by W. T. Tyler
“That’s too bad,” Reddish said, returning the registry. “When the duty officer calls, tell him I want to see him. I’ll be upstairs.”
Behind the vault door of the third-floor commo room, the clerk showed him the incoming cable from Langley listing the names of five Palestinians who’d left Khartoum the afternoon prior to the kidnapping, traveling on stolen Jordanian passports. The Agency thought the second group was targeted against a second American diplomatic mission to the south. The station was instructed to pass the names and passport numbers to the local security service and request additional protection for the embassy and the ambassador.
In his office on the second floor, he unlocked his safe, turned on the coffee maker, and switched on the shortwave radio. He listened to the news bulletins on national radio and turned to the BBC from London. On the wall behind the desk was a framed diplomatic commission; a picture of his ex-wife and daughter standing in the rich golden light of the Roman ruins at Palmyra, Syria; and a black and white photograph of Reddish, the President, and Yvon Kadima standing with a group of black paras in the rubble of a tea plantation in the Kivu during the mercenary rebellions. After the newscast, he turned off the radio, disconnected his phone from the switchboard, and replugged the jack to a direct outside line. He called the director of internal security, but the operator said he was out. He called his residence and got no answer. He telephoned two other contacts at their private residences. Neither was at home. One was in the interior, a second had left for Brussels two days earlier.
What in God’s name is going on? he wondered as he dialed Yvon Kadima’s residence. The houseboy told him the minister had left for Matadi on the coast to visit his banana plantation.
“Did you give him my message last night?”
“Yes, I told him.”
“Tell him again, will you. Tell him it’s important.”
He turned on the national radio again, puzzled. On any other Sunday he might have thought his sudden Coventry a coincidence. Now, remembering Banda’s telephone call, he wasn’t sure. It had happened once before—in Syria on the eve of a coup d’etat when his assets had suddenly dried up, vanished, been blown away—
“Looks like they traced those Palestinians, Mr. Reddish.” The commo clerk stood in the door holding a teletyped sheet just torn from the code machine, sent from the CIA station in Nairobi. The five Arabs traveling south from Khartoum had left Nairobi the previous night, bound for Mogadiscio and Aden. Kenyan passport control had tracked them.
“Headed north again. Looks like they got scared off,” the clerk said. “Do you want me to take that instruction back upstairs?”
“No, I’ll keep it for a while. Thanks.”
He telephoned Sarah Ogilvy, his secretary. “Do you realize what time it is,” she complained. “You woke me up.”
“That makes two of us. It’s eight-fifteen. If you don’t have anything better to do, why don’t you come in. I may need a little help.”
“I suppose you know I’m not the duty secretary this week.”
“It’s not duty I’m looking for, it’s companionship. You’d better bring your lunch—for both of us.”
“I haven’t been shopping yet. I was going after church.”
“No cucumber and lettuce. The same with the cream cheese. Corned beef’s O.K. Smoked salmon’s better.”
She hung up.
In the old days improvisation had been his operational code, and old habits died hard. Swiveling in his chair, he typed out the five Palestinian names and their passport numbers on his old Underwood. From the bottom drawer of the desk he removed a dog-eared telephone book and found the paramilitary camp on the mountain. If his sources had all disappeared temporarily, others could be used. He knew Jean-Bernard de Vaux, the Belgian ex-mercenary who was now aide and equerry to Colonel N’Sika, the commander of the paratrooper brigade. He telephoned the para camp.
In the past he’d often been given credit for knowing far more than he knew or had the right to know. The Agency sometimes struggled with the same omniscient reputation. If it wasn’t deserved, it was sometimes useful, particularly in coping with those lost in the conspiratorial murk of Third World politics. He thought the reputation might be useful now. If Banda was right, and the army, the paras, and others were planning something, they were amateurs, these ham-handed colonels and majors—and amateurs could be scared off.
He spoke to de Vaux, who, after some hesitation, agreed to see him at noon.
