Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 (13 page)

           
Yes. She stood again, clumsy,
exhausted now, almost slipping on the smooth tub, and stepped out onto the tile
floor. There were large soft beige towels. She dried herself, then used the
towels to make a path along the floor of the main room, to keep from getting
more blood on her feet. She went out there, picked up her dress and bag, and
carried them into the bathroom, where the water still ran in the sink. She
cleaned the dress as best she could without getting the whole thing wet, then
rubbed the bag with a wet washcloth. She pulled the dress over her head, the
wet parts sticking to her body, put the shoulder bag over her head as well,
then went out along the towels to her boots. She wiped them on a towel, put
them on, straightened up, and then looked over at the burst bladder of blood
reeking on the bed. There was nothing in her eyes when she looked at him; she
could barely remember him now.

           
What she remembered was the money.
Spreading another towel in front of herself, she moved to the dresser and was
about to close the lid on the attache case when she saw that, in addition to the
money, it also contained a passport. She took it out, opened it, saw a picture
of the john looking grumpy.

           
Don’t want this passport. Don’t want
to carry anything that hooks me up with that Danish man. She put the passport
on the dresser, closed the case, picked it up by the handle in her left hand,
and looked around the room. Nothing else.

           
It was so hard to think, to keep
moving. It was as though great lethargy and great horror were both just outside
her range of vision, range of understanding. I’m not working any more today,
she told herself. I’m going home, I’m gonna sleep, I don’t know what happened
in here. This is too crazy. I’ll feel better tomorrow.

           
Two new experiences there: sex and
death.

           
Both were intensely absorbing and
interesting, and neither was exacdy what I’d expected. The one wasn’t all
pleasure, and the other wasn’t all grief. Emotions seem to blend into one
another when you’re a human, even the greatest happiness being tinged with
sorrow, the most horrible agony illuminated by some kind of satisfaction.

           
How
intensely
these creatures live! My kind burns for a long time with
a very low flame; humans burn bright and hot, and don’t last. I have always
thought our way was better, but would they? Given the choice, would they select
our long serenity, or are they happier with their consuming passions?

           
Well, they don’t have the choice.
And soon, according to His plan, there will be no choices left at all. I have
my people now, my representatives. I’ve touched them all, I’ve put them in
motion. Grigor Basmyonov is on his way to New York to consult a cancer
specialist; Li Kwan is washing dishes in the loudly grumbling belly of the
Norse American Line
Star Voyager;
Maria
Elena Rodriguez is buying a wedding dress in Brasilia and fighting off feelings
of guilt for her so-easy manipulation of

           
Jack Auston; Hodding Cabell Carson’s
campaign to rid himself of the explosive Dr. Marlon Philpott is about to bear
fruit; and Frank Hillfen is in a county jail in Indiana, held for parole
violation, but will soon be loose once more.

           
Which leaves Pami Njoroge. Her
murder of Kjeld Ulrichslund and the sudden appearance of the attache case full
of money should get her moving. Shouldn’t it? But it seems to have paralyzed
her in some way. She has the cash well hidden, she has her memories well
buried, but she isn’t in motion. These people must be in motion.

           
We must poke little Pami.

           
Pami lunged upright out of sleep,
staring at the window, terror in her heart, the taste of vomit in her throat.
Dim amber illumination from a distant streedight defined the open glassless
rectangle of window, indicated the shape of the canvas cot and metal bureau
crammed into this narrow closet of a room, but those weren’t what Pami saw.
What Pami saw, though now she was awake and her eyes were open, was the
nightmare.

           
Her right arm ached with the tension
of slashing at the dream shark; her belly was cramped from the horror of those
shark teeth grinding through her middle. The drowning water, heavy and dark as
blood, still lay on her face, bearing her down. Her heart pounded, bile moved
in her throat, her nerves all jumped and trembled as though she’d just been
electrocuted.

           
The shark dream wasn’t the only
violent phantasm to destroy her nights since the murder of the Danish man, it
was merely the one most often repeated. But there was also the dream in which
she chopped off her mother’s breasts and ate them, her nose filling with blood
and milk. And the one where biting ants covered her body, crawling into her
nose and ears and all her

           
body openings, red ants, biting,
stinging, drawing blood, a blanket of swarming red ants eating her as she
ran...

