Cutter slipped to the upper floor of the seedy rooming house without making a sound. The threadbare carpet barely covered stained moldy floorboards but somehow Cutter’s tread made no creak. He passed the first door—a linen trader snored inside with his hired whore. He slid past the second, where a fat gun trader slept soundly with his hand on one of his samples.

  O’Neil’s room was the third. It was locked, but that wasn’t a problem to Cutter. A moment’s work with a lockpick was all it took.

  The room was dark. The mosquito shutters were up, reducing what little moonlight there was to a mere glimmer too insignificant to even cast shadows. But the chamber wasn’t very big. A bed, a dresser, a night-stand, nothing more.

  The killer slipped his knife from its sheath and moved to the bed. O’Neil woke and turned as Cutter pressed his blade to the big man’s throat.

  “Do not move, Mister O’Neil,” Cutter warned. “You have a choice to make.”

  In the dim light from the hallway O’Neil could make out the silhouette looming over him. He could certainly feel the sharp blade pressing into his flesh. “What?” he growled.

  “In my right hand I have a knife at your throat. I would be most happy to cut your windpipe and watch you die. In my left hand I have one thousand U.S. dollars.”

  “Keep talking.”

  “Earlier tonight you were given a letter—a letter that I am required to find. You may give me the letter and receive the thousand dollars, or you may deny me it and have the knife.”

  “A thousand bucks or death,” O’Neil considered. “All for one little letter? What’s in there that makes it worth so much?”

  “That is not your concern, Mister O’Neil. Your only concern is whether to tell me where you have concealed that missive or to die. I would actually prefer you to choose the latter.”

  So that was it! The knifeman thought O’Neil would have hidden the letter. He hadn’t realized that the one-armed mercenary had no idea of the message’s value and that it lay atop the dresser concealed only by the room’s darkness.

  “Who sent you?”

  The knife pressed deeper, drawing blood.

  “I ask the questions, and there’s only one answer that I require,” Cutter insisted.

  “You want my answer?” O’Neil asked. “Okay, buddy. Here it is.”

  Beneath the sheet, O’Neil held a M1911 single action semi-automatic .45. He discharged three shots through the covers right into Cutter’s chest.

  The killer was thrown back by the bullets, hammered away from the man he threatened. He fell back into the night-stand, tumbling it over, sending the tin washbowl clattering to the floor. He left a smear of blood on the wall where he slid down it. Then he died.

  O’Neil swung out of bed. He struck a match on the wall and lit the lamp. He checked the corridor for more assassins. There was nobody there.

  Nor did anyone come. Gunfire in this part of town wasn’t that rare. The survivors knew it was best to stay in behind a locked door with a shotgun ready.

  O’Neil checked Cutter’s body. He pocketed the wad of notes—a little over a hundred dollars rather than the promised grand—but there was nothing else to find. Certainly no helpful signed note from whoever had hired the killer.

  “Time to go,” O’Neil decided. He grabbed the letter from the dresser, crammed it into his jacket beside the banknotes, and let himself out via the window.

  Housekeeping could deal with the body in the morning.

  ***

  Madame Rosa’s was quieting down by four a.m. O’Neil paid the full price for a room but declined to pick a girl to share it with him. Right now he wanted anonymity and privacy in a place that was set up to keep quiet about who visited.

  Once he’d bolted the door of the little cubicle, he checked out the space. The window was barred to prevent any customer skipping out, but it also prevented thugs with knives from crawling in. He found the spyhole that allowed Madame Rosa to keep an eye on what was happening and plugged it. Only then did he open the parchment envelope and take a look at what Cutter had tried to kill him for.

  It was a recipe:

  2 tablespoons fine chopped Onion

  4 cups Potatoes cut into medium pieces

  8 oz. of tomato Sauce

  2 lbs. Ground Monkey

  2 tsps salt

  4 cups Water

  Pepper

  Grind monkey to mince, brown in stock pot, drain off grease.

