Slave Safari Page 9

  Butler tested it by reaching up, grabbing a piece of wood with his right hand, and lifting his feet off the ground.

  He hung there suspended by his right hand momentarily; the wood was anchored and strong. He grunted softly to himself and then began climbing the latticework like a ladder. The window to the second floor bedroom was unlocked and open slightly at the top. Inside he could hear the faint whirring of central air conditioning breathing coolness into the room.

  The night was black as a railroad tunnel at midnight, and the inside of the bedroom seemed to be brightly lighted by the small lamp built into the light switch near the door.

  In the bed, under a shiny sheet, he could make out a woman’s form. That should be Hillary Butler.

  Holding onto the latticework with one hand, Butler inched the bottom window up until it was fully opened. Then he carefully stepped into the room, his shoes sinking deeply into the plush velvet carpet that covered the floor. He paused, sipping his breath carefully through his nose, trying to make no sound, then moved toward the bed, the foot, around the side. He could see the girl’s face now. It was Hillary Butler, sleeping the dreamy sleep of the peaceful-with-the-world. That she slept in this air-conditioned room under that satin sheet because her ancestors had carted men and women and babies across an ocean in the hold of a stinking rat-infested ship, did not seem to intrude on her sleep at all. Butler hated her.

  He stepped back and from his pocket took a small foil-wrapped packet. Carefully he pinched the top to break the air-tight seal.

  The characteristic smell of chloroform rose from the package into his nostrils. From the packet, he pulled out a heavy gauze pad soaked with the drug, and carefully put the foil back into his jacket.

  Quickly he moved forward. He stood alongside the girl and transferred the chloroform pad to his right hand. Then he reached down and covered the girl’s nose and mouth with the pad. Hillary Butler bolted upright in bed, and the big man dropped his body on hers to hold her still. She thrashed for a few seconds, her eyes wide open and shocked, trying to see her attacker, but only able to see the glint of light reflecting off a golden chain-link ring on the hand that covered her face. Her thrashing slowed down. Finally, she was still.

  Butler stood up and looked down at the unconscious girl. He left the pad on her face and methodically began to search the room.

  He carefully went through a clothes closet that ran the length of one wall, looking at dresses and rejecting them until he found one, a blue and white jersey shift with a hand-made label from an exclusive New York City couturier. He made sure the other garments were hanging neatly before he closed the closet. On a dressing table, he saw a polished ebony wood jewelry box. He reached inside and grabbed a handful of jewelry, carried it to the room’s little night light, and inspected it. He took an engraved golden charm bracelet and a pair of gem earrings. The rest he returned to the box.

  Butler rolled up the blue and white dress and stuck it under the belt of his trousers. The jewelry went into an inside jacket pocket.

  At the bed, he pulled the chloroform pad off the girl’s face, put it back in his pocket, then lifted the girl up in one muscled arm, carrying her under his arm like a rolled up set of blueprints and went back to the window.

  With ease that surprised him, he carried the girl down. Still holding her under one arm, he moved toward the line of trees and headed back for the roadway where his car waited.

  He dumped the little rich girl on the floor in the back of the car, covered her with a blanket and then drove off quickly. He didn’t want to be stopped by any policemen wondering what a black in a rented car was doing in this section of the county at almost three o’clock in the morning.

  After parking in the motel lot in front of his room, Butler placed a fresh chloroform pad near Hillary Butler’s face, then went inside his room where the prostitute was still unconscious.

  He dressed her in Hillary Butler’s blue and white dress, then put on the stolen jewelry. The charm bracelet engraved on the back. “To Hillary Butler from Uncle Laurie.” Earrings. They were made for pierced ears. The whore’s ears were not pierced. Butler swore under his breath. Damn, just like a white bitch, not to have holes where you wanted her to. He rammed the point of one earring through the fleshy lobe of the unconscious girl who did not even stir, even though drops of blood ran down her ear from the small hole. He clipped the earring in back with the small squeeze lock attachment, then fastened the other earring in the same way.

