Rogue's March (36 page)

They had dinner at a hilltop restaurant overlooking the city, sitting outside on the deserted terrace, watching the rain clouds move in. She told him about the lectures she'd attended the previous winter in Paris. He described a few of the more remote regions of the interior that interested her. As they left the restaurant, the rain began to fall, huge sporadic drops at first, but then in sheets as they reached the old Belgian residential section, flooding the tarmac and flailing green leaves and purple blossoms from the trees. The Houlets hadn't returned.

“Please, come have a brandy,” she suggested. “It's raining so terribly.”

He had no interest in seeing the Houlets. “It will pass in a minute. Thanks for the evening. I enjoyed it.”

“But I must ask you something. Please. It's quite important.”

He let her out at the front door, drove forward to park his car at the edge of the drive, and ran back through the rain to join her in the hall. She led him to the front salon. The green marble fireplace held a small grate piled with kindling and ceremonial logs. A felt-covered card table had been readied nearby, decks of cards, coasters, and ashtrays in place. An Empire sofa faced the fireplace across a small Chinese carpet.

“Not bridge you were talking about, was it?”

“Bridge? No. I don't play. Do you?” She brought glasses and a crystal decanter from the antique cabinet. The rain rushed through the trees outside and flooded the spouts beyond the windows, pouring from the gutters. She stopped, listening. “Have you ever been to Entebbe in the rain, hours and hours of it, just like this? Just gray skies and rain.” She shivered in recollection, the chill touching her. “Like prison, destroying the will that way. It had that effect on me.
Africa
, I thought. I don't want to remember it that way. Did it affect you the same way at first?”

“Asia did, during the monsoon. Not here so much. It goes pretty fast.”

“The wind on Santorini affected me that way too. My hotel was high on the mountain and the wind blew all night long. I had to fight against it. It was dreadful, terrible at first. It took away my courage.” She removed a folded map from the cabinet drawer.

“So it wasn't all vacation, the Greek islands.”

“No,” she admitted. “There were many nights like that, mornings too.” She turned toward the front windows.

He guessed that she wasn't planning to catch Houlet's plane after all, but was thinking about a trip to the bush and wanted his advice.

“It's a car,” he said.

She put the map away. The Houlets entered a few minutes later, voices unnaturally loud, still amplified by the din of the crowded reception they'd just left. They were accompanied by Armand and a young brunette from the French cultural center. Houlet was short, plump, and bald with a cherub's wet mouth; Madame Houlet was more stately but also plump, her brown eyes warmer, with a curiosity her husband's lacked. Her perfume filled the room, which suddenly seemed very alien to Reddish, very French, very uxorial.

“Back so soon, Gabrielle? No more adventures? Ah, Reddish. A very great pleasure. You know my wife, I believe, and Mr. Armand. And Miss Foucart, to be sure.” His voice was still very loud, even aggressive. A late supper was waiting, but Houlet decided to have drinks first. He energetically searched for glasses and whiskey. Gabrielle had withdrawn silently to the sofa near the fireplace.

“I didn't see you there,” Armand recalled, speaking of the reception. “You were right not to go. The usual crowd. Wretched food. And no one from the new Revolutionary Council was there, not a soul.”

“Does that surprise you?” Houlet asked.

“No, not much,” Reddish said. “Still feeling their way, I suppose.”

“Of course. Precisely. But of course, Gabrielle wasn't there to enlighten us.” Houlet called across the room to Gabrielle. “I was just saying to Reddish that we had no one at the reception to enlighten us.”

“Shhh,” Madame Houlet said, hand lifted to her silver-gray coiffure. Fixing her eyes suddenly on Reddish, she smiled.

“But of course you and Gabrielle had much to talk about, I'm sure,” Houlet continued loudly.

“Extraordinary, isn't it,” Armand murmured with a vague smile, “that you could have been in Malunga while the assault was under way and then drive out quite calmly, past the bodies in the road, guns going off in all directions. Gabrielle has told us.”

Houlet winked at Reddish. “And to see everything so clearly,” he added. “Was she really so composed as all that, even to describe the number of bullets fired—”

“
Shhh,
” Madame Houlet urged, setting out coasters. “Do you play bridge, Mr. Reddish?”

