Rogue's March (53 page)

The cell was warm in the afternoon heat, a square of blue sky visible through the smoke hole in the roof. The three of them sat slumped against the stone wall, legs and hands still shackled.

“So it was your idea, yours and N'Sika's,” Masakita continued quietly.

“Just the two of us at first, that's right. In the beginning. We had more information than we could ever use up at G-2, all those intelligence reports we worked with on the foreign intelligence staff—Belgian, American, British, a few French, even some Portuguese. All going to waste. Who could make sense of it, eh? All that information just going to feed the President's paranoia.

“So there we were, N'Sika and me, with a network of brokers and agents bigger than any the Rothschilds ever had—the Rothschilds, Lloyd's of London, the Banque-Indochine, Barclays, or King Leopold himself. We were sitting on top of an empire, and what were we doing with it? Nothing at all. N'Sika was fed up with the old President and wanted to go blasting into the palace one night and just take it over, just like that. We were all fed up with it—the corruption, the thievery, the country coming apart the way it was. We told him he had to be clever about it, as clever as the Belgians, the Americans, the Russians, and everyone else. So Lutete and I found out about the MPLA guns coming into Brazza that day about the time the East Germans were sending those hand implements—”

“What about the nationalizations?” Masakita asked.

“That was N'Sika—his idea. No one could talk him out of it. He wanted to make something decent out of it, like me. ‘Create a world out there,' like the bankers in Brussels used to tell me when I was trying to sell shares in a tin mine up in the Kivu. ‘Create a world out there and we'll manage it for you.' That's what they used to say. Not directly, you understand, but that's what they meant. N'Sika didn't want that. So he just took it over. He was ahead of us, ahead of all of us.”

De Vaux grunted to his feet and rattled clumsily across the stone floor to stand in the center of the oblong of sunshine, looking up at the patch of sky. Two guards crouched on the roof, their voices sometimes heard but their black faces seldom seen.

“Hey up there!” he called.

A wet black face appeared in the opening, looking down silently, brow dripping sweat that fell through the column of sunlight and splashed on the bone-white stones.

“Hot up there, is it, laddie?” de Vaux called. “
Coo
,” he purred in a perfect imitation of the late Sergeant Major Rudy Templer, recently of the King's Shropshire Light Infantry. “Drop down here where it's nice and cool. Nice and easy like. Fetch your rifle with you. We'll show you a little close-order drill.”

The man at the opening spat at de Vaux, who moved aside as the spittle floated down. “Dry as cotton, is it? Try a little beer. I could catch that.”

The face went away, and de Vaux went back to the wall. “You should have packed it in and gone across the river,” he told Masakita.

“You too. You could have left.”

“Me?” De Vaux laughed. “Where to? Back to Antwerp? No. What's in Antwerp these days? Nothing, that's what. Shipwrecks, I'd say, like I told you before, everything else smashed. Put it in better words if you can, but that's what it comes down to with us—shipwrecks.”

“That appeals to you?”

De Vaux shrugged. “It's what comes to me. I don't know too many books the way you do. That's not the school I learned in. But what I've read I remember. Shipwrecks. Wreckage from the storm, eh. Whatever comes to you, you use—like that shirt you're wearing. Fred's Ford Mart. Who'd it belong to. Who's Fred? Who the shit cares. It just came to you worn out, secondhand like it is. Like this fucking prison here.”

Masakita's sympathy was stirred, guessing a secret romantic in the man next to him, a schoolboy's vanity, proud of his hand-me-down scholarship.

“It's the same—Africa, Asia, the jungle, the beach, or anyplace else,” he continued. “It doesn't matter how you got there, what storm sent you off course, who smashed your keel, who the shit Fred is—you're there, wearing his shirt, all by yourself, living off your wits, dragging up whatever's left, whatever you can find, knocking a place together however you can. The bulkhead's a door, the decking a roof, everything topsy-turvy, but it keeps the rain out.” He spat blood from his loose teeth and stretched out his legs.

“No more than that?” Masakita asked.

