by W. T. Tyler
“There’s no time. They’re watching me. They know, you see. C’est à vous, mon ami.”
Somewhere off in the background a goat cried out, two women were shouting in Lingala, but then a truck engine revved up, drowning out everything else. The connection was broken.
Reddish stood with the dead phone in his hand, remembering too late his caller’s name. He was Mr. Banda, an obscure little civil servant who worked in a dusty little office in customs clearing incoming shipments. Reddish had once done him a favor, a small thing, of little consequence at the time, but one the older man had never forgotten.
During the Simba rebellions, Banda had been assigned to a provincial town in the north, where he’d been captured, imprisoned, and sentenced to death by the rebels. The death sentence hadn’t been carried out by the time the town had been liberated by government troops. The prison had been blown to rubble by army mortars, but Banda had escaped, bloody yet alive. The army was systematically killing the wounded in the small rural hospital, and Banda had taken refuge in the deserted UN compound, where he was discovered by the team of UN doctors and nurses who reoccupied the clinic. By then his name had appeared on the army death list as a rebel collaborator.
When Reddish visited the town following the Simba retreat, a dossier had been assembled on Banda’s behalf by the sympathetic UN staff—attestations and affidavits gathered among the townspeople, all duly signed or thumbprinted, swearing to Banda’s imprisonment by the rebels. The senior UN doctor, a nervous Austrian, had tried to present the dossier to the army commander, who refused to meet with him. The doctor asked Reddish to discuss Banda’s case with the colonel. It was filthy hot that day and Reddish’s C-130 was waiting at the airfield. He looked at the dossier, all tricked up with red ribbons, green ink, and official cachets, the way the UN would do it, guessed that it wouldn’t solve Banda’s problem with a drunken, brutal army colonel who’d twice been humiliated by the rebels in battle, and he had done the simpler thing, smuggling Banda through the military roadblocks in his borrowed Landrover and flying him back to Kinshasa in the C-130 for hospitalization.
Banda was reinstated at the ministry of interior after his convalescence. Reddish saw him from time to time on the streets and had been invited to meet his family. He’d attended his daughter’s wedding. Banda, like many other minor officials, had become effusively pro-American, part of a small frightened middle class who found in American military and economic support their only escape from the bloody legacy left them by the Belgians. Maimed by the past and frightened by the future, they were patriots of the status quo, even a corrupt or oppressive one, which protected them against the mindless anarchy of the truly dispossessed and the waiting sedition of the Russians and Cubans across the river. Their fears, like those of the pro-Western regime, were those American success hadn’t solved.
Night had fallen beyond the windows. The watchman’s fire blazed brightly in the side garden. Reddish left the villa and walked out into the darkness, light with wood smoke, to stand near the iron gate listening. Trucks were being sent out now, Banda had said, but sent where? To do what? That made as little sense as the infiltration of foreign guns from across the river. What kept the paratroopers and the army loyal wasn’t lack of guns, but tribal antagonisms and fear of Western reaction if they smashed parliamentary rule and toppled a pro-Western regime.
The mercenary threat made even less sense. Less than two dozen were left in the country and all of them in prison, a handful of killers and psychopaths rotting in their felons’ rags in the maximum security dungeon at the para camp on the hilltop behind the city. He knew a few of them, foul-mouthed liars and braggarts, most of them; others pathetic in their weaknesses, like Cobby Molloy and Rudy Templer, the two Brits who once hung around the airstrip at Stanleyville before the mercenary rebellions, cadging cigarettes and whiskey from the incoming C-130 crews hauling in ammo, offering free favors from their fifteen-year-old bush bunnies in return. From time to time he still received appeals for his help, smuggled out of prison and posted to the embassy in dirty envelopes, his name misspelled.
Standing at the gate, he heard only the sound of traffic on the boulevard a few blocks away. He returned to the study and telephoned Yvon Kadima, the minister of interior, his controlled asset. There was no answer on his private line at the ministry. He called his villa, and the houseboy who answered told him Kadima was still at his office. Kadima kept a suite at the old Portuguese hotel where he entertained his métisse concubines and mistresses, but if he was there, he was probably drinking.
“Tell him Robert called,” Reddish said irritably. “Tell him he can reach me at home after ten.”
