Reese nodded slowly with either approval or understanding, or perhaps both. “So what did you do to earn your five thousand a month, Doc?”
“I’ve just told you.”
“No,” Reese said, shaking his head. “That might be worth, say, maybe five hundred bucks a month, but not five thousand. What was the big ticket item they had you working on?”
I will not answer, Dr. Mapangou thought, closing his eyes again. Tomorrow I will go to the airport and get on the plane and fly to Dakar and take the bus down to Banjul and then go for bush and never come out. They cannot find me there. Never.
He opened his eyes, and Reese’s cold stare hit him like a hard slap. “Felix,” Dr. Mapangou said. “They wanted me to locate the man Felix for them.”
A big smile spread itself across Reese’s face. “Well, now,” he said and grabbed his drink and drained it. “Well, now, by God.” He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, but the smile refused to go away. “You fingered him. You fingered Felix.”
Dr. Mapangou closed his eyes again and thought about Ban-Jul.
“How’d you do it?” Reese said, and for the first time there was nothing but admiration in his tone.
Something flickered in Dr. Mapangou’s thoughts, then died, and flickered again. He tried to smother it, but it refused to die. It does, he thought, after all, spring eternal.
“It was complicated,” he said, the pride creeping into his voice.
“I bet.”
“I have many friends at the UN. They tell me things. Sometimes they don’t quite know what they’re really telling me. I mean by that that one friend will tell me one thing, and I will tell him something, then another friend will tell me something, and then I put it all together — like a puzzle. In this instance, a PLO friend mentioned something, and a member of the Irish delegation said something else, and then one of my colleagues from Libya let drop a rather careless remark, and the Israelis, of course, are really terrible gossips, and one of them — I won’t say which one — gave me, unknowingly, of course, the last item I needed.”
“What was the key piece?” Reese asked with naked curiosity.
“It was the name of a doctor — an Indian doctor in London. He was not licensed to practice, but still he did. Or does. He was treating a woman and her child. The woman had tuberculosis. The woman had been sent to him by someone in the IRA. He was, or is, I suppose, the unofficial IRA doctor. Perhaps a specialist in gunshot wounds?”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Well, I heard about the doctor from one person and about the woman and her child from another, and from yet another source I heard that Felix was worried about a woman member of his organization who had tuberculosis. So you see I simply put the various pieces together and then reported my findings to Mr. Arnold and Mr. Benedict.”
Reese leaned back in the chair and stared thoughtfully at Dr. Mapangou. For the first time, there was a measure of respect in the look that he gave the small neat man with the graying hair.
“Mr. Benedict and Mr. Arnold,” Reese said finally in a musing voice.
“Yes.”
“They want to sell Felix to both the Libyans and the Israelis for ten million bucks, right?”
“Yes.”
“But there can’t be two Felixes, can there?”
“No.”
“So what they really plan to do, Mr. Benedict and Mr. Arnold, is run a shitty, right?”
“A shitty? Yes, a shitty, as you say.”
Reese leaned forward across the desk and dropped his voice back down to the register where it turned into a confidential rumble. “What was your cut gonna be, Doc — out of the twenty million?”
Dr. Mapangou licked his lips. “Five hundred thousand?” He made it a tentative question.
Reese nodded his big head as if the amount were reasonable, but not overly so. He paused and chose his next words carefully. “How would you like to make, say... two million instead?”
The hope that had been flickering somewhere down in Dr. Mapangou’s breast burst into a roaring blast. But he kept his voice calm and casual, except for a small squeak at the very end.
“I would like that very much,” he said. “Very much indeed.”
18
There was some discussion, not quite an argument, about who would get the window seat. It was finally decided that the sad-eyed Englishman would sit there because he liked to look out. After more discussion, with the American growing just a trifle exasperated, it was also decided that the woman, who may have been either British or American — it was hard to tell — would sit next to the Englishman, while the American with the skewed left cheekbone that made him look a bit cockeyed would sit across the aisle from her in seat 3-B next to first-class window seat 3-A, which was already occupied by Faraj Abedsaid, Attaché (Cultural Section), of the Libyan Arab Republic’s Embassy in London.
At 8:45 A.M. Dunjee buckled his seat belt just as a flight attendant announced in Italian, English, and French that this was Alitalia flight 317 from London to Rome and flying time would be approximately two hours and fifteen minutes. Dunjee turned to glance at his seat companion and give him what he knew to be his politician’s nod, not too friendly, but not too distant either, a nod that in effect said, Even if you can’t vote for me, pal, maybe you know somebody who can. Abedsaid gave him a slight nod back.
Once the plane had reached cruising altitude, Delft Csider raised the lid on the large attaché case that rested on her lap and, in a clear, penetrating voice, said, “Congressman, do you want to do the mail first, or do you want that spud-in report from Denver?”
“Let’s get the mail over with,” Dunjee said, speaking just slightly louder than he normally would.
Delft Csider handed him a sheaf of letters and a clipboard to write on. Dunjee fumbled for a pen, giving Abedsaid sufficient time to glance at the top letterhead which read, “Anadarko Explorations, Inc.,” and underneath in somewhat smaller letters, “Tulsa, Oklahoma.” There was also an address, a phone number, a telex number, and a cable acronym, ANADEX; but they were all in eight-point type and too small to be read from any distance.
Dunjee started signing the letters with his own name, carefully reading each one first. After signing his name, he passed each letter across the aisle to Delft Csider. Next to her, Harold Hopkins stared out the window at the clouds below. After a few minutes of cloud-staring he leaned back in his seat and went to sleep.
When he reached the last letter in the pile, Dunjee said, “What happened to the one to Minister Obalana in Lagos?”
“You decided it would be better to call him from Rome, Congressman.”
“That’s right. I forgot. Let’s have that Denver report. Never mind, I see it.” Dunjee reached across the aisle toward the open attaché case. The clipboard with the last letter still on it slipped from his lap and fell at Abedsaid’s feet. The Libyan reached down and picked them up, noting that the letter was addressed to The Hon. Salim Abdulrazzak, who happened to be the Minister of Resources for the State of Kuwait.
“Sorry,” Dunjee said.
“Not at all,” Abedsaid said, handing him the letter and the clipboard. Dunjee signed the final letter and passed both it and the clipboard over to Delft Csider.
When he was through, Abedsaid said, “You are a United States Congressman?”
Dunjee turned slightly and gave him his best smile — very white, very warm, very wide. “Not any more. My associates just call me that out of habit. It sometimes helps when it comes to making reservations.”