“Not much. Then one day it all comes crashing down around your ears,” he said, studying the litter of the cell, the trusses overhead, and the square of sky. “Like this rathole.” He spat again and wiped his mouth. “You wake up again, knowing what you should have known all the time, what that crazy Robinson Crusoe forgot. You don't build houses like this. So you sit here like this, the way we are, knowing they've beaten you again the way they did Crusoe, a poor bugger with a stinking goatskin cap on his filthy head, a freak, beard hanging down to his knees, worms in his belly, scabs on his hands, and so that's what he remembers—that he's still a civilized man, a white man too, and he hasn't measured up. What if he had to walk down the street in Brussels like that, eh? They'd lock him up in the asylum before he got ten meters. So he's rescued himself, made a new world for himself out of an island no one else wants, made a house out of a smashed ship. So what? What is it except something that no one except a goddamn bloody fool would ever live in—”

“You keep talking about a shipwreck,” Masakita said.

De Vaux said, “That's the whole point, isn't it? A shipwreck means a ship, doesn't it? But think about that for a while. So you come staggering out of the sea the way he did, half drowned with salt water, half crazy the way he was. You've got to think of the ship, don't you? ‘Great God, where was the ship?' He keeps talking to himself. ‘Jesus, that was some bloody ship!' He even tells Friday about it. So he's still on that desert island twenty years later, still talking about the ship. ‘Great God, where is the ship?' he wants to know. That's the worst joke of all. We're told of it all our lives, aren't we?—told about it in our deepest dreams, the way Crusoe was, but I can tell you something different, something we all know bloody well, which is why we keep dreaming about it. There wasn't any fucking ship, never.”

Chapter Ten

Gabrielle was gone, driven by Reddish to the airport two nights before his own departure to catch her midnight flight for Paris. They planned a week's holiday together in France on his way back to Washington, where he'd been reassigned. As they said goodbye in the nearly deserted terminal, she gave him a bound envelope, carefully wrapped—a going-away present, she'd said—her copy of Stendhal's autobiographical fragment,
Henri Brulard
.

“Something to cheer you up,” she'd told him, smiling. “I don't want to worry about you. This way I'll know you're in the best of company.”

The villa was empty those two nights after she'd gone. He was at loose ends, no longer part of the embassy at all. The night following, he'd brought the envelope from his bedroom, intending to look at it, but had put it aside finally, unopened.

On the day of his departure, Bondurant had still had no word from N'Sika. In the middle of the afternoon, Reddish had a brief talk with Bondurant and afterward went down to his old office to pick up a few personal items Sarah had collected for him. Another man's presence was already there in his old office, his banished. His replacement was named McPherson, a man ten years younger. The office was filled with the sweet scent of honeyed undergraduate pipe tobacco. On the clean desk were a new blotter unstained by coffee rings, a pad scrawled in a neat unfamiliar script, dinner and cocktail invitations for the embassy novice, and a leather photograph folio holding the smiling faces of a pretty wife and two children.

“He's certainly eager, no doubt about that,” Sarah told him, as she entered to fill the desk drawer with newly sharpened pencils, legal pads, paper clips, and memo pads. New pictures and maps were on the walls, fresh plants on the windowsill, and the old leather chair with its cracked cushion had been replaced.

“He's younger too,” she added, “which means that his disposition isn't quite so threadbare.”

“Wait until he gets a load of your shorthand and parsley sandwiches,” Reddish said, picking up the two framed pictures left for him on top of the file cabinet. The two pictures had been taken at a devastated tea plantation in the Kivu during the mercenary rebellions. Reddish and the old President stood together in front of a squad of paras.

“You'll notice he doesn't smoke burned-out cigars left from old dinner parties either. Did you notice? He's a pipe smoker.”

He didn't answer, looking at the two pictures for a minute. Then he tore off the backing, and ripped them in pieces.

“What are you doing!” she cried, seizing his arm, but it was too late. The President had signed them. “That's a souvenir. If you didn't want them, I'd keep them.”

“Souvenirs of what?” He threw them into the wastebasket.

The Havershams gave a small farewell buffet the night of his departure. The ambassador made a brief dignified speech and proposed the toast. Reddish's response was even more brief, but also awkward. Listening to him in the candlelit rear garden, Bondurant heard again the stubborn, cryptic man he'd only begun to understand those last weeks.