  Butler untied the girl’s ropes and stashed them in his small suitcase. From a back compartment of the bag, he pulled out two heavy brown-colored plastic bags, shaped like army duffle bags.

  He stuffed the prostitute into one of them. The bag locked at the top with metal snaps but there was enough gap in the closure for air to get in. General William Forsythe Butler took the other bag out into the parking lot. There was no one in sight. Only three cars were parked in the lot, and those rooms were darkened, their occupants probably asleep. Butler opened the back door of the Buick, reached in and began to feed Hillary Butler into the bag. He handled her without tenderness, breaking the strap of her light nylon nightgown. The gown slid down, revealing a creamy white well-formed breast. Butler laid his black hand on her breast, feeling its warmth, looking in the dim light at the contrast between her skin and his. He tweaked the end of the breast viciously, and the girl flinched in her stupor. He grimaced to himself as he released her. Get used to it, honey, he thought. There’s gonna be more where that came from. Your family’s got a three-hundred-year-old bill to pay, and payment’s gonna come right out of your fine white hide.

  Butler closed the bag with the snaps, then again glancing around the lot, slipped back into his room, picked up the bag containing the street girl and carried that back to the car. He tossed her into the back seat on top of Hillary Butler.

  Then he cleaned everything out of the room and left, wiping all the doorknobs free of prints, and leaving the key in the door of the room.

  Fifteen minutes later, his rented car was parked in a black unlit street, a scant hundred yards from the pier where the Liberian freighter was now coming to life, preparing to sail.

  Butler locked the doors of his car and went looking for the captain. He found him on the bridge of the ship and whispered a few words to him.

  The captain called a sailor to him and talked to him softly. “Your keys,” the captain asked Butler. Butler gave them to the sailor who turned away.

  Ten minutes later, he was down on dockside below the ship with a big steamer trunk on a forklift.

  “Carry that trunk to my cabin,” the captain told another sailor, who scurried down the gangplank and helped the other lug the heavy trunk aboard.

  Butler waited a few minutes, then went to the captain’s cabin.

  The trunk was neatly in the middle of the floor. Butler opened it and roughly yanked the plastic bag out of the trunk. He opened the clips on top, glanced in and saw the prostitute wearing Hillary Butler’s blue and white dress. Carefully, he pulled the plastic bag down until the girl’s face and shoulders were free.

  Butler looked around the cabin. On a small table near the captain’s big bed was a fourteen-inch-long bronze statuette. Butler hefted it in his hand. It was heavy enough.

  He walked back and knelt alongside the unconscious whore. How peaceful she looked, he thought, as he raised the heavy statuette over his head and slammed it down with the force of a hammer into the girl’s face.

  Butler was thorough. He shattered her teeth, broke her facial bones, and for good measure broke one of the bones in her left arm.

  He stood up, puffing slightly from the exertion. The carpet on the floor was spattered with gore, and with a towel from the captain’s private bathroom, he mopped it up as best he could, then washed the statuette clean. He noted what looked like specks of blood imbedded in the link design of his gold ring, and carefully washed it out under running water.

  Butler snapped the dead girl back into the bag
but left it on the rug in the middle of the floor. Before leaving the room, he checked to make sure Hillary Butler was still alive in her plastic cage, then slammed the lid of the heavy trunk shut.

  Back on the bridge, Butler called the captain to one side. From his inside jacket pocket, he took an envelope containing $5,000 in hundreds.

  “Here,” he said. “Your fee.”

  The captain pocketed it and then looked again at Butler with a bland open face.

  “What do I do this time to earn it?”

  “There is a bag on the floor of your cabin,” Butler said. “When your ship is underway ten minutes and it is still dark, dump its contents overboard. It would be best if you were to do it yourself. Your crew should not know.”

  The captain nodded.

