Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 (12 page)

           
“I’ll look for the five-million
job,” he promised.

           
“Good. In the meantime, hold on to
that card.”

           
“I will.” He tucked it into his
shirt pocket.

           
“Where do you want me to drop you
off?”

           
“Oh, any well-off neighborhood will
do,” he said.

           
She laughed. He was glad she did.

           
X must say it was touching when
Frank wouldn’t take the money. Humans do have this capacity to be appealing,
when you deal with them one at a time and avoid the ghastly overview That a
creature like Frank Hillfen, so utterly without hope, so totally enmired in
slow self-destruction, so devoid of any experience of using free will, should
refuse Mary Ann Kelleny’s three hundred dollars, made me feel quite kindly
toward him, for that moment.

           
Will he do what’s necessary when the
time comes? Oh, yes. We can arrange that, we can manipulate that. The group I’m
assembling will do what I want—that is, what
He
wants done—but it will be
their
choice,
their
idea,
their
free will in action. The human
race will freely choose to end itself.

           
Well? They’ve been rehearsing for it
quite long enough, haven’t they?

           
Not the entire human race, no, of
course not, we are not conducting a referendum on this.
His will be done.
But representatives of them all, carefully chosen
representatives. From every race, from every continent. No one left out.

           
We’re playing fair here.

           
The thinner she got, the more the
Europeans liked her. At home they had their soft pale cushion women; in
Nairobi, they wanted something lean and mean and dark. That was Pami: lean and
mean and very dark. So easy, and so good for business; when you’ve got
slim,
you never have to diet.

           
Pami’s stroll was up Mama Ngina
Street past the European embassies and down Kimathi Street beyond the New
Stanley Hotel, where the tourists sit beneath the famous huge thorn tree spiked
all over with messages. To whom? From whom? Nothing to do with Pami, anyway,
nothing to do with an illiterate twenty-three-year-old Luo from up above Lake
Naivasu. She’d come to Nairobi at fifteen because she wasn’t wanted at home and
had already outlasted her reasonable life expectancy. In Nairobi she knew no
one except a few policemen, “protectors,” and colleague whores. No person in
this world had a message for Pami Njoroge, a twenty-shilling Kenyan whore with
cold eyes, a twisted mouth from a jaw long ago badly broken and ineptly mended,
and a recently diagnosed case of slim, the African familiar name for AIDS.
*

           
At first he didn’t look that much
like a john: too big and self-confident and well-built. But then she was
distracted by a beggar with deformed legs that she almost fell over, and when
she looked up again along crowded, busding Kimathi Street the big European with
yellow hair was closer, and fewer other people were in the way, and she could
see he was fatter and sweatier than she’d thought.

           
He was probably fifty years old,
well over six feet tall, with a bulging soft torso contained in a white
business shirt large enough to be a tent in the up-country where Pami was born.
His dark tie was pulled down from his thick neck, the shirt collar open. His
dark blue suit, like a banker or a diplomat, was rumpled and desperate looking,
the coat dangling open like double doors. He walked heavily, feet slapping the
pavement, like a ritual bullock plodding toward the place of sacrifice, and
when he saw Pami his pale eyes sparkled and his cheeks grew round when he
smiled, wet-lipped.

           
She gave him back her own twisted,
mean, secret smile, knowing it would excite him with its dangerousness—he’d
have no idea how dangerous—and when he passed her, the two of them momentarily
very close, pushed together by the jostling crowd of pedestrians, he looked
down at her with those bright eyes—they were the palest blue she’d ever
seen—and said, “Oh, you come with me.” He spoke English with some kind of thick
accent, in a deep guttural voice. Was he German? Somehow he didn’t seem quite
like a German. And in any case, what did it matter?

           
His hotel was three blocks away, one
of the newer American- designed ones, the same anonymous but lavish cell
repeated one hundred sixteen times. By day, the rear door from the parking lot
was left unlocked, so the john took her around that way, to avoid the problems
of bringing this alley cat through the lobby.

           
His room was on the second floor,
with no view except another wing of the hotel. There were two beds, a single
and a double, both neatly and smoothly covered with Mondrian- influenced
spreads. The maid had been through, to put a strip of paper around the toilet
seat and distribute fresh plastic glasses in sealed plastic bags, all of these
tiny ways to deny the great teeming filthiness of the world just out there,
just beyond that double-paned permanently shut window. What did sealed plastic
bags and droning vacuum cleaners mean, when these big blond residents brought
their skinny dirty Pamis inside?

