Rogue's March (24 page)

But Reddish wasn't convinced that Masakita hadn't heard the broadcast, that his whole jerry-rigged scenario hadn't been calculated to conceal the fact that he had.

“Is that what the radio said,” Masakita asked, “‘a foreign-inspired revolt by radical elements'? By radicals? By Marxists?”

“They didn't say Marxists,” Reddish replied carefully.

But Masakita didn't seem to hear. “Marxists? Is that what they were—the
jeunesse
at Mundi or Malunga?
Marxists
? They knew nothing about Marxism! Nothing! If that's what they are, then the communes are full of Marxists! Everywhere, not just Malunga—of people searching for the quickest, simplest way of expressing their hatred of their condition! Its message is simple: ‘Deliver us from futility, from poverty!' Is that so hard to understand? Must you be a communist to understand that? It's as quick as those soldiers' bullets! That's all this so-called Marxism is! ‘Deliver us from the past, from the present!' That's the message. It's one of weakness, not strength! Do you mean you don't understand that?”

“I understand it,” Reddish said, “but it's not me they're listening to. You either. Get your thinking cap on. I'll be back this afternoon.”

Chapter Three

A faint pall of smoke from the fires still smoldering in Malunga lay over the commercial district. The morning sun was bright on the deserted streets, the silence broken only by the occasional shriek of a siren and the rattle of army trucks deploying fresh troops or bearing away another group of political detainees.

“It's a classic case, isn't it?” Lowenthal said to Reddish at their nine-thirty meeting. “A military takeover, textbook style. They've smashed the rebels, taken the
présidence
, and dissolved the parliament.”

“Too classic.”

“But why no names yet?”

Reddish's mind was elsewhere. He'd run out of cigarettes and now lit a cold cigar he had no appetite for. “I don't know. Maybe they're still running scared.” He chased away the smoke with his hand.

“Scared? Who's left to be scared of?”

At seven o'clock the previous evening, the commo chief from upstairs had brought Reddish the first intercepts from army GHQ to units in the interior, appealing for support for the new Revolutionary Council. By ten, when the radio announcement had come announcing the fall of the regime, only three of the five army commands in the interior had pledged their support.

“Everybody,” Reddish said. “The army in the bush, us, the Belgians. You name it.” His eyes roamed the desktop restlessly. He knew what Lowenthal would write of Sunday's events, and he was worried. “Masakita's still on the prowl and that probably scares them too.”

“Some say his body was found in the wrecked compound.”

“Like the phantom transmitter?” Reddish asked, his gaze resting coolly on Lowenthal's anxious face.

“I admit it's still a little confusing, isn't it? But certainly you must have some suspicion about the new council, who the leader is. You must have a few clues.”

“None at all.” He wasn't prepared to write the political section's cables for them.

“Selvey seems to have drawn a blank too. I find that a bit puzzling, I must say.”

Maybe a solitary, Reddish had thought, someone whose genius wasn't recognized until it was there; the man who'd remained hidden all these years, lying beyond all conceivable expectations until his actions declared him no longer incognito. “It's all screwed up,” he said.

Lowenthal got up, leaving behind on Reddish's desk a copy of the political section's cable reporting the regime's fall. “Military Frustrates Radicals' Coup Attempt,” read the subject caption. “If you get anything new, let me know, will you?” Lowenthal asked, still disappointed. “Becker and I are working on a wrap-up cable.”

“It's not over yet. You'd better wait.”

But Lowenthal didn't turn as he went out.

“My, aren't we grumpy this morning,” said Sarah Ogilvy as she crossed in front of his desk with a small green watering can. She was in her mid-forties, as thin as a rake, with salt-and-pepper hair and an acerbic tongue that was the despair of the younger secretaries at the embassy. They saw in her the inevitable spinsterhood of the career service; she found in them the irresponsibility of girls who hadn't yet decided whether they wanted a career, an affair, or a husband. She'd worked with Reddish in the Middle East and had rejoined him in Africa, hoping to recoup her savings with the local hardship bonus after a five-year posting in Paris.

