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never wrote back and I never heard from him again.”
    “Those Lubandans have a way of vanishing, don’t they?” Bill said with a kind of dark nostalgia.
    I glanced toward the far end of the room, the animal heads that hung in the distance. “So, what do you want from me, Bill? Why this meeting, all these questions? I’m not a cop or a private investigator.”
    Bill glanced down, then looked up again, his gaze now quite full of purpose. “I’d like for you to nose around a little, see what you can find out about Seso.” He allowed a moment for this to sink in, then added, “I know I’m asking a lot.” He was silent for a time, his gaze unaccountably directed toward the great elephant head, a creature too magnificent, its death too tragic, to be memorialized this way, the masthead of an entrance hall. “Lubanda was hard on everybody.”
    “It was hardest on Martine,” I said.
    I suddenly saw her just as she’d first appeared to me, her hair tucked beneath a checkered scarf, leaning over a basket, glancing up as I approached. How like Martine that first glance had been, a no-nonsense expression, but somewhat quizzical. Everything she looked at, she questioned, as if the only thing she could be sure of was herself.
    Bill released a breath that seemed weighted with bad memories. “I sometimes wonder how different things might have been if Martine had just—”
    “Stop,” I said sharply. I glanced away, then, after a moment, turned back to Bill. “Just… stop,” I repeated softly.
    And he did, his eyes darting from table to table before he settled them once again on me.
    “So, will you do it, Ray?” he asked. “Will you make a few inquiries into Seso’s murder?”
    Before answering, I asked a question of my own. “Why do you care about this? You haven’t seen Seso in years.”
    “Well, the truth is, the Mansfield Trust is poised to offer a great deal of aid to Lubanda,” Bill answered. “And if we do that, so will everybody else. It could change the country.”
    “What does Seso’s death have to do with whether the Mansfield Trust opens the money chute?” I asked.
    “It probably doesn’t,” Bill answered. “But it’s a loose end that bothers me. I like all my ducks in a row.” He smiled. “Mixed metaphors. Sorry.” His tone grew serious. “Think of it in terms of your business. I don’t want to risk missing the mark with regard to Lubanda. If Seso had something I need to see, then I want to see it.”
    “You’re afraid not to see it,” I said.
    “Life’s a trickster, Ray,” Bill said. “I like to know if there’s a rabbit in the hat.” He looked at me in the way of one who’d shared a searing experience. “It’s always the thing we don’t know that destroys us.”
    A staple truth of risk assessment came to mind: the fear of loss is sometimes all that is needed to incur it. Certainly the awful knowledge of what I’d done in Lubanda had kept me from going back to Tumasi, Martine’s farm, my one year of living dangerously. Save for the single failed attempt I’d made ten years before, I’d avoided the risk of going back there, or even of thinking about it, the error of my own actions still more than my self-protective soul could take.
    “Well?” Bill asked.
    Classicist that I remained, I suddenly thought of Artemisia, how fiercely Xerxes’ only female commander had fought at Salamis. It was a bravery the king had found merely ill-fated rather than inspiring, however. “My men are become women and my women become men,” he’d said, and with that stark admission retired from the field. Martine was like that fabled woman warrior, it seemed to me, and should have received Lubanda’s praise, rather than its ire.
    “I need an answer, Ray,” Bill said, though softly, fully aware of the weight of his request.
    As if there were a dark insistence that I could no longer avoid the verdict that honesty required, I sank the photograph Bill had given me into the pocket of my