  Add tomato sauce, salt, onions and 4 cups of water.

  Heat to a simmer boil

  Add potatoes

  Cook covered on low fire 1½ - 2 hours until the potatoes are done. Stir occasionally.

  Pepper to taste

  “What the hell?” puzzled Armless O’Neil. Lots of guys had tried to kill him before. None of them had tried to kill him for a way to make peppered monkey stew.

  Until now.

  O’Neil refolded the paper back into the envelope and resealed it as best he could. He lay back on the creaking mattress and tried to figure out his options.

  He needed to leave town more than ever now. He’d taken a contract with the kid from Degarde and Carriere’s; that down payment was in his pocket next to Cutter’s roll. And somebody was trying to kill him.

  The best thing to do was to head upcountry to find Reverend Foster and give him his mail.

  ***

  Daniel Fletcher roomed in a very different kind of lodgings house, a neat respectable establishment run by a guardsman’s elderly widow approved by the even more respectable Mssrs Degarde and Carriere. The other boarders were all older, professional gentlemen, fixed in their habits and tastes, sent to represent their firms on this lucrative African frontier. If the young clerk yearned for anything other than their sedate orderly success he dare not voice it even to himself.

  Fletcher rose early, as always. M. Carriere generally got to his practice around seven forty-five and expected his clerks to be waiting for him. The guardsman’s widow was up earlier still, preparing a hot English breakfast of fried eggs, sausages, liver and kedgeree. The young clerk could smell it as he descended to the kitchen.

  He could smell it burning. Fletcher frowned and hurried to the stove to see what could have gone wrong.

  “I think you’ve left the sausages too long, Mrs.…” the clerk began before he noticed the burly man with his arm round the landlady’s throat. A second disreputable intruder was at the table, tearing open the letters that had just arrived in the mail.

  He looked up. “Early riser,” the mail-thief noted, in French. He picked up the machete that he’d laid on the tablecloth and approached Fletcher.

  “What? What’s this?” demanded the clerk, backing off. He’d have fled except that his landlady was still locked in the other man’s grip. “Who are you people? What do you want?”

  “We want the Dexter letter,” the advancing hoodlum growled. “We want to know what was in it.”

  “The letter from America? That was confidential—and unopened. I don’t have it anymore.”

  “We know that. You gave it to the cripple. We want to know, where is he? And where’s he taking the message?”

  Fletcher swallowed hard. “I—I can’t tell you,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm. He failed.

  The other thug spoke. “You tell us or your ma here will need new teeth, or maybe a glass eye.” He tightened his grip on the widow’s throat.

  Fletcher looked helplessly at the two intruders. He might possibly be able to wrestle one of them—he didn’t think so—but the man before him was armed with a wicked eighteen-inch blade and the other held an old woman in a brutal stranglehold. He desperately reviewed his options. He couldn’t think of any.

  The lattice heat-screen behind the widow shattered inwards. Armless O’Neil reached through, delivered a kidney-jab to the thug who held the landlady, then hooked him out of the broken window into the back-alley beyond.

  Now it was the machete-wielder’s turn to be shocked and perplexed. When he turned away to see what was happening, Fletcher seized up the breakfast table teapot and shattered it across the side of the man’s head. The china broke, splashing boiling water over the thug’s face and eyes.

  The man cried out and sliced with his knife. Fletcher tumbled back, got tangled with a chair, and landed on his back on the kitchen floor.

  “I’m gonna gut you for that!” the scotched intruder promised, looming over him.

  O’Neil came through the broken shutter, past the terrified widow, and barreled into the machete-man. His other opponent lay sprawled in the dust outside, broken nose staining the grey dirt scarlet.

  O’Neil dropped the thug to the floor next to the clerk. Fletcher rolled aside as the heavy bravo crashed down beside him in a tangle of tablecloth and broken crockery. O’Neil stamped his boot down to shatter the wrist that held the machete.

