“What’s the difference?”

  “Well, it’s part of the policy of competing brands. They learned it from Procter and Gamble.”

  He didn’t seem amused at this. He thought it over and just shook his head, and I asked again what had happened to Ndoro.

  “Knanda Ndoro,” he said. “The Modonoland Retriever. Quite a man, Tanner cat. Quite a man. Know much about him?”

  “Not much,” I said.

  “He was a fascist bastard,” Plum said.

  Bowman seemed not to have heard. His face took on an odd quality. “A natural leader,” he said. “An infinitely charismatic man. A charmer. Tremendous natural intelligence, a good British education, and enormous personal magnetism. Maybe he was bad for the country in some ways, but he was damned good for it in others. Gave these buggers a sense of identity, a feeling of national purpose.

  “I had a hard time getting him to leave the capital. He wanted to stay. Of course we got out at the last minute. You must know about that. Then that mad rush through the jungle. I thought we were clear at one point. I thought the two of us, you know, would be equal to anything the jungle might throw up against us.”

  He lowered his eyes and dropped his voice. “Then the fever struck. I caught it first and came close to dying. But he nursed me through it. And then, just as I was recovering nicely, he came down with it. He was burning up with fever and couldn’t eat and was delirious and, oh, it was terrible.” A pulse worked in his temple. “I stayed up with him day and night. I tried to bring him out of it by sheer force of will, but my will just wasn’t equal to that fever. After three days and nights of it he died.

  “I dug his grave with my own two hands. By the side of a tree near a river bank. Scooped out the dirt with my own two hands and laid him to rest. I thought of a poem they taught me in school. Stevenson wrote it, Robert Louis Stevenson, for his own epitaph. It went like this:

  Under a wide and starry sky,

  Dig my grave and let me lie.

  Glad did I live and gladly die,

  And I laid me down with a will.

  This be the verse you grave for me:

  Here he lies where he longed to be;

  Home is the sailor, home from sea

  And the hunter home from the hill.

  “I thought that might make a good epitaph for him, that it was fitting. But I had nothing to write with and nothing to write on, and anyway I knew I’d never be able to mark that grave so I could find it again. So what was the point of an epitaph if wasn’t anybody going to know who was buried there? What I did was I just spoke the words aloud, and I don’t suppose that did any more good than writin’ them, but it was something to do and I did it.”

  He heaved a sigh, and we were all three respectfully silent for a few moments. “He must have been a very great man,” Plum said. A few moments ago, I seemed to recall, she had characterized the late Retriever as a fascist bastard. Women are decidedly fickle.

  Bowman agreed that the Retriever had indeed been a great man. “You hear all these people talk about Black Power,” he said, “and here’s a guy actually went and did something about it. And with such style, such flair.”

  “You must have been terribly devoted to him,” she said.

  “Well, I could say it was just a job. Just the same old shuck.” He grinned gently. “But I’ll tell you a thing as straight as anything anybody ever told you, Plum kitten. And that’s that nobody on earth was ever as devoted to anybody as I was to Knanda Ndoro. And that’s the truth.”

  Plum bowed her head and closed her eyes. Bowman let the poetic beauty of the scene build to a peak, then borrowed my Swiss Army pocketknife to scalp his two former comrades. Scalp is not the right word for it, but it will have to do. There was still some alcohol in my jug, and we used it to wash the red dye from the, uh, scalps. They would be presented to Sheena, who would accept them as trophies of the hunt even as she accepted Plum and me as faithful members of her rebel band. At least that was the theory.

  I pictured Bowman digging Knanda Ndoro’s grave with his own two hands. I wanted to ask him about the treasure, but it seemed inappropriate to bring it up now.

  Chapter 10

  “And the voice of the Lord came unto Jane, and spake unto her. And the Lord said, Lo, thou art white, and thy father was white and his father before him. And the whiteness of thy father and thy father’s father is an abomination in my eyes, and thou art whitened as a sepulcher. So henceforth shalt thy name not be Jane, but from this day forward and forevermore shalt thou be called Sheena, which means Queen of the Jungle.

