Night Must Wait (49 page)

"Leave us," Gilman ordered him, as if she had the right. Her blue eyes flicked to him and back to Lindsey. As if her Americanness, her whiteness, her coming in like an angel of healing gave her power.

He didn't trouble himself to answer and let himself look more relaxed, angling his elbows against the wall as if he put his weight upon them. She shrugged then as if she had known better and he felt the first positive emotion she'd ever stirred in him.

Now he could pay attention to the words that she spoke. Not enough to distract him from his business—to protect his principal. He watched Wilton too. Every instinct told him to, though he knew she had no weapon.

"You still have the delusion that I killed Sandy? I can think of no other excuse for your hounding me with those goons," Gilman said.

Lindsey stood up on the far side of the desk, precise. White, apparently passionless, her mouth firm and certain. The same age as Gilman, but dominant, immortal even, like a creature of marble and steel. He'd stopped calling her by any honorific years ago, when Oroko started to understand that she would never allow anyone closer than friendship. Her sex didn't matter, only that he protect her. As time passed and Lindsey persisted in treating him not as her weapon nor shield, but an associate, he'd found himself troubled and affected by her very loneliness.

So different from her dead friend who'd hired him. So far from that one's easy grin and joking manner and shabby clothes. Sandy, whom he had loved. They spoke of her now. Oroko waited. Everything could wait now. They had Gilman. Sandy's murderer. The fan whirred above in the flickering fluorescent glow.

He could hear the dogs howl in some distant neighborhood, the jangle of radios seething below from the bars on Independence Street. Lagos, humming and belching in the night. His men had cleared the streets for Gilman to come to them, now the streets came back to life.

"What more evidence do I need than your paid assassin's own words," Lindsey said, contained. "You gave Paul the very same five hundred of American money that Sandy gave you for feeding your starving children. Starving children." Lindsey let the words settle between them before she went on. "American dollars to kill me, and he failed. He picked the wrong bedroom."

This was Lindsey's kill—he had to stay back unless Gilman initiated action. He would not let anger in because he knew all about passion and the mistakes it made. Wilton remained still in her chair, listening, rigid.

"Am I supposed to pardon you because you fucked up?" Lindsey smiled. "Killed the wrong person?"

"You say that," Gilman said. "But I heard Sandy died of snake bite, an accident. How can it be murder?"

Oroko would have said she hid something with her words, as if she did know how it might not be an accident. Yet he read no guilt, none, and all his awareness sprang into focus.

"When you put a five-foot black cobra in my own bedroom wing, that's murder."

"It didn't get in by itself?"

"The pillowcase on the floor smelling of snake urine suggests not."

"And why do you accuse Paul?"

"His confession. His possession of Sandy's cash. His description of you and your mercenary lover. The directions he quoted you giving for a cover-up suggesting accidental death."

Gilman's fair skin reddened.

"That's total shit." Gilman resettled her hands about the revolver. She still held it with too tight a grip.

Oroko listened for any change in her voice, or that too great steadiness of a speech that cannot vary lest a different truth slip through. He watched her stance, every sense alerted. Could have counted the strands of gray and silver in her red-gold knot of hair.

"Paul was with the Biafran Red Cross and came with me out of Biafra to help me deliver Wilton into your care. I thought of Sandy's jokes and teasing as healing Wilton, and her remaining in Nigeria as supportive. I stupidly depended on you. You never meant to keep your promises."

Lindsey looked as though she wasn't listening. It was a trick she had, Oroko had seen her drive men to rage with it.

"Shell shock—it gets worse when you evacuate the patient to a nice safe place. I told you and you didn't trust me. Not even as a doctor. Wilton sits and drools in her chair most days, Lindsey, when she's not having fugues of fear and rage. So safe in America, where you sent her to have the memories and brilliance drugged out of her."

Gilman stopped, her words had begun to run over each-other, but she'd noticed apparently. He saw her swallow.

"We lost her mind for her. I made mistakes, yeah. But you lost her mind for your convenience. Because you didn't know how to be human once Sandy died and you couldn't be bothered to make the effort to try. Because you feared what Wilton might say about you and your methods of influence and governance, and assassination.

