Rogue's March (47 page)

Chapter Four

The old man was dead now, and except for de Vaux the cottage was empty. He'd sent them away, first his wife and two children, then the old cousin and his wife, and finally the old man himself, whom he'd smuggled out the front gate, the dead body wrapped in a wad of laundry. His wife and children had flown to Kisangani and would go north from there, into the bush to wait for him in the village near the Sudan frontier where they'd waited out the mercenary rebellions.

The old cousin had left the previous day to go to Kisangani by boat to await the old man's body, but it was only a device to get the old cousin safely away. De Vaux had no intention of having the body embalmed and shipped by plane or boat to the north. If another fetisheer had won N'Sika's confidence by claiming responsibility for the old man's death, he'd want the bones and vital organs too. De Vaux meant to deny them to him.

After he'd got the old cousin away, de Vaux had smuggled the corpse out the gate in a laundry bag. In the
cité
, he'd rented an old
deux-chevaux
from a Belgian mechanic, changed into blue overalls, and driven east into the savannahs, where he'd buried the body after dark along the Black River.

De Vaux hadn't talked to N'Sika for over a week, but that evening he'd received a note from N'Sika's headquarters summoning him to an eleven o'clock meeting.

He sat under the reading light on the sun porch, the appointment an hour away, reading a book about upland sheep raising. Sheep were impractical in Africa, but except for
Robinson Crusoe
, the book was the only one he had. Like the Defoe novel, it had been left from the UN peacekeeping contingent's reading room, borrowed, like the other, from an English lending library and never returned. A circulation slip was glued to the endleaf. Whoever had borrowed it owed a king's ransom, maybe five hundred pounds sterling. N'Sika was King Croesus by then, but he was no better off than the poor sod who'd borrowed this book.

He sat quietly in the chair, the automatic rifle at his feet, a pistol on his hip, a quart of beer on the nearby table, his mind engaged by the mysteries of upland sheep raising. Perhaps he could begin again in New Zealand or Australia, but then he remembered the immigration laws that excluded Africans—his wife, and two children—hesitated, ripped off the cover, and threw the book aside.

At ten-thirty he left the cottage, crossed to the headquarters compound, and for the first time in two weeks joined those who sat on the chairs under the palm trees awaiting N'Sika's summons. The electric lights were as dim as ever, the mood still sinister, despite the general amnesty which had been announced the same week.

The number of foreign visitors had grown—European businessmen, board members from the great banking houses of the Continent, envoys from the smoke-encrusted foreign ministries of the metropoles or the communist East, international civil servants from the World Bank, the IMF, and the UN.

On this night, de Vaux was surprised to see two Chinese in dark blue uniforms sitting with Dr. Bizenga in armchairs along the strip of red carpet. They weren't from Taiwan, but from Peking's embassy across the river in Brazzaville, come to discuss purchasing the regime's copper. Dr. Bizenga led the two Chinese into the salon and returned alone to join Major Lutete and Major Fumbe, who were talking about the deadlocked negotiations with the Belgians. Of all the civil servants and advisers summoned by N'Sika to the para hilltop, de Vaux considered Dr. Bizenga the most obsequious—laughing at the council members' jokes, flattering their dull grunts into philosophic profundities, and embellishing their banalities like an alchemist filling decayed cavities with carious gold.

De Vaux turned away from Bizenga's voice and listened instead to two captains talking about the recent amnesty. They claimed that two hundred insurgents and outlaws had registered at police and military posts in the interior seeking amnesty. Four hundred jeunesse had registered with the police in the capital itself. All day long, mothers, grandmothers, sisters, wives, and fathers had queued up along the road outside the para hilltop waving palm fronds and chanting rhythmically each time a military vehicle sped through, hoping to catch a glimpse of Colonel N'Sika to show their appreciation. In the late afternoon, N'Sika had agreed to receive a delegation of old women brought from the front gate. Moved by their words of appreciation, their tears and flowers, he'd accompanied them back to the front gate to speak to the crowd gathered there.

But he was furious when he returned to his office, and he immediately sent for Majors Fumbe and Lutete and the new minister of interior. He'd supposed that the outpouring of emotion had been spontaneous; but as he stood in the rear of his jeep addressing the throng, he'd seen the municipal buses that had brought them there from the communes.

