by W. T. Tyler
“Masakita? I don’t know him. Isn’t he the former rebel, the turncoat?”
“I sent him a letter, maybe a week ago. I told him I was returning to São Salvador and would need his help.”
“Don’t trust any of them. None of them. They’re all the same, those bastards across the river. I told you, the Portuguese are easier to deal with. The regime over there is rotten, corrupt.”
“Not Masakita,” dos Santos said, smiling at Nogueira’s reaction. His cynicism was only a reflex; he’d been alone a long time. The rain drummed against the roof. The thunder rolled away to the northeast, down the valley. Dos Santos drank another bottle of beer as he listened to Nogueira’s melancholy monologue. The empty house and the sound of the rain no longer seemed the symbols of his imprisonment. Listening to Nogueira and knowing the solitude that lay behind his words restored that continuity that had been lost to him as he stood alone in the rain at the port.
He could now think of the future again. The guns were on the porch, sheltered from the rain. Mers-al-Kabir was only a brief momentary memory: the rocking boat, the fierce sunlight, the splintered mirror of the sea. In this cottage a Frenchman had once lived. He had sat with his wife and perhaps his children in this same room; now they were gone. The windows were broken, the plaster fallen, the roof sagged; but there were lizards on the ceiling and finches in the trees outside. It was a beginning. To forget the past and restore the future would take time.
He remembered something Masakita had once told him in Paris when he was alienated from everything around him, like Lieutenant Nogueira, and existence no longer meant anything but the sound of his own voice. Masakita had told him of a Frenchman who’d written of that moment in history when the Roman gods had disappeared and Christ had not yet come, a unique moment in which neither past nor future existed. Men stood alone. Dos Santos had remembered it many times. Each time he thought of his own country and of Africa, of Western capitals like pagan Roman gods and of African exiles like himself, waiting in the slums and catacombs of Europe and not living as men at all.
He now told Nogueira of that moment, and they sat in the kitchen drinking beer until the cigarettes were gone.
The morning mist still lay within the grove of palm trees when dos Santos awoke. The house was silent, Nogueira asleep under the mosquito netting in the next room. Dos Santos went quietly out into the rear yard, stopping near the lean-to where the ashes were wet and cold under the palm boughs. He walked back through the palm grove. Standing among the trees at the rear, he could see the mist thinning over the valley below. On the heavy air he detected the fragrance of blossoms and ripening citrus. Turning his head, he saw a dozen lemon trees a few meters down the slope, their gnarled limbs still heavy with fruit. He moved down through the wet grass toward the trees.
He still hadn’t returned as the battered gray Delbeques truck, with Vitrac behind the wheel and alone, came silently back down the lane and stopped near the elevated porch. Vitrac left the truck, slightly hump-backed, and moved with his head thrust forward. He wore gray shorts and hightop buckskin boots. In the doorway of the room where dos Santos had slept, Vitrac paused, studying the cheap tin suitcase and the portable radio. Nogueira slept noisily under the mosquito netting, mouth open, smelling of beer.
“C’est fini? Tout va bien! Donc—Come on. It’s late. Get up.”
Nogueira lifted himself sluggishly to Vitrac’s voice. His head ached. He looked away from the bony face toward the window, found the morning sun under the shade, and sat forward for a minute before he moved his feet to the floor, searching for his rubber sandals. “You’re early. You said ten o’clock.”
“Early? What do you mean, early? We have a long trip. Where is he? Did you send him to Brazza?”
Nogueira rose and moved past him, pulling on his shirt. “Don’t get excited.” He went over to a small metal trunk and foraged among the dirty clothes. “Pas de cigarettes. Rien. We smoked his.” He took a web belt and holstered revolver from the bottom of the trunk and slung it over his shoulder as Vitrac watched, baffled. From the tray he scooped up a handful of .38 cartridges, inserted them in the spare magazine, and stuck the clip in his pocket.
“What are you doing? We must be there today, tonight! What are you wasting time for?”
“Today.” Nogueira laughed. “I’ve been here for two years. That’s long enough to forget what I came for. Watch the books with your dirty shoes.”