"You feared who might understand and believe what she said, because even now you remain an American citizen with Embassy connections, in spite of this office and all your criminal success."

"I'm listening," Lindsey said.

Oroko saw her tamp down some emotion so fast he couldn't tell what it might have been. He felt they had always quarreled like this. There was a familiarity between them, in the way Lindsey let Gilman go on and on until she ran out of things to say.

"Paul needed money," Gilman said. "For personal reasons, he said. I handed it over like a fool because he gave his word of honor, but he never showed up again. I flew back to Biafra, cheated, pissed off. I thought him a thief. I'd no idea your goons would slaughter him and use his possession of Sandy's money to involve me. They must've beaten those stories out of him. Don't you know torture's unreliable? Did Oroko supervise? You need a professional for jobs like that."

Good question—Oroko had to agree with the premise.

Lindsey shook her head. Oroko remembered the sergeant dragging in Paul's bloodied corpse, its face broken nearly out of recognition, the body lumpish with other injuries, held together by the rent clothes. A thud on the floor, the beaming salute from a man who had stopped to change his uniform and shave and splash himself with fragrance before presenting his kill like a well-groomed cat dumping a rat upon the floor. "Madam—this is the man," he'd said.

"Oroko knows what he's doing, how far to go," Gilman said. "My Jantor explained it to me. Truth is lost in pain. Or in panic. Your thugs got what they wanted to get, but not truth."

Oroko watched. His job, to protect his principal. Only that, unless she ordered him to act. But he heard the words and he saw the little thing that happened in Lindsey's dark eyes, that slight movement of the pupils which had nothing to do with the lighting. Saw her swallow once as if it bought time to think, time to change.

"Oh, I've wanted to kill you, all right," Gilman said. "But with my bare hands. Not with this stupid revolver. Not with a snake or an idiot thief as agent."

Lindsey looked down at the desk, and Gilman must have thought Lindsey sought the revolver because she brought it up and set it on the gleaming wood. Gave it up as if having had her say, she now wanted and needed none of the things he would have sworn she came to do.

Oroko understood then that he'd been wrong about her. This was the act of an intemperate child bucking an authority she's resented all her life, not the act of a murderer with more murder planned. He could see that Lindsey saw the gesture as Gilman's final argument.

She believed Gilman. He could see it in her shoulders, in the angle of her neck, and he wished she didn't. Lindsey's gaze locked on the revolver. Oroko stopped himself from moving forward. What would he do, take it away?

"I keep thinking," Gilman said. "I keep seeing us in a suburb on Long Island, manicured hands and hair in permanents, sitting next to pot-bellied husbands playing bridge. You knew how to play bridge, didn't you? You were trained for that life just the way I was. You know, Lowenstein gives Wilton a possible alternate diagnosis of a schizophreniform disorder. Better than his first 'full-fledged sociopathic pers—'"

"Fools." Wilton's voice came clear and even. She stood, moved around the bookcase to stand and look at all three of them. Clad in black like a mourner, with her eyes wide, skin white as ice, the tumbled graying hair lying thick over her shoulders. "You understand nothing."

Chapter 113: Oroko

December 1971

Lagos, Nigeria

Gilman stared, shocked in face and body.

"Wilton," she said. "
How
?"

Curious that Gilman's posture reflected a sudden physical guarding as if she feared something. What had happened between them?

"I had her brought," Lindsey said. "I wanted her witness."

"Trivialities." Wilton made a gesture with her clawed right hand. "You waste time before God. You were my children. I, your father. Not mother, that's too tender, too intimate. But I raised you up and you turned on each other. How could you, who had so much? A sibling rivalry to betray us all and God Himself? I have permitted you to bring me here for my questions to be answered."

So much threat in so small a body. Oroko moved, repositioning.

"Why Lindsey, did you start civilian bombings of Umuahia weeks early? Was it knowing you had the influence to betray our arrangement, a moment of power over me?"

"I don't remember," Lindsey said.

"It wasn't even important then? For that pleasure you killed my son."

