Night Must Wait (50 page)

No answer, no change in Wilton.

"Well Abraham has nothing on Wilton," Gilman said.

"Gilman, I can give it all back to you," Lindsey said. "A place to work. Significance. All those who came out of Biafra are banned from ever reentering Nigeria, except for you. You belong here. Wilton paid your price."

"You're crazy," Gilman said, straightening. "I'm going to the States if your hirelings are finished tormenting me. I'm going home."

"You have no home. You and I both—we'll never leave Nigeria." Lindsey nodded to Oroko. "Take her and have Thomas guard her in the next room while I draw up instructions for her disposal. Goodbye, Gilman."

"You can't dispose of me." Gilman's eyes went wild.

"Debate it with Oroko," Lindsey said.

Oroko saw the angry child return in Gilman's flushed face. But he also noted that every so often Gilman would glance over as if to reassure herself that Wilton stayed still, did not threaten her, and Wilton didn't look back.

Lindsey turned away from both Oroko and Gilman, standing with her back to them, her face canted, studying the row of music albums on her lower shelf. Oroko wondered what expression she hid, scanning the music without seeming to care anymore for friend, enemy, or employee. Lindsey reached out and selected a battered sleeve, slipped out the black round with its cryptic fine-lined surface so delicately inscribed.

"Take her away, Oroko."

When Oroko indicated the door with an open hand to the woman now his peculiar guest or prisoner, he heard the first notes break onto the slow air. He knew the phrase. It was the Tchaikovsky that never ended.

Gilman moved like a woman who doesn't know why she bothers, not anticipating, as if she hadn't really heard the grant of life in Lindsey's words, the pardon that he too gave. Oroko looked back, but Lindsey and Wilton stood listening to the music.

He found Daniel just the other side of the door waiting for orders and gave him a quick series of hand signals—
restraints, two-man guard
. He turned back into the room and closed the door again, noting that Wilton had moved toward Lindsey, a mere step, but he felt it was too close.

Lindsey had a pad of unlined paper on which she wrote. She took an envelope and folded a page of the work to fit. She looked him in the face as she rarely did, searching. She handed him first a sheet of paper, close written, then the envelope.

"Get these orders processed, immediately. There are instructions for you to read in the envelope for later," Lindsey said.

"You are ill, madam," he said. "I shall order your automobile."

She didn't answer. She considered Wilton instead, and Wilton looked back, as if they struggled, the one with the other in a way he could not control or moderate. Then Lindsey said, as if giving in to some weakness, "Escort the Doctor and Edmund to the car. Take the morning flight North, you know the one. But I would prefer that tonight you remain in this building, that you not commence your journey with the Doctor, until I have left. That will be soon. I do not plan to delay."

Oroko nodded. He didn't ask about Wilton yet. Lindsey still had that to decide.

"Goodnight, Oroko."

Even as he started to object, Lindsey took the revolver into her hand, checked that the safety was still off.

"I will watch her. You need not concern yourself."

"Hurry, Doctor," Oroko said. He pushed Gilman toward the waiting Jeep. "I must not leave her alone for long."

He hissed a signal and Edmund came running. "Guard her as a dangerous prisoner, but do her no harm," Oroko ordered, thrusting the packet of papers into Edmund's hand. "I will meet you at Ikeja, the 6:00 a.m. flight. Purchase two tickets."

He looked up at the looming building and froze, watching the slit of light expand in a window stories above. He felt himself draw breath, but it was too far. No one would hear him. He saw Lindsey's black shape against the bright lit room behind, imagined he heard the music still coming from the old scratched record.

Gilman looked up too, as if drawn by his sudden attention. His inhalation.

Lindsey stood with the metal shutter drawn open, illumined, outlined.

He heard glass, not automobile nor the cheap stuff of bar windows. Office glass. Yet Lagos was a city of breaking glass, picked locks, stolen goods and murder. A common sound. Surely it could have come from anywhere.

"Guard her," he said, shoving Gilman toward Edmund, and then he ran.

