The Bureau of State Research had maintained a low but constant state of terror in the capital since the coup d’etat five years ago. President Daniel Weah was a vain, badly educated man with an inferiority complex matched only by his greed and ruthless cunning. He had killed all his fellow plotters in the confusion after the coup and assumed total power as President-For-Life, although he still held his former army rank of sergeant. One by one, he had removed the government officials and ministers of the old regime and replaced them with badly-educated men from his village. The Chief Justice had been shot in court; the Minister for Defense and two senior army generals had died when their helicopter had been brought down by a heat-seeking missile near the border; the head of the TV station had been blown up by a car bomb that killed sixteen passersby and wounded more than fifty others. Prominent businessmen had been assassinated, too, and the state had appropriated their assets; like many other small businesses, Harry paid his taxes directly to a bagman who came around every week and had an uncanny knowledge of the turnover of the bar.
None of this was particularly exceptional for a post-revolution African country in the early 1980s, but after the rebels took the south, the army began its own terror campaign. Soldiers of the two tribes which had previously held power in the country were disarmed and herded into camps; more than a hundred were killed when they had tried to break out of their barracks. Bodies appeared at intersections with their severed heads in their laps, seeming to watch the thin traffic go past. No one dared remove them. A missionary was shot in his church because he had given shelter to the families of two disappeared army officers. Checkpoints were set up at every road out of the city and if someone was detained they were never seen alive again.
Despite the terror and the pincer-like advances of the two groups of rebels, most of Harry’s acquaintances in the golf club, the focal point of the expatriate community, were of the opinion that the President would survive. These were men who had lost almost everything as the economy dwindled away into the pockets of a very few, but like gamblers who stake everything on a final throw, they refused to believe that they were out of the game. Harry himself thought that the President was smarter than he looked. Daniel Weah might be a swaggering bully who behaved like a cattle-herder who had just come to the big city, but that was an act. He played dumb, but was shrewd and well advised, and always pretended to listen to the elders of his own tribe. Now, though, it seemed that he was losing his grip; a few nights ago he had had to appear on TV and explain that the massacre at the barracks had been due to rebel infiltrators, which no one believed at all.
When the army truck pulled up by the side of the road, the crowd parted for it with alacrity. It was a Bedford ten-tonner with a heavy grill over its radiator, its cab and the canvas cover over its loadbed splotched brown and green. Soldiers jumped down, lifted a man’s corpse out by its arms and legs, and dropped it onto the tin counter of an empty butcher’s stall. Then the truck pulled away, soldiers clinging to its sides and whooping with laughter at their joke and firing their M16s into the air even though so-called happy shooting had been banned to save ammunition.
The corpse wore only ragged trousers. It had been severely beaten, and shot in the back of the head. An iron rod had been pounded into its chest, and its hands and feet had been cut off. Something horrible had happened to its mouth; it looked like someone had broken the jaw and stretched it, then hammered crooked ivory nails into the gums and through the cheeks. The crowd looked at the mutilated corpse, murmuring to each other. Harry, shocked, pushed his way out of the circle, and was hailed by the French journalist, René Sante.
As usual, Sante was brimming over with gossip and rumors. He was indefatigable, a stringer for half a dozen newspapers and one of the major American TV networks. He had been at a dinner for the remaining ambassadors last night, he said. The President had worn his sergeant’s uniform, his blouson heavy with ranks of medals he had awarded himself. Before the dessert course he had made a speech.
“He said he would deal the rebels a blow from which they could not recover,” Sante told Harry. “There’s talk he plans to napalm the frontline villages. He also said that there were no shortages, that thieves had stolen the riches of the country and he would soon arrest them all, and all would be well. Then he took a spoonful of his dessert and got up and left. He gets bored at those things, my friend. I’ve been to about twenty, and I’ve never once had dessert. It was ice cream, too—I haven’t had ice cream for a month. I think,” Sante said, lowering his voice, “that there is not long left. They say he has brought mercenaries in, and that’s always a desperate move. The population never likes it because it reminds them of the worst excesses of colonialism, and there’s always the risk that they’ll go out of control.”
Harry and René Sante were sitting at a café table on the other side of the market. The journalist was sipping from a beer; as usual, Harry had bought iced tea which he didn’t touch, except occasionally to hold to his forehead. He was grateful for Sante’s chatter because it helped him not to think about the corpse and what it might mean. The day was brightening, and splinters of light penetrated the lenses of his dark glasses like slivers of hot silver; he could feel his exposed skin begin to tighten. He told Sante that last night a TV journalist from CBS had been drinking at the bar.
Sante nodded vigorously. He was a small wiry man, full of energy. He wore a travel-stained safari jacket, its pockets bulging with canisters of film, cassette tapes, spare batteries. He had set his three cameras on the rickety tin table. He was pleased to have caught the dumping of the body; he thought he could sell it to Paris Match. It was a parable of the African situation, Harry thought. The army and the journalists fed on horror, and the ordinary people went hungry.
Sante said, “I know the guy from CBS. He’s just been with Leviticus Smith. Smith is boasting that the war will be over in six months. He says he will be President for two years, and then he will think about elections. You should consider of getting out, my friend.”
