Rogue's March

by W. T. Tyler

  Cecil had sent a cable to his wife imploring her return but had heard nothing. His mother-in-law was now ill and his wife had stayed over with her. He remained at his residence after lunch that day, complaining to his secretary of a mild fever, despite the thermometer reading. Examining his face further in the medicine cabinet mirror he tried to convince himself that the thermometer was unreliable and that some nameless African bacillus was polluting his bloodstream, swimming freely on afternoons like this when he felt most enervated, that in fact his body had become a virtual tropical pond of such bacilli, sapping his energy, stiffening his joints, robbing his sleep, and utterly destroying his will as well. But peering at his eyes, tongue, and tonsils, he could find no more than the Baptist missionary doctor had been able to find two days earlier in his surgery. He’d given Cecil a brown bottle of tablets for dehydration.

  With a few hours of solitude ahead of him, he changed to his shorts and crept down the stairs to the library, moving like a man about to be accosted. But the house was silent, the servants retired to their quarters in the afternoon heat. In the library he found a book on the Crimean campaign which he’d been trying to finish for over a month and continued outside to the cushioned lounge chair at poolside. The afternoon was brilliant, the deep, Prussian blue sky windless, and no sound stirred—not a distant radio or army siren, no nearby cassette music, nothing at all. The surface of the pool was unbroken; in the far corner the pneumatic armchair lay motionless, like an abandoned bathtub toy. He sat down gratefully and had just settled himself back when he felt a sharp metal tooth prod his spine. Sitting forward he retrieved one of Carol Browning’s barrettes, lost there during their midnight romp among the cushions. He discarded it on the metal table, eyes averted from her other possessions the yard boy had assembled there—suntan lotions and creams, two pairs of sunglasses, a bikini halter, and a tortoiseshell comb.

  The book he’d brought from the library was a stern master, tortuously detailed, densely footnoted. Rereading it again, Cecil felt like a laggard schoolboy after a long holiday, his mind dissolved by August heat and summer sherbets, indolent mornings and long afternoons on the river, adrift in a punt under the willows. His attention wandered as he turned the pages, escaping Latin declensions and the smell of chalk and dusty classrooms to turn to the pool, to the shrubbery beyond, and finally to the clutter of objects on the metal table. Looking at them silently, head reclined, eyelids heavy, he knew by the relief he felt that their owner wasn’t here what his secret affliction was—not fever, not bacillus either—was the indefatigable Miss Browning. He continued to gaze at them, hypnotized, consciousness diminished as he drifted toward sleep, the book slipped aside. A thought formed itself: he couldn’t continue like this. Last night it had been three o’clock, the night before, two. The time had come for an honorable retreat from the field of battle. Those were the last, inertial thoughts that came to him before sleep, the first he recalled as he awoke, refreshed, the garden deep in shadow, the lights of the terrace lit.

  At seven o’clock, he was standing fully dressed near the front window awaiting the arrival of Carol Browning’s moped. On the desk in the study was her beach bag in which he had gathered all of the lost articles of her semi-occupancy—barrettes, suntan-lotion and shampoo bottles, sunglasses, a pair of nylon briefs, a bikini halter, three tape cassettes, and a sticky, half-empty brown bottle of exotic design containing something called cocoanut-café liqueur. In his jacket pocket was something she hadn’t lost at all but had given to him secretly one evening at a reception when her moped was being repaired—the key to her flat.

  By seven-thirty he’d finally chosen the words to explain his decision, regretful but exculpatory, of course. By eight, she still hadn’t arrived and he’d grown uneasy, his glass empty for the second time. By eight-thirty, he’d finished his third drink and his earlier intentions seemed crudely gratuitous. He’d also begun to forget what he was going to say. She telephoned from her flat ten minutes later, very tired, kept late at the embassy by Bondurant. She’d decided on a quiet evening, playing bridge with friends.

  “Oh yes, that’s sensible,” Cecil said, relieved at the postponement, “quite sensible. It was rather late last night, wasn’t it? Probably the rest will do you good. A quiet evening at home, eh?” He guessed she would be entertaining the other American secretaries in her apartment building.