He called Bintu, the President’s chef du cabinet and another controlled asset. The switchboard operator said Bintu had gone to the coast for the weekend. He searched the drawers of the desk for the local phone directory. Banda’s name wasn’t listed. He looked instead for the spare key to the liquor cabinet, but couldn’t find that either. A man without memory is like a lizard without legs, he recalled, taking out the screwdriver. The President had told him that, at their first meeting nearly four years earlier, but it wasn’t until later that he’d finally understood what he meant. A man without memory wouldn’t survive his enemies.
He knew what Banda’s memory was. The poor little bastard was scared to death of the army.
The liquor cabinet lock was single-toothed and tightly mortised. He tried to jimmy it with the screwdriver, but the teak doors were stouter than the old metal and the tooth snapped off. Only after he brought out the whiskey bottle from the cabinet, opened it, and picked up the glass did he see the missing key, lying there on the napkin in front of the soda siphon where the houseboy had left it, concealed from the discovery of the cook. From separate Kwilu tribes, they mistrusted each other, each complaining of the other’s peculations. Tired of their accusations but unwilling to fire either, he’d taken possession of both pantry and liquor cabinet keys, but frequently misplaced them. When he did, they were always returned to him on the sly, like the key on the napkin, the truce kept alive.
But he’d broken the lock. “God damn it,” he swore softly. The cabinet had been made in Saigon, the only piece he’d brought back with him.
Reddish was of medium height, with sandy hair receding from a high sunburned forehead and a crooked nose that looked as if it had been broken a few times over the years and never reset properly. The eyes were neutral. He was in his mid-forties, a bit thick in the waist, his hair thinning on top. His suits were usually rumpled and nondescript. They were bought off the rack from a Baltimore wholesaler every three or four years during home leave and never settled into comfortably until they were out of fashion. He looked like a man already reconciled to whatever face or destiny the age of fifty would settle upon him, a man who probably drank and smoked too much, whose ambition might have slipped some since his divorce, like his hairline and tennis game; but he was an intelligence officer, not a career diplomat, and for him appearances didn’t count for much. He’d joined the overseas ranks as a case officer after five years as a weapons expert in the Agency’s technical services division, where appearances hadn’t counted for much either. To his foreign colleagues, he was simply another diplomat. He stood with three of them now near the rear wall of the Belgian Ambassador’s residence, come to say farewell to the departing Belgian counselor.
“Terrible about your chap in Khartoum,” the Pakistani Ambassador said.
“Very bad news,” agreed Abdul-Aziz, the Egyptian chargé.
“Have you any information?” inquired Federov, the Soviet Ambassador.
“No,” Reddish said, his mind elsewhere. “Nothing at all.”
“A pity,” Federov murmured.
“The PLO office in Damascus denies any knowledge,” Abdul-Aziz offered consolingly.
“It’s impossible to know which terrorists are doing what,” the Pakistani complained. “Who blew up the Portuguese oil tanks at Luanda? The MPLA claimed credit. So did GRAE.
”
“Freedom fighters, not terrorists,” Abdul-Aziz disagreed.
“Terrorists,” the Pakistani insisted, smiling slyly at Federov, who said nothing. The Russian was short and paunchy, with stiff gray hair and a scholarly squint that sometimes stirred mysteriously in the gray eyes lurking behind the steel-rimmed spectacles. His peers sometimes found the squint an annoyance, a cipher they couldn’t read. Did it signal myopia, contempt, or secret amusement at possession of the facts they didn’t know? Vanity sometimes provoked the more aggressive to thrust and parry, as the Pakistani was doing now. “When they’re our chaps, they’re freedom fighters,” he said to Federov. “When they’re yours, they’re terrorists. You don’t agree it wasn’t terrorism that blew up those oil tanks?”
“I don’t know that I disagree,” Federov replied politely.
“Oh, but you must disagree,” the Pakistani chided, “otherwise what would Moscow say?” His brown eyes darted toward Reddish, inviting his complicity. “Isn’t it Moscow that supplies those MPLA chaps across the river with rockets?” Reddish said nothing, looking away. A provoked Soviet diplomat was one who’d stopped thinking, retreating clumsily into the trenches, dug in behind the official line, but it wasn’t the thunder of cold war artillery Reddish wanted to hear. Federov was only interesting when he thought quietly aloud, as he sometimes did when he and Reddish talked together, but the Pakistani’s vanity made that impossible.
