Lew grinned, trying to appreciate Balim’s humor and stop thinking about Amarda here in Kisumu. Did she mean to talk to Ellen? What was going to happen? He said, “I’ve got the idea.” To Isaac he said, “Do we have a name?”
“Two names.” Isaac extended a small sheet of paper marked in blue ink with his small neat handwriting. “One is Kamau Nyaga, who calls himself assistant terminal manager. I phoned a railway friend in Nakuru, and at the moment the manager’s position at Butere is unfilled, so this fellow is making hay while the sun shines.”
Balim chuckled. “An odd metaphor, under the circumstances,” he said, with a nod toward the windows, against which the rain was streaming.
“Lew knows what I mean,” Isaac said, at his prissiest.
“Yes, I do.” But, he thought, what does Amarda mean?
“The other,” Isaac went on, “is called Godfrey Juma. He is freightmaster and has been there for a very long time.”
“We have bribed him before,” Balim said drily. “That is, Frank has. You can give him Frank’s best.”
“I will.”
“Unfortunately,” Isaac said, “we cannot tell from here which of these two has authority, or even the physical control of the shipment.”
“We don’t,” Balim pointed out, “wish to bribe the wrong person.”
“I see that,” Lew said.
“It’s as bad as having two women,” Isaac said with a sigh.
Lew peered sharply at him; had he meant something by that? But Isaac’s face was as open and innocent and humorless as ever. Feeling grim, Lew got to his feet, saying, “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Merely do your best,” Balim suggested. “Romance them both, but only plight your troth with one.”
Oh, for God’s sake. “That’s what I’ll do, then,” Lew said, and got out of there before they could drive him any more crazy.
The gray Citroën was in his rearview mirror, beyond the rain-running back window. Being on a mission where face was of importance, Lew had been given one of Balim’s better cars, an almost undented black Peugeot. He had barely steered it out of town, heading northwest through the rain on the B1, when the gray Citroën appeared behind him.
He didn’t notice it at first, because he’d been thinking about Ellen. Was it possible for a woman to clench her lips? Leaving Balim’s building, going out to the rain and the Peugeot and the uncertainties of both Butere and Amarda, Lew had kissed Ellen good-bye, and it had seemed to him that her lips were harder than usual; corrugated, almost. Or was that merely paranoia? Or guilt? “Shit,” he said out loud, driving along, and that was when he glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the Citroën.
His first impulse was to hit the accelerator, but of course he couldn’t do that. Nor could he hit the brake and stop, not here on the main road out of Kisumu. So he kept driving until he reached Kisiani, where he took the small unpaved turnoff to the left. Not far out of town he found a place where farm vehicles had beaten a path in to the right past a cluster of trees. He made the turn, jounced around behind the trees, and stopped.
The Citroën was huge in his mirror, like a brooding shark. Lew stepped quickly out into the rain, wanting the meeting to take place in her car, not his.
“Surprised?” she said, smiling at him in uncomplicated happiness as he slid into the Citroën.
“More than I can say.” Slamming the car door, he took her in his arms and kissed her; not because he wanted to, but because he knew very well it was what he was supposed to do.
But then he did want to.
It was in the role of hero that he had first met her. He was the hero and she the damsel in distress. He was the handsome stranger and she the beautiful virgin in the bosom of her family. He was Lochinvar and she—Except that, in the poem, Lochinvar’s damsel was named Ellen.
His own Ellen had seemed an irrelevancy then, not mentioned in sagas. But she did exist, the outer world did exist, and the wall he’d built between reality and fantasy had crumbled this morning when he’d first seen Amarda’s car half a block from his house. The damsel in distress doesn’t drive two hundred miles to get laid.
In the Citroën now, sex finished, the beast slaughtered yet again, the two of them sprawling on bedlike reclining seats, it was possible at last for Lew to move in the direction of rational thought. So far from being a helpless orphan, Amarda at twenty was a grown woman capable of getting what she wanted out of this world. How much did she want Lew, and for how long? How much trouble did she want to make? What did she intend to do about Ellen?
The Citroën was like some cave on an asteroid somewhere. The interior was very warm now, the windows completely steamed over, and the rain—filtered through tree branches—thudded erratically on the roof. In this setting, the girl naked and luscious beside him, Lew set out to end the relationship. “Um,” he said.
“Don’t say anything.” Her murmuring voice was languorous with the satisfaction. Her small warm hand traveled slowly down across his chest and belly.
“Um!” He sat up, turning away from her hand, trying desperately to think of something to say. “What time is it?”
“The clock works.” Her rejected hand, not seeming to mind, gestured idly toward the dashboard.
He barely looked at the thing. The point wasn’t the time but his reaction to time. “I’ve got so much to do today,” he said.
“Mmmmmmmm.”
Dear Lord. He risked a look at her; how could he give that up? Almost without his collaboration, his hand stole forward to touch that breast. “You are something,” he said.
But then all at once she was brisk, sitting up, stretching—he held the bowl of her belly and dreamed he’d live in the cave forever—saying, “It is late. I have to get back; I have to see Mr. Balim.”
Cold reality. Drawing back his hand, hunching himself protectively over his lifted knees, he said, “Balim? What for?”
“That’s why I’m here.” She leaned forward to pull a box of tissues from the shelf under the dashboard, then looked back with her sunniest smile. “Aren’t I clever?”
“I’m sure you are.”
Cleaning herself like a cat, she said, “My grandmother had more questions. Also bills to be paid, extra expenses. I convinced her I should drive here today, much better than asking poor Mr. Balim to fly to us every time.”
“Of course.”
“You make me so messy,” She said comfortably, balling up tissues.
Her grin when she looked sidelong at him was filled with the innocence and freshness that made him her fool. “I wanted to see you on your home ground.”
“Am I different?”
“Sadder, I think. I don’t know why.”
“Ellen,” he said, forcing the name out before he could stop himself. He had to bring this to an end, no matter what his body wanted.
She looked first startled, then hurt, as though he had betrayed some pact between them. “Oh, dear,” she said.
“I don’t want to lose Ellen,” he said. “But I don’t want to hurt you.”
“And you think it has to be one or the other.”
“Sometimes I think it’ll be both.”
Turning away, she rubbed a small circle in the steam of the side window so she could peer out at rain-soaked farm fields. “Ellen is very beautiful.”
“That isn’t—”
“And very sophisticated.” Amarda turned back to him, an intelligent, wistful child. “She is very exciting,” she said, “and you are very exciting.”