Catacombs (9 page)

Catacombs.

Rubbing his fingertips lightly over the facets of the bloodstone, Morgan could just feel the tiny pictographs etched there. He was overcome with a sense of imminent danger, the folly of disbelief.

"General Timbaroo?"

The mercenary came briskly forward, three paces, and clicked his boot heels together.

"Yes, sir!"

"If a car is ready for me, I'd like to start for home now."

KINGDOM MISSION

Ivututu, Tanzania

April 29

I
n the mission hospital Erika Weller worked with a mind-numbing intensity until well after sunset, trying to keep up with the needs of critically ill men and women. She was certain it would not be long before she heard the boots of Colonel Ukumtara's askari on the stairs outside. No doubt her punishment for plotting an escape would be mild: an elaborate, scornful dressing down from the colonel himself, then close house arrest during those hours when she couldn't be at the hospital. No community meals. Perhaps she would also be deprived of morning Mass.

Raymond Poincarré had returned just before dusk from the airstrip with many cartons of supplies that had to be unpacked and put away; he'd been busy in the hospital storeroom and hadn't come upstairs for his evening rounds. Her only company, aside from a couple of nurses who were virtually sleep-walking, was Father Varnhalt, who had arrived dutifully after vespers with communion wafers for those patients able to accept them. At least his phonograph had been silent for a while. But the mourning drums of the neighborhood villages had begun, along with the yaps and chortles and bloody howls of jackal and dog baboon in the rocky hills and ravines behind the mission.

The only sound she had been listening for, and hadn't heard, was the engine of the Bonanza as it took off for the return hop over the mountains to Mbeya town.

That was significant. It could mean that Bob Connetta had succeeded in temporarily disabling the plane before Dr. Poincarré arrived. Bob was a twenty-three-year-old graduate student in archaeology, the son of an American colleague of Chips'. The Chapman/Weller expedition had been Bobby's first major venture into the field, and one that would make him famous out of all proportion to his experience. That is, if he lived. She couldn't condemn Chips for having delegated him to sabotage the Bonanza–no one else had the opportunity. But she was worried.

Chips had been fitfully asleep for more than an hour. She replaced his IV bottle, a five-percent dextrose solution in water, and tried to rouse him; but when she spoke he replied deliriously, replaying some yacht race or other he'd been involved in years ago. Erika couldn't cool him down and was worried about his breathing. She wondered if she should insert an endotracheal tube.

Father Varnhalt, wearing a purple-and-white surplice over dust-smudged khakis, was down on one knee, mumbling in Latin at the bedside of another patient. When she turned around, tears squeezing from her eyes, she saw Raymond Poincarré at the door, watching her.

"He's worse," Erika groaned. "It's just consuming him, like a fire in a hollow tree."

"Sometimes it happens that way. Then there's a remission. We'll try more procaine penicillin."

"Useless! Nothing . . . bloody . . . works, only the grace of God is going to save the lot of them."

"Erika!"

She struggled to control herself. "Yes. All right. Nothing good's going to come of carrying on, is it? I'll . . . prepare an injection,
 
or do you want to drip it?"

"Injection," he told her.

Erika opened the pharmaceuticals cabinet and took out the little bottle of penicillin, broke the cellophane pack of a fresh disposable syringe. While Raymond looked at Chips' chart, Erika administered the drug. The doctor said quietly, not looking at her, "The pilot had a slight mishap on landing."

Erika felt a cold flash of fear. "I hope he wasn't hurt."

"No, it's nothing, really. Flat tire. Of course he hasn't a spare."

"Couldn't he take off with a flat tire?"

"Any competent bush pilot could manage that, even in the dark. The problem seems to be in coming down again. Rather than run the risk of crumping a new airplane and having the government sack him, the pilot has decided to remain until a new tire can be dropped to him in the morning."

"That's . . . sensible."

"I think so. He prefers, naturally, to stay with his aircraft. I let him know there was rather much risk of contracting the fever if he put up at the mission. He'll be uncomfortable, but we'll send supper and a bottle of wine later."

