The Big Book of Espionage

by The Big Book of Espionage (retail) (epub)

  I got into the Austin and started driving. The road soon became a dirt trail whose billowing ocher dust stuck to the car like snow and made it necessary to run the windshield wipers. It was impossible to drive with the windows open. The temperature inside the closed vehicle (air-conditioning was a thing of the future) could not have been less than one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Slippery with sweat, I followed the map, and after making a right turn into what seemed to be an impenetrable thicket of rubbery bushes, straddled a footpath which in time opened onto a clearing containing a small village. Another car, a dusty black Rover, was parked in front of one of the conical mud huts. This place was deserted. Grass had grown on the footpaths. There was no sign of life.

  I parked beside the other car and ducked into the mud hut. Benjamin, alone as usual, sat inside. He wore national dress—the white togalike gown invented by nineteenth-century missionaries to clothe the natives for the benefit of English knitting mills. His feet were bare. He seemed to be deep in thought and did not greet me with word or sign. A .455-caliber Webley revolver lay beside him on the floor of beaten earth. The light was dim, and because I had come into the shadowy interior out of intense sunlight, it was some time before I was able to see his face well enough to be absolutely certain that the mute tribesman before me actually was the chief constable with whom I had passed a pleasant hour the night before in the Equator Club. As for the revolver, I can’t explain why I trusted this glowering giant not to shoot me just yet, but I did.

  Benjamin said, “Is this meeting place sufficiently private?”

  “It’s fine,” I replied. “But where have all the people gone?”

  “To Ndala, a long time ago.”

  All over Africa were abandoned villages like this one whose inhabitants had packed up and left for the city in search of money and excitement and the new life of opportunity that independence promised. Nearly all of them now slept in the streets.

  “As I said last night,” Benjamin said, “I am thinking about doing something that is necessary to the future of this country, and I would like to have the encouragement of the United States government.”

  “It must be something impressive if you need the encouragement of Washington.”

  “It is. I plan to remove the present government of this country and replace it with a freely elected new government.”

  “That is impressive. What exactly do you mean by ‘encouragement’?”

  “A willingness to stand aside, to make no silliness, and afterwards to be helpful.”

  “Afterwards? Not before?”

  “Before is a local problem.”

  The odds were at least even that afterward might be a large problem for Benjamin. President Ga’s instinct for survival was highly developed. Others, including his own brother, had tried to overthrow him. They were all dead now.

  I said, “I recommend first of all that you forget this idea of yours. If you can’t do that, then you should speak to somebody in the American embassy. I’m sure you already know the right person.”

  “I prefer to speak to you.”

  “Why? I’m not a member of the Ministry of Encouragement.”

  “But that is exactly what you are, Mr. Brown. You are famous for it. You can be trusted. This man in the American embassy you call ‘the right person’ is in fact a fool. He is an admirer of President for Life Ga. He plays ball with President Ga. He cannot be trusted.”

  I started to answer this nonsense. Benjamin showed me the palm of his hand. “Please, no protestations of innocence. I have all the evidence I would ever need about your good works in my country, should I ever need it.”

  That made me blink. No doubt he did have an interesting file on me. I had done a good deal of mischief in his country, even before the British departed, and for all I knew his courtship was a charade. He might very well be trying to entrap me.

  I said, “I’m flattered. But I don’t think I’d make a good assistant in this particular matter.”

  Something like a frown crossed Benjamin’s brow. I had annoyed him. Since we were in the middle of nowhere and he was the one with the revolver, this was not a good sign.

  “I have no need of an assistant,” Benjamin said. “What I need is a witness. A trained observer whose word is trusted in high places in the U.S. Someone who can tell the right people in Washington what I have done, how I have done it, and most of all, that I have done it for the good of my country.”

  I could think of nothing to say that would not make this conversation even more unpleasant than it already was.

  Benjamin said, “I can see that you do not trust me.”

  He picked up the revolver and cocked it. The Webley is something of an antique, having been designed around the time of the Boer War as the standard British officer’s sidearm. It is large and ugly but also effective, powerful enough to kill an elephant. For a long moment Benjamin looked deeply into my eyes and then, holding the gun by the barrel, handed it to me.

  “If you believe I am being false to you in any way,” he said, “you can shoot me.”

  It was a wonder that he had not shot himself, handling a cocked revolver in such a carefree way. I took the weapon from his hand, lowered the hammer, swung open the cylinder, and shook out the cartridges. They were not blanks. I reloaded and handed the weapon back to Benjamin. He wiped it clean of fingerprints, my fingerprints, with the skirt of his robe and put it back on the floor.

  In the jargon of espionage, the recruitment of an agent is called a seduction. As in a real seduction, assuming that things are going well, a moment comes when resistance turns into encouragement. We had arrived at the moment for a word of encouragement.

  I said, “What exactly is the plan?”

