Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“It still seems high.”

“It seemed high the morning after, take my word for it. I felt bloody stupid. I blamed myself six ways and backwards — for falling for it in the first place, and for not getting anything out of it, as if there was something there to be gotten and it was my fault it hadn’t worked. And then, it must have been ten days later and I’d put the whole thing out of my mind, and I was in a meeting with my then-boss and that old bastard Kostler. Do you know him?”

“No.”

“Consider yourself lucky. I was in there, and Kostler was kicking our brains in, really killing us. And something clicked in. I felt the presence of a power within me that had not been there before. I took a breath, and I literally felt the energy shift in the room, the whole balance among the three of us. And I started talking, and the words were just there, Alan. I could have charmed the birds out of the trees, I could have talked a dog off a meat wagon.”

“You were on,” Hilliard suggested. “Everybody has days like that, when the edges just line up for you. I had it one night playing pool at the Harcourt Club in Nairobi. I couldn’t miss a shot. Bank shots, combinations — everything worked. And the next day I was the same klutz I’d always been.”

“But I wasn’t,” Donnelly said. “I had something extra, something I hadn’t had before, and it didn’t go away the next day or the next week or the next month. It can’t go away now. It’s not a lucky charm, something you could pick up downtown at the fetish market. It’s a part of who I am, but it’s a part that never existed before I ate Atuele’s lawn clippings and had an egg rubbed in my scalp.”

Hilliard thought about this. “You don’t think it’s all in your mind, then,” he said.

“I think it’s all in my self. I think, if you will, that my self has been enlarged by the addition of a spirit that wasn’t there before, and that this spirit has incorporated itself into my being, and—” He broke off abruptly, gave his head a shake. “Do you know something? I don’t know what I believe, or what happened, or how or why, either. I know that a month after my ceremony I got a five-thousand-dollar raise without asking for it, which makes Atuele look like a damned good investment. I’ve had two raises since then, and a promotion to the second desk in the Transcorporate Division. And they’re right to promote me, Alan. Before they were carrying me. Now I’m worth every penny they pay me.”

After dinner Hilliardand his wife watched a movie on the VCR. He couldn’t keep his mind on it. All he could think about was what he had seen in Atuele’s compound, and what Donnelly had told him at the hotel bar.

In the shower, he tried to picture the ceremony Donnelly had described. The roar of the shower became the relentless drumming of a quartet of grinning sweating half-naked blacks.

He dried off, made himself a drink, carried it into the air-conditioned bedroom. The lights were out and his wife was already sleeping, or putting on a good act. He got into bed and sipped his drink in the darkness. His heart welled up with the mixture of tenderness and desire that she always inspired in him. He set down his drink half-finished and laid a hand on her exposed shoulder.

His hand moved on her body. For a while she made no response, although he knew she was awake. Then she sighed and rolled over and he moved to take her.

Afterward he kissed her and told her that he loved her.

“It’s late,” she said. “I have an early day tomorrow.”

She rolled over and lay as she had lain when he came into the room. He sat up and took his drink from the nightstand. The ice had melted but the whiskey was cool. He sipped the drink slowly, but when the glass was empty he was still not sleepy. He thought of fixing himself another but he didn’t want to risk disturbing her.

He had the urge to put his hand on her bare shoulder again, not as a sexual overture but just to touch her. But he did not do this. He sat up, his hand at his side. After a while he lay down and put his head on the pillow, and after a while he slept.

Two days laterhe lunched with Donnelly at the native restaurant. Hilliard had chicken with yams with some sort of red sauce. It brought tears to his eyes and beaded his forehead with sweat. It was, he decided, even better than the stew he’d had there earlier.

To Donnelly he said, “The thing is, my life works fine just as it is. I’m happily married, I love my wife, and I’m doing well at the embassy. So why would I want a ceremony?”

“Obviously you don’t.”

“But the thing is I do, and I couldn’t tell you why. Silly, isn’t it?”

“You could talk with Atuele,” Donnelly offered.

“Talk with him?”

“He may tell you you don’t need a ceremony. One woman came to him with a list of symptoms a yard long. She was all primed to pay a fortune and be ordered to smear herself with palm oil and dance naked in the jungle. Atuele told her to cut back on starches and take a lot of vitamin C.” Donnelly poured the last of his beer into his glass. “I thought I’d take a run out there this afternoon myself,” he said. “Do you want to come along and talk with him?”

“I’m actually avery happy man,” he told Atuele. “I love my job, I love my wife, we have a pleasant, well-run home—”

Atuele listened in silence. He was smoking one of the cigarettes Hilliard had brought him. Donnelly had said it was customary to bring a gift, so Hilliard had picked up a carton of Pall Malls. For his part, Donnelly had brought along a liter of good scotch.

When Hilliard had run out of things to say, Atuele finished his cigarette and put it out. He gazed at Hilliard. “You are walking on the beach,” he said suddenly, “and you stop and turn around, and what do you see?”

What kind of nonsense was this? Hilliard tried to think of an answer. His own voice, unbidden, said: “I have left no footprints.”

And, quite unaccountably, he burst into tears.

He sobbed shamelessly for ten minutes. At last he stopped and looked across at Atuele, who had smoked half of another cigarette. “You ought to have a ceremony,” Atuele said.

“Yes.”

“The price will be four hundred dollars U.S. You can manage this?”

“Yes.”

“Friday night. Come here before sundown.”

“I will. Uh. Is it all right to eat first? Or should I skip lunch that day?”

“If you do not eat you will be hungry.”

“I see. Uh, what should I wear?”

“What you wish. Perhaps not a jacket, not a tie. You will want to be comfortable.”

“Casual clothes, then.”

“Casual,” Atuele said, enjoying the word. “Casual, casual. Yes, casual clothes. We are casual here.”

“Friday night,” Hilliard said. “How long do these things last?”

“Figure midnight, but it could go later.”

“That long.”

“Or you could be home by ten. It’s hard to say.”

Hilliard was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I don’t think I would want Marilyn to know about this.”

“She’s not going to hear it from me, Alan.”

“I’ll say there’s an affair at the Gambian embassy.”

“Won’t she want to go?”

“God, have you ever been to anything at the Gambian embassy? No, she won’t want to go.” He looked out the car window. “I could tell her. It’s not that I have to ask her permission to do anything. It’s just—”

“Say no more,” said Donnelly. “I was married once.”

The lie wasinconvenient in one respect. In order to appear suitably dressed for the mythical Gambian party, Hilliard left his house in black tie. At Donnelly’s office he changed into khakis and a white safari shirt and a pair of rope sandals.