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“Is it?”
“Unquestionably. We’re at rather a stalemate, aren’t we, though? I don’t suppose either of us is entirely willing to put much trust in the other, and yet we have to do precisely that, don’t we?”
“Why?”
“Because we need each other.”
“For what?”
His eyes flashed but his voice remained cool, confident, on top of it all. “Nothing’s really changed,” he said. “You need me to get a portion of the treasure. You don’t know where it is and there’s no way you can find it on your own. You can search the shipyard until the tide goes out permanently. It won’t do you any good.”
“I see.”
“I’m sure you do.” He beamed. “You have me all wrapped up like a parcel, but I’m really on an equal footing, am I not?” His deep voice echoed in the room. “You’ll get no information from me, Ta
“And what’s that?”
“You will untie me. Now. And you and your little brown girl will wait here while I recover the fortune myself. Then I will return-”
“Sure you will.”
“Why, I still need your help to get out of the country. I could do it without you, but why should I? You already know everything. And we really do need each other, Ta
“So you would come back on your own, and then the four of us would waltz off together.”
“Precisely.”
“And we would split the fortune according to plan, and we would all be satisfied.”
“There is enough for all.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So it is settled. Now if you will cut these bonds-”
“But nothing’s settled,” I said. “I may be crazy but I’m not stupid. Not that stupid, anyway. Even if what you said made perfect sense, I don’t believe you’d stick with it. Your ego wouldn’t let you be equal partners with anyone in anything.”
His face hardened. “You will never get the treasure without my help.”
“I know.”
“And you ca
“I know.”
He frowned. “Then what will you do?”
“I will get the hell out of this godforsaken country,” I said. “Your treasure can stay here, and so can you. I don’t really care about your fortune. I didn’t come here to get rich, and I don’t really have any use for the money now. I have to get back home and buy a house something like this one, except maybe a little bigger, and without quite so much plastic in it. And then I have to marry a girl named Katin Bazerian and adopt the heir apparent to the throne of Lithuania. Heiress apparent, that is. And then I have to live happily ever after, and I can do that without your bearer bonds and your diamonds and whatever the hell else you’ve got. And without your monumental ego for company, for that matter.”
“You will just… just leave?”
“That’s the idea.”
“And the fortune? You will leave it for me?”
“Right.”
“Well,” he said. “That is-”
“But you probably won’t get much pleasure out of it. Because I’ll leave you here, tied up like this, so that you won’t spoil our exit. And I’ll leave Sheena here, too, because I don’t see how I could get her out of here under the circumstances, and because you’ll need someone to keep you company. And I guess I’ll leave her untied, because otherwise she might starve to death, and I wouldn’t want that on my conscience.”
He was staring at me.
“And whether she’ll have any particular animosity toward the man who sold her down the river, and I do mean down the river, well, I wouldn’t know about that. You’ll just have to see.”
I got up and started for the door.
“Wait,” he said. “Wait. We must talk this over.”
Chapter 16
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, or so they tell me. It occurred to me now that a journey of not too much less than a thousand miles could have been avoided if I had taken a few dozen well-chosen steps at the onset. For we had indeed come full circle, and the final act of our little drama was being staged in the very cemetery where it all began, and not fifty yards from the grave where I had been buried alive.
The moon beamed benevolently down upon us, and the stars contributed their conspiratorial winks. Plum, gaily outfitted in Mrs. Pe
Both the flashlight and the shotgun were very sincerely pointed at Knanda Ndoro. He, too, wore some clothing of Mr. Pe
It was, I felt, an ideal division of labor. Plum, abetted by moon and stars, supplied the light. I served as the security force. And Knanda Ndoro did the retrieving.
The hole was about three feet deep when he heaved a sigh and leaned on his shovel as if our expedition were a WPA project. “This hardly seems equitable,” he said. “I’m still groggy from that bloody opium, you know. And here you have me doing nigger work. You’ve the soul of a colonialist exploiter, Ta
“Did you make Sam Bowman do his own digging?”
“There was no digging to do. The grave was open. The gravediggers are an odd lot. They seem to work when the spirit moves them. They’d buried some poor bugger, dropped the casket in the hole without shoveling on the lid. I put the treasure in and filled the hole for them.”
“With Sam Bowman in it.”
“There was room.”
Plum trembled involuntarily, and the flashlight beam danced. “You can’t make him sound like a martyr,” Knanda Ndoro went on, chatting pleasantly. “He was no angel, you know. I don’t think you would have liked him at all.”
“Dig.”
He hefted the shovel, sent the blade biting into the rich black soil. His skin, glossy with perspiration, gleamed in the flashlight’s beam. He wielded the shovel with little visible effort, his muscles rippling beneath the smooth skin, the pile of dirt growing at the side of the hole.
“A schemer,” he said, talking as he worked. “A plotter, a criminal, and a compulsive babbler. I’ve been an aficionado of Harlem culture for years, Ta
“Mmm,” I said agreeably.
“But then I’m an adaptable sort. I’ve often reflected that this is a test of greatness, the capacity to adjust to adverse conditions and make the best of them. After I was forced to put an end to Bowman, for example, I had to make fresh plans for escaping from the country. I did so. They fell through, a dreadful example of things going wrong. I barely escaped with my life. Without hesitation I headed for the interior. I’ve lived in urban centers all my life, and yet I adapted to the countryside, learned to live off it. When I encountered that white girl and her little band of madmen I didn’t give up and die. Nor did I try to flee. Instead I took command. Some men are born to lead, Ta