the coffee and watching the street. Nothing had happened since the police had left and Major Indindu had arrived. It was now twenty minutes to five.
The Major said, “Is there more of that coffee?”
“A pot in the kitchen,” Parker told him.
“I’ll get you some,” Formutesca said.
“Thank you.”
As Formutesca hurried from the room, the Major walked over to Parker and said, “Frankly, I don’t understand where you fit into all this. Things seem to have gotten more confused than poor Gonor indicated to me.”
“Gonor did some things wrong at the beginning,” Parker said. “They came back to bite him at the end.”
The Major looked doubtful. “Was it as simple as that?”
“Yes. He went to Hoskins, he told Hoskins the story without first finding out if Hoskins was the right man, and after that Hoskins couldn’t keep away. He’d been told how much gravy there was here and he couldn’t help himself; he had to try for it.”
“Couldn’t you have done anything?”
“I did. I leaned on him. I told him to go away. I hung him out my hotel window.”
“You should have dropped him,” the Major said.
Parker shook his head. “No. He was an irritation to me, that’s all, so I made sure he wouldn’t hang around me and bother me. I didn’t have to kill him for that, and Gonor didn’t hire me to do any killings for him. I told Gonor that Hoskins was hanging around, that he could be trouble. If Gonor had wanted him dead he should have done it himself.”
“Did you know Hoskins would try something tonight?”
“No. I thought he’d been convinced.”
“Perhaps Gonor did too.”
Parker shrugged. “We were wrong.”
“You’re supposed to be the professional at this,” the Major said.
“Not at people. Nobody’s a professional at people. Hoskins was a con man, nothing else. He’d never made a direct offensive move in his life. There was no reason to suppose he’d act that way tonight. You can use hindsight and make it make sense, but you couldn’t have called it ahead of time. Besides, Gonor was over by Hoskins’ car, on the other side of the street, so it looks as though Gonor went to him and forced the issue. Hoskins might have been figuring on just hanging around, watching, following them after they left here, hoping for a time when he could pull a sneak on them.”
Formutesca came in with the Major’s coffee. “Here you are, sir. Cream, no sugar.”
“You remembered. Thank you so much.”
Formutesca said to Parker, “You know, I was thinking. It’s a good thing you came back. I couldn’t have taken charge out there. I’d have fallen apart. I’d have just stood around shaking in my boots till the police showed up.”
The Major said, “I’m sure you would have done well, Bara.”
Formutesca smiled weakly and shook his head. “I’m sure I wouldn’t.”
The Major sipped at his coffee, then said to Parker, “How is it that you didappear? I was under the impression you had left for good this afternoon.”
“I did. But other things happened.”
“For instance?”
“Sit down,” Parker told him. “This’ll take a while.”
3
Parker said:
My woman was supposed to be waiting for me in Boston. When I left Gonor I went to my hotel to check out and take the shuttle flight to Boston. In my room was one of Goma’s white troops, one of the three that had tried to muscle me into keeping out of this. He told me he and his friends had taken my woman and they had her in a safe place. When they got the diamonds I could have her back.
I said there wasn’t any way I could get the diamonds away from you people by myself, and he said his group would take care of getting them all I had to do was tell him what was going on tonight, where you people would be, what the plan was.
I told him I wanted to think it over, I needed some time. Mostly I didn’t want to tip things too early; I didn’t want his bunch breaking in here before you people. So we sat around my room for a while, and then we went and had dinner, and then I gave him a story.
I told him the Kasempas were holed up out on Long Island on a small estate on the north shore. I told him I’d only been out there once we didn’t want to make ourselves conspicuous hanging around, so I was vague about where the place was. I said we worked out our attack plan from a map of the property Gonor had made plus blueprints of the house. I said I thought the house belonged to the UN mission of one of the other African countries near Dhaba, but I didn’t know which one.
I said you people were going to hit the place at two this morning, that you were going to kill everybody and then set the place on fire to cover up. I said the place was so isolated nobody would know about the fire until at least tomorrow sometime. And I said that afterwards you weren’t going back to Gonor’s apartment, you were coming here to this unused museum.
