with the ski poles, knees bent, hips sashaying, slaloming down a snow-sided mountain, from the looks of her.
Juma, in pretending to ski, pretended to lose his balance. On one leg, arms pinwheeling for a long time, he pretended to be trying to regain his balance. Finally, he let himself fall. Dust rose around him.
A large monkey, scolding angrily, tried to take one of the ski poles from Barbara.
After Carr treated the people, they wandered back into the jungle or the bush on narrow footpaths.
“Terrible eye troubles.” Carr said. “So close to the equator, without protection from the sun. And there are always the flies.” He waved a dozen flies away from a child’s face. “And burns. The children try to help out with the cooking. They play too close to the fires. Or they fall out of their mother’s breast-slings or back-slings into the fire. The mothers, you see: most of them are children themselves.”
Most of the mothers were long-legged girls, skirted this way and that with
“Is this meddling?” Carr was getting tired. “I should ask the good Dr. McCoy if what we ordinary folks do here in the bush is meddling. What some of these bloody science chaps would like to do is put a glass case over Africa and view it all as history.”
Looking across the compound, Fletch said, “Couldn’t put Juma under a glass case. He’d break it.”
“I believe he would,” Carr said.
“By the way, Carr, I’m remembering that Barbara and I didn’t take any medical shots before we left the States.”
“You’ll be all right,” Carr said. “Be sure and take your whiskey.” He glanced out to see where the sun was. “But, first, let’s walk the riverbanks. I’ll show you how far I haven’t gotten with my crazy idea. Lost Roman city,” Carr said. “Pah! I’m crazy!”
“Last night I read the previous two days’ newspaper reports on the murder you saw at the airport,” Carr said as he and Fletch ambled along the riverbank. “I also talked with Dan Dawes.”
“You talk to Dan Dawes?”
“Why not? He’s a schoolteacher.”
“He’s also a paralegal executioner.”
“That, too. Here we refer to him as being ‘very close to the police.’”
“He’s a hit man for the cops.”
“There is great diversity in this world, Irwin. One must not expect the same standards everywhere.”
“Sorry. Go on.” As he walked, Fletch slapped at the flies on his arms, his legs.
“The murder victim’s name was Louis Ramon. He was carrying a French passport. In a money belt he was also carrying an extraordinary amount of German marks—about one hundred thousand United States dollars’ worth.”
“He wasn’t robbed?”
“No. They found the money on him.”
Fletch marveled softly, “He wasn’t even robbed by the police.”
“Interpol’s return cable said that Louis Ramon was some sort of a low-life currency trader, opportunist, possibly smuggler. He first came to their attention five years ago when he was suspected of moving a large amount of Italian lire into Switzerland, and again, three years ago, of moving a large amount of French francs into Albania. He has been fined and admonished, but has never served time in prison, as far as they know. Here, come this way. I’ll show you what we’re doing.”
They turned right into the jungle and followed a track wide enough for a Jeep about twenty-five meters from the river. Foliage was beginning to overgrow the track.
At the end of the track they came to a circular clearing.
In the center of the clearing was a hole in the ground so small Fletch wouldn’t have noticed it if it weren’t for the settling mound of dirt surrounding it.
“We dig holes with a giant corkscrew,” Carr said seriously, “see what comes up. What we use is actually a sort of primitive machine they use to look for water, before digging a well. We can only go down about fifteen meters. Do you think fifteen meters, forty-five feet, is enough to reach back two or three thousand years? I doubt it.” He kicked the earth with his boot. “Soft earth. Jungle growth.”
Carr led the way back toward the river. “Every hundred meters or so along the river, we go about twenty-five meters into the jungle and dig our little hole. Do you think that’s far enough from the river? Too far? I think it’s more likely a settlement would have been on the west side of the river, the inland side from the sea, don’t you? We’re apt to dig more holes anywhere there’s an elevation in the land.”
“How long have you been doing this?” Fletch asked.
“About eighteen months. Lots of holes, up and down both sides of the river.”
They headed south along the river again.
“Anyway,” Carr continued, “Louis Ramon was on your plane from London. The suspicion is that he came to Kenya to pull off some sort of a currency scheme, and his partner, or accomplice, or whoever he met at the airport in Nairobi, simply did him in.”
“Not his partner,” Fletch said. “Not his accomplice.”
“Oh? Why not?”
“Because a partner or an accomplice would have known Ramon was carrying a hundred thousand dollars in German marks, and taken them. He had plenty of time. He wasn’t that conscious that I was there. I mean, if you’re going to stab someone in a men’s room, you might as well rob him, right?”
“I forgot you’re an investigative reporter,” Carr said. “Old Josie Fletcher must be proud of you. You have her brain.”
“I deal in reality,” Fletch muttered. They were passing another track into the jungle. “I think it was more of an accidental meeting. There was no prologue to the argument I heard. The voices were surprised. Immediately enraged. It was all very fast. It was as if two men met accidentally, two men who had known each other, hated each other before, had some ancient, powerful grudge between them, or maybe even saw each other as an immediate danger to each other, or one to the other. It was too fast,” Fletch said. “I wish I understood Portuguese.”
Carr was leading him up another jungle track.
In the clearing was what appeared certainly to be a giant corkscrew. An aluminum frame sat on the ground, four meters square at its base, one meter square at its top, about three meters tall. Sticking through it and twelve meters above it was a slim screw shaft. On each of the four sides of the frame was a wheel one meter in diameter with a perpendicular handle of the sort found on coffee grinders.
“I guess Sheila decided to backtrack,” Carr said.
He stooped over the fresh mound of dirt and combed through it with his fingers. “Nothing. Do you think we’re crazy?”
“What does it matter? Everyone’s thought crazy until proven right.”
Carr stood up and dusted off his hands. “Usually people are proven wrong, aren’t they?”
“Yeah,” Fletch said. “I guess most people are crazy.”
“To choose your own way of being crazy,” Carr said, stepping out again. “That’s the thing.”
When they were back walking the riverbank south, Fletch asked Carr, “How would such a currency scheme as Louis Ramon seemed to be attempting work?”
“I don’t know,” Carr said. “I’m not sure I want to know. But I do know that having that much foreign currency in Kenya is illegal.”
“Why?”
“As far as its currency is concerned, Kenya’s economy is closed. You may not take more than ten
“How do they manage that?”
