Night Must Wait (3 page)

The brush along the side of the road rustled. Sunday stumbled from the dew-hung scrub, scrambled across the road and made his way into the backseat, tucking his body low.

"Injured?" She knew the answer before Sunday spoke, recognizing the taste like sweet rusty meat on the back of her tongue, the hot smell in her nostrils.

"Yes. It will be all right. Please," he said. "We can go?"

A stain spread across his brown shirt. A slow bleed, the fabric now adhering to his skin. It would have to wait. That much blood, the wound must be deep. A knife? Thirty miles until they reached the missionaries outside of Otukpo. Possibly too far on these bad roads.

"Put your hand on the wound. Press down hard. We will be all right. I'm taking you to my friend, Doctor Gilman. Only an hour more."

Gilman would give them refuge. Her heart warmed at the thought of her friend's dependability, that American pose of carelessness masking both skill and affection. Wilton should have visited Gilman long ago, but no matter how many months it had been, Gilman would take them in, glad that Wilton finally needed her. She knew Gilman. She'd reaffirm the friendship, test Gilman's commitment and ready her friend for the hard times coming. Efficient, actually.

A check of the grassland flushing gold and she slipped back into the car. The cold engine hesitated, coughed and caught.

Wilton aimed the Citroën east, down the road flaming with white sunlight.

Chapter 3: Lindsey

December 1966

Lagos, Western Region, Nigeria

A short walk away from the white concrete building of the US Embassy in Lagos, Lindsey Kinner stood at her office window and gazed on the street below. Most Americans hated the nervous walk down the street and around the corner from the Embassy to the Records Building, where all the paperwork got finished. Sometimes she watched them struggle past the eager reach of street merchants and beggars, ducking lurching bicycles, hunched against the cacophony of careening motorcycles and taxis, the air filled with voices, each straining to dominate over the rest. The Americans shrank from open-sewage ditches bubbling with refuse. Once the disorder, smell and noise had assaulted her too. Now it was part of the adventure.

Lindsey smiled and cranked the louvers shut on her fourth-story window. The hum of fans and the click of typing soothed. Every day after a morning of argument and chatter, the small square building where she worked emptied as the lunch crowd headed home or to favorite roadside vendors who sold bush meat on skewers or deep-fried chickpea dough balls. She could get some planning done in this quiet time before her friend Sandy Hemsfort came by to share cold sandwiches and Cokes.

Lindsey sat back in her metal chair and looked at the papers she held. Her mind shifted to ideas far from the information in her hands. Around her the other small rooms along the hallway stood quiet except for the steady tap of keys from Gene Asika's office. He always showed up on time and worked late. An exception to the unwritten rules of this sideshow building of the US Consulate. Passing the Foreign Service Exam and meeting the assistants in the Lagos office didn't teach her a fraction of what she needed to know. Wilton had tried to prepare her for Nigeria, but being here in Lagos was the real education.

Not working was the first principle she'd picked up from the Nigerians. She wouldn't copy, but she watched. As soon as you landed a permanent job with the Consulate, you started to push the limits to see how much time you could spend obstructing. Reminded her of Dickens's Office of Circumlocution. She tired of the repeated excuse "He's not on seat" when she went to see administrators. By contrast to most of her fellow workers, the Eastern Nigeria Igbos like Asika looked obsessive about work. Unbalanced.

Igbos had ambition. Like Chinese and Jews they seized education and advancement with greed. Asika stayed at his post when the massacres erupted in the North and though many of his fellow Easterners fled Lagos and the West, he remained, trusting in the Federal Government's assurances of protection. He grew less cheerful, more hunched, deeper lines drawn in a face that lightened when she greeted him. He returned her good mornings with too much pleasure.

Asika rattled on. A good typist, the best in the pool. Not only did he finish assignments, he was fast. Since he had no friends, he worked through his lunch hours. Most weekdays only the two of them remained on this floor at noon.

But right now, she wasn't competing. A promotion promised, she needed to think about her own affairs and positioning. In her private life Lindsey bought up debts across the city, using her inheritance. Good investments when she picked the right obligations, even if half never paid on time. She didn't expect money out of those loans, but rather payment in kind. A vote in the finance committees when it counted, the approval of a contract she preferred. Sometimes, easy passage for a load of goods.

