“I’ll go.”

“You will?”

I nodded.

And so I went to the post office and told them to hold my mail and went to Brooklyn and boarded Minna with Kitty and her grandmother and tied my money belt around my waist and put my passport in my pocket and went away. I caught a Sabena flight to Brussels and another Sabena flight to Leopoldville. I flew Central African Airways into Nairobi, where I knew some people. They arranged for the necessary papers, and I got a slot as a deck hand on a Portuguese freighter that got me to Griggstown in five days.

It would have been easier to fly directly to Griggstown. Almost directly, anyway, via either Capetown or Salisbury. But I felt it wouldn’t be a good idea to let the Modonoland officials see my name on an incoming passenger list.

Modonoland and I go back a ways.

The opium, for example. It was largely my fault that it was growing there. Once upon a time I’d been talking to Abel Vaudois, a Swiss who lives in Bangkok, and I guess I gave him the idea of growing opium in Africa, and he subsequently made the deal with Knanda Ndoro.

So I had felt responsible, and when Abel sent me a bank draft as payment for the idea, I gave a large portion of it to the MMM. And if it hadn’t been for the MMM there would have been no white supremacist coup, and if it hadn’t been for me I don’t suppose there would have been much of an MMM, so-

Well, one thing leads to another, doesn’t it? Modonoland bothered the hell out of me. I hated to read news stories from there. They all seemed personally accusing.

All of which did not quite add up to enough of a reason to pursue wild geese in that beleaguered nation. I might feel compelled to send them a check now and then, and write occasional propaganda for the cause, and give aid and comfort to any MMM comrades who came to New York. But to chase all the way over there in search of the Retriever and the black militant who had been sent to retrieve him, that was something else.