  “And the voice of the Lord spake unto Jane called Sheena, and said unto her, Lo, over every living thing shalt thou have dominion, over them that groweth in the ground and them that creepeth in the sky and them that lieth down and them that riseth up. And over every man and every woman shalt thou have dominion, and of the men, if they be white, then shalt they surely be put to death. And of the women, if they be black or white, they shall be surely put to death. And of the men, if they be black, let them come into thy tent, and let them lie with thee, and let them come unto thee when thou liest down and when thou risest up.

  “And the voice of the Lord-”

  I tuned out the voice of the Lord, no disrespect intended, and let my eyes take over for my ears. Sheena was a far cry better to look at than to listen to. As far as the eyes were concerned, she was a Playboy centerfold brought miraculously to life, the ideal Playmate of this or any other month. She had hair so golden the French peasantry would have hoarded it and eyes as blue as a Billie Holiday record. Her breasts convinced one that mammals were God’s chosen creatures, and that God had the right idea. Her legs went all the way up to her neck.

  The ears received another message entirely. If she looked like a wet dream, she sounded like Cotton Mather on an acid trip. She ran down the gospel according to St. Sheena with the precise cadence of a New England preacher. I was occasionally reminded of the Book of Mormon; the Angel Moroni, like Sheena, had tended to transmit his revelations in King James English. And, also like Sheena, he had frequently made less than an abundance of sense. It kept sounding right, but it kept not meaning anything.

  Actually, she might almost as well have been reciting the Book of Mormon, or the Magna Carta, or the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, or the Complete Works of Chester Alan Arthur, for all the impression it was making on her disciples. They evidently liked the sound of it, and the sound of it was all they got, because Sheena was babbling on and on in English – albeit her own personal version thereof – and of all the crowd gathered around her, only Plum and Bowman and I understood English. The rest of them – of us – could no more understand English than I could understand them.

  I drew Sam aside and asked him if Sheena spoke the native language. “Just English,” he said. “I don’t think she understands the native tongue, either. And they don’t understand her. It’s a very heavy relationship.”

  “What language do the natives speak?”

  “I don’t know the name of it. I can get around in it without breaking a leg, but I don’t know what you’d call it. Some local dialect. It’s nothing like what they speak farther south.”

  “How does Sheena talk to the men?”

  “You’re hearing her.”

  “I mean how does she communicate?”

  “Through me, now. She’ll tell me something in English and I’ll translate it into wog-gabble. I don’t know how she worked it before I happened on. But dig, it’s weird. They always seem to know what she has in mind. Like I tried turning her orders upside down one day, and it didn’t take. She has this fantastic intuitive thing with them. A very down scene. She doesn’t tell them what to do so much as she does things, she gets into a set, and they act in concert with her.” He shook his head in reminiscence. “The best illustration is at a massacre. The lady’s at her best at a massacre. She doesn’t tell anybody what to do. She just wades right in and lets fly, reelin’ off her own personal scripture and swingin’ that machete of hers like the jawbone of an ass. When we raid a village or wipe out a mission, she is purely beautiful.”

  “You sound as though you enjoy it.”

  “Shit, man, who wouldn’t?” His eyes met mine. “It’s all the same scrum, baby. Whether it’s Oakland cops or back-country priests and nuns, it’s the same ofay establishment. It’s cuttin’ whitey up and makin’ him bleed, that’s what it’s all about. After four hundred years of slavery, you got to expect a little desire for vengeance.”

  I must have backed off, or looked as though I was about to, because all at once the tension and fervor left his face and his features eased into a grin. “Nothing personal, Tanner cat. Course you understand that.”

  “Sure,” I said, unsure.

  “Just a matter of not cuttin’ off your hose despite your race, is how you maybe could put it. One white man is one thing. I can dig you on a personal level. But in the abstract, the whole lot of you, that’s somethin’ else.”