           
“I am Danish,” he said, locking the
door. “Am I your first Danish man?”

           
How would she know? “Yes,” she said.

           
“Good.” He smiled, and crossed the
room to close the drapes over that broad rectangle of plate glass. She stripped
off the small plastic shoulder bag and loose pale green cotton shift and low
black plastic boots that were all she ever wore at work, and the big man turned
from the window to beam at her dark nakedness, the small loose breasts with
their large areolas, the narrow muscular hips, the lush foliage of her bush.
The room was dimmer now that the drapes were drawn, everything in it touched by
a pale grayness, in which his eyes gleamed like tiny signal lights from a ship
far out at sea. “You will be rough?” he asked, with a hopeful rising
inflection.

           
Her jaw produced another nasty
smile. “As rough as you want,” she said.

           
He walked toward her, undoing his
belt, then reached around to clasp her buttock hard with one hand. “No ass at
all,” he said.

           
“I got enough ass,” she told him.
“And it cost twenty shillin.”

           
“Oh, yes, yes,” He released her,
took off his suit coat, reached into its inside pocket, pulled out a large
thick billfold, and tossed the coat carelessly onto the single bed. He stood
weaving slighdy, as though he were drunk, breathing audibly through his open
mouth, as he leafed through crackling currencies in the billfold, muttering to
himself: “Francs. Krone. Marks. Oh, I spent it all.”

           
People had tried to pay her in other
currencies before, but she wouldn’t do it. She had great trouble finding a bank
to change the money, usually had to give some hotel desk clerk a blowjob in
return for switching dollars or marks into Kenyan shillings; and then she would
be cheated on the exchange rate, as well. She was about to tell this man her
policy—she’d put her dress and boots and bag back on and walk out if he had no
shillings—when he tossed the billfold onto the coat on the bed and said, “I
get. Okay.” And plodded heavily over to the closet.

           
Pami looked at all the paper money
stuffed into the billfold, lying open on the coat. All different kinds of
money, and lots of it. Probably more than she earned in a month, if you added
it all together. And didn’t cheat on the exchange rate.

           
The big man slid open the mirrored
closet door, stooped with a grunt, and brought out a black attache case with
gleaming chrome locks. This he put on the low dresser, took a key ring from his
pocket, unlocked the case, and lifted the top. He made no effort to hide the
stacks of money that almost filled the interior. Again, there were four or five
different currencies, but this time including shillings; she saw stacks of one
hundreds, five hundreds. And on top of it all, in a brown leather case, was a
hunting knife.

           
Pami moved toward the door, keeping
an eye on the blond man’s hands as he pushed the knife aside and rooted through
the wads of money. She’d known women who were killed by johns, sometimes
tortured first, sometimes cut up afterward. It wasn’t going to happen to her.
If she had to run, she wouldn’t worry about the dress or the boots or the bag.
Ail of that could be replaced.

           
But what he finally brought out of
the case, holding it up by the edges in both his hands, studying it as though
he’d never seen one of these before, was a twenty-shilling note. Mostly blue,
the twenty shilling has a picture of Mzee Jomo Kenyatta on the front, looking
responsible and noble and caring, and a serene family of lions on the back,
with playing cubs. Turning to Pami, holding up this note, he said, “Do you know
what this is worth?”

           
What kind of question was that? “Twenty
shillin,” she said.

           
“Ah, yes,” he said. “But in pounds,
English pounds, oh let us say seventy P. And in U.S. dollars, one. One dollar.”
Showing that wet smile again, he said, “This is a very significant amount of
money, twenty shillings. I hope you will give first-rate service for it.”

           
“Come and see,” she said, holding
out her hand for the money. He gave it to her and she half turned her back,
stooping to put the bill into her left boot, knowing he wouldn’t be able to
resist grabbing her. I’ll do him in no time, she thought, as his hands groped
her, I’ll be on the street in a minute and a half.

           
But it didn’t work out that way.
Naked, he was a pink wet whale, wheezing and sweating with every exertion, but
what endurance he had! He turned her this way, he turned her that way, he
studied and pried, he even drew a real response from her two or three times,
and still he went on, still he wouldn’t stop, and she was becoming furious. To
a whore, time is money.

