The Quest: A Novel

time.”
    Signore Bocaccio laughed, and they climbed into the aircraft.

Chapter 34
    H enry Mercado, wearing a bathrobe and undershorts, sat on the balcony of his top-floor room sipping coffee. The fog was lifting, and in the distance he could see a single-engine black aircraft rising off a hilltop airstrip. He said, “That must be Frank.”
    Vivian, sitting next to him, replied, “He said to look for him about seven.”
    Mercado glanced at her. She was wearing a short white
shamma
that she’d picked up somewhere, and she had obviously worn it to bed. The
shamma
reminded him of Getachu’s camp. The parade ground. The pole. He wondered if she’d thought about that.
    Vivian told him, “Frank said he’d do a flyby and tip his wings.”
    He supposed that meant she had to leave and get to her own room—or Purcell’s room—so that Purcell would not see both of them having coffee on Henry Mercado’s balcony at 7 A.M . But she didn’t move.
    To make conversation, he said, “This is a squalid city.”
    “It is not Rome.”
    “No. This is the Infernal City.”
    She laughed.
    He had developed a strong dislike for Addis Ababa in 1935, and forty years later nothing he’d seen had changed his opinion. Even the Ethiopians disliked it. It was like every semi-Westernized town he’d seen in Africa or Asia, combining the worst aspects of each culture. Its only good feature was its eight-thousand-foot elevation, which made the climate pleasant—except during the June-to-September rainy season when mud slid down the hills into the streets.
    He poured more coffee for both of them. Vivian put her bare feet on the balcony rail and her
shamma
slipped back to her thighs.
    He was surprised that she had accepted his invitation for coffee on the balcony, and more surprised when she came to his door wearing only the
shamma
and little else. Or nothing else.
    On the other hand, Vivian was of another generation. And sometimes he thought of her as a child of God: naturally innocent while unknowingly sensuous.
    He looked out at the black aircraft in the distance. It was circling over the hills and making steep, dangerous-looking turns. He said, “I hope he’s a good pilot.”
    She was staring at the aircraft and didn’t reply.
    He looked out again into the city. Like all the cities of his youth, he hated this place because it reminded him of a time when he was hopeful and optimistic—when he believed in Moscow and not Rome. Now he was burdened with years and disappointments, and with God.
    If he looked hard enough into the swirling fog below, he could see Henry Mercado dashing across Saint George Square to the telegraph office. He could hear the roar of Italian warplanes overhead. He could and did remember and feel the pleasure of making love to the nineteen-year-old daughter of an American diplomat in the blacked-out lobby of the Imperial. Why the lobby? He had a room upstairs. What if they’d snapped on the lights? He smiled.
    “What is making you smile, Henry?”
    “What always makes me smile?”
    “Tell me.”
    So he told her about having sex in the lobby of the Imperial Hotel during an air raid blackout.
    She listened without comment, then stayed silent awhile before saying, “So you understand.”
    He didn’t reply.
    “We do things when we’re frightened.”
    “We were not frightened of the air raid.”
    “We want to hold on to another person.”
    “I didn’t follow this person to Cairo.”
    She didn’t reply.
    He looked out at the Imperial Hotel. Its surrounding verandasseemed to sag. He had the nostalgic idea of checking in there instead of here, but maybe it was enough to visit once a day when he went to the press office. In fact, the places that once held good memories were best left as memories.
    The aircraft was climbing to the north, and Mercado saw that it cleared a distant peak by a narrow margin. Vivian didn’t seem to notice, but he said to her, “I hope you’re prepared to do some aerial photography in a small plane with a novice pilot.”
    “You should stay here, Henry.”
    “I don’t care if I die, Vivian. I care if you die.”
    “No one is going to die. But that’s very… loving of you to say that.”
    “Well, I love you.”
    “I know.”
    He didn’t ask the follow-up question and stared out at Addis Ababa. It was dirty and it smelled bad. Old men with missing pieces of their bodies were a walking reminder of old-style Ethiopian justice. Adding to the judicial mutilations were the