The man appointed to keep Burton company was six feet three inches tall, broad-shouldered, huge-chested and massively limbed. He was wearing a white doeskin headband, a white kid-skin vest, a white doeskin belt with a broad silver buckle on which was an alto relief wolfs head, tight white doeskin trousers, and white doeskin boots reaching to just below his knees. His face was broad and high-cheekboned, and his nose was large, long and aquiline. He looked more like Sitting Bull than a Negro, except for his everted lips and kinky hair. When he smiled, he was craggily handsome.
He introduced himself with a conventional handshake, announcing in a rich basso that he was Bill Williams and was pleased to know Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. Burton was not sure that his use of the title was not a put-on.
“Tom Turpin didn’t appoint me to act as your faithful Indian guide and bodyguard,” he said, grinning. “I volunteered.”
“Oh?” Burton said, raising his eyebrows. “May I ask why?”
“You may. I read about you; you intrigue me. Besides, Turpin has told me much about how you led him and the others across the mountains and into the tower.”
“I’m flattered,” Burton said. “However, I do have a slight bone to pick with you. Why did you almost run over me with your motorcycle?”
Williams laughed and said, “If I’d tried, I would’ve made it.”
“And the pejorative?”
“I just felt like it. Choppers bring out the meanness in me. I also wanted to test your mettle. I didn’t mean anything personally.”
“It makes you feel good to upset Whitey?”
“Sometimes. If you’re truly objective, you won’t blame me.”
“Hasn’t sixty-seven years on The River changed your attitude any?”
“That’s something you never get rid of. I don’t let it bother me though. It’s like a dull toothache you get used to,” Williams said. “Want a drink?”
“White wine. Any kind.”
Burton had decided to stay sober.
“Let’s get it in one of the rooms upstairs. It’ll be quieter there, and we won’t have to shout to hear ourselves.”
“Very well,” Burton said, wondering what Williams was up to.
They got into the elevator with a laughing, shouting, giggling crowd. On the way up there were cries of protest as the riders groped each other. Someone passed gas before they reached the second floor, and there were shouts of amused outrage. When the doors opened, the culprit, the man blamed, anyway, was thrown headlong onto the floor.
“Everybody’s feeling good, real good,” Williams murmured. “Won’t be so later on, though. You armed?”
Burton patted his jacket pocket.
“Beamer.”
The rooms they passed were, except for one, packed and loud. Here a dozen men and women were sitting and watching a movie on a wall-screen. Burton, curious, stopped to look in. It was one that Frigate had insisted he see, the actors Laurel and Hardy selling Christmas trees in Los Angeles in July. The viewers were laughing uproariously.
“They’re New Christians,” Williams said. “Quiet, harmless folks. They couldn’t refuse Turpin’s invitation, they’re so polite. But they don’t hold with most of the goings-on here.”
They found an empty room far down the hall around the corner. On the way, Burton admired the reproductions of oil paintings. Rembrandt, Rubens, David’s “Death of Marat,” many by Russians, Kiprensky, Surikov, Ivanov, Repin, Levitan, and others.
“Why so many Slavs?” Burton said.
“There’s a reason.”
They got their drinks from a converter. Burton sat down and lit up a cigar.
After a silence, Williams said, “I’m not American, you know.”
Burton puffed out smoke and said, “You would have fooled me if Turpin had not told me you were Russian.”
“I was born Rodion Ivanovitch Kazna in 1949 in the black ghetto of the city of Kiev.”
“Amazing,” Burton said. “I didn’t know that there were Negroes … no, I take that back. There were some Russian black slaves. Pushkin was descended from one.”
“What very few people knew, and the Russian government took good care to conceal, was that about twelve million blacks were living in segregated areas of Russian cities. They were the descendants of slaves. The common Russian didn’t want to mix with them any more than the whites of America did with their blacks, and the government, secretly, of course, approved and enforced that policy. Despite which, there was some interracial screwing, as always. Can’t keep the blood pure no matter how you try. A stiff prick has no bias, and all that. One of my great-grandfathers was a white Russian, and a grandfather was an Uzbek. Turkic-speaking, he never did learn to speak Russian well, a Mongol.
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