  “When you strike at a prince,” Benjamin said, “you must strike to kill.”

  Absolutely true. It did not surprise me that he had read Machiavelli. At this point it would not have surprised me if he burst into fluent Sanskrit. Despite the rigmarole with the Webley, I still did not trust him and probably never would, but I was doing the work that I was paid to do, so I decided to press on with the thing.

  “That’s an excellent principle,” I said, “but it’s a principle, not a plan.”

  “All the right things will be done,” Benjamin said. “The radio station and newspapers will be seized, the army will cooperate, the airport will be closed, curfews will be imposed.”

  “Don’t forget to surround the presidential palace.”

  “That will not be necessary.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the president will not be in the palace,” Benjamin said.

  All of a sudden, Benjamin was becoming cryptic. Frankly, I was just as glad, because what he was proposing in words of one syllable scared the bejesus out of me. So did the expression on his face. He was as calm as a Buddha.

  He rose to his feet. In his British uniform he had looked impressive, if slightly uncomfortable. In his gown he looked positively majestic, a black Caesar in a white toga.

  “You know enough now to think this over,” he said. “Do so, if you please. We will talk some more before you fly away.”

  He ducked through the door and drove away. I waited for a few minutes, then went outside myself. A large black mamba lay in the sun in front of my car. My blood froze. The mamba was twelve or thirteen feet long. This species is the fastest-moving snake known to zoology, capable of slithering at fifteen miles an hour, faster than most men can run. Its strike is much quicker than that. Its venom will usually kill an adult human being in about fifteen minutes. Hoping that this one was not fully awake, I got into the car and started the engine. The snake moved but did not go away. I could easily have run over it, but instead I backed up and steered around it. Locally this serpent was regarded as a sign of bad luck to come. I wasn’t looking for any more misfortune than I already had on my plate.

&nbs
p; After dinner that evening I spent an extra hour in the hotel bar. I felt the alcohol after I went upstairs and got into bed, and fell almost immediately into a deep sleep. Cognac makes for bad dreams and I was in the middle of one when I was awakened by the click of the latch. For an instant I thought the porter must be bringing my morning tea and wondered where the night had gone. But when I opened my eyes it was still dark outside. The door opened and closed. No light came in, meaning that the intruder had switched off the dim bulbs in the corridor. He was now inside the room. I could not see him but I could smell him: soap, spicy food, shoe polish. Shoe polish? I slid out of bed, taking the pillows and the covers with me and rolling them into a ball, as if this would help me defend myself against the intruder who I believed was about to attack me in the dark with a machete.

  In the dark, the intruder drew the shade over the window. An instant later the lights came on. Benjamin said, “Sorry to disturb you.”

  He wore his impeccable uniform, swagger stick tucked under his left arm, cap square on his head, badges and shoes and Sam Browne belt gleaming. The clock read 4:23. It was an old-fashioned windup alarm clock with two bells on top. It ticked loudly while I waited until I was sure I could trust my voice to reply. I was stark naked. I felt a little foolish to be holding a bundle of bedclothes in my arms, but at least this preserved my modesty.

  Finally I said, “I thought we’d already had our conversation for the day.”

  Benjamin ignored the Bogart impersonation. “There is something I want you to see,” he said. “Get dressed as quick as you can, please.” Benjamin never forgot a please or a thank you. Like his penmanship, Victorian good manners seemed to have been rubbed into his soul in missionary school.

  As soon as I had tied my shoes, he led the way down the back stairs. He moved at a swift trot. Outside the back door, a black Rover sedan waited with the engine running. The sergeant stood at attention beside it. He opened the back door as Benjamin and I approached and, after a brief moment as Alphonse and Gaston, we got into the backseat.

  When the car was in motion, Benjamin turned to me and said, “You seem to want to give President Ga the benefit of the doubt. This morning you will see some things for yourself, and then you can decide whether that is the Christian thing to do.”

  It was still dark. As a usual thing there is no lingering painted sunrise in equatorial regions; the sun, huge and white, just materializes on the rim of the earth, and daylight begins. In the darkness, the miserable of Ndala were still asleep in rows on either side of every street, but little groups of people on the move were caught in our headlights.

  “Beggars,” Benjamin said. “They are on their way to work.” The beggars limped and crawled according to their afflictions. Those who could not walk at all were carried by others.

  “They help each other,” Benjamin said. He said something to the sergeant in a tribal language. The sergeant put a spotlight on a big man carrying a leper who had lost his feet. The leper looked over his friend’s shoulder and smiled. The big man walked onward as if unaware of the spotlight. Benjamin said, “See? A blind man will carry a crippled man, and the crippled man will tell him where to go. Take a good look, Mr. Brown. It is a sight you will never see in Ndala again.”

  “Why not?”

  “You will see.”

