“Distract her hands,” Carr muttered.

Fletch tickled the back of the little girl’s neck.

As her hands flew up, Carr’s huge, strong hands slipped the little girl’s leg bone back into alignment. First she giggled; then she yelped.

“It’s over, sweet. You’ll be a beautiful dancer when you get older.”

Carr slipped a strongly elastic brace over the girl’s foot and up her leg. The cut over the compound fracture was almost healed. The leg had been broken a week or more. He then splinted the leg.

“We do what we can,” Carr said. “Patent medicines.”

They had flown southeast from Nairobi.

At Wilson Airport, Juma had helped carry things from the Land-Rover to the airplane, had helped pack them in, then climbed into the backseat beside Barbara. Fletch had heard nothing said by anyone about Juma’s accompanying them. The snow skis were in the airplane’s aisle, almost the full length of the plane.

On the flight, Juma read a book, Ake, by Wole Soyinka.

Chin in hand, Barbara studied the landscape through the window.

From the air, Carr’s camp was barely noticeable. It was on the west side of the river in a natural clearing north of thick jungle. About twenty-five kilometers east sparkled the blue of the Indian Ocean.

The airstrip was just a two-wheeled track. There was a long cook tent, a small tent each side of it, and, at the front, a rectangular piece of canvas supported by four poles. A derelict Jeep was in the shade of a huge banyan tree.

Carr placed the airplane’s wheels in the ground tracks precisely. Fletch pushed open the door beside him. The heat was immediate, intense, humid.

About fifty people moved slowly from under the trees to greet them.

Watching the people, Carr flipped off the switches on his instrument panel. “Clinic’s open, I guess.”

Monkeys were everywhere, on the ground, in the huge banyan tree, on top of the tents, on the table and chairs under the horizontal canvas. There were papa monkeys with baby monkeys on their backs; mamma monkeys with infant monkeys at their breasts; children monkeys playing their own games up and down and around, everywhere.

“They bite,” Carr said. “They steal. They are no respecter of persons.”

Sheila, in tennis shorts and a preppy shirt opened at the collar, waited for them at the end of the runway track. On the tray she carried was a pitcher of lemonade and glasses. “All’s right here,” Sheila sang out to Carr the minute he stepped out onto the wing. “All’s right with you? Then all’s right with the world.”

“Find anything interesting while I was gone?” Carr asked.

“Yes,” Sheila said. “The spare keys to the Land-Rover you insisted you lost.”

Carr shrugged.

After putting the tray on the ground and pouring out the lemonade, Sheila hugged and kissed Carr. “My sweaty beast,” she said. She hugged and kissed Fletch when she understood who he was. “Good. We need some more brawn.” Hugged and kissed Barbara. “Excellent! A woman to catch me up with the world!”

Juma stood away, looking at Sheila sourly.

When Carr introduced them, Sheila gave a little wave of her hand. “Hello, there, Juma. Glad you came to join us.”

“I actually brought some half-decent steaks,” Carr said.

“I’m sure they were very dear.”

“Not as dear as the chicken.” A monkey was peering into the lemonade pitcher on the ground. Sheila gently guided it away with her boot.

Juma spoke quietly to Fletch. “Listen. Is that Carr’s woman?”

“I guess so. Sheila. Yes.”

Juma said, “I didn’t know that.”

“Nothing Roman turn up?” Carr asked Sheila as they walked toward the tents.

“Just the usual. Spear tips. A tusk. A skeleton.”

“Human?”

“Yes. A child. Fairly recent, I think.”

For much of the afternoon, in the shade of the extended cook tent, Fletch watched Carr doctor the people. Many children had burns, and Carr dressed them. Many, many others had eye infections, which Carr bathed. He put ointment into each infected eye and sent each mother or father away with a small tube and exact instructions. Other people had boils and sores and cuts and broken bones, complained of aching stomachs, and, in each case, Carr questioned, examined, reached into his kit for something that would clean, cure, fix, do no harm anyway. The people knew enough not even to ask him about their many spots of skin cancer. For two old men Carr thought had internal tumors he could do nothing and said so. He told them where he expected the Flying Doctor to be in a week or ten days.