As Reddish sat down again, Sarah said, “You never give away anything for free, do you?”

“Just his heart, sugar, and you got it,” Selvey said. He winked at Reddish. “Ain't no free diplomas in the school of hard knocks, ain't that right, perfessor?” He nudged Lowenthal, who turned quickly.

“Sorry.”

Selvey, a little tipsy, whispered, “The Cubans are coming.”

Ambassador Bondurant and Reddish walked alone to the car. Haversham drove him to the airport.

They talked throughout the afternoon that final day as the thick finger of sunshine from the smoke hole toiled infinitesimally across the stone floor and climbed the far wall, like the secret stroke of a pendulum. No voices came from the roof or the road outside. They heard the occasional cooing of the pigeons and the chitter of swallows that nested high under the roof overhang. Then the afternoon dimmed, deepening the shadows and blackening the sky overhead. The first stars came out.

At ten o'clock a truck stopped in the road above and they heard the soldiers disembark, heard the clatter of their rifles as they reassembled in the road, and then listened to the commands of their lieutenant as they practiced, the click of firing pins echoing in empty chambers.

“What time?” Nogueira asked, head lifted toward the high window.

De Vaux shook his head. “No regrets now?” he asked Masakita. “Not the exile you said you couldn't live with?”

“No.”

“Not Paris, not Cairo?”

“No, that's finished now. How about you? You could have gone too.”

“No, not really. A few things, maybe. Not much.” His head rolled back against the stones and his eyes lifted to the window. He seemed to grow more thoughtful now as Masakita waited, his voice softer as he began again.

No, he had no regrets. He'd started with nothing but a few ideas in his head, come out of the slums of Antwerp, his mother a seamstress, patching clothes for a secondhand shop on the street below that bought and sold garments to the merchant seamen. He remembered how she sat in the alcove with the winter light over her shoulder, her sewing basket and her cards of thread and wool on the table nearby. In the pockets of an old seaman's jacket she'd found a few postcards brought back from Leopoldville. There was a picture of a gorilla from the Kivu, an oryx, Congolese fishermen with their basket nets along the falls at Stanleyville. De Vaux had carried those cards with him for months, and when they were about to fall apart he tacked them over his cot. The gorilla's eyes had burned their way into his soul. But his first memories were those of his mother sitting in the small alcove, the light over her shoulder.

What was he to do? Go back to that again?

No, Antwerp wasn't for him, no more than exile was for Masakita. Antwerp would be the same, except death would come slower, the way it came to his mother. Always the same there. He'd seen it last time he was there, his mother still sitting in the alcove with her secondhand clothes piled at her feet—older, grayer, still sewing.

She had her toast and tea at seven each morning after mass, then turned off the gas, letting the weak winter sun warm the alcove where she sat. Always the same there. Nothing would change her. He'd bought her a sewing machine, but she'd sold it. Nothing would change her except death. The same on the streets. The clerk or accountant read the stock closings on the bus or tram in the morning, folded his paper to glance at the headlines, and then searched the thighs of the woman across the aisle as he continued the front-page ax murder among the lingerie ads.

The sky was always gray through the windows, smoke threading over the rooftops. At ten the dentist down the street put on his smock and rinsed out his mouth. Could any of them find their way in the dark, go where he'd gone, in hellish heat or a sorcerer's darkness along the track to Bunia that night where the dead man had been waiting for him, terrified.
Cold out here
—that's what death had to say, wanting to put his shapeless hands in his pockets, his fingers in warm fingers again, to hide his terror in de Vaux's. What was Antwerp these days?

Could any of them go where any gull could go, out beyond the antipodes, Tierra del Fuego lost behind him? No. Some called the jungle a dungeon, but it wasn't that. How could he tell them what he'd found if he were to go back? No words, no words at all, and the words were what was missing. Masakita had words. But not him. But there were no words for what his father-in-law had taught him. How could you tell Antwerp that? Was there any sense left there? The secretary at the typewriter, the clerk folding his newspaper, the dentist rooting for decay among the ten-year-old molars? Sense gone dumb in them, as dumb as the stones where they sat, as dumb as the brass ferrule that taps the blind man's cane through the winter darkness to open the newspaper hutch near the train station …