Assignment Black Gold (24 page)

“Hobe?”

Durell knelt beside the fallen man. The knife was embedded
in his stomach up to the hilt. Kitty made a moaning sound and put aside the
heavy Magnum.

“I didn’t mean—I wasn’t going to—”

“Things happen,” Durell said. And again: “Hobe?”

“Just as—just as well," Tallman whispered.

He didn‘t speak again. When Betty showed up, he was already
dead.

Betty knelt beside him and looked at him with dry eyes and a
set mask for a face.

Chapter 22.

“I need you, Sam,” Kitty said. “I really do.”

Durell stared up at the ceiling of his room in the Lopodama
Hotel. “I don’t think you do.”

“I’ve been looking for you all my life.” She rubbed the sole
of her foot along his left calf. “I really have. I’ve made two mistakes so
far—”

“Don’t make a third,” he said.

“What’s the matter with you, anyway? What kind of a man are
you?”

“You see, you don’t know anything about me.”

It was still raining. The smell of smoke and destruction still
hung over the city, but the wind had died, and the storm was passing out to the
west, over the Atlantic Ocean. Some of the shopkeepers in the
Pequah
had taken down the steel shutters over their store
windows and were open for business. The hotel was crowded. A lot of European
refugees had come in from the countryside during the fighting. The clerk
had honored Durell’s claim to the room, although Durell had spent little time
here since his arrival in Lubinda. The bed was cool, big, comfortable. It didn’t
matter how big it was. Kitty was pressed close beside him, leaving most of it
empty.

There was a change in the atmosphere, too. The sticky humidity
was gone. The day was actually cool, relatively speaking, Durell thought.
Everything was relative. He had managed to get the radio on the Lady working,
after he and Matty had rounded up the remaining Apgaks on the rig, who were
just as happy to surrender after Kitty spoke to them. in their clicking
dialect, announcing the Saka’s return over the booming echoes of the PA system
on the platform.

It was evening before the rescue boats arrived from shore.
One of the first aboard was Colonel Komo Lepaka. His stick figure
paused only briefly when he had surveyed the tangled mess of wrecked
machinery aboard.

“It can be repaired?” Lepaka asked.

Matty the Fork had replied. “Yes, with a lot of work. There’s
plenty of oil down there. Enough for everybody.”

Kitty said, “Enough for new schools, Colonel.”

“Why did Hobe try to destroy everything?”

“He didn’t want Madragata to get it, if the Apgaks took over
the government. A question of revenge for being double-crossed, as he thought,”
Durell said.

Lepaka looked tired. “Ah, yes. And Mrs. Tallman?”

“I think she ought to go home,” Durell suggested.

“It will be arranged.” Lepaka turned his heavy-lidded eyes
away from the destruction. His dark brown face looked as gaunt as ever. “It is
all over, you understand. For now. The Saka came back. You brought him back. It
has saved Lubinda.”

“Lubinda could have saved itself.” Durell said.

“I am sorry about Hobe Tallman,“ Lepaka said.

“He had no place to go.”

Later, after he had seen Matty back to the hospital, he had
walked with Kitty through the wet,
rubbled
street to the
hotel. Armored troops were stationed at strategic posts throughout the city.
Lights blazed in the Presidential Palace. There was the sound of commercial
jets at the airport, probably bringing in scores of reporters from all over the
world to add their din and sensationalized comments to the affair for the next
few days.

But it was all over.

There was a call for him from the elegant, isolated U.S. Embassy
down the coast, well out of the area of disturbance. Durell took the call while
Kitty, by unspoken agreement, showered in the bathroom with its blue Portuguese
tiled walls.

“Durell? We’ll want a full report on what you’ve seen and
done, at the soonest. We want to know about the People’s Army and how the
military security forces crushed opposition to the legitimate aspirations of
the
Lubindan
people—"

“Who is this?" Durell asked.

“I’m Henry Adams, the Ambassador's secretary.”

“You have a good name,” Durell said.

“What? I'm sorry, I don’t understand—"

“Don’t spoil it,” Durell said. The shower in the bathroom
had stopped hissing. The lights were still not working in the Lopodama, but the
manager had provided candles and oil lamps. There were ships’ lights moving out
on the broad anchorage in the estuary, beyond the windows. Durell said, “I’ll
make my report directly to Washington.”

“But we have a need to know—”

“To hell with you,” Durell said.

He hung up, then took the phone off the hook.

Kitty was waiting for him.

Later, when they had Slept, and the next clay had begun with
a drizzle that promised to end before noon, he ordered breakfast brought up to
the room. It was served by a thin, long-legged boy who might have been Lepaka’s
son. They ate in bed, listening to the drip of the rain from the roof eaves,
enjoying the cool sheets and the wind that blew in off the harbor, Traffic
began to move more briskly in the streets.

“Sam, will you be taking Brady’s place?” Kitty asked.

“No.”

“But that’s your job, isn’t it?”

"I'll clean up Brady’s Central, yes. The main thing is,
Lubinda will remain a free republic for a while yet—perhaps until the old man,
the Saka, dies. For real, this time. Then we’ll have to watch Komo Lepaka. Most
people in the police and security business gradually get totalitarian ideas.”

“I thought you liked Komo.”

“I do.”

“But you’ll swing against him if he turns?”

“If he tries later on to put Lubinda on the other side, yes.”
.

“It seems so futile. Why did Brady have to die?”

“He died in a small skirmish. You can think of it like that.
At least, things are kept stable here for a while longer, thanks to him. That’s
why I came here. It’s a worldwide struggle, and every little bit helps. Soon enough,
I’ll be sent somewhere else, Kitty You seem to want a personal substitute for
Brady, a better dream. Maybe a better man. I don’t know if I’m better than Brady,
except that I’m alive and he got himself killed. I couldn‘t live up to any
woman’s dream, in any case.”

“Sam, you and I—”

“You and I have this, now. Now, and nothing more.”

“Oh, hell,” she said. She turned her face away from him and
stopped rubbing her foot along his leg. “It’s so good like this, you and I . .
.”

She turned her back to him and moved to the other side of
the bed. It was as if she had moved to the opposite end of the world. The bed
was wide and cold between them.

Durell said, “Come here.”

She did not move.

“We still have some time together,” he said.

“No.” Her voice was muffled. Her hair was tumbled over the
white pillow. “It’s wrong.”

“You’re a Puritan again?”

“I never was. You know that.”

“So let’s make use of our time," he said.

For a long minute, she did not move. She drew a deep breath
and he looked at her fine smooth back, the swell of her hip, her lustrous
hair. He thought maybe he ought to get out of the bed and go about the business
that had brought him here. Then he thought of the Ambassador’s man in the
distant, safe embassy down the coast, smug in its antiseptic isolation, and
decided it could all wait. All of them could wait. He reached out for Kitty,
and when she felt his hand on her thigh, turning her toward him, she made a
small sound and came back across the wide bed and hugged him tightly, as if it
could be forever; and he thought that even an hour, a minute, or a moment,
could be an eternity.