Assignment Black Gold (12 page)

“We knew, Komo. Yes, we knew.”

“You wished to die?”

“No man wishes to die.”

“But you were given
luitha
?”

“It helps.”

“Then you will die, Butithi.”

“I wait.”

“Do you know what your noble leader, Madragata, the hireling
of the Maoists, did this morning, Butithi? It may explain why he left you, in
particular, to do this work of suicide.”

The captive waited. He had rolled over on his back, his face
upturned to the sun, his eyes wide open, the retinas burning in the glare. He
said nothing. He moved one hand up before his face briefly, to look at
the bloody stumps where his fingers had been amputated, and then he
lowered his hand and let the blood run slowly over his naked, sweaty chest.

“Butithi?”

“I hear you, traitor to our people.”

“Butithi, your noble leader this morning, to keep us busy
and our attention distracted from this place, attacked your village and killed
your wife and three of your children and many others. And also Senhor
Fernandez, the Portuguese shopkeeper there, and his wife and children, too.”

“Good.”

“Do you understand me, Butithi?"

“It is good that Senhor Fernandez is dead. He was a
colonialist, imperialist oppressor of our people.”

“And your wife and children, Butithi? What were they?”

“You lie, Komo.”

“You know that I never lie.” Lepaka paused. “Have you
anything more to tell me?”

“I wish to die.”

“You shall.”

Lepaka took the bloody knife from his patrolman and knelt
beside the prisoner. He thrust the point of the blade under Butithi’s left ear,
twisted it, then cut across the man‘s throat in a swift movement and stepped
back as the blood spurted and
gouted
from the severed
artery, pumping like a small fountain of thick bright red into the hot, sunlit
silence. Lepaka continued to work with the knife, handling-it deliberately,
expertly cutting through to the bone of the spinal column and around to the
base of the neck. He did not sweat or show any effort at the butchering work.
The body jerked several times, the limbs twitched, the dead eyes rolled. When
the head was completely severed Lepaka stood up and threw the knife overboard
and turned back to the patrolmen, who watched what had been done with no
expression on their faces.

“Take the head back to his village. Put it on a pole in
front of his house, and leave it there.”

Durell suddenly realized that Kitty Cotton had buried her
face against his chest and had not watched the execution.

Chapter 10.

Hobe Tallman said, “It’s been a bad morning for Lubinda.
Madragata’s people slip in and out of the city like ghosts. Today is their
worst work yet. Kitty, I have some air tickets for tonight’s flight to
Luanda, and you can transfer from there for São Tomé and then go on to Lisbon.
I can charge it to the company’s expense account. Hell, we don’t have much cash
left, but there’s enough for that. I’ll make all the arrangements about Brady,
don’t give it a thought." Hobe was very much the efficient
executive. It was a side of the man that Durell had not seen before. “I’ll take
care of everything, Kitty. You just do as I say. Get out of here while you
can.”

“No,” she whispered.

“Why not?”

“I want to stay with Sam.”

“But, Kitty—”

"Brady worked for Sam—or Sam’s people, anyway. I think
I should stick it out. Anyway, I have no other place to go. I don’t have
anyone, anywhere, in the whole world. And I have work to do in Lubinda.”

“You poor child, you’ll get yourself killed,” Hobe said.

“I’ll take my chances with Sam.”

They were in Hobe’s office at the oil company dock. A pall
of dark smoke drifted in the sky above the low
jungled
hills to the west. The air conditioner in Hobe’s office worked only fitfully,
and the man’s pink-brown face was shiny with sweat. Still, Hobe looked neat and
tidy, like a city man on his way to the commuter train. He looked at Durell and
said urgently, “Take her out of it, Sam.”

“I can’t. I’m not sure I want to.”

“I’ve already cabled the home office about the
kidnapped men, and I’ve ordered all the rest of our people to stay close to the
compound. I think there’s going to be a revolution in this country any hour. We
only have a few weapons on hand, and Lepaka won’t give us more. Says he can’t
spare them. You don’t have to worry about Matt the Fork, though. I hear he’ll
be up and around and out of the hospital in a couple of days. I’ve taken care
of all that, too. But Kitty—”

“What would they want to steal from your office out on the rig?”
Durell asked quietly.