A man who carried himself proudly limped in on a crude crutch made of a tree branch. He said he had dropped a rock and crushed his toes. Carr clipped off two toes with garden shears. He stitched, trimmed, disinfected, dressed them. A third toe, only broken, Carr set.

Carr wrapped the two severed toes in a piece of gauze and solemnly handed them to the man.

“How did these people know when you were coming?” Fletch asked Carr.

Carr didn’t answer.

“How did Juma know all about my father? How did he know Barbara and I were having breakfast on the Lord Delamere Terrace at that moment? He came straight to us, without inquiring or appearing to look around. How did he seem to know we were coming down here before we did?”

Carr said, “Never try to figure out how Africans know things. It’s their magic. But I can give you a clue. Much of their magic is simple observation. They spend what is to us an inordinate amount of time thinking about people. I mean real people, the people around them. They think about people instead of things, possessions, cars, televisions, hair dryers. They think about the people they know instead of thinking about mythical people, politicians, sports heroes, and movie stars; instead of thinking about mythical events, distant wars, currency crises, and meetings of the United Nations.” Carr dropped an empty tube of Neosporin ointment into an oil drum being used as a wastebasket. “Our magic, of course, comes from the pharmacy. Out here we have a beautiful relationship, as long as we respect each other’s magic.”

“But why were they waiting for you?” Fletch was taking off his sneakers and wool socks. “Sheila could have treated their burns and infections …”

Carr opened a fresh roll of gauze. “They don’t trust Sheila. If you didn’t notice, Sheila is an Indian lady. She’s tried to help, but they won’t let her. Magic, everywhere, has to do with the persona. They also wouldn’t trust you to help them, even though you are a white man. The older people would not be able to bring themselves to complain to you, to tell you they have problems, because you are too young. So I get these dirty jobs.”

A young man explained to Carr that he’d had a sore on the back of his hand. So he had stuck his hand in battery acid. Now the hand, wrist, forearm were horribly inflamed.

As Fletch helped Carr, held this, held that, fetched a new box of medical supplies from the airplane, he watched a tent being set up in the clearing under Sheila’s direction. His and Barbara’s knapsacks were carried up from the plane and put into that tent.

Because the snow skis were so long, and so unusual, two men carried them to the tent on their shoulders. Fletch heard the exclamations as Barbara took the skis out of their cases and showed everyone what they were. Standing in the dirt in the tropical sun, the jungle a green wall behind her, Barbara went through the skiing motions with the ski poles, knees bent, hips sashaying, slaloming down a snow-sided mountain, from the looks of her.

Juma, in pretending to ski, pretended to lose his balance. On one leg, arms pinwheeling for a long time, he pretended to be trying to regain his balance. Finally, he let himself fall. Dust rose around him.

A large monkey, scolding angrily, tried to take one of the ski poles from Barbara.

After Carr treated the people, they wandered back into the jungle or the bush on narrow footpaths.

“Terrible eye troubles.” Carr said. “So close to the equator, without protection from the sun. And there are always the flies.” He waved a dozen flies away from a child’s face. “And burns. The children try to help out with the cooking. They play too close to the fires. Or they fall out of their mother’s breast-slings or back-slings into the fire. The mothers, you see: most of them are children themselves.”

Most of the mothers were long-legged girls, skirted this way and that with kangas, wearing uncomfortably tight-looking metal bracelets and anklets, their breasts covered, if at all, with arrangements of necklaces. Whatever their troubles, all seemed in good spirits. They were attractively shy with Fletch, never looking directly at him, that he saw, but clearly talking about him, and Juma, and Barbara.

“Is this meddling?” Carr was getting tired. “I should ask the good Dr. McCoy if what we ordinary folks do here in the bush is meddling. What some of these bloody science chaps would like to do is put a glass case over Africa and view it all as history.”

Looking across the compound, Fletch said, “Couldn’t put Juma under a glass case. He’d break it.”

“I believe he would,” Carr said.

“By the way, Carr, I’m remembering that Barbara and I didn’t take any medical shots before we left the States.”

