5
Formutesca continued to sit on the trapdoor after the elevator had stopped. He could hear the door slide open. He sat there listening, controlling himself, feeling the excitement and nervousness in him like low-voltage electricity pouring through his body. Across the way, Manado sat and stared at him. But Formutesca had no time now to think about Manado or to worry about whether or not Manado would carry his weight when the time came. He had no time now to think about what was or was not happening in the elevator, no time to think about the fact that no attempt at all had been made to push the trapdoor up. All he could think about was what was happening inside himself.
Bara Formutesca was African middle class, and he himself wasn’t entirely sure what that meant. His father was a British-trained doctor, his mother a German-trained schoolteacher, and their son was an American-trained diplomat. But what did that mean, or matter?
When he was very young, six or seven, Formutesca first learned about the two words white men in his country used when referring to black men. One was a word that meant monkey, and that referred to the tribesmen outside the cities and the workers on the big estates and the urban poor. And the other was a word that meant something like civilizedand something like evolved, and that referred to the white-collar workers and the professional men, all the Africans who had received training in European skills and who conducted their lives by European standards. In the way it was used, this second word seemed to imply also a further level of meaning, something slyly contemptible, something like castratedor tamed. It had seemed to Formutesca, as a very young child hearing those words, that between the two it was better to be a monkey than a eunuch, and ever since then he had watched himself for traces of that wildness and that brash humor that he thought of as being the essence of monkeyness.
But his parentage, his background and his training all made him tend in the other direction toward the tamed. He was too intelligent to throw all that over the average “monkey” in Dhaba had an annual income of one hundred forty-seven dollars and would die of one of several possible dreadful diseases before his fortieth birthday. But when he saw the bland, emasculated Africans in their blue-gray suits gliding along the halls at the UN as though on muffled roller-skates, he determined over and over again never to let that depersonalizationwas what it was happen to him.
Could one of them possibly be here now in his place? One of those smooth-faced amiable pets? Never.
In the dim light he saw Manado’s eyes gleaming, and he suddenly smiled because it occurred to him that he and Manado were both exceptions to the rule, and for opposite reasons. Manado was a monkey trying to be a mannequin, and Formutesca was a mannequin trying to be a monkey.
Manado whispered, “What’s that sound?”
Formutesca had heard it too. A click, and then a thudding sound, and then more clicks, and then silence. He held up his hand for Manado to be quiet and listened. Nothing happened for half a minute and then the sequence started again: the click, the thud, more clicks, silence.
“The elevator,” Formutesca said, he didn’t bother to whisper, and his words had a slight echo up and down the elevator shaft. He made hand motions, bringing the sides of his hands together to illustrate what he meant. “The doors are trying to close.”
Manado said, “What’s the matter with them?” There was something trembling in his voice.
There was very little light here. Formutesca switched on the flashlight and shone it on Manado’s face. Manado’s eyes were wide with barely controlled panic, his mouth hung open, and his whole manner was startled, on the verge of flight. He seemed to be wearing hysteria like a plastic raincoat; he could be seen through it, but dimly.
It would be no good if Manado fell apart. It would be very dangerous for Formutesca if he couldn’t rely on his second man. Quietly he said, “There’s something in their way. They can’t close because something is blocking them.”
“What?”
Carefully, Formutesca said, “Probably a body.”
Manado blinked, then shut his eyes entirely and held up a hand. “The light,” he said.
“Sorry.” Formutesca switched it off. “Shall we go see?”
Manado didn’t answer. Formutesca, peering at him, said, “Are you ready?”
“Yes. I nodded.”
“I didn’t see you.”
“I’m sorry, I should have, I didn’t realize.”
Formutesca reached out and grabbed Manado’s wrist. “Don’t fall apart, William,” he said. “We need each other.”
“I won’t. I just don’t want to be up here any more.”
“Neither do I.”
Formutesca lifted the trapdoor, keeping his head to one side of the opening. He wanted to be sure they were both unconscious before he showed himself, and he also didn’t want to be in the line of any updraft in case some of the gas was still active. He knew it was supposed to be inert by now, but he felt a kind of vague awe toward gas and didn’t trust it.
Light columned upward from the opening, but that was all. Formutesca counted to three and then looked over the edge and down into the elevator.
Both. One face up along the back, the other face down across the entrance, his upper half out on to the floor, his body keeping the door from shutting again.
Formutesca turned and nodded at Manado. “Perfect,” he whispered, and was pleased to see Manado manage a smile.
Formutesca went first, dropping lithely down into the elevator and stepping over the body in the doorway. Ahead of him was a largish room full of display cases with wooden masks lined along the far wall. Monkey faces looking at him. He felt like an initiate.
He heard Manado land behind him. Not looking back, he moved farther into the semidarkness.
Manado called softly, “Just a minute.”
Formutesca turned back just in time to see Manado slit the throat of the one in the elevator. The blood looked like red paint, too sudden and thin to be real.
Formutesca went blank. All he could do was stand there in shock and amazement. It was true they’d talked this over beforehand, he and Manado and Gonor, and decided the Kasempas couldn’t be allowed to live. They would have to be killed, all five people in the building, and their bodies buried in the basement. They’d argued that out more than a week ago knowing it would be too dangerous to everybody concerned to leave the Kasempas alive.
Still, to have it happen so fast, so casually, just a few seconds ago he’d been worrying that Manado would panic, and now, with a calm that even Parker might envy, Manado had dropped into the elevator and methodically slit a Kasempa’s throat.
In his shock and confusion Formutesca remembered when they’d found out that Balando was the one betraying them to Goma and his white mercenaries. He remembered that it was Gonor who had finally killed Balando and it was he himself who had done most of the questioning, but it was Manado who had suggested the tortures. They hadn’t had to use them; the suggestions had been enough. Manado, serious-looking, studious, studying Balando with efficient earnestness, suggesting horrors he’d heard of when he was a child.
Suddenly Formutesca knew just how many light-years he was from monkeydom. However much he might play at savagery he was a tame lamb, nothing but a tame lamb.
Cast adrift, he invoked Parker. How would Parker act now? How would that man think? What would he be? Neither monkey nor lamb, but something better than both. It seemed to Formutesca that Parker would remain cold, aloof, emotionless, that he would be like a computer, quickly but methodically solving the problem of this robbery, moving through it like a pre-programmed robot. That’s how he must be himself if he was going to survive. This was not a joke.
Manado was saying something. Formutesca looked at him, trying to understand, and saw Manado gesture with the streaked knife at the other unconscious man, the one across the doorway.