But there were electric lights burning in the ceiling, and the elevators were apparently running, for the lieutenant led them to the narrow corridor leading to the elevators.
One of the elevators was waiting. There were only a few shreds of its mirrored walls left, and there were bullet holes in the side and rear walls.
The last time he’d been on this elevator, he’d had to drag the body of a Simba out of it, and the moment he had, the elevator door had closed, leaving him on the ground floor.
The lieutenant bowed them into the elevator. The door closed, and the elevator began to rise. At the fourth floor, it stopped.
On the corridor wall, there was a bullet-chipped area, and a dark splotch running from the chipped area almost to the floor.
The last time Jack had been on the fourth floor of the Immoquateur, when the door opened, there had been a Simba in parts of a Belgian officer’s uniform standing in the corridor. He had not had time to raise his pistol—a 9-mm Luger parabellum—before a burst from Jack’s assault rifle had smashed into his midsection.
Jack had taken the pistol and gotten back on the elevator and ridden to the tenth floor, absolutely terrified of what he would find there.
“No,” Jack said in Swahili. “Take us to the tenth floor first.”
The lieutenant gave him a strange look but pushed the tenth-floor button, and the door closed and they rode to the tenth floor.
Jack got out first and went to the door of the Portet apartment.
The door was closed but could not be locked. Jack had smashed the doorknob and lock first with the butt of his FN—which had caused the stock to break—and then with the heel of his boot.
He pushed the door open and entered the apartment, expecting almost anything but what he got; there was no question in his mind that the apartment would be stripped of anything that could be picked up or torn loose.
It was not. Everything was there. Furniture, lamps, rugs on the floor, and even Hanni’s Grundig radio, tuned to the BBC’s Light Programme from London.
“Mon Dieu, c’est Monsieur Jacques!” Tomo, the houseboy, exclaimed in surprise as he came into the living room from the kitchen.
He wasn’t wearing his usual crisply starched white jacket, but he was alive, well, and apparently on duty.
The last Jack had heard of him, from Mary Magdalene, was that she had ordered him to go to his village and stay there until the trouble was over.
Jack, his eyes tearing and his throat painfully restricted, walked to Tomo and embraced him.
When he could find his voice, Jack said: “We’ll be staying here, Lieutenant.”
“When Colonel Supo gets to Stanleyville, tell him where we are,” Lunsford said.
“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant said.
“That will be all. You may go,” Lunsford said.
“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant said, and saluted.
“Tomo, when did you come back?” Jack asked.
“I did not go home,” Tomo said. “I stayed in the bush across the river until the whites from South Africa came. Then I came here and protected things.”
“Tomo, you’re wonderful.”
“I am the number-one boy,” Tomo said. “It was my duty.”
Tomo took a good look at Lunsford.
“I know you,” he challenged. “You are a Simba!”
“No,” Jack said. “You saw him here?”
“I saw him enter the building when the Belgians came,” Tomo said. “And then I saw him leave the building with Mary Magdalene and your mother and sister and the young white woman with the baby. He was a Simba.”
“He is an American officer who was dressed like a Simba,” Jack said, and then he felt overcome by an urge to giggle. He switched to English, and through his giggles said, “It’s a good thing he recognized you as a Simba now, Major, sir, rather than later, or you would have woken up in the morning with your throat neatly sliced open.”
“I am a friend, Tomo,” Lunsford said in Swahili.
“If M’sieu Jacques says so,” Tomo replied dubiously.
“First things first, Tomo. We have to get out of these wet clothes. Is there anything we can wear? And what about these clothes?”
“There are underthings,” Tomo said. “I found them above the ceiling. Under things and your Browning gun, and some other things . . . Madame Portet’s radio . . . but all the men’s clothing is gone. I can dry those clothes, and iron them.”
By “above the ceiling” Tomo meant between the concrete floor of the floor above and the false ceiling of acoustic tiles in the