“Where is the Angolan? Did you talk to him? Is he coming with us?”
Nogueira didn’t answer, moving carefully between the books piled on the floor. He crossed the hall, looked into the empty room, and went back through the kitchen and out into the yard, Vitrac at his heels. Standing in the palm grove, he shouted for dos Santos. After a minute he called again, and dos Santos answered from far down the hillside. Nogueira stood in the sunny silence looking out through the motionless palm trees and the growth of wild shrubbery.
“He’s not a bad sort,” he said finally, as if he were talking to himself, head lifted toward the blue sky where the haze was clearing. “But he’s too much the intellectual. Doesn’t talk, just listens. He wouldn’t sell you or your Portuguese friends any guns. Wouldn’t last in Angola either, not against the army there. No safe conduct for him. If they didn’t get him, his kidneys would go, kidneys or bowels, all that shit built up, rotting your insides out. Like mine. It’s the way you get after a while—too many ideas, too much thinking. That’s what Europe does for you. Not like you bastards. You took it in with your mother’s milk.” He didn’t move for a minute, head still lifted. Finally he shrugged, turning. “I’ll go to Brazil. I think I’d like it there. What about you, back to France?”
Vitrac didn’t reply. Nogueira looked with contempt at his haggard face and turned away, moving down through the trees with the gun belt and pistol case over his shoulder, like a coupeur des fruits with his climbing rope about his neck, on his way to the forest in search of wild palms.
Vitrac waited anxiously near the porch steps. As the first shot came, he shuddered in reflex, his eyes suddenly bright. Two more shots followed, muffled and without reverberation. He retreated to the kitchen and from the window watched the sunny hillside. Ten minutes later he saw Nogueira come back through the palm grove, counting out franc notes and dollar bills from a tobacco-colored wallet.
He called to him, still frightened, from the doorway.
Nogueira didn’t answer. Bending near the wooden steps, he pulled a mattock and shovel from beneath the house and went back down the hillside.
That afternoon they loaded the crates in the lift van aboard the truck. Nogueira took with him his metal footlocker, a few books and dos Santos’ shortwave radio. He burned the dead man’s letters and papers, including the notebooks, which he threw in the fire without looking at. In the bottom of the suitcase he found a roll of parchment bound with a rubber band. Inside was a diploma from a French university. Rolled in the diploma was a polychrome print of a brightly plumed bird from the African savannahs—an expensive print, brittle with age, drawn by a nineteenth century French naturalist. Nogueira studied it in the sunlight of the yard, pleased.
“C’est joli, eh?” he said to Vitrac, holding it up, but Vitrac told him to burn it.
Nogueira only laughed, determined to keep it. “You’ve taken his guns, everything else, why not this.” He rolled it up and stored it in the bottom of his trunk.
That night the truck crossed the frontier into the other Congo at a two-man border post on a track near the Cabinda frontier. The lift van passed through customs without inspection, as Vitrac had promised, documented as railroad parts destined for Matadi. Five kilo-meters beyond, Vitrac turned the truck into an abandoned sawmill. A light rain was falling. Nogueira could see nothing. Vitrac stopped the truck at an old saw shed and they sat in the cab waiting, lights out.
“Where are the Portuguese?” Nogueira said. “I don’t see anyone.”
“They’re here. Just wait. Don’t get out.”
<
br /> But Nogueira got out anyway. As he slammed the cab door the lights from a hidden army truck across from the saw shed came on. The truck rumbled forward and Nogueira retreated as it grew closer, blinded by the lights.
“Just stay there. Don’t move!” He heard Vitrac’s frightened voice call to him from the cab. “Don’t move, for God’s sake!”
Nogueira stood motionless against the cab door. The truck had stopped, the lights dimming out. He heard the clanking of rifles as the shadows spilled from the bed of the army truck. A powerful flashlight moved toward him through the rain, probing his face. He turned his head finally, blinded, protesting in Portuguese.
De Vaux stood holding the flashlight against Nogueira’s face. “Who are you?” he asked coldly.