“I’m comfortable here.”
After the coup, Harry had been tempted to give up the bar and start over somewhere else, but things had quickly settled down. Humans were creatures of habit, and old habits and customs persisted despite the bursts of energy which suddenly and unpredictably overwhelmed their precarious social structures. They had no patience; they didn’t have the long view. They saw only what was before their noses, and lived for the day. Harry was able to move among them so easily because they twisted facts in their own minds to fit their preconceptions.
Even René Sante, who lived off his wits, was easy to fool. He saw Harry as a kind of fellow traveler, not exactly an ally, nor even a friend, but someone who had a common interest in the mixed currency of gossip and rumor and fact by which stringers survived. To Harry, the journalist was neither prey nor a threat. Harry would never drink from him, but René yielded to Harry all the same, too ready to spill what he knew.
“There’s a new thing I saw,” Sante said, drawing his chair closer to Harry. “It was in front of the army barracks. Three men, on stakes.” At first, Harry thought Sante meant that the men had been tied to posts and shot and left as a warning; a few days ago a dozen men had been hanged from lampposts along the main commercial street, with placards tied to their chests proclaiming them to be saboteurs. But Sante said no, this was different.
“These are stakes about eight feet long, sharpened at one end. The men have been lifted onto them and dropped so the stake pierced the—how do you call it?—the asshole. It went all the way through one, came out of his chest. All three were officers. One was a major I knew vaguely. They say it’s the President’s new adviser, the mercenary they call the Count.”
Harry is left alone in the small square room for ten days.
The bars at the window are coated with silver. He burns his left hand badly; the old wound in his side, between the fourth and fifth ribs, aches in sympathy.
At intervals guards bring in vegetable slo
p heavily flavored with garlic. Another pointless insult, like the crucifix. Harry has not needed to eat for forty years.
He managed to drink a little from one of the dying men in the cell in Block A before the guards pulled him out, but in a few days his thirst begins to return. He catches a rat on the first night, but after that the rats keep away, although they had the run of the cells in Block A. He keeps the worst of the thirst at bay by eating the cockroaches and centipedes which infest the room, crunching down a dozen at a time, savoring the small bitter sparks of life and spitting out pulped chitin, but the thirst persists, a low-level ache, a hollow in his belly. His bones feel brittle, their cores hollow. He tries to exercise. His muscles clench weakly, like tattered grave shrouds on his dead bones, but he knows he has to keep up his strength. Someone has been turning humans, making an undead elite within the army. The Count, the President’s adviser. Harry has a black dread that he knows who the Count is, but he tries not to dwell on it. He’ll find out soon enough.
He spends most of the time in deep black dreamless sleep, curled up tightly in the corner beneath the oblong slot of the barred window, where the hot, heavy African sunlight cannot find him. Where he is safe from the memories of what he did to the twenty men in the cell in Block A. Where he is safe from his past. Still he weakens, hour upon hour. He needs the life in hot sweet salty human blood. Even in his sleep he can feel the tides of blood moving through the bodies of the guards and the prisoners in this terrible place, each a secret sundered sea. The thirstier he grows the more sensitive he becomes. He can hear the wary rustle of the rats in the spaces behind the walls, the conversations and laughter of the guards, the sighs and moans and rattling breaths of the prisoners in the cells in Block A, the music played by a radio in the old gymnasium on the other side of the compound where the officers lounge, drinking beer and whiskey, and the rattle of the vultures on the tin roof. Every night two or three prisoners are tortured until they confess to the truth of the accusations made against them by the security force (and everyone screams, and pleads and finally confesses to stop the torture; Harry can hear every word) and then are led out—either to the cinder track behind the prison block where they are made to kneel in front of the wire fence in the harsh glare of the lights on the tower and are shot in the back of the head by an officer, or to a waiting truck which drives them off to some public place where they are impaled as a lesson to the populace. Harry hears it all, and wider, further, the agitated stir of the city, and the rattle of small arms fire and crump of mortar rounds in the suburbs as the two groups of rebel forces engage with the army to the east and west.
And on the tenth night, precisely at midnight, he hears the limousine sweep into the compound and the panicky flurry of the guards as they spring to attention, the steady tread across cinders, down the stairs, along the corridor, the heavy presence growing nearer and nearer, like a thunderstorm racing across the plains. Harry feels a fluttering panic, an echo of the horror the rats feel about the monster in the cell in Block B, who is his own self. The steady tread fills his head, and then the door slams open like all the graves of the world opening at the Last Trump and the Count is in the cell, a tall dark upright figure filling the little room with his presence, with only the broken projector between him and Harry.
“Fe-fi-fo-fum,” the figure says. The voice is deep and resonant. It fills the cell; it resonates in Harry’s hollow bones. “I smell the blood of an Englishman.”
Impalation became the chosen form of public execution. In front of the post office; along the square between the Presidential Palace and the edge of the Park of the People’s Liberation; by the entrance to the ferry terminal. Stakes with rounded points were used in the last place, and when Harry went past one evening two of the men were still alive, screaming to be killed. None of those watching dared go near because of the soldiers who sat around the base of the stakes, smoking and drinking beer and gambling.
