Rogue's March (37 page)

De Vaux was too tired to argue and suspected his helper was lying to him. How did he know who had lived there? He gave the helper his torch and told him to go back to the truck if he was frightened. After the helper left, de Vaux spread his bedroll inside, ate a cold sandwich, drank his cold tea in the light of the lantern, and went to sleep.

He didn't talk about it afterward, not to anyone, not even his Congolese wife, years later, whom he told everything. It was the most terrifying night he'd ever spent in his life, but it was nothing anyone could ever describe, nothing you could either believe in or not believe, as the Europeans were always asking: “What about this witch doctor or fetisheer business? What do you think? Is there anything to it?”

That was the wrong way to put it. It wasn't anything you could think about at all, no more than you could a raging fever. What was that—mental, something your mind was seized with? He could define it no better. It was just an experience, a condition that drove your terrified little mammalian mind from whatever crypt or fissure where civilization had hidden it away all those centuries and stalked it, right out there on the jungle floor. That was why the Europeans would never understand.

He'd been awakened in the middle of the night to find something in the hut with him. A
rat? A reptile? Maybe a snake
? Probably. It had happened to him before. He reached for his lantern. It was as cold as ice. And just as suddenly the cold clutched at him too, blowing across his face like Antwerp fog from the winter streets, a sinister breath that filled the thatched hut and condensed like hoarfrost on the cold metal of the lantern, which from that moment on would be useless to him no matter how many times he replaced the wick or the candle.

So he was sleeping, he convinced himself, just sleeping, just an exhausted victim of one of the uglier tricks of sleep after a brutal day on the track. In an act of will he woke himself, but consciousness was much worse; the icy lantern was there, just as this paralyzing coldness was there, trapped outside himself—an evil stalking presence that rose wrathfully from the darkness and struck at him, something foul, cold, and unspeakable.

He scrambled away against the thatched wall of the hut, where he braced himself, eyes straining in the darkness to know his captor. He didn't know what it was. It was without shape—no face, no body, nothing tangible except its coldness—yet it was there, its icy presence licking at his bare ankles, then his arms, and neck, but retreating each time he struck out at it. He flung his cigarettes at it, his wallet, his wristwatch, kicking at it finally with his feet, trying to push himself through the wall thatching to escape into the warm darkness outside the hut, still holding the lantern up to shield his face. But the vines and raffia rope held the thatched wall in place and he was its prisoner.

Caught momentarily in the tangle of fiber rope, he felt its coldness reach his neck and jaw. He cried out, freed himself, and rolled to his side, kicking as it retreated, cold, gray, as palpable as sea fog; and in that moment, in the terror of his condition, in an instant of clairvoyant insanity de Vaux understood the terror of its own. It was a dead thing—his helper had been right—but no longer in the physical shape, the blood and bones his Creator had given him, but in this other, set loose in this unspeakable condition and now trying to hide its formlessness away in de Vaux's warm flesh and bone, to escape that very nullity de Vaux was recoiling from in terror.

“
You bugger! You won't do it! Not me, you bastard
!”

His discovery seemed to him so clear, so remarkable, and so terrifying in its simplicity that in that instant it seemed to him that through raw fear he'd divined what philosophers and theologians searched a lifetime for through their dusty texts without discovering. There would be a ton of gold in that philosopher's stone—death was even more unspeakable, more terrified of its nullity than life—and if later he was to feel cheated of that discovery, at the time it gave him the courage to continue battle. He had no idea how long he fought off his assailant. Only when the first dawn light showed through the trees and he could see the outline of the door did the oppression lift, the cold withdraw. As he crawled through the door exhausted, the mist had begun to stir from the black river that thrashed through the sunless jungle behind the village.

He gathered together his kitbag, his bedroll, and lantern, and retrieved his pocket articles from the earth floor of the hut. In the dawn light he saw, hanging from the roofpoles outside, the gnawed gray sticks tied and knotted with viscera. Some were old, weathered by the sun and rain, but at the side of the hut he found a pendulous goat horn sealed with a wad of fresh entrails.

