Rogue's March (34 page)

Wet black faces, kerosene lanterns here and there, the clatter of a distant helicopter. Few turned to look. The words, sentences, and paragraphs came pouring out:

“… and what strange state of affairs is this? A President so terrified by the suffering of his people that he hasn't the courage to lift one finger on their behalf! Listen! Listen to me! Did you come here to chatter like parrots, like old women!…”

Crispin moved closer, carrying his unsold baskets, oblivious of the soldiers dispersed through the crowd.

“… so we put a simple proposal to the President! We would put down the fighting in Malunga ourselves! The soldiers would do it, imposing martial law, and after calm was restored, we would return to our barracks! We would let the people decide whether what we did was right or wrong! But the President betrayed us, just as he betrayed you! He sent word to the national police that we were to be arrested—me, N'Sika, Lutete, and Fumbe—all of us. Could we permit that? No! Never! If we were to be arrested let it be done after the rebels in Malunga were disarmed. If we soldiers were to be brought to justice, then let us be brought before the people with Pierre Masakita, Lule, and those others who gave guns to their followers in Malunga! Let us be brought to justice with those
vin rouge
intellectuals who would have made the blood run in the ditches of Malunga as the
vin rouge
had run in the veins of the colonizers, the same vin rouge these killers had drunk to get their courage up! Vin rouge imported from abroad, red wine, the white man's drink, not ours, not
masinga ya mbila
, the palm wine of our own forests!

“If we soldiers were to be brought to justice, then let us be brought before the people with the President and his cabinet, with those politicians who talked the money out of the people's pockets and into their own, who talked of economic progress and social progress, of education for the masses, maize for the hungry, and unity for the nation, who talked of this and that, night and day, day and night, who talked of everything but their villas in Belgium and Switzerland, the Mercedeses in their garages, their fleets of taxis and trucks, their coffee and palm oil plantations, their lackeys and whores. Progress here, progress there, but what progress? Quel progrès? What progress? Progrès
à wapi
!”

Crispin stopped, distraught, as the roar swept the front ranks first and then engulfed the rear, drowning N'Sika's voice:

“
Progrès à wapi! Progrès à wapi! Progrès à wapi
!”

“Listen to me! Shut up and listen! There are other things too! Other things we discovered! After the minister of finance and the governor of the national bank heard about the fighting in Malunga, they tried to flee the country! Why would they do that? Why would they run away like criminals? Were they criminals? Of course they were criminals! Listen, the old President once talked of how vast our cash reserves were, as vast as the great river over there behind you! Was that true? Did you believe him? Of course it wasn't true! So these two thieves were discovered hiding away in the airport baggage room, where we found them, their suitcases filled with dollars. Diamonds too! Of course.

“And what about these reserves, all this money that the country had accumulated, all these reserves! Do you know what these reserves were, what they are! Just three pieces—underwear, pants, and shirt! That's all! Just what you're wearing—underwear, pants, and shirt! Three pieces, that's all. Where has the money gone! To Belgium, of course—to Belgium, France, and Switzerland! And what did these Belgians and Frenchmen give back in return? Peacocks for the presidential garden! So we shot them! The Revolutionary Court sentenced them and we shot them! So we shot these thieves, this scum that these years of confusion and anarchy had given us—shot them as we'll shoot others who'll be tried and sentenced by the Revolutionary Court …”

The crowd was deathly silent.

Canvas-covered trucks had moved slowly down the closed street and stopped near the wooden platform.

“… so we cast out the politicians, just as we smashed the rebels in Malunga. What choice did we have? We had no choice! Because their leaders, the provocateurs Masakita and Lule, had given them something more dangerous than the drunkenness of foreign ideology! What was it? You know what it was—something that kills like the mamba, something that kills ten, twenty, thirty men with a single flick of his red tongue—
moko, moko, moko
, one by one, all of us, each of you.…”

He held up the automatic rifle, holding it high over his head as the crowd roared its anger: “
Te, te, te
!”

