Heat of Passion by Harold Robbins

Author:Harold Robbins
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

After the truck was unloaded, Marni went into the long tent where the food and medical supplies were stored before distribution. With Venacio, her Angolan assistant, she began a count. Auditing aid was half her job, the easy part. Trying to get as much of it as possible into the hands of the people it was intended for was the tough part. Food and medicine would mysteriously disappear from the warehouse overnight, trucks would arrive with less aid than it had started with. Even worse than common thievery was the blatant theft by corrupt government officials, rebel warlords, black marketeers, and gangs of hijackers.

Countries are like people, Marni thought. They develop personalities and emotional distress, just as individuals do. They can go schizo like Germany did under the Nazis, paranoid like Russia under Stalin. Angola she saw as a beaten child, whipped and starved, raped and tortured, until it no longer knew what a normal existence was. Traumatized, the whole country acted psychotic, often hurting itself and those who were extending a helping hand.

They should audit the misery, she thought, and gather it up and shove it down the throats of the companies and people feeding the war frenzy with oil and diamond dollars. Starvation, disease, deaths and injuries from bombing, shelling, and land mines, looting, hijackings, ambushes, rape, kidnapping, murder—it would be an audit of hell, she thought.

“Menina,” Venacio said, addressing her with the Portuguese word for Miss, “I just counted eighty-six bags of wheat and you wrote down rice.”

“I’m sorry, my mind is somewhere else.”

“Your mind is so full of your many duties, you don’t have room for your own thoughts.” He took the clipboard from her. “Go for a walk, go for a dinner and movie.”

They both laughed at the joke.

“Okay, I do need some air. Finish up the counts. When you tell me how much was stolen between the airport in Luanda and here, lie to me so that I can feel better about the world.”

She left the tent and the small UN encampment, walking along the dirt road that ran beside the river. Women offered food—oranges, ears of corn, sticky balls of yam—and polluted drinks to the drivers of the trucks and busses using the road. She knew that some of the women offered more carnal pleasures, too, and that AIDS was not just a deadly disease to these people, but a fact of life. So was poverty, crime, and murderous warfare.

Yet so many of these women had easy smiles and took delight at the littlest things. And often she saw acts of generosity and kindness. The only noticeable malice was in the arrogance of the men who carried automatic weapons and acted more like bandits than soldiers.

Under the shade of an eucalyptus tree, she paused and watched garimpeiros working the river for diamonds. An altercation broke out between river miners as one man used a piece of wood to drive back others from what he considered to be his claim. There was more shouting and splashing than bloodletting.

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