“I don’t know, I can’t even guess.”

“Did you know that Brady was out there?”

“I certainly did not. No one was authorized to go out to the
Lady except Matt and myself.”

“You didn’t take him out there?”

“I told you, no. Absolutely not.”

“Then the only people who can tell us about Brady’s death,”
said Durell, “are the maintenance crew who were on the Lady. And the Apgaks
have them.”

Hobe said, “Poor devils.”

“I’d like a list of the men who were aboard. Brady was
murdered about two days ago, before the Apgak attack.”

Hobe’s eyes grew round. “What does that mean? None of my men
are murderers, Durell.”

“That remains to be seen. They surely knew about Brady’s
death—one of them knew, anyway.”

Hobe grunted. “Matt can give you the list. I didn’t assign
men to their specific jobs. Matt took care of that.”

Durell felt frustrated. “What about your records that were
destroyed’? Why would anyone ransack your office on the Lady and take away some
of the records and destroy the rest?”

“I can’t even guess,” the man said helplessly. “Those papers
can’t be replaced, you know. They were highly confidential and not in
duplicate. You don’t understand the oil business, Durell. It’s cutthroat
competition, and trade data is one of the most highly guarded commodities on
the agenda. It could have been a competing company, anxious to know what we had
achieved here. Maybe one of the crew was an industrial spy, say, for G.P. Gina.
They originally wanted these offshore leases real bad." Hobe looked
pleased that he had come up with a plausible theory. “I’m sure that was it. Or
maybe Brady destroyed the records himself.”

“Why would he do that?” Durell asked.

Hobe shrugged impatiently. “I can’t begin to guess right
now. Everything’s turned upside down. Did you know that the Apgaks killed
Henrique, my servant, out at the bungalow? Put a‘ spear through his belly end
pinned him to the back door and left him there to die, very slowly. I’m sorry,
Kitty, but you have to face the truth around here. If you saw that poor old
fellow with his guts hanging out—”

“I saw enough on the rig,” Kitty said flatly.

“Then you ought to go home.”

“I’ll still stay with Sam. How is Betty?”

“Hysterical, naturally." Hobe put his palms out as if
thrusting something away. He seemed defenseless, suddenly. “Betty is in the
next room. She’s been drinking too much. I don’t know what she’s up to, she‘s
not quite herself. I want her to fly home tonight, too. With you, Kitty.”

Then Betty’s voice came from the office door behind them.
“I’m not going no place, you sad shit. Hobart Mandrake Tallman! Wish you were a
magician, at that.”

“Betty, please."

“Go to hell.” Her face was loose, her eyes uncertain, her
hair disheveled. She looked at Durell. “Hi, Sam baby. You bastard. You prefer
the little Puritan maid, hey? Gives you kicks to break her down?”

“Betty,” Hobe said again.

“You.” Her voice was savage whenever she addressed her
husband. “You screwed up everything again. I heard you call the home office,
begging them to quit, to give up the job, saying there’s no oil, nothing just
killings and dirt. You want to fail again, don’t you?” Her voice lifted to just
below a scream. “That’s what you do best—fail at your work, fail with people,
fail in bed with me. I do everything in the books to turn you on, and you’re
just a limp little
twiddly
, all the time, you—you
failure!
"

“Take it easy," Durell intervened.

“It’s all right,” Hobe said. “She's just drunk and homesick.
Homesick for the gutter where I found her.”

“Yeah. Right on. And where did you bring me’? To this mess,
this black gutter, where poor old Henrique gets his guts pulled out and
everybody caters to this—this”—she swung to Kitty, who watched her
soberly—“this prissy-faced excuse for a woman, who picked poor Brady to death.
So you did rue a big favor, Hobart Mandrake the Non-Magician Tallman! Big oil
man, ’way up on the management level, lots of bread in the old oil, the whole
world’s swimming in it and you’re going to pump it out right here in Lubinda,
terrific stuff, sweet oil—”

Hobe slapped her. “Shut up.”

The sound of the slap punctuated the end of her tirade. She
stared helplessly at her smaller husband, a. tall woman just beginning to get flabby
around the edges, her big eyes suddenly swimming with tears, eyes that were
accustomed to the blue sparkle-makeup of nightclubs. The tears came silently,
running down her suddenly ravaged face, streaking the pancake around her
nostrils.