“You’ll be all right,” Carr said. “Be sure and take your whiskey.” He glanced out to see where the sun was. “But, first, let’s walk the riverbanks. I’ll show you how far I haven’t gotten with my crazy idea. Lost Roman city,” Carr said. “Pah! I’m crazy!”

“Last night I read the previous two days’ newspaper reports on the murder you saw at the airport,” Carr said as he and Fletch ambled along the riverbank. “I also talked with Dan Dawes.”

“You talk to Dan Dawes?”

“Why not? He’s a schoolteacher.”

“He’s also a paralegal executioner.”

“That, too. Here we refer to him as being ‘very close to the police.’”

“He’s a hit man for the cops.”

“There is great diversity in this world, Irwin. One must not expect the same standards everywhere.”

“Sorry. Go on.” As he walked, Fletch slapped at the flies on his arms, his legs.

“The murder victim’s name was Louis Ramon. He was carrying a French passport. In a money belt he was also carrying an extraordinary amount of German marks—about one hundred thousand United States dollars’ worth.”

“He wasn’t robbed?”

“No. They found the money on him.”

Fletch marveled softly, “He wasn’t even robbed by the police.”

“Interpol’s return cable said that Louis Ramon was some sort of a low-life currency trader, opportunist, possibly smuggler. He first came to their attention five years ago when he was suspected of moving a large amount of Italian lire into Switzerland, and again, three years ago, of moving a large amount of French francs into Albania. He has been fined and admonished, but has never served time in prison, as far as they know. Here, come this way. I’ll show you what we’re doing.”

They turned right into the jungle and followed a track wide enough for a Jeep about twenty-five meters from the river. Foliage was beginning to overgrow the track.

At the end of the track they came to a circular clearing.

In the center of the clearing was a hole in the ground so small Fletch wouldn’t have noticed it if it weren’t for the settling mound of dirt surrounding it.

“We dig holes with a giant corkscrew,” Carr said seriously, “see what comes up. What we use is actually a sort of primitive machine they use to look for water, before digging a well. We can only go down about fifteen meters. Do you think fifteen meters, forty-five feet, is enough to reach back two or three thousand years? I doubt it.” He kicked the earth with his boot. “Soft earth. Jungle growth.”

Carr led the way back toward the river. “Every hundred meters or so along the river, we go about twenty-five meters into the jungle and dig our little hole. Do you think that’s far enough from the river? Too far? I think it’s more likely a settlement would have been on the west side of the river, the inland side from the sea, don’t you? We’re apt to dig more holes anywhere there’s an elevation in the land.”

“How long have you been doing this?” Fletch asked.

“About eighteen months. Lots of holes, up and down both sides of the river.”

They headed south along the river again.

“Anyway,” Carr continued, “Louis Ramon was on your plane from London. The suspicion is that he came to Kenya to pull off some sort of a currency scheme, and his partner, or accomplice, or whoever he met at the airport in Nairobi, simply did him in.”

“Not his partner,” Fletch said. “Not his accomplice.”

“Oh? Why not?”

“Because a partner or an accomplice would have known Ramon was carrying a hundred thousand dollars in German marks, and taken them. He had plenty of time. He wasn’t that conscious that I was there. I mean, if you’re going to stab someone in a men’s room, you might as well rob him, right?”

“I forgot you’re an investigative reporter,” Carr said. “Old Josie Fletcher must be proud of you. You have her brain.”

“I deal in reality,” Fletch muttered. They were passing another track into the jungle. “I think it was more of an accidental meeting. There was no prologue to the argument I heard. The voices were surprised. Immediately enraged. It was all very fast. It was as if two men met accidentally, two men who had known each other, hated each other before, had some ancient, powerful grudge between them, or maybe even saw each other as an immediate danger to each other, or one to the other. It was too fast,” Fletch said. “I wish I understood Portuguese.”

Carr was leading him up another jungle track.

In the clearing was what appeared certainly to be a giant corkscrew. An aluminum frame sat on the ground, four meters square at its base, one meter square at its top, about three meters tall. Sticking through it and twelve meters above it was a slim screw shaft. On each of the four sides of the frame was a wheel one meter in diameter with a perpendicular handle of the sort found on coffee grinders.

