“Sure,” I said, unsure.

“Just a matter of not cuttin’ off your hose despite your race, is how you maybe could put it. One white man is one thing. I can dig you on a personal level. But in the abstract, the whole lot of you, that’s somethin’ else.”

“But missionaries,” I said. “Priests and nuns, doctors and nurses. I don’t-”

“Missionaries!” He shouted the word, and several nearby warriors turned to gape at us. I tried to shrink away from them and avoid their eyes. My makeup job was fairly good, but the closer one looked at me the whiter I appeared. “Motherfucking bloodyminded missionaries,” he went on, in a lower register now. “Tanner cat, those are the worstest white devils of all. No question, no argument. Give me the straight-out colonialist any day of the week. You know where you stand with him. Like the Mississippi sheriff – he may kill you, but he won’t lay a load of bullshit on you. But the missionary, he comes into my country where I got my own religion and my own way of doing things, my own ceremonies and costumes and medicine and agriculture, and he gives out some vaccinations and passes around some food, and the next thing you know he’s sayin’ how my religion is a shuck and my ceremonies are a crock and my medicine’s a superstition and my crops don’t grow right, and what he’s tryin’ to do is turn me into a white man on the inside and leave me the same old bush nigger outside. The colonialist takes a man’s body and leaves him his soul, and that’s bad, but it’s a damn sight worse the other way around. That whole missionary attitude, that holier-than-thou routine, that white man’s burden birdsong. I hate that, man. It makes me want to reach out and rip things.”

And again the eyes were blazing, the forehead creased, the veins standing out on the glossy black temples. And again, too, the passion waned all at once and teeth flashed in a smile. “Course you wouldn’t buy that,” he said.

“No, I agree. Missionaries are the most arrogant people in the world, and they don’t even know it, they actually think they’re humble. But-”

“But you don’t buy killing them.”

“Not especially, no.”

“Because their hearts are pure, right?”

“Not exactly that, but-”

He clapped me on the shoulder. It was a friendly gesture but one that very nearly knocked me from my feet. “Tanner cat, the trouble with you, you know what it is?”

“I’m white.”

“Well, that’s maybe part of it. But you can’t help it, it’s just an accident at birth. The sort of thing that’s apt to happen to a man when both his parents is white. The real trouble is that you just aren’t a fanatic.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which checks my mail, thinks I’m a fanatic. The Central Intelligence Agency, which bugs my apartment, concurs in this judgment. The police of countries all over the globe, having spotted my name on lists of various unwelcome organizations, concur in the opinion. I’m not even allowed in Canada, and you can’t be a whole hell of a lot more fanatic than that.

But that wild-eyed fanatic was the old Evan Tanner. And if the leopard can change his spots and the Nixon his image, surely the Tanner can mature from youthful fanaticism to mature responsibility. And, I thought now, in my new role of Scarsdale Galahad and Levittown Lochinvar, in my chosen identity of breakfast-eating Brooks Brothers type, I couldn’t deny the truth of Samuel Lonestar Bowman’s remark. I just wasn’t a fanatic.

A little later I repeated most of the conversation with Plum. She didn’t concur in Bowman’s opinion of missionaries. As far as she was concerned, no one who fed the hungry, clothed the naked, and healed the sick could be all bad. Her trouble was that she wasn’t a fanatic either.

“And they don’t just kill white people,” she pointed out. “They kill black people as well. There were black corpses at the mission.”

“I know. When they hit a mission, they kill everything that moves.”

“And when they raid the villages, they do not merely do this to get supplies and to recruit more men for their forces. They kill and loot and burn.”

“True.”

“And they kill all women, Evan. Not just white women. Black women as well.”

“True. That’s Sheena’s idea. It’s a particular fixation she has. She wants to be the only woman in the world.”

“Honestly?”

“So Bowman says. There’s no one else I can ask.”

“That’s some ambition of hers.”

“It’s every woman’s ambition, deep down inside. It’s just that she’s doing more to achieve it than most.”

“If someone does not do something, Evan, she may manage it.”

“It doesn’t seem too likely.”

“But Evan,” she said, her hand on my arm. “Listen to me. You have said how Bowman likes to kill white men, and his reasons, and I think the reasons are crazy but I can understand why he might feel this way. But what about the harmless villagers? And all of the black women? Why should he be willing to kill them?”

I covered her hand with mine, then let go abruptly and glanced hurriedly around. No one seemed to have noticed, and Plum looked oddly at me. I told her that everybody thought she was a boy, and that if we held hands and necked the other clowns would either figure out that she was female, in which case she would get the ax, or assume that I was some kind of a faggot. I wasn’t quite sure how tribesmen in the Modonoland interior felt about homosexuality. While it seemed the sort of thing worth knowing, I felt it might be just as well to wait until I was back in New York and then look it up in an anthropological journal. Sometimes secondhand research has its points.

But I didn’t dwell on this, and Plum took her hand off my arm, and I reminded myself that, from here on in, she might as well be a boy for all I cared. We’d had our last fling. It was time to be faithful to Kitty.

“Getting back to Bowman,” I said, by way of getting back to Bowman. “He’s a fairly arresting type, don’t you think? An extremely charming type. He can chill your blood one minute and take it all back with a smile.”

“He talks weird.”

“I know. He shifts back and forth from Harlem hard-bop jive to plantation hand to college graduate. Sometimes he even sounds vaguely British. It goes along with being a good linguist, which he damned well must be to handle the dialect they speak here. It sounds like turkey. Not the country, the bird. You know – gobble gobble.”

“I don’t trust him, Evan.”

“Neither do I. But we can’t really get out of here without his help – we can’t even survive without it. And he can’t get away without us.”

“How do you know?”

“He’s been here a long while now and never got away so far.”

“Maybe he wants to stay.” Her lip curled and her eyes looked older by some years. “Maybe your friend Bowman likes it here.”

“He doesn’t want to stay. He can stand it here, all right, but it won’t keep him happy for very long. He’s too complex to settle for the Noble Savage routine.”

“I suppose you are right. I know that he has depth. When he spoke of the death of the Retriever, even while I knew the political crimes of Knanda Ndoro, yet I was moved, Evan.”

“Well, he’s charming. And he’s complex, and he has depth, and I know damned well he has a use for us or else he would have killed us back at the mission. Because it’s not hard to say why Bowman goes along with killing innocent blacks and their women. I think he just plain enjoys it.”

The Red Ball Irregulars were just another army, after all. And armies are armies as sure as war is hell, and this one, like the one I had served in (and like the one Napoleon served in, and like the one Julius Caesar served in) was an organization of hurry up and wait, a group which spent most of its collective time doing nothing at all.

We spent the rest of that day doing nothing at all. Sheena had pitched camp on the site of an abandoned village about a dozen miles from the ruined mission. The abandonment of the village had not been entirely voluntary; several months previously Sheena had raided it, and its huts were subsequently unoccupied because of the demise of the previous occupants. The jungle had made a good start at reclaiming the cleared land, and weather had done a job on the huts, but they were still standing and reasonably sound. Plum and I had one all to ourselves, and we spent most of the day sitting in it and grunting at each other.