  “Something to take my mind off things.”

  “Certainly, I understand. But I didn’t know you played bridge.” If he’d known she could play cards, that might have given a different texture to his fatigue.

  “The Italian military attaché has been teaching me at the Belgian Club during lunch. We’re going to play tonight.”

  “The Italian military attaché? Faggioni?”

  “Carlo. Do you know him?”

  Carlo! Carlo Faggioni! Of course he knew him. A muscular nincompoop, a ballet soldier in tights. “Not too well, but I understand his wife is very good. At bridge, I mean,” he recovered quickly. What else could he have possibly meant? But she’d called him Carlo. “Where are you playing?”

  “His wife’s in Naples.”

  “Not at his flat, I trust.” He laughed falsely, but quickly recovered, wiping his face. “I meant the bridge game.” His mind squirmed beyond him, a serpent’s nest of double entendres.

  “I don’t know,” she said laconically. Her indifference gave him encouragement, but a moment later he discovered she wasn’t being laconic at all. She was chewing gum. “He’s going to let me know. Maybe at the Spanish Ambassador’s.”

  Good Lord! “Look here, Carol,” Cecil said sternly. “I don’t want to appear too paternal about all this, but I should be very careful if I were you.”

  “About what?” He heard the resentment in her voice.

  “About these people. I should watch my step if I—”

  “You’ve been listening to too much gossip. I think they’re neat.”

  “It’s not a matter of gossip, but a matter of reputation. There’s a distinct difference, you know. In the case of the Span—”

  “Oh for God’s sake, don’t be such a prude. I’ll talk to you later. I’ve gotta go.”

  Blood flushed to his skin and scalp, senses quivering, as alert as a hare, Cecil stood for a long time at the phone table after she’d hung up. In this cuckold’s delirium he explored every word she’d uttered, every phrase, intonation, and intake of breath for its hidden text, like a code clerk decrypting a cable. What had she truly meant? What was her real relationship with Faggioni? If she was so grossly insensitive as not to recognize her own foolishness or Faggioni’s designs, he would explain both to her. Was she merely stupid or was she maliciously cunning? But she hadn’t attempted to conceal anything from him. On the contrary, she’d told him precisely of her plans for the evening. After all, bridge required four persons, not just two. Besides, neither Faggioni nor the Spaniard had a pool. And he had the key to her flat. No, Cecil decided, drawing a reassuring breath, there was no more to her evening of diversion than she had described. Perhaps she was intellectually curious after all.

  Perhaps he could teach her chess.

  Chapter Six

  Masakita had already left the abandoned rebel camp in the swamps near Funzi.

  It was dusk and the scattered villages along the sand road were in shadow. The battered Mercedes truck rocked back and forth along the ruts and through the sand shoals, and then with a lurch shifted gears and began the long descent toward the swift green river below. The air was stagnant at the lower elevation. As the truck slowed to approach the ferry, Masakita could see through the whipping canvas two trucks and a pair of Landrovers already in front of them waiting to cross the river.

  The truck shuddered to a stop and the dozen cramped passengers crawled from the bed and onto the riverbank. Beyond the lip of broken asphalt where the ferry moored, the swift green current plunged northward in a dozen racing pools. The old ferry was chugging back toward them. Bats chittered in eccentric c
ircles; frogs thumped from the lush dark weeds. The truck drivers and passengers squatted silently in the warm dust, waiting for the ferry. An old mama in a filthy cotton smock charred a few ears of corn over a charcoal fire. A mother with two children crawling over her shoulders sat fanning the flies from her roadside wares—fruit, peanuts, and a few spines of smoked fish, as black as wood bark.

  Masakita bought a plantain and ate it as he stood on the ferry landing. His wife had bought “new” clothes for him for his journey, pulled from one of those bundles of secondhand apparel imported from America or Europe in compressed bales, like raw cotton, and sold throughout the interior. The khaki trousers were patched over in a dozen places with a quilt of heavy thread; the faded khaki shirt was clean but washworn. Over the breast pocket was a blue cotton medallion: FRED’S FORD MART.