De Vaux thought he knew what N'Sika wanted. You steal what you've got, and after a few weeks you believe it was brought to you on a golden calf, carried on a golden throne. But it wasn't gold at all, and when they took it away from you, you'd be hauled away by the heels, like a dead cat by the collector of dead cats.

The two captains rose and went back to the refreshment room; de Vaux sat alone, unable to escape Dr. Bizenga's voice as he described the Belgian negotiating team. Everyone on the national side had been willing to give into the Belgian demands—everyone except N'Sika. In the end, Bizenga predicted, he would be forced to give in too:

“You can't change these men,” he explained. “They are just burghers, narrow-minded, rigid, dogmatic. They have a certain density, an opacity you can't avoid. When you meet them on the street in Brussels, it's like walking into a lamppost. And everything they say is said with the sort of hollow iron ring a lamppost makes when you walk into it.”

Major Lutete laughed in amusement, as he would at a dog in a circus who walked on his hind legs.

“… ‘It is cold,' he might say, the European way, looking at you very seriously. Are there icicles in your beard too? Frost in your nose? You feel to see. They expect it, these Europeans. The world exists only to verify their own existence—meat, drink, and hard fact. Or, ‘I lost ten thousand francs at backgammon at my cousin's last week,' or, ‘My mistress locked me out.' Whatever. Things happen to them, you see, these burghers I'm talking about—absolute things. And as a result over the years they've finally succeeded in creating themselves as a series of palpable iron objects. It's true, Major. He finds something admirable in his corporeality, his bulk. His thoughts may be timid and hare-brained, but they belong to him, no other. When he gets wet, he reminds you of something in the rain—a tree or a fireplug. Most men of intelligence would far prefer to see themselves in this way—as an object, a palpable object. Not a subject at all, no. But that's the intellectual's weakness and why it's so easy to deceive him.

“What did Marx say?… Well, I can quote Marx in this company, can't I, since we must borrow from both worlds, East and West? Well, Marx said that the only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain. So the truth is that Marx didn't want to be an intellectual either. Secretly, he hungered to be a burgher—an iron-ringing object, a collection of iron-ringing molecules that can't be altered one iota by dreams, by sight, by touch. He wanted to get all of these phantoms out of his head.

“What can you do to dreamers? You can smash them but you smash nothing. Dreams, vapors! But with this other man, this European burgher, the physical object remains—like the fireplug in the rain. If you walk into it, too bad! The physical object is what you feel, simple corporeality. Compare this to the man of feeling, the man of intelligence, of noble thoughts. He can't breathe, but he dissolves a little of his substance in your face, the tiny atoms of which he's composed. So deadly serious, yet, but a stench really. The breath of Marx or Lenin, fifty years dead now. But the European intellectual is no different, is he? He dissolves himself and his world in your face, this literary gentleman, like a ripe carcass sending up clouds of blowflies. I'd rather walk into a Belgian lamppost, like the delegation that was just there. He tells me that I exist, just as the intellectual and his blowflies tell me it's completely his world.”

He laughed again. A few laughed with him.

“Who leads the Belgian delegation?” Major Fumbe asked.

Dr. Bizenga mentioned a name. “A terrible invention, this man. He's walking proof of everything I've said. His grandfather was a count. His mother ran off with a French perfume salesman. An iron-ringing lamppost right there.”

De Vaux finished his glass of beer, seeing the Chinese leave silently. He believed he would be the next summoned. Twenty minutes later, N'Sika's secretary slipped from the rear steps and de Vaux went to meet him. The secretary said that de Vaux was mistaken: the meeting wasn't for this night, but for eight o'clock the following morning.

De Vaux returned to his cottage at the edge of the hill. The porch light and the lamp on the sun porch were still lit; his sentinel crouched on his stool under the palm tree. He unlocked the front door, still annoyed at whoever had deceived him.

