Tropic Moon Read Online Free PDF Page A

There are others like him in Libreville.”
    â€œAnd his wife?”
    â€œWell, she’s his wife! What else can I say? She was already with him back then. For the most part they worked around the Terns. Bottoms up!”
    Timar drained his glass three times, maybe four. The police chief drank just as much. Soon he was chatty. If a phone call from the prosecutor about an urgent matter hadn’t come, the conversation would have gone on a lot longer.
    Timar left when the sun was at its height. It was so oppressive that after a hundred yards he felt scared. The nape of his neck was burning. The whiskey wasn’t sitting too well with him, and he kept thinking about Eugène Renaud’s snail fever and the other stories he’d just heard.
    Most of all he was thinking about Adèle: when he was just seven years old she was already helping Renaud spirit girls off to South America. She’d followed Renaud to Gabon when there’d been nothing along the coast but wooden shacks. They’d gone into the jungle—the only whites for days and days in any direction by skiff. They’d started logging and sending the timber downriver.
    Timar turned it all into naïve images—illustrations out of Jules Verne mixed up with bits and pieces of reality. He followed the long red dirt path by the shore; he could see the palm trees outlined against the sky and the lead gray of the sea. There were no waves and hardly a ripple—just one, like the curve of a lip, extending the length of the beach. Colorful loincloths and half-naked men surrounded the fishermen’s skiffs that had just come in.
    The river was over there, at the lower end of the bay, less than half a mile away. Back in the heroic times of Eugène and Adèle, there’d been no merchants’ houses or government buildings here, their red roofs mixed in among the greenery.
    She must have worn boots and an ammunition belt. Surely not a black silk dress over her naked body.
    He tried to walk in the shade, but it was just as hot there as in the sun. The air was scorching; even his clothes were hot to the touch. Back then, they hadn’t had brick walls—or ice to cool a drink.
    After eight years, and in defiance of the administrative order, Eugène and Adèle had returned to France with six hundred thousand francs. In a few months, they’d spent them. “Blown it all,” the police chief said.
    On what? What sort of life had they led? Where might Timar, barely pubescent, have run into them?
    They’d gone back to Africa—back into the jungle. Eugène had had two attacks of snail fever. Adèle nursed him through them.
    They’d bought the Central only three years ago.
    Timar had held her in his arms one morning, on the edge of a sweaty bed.
    He didn’t dare take off his sun helmet to wipe his forehead. It was noon and he was the only one walking along that burning path. There was absolutely no one else.
    The police chief had told him other stories about other people, not at all indignantly, though he grumbled that they went too far.
    Like the plantation owner last month. Thinking that his cook had tried to poison him, he’d hung him by his feet over a washtub. From time to time he would lower the cook’s head into the water. Then for more than fifteen minutes he’d forgotten to pull him out. The cook had died.
    The trial was still going on. The League of Nations had stepped in. And now another native had been killed.
    â€œThere’s nothing we can do for them,” the police chief had declared.
    â€œFor who?”
    â€œThe killers.”
    â€œAnd the other times?”
    â€œIt’s usually possible to arrange something.”
    When Adèle left the house on the night of the party, what had she gone out to do? And why, a few hours earlier, had she struck Thomas in the face?
    Timar hadn’t said anything about it. He wasn’t going to. But hadn’t there been other