Rogue's March (41 page)

N'Sika listened as Federov explained. His words were difficult. He had little time. Tomorrow the Belgians would come again, followed by the French, the Americans, the Germans, and the Israelis, then the Arabs, each with their own interests, their own problems of investment or trade, their own veiled warnings. In the meantime the ministries were in chaos, like their balance sheets and deposits. The council was more frightened and divided than ever, as terrified of de Vaux as they were of Masakita and the old rebels in the bush, whom they claimed Masakita was now organizing, perhaps to be joined by a few mutinous army commands. De Vaux was no longer of use to him. He'd betrayed him by concealing his uncle's illness and could no longer be trusted. So he trusted no one on this hilltop, no one at all. He needed to be ten men to do what needed to be done, but he was alone; what strength he had was being leeched from him each day in a hundred trivial decisions. The powers of his ancestors were forsaking him as his old uncle wasted away; his education had been that of a soldier, not a politician.

So something was missing. He searched for quick and simple solutions to these problems which a month earlier he hadn't dreamed existed. Bullets had been quick, but the burden they brought was crushing. What could he invoke in his search for simplicity? Bullets? No. God? Which god? Mammon had been the old President's god, the key that unlocked all doors, bought allegiance and loyalty, silenced dissension, and fueled the engines of government. What else was left? The Belgian colonialists had thrown the other on the rubbish heap of history during their long period of plunder and exploitation, like the old fetishes burned by the Catholic priests in his village. After he'd executed the old President and his cabinet ministers, he'd felt no remorse and seen none in the faces of the civil servants and the people in the streets. He knew it was true—that the body of the Belgian Christ could be as easily forgotten on the rubbish heap as the old fetishes.

But what Federov was telling him was something else, something new entirely, as simple in its design as those laws which kept the planets in motion overhead. Exploitation was something he could understand even better, and now Federov was describing Western exploitation of Africa in Marxist terms.

N'Sika listened, not understanding everything he was being told, but impatient to be told more.

“What did you do before you became a diplomat?” N'Sika interrupted suddenly, as interested in Federov as the lessons he was teaching.

The Russian said he'd been a schoolteacher in the Urals.

“What did your schoolhouse look like? Was the roof tile or was it thatched?”

Federov described the schoolhouse.

“And the children, did they have enough to eat? Did they wear shoes? Did they sit out in the sun and rain or did the government put a roof over their head, give them food to eat?”

N'Sika's aide interrupted to say the Pakistani Ambassador was waiting to discuss the cancellation of a contract for textile machinery, but N'Sika sent Lutete to meet him and continued to talk to Federov.

Lutete didn't mind the interruption. It seemed to him that they weren't talking politics at all; more importantly, he knew that the Pakistani would pay to have the contract restored and the foreign exchange released. He intended to get his share of it.

Crispin was at his table in the afternoon sun, bent over his copybook, when he heard the knock at his door. He turned quickly, crammed the book back into the drawer, and heard the voice of his cousin's wife: “Crispin! Crispin! Are you asleep?”

He opened the door and saw a stranger standing next to her, a black oilskin bag over his shoulder. He wore a wrinkled white shirt, a black tie, and a black serge suit that smelled of diesel fumes. He was a traveler, maybe an evangelist. Pinned to his lapel was a fiber cross, still green from the interior.

“Crispin Mongoy?”

“
Ehhh.
” The African took a letter from his oilskin bag and gave it to him.

“Give him some money,” Crispin told Kalemba's wife, who gathered her skirts about her and shuffled barefooted back along the corridor.

The pastor continued to eye Crispin disapprovingly. “Are you a Protestant?”

“No,” Crispin said.

“The man who gave me this letter said he was a Protestant.”

“Where did he give you the letter?”

“On the lake at Benongo.”

Kalemba's wife returned and gave the pastor a few coins, which he silently counted as he pinched them into his leather purse. “God be with you,” he said, nodding to Mrs. Kalemba.

The letter was from Pierre Masakita:

Dear Crispin
:

I passed Kimpiobi on the track today, and he told me you were safe under Kalemba's roof. I have no news of any of the others
.

If you're able, I would appreciate it if you would begin to make discreet inquiries as to the whereabouts of the old members of the political bureau of the party
.