In spite of his haste, Oroko was too slow. Knowledge had not prepared him. He found Thomas trying the door, calling out. Gesturing Thomas back, he fumbled his key to unlock Lindsey's office. Crouching low, he entered.

Lindsey lay crumpled with Wilton kneeling by her in front of the shattered window, red blood soaking into carpet. Revolver still upon the desk, music playing on. Wilton straightened over Lindsey's body and he hit her hard back against the wall where she thudded, stunned.

He knelt by Lindsey and touched the marble face, only marred by the neat entry of the assassin's bullet. The exit wound was ugly—the back of her head nearly blown away, a ruin of blood and bone and brain.

Oroko glanced up at the opened window blinds. He schooled his face in a moment, blinked hard against the heat in his eyelids and moved crabwise to Wilton, dragging her by her collar after him across the carpet. He would offer the enemy no second target.

He'd failed. Lindsey had given him the order. She'd ordered him to fail. But he hadn't yet fulfilled his commitment—there remained one thing more.

"Yes, Madame Lindsey," he said aloud, in tribute.

Chapter 114: Wilton

December 1971

Lagos, Nigeria

Wilton knew he was looking at her. At the sound of his soft step her heart leapt with hope and she stayed still, waiting, but he did nothing. Every second counted against her. God had not forgiven her yet.

"Professor," Oroko said.

He'd stayed in the doorway for some minutes. Now Wilton looked up. She could not beg him, or even ask. She could not take control, she must submit to God's intention and not her own.

The reek of blood hung about him, the stains of Lindsey's sogged Oroko's trousers and the cuffs of his shirt. Wilton noted the revolver in his hand with pain, she knew now he would not shoot her here.

"I have no instructions about you, Professor Wilton," he said.

"You don't need any."

"I do. The habit is in me to do as she said."

"Then you are not the son I raised."

She saw him flinch and his fingers seemed to tighten. He continued to watch her, leaning against the door frame.

"Did you kill Sandy?"

"What I said finally drew all the puzzles about her death together, didn't it? It solved the questions you didn't ask?"

He nodded once, his expression difficult to read behind the glasses.

"And Lindsey Kinner?" he said.

"You know better than I can tell you," she said. "All I did was speak with her and wait with her."

"But you didn't stop her."

"No. That was in God's hands."

"You do not weep."

"You'd done all of your crying before I met you. Maybe that is true for me also. Now you've talked too long. You shall have to let me go."

"We can use you," he said.

"If you do not let me go, you will have to kill me later, for the wrong reasons. You know what I know. You know what I have done. Killing, I think, is too kind. It is my sorrow that you agree with that. I go to exile, in a cold land."

"Come," he said, using the revolver to indicate where he wanted her, taking a firm hold of her upper arm. She walked with him out of the room, down the stairs flight after flight, past dozens of worried men in uniform, to the ground floor. None of the guards questioned. No one hesitated to let them pass.

He guided her along a side hall to a back alley exit he unlocked, the revolver pressed to her spine. Then she obeyed the push of the weapon and he followed her out under the hazy stars.

He stood without motion, one long breath in that heavy scented air, garbage and flowers, spilled booze in the street and the thick scent of Lindsey's blood on his shirt and knees where he had knelt. Even here on the raggedly paved street with only a few rank straggles of flowering bush poking over the broken-glass-topped walls around them, insects shrilled and clicked, scuttling in the urban night. As if their lives were only transferred by the changes men had made, not deleted, not quelled. Oroko slipped a hand inside his coat jacket and drew out her passport, handing it over.

She wanted to stop Oroko, beg him, but the panic rising in her throat choked her so no sound emerged. No friend, no home, no place. The tears she had denied flooded up, now that he would not see them. She tried to open her mind to God, but all she heard was the night of insects and lonely men. Oroko lifted his hand from her arm, stepped back deeper into shadow and Wilton went from him into the night.

Chapter 115: Oroko

December 1971

The Road to Borno, Nigeria

"This i
s
your country," Oroko said. "I think you will stay."

