Agents of Treachery
Page 4
Servants arrived with coffee and a silver dessert bowl. “Ah, strawberries and crème fraîche!” said Ga, breaking into his first smile of the evening.
After the strawberries, another servant offered cigars and port, discreetly showing me the labels. Ga waved these temptations away like a good Baptist. I did the same, not without regret.
“Come, my friend,” said Ga, rising to his feet and suddenly speaking West African rather than Missouri English, “it is time for a walk. Do you get enough exercise?”
I said, “I wish I got more.”
“Ah, but you must make time to keep up to snuff,” said Ga. “I ride horseback every morning and walk in the cool of the evening. Both things are excellent exercise, and also, to start the day, you have the companionship of the horse which never says anything stupid. You must get a horse. If you are too busy for a horse, a masseur. Not a masseuse. They are too distracting. Massage is like hearty exercise if the masseur is strong and has the knowledge. Bob Hope told me that. Massage keeps him young.”
By now we were at the front door. The spick-and-span young army captain who had earlier leaped out of the closet behind Ga’s desk awaited us. Standing at rigid attention, he held out a paper for Ga. Benjamin immediately went into reverse, walking backward as he withdrew from eyeshot and earshot of the president, while the latter read his document and spoke to his orderly. I followed suit.
Staring straight ahead and barely moving his lips, Benjamin muttered, “He is charming tonight. Be careful.” These were the first words he had uttered all evening. Throughout dinner, Ga had ignored him entirely, as if he were a third pit bull lying at his feet.
Outside, under the stadium lights, Ga led the way across the shadowless grounds to his animal park. Three men walked in front, sweeping the ground in case of snakes. As I knew from rumor and intelligence reports, Ga had a morbid fear of snakes. Another bearer carried Ga’s sporting rifle, a beautiful weapon that looked to me like a Churchill, retail in London, £10,000.
The light from the towers was so strong that everything looked like an overexposed photograph. Ga pointed out the gazelles, naming them all one by one. “Some of these specimens are quite rare,” he said, “or so I am told by the people who sell them. I am preserving them for the people of this nation. Most of these beasts no longer live in this part of Africa, but before the Europeans came with their guns and killed them for sport, we knew them as brothers.”
Ga was a believer in raising a mythical African past to the status of reality. The public buildings he had built during his brief reign featured murals and mosaics depicting Africans of a lost civilization inventing agriculture, mathematics, architecture, medicine, electricity, the airplane, even the postage stamp. In his mind it was only logical that the ancients had also lived in peace with the lion, the elephant, the giraffe—everything but the serpent, which Ga had exiled from his Utopia.
We tramped on a bit, to an empty paddock. “Now you will see something,” he said. “You will see nature in the raw.”
This paddock was unlighted. Ga lifted his hand, and the lights went on. Standing alone in the middle of the open space was an animal that even I was able to recognize as a Thomson’s gazelle from its diminutive size, its lovely tan and white coat, the calligraphic black stripe on its flank. This one was a buck, just over three feet tall, a work of art like so many other African animals.
“This type of gazelle is common,” Ga said. “There are hundreds of thousands of them in herds in Tanganyika. They can outrun a lion. Watch.”
The word suddenly does not convey the speed of what happened next. Out of the blinding light in which it had somehow been concealing itself as it stalked the Tommy, a cheetah materialized, moving at sixty miles an hour. A cheetah can cover a hundred meters in less than three seconds. The Tommy saw or sensed this blur of death that hurtled toward him and leaped three or four feet straight up into the air, then hit the ground running. The Tommy was slightly slower than its predator, but far more nimble. When the cheetah got close enough to attack, the little gazelle would make a quick turn and escape. This happened over and over again. The size of the paddock—or playing field, as Ga must have thought of it—was an advantage to the Tommy, who would lead the cheetah straight to the fence, then make a last-second turn. Once or twice the cheetah crashed into the wire.
“This is almost over,” Ga said. “Usually it lasts only a minute or so. If the cat does not win very quickly, it runs out of strength and gives up.”
A second later, the cheetah won. The gazelle turned in the wrong direction, and the cat brought it down. A cheetah is not strong enough to break the neck of its prey, so it kills by suffocation, biting the throat and crushing the windpipe. The Tommy struggled, then went limp. The cheetah’s eyes glittered. So did Ga’s.
Beaming, he threw an arm around my shoulders. He said, “Wonderful, eh?”
I smelled the food and wine on his breath, felt his excited heart beating against my shoulder. Then, without a good night or even a facial expression, Ga turned on his heel, and, surrounded by his snake sweepers and his gun bearer, marched away and disappeared into the palace. The evening was over. His guests had ceased to exist.
