Страница 80 из 103
They stopped at cell #31, then waited there until a turnkey showed up. It took about five minutes, and they passed the time chewing gum and wisecracking about Laura in some
Malian dialect.
The turnkey finally flung the door open and they threw her in. The door slammed. "Hey!" Laura shouted. "I'm hand- cuffed! You forgot your handcuffs!" The peephole opened and she saw a human eye and part of the bridge of a nose. It shut again.
She was in a cell. In a prison. In a fascist state. In Africa.
She began to wonder if there were worse places in the world. Could anything be worse? Yes, she thought, she could be sick.
She began to feel feverish.
An hour is:
A minute and a minute and a minute and a minute and a minute.
And a minute, and a minute, and a minute and a minute and a minute.
Then another, and another minute, and another, and yet another, and another.
And a minute, then two more minutes. Then, two more minutes.
Then, two minutes. Then, two minutes. Then a minute..
Then a similar minute. Then two more. And two more again.
That's thirty minutes so far.
So do them all over again.
Laura's cell was slightly less than four paces long and slightly more than three paces across. It was about the size of the bathroom in the place-where-she'd-used-to-live, the place she didn't allow herself to think about. Much of this space was taken up by her bunk. It had four legs of tubular steel, and a support frame of flattened iron struts. Atop the frame was a mattress of striped cotton ticking, stuffed with straw.
The mattress smelled, faintly and not completely unpleas- antly, of a stranger's long sickness. One end was lightly spattered with faded bloodstains.
There was a window hole in the wall of the cell. It was a good-sized hole, almost six inches around, the size of a drainpipe. It was approximately four feet long, bored through the massive concretized sand, and it had a crisscrossed grill of thin metal at the far end. By standing directly before the hole
Laura could see a simmering patch of yellowish desert sky.
Faint gusts of heated air sometimes rippled down the tube.
The cell had no plumbing. But she learned the routine quickly, from hearing other prisoners. You banged the door and yelled, in Malian Creole French, if you knew it. After a certain period, depending on whim, one of the guards would show and take you to the latrine: a cell much like the others, but with a hole in the floor.
She heard the screaming for the first time on her sixth day.
It seemed to be oozing up from the thick floor beneath her feet. She had never heard such inhuman screaming, not even during the riot in Singapore. There was a primal quality to it that could pass through solid barriers: concrete, metal, bone, the human skull. Compared to this howling the screams of mob panic were only a kind of gaiety.
She could not make out any words, but she could hear that there were pauses, and occasionally she thought she could hear a low electrical buzzing.
They would unlock her handcuffs for meals and for the latrine. They would then seal them up again, tightly, care- fully, high on her wrists, so she couldn't wriggle through the circle of her own arms and get her hands in front of her. As if it mattered, as if she might break free with a single bound and tear her steel door from its hinges with her fingernails.
After a week her shoulders were in a constant state of low-level pain, and she had worn raw patches on her chin and cheek from sleeping on her stomach. She did not complain, however. She had briefly spotted one of her fellow prisoners, an Asian man, Japanese she thought. He was handcuffed, his legs were fettered, and he wore a blindfold.
During the second week, they began handcuffing her hands from the front. This made an amazing difference. She felt with giddy irrationality that she had truly accomplished some- thing, that some kind of minor but definite message had been sent her from the prison administration.
Surely, she thought, as she lay waiting for sleep, 'her mind gently and luxuriously disintegrating, some mark had been made, maybe only a check on a clipboard, but some kind of institutional formality had taken place. She existed.
In the morning she convinced herself that it, could not possibly mean anything. She began doing pushups.
She kept track of days by scratching the grainy wall under her bunk with the edge of her handcuffs. On her twenty-first day she was taken out, given another shower and another body search, and taken to meet the Inspector of Prisons.
The Inspector of Prisons was a large smiling sunburned white American. He wore a long silk djellaba, blue suit pants, and elaborate leather sandals. He met her in an air-conditioned office downstairs, with metal chairs and a large steel desk topped with lacquered plywood. There were gold-framed portraits on the walls, men in uniform: GALTIERI, NORTH, MACARTHUR.
A goon sat Laura down in a metal folding chair in front of the desk. After sweltering days in her cell, the air condition-- ing felt arctic, and she shivered.
The goon unlatched her handcuffs. The skin below them was calloused, the left wrist had an oozing scab.
"Good afternoon, Mrs. Webster," said the Inspector.
"Hello," Laura said. Her voice was rusty.
"Have some coffee. It's very good. Kenyan." The Inspec- tor slid a cup and saucer across the desk. "They had good rains this year."
Laura nodded dumbly. She picked up the coffee and sipped it. She had been eating prison fare for weeks: scop, with the occasional bowl of porridge. And drinking the harsh metallic water, two liters every day, salted, to prevent heatstroke. The hot coffee hit her mouth with an astonishing gush of richness, like Belgian chocolate. Her head swam.
"I'm the Inspector of Prisons," said the Inspector of Pris- ons. "On my usual tour of duty here, you see."
"What is this place?"
The Inspector smiled. "This is the Moussa Traore Penal
Reform Institute, in Bamako."
"What day is this?"
"It's ..." He checked his watchphone. "December 6,
2023. Wednesday."
"Do my people know I'm still alive?"
"I see you're getting right to the crux of matters," said the
Inspector languidly. "As a matter of fact, Mrs. Webster, no.
They don't know. You see, you represent a serious breach of security. It's causing us a bit of a headache."
"A bit of a headache."
"Yes.... You see, thanks to the peculiar circumstances in which we saved your life, you've learned that we possess the
Bomb."
"What? I don't understand."
He frowned slightly. "The Bomb, the atomic bomb."
"That's it?" Laura said. "You're keeping me here because of an atomic bomb?"
The frown deepened. "What's the point of this? You've been on the Thermopylae. Our ship."
"You mean the boat, the submarine?"
He stared at her. "Should I speak more clearly?"
"I'm a little confused," Laura said giddily. "I just spent three weeks in solitary." She put her cup onto the desk, carefully, hand shaking.
She paused, trying to sort her thoughts. "I don't believe you," she told him at last. "I saw a submarine, but I don't know that it's a genuine nuclear missile submarine. I have only your word for that, and the word of the crew onboard.
The more I think about it the harder it is to believe. None of the old nuclear governments were stupid enough to lose an entire submarine. Especially with nuclear missiles onboard."
"You certainly have a touching faith in governments,"
said the Inspector. "If we have the launch platform, it scarcely matters where or how we got the warheads, does it? The point is that the Vie