  “And there is a trunk in your room. Inside there is another bag with another set of contents. You will follow our usual procedure with that, turning the trunk over to my man who will meet you at your next port. He will fly it to Busati.”

  “I see,” the captain said.

  Butler reached into his pocket and withdrew a half dozen of the foil packages of chloroform pads. “Take these,” he said. “They may be helpful in keeping your cargo…let us say, pliable.”

  The captain stuck the packs in his pocket. “Thank you. By the way,” he said, with a small smile at the corners of his mouth, “May I make use of this cargo?”

  The Busati chief of staff thought a moment, thought of Hillary Butler, thought of her warm white breast, thought of her next home in the house behind the pearl door button, and shook his head. “Not this time, Captain,” he said. Hillary Butler was the last one, and random rape simply would not do. There just was not enough terror in it, at least not for one whose ancestors had given his ancestors their slave name. Nothing but gang rape under his own personal supervision would suffice. For a starter.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  The captain shrugged.

  “Now don’t forget with the other bag,” Butler said. “Ten minutes out to sea, dump her. The current should run her ashore sometime tomorrow.”

  “It shall be as you say, Colonel.”

  “Oh, by the way, it’s General now. I’ve been promoted.”

  “I’m sure you’re worthy.”

  “I try to be,” Butler said.

  He took his car keys, trotted lightly down the gangplank and returned to his car. For the first time since he’d reached America, he turned his air conditioner up high.

  Two hours later, he was back in the 707 jet, on his way home to Busati.

  The last name on his list, he thought. The legend was coming true.

  For a moment, a random thought of that American Remo and the elderly Oriental intruded on his mind, but he rejected it. By now, they would either be out of Busati or in the custody of the troops, in which case he would see that they were exiled from the country for good. The Loni legend was to be his alone to fulfill.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “ONCE WE LIVED IN palaces. Our buildings stretched to the clouds. Our land was rich and we were at peace.”

  The girl turned away from Remo who lay on his back on a hillock, chewing a piece of grass. “And now, this is our world,” she said bitterly, waving her arm across the field of her view. “A land of thatched huts and poverty, of ignorance and disease. A land in which we are hunted by the Hausa like game animals. We are a people from whose men the courage has been bred out, like milk-giving is bred into a cow.”

  Remo rolled on his left side to look at the girl. She was tall and lithe, and silhouetted against the white daylight sky of Africa, she seemed blacker than was her dark skin. She wore only a short white robe in the fashion of a Grecian toga, but its outlines, too, looked dark against the hot white sky. Her back was toward Remo, and out in front of her, down at the bottom of the hill, he could see the grubby little camp which now represented the once-great Empire.

  “Could be worse,” Remo said.

  “How?” The girl turned and came to Remo, and in a smooth graceful motion slid down to the grass alongside him. “How could it be worse for my Loni people?”

  “Take my word for it,” Remo said. “You complain that civilization has kind of passed your people by. Well, you haven’t missed a thing. I come from what they call civilization, and I prefer it here. At least, if you stay out of the Hausas’ way, you’ve got some kind of peace.”

  He reached forward and took her left hand in his. She recoiled involuntarily from him, then tried to relax, but Remo released her hand. Princesses of the Loni Empire were virgins till they were wed; they knew not of men and no man entered into them until it was by ceremony and custom ordained. His was probably the first male hand which had ever touched the beautiful artist’s hand of Princess Saffah of the Loni Empire.

  “Do not release me,” she said. “It feels warming, your hand. And you are right, it is peaceful here. But peacefulness is like rain. It is nice, but always to have it pressed upon you is quite another thing.”

  She took Remo’s hand up in hers, silent for a moment as if shocked by her own boldness. “You, for instance,” she said. “You lie here now, sucking grass like a cow, and talking of how lovely peace is, and you know that as soon as you can you will go back to this world you hate.”

  Remo said nothing; she was right. When he found and freed the slave girls and discovered what had happened to James Forsythe Lippincott, he would leave.

  “Could I stay if I wanted?” he finally said.

