by W. T. Tyler
The faces at the table turned toward Selvey, who sat forward uncomfortably, half embarrassed, half angry. “What’s your point,” he asked, “that someone planted Russian guns on those bimbos in Malunga just to dish the Sovs? Jesus Christ, Andy!”
Bondurant peered coolly at Selvey over his glasses. “His point was that Brazzaville’s evidence last year was as good as yours today. Do you disagree?”
“But we’re suggesting possibilities, not writing a writ,” Becker complained, still appealing to Reddish.
“Precisely,” Bondurant continued. “Precisely why we must be careful here. Others will interpret it however they wish, whether it has a factual basis or not. I agree with Reddish that the language of the cable goes considerably beyond the facts that are known to us.”
The room was silent. Bondurant peered about him, disappointed. “I fully recognize the need to identify Soviet and Cuban plots where they occur,” he resumed quietly, “but I think we give Moscow far too much credit when we find its fingerprints on every smashed teacup in the pantry.”
General Leggard and Colonel Selvey sat with suppressed anger, shrunken within their starched khaki uniforms. Becker’s expression was fatalistic; Lowenthal’s held the pain of a personal wound. Bondurant gazed at them, bemused. “I also happen to think it’s quite dangerous,” he added, “dangerous for them, dangerous for us.”
“I wonder if you would amplify a bit for us,” Becker suggested politely, the acolyte now returned to the procession.
Bondurant hesitated. The room was respectfully silent; the silence drew him on. “For what it’s worth,” he began, “I believe that Soviet weapons support for an obscure little party with no popular base and no hope of achieving one would have been irrational. Soviet behavior may sometimes be rash, but it’s not unpredictable. Nevertheless, most of you seem convinced, even without evidence, that Moscow is capable of that kind of recklessness. I’m not, not yet, at any rate. It’s possible that Soviet policy may one day go suddenly berserk, whether in Africa or elsewhere, but I don’t believe that day has yet come.
“I think we bring it closer, however, when we accuse Moscow of irrational behavior on the flimsiest of evidence. Accusations of that nature get circulated elsewhere as hard fact. They also make it impossible to understand what Moscow is really up to. You can’t anticipate an adversary if you continually falsify his actions. The most you can do is stir up those in Washington and elsewhere who are already frightened enough of what they refuse to understand to believe the worst.”
He gazed about the room, not confident he had their understanding, even if he had their attention. “When that happens,” he continued, “then our own policy voices take on the same clumsy aberrant character, with the result that neither side understands any longer what the other is talking about. To me, as I said earlier, that is truly dangerous—two frightened, confused, dangerously armed men shouting at one another in a language neither understands. To the other, his adversary is a lunatic. For me, both soon will be.” He put his reading glasses back on and peered at the draft cable in front of him. “So that is what I meant. Coping with real problems in Washington is difficult enough. Coping with fictitious ones makes policy coherence impossible. So that’s all I meant. What Mr. Reddish has in mind, I’m not sure. In any case, the language suggesting Soviet and Cuban involvement should be struck from the draft, as Reddish proposed.”
“I sometimes have the impression Bondurant is a bit too generous,” Dick Franz observed, descending the outer stairway. “He imagines they think as he does—a Moscow version of the Foreign Affairs Council.” He slipped on his sunglasses.
“Why didn’t you tell him then?” Selvey demanded, irritated at Franz’s silly smile.
“Oh, it wouldn’t do. A law of survival, isn’t it?”
Selvey saw Reddish leave the door at the top of the steps and waited for him in the courtyard below.
“Whose ass were you covering, anyway?” he wanted to know. “What the shit were you afraid of, that some GS-18 back at the Agency would think you let the goddamn Russians come sneaking in the back door while Les was on leave.”
“It was a bad cable.”
“Maybe you know something we don’t.”
“Not yet.”
“Then you’re covering your ass.”
“Vigilance against policy incoherence,” Franz quipped.