She opened the blinds and watered the potted plants she kept on his windowsill where the morning sun reached them.

“We've got enough to do around here without that,” Reddish complained.

“It must be the cigar,” she replied acidly, still watering the plants. “It's really too early for cigars, especially half-smoked ones.”

“Why don't you find me some cigarettes then?”

Part of Reddish's frustration lay on the desk blotter in front of him. The previous day he'd searched the files for any recent reports on clandestine arms movements which might explain the Soviet-made guns in Malunga. Sarah had searched Haversham's reading file and had discovered a cache of reports bundled together and squirreled away in Haversham's safe drawer. There were six reports in all describing Soviet arms shipments to MPLA units in Angola and Cabinda, all in chronological sequence and obtained within the past two months from intelligence sources in Istanbul, Antwerp, Algiers, and Paris.

She'd also brought with them a routing slip from Colonel Selvey's office which she believed had been attached to the six reports but had fallen free. The routing slip was from Major Miles, the army attaché, to Colonel Selvey, but the handwriting was barely legible: “Re Major Lutete: we've been [indecipherable] this guy for ten months. Can Les help out? We need more stuff.”

“This still doesn't make sense to me,” Reddish complained now. “Are you sure this buck slip was attached to these reports?”

“Positive.” She put down the watering can and crossed to his desk, looking at it again. “Yes, I'm sure.”

“Then what the hell's it say?”

She studied the handwriting again, frowning as she brought it closer. “We've been—” She stopped and began again. “We've been …
avoiding
this guy for ten months. Can Les help out? We need more stuff.”

“Avoiding?” Reddish asked dubiously, taking back the slip. “Avoiding?”

“I'm sure that's what it says.”

“I don't read that as an
a
.”

“It's a very poor
a
, but the whole thing is a terrible scrawl anyway. What difference does it make?”

“Can Les help out? How could Haversham help out if they were avoiding this guy Lutete?” He looked up at her, waiting.

“I don't know. Major Miles wanted Selvey to ask Haversham to help with Major Lutete, whoever he is. Who is he?”

“Major Lutete? Some jerk up at GHQ, I think.”

“Didn't Haversham mention it to you?”

“No.” He continued to study the routing slip. “I don't think that's what it says. I don't think ‘avoiding' is the right word.”

“Maybe your eyesight would be improved if you got rid of those ridiculous glasses.”

“Yeah, and maybe my disposition would be better if I knew what the hell was going on around here.”

“Probably Haversham didn't want to bother you with it,” she suggested. “It's a military matter anyway.”

“Are you sure this routing slip was attached to these six reports?”

“You're never satisfied, are you?” She left his office and returned a minute later with Haversham's reading file, which she spread on the desk in front of him. A few paper clips lay in the seam, fallen free from the documents within. “The six reports and the routing slip were right here, behind these letters.”

“Maybe the slip was attached to the letters.”

She turned over the letters on the other leaf of the folder. One was a typewritten note from Sylvia Haversham to the GSO asking for new drapes for the sewing room, the other a note from Sylvia to the commissary complaining about weevils in the flour. Haversham hadn't forwarded either of them.

“I guess that makes it official,” Reddish conceded, giving her back the folder. “‘Weevils in the flour.' That's bad. Maybe Sylvia Haversham did it.”

“Did what?”

But Reddish didn't answer, gazing thoughtfully out the window, as if something had just occurred to him.

The country team meeting, twice postponed the previous day, was scheduled for eleven o'clock. Reddish was ten minutes late as he crossed the sunny silence of the interior courtyard, where a set of outside steps climbed to the ambassador's suite and conference room on the second floor. In the APO mail room he'd found a letter from his daughter awaiting him, postmarked from the New England village near her school. He stopped as he read the first sentences:

Dear Daddy:

Don't get excited, I'm OK. I'm writing this in the library which is pretty creepy this time of nite, trying to write a stupid paper on Thucydides and the war between Athens and Sparta
.

“Hey, Mr. Reddish, sir,” called the Marine receptionist from the doorway behind him, “they're looking for you upstairs. Miss Browning's been calling all over.”

