The Shadow Cats

A story by Keith Croes

Vehicles whined and clattered and clanked out the open window. Limp white curtains, bright in the morning sun, backed uncertainly away. Peter Lyon sat up in bed, smelling dust and exhaust.

"Kontouche, what is it?"

The young man had his head out another window of the small cabin, but before he could answer, two loud raps came at the door and it opened. Ibrahim Momoh stepped through, his black face somber.

"Peter, it is Babangida."

The door closed. Brakes squealed outside like a brass section warming up.

Already wearing underwear, Peter donned shorts and shirt, watching the naked Kontouche hitch up a pair of shorts and then stand at the door, holding it open for him. He crossed the low wooden porch and joined Ibrahim at the edge of a dirt road that passed in front of the cabin. They stood near the end of a convoy of about a dozen jeeps and troop trucks. Followed closely by several soldiers, a bulky figure approached. Despite the hour, the man's uniform was stained dark under the armpits and down the center of the chest. He stopped several meters away and Peter had the odd thought that the distance would be ideal for an Old West gunfight. Then he realized the holster.

"Dr. Momoh -- " Speaking thickly, as if he were chewing on the words, the man nodded at Ibrahim.

"General Albert Babangida, I'd like to introduce Dr. Peter Lyon from the United States."

"Yes." The general moved closer. He was breathing heavily from his trek alongside the convoy, but he managed a nasty black-gummed and yellow-toothed smile that made Peter want to protect his neck. "Welcome to Rwanda. You have all your equipment?" He motioned with his head toward a small mountain of crates in the courtyard.

Until now, Peter had seen the village of Kili only in the weird play of incandescent lanterns and flashlights as he, Ibrahim and Kontouche had unloaded Ibrahim's truck the night before. He took a quick glance around at the slapdash buildings of the clinic, the huts congregated on the fringes of the hard-packed dirt road, the immense trees, the towering sky. Except for the soldiers, the village appeared deserted. From Peter's perspective, they may as well have been on Mars. His eyes slowly scanned past the general to the dappled shadows of the forest several hundred meters a way, and he got the feeling that someone was watching. Martians maybe.

He shook his head. "I'm expecting the rest to come overland from Kenya. Two trucks."

"Yes." The general nodded. "Two trucks."

"And we'll be putting up a temporary operating room next to the main clinic building."

"You have a permit?"

Peter looked at Ibrahim, who answered quickly. "Yes, it's all arranged, general."

He grunted. The soldiers standing behind him had lapsed into their own quiet, amiable discourse, and the general seemed not to mind.

"We are glad to have Dr. Momoh back, Dr. Lyon," the general said. "Though he was gone longer than we expected."

Ibrahim turned his hands in a lean little gesture that neatly captured the whimsy of fate. "The preparations to bring Dr. Lyon here were extensive."

"You probably did not know, Dr. Momoh, that I approved your request to attend the medical conference in New York in the first place, as such items are routinely forwarded to us by the Ministry of Culture. I also approved your request for an extension, and Dr. Lyon's request to return with you."

"I wasn't certain."

"It was for the good of the people that I let you go, and that I let Dr. Lyon return with you now. Even in these troubled times, we can do some good, no?"

"When have they not been troubled?"

"Yes." The general began to turn away, then stopped suddenly, looking at Peter. "What do you expect to accomplish here?"

Peter appreciated the shallow, dark eyes of a shark. "As much as I can, general."

"And you will help whoever comes to you, like a good physician."

"I suppose I must."

"Perhaps you should be more discriminating."

The general shoved against the chest of one of the soldiers, provoking a round of laughter, and the group retreated toward the front of the convoy. Peter glanced at Ibrahim, whose teeth were clenched.

"That is Babangida," he said.

Again Peter gazed around, past the huts and along the soft, breathing edges of the rain forest beyond. Something out there. Something watching. Both men turned when they heard the cabin door scrape open behind them.

"Someone who sweats so much should be thinner," said Kontouche from the shadows of the porch. As the trailing jeep clanked out of sight behind a tree as large as a hot-air balloon, the road filled with curious faces. Kili came to welcome him.

The woman's adnexa oculi and orbital musculature had puckered around her left eyeball, which Peter guessed had been ruptured. She babbled at him in bastard French as he squatted beside her, his thumbs attempting to part the creases of distorted flesh that ran back to her temple and down her cheek. Kontouche stood at his side with a stumpy pencil poised over a clipboard.

"She says a soldier hit her with the butt of a rifle. She says he got the worst of it."

"I'm guessing 38."

Kontouche spoke to her and she answered.

"Thirty-six. You get better, doctor, after only a few days!"

"Female, 36, ruptured globe OS, limited tenderness, marked necrosis -- " Kontouche scribbled to catch up. " -- possible biopro, near rectus muscles, whole eye, near-full blepharo. What's her name?"

Kontouche spoke again.

"She asks yours, doctor."

Peter regarded the wide right eye regarding him. "Peter...Pierre." He scanned by her temple with a probe the size of a cigarette lighter, watching the flat front surface of a gamma imaging unit hanging on a strap around his neck. "Pierre Lyon. Et vous?"

"Antoinette Diouf," she said.

"Tell Antoinette that we can give her a new eye. Any time Thursday?"

Kontouche flipped ahead several pages. "Two hours."

"Okay. That'll do it for Thursday then. Have her come in first thing in the morning and be prepared to spend the night here."

The woman spoke to Kontouche, who emitted a rude hooting sound. "She will do whatever the handsome White Lion tells her to do."

Peter stood and reached out for the woman's hand. "Merci, Antoinette." And then to Kontouche: "Tell her. Make sure she understands."

Ibrahim waved from the midst of a tall, skinny family across the crowded courtyard, and Peter nodded back. As he passed in front of the new OR, grasping and squeezing the hands extended toward him, his pulse gave a spurious beat. The first-date jitters, the same welling feeling as when a new woman opened the door of her apartment for the first time. And there she stood. Lightweight, translucent sides breathed sterile air inward, producing an internal sigh of positive pressure, and the roof was a dark, grainy hairstyle of composite plastic. The place was as good and as safe and as strong as any operating room at Johns Hopkins. And soon he would be inside her, performing the same miracles.

Ibrahim crouched next to a boy of about ten years, who sat on the ground, knees spread, with a light cloth like a bedsheet wrapped around his midsection. Ibrahim's nurse, Ilda Gayan, had put down her clipboard and now held one hand on the boy's forehead, her other arm around his narrow shoulders. The child was loose in her grasp, head lolling back, mouth hung open, eyes staring blankly at the sky.

"Fever?" Peter asked.

Ilda nodded.

"Wuchereria," Ibrahim said, lifting the sheet away from the boy's lap. "Elephantiasis."

Peter looked up at the curious faces of the boy's family hovering over them, then back to the boy's scrotum, which was the size and color of a large medicine ball.

"I did some reading on tropical diseases before coming here, but it's a little out of my specialty," Peter said.

Ibrahim gave the boy's parents a series of confident nods. "Oh, I can handle this," he said. "Just thought you'd like to see what a pinworm can do."

"Remarkable." Peter laid a hand on the boy's wiry hair. "You'll be fine, mon ami." His hand brushed Ilda's, and they exchanged smiles. The gold ring in her left nostril flashed in the sun. "Remarkable."

They had left the small farms behind and entered the darkening clutch of overhanging jungle. Alone with his driver, Babangida thought of other things and stared out the passenger-side window of the Mercedes staff car. Suddenly, he ordered the driver to stop.

The line of vehicles to the rear halted and waited.

After several minutes, the driver ventured, "Sir?'

"A little longer," Babangida replied. He retracted the electric window and the outside plunged in, warm and sticky and thick with heavy green aromas. "The air conditioning," he pointed, and the driver turned up the fan. "Off!" he snapped. "Turn the damn car off!"

The engine died. Babangida slid the radio mike from its bracket under the dashboard and touched it to his cheek. "Cut your engines," he said, repeating the command several times.

