Agents of Treachery

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  Brown was one of the names I had used on previous visits to Ndala, but it was not the name on the passport I was using this time. He paused, studying my face. His own face showed no flicker of expression.

  Without further preamble, he said, “I am contemplating a project that requires the support of the United States of America.”

  The dramaturgy of the situation suggested that my next line should be, “Really?” or “How so?” However, I said nothing, hoping that Benjamin would fill the silence.

  Frankly, I was puzzled. Was he volunteering for something? Most agents recruited by any intelligence service are volunteers, and the average intelligence officer is a sort of latter-day Marcel Proust. He lies abed in a cork-lined room, hoping to profit by secrets that other people slip under the door. People simply walk in and for whatever motive, usually petty resentment over having been passed over for promotion or the like, offer to betray their country It was also possible, unusual though that might be, that Benjamin hoped to recruit me.

  His eyes bored into mine. His back was to the wall, mine to the dance floor. Behind me I could feel but not see the dancers, moving as a single organism. Through the soles of my shoes I felt vibration set up by scores of feet stamping in unison on the dirt floor. In the yellow candlelight I could see a little more expression on Benjamin s face.

  Many seconds passed before he broke the silence. “What is your opinion of the president of this country?”

  Once again I took my time answering. The problem with this conversation was that I never knew what to say next.

  Finally I said, “President Ga and I have never met.”

  “Nevertheless you must have an opinion.”

  And of course I did. So did everyone who read the newspapers. Akokwu Ga, president for life of Ndala, was a man of strong appetites. He enjoyed his position and its many opportunities for pleasure with an enthusiasm that was remarkable even by the usual standards for dictators. He possessed a solid gold bathtub and bedstead. He had a private zoo. It was said that he was sometimes seized by the impulse to feed his enemies to the lions. He had deposited tens of millions of dollars from his country’s treasury into personal numbered accounts in Swiss banks.

  Dinner for him and his guests was flown in every day from one of the restaurants in Paris that had a three-star rating in the Guide Michelin. A French chef heated the food and arranged it on plates, an English butler served it. Both were assumed to be secret agents employed by their respective governments. Ga maintained love nests in every quarter of the capital city. Women from all over the world occupied these cribs. The ones he liked best were given luxurious houses formerly occupied by Europeans and provided with German cars, French champagne, and “houseboys” (actually undercover policemen) who kept an eye on them.

  “Speak,” Benjamin said.

  I said, “Frankly, chief constable, this conversation is making me nervous.”

  “Why? No one can bug us. Listen to the noise.”

  How right he was. We were shouting at each other in order to be heard above the din. The music made my ears ring, and no microphone then known could penetrate it. I said, “Nevertheless, I would prefer to discuss this in private. Just the two of us.”

  “And how then will you know that I am not bugging you? Or that someone else is not bugging both of us?”

  “I wouldn’t. But would it matter?”

  Benjamin examined me for a long moment. Then he said, “No, it wouldn’t. Because I am the one who will be saying dangerous things.”

  He got to his feet, uncoiled would be the better word. Instantly the sergeant who had brought me here and three other constables in plain clothes materialized from the shadows. Everyone else was dancing, eyes closed, seemingly in another world and time. Benjamin put on his cap and picked up his swagger stick.

  He said, “Tomorrow I will come for you.”

  With that, he disappeared, leaving me without a ride. Eventually I found a taxi back to the hotel. The driver was so wide awake, his taxi so tidy, that I assumed that he, too, must be one of Benjamin’s men.

  The porter who brought me my mug of tea at six a.m. also brought me a note from Benjamin. The penmanship was beautiful. The note was short and to the point: “Nine o’clock, by the front entrance.”

  Through the glass in the hotel’s front door, the street outside was a scene from Goya, lepers and amputees and victims of polio or smallpox or psoriasis, and among the child beggars a few examples of hamstringing by parents who needed the income that a crippled child could bring home. A tourist arrived in a taxi and scattered a handful of change in order to disperse the beggars while he made his dash for the entrance. Clearly he was a greenhorn. The seasoned traveler in Africa distributed money only after checkout. To do so on arrival guaranteed your being fondled by lepers every time you came in or went out. One particularly handsome, smiling young fellow who had lost his fingers and toes to leprosy caught coins in his mouth.

  At the appointed time exactly Was I still in Africa? Benjamin’s sergeant pulled up in his gleaming black Austin. He barked a command in one of the local languages, and once again the crowd parted. He took me by the hand in the friendly African way and led me to the car.

  We headed north, out of town, horn sounding tinnily at every turn of the wheels. Otherwise, the sergeant explained, pedestrians would assume that the driver was trying to kill them. In daylight when everyone was awake and walking around instead of sleeping by the wayside, Ndala sounded like the overture of An American in Paris. After a hair-raising drive past the brand-new government buildings and banks of downtown, through raucous streets lined with shops and filled with the smoke of street vendors’ grills, through labyrinthine neighborhoods of low shacks made from scraps of lumber and tin and cardboard, we arrived at last in Africa itself, a sun-scorched plain of rusty soil, dotted with stunted bush, stretching from horizon to horizon. After a mile or so of emptiness, we came upon a policeman seated on a parked motorcycle. The sergeant stopped the car, leaped out, and leaving the motor running and the front door open, opened the back door to let me out. He gave me a map, drew himself up to attention, and after stamping his right foot into the dust, gave me a quivering British hand salute. He then jumped onto the motorcycle behind its rider, who revved the engine, made a slithering U-turn, and headed back toward the city trailed by a corkscrew of red dust.

  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?”<
br />
  “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.

  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 le
d 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.