Two uniforms brought James Symmes in that evening. Symmes walked with the help of a cane crafted from a knobby branch. He might as well have had COUNTRY tattooed on his forehead. They brought him to an interview room, gave him a cup of coffee, and went to find Westermann.
Westermann was at his desk; the two uniforms paused at the threshold of his office, unsure whether to disturb him. Westermann was staring at an open file on his desk, but clearly not reading. The men could also tell he was unaware of their presence. One of the uniforms finally tapped on the doorframe, and Westermann, startled, looked up. They told him that Symmes was waiting in the interview room. Westermann waved them in.
“Any trouble?”
The senior of the two cops, a short guy with a barrel chest named Konchesky, did the talking. “No, sir. He was surprised to see us, but didn’t seem too bothered.”
“Good.”
“He had a gun, though, sir. Army-issue Colt.”
Westermann frowned. “He say anything about it?”
“Said there was no way he was coming into the City without being able to protect himself.”
“Country mouse,” the other chimed in.
“Okay,” Westermann said, thinking about Symmes’s shack; how the entire population of Fort Deposit wouldn’t fill some of the apartment buildings here. “He say anything else?”
“No, sir. We saved him for you, just like we were told.”
“Thank you.” Westermann let them go. He closed his eyes, willing his mind to empty of competing thoughts; to focus on the task at hand. He called Kraatjes.
* * *
Kraatjes placed a pack of Luckies on the IR table and invited James Symmes to take one. He shook his head.
“Am I under arrest?”
Westermann was surprised by Symmes’s eyes. They betrayed no fear; no intimidation at being brought in, without explanation, to police headquarters in a strange city. He wasn’t scared, didn’t even seem curious. The question came off as an attempt to clarify a minor detail.
“We just have a few questions for you. I was going to come back out to Fort Deposit, but the chief out there told me you were headed this way, so it saved me the trip.”
Symmes grimaced with the good side of his face. This close, it looked as if the right side of Symmes’s face was slowly sloughing off, his eye drooping, his mouth frozen in a permanent half frown, his cheek slack. He held his atrophied right arm close to his chest, as if he were clutching books.
With his left hand, Symmes scratched next to his left eye. “What questions?”
“Why don’t I start with why you came to the City today?”
“To see Dr. Maddox.”
“About what?”
“Am I in trouble here?”
“No.”
“I wanted to talk to him.”
“About what?”
“Ole Koss.”
“What about Ole Koss?”
Symmes snorted a laugh. “How much time you got?”
Westermann shrugged. “All the time you need, James.”
“Jimmy.”
“Okay, Jimmy.”
“You want to know about Ole Koss?”
“Sure.”
“Well, we was in the service together, after the war. They sent a dozen of us over to Africa, watch over this open-pit mine they had. We didn’t actually do much; they had other troops on guard. We just dried out in the sun, rested, drank. We’d had a rough go in Germany.”
Westermann stole a look at Kraatjes, who was leaning forward in his chair, forearms on the table and fingers laced. Symmes took a sip of coffee and used his left hand to wipe away some that had dribbled from the right side of his mouth.
Kraatjes said, “Excuse me, Mr. Symmes. I don’t mean to be insensitive, but it doesn’t seem to me that you would pass an entrance physical. Is this something that happened to you in Africa?”
Symmes closed his eyes and nodded. “I’m getting to that.
“We didn’t have much to do, like I said. So, sometimes we went looking for something. One time, this carpenter we knew, called Van Oot, he asks us if we want to go out in the bush, see a friend of his that’s got a ranch somewhere. Van Oot traded some pills to a hophead at dispatch for a few days’ use of a jeep, and we loaded it up with gas cans and beer. The bush, there are tracks but there aren’t really roads. Van Oot drove and I don’t know how he found it, but it took us a half day to get out to the ranch and we drank the whole way. Van Oot’s friend Danny lived on this ranch that was over a river, and he had a team of Africans that worked for him. We sat out on his porch that overlooked the river and drank beer and watched the crocs and hippos in the water.
“So, the next day we woke up with hangovers and had breakfast and this tea that’s half-whiskey. Danny, he was big, maybe like six foot five, he asked if we wanted to go deeper into the bush, see this African he said would take us on a lion hunt. So, yeah, sure. We headed out in two jeeps this time; me and Joe Turner following the other three in Danny’s Rover. We drove for hours, passed some villages; stopped for lunch at this watering hole where there were some elephants.” Symmes shook his head at the memory of it.
“We kept on and in the late afternoon we came to this village. The other villages, we’d gone around them, you know. Waved to the people we saw, but basically stayed away. Here, Danny led us right to the village edge and we parked the jeeps. It was quiet there, except for some dogs that came out to us and some livestock noises, like all those villages.
“I’ve seen a lot,” Symmes said, shifting his gaze to the table, “what with the war and all. But this was something different. I don’t know. Maybe when you look back at things you think that you remember this or that and maybe it was that way and maybe it wasn’t. But we knew before we got there that something was wrong. We didn’t see anyone outside the village. And when we went in—this village was really just a bunch of huts around a clearing—there were a couple of bodies lying out in the open. I don’t know if they had just died there or whether the hyenas dragged them out, but animals had started on them, but then just left them alone. We could hear the sound of the flies coming from everywhere. We found the villagers dead in their huts. It looked like they had been vomiting blood, or maybe bleeding from their mouths.
“Danny got frantic, looking for someone, running in and out of huts; saying that people were missing; that maybe they’d left. But he finally found her, a woman. He was grabbing her and holding her and getting blood all over himself. Koss and Van Oot and I pulled him off, but he fought like hell, busted us up pretty good. He was big, you know. And he’d lost it.
“When we’d gotten over the shock of it, we put bandannas over our mouths. Joe Turner had been checking the perimeter, and when he joined us, you could see that he hadn’t found anybody alive. You could also see what we must have looked like, with all this blood on us. Some of it was the woman’s, but some of it was ours, too. Like I said, Danny was big and we had a hard time pulling him off. We finally forced some whiskey into him and he calmed down enough that we got him in the jeep. Koss made us wait for a minute and he went back into the village. We saw smoke, blue smoke rising into that low sky, and Koss walking out with this wall of flames behind him.”