The air hung around them. Soldiers lit cigarettes, giggled or chatted or were silent. Twenty meters in front of the Mercedes, invisible to all but Babangida and his driver and nearly obscured even to them by the failing light, a panther crossed the road from right to left, pausing in the middle to look toward them. One of the animal's eyes glinted as if a single penetrating ray of the sinking sun behind them had somehow made it through the tangled roof of the jungle, and Babangida felt the reflection push into his open mouth and down his throat. He swallowed. "Good thing we're not superstitious," he whispered.

"Sir?"

"Let's get the fuck to Darva," he barked into the mike, and the rising window blotted out the tumult of resurrected engines. He watched the driver switch on the headlights, which cast a weak yellow glow on the empty road.

Peter and Ibrahim sat in matching wooden rockers on the porch as night seeped into the world, flooding it in minutes from the ground upward.

"That was quick," Peter said, and Ibrahim rose and went to a small table, where he snapped the switch on an incandescent lantern.

At that moment Kontouche trotted from around the side of the building closest to the clinic. Calling cadence in the "Hut, two" military manner, knees pumping nearly to his chest above the bouncing white blurs of his dusty bare feet, he took an unnecessarily wide semicircular path out onto the road and back to the porch, stomping to attention in front of them and offering a gawky, left-handed salute.

"All clear in postop, mes capitaines," he reported.

"The woman with the new wrist," Peter said. "She'll need to be watched."

Kontouche shrugged generally. "Ilda's turn," he said. He stepped up on the porch and strode to the door, flicking them a final salute before disappearing inside.

Ibrahim resumed his rocker.

"We'll need to go to Kigali soon for more AIDS vaccine," he said.

They sat. Outward the darkness thrummed in tidal layers of insect sound, rising and falling. Slowly, the slow rocking of the chairs synchronized.

"I may need more skin," Peter said. "I brought eight tints. Your people have a remarkably consistent number seven. Very dark."

Ibrahim gave a surprised snort. "That should simplify inventory. We'll send Kontouche to the Western Union in Darva on Sunday. Is that okay?"

"Sunday's fine."

Rise and fall, back and forth. Inside Kontouche began a solemn chant, making splashing sounds as he rinsed his feet in a bucket.

"I've been here almost a month," Peter said.

"You have three more."

"They'll go quickly."

At that Ibrahim said nothing, then "We are lucky to have you for an hour. I fully expected to return alone."

"You would've made a good living in sales, Dr. Momoh."

Ibrahim chuckled.

Back and forth, rise and fall.

"They come every day from many kilometers around asking for the White Lion," Ibrahim said. "God, that I could do as much."

"Yes. Yes. Women and children and senior citizens, the crazy and the crippled, fungi and bacteria and viruses and parasites from outer space, neurological dysfunctions whose etiology I can only guess -- "

"The men will come."

Kontouche's tune had lightened a bit. The bucket clanked.

"This is a very special valley, Dr. White Lion, the Tanyi Valley, from Kili to Darva and up to the village of Tanyi. We are descendants of the same tribe, a lineage that has remained very little affected by the outside world for centuries. There has never been a political regime that has established any more than a figurehead presence here. Partly because they see nothing here. Just the poor people along the road and a jungle remote enough and dense enough to guard its wealth better than most. But the poor people in the villages? Believe me, that is only part of us. At least as many now live...out there." Peter turned for a moment toward the hand gesture. "Regimes come and regimes go, but this regime...They are more greedy for what the jungle might have to offer, and have more money to pay for the equipment and manpower to take it. That is why I came to you after your talk at the conference. For the first time, I'm afraid for the chats d'ombre."

"Qu'est-ce que c'est?"

"I never told you our old French name? I told you we were known as great warriors. The French called us the chats d'ombre and steered clear of the Tanyi Valley. Others have not had so much sense. They send the big bosses and their aides, who have a way of...disappearing. Shipments get lost. Soldiers desert and go home to their wives and girlfriends. All very mysterious."

"All right, where's my goddam dictionary."

"Chats d'ombre, Dr. White Lion. The shadow cats."

A distant blat of automatic gunfire brought the chairs to a simultaneous halt.

"They get closer," Ibrahim said quietly. "They will come."

The door flew open and Kontouche walked naked across the porch, flinging water from the bucket into the road. He stood for a moment peering out at the darkness. "They get closer," he said.

The following morning was reserved for examining patients who had received surgery the day before. It dawned in steady drizzle. Early afternoon Peter exited the main clinic building, where they had established a postop ward with about a dozen cots, and realized that Ibrahim was right, that the courtyard was not as crowded as it had been. And that the weather had nothing to do with it. They came every day, rain or no.

He called for Kontouche, who trotted over with an opened umbrella in one hand and his clipboard in the other.

"Ilda will be giving the shots today," he said. "Have everyone who's here for vaccinations or other medications line up at the back of the clinic."

Kontouche held the umbrella over Peter's head and yelled out the instructions so that Peter's ears rang. When he had finished, Peter smiled and said, "Well, let's see what we have today."

About 30 people remained huddled in the courtyard, and Peter and Kontouche worked through them quickly. Four people needed immediate treatment, and Kontouche directed these to Ibrahim in the main clinic. The rest received instructions and left with their families or joined the others receiving medications at the back of the clinic, so that when they reached the final figure, a man sitting with a dun-colored poncho over his head, they were alone with him in the drizzle.

A boy with ghostly white eyes drifted up out of the man's lap into Peter's view.

"That's okay," Peter said. "Here, let him sit." Peter gently grasped one of the man's wrists and directed the boy to the ground, retrieving the ophthalmoscope from the pocket of his smock with his free hand. The boy whimpered and his arms jerked in reflexive panic. "It's okay," he said, checking the boy's eyes in quick succession. "Qu'est-ce que vous appelez-vous, mon petit ami?"

The boy began to cry, and the man said in a soft voice, "Henri." The boy grew silent.

"Henri, vous etes un garcon tres bon." Peter searched for the man's face in the depths of the poncho. "Est-ce qu'il votre fils?"

The man nodded.

"Has he received a blow to the head or face? Any injuries?" Kontouche translated.

The man reached out a large hand and ran his thumb gently over a depression in the boy's temple.

"Your son has traumatic cataracts. We can do an operation that will very likely enable him to see again."

Kontouche relayed the message and the man began speaking so softly that Kontouche was forced to strain forward under the umbrella, which he was trying gamely to hold over the four of them.

"He asks if Henri will be able to see the markings on a parrot at a hundred meters."

"What?"

Kontouche rolled his eyes in bewilderment. The man spoke again.

"He says that Antoinette Diouf got an eye here, and that she sees the markings on a parrot at a hundred meters."

The man sat quietly. Peering again into the dark hollow of the poncho, a poncho the color of mud, Peter felt something like a rising and falling, a giddiness.

"No, no."

Kontouche said, "Non, non."

Softly, the man said, "Pourquoi pas?"

Peter chose the words carefully, allowing Kontouche enough time between sentences to translate. "Because Antoinette received an artificial eye. It has greater resolution. It sees better than her real eye. Your son is just a boy. He cannot receive an artificial eye because he will grow. His eyes will grow. An artificial eye will not grow. We can give your son new lenses. What is now white in his eyes, we can replace with new lenses. It is very likely that he will then be able to see normally, like every other boy. But we cannot give him an artificial eye like Antoinette's."

The man spoke again, and Peter thought that he was difficult to hear because his voice somehow harmonized with the whisper of the rain in the puddles, the humming on the slick earth, in the high grass, in the leaves of the trees, outward through tidal layers of the living space that enfolded the clinic compound, and Kili, and Africa. It rose and fell. Leaning forward with his clipboard behind his ear, Kontouche translated in rapid, high-pitched bursts. "And the old cripple Duperee. You gave him legs and now he outruns the village messengers. The widow Taya has a new arm that can down a running boar with a stone. An armless beggar now does handsprings in Darva."

The man stopped. Kontouche stopped.

"We can do for your son what I told you we can do," said Peter.

"Vous etes le Lion Blanc?" the man asked.

"Oui."

Kontouche listened to the man's next words with mounting excitement. "He asks when Henri can come for the operation!"

