Moments later the whole tire went up with a combustive roar. Nze gasped for air and felt broiling heat fill his mouth. Choking on his own scream, he struggled grotesquely to tear free of his bonds with fingers he no longer had, the blaze ringing him in, raking him with its vicious talons. Blots of diesel fuel and gummy, liquified rubber dribbled over his skin, bonded with his skin, ate their way down and down and down into his skin. He could hear his blood sizzle in that blasting, torching heat as the fiery mix splashed the raw bloody stumps of his wrists.

The lids burning away from his eyes, wilting off in curled, blackened strips, Nze endured several remaining instants of sight before the eyeballs themselves were cooked in their sockets—a brief staring agony of horror in which he could see Fáton through breaks in the sheet of flame, standing with his camera raised, his pale lips drawn into a leer beneath the wide, black circle of its lens.

Then Nze’s throat finally unlocked to release the scream that had been trying to force its way out. His body its own raging pyre, he continued screaming for some time, bellows that went climbing high into the air with the flames and smoke. Fáton was cognizant of them long after he and his men had returned to the 4×4 and swung back around onto the snaking jungle trail.

Nze had not taken his advice about the deep breaths, it seemed . . . and, in Africa as perhaps nowhere else on earth, one’s mistakes bore the harshest of all possible consequences.

FIVE - VARIOUS LOCALES

FIVE

VARIOUS LOCALES

ON HIS LAST EVENING IN MADRID, SIEGFRIED KUHL sat facing his high terraced window above the Gran Vía and watched the sunset bathe his completed scale miniature of the Iglesia de San Ginés in deep burgundy light. Against the wall near the apartment door were his few articles of luggage. Beside his chair was a large paper shopping bag that contained a purchase he had made at an art-supply shop some blocks from La Casa Real.

He had moved with haste to close out his affairs here, and it had now come down to his final act before leaving.