Reckoning (16 page)

“You dye your hair?” Bombwe asked. He spoke good French.

“Yes. I felt too conspicuous in Africa with fair hair.”

Bombwe smiled maliciously. “You did not dye your skin?”

“Not so easy to do.”

Bombwe pretended to find something else wrong with the passport. “What brings you among us?”

“I am an anthropologist. I want to study customs.”

“Pygmies?”

“Yes, pygmies,” Dockrell confirmed. “In the Ituri forest, near the village of Diku.”

“When you find these pygmies, what will you do with them?” Bombwe seemed genuinely curious to know.

Dockrell could see that Bombwe had a cop’s talent for asking simple questions that were hard to answer. “I’d go around with
someone for a set period of time and see exactly what he did, who he talked with, what he ate, whether he became angry or
laughed, whether he sang or prayed or took a nap. We compare that with what a similar person might do in the United States,
and we compare the differences and similarities.”

The policeman was back to examining the passport again. “It says you were born in Jonzac. Where in France is that?”

“North of Bordeaux, up near the town of Cognac.”

“I’ve never heard a Frenchman speak like you.”

“We speak a patois with a heavy accent in Jonzac,” Dockrell said, allowing a note of impatience to creep into his voice. His
hometown of Summerside was at the French end of Prince Edward Island, and unlike many Anglos there, Dockrell learned to speak
French as it
was spoken there. The trouble was that this 17th-century Acadian French sounded weird in comparison to the modern European
language.

Bombwe pocketed the passport. “We might have a problem.”

Dockrell ignored this. “I will need to hire someone to take me to the forest and find me local guides. If you know someone,
tell them I will pay what they ask.” He put his hand out for the passport.

The policeman took it from his pocket and handed it to him. “We leave early tomorrow morning.”

Dockrell didn’t need a wakeup call next morning. The heat radiating down from his room’s metal roof drove him out into the
eight o’clock sunshine. A driver was waiting in a beat up old taxi, brushing flies off his face with his hand. When he saw
Dockrell, he waved to him and got out to open the trunk for his bag. He didn’t speak French and Dockrell had no Swahili, so
they didn’t get anywhere with each other. On the road outside town, they stopped for Bombwe, who was asleep in the shade of
a tree. The driver switched off his engine and was apparently going to wait for the policeman to wake at his convenience.
Dockrell got out and shouted to him.

They drove fast on dirt roads into deepening forest until early afternoon. The driver made a sharp turn onto a track that
was no more than two wheel ruts through thick jungle. Both he and the policeman seemed to know where they were going. As they
hurtled along at breakneck speed, bushes slapped the windshield and
scraped along the sides. Then, without any warning, the driver braked, threw open his door and ran into the jungle. The policeman
was only a few steps behind him. Thinking the car was about to explode, Dockrell jumped out and threw himself face down on
the ground behind a tree.

Nothing happened, and after a minute or so he heard shouts from the direction in which the two men had gone. He ran after
them and found them with two other men at some chopped down palm trees with big earthenware pots under the cutoff point of
each trunk. The two men looked up and saw him.

“Muzungu!”
they shouted, and Bombwe had to wave his big folding knife in their faces before they quieted down. He lectured them sternly
in Swahili. To Dockrell’s surprise both men began speaking French.

“We are not superstitious and primitive,” one said.

The other said, “My brother and I were educated at the mission school. We do not believe in old-fashioned things.”

Dockrell had no idea what they were talking about. The policeman said that they were illegally making palm wine. The sap of
the palm collected in the pots and fermented on its own. He gave Dockrell a wood cup of the wine, and it tasted almost exactly
like Hearty Burgundy California jug wine.

“These men must pay a fine of three hundred zaires each or spend many months in jail,” Bombwe announced.

Dockrell picked up his cue. “If I paid their fines for them, would they guide me into the forest?”

“You are BaLese,” Bombwe said to them. “You could do that.”

“Only a judge can impose a fine on us,” one said.

Bombwe smiled. “A judge would not make a bargain for you with this gentleman here.”