Erika stared at Raymond, wondering just what he was trying to tell her. Apparently he'd arrived too late to prevent Bob Connetta from slashing the Bonanza's tire. Was he now letting her know how hopeless it would be to attempt to steal the plane with the pilot, who was undoubtedly armed, watching over it?

Raymond finished taking Chips' pulse, and made a notation on the chart.

"By the way, Colonel Ukumtara has requested that you take supper with us this evening, at nine o'clock."

"Tell him how genuinely delighted I am, but I'm afraid–"

Raymond glanced up, frowning. "Erika, it isn't a request you can reasonably refuse."

She was about to protest again but another nurse, one of those assigned to the temporary ward in the school building, had come hurriedly upstairs.

"Doctor, can you come? There's a woman they've brought in with a snakebite, she bleeds from the nose already."

Raymond whirled. "Get me antivenin from the storeroom." He hesitated a few moments, looking back at Erika with an unexpected expression: exasperation, helplessness.

"It's vital that you be there," he said, and was gone; Erika heard him running almost heedlessly down the unsafe stairway outside.

Around eight o'clock Erika came to a curious standstill, as if her vital machinery had frozen. Her mind was a void; the simplest task required excruciating concentration. She had pains in her chest and her mouth quivered uncontrollably. Her best friend among the nurses, Alice Sinoyi, dropped by and noticed her distress. Alice led her home and drew a precious hot bath for her, laced with aloe juice and some kind of stinging botanical that made Erika's blood race. Alice spent a half hour soaping Erika, rubbing her down with a sponge, crooning the Sonjo songs of her childhood.

The treatment worked; Erika was revived. After her bath she had an additional mild tonic for the nerves, some Scotch and Fiuggi water, and realized that she could face the coming ordeal with patience if not spirit. She felt clean, lonely, bereft, abstracted. She put on a freshly ironed bush outfit and desert boots, another surgical mask, and went along at a quarter past nine to Colonel Ukumtara's bungalow, still feeling half a step beyond reality.

A woman who had died of fever was being removed from the school building by silent relatives. The body had been rolled in a straw mat, which was covered with black cloths and baobab leaves. A
muganga
, splendid in a stifling, vintage military greatcoat which he wore only on important occasions, walked alongside sprinkling herbal medicine on the cloths, an antiseptic barrier between the dead and the living. The faces of the pallbearers, all men, were smeared with clay. They staggered uncertainly with their burden, as if they had drunk a great deal of
pombe
, the hot thick homemade beer of the bush, to steel themselves for this task. In the distance drums and melancholy, high-pitched improvisational songs signaled another wake in progress. There was an odor of burning in the air, fires of purification everywhere. But against all opposition the fever continued to thrive.

Colonel Ukumtara was one of a rare breed, a Masai tamed and assimilated into the contemporary East African culture. Most of the decimated tribe, who in their prime had been aristocratic nomads with cattle, fierce spearmen and hunters of lions, had failed to make even the slightest adjustments to changes in their environment. Ukumtara seemed to have prospered. He enjoyed French wines and disco music on his powerful transoceanic Grundig radio. He was tall, with a rock-like shaved head, but lighter in color than most Masai; a Hamitic, caucasoid strain was apparent in his bloodlines. His habitual expression was one of gaping good humor, but that could be deceptive.

He wore two rows of medals on his blue uniform blouse and a pearl-handled automatic in a sweat-blackened shoulder holster. He had avoided the fever by staying indoors, burning incense, not bathing, and having a daily dose of Sloan's liniment, which he took internally with a bowl of
pombe
.

The atmosphere in his closed-up bungalow, despite the cool temperatures outside, almost knocked Erika over. But the colonel scowled when he saw she was wearing a surgical mask and insisted that she remove it. No one in the house could become infected; to think so was to invite a malignant fate...