The villagers stirred from their huts to watch as he struggled down the path to the road, more exhausted now than he'd been the night before. He made a good show of it, trying to walk a straight line, shoulders back. He didn't look over his shoulder at those mute savages who watched him go, didn't care who had lived and died in the abandoned hut; and if the poor buggers he'd left behind continued to be oppressed by something dead trying to crawl its way back to life, more terrified of its condition than they were of theirs, maybe they deserved that too.

By the time he reached the truck eight kilometers away, his discovery no longer seemed so remarkable. His pounding feet and aching head had driven everything else from his mind. Maybe it was only his own exhaustion after all; maybe bad pork or contaminated tea. In the hellish heat of the day, his philosopher's stone of the previous night dissolved, fled like quicksilver in a memory of acute delirium.

But his fatigue was real; so was the lantern. The helper was waiting when he reached the truck. “Start the engine up and let's have some warm water,” de Vaux told him. “What's the long face for, lad? Didn't sleep well or didn't expect to see me? Should have stayed put, like me. Slept like a stone, I did.”

The lantern was still cold to the touch; he put it on the engine hood before he set to work. He took the spare axle from the work chest, pulled the wheel and wheel bearing, and replaced the broken axle. Afterward, he ate some cold biscuit as he shaved, and finally retrieved the lantern from the hood. It was now neutral to the touch, but on the warm engine cowling was a pool of milky water, larger than any condensation which might have been explained by the damp African night and too curious in color to be the result of any leakage from the lantern well.

“Manioc dust,” de Vaux explained to the curious driver. “Must have been a manioc mill in the next hut, eh? Buggers thought we were going to steal their manioc sacks.”

But when the truck reached Bunia that night, the milky track was still there, although the fluid had evaporated, leaving a foul corrosive scar down the blue cowling.

So de Vaux—mechanic, planter, and petty empiricist—had concluded that something had been with him in the hut that night: a dead man's spirit, his memory, or some grisly avatar set loose by those tied sticks the village fetisheer had hung from the roof pole. He didn't know what it was, but it was his business, not to be shared with anyone else. Whenever he passed those bush savages on the track with their grotesquely tied sticks or primitive talismans carried to escape the destinies that stalked them through the thick green African twilight, he was reminded of the lantern.

He thought about it also as he grew to despise those others, the Europeans, for their contempt for what these black men knew, just as he despised them for the superiority of their belief that reality was identical with their own European understanding.

They called it belief. He called it madness, as mad as the fevers of avarice, dogma, art, and redemption that they called civilization.

The Revolutionary Military Council's security committee met daily at seven o'clock in the evening. The working hours of the first days of the crisis had now become routine. N'Sika worked through the night, slept from noon until five, and returned to work. The other members of the council had adjusted their hours to his.

At six that afternoon, de Vaux left his jeep in the gravel drive in front of N'Sika's headquarters, climbed the steps past the armed guards, and went down the tiled corridor to his small office directly across the hall from N'Sika's suite. Inside, he telephoned for the afternoon intelligence summaries and the daily reports from military and police units in the interior. De Vaux prepared from them the daily intelligence brief which would be presented to the seven o'clock meeting of the security committee. N'Sika chaired the committee; de Vaux was the
rapporteur
.

Dusk was falling outside as he crossed the hall to the committee room adjacent to N'Sika's office, carrying a map board. In the garden outside, council members were already gathering on the chairs and divans of the small terrace that had become N'Sika's waiting room. Many sat there through the night waiting for an audience. N'Sika rarely appeared on the terrace, but his presence was there nonetheless, as it was everywhere else in the capital, even as his person had become more elusive than ever.

