by W. T. Tyler
“We came early, God knows why,” Armand continued, looking sleepily at the Frenchwoman as if she might remember.
“The Houlets brought us,” she reminded him.
“Oh yes, so they did. In the absence of the cabinet, I suppose Mr. Reddish might pass for a celebrity. I should have mentioned that.”
“Oh? Is he?”
“Oh yes. He’s been here longer than any of us,” Armand said dryly. “The senior American diplomat north of the Zambezi, a virtual walking encyclopedia of all that’s happened here. Only he never shares it with us, you see. Quite selfish in his seniority.”
“And how long has it been,” asked Madame Bonnard. Her hair was dark and cut short. Reddish was uncomfortably aware of her perfume.
“Almost four years.”
“Four years.” Armand gave a brittle laugh, and Reddish saw her mouth stiffen, her eyes still lifted toward him. “And I believe Lowenthal told me you were leaving soon. Is that true? Lucky fellow. Where will they send you next—Africa again? You’ve earned your pardon, God knows. All of us have.”
“Is it so bad as that?” she asked, turning to confront Armand.
“Oh I’m absolutely the wrong person to ask. Reddish is leaving. Ask him. Going to an embassy of your own now, are you?” He put down his drink carelessly and opened his cigarette case. “An African embassy, no doubt. That’s the recognition we get, isn’t it? Twenty years in a brothel and they promote you by making you its mistress.” He laughed and turned away to light his cigarette. “But we must have a long talk before you go,” he resumed, suddenly serious, “just the two of us. Or maybe you’d prefer a small dinner.”
He turned to the Frenchwoman. “Diplomats tend to be much more frank with one another on the eve of their departure, much more honest. In places like this, we all tend to become very much the same, very old, very dull, very cynical. But I wouldn’t say Reddish has become the oldest of us all. No—quite the contrary. He’s managed to keep quite young, but then most bachelors do, don’t they?”
“And honest too, I suppose,” she said calmly, “or is he like you?”
“Oh no, not like me.” Armand laughed, surprised but pleased. “Not at all like me—”
“Only because you’re not a bachelor?” she said coolly, looking away across the terrace, her interest in the conversation ended.
“Armand speaks for himself,” Reddish told her. “I hope you enjoy your visit.”
“Thank you. That’s very kind.”
Reddish moved down the steps and across the lawn. On the dark road outside the gate, he heard a rumble from the east and stopped to listen. It came a second time, but he ignored it, walking on toward his car. It was the sound of a thunderstorm moving out across the savannahs.
Chapter Three
Reddish didn’t sleep well. It was a little after five o’clock on Sunday morning when his bedside phone woke him. He groped for the receiver on the bedside table and rolled to his side without turning on the light. The communications watch officer was calling from the embassy. “Sorry to get you up like this but I thought I’d better call. I’ve got something.”
Reddish sat up. “Local?”
“No, sir. Khartoum. I’ve got an instruction for you.”
“That’s all?”
“Yes, sir. That’s it.”
“Thanks. I’ll be in about eight.”
He dressed in the darkness and went downstairs to put the coffeepot on while he shaved. Nothing during the night at the embassy, he thought, standing at the bathroom mirror. Banda hadn’t telephoned again; neither Kadima nor Bintu had returned his calls. Even the villa seemed unnaturally silent. If there were those within the army plotting to bring down the government, the Americans would be the last to know, as much a target as a corrupt president or a paralyzed parliament. Isolation was the price most often paid for political success, and the embassy had been successful. In their success, they’d come to know everything about the country but the secret despairing faces of the opposition, those who mistrusted the Americans as much as Banda and others mistrusted the Russians and Cubans across the river.
He waited in the kitchen for the dawn to come. As the first gray light came into the back garden along the thorn-grown wall, he carried his coffee cup out to the rear patio. The dew was heavy in the grass and the first finches were moving in the shrubbery. He’d once been a late riser, but in recent years, living alone, he was usually up and about at this hour. Solitude didn’t explain it.
Growing up in a small town in Wisconsin, he had heard his father moving about in the morning darkness in the downstairs kitchen in the same way, before his mother was awake, and solitude hadn’t explained that either. He’d worried about his father then, afraid his parents were getting a divorce, that his father was losing his job or the house, or had cancer like the dying machinist next door. Lying in his upstairs bedroom, half awake as he speculated about what might be making his father old before his time, he would hear him lighting the wood stove, filling the coffeepot, fetching the paper in, and in the winter filling the bird feeders in the crabapple tree outside the kitchen door. On those mornings when they’d gone duck or grouse hunting together, he’d shared the chilly kitchen with him, but those mornings were different. The stars were still out, the icy air took your breath away, and even the frying bacon and the coffee bubbling on the stove had a special aroma, not to be found on any ordinary morning.
