Free A Dancer In the Dust by Thomas H. Cook Page B

were dark and still. “Good,” he said, quietly, though with a curious edge. “It is good that she has a friend.”
    He meant a white friend, as we both knew, and by that he meant someone with influence. Even so, his remark had less than an amiable tone, the suggestion being that Martine would soon be in need of such a friend, and that quite naturally that friend, like Martine, would be white.
    “Why is that?” I asked.
    The constable only smiled, then nodded toward the door. “Be careful on your way back to Tumasi. It is a dangerous road.”
    We walked out of the building, got into my Jeep, and headed back toward Tumasi. Fareem was clearly shaken, and for a long time he said nothing. Then, quite suddenly, he said, “It is as I thought. They are after Martine.”
    “Who?”
    “The big men in Rupala,” Fareem answered. “She got a letter from them. They want to evaluate her farm.”
    “‘Evaluate’? What does that mean?”
    “I don’t know, but it is never good when they come here, the people from the capital.”
    I tried to reassure him. “Everything is going to be fine,” I said. “It’s probably just some sort of survey. Governments are always taking surveys.”
    The sun was going down when we arrived at Martine’s house an hour or so later. She was sitting on the porch as we came to a halt, but rose quickly and was almost upon me by the time I got out of the Land Cruiser.
    “There is something wrong,” she said the instant our faces came into view.
    I told her what had happened—the theft, Seso’s arrest, our journey to Nulamba, what had transpired there.
    “The constable wouldn’t release Seso,” I said at the end of the narration. “But he looked fine. He hasn’t been harmed. I expect that he’ll be released very soon.”
    I started to buttress this conclusion with some unfounded notion about legal procedure, the rule of law, the present government’s commitment to these decidedly Western principles, but before I could speak, I happened to glance out and, in the distance, across the plain, I saw a long line of slender figures moving slowly at the far reaches of the bush, their animals moving with them: goats, cattle, camels, a dog or two. It was a group of Lutusi on their way to some watering hole perhaps forty or fifty miles off, slowly and gracefully moving at their own pace.
    “It’s beautiful,” I said by way of lightening the mood. “The way they move.”
    The tenderness of Martine’s reply touched some previously untouched part of me.
    “The Lutusi have their own pace,” she said in that way of hers, with neither admiration nor condemnation, but only as a matter of fact. They had their own time, and it was at one with their immemorial course, immutable as an ocean current. It was neither good nor bad. It simply, intractably… was.
    At that moment, as we three stood together watching the line of Lutusi at the horizon, Martine seemed at peace with her homeland, a country so perfectly hers that I could not have foreseen the fury with which it would turn against her, nor that, in the face of that fury, she would set a course down Tumasi Road where, at some terrifying instant, she must have heard a rustling in the brush, then the rhythmic clack, clack, clack of the shells as they sounded behind her, then in front, then tightening like a clattering noose all around.

Rupala, 10:48 A . M .
    Einstein is said to have welcomed death because it put an end to risk. I have to admit that I’m not quite as sanguine about it. Death doesn’t appeal to me, but sometimes killing does. “The reek of human blood smiles out at me,” one of the Furies says as they close in upon Orestes. I have known that smile, and I must confess that at this moment, I know it once again. The unavoidable truth is that there are times when the rigors of forgiveness defeat us, and we wish only to do damage.
    Even so, why could I not have let Seso’s murder go, returned to my secure little office and my safe