“Knew him?” the Old Coaster said indignantly. “Knew them all, lads, every last bugger of them, from Calabar to Ouagadougou. They were our children, we natured and we nurtured them. I know the Niger River all the way to Timbuktu. I know Gao—I know Kano—I know Jos—I know Enugu—”
“Is the Prime Minister pink?” Carlton egged him on.
“Pink, sir? Hardly, lad. Bamako, Niamey, Accra, and Porto-Novo—” He sounded like a train announcer. “I stood on the spot at Segu where Mungo Park first saw the Niger, sir—”
“He’s straight-out red! Isn’t he, Mr. Johnson?” the senior senator from Alabama asserted with enthusiasm.
“The name is Vaughan-Johnson, sir. And he’s a bloody Black from head to toe. We didn’t bugger around with them like you people did in America. We kept them pure and Black and unadulterated.”
* * *
His Lovely Ladyship was surrounded by admirers, most of them of the male species, when the bogus PM saw her finally. And still she seemed oceans away from him in time and space, as he himself stood near the middle of the salon hemmed in by a group of diplomats and an assortment of other miscellaneous people, including a chap from high up in the State Department echelon. They asked him what he thought of the legacy of Malcolm X and nonviolence and Martin King and affirmative action, Black unemployment, and voting rights. Busing, Jesse Jackson. Segregation, integration and South African liberation? He parried each thrust with a fine dexterity.
What did he think of Malcolm X? “A great American indeed. Red-blooded, hard-hitting, courage of his convictions—and that sort of stuff—In the American tradition—a frontiersman of the New Frontier. A shame to lose him.”
Nonviolence? “I believe in the kind of nonviolence your American government believes in—”
“Our government, sir?” From a bewildered gentleman from the Pentagon.
“Yes indeed! Preventive nonviolence. I believe we should keep everybody nonviolent, even if we have to blow them off the face of the earth, in the American tradition.”
“But surely you are jesting, sir.”
“Yes, I am surely jesting, sir.”
Reverend King? “He was a truly great man. I wish even now that I had been able to meet and speak with and have dinner with and ask him some questions. When I learned I was visiting your country, I said to myself, if only that great man were still alive, what a difference it would make throughout the world. The greatest man your country has produced in the Twentieth Century.”
“Jesse Jackson? A quantum leap, sires, in the evolution of the Homo sapiens. Greatest American presidential candidate the world has ever known.”
The man from the higher echelon of the State Department changed the subject. He said importantly, “We are prepared to give your people substantial financial assistance, with no strings, so long as we know that your national budget is reasonable and proper.” He cleared his throat. “And not based on such anarchistic hogwash as governmental planning, which always creates a hopeless situation of economic chaos.”
“Our government is always reasonable and proper with its planning for its national budget,” Jimmy Johnson replied vaguely. He was distracted now by the sight of Maria Efwa surrounded by so many dignified wolfish dignitaries and especially by the fact that she seemed to be enjoying every damn minute of it. He felt a sense of deep and ethnic betrayal. How could she turn her back on her Black brothers and sisters all over the world? How could she sell out the cause of Pan-Africanism so lightheartedly, so laughingly? How could she forget the struggle for uhuru so offhandedly? To put it bluntly, he was jealous. It was an emotion rarely felt by him, almost unremembered. When he saw her surrounded by all those pale-faced drooling goggle-eyed male hyenas, he forgot about all the women who had been grinning in his face the entire evening. That was different anyhow, somehow, he told himself, when it was brought to his attention by his damn kibitzing never-sleeping conscience.
“I don’t mean,” the high-echeloned man from the State Department hastened to assure the distracted Prime Minister, “that we expect you to have a national budget that’s always in the black.”
“Black?” the phony preoccupied PM repeated.
“Oh no,” the bogus PM answered with great urbanity. “We are all for Pan-Africanism, but we are not that nationalistic. We would never keep our budget in the black.” When he heard his own words he had to laugh, which saved the day because the people around him, including the State Department man, knew then that he was making fun with his special African sense of humor, which was completely over their heads. Whereupon they naturally laughed uproariously.