The drops trembled in the fine golden hairs along her
upper lip, clinging to the corners of her mouth.

She gestured helplessly.

“Oh, Hobe,” she whispered as she wept. “Hobe, it was all
just a dream, wasn’t it? A beautiful, silly dream."

Hobe Tallman turned away from her.

“Drunk,” he said to Durell. “Just as I said. She’s drunk.”

Chapter 11.

Durell took Kitty with him to the Lopodama Hotel. The city
was quiet, the Pequah’s shops were all shuttered, and the open-‘air market on
the waterfront was swept clean as if by an invisible, ominous wind. The heat
and the silence made the afternoon seem intolerable. All the vagrant odors that
clung to a tropical city were magnified into a sullen miasma. He asked
the girl if she wanted to go back to Brady’s shop and her apartment for
anything. She shook her head and said she didn’t ever want to see it again.
There was nothing in it she wanted.

His hotel room was shadowed, fractionally cooler than the
city’s streets. The girl sat down on the edge of the bed land folded her hands
in her lap and considered her fingers as if she had never seen them before.
He was concerned about her. Perhaps she was thinking of the amputations on the
captured Apgak before Lepaka had cut off the man’s head. Durell left her where
she sat and went silently around the room and quickly and deliberately tore out
every microphone bug he knew was there. The girl finally watched him, but
her eyes were still apathetic.

“Sam, why was Brady killed?”

“I don't know.”

“But you know what’s going on?”

“Not yet. My job is to find out what happened to Brady
and why,” he said. “I know part of it now. And you know, too. But my problem
doesn’t end there. Brady was killed for a reason, a reason big enough to cost
him his life.”

“But he said his job with you people was nothing, just an
easy way to earn a few extra dollars. How much of a retainer did K Section pay
him?"

“Maybe a hundred a month.”

“He was making much more out of his export business,
shipping all those Apgak and
Hulipo
art things out to
dealers in New York.”

“I know.”

“He got a kick out of working for you, didn’t he?”

“Probably. We recruit on several bases. Sometimes they do it
for the money, sometimes they’re even patriotic, sometimes they think it’s all
fun and games.”

“Fun and games," she repeated bitterly.

“Take it easy, Kitty."

“It's just that we didn’t love each other anymore, that’s
all. We hardly spoke to each other, Sam. It was all over, finished,
kaput
. I don’t feel sorry about that,
even now, and maybe I ought to feel guilty because he’s dead, so terribly dead,
high up there and out so far in the ocean. But I don’t feel guilty, Sam, and
not feeling that way makes me feel worse. I ought to be crying for him, but I
can’t.”

He tried a smile. “Your New England conscience?”

“Oh, hell.” She looked up. “Why did you pull out all of
Lepaka’s bugs?”

“I have to phone a report in to Lisbon Central about Brady.
They’ll relay it to Washington.”

“Are you going on with this business?”

“I have to.”

“They’ll tap your call, too, you know. Lepaka is a very
efficient man. Everything he does is efficient. Like—like—”Her mouth
trembled and she hugged herself. He knew she was thinking or the way Lepaka had
cut the man’s head off. “I’m afraid of him. Komo Lepaka. He always talks so
softly, so politely, that big long drink of water, all knobby knees and elbows.
almost comical. But he wasn’t comical when he—when—”

“Take it easy,” he said again.

He picked up the telephone and asked the operator for an
overseas line. Oddly, the communications system was working well. He was
promised a line in ten minutes. While he worked out the cipher, using an old
BT-9 code he had committed to memory long ago, the cable office called back and
said they were ready. He made the message brief, reporting Brady’s death. He
added that he would set up a new Central for Lubinda and handle it until a
replacement was sent out. He did not offer any reasons for Brady Cotton’s
death, nor did he suggest any of the ideas that had formed in his mind about
what he had to do about it.

When he hung up, Kitty’s eyes were upon him. “They may or
may not send that code, you know. At least, not until Colonel Lepaka reads it
and figures it out.”

“That’s all right," he said.

“Why do you go on with it?” she asked.