“Nogueira, Lieutenant Nogueira,” Vitrac called eagerly from the cab. “Major de Vaux? It’s me, Vitrac. On time, just as I said.” His voice lacked conviction and de Vaux lifted the torch beam to the shrinking face.
“Get out.” He pushed Nogueira away from the cab door. Two black paras immediately seized him and thrust him against the truck frame. “Put them in the truck,” de Vaux told his para corporal, “both of them. With three guards.”
“What truck?” Vitrac asked in confusion, climbing from the cab door. “My office in Brazza is expecting me. That wasn’t our agreement. Listen, Major—”
But the para corporal rudely pulled him from the cab door and pushed him toward the army truck. “Kangana monoko!”
Chapter Two
Dawn was coming, the darkness beginning to dissolve in the streets. A crippled wind, laden with musk and charred wood, stirred across the rooftops.
Masakita awoke to a movement in the room, a shadowy figure hovering silently near the bed, holding something loose between his hands, like a garrote.
“Who is it!”
“It’s me, Reddish.” Fatigue had settled in his voice like rheum. He turned on the lamp on the bedside table, holding the bloody Mao jacket Masakita had been wearing when he’d been wounded. He was freshly shaven, his hair damp, wearing a wrinkled seersucker suit, but his eyes were tired. “You’ve been sleeping a long time.”
“What time is it?”
“Five-thirty—in the morning.”
Masakita struggled to sit up. The bandage on his shoulder was clean, professionally bound with surgical clamps, like a hospital dressing. He looked down at it, puzzled.
“I brought a nurse from the embassy yesterday,” Reddish said.
“Yesterday?”
“Today is Tuesday. You’ve been here since Sunday. Don’t try to move. It’ll be a little raw.” He pulled a chair from the dressing table and brought it to the side of the bed. “Are you hungry? You had a little broth yesterday. You weren’t awake very long.”
“I remember.”
“We didn’t have a chance to talk. Do you feel like talking now? I want to get a few things straight, the sooner the better.”
“What things?”
“If you’re hungry they can wait.”
“What things?”
Reddish sat back. “The guns. Why don’t we begin there. Where did they come from?” He grimaced, shifting position again, like a man with a backache. “They were new guns, weren’t they? Still in oil. The ones I saw were still in oil.”
Masakita sank back, staring at the ceiling.
Reddish waited. “Soviet-made, maybe Chinese,” he continued. “You can’t tell at a distance. The Czechs make an AK-47 too. So do a few others. Where did they come from? Brazzaville?” He waited again. “Who managed it?” But Masakita didn’t reply and Reddish stood up. “I’ve got time. Maybe you need something to get the blood moving. What do you want—soup, broth, tea?”
“Spirits. Something strong, please.”
“You still have pain?”
“A little.”
“Broth would be better.”
“Something strong.”
Reddish brought a small tumbler of cognac from the kitchen and left it on the bedside table. “Where did the guns come from?” he began again patiently. Awkwardly, Masakita twisted to his side and sipped from the tumbler, grinding his teeth after he’d swallowed. “Brazza, wasn’t it? Who managed it?”
Masakita eased himself back against the pillows. “You saw them?”
“I saw them.”
“If you saw them, what difference does it make? Possession is all that matters, isn’t it? Whether you can use them or not isn’t important. Here you’re shot for possession alone. If they were Russian guns you saw, so much the worse.” He tried to sit up again, stiffened in pain, and sank back.
A siren sounded far in the distance. A night moth bounced against the window screen, drawn by the table lamp. “Where’d they come from?” Reddish asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know. They were in your compound and you don’t know. That’s funny, isn’t it?” He lifted Masakita’s bloody Mao jacket from his knee and withdrew a package of crushed cigarettes, four letters, and three 9-mm cartridges. “Where did you get these?” He held the brass shells out in his open hand.
Masakita lifted his head to look at them. “Albert Matanda,” he replied, sinking back, his eyes closed. “Matanda is the chief of the Mundi agricultural farm. He brought them to show me there were guns in the compound.”