De Vaux knew N'Sika had always had the ambition for power, but he hadn't realized until after the coup how completely he commanded its instincts. He'd always kept himself remote from others, not only because of the stammer which had been such a humiliation in his younger days, but because of those warnings of ambition which come to many unique men who believe far more in their own destiny than they'll ever be able to admit to others, suffering that burden in solitude, as N'Sika once suffered his stammer. Solitude had made him stronger than the other members of the council, who were only now discovering how totally he was their master.

It was N'Sika who'd decided to nationalize the economy, N'Sika who'd ordered the recent executions, N'Sika who'd led them forward by making it impossible to retreat, and N'Sika who now had made them all his hostages. In his own strength, intolerance for their weakness would grow. The old President, hysterical in his last days and final hours, had been the first to feel N'Sika's malice. N'Sika despised him not only because of his weakness and corruption but because for years his ambition had made him the accomplice of the President's venality and paranoia. As N'Sika's strength gave way to grandeur, his colleagues on the council would feel that malice too. In not recognizing N'Sika's own genius during those long years of suffering and obscurity, they too, like the old President, would be judged guilty by N'Sika, accomplices in his own degradation.

De Vaux wondered who would be next. In the dimming light of the garden, he watched Majors Fumbe and Kimbu, N'Sika's closest confederates, talking quietly with the three Belgians sent from Brussels to open compensation negotiations resulting from the nationalization of the copper mines. Both were still useful to N'Sika—Kimbu for his brutality, Fumbe for his blind obedience.

Major Lutete sat near the arbor smoking as he edited a news release. Lutete was a question mark, like Dr. Bizenga, who waited in the shadows far to the rear, listening to a tall Senegalese in a white boubou—probably the envoy sent secretly from the Organization of African Unity in Addis Ababa to pledge support but to insist that the executions cease. Dr. Bizenga wasn't a member of the council but an economic adviser and gadfly. His bony repellent face, steel-rimmed spectacles, and obsequious manners set him apart from the soldiers. He might be useful in the copper negotiations. Already he'd suggested through Lutete that N'Sika give him a diplomatic post abroad, either at the UN in New York or in Paris.

At the front of the garden two council members were talking heatedly to N'Sika's personal secretary. Both were members of the security committee, both clumsy and thick-witted, their only advantage to N'Sika the troops they commanded. But N'Sika's popularity in the army made them less important now. As de Vaux watched, they turned, walked to their separate jeeps, and were driven away.

Did that mean N'Sika had canceled the seven o'clock security meeting?

He went back to his office, where his aide was waiting with the folder containing the reports from the interior.

“Anything more from Funzi?” de Vaux asked. Funzi was on the fringes of the old rebel areas; a police post at Funzi had been raided for weapons the night before. Near Funzi were the forests where Pierre Masakita's rebels had launched the old rebellions.

But the aide said nothing, looking at de Vaux in confusion.

“What is it? More attacks near Funzi?”

He shook his head and gave de Vaux the folder. It was empty. On the outside cover leaf where the names of the security committee members were listed, de Vaux's name had been struck off by a single stroke of N'Sika's felt-tipped pen.

Chapter Twelve

“I don't wonder they're behind barbed wire,” Bondurant declared nervously as they drove through the steel gates of the para compound. He'd been summoned by N'Sika following Washington's request that he urge the council to cease the executions. Three days had passed before N'Sika had answered the ambassador's request for a meeting. It was almost midnight. Soldiers with automatic weapons were strung out along the road under the palm trees. Muzzles were three times lowered against the hood at internal checkpoints. Despite the calm in the city, the para hilltop resembled a night bivouac for an army doing battle somewhere out in the darkness.

“You'd think they would have sent someone to meet us,” Lowenthal complained.

“It's over there,” Reddish told the uneasy Congolese driver, pointing off through the trees, “where the floodlights are.”

Paramilitary troops cordoned the side terrace to which the major who'd met the car led them. A row of old armchairs was lined up on a strip of red carpeting under the trees, feebly lit by double strands of electric lights strung from the trees and a few iron poles.