“A schemer,” he said, talking as he worked. “A plotter, a criminal, and a compulsive babbler. I’ve been an aficionado of Harlem culture for years, Tanner, but your man Bowman told me rather more about it than I cared to hear. I soaked it all up almost in spite of myself. I believe I gave a rather good verbal imitation of him. I may have made mistakes, but you must admit I had the accent right.”
“Mmm,” I said agreeably.
“But then I’m an adaptable sort. I’ve often reflected that this is a test of greatness, the capacity to adjust to adverse conditions and make the best of them. After I was forced to put an end to Bowman, for example, I had to make fresh plans for escaping from the country. I did so. They fell through, a dreadful example of things going wrong. I barely escaped with my life. Without hesitation I headed for the interior. I’ve lived in urban centers all my life, and yet I adapted to the countryside, learned to live off it. When I encountered that white girl and her little band of madmen I didn’t give up and die. Nor did I try to flee. Instead I took command. Some men are born to lead, Tanner, and others are born to follow. True leaders have presence. Even those pitiful savages recognized this, just as they responded to the force of the white girl’s persona. I drilled them into my own private army. I learned their ridiculous dialect. I won their trust. In time I might have used them a steppingstone back to power. At least I toyed with the idea for lack of anything better.
“Then you turned up, and again I grasped the essence of the situation and looked for a better way. By using you and the child I could return to Griggstown, get clear of the savages. By letting you think I was Bowman I could take advantage of your help.” The disarming smile. “I can scarcely pretend that everything’s gone completely according to plan. One can never prepare for every possible contingency. And I do have that one flaw of insufficient humility against which I shall have to guard in the future.”
“I sincerely hope so.”
“You needn’t worry.” The shovel sank into the earth, the muscles worked, and another load of dirt was transferred from the hole to the pile. “Not everything has gone according to plan,” he went on. “But everything’s worked well enough.”
“Then why are you the one with the shovel?”
“That’s a small point, isn’t it? We’ll all come out of this well enough.”
The flashing smile again, and I thought that it was literally disarming – it had the effect of unloading the shotgun even as I clutched it. The man’s presence and force of personality were extraordinary. I had the gun and he had the shovel, but his manner stripped us both of these tools and made us equal partners in an enterprise.
He fell silent, and the pile of earth grew as the hole deepened. Plum held onto the flashlight and I held onto the shotgun. The shovel sank into the pit, and the Glorious Retriever sighed with satisfaction.
“Soon,” he said. “I believe I’ve hit it.”
“The treasure?”
He shook his head. “That’s in a metal case. It would make another sort of noise entirely. I think I’ve hit the body.”
He dug some more, and it seemed that he was right. The aroma of carrion filled the air. Then the shovel did hit something metallic, and he used the shovel to scrape off dirt. He set the shovel aside, lifted a huge metal lockbox out of the pit, and climbed out after it.
“Now,” he said, setting the box down. “Now we’ll just – God in heaven!”
He started at the yawning grave, pointed, and my eyes swung in that direction, and I blinked at the remains of Samuel Lonestar Bowman, wondering what I was supposed to be looking at.
“Evan, look out!”
I whirled around, Plum ’s cry ringing in my ears. Ndoro’s foot lashed out, sent the shotgun spinning out of the way, and his huge hands gripped the garden shovel, swinging it like a battle-ax, swinging it at me.
Chapter 17
“The rest of it was nothing special,” I said. “Just a matter of procedure, really.”
“Procedure.”
I nodded. “We had to leave the country, and I couldn’t very well use my own passport, since I was officially dead. Plum went to see the MMM people, but it turned out that they were all in jail.”
“Still?”
“Not still. Again. Elizabeth finally commuted those sentences to life imprisonment, and that gave the junta the chance they wanted to defy her. They had a mass hanging, and when the MMM crowd showed up to protest it, they all wound up in prison. So I had to bribe a freighter captain to get us to Johannesburg.”
“ Johannesburg?”
“Well, I have some friends in Johannesburg.”
“And then from Johannesburg you came home.”
“Well,” I said, “not directly. First we had to go to Geneva. There’s a clinic not far from there where they do extraordinary work. They’ve had wonderful success with personality disorders, and the doctor I spoke to said he thought they would be able to work wonders with Jane.”
“Jane?”
“Sheena.”
“You didn’t leave her in Griggstown?”
“Well, how could I? I didn’t think the Penners would be that happy to find her there, and besides she was basically a good person underneath, and she’d had a terrible life, and-”
“And after all you were married to her.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Kitty-”
She made a moue. Girls are forever making moues in books, but I had never seen one made in real life before. There was a time when I thought they were French desserts. A chocolate moue, s’il vous plait, and a small cognac. Kitty made a moue as if she had had considerable practice doing just that. Then she took a short sip of wine and a long look at me.
“You went to Geneva,” she prompted.
“I had to go to Zurich anyway. To turn the bearer bonds and negotiable paper into cash and put part of it in my account there.”
“Part of it?”
“Well, part of it went to the clinic in Geneva. And part of it went, uh-”
“To Griggstown to finance the work of the MMM,” she supplied. “Don’t gape. How long have I known you? A long time, Evan. Where else did part of it go?”
“That’s all.”
She nodded encouragingly. “So then you came on home.”
“Not exactly. I had to stop off in Amsterdam and sell the diamonds.”
“And from Amsterdam -”
“ Dublin,” I said doggedly.
“ Dublin?”
“I have trouble getting into England. You know that. From Dublin I took the ferry across the Irish Sea. Then we went from Liverpool back into Wales. Glamorganshire, to be specific. We went to this little town called Llundudllumellythludlum-”
“Oh, that little town. We?”
“ Plum and I.”
“I’d almost forgotten about her. You took her to Glublublub? Why?”
I explained. I took Plum to the little Welsh town because the more I thought about it the more I realized there was no other sensible place for her. She was obviously out of it in Modonoland, neither black nor white in a land where the twain never met, and where neither black nor white had it too good anyway. And while the Cape Coloreds in Capetown might have made a place for her, it was a place I wouldn’t have wished on anyone. Nor did I think the good old U.S. of A. was quite what she needed to fulfill herself.
“But she has relatives all over Glamorganshire,” I told Kitty. “On her father’s side. The Welsh Nationalists I put her in touch with were all excited at the idea of digging up relatives of hers. She’ll fit in perfectly. Since she’s the only colored person for miles around she won’t have to worry about prejudice. There’s never prejudice anywhere unless there’s a good-sized group to focus it on.”
“So Plum is in Wales.”
“That’s right. In-”
“Please don’t say the name of the town again.”
“I was going to say the name of the county.”