The soldiers dragged the ragged, frightened youths from the truck beds and herded them, fifty or sixty strong, along the cockpit of green grass in front of the platform. Their uniforms were torn, black with grime and blood, their hands shackled behind their backs. Many were in their early twenties, but they looked younger now, as helpless as Ivory Market thieves trussed up by the police after their capture. Some were in their teens, the orphans of the Kwilu or Orientale, their families dead in the rebellions, harvested from the dense green forests and savannahs by an inept government to rot in the urban slums.

Crispin was too far away to recognize any of the faces.

“… and there you see the green mambas of Malunga, the hoodlums and thieves who were misled, betrayed, corrupted, first by the old politicians, and then by the
vin rouge
ideologues! But look at them now! Their jaws are empty, their fangs drawn, their poison gone!”

They brought the guns. The paras carried them from a pair of flatbed trucks, slung heavily in tarpaulins or pine crates and dumped in the roadbed with that heavy ironlike resonance unmistakable anyplace on earth. The flashbulbs flared in the darkness. Photographers and cameramen leaned over the restraining ropes.

“… revolution is a man's work, not a child's. It's our work—forget about the green mambas! Listen to me! Listen! The revolution is won together or not at all. But it takes work, hard work!
Eeer wa
! Do you hear me!
Eeer wa
! We must push and pull together, all of us!…”

Crispin listened as the crowd began to take up the work chant of the riverboats and barges, fields and forests, heard wherever two or more Africans had labored together, driven under the lash of that primitive chant.

N'Sika was holding something aloft, a paper taken from his pocket, lifted in the glare of the klieg lights, but Crispin had missed his words.

“… and it won't be easy! Never! Many will be against us. They will talk against us, lie against us, plan against us! They will say we've cheated them! All right! Let them talk! But it's our copper we're taking back, our mines, our minerals! The order is here—in my hand! We won't change that—never! We can't change our pride, our manhood, our revolution! Can we be children again, crawling back through our own filth? No! Never! So let our enemies know that—that we can no more change our revolution than we can change our race or the color of our skin! No! Never! And if others seek to humiliate us because of that, we must either submit to our own degradation or we must fight! Only weak men and women, prostitutes and lackeys, are accomplices in their own degradation! We are what God has made us—Africans! We will fight! But it is the revolution that will carry our battle, not plots or counterplots! Only hard work will win it, not words or foreign guns! So together we will change the condition of this nation! But peacefully, with hard work and sacrifice! I have talked too much tonight. I'll talk to you again. For tonight, it is enough. There is much work to do.”

Crispin stood hollow and frightened in the surging crowd, baskets at his feet, watching N'Sika leave. N'Sika had nationalized the economy. His party's revolution had been stolen by the new regime, his life denied him for a third time.

Reddish stood on the fringes of the crowd near the wooden barricade.

“
Flamand,
” a nearby voice whispered to him. “
Flamand! Ecoutez, flamand! Monoko non ngui! Français te. Français na yo te
! Listen, European, white man, or whoever you are! Listen! He speaks our language, not yours! Lingala, not French! What are you doing here? Go home, eh. Home is where you belong,
flamand
!”

Reddish turned to see an old man stick his tongue into his fist and then hurl its imaginary demon to the ground.

The crowd was slow to disperse. The faces Reddish passed as he moved away still wore the exhilaration of victory, like spectators leaving a victorious soccer match. On the boulevard a limousine from the Belgian Embassy led a cortege of diplomatic cars through the thinning crowd. The driver stupidly tried to force his way through the foot traffic and honked his horn furiously. A crowd surrounded the limousine almost immediately, a few beginning to rock it back and forth as they took up Colonel N'Sika's work chant, “
EEER wa! Eeer wa
!” The mood wasn't ugly, just jubilant. A squad of soldiers put an end to the demonstration.

He walked back to the embassy through the dark streets. Lowenthal was in shirtsleeves at his desk, the outer suite in confusion as old files were being rifled for copies of the Belgian minerals accords and the treaties and agreements protecting Western investment. The embassy didn't yet have a copy of N'Sika's speech, but Dick Franz at USIS had taped it, and one of the USIS locals was translating it.