  “But missionaries,” I said. “Priests and nuns, doctors and nurses. I don’t-”

  “Missionaries!” He shouted the word, and several nearby warriors turned to gape at us. I tried to shrink away from them and avoid their eyes. My makeup job was fairly good, but the closer one looked at me the whiter I appeared. “Motherfucking bloodyminded missionaries,” he went on, in a lower register now. “Tanner cat, those are the worstest white devils of all. No question, no argument. Give me the straight-out colonialist any day of the week. You know where you stand with him. Like the Mississippi sheriff – he may kill you, but he won’t lay a load of bullshit on you. But the missionary, he comes into my country where I got my own religion and my own way of doing things, my own ceremonies and costumes and medicine and agriculture, and he gives out some vaccinations and passes around some food, and the next thing you know he’s sayin’ how my religion is a shuck and my ceremonies are a crock and my medicine’s a superstition and my crops don’t grow right, and what he’s tryin’ to do is turn me into a white man on the inside and leave me the same old bush nigger outside. The colonialist takes a man’s body and leaves him his soul, and that’s bad, but it’s a damn sight worse the other way around. That whole missionary attitude, that holier-than-thou routine, that white man’s burden birdsong. I hate that, man. It makes me want to reach out and rip things.”

  And again the eyes were blazing, the forehead creased, the veins standing out on the glossy black temples. And again, too, the passion waned all at once and teeth flashed in a smile. “Course you wouldn’t buy that,” he said.

  “No, I agree. Missionaries are the most arrogant people in the world, and they don’t even know it, they actually think they’re humble. But-”

  “But you don’t buy killing them.”

  “Not especially, no.”

  “Because their hearts are pure, right?”

  “Not exactly that, but-”

  He clapped me on the shoulder. It was a friendly gesture but one that very nearly knocked me from my feet. “Tanner cat, the trouble with you, you know what it is?”

  “I’m white.”

  “Well, that’s maybe part of it. But you can’t help it, it’s just an accident at birth. The sort of thing that’s apt to happen to a man when both his parents is white. The real trouble is that you just aren’t a fanatic.”

  The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which checks my mail, thinks I’m a fanatic. The Central Intelligence Agency, which bugs my apartment, concurs in this judgment. The police of countries all over the globe, having spotted my name on lists of various unwelcome organizations, concur in the opinion. I’m not even allowed in Canada, and you can’t be a whole hell of a lot more fanatic than that.

  But that wild-eyed fanatic was the old Evan Tanner. And if the leopard can change his spots and the Nixon his image, surely the Tanner can mature from youthful fanaticism to mature responsibility. And, I thought now, in my new role of Scarsdale Galahad and Levittown Lochinvar, in my chosen identity of breakfast-eating Brooks Brothers type, I couldn’t deny the truth of Samuel Lonestar Bowman’s remark. I just wasn’t a fanatic.

  A little later I repeated most of the conversation with Plum. She didn’t concur in Bowman’s opinion of missionaries. As far as she was concerned, no one who fed the hungry, clothed the naked, and healed the sick could be all bad. Her trouble was that she wasn’t a fanatic either.

  “And they don’t just kill white people,” she pointed out. “They kill black people as well. There were black corpses at the mission.”

  “I know. When they hit a mission, they kill everything that moves.”

  “And when they raid the villages, they do not merely do this to get supplies and to recruit more men for their forces. They kill and loot and burn.”

  “True.”

  “And they kill all women, Evan. Not just white women. Black women as well.”

  “True. That’s Sheena’s idea. It’s a particular fixation she has. She wants to be the only woman in the world.”

  “Honestly?”

  “So Bowman says. There’s no one else I can ask.”

  “That’s some ambition of hers.”

  “It’s every woman’s ambition, deep down inside. It’s just that she’s doing more to achieve it than most.”

  “If someone does not do something, Evan, she may manage it.”

  “It doesn’t seem too likely.”

