, so-
Well, one thing leads to another, doesn’t it? Modonoland bothered the hell out of me. I hated to read news stories from there. They all seemed personally accusing.
All of which did not quite add up to enough of a reason to pursue wild geese in that beleaguered nation. I might feel compelled to send them a check now and then, and write occasional propaganda for the cause, and give aid and comfort to any MMM comrades who came to New York. But to chase all the way over there in search of the Retriever and the black militant who had been sent to retrieve him, that was something else.
Something which would have ordinarily remained undone.
But.
But Kitty wanted to get married, and Minna was growing up, and New York was not a winter festival, and he who turns and runs away lives to run another day. And when it is January in New York it is July in Modonoland. Or, more accurately, when it is January in New York it is also January in Modonoland, since they use the same calendar we do, but January in Modonoland is a far cry from January in New York, Modonoland being in the Southern Hemisphere and their summer occurring during our winter, all of which is childishly simple to understand and maturely difficult to explain.
So I went there.
So they buried me.
Chapter 3
“Evan? Are you all right?”
“No.”
“It’s raining.”
“It certainly is.”
“Are you all right?”
“No.”
“Because for a moment I was talking to you and you didn’t answer me.”
“I was thinking about something.”
“Oh. Are you all right?”
She was evidently going to keep on asking until I said yes. So I said yes. And as I did so, the water stopped dripping through the tube. But it was still raining. I could hear it. I put my lips to the tube and sipped air.
“It’s still raining,” I said.
“It’s pouring.”
“But the water’s not coming through the tube.”
“I’m sort of hunched over it, Evan.”
“Oh.”
“Is that bad?”
“No,” I said. “Don’t move. Or I’ll drown.”
“Oh.”
“I may drown anyway. There’s a certain amount of seepage going on in here. I don’t know who manufactured this casket, but the quality control isn’t all it should be. Plum?”
“What?”
“I sort of have to get out of here.”
“Oh, Evan-”
I put my hands against the lid of the coffin, took a breath, composed myself, and with all my strength pushed at the coffin lid.
Nothing whatsoever happened.
“It’s all nailed and bolted together,” I said. “If I could just take the damned thing apart.”
“Do you have any tools down there?”
“A book, a ham sandwich, a money belt – you’d think I could buy my way out, for Christ’s sake. A flashlight – just a second, maybe I can get a hold of that flashlight.”
I squirmed around and managed to get my hand in my pocket. It was the wrong pocket. I squirmed some more and found the right pocket and got the flashlight out. I switched it on. It was a tiny little thing but it was blinding in there. I blinked at the light for a few seconds, then played it around the interior of the casket. There were all sorts of hinges and clasps and things, and none of them looked as though my fingernails would have much effect on them.
“You have the light, Evan? Will you be able to get out now?”
“I don’t see how,” I said. “I would need, oh, a screwdriver and a knife and a saw and God knows what else.”
“I have them.”
“Sure.”
“I’ll give them to you.”
“Sure, Plum. That’s wonderful.”
“What is the matter, Evan?”
I said, “Once upon a time there were two brothers, and they both went out and bought horses. And they had to figure out how to tell the horses apart. They counted their hoofs, but both horses had the same number. They painted a big X on one, but the rain washed it off. Finally they measured them, and lo and behold they had a sure-fire way to tell them apart, because the black horse was two inches shorter than the white horse.”
“But if one was black and the other white-”
“That’s the point, Plum.”
“I don’t understand why you raise the question of color at a time like this.”
I closed my eyes for a few seconds. Then I said, “No, you don’t understand, Plum. It’s the same as telling the horses apart. If you could pass me a knife and a screwdriver and a saw and I don’t know what else, there would be a space big enough to crawl through, and I wouldn’t need the tools to begin with. Like the horses.”
“Look out, Evan.”
“Huh?”
Look out for what, I wondered. And, in answer to my question, something plummeted through the breathing tube and hit me in the mouth. I made the appropriate noise and Plum said that she was sorry but that she had warned me. This was true enough.