“Would you mind telling me how you acquired the ability to transform yourself?” I asked.
He seemed not to have heard me, continuing to stare at the wall.
I found this intriguing—it was my experience that most witch men would leap at an opportunity to present their magical credentials, to boast of their connections with various gods and elementals, to go on and on about the trials they had endured in their spiritual quests.
“The killings,” I said. “Were they somehow related to the ritual that permitted you to transform yourself? Or were they merely… coincidental?”
He let out a heavy sigh, and his mouth remained open, as if it had been a last breath; but then he blinked, and his eyes cut toward me again.
“These questions,” he said, “they hide another question. The thing you truly wish to know is whether I am a liar or a fool. If I were a fool, I would have no answer. If I were a liar, I would not tell you the truth.”
“You underestimate yourself…” I began, but he gave a dismissive wave.
“I have no need to ask whether you are a fool,” he said. “You claim to be a doctor who studies snakes, yet your questions are the same as that other fool’s. You think to trick me into revealing myself. Yet you are such a great fool, you can’t see that I have already done so.”
“All men are fools one way or another,” I said. “But I’m willing to accept your judgment. Why don’t you enlighten me?”
To this point, his movements had been measured and slow, something I attributed to the weight of the manacles. Now he whirled about and brought both fists down upon the center of the table, splintering it. This movement was so quick and fluid, I did not even have time to flinch, but was frozen by the violence; and as he leaned toward me, pinning me with his angry yellow gaze, I realized that the manacles would not be much of an impediment should he choose to attack.
The policeman’s voice came from beyond the locked door, asking if everything was all right. Before I could respond, Buma told him to leave us alone. Immediately thereafter, I heard footsteps in retreat along the corridor.
“I wonder what’s gotten into him?” I said to Buma, tamping down the coals of an incipient panic. “Whatever you’re trying to sell, it seems you’ve found at least one idiot who’s swallowed it.”
He said nothing, remaining motionless; but I sensed a trivial relaxation in his tense posture.
I shifted to a more comfortable position, trying to present an image of cool indifference. “You were going to say?…”
Buma dropped his eyes to the iron cuffs encircling his wrists; after a bit he let out another sigh and shifted back about to face the wall. “It would be best for you to return to Abidjan,” he said.
I was for the moment confounded that he knew where I lived, but then realized there was an obvious explanation.
“I’m not impressed,” I said. “It’s likely that Mister Rawley told you about me. If not Rawley, then one of your guards.”
This time, I thought, his peculiar thin smile was in actuality a smile. “If you travel upriver five days,” he said, “you’ll come to a place marked by a ferry landing that was burned by the soldiers. Walk into the jungle straight back from the landing until you see a giant fig tree. It’s not far. There you will find what you have been seeking.”
“And what exactly is that?”
“A python,” Buma said. “A white one.”
I was almost certain I had told Rawley that I was searching for an albino rock python—a healthy specimen would be worth six figures, and if it could be bred, I could make even more from the first litter. The money would free me from writing more grant proposals, from doing tedious research. From Africa. Yet I couldn’t imagine Rawley being so chummy with Buma that he would let slip this piece of information—if I had told him, I had done so only in passing; it would not have been in character for me to dwell on such a quixotic enterprise. Still, this was the only possible explanation.
“I suppose the snake’s just hanging around the fig tree, waiting for me to catch it.”
Buma shot me an icy glance. “If you go there, you will find it.”
“Golly, thanks. I’ll get right on it,” I said. “And here I thought you told me I’d learn nothing about pythons from you.”
“Then it seems you must assume I am a liar,” said Buma. “Not a fool.”
I had to laugh at this. Rawley had been right—the man was clever; but I remained convinced that everything about him, from his reptilian mannerisms to his cryptic dialogue, was part of an act. Better conceived than others I’d seen, but an act nonetheless.
“Do you truly want answers to your questions?” Buma asked.
“Of course I do.”
He turned to me again, slowly this time, and gave me an assessing look; he nodded. “It will be difficult, but you may be able to understand,” he said. “Very well.” He reached out and clasped my right wrist with his left hand.
In reflex, I tried to pull away, but my hand might as well have been stuck in an iron wall—his strength was irresistible. He closed his eyes, squeezed my wrist until my fist opened; then leaned forward and spat into my palm. With his free hand, he closed my fingers around the spittle, so that it smeared into the flesh.
“There,” he said, releasing me. “My brothers and sisters will not harm you now.”
“I thought you were going to answer my questions.”
“Words can never convey the truth,” he told me. “Truth must be revealed. And so it will be revealed to you.”
He settled back in his chair, let out a hissing sigh.
“That’s it? That’s your answer? The truth must be revealed?”
Buma’s eyelids were half-closed; his chest rose and fell, but very, very slowly, as if he were asleep. “Tomorrow,” he said in a dusty, barely audible whisper. “We will talk more tomorrow.”
The town was tucked into a notch between low green hills, beyond which lay deep jungle, and it stretched for nearly a quarter mile along the banks of the Kilombo, thinning out to the west into a district of thatched huts and shanty bars. Farther to the west, separated from this district by mud flats, lay the hotel Rawley had mentioned, the Hotel du Rive Vert, a venerable structure dating from the 1900s, when European traders had plied the river, exchanging cheap modernities for skins and ivory. The rive was no longer vert, the grounds having deteriorated into patches of parched grass crossed by muddy tracks, sentried here and there by dying, sparsely leaved eucalyptus. Standing isolate amid this desolation, the building itself—a rambling white stucco colonial fantasy of second-story balconies and French doors and a red tile roof—had the too-luminous incongruity of a hallucination, a notion assisted by the presence next to the front entrance of a lightning-struck acacia with a hollow just below its crotch that resembled an aghast mouth—it looked to be pointing at the hotel with a forked twig hand and venting a silent scream.
There was no sign of Rawley at the hotel, no message. The hotel bar, gloriously dim and cool and rife with mahogany gleam, was a temptation, but I didn’t want to be drunk when Rawley arrived. I set out walking along the riverbank, thinking I might stop in at one of the shanty bars for a beer or two—no more than two. The beer, I thought, would provide a base for the heavier alcohol consumption that would likely ensue once Rawley and I finished our business and got down to reminiscence.
This was toward the end of the dry season, and while the better part of the days were sunny—as it was that day when I left the hotel—the late afternoon rains were lasting longer and longer, often well into night. The land was so thirsty that by mid-morning of the following day, the streets were parched again, and wind blew veils of dust up from the flats; but there was a new heaviness in the air, and in the mucky soil at the edge of the water you could see shallow troughs where crocodiles had lain motionless during the downpour, steeped—or so I imagined—in a kind of bleak satisfaction, as if they believed that the mud and the river and the wet darkness were merging into a single medium, one perfect for their uses. Curiously enough, I did not see a single crocodile during the first portion of my walk. The flats reeked of spoilage and were strewn about with cattle bones and skulls, empty bottles, paper litter, and fruit rinds; occasionally I passed a dead tree or a mounded puzzle of sun-whitened sticks and twigs that once had been a shrub of some sort. The river was a couple of hundred feet wide at this juncture, roiled and muddy, and the far bank was occupied by secondary-growth jungle, leached to a pale green by the summer drought—from it came the sound of a trillion exquisitely unimportant lives blended together into a seething hum, just audible above the idling wash of the water. Flies buzzed about my head, and at my feet I saw the delicate tracks of crabs. But no crocodiles, no significant animal life of any kind.