  “I do not know. The legend is silent.”

  “Oh, yeah. The legend.”

  Since he and Chiun first had arrived two days before, they had heard of little else but the legend. Chiun had been installed, seven steamer trunks and all, in the finest thatched hut the Loni had to offer. Princess Saffah who ruled this camp as her two younger princess sisters ruled the other two Loni encampments in the nearby hills, had moved out to make room for Chiun.

  “Dammit, Chiun, that’s not right,” Remo had said. “Move into some other place instead of moving people around.”

  “Not right?” Chiun said. “What is not right? That the people of the Loni should not honor a man who has come thousands of miles across the seas to repay a debt centuries old and to put them back into power? They should not give up a hut to a man who will give them palaces?”

  “Yeah, but moving their princess?”

  “Princess? Suddenly you are a royalist. Remember this then. Princesses and princes and kings and queens come and go. But there is only one Master of Sinanju.”

  “Talk about the world being lucky,” Remo said sarcastically.

  “Yes, the world is lucky to have such a one. But even luckier are you who have been permitted to bask in the warmth of the Master’s magnificence.”

  And so Chiun had moved into the hut of Princess Saffah.

  In quiet protest, however, Remo refused. He insisted upon moving into one of the smaller huts of the village. The first night he was cold. The second night he was wet. The morning of the third day, he walked into Chiun’s hut with his blanket in his hand.

  “I thought you might be lonely,” Remo said, “so I decided to move in to keep you company.”

  “I am happy you think so much of me,” Chiun said. “But please, I would not want you to do anything against your principles.”

  “No, that’s all right, Chiun. I’ve made my mind up. I’ll stay.”

  “No,” Chiun said. “I insist.”

  “Sorry, Chiun, I’m not leaving. I’m going to stay here and keep you company whether you like it or not.”

  “You are leaving this instant,” Chiun said, and then called the entire Loni village to remove Remo by force if necessary. As Remo slunk away back to his own little mud hut, he could hear Chiun explaining behind him: “Sometimes the child forgets himself and must be reminded of his place. But he is young and will yet learn.”

  Remo had wandered up the hill and Princess Saffah had followed him. She had come to console him.

  “Yeah, t
he legend,” Remo repeated. “Look, you’re a smart girl. Do you really believe the Loni are going to return to power because Chiun is here?”

  “Not just the Little Father,” she said. “You are here too and you are part of the legend.” She opened the palm of his hand and pretended to examine it. “Tell me, when did you die?” She laughed as she felt Remo’s hand tense momentarily. “You see,” she said laughing. “The legend speaks only truth.”

  “You’d better tell me of this legend,” Remo said. He was happy that she still clung to his hand.

  “Once,” she began, “many years ago there was a Master from across the sea. And because he stood with the Loni, the Loni were a great and just people. They lived in peace; they inflicted injustice upon no man. In the ancient days, by your calendar, the great libraries of the world were said to be at Alexandria in the land of Egypt. But the greatest of all was at Timbuktu and it was the library of the Loni. This is true, what I am telling you Remo, you could look it up. And it was the Loni Empire that gave to the world the gift of iron. That, too, is true. We had men who could repair damaged eyes; we had physicians who could heal those with twisted brains; all these things, the Loni had and did and we were a great people, blessed of God.

  “It was said of the Master that the Loni had given him their courage for safekeeping, while they used their heads for science and their hands for art. And then this Master from across the sea went away and the Loni who had relied on him were overwhelmed by an inferior people and our empire was lost. Our best men and women were sold into slavery. We were hunted and tracked like animals until we retreated, three small bands all that was left, into these hills where you now find us and where we hide from our enemies.

  “But this Master sent word across the years and across the seas and across the mountains that one day he would return. He would bring with him a man who walked in the shoes of death, a man whose earlier life had ended, and this man would face in mortal combat an evil man who would keep the Loni in chains. That is you, Remo, and this is truth I tell you.”