  “But Evan,” she said, her hand on my arm. “Listen to me. You have said how Bowman likes to kill white men, and his reasons, and I think the reasons are crazy but I can understand why he might feel this way. But what about the harmless villagers? And all of the black women? Why should he be willing to kill them?”

  I covered her hand with mine, then let go abruptly and glanced hurriedly around. No one seemed to have noticed, and Plum looked oddly at me. I told her that everybody thought she was a boy, and that if we held hands and necked the other clowns would either figure out that she was female, in which case she would get the ax, or assume that I was some kind of a faggot. I wasn’t quite sure how tribesmen in the Modonoland interior felt about homosexuality. While it seemed the sort of thing worth knowing, I felt it might be just as well to wait until I was back in New York and then look it up in an anthropological journal. Sometimes secondhand research has its points.

  But I didn’t dwell on this, and Plum took her hand off my arm, and I reminded myself that, from here on in, she might as well be a boy for all I cared. We’d had our last fling. It was time to be faithful to Kitty.

  “Getting back to Bowman,” I said, by way of getting back to Bowman. “He’s a fairly arresting type, don’t you think? An extremely charming type. He can chill your blood one minute and take it all back with a smile.”

  “He talks weird.”

  “I know. He shifts back and forth from Harlem hard-bop jive to plantation hand to college graduate. Sometimes he even sounds vaguely British. It goes along with being a good linguist, which he damned well must be to handle the dialect they speak here. It sounds like turkey. Not the country, the bird. You know – gobble gobble.”

  “I don’t trust him, Evan.”

  “Neither do I. But we can’t really get out of here without his help – we can’t even survive without it. And he can’t get away without us.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He’s been here a long while now and never got away so far.”

  “Maybe he wants to stay.” Her lip curled and her eyes looked older by some years. “Maybe your friend Bowman likes it here.”

  “He doesn’t want to stay. He can stand it here, all right, but it won’t keep him happy for very long. He’s too complex to settle for the Noble Savage routine.”

  “I suppose you are right. I know that he has depth. When he spoke of the death of the Retriever, even while I knew the political crimes of Knanda Ndoro, yet I was moved, Evan.”

  “Well, he’s charming. And he’s complex, and he has depth, and I know damned well he has a use for us or else he would have killed us back at the mission. Because it’s not hard to say why Bowman goes along with killing innocent blacks and their women. I think he just plain enjoys it.”

  The Red Ball Irregulars were just another army, after all. And armies are armies as sure as war is hell, and this one, like the one I had served in (and like the one Napoleon served in, and like the one Julius Caesar served in) was an organization of hurry up and wait, a group which spent most of its collective time doing nothing at all.

  We spent the rest of that day doing nothing at all. Sheena had pitched camp on the site of an abandoned village about a dozen miles from the ruined mission. The abandonment of the village had not been entirely voluntary; several months previously Sheena had raided it, and its huts were subsequently unoccupied because of the demise of the previous occupants. The jungle had made a good start at reclaiming the cleared land, and weather had done a job on the huts, but they were still standing and reasonably sound. Plum and I had one all to ourselves, and we spent most of the day sitting in it and grunting at each other.

  The others, forty or fifty of them, spent most of their time sharpening knives and machetes, practicing hand-to-hand combat, combing their ancillary hair for lice, picking their noses, and scratching themselves. In the interests of verisimilitude I tried to be doing one or more of these things whenever anyone was looking my way. The only knife I had was distinctly out of place in that company, and if I got involved in their hand-to-hand contests the game would be up in no time at all, so that left lice hunting, nose picking, and general scratching. I didn’t mind hunting for lice, but I was more than a little disconcerted when I began finding them. I tried to console myself with the thought that this lent additional verisimilitude to the pose. This was relatively little consolation.

  Shortly before sunset, they began preparing for the feast. Men piled mountains of brush and planks from a dilapidated hut in the center of the village and poured a can of some petroleum distillate on it. One of them struck a match – looting does provide one with the trappings of civilization – and the whole thing went up in a glorious whooshing blaze.