Catacombs (23 page)

"What happened to that notebook?"

"Oh, Lord, there were so many! It's probably at the University of Edinburgh, with the rest of his papers. That's where I shipped his files when I cleaned out the villa in Dar. I also sold most of his library to a second-hand dealer, but none of the notebooks was included. I don't think. But there were boxes and boxes."

"So the green book with a description of the Catacombs could have slipped through accidentally, and turned up in the bookshop. Remember the dealer's name?"

"Sure. Mr. Ganges. I guess he's still doing business there. On Maktaba Street, near the New Africa."

"Did your father go into the Catacombs without you?" Jade asked.

"The second day, after I twisted my ankle. I couldn't even stand up. We thought it would get better, so he went ahead with his exploration. I didn't see him until past sundown. By then I was in such pain I was almost delirious. I was running a fever."

"Is it possible that Dr. Hardie made a second discovery at the site, that there was a lot more to the Catacombs than a chamber filled with mummies?"

"A major archaeological discovery? My father wasn't the type to get excited about anything, but I would have known."

"Maybe what he saw in the other Catacombs was so amazing that he was afraid to say a word, until he'd had a chance to thoroughly explore the find on his own."

"He trusted me," Raun insisted. "He would have dropped a hint, given it away. Whenever I had a birthday due and he'd planned something special, his mouth would twitch at the corners and he'd try not to smile when he looked at me. Then I'd go to work on him, and get him to spill the beans."

Her head turned restlessly on the pillow. She looked around the dreary prison ward, falling into a visible depression, bluntly reminded that the joy and freedom she'd had as a girl might be irrecoverable.

"He must have been concerned about your condition when he came back," Jade said. "You were feverish–you might not have been fully aware of what was happening, what he had to tell you."

"I don't know. I just don't remember. The pain was bad. He had to carry me. He must have walked all night. The next thing I knew I was in a flying medic's plane, on the way to Dar."

"Do you remember the location of the Catacombs?" Gibson asked.

"Yes. By that I mean I couldn't locate it on a map. But I could find the place again. I'm bush trained. I have a photographic memory for terrain."

"You're not going," Jade said.

Raun stared at him. Her voice, when she spoke again, was low but fierce.

"Then you won't either."

"Miss Hardie," Gibson said, "there's a great deal we can do for you. But you have to try to be reasonable–"

"I don't think I have to talk to either of you again if I don't want to! Go ahead. Put me in deadlock. Bright lights, I can't use the john without somebody watching. The way I've been feeling lately, I'll go berserk in about a week. What good will that do any of us? Reasonable. Huh. First I was poisoned this morning, then I nearly had my throat slashed. I was lying naked in a pool of blood with about sixteen men milling around staring at me. They told me this was an easy place to do time. Friendly white-collar criminals. Your choice of wallpaper in your room. Just like a Howard Johnson's. I've done one year and it went down like thirty. We've been snowbound for seven goddam m-months."

Raun began to cry. She was one of the rare women for whom tears were an enhancement. Her eyes looked larger, softer, her pasty skin took on a compensating glow.

"I want a presidential pardon. Then I'll lead you to the–the Catacombs, if that's what you call it. You'd better decide in a hurry. One hour. Then I'll never say another word, never!"

She looked stubborn; she looked as if she meant it. Jade thought of the long trial she'd endured, stoical months under intense examination. In different circumstances he would have admired her toughness of spirit. Now he took pains not to show his exasperation.

"Boomer available this afternoon?" he said, turning to Gibby.

"He can be reached."

"Let's you and I have some conversation," Jade said, and he smiled at Raun Hardie as they left.

The rain had abated; they walked across the rec grounds, Gibby backing against the wind as he tried to light a cigarette.

"Maybe it's a hoax after all."

"No," Jade said. "Hardie made his discovery. But he didn't let his daughter in on it. He might have been afraid to."

"Why?"

"Archaeologists don't lead such dull lives. They're prey for certain types of entrepreneurs, those who deal in black-market artifacts. Some of them could be depraved enough to grab a fifteen-year-old kid who wasn't discreet and set fire to her toes until she spilled what she knew about daddy's latest discovery."

"So Hardie was protecting her. But he jotted down a few notes. What's your gut reaction?"

"Everything Raun was telling us is true. But she's careful about what she says."

"Meaning?"

Jade kicked apart a waterlogged clump of snow.

"I get the feeling that somehow I'm being used. I don't like that feeling."

"She offered to take a lie-detector test."

"Sure–we'll hook her up to a polygraph, and also run her by a couple of your best interrogation teams. She'll make out just fine. No inconsistencies. The work she used to do was close to that of an investigative reporter; and she spent three months in the dock handling some very tough cross-examination. She's had the course."

"Do you want to take her with you?"

"Do I want two left feet? This must be my lucky day. Except I know damn well it isn't. Will Boomer give her that pardon?"

"On your say-so."

Jade stood staring at a line of blue sky near the horizon. A muscle in his jaw was working hard.

"Let's do it then."

DAR ES SALAAM

Tanzania

May 14

M
iss Sunni Babcock, of Basking Ridge, New Jersey, awoke shortly after daybreak in the suite at the Kivukoni Five-Star Hotel suffering from what she would have described as a "bad body" had anyone been there to listen to her complaints. She had a low-grade fever, an upset stomach, a feeling of having been insistently pounded on, like a badly dented fender, with a rubber mallet. Being alone again–Toby had left her alone much too often lately, she thought–gave her a touch of homesickness and dark, dark melancholia. She was crazy about Toby Chapman and would follow him to the ends of the earth, but she missed her mother and father and little brother and her championship jumper Moody's Gate, and when she finally got home she was going to
kill
Ernie if he had let the horse go to pot.

