“Mark?” I whisper hoarsely.
Stipe—if it is Stipe—does not respond.
“Mark? Is that you? Help me, Mark.”
There is nothing from the white man. Before I can say anything more the policemen have pushed me through and closed the door behind us.
They pull me down another corridor. At the end an open door leads into a bedroom. Bedroom? There is a man lying on a bed, sound asleep. My eyes are adjusting to the light. The man in the bed comes into focus. Except it’s not a bed. It’s an office table. They push me into the room so violently I have to put a hand out to stop myself from falling over. I touch the sleeping man. He is cold and clammy and soft. I snatch my hand away. The man is not sleeping. I look around the room. In one corner, grinning to himself, is the captain.
I look again at the body. The head is hideously swollen. The bruising is so severe and so widespread that at first it’s not easy to see that the body is white. It is Smail. His testicles are the size of cricket balls. There is blood at the tip of his stubby penis.
“Where is Auguste Kilundu?”
The voice comes from behind. The question registers but in my shock I do not understand that it requires an answer. One of the policemen spins me round.
“Where is Auguste Kilundu?”
I have no voice.
“We will leave you here with your old friend and the captain,” the policeman says, “unless you tell us now where Auguste is hiding.”
“I’m very thirsty,” I say. “I’d like some water. I also want to see the British ambassador.”
The policeman swings a fist into the side of my face. The blow is hard, though not enough to fell me. I go down anyway to avoid more punches. All three kick at me. The captain gets up to join them. He is carrying a heavy stick. I put up my hands to protect my head. He lashes me across the neck and shoulders. The room is small and they are in each other’s way. I find some protection under Smail’s table. One of them takes hold of my ankle and starts to pull me out from under the table. I grab the legs. The blows come down on the exposed part of my legs and lower torso. Someone is stamping on me. I hold on to the table and try to pull myself under. It moves. They continue to pull. The table moves, it slides on the floor, it topples over. Smail is lying on top of me. Suddenly the beating stops. One of the policemen says something. A few moments later the door closes and there is total silence. They have left me alone.
I lie still. I lie under Smail’s body, my face pressed into the cold death-sweat on his chest. Then, as if only understanding at that moment the horror of my situation, I panic and flail about to struggle out from under him. I kick my legs free and when I am free I gaze in revulsion at the corpse. I crawl to the furthest corner. I wipe my face and bare arms, any exposed skin, to be cleansed of the touch and smell of him. The air is putrid. I take deep breaths. I concentrate, count, breathe. Calm. Calm, be calm . . . I have another story. A fantastic story, better than the killing of the ANC colonel. Zoubir Smail, Lebanese-born diamond merchant, Communist Party member, close associate of deposed prime minister Patrice Lumumba, widely rumored to have organized and facilitated secret Soviet funding of the MNC, murdered by Mobutu’s secret police. Eyewitness account of tortured body in Léopoldville’s Central Prison. I can use all of this—along with my own arrest and beating—for novels, stories, plays. It can be the dramatic set-piece around which my work will turn. I will be able to make something of this. Yes. As long as I can make the deal with Stipe. I gaze at Smail. Does a man die at your feet, your business is not to help him, but to note the color of his lips. I must gather my wits. I must note the color of his lips.
Listen to me.
There is a dead man—not a friend, but a man I once knew—lying in a pathetic heap not ten feet from where I am and I am thinking about my own advantage. I feel suddenly repelled—utterly disgusted—by my own callousness. Is this all I have ever been? A selfish, egotistical watcher? I let out a groan. I bury my face in my hands and start to sob, from fear, from despair, from loathing of myself. I never said I was brave or idealistic, but I kept my weakness from myself. I always managed to do that.
This is me talking now. No tricks, no artifice, no writer’s advertisements. No false self-accusation that will make me look well. There is nothing hidden or complicated or deep or doubting. I am banal and self-serving. This is the truth. I have disguised myself with words. Fiction words. Lie words. Others—not all, but many—are taken in, but I am no longer taken in by myself. Fiction words once made me feel well, but no more. They serve the liar who arranges them, the solipsist who designs their effect, the egoist who veils their sly, unpleasant insinuations and passes off brass as gold. Other people? Other lives? Where do others come into this? What room is there in this, in what I do, for others? My every waking thought turns on myself. I am at the forefront of my own imagination. Others—insofar as they exist at all—move around my sun. They live in my light and my darkness. At my whim. I have never had a single genuine concern—real, heartfelt—for another human being. I have never been honest. I have never once given up anything for another person. This is not exaggeration. I am not making myself look bad to make myself look good. I have got away with it until now because like the clever criminal I leave no fingerprints at the scenes of my crimes and I am always careful to go masked. Poor Smail. How small he looks in death, how reduced. I will lay him out. I will get him back on the table. I crawl back to him. Where the skin is not bruised it seems blue. It’s the blue of blood in the veins of very old people, the men and the women with pale, papery skin who wait for death in rooms which smell of fish paste and mothballs. I will get him on his table. He’s heavy and I am not strong. I take him, hands under his arms, and strain against the weight. His bloody swollen head lolls forward. I strain, pull, hoist. It’s no good. I try again but I can’t get his upper body onto the table. I let him down gently. I roll him onto his front, crushing his big bruised balls under him. I say out loud, sorry. Sorry. I stand over him. The ends of his fingers are black, as though frostbitten. I lean down and take him by the waist. I heave with all my strength. He’s doubled over, bent in the middle, head on the floor, knees and feet on the floor. Sweating with the effort I swing him round to the table. He’s slipping from my fingers. I let out a groan as I make a final effort to lift him another few inches to get a part of him, any part, on the table. I can’t do it. I don’t want to drop him, but he’s slipping from me. He crumples to my feet.
