“These two didn’t give you much trouble.”

“Oh, they didn’t expect anything, see. They were digging you, and I just came along and zapped them. And then they trusted me, see, which is always a mistake, like.” He shook his head. “No chance,” he said. “Only thing is to go back to where Sheena is at and pass you off as members of the tribe.” He shook his head. “Which ain’t gonna be exactly easy. Sellin’ you two to Sheena is like sellin’ sand in the desert.”

“Tell her we’re friendly. That we’re on her side, something like that.”

“You’re the wrong color, man. And the bird, she’s the wrong sex. You know anything about Sheena? She’s one beautiful crazy-ass chick, man. Great big blonde with jugs out to here and wild legs, looks like something out of a Swedish movie.”

“Where did she come from?”

“She was a missionary’s daughter.”

“You’re putting me on.”

But he wasn’t. Sheena, it seemed, had started life as plain Jane Grey (“Unlucky Lady Jane,” Bowman said) until a cannibal gang cooked and ate her parents. Jane was on hand to watch all this, and was at a sufficiently impressionable age for the spectacle to leave scars. Additional scars were left by the cannibals’ subsequent treatment of Jane herself – they used her to satisfy another hunger entirely, raping her beyond the bounds of good taste.

One might think that this sort of treatment would have made Jane, who had been shy anyway, and who had experienced a typically repressed childhood, into a man-fearing black-hating desiccated old bitch, and perhaps a vegetarian in the bargain. But somehow the Fates turned the picture inside out and printed it as a negative. She hated whites, not blacks. She hated women, not men. Far from desiccated, she was genuinely juicy, a full-fledged polyandrous nymphomaniac. (These – mark it well – are my words. Bowman’s description was less scholarly.)

Nor was she any sort of vegetarian. I learned now what had happened to the various human organs the absence of which I had last night noted. They had been eaten.

“So you see where it’s at,” he summed up. “Certain people don’t get to live when Sheena has any say about it. Like all women, white or black. And like all white men. And like any black men who won’t come join the harem. Which comes out” – he sighed – “that we got a problem. You’re white. The chick is half-white and also she’s a chick.”

Plum snorted quietly.

“Not that I’m complainin’ myself, understand.” He beamed at her, and her irritation dissolved in the glow of the smile. “Wouldn’t have you any other way, baby. That mixed-blood bag is very exotic. I dig it.”

I think she blushed.

“Thing is, you can’t come into Sheena’s camp looking like yourselves. But there’s a way around it. There generally is, has been my experience. We cut your hair short enough and darken it up some and it won’t look so bloody Caucasian. Use some dyes to darken your face. Darken up the bird’s, too, and her hair. At least it’s kinky to start with. Makes it easier.”

“I knew it would come in handy someday,” Plum said.

“Have to tie them there up a little,” he went on, pointing at her breasts. “And Evan, my man, I don’t guess it would hurt for you to join the red crotch club. It’s just this cochineal dye she has us put on. Don’t hurt none, and to tell you the truth I think it keeps the flies off.”

“What about Plum?”

“She have much trouble with flies?”

“No, but-”

“No point then, man.”

This stupidity got sorted out when Bowman explained that Sheena and her Merry Men only went naked on selected occasions, such as massacres, so that they wouldn’t get blood on their clothing. He and his two erstwhile buddies had been fully dressed when they came calling on us, but had stripped outside and left the clothes there. We could even wear their clothes, he suggested; it might help make the deception effective.

I don’t know if it did or not, really. In Plum’s case, the white duck slacks were a foot and a half too long for her, the waist almost that much too large for her, and the canvas tunic was so oversized that her breasts disappeared in it; there was really no point in binding them. My outfit came a little closer to my size – either my opponent had been less gigantic than he had seemed or the clothes had been too small for him.

We had no sooner gotten the clothes on than we took them off again and began making ourselves over as members of Sheena’s gang. Bowman took charge of things, and I was more than happy to let him. I had lost the ability for intelligent planning somewhere along the way and didn’t know if I would ever get it back. It was easier by far to nod and grunt while my hair got shortened and my skin darkened and my generative paraphernalia dyed a screaming scarlet.

He did the honors for Miss Pelham Jenkins, too. I had to admit that the transformation was fairly remarkable. The little bridge of freckles disappeared as her skin turned several shades darker. The very unusual cap of blond curls became a very usual cap of dark brown curls. Sam Bowman did good work, and if it seemed to me that his hands lingered rather too affectionately on the flesh he was darkening, there was really nothing I was entitled to do or say about it.

And through it all, Bowman talked. About the life he had for himself, roaming the jungles with Sheena’s gang and instructing them in hand-to-hand combat and guerrilla warfare techniques. About his flight from Griggstown, and how he had been very nearly killed a dozen times, and how he would have starved to death or died of a fever if he hadn’t met up with Sheena. About the Chief, and the stupidity of this assignment, and the superiority of the average urban ghetto to the average jungle, and of the average urban ghetto dweller to the average denizen of the bush.

“Not that these cats don’t have a certain charm, you dig. Because they do. And they are purely beautiful at getting their bodies to do what their heads tell them. When I was in Oakland with the Panthers we would get all these very straight college boys stuffed up to here with Black Power slogans. All hung up on Afro culture and Mao and Che, the whole bag. Intense, you know. I’d lay some judo and karate on them and they’d practice day and night and concentrate on nothing else, but it was like their bodies wasn’t right for it. They didn’t feel it, they didn’t have the rhythm for it, and they never did get it down right.”

I asked about Knanda Ndoro, and about the details of his assignment. He said he had been sent to rescue the Retriever but was rather bitterly surprised when I let him know that America had simultaneously supported the side that deposed the dictator. “They never told me that,” he said.

“Maybe they wanted to make your performance more convincing.”

“They do one thing with one hand and the opposite thing with the other.”

“The other hand was the CIA.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Well, it’s part of the policy of competing brands. They learned it from Procter and Gamble.”

He didn’t seem amused at this. He thought it over and just shook his head, and I asked again what had happened to Ndoro.

“Knanda Ndoro,” he said. “The Modonoland Retriever. Quite a man, Tanner cat. Quite a man. Know much about him?”

“Not much,” I said.

“He was a fascist bastard,” Plum said.

Bowman seemed not to have heard. His face took on an odd quality. “A natural leader,” he said. “An infinitely charismatic man. A charmer. Tremendous natural intelligence, a good British education, and enormous personal magnetism. Maybe he was bad for the country in some ways, but he was damned good for it in others. Gave these buggers a sense of identity, a feeling of national purpose.

“I had a hard time getting him to leave the capital. He wanted to stay. Of course we got out at the last minute. You must know about that. Then that mad rush through the jungle. I thought we were clear at one point. I thought the two of us, you know, would be equal to anything the jungle might throw up against us.”