“Not very well, I'm afraid.”

“I'm sure Gabrielle was very heroic,” Armand said.

“But of course,” Houlet announced, clumsily pouring out drinks. “But of course she was heroic.
Le livre du moi est toujours
héroïque.”

Thunder roared in the distance and pealed across the rooftops. Houlet flinched in mock fright. The rain came harder. “What was that?” he asked as he restoppered the decanter. “Gabrielle's guns again?”

“
Shhh,
” Madame Houlet insisted from the sofa, where she'd gone to join Gabrielle. “Shall we light the fire.”

“But why all this
shhh
?” Houlet continued. “Why all this silence.” Madame Houlet studiously ignored him. “My wife is a romantic,” Houlet volunteered to Reddish, lowering his voice. “Like Gabrielle. But Africa's no place for romantics. God, no. Writers either.” His voice dropped even further. “God save us from those who've come to Africa to discover themselves, eh? From writers who've come to discover Africa for us. Do they think Africa exists just for their own salvation? But what is that you're drinking?”

Identifying the brandy in Reddish's glass, he was apologetic. “The thieves' brandy, of course. The houseboys',” he whispered. “The best is kept hidden away.” He unlocked the bottom of the cabinet and brought forth an old bottle. “Try this. This is much better.”

“No, thanks. This is fine. I'll be on my way in a minute.”

“Gabrielle?” Houlet lifted the bottle in her direction.

But she had overheard his whispered remark and was looking silently at Reddish, her eyes lost to him again, as they'd been that night in the elevator, and she didn't answer Houlet at all.

Chapter Eleven

As de Vaux left the rear porch of his cottage early that morning, the old sentinel was stooping near a palm tree where something lay hidden in the grass. De Vaux's two small children played during the day in the swing and sandbox nearby, but at this hour they were still in the house with their nurse, who was scolding them through breakfast. The old sentinel moved to a squat, knees against his chest as he cautiously reached for something hidden to de Vaux, fingers extended, as if stalking a lizard or toad.

De Vaux joined him and saw it wasn't a lizard at all, just a wooden figure as mute as the one they had discovered a day earlier, no more than two meters in length, a wooden creature with a coat of beaten bark daubed with dried mud, a blunt snout and four stubby reptilian legs, evilly carved to resemble those of a pig or crocodile. A child might pick it up impulsively; a European would be curious but cautious; a wary African wouldn't touch it at all.

De Vaux believed it was meant for the children. He crouched down beside the old guard and with the barrel of his revolver prodded it to its side. Hidden beneath the bark fiber were the poisonous metal barbs, tiny fishhooks whose shanks were embedded in the wooden core, their snelled tips exposed but bent downward in the bark, unfelt by the grasping hand but immediately alive as the creature was lifted, the snelled teeth biting deeply into fingers and palm. He wrapped his handkerchief about the snout and lifted it into the sunlight, belly up. The hooks were smeared with a viscous substance. It was an old fetish, as old as the iron fishhooks, but the toxin was as fresh as that found on a similar fetish a day earlier.

“Green mamba?” the old sentinel ventured aloud as he identified the venom-barbed hooks, parroting what he'd heard on the national radio: the jeunesse were everyone's enemies.

De Vaux told him to search the grounds again, and he carried the fetish back to the cottage and down the hallway to the far wing and his father-in-law's room. Behind the closed door, the darkness stank of his sickness. He lay on the thin pallet, ill and feverish, head back, his eyes closed and his mouth open, like the cleft beak of an old tortoise. His black skin hung in loose seams from his ancient face, arms, and thighs. About his waist was a dusty crimson sash; a stuffed snakeskin wrapped his right ankle, a bracelet of yellow leopard teeth the other. The long thin reed pipe with the fire-blackened clay bowl no larger than a thimble lay on the bedside table among the medicine bottles. A week had passed since he had last smoked it. For three nights that same week he'd been driven through the dark streets searching for Pierre Masakita's whereabouts. The last night, he had spat blood.

It was all de Vaux could do to look at him in this condition. Once the strength and power of his people to the north, he was now dying.