"Well, I'm not sure."

"Why not?"

"You have the schedule."

"Oh." Kontouche thumbed ahead through the papers on the clipboard.

General Albert Babangida lumbered toward the headlights of the command truck, bellowing. In the cab, the driver punched the knob. "No, no, idiot! I can't see the road!" The lights came up quickly. Troops were filling the thoroughfare, emerging in stumbling silhouettes from the bush on both sides.

"Habyar! Berlouis!"

Figures, stark and colorless in the glare, scurried from his path as the general pounded to the rear of the truck. Hurling aside one panel of the canvas, he thrust up an arm. "Give me a hand!" Two of the five men on board hauled him up, and he quickly ordered everyone out but the radio operator. "Get Habyar and Berlouis," he hissed, then sat down on the side bench with his arms like mahogany trunks twining across his broad chest.

Within several minutes, Colonel Moussa Habyar and Colonel Alain Berlouis had arrived. Along one of the canvas sides, Babangida had drawn open a retractable map of the Tanyi Valley.

"Habyar, you pounced when you should have paused." Waving a wooden pointer, Babangida paced over the planking of the truck bed, causing a noticeable compression of the suspension from side to side. "They do not go so close to Kili. They do not stray too far, and they do not go too close."

A man with a long, sad face blinked rapidly. "We could see them, we were right behind them. We have five kills!"

"S-o-o-o-o -- " Babangida drew out the word. " -- instead of having time to dig in and fight back against superior numbers, in which case they would have suffered greatly, they fled to the west and -- " The general turned his attention to Berlouis, who was biting his thick lower lip. " -- caught Colonel Berlouis by surprise. And Colonel Berlouis, happily parked in a banana grove anticipating an easy mopping-up operation, thought it prudent to run away. To live to fight another day?" The yellow smile flashed.

Slapping the map with the pointer, the general continued with growing volume. "How many times have I said it? They are Robin Hood and this is their Sherwood Forest, the final pocket of resistance to the leadership of our president and chairman of the Armed Forces Ruling Council of Rwanda. How many times, eh? And we will bring them down if we have to level all one thousand square kilometers of this godforsaken shithole!"

He paused, then continued more calmly. "Habyar, you attacked when you shouldn't have. Berlouis, you retreated when you shouldn't have."

The pistol made a hollow sound coming out of the holster, and in the echo of its detonation Berlouis slumped forward as if he had a stomach cramp.

Babangida took in Habyar's face, vacant with shock. "Don't worry, Moussa," he purred. "For attacking, you get two chances."

Ibrahim's chair stilled. His hands were locked behind his head and an elbow blocked his face, which would've been hidden anyway in the backlighting of the lantern behind him.

"Did he give you a name?"

"Guy Diop. Have you heard of him?"

"No." The rocking resumed. "But you could be right. He could be one of them."

"He's tall. Very tall." Peter gave up trying to make out the other man's expression and, as he had for many evenings now, relinquished himself to the pulsing darkness. The feeble noise of battle had at some seamless point escalated to true thunder, a visceral kind of everywhere rumbling. "Ibrahim," he said eventually, "have you ever had the feeling that if you left this place, you and your people, that within a year there would be no trace that you were ever here?"

"Hmm," Ibrahim answered deep in his chest. "No. There is little enough trace of us now."

With Ibrahim's sponsorship, Ilda Gayan, a native of Kili, had trained as an OR nurse at a major hospital in Kigali. Peter learned that she had worked with one of the top orthopedic surgeons there, though he knew that training alone could not account for her. Her talent for biopro surgery was instinctive. It wasn't long before Ibrahim had relinquished the OR completely, leaving the major surgery to Peter and Ilda with Kontouche acting as an assistant.

She had a face with one primary expression -- loving -- and the number-seven skin of the people of the Tanyi Valley. Ibrahim had mentioned to Peter that she had been widowed more than ten years before, shortly after being married. She lived in the cabin closest to the main clinic, but she and Kontouche took turns sleeping in the main clinic on nights after surgery days.

Peter guessed that she was not yet 30. Though she probably didn't fully realize it, he quickly had her performing functions ordinarily reserved for an assistant surgeon. During microsurgery under high magnification, her touch was more precise than his, if less practiced.

"You see the atrophy in the gastrocnemius." Peter pointed the shiny thin rod of the laser scalpel. "The anterior muscles are better, but not much. We'll have to replace the fibula and tibia and maybe the lower portion of the femur --we'll find out when we get in. But the major challenge will be to preserve the blood supply to the foot."

The man had untreated fractures of both bones in his lower leg after falling from a tree several years before. The resulting calcified deformation was a knotted mess. Somehow, the tissues of the foot had remained healthy.

"There's no book in the world that will teach you how far up to debride the ligaments. But the sick muscle is cut away like this, and then you begin thin exploratory sections. You go until the tissue looks healthy. There's no other way to explain it. Too far into the ligament and you defeat the conversion capabilities of the prosthetic muscle, and then you're into replacing the ligament -- given that you recognize your mistake. The point is, why make more work for yourself? Kontouche, the vitals?"

"Strong and stable, mon capitaine."

"And before we cut out the offending bones, we shore up the vessels to the foot. Pack that foam in there tighter, Ilda. Here. And here, distal."

The walls of the OR glowed thin yellow, nearly obscured by the bright light of the surgical field.

"Scope," Peter said. Ilda swung the instrument in front of him and pressed her eyes to the secondary set of oculars. He used the footpedal to send the stereo objectives scanning up and down the leg. "Can we save them?"

"No," Ilda replied. "Aneurysms."

"Where would you cut?"

He scanned toward the knee.

She touched a spot on a major vessel with the tip of a cannula. "Here."

He scanned down toward the foot.

"And here."

"Good. We'll do the posterior tibial artery first. Laser anastomosis. Spot-welding, just like the exhaust system of an old Chevy. Give me about a meter of the eight gauge."

Focusing and firing the microscope's laser, he replaced the vessels and cut away the bones of the lower leg. Since they had processed and stored as much donor tissue as they needed, Kontouche deposited the bones in a plastic bag to be thrown away. The femur was sound, as were the tarsus bones of the foot. The synthetic fibula and tibia -- tritium alloy coated with porous plastified calcium phosphate that had an exterior structure indistinguishable from bone -- were quickly fit into place, then laser-contoured at the joints to ride smoothly against the existing bone. A pungent fog of vaporized tissue hung around them.

"And now the muscle," said Ilda.

"Yes, the major ligaments are okay."

Tentatively, Kontouche withdrew a tagged strip of slimy gray biopro muscle from the saline wash that Peter had prepared. The substance was engineered to adapt to the DNA messages of the cells of the ligaments, then shrink or grow a bit to match the size of the normal original. By the unavoidable nature of the engineering, it was about five times stronger than natural muscle, something that the nervous system seemed to compensate for with no trouble.

Peter removed the tag, which was a plastic pincer in the synthetic flesh. "Peroneus brevis," he read. "Thank you, Kontouche. Your end, madame?" Ilda held the muscle so that it was suspended between them. "The brand name for this stuff is Forta-Mesh. I call it Muscle-Matic. Kontouche, what do we have there?"

As he and Ilda made the microscopic attachments, Kontouche leaned over the white plastic trough and went through the list: "Peroneus longus. Anterior tibial. Tibial. Extensor digitorum longus. Plantar. Soleus. Flexor digitorum longus. Gastrocnemius. All here, mon capitaine."

"We have a leg," Peter said, smiling under his mask.

At the end of the procedure they watched the dark skin settle around their work like plastic shrink wrap. No stitches, just a day or two of rest and limited movement. Peter doused the bright surgical lights and stood next to the sleeping man, who lay with two straight legs silhouetted against the white pad of the operating table.

Ilda was already on her way out, and Peter remembered the two choleric babies that awaited medications in the clinic. She stopped and turned at the sound of his voice.

"Ilda, you were terrific, as usual."

Her mask bunched down around her neck, she smiled and bowed quickly, then slipped between the clear, overlapping plastic flaps of the entranceway.