So it was the middle of May, springtime in Basking Ridge, and she lay there naked in the tangled bed that was damp from night sweats, thinking about the cool green lawns around the Japanese-style ranch house on Loring Lane, the collie dogs and the cats, the lilacs and fruit trees coming into bloom. In Dar es Salaam (which she thought of as "Turd Town" in her grimmer moments) it was dust and heat and socialists who couldn't say enough bad things about America, even your high-type socialists at the embassies, where you just had to put up with the badmouthing because they had the only decent food and parties available.

Could they really have been here for six weeks? And when was Toby going to give up?

Sunni sniveled and tried to get comfortable, but almost immediately she was sorry for the thought: How would she feel if it was her father who hadn't turned up for months and months, and no one was willing to give her a straight answer about what could have happened to him? Beside herself with anxiety, that's how she would feel. Worried sick.

It was really amazing that Toby could hang in there, day after day, waiting hours to see the minister of this or that, spending a fortune on bribes, and not lose his temper and bash somebody. Well, he'd come close a time or two: It was interesting to see him getting red from the neck up, like a thermometer with all the hot mercury shooting into the bulb. But he'd never taken his frustrations out on her. That was the really beautiful thing about Patrick Tobias Chapman. He was as considerate, mannerly, and loving as he'd been from the day they'd spotted each other on the Quai d'Orsay–and just sort of drifted together through the Sunday strollers, irresistibly attracted, smiling at each other. When they were still two or three feet apart (hadn't
 
spoken, eye contact only), she'd felt exactly as she had once upon a time in physics lab, doing the experiment with a high-voltage Tesla coil, her skin tingling wildly and every hair on her body quivering upright. It was as lush as any orgasm she'd experienced to date. Talk about turned on. They'd scarcely skipped a night of lovemaking since October, and right now, queasy as she felt, she could get a ripple going in her groin thinking about those bashful chestnut eyes and his crazy English cowlick. It was real. it was meant to be.

But where was he so early, and why hadn't he told her he was going out? She quickly gave Toby the benefit of the doubt. He was depressed and scarcely slept anymore; probably he'd gone for an early walk around the brassy, scum-edged harbor that lay across from the hotel.

Sunni felt a threatening dry tickle in the back of her throat; her compact body was slicked all over, as if greased, and sooner or later she was going to upchuck. Might as well get it over with. She eased out of bed and went into the bathroom and knelt, then erupted with more violence than she'd anticipated, and at both ends, which made her feel nasty and childish and disconsolate. Her bowels had been nothing but water for days. When she had cleaned up as best she could she crept into a tepid shower and bawled her heart out

Toby was sitting on the side of the bed when she came out of the bathroom, cleaner but a little wobbly and short of breath. Her neat round tummy still looked bloated. His large hands were knotted between his knees; he was staring in a funk at the brown tile floor. Sunni slipped an arm around his waist and rested her head against him.

"I'm not feeling so great, Tobe."

"You're rather warm."

"I know it. Maybe I picked up a
dudu
at that Pakistani restaurant last night."

"Why don't I ring the hotel doc?"

She made a face. "His clothes aren't very clean and his breath smells bad, like, I don't know, chickenshit. Maybe I'll get better after I have some coffee, you think?"

"I hope so."

"Where'd you disappear to so early?"

"Airport. Trying to find that bush pilot, Dodds. You know, the one that the other pilot said might have seen something down Mbeya way." He sighed. "No luck."

"Oh well." Sunni tightened her grip on him and tried to sound cheerful. "Something's going to break for you. Any day now. I feel it in my bones."

"Yes. Must keep plugging away, that's all. It's what Dad would do." His smile was the saddest thing she'd ever seen. There were lines of strain in his twenty-year-old face, a heaviness of self-doubt in the sunken eyes. No appetite, little sleep, he was getting too skinny for his six-foot three-inch frame. Sunni was smaller, almost petite, but her arms would easily go all the way around him.

Breakfast didn't help. As usual they waited three quarters of an hour to be served. During their first week at the Kivukoni Five-Star Hotel, Sunni had been infuriated to the point of tears by the staff, all of whom were so vague and distant and inefficient they seemed to be sleepwalking. But she and Toby had learned that most of the blacks in Dar were like that, and it had nothing to do with your stereotyped lazy black African. Too many of the people in this pockmarked paradise were half starved: Famine, kwashiorkor, and intestinal parasites had been facts of life for generations, and as a result their brains didn't work very well.

Once they had their food, Sunni couldn't choke anything down; but she did sip a little tea. Toby was so preoccupied he didn't notice her lack of appetite. He was analyzing a fistful of messages from strangers responding to the offer of a reward he had posted in public places around Dar.

The English-language
Daily Mail
and the Swahili weeklies had refused to run his ad, for rather hazy reasons. It was the official position of the government of Tanzania that the explorers were missing in a largely unexplored, inhospitable region of the country, and despite the fact that the government had more urgent problems to deal with, reasonable efforts were being made to locate them. The attempts of individuals to find the explorers could be interpreted as criticism of the government, which was always met with stringent censorship.

Toby had become expert at sorting out the sly cranks and con artists from possibly legitimate sources of information. This morning there were no possibilities to follow up on.

And it had lately occurred to Toby that the police were sifting through his mail and messages before he received them. From time to time he was rather obviously followed by plainclothesmen. They could have chucked him out of the country at any time. But he sensed that the
polisi
preferred to have him here, severely restricted like all other foreign nationals from travel to outlying districts, than in England or the States broadcasting his suspicions that the government of Tanzania was implicated in the disappearance of his father.