We lost no time in leaving. Minutes later, as we rolled toward the wakening city in Benjamin’s Rover, I asked a question.
“Is he always so hospitable?”
“Tonight you saw one Ga,” Benjamin said. “There are a thousand of him.”
I could believe it. In this one evening I had seen him in half a dozen incarnations, Mussolini redux, gourmet, Joe College, tender friend, zoologist, mythologist, and a fun-loving god who stage-managed animal sacrifices to himself.
The Rover purred along a smoothly paved but deserted road, bush to the left and right, the sticky night dark as macadam. Headlights appeared behind us and approached at high speed. The sergeant switched off the Rover’s lights and pulled off the road. The tires bit into soft dirt. Benjamin and I were slammed together hip and shoulder. We were being overtaken by a motorcade. A Cadillac, the lead car, swept by at high speed, then a Rolls-Royce, then another Cadillac as chase car.
“The president,” Benjamin said calmly when the Rover stopped bouncing. “He always has a woman or two before the sun rises. He is quick with them, never more than fifteen min-utes, then he goes back to the presidential palace. He never goes to the same woman twice in the same month.”
“He keeps thirty-one women?”
“More, in case one of them is not clean on a certain night.”
“How does he choose which one?”
“Each woman has a number. Each month Ga receives from somebody in St. Louis, Missouri, what is called a dream book. It is used in America to play the numbers game. He uses the number in the dream book for the day.”
I said, “So if you want to find him on any given night, you match the woman’s number to the number for that particular day in the dream book.”
“Yes, if you know the address of every woman, that is the key,” Benjamin said.
He smiled and placed a hand on my shoulder, pleased as a proud father with the quickness of my mind.
* * * *
For the next several days there was no sign of Benjamin. I was not locked up, but as a practical matter this meant that I was confined to the safe house during daylight hours. There was nowhere to go at night. Like any other prisoner I invented ways to pass the empty hours. Solitude and time-wasting did not bother me; I was used to them; both were occupational hazards. I was concerned by the lack of exercise, because I did not want to run out of breath in case I had to make a run for it. This seemed a likely outcome. How else could this situation end?
I jogged in place for an hour every morning, and in the afternoon ran the 100- and the 220-yard dashes, also in place but flat out. I did push-ups and sit-ups and side-straddle hops. I punched and karate-chopped the sofa cushions until I had beaten every last mote of dust from them. I jitterbugged in my socks to cracked 78 rpm records I found in a closet, Louis Ar
mstrong, the Harmonica Rascals, the Andrews Sisters. Satchmo’s “Muskrat Ramble” and the sisters’ “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B” provided the best workouts.
The sergeant stopped by every day to cook lunch and dinner and wash up afterward. He brought quality groceries, and he was a good cook, specializing in curries and local piripiri dishes loaded with cayenne pepper that made the heart beat in the skull. I asked him to bring me books. He refused money to pay for them or the groceries—apparently I was covered by a budget in secret funds—and came back from the African market the next day with at least one Penguin paperback by every writer I had named and a few more besides. The books were dog-eared and food- and coffee-stained, and most were missing pages.
I was in bed, reading a W. Somerset Maugham short story about adulterers in Malaya, when Benjamin finally showed up. As usual he chose the wee hours of the morning for his visit. He was as stealthy as he had been when he visited me in the hotel, and I heard no car or any other sound of his approach.
All the same I felt his presence before he materialized out of the darkness. He seemed to be alone. He carried a battered leather valise, the kind that has a hinged top that opens like a mouth when the catch is released. The valise seemed to jump in his hand, as if it contained a disembodied muscle. I rationalized this by thinking that he must be trembling for some reason. Maybe he had had a bout of fever and was not quite recovered. That would explain why I hadn’t seen him for a week.
Then, at the instant when I realized that there was something alive inside the valise and it was trying to get out, Benjamin held the bag upside down over my bed and pressed the catch. The bag popped open and a huge blue-black mamba uncoiled itself from within. It landed on my legs. With blinding speed it coiled and struck. I felt the blow, a soft punch but no sting, on my chest just above the heart. I knew that I was a dead man. So apparently did the mamba. It stared into my eyes, waiting (or so I thought) for my heart to stop, for the power of thought to switch off. No more than a second had passed. Already I felt cold. An ineffable calm settled upon me. The laboring air conditioner in the window was suddenly almost silent. My hearing seemed to be going first. Next, I thought, the eyes. I felt no pain. I thought, Maybe after all there is a God, or was a God, if the last moment of life has been arranged in such a kindly and loving way.