Chapter Four
Reddish had sat with Michaux that day two months earlier on the verandah of the old cercle at Kindu, seven hundred miles east of the capital deep in the African bush. Behind them, half in shadow, the whitewashed wall of the old sporting club was scaled by the African sun and pocked by the rifle fire of the rebellions two years past. Vultures and magpies flapped along the sagging fence behind the weed-grown courtyard where the tennis courts had once lain. Waiting in the sand drive under the laurel trees was the old Fiat Cinquecento that had brought him from the airstrip. Michaux’s muddy Landrover stood near the concrete steps, the Mutatela driver squatting in its shadow eagerly turning the pages of the newspapers Reddish had brought from the capital. The trials of the leaders of the transit and student strikes had just ended; the photographs of the executed men, hands and feet bound, blindfolded, decorated the front pages.
“Still as suspicious as ever, is he?” Michaux asked, amused, talking of the President. “Terrified of strikes, foreign guns, Russians, Cubans, and God knows what else. Students now, eh? Is that why he brought back that scoundrel Jean-Bernard de Vaux? Someone told me he’s the President’s bodyguard. Doesn’t trust the Americans now, just his old Belgian mercenaries.”
Michaux knew Reddish as the President’s shadow during the rebellions, accompanying him on the C-130 flights about the interior. Even during the most bitter days, when the nation seemed merely so much carrion for the UN and the cold war jackals, Reddish had never adopted the bush jackets or safari suits worn by other junketing diplomats or UN civil servants, but always the same drab rumpled seersucker or tropical suits, the coat settled damply about his shoulders like a barman’s jacket.
“Not the President’s bodyguard, Colonel N’Sika’s, the new commander of the para brigade. Where did you know de Vaux?”
“Jean-Bernard de Vaux? Here,” Michaux said. “I know him well. An ugly little guttersnipe, straight from the Antwerp slums—a mongrel, that’s what. Clever though; everyone knows that. So now he’s with the para brigade. Bodyguard, you say?”
“Aide and equerry to Colonel N’Sika, the commander.”
“N’Sika?” Michaux frowned suddenly, memory gone. “Don’t know him. Where’s he from?”
“The north. Equateur.”
Michaux brightened. “Then I wouldn’t,” he declared, relieved. He was no longer physically active, a crippled old crab on the beach; memory was the tide that lifted him away. He drank from the whiskey Reddish had brought him from the capital, smiling. “No, don’t know him. Equateur, you say? No, too much jungle in the blood up there, like Maniema—too dark, too savage.” He laughed.
He was almost seventy, his thatch of white hair crudely cut, the flesh of his face and neck scarred by the equatorial sun. He had lived in the bush for forty years, surviving fever, isolation, superstition, and disease, the murder and mayhem of the Simba and mercenary rebellions, and now the torpor of an exhausted countryside. The roads were worse now than forty years ago; he couldn’t evacuate his palm nuts to the river or the railhead; the pressing plant, burned by the rebels, hadn’t been reopened. After forty years, all he had for his labors were his crippling arthritis, a derelict palm oil plantation thirty kilometers to the south, and a middle-aged Batatela woman who kept house for him and whom he called his wife.
“They say the President is in poor health,” Michaux continued, still eager for gossip from Kinshasa. “They say that’s why he hides himself away in the capital—cancer of the throat, I heard. Paralyzed, they say—eve
rything. Is that why he went to Brussels last month, because of this cancer?”
“Health isn’t one of his problems,” Reddish said, gazing out into the bright, windless African afternoon.
“But everything else is, eh? The army, the parliament, the cabinet, the Russians, now the students. Is that why he reorganized the paras, with his new colonel in charge? They say the regular army threatened to mutiny in the south.”
“A little misunderstanding, that’s all.”
“The army and the students fought in the streets, but the national radio tells us nothing. Is that a misunderstanding too?”
“Probably. How well did you know de Vaux?” Reddish persisted, his curiosity stirred. He collected the odd anomalous fact as other men collect pocket pieces, pipes, or books. He knew de Vaux well enough to recognize that some of his information was false.
“Well enough. I knew him here. Why? Has he tried to hire himself out to the Americans? If he has, you’ve got a brass sovereign. Tried to hire himself out to me once. Wouldn’t have him.”
