"I mean we're here."
"Oh, yes!" Ilona agreed. "Yes-yes-yes!"
"Don't you want to get out and rest?" Lagula asked. "The long ride must have tired you."
"Now that you mention it, I'm exhausted," I admitted.
"Wouldn't you like to stretch your legs?"
"I've been doing that for the past hour," Ilona said.
"He said 'stretch'," I explained.
"Oh. Well, all right." Amazingly, she sounded reluctant.
But she rearranged her dress anyway. I adjusted my poncho, and the three of us got out of the car. We were in front of a small hut on the outskirts of Salisbury. It was Lagula's home, and he ran much of his business as a tourist guide from there. Twilight was descending as he showed us inside.
He fixed us something to eat, and we hit the sack early. Not the same sack. Three different ones. But it wasn't long before Ilona crawled into mine. I was beginning to appreciate why Highman might have wanted to ditch her. She was insatiable. If he'd had her as a steady diet, she must have been quite a drain on his energies. I couldn't see how he'd had any strength left for S.M.U.T. It was one whale of a night, and it as nearly dawn before she allowed me to get any sleep at all.
It was close to noon when Lagula shook me awake. Ilona was still deep in dreamland. I envied her.
"I thought I might drive you back to your hotel to get some clothes," Lagula suggested.
"Yeah. I guess we'll have to do that. I can't keep running around in a poncho."
"Shall I wake the young lady?"
"Please don't." I shuddered at the thought of facing any more of Ilona's passion. "Let her sleep until we get back."
The trip took us about an hour. We made better time than the afternoon before because it was still early and the traffic wasn't so heavy. I figured Ilona must still be asleep when we returned.
But she wasn't asleep. She wasn't awake, either. She was lying in the middle of the room, a shambles now, like a naked, broken doll. Her body was horribly twisted, the neck broken. Yet there were no visible marks on her. Only her face, with its horrible grimace, seemed to speak of violence. Only her hands, like claws frozen to her ears, gave some hint of the agony through which she must have gone. Only her staring eyes gave mute testimony to the final terror of her death.
As with Prudence Highman, there was no clue to what had killed Ilona. But the twisted flesh was enough to make me sure of one thing. Peter Highman was in Rhodesia, all right. He'd kept his date with his mistress. And somehow, he'd murdered her.
He meant to murder me, too. I was positive of that. He'd kill me as he'd killed Prudence and Ilona if he got the chance. He'd do it in the same way. There wouldn't be a shred of evidence, yet somehow he'd contrive my death.
The question was how?
CHAPTER SIX
There seemed no sense in waiting around for the answer, which would undoubtedly be a killer. Lagula's hut had been fingered, and Ilona's corpse said it was no longer a safe place to hide out. I said as much to my pigmy friend, and he agreed. We left everything as it was and headed back into the center of Salisbury.
"You can't go back to your hotel," Lagula advised. "They'll be waiting for a chance to kill you there."
"Then where can we go?"
"I don't know. I'm trying to think. I'd take you into the native district with me, but your skin would make you too conspicuous there."
"Maybe we shold split up," I suggested. "You'd be safer among your people."
"My people?" Lagula chuckled. "You think that because my skin and theirs are black that they are my people. Do you always deal in appearances, Mr. Victor?"
"What do you mean?" I was nettled because he seemed to be laughing at my naivete.
"While my sympathies are with them, the black men of Salisbury are not my people," Lagula explained. "We African pigmys are not Negroids as other native Africans are. We are Negrillos, smaller in stature and lighter in color than the average African. The Negrillos originally migrated to Africa from South Asia. But when you speak of 'my people' in that would-be definite way, not even all Negrillos share such a kinship. The two largest pigmy tribes are the Batwas who settled in the great bend of the Congo and the Akkas who live along the banks of the upper Nile. Neither group considers the other 'their people'. And I bear no relationship to either. 'My people' were the Balulwa tribe, a small and select group who lived for centuries in the Rhodesian bush."
"Were?" I fastened on the word. "What happened to them?"
"They are almost extinct by now. Earthquakes destroyed our village and nearly all the inhabitants some twenty years ago. Only two families survived. Mine and one other. Since then the old people have died off. The only ones left are myself – unfortunately an only child – and the offspring of the other family. And the other family had no sons. Only five daughters. Thus it fell to me to see to it that the Balulwa were perpetuated. Since the five girls are all attractive, that wasn't hard to do at first. But their sexual demands grew insatiable and eventually I was forced to flee from them. That's when I came to Salisbury and then went from there to
England for my education. But those five girls of the Bulalwa tribe are still waiting there for my return."
"And will you go back?"
"Eventually. It is my duty. And my pleasure, I admit. But when I go back it will be to die. The five of them will kill me with their lust."
"There are worse ways to go," I told him.
Amen! It came in the form of a sudden burst of tommygun fire, a rat-a-tat demonstration of one of those "worse ways". We'd been cruising up a long avenue and traffic was light when the limousine shot out of a side street and the fusillade was loosed at us. Only our hairpin-triggered reflexes kept Lagula and I from proving the point with our lives. Only by diving for the floorboards of the car did we avoid instant corpsedom.
With Lagula no longer at the wheel, the car spun out of control. It mounted the sidewalk, cut a neat swath across a wide lawn, and kept going to shear down a row of low bushes. Throughout, the other car paralleled our erratic route in the gutter and continued to spray us with bullets.
"Jump!" Lagula yelled as we kept going toward the brick wall of a house. "And run in different directions," he added.
It made sense. If we separated, the gunman would have to split his fire between two moving targets. We'd each have a better chance of getting away that way, too, since the car couldn't follow us both.
As it turned out, fortunately, it couldn't follow either one of us. I dived out and turned a somersault. As I came up, I saw Lagula skidding across the turf on his belly. He sprang up and kept going in a crouching run, bullets kicking up the dirt at his heels, but not catching up with him before he'd gained the shelter of a hedgerow. By the time he vanished behind the hedges, I was sprinting around the side of the house our car had rammed. The killer car was unable to stay with either of us and it roared off in frustration.
I kept running, cutting through backyards and alleys, avoiding the streets. After a half-hour or so of this, I was pretty winded. I slowed and cautiously went down a long driveway leading to another avenue. As I neared the mouth of it, I saw something that made me flatten myself against the garage wall and stare across the street.
A car was just easing into the curb there. I recognized the car. It was the same one which had just been spewing hot lead at me.
It stopped and a man got out of the back. He was carrying – so help me! – a violin case. I didn't have to think back to Jimmy Cagney movies to know this was no Heifetz toting a Stradivarius to Carnegie Hall. It was corny, but there it was. Chicago had shipped a reincarnation of Al Capone to sunny, fun-filled Salisbury.
The man stepped aside and another man emerged from the rear of the car. He too was carrying something, a large package of some sort; I couldn't tell what it was. The first man climbed back inside and the car pulled away. The other, left standing on the sidewalk, turned to watch it go, and I saw his face clearly for the first time.