Outside the newspaper shop a flock of beggars and hawkers had cornered a young woman as she stepped out of her car. In a contraption made of rough boards mounted on wheels a man with no legs scooted across the street to join the fray, pushing himself along by slashing at the pavement with hands bound in strips of old tires. Cripples with deformed legs and twisted bodies dragged themselves around in the sand, a child in rags jabbed his withered stumps toward her face, and street hawkers who regularly congregated in front of the shop because Europeans stopped there to buy foreign newspapers shoved at her hand-carved boxes of wengay wood, toy helicopters and bicycles and boats hand-crafted of wire coat hangers and discarded bits and pieces of tin, and malachite necklaces and ivory bracelets. A man with a hole where his nose should have been and a grotesque, gaping mouth with no lips shook his callused hand at her and bleated, “Donne, mamy! Donne!” The other beggars took up his cry, and soon the little street echoed with their clamor, “Donne, mamy! Donne!”
Jacques Delpech, coming out of the shop with a handful of magazines and newspapers, which were delivered regularly to his box there, looked up briefly at the noise. It was a common sight, nothing out of the ordinary. He started for his car, where Louis sat with the motor running.
“The Belgian businessman!” the woman called in English, and when he caught her eye, she tried to smile.
“Ah, the cultural attaché!” he laughed. The beggars began to scatter as he walked toward her, except for the man with no nose who lowered his voice and murmured plaintively, “Donne! Donne!”
“Should I give him something? I can’t give them all something, can I?” Sarah asked.
“No,” Jacques said, and slipped a ten zaïre note cautiously into the beggar’s hand.
“Jacques Delpech, I remember your name now,” Sarah said, as he escorted her into the shop. “The handsomest man in Kinshasa, Gussie would never forgive me if I had forgotten your name.”
As they turned into the shop, Jacques heard a scuffle and thud. The other beggars had thrown the man with no nose into the sand and were beating and kicking him.
“You don’t have to stay. I’m all right now.” She gazed distractedly around the shop. “It was like being shoved into the middle of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. I wasn’t afraid. I don’t like Hieronymus Bosch,” she said, after a pause.
Jacques could not stop looking at her and was afraid that at any moment she would notice his rudeness. Sarah Laforge was transformed. Her thick mass of tight curly hair had been clipped into a rosy blond halo that somehow made her look taller and slimmer. She was elegantly dressed in a linen skirt and an electric blue silk shirt. She smelled of expensive French perfume.
“You don’t have to stay,” she said again.
“I don’t mind. I’ll see you back to your car. You might end up in another Bosch painting.”
She gave him the shy smile of a bright and cunning child. “I want to buy a card. A baby card. For a new baby. Gussie told me to look here.”
La Détente, run by an obese Belgian woman, was a jumble of a shop frequented by Europeans and moneyed Zaïrians with European tastes. To one side there were stacks of magazines like the Economist, Jours de France, Time, Paris Match and fashion magazines several months and seasons out of date, and the major newspapers of Europe three days to two weeks late. Everything from novelty fountain pens and key rings, jigsaw puzzles, costume jewelry, L’Oreal cosmetics, cookbooks in various languages and Astérix comic books were scattered around on tables and in display cases.
Sarah located the greeting cards. “They’re all too humorous,” she said, shuffling rapidly through them. “I want something nicer, more serious. I want something really, really nice.”
“A boy or a girl?”
“A girl,” Sarah said, her face lighting up. “It’s a girl. My servant Malu, his wife has had a baby, and they named her Sarah. For me. I was touched. On Sunday they brought the baby to show me.”
She frowned, reading each one of the cards intently before setting it back on the display. “Here, I think this one will do,” she said finally.
“Does the mother read?”
Sarah’s round blue eyes clouded with confusion. She glanced down at the card and turned it over in her hand. He had never seen such honest eyes, eyes that without a moment’s hesitation, seemed to fling open the doors of her mind and heart. Come in and look around, they said, look as much as you like, I have no secrets here.
“I want to pick up the Herald Tribune,” he said, and left her still looking at the card. He had spoiled her happy mood, and he was annoyed with himself. She had been so delighted with the idea of her houseboy naming his daughter after her. He picked up the newspaper. He hoped the daughter was real and not just a baby her houseboy had borrowed to bring to show her in order to get money, and presents to sell.
As he paid for the newspaper, he saw her slowly putting the card back on the shelf.
Outside, a stillness had fallen over the street. The beggars had disappeared, and the few remaining street hawkers sprawled listlessly on the sidewalk and showed no interest in Sarah and Jacques. The street was deserted. Louis dozed behind the wheel, the motor of the car still running.
“Would you like to see my presents for Sarah?” she asked, brightening again.
She took two tiny dresses, one pink and one white, from a package in the car and held them up for him to see.
In the cloudless sky behind her blond head, black streams of sugar bats swirled noisily around the mango trees lining the avenue.
“They’re hand-smocked,” she said. “I found them at one of the tradings. In a heap on the floor, like everything else. Made in China. Look at the detail.”
Around her pale neck she wore a thin gold chain, almost invisible, with a small diamond that nestled in the hollow of her breastbone and that moved and sparkled in the fading sunlight. She fingered the pink and coral threads of the smocking, smiling thoughtfully. She had forgotten the card and was happy again.
“Very nice,” Jacques said. The next day he would be leaving for two weeks in Guinea, then two more weeks in Brussels doing battle with Janine and her father and her lawyers, awkwardly taking little Suzanne to the park and then to lunch at the Villa Lorraine. He was about to join the ranks of those men who see their children occasionally for stilted lunches in expensive restaurants with obsequious waiters in black fussing, interrupting, intruding. He would not see Sarah again for a month, possibly longer. “I wonder . . . would you like to come by the house for a drink? Watch the sunset on the river?”
Her look at first was puzzled, then vague, and he realized with dismay that she was going to say no.
“I’m afraid I can’t. The new ambassador is having a big dinner party, and he’s asked me to, kind of, hostess for him. Command performance, my boss says, and I have to be there early.” Her great blue eyes stared up at him merrily. “The new ambassador, his name is Virgil Peacock,” she said, wrinkling her nose mischievously. “That’s his real name.”
Jacques laughed obligingly.
That night, lying awake in bed, listening to the night sounds in the garden, Jacques ran his meeting with Sarah Laforge through his mind over and over and tried to understand why he had such tender longing for this woman he hardly knew. He saw her proudly holding up her gifts, the tiny pink and white dresses. The sparkle of a diamond at her throat. Her lovely mouth sagging with disappointment over the card. The animated play of her eyebrows as she talked. Just the idea of a little girl wearing the dresses she had found for her made her face glow.
In his imagination he reached out to caress the curve of her lovely, pale face. Sarah Laforge did not look like a woman who would let a three-year-old child wander off and drown while she gossiped with friends and had a pedicure in the bedroom.