She was late, and they had not waited supper. House-boys served Erika goat curry, eland steak, and peas cooked in groundnut oil, along with a glass of a good Bordeaux that had just arrived from Mbeya. Father Varnhalt was also on hand. He was nearly seventy and suffering from bush fever; he had been a long time at the mission. His hands trembled so badly he was forced to eat with his mouth only inches from his plate.

At some point he had surrendered his faith to the unremitting hostility of the natural world–drought, storm, plague, the evil spirits of the forests. He depended now on ritual, the sterile intonations and responses of a dead language, to get him through the day. He reinforced a precarious hold on reality by talking matter-of-factly about the horrors that had driven fellow priests and white sisters mad in their isolated circumstances.

"One day at Mass Father Sylvanus saw his entire congregation turn to animals before his eyes–creatures with long snouts, tufted ears, and the fiery eyes of dragons. They gnashed their teeth at him, and farted obscenely when he tried to speak. This is true. Mother Celeste was bathing in a pool when she looked up and saw the devil sitting on the limb of a fig tree playing with his penis. He ejaculated demon seed into her water; his seed turned into thousands of little biting creatures which tried to tear the chaste white flesh from her bones. Father Xavier Antonio was walking along a path in the Loita when he encountered a giant. One side was hair, the other stone. The giant, whose name was Enenauner, beat on a tree with his club until Father Xavier went deaf from the noise. I know this to be a fact."

Colonel Ukumtara ate heavily, washing down his meal with copious wine. He had gained at least twenty pounds during his idle weeks at the mission, most of it in his belly.

"Your religion is foolish," he said, pointing his bread knife at Father Varnhalt. "The Masai know this. The Bible is too long. There is too much to read. Why should we pray to a man? Men die, and are no longer real. We know this by looking around and seeing that they are not there. The moon and the sun endure. They are real. We see them, every day, in the sky. Evil spirits are real; with our own eyes we see the evil they do. Then pray to the evil spirits who would harm you, so you will not be harmed. Pray for the sun to come up in the morning and cast away the dark where evil hides. This is sensible; this is good. Your religion will have us all crazy like you."

"The sun will always rise; it is God's law."

"What if it doesn't? What if there's no light tomorrow, and tomorrow after? Don't you think the evil spirits will be all over us then? Who will you pray to when that happens?"

Father Varnhalt tried to smile at this nonsense, but his emotional and theological resources failed him again. Some horror residing in his head caused a rearrangement of his features. He spilled wine on himself.

Raymond Poincarré sat with his hands in his lap, eyes glazed, his own meal largely untouched. Erika put a steadying hand on Father Varnhalt's arm and glared at Ukumtara, who was too busy eating to take notice of her displeasure. She wondered what wouldhappen if the colonel could have a glimpse of what lay inside the Catacombs; a look at the cat people of Zan with their watchful, mesmerizing eyes. If he didn't faint dead away he might be transformed, temporarily, into a jackal, which was about what he deserved.

Ukumtara suddenly pushed his plate aside, frowning, and poured more wine for himself.

"I don't like eating with you," he said to Father Varnhalt. "You put me in a bad mood. Go along to your own house now."

Father Varnhalt's throat tightened; his eyes swam with tears.

"Will you go with me," he asked Erika, "and see that there's nothing under my bed?"

Ukumtara roared, but his laughter ended in a coughing fit. He got up to change the frequency on his radio, finding Cuban salsa on a station in Maputo, Mozambique.

As he was listening he braced himself against the top of the low bookshelf where the radio was, a look of intense concentration in his eyes. He pressed his right hand against his chest. He seemed short of breath. He strained to release a belch. Then his eyes rolled up in his head and he sat down heavily in a chair. He was beaded with sweat.

Raymond looked around at him.

"Is something the matter, Colonel?"

"I'm not feeling well. Indigestion."

"I've told you often, it's no good bolting your food the way you do."

Ukumtara's face was contorted. "Pain . . . here," he panted, still holding his chest.