  At the end of the street an army truck was parked. A squad of soldiers armed with bayoneted rifles held at port arms formed a line across the street. Benjamin gave an order. The sergeant stopped the car and shone his spotlight on them. They had not stirred or opened their eyes as when the sergeant drove down this same street the night before. Whatever was happening, these people did not want to be witnesses. The soldiers paid no more attention to Benjamin’s car than the people lying on the ground paid to the soldiers.

  When the beggars arrived, the soldiers surrounded them and herded them into the truck. The blind man protested, a single syllable. Before he could say more, a soldier hit him in the small of the back with a rifle butt. The blind man dropped the crippled leper and fell down unconscious. The soldiers would not touch them, so the other beggars picked them up and loaded them into the truck, then climbed in themselves. The soldiers lowered the back curtain and got into a smaller truck of their own. All this happened in eerie silence, not an order given or a protest voiced, in a country in which the smallest human encounter sent tsunamis of shouting and laughter through crowds of hundreds.

  We drove on. We witnessed the same scene over and over again. All over the city, beggars were being rounded up by troops. Our last stop was the Independence Hotel, my hotel, where I saw the beggars I knew best, including the handsome, smiling leper who caught coins in his mouth, being herded into the back of a truck. As the truck drove away, gears changing, the sun appeared on the eastern horizon, huge and entire, a miracle of timing.

  Benjamin said, “You look a little sick, my friend. Let me tell you something. Those people are never coming back to Ndala. They give our country a bad image, and two weeks from now hundreds of foreigners will arrive for the Pan-African Conference. Thanks to President Ga, they will not have to look at these disgusting creatures, so maybe they will elect him president of the conference. Think about that. We will talk when you come back.”

  In Washington, two days later at six in the morning, I found my chief at his desk, drinking coffee from a chipped mug and reading the Wall Street Journal. I told him my tale. He knew at once exactly who Benjamin was. He asked how much money Benjamin wanted, what his timetable was, who his coconspirators were, whether he himself planned to replace the abominable Ga as dictator after he overthrew him, what his policy toward the United States would be—and, by the way, what were his hidden intentions? I was unable to answer most of these questions.

  I said, “All he’s asked for so far is encouragement.”

  “Encouragement?” said my chief. “That’s a new one. He didn’t suggest one night of love with the first lady in the Lincoln bedroom?”

  A certain third world general had once made just such a demand in return for his services as a spy in a country whose annual national product was smaller than that of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. I told him that Benjamin had not struck me as being the type to long for Mrs. Eisenhower.

  My chief said, “You take him seriously?”

  “He’s an impressive person.”

  “Then go back and talk to him some more.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “What about the encouragement?”

  “It’s cheap. Ga is a bad ’un. Shovel it on.”

  I was cheap, too—a singleton out at the end of the string. If I got into trouble, I’d get no help from the chief or anyone else in Washington. The old gentleman himself would cut the string. He owed me nothing. “Brown? Brown?” he would say in the unlikely event that he would be asked what had become of me. “The only Brown I know is Charlie.”

  The prospect of returning to Ndala on the next flight was not a very inviting one. I had just spent eight weeks traveling around Africa, in and out of countries, languages, time zones, identities. My intestines swarmed with parasites that were desperate to escape. There was something wrong with my liver: the whites of my eyes were yellow. I had had a malaria attack on the plane from London that frightened the woman seated next to me. The four aspirins I took, spilling only twenty or so while getting them out of the bottle with shaking hands, brought the fever and the sweating under control. Twelve hours later I still had a temperature of 102; I shuddered still, though only fitfully.

  To the chief I said, “Right.”

  “This time get all the details,” my chief said. “But no cables. Your skull only, and fly the information back to me personally. Tell the locals nothing.”

  “Which locals? Here or there?”

  “Anywhere.”

  His tone was nonchalant, but I had known this man for a long time. He was int
erested; he saw an opportunity. He was a white-haired, tweedy, pipe-smoking old fellow with a toothbrush mustache and twinkling blue eyes. His specialty was doing the things that American presidents wanted done without actually requiring them to give the order. He smiled with big crooked teeth; he was rich but too old for orthodontia. “Until I give the word, nobody knows anything but us two chickens. Does that suit you?”

  I nodded as if my assent really was necessary. After a breath or two, I said, “How much encouragement can I offer this fellow?”

  “Use your judgment. Take some money, too. You may have to tide him over till he gets hold of the national treasure. Just don’t make any promises. Hear him out. Figure him out. Estimate his chances. We don’t want a failure. Or an embarrassment.”

  I rose to leave.

  “Hold on,” said the chief.

  He rummaged around in a desk drawer and after examining several identical objects and discarding them, handed me a large bulging brown envelope. A receipt was attached to it with Scotch tape. It said that the envelope contained one hundred thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. I signed it with the fictitious name my employer had assigned to me when I joined up. As I opened the door to leave, I saw that the old gentleman had gone back to his Wall Street Journal.