Slave Safari Page 7

  “They really got to your head, didn’t they, Mister not-allowed-to-carry-the-ball cornerback. And don’t give me Whitey’s talk about being wiped out. We been wiped out every century. And here we are.”

  “No,” said Butler sadly, “I don’t think we’re going to be wiped out, because I don’t think we can get up a good enough revolution right now to get wiped out. We’re gonna be smothered in our own stupidity.”

  His sister’s response was that Butler was too impressed with Whitey. Butler’s answer was that Whitey wasn’t all that good and pretty stupid himself, but that his sister made even the worst white cracker look like an intellectual giant.

  Butler’s despair deepened with almost every daily newspaper story about non-negotiable demands, the unity of the Third World and the talk of bullets. When departments of African studies were introduced across the land, William Forsythe Butler was at the point of tears. “The engineering schools, you dumb bastards,” he would yell in the privacy of his apartment. “The engineering schools. That’s survival.”

  Few of his friends spoke to him anymore, naturally, since he was an Uncle Tom without courage. Butler took it out on the gridiron. He was a cornerback with a vengeance, and he had a plan. One day, it all worked and Butler had a new team, the New York Giants, and a promise that he would be given a real shot at running back.

  Opening day, he started the season at cornerback. He ended the season there.

  It was then that William Forsythe Butler began to wonder if just maybe his sister wasn’t right.

  The black consciousness movement was taking hold now in football and Butler became its spokesman. He did a statistical survey of the league that showed that more blacks than whites were jolted out of positions and put onto defensive teams.

  He demanded to know why blacks got paid less for playing the same position as whites. Twentieth-century slavery, he called it. He said that racism was the reason there wasn’t a black quarterback, and announced that he would try out for that position the next year with his team.

  These were the things Willie Butler talked about, but no answers came from organized football. Soon the sports pages froze him out of space, not wanting to do anything to damage the all-American spirit of the game.

  And then one day, the back page of the New York Daily News bannered a headline that triggered in Butler a violent response and made him vow never to forget the slavery that had brought his forebears to the country. The headline read:

  WILLIE BUTLER SOLD

  Butler first heard of it reading the paper, and rather than be sold anywhere by anyone, he retired from football.

  He was still a young man, so he drifted into the Peace Corps, where he was shipped to Busati to try to develop an irrigation project that might raise a small parcel of the nation’s land to its fertility level of two thousand years before. While working there, happy to be away from America, he was approached by the CIA man assigned to the Busati Peace Corps. The CIA man was going home; he had seen Butler at work and realized he was a true American; how would he like to work for the CIA?

  For the extra money, Butler said sure, determined to screw up the intelligence apparatus by sending in ridiculous reports of non-occurring events and by predictions that bordered on the sublime.

  In Busati’s heat, the predictions all seemed to come true. Butler was put on full $36,000 salary by the CIA, assigned to help then-Colonel Obode, who was pro-West at the time, seize power.

  About that time, William Forsythe Butler made a journey to the mountains of the Loni. As soon as he stepped into the first village, he knew he was home.

  And he was ashamed of his home. The Loni were divided into small bands who hid in the hills; the men were timid little root-grubbers who spent their lives looking over their shoulders for the approach of the Hausa, or for oncoming elephants, or for anything larger than a lizard. The Loni Empire, probably because of the cowardice of its men, had turned into a matriarchy, the three major packs being led by three princess sisters. Butler met one sister and told her he knew he was a Loni.

  How do we know you are not making up a story, he was asked.

  And in his frustration, Butler made a hissing clicking sound in the back of his mouth as he had always done since childhood. The princess suddenly embraced Butler and welcomed him home.

  Butler was confused.

  The Princess explained that Loni men, when angered, always had made that hissing sound in their throats. She had not heard it in a long time.

  Butler forgot about Obode and about his CIA assignment. He spent two weeks in the village where, for the first time, he heard the Loni legend. He had been brought up in a society which did not believe in legends, but even he thought there was enough in the legend that pertained to him.