  Before she’d bought the clothes in Benongo, his wife had had a premonition. She’d twice dreamed that he’d been pardoned, both times before the news of the general amnesty reached them. The first time she’d dreamed that he’d received a letter from the President and had gone by packetboat to the capital, where a military band was waiting at the port together with the cabinet officers in their morning coats, their blue and gold silk sashes, and in the rear the sedan chair, the tipoy, of the new President.

  The dream was drawn from her memory of the old regime and Pierre’s return from Cairo to accept the post in the government of national reconciliation. She’d had a second dream three nights later and awoke in the darkness to tell him that she’d held in her hands the heavy vellum of the presidential envelope with its red wax seal.

  Masakita remembered the envelope he’d received in Cairo.

  That day they’d gone to the village below Funzi in the pirogue for cooking oil. As they were returning, they saw the police boat from Benongo flashing southward on the lake in a spume of white spray. She told him that the boat had brought the letter to the village.

  But when they reached the slough below the village, the same inert water lay under the trees as they traveled the final meters, and in the gloom she’d known that no boat had stirred the dark waters since their own pirogue earlier that day. That night she wept. She cared nothing for the ceremony of public life. She had known him as a schoolboy—the boy who had gone to the mission school at Benongo, and she had known then, as the village knew, that there was something unique in him, something in the spirit of the boy and now the man so rare that he would never be permitted to keep it. There was far more in him than the Catholic fathers, Europe afterwards, and now the new government would allow him to keep. Her father had told her that and she didn’t understand. Death she knew, but not murder.

  When the word came two days later from Benongo that the amnesty had been announced, she’d turned immediately to him, listening as the old chief described what he had heard. He took from his damp waistband the printed circular from the police post at Funzi. Her dreams were now in her eyes, as they were there on the damp paper in the chief’s hands.

  Kerosene lanterns lit the deck of the ferry as it plowed the dark current toward the opposite bank. The passengers gathered along the rail searching for the breath of wind that came in mid-channel. They disembarked hastily at the landing and climbed the bank to the sûreté shack, anxious to pass through before the checkpoint closed down for the night. Inside a single clerk examined their documents and registered their names in an old ledger by the light of a moth-covered lantern. The passengers crowded the small room. When one of the moths settled on the clerk’s lower lip and stuck there, an old woman snickered and two children laughed. The clerk stood up angrily and threatened to close down the checkpoint. A truck driver told the passengers to line up outside the door and enter as their names were called. He took their documents and the clerk sat back down again, mollified.

  After thirty minutes they climbed back into the truck and continued their journey toward the capital a few hours away. At a small village they were joined by a petty administrator carrying a suitcase and a flashlight. He chased two women from their seats next to the tailgate to sit there himself, his luggage alongside, his European felt hat on his knee. After he’d settled himself, he probed the faces of his traveling companions with his flashlight, ignoring their pained, shrinking faces. “You must be careful who you travel with these days,” he said. He was a government official, and government officials had to be vigilant. Were there other government officials present? No one answered. The light flashed against Masakita’s face and remained there. “I know you,” the official said. “You work for the national bank.”

  Masakita didn’t reply.

  “Either there or the insurance office near the railroad station.” He moved the light to the patch over the pocket. “What is that?”

  Masakita told him it was the emblem of a foreign company.

  “So you’re wearing the rags of the foreigners. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Don’t you know we have our own revolution now? No more vin rouge.”

  The diesel fumes were heavy under the creaking canvas as they bounced along through the darkness. Masakita sat with his head against the sideboards, looking back through the arc of canvas, searching for stars. They were on the high savannahs, no villages on either side.