In the privacy of his office, Reddish retrieved his debriefing of the Cuban defector from his safe and sat at his desk, still troubled, rereading the Cuban’s paragraphs describing the sudden moratorium on Cuban activities, including his claim that the Russian Embassy in Brazzaville was behind it. The defection was one of Reddish’s few successes in recent years, a clue as to Soviet tactics in the region, but it was a fragile one, suspiciously received by those in the Washington intelligence community unable to credit any evidence of Russian quietism—and by those at the Agency who remained skeptical of Reddish himself since Damascus. To either, the flimsiness of any evidence asserting that Soviet policy was aggressively predatory, as the Becker/Lowenthal cable suggested, wouldn’t matter.
“I heard you got them to change the telegram,” Sarah said as she came in with a folder of incoming cables.
Reddish nodded uncomfortably, quickly burying the Cuban debriefing memo beneath the correspondence on his desk. “Who told you?”
“I heard Selvey bellyaching to Walker. It’s nice to know there’s something you and the ambassador agree on.”
“We won the battle, not the war.”
Winning the war was why Masakita mattered to him. He was up for reassignment, possibly a post of his own.
A dark green sports car waited in the embassy courtyard near the front steps, the top down. A woman sat behind the wheel, her eyes hidden by sunglasses. She wore a sleeveless white blouse, made brighter by arms tanned by the sun and she was reading a French newspaper propped on the steering wheel in front of her. She’d ignored the warning from the Marine guard that she was parked in a reserved area. She lifted her eyes occasionally to glance at the faces of the embassy staff as they left for the day.
It was a little after five when Reddish left the building, the courtyard nearly deserted by then. He saw the dark green sports car but didn’t recognize the face, even after she’d honked the horn and lifted herself in the seat to call to him. Only after she’d raised the sunglasses to her forehead did he finally recognize her and cross to where she waited.
“Where are my sacks?” she asked plaintively.
“You didn’t get them? They were in the back of the embassy station wagon.”
“No, I didn’t.”
She’d been half asleep and a little disoriented as he’d put her into the embassy station wagon the morning before to be driven to the Houlets’. The curfew had just lifted.
“The driver probably brought them back. Maybe they’re in the motor pool.”
They walked around the side of the building and into the rear courtyard, where the dispensary and motor pool lay. Her two burlap bags were recovered in the dispatcher’s office, piled on a table in the corner with a few other lost or forgotten parcels from the chauffeur-driven American community.
“I was a little worried,” she admitted as Reddish carried them back to the car. “They’re tribal masks. I bought them from a trader on Sunday. I was sure I’d lost them.”
“You mean they’re valuable.”
“I’ve no idea. Sentimentally, I suppose. They’re all I have and I won’t have the opportunity to look again. I know a few of the people at the Musée de l’Homme, where they have a perfectly incredible collection. They told me what I might look for.”
“You’re leaving then?”
She turned, as if she thought he knew that. “Yes. Very soon probably.” The color had come back into her face, which was more remote than ever, the face of a fashionable French tourist who could travel from Cairo to Nairobi, Nairobi to Capetown, and never seem more than ten minutes away from her hairdresser or her flat in th
e Seventh Arrondissement in Paris. Some Manhattan women had, for Reddish, the same annoying look.
“Too much for you, is it?” he said, tempted. He wondered how much she’d told Armand and Houlet about Sunday night. Probably the whole bloody story.
“It’s been very difficult, very confusing.”
He thought her smile a little brittle, like the mouth—old family porcelain to be looked at behind glass, too fragile for everyday use. He wondered for the first time about her personal life and who her husband was. “You give up too easily,” he offered carelessly. “Things are beginning to quiet down now.”
“During the day, yes, but we heard gunshots last night. They were quite near.”
Like weevils in the flour, Reddish thought.
She opened the door and he put the burlap bags behind the front seat.
“I see you’ve got a new car.”
