They raced past the boathouse, their feet splintering the tidal pools into silver needles of moonlight. The shed was dark and silent; the opfoes had smashed the door, found no one inside, and swept on past.
The swimming beach ended beyond the boathouse. Lessing indicated the path that led upslope to Abu Talib’s cottage and squatted to cover Mallon and the Arab. He waited until they disappeared into the trees, then slipped into the underbrush along the shore.
If only he had worn his camouflage fatigues instead of a while shirt and light blue dungarees! Who could have anticipated this!
He paused to evaluate the situation. Except for sporadic firing, the battle was over, an easy victory for the enemy. Communications, the arsenal, headquarters, the watchtower, the dormitories, all were ablaze, roaring funeral pyres above the sable-velvet jungle. Somebody was using a bullhorn to call the survivors to surrender. Brief fusillades of shots followed. Perhaps Club Lingahnie’s younger guests would be spared, but it sounded as though the instructors and senior visitors were being “emphatically deactivated,” to use the current euphemism.
He went on, gliding unseen through the hundred or so meters of undergrowth that separated the swimming beach from his quarters, past angular blacknesses that were garden chairs and tables, to press himself against the cool, white-painted wall.
His living room was brightly lit, not by the Club’s electrical system — that was a bonfire now — but by a single, dazzling beam: a hand-held spotlight.
He slipped around to the side, clambered up onto the South Sea Island-style verandah, dodged potted palms and porch furniture, and slid along the wall by the kitchen. He avoided the back door — there might be a sentry — and peered in through the pantry window. Its inner door was open, and he could see most of the living room. The archway to the kitchen was outside of his field of vision to his right. Directly opposite, beyond the serving bar that divided the front room from the kitchen area, lay the hallway that led back to the three bedrooms. A heavy, battery-powered military lantern squatted like a one-eyed Cyclops atop the blue, plastic surface of the bar.
Jameela leaned against the serving bar facing him, her silken shalwar-qameez sleeping costume silver and ice-blue in the lantern’s stark beam. Behind her, in the semi-darkness of the living room, he recognized Helga Bauer. What was she holding in her hands? A golden pot? No, it looked like Lessing’s Alladin’s lamp! What was going on?
He risked standing up, his light-colored clothing good camouflage against the white wall, and got a clear view of the interior. Somebody — Felix Bauer — knelt there upon Jameela’s Persian carpet, one leg of the overturned coffee table sticking up beside him like a spike. The German was swaying rhythmically to and fro. What was he doing? Using some sort of tool? A military field shovel?
Lessing realized what was happening.
Bauer, Jameela, and Helga were captives. Lessing sensed someone in the kitchen, and there was almost certainly another opfo in the farther shadows of the living room: the shadow of a gun barrel showed there against Jameela’s gay, blue-and-white drapes.
The man in the kitchen came into the living room.
It was Richmond. He halted beside Jameela at the serving counter and said something to Bauer.
The kikibird looked the same as when Lessing had last seen him in New Orleans: the baggy suit limp and impressed, the big hands as bony and pale, the liver spots like blotches of purplish decay upon the balding skull. He bent and took something gingerly from Bauer’s fingers. His expression was no longer morose. He looked positively happy — satisfied — exalted.
He had found Lessing’s stash of Pacov.
Bauer must have told him, willingly or otherwise, and the opfoes had made the German dig it up!
Richmond had what he wanted. He was inspecting the metal box Bauer handed him. He forced the latch open, looked inside, and smiled. Jameela — and Bauer and Helga — were of no further use. Perhaps he wouldn’t harm them.
But then perhaps he might.
Richmond spoke to the invisible man in the living room, at first imperiously and then with angry insistence. Lessing felt rather than heard the vibrations of his voice through the flimsy wooden wall. At last a bearded commando in a black combat tunic appeared to bark a command at the two women. He gestured with the muzzle of his submachine gun toward the hallway leading to the bedrooms.
From the kitchen a louder voice snapped a sentence in a language Lessing recognized as Hebrew. Blackboard halted, indecision mirrored upon his swarthy features.
Richmond arose clutching the plastic envelope containing the two containers of Pacov to his rumpled shirtfront as a preacher holds a Bible. Lessing’s Stik-Ever tape seals came away, and Richmond pulled out first the silvery globe of Pacov-1, then the black cylinder of Pacov-2. He held them up to the light. He said something else. The soldier looked past him at the man in the kitchen.
This third opfo chose this moment to emerge and stand arms akimbo in the kitchen archway. There was no insignia on his battle-dress, but the up-julting chin, the neat pencil of moustache, the cap of close-cropped, curly, black hair, and the arrogant set of his shoulder blades identified him; Lessing had met his like many times during the Baalbek War. Here, almost certainly, was the commanding officer, the one who had supervised the massacre of Club Lingahnie.
The officer appeared upset. Lessing didn’t need to hear the words, which were in Hebrew. Richmond was interfering in the chain of command, and the CO. was having none of it. A camouflage-daubed finger swept up and pointed: outside! Civilians out! Stay the hell out of military business!
Richmond shook his head vehemently and shot a contemptuous remark down at Bauer. The German still squatted in the seeping water in the shallow pithe had dug, head down and arms at his sides. He probably already thought of himself as dead. Neither of the two women had moved.
Richmond held up the envelope, tapped the glassine. It was the officer’s turn to shake his head. The kikibird persisted, anger-ridges on his cheeks gleaming fish-belly white in the spotlight’s beam.
The officer waved a hand in a furious “I-give-up” gesture. He was surrendering to higher authority: political clout over military expertise.
The bearded soldier mouthed an order and raised his gun again. Helga and Jameela both spoke at once, but Lessing couldn’t make out what they said. Blackbeard began to herd them along the hall toward the bedrooms. Helga Bauer turned her face toward Richmond, and Lessing saw that she was weeping, pleading, begging. The soldier thrust her brusquely on into the master bedroom at the end of the short corridor. Jameela followed. Blackbeard banged the door shut after them; then he returned, his snub-nosed submachine gun nonchalantly cradled in one black-sleeved arm.
He halted behind Bauer, bent, and touched the nape of the German’s neck with his weapon’s muzzle. Bauer shut his eyes and opened his mouth in a round “O.”
The soldier backed off a step and fired one round.
Bauer tumbled forward, his life already gone. The walls of the sandy pit started to collapse upon his convulsing limbs, and muddy, red water sloshed up onto the darker red of Jameela’s carpet.
In the bedroom Helga Bauer shrieked. Her anguish was audible even through two walls and over the racket of distant explosions.
Richmond gave another order. The soldier rubbed at his bristly beard, grinned, and turned back to the bedroom door. The officer stalked forward to protest, clenching a fist under the kikibird’s nose. Richmond’s face took on a piously superior expression, the look of a man who quotes directly from the Holy Book: a Supreme Party Directive, an Imperial Edict — whatever the current omnipotent authority happened to be. The officer threw up his hands in disgust and tramped back into the kitchen.