Kontouche fiddled with the anesthesia computer and the man stirred. Reaching over and touching the plastic bag on the instrument tray, Peter said, "Better save the bone."

Kontouche's eyes widened above the surgical mask, struck a pale yellow by the light through the translucent walls. Like the light through the amber membranes of a beehive, Peter thought. "But you said we had enough."

"Well, maybe not. Let's type and save it."

One hand on the man's forehead, Kontouche shrugged.

The man Kamanuzu had received his lower leg on Tuesday. They were performing surgery twice a week, Tuesday and Thursday. Henri Diop was scheduled to arrive for his intraocular lenses on Thursday.

Very early Thursday morning, Peter and Ilda were in the courtyard. A transition happened this time of day in Kili, and Peter had come to accept it even as it made him uneasy. Since he rose before sunrise each surgery day, he had been a sober witness to it more than once. There was a time, right about now, when the jungle gave up the rhythms of the night and spent a floundering, almost comical period coming to terms with the day. For the space of several minutes, all bets were off in the killing cycles between the loamy earth, up through the undecided grasses, the aimless trunks and branches, to the very apex of the bright green carapace of the rain forest. No predator was so hungry that it could concentrate on pouncing during this strange swing of the compass, and no entree on the food chain was so fearful that it could honestly feel threatened. It was directionless commotion, with winds coming from nowhere and going nowhere, trees uncertain which way to bend. Animals plopped down and rolled around, waiting for it to end. Humans laughed uneasy laughs.

And the air during this disturbance became a flawless transparent gel that magnified everything. It was through this gel that Peter saw Henri Diop half-goosestep, half-float into the courtyard, arms reaching upward over his head as if he were surrendering. Holding his hands, a woman in a bright, multicolored dress walked behind him. In contrast to Henri's cries, which alternated between defiance and horror, she smiled grandly, revealing perfect white teeth. A large gold ring in her left nostril swung like a metronome. A scarf made of the same fabric as her dress clung tightly to her head.

Peter found himself walking quickly toward her with Ilda beside him. Perhaps she had been smiling at Ilda, he thought.

"Well, we are very glad to see Henri." At the sound of the man's voice, Henri's warbling climbed in pitch. Peter took one of the boy's hands from the woman, who relinquished it easily, and knelt down, putting his other hand on the bare skin of the boy's side. "Henri, nous sommes vos amis. We are going to make you well again."

Henri screamed, his face a caricature of terror, and tugged so hard on the hand that remained in the woman's grasp above him that one leg rose off the ground.

"This will only take a few hours?" the woman nearly shouted in English.

Peter nodded. "But we have to calm him down some."

Brushing Peter lightly aside, Ilda took the boy in her arms and whispered in his ear. Tears like slick black trails of oil wandering around his cheeks, Henri immediately ceased his wailing and drew into Ilda, staring sightlessly across her shoulder, his breaths coming in sharp little sobs.

"Okay, just a few hours," Ilda said, smiling up at the woman. "You can wait out here. There is Kool-Aid and sandwiches on the porch of the clinic." She rubbed the top of Henri's head quickly back and forth with the palm of her hand. "Henri is first on the schedule today."

Peter rose, thanked the woman for coming and headed for the OR, leaving the three of them behind. Kontouche would be preparing the instruments in their sterile arrangements, he knew, but the thought of the young man, industrious and dutiful behind his lackadaisical front, did not bring its usual pleasure. Instead, the image disintegrated to powder and blew away on the steady breeze that had arrived. In Kili, at the eastern edge of the Tanyi Valley, the day had found its menace. Somewhere blood flowed. For Peter, the day's compass had found its direction at the moment that Henri had decided to accept Ilda's embrace. In the tiny blind face, there had been recognition.

The distant pummeling of armaments was the night's bass voice. Peter snugged a sheet up over his shoulder; which seemed bonier than he remembered. The thin mattress of the cot felt like cardboard over concrete. He took the chance that Kontouche was still awake. "The people in the jungle, do they know the people of the villages?" Fully a minute passed. He flipped the pillow, slugged it. Unexpectedly, a hesitant voice came out of the darkness from a point closer than he would've guessed.

"The women come to the villages sometimes for stores. The woman who brought Henri Diop today, I've seen her before."

A faraway whistle descended into a shushing sound like a wave dashed against a sheer granite crag. A spume of fire, Peter thought, each droplet a searing missile. The curtains lounged in the moonlight.

"I came to help, Kontouche. I only want to help."

"I know."

"You know? How do you know?"

"I know you came to help."

"I think everybody knows a hell of a lot around here."

"Everybody knows you came to help." Kontouche rolled away from him with a rustling sound, mumbling something unintelligible that carried the tonal aspect of encouragement.

Guy Diop appeared the next evening as Peter and Ibrahim rocked on the porch. Peter assimilated the face first hovering above the far edge of the road at the limit of the light cast by the small lantern. Though he saw it clearly, he did not accept it for a face, as it seemed to float much too high to be associated with a body. Then the whole man was there, fully two meters tall and moving barefoot and soundlessly across the dirt and stones. He wore only a pair of camouflaged campaign pants. As Peter stood on the porch, which gave him an extra 25 centimeters or so, they were eye to eye. Ibrahim remained seated, shipwrecked in the middle of a story.

"I have men who need attention," Diop said in English as soft as his French.

"That's why I'm here," Peter answered. Inside the cabin, Kontouche sang his solemn song.

The wounded came at night almost every night. Kontouche and Peter would drop a loose tarp around the walls of the OR and raise it again in the darkness before sunrise; otherwise the OR glowed like a huge Chinese lantern in the compound. Then they would wait, and if the wounded came, they came, usually accompanied by the woman who brought the boy Henri Diop in for his surgery, but sometimes led by Guy Diop. The groups would come on foot, exiting the jungle behind the clinic. Those who couldn't walk were carried on stretchers.

Very little was said on these occasions. Peter once asked the woman, whose name was Marie, how Henri was getting along, then spent several minutes fending off her kisses. He once asked Guy Diop what they called themselves, these fighters against the Armed Forces Ruling Council of Rwanda, and received only a puzzled look in reply. "We live here," Diop said. "How about the chats d'ombre?" Peter suggested. Diop quickly shook his head. "Romantic legends are for villagers," he said.

Peter watched carefully the first time Diop and Ilda were together with him in the OR. Though they gave no sign of knowing one another, he didn't bother to introduce them, nor did they apparently think it necessary to introduce themselves. As for Ibrahim, the night that Diop assembled himself head down on the road outside Peter's cabin, Ibrahim had given Diop a long, warm handshake amid a barrage of God-bless-you's. It was the same way the old black man had greeted Peter in an aisle of an auditorium at Columbia-Presbyterian.

Ibrahim once again began scrubbing for surgery, and Marie soon became a good judge of how much they could accomplish in one night. Few of the wounded were forced by the dawn to disappear into the jungle untreated.

They managed four or five men a night, replacing limbs and organs from what seemed to be a mix of old and new trauma. Of those who had received their injuries years before, Peter wondered at the strength of kinship that made their survival in the jungle possible. These were not people who could travel fast.

After two weeks and more than fifty men, a message came from Kigali. The number-seven skin had arrived, and Pamela Kogan had brought it. Personally. It would be an overnight trip, and Peter asked Ilda to come along.

They slept until noon, ate breakfast and spent an hour treating people in the courtyard, as they did every day now. With a list of additional supplies scrawled in Kontouche's hasty pencil, they mounted Ibrahim's Toyota and set out south down the dirt road. After so long an absence from behind the wheel, Peter found the truck to be incredibly unpredictable. They had gone many kilometers before he felt comfortable enough to speak. Third gear was as good as it got, and he even risked an elbow out the open window.

"We'll get the skin from Pam and then have dinner," he said above the racket. "'Tomorrow we'll go shopping for the rest. Kontouche's list?"

Ilda nodded a worried smile.

"What's the matter?"

She shrugged and laughed. "Where do we stay?"

"The Hilton. That's where Pam is. If we can get a room."

"I have a friend -- "

"What?"

"I have a friend in Kigali. We can stay with her if we can't get a room."