  The Loni children coming home. Well, wasn’t he a Loni child who had come home?

  And the man of the West, who was dead, killing the man who would enslave the Loni. Well, wasn’t Butler from the West? And couldn’t you call him dead, in a sense, because he had given up his former life to come live with the Loni? And the man who would enslave the Loni? Who else but Obode?

  He did not understand anything about the Oriental who would redeem the Loni in the ritual flames, but who said legends had to be letter-perfect?

  It was close enough to him to count. And to show his brotherhood in blackness to the Loni people by repaying those who had taken them in slavery, and also to indulge himself a little bit, Butler decided to add something to the legend…the man who collected payment for a centuries-old sin.

  He opened the briefcase on the seat next to him in the 707 jet and stared at the brown-cornered parchment, a ship’s manifest, a load of slaves from East Africa. Another old parchment was a bill of sale. There was a yellowed fragment of paper from a plantation. Another fragment showed a family tree. And woven through all the documents were the names of the Lippincotts, the Butlers, the Forsythes: the three American families whose fortunes had been made in the slave trade.

  From a small envelope he took a stack of newspaper clippings. The last one was a pretty little piece in the Norfolk Pilot about a Hillary Butler’s engagement to a Harding Demster III. He hoped Harding Demster III would not be upset about waiting at the altar.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THERE HAD BEEN TROUBLE at the Busati Airport. According to the army detachment continuously assigned to Air Busati, largely to prevent the planes’ tires and wheels from being stolen, seven large lacquered trunks were missing from the baggage terminal, and fourteen soldiers were unaccounted for.

  The periodicals stall had also been ransacked. It was believed that a riot had occurred in the stall because of the extensive damage, yet there were not enough people at the airport to cause such a riot. In fact, the only people there who were not Busatians were a white American and an aged Oriental, who had vanished along with the soldiers and the lacquered trunks.

  “Do you think it is true?” asked General Obode of his personal valet, a fellow Hausa.

  “About the riot?”

  “About everything.”

  “You mean the East and the West, father and son?”

  “Yes,” said Obode.

  The valet shook his head. “The Loni are in their mountains and there they shall stay. We should have no fear of a heartless mountain band. Especially now that you have begun to give them positions in the government. They shall not rise again. Fear not.”

  General Obode thought a minute. “Draw another $10,000 from the Ministry of the Treasury and deposit in my Swiss bank account,” he said.

  Meanwhile, across the Busati plains, a caravan plodded toward the mountains. Seven trunks on the shoulders of fourteen soldiers bobbed along the line, the sun glinting off their lacquered exteriors.

  In front of this line marched the Master of Sinanju and Remo. Remo was furious.

  “You’re a damned two-faced sonuvabitch,” he said.

  “A contract is a contract,” said Chiun. “A preceding unfilled contract always takes pre
cedence over a more recent one. It is only fair.”

  “You’re talking about a contract over two thousand years old. The House of Sinanju didn’t even exist then, damned two-faced sonuvabitch.”

  “Name-calling no more obviates a contract than a few years here or there.”

  “This thing dates back before Christ. A few years. A few years, Little Father?”

  “It is you who chooses to date things from the time of Christ, not the House of Sinanju. We have an unfilled contract, paid for, mind you, paid in full. It was from the Year of the Ram. Or was it the Year of the Rat?”

  “Probably from the year of the two-faced sonuvabitch.”

  “No matter. It was before the year of your 1950s, or was it 1960s, when the House of Sinanju agreed to train something dragged in off the streets, as a stopgap measure in lieu of a real assassin.”

  “May your autographed picture of Rad Rex be burned,” said Remo.

  Chiun looked back at the trunks and said something to one of the soldiers in what Chiun had explained was a Loni dialect. By the tone of the voice, Remo could tell Chiun was reminding the soldiers that the trunks contained valuables, probably that the first trunk contained the picture of Rad Rex, the star of As the Planet Revolves, and in case of emergency, it should be saved first.