"You had a son?" Lindsey's voice reduced to an appalled whisper.

"You fool, no son of the body. Christopher, my servant. Even as I raised you to make this land, I had others, children of the mind, of the spirit under God."

Oroko straightened, words balling up in his throat, a question about to burst and she focused at his motion.

"I gave you a world and you played with it. My fault. The father bears responsibility, so I can rage, rage on against the squandering of your promise, but what it means, ah, what it means is the flaw was mine, the sin mine, the pride and jealousy rooted in my spirit and ruined there."

"Wilton?" Gilman said, as if anyone could calm such a passion.

"I loved you too much.
Thou shalt have no other gods before Me. Thus saith the Lord.
I set you up for gods and turned my face so I wouldn't see your evil, your pride spewing forth like corruption from a wound. I set you up for gods. For sin like that there is only one kind of sacrifice."

"It was you?" Lindsey's voice hoarse like she had ashes in her mouth. There was a look of terror in her brown eyes. Oroko felt his breath stop, his hands catch into fists.

"You always could touch snakes," Gilman said. "God, Lowenstein was right."

Wilton stood still but there was no compromise in her eyes.

"How many sacrifices have you made?" Kinner said.

"The dog," Wilton said. "Christopher, Father Josiah."

"Buried alive," Gilman said to Lindsey.

"Sandy. I didn't choose Sandy. I let God choose who died that time, and He told me by the innocence of her sacrifice that we were not done."

Oh, Sandy
. Oroko could taste her name in his mouth.

"You tried to shoot me," Gilman said, "that day in the tent when I knocked the gun out of your hand. I thought you were going to kill yourself."

"That failure was a sign. God had more suffering in store for you than death."

"And tonight…" Kinner said.

"Yes, tonight," Wilton said. "We are not done."

Oroko felt sweat break out on his back. Nothing to do with the doctor, everything to do with this woman who made him feel her eyes could kill.

Lindsey sat down, drew the revolver toward her. Oroko noted how Wilton's gaze clung to it with desire.

"Oh, we are done," Lindsey said. She swallowed. She considered Wilton and he saw how fast Lindsey's lips parted as if she could not get enough air.

"Lindsey," Gilman said. "Don't."

"Sandy," Lindsey said.

"She's
done
," Gilman said. "Wilton, sacrifices are over. God will have his way. It's not for us to be jealous of His power. You said that to me once."

Oroko saw Lindsey close her eyes. She laid the revolver back down, her hands falling away from it. He heard again the howl of dogs, the racket of the nearby bars. As if the noises had all stopped and then restarted, though he knew that couldn't be true.

He felt the air pull slow and deep, shuddering into his lungs.

Gilman reached forward, moved awkward to the desk between her and Lindsey, placed both hands palm down and leaned into that support. "Should have seen."

He could barely hear her.

Lindsey said nothing. The sweat gathered on her forehead as it does on the face of a woman in labor.

He wanted to interrupt, but he had no words. For the first time he felt Sandy was gone, her exorcism complete. A loss and a solace in one. He pressed the handle of his knife, enough to make it hurt as the minutes passed. Lindsey's face was bad, grayed.

Gilman stood upright again, easing her shoulders, glancing around, her gaze catching on him. "What will you do with Wilton?"

Her blue eyes seemed blurred like those of a drunk woman. Or was it him? He brought himself into focus. No, he was all right. It was Gilman who was undefined. Wilton stayed immobile, white and black, the silver in her hair glinting.

"I don't know," Lindsey said. "What would you?"

"Put her in care somewhere. Maybe here is better than America."

"You're compassionate," Lindsey said.

"If you ever were, now is the time."

Lindsey straightened, passed a hand across her face as if waking from a nightmare, but it made little difference in the color of her skin. "I killed her son."

Her sons are legion.
Oroko did not speak the words, but he could taste them in his mouth. But maybe some had been favored over others. Her love was death.

"You couldn't have known."

"Yes, I could. Wilton, I didn't understand why you asked for a delay. Thought it wasn't critical. Thought I knew better. People would die anyway, whenever the bombing started targeting urban areas."