“You’re staring,” Molly said.
Sam hurried to the front desk, described the old man, and was told his name was Cuervo. “Mr. Cuervo,” the clerk said, “is a dealer in Kikuyu and Masai antiquities. He has a gallery on the Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles. The Africana.”
Sam returned to his table and told Molly to belt up.
“But we just got here.”
They took a taxi to Embakasi Airport, where Sam saw an El Al Boeing 707. Refuelling, he was told, before proceeding to Johannesburg as scheduled. There were also two unmarked airplanes on the far end of the tarmac, another Boeing 707 and a Hercules, both being guarded by Israeli tourists.
Instead of returning directly to the Norfolk, Sam and Molly stopped at the Thorn Tree Bar at the New Stanley Hotel. And there he was again, the old man, and at tables on either side of him there were Israelis laden with camera cases that obviously held weapons. Mr. Cuervo was chatting with two other men, whom Sam later discovered were Lionel Bryn Davies, chief of the Nairobi police, and Bruce Mackenzie, a former minister of agriculture who now served as a special adviser to Jomo Kenyatta. Once the two men left, Mr. Cuervo motioned for Sam and Molly to join him.
“I thought we’d met before,” Sam said.
“Oh, no. I’ve never had the pleasure. But of course I recognize you from television. What brings you to Nairobi?”
“We’re on safari.”
“Ah.”
“And you?”
“Tomorrow night you and Mrs. Burns must be my guests for dinner at Alan Bobbé’s Bistro, and then I will try to answer at least some of your questions. Shall we say drinks at seven?”
“Are you sure we haven’t met before?”
“I’m afraid not.”
That night, Saturday, July 3, following the ninety-minute raid on Entebbe, two El Al Boeing 707s, one of them a makeshift hospital, put in at Embakasi airport. They were joined in the early hours of Sunday morning by four Thunderbird Hercules. Waiting ambulances rushed ten of the more gravely wounded Israeli soldiers to Kenyatta State Hospital. Then the airplanes refuelled and were gone.
Sam read about it at breakfast in the Sunday Nation, which had to have had advance notice of the raid. The rest of the day passed slowly, Sam irritable, self-absorbed, but at last it was time to join Cuervo at Alan Bobbé’s Bistro. The maître d’, who had been expecting them, reached for the bottle of Dom Perignon that floated in a bucket of ice on their table.
“Please don’t open it yet,” Molly said. “We’ll wait for Mr. Cuervo.”
“I’m afraid Mr. Cuervo had to leave Nairobi unexpectedly. He sends his apologies and insists that you are to be his guests for dinner.”
Back in Washington, writing his piece about Cuervo for the New Republic, Sam checked things out in Los Angeles as a matter of form. As he suspected, there was no Africana Gallery on Rodeo Drive nor a Cuervo listed in the telephone book.
Seven
1983 it was. Autumn. The season of the sodden partridges, drunk from pecking at fallen, fermented crab apples. Leaves had to be raked. It was nippy out there. The air smelled of oncoming snow, but Moses had not yet taken down his screens and set his double windows in place. His winter wood, dumped in the driveway by Legion Hall, needed to be stacked. Avoiding these chores, Moses—choking on dust—surrounded by overturned cartons—contemplated the interior of his cabin. A sea of disorder. All because he was determined to find his missing Silver Doctor, as if his life depended on it. Exhausted, Moses went to pour himself a drink. Then the phone rang.
“Hi, there. It’s me.”
The overdressed, fulminating divorcée he had picked up in Montreal on Tuesday.
“I’ll be on the four o’clock bus to Magog. Is there anything I can bring?”
Oh, Christ, had he invited her out for the weekend? “Um, no.”
“You don’t sound pleased.”
“Why, I’m delighted. I’ll meet you at the bus station.”
As soon as she hung up, Moses dialled Grumpy’s and asked to speak to the bartender. “It’s Moses Berger. What’s the name of the lady I met at your place on Tuesday?”
“Not Mary?”
“Yes. That’s it. Thanks.”
He collected empty bottles and soiled dishes. He emptied ashtrays. Then he began to stuff papers back into cartons. Fool. Drunkard. Why didn’t you say you were in bed with a fever?
There had been a time when Moses had enjoyed the novelty of having a woman out to his cabin for the weekend, but now that he was fifty-two years old—grown increasingly cranky, according to Strawberry—given to rising and eating whenever it suited him, he found it an intolerable intrusion. The exception, for some years, had been Kathleen O’Brien, whom he adored. But eventually he came to dread her visits as well. Visits that unfailingly ended with the two of them stumbling about in a drunken stupor. Kathleen disposed to tears and self-pity and finally incoherence, lamenting the fate of what she called Les Misérables. The select club of Gursky casualties. She, a victim of Mr. B., and Moses undone by Solomon.
Each time she came out one or another of the tapes had to be played. Mr. Bernard, mouldering in his lead-lined coffin, coming back to haunt them: “Every family has a cross to bear, a skeleton in the closet, that’s life.…”
The rabbi who had spoken over Mr. Bernard’s casket had said, “Here was a man who was wealthy beyond our wildest dreams. He flew in his own jet. He sailed on his own yacht. He had been to Buckingham Palace as well as the White House. Mrs. Roosevelt and Ben-Gurion had both come to his house to eat Libby’s boiled beef and kasha. Prime ministers of this great country regularly sought his advice. The truth is Mr. Bernard, may he rest in peace, founded one of the greatest family fortunes in North America. But what did this paragon, this legend in his own time, plead for on his deathbed? I’m going to tell you because it’s such a beautiful lesson for all of us gathered here. Mr. Bernard asked for the one thing his millions couldn’t buy. God’s mercy. That was his last request. A plea for God’s mercy.…”
But Mr. Morrie, who had been there, told Moses what had actually happened at his brother’s deathbed.
Fading, his eyes filming over, Mr. Bernard had blinked awake to see Libby taking his bony waxy hand, holding it to her powdered cheek. She sang:
Mr. Bernard tried to scratch, intent on drawing blood, but he no longer had the strength. “No, no,” was all he could manage.
“Bernie, Bernie,” she sobbed, “do you believe in God?”
“How can you talk such crap at a time like this?”
“It’s not crap, sweetie-pie.”
“It’s not crap, she says. Don’t you understand? Don’t you understand anything? If God exists, I’m fucked.”
And then, Mr. Morrie said, he was gone.
KATHLEEN’S VISITS, often unannounced, became a torment. The once fastidious and acerbic Miss O., a lady of quality, spilling out of her Subaru with the dented hood, puffy, her step uncertain, wearing a food-stained old sweater and a skirt with a broken zipper, bearing liquor commission bags that rattled, and then talking into the dawn, repeating her stories again and again.
Contemplating her one night, passed out on the sofa, snoring, her mouth agape, Moses remembered her leading him out of the Ritz, at Anita Gursky’s first wedding, to spare him listening to the poem L.B. had written in honour of the bride and groom. He leaned over and wiped her chin, he kissed her on both cheeks, covered her with a blanket, and whispered, “I love you,” assuming that she couldn’t hear. But Kathleen stirred. “Me too you,” she said. “But what will become of us?”