  The thug howled in pain. O’Neil dropped hard, bringing his knee down on the attacker’s windpipe, strangling any further cries. He drew back the hook on his left stump and pistol-whipped it across his enemy’s face. The intruder struggled no more.

  “Armless O’Neil?” Fletcher recognized as the big man rose victorious. “But…”

  O’Neil hauled him up off the floor. “Thank you,” the clerk said automatically, as if his rescuer had passed the toast.

  The widow edged round her shattered kitchen and fled for aid. O’Neil looked round the devastated kitchen. He rescued a blackened sausage and jammed it in his mouth. “Time to go, I’d say,” he judged. “C’mon kid. You’re with me.”

  ***

  Léopoldville was a grimy memory. O’Neil stretched back against the stern-rail of the tramp steamer that cut its way up the broad winding Congo River and breathed in air that wasn’t stale with sweat, garbage, and corruption. A formation-flight of colorful herons winged across the water. The blossoming trees were thick with chattering monkeys. This was O’Neil’s Africa, and he loved it.

  Daniel Fletcher wasn’t as happy. He clung to the side of the boat as it rocked its way up-country. The young clerk still wasn’t quite sure how he’d come to be there.

  “I should have left word for M. Carriere,” he repeated again.

  O’Neil settled more, his arms behind his head, and lowered his hat-brim to protect his eyes from the glaring sun. “Like I said, kid, there’s no point giving those goons any more clues on how to chase us. They’ll figure it out soon enough anyhow.”

  The clerk was recovering his wits after his scare. The peaceful ritual of his orderly morning seemed a long time ago—every mile up the lush twisting river took it further away—but he was determined to get to the bottom of what had happened. “Who’s ‘they’? Why did those men come to question me? What is going on?”

  “You tell me,” O’Neil shrugged. Hoods with weapons coming after him was nothing new. “I was hoping you’d know what the hell got those guys so stirred up.”

  Some large animal wallowed on the river-bank. Fletcher had been in Africa for five months now but he’d never ventured outside Léopoldville. He stared at the big grey mammal with a mixture of worry and excitement. This was the Africa he’d pictured when his firm had sent him to the Congo. After months of tedium in Degarde and Carriere’s office he’d despaired of anything else.

  Fletcher shook his head. “I don’t know anything. Why didn’t we just wait for the police to come and question those burglars? They could have told us who sent them and why.”

  “Those were local goons-for-hire. They wouldn’t be able to tell much, certainly not who really hired them. And in Léopoldville, the cops tend to be a bit… variable about who they blame for brawls.” O’Neil didn’t want to discuss the dead man in his room with the local force right now.

  “They wanted Mrs. Dexter’s letter. M. Carriere said it was important to convey it to Revered Foster quickly. That was why he had me ask around for a reliable courier who knew his way around the Ubangi. He never said it would be dangerous.”

  “They never do, kid.”

  The young clerk tried to find some shade. After years of African heat, O’Neil’s skin was a burnished bronze. Fletcher’s flesh was simply turning an uncomfortable pink. “I don’t see why I had to come with you. This wasn’t part of the agreement.”

  “You think those were the only two guys in town who’d take cash to ask you a few questions?”

  Fletcher shuddered at the idea of more men like that hunting him. “But I really don’t know anything! Honestly, Mr. O’Neil.”

  “Just O’Neil’s fine, kid. And maybe you know more’n you think. Who was this Dexter dame, for starters?”

  “She was a rich American lady. She’d been in Africa years ago, back in the Earlies2. Went home rich, married, never had children. Her husband died three years ago. She passed away last month. That’s pretty much it.”

  “How’d she know Foster?”

  Fletcher shrugged. “When the letter was forwarded to us I checked the records. Reverend Foster came as a sponsored Congo-Balolo3 missionary back in 1909. He was originally stationed out in old Koloneke, the mining camp, then later at Kutshu. He’s been here ever since. I guess he could have met Mrs. Dexter back in the day.”

  That explained why a dying woman in the U.S. might send a letter to an old preacher in Africa, but not why it should be a recipe.

