whistle would abort, presumably, and he could go where he should be. Boyle was heading for the Portosans.
He had to hurry. He signaled vaguely to Iris, not sure she was getting what he was trying to convey. He handed his plate of tomatoes to the wife of the embassy’s communication officer, who was there making herself useful but who seemed nonplussed at his act.
Boyle led him past the Portosans and around to the back of the residence garage. There was a door in the rear wall and Boyle would have a key. He had keys to everything. He gave Boyle time to let himself in and light up his Santos Dumont. He would be ready for Ray when he could address him from the center of a cloud of smoke. This was going to have to do with Wemberg.
Ray entered the garage. Boyle, in his flowing white linen suit perfect for the temperature but wrong for the memorial service, was there, glimmering and smoking.
It was about Wemberg. It was urgent, supposedly. Boyle handed him a notecard with five license plate numbers scrawled on it. He had nobody else to send on this errand, which was to go three blocks away to a parking area and ascertain which cars with the license plates indicated were
There was no time to talk because people would be leaving. It had been established that Wemberg was not back at his flat or at any of the other likely locations. Somebody, some group sympathetic to Wemberg’s complaints against the government and the embassy, had given him sanctuary, was Boyle’s guess. The idea was to move fast. If this was an ad hoc thing, the faster they moved the sooner they would find Wemberg and get him on a plane. The ambassador wanted Wemberg on a plane tomorrow, or at least no later than the next day.
I have no interest in this, Ray thought: Let me alone before I miss everything. He had to get back to Iris and Morel. Mine enemy gleams, he thought. He was sounding rather high-romantic to himself and wondered what that was about.
Just as Ray was about to go, Boyle stopped him. He wanted to be certain Ray could read the scrawled license plate numbers, so he took out his penlight and held the beam on the card while Ray read the numbers aloud for him. Ray had been able to make out the letters and numbers perfectly, using available light. It was all a waste of precious time and it was typical of Boyle. Boyle was insane.
Securing the license plate information had taken less time than Ray had anticipated, but locating Boyle once he was back with the information had become nightmarish because stupidly they hadn’t fixed on a rendezvous point in advance. So he had had to find Boyle, who was busy machinating someplace, without showing to anyone the slightest interest in where the man might be. He had found him after a tedious period of wandering through the dissolving event. Finally a crisscross pass had been arranged by the usual winks and nods. When it was done he was tired of life.
Poor Iris. Her lot had been to wait and watch patiently while he came and went, circulated, self-evidently doing nothing. She had known roughly what was going on. She had waited, abandoned, sitting in the horseshoe pitch on an upturned wastebasket, feigning interest in a fashion magazine, which had probably been for his benefit. There was no subject she hated more than fashion. Morel had gone. Kerekang and his urchins had gone.
He collected her.
“I am dying,” she said. “You abandon me.” They were walking home, although dragging themselves home would be closer to it.
She went on. “You abandon me. You aren’t supposed to.”
“I know,” he said.
“I should be used to it. I guess it hasn’t happened for a while because it hit me this time with a sort of shock, like the old days when it happened all the time. Which led to an understanding, you may recall. You would not let this happen to me unless it was an absolute emergency.”
“Which this was. Well, it classified as an emergency.”
“I won’t ask you what it was. You know I was out there in suspended animation for a whole hour. I considered holding the magazine upside down as a distress signal, would you have noticed? I won’t ask you what the emergency was because I know you can’t tell me.”
He considered violating the house rules. She would appreciate it if he did. And this situation was something she had undoubtedly put together for herself already.
He said, “I’ll tell you what it was. But please tell me you won’t ever do anything like that magazine trick. People notice things. Say you won’t.”
“I never have, I wouldn’t, but I wanted to. I wanted to hold the thing upside down, and wave it in the air every time you passed.”
“Good Lord.”
“Don’t worry.”
“Anyway, you noticed how Dwight was nowhere to be seen. Well, they have him set up for a flight home tomorrow at noon. He was supposed to go back to get his bags, which Maeve had packed for him, and then come back and stay the night at the DCM’s.
“He’s a missing person. And he didn’t just wander off somewhere.
“The theory is that he prevailed on somebody to hide him out so he can continue his campaign. He kept saying he wouldn’t leave Africa without Alice’s body, and he meant it, apparently.
“So now we don’t know where he is. He has a wide circle of friends, Batswana friends, and so did Alice. They need to find him right away, so I had to go and check some license plates. They know he left in a car. I had to check on which cars had been parked in a certain place and no longer were, if you see what I mean. I had no choice. There was nobody else to do it. Everybody else was tasked up.”
She was listening closely. She looked at him with an expression distinctly combining gratitude and surprise.
“Thank you,” she said. “I mean it.”
He thought, If she thinks this is the thin end of the wedge, she’s wrong…
“And all the wandering around mysteriously, what was that?”
“It was part of the deal.”
“I know, but it seemed so strange and protracted…”
“It wasn’t very strange.”
After a silence, she said, “I know who you report to, by the way.”
This didn’t surprise Ray very much. He shrugged.
“And I’m sorry for you. I knew before today, so don’t worry that it’s anything you did this afternoon. Anyway it’s the new consular officer and I pity you, I do.”
“Are you saying that because it’s always the consular officer? Because it isn’t always the consular officer.”
“No, everybody knows. He’s awful. All the people I know, know. I just look interested. I play dumb, don’t worry. Also if your previous boss was that very nice Marion Resnick, I’m sorry for you. What a contrast. You can confirm my guess by pulling your earlobe if you want to.”
“I can’t say anything about this.”
“But you do understand that everybody knows.”
“Maybe they only think they know.”
“Oh I don’t think so. But that’s all right.”
She stopped, spun against him, and locked her arms around him in a hard embrace, there on the street. Immediately he felt calmer.
He noticed that he was hungry. He hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast.
On impulse, he said, “Should we go someplace for coffee?”
She said, “I like the idea, but it’s Sunday. One of the hotels would be about it. I don’t want to get caught in the braai at the Sun, but we could go to the coffee shop. Everything else is closed, the regular places.”
The hotel they were nearest to was the Sun, but she didn’t love going there. She disliked it because the tone of the place was corrupted by the casino, the types it attracted. The Sun was off his normal beat, for obvious reasons. He was a schoolteacher. But when he had a plausible reason to go there, he went. He liked it for the same reasons that Iris didn’t. It was a sink of vice, so you saw temptation winning or losing, loss of composure, certain