“It’s Madame Houlet’s. She’s been very generous, much more so than Houlet. A plane leaves on Sunday, and he’d prefer that I be on it. He believes it quite dangerous even now—unpredictable, he said. If I can’t drive about, there’s nothing to see. If there’s nothing to see, there’s no reason to stay.”
“As simple as that, is it?” Recklessly, not caring any more, he let his gaze travel her ankles and legs as she got in. “What is it you want to see?”
He thought he saw her color as she settled behind the wheel. “The cité, some of the countryside, a few of the villages.” Her attention was on the ignition switch as she probed with the key. “Houlet says it’s impossible.”
He closed the door after her. “Maybe not. You’ll be here tomorrow?”
“Yes, still here.”
“Why don’t I give you a call then. We could go down to the cité for a drink, maybe dinner.”
She looked up, startled. “I wouldn’t want to put you to any trouble.”
“No trouble.” He wasn’t sure whether she was surprised, insulted, or calling his bluff. “Getting away from the diplomats for a night might do you some good.” He was smiling.
She ignored it. “Yes, that would be nice,” she said vaguely. “All right then, tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow.”
One of us is lying, he thought, watching her drive out the gate.
Chapter Four
Army trucks and armored cars still commanded the main intersections, but they were permitting traffic to pass. Some of the roadblocks along the side streets had been removed. The streets were stirring again. The iron shutters that had closed the Portuguese, Greek, and Pakistani shops had been rolled open. The small green market near the port was active again. Spoiled fruit rotted in the gutters below the garlands of fresh flowers in old coffee tins. African vendors stood or squatted in the shadows under the tin roofs. The riverboats were unloading passengers and cargo.
Groups of blacks crowded the streets near the port, barefoot women in faded washworn waxes, with thin black scallions of pigtail sprouting from their uncovered heads, women whose shy loping flight across the wide boulevards identified them as newly arrived migrants from the interior. Reddish eased his Fiat to a stop, letting a group of women pass. They carried on their heads cloth- or leaf-wrapped packets of goods, lard tins, or orange vessels of palm oil. The old riverboats were moored two deep adjacent to the boat sheds, and he stopped again to look, wondering if the ferry to Brazza was in operation. It wasn’t. The only boats moving were those carrying domestic cargo, their debarked passengers still visible on the streets, as they would be for several hours along the boulevards before they vanished into the outlying communes, into the hives of clay, tin, and brick whose walls would conceal their faces, their cooking fires, their small pallets, their songs and dances.
No one knew their numbers. It was the anonymity that made the diplomats and the old colons restless and uneasy, faceless thousands infesting the tin and mud hovels in squalid candlelit rooms without water or electricity, five or six, sometimes ten to a dwelling, sometimes more. It was the postulation of that deprived, oppressed population that preyed on their minds and still nourished, as recently as Sunday, the imaginations of those who waited in the old Belgian residential section or the embassies of the European city, behind spiked walls and compounds, fearing the worst.
But after the migrants left the riverboats or the trucks—pulling to their heads the rags of their possessions, carrying the sandals and dodging the cars as they scurried to the safety of the sidewalks that belonged to the flamands, the Portuguese, and Pakistanis who sat in the cool shadows of their shops and sold them cheap cloth, salt, oil, cutlery, and plastic dishes—they sought only some tiny parcel of dirt yard where the smoke eddied from the ash of a hearth fire as it had once in the Kwilu or the Kasai, where the pots steamed and the wooden manioc pestles thumped the same, where in the darkness the same thin pallets would be unrolled, the songs, sounds, and laughter the same. Because inevitably they found some community of their own kin, their own blood and bone, brothers, sisters, aunts, and cousins, gathered together in mutual cohesion against the terrifying intrusions of that polyglot brothel capital, where the sanctity of family and tribe sustained them still.