Decisions need to be made within the next few weeks. All of us must recognize the new reality which faces us and come to terms with it. An accommodation must be made which enables you, and others like you, to take up their work and their lives again.

I will be in touch with you again.

Pierre M.

Thirty minutes later, Crispin was crossing the
grand marché
on his way to a small bar on the edges of the commercial section, Masakita's letter in his pocket. The owner of the bar was a cousin of the politburo's recording secretary. The burden lifted from his shoulders, he strode through the clutter of stalls and babbling old women as he had once marched through the back lanes of Malunga; but at the rear of the market he was brought up short by a small poster tacked to a telephone pole. He identified the face even before he read the name and inscription:

PIERRE MASAKITA

1,000,000 Francs

Ya Matabisi

Sambu Na Mtu Na

Pierre Masakita had a price on his head. The poster was new, so new that it still attracted some curiosity, including that of two policemen who stood in the shadows of a nearby stall, unseen to Crispin. A few urchins gathered to look too, standing with Crispin. Perhaps it was their presence which provoked his response. Angrily, he ripped the poster from the post and stuffed it in his pocket.

The two policemen saw him and immediately blew their whistles. Crispin bolted away into the
marché
, the urchins after him. Hearing the policemen's whistles and seeing the fleeing figure, others took up the chase, believing him a thief. A dozen African workers unloading a truck jumped to the ground to block his path. He leaped sideways into a stall, fell over the counter, and sprawled among cassava and beans. Before he could regain his feet, a dozen youths had tackled him while the old woman who owned the stall beat him savagely with her staff.

He was bleeding, his nose and mouth dripping blood, his shirt torn, as the two policemen and the largest of the pursuing youths led him off to the police station.

In his pockets they found a nickel-plated Belgian revolver, the poster he'd torn from the post, and a letter. The revolver had been stolen from a Belgian shopowner almost a year earlier; the poster was government property. The letter interested no one until it was discovered by the lieutenant at the central prison.

Book Three

Chapter One

Reddish spent the third night of his trip at a palm oil plantation on the banks of the Kwilu River, hundreds of miles to the east of the capital, the guest of his old friend Faustin Kaponji. He arrived at dusk, driven in the old Landrover Kaponji had sent to Kikwit to fetch him.

Kaponji was waiting for him on the porch of the guest cottage, eager for news from the capital. He was a Maluba. “A Jew of the Congo,” he'd called himself when they'd first met three years earlier. A small man in his early fifties, with a dark puckish face and a lively imagination, Kaponji was a man of parts. He was a businessman who professed no interest in politics, but he had an insatiable curiosity, as well as a great deal of money. As a youth he'd been a diamond smuggler in his native Kasai and had accumulated enough capital to launch his career as trader, planter, and businessman. He owned the palm oil plantation, which included a half-dozen Belgians on the staff, had a small office in the capital where he traded in German steel, Thai sugar, Japanese appliances, and Czech hand implements, as well as an office in Brussels, where his Belgian wife lived. His Maluba wife lived with their children on a second plantation in the Kasai. His plump
métisse
concubine kept another home for him in the capital. He was also a Rosicrucian.

Kaponji had assembled the Belgian and African staff in the plantation recreation center for a small cocktail party. In the muggy African twilight, Reddish shook their hands and answered their questions, Kaponji at his elbow. The Belgians had brought their wives, tired middle-aged women who sat silently to one side, anxious to return to their own cottages, where their dinners were waiting. Their husbands gave to Kaponji the same extravagant servility they'd once given their Belgian overseers.

As the two men returned to the main house, Kaponji tried to cheer Reddish up, convinced he was depressed by the overthrow of the old President.

“Well, everything has its dark side, but that's not what you should look for. I suppose the old man got what he deserved, the others too, but it's bad enough just remembering your own youth, isn't it?—the tricks, the deceit, the sharp practices. Crimes too, of course. We've all committed them, no doubt about that. But we're lucky, each of us. The mind's recuperative powers are enormous, André. Thank God for that. You see the new boiling vat over there, still in the crate. Just arrived—from Germany. So just be thankful for the power you have in your own head! It's enormous! Positively immoral, the strength there! Guilt is only in books,
mon ami
. Only in books, thank God for that. Otherwise we'd all be dead—dead of grief or remorse. Any one who says differently is a fraud—intellectual trash. I'd rather be a Rosicrucian these days than these grief-stricken Catholics or socialists. Better social doctrine than what these communists or capitalists have to offer, too. No one's putting Rosicrucians in jail these days, are they? Of course not. There's no reason to—no intellectual pretense to it at all. It's all just mumbo-jumbo, simple humbug, that's all. So it frees your head for other things.”

