Free The Sleeper by Christopher Dickey Page B

The blonde woman in the safari hat is waving again. Same skyscraper and same low building in the background. She turns and looks at it and looks back at the camera and waves.
    I rewound that section of the videotape. The woman waves, and turns, and behind her, flying above the low building, is the American flag. I rewound the whole tape and started it again. Every scene except the one with the giraffes shows the same low building. Now I see the guards around it more clearly. There is another scene of the parking lot, another shot of the guardhouse in front of it. In all of them, the blonde in the safari hat is laughing and waving. You can’t hear what she’s saying over the noise of the buses and cars, but she thinks the person behind the camera, who is saying nothing, is just the funniest person on earth. There was no time and date on the video. But I knew it must have been taken before August 1998. The building in the background was the American Embassy in Nairobi. On August 7, 1998, it was blown up by a hit team from Al-Qaeda.
    The image turned to gray snow and I got up to look for a pen and some paper to make some notes. In the room with the computer I finally found the stub of a pencil and a yellowing envelope.
    â€œMás lento. Muy, muy lentamente.” The voice was coming from the living room. The doctor’s voice. “ El cinturón. ” I could feel the hackles rise on the back of my bruised neck. The voice was on the tape. “Primero, el cinturón.”

Chapter 10
    The video was still rolling. The blonde was in what looked like a big hotel room. The white curtains were drawn, but there was still a lot of light. She still wore her safari hat, and she was looking down at her waist, unbuttoning her safari shirt. Underneath she had a short, thin T-shirt that showed her navel and was tight against her heavy breasts. Something was written on it. Her stomach was flat, and she flexed the muscles a little for the camera. She unfastened the canvas belt, the cinturón.
    The woman was standing at the end of a bed and in the foreground I could see a man’s naked legs. The right one was scarred and withered. “Give me the belt.” His hand reached out and she looked into the lens as she dangled it in front of him. Only then did I recognize her as Pilar.
    She took off the safari shirt and dropped her pants to the floor, standing before the camera with her hands on her hips, wearing nothing but a thong, the hat, and the T-shirt. The logo across the front read “friendlyboy.” Now the hat came off. She shook her head. Her dyed blonde hair, thick and heavy as a mane, cascaded over her shoulders.
    This was the woman who had shaken my hand so warmly, swung a steel bar so painfully, and died so quickly. The tape kept rolling.
    She pulled off the T-shirt and the thong, and stood completely nude in front of the camera. There was not much tease, because there was no sense of modesty. She had the same kind of matter-of-fact confidence stark naked as she seemed to have when she was covered from head to foot. The muscles in her arms and stomach were all softly outlined. There was no hair on her body at all.
    In a mirror behind her, I glimpsed the man who was filming. He had his shirt open, and no shorts and he was clearly aroused. But the camera blocked his face. Apart from his graying hair and trim salt-and-pepper beard, I couldn’t tell much about his features.
    â€œPut the camera on the desk,” he said. She took it from him, still running. Now I could see the whole bed, but the light from the picture windows behind it turned the man into a silhouette.
    Pilar straddled him, rubbing herself against his groin even as she slid the belt around his waist and his hands and strapped down his arms. She rose up on her knees and he twisted himself beneath her until he was on his stomach. She kissed and bit his shoulders, the small of his back, working her way down his body. As she got nearer