“What? You mean the whole town?”
“Just a handful of people. But nobody stops them.”
The bus … Out of pity for us all, I didn’t laugh. “So we simply climb aboard,” I said, “and go away.”
“Yes. Day after tomorrow. Can you just come with me?”
“Sure. I’m drunk enough.”
“Good. Stay drunk.”
“What about you,” I asked Davidia—“are you drunk enough?”
“I’m in love enough.”
She had a somber glow about her, a smoldering vitality that warmed the air. She made me hungry. I wanted to smell her breath.
And the nightclub girls, one of them wearing a curly blonde wig, like a chocolate-covered Marilyn Monroe … The bartender didn’t talk to them and they ordered nothing, they only watched me, and waited.
Michael’s tongue was tangled in martinis—“I don’t want to be a thumb,” he said, “in the turd in the punchbowl of life.”
“What?”
Michael was drunk. That meant he was in pain. He gripped a pen, he was writing something on a napkin. He tapped me on the shoulder and handed it to me. In the pleasant darkness, I couldn’t make out the letters.
I told him, “I wouldn’t have expected you to marry black.”
Michael shook his head as if to clear it. Davidia stared at me. “What did you say?”
Right. What had I said? “The drinks are clobbering me. It’s the altitude.”
“You should have put food in your stomach,” Michael said.
Davidia said, “Explain your remark.”
“You mean defend it.”
“Fine. Defend it.”
“I’ll explain it,” I said.
“We’re waiting.”
“He’s always had a weakness for the Middle Eastern type, that’s all. The Persian princess sort of female. I apologize for talking out of turn. I do apologize.”
She laughed. She was angry. “Don’t twist yourself in knots.”
It was only for Michael’s sake I was trying to smooth things, but Michael wasn’t even listening. “Back to another subject,” he said. “I never answered your question about the Tenex corporation.”
“Tenex?”
“Do you remember? At the Freetown airfield. We were talking about uranium. Tenex handles U-235 material from dismantled Soviet warheads. Dilutes it to ten percent pure and barters it to the United States.”
“Jesus, Michael — again, the U-235?”
I’ve always thought it a laugh, Michael’s obviousness when he means to be sneaky. No stage villain ever looked more the conspirator, leaning forward into his face’s shadow, his head cocked toward the game, the trick, his right eyebrow going up, his lip curling in a sneer.
A quick, horrid intuition assaulted me.
Davidia placed her hand on my forearm and asked if I was okay. I said, “I’m fine, except I need to be smarter.”
“Smarter isn’t always better though, is it?”
“Good night.”
I went over and made an arrangement with the whore in the blonde wig. She stood up, and hand in hand we journeyed to my bed.
She was drunk, also in some way drugged, and she passed out when we were done — perhaps before we were done, and I simply didn’t notice.
* * *
Later I woke as the woman was leaving, and I locked the door behind her and lay in bed watching the Chinese cable station, a piece about fourteen baby pandas in the Shanghai zoo. A sudden rainstorm hit the roof like an avalanche and killed the city’s power and sent all of existence back where it came from. I thought of the woman wandering around out there in the roaring dark.
On my nightstand I found the napkin Michael had written on. By the light of my cell phone I made out the words, but not their meaning:
He’s my panda
from Uganda
he’s my teddy bear
they say things about him
but I don’t care
Idi Amin
I’m your fan!
— I read it several times. The rhyme scheme interested me.
* * *
Not long after six in the morning I heard, through the papery walls, the buzz of Michael’s clippers and the shower running next door, and soon I heard someone going out. A few minutes later came a light tapping. I was heating water for instant coffee — the Suites provided a drip brewer but nothing to brew in it, only a jar of Nescafé. The tapping came again, and I realized it must be Davidia.
I got close to the wall and said, “I’m awake.”
Her voice came quite clearly. “Come and see me.”
“Should we meet in the restaurant?”
“Let’s talk in here,” she said. “Come over. Or around.”
“I could easily come right through.” Talking through the wall like this, I felt how close our faces were.
The lights in the hallway flickered on and off. The door stood open. In the random illumination she waited in a yellow silk robe, barefoot. She stepped aside and I entered bearing my cup and my jar of Nescafé.
“Where’s Michael?”
“Taking his morning run.”
The air tasted damp from the shower. Her underwear was lying around. I smelled her perfume. But she said, “It stinks in here. Sorry. Sometimes he sits down and smokes half a dozen cigarettes one after another. Doesn’t say a word. Lost in his head.”
She picked up a cigarette from the nightstand and put the end in her mouth. Looked around. Perhaps for a lighter.
“Do you smoke?”
She threw it in the pile of butts in the ashtray and said, “I’m so stupid.”
“Let’s have some coffee. Do you have bottled water?” She gave me a liter jug and I set about heating water in the brewer.
She sat on the bed. “We had a fight.”
“I’m surprised to hear that. I mean to say — you were pretty quiet about it. I had no idea.”
“He wanted to be quiet. So he could hear you through the wall.”
“Hear me?”
“You and the girl,” she said.
“We were quiet too,” I said.
“We’re a stealthy bunch of idiots,” she said. “And I mean idiots.” She got up but didn’t know where to go. “I’ve been wanting to see you alone.”
“Why?”
She paused. “I don’t have a ready answer.”
“Did you have something you wanted to say?” Seeing I wasn’t helping, I added, “I’m only trying to help you figure it out.”
“I wanted to see what we were like together.”
“Oh.” I devoted myself to the cups and spoons and Nescafé. “What were you fighting about?”
“I thought Kampala was the destination. Now we’re going on to Arua.”
“But last night at dinner you were ready to swing with it.”
“‘Swing with it’? Who are you, Jack Kerouac? You reach way back into the last century for your Americanisms.”
“Nevertheless.”
“Sure, last night I was a real swinger. Alcohol affects me too. I didn’t realize he wasn’t telling us anything.”
“Michael doesn’t draw up plans. He weaves tales. Just let him be mysterious. If there was any way of hurrying him along, believe me, I would have found it by now.”
“This is why I had to talk to you — to compare notes. Can I trust you? No — I can’t, can I? — I mean, trust you to be straight with me. What are we doing? I mean, specifically, you two — what are you up to? There’s something going on, and he won’t tell me what.”
“There’s nothing going on in the sense of — going on. We’re traveling together.”
“Why do you tag along?”
“I’m one half of the entourage.”
“He assumes you’re devoted to him. I’m not so sure.”
“He assumes I’m devoted to getting rich. You know — exploiting the riches of this continent.”
“And is that really you? A cheap adventurer?”