  It had shocked Remo when he had first heard Chiun speak this Loni tongue. He had thought the Master of Sinanju knew only Mandarin, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and some English. But at the airport where he and Chiun had headed by foot after leaving General Butler in the jeep, Chiun had silenced him while moving to the airport gate. When they had gotten out of Butler’s jeep, Remo had wanted to go right back to town to get on with the job of looking for the white house behind the iron gate. But Chiun had demanded they go to the airport and pick up Chiun’s luggage. He would not negotiate or compromise. He wanted his luggage, he told Remo.

  They did not know it but they reached the airport only minutes after Butler’s airplane had taken off, and the permanent military detail at the airport was lounging around in the terminal when the two entered.

  “I will speak to them in the language of the Loni Empire,” Chiun said, “to find where our luggage is.”

  “The Loni? That’s a tribe, Chiun.”

  “No, it is a great kingdom of great virtue,” Chiun had said, which Remo took to mean that when they hired assassins they paid their bills on time.

  “Well, lets get your luggage and get back to the capital. I’ve got work to do.”

  Chiun raised a long bony finger. The nail reflected the overhead light like a sliver of diamond. Chiun called to one of the guards in what sounded to Remo like the Swahili spoken as the main language of Busati.

  “They’re not going to talk to you, Chiun. Were foreigners.”

  “Speak for yourself, white man,” had said the Master of Sinanju.

  Remo crossed his arms and waited confidently for Chiun to get a rifle pointed at him by one of the guards. Let him fight his own way out, thought Remo. Perhaps there would even be a flaw in a stroke. That would be good to watch, even though Remo wasn’t going to hold his breath waiting to see it.

  Chiun spoke first in Loni dialect, then translated for Remo.

  “I am the Master of Sinanju and this is Remo who is white but close to me. I tell them close, Remo, because they would not understand your natural disrespect and lack of appreciation. I would see your king for a debt I owe as a Master of Sinanju. Remo, they will know this, for it must be spoken of widely in their villages and temples that there is a debt owed by the Master of Sinanju.”

  The two guards conversed heatedly between themselves. Remo smiled.

  “You mean to tell me, Little Father, that two African soldiers are going to remember a centuries-old contract by a foreign hitman.”

  “Try as you might, Remo, you will not understand the nature of Sinanju. The Loni know how to appreciate the services of the Masters of Sinanju, not like the Chinese emperors or the vile Americans.”

  Remo shook his head. When Chiun began on the glories of Sinanju, there was no reasoning with him. Perhaps five people in all the world had heard of the House of Sinanju—four of them must be in intelligence agencies and the fifth an obscure dust-covered historian. But to hear Chiun tell it, Sinanju was more important than the Roman Empire.

  Chiun babbled on and the soldiers looked confused. They motioned for Remo and Chiun to follow them.

  “You will see how a true people of dignity treat a Master of Sinanju,” Chiun whispered proudly to Remo. “There are those with enough culture in the world to see a true assassin as more than a hitman, as you call him. You will see.”

  “Chiun, you don’t even know if these soldiers are Loni. They’re probably going to shake us down.”

  “You have them confused with Americans,” Chiun said.

  The soldiers led Chiun and Remo to an officer where Chiun again explained something, hands moving unusually rapidly for just the telling of a story. Remo tried to discern from the officers face what the reaction was, but the officers night face was as changeless as space.

  The officer pointed to a newsstand inside the airport.

  Chiun nodded and beckoned to Remo.

  “You’ll see. You’ll see what true respect is,” he said. “Follow me.”

  Remo shrugged. The air terminal—slightly smaller than the one in Dayton, Ohio—was five times too big for the passenger use. Remo waited with Chiun at a periodicals stand, which had mostly English-language publications.

