Bob Quilp was out in the living-room waiting for the call from Aaron saying that Parker would cooperate, that everything was going to be all right. Daask had a very strong feeling about the closeness of this kitchen, his solitude with this woman, the persistent sexual overtones of the relationship thrust upon them. He couldn’t help it, and he didn’t intend to do anything about it, but the aura itself was pleasurable and he wanted to prolong it.
“A glass of milk,” he said. “Would you like that?”
“I want to go upstairs again,” she said. She got to her feet and stood there waiting.
Daask was suddenly irritated by her. Didn’t she feel the ambience between them? Wasn’t she aware of what sort of person he couldbe, how lucky she was that he was gentle? He wanted to say something about it, to point it out to her, but he couldn’t find any phrasing that didn’t sound silly somehow. Or threatening.
He shrugged and got to his feet. “Up to you,” he said. “You go first.”
They went up to the second floor, and she went willingly into her room. He stood in the doorway a minute, watching her go over to the bed and sit down with her back to him.
Then he said, “In a little while we’ll have to tie you up.”
She turned her head, and it pleased him to see a little glint of fear in her eyes. “Why? I won’t try to get away.”
“We’ll be leaving,” he said. “We’ll tie you when we go. But we’re going to tell Parker where you are, so don’t worry. He’ll probably be here before morning.”
She shook her head. “He won’t do what you want him to do.”
“Of course he will,” Daask said reasonably. “You’re more important to him than Gonor is; it only makes sense.”
“He can’t stand to be pushed,” she said.
“He’ll cooperate,” Daask said. “It’s only sensible.”
She shrugged and turned her back again.
Daask was about to say something else, but from downstairs he heard the ringing of a telephone. “That’s it now,” he said and shut the door. He locked it and hurried back downstairs.
3
William Manado sat on the floor in the back of the truck and fingered his machine gun. It was too dark to see anything except when an occasional automobile drove down Thirty-eighth Street from Park Avenue and its headlights shone through the windows in the rear doors, illuminating himself and Formutesca sitting across the way. Formutesca smiled encouragingly at him every time there was light that way, but in the intervals of darkness there was no encouragement from anywhere, and Manado was frightened.
He hadn’t shown it; not to Formutesca, not to Parker, certainly not to Gonor. He hadn’t shown it, he wouldn’t show it, and he wouldn’t let it interfere. But he couldn’t deny it either he was afraid.
Unlike Formutesca and Gonor, unlike most of the governing class of Dhaba, Manado was not from a professional family. There were no doctors, lawyers, civil servants or engineers in his background. He had come from a village family, a very poor village family, and he would be a very poor villager himself today if it were not for one thing. Manado could run.
He was fast, and he was tireless, and he could pace himself. He had run himself on to the track team at Tchidanga School, and he had run himself into an exchange scholarship for a Midwestern American university. Fortunately, his brain was as fast as his body, and he’d been able to take advantage of the advantages his running had brought him. He majored in political science at the American university, mostly because all exchange students were expected to major in political science, and took his minor in mathematics, because he liked to watch numbers run. As for America, what that country offered him because he had brains and speed baffled him almost as much as what was refused him because he was black. Afterwards, when people at home asked him about that, what it was like to be a black man in America, he always said, “Well, it takes some getting used to.” What he meant was, “I’m not sure, but I think maybe it’s worth getting used to.”
His experience of the United States got him offered the post at the UN mission, and the ambivalence of his feelings toward the United States made him accept. Would it be different in New York City from in the Midwest? Would it be different for a member of a UN mission rather than a student? Not much.
In a way, it was America’s ambivalence toward him that first made him consciously a patriot about his homeland. He saw that Dhaba with idealistic men at her helm could eventually offer everything America offers, and without the left-handed taking away. He wanted that; he wanted it badly.
Badly enough to be sitting here in this darkness, a machine gun cradled in his lap, waiting to steal and to kill.
Could he kill? He hated the Kasempas for their rape of his homeland. He was afraid of them for their reputations as brutal men. What the hatred and the fear would combine to form he didn’t yet know. He had never killed anyone, had rarely ever fought with anyone. He had a secret admiration for men like Parker, who could face the bloodiest possibilities without flinching, but he believed he could never be like them.
He heard movement, a rustling sound, and knew it was Formutesca looking at his watch again, reading the green fingers of the luminous dial. Then Formutesca whispered, “Two o’clock.”
Time. Manado nodded, even though Formutesca couldn’t see him, and moved on hands and knees to the rear of the truck dragging his machine gun behind him. He looked out the window in the door and the street was empty, so he pushed the door open and climbed out to the street, leaving the machine gun on the floor of the truck.
Formutesca climbed out after him. “Start unloading,” he said and went around to talk to Gonor in the cab of the truck.
Manado brought out the ladder and propped it against the rear of the truck. Then he got his own machine gun, found Formutesca’s, and wrapped them both in an old pink bedspread and laid the package on the curb. Finally he took out the long wooden toolkit and put that also on the curb. He shut the doors, and Formutesca came back.
“All set,” Formutesca said.