"Okay, well, I don't think it will be necessary. There are other hotels."

She directed the same worried smile out the window and Peter shut up. The silence between them drew out for a long way until it finally snapped, and they were alone in the cab with nothing but the whining engine. Peter thought of Pam Kogan, a colleague who was once more than a colleague. One memory of her was almost a conditioned response; it floated to the surface on those rare occasions when he was unwise enough to think of the year they lived together in medical school. They were sitting under a Cinzano umbrella at a sidewalk cafe. She was licking mustard from her fingers, face glowing in the muted sunlight.

"I want to help the world," she had said, and he remembered how her fingers had spread in emphasis, and the sucking sounds as they popped one after another from her mouth. He had joked dryly that all he wanted was to get rich, and it turned out that the scene was exactly opposite of the truth. They had both been joking.

Over the years the Pavlovian memory had gained the impressionistic quality of a Degas work, becoming brighter and more profound in the painterly blur. It had it all: his love for her, his lust for her, and the tip of the wedge that drove them apart. As it rose around him in the yanking cab of the Toyota, it acquired something else: an otherworldliness that made it nonsensical and trivial. To a boy who had to carry his balls around like a Hefty bag full of a day's trash, a poignant moment under a Cinzano umbrella held little interest. He was here, on the bumpy seat, and no one could ever know what the last six weeks had been like, especially not Pam. He had been inside the dark beehive, hour after hour, a drone bee serving the Queen of Life. He had only to close his eyes and he was there, just the night before he was there, fingertips on the joystick of the laser, not healing so much as reinstituting the human structure to its rightful place for a people more in need than anyone he could imagine. He and the woman next to him and a noseful of vaporized tissue. They were doing things no one had ever done and they hadn't yet reached their stride. He wanted the skin more than anything. If Pam was of a mind to play games, she had come a long way for nothing.

He glanced at Ilda. She was asleep.

The lobby of the Hilton was laid in flagstone and open to the outside, though tall, narrow panels of framed glass could be brought together or wood-slatted curtains lowered to block out wind or rain or sun. There was a sunken bar and, on the same level as the lobby, glass tables and wicker chairs spread out among potted plants. After checking himself and Ilda into separate rooms, Peter called Pam and arranged to meet her near the bar in an hour. He just dialed her room and there she was.

He called Ilda and told her the same, then stripped and took a bath with the shower on, exterminating a small bar of hotel soap, a soluble globe of rose water, a dip bag of skin softener and double-dose canisters of shampoo and hair conditioner. His hands were wrinkled, pale and peeling when he found a switch for the water jets, which blasted him aloft for a final floating fifteen minutes before shavetime, aftershave, underarm deodorant and a last look in the mirror

at a thin, tough face he liked.

He saw Pam's frizzy red-blonde hair almost as soon as he stepped from the elevator. She was seated at one of the glass tables near a tall, narrow window.

"Hi," he said. "Did you come through Paris?" Long ago they had talked about going to Paris together and never had. That particular nugget had been exhumed on his own flight over, triggering the Degas painting, "Boulevard with Cinzanos." He sat squeaking in one of the two empty chairs. Out the window a terraced landscape of trees and plants and stone paths lay in premature dusk, gathered in the shadow of the building. On the opposite side of the large room, the sun shone through the windows.

"Oh, Peter." He was surprised by the openness in her eyes, by her hand around the back of his neck, by her leaning toward him and kissing him on the cheek. She was wearing lipstick. He felt himself to be in colossal trouble. "You need a haircut," she said.

"Yeah, but don't I smell good?"

She laughed, eyes sparkling.

"What's the matter?"

The wet eyes spun and looked inward. "Mimi buzzed back. Roger could've got it, or Burt -- " At the mention of their partners' names, Peter was filled with an immediate sense of the men. Roger with his racquetball forearms, every conversation a volley that carried victory or defeat. Lost little brilliant Burt, aching for praise and acceptance, ideally from his mother. Both men standing in the clean, well-tended spaces of their lives, their fatuous concerns a kind of rapture around them. " -- but I was between patients, so I picked up. It was a man from the Rwandan embassy. He asked questions about you."

She began to crumble and then caught his silent eye.

"I bragged about you," she said. "And then I thought, gee, this is strange. So I asked if there was a problem, and he said there was some fighting. Some fighting in your district. He said that you were very close to it, involved, and that they would make every effort to protect you. But then I thought -- " She choked and he reached out for her hand. " -- I thought I'd hurt you somehow."

"When was this?"

"Oh -- " She shook her head as if she couldn't possibly remember. " -- Monday."

"Three days ago."

"We had your skin by then, so I decided to bring it."

"Get yourself together, Pam."

Extracting her hand from his, Pam had already ducked under the table to retrieve a tissue from a handbag at her feet. Ilda was approaching across the flagstone. She stopped and stood quietly by the table and Pam reappeared, her face dry and astounding in its composure.

"I'll have another gin and tonic," she said.

Ilda blinked and waved at someone across the room. "Pam, this is my nurse, Ilda Gayan. Ilda, Pam."

"Oh -- " A gate crashed shut over Pam's face and Peter was relieved to recognize the Pam he had seen almost every day for the last six years, Pamela Kogan the colleague. Pamela's house was secure, and the job would go much easier now. "I'm sorry. Peter, you could have said something."

"I'm sorry," Peter said. He looked up at Ilda. "I could use a scotch and soda, though."

Smiling, Ilda sat in the third wicker chair and a waitress showed up to take their order.

"So," Pamela Kogan said, holding her hands together on the glass tabletop, "is there fighting here?"

Peter sat with overlapping hands in near mimicry of her posture. "Pam's heard about the fighting and is worried about my safety," he said to Ilda.

"You did leave without mentioning it. Are you in any danger?"

"I don't know. Ilda, am I in any danger?"

Ilda cleared her throat and placed her palms on the glass. "We are treating the wounded," she said.

"That puts me in danger?"

Ilda also caught the silent eye. "Dr. Lyon has many friends."

"But am I in danger?"

Ilda's head lowered and she nodded into her chest.

"When was the last time your townhouse was ripped off, Pam? How is the traffic on the beltway these days?"

Pamela Kogan sighed.

"What were you doing last night, Ilda?"

Ilda glanced at him. "We...we had a double amputee, both legs. And a man with a jaw and left arm and shoulder to replace. Another with both feet and lower left leg. And a hand, forearm and elbow."

"Am I in any danger, Ilda?"

Ilda laughed and shook her head. "No, you are in no danger."

Peter felt a new force, familiar but wildly strong in a way somehow connected to the thin, tough face and shaggy hair he had seen in the mirror of his bathroom, and he turned it now toward Pamela Kogan. "The insertion of biopro ligaments for the major muscles of the limbs should be made to the bone, natural or biopro, between five and ten millimeters ahead of the site of physiologic insertion, depending on the size of the muscle. The motion is better; the rehab is faster. For biopro lungs, you can take the layer of cartilage off the prosthetic diaphragm and throw it away, then attach the diaphragm two or three centimeters higher in the thorax. You don't need the cushioning, and breathing efficiency is increased by almost 20 percent. Whoever said nature had it exactly right? We're performing combinations like no one's ever seen. Ever. And we're almost out of skin."

Pamela Kogan nodded. "The manager has it in a cooler in the kitchen," she said. "All 500 square meters of it. You could cover a football field." The waitress arrived.

"Not even half," Peter observed, eyes following the drinks down to their cocktail napkins. "We'd like you to have dinner with us."

Shaking her head, she reached down for her handbag. "No, I'd rather not. I've got an early flight." She turned to him as she stood. "You're a god to them, aren't you."

Peter laughed. "I don't know. Am I a god to them, Ilda?"

To his amazement, Ilda nodded.

He was in surgery when the phone rang or a knock came at the door, and he answered one or the other and it was Ilda. For a while his fingers were on the laser joystick and there was peritoneum slit and folding back and red muscle and white bone in the bright surgical lights, and then her cool body was beside him. He thought in the dream: She just wants to sleep here, like a campout, completely innocent.

