"Yes, El Hassan," she said, her voice expressionless. She didn't waste
time. Homer Crawford heard the phone click as she hung up.
He was in a branch building of the post and telegraph network on the
Rue des Resistance. Before leaving it, he looked out a window. Half a
block away was the office of the Sahara Division of the African
Development Project. Even as he watched, a dozen men hurried out the
front door, fanned out in all directions.
Homer grinned sourly. Old Sven was moving fast.
He shot a quick glance around the lobby of the building. He had to get
going. Zetterberg had started with a dozen men to trail down El
Hassan. He'd probably have a hundred involved before the hour was out.
A corridor turned off to the right. Homer hurried down it. At each
door he looked inside. To whoever occupied the room he murmured a few
words of apology in Wolof, the Sengalese lingua franca. The fourth
office was empty.
Homer stood there before it for a long, agonizing moment, waiting for
the right person to pass. Finally, the man he needed came along.
About six feet tall, about a hundred and eighty; dressed in the local
native dress and on the ragged side.
Homer said to him authoritatively, in the Wolof tongue, "You there,
come in here!" He opened the door, and pointed into the office.
The other, taken aback, demurred.
Homer's face and tone went still more commanding. "Step in here,
before I call the police."
It was all a mistake, of course. The Senegalese made the gesture
equivalent to the European's shrug, and entered the office.
Homer came in behind him, closed the door. He wasted no time in
preliminaries. Before the native turned, the American's hand lashed
out in a karate blow which stunned the other. Homer Crawford caught
him, even as he fell, and lowered him gently to the floor.
"Sorry, old boy," he muttered, "but this is probably the most
profitable thing that's happened to you this year."
He stripped off the other's clothes, as rapidly as he could make his
hands fly. The other was still out and probably would be for another
ten minutes, Crawford estimated. He stripped off his own clothes and
donned the native's.
Last of all, he took his wallet from his pocket, divided the money it
contained and stuffed a considerable wad of it into the European
clothing he was abandoning.
"Don't spend all of that in one place," he growled softly.
Homer dragged the other to a side of the room so that the body could
not be spotted from the entrance. Then he crossed to the door, opened
it and stepped into the corridor beyond.
* * * * *
There was no need for sulking. He walked out the front door and headed
away from the dock and administration buildings area and toward the
native section, passing the Reunited Nations building on the way.
Dakar teems with multitudes of a dozen tribes come in from the jungles
and the bush, the desert and the swamp areas of the sources of the
Niger, to look for work on the new projects, to visit relatives, to
market for the products of civilization--or to gawk. Homer Crawford
disappeared into them. One among many.
Toward noon, he entered the cleared area which was the restaurant he
had named to Isobel and squatted before the pots to the far end of the
Vietnamese owned eatery, examining them with care. He chose a large
chunk of barbequed goat and was served it with a half pound piece of
unsalted Senegalese bread, torn from a monstrous loaf, and a twisted
piece of newspaper into which had been measured an ounce or so of
coarse salt. He took his meal and went to as secluded a corner as he
could find.
Homer Crawford chuckled inwardly. That morning he had breakfasted in
the most swank hotel in West Africa. He wished there was some manner
in which he could have invited Sven Zetterberg to dine here with him.
Or, come to think of it, a group of the students he had once taught
sociology at the University of Michigan. Or, possibly, prexy
Wallington, under whom he had worked while taking his doctor's degree.
Yes, it would have been interesting to have had a luncheon companion.
A native woman, on the stoutish side but with her hair done up in one
of the fabulously ornate hair styles specialized in by the Senegalese,
and wearing a flowing, shapeless dress of the garish textiles run off
purposely for this market in Japan and Manchester, waddled up to take
a place nearby. She bore a huge skewer of barbequed beef chunks, and a
hunk of bread not unlike Homer's own.
She grumbled uncomfortably, her back to the American, as she settled
into a position on the floor. And she mumbled as she began chewing at
the meat.
_No table manners_, Homer Crawford grinned inwardly. He wondered how
long it would take for the others to get here. He wasn't worried about
Isobel, Cliff Jackson and Jake Armstrong. It would take time before
Zetterberg's Reunited Nations cloak and dagger boys got around to
them, but he wasn't sure that she'd be able to locate his own team in
time. That bit he'd given the Swede official about his being so
bully-bully with the other Reunited Nations teams was in the way of
being an exaggeration, with the idea of throwing the other off.
Actually, working in the field on definite assignments, it was seldom
you ran into other African Development Project men. But perhaps it
would tie Zetterberg up, wondering just who he could trust to send
looking for El Hassan.
He finished off his barbequed goat and the bread and wiped his hands
on his clothes. Nobody here yet. To have an excuse for staying, he
would have to buy a bottle of Gazelle beer, the cheap Senegalese brew
which came in quart bottles and was warm and on the gassy side.
It was then that the woman in front of him, without turning, said
softly, "El Hassan?"