           
I’m gonna infect him, she thought,
moving from her usual indifference as to whether or not a john caught her
disease to an aggressive desire to
make
him catch it. She managed to get her saliva into his mouth, and later into his
anus, and then she stopped fretting over the lost time. What the hell. She gave
herself up to the acceptance of the moment.

           
At the finish, he was on his back,
puffing and heaving, she riding him like the boy on the dolphin, fast and hard,
grinding down, clenching tight. His head and neck got redder and redder, his
pale eyes bulged, and when he came he cried out like a woman, the high wail
ending in a bubbling cough. He sagged onto the mattress, muscles slack, jaw
hanging open, dull eyes gazing toward the ceiling.

           
She frowned down at him, sweat-slick
herself, rubbing her palms over her wet belly and drying them on her thighs.
“Mister?” she said.

           
There was no reaction. Moving
gingerly, she climbed backward off him, crawling on hands and knees back down
over his legs and over the foot of the bed, to stand there and stare at him,
lying like a big rag doll with the stuffing coming out. I killed him, she
thought, and grinned in glee at the idea. She’d never killed anybody before. I
killed him wid my box.

           
She looked around, and her eye lit
on the open attache case on the dresser.
Steal
it!
She took one step.

           
“Nnnnnuunnn-nanghhann! ”

           
She spun back, terror-struck, and he
wasn’t dead at all, his head and left arm were raised, eyes staring in pain and
fear as his left hand wobbled, trying to point. “Med-cine,” he gasped. “Drawer.
Med-cine!”

           
Not dead, but dying. She watched
him, and didn’t move.

           
He cried out again, and once more,
and then his head and arm fell back, and he lay with his head twisted at an
angle, staring at her. “I’ll,” he panted, and wheezed. “Get,” he whispered,
harsh and sibilant. “P’lice,” he gasped, and his flailing arm lunged out and
caught the phone beside the bed.

           
No! Terrible trouble! And the money
was
hers\
She stared from him to the
money in the case, and her eye lit on the hunting knife.

           
He knew what she was going to do
before she even reached the case: “I won’t call! I won’t call!” But the wooden
handle was in her hand, the sheath was flung away into a corner, and she leaped
on him like a cheetah, punching down, punching down, unable to stop, hitting
him over and over, cutting him open in a hundred places, gritting her
bloodstained teeth, snarling in her throat, using every ounce of her strength
to drive the blade into him, again and again and again, until at last the knife
caught on something inside him and her hand was so slippery with blood it slid
right off the handle when she pulled back.

           
She sat on his legs a minute longer,
panting, muscles trembling with strain. Then once again she climbed backward
off him, and stood shaking in the middle of the room. Blood had spouted from
him, and more blood had sprayed around every time she’d lifted the knife, and
now there was blood everywhere. There were dark droplets on the ceiling. Blood
ran into the mattress where twice she’d missed him in her frenzy and slashed
down through spread and sheet into the cloudy stuffing. Great splotches and
splashes marred the walls and the drapes over the window. The mirrored closet
door was smeared. The maroon carpet was sticky beneath her bare feet. And her
own body felt as though she’d been dipped into a giant jar of rancid raspberry
jam. Blood was caked around her nostrils; she breathed the foul air through her
mouth, and tried to think.

           
Boots, dress, bag. The boots were
dark, so nothing showed. The dress was stippled with drying blood, and so was
the bag. Snuffling in her throat as she tried to breathe, she moved in a dazed
and wandering manner into the bathroom, turned on the water in the sink, then
turned on the shower as well and climbed in under the flow. A few times before,
johns had let her shower in the wonderful hotel bathrooms, so she knew how to
make this one work. She peeled the paper wrapping from the soap cake and rubbed
the soap in her hair, over and over, rinsing under the rush of water and then
rubbing the soap into her hair again, repeating and repeating until at last the
white soap did not come back rosy from her head. Then she scrubbed her arms and
body and legs. Her pubic hair was like a sponge, full of blood, to be soaked
again and again; finally she sat down in the tub, the shower water falling on
her like rain, and simply washed and washed and washed. Would the water never
run clean?