"Yeah."
"You'll do anything I say." With agonizing slowness, she opened her legs to him.
"Yeah."
"Anything."
"You name it," Barney said, bringing her to full gallop.
"Anything," she moaned.
With intoxicating relief, Barney spent himself. "Well, almost anything, honey," he said, puffing. "Can't rush into things, you know."
She was mad, but not too mad. About as mad as a satisfied woman can get. "Roll over," she said, tweaking his cheek.
Barney did, and his eye fell on the bottle he had brought up with him. It was bourbon. What the hell, he thought. He would start cultivating a taste for the stuff. It was easier than trekking nude past Malcolm to retrieve the tequila.
"Forgot the glasses."
"Drink from the bottle. Give me a cigarette." She sat up in bed, her firm, sharp breasts peering out above the sheets. Barney handed her a pack of smokes.
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He took a swig. It went down hot and good. It was fine bourbon. There was much to be said about the drink.
"How about me?" the woman asked. She ex-' tended her hand for the bottle.
Barney examined the hand. It had fine lines. It was a fine hand. If he had another bottle of bourbon, he certainly would have put it into that hand.
"Well, how about me?"
It was a good question. Barney took another swallow, a long one. She had a right as his bed partner to share in the bourbon. An inalienable right. She certainly had that right. And it was her bourbon. Barney swallowed again and moved her hand away.
She settled for a cigarette. They lay back contentedly, she smoking, Barney drinking, and she told him about the Afro-Muslim Brotherhood.
Her name was Gloria X and she was its leader although only a handful of people knew it. It was a secret society aimed at fomenting a sense of outrage among the black people, to make them angry enough to revolt against their white oppressors.
"Enough, enough," Barney said, waving away her prepared speech. "What is it you want me to do? Paint my face with shoe polish and join the Peaches of Mecca?"
"I want you to kill someone."
"Anyone special?"
"A prominent civil rights leader whose middle-of-the-road policy is holding back the cause of black nationalism and the freedom movement."
"How do you know I won't go racing off to the police with this information?"
"Because, Mr. Daniels." She smiled evilly.
"Because what?"
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She stared directly into his eyes, her coldness reaching to the pit of Barney's stomach. "Because I know what happened in Puerta del Rey. That's an interesting scar you carry," she said, touching the "CIA" brand on his belly.
Barney turned toward her. He was about to speak. He was about to tell her that he himself did not remember what happened in Hispania that led him through the jungle and into the hut where he had been tied and cut and burned with the glowing poker, that he did not remember the thing buried deep in his brain, the event that caused him not to care when they cut him and beat him and branded him and yet kept him alive in spite of the torture.
He was going to tell her, but she cut him off. "So I know, Mr. Daniels, that you have no love forchis government or its agencies or, for that matter, for white men."
So she didn't know. She didn't know any more than he did.
"And besides, Mr. Daniels," she continued, "if you refuse I will have you killed. Now hush up. The news is coming on."
Gloria X flipped a switch at the bed table and a transistorized television set on the opposite wall instantly lit up.
Barney sipped the bourbon, once again trying to remember Hispania but failing, as always. Something had happened there. Something.
The newscast reported on the usual goings on of the planet. A revolution in Chile, a flood in Missouri. A drought threatened in New Jersey, and a civil rights threat in New York.
Gloria X began to emit happy little squeals as the television flashed a picture of a fat black man. Daniels had seen him several times on TV in South
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America. He was called a national civil rights leader. He spoke a lot, but was never shown with a following of more than forty persons, most of them white Episcopal ministers.
He was Calder Raisin, national director of the Union of Racial Justice, commonly called URGE, fat, pompous, invariably making wild inaccurate statements calculated to offend whites and at best amuse blacks who paid him no attention anyway.
The affected voice bellowed out of the TV set. "The Block Mon," Raisin shouted, "will not tolerate lily-white hospital staffs. At least one out of every five doctors must be black, in both public and private hospitals." It took Barney a while to understand that "Block Mon" meant "black man." Maybe Raisin's gulping adenoidal pronunciation was a new proof of high culture.
"Mr. Raisin," the television reporter quizzed, "where will the country get all these black, doctors?"
"After centuries of educational deprivation, the Block Mon must be given doctor's degrees. I de-mahnd a massive medical education program for Blacks, and, if need be, an easing of the discriminatory standards of medical boards."
"Would you name these discriminatory standards?"
"I would be glad to. Because of segregated and inferior education, the Block Mon has more difficulty getting into medical school, let alone passing tests given by white medical boards of examination;
"I demahnd immediate abolition of entrance examinations for medical schools. I demahnd the end of testing to pass. I demahnd the end of the strict standards of medical schools as just another technique of Jim Crow segregation, northern style."
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"And if your demahnds-er, demands-are not met by the medical schools?" the reporter asked.
"We shall begin a sick-in, utilizing every badly needed hospital bed. I call upon everyone, Block Mon and white alike, who has a passion for racial justice to register at a hospital. I have here a list of phony symptoms guaranteed to get you admitted. When the truly sick are dying in the streets because there are no beds for them, perhaps then the medical schools will face up to the need to create more black doctors."
The camera panned back, revealing the portly Mr. Calder Raisin clad in a white hospital gown, standing by an empty bed. His voice was taken off the audio and a commercial for throat lozenges went on.