Influence meant she could change this world and this government by increments. Wilton's fight to make a better world here could be achieved. Everything an equation, Lindsey only needed the data.

Asika stopped typing. Broke off, not as if he'd reached the end of a sentence. Lindsey straightened, chilling. A strange sound. Was someone choking?

"Gene?"

Lindsey stood, tugged her skirt into line. Someone in the hall. Certain it wasn't Gene, she didn't want to move. Dread tightened her throat. A soft thud from the quiet hallway. Strange how bad a sound that was in the office on a Monday near noon.

Lindsey slipped out from behind her desk, lifting the metal chair and setting it back without a sound. She wasn't officially important enough for a phone. Only a filing cabinet and metal desk and chair. She even had to borrow a stapler when she needed it. A Smith Corona in the center of her desk, the small stack of paper beside the typewriter, nothing that would help her now.

All this was deliberate, ensuring she looked as unimportant as possible. How could a mere woman who needed to ask for paper by the sheet and a stapler on loan possibly be on contract with the CIA? Maybe she should have played this another way. She picked up the bone paper cutter shaped like a crocodile with its surprised eyes peeking up. The tail was sharp, the head angular and hard to grip. Still it made her feel better.

She moved toward the door. If someone was in the hall, there was no place to hide. Lindsey poked her head through the doorway.

Along the bare narrow corridor most doors were closed, louvered glass windows shut. Pale sunlight diffused through hazy panes. She heard a faint rasping sound and a repeated tap, like a finger upon a pad.

Then two bare-footed men burst from Asika's office and crossed the end of the corridor. Both dressed in dark clothes like pajamas, with flat caps. Different from the pressed white short-sleeved civil servant garb Gene wore.

Lindsey caught the flash of startled eyes in black faces and then they disappeared. A door slammed.

Lindsey's mouth tasted of iron. She moved down the corridor in her silly sling backs. Barely noon and not hot yet, but her blouse stuck to her back. At Asika's door she gripped the crocodile harder and looked inside.

She couldn't see his face. It had been pushed down into the maw of his typewriter, where the keys have play. The body of the machine gleamed wet with blood that slid out between the pieces of mechanism and moved in slow snakes across Asika's typed papers and desk to spill upon the linoleum floor. Not a tapping. Now that Lindsey saw it, she heard dripping.

Someone had slit his throat from behind. What possessed him to set his desk with his back to the door? Hadn't he seen any Westerns?

A door opened in the outer office. Lindsey moved fast away from Asika into the main reception room, though she didn't like turning her back on the sound of his blood. No place to hide. Were his killers returning? For her?

Sandy strode in and let the door slam. Khaki pants and shirt, her geologist's uniform. She carried two cold-beaded Cokes in her fists, set them down on the reception desk and shrugged, flipping her long red braid over her shoulder.

"Sorry I'm late." Sandy stopped. "Linsday, what's gotcha? Cripes. You okay?"

"I need a phone." Her voice felt slow and thick. "Men came and killed Asika. With a knife."

"Shit."

Lindsey reached for the receptionist's black telephone and dialed. Funny what certainty Sandy's presence brought. She felt calm, quite normal now. In English, she overrode the Yoruba-speaking voice on the other end.
Sound professional, organized.

"No, I am not mistaken, sir. He's dead."

Sandy walked toward Asika's office then stopped. She swallowed hard—her freckles seemed to darken, then Sandy retreated across the reception room to the windowsill.

Chapter 4: Gilman

December 1966

Hospital at Ezike, Eastern Region, Nigeria

The muggy clinic shrilled with voices. Dr. Katherine Gilman looked out of her exam room into the waiting room and saw blood, vivid splashes on the man slumped against the wall bench.

She hurried in.
Arterial bleeding. Shoulder wound.
Gilman pushed a turbaned woman aside and reached to stem the spurting blood. A sticky spray across her left cheek, the thick hot taste familiar in her mouth.