The State Department man assured him further, “A government whose national budget doesn’t annually run in the red consistently is untrustworthy and not worth a tinker’s damn.”
Jimmy believed he had not heard the State Department man properly. Nevertheless, he heartily agreed with him. And when he looked away this time, he spied a face staring at him from about fifty feet away, and his throat grew hot and his knees gave in and he almost fainted. It was the face that belonged to the voice he’d heard earlier that evening. It was the American who had wrestled with him in the lounge of the Ambassador Palace Hotel back in Bamakanougou, when he was Jimmy Leander Johnson from Lolliloppi, ’Sippi, Near-the-Gulf. The friendly face was smiling at him. Jimmy panicked. His own face broke out in cold perspiration. He turned and walked away in the opposite direction. He had to struggle hard to keep from running. Nevertheless, in his great hurry, he ran smack into Daniel Throckmorton Esq., the ex-ambassador, the good friend of Prime Minister Olivamaki.
There was a brief and painful moment when the two tall strikingly handsome men stood staring at each other, the ambassador’s smile ultimately beginning to fade when he saw that there was not the slightest sign of recognition on the young Prime Minister’s face. The ex-ambassador extended his hand and they shared a warm handshake.
“You remember me, Mr. Prime Minister. I was a good friend of your father’s.” And of course, the panicky bogus PM said, “Of course I remember you. How could I ever forget? You were a good friend of my father’s.” As he looked around desperately for someone to throw him a life jacket, but his dedicated ethnic brothers were nowhere in evidence, excepting his lovely dedicated ethnic sister, whose eyes he caught, but briefly. In that split second, he sent an SOS to her and he fiercely hoped she got the message.
Throckmorton began to ask about this person and the other, venerable citizens of Guanaya, about whom the ersatz PM knew absolutely nothing. He then waxed reminiscently and nostalgic about old times before the PM was the PM, about which the ersatz PM knew less than absolutely nothing.
“Remember the time, Jaja—may I still call you Jaja? We used to know each other by our first names, but you’re a Prime Minister now. We used to call each other by nicknames.”
Jimmy said, “Call me Jaja, by all means,” and wondered what the hell he used to call this tall distinguished pink-faced drink of gin and tonic who used to call him Jaja before he was Prime Minister, and so forth and so on.
Throckmorton picked up the threads of his African nostalgia.
“Remember, Jaja, the time you and I got lost out on the desert in a Land Rover? And we went around in circles for hours and might have ended up in Libya or Algeria or Chad or God knows where?”
Jimmy said, “Yes—as if it happened yesterday.” He felt a headache coming on, a thing that almost never happened to him. His head was leaping, thumping.
“You remember who it was that rescued us?”
Jimmy could feel his forehead throbbing now. Bomp! Bomp! Bomp! Bomp! He thought perhaps his erstwhile nameless-at-the-moment friend could hear and see the thumping in the temples of his forehead. He said, “Yes indeed.” And Throckmorton began to laugh at the memory of their rescue, which must have been hilariously funny. So, Jimmy joined in the laughter. Suddenly Throckmorton stopped laughing and stared at Jimmy with a funny expression (funny-queer, not funny-ha-ha).
“Do you really
remember, Jaja?”
His Excellency stared absently past Throckmorton at the gleamingly polished mantelpiece above a fireplace enclosed in the west wall with glowing candelabra of golden bronze atop the mantel.
Jaja said, “Of course I remember. What do you mean?” He needed six aspirins in a shot of Cutty Sark and White Label mixed with OLD GRANDAD and a jigger of Jack Daniel’s.
Throckmorton said, “I had a funny feeling that you didn’t even remember me. Perhaps the new responsibili—”
Jaja said, “Of course I remember you. You were not only my friend; you were my father’s friend before me.”
Throckmorton’s eyes lit up in joyous reaction to this conclusive evidence that his good friend still remembered him. “We were rescued on the desert by two Tuaregs!” he reminded Jaja.
Jimmy decided to live dangerously with his throbbing headache. “And we thought they were going to sell us into slavery,” he reminded his good friend whatever-his-name-was.