           
There was no movement of air in the
hot night. The room smelled like blood, like the Danish man’s hotel room. Trembling,
her movements exaggerated and uncoordinated, Pami pushed away her single sheet
and clambered from the cot to lean out the window in search of air. But there
was no air. The hot night of Nairobi lay against her face like the blood/water
of the dream, a palpable presence. She looked up at the starless black sky,
clouded over and oppressive, then down at the narrow dirty lane two flights
below. The streedight was at the corner with the main road, four buildings
away, and not much of its light made it through the trees down there. Nothing
seemed to move in the lane.

           
Pami backed from the window and sat
on the cot, trying to force herself to be calm. No matter how many times the
dreams came at her, no matter how often the same ones repeated, they still terrified
her, the effects still lasted for hours, they still destroyed sleep. This can’t
go on like this, she thought. I have to sleep.

           
She looked at the wood strips of the
wall beneath the window. Behind them was the attache case, with all the money
still in it, every bill. She’d never even counted it, had merely brought it
home that day and pulled out the wood strips, shoved the attache case in, put
the wood strips back in place, and gone on with her life exactly as before,
hooking for the European johns, making just enough to exist, living in this
“residential hotel” that was filled with other whores, with their pimps, and
with a few strong-arm robbers as well. Nothing had changed, except for the
dreams.

           
It has to stop, she thought, and she
hated it that every time she took in breath the air still smelled like that
hotel room, dark and repulsive with spilled blood. She had to sleep, but she
couldn’t sleep. I can’t stay in this room any more, she thought.

           
Her few clothes were in the top
drawer of the dresser. She chose a dress—she’d long since thrown out the pale
green one from
that day
—and stepped
into her boots, and then got the hammer from under the bed. To protect herself
against unwanted invaders at night, she did what many of the residents of this “residence”
did: every night, before going to bed, she nailed a block of wood to the floor
against the door, so it couldn’t be pushed open from outside. Now she used the
hammer to pry that block up, put block and hammer together under the cot, and
went out to the dark hall, which smelled more familiarly of urine and bad food.
Pulling the door closed behind herself—it would neither latch nor lock—she made
her way down the hall toward the stairwell, where faint light came up from the
entranceway. She’d meant to go down the stairs and outside, but at the last
second changed her mind and went up the stairs instead, the four steep creaking
flights to the top floor and then the metal ladder bolted to the wall the final
flight up to the roof.

           
The trapdoor up at the top was often
left open, and that’s the way it was tonight. Pami climbed out, resting her
palm on the tarpaper roof as she emerged, feeling how the sun’s heat was still
husbanded there. She walked slowly to the front of the building, sat on the
knee-high brick wall at the edge, and looked far down at the lane, through the
trees. The packed dirt of the lane looked almost soft in the darkness way down
there, almost like a pillow.

           
I wonder why I killed the Danish
man, she thought. I wonder what I wanted. All I really want is to sleep, not go
through this shit any more. Not any of this shit. Not all these johns that look
like the Danish man, not this shitty building where you got to nail yourself
in, not this sickness I got in my blood. What happens when the sores start to
show? Nobody gonna give me twenty shillings then. Nobody fuck me for
free
then. What did I want that time?
What do I want?

           
Pami looked up, wishing there were
stars. Moisture was on her eyes, and she looked at the sky, wishing there were
stars tonight. She let herself relax, looking upward, just relax, not pay any
attention at all...

           
“You gonna jump?”

           
Startled, Pami stared around the
roof, blinking tears out of her eyes. “Where you? Who you?” It had been a
woman’s voice, but from where?

           
“Sittin over here,” said the woman,
and when she waved her arm over her head Pami could see that she was a person
sitting in the front corner of the roof, her back against the
L
of the low wall. “But if you gonna
jump,” the woman went on, “lemme go downstairs first.”

           
“I’m not gonna jump,” Pami said. She
got up from the wall, tottering a litde, losing her balance and then catching
it again before she fell over the wall. “Never meant to jump,” she said,
feeling sullen and spied on.

           
“You wouldn’t be the first, if you
did. From this roof.”

           
“Well, I didn’t. Just came up for
some air is all.”

