out alone. He couldn’t believe she was being so rash. He knew about those two places, hangouts for Kampala’s working girls. Any woman, white or black, who went in there unescorted was advertising. He lay in bed for half an hour. Finally, feeling a need to assert some masculine power, he got dressed and taxied to the Half London, where an Afro-pop band was entertaining a boisterous crowd of local yuppies, hookers, and expats. Mary was dancing on the open-air dance floor with a slim young guy. Watching her sensual movements in the smoke-veiled lights, Dare was hurt that she could be having such a good time without him. When the number ended, she went to the bar with her partner, who put an arm around her waist. Dare was pleased to see her pull it off, but that gesture did nothing to calm his jealousy. He approached them from behind, heard the guy say, “Oh, come on, sweet,” in a British or Australian or South African accent, and then tapped him on the shoulder and said, “That’s it, Nigel, last dance.” The Brit, Aussie, or South African said, “Who the hell are you?” Mary let out a squeal of inebriated delight. “He’s my boss!” Dare added that he was a helluva lot more than that. “Like what?” said the guy, squaring off. This was ridiculous! It wasn’t dignified, a middle-aged man about to get into a bar fight over a woman. That was avoided when the band started up again and Mary pulled him onto the dance floor, where he felt awkward and out of place. “I just knew I’d get you out! ” she said with a wicked sparkle in her eyes.
She wanted to stay until the set was over. He insisted they go back to the hotel and in the end practically carried her out to the taxi park down the street. They argued during the ride, the argument continuing in the lobby, in the corridor, and into their room, where it degenerated into a shouting match, Mary slapping him when he told her that she’d been behaving like a tramp. He said, “Lucky you’re a woman, or you’d be taking an eight-count right now.” With a fierce, challenging look, she said, “Don’t let that stop you!” That scared him because it reminded him of Margo, who expected men to be violent and, when they failed to meet her expectations, egged them on until they were. Dare had never laid a hand on her, and he wasn’t about to break that precedent now.
Things took their natural course. He and Mary resolved their differences with their bodies—the old fight-and-fuck syndrome. In the morning, as they packed for the trip to Murchison Falls, she was remorseful. He responded with his own apologies, though he wasn’t sure what he was apologizing for. His happiness returned, but absent its former purity. A slender vein of doubt had come into it. There were drawbacks to love with a much younger woman.
They had one major mission at Murchison—to touch base with Dare’s old associate from Blackbridge, Keith Cheswick—and one minor mission—to photograph, for Doug’s benefit, a rare bird called the shoebill stork. Cheswick had chosen Murchison for their meeting place because he was doing business just over the border, in the Congo. They checked in at a lodge in Paraa, where a fax from Cheswick was waiting for them: “Enjoy the view and the pool. Meet me tomorrow eight-thirty sharp at the dock. A launch reserved for us exclusively. We can talk shop and you’ll have a good chance of spotting your bird. Cheers, K.C.”
Over two years had passed since he and Cheswick had flown together in the Congo. Cheswick still had the look of the RAF fighter-pilot who was aging well: the trim gray mustache, the flat stomach, the dry iron eyes squinting out of a tanned face; but the peculiar stresses of the mercenary’s calling had begun to extract a toll. His movements weren’t as supple as before, and his shoulders were slightly stooped, not so much from the weight of years as from the weight of too many unpleasant experiences.
The launch, piloted by a skinny Ugandan in shorts and a cast-off park ranger’s shirt, was a wooden craft with an awning that aspired to the decrepitude of the African Queen. As it chugged upriver, Mary, a laminated photo of a shoebill stork that Doug had given her on her lap, swept the shores with her binoculars, and the two men