Their conversation had been interrupted by the arrival of the sedan from the internal security sub-office to take Reddish away to the army depot. There he examined a cache of weapons discovered at an army checkpoint aboard a trader’s truck south of Uvira along the lake. They were concealed beneath bags of rice and tinned goods marked with Chinese characters, smuggled in from Tanzania. The major at Kindu had reported to his headquarters in the capital that he’d seized a shipment of Chinese-supplied weapons and rations intended for old rebels in the bush preparing to reopen the insurrections. The President had been alarmed at the report; so had Kadima, the interior minister, and Bintu, the President’s chef du cabinet.
Reddish had been dubious. He’d told Kadima he would look at the weapons himself.
“Chinois,” the army captain muttered, prodding a mud-caked carbine with his foot. He had a broad, stupid face; the whites of his eyes were muddy, the pupils dilated, like a hashish addict’s.
The cache of weapons lay on a wooden pallet in an ordnance repair shop, half covered by a filthy tarpaulin. In the dim light of the shop, Reddish found what he’d expected to find—a potpourri of rusty old ordnance the rebellions had given back after a few years—old Belgian rifles, German 9-mm Schmeisser submachine guns, Italian 9-mm Berettas, and two Danish 9-mm Madsen submachine guns. The automatic pieces were once mercenary hardware, stolen, sold, stolen, and sold again, most recently to the trader who’d smuggled in the Chinese rice and tinned goods from across the lake. A few had a coating of fresh light oil, but the remainder had been heavily coated with fish oil and stank as oppressively as the tarpaulin. A few were missing firing pins; others had ruptured barrels. Pushed down the bore of a Belgian rifle was the shaft of a hunting arrow with a broad scalloped point of hand-forged iron.
“Masakita,” the captain grumbled. He disappeared off into a dark corner and returned with an empty rice sack, pointing out the Chinese characters.
“He says the guns were for Masakita’s followers,” the security chief translated.
“How does he know that?” Reddish asked, cataloguing the guns in his notebook.
“He says Masakita was in China.”
“Ask him which guns are Chinese.”
The captain searched among the weapons Reddish had moved aside and dug out a Danish 9-mm Madsen. The hieroglyphics of the armorer’s die might have looked like a Chinese character to a bush soldier, but the weapon was Danish, once a mercenary piece, now part of the gun traffic along the frontiers of this ramshackle empire. Poachers bought guns; so did brigands, provincial officials, and frightened tribesmen beyond the reach of an inept administration.
Reddish pulled the old arrow from the rifle bore and studied the arrowhead, intrigued. “I think it’s a hippo arrow, isn’t it? Used by the hunters on the lake?” He held the arrow out to the captain, who made no move to take it.
“He doesn’t hunt hippos,” explained the security chief.
“What does he hunt then?” Reddish asked, losing interest.
“He hunts what the soldiers always hunt,” the chief said to him softly as they went back to the car—“rice, cigarettes, and beer from the trucks.”
“Contraband, is that it? Everything they can get their hands on?”
The chief nodded. “When the army is hungry or bored, everything is contraband.”
Michaux had guessed Reddish’s purpose in coming. He greeted him at dusk as Reddish returned to the cercle for dinner, rising from his chair on the verandah, propped grotesquely on his heavy walking stick.
“Is that what brings you out here for a few hours, looking for new rebels en brousse? Look for yourself, mon vieux! What do you see except exhaustion?” His bright eyes swept the dimming desolation of the cercle—the fallen roof tin perforated by rifle fire, the litter of mortar rubble along the wall, the weed-grown fence where the magpies had quarreled.
Michaux talked that evening of de Vaux.
“Oh yes—de Vaux. Yes, I remember. What can I say about him? He started off in Bunia up near the Sudan border after the war. That’s where I first knew him. All he had was the cloth on his back. Hired himself to a Pakistani merchant as a mechanic and driver, smuggling tea and coffee into Uganda and Kenya. Brought back stolen lorries. Quick with a spanner or a knife, take your choice. Quick with other men’s wives too, if you want to know. Tried to hire himself to me, like I said, but I wouldn’t have him—a brass sovereign if I ever saw one! Twice he tried. So now he’s with the para brigade, eh? Aide and equerry?”
