Oh, Leonora, at least try to smile.
The other Volunteers used to say that regularly, and precisely because their work gave them little to smile about, she’d try. She did it now, a polite smile for the angular blond man who stepped from the Jeep. He smiled back and slapped his hat against his thigh to shake off the dust. He took off his sunglasses: well trained in the art of courtesy, at least.
“Leonora Tesla? I’m Günter Schmidt.”
He spoke in English with a soft accent she couldn’t quite place. Not German, but no law said his German name meant he was brought up in that country. That’s what the permeability of European borders was about. It was supposed to be a good thing.
They shook hands. Schmidt’s was soft and fleshy, as befit someone who dispensed money from behind a desk. “You’ve had a long drive,” she said. “Sit down. I’ll get you something to drink.” She indicated a stool on the hard clay under the overhang, but he followed her into the house. He’d learn, she thought. In Africa the indoor, though shadowed and appealing, was never cooler than outside.
Still smiling, Schmidt dropped himself onto one of the rough-hewn chairs at her plank table. She handed him a bottle of BB orange soda. In a hut without electricity, of course she had no refrigerator, but she’d learned the African trick of burying bottles in a box in the hut’s clay floor, so the drink was relatively cool. “We’ll be more comfortable outside,” she suggested, resigned to try to be pleasant to this intruder.
“No,” he said, “I’d rather stay here. Leonora.”
She bristled at the odd way he said her name, but his expression was mild as he looked about her hut. So she shrugged, wiped her brow with her kerchief and sat beside him.
“You’ve lived here long?” Schmidt asked, taking a pull from his soda bottle.
“No. I don’t live anywhere long. My work takes me many places.”
“That would account for the… simplicity.”
“And yet my possessions, few as they are, are more numerous than those of the women in our programs. When you’re rested, I’ll take you to see the kiln. We’ll be covering a lot of ground today if you want to see the full scope of our work.” She stood to reach her own Jeep keys on the hook by the door.
“No, I think we’ll stay here. Leonora.”
She turned sharply. His smile and the mild expression in his eyes were still in place, but his hand held a pistol, pointed at her.
Calm, Leonora. Stay calm. “What do you want?”
“Where is Harold Middleton?”
Tesla’s heart, already pounding, gave a lurch. But she spoke calmly. “Harold? How would I possibly know?”
Schmidt didn’t answer her. The gun moved slightly, as though seeking a better angle.
“Isn’t he in America, in Washington? That’s where he lives.”
“If he were in Washington,” Schmidt asked reasonably, “would I be here?”
“Well, I haven’t heard from him in almost a year.”
“I don’t know whether that’s true, though eventually I’m sure I’ll find out. But it doesn’t matter. Whether you’ve heard from him or not, you know where he’d go. If, say, he were in trouble.”
In trouble? “No, I don’t.”
“When you worked together-”
“When we did, I might have been able to tell you. But I don’t know anything about his life now. He teaches music; I don’t even know where.”
Neither of them had moved since Tesla had seen the pistol. Neither of them moved now, in the stretching silence. A breeze rustled the leaves in the acacia behind the hut. Sweat trickled down Tesla’s spine.
“Who are you? What do you want with Harold?”
He laughed. “I suppose you had to ask that, but you know I won’t tell you. But it’s about your work, Leonora.”
“The Volunteers?”
His smile was bitter. “Your work. So. You really don’t know where Middleton is? Not even if I shoot you?”
A gunshot roar ricocheted off the tin roof and mud walls; Tesla stumbled, grasped the plank table for support as clay shards flew everywhere. She found herself staring into Schmidt’s mild eyes. Wheezing a few breaths, quieting her heart by an act of will, she answered him.
“Even if you shoot me. I don’t know.”
Schmidt nodded. “All right. You don’t know where he’d go if he were in trouble. I suppose then we’ll have to depend on what he’d do, if you were in trouble.” He stood. “Come.”
“What?”
“As you said: We’ll be covering a lot of ground.”
She walked ahead of the gun out onto the uneven baked earth. The glaring sunlight was unforgiving; she did not turn, but waited. There: a stutter in his step, a whisper of plastic on fabric. Behind her, Schmidt reached into his pocket for his sunglasses, she dropped down and rolled into him. He stumbled; she yanked his ankle forward, threw her weight sideways into his other knee. Dust boiled as he thudded to the ground. Another shot screamed, but out here in the endless bush it didn’t thunder, and she’d been prepared to hear it. The gun waved wildly, looking for her, but by the second shot she was in the hut and by the third she’d hurled a clay pot with the force and accuracy of Yaa Asantewa’s spear.
In the whirling dust, Schmidt-and more important, the gun-was still.
Forcing her breathing even, Tesla crouched by the door, waiting. When all had been motionless for a full minute, she crept to the table, reached down for one of the soda bottles and flung it at Schmidt’s head. On impact it smashed into glittering shards, but Schmidt didn’t move.
Slowly, she rose. She made her way to where Schmidt lay in the settling dust. His blood trickled into the dry soil amid the shards of a once-beautiful pot. There, you see, Leonora? This time you were on the side of the dust. And the predator always wins.
Her first steps back inside took her to the plastic water bucket in her makeshift sink. She scooped with her hands, splashed water over her face and head as though here, at the edge of the Namib, water was hers to waste.
Then she made her way swiftly about the room, collecting the few things she would take. When her canvas bag was packed she used a knife to slit the seam she’d sewed on the thin mattress as she had on each mattress in each hut she’d stayed in. She extracted the envelope of American dollars and the small, battered portfolio she’d had with her since The Hague. She slipped them both into the side pocket with the iPod, zipped and she was done.
Getting Schmidt into the Jeep was harder. She was strong but he was tall, and leverage was a problem. Eventually, his head wrapped in a towel to keep bloodstains from the seat, she’d maneuvered him into the back, fished the keys from his pocket and started the engine. Driving along the dust track the way Schmidt had come, she saw ahead the spot she’d been thinking of, where the edge of the road fell off steeply toward the wadi. She passed it and turned around so the Jeep was headed toward her hut. Then, on the curve, she yanked the wheel sharply, opened the door and jumped.
Anywhere in the wadi would have worked, but her luck was better than she’d had the nerve to hope, and the Jeep smacked head-on into an acacia tree. When she reached it-limping slightly, she’d banged her knee-cracks spider-webbed the windshield. Excellent. Then came more sweat, strain and maneuvering, and finally Schmidt was half-in, half-out of the driver’s seat. Though the crack in his skull was clearly not from this crash, he was unlikely to be found for a while-except by the hyenas that skulked along this dry streambed. Once they were through, no one would doubt what had killed Günter Schmidt.