“I guess Sheila decided to backtrack,” Carr said.

He stooped over the fresh mound of dirt and combed through it with his fingers. “Nothing. Do you think we’re crazy?”

“What does it matter? Everyone’s thought crazy until proven right.”

Carr stood up and dusted off his hands. “Usually people are proven wrong, aren’t they?”

“Yeah,” Fletch said. “I guess most people are crazy.”

“To choose your own way of being crazy,” Carr said, stepping out again. “That’s the thing.”

When they were back walking the riverbank south, Fletch asked Carr, “How would such a currency scheme as Louis Ramon seemed to be attempting work?”

“I don’t know,” Carr said. “I’m not sure I want to know. But I do know that having that much foreign currency in Kenya is illegal.”

“Why?”

“As far as its currency is concerned, Kenya’s economy is closed. You may not take more than ten shillingi in Kenyan currency out of Kenya. The truth is, the Kenyan shilling doesn’t exist outside Kenya. It’s like casino money. It only has reality within its own closed environment. Kenyan money is pegged to the English pound, but there is no international trading or market in the currency itself.”

“How do they manage that?”

“By strict enforcement of the law. A while ago, an Indian lawyer was discovered by the police to have thirteen United States dollars in his pocket. He was sentenced to seven years in prison for currency violations.”

“I’d call that strict enforcement of the law.”

“Let’s cross the river here. Walk back on the other side.”

They stripped. Carrying their clothes head high, they waded across the sluggish river. The water was armpit high on them both.

Carr said, “You can see all sorts of signs this river used to be deeper. Can’t you?”

While they were waiting on the eastern riverbank to dry off, Carr glanced at the black and blue mark on Fletch’s lower belly, but said nothing.

Carr pointed back across the river, further south. “See that baobab tree there? Tomorrow I think we’ll make a trail into the jungle past that. But we mustn’t disturb the tree. Baobab trees are sacred here. Rather than disturb them, people here build major highways around them.”

After dressing, they walked faster northward along the riverbank. They ignored the many trails into the jungle.

“Kenyans take anything having to do with the government very seriously indeed,” Carr said.

“Juma says his father is in prison for a year and a half for parking a government car outside a bar. He used to be a government driver.”

“Not long ago,” Carr said, “one of your fellow Americans had dinner in a Nairobi restaurant. Two men waited on him. At the end of dinner, the man wanted to tip them both, but he only had a one-hundred-shillingi note. I guess he thought he was making a joke. He tore the one-hundred-shillingi note in half and tried to give half to each waiter. The newspaper report I read said, ‘Shocked and embarrassed at this desecration of Kenyan money, the waiters called the police.’ The man was arrested. He spent the night in jail. He was tried the next morning, fined one thousand dollars, and escorted by the police to the airport and put aboard the next airplane leaving Kenya.”

“Some joke.”

“It’s illegal, of course,” Carr said, “but here, in the bush, girls are still circumcised. But you tear a piece of paper money in half and you get yourself written up in The Standard.”

Fletch asked, “So how would you work a currency scheme?”

Carr walked a long way before answering. “Generally it’s true,” he said slowly, “that the stricter such currency laws are, the greater are the rewards for violating them successfully.”

The camp came into sight just at full dark. The live fire at the back of the cook tent was bright.

As they were wading back across the river, Carr said, “I guess we’re crazy. Looking for a lost Roman city. But the past fascinates. Doesn’t the past fascinate you? The past, where we came from, who we were, tells us so much about who we are. Don’t you think so?”

Fletch ducked below the surface of the water to get some of the sweat out of his hair.

While they were drying on the western riverbank, Carr said, “I guess I’m just messing up the jungle.”

“Not much.”

“I’ve promised myself one thing, though.” He was looking downriver. “The instant I find anything, the slightest evidence I’m right, if I ever do, I’ll turn the whole thing over to proper scientists. If I’m right, I swear I won’t muck the site up.”

“Right,” Fletch said. “What this place needs is Dr. McCoy. You won’t catch him clipping off anybody’s toes.”

“As soon as you and Barbara are ready,” Carr said, “join us for a whiskey. Bring your own ice.”