After more arguments in Swahili, it was settled among them. Dockrell paid Bombwe six hundred zaires. At the official rate,
this was about $180; Dockrell had bought his zaires on the black market for one-third of this rate. He hadn’t been in the
big time long enough to have stopped looking for bargains.

Dockrell and the two BaLese men would go on by taxi, leaving the policeman at the winery. The taxi driver would pick him up
on his way back, and Bombwe would leave the winery in charge of the men’s relatives.

As they drove away in the taxi, one of the brothers looked back and said sadly, “He will sell it all while we are away and
keep the money.”

The other disagreed. “He will drink as much as he can and fall down. The rest will be stolen while he sleeps.”

Richard Dartley stayed behind, at the edge of the smoke-filled clearing deep within the Ituri forest, as Dieudonne went to
talk with the people there. There were eight domed huts in the clearing, thatched with big leaves. If Dartley had lain full
length in any of them, his feet would have poked out the side.

Dieudonne waved him forward. Three men, five women and a dozen children of various sizes stood near the smoking campfire.
The men were about four foot nine, the women from four three to four five. All wore a piece of cloth over their genitals,
held in place by a vine around the waist. Their skin was a golden brown color, as was their hair, lighter than those of the
BaLese. The women had their teeth chipped into points and wore painted black lines on their faces and black circles on their
arms and legs. Their breasts were bare.

They did not stare at Dartley and seemed more shy than frightened of him.

“Do they think I might eat them?” he asked.

“Everyone in the Ituri believes that,” Dieudonne responded. “But the white man you seek at Diku has been there some time,
and he hasn’t harmed anybody. Since you are a friend of his, they think that you too may be safe. But they will be careful.”

They watched Dartley open his knapsack and take out a pack of Marlboros. He gave cigarettes to everyone except two babies.
They grew considerably more relaxed after that, although the mothers still tensed when their children went too close to him.
Two of the men offered to take them to Diku. They spoke the BaLese language with Dieudonne, but knew not a word of French
or Swahili and had no language of their own. The four set out along the forest path. Dartley had just stepped over a column
of driver ants, which were dragging a small dead bird to their nest, when the leading pygmy stopped and held up his hand.
Dartley
froze. It was the exact same gesture the point man of a patrol used in the Vietnam jungles to let those behind him know he
thought something was ahead. But this African jungle was peaceful.

“Can you hear?” Dieudonne asked him.

Dartley listened intently but could hear nothing.

“They are hunting,” Dieudonne explained.

They moved forward again and after a few minutes Dartley heard an odd clicking sound and some faint shouts. He had always
thought he had excellent hearing, but obviously he was not in the same league as Ituri residents. They met up with seven pygmy
men, some of whom were smaller than the two with Dartley. But all were muscular and in Olympic training condition. Dartley
passed around cigarettes, not smoking himself, of course. He still got an occasional pang for them, but nothing serious. It
didn’t bother him to have cigarettes in his knapsack or to have people smoking around him. It had taken him some years to
reach this state of indifference, and he still had vivid memories of the days, weeks and months when he first quit smoking.

Dartley knew from the way the men eyed his automatic rifle that they knew what it was. He was told that they were hunting
deer but he was not invited to use his gun to help them. They used small bows and short metal-tipped arrows. The clicking
he had heard earlier were wood clappers tied around the necks of tiny hunting dogs. According to Dieudonne, these dogs didn’t
bark much and this was why the clappers were needed.

Eight of the pygmies stretched into a long curving line across the jungle, and the ninth took the dogs some distance away
into the bush. Dartley and Dieudonne tried to keep out of the way.

They heard the clicking and an occasional yelp as the dogs approached, spread out and sniffing through the brush. They flushed
one small animal, hardly bigger than themselves, and some gave chase, driving it toward the waiting pygmies. One lined up
his bow and arrow on it, loosed the arrow and hit the animal in its side. The animal kept running, hounded by the dogs. There
was no wild shooting. Only the man closest to the fleeing creature shot at it and never missed. The creature lay heaving on
its side on the ground, with four arrows buried halfway up their shafts into it. Dartley was amazed to see that it was a tiny
deer, about the size of a dachshund.