“Just the cartridges, no weapon?” Reddish spilled the shells onto the table under the lampshade.
“A pistol too, but I left it on my desk.”
“When was that, Sunday afternoon?” He watched Masakita nod. “So you were in your office and this man Albert Matanda came in to tell you there were guns in the compound, is that it?”
“Yes.”
“What about these letters?” One was postmarked from Paris, two from Cairo, and one from Algiers. Reddish had looked at them in the kitchen. The two from Cairo were from staff members from the Afro-Asian Secretariat, the one from Algiers from a man named dos Santos, asking for help, like the letter from Paris.
“I had them with me when Albert came in, trying to answer them.”
“So you were writing letters in your office.”
“I hadn’t begun. I’d had them with me for several days.”
“This letter from Paris is from an old rebel leader trying to put together a new rebel front, like the old days. He says he has local support in the Kivu.”
“I get such letters all the time.”
“So they weren’t his guns either,” Reddish said.
“No, certainly not.”
“So whose guns were they?” He put the four letters in his pocket.
“I told you—I don’t know.”
“How did they get into the compound?”
“Trucks brought them.”
“Brought them from where?”
“From customs, I thought. Now I’m not sure.”
“When was that?”
“Two trucks came on Saturday night, two more on Sunday.”
“As simple as that, just sent from customs. Guns sent from customs. What about customs documents, manifests?”
“Albert had them.” Masakita sipped again from the tumbler. “They were the documents for crates of agricultural implements for the workers party farm at Mundi in the savannahs. That’s what we thought were in the crates, hand tools for Mundi.”
“Who was to give you the hand tools?”
“The DDR, the East Germans. They promised hoes, machetes, shovels, and mattocks. Albert was to take them to Mundi by truck on Sunday afternoon.”
Reddish knew about Mundi. An embassy AID officer had visited the agricultural camp after the party had appealed to the foreign diplomatic missions for support, but he had seen no implements, no cultivation, and no crops, just an hour of close-order drill and a thirty-minute political recitative; Marxism-Leninism, he’d reported, but Reddish had wondered how the hell he knew. Before he’d joined AID, he’d been a rural agricultural agent in Indiana.
“So what were you going to do,” Reddish a
sked, “take the guns to Mundi until your people out there could be trained to use them?” He sat forward, elbows on his knees, shoulders hunched, his face beginning to come to life.
“We weren’t expecting guns. We asked for support for Mundi—money, equipment, hand tools, anything. The Swedes and the East Germans were the only ones to promise donations. The Swedes gave us shovels and seed. The East Germans promised hand tools, fifteen to twenty crates, sent from Karl-Marx-Stadt. Those were the crates we were expecting.”
“But they gave you guns instead. Your jeunesse in Malunga didn’t know how to use them, not yet anyway, not until they’d been trained at Mundi. What happened Sunday? Did they get impatient, just grab the guns and run?”
“Mundi was an agricultural camp. No one was to be trained at Mundi with guns.”
“Let me tell you what I know about the weapons,” Reddish said. “First, they were still in cosmoline, which means they’d just been cracked from the shipping crates. Secondly, the rebels I saw didn’t know how to use them. The AK-47 is maybe the most efficient weapon for its weight in the world, and these kids couldn’t handle them. Funny, don’t you think? They looked a little tanked up to me, like they’d been drinking lukulu. You know about lukulu, don’t you? Something that gets your nerves together but not your head, not your reflexes either. People who drink the stuff do stupid things, like people fired up on dope or LSD. What was the lukulu for, someone’s quick fix to get some untrained kids out on the streets with guns they couldn’t use? What did you think?” Reddish asked, his voice gathering disapproval. “That the mobs in the streets were so fed up they’d help out too once the fighting started?”
“No,” Masakita said. “Lukulu? There was no lukulu.”
“So you don’t know anything about that either.”
“You’re mistaken.”
“All you know is that you were expecting hand tools—shovels and hoes—is that it?” He sat forward again. “That’s bullshit, friend. You know it and I know it. Stop your lying.”