The door opens. It’s Stipe. He barely glances at Smail.
Staring at me, he says, “I’ve seen you looking better.”
“Look at what they did to Smail. Look at what they’ve done.”
He looks at the body for a second. His face registers nothing. Boredom perhaps. I know his work now. I hate him.
“Let’s concentrate on you for now.”
“No, let’s concentrate on you!” I shout at him. “Let’s concentrate on what you’re doing here . . .”
“You asked to see me.”
“ . . . Here in this country.”
He shrugs. He says, “I’m trying to make this country a safe place.”
“Safe for who?”
“People like you.”
“Leave me out of it.”
“You always want to be left out of things, Gillespie,” he says scornfully, “but you’re involved in this. I don’t mean just because you have connections with the people we’re looking for. You’re involved the same way we’re all involved. People like you don’t like the dirty games people like me play, but you benefit every time we play and win. You won’t admit it, you’d probably deny it even to yourself, but you want me to win, because if I lose, then so do you. You lose everything. All your privileges. Writing, publishing, journalism—to mention only the things of particular interest to you—they’re only possible in a certain context, and my job is to make sure that context continues to exist. Sometimes that means doing unpleasant things, sometimes it means associating with unpleasant people.”<
br />
“Like Dr. Joe from Paris? Or Dr. Gottlieb, as I believe he’s called.”
Stipe flickers. For once I have surprised him.
“A poisoner?” I say, pressing forward while he is momentarily off-balance. “That’s more than just unpleasant, Mark.”
“There are a lot worse than Dr. Joe. They’re not the kind of people you feel comfortable inviting to your house for dinner. But you do. You have to. They come and sit at your table and it can be real hard to swallow your food in their company, but you make the effort. You eat the dinner, you drink the wine because you know if you don’t, our context—our precious context—disintegrates.”
He pauses. He glances at the floor, at Smail.
Keeping his gaze on the corpse he continues, “What am I doing here in this country? I am making sure that the biggest and richest country in central Africa—one with huge strategic importance—doesn’t fall into the hands of the people who want to destroy our context.”
“Keep it up, Mark. You’ll soon be telling me it’s better to be dead than Red.”
“No,” he says casually. “It’s more of a Hobbesian thing with me. Better led than dead. I’ve always been a believer in strong leadership. I’ve always believed in doing what is necessary. It’s the one thing I have in common with Inès, I suppose. How is Inès?”
The mention of her name jolts me back to the reality of my predicament.
“I don’t know.”
Stipe nods slowly. “You haven’t seen her?”
“No,” I reply quickly and unequivocally. “I told you I haven’t seen her since independence day.”
“Not even around town? Not even at press conferences?”
“We move in different circles, and you know Inès: she thinks press conferences exist so journalists won’t get the story.”
There is a thin crack of a smile from Stipe. It is followed by a long silence.
“Just so there’s no misunderstanding,” he says evenly, “if you don’t tell me where Auguste is, by nightfall you’re going to look exactly like Smail there and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“That’s a lie, Mark,” I reply fiercely, unintimidated by his threat. “There’s everything you can do about it. You can go to your ambassador and your ambassador could tell Mobutu to order my release and I would be out of here in twenty minutes.”
“Okay,” he says with a small smile, acknowledging my point, “let’s say there’s nothing I would feel inclined to do about it.”
“I can’t tell you where Auguste is.”
“Think about this, Gillespie.”
“I can’t tell you because I don’t know.”
He looks at me and I hold his gaze. I haven’t convinced him, but I may have created the beginnings of a doubt.
“What did you do after I left you at Roger’s?” he asks.
“Roger cleaned up my foot and drove me home. I had a drink and went to bed.”
“Did you see Roger yesterday?”
I stick to my story. “No.”
“Talk to him?”
“No.”
He pauses before continuing, weighing my answers. They have been straight, unambiguous, confident. Am I creating doubts in him?
“Ask Roger if you don’t believe me,” I say defiantly. It’s all I can say. It’s the logical challenge of the innocent man. A meaningless one, of course, because he will already have made plans to talk to Roger. What will Roger say? I can’t think of that. I have to hope. And there is reason to hope, I realize. It’s day. A night has passed. That means Madeleine has not discovered Auguste’s hiding place. Perhaps she didn’t go there after all. Perhaps there is no other lover. Perhaps I am the only one. I feel a strange surge of tenderness towards her.