Clean sheets as far as he could reach, and the rest of the Hilton room, the television set, the chairs, the carpeting, the art factory prints were junked about them like a campout on Mars, nonsensical and trivial in the jungle pulse, the rise and fall. Into the Tanyi Valley he had dissolved like a bar of soap, a dip bag of skin softener, a globe of rose water, and a white lion was left at the heart of its everywhere rumbling. The cat, huge and smelling of musk, rose from the operating table and stretched. Its skin flowed over the ligaments of its joints, the muscles, the bones, smooth as a river of oil. Oil made flesh. Its lazy self-involvement carried all the menace in the world.

And there she was. Her hand was at the base of his erection, not stroking his penis, but tight around its base. Desperate. Less than innocent. "I am not a god," he whispered, and he found her at the vibrant core of the land, smooth as oil. She lay in shadows. He dreamed: in a cabbage plant, enfolded by the shadowy leaves: I am not a god.

"Some things I'd rather find out for myself," she answered.

The next morning he called Pam and thanked her for coming. After he hung up, he kissed Ilda's left nipple and thanked her for coming. She was a silhouette against the white sheet.

They wandered Kigali in a bright, guiltless sun. By late afternoon they were in the cranky Toyota, headed north. Third gear was as good as it got.

"You know Guy Diop, don't you."

They were the first words spoken in half an hour, but she answered immediately: "Yes." She turned toward the open window and he strained to hear. "He was my husband's friend. Now he and Marie are my friends."

Several minutes later, he asked, "Is Marie his wife?"

She returned a crooked smile. "Yes. I don't see them often. No one in the village sees them often."

They bounced about in silence that was not in the least uncomfortable. At one point she reached over and touched his thigh, but he was driving and thinking of Ibrahim and the old man's litany of God-bless-you's, how desperation sometimes gives you the edge, and though on some level he was aware of her touch, he knew it also to be the kind that didn't need to be returned or even acknowledged, that it simply was, that she had no more real awareness of it than he. The jungle rose around them in the dusk as they neared Kili and Peter felt an odd displacement. "What 's wrong with this picture," he muttered. Ilda was already sitting tense and straight, head and eyes scanning the road in front of them as if she expected a tire to blow any second. "What is it?" he said.

"I don't know."

He flicked on the headlights, though enough daylight remained to see well without them, and noticed movement to the right, dark slivers between the trunks and vines and ferns.

"Do you see it?" Peter asked. Ilda nodded out her window. "Something's out there. Pacing us." His foot pressed ahead slowly against the accelerator, and the roar rose and caught and dropped with a shift into fourth gear. "Fifty-five!" Peter called out. "Sixty! Jesus, is there more than one?" The rear tires seemed to be bounding airborne off the uneven road. "Sixty-five!"

"A panther?" Ilda yelled, and Peter took it for a question.

"Do they travel in packs?" The roar gave a throaty catch and dropped in pitch as Peter yanked the madly wobbling stick into fifth. "Seventy! Do you still see them?" The cab of the truck was a bartender's jigger, shaken not stirred, with the door frame and armrest whacking against Peter's side, the steering wheel becoming the only solid center of the universe to which he clung. Ilda was straight-arming the dashboard, her other hand out the window gripping the exterior door handle. "Seventy-five! Do you still see them?" She turned to him suddenly with a strange expression that sent a jolt of fear through him, and he peered beyond her. The ambitious dusk had laid down another layer of darkness, but the jungle backed away from the road here, and Peter watched the far edge of the clearing as his foot came off the accelerator. The Toyota rolled to a stop and stalled.

The rest of the convoy strung out patiently behind the Mercedes, engines quiet.

"Sir?"

"Just wait," Babangida said, chewing the words. "I cannot believe you didn't see it. Idiot." Tree trunks stretched upward like the legs of massive animals, glowing warmly red through the infrared glasses. "They were following us, and they watch us still. With no more fear than of... of some passing breeze through their shithole valley." Holding the binoculars in one hand, he hammered the other against the dashboard, a crack that could be heard to the last vehicle in line -- a jeep carrying five men who glanced at each other in bewilderment.

Roger was 22 years old, old enough to receive the lower leg he needed, but the wound had turned gangrenous. Peter took Marie aside and quietly described the symptoms so that she would know to bring these people in more quickly, only to discover that the young man of necessity had been abandoned by his squad after a skirmish and had traveled with his wounds three days through the jungle before rejoining the main force. Over Ibrahim's protests, Peter prevailed in keeping the man in the postop ward for a day of observation. After all, he reminded Ibrahim, they had done it before once or twice.

Roger was Peter's first thought the next morning when the fanfare of squealing brakes brought him upright in bed. Dust motes swirled through a slice of sun at the open window like the cross-section of a wave. A naked Kontouche was leaning out the other window. He turned a frightened face toward Peter. "I know," Peter said, tugging up his shorts.

The row of vehicles extended from in front of the cabin and across the courtyard to the main clinic. Some of the soldiers remained seated and some had climbed out of the jeeps and trucks to stretch their legs, but none seemed to pay much attention to Peter as he hurried by, open shirt flapping, nor to Kontouche who followed, still naked. Peter flew across the porch and through the small examination room at the front of the building, screen doors slamming behind him, and came to a halt a short distance into the postop ward. Albert Babangida strolled down the center aisle formed by the cots positioned with their heads against the two long walls of the room. Ilda was behind him seated on the edge of a cot on the far right with a girl who had her white sheet pulled up to her neck. Peter took quick inventory: six people including Roger. The young man was halfway down the left wall, looking properly emaciated with a sheet up to his waist. Babangida stopped directly at the foot of his cot.

"Dr. Lyon, I trust our people are providing you with much opportunity to practice your healing arts?"

Peter recalled the ominous, gummy mouth. Sunlight through the windows on the left lit up the room. Peter's mind grappled with the events of surgery the night before: had it been the left leg? "It's been a wonderful challenge, general."

"But no big problem for someone so famous."

"We have done a lot here. Your people have taken to calling me the White Lion. But it is not something I started."

"Le Lion Blanc, yes." Legs spread, the general had planted himself before Roger's cot. Peter heard a screen door open and close, and an urgent whisper: "Get some clothes on! Now!" Another springy open and close of a screen door, and he sensed Ibrahim in the doorway behind him. "No, no, no. Your contributions are known everywhere." The general made an encompassing sweep of his arm, his hand ending up inches above Roger's sheet. He glanced down over his shoulder at the young man, who maintained a feeble, faraway look. "Biopro surgery, isn't that what it's called? The latest in putting people back together. At least some people. Now why would someone so famous come here to Rwanda?"

The general leaned toward Roger slightly, his fingertips brushing the sheet, and Peter strode toward him until he stood close enough to smell the acrid sweat spreading outward from the armpits of his uniform. "Because I had forgotten what it was like to be a physician." Babangida straightened and Peter realized the man was almost his own height. Their eyes locked. "Biopro surgery is only a small part of what we've been doing. Your people suffer from a pathetic spectrum of debilities." Peter gestured toward the various cots. "Malaria and cholera, elephantiasis, opportunistic infections and cancers from AIDS, blindness from cataract. If your government were more efficient in providing medical care, I would be home tending the flat feet of rich Americans."

"And him -- " Babangida cocked his head toward Roger. " -- what is wrong with him?"

"A malarial fever."

The general leaned over and snatched the sheet away, revealing Roger's misshapen cotton briefs and a pair of spindly black legs. Peter looked closely at each leg in turn, thinking Is it live or is it Memorex? The young man groaned and rolled to his side.

"You have another month here?" Babangida's chin was outthrust -- he's looking down his nose at me, Peter thought -- and he held an edge of the sheet in his hammy hand.

"Five weeks," Peter answered.

The general released the sheet, tossing it like a cigarette butt. "I will be glad to see you go." Ibrahim stepped aside to let him out of the room.

Peter looked at Ilda first, who bent forward and kissed the girl's forehead without taking her eyes from him, then turned toward Ibrahim. "May I speak to you privately," he said, and then louder, "all three of you?" The dim, naked figure of Kontouche appeared behind Ibrahim through the screen door to the porch.