“You say he was at Bunia in forty-six?” Reddish asked, drawing him on. “That’s not what I remember.”
They sat on the side gallery of the cercle, the table brought from inside, where a handful of UN technicians and local administrators were drinking and dining. Behind the latticework that divided the gallery from the kitchen area, the smell of couscous and roasting chicken drifted, mixed with the pungence of charcoal. Insects rattled against the hurricane lamp. Beyond the scapular crowns of the palms and palmetto, the sky was bright with stars.
“Oh yes, he was at Bunia then, maybe a little to the north,” Michaux said. “You know him, do you? What’d he tell you about himself?”
Reddish had heard that de Vaux had served with the elite Belgian unit Chasseurs d’Ardennes but had resigned his commission after the war to serve in Indochina. Another source credited de Vaux with service in the crack Third French para regiment during the Battle of Algiers, after which he’d been decorated.
Michaux smiled as he noisily refilled his glass. “Chasseurs d’Ardennes? Never! Don’t be fooled. A chaser of women was all he was in those days, women and money. A handsome lad, bright as a penny, but a thief. Stole the Pakistani bankrupt, they say, but no one minded. Good riddance, some said. After that a Belgian took him on. That would have been forty-eight or forty-nine. I think it was a Belgian, but he could have been a Greek. Took him on as overseer and mechanic. No—wait! He was Greek, that’s right, an old Greek who married late, the way they do. From Rhodes I remember. He brought a Greek wife from there, a widow and her daughter, all in black. Pretty, both of them. Before the old man knew it, de Vaux had made a mistress of the wife. After he got tired of her, he had a go at the daughter.
“By God, there’s a lad from Antwerp for you. His old man must have been a sailor, eh, off the ships. Anyway, de Vaux finally ran off with the girl and took over an abandoned tin mine up in the Kivu. Bought it for a song—but why not?—it was worthless, an old shaft filled with tailings and a smashed lift. Tried to sell shares in it, I remember, tried to create a world out there. That was the second time he came to see me. Shares! Had the Greek girl’s baptism card with him, all gold and gilt, flowers on the margin, cupids blowing kisses through silver clouds, the way the Greek churches do it. Found his pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, he had. He was going over to Kampala to have it copied up, printing and artwork both. I had to laugh when I saw it—shares like a bloody baptism card.
&n
bsp; “Anyway, all he got out of it was the three hundred thousand francs the Greek paid to get his stepdaughter back. De Vaux didn’t care, not a man like that. He knew enough chiefs in the bush by then to pick his crop when the young lasses bloomed—jungle poppies, eh? What age would that be, twelve or thirteen? Next thing I heard he’d bought a tea plantation on the track to Goma, right at the edge of the lake. After that he bought another mine and lost everything again. It was as worthless as the first.”
The waiter brought chicken and rice. Michaux began to eat hungrily, without waiting.
“So he was here in the bush all those years,” Reddish said.
“He was here, no place else. Had a way with the blacks, no doubt about it. Hard worker too and clever as a snake. Went after what he wanted, but a swine too, for all the honest ambition he ever had. What good is his kind of ambition out here? Brings you closer to the grave, that’s all. Take my word for it—leave your ambitions in the old world. Take this one as you find it. Don’t try to make another. Battle of Algiers? Never. Did he graduate from Saint-Cyr too?
“He did disappear for a few years, that much I remember. Some thought he was dead, killed while poaching the King’s elephants up in Parc Albert. Nothing was out of bounds for him in those days. Others told me he went up to Juba in the Sudan, as bold as brass, trying to corner the ivory trade. Tea prices had fallen. They say he had a fleet of lorries up there. Whatever it was, when I saw him again he’d learned a little English. Spoke it well too—talked like a limey though, dockside style. Maybe he picked it up in prison in Entebbe or Khartoum. Does that make him an Oxford man too?”
Michaux laughed, eyes lifted as he brought knife and fork together again on the plate in front of him.
“When did you last see him?”
Michaux raised his knife, waving it toward the dark courtyard behind Reddish. “Outside the gate there, during the rebellions. He was commanding a merc unit. Lost track of him after that.” He frowned as he drank from his glass, memory fading again. “What happened to him after that?”