  “We’ll store your luggage, Chiun, making sure your picture of Rad Rex is safe, and tonight I’ll check out the white house with the iron gate.”

  “No,” said Chiun. “We must wait for that officer. To leave now would be disrespectful to the Loni.”

  How come, Chiun, these Loni have your respect?”

  “Because, unlike some people, they have earned it.”

  “Chiun, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but really now. Every Master of Sinanju has been taught Loni dialect for centuries, because you still owe them a contract?”

  “Correct.”

  “I kind of think that little debt might have been forgotten by now. Just how many languages do you know well?”

  “Really well?”

  “Yeah.”

  “One. My own. The rest I use.”

  Remo noticed an imported copy of the New York Times selling for $2.50. Under the fold of the front page, there was a story about the television networks adjusting their Watergate coverage to allow the showing of soap operas.

  “As the Planet Revolves is back on the air in the States,” said Remo, mildly.

  “What?” demanded Chiun.

  “Your shows. They’re back on.”

  Chiun’s mouth began to work as he tried to speak, but nothing came out. Finally, he said “I left America under the condition that I was leaving a void. America has lied to me. How could they have returned the programs just like that, after taking them off just like that?”

  “I don’t know, Little Father. But I think now we can get about our business so we can get back to the States faster, right? You can pay your respects to the Loni some other time. If they’ve waited a couple of thousand years, they can certainly wait another one or two.”

  For the first time, Remo saw Chiun in conflict.

  Just then, the Army captain they had spoken to walked up to them and said in British-tinged English:

  “My men and I have been delighted, sir, by your telling of that silly Loni fairy tale. To show our pleasure, we will be glad to retrieve your luggage for only one hundred dollars American.”

  Remo put his hand up over his mouth to stifle a laugh.

  Chiun resolved his internal conflicts. The frail Oriental went whirring into the newspapers, shredding them. The stand went into a wall rack, and the wall rack went into the vendor, who went into the lighting fixtures along with the rack, stand, and little shredded bits of white papers that slowly settled like a soft snowfall in the Busati Air Termin
al.

  “Just so it should not pass, this perfidy, in calmness,” said Chiun. The captain who had tried to shake them down had begun to back away, when a word from Chiun stopped him.

  This time, Chiun did not translate for Remo as he spoke with the captain. Finally, Chiun beckoned for Remo to follow him. As they walked behind the captain, Chiun said softly to Remo, “They are not Loni, these people.”

  “Good. Then lets go to the city and finish what we came to do.”

  “First I must finish what I came to do,” Chiun said.

  Several hours later, as they trudged across the Busati plain, Remo was still picking little bits of newsprint out of his jacket pockets and bitching at Chiun for deceiving him into thinking they were going back to the capital city.

  “I told you,” Chiun said. “An older contract takes precedence.”

  “That doesn’t answer my problem, Little Father.”

  “To a fool, nothing is an answer.”

  “You and I are paid by the same employer. We have a job to do and we are not serving him.”

  “You may leave if you wish,” Chiun said.

  “How?” said Remo, looking around the plain. “I don’t even know where I am.”

  “When did you ever?” said Chiun and marched on happily toward the mountains in the distance. For a full day they walked and Remo complained about the assignment being missed, the Loni who would undoubtedly rob them when the two got to their village, and the awesome dryness of the plain, which Chiun kept referring to as the lush gardens before the mountains, for they had once, he explained, been the most beautiful gardens in the world.

  “The Loni must have paid your ancestors pretty good,” said Remo.

  “They recognized true worth.”

  “They’re gonna jump us as soon as we get to enough of them.”

  “The Loni are fair and just and decent.”

  “They must have really paid,” said Remo. He felt clammy and dusty and grimy, not having changed clothes in two days. Chiun, naturally, had seven trunks full of changes.

  As they climbed into the mountains, night descended in its awesome majesty upon the old continent. Remo noticed immediately that these were not simple paths, but stab-ways cut of rock worn by centuries of feet.