Pressure points, get that gusher stopped.
She needed help and none of the curious crowd of Nigerians surging through the doorway of the examination room could give it.

"Clear out—give me space, Goddamn it."

Sister Catherine appeared, white cape and veil asserting her authority.

"I heard screaming," Sister Catherine said. So Irish. Fifteen years nursing in Africa but she still had her convent accent.

"Shut up!" Silence welled about Gilman.

Sister Catherine took over the pressure points. No time for gloves. Her tanned triangle of face, faded-blue eyes and wide mouth framed in white coif remained calm. When they'd first met, Gilman had tried to shake the nun's composure, but she'd lost the game.

The curious crowd edged into the room, all competing for a better view. The noise rose, voices talking about what happened, what was to come.

"Knife wound. Ragged edge. Rusty? Goddamned hunting knife, I'll bet."

She needed the operating room.
Tetanus jab. Penicillin.
Sister Catherine could keep pressure on at this angle for a few minutes. Gilman pulled out pads of gauze and surgical tape for a temporary dressing. Meanwhile, the racket rose outside the room again. A motor raced, backfired. More exclamations erupted. So much goddamned noise.

Lucky bastard. Knife must have nicked the arterial wall, which held until moments ago.
She glanced at the clock on the wall, but her attention caught on a familiar face. Intent narrow features. Alert and silent.

"Damn it, Wilton, what're you doing here?"

Wilton turned away, faced the people jostling in the doorway and spoke. Their expressions quieted and the mass of bodies melted away. Wilton closed the door.

What in hell had she said to work that magic?
Gilman, envious, happy with an intensity all the greater for the unexpectedness of her friend's appearance, finished whipping the pressure bandage into place.

"This is Sunday. He's a refugee, headed North." Wilton spoke so low Gilman had to read her lips. "Minority tribe—Tiv. Muslim. Worked down on the coast, near Port Harcourt. Made it all the way here, over two hundred miles."

"Do you think they know?" Gilman motioned to the closed door, then glanced down, registering a detail she had missed. No one could see the man's tribal scars, or his racially distinctive bone structure. Wilton had wrapped a bloodied rag around his face. All she could see was his terrified, bloodshot eyes. Nothing unusual in his clothing, and with a face wound, no one would expect him to talk.

"Never mind," Gilman said. "I see you covered that."

Sister Catherine laughed.

Chapter 5: Lindsey

December 1966

Lagos, Western Region, Nigeria

Uniformed police flooded the Records Building like brown ants after sugar. Lindsey had to sit at the reception table and answer questions. Everything she said ground into her the awareness of what she hadn't done, of the impotence of her actions. At least she'd kept her cool.

The Yoruba captain, handsome in a greyhound way with broad tribal cicatrices enhancing his high cheekbones, smiled at her. Polite, supportive, no doubt dismayed by her self-control. He'd probably been chosen for his command of English.

"Are you well? Do you need some gin, perhaps sherry?"

"I'm not the fainting kind," she said more sharply than he deserved.

"No, Madam Kinner, of course you are not. I admire your aplomb. But this has been a dreadful shock, and on behalf of my country and my people, let me apologize that any incident so sordid and indelicate should involve you."

She wanted to smack him but picked up a pen from the table, played with it. Yes, she said, she'd been working though it was lunchtime. No, she hadn't recognized the men. The captain didn't expect her to, and that irritated her. Simply because they were Nigerians didn't mean they all looked alike to her, she wanted to say, but the sad truth was she remembered only the flash of their eyes, their approximate heights measured by the doorway and the darkness of their clothing.

"No, no," the Yoruba captain said, telling her by his repetition that he spoke the official line and not his thoughts. "I assure you, dear madam, that this is not a tribal killing. Something personal or perhaps an unpaid debt."

After the police had gone, in came the office staff, including some she barely recognized from the lower floors. Word of the tragedy must have buzzed out of the place on the backs of flies. People patted her hand and made sympathetic noises and talked in a mix of Yoruba and English among themselves.

Sandy, trapped in a corner by two chattering women with their hair twisted up in dozens of tiny pigtails, had an expression both cross and foolish. Lindsey could only imagine she looked the same.