The summer before Reddish went off to college, he took a job operating a stamping machine at the same corrugated box factory where his father worked as an accountant. The noise was deafening, the work brutal. After the first hour, his mind went blank, numb with boredom as he watched the time clock, not the clock just inside the employee entrance on the loading dock, but the office clock on the rear wall of the glass-windowed enclosure where his father and two other accountants sat, summer and winter alike, bent over their desks, the light always the same. It was the sight of that silent gray figure hunched over his ledgers that finally explained for Reddish his father’s early-morning restlessness. He told himself then that he would escape the world that had trapped his father; yet now, twenty-five years later, his restlessness was the same.
He left his coffee cup in the sink and drove out the front gate. The tree-shaded villas nearby, occupied by government ministers and diplomats, were still silent at this hour. A few arriving cooks and houseboys stirred along the roadbed under the trees. He turned away from the embassy and drove out the empty boulevard toward the sprawling police camp at Bakole. He saw no signs of activity and drove into the hills past army headquarters, deserted at this hour except for a single Mercedes parked near the front steps. He followed the tarmac higher and circled the paramilitary cantonment on the adjacent hilltop where the mercenaries were imprisoned. They were still an embarrassment to the regime, a political problem for which no one had found a solution. The President, like the army, was too frightened of European reaction to hang them and too terrified of their bloody talent for retribution to pardon them; so they rotted in prison, a sure sign of everything else that was wrong with the regime.
The gates to the para camp were open, the barriers lifted, the motor pool filled with idle and disabled vehicles. The gate guards were gossiping with old women and young girls from the nearby village who brought fruit and vegetables to sell at the gate.
He drove back down the hill to the presidential compound. The ornamental gates were drawn closed, the white ducal villa beyond the slope of green lawn somnolent in the morning light. The royal peacocks hadn’t yet been released from the aviary to parade under the trees and along the walks. On the side terrace, a solitary gardener was stooping to turn on the underground sprinkler system, a gift from the same Belgian société that built the small lake and the Swiss-chalet boathouse tucked away in the corner of the grounds, invisible from the gate. The same firm had been awarded the contract for improving the municipal water system, but progress had been slow. The cités where the Africans lived still had their co
mmunal faucets, Reddish his roof tank.
A handful of ragged Africans were already gathered on the bare earth under a tulip tree, some holding ten-franc copybooks, others folded newspapers concealing their petitions. Most wanted jobs, medical treatment, or the release of imprisoned relatives. A few simply wanted money, relief from the evil eye, or to pay homage to their president. They’d spent the night there sleeping on scraps of cardboard. By eleven o’clock, when the gates opened and the President’s motorcade swept by, speeding him to mass at the old Belgian-built cathedral, they would have been dispersed, their petitions received to be burned in the incinerator at the guard barracks, the supplicants sent back down the hillside, the President spared the humiliation of their rags and tatters, the contagion of their nameless diseases. But even as the speeding Mercedes roared by them far down the hill or along the boulevard, they would turn to greet him, their spirits lifted from the roadside dust for a moment to flap their rags at the splendor such men make across the Africans’ miserable planet in whose ancient, abiding helplessness there seemed to be no such thing as moral outrage.
Reddish circled the stone kiosk near the gatehouse, ignored by the presidential guards, who wore chrome-plated helmets and carried newly arrived American M-16 rifles. He drove back toward the city. He’d once made the same reconnaissance each night, accompanying the chief of the internal security directorate on his rounds as he locked up the city each night for an uneasy President, making certain that the capital was quiet, the police on duty or safely dispersed, the mud and tin hovels of the native communes asleep with their misery, the army secure in its barracks. The midnight patrol had ended in the study of the presidential villa, where they reported to the old man and his chef du cabinet, but that was before his power had been consolidated and his own security apparatus in place.
He turned off the main boulevard to idle past the Soviet and East German embassies. They were as peaceful as the surrounding streets, their gates locked. The gray shutters were drawn; the courtyards empty. Two policemen sat on the curb opposite each gate watching the compounds. They didn’t turn as Reddish drove past.
At the grand marché the morning sun had broken through the overcast, the quick yellow light flooding the open square. African women were unloading their produce in the stalls; trucks from the interior were discharging cargo in the narrow lanes. Five sleepy soldiers in jungle-green twill, on furlough from the interior, climbed from beneath the canvas of an old Mercedes truck and straggled off stiffly, still cramped from their long journey, still carrying their weapons. A few street orphans who made the marché their home chased after Reddish’s Fiat, mistaking him for an early shopper. At an intersection he watched a policeman in gray khakis flag down a Portuguese merchant who’d run a stop sign. The Portuguese gave him a package of cigarettes and drove on.
Business as usual, Reddish thought. What guns?
He left the commercial district and drove into the native commune of Malunga, the largest African cité in the capital. The sunshine was thick with the dust drummed from the dirt road and the adjacent footpaths by women in brightly colored waxes returning from the small native markets carrying baskets of fruit, palm oil, and dried fish. Jobless African youths stirred through the lanes or sat atop the concrete-block walls in front of open-air bars eyeing the young girls. It hadn’t rained in ten days. The older women were lined up twenty deep at the communal pumps. The rising dust mixed with the smoke still drifting from the morning cooking fires that burned within the beehive of compound yards where goats had cropped the shrubbery and foliage bare.