In the salon of the main house, Kaponji rummaged through a drawer and brought out an old bottle of Indian elixir to add to their gin glasses. “This will bring your spirits up. In five minutes you'll be a new man, freshly minted.”

During dinner alone in the dining room, Kaponji talked about the new Revolutionary Council. He knew a few of the names. Major Fumbe was too stupid to be a rascal, like the old President. He didn't know Lutete. Colonel N'Sika was a strange man. Perhaps a little primitive, but not stupid. No, he certainly wasn't stupid. When you find a politician who isn't merely stupid or venal, that makes you uneasy. So he was uneasy about N'Sika.

Kaponji explained that N'Sika credited his uncle, an elderly
chef coutumier
or traditional chief from the north, with lifting his career out of obscurity. But de Vaux was probably behind it, the eminence grise of this new regime.

“In what way?” Reddish asked.

“The plane crash,” Kaponji said. “You remember the plane crash in the north, the one in the storm at Mbandaka where the old general was killed?”

Reddish remembered.

“The old general was N'Sika's enemy, the man who'd been blocking N'Sika's career. So there you are—the plane carrying your worst enemy blows up in a rain squall. Was it lightning or a bomb? Who knows? Not N'Sika. But if you can manage both, dynamite and a detonator, a fetisheer and his power, you have the best of both worlds, don't you? And this fellow de Vaux can, believe me. But not N'Sika. You see the power that gives him? Of course, quite simple.”

The following morning, Kaponji took Reddish on a tour of the plantation and pressing factory. At ten o'clock, the launch was ready at the boat landing to take him upriver to the missionary landing strip. A pilot would fly him from there to Lutu at the end of the lake, where he'd catch the evening packetboat for Benongo.

Kaponji was still reassuring him as they walked down to the river: “… put all this business out of your head, André. It happens and then it's all over. There's only one law—decay and regeneration. We're all freshly created creatures. You can't change the rest, never. Wars, crimes, obscenities, executions—they all happen. We recreate ourselves every day, in the wink of an eye. The past is no more. Otherwise how could you walk back through that village along the river, looking at its poverty, its disease, its superstition and filth. All those wretched creatures. Can we die every day? No. Be grateful for it. Commerce recreates you every day in the same way. A new man is what you are. Politics will kill you before your time in this country, mark my words. Don't think about the old President—that shyster! Politics was what he wanted, politics was what he got—a bullet in the head. Yesterday's cruelties and abominations are forgotten, of course. Let your recuperative faculties work, your brain cells regenerate. Commerce! Commerce is the answer, André!”

Reddish made the overnight trip to Benongo in a creaking fetid cabin, the wooden bunk airless, the mattress under him as thin and stiff as a copra rug. The warped door to the cabin wouldn't close and was slammed to and fro constantly by the movement of the dogwatch hands from the fo'c'sle as they shuffled barefooted back and forth. The matchwood walls shuddered and pounded from the vibrations of the pistons below.

On the other side of the cabin wall the Belgian first mate blew and spat, thrashing in his bunk and grunting hoarsely from time to time, as if a woman were with him, one of those cool, dusky, long-legged girls who had silently moved aboard at Lutu, an isolated village where the women were unspoiled by bars, beer, or the single white man who lived there, an elderly Swiss pharmacist who lived in eccentric celibacy with his malarial dreams and his collection of old masks. Reddish had caught sight of the first mate at Lutu—a sixty-year-old
flamand
with jaundiced eyes and tobacco-stained whiskers who'd watched hungrily as the girls came aboard and squatted down in the evening shadows of the deckhouse, unburdening their shoulders of the freshly fermented palm wine they'd brought aboard in wicker-wrapped bottles cooled with damp palm leaves.