Gilman met his glance, her face defiant as if expecting reproach, or perhaps some determination to force her agreement. He saw no call for any of those things. After the flight, he'd taken her on in the Jeep alone, knowing there'd be no further need for extraordinary force.

He was enough. She had no idea how clearly her compliance showed in her face and body. He would have no trouble from her. Her bones knew it as well as he did. The Jeep bumped along the rough roads, through the buff and dull olive of the dry Northern country. They swerved around a straggling group of women moving alongside the road. Each balanced a load on her head, a bright print cloth limp around her waist, dusty limbs lined with sweat in the breezeless morning. Then there was only landscape again.

"Like a dog returning to its vomit," she said suddenly.

"Proverbs 26:11." Oroko spoke without thinking.

"So you had missionary schooling? Bible study?"

"Long ago," he said. "Have you considered that a dog does this because it is his nature, as returning now is yours? Not so much the definition of a fool, only nature calling to its own. You will never leave."

"I could," she said, because it was her nature to argue. He could feel it in her. "I can go straight to the Embassy."

"You have no record of admission to the country," he said. "Your visa exists in no records except for the page on your passport. You are illegal. There is no exit from your past or your present. Take what is yours, Doctor," he said. "This is all you get. There are other friends of Sandy's who would try to revenge her if they thought you living. Don't return to the big cities. Do not walk in the lights there."

"Won't you tell them yourself that I'm innocent? So you don't look a fool for failing to punish me?"

He shrugged and did not answer. He didn't want to explain that he had no audience to tell. No judge, now that Lindsey Kinner and Sandy Hemsfort were gone. He heard Gilman sigh in frustration, but she still feared him—he could tell from the way she held herself within the rattling vehicle.

"What happened to your friend Wilton? What really happened?" he said.

"We broke her."

She was quiet a few more miles. "Did you know Wilton?"

Oroko nodded. He knew the mirrored sunglasses hid his eyes.

"Was she good to you?"

Gilman looked at him as if she might catch some clue whether or not he listened, and out of some impulse he couldn't fathom, Oroko nodded.

She fell silent and perhaps half a mile passed before her voice sounded again, this time bursting out as if she'd finished the previous sentence a mere breath ago.

"Once I lost someone I wanted to protect."

"Your mercenary lover."

"Yes, Tom Jantor."

She shook her head, the loose hair whipping about her face until she reached up and fought the strands into the coil of hair knotted at the nape of her neck.

"Wilton couldn't have felt each individual death as hard as that, but there were so many, and they ripped her apart because she was both American and Nigerian. Have you ever been to America?"

She didn't seem to need his response, so he gave none. Of course, she assumed he never had.

"You probably never saw anything like the America Wilton knew," Gilman said. "Never imagined it. But it's real too. If you knew, Oroko…It was too big a difference for her to bridge. No one could stretch between without breaking."

He turned on to the smaller side road and the light grew long, the shadows of tall rocks and stubby trees reaching into each other. He slowed at the next turnoff, going up the pebbled rise on the beaten track. The corrugated tin roofs of several long, low buildings came into view, euphorbia bushes ranked into defensive walls about the large compound. Oroko brought the car to a stop and looked at Gilman. He pulled a folder of papers from the glove compartment and handed them to her.

"Did you kill Wilton?" she asked as if she might surprise a new truth out of him.

"God will give her peace," he said.

She got out of the jeep as if now at the end she simply had nothing else to do. But he knew better. She had work to do, another woman to become. She turned with a half salute, not really looking at him, the papers flapping once, and walked away toward the hunched hospital buildings waiting for her, into the dust and the brilliance until even with his sunglasses he had to close his eyes for a moment before he took the wheel again and backed the vehicle around.

Oroko glanced once into the rearview mirror before he turned down the curving drive, but it was as if the sun had eaten her. All the mirror held was the light itself.

Message from the Author

Thank you for picking up this book and traveling with me for a while. As mentioned in the acknowledgements, the references I used fill shelves. This is fiction; only a few established historical figures herein ever drew breath, and I wanted to serve my story arc, not simply recount events. I've stretched time and shifted historical events, placed my words in the mouths of historical figures.