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“Then you turned up, and again I grasped the essence of the situation and looked for a better way. By using you and the child I could return to Griggstown, get clear of the savages. By letting you think I was Bowman I could take advantage of your help.” The disarming smile. “I can scarcely pretend that everything’s gone completely according to plan. One can never prepare for every possible contingency. And I do have that one flaw of insufficient humility against which I shall have to guard in the future.”
“I sincerely hope so.”
“You needn’t worry.” The shovel sank into the earth, the muscles worked, and another load of dirt was transferred from the hole to the pile. “Not everything has gone according to plan,” he went on. “But everything’s worked well enough.”
“Then why are you the one with the shovel?”
“That’s a small point, isn’t it? We’ll all come out of this well enough.”
The flashing smile again, and I thought that it was literally disarming – it had the effect of unloading the shotgun even as I clutched it. The man’s presence and force of personality were extraordinary. I had the gun and he had the shovel, but his ma
He fell silent, and the pile of earth grew as the hole deepened. Plum held onto the flashlight and I held onto the shotgun. The shovel sank into the pit, and the Glorious Retriever sighed with satisfaction.
“Soon,” he said. “I believe I’ve hit it.”
“The treasure?”
He shook his head. “That’s in a metal case. It would make another sort of noise entirely. I think I’ve hit the body.”
He dug some more, and it seemed that he was right. The aroma of carrion filled the air. Then the shovel did hit something metallic, and he used the shovel to scrape off dirt. He set the shovel aside, lifted a huge metal lockbox out of the pit, and climbed out after it.
“Now,” he said, setting the box down. “Now we’ll just – God in heaven!”
He started at the yawning grave, pointed, and my eyes swung in that direction, and I blinked at the remains of Samuel Lonestar Bowman, wondering what I was supposed to be looking at.
“Evan, look out!”
I whirled around, Plum ’s cry ringing in my ears. Ndoro’s foot lashed out, sent the shotgun spi
Chapter 17
“The rest of it was nothing special,” I said. “Just a matter of procedure, really.”
“Procedure.”
I nodded. “We had to leave the country, and I couldn’t very well use my own passport, since I was officially dead. Plum went to see the MMM people, but it turned out that they were all in jail.”
“Still?”
“Not still. Again. Elizabeth finally commuted those sentences to life imprisonment, and that gave the junta the chance they wanted to defy her. They had a mass hanging, and when the MMM crowd showed up to protest it, they all wound up in prison. So I had to bribe a freighter captain to get us to Joha
“ Joha
“Well, I have some friends in Joha
“And then from Joha
“Well,” I said, “not directly. First we had to go to Geneva. There’s a clinic not far from there where they do extraordinary work. They’ve had wonderful success with personality disorders, and the doctor I spoke to said he thought they would be able to work wonders with Jane.”
“Jane?”
“Sheena.”
“You didn’t leave her in Griggstown?”
“Well, how could I? I didn’t think the Pe
“And after all you were married to her.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Kitty-”
She made a moue. Girls are forever making moues in books, but I had never seen one made in real life before. There was a time when I thought they were French desserts. A chocolate moue, s’il vous plait, and a small cognac. Kitty made a moue as if she had had considerable practice doing just that. Then she took a short sip of wine and a long look at me.
“You went to Geneva,” she prompted.
“I had to go to Zurich anyway. To turn the bearer bonds and negotiable paper into cash and put part of it in my account there.”
“Part of it?”
“Well, part of it went to the clinic in Geneva. And part of it went, uh-”
“To Griggstown to finance the work of the MMM,” she supplied. “Don’t gape. How long have I known you? A long time, Evan. Where else did part of it go?”
“That’s all.”
She nodded encouragingly. “So then you came on home.”
“Not exactly. I had to stop off in Amsterdam and sell the diamonds.”
“And from Amsterdam -”
“ Dublin,” I said doggedly.
“ Dublin?”
“I have trouble getting into England. You know that. From Dublin I took the ferry across the Irish Sea. Then we went from Liverpool back into Wales. Glamorganshire, to be specific. We went to this little town called Llundudllumellythludlum-”
“Oh, that little town. We?”
“ Plum and I.”
“I’d almost forgotten about her. You took her to Glublublub? Why?”
I explained. I took Plum to the little Welsh town because the more I thought about it the more I realized there was no other sensible place for her. She was obviously out of it in Modonoland, neither black nor white in a land where the twain never met, and where neither black nor white had it too good anyway. And while the Cape Coloreds in Capetown might have made a place for her, it was a place I wouldn’t have wished on anyone. Nor did I think the good old U.S. of A. was quite what she needed to fulfill herself.
“But she has relatives all over Glamorganshire,” I told Kitty. “On her father’s side. The Welsh Nationalists I put her in touch with were all excited at the idea of digging up relatives of hers. She’ll fit in perfectly. Since she’s the only colored person for miles around she won’t have to worry about prejudice. There’s never prejudice anywhere unless there’s a good-sized group to focus it on.”
“So Plum is in Wales.”
“That’s right. In-”
“Please don’t say the name of the town again.”
“I was going to say the name of the county.”
“Don’t say that either. She’s in Wales and Sheena’s in Switzerland. You’ve managed to scatter your wife and your under-age mistress far and wide, haven’t you?”
I tried to make a moue. It didn’t work. I looked at Kitty, and she looked at me, and I shrugged.
“At any rate,” I said, “here I am. I went back to Dublin and got a plane straight to New York. I’m back.”
“So you are.”
“And I’m ready to put both my feet on the ground now,” I said. “I’ve had a chance to work everything out in my mind. About you and me and Mi
“What in hell is an aluminum storm?”
“You know, those combination windows. Storm windows. I don’t know what they are. They advertise them in the Sunday Times in the section where they offer termite inspections. Whatever they are we’ll have them. We’ll have a sane life, that’s what I’m getting at, a sane and healthy life for both of us, for the three of us, and we can have more children of our own, and maybe a dog, any kind of dog you want, you can pick out the dog-”
I sort of trailed off. She was looking at me with a very strange light in her eyes, and my voice seemed to be echoing oddly in my ears. “Any kind of a dog,” I said, trying again, and let it trail off again because it was not going well.