Pygmy men with pygmy dogs hunting pygmy deer—he felt kind of out of scale in this place.

Paul Egan was at Diku when they arrived. He was sitting outside a mud-walled hut on a bench hacked from a tree trunk, a rifle
leaning next to him. Dartley turned the selector to automatic and sent a burst of three shots over his head that tore chunks
out of the sunbaked mud high on the hut wall. Egan reached for his gun but saw that he was beat. Dartley walked across the
clearing, keeping him covered.

Egan growled, “You’d never have got me before a week ago. I started getting careless back then.” His
voice was thick and Dartley noticed a small clay jug by his side.

“I’m not the one who’s out to kill you. Global sent me here to save your ass. “ Dartley took his rifle off his shoulder to
prove his point and leaned it against the hut.

“Christ, you sure knocked the wind outta me. That your idea of a joke?”

“You said yourself you’d gotten careless,” Dartley said. “I wanted you to see just how careless.”

“You think I should hide in a hut all day?”

“No. But it shouldn’t be too hard to arrange things so that no one can approach this village unseen.”

Egan snorted in disgust and raised the clay jug to his mouth. He didn’t offer any to Dartley. Egan was a big man, six-foot-one,
and overweight. He had started to let himself go. He had several days’ growth of beard, he was unwashed and his clothes were
crumpled, greasy and stank.

“I’d gotten around to thinking no one could find me here,” he said.

“Nick Avedesian thought that, on an installation in the North Sea.”

“They got him?”

Dartley nodded. He told Egan of recent developments. Egan had headed into the jungle after the first four deaths and had heard
about none of the others. To be sure that Peter Ligeti in Charleston was protected, Dartley said he was dead also.

“Out of the ten of us, there’s only me and Murdoch left?” Egan asked incredulously.

“Damn right.”

He looked Dartley over. “Since you did such a lousy job of protecting Avedesian and Ligeti, what makes you think you can save
me?”

“I know more now than I did before. It will be one man. Now he has to face two of us instead of you alone.” He told him what
he knew about Dockrell and was pleased to see that Egan had shut up and was taking it all in.

The villagers who had fled at the sound of gunfire were returning, being coaxed by Dieudonne. Egan shouted some words to them
also and they responded.

“You’ve learned their language?”

“Bits and pieces. What I need to know. I’ve been a field geologist all my life, and I’m fifty-six. Except for Russia and China,
I’ve worked just about everywhere else. I can get by in some lingos that the Harvard profs haven’t even gotten around to naming.
When you don’t have anyone to speak English to for weeks on end, you’d be surprised how fast you learn what people are saying.”

Dartley asked, “Are you looking for oil here or just hiding?”

“Bit of both.”

“Any luck?”

“Well, so far as hiding goes, it seems I can forget it,” Egan said good-humoredly and took a swig from the jug. “As for oil,
all a geologist like me can do is
map the rocks on the surface and from that try to guess what the strata and faults and intrusions underneath look like. If
I see signs of any likely-looking traps for a migrating liquid, Global will send a seismic sounding crew in. If their results
look promising, they might drill a test hole—but once you talk of drilling you begin to talk in millions of dollars. There’s
guys like me tramping around in every armpit of the world. We’re crazy, so we come cheap.” He waved his hand in what could
have been an imperial gesture. “I kinda like this place. The Ituri ain’t at all bad as jungles go.”

“Diku is two days’ walk that way,” one of the brothers told Dockrell.

Dockrell looked down what appeared to be an animal trail winding off into the bushes. Was the man lying to him?

“I want to drive there,” Dockrell told him in a white-master voice.

The man laughed, walked down the trail a few strides and held out his arms until they spanned the width of clearance between
the bushes. “It’s impossible,” he said, as if speaking to a child.

Dockrell would have kicked his ass, only he hadn’t wanted to turn the three men against him, particularly the taxi driver,
who was showing signs that he’d had enough. Instead he took out his map of the area and showed them a road to Diku which was
clearly marked there. The brothers shook their heads in wonder at the map. One of them pointed out something to Dockrell
which he hadn’t noticed before. Although, the map had been recently printed, it was a reproduction of one printed in Brussels
in 1913.