Peacemaker. Gordon Kent

were available to take guests to their rooms because animals came in from the bush, seldom anything more dangerous than a baboon, although a baboon can kill a child, maim a grown man. Elizabeth was afraid of neither the dark nor the animals, and she strode along, the low lights with shades like conical hats shining on her ankles, leading Harry by the hand as if it were he who needed her protection. Once in their room, however, she became tentative. She stood with her blouse partly unbuttoned, as if lost in some idea. Then she moved to the closet, took the blouse off, hung it up, and turned back—and stood there. When he put his arms around her she moved away, said, “No. Not yet.”

      She continued to undress slowly. Wearing bra and thong panties, she took a cigarette from her purse and stood looking at it. He had been astonished that she smoked; he still didn’t much care for the taste of cigarettes on her. In Africa, everybody smoked.

      “I want to tell you something,” she said.

      He thought he had heard all her revelations. The ones about other men had been hard on him. He had shucked off a lot of immature bullshit, coming to grips with them, coming to realize that love in this case required accepting whatever had gone before. It had taken him weeks to come to it. Along the way, always, was the possibility of AIDS. He had coped with that, too.

      “Is this place really secure?” she said. She had been tapping the cigarette, tapping it and tapping it, and at last she struck the lighter he had given her and put it to the end. “Are you sure?”

      “Absolutely.” He had scoped the room and made sure it was clean. Kenyan security were not on to him. They would sometime, but just now he was not of interest to them. She was on a false passport he had got from the embassy and not interesting to them. They were secure.

      She strode up and down. She was nervous, more nervous than he had ever seen her. After several minutes, she turned on her little radio, stubbed out the cigarette and took out another. When it was alight, she said, “I want to tell you something I haven’t been able to tell anybody else.”

      Harry O’Neill prepared himself.

      She sat on the bed and took his hand and drew him down next to her. They were both big, both mostly naked. She said, “I have something I didn’t give you. Business, you know.” Business meant in her capacity as agent. Harry felt immense relief. Not another lover, then. She swallowed noisily and smoked and said, “I couldn’t tell the guy before you. And Hammer—”

      Hammer had been in his forties, overweight, and he had driven his Range Rover down to Ruaha in the rainy season, and they had found him after he’d been missing for two days. The vehicle had got stuck in a vast mudhole and he’d had a heart attack.

      “Hammer died two years ago. I had this—something to tell him—but I couldn’t for a while; it was the bad time, the really bad time, you couldn’t travel and there were killings everywhere and everybody on the move, and—By the time I thought it was safe to send a signal, he was dead. Then that idiot came in and I couldn’t trust him.” She looked at him. “I just couldn’t trust him, Harry!”

      Their bare shoulders and arms and thighs were pressed together, but O’Neill knew that he was supposed to sit and listen. This was one of those times when love and sex didn’t go hand in hand.