“They say he didn't mention the Soviets,” Lowenthal greeted him in agitation. “He didn't talk about Russian guns?”

Reddish sank down on the sofa next to the door. “He talked a little about foreign ideology—
vin rouge
—but it was ambiguous.”

“But certainly the Soviet guns were there. He couldn't hide them.”

“The guns he showed were a grab bag—Belgian NATO rifles, some old Enfields, some Soviet carbines, even a few M-14s.”

“So he's not going to throw the Russians out? Everyone thought the mob would march on the Soviet and East German missions. That's where most of the press corps was, on the street outside the two embassies, waiting.”

Reddish said, “N'Sika tricked them off the scent. No one was thinking nationalization. They were thinking about the guns. He couldn't very well nationalize the economy and shut down the Russians. He needs to keep his options open.” He searched his pockets for a cigarette, but the package was empty. “But it was a good speech. It worked. I didn't think he could do it, but he did.”

“It doesn't worry you?”

“A lot of things worry me. I just haven't had a chance to think about them. Hello, Abner.”

Colonel Selvey stood angrily in the doorway. “What the shit's going on? I almost got my goddamned window busted out again.”

“Andy and I were just talking about it,” Lowenthal said.

“What'd N'Sika tell those baboons, anyway?”

“What they've been waiting to hear,” Reddish replied.

“So what kind of regime are we talking about?” Lowenthal asked.

“N'Sika's,” Reddish answered laconically. “‘Moderate and pro-Western in its political orientation.' Isn't that what you guys wrote in your cable two days ago?”

“Hindsight is twenty-twenty,” Lowenthal said.

“So it's all fucked up again,” Selvey put in.

“Pretty much,” Reddish conceded.

“How do you write that State Department-style?” Selvey asked Lowenthal. “What do you tell the White House? ‘Dear Doc Kissinger. If you birds think you got troubles in Vietnam, we just wanted to let you know. It's worse over here, and these bimbos ain't just wearing black pajamas. It's all black.'”

“That raises an interesting point.” Lowenthal remembered. “What about the Soviets?”

“Raises shit,” Selvey snorted. “You birds couldn't raise a bamboo dildo in a Bangkok nooky house, and that's the best there is. C'mon Andy. I wanna show you a gadget DIA just farmed out.”

“What about the Sovs?” Lowenthal called out.

“We'll talk about it,” Reddish said.

Selvey found two cans of beer in the closet refrigerator, popped the lids, and gave one to Reddish. He led him into his office, brought a jar of peanuts from his desk drawer, poured them into a clay pot, and closed the door.

“Maybe I'm not smart in the same way you birds are,” he began, sinking down behind his desk, “but I'm not the redneck or the Tennessee plowboy everyone thinks I am. I don't talk their talk and they don't talk mine.” He drank from the can, sighed and sat back again, his feet lifted across the corner of his desk. “But I just don't understand what the hell's going on. None of it makes any goddamn sense to me. I had a contact up at G-2, a major we sent to the US last year for training who's been giving us a little stuff. His name's Lutete. Maybe Les told you.”

“I heard about it.”

“For the past month, this bird's been after us to give him everything we could on Sov or Chicom arms shipments and military supplies—to Brazza, Burundi, Tanzania, the liberation groups, you name it. So we went along. The whole fucking time GHQ knew Masakita and his crowd were expecting guns from someone, but the little fucker doesn't say a word about that.” Selvey sat forward suddenly. “You know who his cousin is?”

“N'Sika's deputy.”

Selvey was disappointed. “Who told you that? Miles?”

“Bondurant. He said you wanted to open up a channel to him.”

“Channel, shit.” Selvey sank back. “Miles saw him at the airport last night when he came in. They're shipping him out to the command in Bukavu. Miles couldn't get squat out of him, just that he was being reassigned. They diddled us, diddled us good.”

Reddish said, “That's the way it goes.”

Selvey studied him morosely, still angry. “Just the same old shit for you, is that it? All the time this shoot-up was coming, this asshole we trained in the States knew something was up and didn't say a goddamned word.”