Federov asked the Pakistani when his home leave commenced.
“Oh you can’t slip out of it that easily, old chap.” The Pakistani laughed.
“How is the weather now in Karachi?” Abdul-Aziz asked.
“Islamabad,” the Pakistani corrected immediately.
Federov’s reticence was characteristic. He had nothing to gain from cocktail party debates, unlike the Pakistani, who thrived on them. The latter’s principal task was to sell used and obsolete textile machinery to the Africans while keeping open the local market to cheap Pakistani textiles made on more modern Swiss machines. Apart from that, his diplomatic triumphs were merely personal, like the silver-plated cups and cigarette cases he won playing bridge at the Belgian Club, where he could be found four nights a week.
Federov’s situation was more delicate, the tactics more complex, the stakes higher. The government was hostile, the Soviet mission small, his staff curtailed, his front gates monitored, like his telephone and his small talk. If he erred, the Soviet mission would grow smaller. So in his silence Federov belonged much less to the gossip of the moment than the other diplomats; in his presence Reddish sometimes sensed a figure of more remote but no less certain future expectations, like a priest practicing among lepers.
“It will be splendid in the hills,” the Pakistani was saying, “a relief from this terrible heat, but then I’d fancy anyplace else on earth these days, wouldn’t you?”
Federov offered no comment. Reddish looked with Abdul-Aziz across the terrace toward the french doors where more guests were emerging. More than a hundred were already assembled, but Reddish saw no local military officers. Federov, his glass empty, gestured to a white-coated Congolese waiter carrying a tray of drinks, but couldn’t catch his eye. From ten feet away, Richter, the East German chargé, saw the motion, plunged after the waiter, and fetched him back.
“Please,” Federov insisted, embarrassed by Richter’s deference, offering the lowered tray to his companions, “after you.”
Richter remained with them, tall and dour, saying nothing. A minute later the Spanish Ambassador joined them too, but by mistake. He’d seen the Pakistani but not the others, whose backs were turned; now he was trapped with Federov and Richter, two men he scrupulously avoided. He’d served in an Eastern European capital, and the experience had been a humiliating one. He made the most of his current ambush, however, shaking hands all around, slavishly following protocol. He was small and dark-haired, nattily dressed in a blue blazer and ascot, as if he’d just come from his boat on the river, where he entertained the Scandinavian secretaries and the nurses from the Swedish hospital. His energies were much more muscular than inquisitive, probably the source of his embarrassment in Bucharest, Reddish sometimes thought. A hunter and horseman, he kept an Arabian stallion stabled near the coast on a Belgian-owned beef ranch. In Karachi, he’d played polo and learned to shoot from a pony. The protocol dispensed with, he disappeared immediately, pulling the Pakistani after him. Richter’s reproachful eyes, unlike Federov’s, moved with them.
“What was it we were talking about?” the Russian now asked, turning to Abdul-Aziz.
The Egyptian couldn’t remember. “The American in Khartoum?”
“Before that.”
Federov looked at Reddish.
“Tribes,” Reddish said, naming a small rebellious tribe living high in the hills near Lake Tanganyika on the remote eastern frontier. An article in the daily Le Matin a few days earlier had claimed Peking was smuggling them guns from across the lake. The story had been planted by the Republic of China’s embassy press officer, but Reddish doubted that Federov knew that. The President feared Peking as much as Moscow, and the Taiwanese Embassy did what it could to keep those fears lively.
“You’ve been there?” Federov asked.
“No, no one’s been there for years.”
“Bandits then?”
Reddish said, “The Belgians were never able to pacify them. They just left them alone, like this government.”
“And the story in Le Matin?”
“Very doubtful.”
