Promptly at eight o’clock, the sergeant carried a cooler into the house, rattled pots and pans in the kitchen, and served my dinner, all five courses at once. The food was French. “This is the same food that all the presidents will be eating at the state dinner,” the sergeant said. I ate only the heated-up entree, medallions of veal in a cream sauce that had separated because the sergeant had let it boil.
Around two in the morning, the sergeant’s walkie-talkie squawked. He lifted it to his ear, heard what sounded to me like a single word, and replied with what also seemed to be a single word. The conversation lasted less than a second. He said, “Come, Mr. Brown. It is time to go.”
We drove through a maze of streets but on this night of revelry saw no sleepers by the wayside. Everybody was still celebrating. Oil lamps and candles glowed in the blackness like red and yellow eyes, as if the entire genus carnivora was drawn up in a hungry circle on the outskirts of the party. Music blared from loudspeakers, people danced, thousands of shouted conversations stirred the stagnant, overheated air. The city had become one enormous, throbbing Equator Club. The sergeant maneuvered the Austin through the pandemonium with one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the hooter, constantly beeping to let people know that he wasn’t trying to sneak up on them and kill them. Not since Independence Night, I thought, could there have been so many witnesses awake at this hour, ready to observe whatever Benjamin was going to do next.
At last we drove out of the crowd and into the European quarter. Through the rear window I could see the distorted, smoky-red glow of the city. I imagined I could feel the earth quivering in rhythm to the innumerable bare feet that were pounding it in unison a mile or so away. The music and the shouting were very loud even at such a distance.
The sergeant drove at his usual brisk pace, lights off as usual. He parked the car and switched off the engine. By now my eyes had adjusted, and I could see another police car parked a few yards away. We were parked on a low hilltop, and the red glow of the city caught in the mirror-shine of its metal. Soon a third car drove up and parked close beside us. It was Benjamins Rover, identifiable by the baritone throb of its engine. The driver’s cap badge caught a little light. A large man who might have been Benjamin sat in the backseat alone.
Moving swiftly, Benjamin got into the backseat with me. The dome light blinked. He wore the dress uniform I supposed he had worn to the state dinner-long pants, white shirt with necktie, short epauletted mess jacket that the Brits call a bum freezer, decorations. Benjamin smelled as usual of starch, brass polish, soap, his own musk.
Headlights swept up the hill, turned sharp left into the street that paralleled the one on which our own cars were parked, then stopped. Car doors slammed, men moved quick-time, a key turned in a lock, a door squeaked as it was opened, a scratchy Edith Piaf LP played five or six bars of “Les amants de Paris.”
We were parked behind the house into which Ga had gone to keep his rendezvous for tonight. Jumpy light showed in an upstairs window, dim and yellowish, as if filtering down a hallway from another room. The back door opened. A flashlight blinked. The Rover’s headlights flashed in reply.
“Come,” Benjamin said. He got out of the car and strode into the darkness. I followed. The sergeant got something out of the trunk, then slammed the lid. Behind me I heard his brogans at a run. We went through the open door. Inside the house, the record changed on the hi-fi, and Piaf began to sing “Il Pleut.” Benjamin, entirely at home, strode down a hallway, then up a stairway. At the top, in half-shadow outside a half-open bedroom door, a policeman stood at attention as if he did not quite know exactly what was expected of him or what would happen next.
In a mirror I saw a man and a woman engaged in vigorous coitus and heard the woman’s moans and outcries. The sergeant marched into the room. Benjamin gave me a little push, and I marched in behind him. The room was full of burning candles. The smell of incense was strong. Smoke hung in the air. The woman shouted something in what sounded to me like Swedish. She was quite small. President Ga, lying on top of her, covered her completely. Her legs were wound around his waist, ankles crossed, feet in gilt shoes with stiletto heels. I looked into the mirror in hope of seeing the girl’s face. My eyes met Ga’s. The candlelight exaggerated the size of his startled, wide-open eyes. His face twisted into a mask of furious anger, and he rolled off the woman, knocking off one of her shoes. Now I saw her face, smeared lipstick and tousled hair. She was a cookie-cutter blonde, as flawless as a dummy in a store window.
I knew what was coming next, of course. The sergeant took one step forward. In his outstretched hands he held the valise that I remembered so well. Evidently that was what he had retrieved from the trunk of the Austin. The snap of brass latches sounded like the metallic one-two of the slide of an automatic pistol. The sergeant opened the valise and turned it upside down. The mamba flowed out of the bag with the same unbelievable swiftness, as if it were coming into being before our eyes. I tried to leap backward, but Benjamin stood immediately behind me, blocking the way. President Ga and the blonde froze as if captured in a black-and-white photograph by the flash of a strobe light.
The snake, a blur as it attacked, struck at the nearest target, President Ga. He grunted as if a bullet had entered his body His mouth opened wide and he shouted in English, “Oh, Jesus, Sweet Jesus!” It was a prayer, not a blasphemy. In the same breath he uttered a tremendous sob. Between these two primal sounds, the woman, screaming, threw her body over the foot of the bed. Somehow she landed behind us on all fours in the hallway. Still shrieking, still wearing one gilt shoe, she sprinted down the hallway. The constable in the hall pursued her for a step or two, picked up the shoe after she kicked it off, and caught her by the hair, which was very long. Her head jerked back, but she kept going, leaving the constable with a handful of blond threads in his hand. He stared at these in puzzlement, then blew his whistle. At the head of the stairs the woman was captured by a second constable, a man almost as large as Benjamin. He carried her, squirming, kicking, screaming, back toward the bedroom. Her skin was so white that I half-expected powder to fly from it. She bit his face. He twisted her jaw until she let go, and when he saw his own blood on her teeth he slammed her twice against the wall, then let go of her, throwing his hands wide in disgust that a woman should have attacked him, should have bitten him. Her limp, unconscious body slid to the floor. She landed with a thump on her round bottom, her back against the wall, her head lolling inside its curtain of hair. She twitched as if dreaming, and I wondered if her spine was broken. She had shapely breasts, pretty legs, peroxided delta, and it looked as though she had lipsticked her nipples. For some reason, maybe because this touch of perversity was so unimaginative, so innocent, such a learner’s trick, my heart went out to her, if only for a moment.
Behind me I heard a gunshot. In the confined space of the bedroom it sounded like an artillery round going off. The stink of cordite mingled with the incense. Benjamin stood over the bed with a smoking Webley in his hand. The headless snake in its death throes whipped uncontrollably over the bed, spraying blood on Ga and the sheets. With his hands protecting his genitals, Ga scooted rapidly backward over the bed to escape the serpent, even though he must have known that it was now harmless. What a seed God planted in the human mind on the day that Adam ate the apple! From the look on Ga’s face it was clear that he believed that he himself was dying almost as fast as the snake had just done, but his instincts, from which he could not escape, instructed him to cover his nakedness and flee for his life.