Van der Jong pushed another artifact across the table.
'Now look at this. Isn't it charming?'
Nobody else had left the dining-room.
Ventura, Ramirez and Sassine were looking casually around them, their glances passing across our table and moving on. Shadia sat watching me, perfectly still.
'I get them from the garimpeiros, when they come down from the goldfields across the Xingu River. I don't know where they get them, but I would say it was from the prostitutes up there. Don't you think this one is charming?'
I looked down at it, away from Shadia's light blue gaze.
It looked like some kind of nutshell, with apertures carved I into it, after the fashion of Chinese trinkets. It appeared to be I filed with coarse, springy hair.
Daddy, they won't hurt me until midnight. Then they say they're going to start hurting me. Can't you do something?
'Of course I don't sell these to my regular clients.'
He gave a confidential laugh, showing his gold tooth.
Shadia watched me.
I looked down again.
The shell was painted gaudily on the outside, in bright childish colours.
'There was quite a demand in Copenhagen, until they got bored with them. Now I sell through the adult bookstores, in Canada.'
Will you still love me. Daddy, please do what they tell you… Please.
Question: what would James Burdick not be prepared to do?
'It's amusing,' I nodded to de Jong.
'One thing I guarantee.' He leaned towards me and the beads of sweat on his pink face gleamed in the light of the oil lamp. 'It comes from a woman. The men are too proud of themselves!'
I assumed that Pat Burdick was the go-between. In most cases of hostage-and-demand the captor handles the communications but in cases where he knows his business he will leave the hostage to make the appeal directly, usually over a telephone or sometimes on tape. This is logical because the demands are usually made to a man-almost always the victim's father — and if he receives threats from another man his male aggressiveness comes into play and he considers himself challenged and will sometimes try to brave it out and urge the police to go in fighting on his behalf.
I had sufficient respect for Satynovich Zade to believe he was handling this operation professionally.
Daddy, they say I won't ever see you again.
In my trade we don't take things personally or if you want to put it another way we take things about as personally as a pilot does when he drops his bombs. But when I killed Zade it would be with a sense of satisfaction.
'Take it. I give you the damned thing!' said de Jong, He threw up his pink hands, laughing generously.
Shadia turned her head a degree to look at him, then looked at me again. It occurred to me that the cell had been making enquiries into the guests here: there were probably fifteen or twenty in the hotel. Their first question to the staff would concern the time of arrival here of each guest. I had arrived on the same day as Zade and there'd been nothing I could do about that.
'Thank you. It's a charming souvenir.'
I put the thing into my pocket to please him.
There were voices upstairs suddenly, and the men near the bar stopped talking and looked at the ceiling. For a moment the whole dining-room was quiet, then people began talking again. In five minutes Zade and Kuznetski came down again with the girl and crossed over to their table. She had been crying, but was making an effort to appear normal, and I don't think anyone would have noticed it unless they'd been watching her closely.
Flat white light came against the windows and a few people turned their heads and looked away again. In a moment distant thunder rolled.
'Have you been here when there is a storm?' asked de Jong.
'Yes.'
He wiped his pink face dry.
'I tell you something. This is the most poisonous climate in the entire world, it has the most poisonous insects and the most poisonous reptiles. But people come here. I come, and you come.' He drained his glass. 'This place has something, yes?'
'Yes. Something for everyone,'
The rain roared incessantly on the roof.
Light flared white in the room through the slats in the shutters, silvering her body for an instant. She said something but it was lost in the drumming of the thunder overhead. The building shook.
Then there was the warm light of the oil lamp again, glowing on her tawny skin and the mass1 of body hair as she writhed on the bed with her long legs, reminding me in colouring of a tiger lily because she was heavily freckled, reminding me too of Marianne, of the Villa Madeleine, because they both wanted the light on, and everything to be slow.
Shadia said something again, speaking in Polish with the Varsovie accent and laughing a little, perhaps afraid of the storm. She wanted me to put it here, and here, as she moved restlessly on the bed for me, her sweat slipping.
'I like it like this,' she said, 'with the storm.'
She was afraid of it. And probably of nothing else.
I remembered her now.
When Fogel had fired at point-blank range into the faces of the two Deuxieme Bureau men in Paris last year there'd been a woman involved, a native of Poland who had joined the new extremist group being formed in Athens. She had trained as usual in the Palestinian guerilla camps, in this case with the Japanese Red Army units. The only place in Europe where she refused to operate was Germany, and she would have nothing to do with the Baader-Meinhof group.
She was typicaclass="underline" restless the whole time and never stopping to enjoy a new sensation before we went on to the next. Nothing could satisfy her because she couldn't wait, couldn't give it time. I'd known these women before: they're afraid of letting go, and in the end the male streak in them sends them out into the streets with grenades to prove their point that they can't love and so they're going to hate.
She spoke in English sometimes against the drumming of the storm.
'Oh my God, darling.'
Nothing that meant anything.
Fierce light and almost immediate vibration as the thunder banged.
These were the more dangerous moments: when I couldn't hear anything but the storm. At these moments I watched the door.
She had been wandering in the courtyard, around midnight, knowing I would see her because I had to pass that way to my room. Van de Jong had been trying to talk me into becoming a part-time representative in his mail order business because I travelled quite a lot and seemed interested; it was excellent cover because his voice carried, and we had talked till twelve.
'Now,' she said in Polish, 'this time now.'
But of course it didn't work.
The force of the rain rattled the tiles overhead. The hotel was perfectly square, its four sides surrounding the courtyard; and the Spanish tiles sloped at a low angle, sending the flood of water into the guttering and forming cascades through the gaps where it had broken.
'Slowly,' she said, out of breath.
But her long hands were still restless and unsatisfied. Later she'd find more release in the orgasmic flash of a grenade.
The thunder came and I watched the door again.
Because this was a Venus trap.
'Oh darling,' she said in English, 'oh my God.'
The door was locked but there wasn't a bolt.
They might have a key but it wasn't materiaclass="underline" they would need approximately the same amount of time to open the door with a key as to smash it inwards. I had estimated from three to four seconds for them to reach me from the passage outside, including the opening of the door. That was long enough but only if I stayed alert.
Her thighs twisted again under me.
'Where was this?' I asked her.
In the glow from the oil lamp the tattooed number showed blue on her skin.