How much longer? Reddish had often wondered. He didn’t know. The colons in the shops and the diplomats at their cocktails talked of savagery still, but after all these years where were the savages? What savages? Who had cruised these rivers and coasts for centuries now like sharks among herring, devouring everything, even their past, and who now faced alone the limitless ocean of their own annihilation?
“Next time it will be bad, very bad,” grumbled the old Portuguese shopkeeper as he passed the tea, coffee, sugar, and tinned milk across the counter. “You heard about the two Belgian police advisers at Bakole? Cut their throats. In Malunga, it was worse.”
Cut yours, Reddish’s look seemed to say as he turned back silently toward his car at the curb.
He entered the flat by the rear door and found the small bedroom behind the kitchen empty, the bed made. He left the parcel in the kitchen and went quickly into the living room. Masakita stood on the small balcony studying the river, which was at its most magnificent in the late afternoon, when the dying sun bathed the western sky and river in bronze fire. The golden light was shot through with the dark clusters it couldn’t ignite: the towering thunderheads over the savannahs, the trees along the far bank at Brazzaville, and the pirogues drifting upon the silk of river like water spiders, like long-legged flies.
“So it’s over,” Masakita said finally without turning. “The riverboats are unloading again.”
“Not quite, but almost.”
Masakita opened the sliding door and left the sunlight, moving back into the shadows of the small living room. His dark face was tired, scarred by pain, his eyes listless. He hadn’t shaved.
“Has Nyembo come?” he asked, slumping down on the sofa. His arm was still in a sling, but the bandage was gone from his forehead.
“He didn’t report for work. I don’t know where he is.”
“Picked up by the army?” A few books from the bookshelf in the corner lay on the table. He picked one up, glanced at it, and pushed it away. “Whose apartment is this?”
“A transient flat. People who come in for a few days for a visit or special projects.”
“Do you bring people here to offer them employment, people with secrets to sell?”
“No.” Reddish stood flat-footed, coat and trousers rumpled, searching his pockets for his notebook. He was in a foul temper.
“So what is it you expect of me?”
“I want to ask you some questions. What the hell else?”
“And after that?”
“I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”
“Out of the country, is that what you have in mind?”
“That’s one possibility. Whoever these people are, they’re scared of you still. It’s not going to be very pleasant when they find you.”
“Maybe they should live with that uncertainty.”
“
It’s not a toothache,” Reddish said. “Scared people do ugly things. They’re scared of you.”
“Will shooting me make them braver? Will it give truth to their lies? What about you? You were in Malunga. Are they going to shoot you too? You saw it. You know what happened.”
“Not all of it. Some of it. That’s what I want to talk about, how it was done.”
“What does it matter how it was done,” Masakita said. “It’s done now, finished! If these soldiers want to claim foreign guns were responsible, Russian, East German, or whatever, they can say so, and no one will have the courage to doubt them! Not the Americans, not the Belgians, no one! So why does it make a difference to you?”
“It matters. Don’t think it doesn’t.”
“Why? Because they cheated you, these soldiers? Because they smashed your President while your back was turned, because they didn’t ask your permission? Are you humiliated because of that? What do you want? Revenge? Revenge because nothing can happen here without your knowing it? What about the Africans they humiliated?”
“I want to know what happened,” Reddish said.
“So it’s the truth then, just the truth. Of course, certainly,” Masakita continued. “The thieves are swindled, and suddenly they’re interested in justice. What kind of justice? Like everyone else, you’ve lived here with injustice for years. So why, then? For scholarly reasons, reasons of pedagogy, intelligence pedagogy, to refine methods, techniques, to improve on performance next time so that you can’t be tricked while your back is turned?”
“I told you—”
“I know what you told me, but the truth isn’t celibate, is it? It has its own secrets, its own reasons. Don’t misunderstand me, but you must see how strange all of this is. You say I’m not a prisoner, that I’m free to go as I choose. Go where? You don’t know. Go when? You don’t know that either. So I am a prisoner—to those soldiers out there, to your questions here. Questions for what? For revenge?”