“We’ve met, Vivian,” he said, and was pleased to see her eyes shift for a second at the sound of her name. “Not formally, maybe, but you did see a lot of me.”
A thin smile briefly touched her mouth, but she repeated, “You’ve made a mistake.”
“Not me,” he said, and now he was getting irritated. “There’ve been mistakes, Vivian, but I haven’t made them. Right now there’s a murdered man in my room upstairs, and if you people did it you ought to start giving me some damn good reasons why I shouldn’t blow the whistle on you.”
“Blow the whistle?” The curtains were still drawn behind her eyes. “If you have things you think you should tell someone officially, it is your duty to do so.”
“You aren’t paying attention, honey,” Grofield said. “I know what’s happening here this weekend. I know everybody’s here under assumed names, but I know who’s who. I know General Pozos is here. I know your president, Colonel Rahgos, is here. I know Onum Marba is here. I don’t know what name you’re registered under, but your real name is Vivian Kamdela and you’re with the mission from Undurwa. I tell you there’s a dead man in my room, and I’m not taking the rap for it. Now do you take me to Marba or do I start making loud embarrassing noises?”
The curtains had lifted now, showing worry underneath. Her brow furrowed, she said, “What do you mean, a dead man?”
“By a dead man I mean a man who’s dead. With a knife in him. Stabbed right through his textbook.”
“I know nothing of that,” she said. “We had nothing to do with that. I don’t know what you’re mixed up in, but... ”
“I’m mixed up in the Third World, and all because I’m a friend of your friend Marba. I want to talk to somebody. Marba’s my first choice, but the local authorities are a satisfactory substitution.”
She was looking more and more worried. If she’d been the type to chew her nails she’d have been gnawing away by now, but she wasn’t. All she did was sit there and look worried and also look as though she was thinking very hard.
Grofield sat back and let her think. He’d delivered his message to the messenger, now let the messenger decide to take it from there.
She did, at last, leaning forward and saying, “I’m not sure what to do at this point. Will you wait here for one moment?”
“I’ll wait for two moments. No more.”
“I’ll go and see,” she said, and got to her feet and went away, the black leather boots flashing below the fur-fringed black coat. Two men moving by in opposite directions walked into one another, gave perfunctory apologies without looking at one another, and drifted on.
Grofield sat back and waited. Whenever he stopped like this, his attention no longer required outside himself, he became aware again of the aftereffects of the drug he’d been given. His joints still ached and tingled slightly, a faint echo of the first pain he’d felt on coming out of the paralysis, and his nerves were a little jumpy, not as though he were nervous but as though he’d had too much coffee to drink. There didn’t seem to be any real physical impairment, just the slight reminiscent pain and the coffee nerves.
She wasn’t gone long, but having nothing but his own discomfort to think about made it seem long. When she came back he looked up at her expectantly, not really caring what her message was just so she’d distract him from himself, and she said, “You’re to come with me.”
Good. That was very distracting. “Where?” he said.
“Outside.”
“Why don’t I meet him in the hotel?”
“It was thought you would want privacy.”
“You mean,” Grofield said, “you people want privacy.”
She shrugged. “Do you want to meet Mr. Marba or not?”
“All right. I’ll come along.” He got to his feet. “But no rough stuff, all right?”
She frowned at him. “I don’t understand.”
“I don’t want to be beaten up, or drugged, or kidnapped, or anything like that. Okay?”
“Who would do anything like that?”
“You’d be surprised,” he said. “Lead on.”
She led, and the two of them crossed the lobby together, and Grofield had an actor’s awareness of the picture they were making, the handsome actorish white man and the beautiful dramatic black woman crossing the baroque old Chateau Frontenac lobby together. Conversations and footsteps faltered all around them as they walked across the carpet and out the main doors.
The Chateau Frontenac has its own courtyard, where cars and cabs pull in. The main city is out to the right, and that’s the way she went, Grofield going along beside her, down to the right and through the arch and out to the Place d’Armes, the main square of the old city. Because it was off-season, only one hansom cab was waiting there, the horse wearing a blanket and exhaling double plumes of steam, the driver bundled up in an old brown overcoat with a brown fur collar and a green and orange wool cap pulled down over his ears.
The girl said, “We’ll take the cab. Tell him we want to see the Plains of Abraham.”
Grofield hesitated. It was one thing to want to force the issue, it was another to go skipping away blindly into potential deathtraps. “I’m not sure about this,” he said.
She gave him an impatient look. “What’s the matter? No one’s going to hurt you.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“I thought you said you knew Mr. Marba,” she said.
Grofield considered her, and she was right. It was Marba’s character he was relying on, and Marba’s character seemed to him to be cold and calculating and detached, but not violent. He wouldn’t consider approaching General Pozos like this at all, for instance, because of his idea of the general’s character. If his idea of Marba’s character was right, this approach was a sensible one and it didn’t matter where they met. If his idea of Marba’s character was wrong, this approach was doomed and it still didn’t matter where they met.
He shrugged and said, “Okay. We’ll do it your way.”
They crossed the street and woke the hansom driver out of a half snooze. Grofield said they wanted to see the Plains of Abraham, and the driver nodded vigorously and blew his nose vigorously and began clucking vigorously at his horse, which was also more asleep than awake. Neither man nor horse seemed at all struck by their passengers’ bi-racial nature.
Grofield and the girl sat side by side in the open cab. There was a heavy fur blanket on the seat across from them, and Grofield put it over both their laps. She thanked him, her first human touch, and the horse began to walk slowly forward, jerking the cab along behind him.
They traveled slowly around the Place d’Armes, a surprisingly dark square at night to be the middle of such a tourist area, and turned left up Rue Sainte Anne.
At first Grofield had no idea who was talking. A deep-throated muffled mutter seemed to hang in the air all around them, as though the fur blanket on their laps had decided to chat with them. But it wasn’t the fur, it was the cabman, who from within the depths of his overcoat and a thick scarf and the wool cap was reeling off his usual tourist patter as the horse unhappily plodded along like any milkman’s nag on the boringly familiar route. As they started up Rue Sainte Anne he told them they were passing the Anglican cathedral on their left, dedicated in 1804, the first cathedral of the Church of England ever built outside Great Britain. He gave more statistics, then went on to talk about the Price building and the Commercial Academy building and other ingots of fascinating lore.
Grofield looked at the girl, and found her grinning at him. She whispered, “Pay close attention, he gives an exam at the end of the trip.”
He whispered back, “I can’t decide if it’s the man talking or the horse.”