  An old woman suddenly became ill from the diesel fumes and the truck’s rocking motion. The administrator flashed his light angrily into the darkness as the nauseating smell reached him. “She’ll make us all sick! Tell the driver to stop! Put her off!” A young woman told him to shut up; and after he demanded that she too be removed, someone hurled an overripe mango skin at him. It struck him across the collar and neck. His dignity gone, he flung it back, but a plantain skin struck his face, blinding him, and another knocked the hat from his knee. “Stop it! Stop this! Behave yourselves!”

  “Shut up then!”

  “Who are you, a flamand!”

  “We’ll put you off, like the old President!”

  Outnumbered, he huddled closer to the tailgate, drawing his bag nearer.

  The mutterings died away. The sounds of sleep lifted and fell, like the sound of the sea. The stars grew brighter over the tableland of the savannahs, the moon hidden. Masakita shut his eyes, remembering the old rebel camp and his own village, the faint red glow of the fire through the door of the hut where his wife slept, waiting. Lulled by the motion of the truck as the wheels left the sandy track and found the asphalt that led to the capital, he finally slept.

  It was midnight when he was awakened, a cold gun barrel against his ribs. The other passengers had already left the truck and were standing in the weak electric light of the corrugated metal shack where police, army, and sûreté officials were examining documents at the final checkpoint before the capital. The two soldiers prodded him from the truck and motioned for him to get in line with the others. Another squad of soldiers circulated beyond the shack, herding those who’d already passed through to the debarkation point down the tarmac where they would rejoin the trucks. The soldiers’ voices were strong, their movements quick, their guns and uniforms well kept, not at all like the indolent, disheveled police and soldiers of Funzi and Benongo. With a vague, uneasy premonition, Masakita felt again the raw cold will of N’Sika’s revolution here on its periphery, the lights of the capital a bright glow in the distance six kilometers away.

  “Your face is familiar,” the sûreté captain said, holding the tattered identity document as he studied Masakita’s face. “Where are you coming from?”

  “Benongo.”

  “Benongo itself or nearby?”

  “Funzi.” The identity card gave his village as Funzi. It belonged to his wife’s cousin. He’d intended to use it only as far as the capital, where he would talk first with Reddish before giving himself up at the para camp.

  The sûreté captain looked at the card, nodded, and again lifted his eyes. “I know your face, but I’ve never been to Funzi or Benongo.”

  The dark eyes waited. It was for Masakita to explain. How could the officer know
him if he’d never been those places? He was the government, Masakita the supplicant. If what the government knew wasn’t consistent with what this indigent dressed in someone else’s rags could explain, then he was lying. That was the power of his office, a power that made the weak ignorant and the helpless guilty.

  “I once worked in the capital,” Masakita said.

  “Where?”

  “In the ministry of interior.”

  “In the ministry?” The eyes seemed skeptical, then triumphant. “Albert! Oh, Albert.” He called through the door behind him, and a bespectacled clerk joined them from the adjacent office. “You worked in the ministry for ten years. This man says he worked there too. Do you know him?”

  Masakita looked silently at Albert N’Kuba, whom he hadn’t seen since his transfer to provincial travel control. N’Kuba didn’t move for a moment, brown eyes fixed on Masakita’s face, lips parted, the light of recognition still suspended. It would mean so much to be right—a promotion, a cash bonus, as the secret sûreté bulletin promised; yet it would be humiliating to be wrong, the butt of every cruel joke for years to come.

  “You worked in customs control,” Masakita said.

  N’Kuba’s fingers touched his chin in reflex. “The beard … the beard … is new.”

  The eyes fixed then, pupils dilated, and he took a step backward. “Yes,” he murmured. “I know him. Could I speak to you … in my office,” he told the captain, still backing away.

  An hour before dawn an automobile came from the capital traveling at high speed, followed by a second automobile and an army jeep. Masakita was blindfolded before he was led from the clerk’s office, where three soldiers had guarded him, and shoved into the second sedan, a black Mercedes. He was pushed forward in the seat and his hands were tied under his knees, a rope around his ankles.

  Sitting in the front seat, he recognized something familiar in the scent of the upholstery—in the talcum, the bay rum perhaps, or the spice of a European air sweetener. He knew it was a Mercedes and that it was black.