Inside, he immediately detected a strange scent in the air and stopped, unslinging his rifle. Then on the bare floor at his feet he saw a few light smudges of wood ash mixed with something more mealy, perhaps kaolin. The track led across the salon, through the dining room, and down the hall toward the small dark room where the old man had died. De Vaux followed it, gun raised, seeing where it daubed each door in passing, touched each window and sill, and lay in a thick white crust, already beginning to dry, across the threshold of the old man's bedroom. The room was in darkness. He felt for the light switch and turned it on, but the light was out. Already he could detect a figure lying on the bed—small, dark, shriveled, as his father-in-law had been those last days; and in the horror of the recollection, he knew this body was his father-in-law; something had brought him back, the same power that had plagued his house and children this past month, that had broken his bond with N'Sika, and that lay as sinister and oppressive over the sand roads and palm trees of the para camp as it had once lain within that small hostile hut on the track to Bunia and which, condensed to its essence, had stood in a small evil pool on the hood of the old truck.

He stood there remembering it all again; and when the tall white-robed figure rose from the far end of the room where he'd been sitting silently, his breath was withdrawn and his muscles were as weak as water, his strength denied him; and he couldn't raise the weapon as he stared at the tall white-robed figure whose face was blacker than any he'd ever seen. A moment later he seemed to remember the face, but at that instant the two Africans behind him smashed the recollection from his head, and he fell forward across the cot, gun clattering to the floor, his unconscious body lying across the lifeless, lacerated body of the poor cousin that de Vaux had sent to Kisangani on the pretext of awaiting his father-in-law's corpse.

Chapter Five

Les Haversham was still youthful despite his forty-nine years, his brown hair untouched by gray. He was slender, loose-boned, quick with a smile or a handshake, unfailingly courteous with outsiders, always careful at a cocktail party or a reception to remember a first name, a preference in wines or beverages, details of a previous assignment, hopes for the future, where your children were. Embassy wives thought him charming, military spouses debonair, junior diplomats what they would like to become. Somewhat liberal, gray-eyed, dressed in gray tropicals, a button-down
oxford-cloth
shirt, and a rep tie, he seemed the embodiment of the American ethic abroad, committed to the principle that politics was a manageable dividend-paying enterprise, like any other kind of business. Imbued with that ethic, he would never deliberately overthrow a foreign government, arrange a massacre in the streets, or assassinate a president—no more than Ford would blow up General Motors, since such bad faith exceeded his operational franchise and outran his moral base. What he would search for were more practical, promotional schemes that would give him a competitive advantage over those who sought what he sought—dominance in the political marketplace.

He was annoyed with Reddish's reporting to Langley on the Malunga episode, because it put the N'Sika regime in a poor light in Washington. There were those in the State Department or in Congress eager to find excuses for reducing their cooperation with military regimes, especially those who'd seized power as brutally as N'Sika. These same policymakers were searching for ways to reduce US arms sales, and the N'Sika regime would continue to seek US military assistance. Reddish's cables, circulated in Washington and undoubtedly leaked to the Hill, would have the net effect of complieating relations with the new National Revolutionary Council.

Reddish and Haversham had had an argument in the latter's office the week following Reddish's return from the interior. Reddish was touchy and out of sorts. He had received no word as to his future assignment, although his replacement was already on the way. His own departure was less than ten days away. He'd told Haversham nothing about the Masakita episode and was skeptical about the general amnesty announced while he was on the boat from Benongo. The council had claimed that police and army posts in the interior had been alerted a week earlier and were busy preparing the inscription of old renegades and new rebels on the amnesty rolls. He'd seen nothing to support this. He thought the council was lying.

Masakita's letter was still in his pocket, undelivered. He'd twice attempted to see de Vaux, but had been unsuccessful. He'd learned that de Vaux's security responsibilities had been taken over by Major Fumbe.

The station suite was deserted that evening. Everyone else had gone home.

“I think you showed poor judgment sending those cables out,” Haversham said distastefully, feet lifted to the corner of his desk as he reclined lazily in his swivel chair, toying with a letter opener. “By then, the damage had been done. It was all ancient history. No one needs to know how N'Sika pulled this job off. All a postmortem could do would be to stir up a few creeping Jesuses back in Washington who piss down their legs every time you talk about military regimes.” Despite the vernacular Haversham practiced behind closed doors, his voice had the same cultivated drawl to it, like those heard around the Cosmos Club bar. “I don't want to make too much of this, Andy, but I think you've put us on the spot.” He brought his feet down, avoiding Reddish's eyes. “After what you've told Washington about N'Sika's planting those MPLA guns in the workers party compound, a few people are going to worry about getting into bed with him. It doesn't do us much good out here telling them where the bodies are buried.”