“This type of gazelle is common,” Ga said. “There are hundreds of thousands of them in herds in Tanganyika. They can outrun a lion. Watch.”
The word suddenly does not convey the speed of what happened next. Out of the blinding light in which it had somehow been concealing itself as it stalked the Tommy, a cheetah materialized, moving at sixty miles an hour. A cheetah can cover a hundred meters in less than three seconds. The Tommy saw or sensed this blur of death that hurtled toward him and leaped three or four feet straight up into the air, then hit the ground running. The Tommy was slightly slower than its predator, but far more nimble. When the cheetah got close enough to attack, the little gazelle would make a quick turn and escape. This happened over and over again. The size of the paddock-or playing field, as Ga must have thought of it-was an advantage to the Tommy, who would lead the cheetah straight to the fence, then make a last-second turn. Once or twice the cheetah crashed into the wire.
“This is almost over,” Ga said. “Usually it lasts only a minute or so. If the cat does not win very quickly, it runs out of strength and gives up.”
A second later, the cheetah won. The gazelle turned in the wrong direction, and the cat brought it down. A cheetah is not strong enough to break the neck of its prey, so it kills by suffocation, biting the throat and crushing the windpipe. The Tommy struggled, then went limp. The cheetah’s eyes glittered. So did Ga’s.
Beaming, he threw an arm around my shoulders. He said, “Wonderful, eh?”
I smelled the food and wine on his breath, felt his excited heart beating against my shoulder. Then, without a good night or even a facial expression, Ga turned on his heel, and, surrounded by his snake sweepers and his gun bearer, marched away and disappeared into the palace. The evening was over. His guests had ceased to exist.
We lost no time in leaving. Minutes later, as we rolled toward the wakening city in Benjamin’s Rover, I asked a question.
“Is he always so hospitable?”
“Tonight you saw one Ga,” Benjamin said. “There are a thousand of him.”
I could believe it. In this one evening I had seen him in half a dozen incarnations, Mussolini redux, gourmet, Joe College, tender friend, zoologist, mythologist, and a fun-loving god who stage-managed animal sacrifices to himself.
The Rover purred along a smoothly paved but deserted road, bush to the left and right, the sticky night dark as macadam. Headlights appeared behind us and approached at high speed. The sergeant switched off the Rover’s lights and pulled off the road. The tires bit into soft dirt. Benjamin and I were slammed together hip and shoulder. We were being overtaken by a motorcade. A Cadillac, the lead car, swept by at high speed, then a Rolls-Royce, then another Cadillac as chase car.
“The president,” Benjamin said calmly when the Rover stopped bouncing. “He always has a woman or two before the sun rises. He is quick with them, never more than fifteen min-utes, then he goes back to the presidential palace. He never goes to the same woman twice in the same month.”
“He keeps thirty-one women?”
“More, in case one of them is not clean on a certain night.”
“How does he choose which one?”
“Each woman has a number. Each month Ga receives from somebody in St. Louis, Missouri, what is called a dream book. It is used in America to play the numbers game. He uses the number in the dream book for the day.”
I said, “So if you want to find him on any given night, you match the woman’s number to the number for that particular day in the dream book.”
“Yes, if you know the address of every woman, that is the key,” Benjamin said.
He smiled and placed a hand on my shoulder, pleased as a proud father with the quickness of my mind.
For the next several days there was no sign of Benjamin. I was not locked up, but as a practical matter this meant that I was confined to the safe house during daylight hours. There was nowhere to go at night. Like any other prisoner I invented ways to pass the empty hours. Solitude and time-wasting did not bother me; I was used to them; both were occupational hazards. I was concerned by the lack of exercise, because I did not want to run out of breath in case I had to make a run for it. This seemed a likely outcome. How else could this situation end?
I jogged in place for an hour every morning, and in the afternoon ran the 100- and the 220-yard dashes, also in place but flat out. I did push-ups and sit-ups and side-straddle hops. I punched and karate-chopped the sofa cushions until I had beaten every last mote of dust from them. I jitterbugged in my socks to cracked 78 rpm records I found in a closet, Louis Armstrong, the Harmonica Rascals, the Andrews Sisters. Satchmo’s “Muskrat Ramble” and the sisters’ “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B” provided the best workouts.
The sergeant stopped by every day to cook lunch and dinner and wash up afterward. He brought quality groceries, and he was a good cook, specializing in curries and local piripiri dishes loaded with cayenne pepper that made the heart beat in the skull. I asked him to bring me books. He refused money to pay for them or the groceries-apparently I was covered by a budget in secret funds-and came back from the African market the next day with at least one Penguin paperback by every writer I had named and a few more besides. The books were dog-eared and food- and coffee-stained, and most were missing pages.
I was in bed, reading a W. Somerset Maugham short story about adulterers in Malaya, when Benjamin finally showed up. As usual he chose the wee hours of the morning for his visit. He was as stealthy as he had been when he visited me in the hotel, and I heard no car or any other sound of his approach.
All the same I felt his presence before he materialized out of the darkness. He seemed to be alone. He carried a battered leather valise, the kind that has a hinged top that opens like a mouth when the catch is released. The valise seemed to jump in his hand, as if it contained a disembodied muscle. I rationalized this by thinking that he must be trembling for some reason. Maybe he had had a bout of fever and was not quite recovered. That would explain why I hadn’t seen him for a week.
Then, at the instant when I realized that there was something alive inside the valise and it was trying to get out, Benjamin held the bag upside down over my bed and pressed the catch. The bag popped open and a huge blue-black mamba uncoiled itself from within. It landed on my legs. With blinding speed it coiled and struck. I felt the blow, a soft punch but no sting, on my chest just above the heart. I knew that I was a dead man. So apparently did the mamba. It stared into my eyes, waiting (or so I thought) for my heart to stop, for the power of thought to switch off. No more than a second had passed. Already I felt cold. An ineffable calm settled upon me. The laboring air conditioner in the window was suddenly almost silent. My hearing seemed to be going first. Next, I thought, the eyes. I felt no pain. I thought, Maybe after all there is a God, or was a God, if the last moment of life has been arranged in such a kindly and loving way.
Dreamily I watched as Benjamin’s hand, black as the mamba, seized the snake behind the head. The serpent struggled, lashing its body and winding itself around Benjamin s arm. The sergeant appeared, stepping out of the darkness and into the light of my reading lamp just as Benjamin had done. It took the combined strength of these two powerful men to stuff the thing back into the valise and close it. They did so without the slightest sign of fear. In the half-light, with their faces close together, they looked more than ever like brothers. How strange it was, I thought, that this surreal scene in this misbegotten place should be the last thing I would ever see. Benjamin handed the valise to the sergeant. It jumped violently in his hand. The sergeant produced a key and, with a perfectly steady hand, locked the valise. His eyes were fixed on me. He was grinning in what I can only describe as total delight. Make that unholy delight.