"It is your decision," Ibrahim said again. The vehicles had made their noisy departure and the four of them were gathered in the examination room, surrounded by shelves of bottles and stainless steel trays. A small refrigerator hummed in a corner beneath a bright window. Ilda sat on a folding metal chair next to a locked glass-enclosed case of narcotics and syringes. Both Ibrahim and Peter leaned against the padded exam table, where Kontouche sat with a bedpan in his lap.

"No. I accept the fact that I am in danger and have always accepted it. But I have not given enough consideration to the danger I am putting you in."

"How did they find out about you?" Ilda asked.

"What does it matter," Ibrahim cut in impatiently. "We knew it would happen eventually. And we also knew the danger." The others nodded.

"But I did not!" Peter blurted out. "That's what I'm telling you. I did not fully understand it."

"Let's take a vote," Kontouche said. The four of them drifted in a kind of charmed silence. Kontouche kicked his legs, an errant heel every now and then banging against the door of a cabinet built into the base of the exam table.

"Okay," Peter laughed finally. "Okay. Yes I stay, no I go. But I have to vote no, my friends. Ibrahim?"

"You are too famous to disappear, and maybe too famous even to arrest. And if they had enough on you to kick you out of the country, they would have. I vote yes."

"Ilda?"

"No," she said. "If you think you should go, you should go."

"Kontouche?"

"Stay. Even you really want to stay." His face was suddenly stricken with perplexity. "Oh no, that's a tie," he said.

All four of them were about to speak when a sound came from the doorway to the postop ward. Roger stood wearing an outsized pair of camouflaged trousers. He took a hesitant step into the room and uttered a brief sentence in French.

"What was that?" Peter asked.

Kontouche answered. "He says he wants to go back."

"I believe we have our tie-breaker," Ibrahim said gently.

The wounded came at night, and Peter was continually amazed by the old injuries, the maimed and crippled. "How long has the fighting been going on?" he once asked Guy Diop, who paused long enough to look thoughtful. "Your first week here," he said, "you gave an arm to an old man. He was my father. And another old, old man you gave ribs." He gripped his left side. "He was Marie's grandfather." He shrugged. "We get to the end of it, though. One more week."

Twenty-five men a week, fifty in two weeks, seventy-five in three. Ibrahim and Kontouche would prep the men on one of the wheeled tables, roll it under the microscope when he and Ilda were ready, and roll the previous one away. Ilda was doing most of the gross work with the laser scalpel and he was doing most of the microsurgery, and they worked together like a Fourth of July light show. Afterward, they slept in their separate quarters, neither of them ever mentioning the night in Kigali. Peter would often think of it when he and Kontouche were drawing up the tarp from around the OR, Ilda and Ibrahim holding the flashlights.

Several days after Peter spoke to Guy Diop, Kontouche stood wavering at the anesthesia computer, his surgical mask wet with mucus and spittle, sweat beading on his forehead. As Peter watched, his knees buckled and he fell to the floor.

"Ibrahim," Peter yelled, and the old man was there, parting Kontouche's surgical gown.

"Where does it hurt?" Ibrahim demanded, and began palpating the young man's abdomen. Kontouche yelped. "Now you've done it," Ibrahim scolded. "You've gone and got yourself an appendicitis in the middle of a war."

Peter took him next, and the young man gazed up from the operating table through terrified eyes. "You take it out, Dr. White Lion?" he gasped.

"Yes, it's a nasty thing."

"You put a new one in?"

"Yes, absolutely. Biopro."

"Biopro," he repeated. Ilda placed the anesthesia mask over Kontouche's face for a moment, and he smiled for the duration of the procedure.

A little more than a week after Kontouche's appendectomy, no wounded came for two nights in a row. The days of the week had long since become irrelevant to Peter, but his watch told him that the third night was Monday, August 28. Except for his usual ministrations to the villagers, which had come to take no more than an hour or two in the afternoon, he had been given the weekend off. He had slept through most of it.

It was 9:30 p.m. As he crossed the courtyard he heard voices coming from the small clearing behind the OR where Ilda prepared the wounded, telling them what to expect and deciding their order for surgery. His heart punched a tattoo in his chest, undeterred by his being able to visualize the process: homemade, garden-variety epinephrine secreting from his adrenal medulla near the kidneys, setting his sympathetic nervous system on point. Momentarily breathless, he withdrew a hand from the pocket of his shorts and slapped the rippled wall as he passed. "The thrill's still here, baby," he said. Center ring in the Royal Beehive of Her Majesty, the Queen of Life and Limb, Dr. White Lion's Healing Light Show and Medical Extravaganza was about to begin. All those who could walk, step right up.

He rounded the corner and was befuddled, as though he were just introduced to befuddlement itself, shaking hands with it even as he continued to the center of a group of about a dozen people seated around an incandescent lantern. Kontouche and Ibrahim were among the sober faces in the uneven perimeter of figures; both should have been inside readying the instruments and equipment. The OR was dark, though he only now noticed that the tarp had not been dropped into place. "What's going on?" he said.

"Sit down, Peter," Ibrahim said. "Guy wants to speak to us."

Peter found a place next to Ilda, who took his hand. He noticed no stretchers laying about, and he counted eight of Diop's men looking back at him over the lantern, each appearing fit. He thought he recognized one or two, and nodded at them.

"Kontouche, will you translate?" Diop asked quietly. "Thank you very much. Thank you all very much." With a hand cupped to his mouth, Kontouche leaned over and spoke directly to Diop's men, who were sitting near him. "All those hurt in past battles have been cared for by the White Lion. One hundred and eighty-three men, some who fought for this valley while the rest of us were fighting for our mother's nipples. Some who taught us how to fight. One hundred and eighty-three of the jungle people." Peter thought he heard Kontouche say chats d'ombre. "They were good men when they came here, they were better when they left." When Kontouche caught up a moment later, the eight men uttered low vocalizations and applauded politely, an eerily civilized sound.

"Many did not make it this far. But we have done our best."

Diop stopped, and Peter was so intent on his words that it took the reactions of the others in the group to make him realize that he had just heard the deep, ripping sound of distant gunfire. Bugs flapped and zipped above the lantern.

"The fighting is worse now than anyone can remember," Diop said after a pause. "Who would like to think what it would be like without the White Lion? In addition to the 183, the White Lion has treated more than ninety men who have been wounded since he arrived. These men, too, have been made better. Stronger. Faster." Again the men conveyed their appreciation in the subdued manner of corporate executives receiving good news on the last quarter's profits.

"Arnaud!" Diop said sharply. One of the men stood. "That tree -- " Diop pointed toward the jungle in the direction of what to Peter seemed a featureless wall of darkness. Arnaud extracted a knife from his belt and Peter saw only a silvery arc flash next to the man's shoulder. The knife went home fully fifty meters away with a solid thunk. Arnaud sat.

"You and I together could not pull that knife from the tree, Dr. Lyon," Diop said, and Peter sought his eyes. "And so tonight, we will talk about that. I want new legs."

Peter thought he heard the words incorrectly. Like the time he saw Diop's disembodied head across the road, they floated by themselves, unrelated to the world, meaningless. Slowly, in a blossoming horror, he made them out. His mouth seemed full of dental anesthesia. "Are you hurt?"

"You do not understand -- "

"You do not understand, Diop. I came to help the injured, not to mutilate healthy flesh."

Jamming a stiff finger against his sternum -- once, twice -- Diop said, "I am the injured. And I will soon be dead."

Stunned, Peter glanced at Ibrahim, whose face was expressionless, and then at Ilda beside him, who avoided his eyes. He realized that he held her hand, and he dropped it.

"You had this planned, didn't you."

"We did not have it planned," Ibrahim said loudly. "We saw it coming. Because we know their desperation."

Desperation sometimes gives you an edge, he thought. Cold, it was cold under his spinning skin, and Babangida's rich, mocking voice came to his ear: The latest in putting people back together. At least some people. At least some people.

He sat bolt upright. "Where are the prisoners? Surely you take prisoners."