           
“Me, too.”

           
Pami approached the woman, and now
she could see it was just another whore like herself, another skinny young dark
woman with nowhere to go. Pami sat on the wall again, nearer the woman, but
this time on the side wall, where there was no more than a seven- or eight-foot
drop to the roof of the next building.

           
“I come up here at night when I
can’t sleep,” the woman said, “and dream.”

           
“I don’t like to dream,” Pami said.

           
“I like to dream when I’m awake,”
the woman told her. “I come up here and I dream what I’d do if I had a lot of
money.”

           
Pami suddenly felt alert. A lot of
money? Was this some sort of sign, some sort of omen? She said, “What would you
do? If you had a lot of money, what would you do?”

           
“Well, I’d get away from here, to
start,” the woman said, and laughed.

           
Pami laughed with her, thinking
about the money in the wall.
She
hadn’t gone away from here, to start. She hadn’t done anything at all to start.
She said, “Where would you go?”

           
“
America
,” the woman said.

           
Pami looked at her in surprise.
“America? Why?”

           
“Why not? That’s where the rich
people are, isn’t it? If I had a lot of money, I’d want to be with the rich
people.”

           
What could I do in America? Pami
asked herself, and the question made her feel strange.

           
The woman was going on, soothing
herself with her voice, like a lullaby: “Oh, I’d go to America, and I’d go
where the black people are in America, and then everybody think I’m American,
too. I got English, just like them. I’d have water all the time, wash in,
drink, wash my clothes. Well, Pd have lots of clothes.”

           
“Sure you would,” Pami said, making
fun of her.

           
“No, but I mean for the police,” the
woman said.

           
Pami frowned, leaning toward the
woman, saying, “Clothes for the police? What are you talking about?”

           
“Well, I wouldn’t want them to send
me back,” the woman said. “See, let’s say I’ve got all this money.”

           
“Okay.”

           
“Just like I am,” the woman went on,
“I go by the ticket office, I put down thirty thousand shillins, say,
^‘
Gimme
a ticket to
New York
.’ You know what they think?”

           
“They think you’re rich,” Pami said.

           
“Not
me,
they don’t,” the woman said, with bitter selfknowledge.
“Me,
they think, drugs. Here’s this
litde girl, she got no suitcases, she payin cash for her airplane ticket, she’s
just a litde up-country girl never been anywhere before, just got a brand-new
passport last week, they call the police in New York, they say,
^c
Keep
an eye on this girl, she gets off the airplane. Take a look in her twat, you
likely find some balloons fiilla cocaine.’ ”

           
“But there ain’t any cocaine,” Pami
said, and absendy patted herself, as though in approval of her innocence.

           
“No, but they’re
lookin
at you,” the woman told her. “You
don’t ever want the police
lookin
at
you, because then they say you’re
undesirable
and they make you turn around and take the next plane back, and you don’t want
to come back. Not here.”

           
“No, I don’t,” Pami agreed.

           
“I got it all planned,” the woman
said. “First I go buy a couple better-lookin dresses than what I got. Then I
buy a suitcase. Then I get my passport. Then I go to a travel place and say my
rich boyfriend in the government just died and left me all this cash money, and
I buy a
round-trip
ticket and I pay
the travel people right here in Nairobi to get me a room in a hotel in New
York, a regular tourist hotel so I look like a regular tourist, so then when I
get on the plane nobody got any reason to look at me.”

           
“Round trip? Why spend that money?”

           
“They don’t let you in
America
if they think you’re gonna stay.”

           
“You got it all figured out,” Pami
said, in admiration.

           
“It;s my way to dream,” the woman
said. “Someday I’ll fly away from here. If I don’t fly on an airplane”—and she
jabbed her thumb over her shoulder, pointing above the wall behind her—“I’ll
fly that way. One how or another, someday I’ll fly. I like to dream about the
good way.”

           
Pami sat leaning forward, sharp
elbows on skinny legs, looking at the woman, thinking about the different ways
to fly She didn’t say anything. She felt calm. The bad dreams weren’t with her
here, they were all down in the room.

           
The woman turned her head, looking
toward the eastern horizon. “Daytime,” she said. “Same old daytime.”

           
Pami didn’t say anything.