  “I suppose it makes sense for me to help deliver the letter to Reverend Foster,” Fletcher reasoned. “I mean, M. Carriere would probably want me to help out—if he knew where I was.”

  O’Neil didn’t stir but his mouth twisted upwards into a wry grin. “You really wanna know why you’re here with me, kid? Really?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Because when the old lady was being held by that no-good crumb you could’a run. You didn’t. You tried to help, though you knew you’d get hurt. That’s why you’re out here with me.”

  And that was all Armless O’Neil had to say on the matter.

  ***

  The trader at Akula was a fat, sweating half-breed. His soiled white coat had ugly sweat stains at his armpits and between his shoulder blades. He wore a Moslem fez and shouted incessantly at the scrawny natives who carried merchandise around his dockside hut.

  He folded the banknote that O’Neil had made Fletcher give to him into an inner pocket and grinned a half-toothed smile. “You are not the first men to ask this of me lately,” he told them. “Reverend Foster, he is no longer at Kutshu. He moved up-country years ago, into the hills. He comes here, maybe one-time, two-times a year to buy supplies, but that is all.”

  “Someone else was asking?” Fletcher puzzled. “Who?”

  The merchant remained silent, but his hand opened for another note.

  O’Neil instead laid his hook on the man’s shoulder. “Who?” he repeated.

  The trader took the hint. “Some Europeans. French or Belgian. They had a truck.”

  “How many men? What kind of truck?”

  “Six men. Well armed. Military, I thought. Mercenaries. In a big Daimler lorry with canvas sides. They came yesterday.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  The trader turned aside to yell a stream of abuse in some local dialect at an unfortunate native who was stacking crates in the wrong place; or perhaps he just wanted a moment to decide his answer. “I told them what I told you. Reverend Foster does not live at Kutshu now.”

  “What else?”

  The merchant considered denying the rest, but O’Neil’s hook on his shoulder convinced him otherwise. “They hired one of my boys to show them the way up to the mountain pass. The way to find the Reverend.”

  This high up the branching Congo the great river split into hundreds of weaving tributaries, many still imperfectly mapped. The navigable waterways were more reliable than the few forest roads, though hardly less dangerous to traverse. Some twisted right up into the Ubangi foothills. Beyond were deep forest valleys and high veldt, the uncharted heartlands of the African jungle, territory of lions and apes and serpents and of half-tamed tribes that still resented intrusion from the outside world. Only a local stood a chance of leading outsiders through that green labyrinth beneath those giant trees.

  Fletcher glanced nervously at O’Neil. “I don’t like the sound of this. Whatever can be in that letter to bring all this trouble? Who are these soldiers and why are they hunting a simple missionary? What are we to do now?”

  The stew recipe was in O’Neil’s pocket, along with his fee and the cash he’d taken from Cutter. He peeled a dozen notes off the wad then tore them in two. He handed one half over to the trader. “I want fast transport and a reliable guide to get me to Foster before those other guys. If that happens then the other half of these notes comes to you. Understand?”

  The trader nodded and showed his gap-toothed smile again. “It will be as you say. I have just the vehicle and the man. You will be at the mission hospital first. I swear it on my grandmother’s virtue!”

  O’Neil wasn’t reassured by the oath.

  ***

  Fletcher found the journey up from Akula hard. The narrow waterways became narrower still, choked by vine and forest debris. When the river finally failed them the travelers resorted to a battered Ford truck that stuttered its way along the dirt tracks beneath the thick jungle canopy. Even under the vehicle’s bleached canvas the heat was intense. The mosquitoes were worse.

  O’Neil consulted with the trader’s guide, an ancient wrinkled black man who called himself Komolo Joe. They decided to avoid Kutshu altogether and branch off into the foothills, through Batanga and Bulu and so into the highlands. The old guide reckoned that the boy the mercenaries had taken would choose the newer road to the west, but predicted that the rains might make that route slow going in the valley bottoms.