At one turn, Wilson kissed Irina. She pressed her body into his. He turned off the flashlight. He was certain every other couple was engaged in a similar activity. He guessed that Madame P. had selected this excursion, rather than a visit to a well-lit museum, precisely to enable such moments. From the sounds of things, one couple off to the right was doing more than kissing.
Irina moaned and kissed him again. Her kiss was passionate if a little practiced – not that he had any illusions about virginity or a lack of sexual activity. The women had been tested for AIDS and for other STDs, and while a fertility test was not feasible, prospective grooms were reassured by medical exams and histories that showed no obvious impediments to motherhood.
Eventually they all followed Madame’s waggling light to the exit. Irina blinked and rubbed her eyes as they emerged into the brightness of day. It reminded Wilson of stepping out of an afternoon movie. Matinee blindness.
“I am lucky one,” Irina said. “Other men not so…” She shook her head. And glowed.
Senior prom. That’s what the dinner dance resembled, more than anything else – although there were only twelve couples in attendance. A small dance floor, tables for six with stingy bouquets, a flower-bedecked arch (for pictures). The men wore dark suits with carnations in the lapel; the women, fancy dresses. A three-piece band – the vocalist sporting a bright red mullet – cranked out an eclectic mix of music.
This might have been a faux prom, but Irina was real and palpable in his arms. “You’re a good dancer,” she told him, as he guided her around the little parquet dance floor. They had suffered through the chicken dinner, the cloying dessert, the clumsy toasts offered by Madame P. Now, the slow dances outnumbered the fast ones. The lights were dimmed. Madame P. and her diminutive husband had taken a turn on the floor, to a scattering of polite applause, and then retired to a corner.
Irina looked up at Wilson, a slight sheen of perspiration on her face. The guy with the mullet began to sing the Percy Sledge classic “When a Man Loves a Woman.” Irina pressed herself into his arms. They did not so much dance, now, as sway together. “I love this song,” she said, melting into him.
“Mmmmmm.” They swayed some more.
“I want to make love with you,” she whispered.
He pulled her closer, rocking from side to side. Slowly, his eyes began to close, then suddenly blinked open when he saw the herringbone mote glimmering in his peripheral vision, and realized that he would soon be blind. If only for a little while.
“Is good idea, yes?”
Wilson nodded distractedly.
“We make sure?”
“Yeah,” Wilson said. “We should make sure.”
She sensed that something had changed, and worried that she had offended him. She drew back. “What is wrong?”
“Nothing. I’m fine.”
She led him back to their table. Her dress was shredding into ribbons of color and he perceived her through a glaze of light – but he could still see the sweet little furrow in her brow.
“Is talking about love?” she asked. “You don’t like?”
He made a sound that tried to be a laugh but came out as something else. “I get these headaches, sometimes – only they don’t hurt. They just… make it hard for me to see. But it goes away,” he added, a little too hurriedly.
“This is vision migraine,” she announced, pronouncing the word “meegraine.”
Wilson was astonished. “That’s right, but… how do you know that?”
“You forget, I’m in school of medicine before I must quit to work. I will see if Madame Puletskaya is permitting us to depart.”
Madame P. appeared, hovering above. To Wilson, she resembled the screaming figure in Edvard Munch’s famous painting: a white face, surrounded by radiating auras of different colors. Next to her, Madame’s husband was a sinister black figure, pulsating in the darkness. And then, it was almost as if he couldn’t see at all.
Irina clutched Wilson’s hand, speaking rapidly in Russian to their chaperone. Wilson couldn’t understand a word, but the sense of the conversation was clear from Irina’s tone, which segued from conviction to pleading, even as Madame’s morphed from rejection to surrender.
Finally, Irina led him out the door. The cool night air felt like silk against his skin. She stroked his hair as they waited for the taxi. “Is stress,” she said, in a low, firm voice. “And sometimes, there is environmental factor.”
In the hotel, she demanded the key from the desk clerk. Once in the room, she did not turn on the lights, but sat with him on the bed. She removed his jacket and tie, took off his shoes, made him lie down. He heard her go into the bathroom. For a moment, he worried that she’d turn the light on, but she didn’t. He heard the faucet run, and then she padded back to him across the floor.
“Is better, yes? The dark?”
“Yes.” He felt queasy, as he always did when one of the migraines came on, but Irina was a revelation – an angel of mercy, tender and caring.
She placed a damp washcloth over his eyes.
The room was stuffy, so she turned on the ceiling fan. But she didn’t open the windows. How did she know that the noise from the street would bother him?
“It never lasts long,” he told her.
“Shhhhh.” She stroked his cheek with the backs of her fingers, the pressure so light, it might have been a breeze.
Every few minutes, she removed the washcloth. He could hear her turn on the tap, and wring out the fabric. Then she came back to his side and replaced the cloth, now cool, over his eyes.
It had been a long time since anyone had shown Wilson any kindness – in part, perhaps, because he hadn’t allowed it. And no one had ever tended him during one of his migraines. He’d always hidden them, moving away from other people whenever they came on.
He congratulated himself on his intuition about Irina. She had heart. The other women might be mercenaries, even prostitutes, but Irina was the real thing.
The migraine was beginning to pass, though he was still a little dizzy, a little “off.”
Her tenderness took on the aspect of a revelation. That he should find a woman as beautiful as this, and as gentle as this, augured well. And, in fact, everything was falling into place. With Hakim out of the picture, he had three times as much money as he thought he would – and no entanglements. The hard part, turning the hash into cash and getting out of Africa alive, was over. All that was left was the payoff.
He’d bought a ranch and started work on the apparatus. And it would soon be ready. The marriage “transaction” that he’d entered into as a gesture to the future was looking more and more like a windfall, a blessing, a stroke of luck. Providence, or something like it, was smiling on him, readying the world for its cleansing and rebirth.
“It’s almost gone.” He began to sit up.
“Shhhhh…” With the tips of her fingers, she pushed him back down, and removed the washcloth. “I’ll be right back,” she said. “Don’t open your eyes.”
When she came back again, she stretched out alongside him, fitting herself to his body like spoons in a kitchen drawer. She leaned over him, stroked his cheek with the backs of her fingers, then kissed his neck.
“I remove my clothes,” she whispered. “Is all right?”
“Perfect,” he said.
CHAPTER 26
Mike Burke settled the telephone back into place. Wilson’s address was a prison?
He jammed his hands into his pockets as he walked back to the Esplanade. The good news was that he had a name now, a real name – which was more than Kovalenko had. So he’d get points for that. He even had an address. Sort of.