The old cousin who attended him sat on the stool at the foot of the cot, his head against the wall, his ash-caked hands hanging loosely over his bony knees. Once a minor fetisheer, whose power had failed, he was trying to recover it on the old man's behalf. Gathered about him on the dark floor were clay pots, vessels, and fetishes, some with antelope horns projecting from their wooden heads, others with dried viscera, fingernails, scraps of body hair, teeth, shriveled cauls, or embryonic bones in their concealed body cavities.

“He must go home to his village,” the old cousin told de Vaux listlessly, opening his eyes. “He must go, all of us—”

“In time,” de Vaux answered, bending over his father-in-law, his ear at the old man's lips. The breathing was weak and irregular.

The old cousin sat forward, identifying the object de Vaux carried, straining his neck but not leaving his stool. “What is it?”

“We found it in the garden. Do you know it?”

De Vaux took it to him, but he shrank away, lifting his forearm. “No! No! Is it theirs?”

Like de Vaux, the old cousin knew that the fetish found in the garden was a sign and a portent, proof that someone knew the old man was dying, and his power with him, the power that had once protected this household, this daughter and her children, de Vaux himself, and his nephew Colonel N'Sika. Power being challenged was power no longer feared; illness or death in this family was proof that the power was broken and the magic of someone stronger had prevailed. A challenge must be answered by even stronger magic, but de Vaux's father-in-law had no strength left.

Colonel N'Sika had begun to suspect the truth. He'd visited the cottage twice in three days, both times late at night and both times alone, seeking his uncle's counsel. The colonel hadn't slept well; he'd lost his appetite; Pierre Masakita had eluded his uncle and his troops; and his tongue had been paralyzed for a few minutes during an all-night session of the council, humiliating him in front of majors Fumbe and Lutete and others he mistrusted. “Which among them are my enemies?” he'd asked his uncle.

De Vaux knew better than his dying father-in-law what N'Sika's problems were—twenty-two-hour days, all-night working sessions, no sure sense of where their revolution was taking them, and an inept, divided council afraid for their lives and frightened by N'Sika's uncompromising leadership. But the old man had had little counsel to offer. He'd taken back the small ivory amulet N'Sika wore about his neck, studied it silently for a few minutes, and retired alone to his room. When he returned, the ivory amulet had a deeper, richer luster to it, and the old man wore an identical one around his wrinkled neck.

Yesterday, de Vaux had seen the amulet discarded on N'Sika's desk in a container of paper clips and pens.

N'Sika had arrived unannounced for his second visit, and de Vaux hadn't been present. N'Sika had discovered the old man lying in the darkness behind the door, attended by the old cousin and his primitive fetishes. He'd left troubled and uneasy, complaining bitterly to de Vaux on the following morning that the old cousin and his filth were corrupting his uncle's strength and that the cousin should be sent home to his village in the north.

But de Vaux hadn't sent the old cousin away. There was no place for him to go, just as there was no place for his father-in-law to go. If the relics the old cousin had assembled on his father-in-law's behalf seemed primitive and obscene to N'Sika, they were still the articles of the old cousin's faith, and de Vaux had been taught by his years in Africa to take nothing for granted in such matters.

Years ago he'd been victimized by relics as barbarous as these.

He was driving a truck up near Bunia at the time and had broken an axle on the track a hundred kilometers to the west, returning from Stanleyville. Darkness had already fallen and he was too exhausted to pull the bearing and replace the axle with the spare; so he lit his lantern and he and his African helper returned to the isolated village whose cooking fires they'd passed eight kilometers back.

The village was dark when they entered, the Africans vanished into their huts. The few who finally came forward into de Vaux's lantern light were sullen and suspicious. They offered them nothing to eat, but all de Vaux wanted was charcoal for his kettle and a spot to lay out his bedroll. He was willing to pay for it. They wouldn't accept his money, and an old man pointed through the darkness to a hut at the end of the village and said they could sleep there. But they had no charcoal.

When they reached the hut, the African helper refused to enter, claiming that the villagers didn't want them in the settlement and had sent them to the deserted hut to get rid of them, since it was still possessed by the dead man who once lived there.