“What did you do yesterday?” Stipe asks.
“Yesterday? I didn’t have much on.”
“What exactly did you do?”
“Got up, did the usual things. Coffee in the garden. I didn’t have anything to file, I’ve finished the novel, so I went for a drive, just to look round.”
“Where did you go?”
“The docks, along the boulevard, nowhere special. I called in at the Regina for a drink. I bumped into you there. You and Dr. Joe the poisoner, if you remember.”
“Where’s your houseboy?”
“Charles? I don’t know. Isn’t he at the house?”
“He didn’t turn up this morning. Do you know where he lives?”
“In the cité somewhere. I don’t know the address.”
He studies me closely. I have answered his questions without hesitation, almost believing my own lies. But I am a fraction of an inch from collapse. I have to concentrate to keep from trembling. If he presses I will go down. To divert him I take the initiative.
“What makes you think I would know where Auguste is?”
“He’s been in hiding since the coup. Then, about a week ago, Inès dropped out of sight. She stopped going to her office at the Marché and moved out of the place she was staying in Rue de la Tshuapa. Disappeared. My guess is that she joined Auguste and I have good reason to believe she has been trying to organize an escape route for him. It’s logical she would have approached you.”
“It’s not logical at all. Not after what happened between the two of us.”
He turns away and puts a hand to his mouth. He tugs at his lower lip like a professor lost in thought.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you, Gillespie, what goes through your head when you think of Inès and Auguste together. I mean, you must think about it—right?”
“I try not to,” I say.
I know where this is going . . .
“That’s wise, very wise,” he says with unpleasant smoothness. “No sense in torturing yourself with comparisons. I mean, they’re not exactly flattering.”
. . . but I cannot stop myself. I can see before my eyes . . .
“You’re a middle-aged man who’s spent most of his life behind a desk of one kind or another. You’re soft. There’s an overhang at your belt, your bulges are in all the wrong places.”
. . . the things he is taunting me with . . .
“You’re a long way past your prime and Auguste—well, that boy’s in the middle of his. And what a prime we’re talking about. I’ve seen the man, you know, the full man, if you understand me, and . . .”—he chuckles to himself—“it’s impressive. Very impressive. You look at it and you think Jesus, that’s just not fair. You understand what I’m saying? I mean it is huge.” He laughs. “What do you think Inès thinks when she looks at it? I bet it makes her a very happy girl.”
It’s pathetic that something so crude can do this to me, but the collapse is coming. Inside, things are giving way. I shut my eyes but I can’t shut out his words.
He continues, “You know, Auguste was always pretty open with me when it came to women. We had long talks. These guys, you know, they fuck all night. I mean all night. You can just hear Inès, can’t you? Squealing.”
I should be able to ignore this, to dismiss it for what it is. There are hot tears on my cheeks.
“I love that sound, don’t you? That sound a woman makes when she’s being pleasured. I was in a hotel room in Managua one time. The walls were very thin. I heard this couple making out every night. The woman—oh, I can’t tell you the noise she made, the little groans, the cries. Drove me crazy. Just think. Someone somewhere in this city is listening to Inès right now. Can you hear her, Gillespie? Can you hear her now? Listen. That’s her, she’s on her way, she’s starting to come.”
I can hear her. Stipe steps up to me.
“You know what Auguste told me? What he likes best?”
He puts his mouth to my ear. His breath smells of toast, of biscuits.
“In the ass. Think of that, Gillespie. Old Auguste turning Inès over, spitting on his fingers, moistening her up, popping a finger inside and she’s waiting for it. She knows what’s coming. He’s got his thing in his hand, it’s ready. He pushes it against her ass. Thin
k of that. Think of the noise she’s making now. Can you imagine if there were pictures of that?”
I can see her.
“What do you think her face looks like when he’s doing that to her? What does she say when she comes, Gillespie? What does she say?”
She says amore mio. Amore mio. They’re my words, they’re words for me, not for Auguste, not for anyone else, for me, me. Me. Her words. My words.
“What does she say? Because she’s saying it now. Can you hear her? I can. So can Auguste. Auguste can hear her very well.”
I am lost in my tears.
“Leave me alone!” I scream.
“How do you feel about Auguste?”
I loathe him.
“Gillespie? How do you feel about the man who took your woman?”
I despise him, I hate him . . .
“Tell me where Auguste is.”
. . . if I had a knife I would stab him in the heart.
“Tell me. Everything will be okay. We can work it so that Inès will never know it was you. We can even arrange it so you end up looking like a hero, and you know how much she goes for heroes.
The two of you belong together. You know that. You can be together. You can go back to London or Rome or Bologna or Ireland. You can start a family. I know she can’t have kids, but you can get married and adopt. And if you have any problems with that, I can help you there as well. Trust me. Trust me, James. I can get Inès back for you. You believe me, don’t you?”
The Catastrophist: A Novel Page 24