He moved on. In the center of the courtyard a jet of water splashed into a dark pool where a few plastic water lilies lay. An egret with soiled plumage stood at the edge of the pool, his black eyes fixed on the gassy silence about him. No fish or algae were in the pool, whose recirculated waters were kept clear with swimming pool compound following the ambassador's secretary's complaints about swamp odors in the courtyard. The egret had great difficulty balancing himself on one leg. His wings had been clipped by his proprietor, the general services officer, who managed the housekeeping staff, courted the senior officers, and lavished upon them the patronage he withheld from the nondiplomatic staff, like most of the third-floor communicators.

At the top of the steps, Reddish paused again over the letter:

I started looking through old National Geographics, finding the places we'd been, like Palmyra, Damascus, and everyplace else. I remembered the picnics we used to have, the way the sunlight was, our Arab cooks and drivers, and everyone else I loved when we were all together, you and mommy and me, and then I started to cry right here in the library with everyone looking at me like I was having a nervous breakdown or something
—

“You're late,” Miss Browning murmured without looking up from her typewriter. Taggert sat nearby, freshly groomed, each red hair in place as he guarded the door to the ambassador's conference room. Miss Browning, substituting briefly for the ambassador's secretary, had adopted the latter's imperious ways. The older woman disapproved of Reddish, but her instincts were social, not professional. He was never included on the ambassador's dinner or luncheon lists, seldom summoned to the privacy of his office, and was never the recipient of his telephone calls. In the absence of the ambassador's favor, she saw no reason to confer her own; Miss Browning was of the same disposition.

Taggert's duty at the outside door was normally that of one of the Marines; he would have been inside with the others except for the humiliation of the midnight dousing in the club pool, still fresh in his memory, even fresher in the memories of a few inside.

Reddish went in without waiting for the ceremonial door opening. He didn't care much for country team meetings and avoided them when he could, but Haversham's absence now made that impossible. For him, virtuosity in a crowded committee room meant little in the grayer world beyond, where clever answers weren't necessarily correct simply because they sounded brilliant around a board-room table.

The ambassador sat at the far end of the table, flanked by Becker and Lowenthal. The economic counselor and AID director sat farther along. Colonel Selvey slouched in the middle opposite a red-faced General Leggard, the newly arrived chief of the US military mission. The chairs along the walls were crowded with those of lesser rank, all invited guests on this solemn occasion, like freshmen at a graduate school colloquium.

Reddish took Haversham's vacant chair at the front of the table. To his right sat the administrative counselor, to his left Dick Franz, the USIS public affairs officer. He had once been a radio announcer and European stringer for a major news network. Wisdom and authority were present in the resonance of his voice, but without someone's prepared text he was an actor without a script, his sonority dribbling into clever quips and cleverer gossip.

Franz passed him a copy of the draft telegram that Becker was now explaining. Becker and Lowenthal had worked on it most of the morning, describing for Washington the events that had led to the fall of the old regime. Reddish skimmed through it quickly, searching for conclusions. They were identical to those of the national radio bulletin announcing the fall: the military had seized power when the President, paralyzed by cabinet and parliamentary discord, had failed to meet the challenge of the radical left armed with foreign-made guns.

Reddish wasn't surprised by the analysis, which was plausible, if premature; but only diplomats like them could have written it, and only fellow careerists back in Washington could have believed it. They had no time to believe anything else. Like most country team meetings, the cable was diverting theater but dismal history. Those around the table were often convinced of the guile and duplicity of foreign political motivation, but they had little insight into their own.

“… we think it reasonably accurate to say that a coup d'etat has taken place and that it was led by the military,” Lowenthal was saying. “In the classical sense it should undoubtedly be called a countercoup, since there is undeniable evidence that foreign-made arms were introduced into the capital on Sunday, if not earlier, with the intent of mobilizing the communes and overthrowing the regime. The military struck only when it was convinced of the likelihood of success by the rebels. Quite obviously, they saw the possibility of a radical takeover.…”