Federov nodded, satisfied, the fact tucked away. Ethnology interested him; so did geography; he never asked the same question twice, an uncommon talent in a capital where the memory of small talk seldom survived from one cocktail party to the next. After a year in the country, he understood far more of its tribal divisions than the other diplomats Reddish knew. He’d once told Reddish that he’d taught geography and natural sciences in a small town in the Urals before joining the diplomatic cadres. His interest wasn’t merely scholarly: internal politics made little sense without some sense of the more complex tribal declensions. He’d also admitted that he read a great deal to keep himself occupied, as genuine a concession of professional failure as Federov had ever made to anyone—the hostility of the government, separation from his wife in Moscow, and the small prison his local world had become, no larger than his tiny office, the small flat in the chancellery a few steps away, and the dusty compound yard outside, where he’d planted a small garden, trying to grow tomatoes and cucumbers. At receptions such as this one, where the Eastern European diplomats greeted him like curates receiving an archbishop, his power seemed more real; but the impression was illusory, surrendered as quickly as the trailing car from the internal security directorate picked up his limousine outside the front gate and returned with him to the Soviet mission.
“Would the Tanzanians allow them to send guns?” Abdul-Aziz asked. Federov had served in Dar es Salaam before his current posting.
The eyebrows lifted. “The Chinese? No. Never.” His voice was brusque. Reddish never talked to Federov about Peking. Soviet and Chinese troops had clashed along the Ussuri River earlier in the year and along the Sinkiang frontier a month later. Moscow’s diplomatic offensive to further isolate China in Europe and the Third World was then under way, the principal priority of Soviet foreign policy.
Reddish said, “The problem is that Dar can’t control its frontiers any better than this government can.”
“True, but they can control the Chinese.”
“But you’re no longer in Dar to remind them.”
“But this government doesn’t recognize Peking either,” Federov replied with a smile. The moon broke from behind the clouds, lighting up the sloping hillside behind the terrace. “Would you say that was my doing?” he added wryly.
“Maybe it was you that planted that story in Le Matin,” Reddish suggested.
Federov laughed, his eyes lifted toward the tropical moon. He’d fared as poorly at
the hands of Le Matin’s editors as Peking had. Richter said something in Russian, but Federov only shook his head. “Mr. Reddish was making a joke,” he explained in English.
“Georgy! Oh, Georgy!” Cecil, the British Ambassador, raised a gangling arm from a circle of diplomats nearby and came to fetch Federov. “Sorry, but we’ve a bit of a problem with the Bulgarian. I wonder if I might borrow your good offices.” The diplomatic corps was meeting at Monday noon, a vin d’honneur for a departing envoy, but the Bulgarian chargé, newly arrived, was reluctant to cooperate, since Sofia didn’t maintain diplomatic relations with the envoy’s nation. “I wonder if you might talk to him. I suspect he may be a bit confused.”
Left alone, Reddish moved away from the rear wall, drink in hand, searching for a familiar African face. He saw no army officers. Most of the Africans present were the young technocrats the departing Belgian had cultivated, the ex-socialists from the university who were now part of the detribalized intelligentsia, men vaguely anti-Western in everything but style and taste.
Bena Mercedes, his friend Nyembo called them—the Mercedes clan.
He made his way around the edge of the terrace, moving toward the side entrance from which he could slip away into the darkness without being noticed.
“Not leaving already, are you, Reddish,” a sly voice called to him from the dark corner near the terrace steps. “How lucky you are. That late already?” Guy Armand, the French counselor, leaned indolently against the stone wall, ankles crossed, drink against his chest. A dark-haired woman stood with him, her face partially in shadow. Reddish joined them in passing, and Armand introduced them with a casual wave of his hand. “Madame Bonnard has just arrived from Paris, visiting the Houlets. I was pointing out the celebrities while we waited for the ambassador to leave. Were you at the Houlets’ for drinks the other evening?”
“No, sorry.”
“Then you and Madame Bonnard haven’t met. I was trying to identify a few cabinet ministers for her, but none seems to have come.” Armand was tall, his pale skin as dry as parchment, the color now gone from thinning hair that had once been blond. In the lapel of his jacket was a French military rosette, like the souvenir of some lost childhood. He was a faithful disciple of de Gaulle’s stratégie tous azimuts, the enemies everywhere policy which allowed him to treat American diplomats with as much suspicion as the Russians; in his case, the practice not only promoted French grandeur but gave full rein to his talent for duplicity and conceit. “I’ve known such men,” the American Ambassador, Walter Bondurant, had once scrawled across a memo of conversation with Armand sent him by Simon Lowenthal, the embassy political counselor, “an exhausted, malicious mind, drinking its own hemlock. Please send me no more of these Cartesian epigrams.”