"There are no prisoners," Ibrahim scoffed. "They fight and run, and if men on the other side are wounded, they are left behind for their own to take care of. Sometimes, now and then, they come upon wounded soldiers of the Armed Forces Ruling Council of Rwanda, and they give them battlefield aid and leave them by the road. Which is much more generous treatment than their own wounded receive at the hands of the Council soldiers. These men fight and they run, Peter, and usually they run. You can help them to fight. You already have. You have given them a chance, but not quite half a chance."

Peter gagged and the upwelling sting of vomit filled his sinuses.

"What weapons have you seen them with? They have almost no explosives. Yet how do they turn up here with no legs and no arms? Mines and mortars and artillery are leveled against them. What do you think keeps you up at night? What plans do Ilda and Kontouche and I make behind your back? I told you most of this in New York, at an Irish pub on Central Park. You did not hear it. You did not understand it. Well, here it is, White Lion. Do you have something better to do with the next month of your life?"

Peter shuddered violently and looked at Diop. "I cannot cut off your healthy legs," he said. One hand on Ilda's shoulder, he struggled to his feet and stumbled into the darkness around the edge of the OR. Retching, whirling, he shouted: "And then your arms, Diop!" A few more tripping steps, like a drunken man. "And then your guts! Your lungs!" He raised his hands to the diamond-studded roof of the courtyard. "About all I need from you is your brain and brain stem, Diop! I brought the rest on the truck! I brought the rest on the fucking truck!"

He slid through the dark screeching waves of the jungle in a ghost world retreating from the ghostly, a world in which he rattled, and found himself in bed, where he did not sleep. His eyes dried staring ahead at the edge of the thin mattress, and he listened to the pounding bass voice of the night until it died. "And after you, Diop, who?' he said to the empty room. Kontouche found other quarters.

Ilda and Ibrahim were squatting alongside an old woman in the courtyard. They stood as he approached. "They're probably blowing their own legs off."

"You are joking," Ibrahim said, but his face was worried. Suddenly he brightened. "But that would be a solution, wouldn't it."

"They ought to just give them the fucking valley. Can it possibly be worth it?"

Ibrahim dropped back down beside the woman, retracting her lower lip with his thumb and revealing a lesion that shone like raw wet meat in the sun. "You know what Diop would say: We live here." Ibrahim chuckled, a rumbling sound.

"Yeah." Hands deep in his pockets, Peter began to walk away, then stopped as Ilda spoke.

"You will stay?"

He gazed around the courtyard, squinted into the sun and shrugged. "It gets pretty weird around here at night, know what I mean?"

Not much was said on those occasions. Toward the end of a session in mid-September, Ilda asked him if he would take her to Kigali to see a friend. The next morning, they had no sooner installed themselves in the cab of the Toyota than she admitted that she did not have to see a friend, that it was just an excuse to be with him. They drove several hundred meters south on the dirt road and made love, mangling one of Kontouche's scribbled lists.

Peter was struck by how dark were the depths of the jungle even with a midday sun suspended above the high trees. Shortly after he got the Toyota moving again, he spied the flecks and slivers in the shadows, and they paralleled the truck at forty kilometers an hour for fifteen kilometers.

In the far reaches of the Hilton sheets, he shared the shadows with Ilda. "You were assigned to make love to me," he accused in the darkness, the back of his hand against her thigh.

"You invited me to come here, remember?"

"So then you assigned yourself."

She laughed. "A rotten job, but somebody's got to do it."

"Is it getting any easier?"

Her hands came down over his ears, her fingers wandering across his smooth cheeks. "I love you, Peter. What you do now, our people will never forget."

"What I do now, I will never forgive." He rolled over to his stomach and spoke into the pillow. "You ask a lot of your gods." At that instant they entered the ineffable domain of lovers in sharing the identical thought and knowing that they shared it: Ilda's vote that he should leave Kili.

Kontouche now had much in common with Diop's men, and each one who came was awarded a peek at the scar made by the delicate implantation of his nonexistent bioprosthetic appendix. In two weeks Peter had done all he was going to do, and no one even hinted that he should reverse or delay his decision to leave. They had too many times seen his lack of reaction to conversation, to Kontouche's antics, and they had come to simply leave him alone. Peter understood his effect on them, and thought that, in a way, they would be glad to be rid of him.

Ibrahim was to drive him to the Kigali airport. As they had for the last month, they ate dinner in silence, and afterward in the early evening alongside the truck, he hugged Ilda and Kontouche goodbye.

Ibrahim drove slowly, also seeming to be going through a period of adjustment to the unwieldy Toyota, and the jungle shouldered in around them. Soon the men were trotting along both sides of the truck, emerging as imperceptibly as condensate from the fringes of the forest until they had formed two long columns stretching in front of and behind the vehicle. They made no attempt to communicate, but ran in silence, their attention directed forward down the road. Peter saw a few with automatic weapons and bandoleers of ammunition, but most carried spears and bows and quivers bristling with thin arrows. Striding easily out his open window an arm's length away was Guy Diop, twin arcs of white pigment streaked across his cheek.

"Quite an army we've made, Momoh," Peter said.

"They have half a chance. And I know why you did it."

Peter studied Ibrahim's smug expression in the weak light. "You love this valley as much as we do. Maybe more." He laughed and shook his head. "Maybe more."

Peter folded his arms across his chest. "You should've been a salesman."

The driver tapped the power brakes, lurching him and his passenger ahead.

"No, don't stop, idiot! Go! Forget the others!" The infrared binoculars smacked against the closed window, digging painfully into Albert Babangida's eye sockets. He fumbled for the switch and thumbed it backward mightily, as if the effort would speed the descent of the glass. About a hand's width short of its disappearance inside the door, he released the control and sought the microphone in the bracket under the dash. "Habyar! Habyar, get your unit back to the road! Head south, head south now, Moussa, and you will be just west of us!"

The general let his head roll back and screamed as the profile of a painted face pulled up next to his window. Spilling his boneless mass into the space beneath the dashboard, he recovered enough to find the switch and return the window upward until it was almost closed. His pistol was a painful jab in his hip against the front of the upholstered seat. "Faster!" he yelled at the ceiling, and the mike was in his hand. "Habyar, if you are not just west of us, I'll eat your nuts on a piece of toast!"

The driver joined him in a mindless howl as a shot clanged out, followed by a thumping deceleration as the right front tire shredded off the rim. "Faster!" the general roared, which elicited a gurgling noise from between a pair of skinny arms wrestling against the wheel.

Another shot, and the left front tire slogged and thudded and departed, doubling the clatter of rims against the hard-packed dirt road. Two more shots and the Mercedes was a loud, clumsy shell of a crawling monument.

"Why are we stopping!" The general poked his head up above the dashboard and followed the driver's transfixed stare to the road in front of them. In the headlights was a flank of warriors long since gone from Africa, an echo from the archives of National Geographic, their spears cocked at identical oblique angles up from the road, tips disappearing into the darkness above their heads.

The Mercedes began to move, coming up on the passenger side. "Habyar!" Babangida shrieked into the microphone. "We've lost our contingent! They've left us!" And up. "Habyar! Remember what happened to Berlouis!"

And with a crunch of ferns and brush, the Mercedes went over on its roof.

The Degas painting had not relinquished all its magic, Peter saw. It spoke now not only of love and lust and the wide divisions between people, but how worlds become wrapped in the trivial. It retained magic precisely because it had none.

A huge cat with flowing skin was in the Tanyi Valley, where it had been for centuries. Every shadow beneath its living roof was its property, its treasure, and each day it purred its pulsing tidal layers, killed and loved and lived with the purity of instinct. It was the one and only ward of its children, the chats d'ombre, who could do no more and no less than bring it an uncertain peace for an uncertain time. In return its teats dripped magic thick as fruit juice, sunlight like honey, an endless bounty of stars in a river gushing black as oil, as real as his hand on the coolness of Ilda's thigh. Magic clever enough for once to master a little science.

He kissed her quiet face and, turning to his side on the thin mattress, wondered if Kontouche had adjusted to sleeping alone.

THE END

MORE STORIES BY KEITH CROES

keith@croes.com