He drove past the police station, searching for Banda’s house. A policeman at the gate knew the name and pointed off down the laterite road. Behind him a few gray-clad figures lounged dissolutely on the porch facing the clay yard. The police post was half complete. Like rice, cooking oil, and flour, the price of cement had increased threefold since urban population pressures had forced the ministry of interior to begin new construction. A half-mile away he found a small concrete-block cottage that looked vaguely familiar, painted a pale blue, with yellow latticework along the porch. He saw no cars nearby, and he left his Fiat up the lane and walked back to the cottage.
The old woman who answered the door said that Banda and his wife had gone. “Flamand?” she asked curiously, moving her head from the shadows to study his face.
“Flamand te.” He asked her where Banda had gone. Her French was poor; his Lingala made her smile. She wasn’t sure where Banda had gone—West Kasai, she thought—and now she was embarrassed because Reddish’s knowledge of Lingala made it impossible for her to conceal her ignorance. But she knew he’d left last night, taking his motorcar, taking his wife and daughter. Somewhere far away, where his brother lived.
Reddish went back to his car. A few hundred feet beyond the Banda cottage he was forced to the verge by fifty youths jogging in double time down the lane. They wore green twill uniforms and the red armbands of the Jeunesse Nationale de la Révolution, the youth wing of the teachers and professional workers party, whose headquarters compound was nearby. Most of the youths were orphans from the bush or homeless commune kids whom the workers party had tried to train with vocational skills, but resources were limited, its talent meager. A few foreign embassies exploited the vacuum, supplying the JNR reading room with a potpourri of Pan-African, Western, socialist, and Marxist material—the words of Ben Bella, Nkrumah, de Gaulle, Kennedy, Marx, Nasser, and Kim Il Sung. The party jeunesse had grown to over a thousand strong, and growth had brought suspicion and resentment, principally from the commune dwellers of Malunga. The cadre leaders were bullies and thugs, mixing socialist argot with fascist tactics, extorting money from the poor for the workers party membership cards, intimidating shopkeepers, and harassing Portuguese and Belgian merchants. The JNR had clashed with the army during the student and transit strikes of the previous spring, a few were killed, a dozen more arrested.
But the principal object of army and cabinet suspicion was Pierre Masakita, the rebel leader brought back from exile by the President to be named vice minister of interior in the new government of national reconciliation. He was secretary general of the workers party, reorganized with the President’s sanction following his return from abroad.
“Flamand te!” a small urchin in the rear ranks shouted to Reddish as he marched by—“Belgians, no!” He was no more than eight or nine, barefooted, lifting his knees high with the other street orphans who were straggling along after the party jeunesse. But he couldn’t resist turning his head to see the insult’s effects, and when he did, he smiled suddenly, gap-toothed, too innocent to yet know who he or Reddish was.
Reddish drove back to the embassy. As he waited in front of the gate, a score or so of Congolese straggled along the street, moving away from the customs sheds a block away where the ferry from Brazzaville had just arrived. A few were traders carrying tin suitcases to set up shop in the Ivory Market. The Brazzaville Africa Cup winners were playing the national soccer team at the stadium that afternoon, and he wondered if the others were the first arrivals.
The embassy courtyard was deserted except for a Chevrolet station wagon drawn up near the front steps. It was the Sunday duty car, and the driver was asleep in the front seat.
“In kinda early, aren’t you, sir?” said the young Marine as he unlocked the steel riot gate from within. He wore dress blues and a pistol case on his hip. The riot screen was newly installed and a nuisance; the Marine had to struggle to keep it on its track as he pushed it overhead. Taggert, the regional security officer newly arrived from South Africa, was responsible for the installation. His first official act was to install the screen, his second to ban all African employees from the second and third floors, an inconvenience which meant that the embassy staff now had to fetch their morning coffee from the first-floor snack bar. The Marines, with that vernacular quickness of the barracks room, called him “Shaky the house dick.”
Reddish signed the registry and searched the night entries
at the top of the page. No one had come in during the night—not Lowenthal, not Colonel Selvey, the defense attaché, and none of his own people.
“Quiet night then,” he concluded.
“Yes, sir, all weekend, except for that Khartoum business. Maybe everybody’s sleeping off the party for Mr. Harris. That was sure some bust-up.”
Harris was the administrative counselor, departing for reassignment. The staff had given him a farewell party at the embassy recreation center in the suburbs, which would remain a quasi-official monument to his ingenuity in squeezing official funds for nonofficial purposes, like swimming pools, wet bars, and commissary runs to South Africa for fresh lobster.
“Was you there when they throwed Taggert into the pool?”
“I must have missed it,” Reddish said without lifting his eyes from the log. According to the registry, Lowenthal, the political counselor, had been the last officer to leave the embassy the previous evening. At seven, twenty minutes after he left, the Marine had logged an incoming call from Armand. That was about the time Banda had called him. He wondered what Armand had wanted to talk about.
“They throwed him in clothes and all. Jesus, was he pissed. The whole bunch was smashed and maybe Taggert was too. Corporal Martinez was in on it, and Taggert said he was going to get him busted.”