“Yes!” his good friend agreed. “Yes! You do remember!” And he started to laugh and could not stop laughing and the tears stood in his eyes and Jimmy laughed, genuinely this time, at his unknown friend’s infectious laughter, and also at the episode, which at this point he could almost relive himself, and vividly. He even thought that he remembered it.
His old friend, newly found, stopped laughing. “Our Land Rover broke down and they brought us back all the way to Bamakanougou on their camels. We couldn’t sit down for a week.”
“Not even for a fortnight,” Jimmy insisted, and they both began to laugh and relive that day out on the desert all over again. Even as he laughed, Jimmy thought, How many people will I meet who knew me before I knew myself?
After they stopped laughing, Throckmorton threw him a combination curve-knuckler-and-illegal-spitball. “Whatever happened to Abraham Malabuvu? I thought surely he would have been a member of your Independence Cabinet?”
At this moment Jimmy hated his newly found old friend profoundly, murderously. He felt like taking the golden-bronze candelabra on the mantel and beating him till his head was bloody. He hadn’t the foggiest notion about Malabuvu. Maybe he had been arrested for un-Guanayan activities, maybe—but—perhaps he was one of the treacherous conspirators responsible for getting him in this horrendous mess.
“Oh, you mean our old friend Abraham Malabuvu—” Obviously stalling.
“Yes,” Throckmorton agreed. “Abraham Solomon Mamaiumbi Malabuvu—Whatever happened to him?”
With a smile still on Jimmy’s face he broke out into a cool damn sweat. All the jive is gone, he thought. This is the ever-loving nitty-gritty. He saw the gates of Alcatraz closing behind him, where they would keep him till they burned him. And all because he couldn’t answer a stupid question like, Whatever happened to Abraham Malabuvu? “He was a pillar of strength and dependability—” The fake PM kept up the stall. “He—”
“Abraham Malabuvu died suddenly with a heart attack, six months ago,” he heard her say in a silken voice that was like violins playing in a celestial orchestra.
Throckmorton’s puzzled face broke into a thousand smiles. “Maria Efwa! How delightful!”
“Ambassador Daniel Throckmorton!”
Jimmy watched these two reaffirm an old friend, as perspiration of relief poured from him even more profusely than the sweat of fear had poured. He had never been relieved to learn of another human being’s death before, excepting possibly Hitler or Bilbo or Talmadge or Eastland or McCarthy or—or—His possible exceptions were mounting, so he decided to drop the morbid list of wish fulfillments, fulfilled already. He needed a drink. He turned to the ex-ambassador. “I should like nothing better than to spend the rest of the evening reminiscing over old times, Danny Boy, but because of my position I must talk with many others before the evening is over. You do understand, don’t you, Danny Boy.”
“Yes—quite,” the puzzled ex-ambassador replied.
Jimmy turned to his Minister of Education and took her hand and squeezed it warmly, very very warmly, even perhaps heatedly. “I leave you in the company of the most charming most intelligent most beautiful of all Guanayans.”
“Yes—quite,” the ex-ambassador repeated, bewilderedly.
Jimmy turned away and headed for the bar, wherever it was. Just before he got out of earshot, he heard Danny Boy say to Maria Efwa, “Jaja acted very strangely. He never used to call me Danny Boy. He used to call me Throckyboubou, ever since he was a little one.” Jimmy did not hear her answer, because he quickened his pace away from them because he did not want to hear her answer.
He didn’t have to find the bar. He came across one of the floating colored waiters and took four fast Scotch-and-soda highballs from his tray, drinking one right after the other. He was quickly getting cockeyed.
After Throckyboubou and Maria Efwa separated, Carson and Huey moved in again on Danny Boy, at which point the ex-ambassador admitted there was something strange about the Prime Minister’s behavior, now that Carson and Huey mentioned it. “He seemed changed and somehow different.”
Carson literally jumped up and down in ecstatic jubilation. “I knew it! I knew it! He’s sold out to the Commies. He’s un-American!”
They say all good things come to an end, and bad things linger on forever. In any event, when the amiable President said good night to the estimable PM, he assured him for the umpteenth time, “Anything you want, Mr. Prime Minister. Anywhere you want to go in our great country, anything you want to do, just let me know. Your every wish is my command and all that fuh-fuh-fuh-fabulous sort of thing.”
