31 CHAPTER THIRTY ONE (1/2)
I didn't ask Mireille about her deceased husband that day. I sat silently in the back of the car as we drove to the service station, looking at the tiny mole on her neck from time to time. I listened intently to her as she talked with Kross: she was telling him about a hospital troublemaker, an old geezer who refused to take the prescribed laxative. It appeared he was fond of enemas, or rather of having young women touching him where sunlight didn't reach. At least that was the charge leveled by the concerned nurses. Mireille told her story with zest, and Kross laughed.
I didn't. All of a sudden it struck me that all this shit, all those plans we'd made - it was actually happening. I stared out of the passenger window, close to open-mouthed dismay. I was here. This was for real. I was about to enter a country illegally with a wanted man. And all this for a little money - why the fuck couldn't I make a living raising chickens in the Northwest Territories, or something like that? It would get me painting again, that was for sure.
By the time Mireille pulled into the service station, I was so distraught that I couldn't bring myself to speak. She noticed; I saw her skin tighten with suspicion. Then Kross left me alone with her for a moment when he went to pay the bill.
Almost instantly, she said:
”It's funny you don't carry a camera.”
”It's packed with my things,” I lied.
Neither of us spoke for a while.
”Make sure you have it handy when you return,” she said eventually. ”I'd like you to take a picture of me.”
I felt like sobbing. I said:
”Excuse me for a moment,” and went to hit the can. When I returned, she'd already gone. Kross had been waiting for me; he'd brought shopping. He asked me to help put away the stuff he'd brought - bottled water, French bread, tins of corned beef - and I moved like a robot overdue for service. Once I was creakily seated in the Toyota's cab, Kross frowned at me and asked:
”You all right?”
”Yes,” I said. ”I'm fine.” He nodded in an unconvinced manner, then pointed at the fork-like junction maybe a hundred yards away and said:
”See that road running right?”
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”Yes.”
”That's the road to Ghana.”
The road to Ghana was a narrow blacktop highway, the asphalt ragged at the edges and splashed with so many patches they occasionally overlapped. It ran straight as an arrow, bordered on both sides by waist-high straw-colored grass; every dozen kilometers or so there would be a gaggle of conical rooftops in the distance, and the grass parted briefly for the red mouth of a dirt road leading to the hamlet.
The Toyota's tires thundered on the gravel-studded asphalt. I glanced at Kross a couple of times, but he was very busy driving. Finally I said, or half-shouted over the road noise:
”Can you tell me what happens next? I promise I won't jump out and run with the news to the nearest village.”
He was wearing his tough-guy sunglasses again, and I couldn't read the glance he gave me.