Night Trap by Gordon Kent

Author:Gordon Kent [Kent, Gordon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 1998-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

15

14 October, 1991. Mombasa, Kenya.

The warm reek of the sea lay over the Kilindini harbor, over the whole coast, even as far inland as the mangrove swamps and the malarial belt that had once been a barrier to traffic inland. Franci thought he had got used to it, but now and again it would surprise him, like the faint stink of rotten fish somewhere, an air so thick it seemed liquid, a wet breeze. Clouds gathered overhead; the morning’s blue sky became white, then gray, then charcoal, and the rains fell so heavily that it was hard to breathe, the nose taking in water that gave the astringent feel far back of a swimming-pool. He hated the coast, too reminiscent of the place where his life had been ruined, where his life had ended. He wanted mountains, cold, harshness—not this soft stench, this wet heat, these limp palms and downpours.

How long? he wondered. He had thought, in the camp, that it might be a release, this living a secret life in a new place. Secrecy can be a kind of revenge, if not on one’s real enemies, then on strangers, surrogates. But what sort of revenge was it to sit behind the barricaded desk of Bash-O-Vision, to listen to his shrew of a wife? She had started to embroider her role, to behave like a real wife. She was wretched, too, he knew; her cooking had got even worse, and she served the food with spitefulness. He thought she might have taken a lover, and to his astonishment this infuriated him! Why? Why could he not let the poor woman have whatever comfort she could take in this alien place? But he actually spied on her now, tried to find excuses to go home at unpredictable times, leaving Bash-O-Vision in the care of the Chinese while he skulked through back streets to enter his own house silently, expecting to find her on the bed, twined with some stranger whose hairy ass greeted him above her nakedness.

He had never seen her naked. He found that he wanted to. He wondered if he really was going mad. There was nothing he could do with a woman, his poor stump of a member an outrage, a joke, and then—well. But he thought of her, of things he could do. Of her pleasure. If he might give her pleasure, perhaps then—what, he would be more of a man? No. Perhaps he would be more alive. Risa was no beauty, but she was a woman; she had a certain lushness; she was there. She was his wife!

He had hinted at something. She had scowled. He had gone into her bedroom last night on the pretext of asking if the mosquitoes bothered her; she had pulled up the bedclothes and hidden herself. But why?

He supposed he would come to commanding her. She was, after all, his wife. She must obey; she was a religious woman, one who always covered her head, who would have gone covered

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