At that cockeyed moment Jimmy had a sudden perverse inspiration, possibly due to excessive imbibition. “I’d like more than anything in the world to visit Lolliloppi, Mississippi, Mister President, after my visit to New York,” the bogus PM said, malevolently.
“It shall be done,” the President responded graciously—and thoughtlessly.
Another vast crowd of young and middle-aged and elderly diddy-boppers of varying ethnicities and colors and denominations stood waiting outside the White House and ooohed and aahed as Jaja’s party left in two long black limousines with long black SS cars front and back. The city of the snow-white buildings was lit up like daytime outside as they proceeded down Pennsylvania Avenue to the hotel. Carlton Carson was in the limousine with Jaja.
He engaged the PM in a friendly kind of conversation. Did His Majesty know Mr. Throckmorton very well? And of course, the PM knew the ex-ambassador very well. They were old friends, and even the PM’s father knew Throckyboubou very very well. Then Carson wanted to know did His Majesty know that the ambassador was suspected of being kind of pink.
“But of course,” the PM answered. “He probably always has been.”
Carson got excited. His ruse was working quicker than he dared to hope or even dream. These damn Africans were not so damn smart after all. Vaughan-Johnson was right! They were naive children. From now on he would listen to the Old Coaster.
“And you, Your Majesty, you admit you are a friend of his?”
“What difference does it make?” the PM asked. “Look at your own President. He’s as red as they make them.”
This was too much for Carson. He wiped his forehead and sank down into the seat almost out of sight.
The PM stared down at him smilingly. “I don’t hold it against a man that he is pink or red or whatever, I’m democratic.”
Carson pulled himself together out of sheer patriotism and determination, and he told the chauffeur to stop the car immediately. He had to make a telephone call. He could have used the telephone in the car, but he did not want His Excellency to overhear his conversation. The chauffeur pulled up to the curb near a phone booth and Carson opened the door. Jimmy reached out and took the telephone and handed it to old Carlton Carson. “Here you are, Mr. Carson. No need to waste your precious coins, inflation being what it is these days. Eh? All the comforts of home are at your beck and call.”
Carlton Carson paled and stammere
d. Finally, Carson said, “It’s . . . it’s . . . it’s kind of personal, Your Hi-hi-highness. Please excuse me.” And he started out of the car again.
Jimmy detained him again, momentarily. “Look,” he said, “you’re red in the face right now. Believe me, there’s no such thing as a white man. You’re either red or pink, and some of you are even tan. When you’re white, old chap, believe me, you are no longer among the living.”
As the car door had opened, the lights inside the car had come on. The Black chauffeur produced a comic book from beneath him and he began to explode with laughter. He began to beat the steering wheel as he roared with laughter. “You got him, Pogo! By God, you got the rascal! Whooo—a quad-gua-gua qua! Woo-woo-woo! That Pogo is a funny Mary Francis! Woo! Woo! Gi-gi-gi-Whoowee!” Banging on the steering wheel, he accidentally banged the horn, and it blasted the after-midnight silence of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Carson finally got the drift, and he closed the door again, and quietly told the guffawing chauffeur to continue to the hotel. He said not another word until they reached the door to the ambassadorial suite, at which time he said a subdued good night.
Once the PM’s party was safely inside, he took off his bogus beard and took Maria Efwa, without giving her fair warning, into his arms and kissed her fully on her luscious mouth, and she slapped the bogus PM’s sassy face.
His head rang like the sweet bells of Saint Mary. He said, “I’m sorry, I just wanted to express my appreciation to you for saving my life with Ambassador Throckyboubou.”
As angry as she was, she had to smile a wee sweet smile at “Throckyboubou.” She said, “I’m sorry too, Your Excellency.” And she meant it. And she bade him good night and went down the corridor to her room and went in and locked the door, and put an armchair up against it, which was not very trustful of her. Mais—c’est la vie.
Her Excellency’s face still flushed warmly, as she deliberately disrobed, her rich lips still aflame. There was nothing between the two of them, she told herself, emphatically, and there could never ever be. Period.
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