Harry had seen this before, soon after he had been turned. The resistance band of Szekeley gypsies had impaled every German, dead or alive, they took in ambushes.
By now, it was common knowledge that the President had abandoned the advice of his tribal elders for that of the mysterious Count, who was rumored to be Polish or East German. The Count was going to bring in communist troops to clean out the rebels in the south, it was said; the President was opening his Swiss coffers to pay for helicopter gunships, T45 tanks and SAM launchers. Harry’s cronies at the golf club began to revise their opinions. They didn’t want the President to win the civil war if it meant that the communists came in, but it didn’t seem possible that he could win without outside help while his army tore itself apart along tribal divisions.
The evening after Harry saw the men writhing on blunted stakes, René Sante confided the latest scandal with glee. The President’s wife had fled to England with her entourage, and when her bags had passed through the x-ray machines at the terminal they had been found to be stuffed with money and jewels. The Canadian aircrew had refused to fly the jet back because they had not been paid. “Otherwise the President would be gone on the next flight,” Sante said.
Harry, who had been listening distractedly, wasn’t so sure. He wasn’t surprised that the President’s wife had fled while she could. She was a silly vain creature who had never been comfortable with the role of consort of the head of state. On one famous occasion she had invited the wives of the ambassadors to lunch. There had been no food, only gin and whiskey, which the President’s wife and her lady friends had drunk neat. There had been a six-piece band of soldiers who, dressed in camouflage fatigues, played reggae at ear-splitting volume. After showing off the state rooms and the view of the gardens from the balcony of her bedroom, the President’s wife had announced to her guests, “Now, girls, we’re gonna shake our booties.” The ambassadors’ wives had gamely tried to match the wild gyrations of the President’s wife and her entourage, but after two numbers they had been dismissed, and they had never been invited again.
Harry thought that the President loved power too much to run. It wasn’t a communist takeover or even a rebel victory that he was worried about, but the nature of the mysterious Count.
His worst suspicions were confirmed a few nights later, when an officer of the Bureau of State Research came into the bar. Harry was sitting in his usual place at the far end of the bar, a slight, pale, silver-haired figure in white linen suit and black silk shirt, a gin and tonic going flat by his elbow. The packed crowd of businessmen, hustlers and whores parted as the officer, ugly and bull-shouldered, his shaven head gleaming in the purple fluorescents, made his way toward Harry. He wore crisp fatigues and mirror sunglasses and carried an Uzi slung over one shoulder. The Senegalese house band faltered for a moment, then picked up the beat, watching the officer warily; the go-go dancer in the gilt cage above the band was watching too.
Harry called for a drink to be sent over, double Johnny Walker on ice. He expected nothing more than a crude attempt to sell him confiscated ghat or cocaine at an inflated price, or a shakedown he could defuse by paying a dash now and complaining to the chief of police tomorrow.
But the officer ignored the drink. He leaned close to Harry and showed his needle-sharp teeth. The eyeteeth were hooked like a cobra’s. It was then that Harry realized the man was not breathing.
“The Count is interested in you, Mr. Merrick,” the officer said. “He believes you and he might be related.” Then he spat into the whiskey and turned and walked through the crowd and out of the door.
Harry closed the bar early, packed a bag and had one of his boys drive him to the airport. An Air Guinea 747 was leaving in the morning, and he had bribed the booking office to get a seat.
He got as far as the second checkpoint. Out on the airport road, at midnight, figures materialized from the darkness beyond the guttering flares and the drum of burning oil-soaked rags which lit an armored personnel carrier parked across the two-lane highway. They seemed to flit down from the palms which lined t
he road. Six women in loose-fitting fatigues, armed with machetes and M16s. At first Harry thought they were wearing masks, with glaring red eyes and long crooked teeth set in jaws far too wide to be human. Then his driver screamed.
They took the boy there and then, three of them feeding on his living body like turkey vultures, ripping and lapping. Harry tried to run, but the women were stronger and faster than mere humans. They bound his arms with cable and took him to the security compound at the far end of the Park of the People’s Liberation, where in colonial days the daughters of civil servants had played tennis. Harry was thrown into a room crammed with prisoners.
And then the terrible thing happened.
The Count sweeps aside the projector as if it is a papier-mâché toy; it smashes to flinders against the wall. Harry is pressed right up against the filthy breeze-blocks under the window. Moonlight falls over his shoulder and shines on the Count’s knife-thin bone-white face. The nostrils of the Count’s long, aristocratic nose flare, and he says, “An Englishman, but with gypsy blood in him.”
Someone else has followed the Count into the room, but Harry does not see him until he speaks. It is as if he has materialized out of the Count’s vast shadow.
“It’s as I said, master. The Szekeley lineage, a direct descendant.” A small man, pale, hairless, hunched in a green surgeon’s gown. His eyes gleam red and wet behind slab spectacles.
“I thought them all dead,” the Count purrs. He makes a single step, and Harry is lifted into the air. He can feel the silver-coated bars burning the air a bare inch from the back of his skull. The Count’s bone-white face fills his vision.
In the Footsteps of Dracula Page 34