She stirred, opened her eyes, and smiled. “Again?” she said. “You’ll notice I didn’t say, ‘Not again.’”
“I was just wondering,” he said.
“What?”
“If you’re hungry?”
She thought about it. “We didn’t eat, did we? Not food anyway.”
“Not much nourishment in the other. A trace of protein, I think.”
She stretched and yawned, not bothering to cover her mouth. He noticed she had no fillings in her teeth. “What’s wrong with your teeth?” he said.
“Wrong?”
“No fillings.”
“They don’t decay. No matter what I eat, nothing happens to them. I’ve got good gums, too. See?” She snarled at him.
“You’re lucky,” Dunjee said and reached for the phone. They were in his bedroom. Two hours earlier, still holding their drinks, they had almost wandered into it from the living room of the $220-a-day suite with its fourth-floor view of the Spanish Steps. The preliminaries had been brief and largely silent. The lovemaking had been both vigorous and a bit noisy. They had discovered that they were both talkers. Delft Csider was also something of a screamer — small joyous screams that she cut off by biting anything handy. But she didn’t bite too hard, and after a time Dunjee almost began to enjoy it.
“What would you like?” he said when room service answered the phone.
“Eggs and shrimp,” she said. “Something gooey and Italian made out of eggs and shrimp. Lots of shrimp.”
Dunjee ordered two scampi omelettes and some wine. After he hung up the phone, he looked at her. “Drink?”
She nodded. “Make it weak.”
Dunjee rose and went into the living room, returning with two glasses. He handed her one and sat down on the edge of the bed next to her.
“Were you born cockeyed?” she said, touching him gently just beneath his left eye.
He shook his head. “Bayonet practice. A sergeant was teaching me the vertical butt stroke. It shattered the cheekbone. The bone didn’t heal right, and ever since I’ve looked like something out of Picasso.”
“It’s nice,” she said. “It makes you look a little like a—” The knock at the living-room door kept her from completing her comparison. “That couldn’t be room service,” she said. “Not this soon.”
“Maybe it’s the tickets.”
“To Malta?”
“You did tell them to send them up, didn’t you?”
She nodded. “But they said they’d send them up in the morning.”
“Maybe it’s Hopkins,” Dunjee said, looked for his pants, found them on the floor, and slipped them on. He looked for his shirt, discovered it on the floor on the other side of the bed, and put it on, not bothering to tuck in its tails. He went to the living-room door dressed like that, barefoot, drink still in hand, and opened it.
There were four of them, including Harold Hopkins, who was sandwiched in between two large men with mustaches. The two men were young, in their late twenties. The fourth man had done the knocking. He held a pistol in his right hand. The pistol, an automatic, was down by his side, not pointing at anything. The man with the pistol was Faraj Abedsaid.
Abedsaid smiled. “I think,” he said, “that you and I must have a talk, Congressman.”
Dunjee backed away from the door. Abedsaid waited until the two large men herded Hopkins into the room. Abedsaid followed them in and closed the door, making sure it was locked. The two men moved over and leaned against it.
Hopkins looked at Dunjee and then let his glance roam around the room. “I didn’t have no fucking choice, mate,” he said and headed for the Scotch bottle.
“Here,” Dunjee said, holding out his own glass. “Add a touch to mine.”
Hopkins took the glass and began mixing the drinks. Abedsaid waved his pistol toward the bedroom door. “Miss Csider?”
Dunjee nodded.
“Ask her to come out, please.”
Again, Dunjee nodded and moved into the bedroom. Delft Csider was already dressing. “We’ve got a little trouble,” Dunjee said.
“How bad?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“I’ll be right out.”
Dunjee went back into the living room and accepted the drink from Hopkins.
Abedsaid smiled pleasantly. “It’s been rather a frantic day. Much of it was spent in checking you out, Congressman. Our own facilities are a bit limited, so here and there we had to use our friends. You have quite a reputation — at least in Mexico. The Mordida Man. It means the bribe giver, doesn’t it?”
“Something like that,” Dunjee said.
Delft Csider came out of the bedroom, nodded coolly at Abedsaid, ignored the two who were leaning against the door, and lowered herself into a chair.
“Would you care for a drink, Miss Csider?” Abedsaid said.
“No thank you.”
He nodded, looked around, decided on an armchair, and sat down. He held the pistol loosely in his lap. Dunjee and Hopkins continued to stand.
“It was, of course,” Abedsaid continued, “no coincidence that you sat next to me on the plane this morning. Allow me to congratulate you on your performance. It was quite convincing. You succeeded in arousing my curiosity, which, I presume, is exactly what you intended to do.” Although Abedsaid hadn’t posed it as a question, he waited as though expecting an answer.
After a moment, Dunjee said, “Something like that.”
“You were signaling, if I’m not mistaken, your availability.”
“Or maybe I was just trying to hustle a rich Arab.”
Abedsaid smiled again. “Now Mr. Hopkins here is almost equally interesting. Mr. Hopkins is a thief — and a good one, if my informants in London are correct. My apartment there was burgled a few days ago. Another small coincidence.”
“Get on with it, Jack,” Hopkins said.
“Yes, I suppose I should. All of this brings us to the topic that concerns us all — Mr. Bingo McKay, your President’s brother.”
“What the fuck’s he talking about?” Hopkins said.
“He’s not sure yet,” Dunjee said, adding softly, “Are you?”
Abedsaid continued to smile. “We want you to take a trip. All three of you. An airplane trip. The plane is standing by. Now you can either go willingly or you can be smuggled aboard, which would be rather messy — drugs, that sort of thing. I strongly urge you to go willingly.”
“Go where?” Dunjee said.
“Tripoli.”
“Why Tripoli?”
“Someone there wishes to talk to you. Just outside Tripoli, actually.”
“In the desert?”
“Yes, in the desert.”
“Who wants to talk?”
“Colonel Mourabet.”
“Himself?”
“Himself.”
“All right,” Dunjee said. “We’ll go.”
23
It was somewhat earlier that same day, around midnight, New York time, that Dr. Joseph Mapangou sat on the bench in Central Park wondering how long it would be before he was mugged. He had been waiting for fifteen minutes on the isolated bench, deep in the park, and already he had turned down the importunings of a sad-faced homosexual who had begged him to let him touch it, just for a second.
Dr. Mapangou, concealing his horror very well, he thought, had politely told the man to go away. The man had offered him eighteen dollars. Dr. Mapangou had started to giggle. It was a high-pitched, almost hysterical giggle. The man had cursed him and gone away. Dr. Mapangou had stopped giggling.
He sat now, legs tightly crossed, his head swiveling at each mysterious sound that came from the night creatures who crept through the jungle that surrounded him. But it is not a jungle, he told himself repeatedly. It is only a well-kept park, and if there are creatures in it, they are probably only lost dogs, small dogs. Tiny poodles, most likely, with rhinestone collars.