Dreamily I watched as Benjamin’s hand, black as the mamba, seized the snake behind the head. The serpent struggled, lashing its body and winding itself around Benjamin s arm. The sergeant appeared, stepping out of the darkness and into the light of my reading lamp just as Benjamin had done. It took the combined strength of these two powerful men to stuff the thing back into the valise and close it. They did so without the slightest sign of fear. In the half-light, with their faces close together, they looked more than ever like brothers. How strange it was, I thought, that this surreal scene in this misbegotten place should be the last thing I would ever see. Benjamin handed the valise to the sergeant. It jumped violently in his hand. The sergeant produced a key and, with a perfectly steady hand, locked the valise. His eyes were fixed on me. He was grinning in what I can only describe as total delight. Make that unholy delight.
To me, an unsmiling Benjamin said, “You must be wondering why you are not dead yet.”
He was not grinning. The sergeant, watching me over Benjamin’s shoulder, did it for him, big white teeth reflecting more light than there seemed to be in the room.
Up to this point I had not looked at my fatal wound. In fact, I had not moved at all since the snake had struck me. Something told me that any movement might quicken the action of the venom and rob me of whatever split seconds of life I might have left. Besides, I did not want to see the wound that I imagined, twin punctures made by the mamba’s fangs, perhaps a drop or two of blood, and most horribly, venom oozing from the holes in my skin. Finally I found the courage to glance at my chest. It was unmarked.
I leaped out of bed, dashed into the bathroom, and examined my sweating torso. I stripped off my boxer shorts, the only garment I was wearing, and twisted and turned in the stingy light, looking for what I still feared was a mortal wound. But I saw no break in my skin, no bruise, even. The symptoms of death I had been feeling—the light-headedness, the shortness of breath, and a sense of loss so intense that it felt like the shutdown of the heart—went away.
Without bothering to put my shorts back on, I went back into the bedroom.
“Look at him!” the sergeant chortled, pointing a finger at me.
At first I thought he was making fun of my nakedness. I had spent time on a beach in South Africa, and the part of me formerly covered by my shorts was dead-white. I soon realized that he was laughing at something other than my tan line. I was the victim of the most sadistic practical joke since Harry Flashman was kicked out of Rugby College, and these two were the jokers. There is no mirth like African mirth, and both Benjamin and the sergeant were doubled over by it. They howled with laughter, their eyes were filled with tears, they gasped for breath, they hugged each other as they danced a jig of merriment, they lost their balance and staggered to regain it.
“Look at him!” they said over and over again. “Look at him!”
The locked valise had been placed on the bed. The contortions of the infuriated six-foot-long muscle that was trying to escape from it caused it to skitter across the sheets. I tried to get around the helpless men, but they kept lurching into my path, so I was not able to reach the Webley, Benjamin’s gift to me, that was stashed under the mattress. My plan was to empty the revolver, if I could get my hands on it, into the pulsating valise. I was in no way certain that I could stick to this plan if I actually had the gun in my hands and this comedy team at point-blank range.
Breath by breath, I got hold of myself. So did Benjamin and the sergeant, though it took them a little longer. It was obvious what had happened. Some juju man had captured the snake and removed its fangs and venom sac. Knowing Benjamin—and by now I felt that I knew him intimately despite the brevity of our friendship—he had commissioned the capture and the veterinary surgery. Knowing also how terrified President Ga was of snakes, I could only surmise that the defanged mamba was going to be a player in the overthrow of the tyrant. Maybe, if the coup succeeded, Benjamin would make the mamba part of the flag, as an earlier group of patriots had done a couple hundred years ago with another poisonous snake in another British colony.
Benjamin offered no explanations for the prank. I was damned if I was going to ask him any questions. I was by no means certain that I could control my voice. By now the joke had cooled off. Benjamin had stopped smiling. His grave dignity had returned. He made a minimal gesture. The sergeant picked up the valise.
Benjamin said, “I will be back soon.”
With a scratchy throat, I said, “Good.”
The two of them let themselves out the front door. I locked it behind them, and as I tried to put the key into my pants pocket I remembered that I was stark naked. Nakedness was deeply offensive to christianized Africans like Benjamin. Maybe that was why he had stopped laughing before the joke had really worn off.
I reached under the mattress and pulled out the Webley and cocked it. It is a very heavy weapon, weighing almost three pounds when fully loaded, and when I felt its heft in my hand I began to tremble. I could not stop. I was afraid that the gun might go off, but I had so little control over my muscles that I could not safely put it down. Teeth chattering, my body chilling in a room in which the temperature was not less than ninety degrees, I understood fully and for the first time just what a brilliant son of a bitch Benjamin was.
* * * *
Two days later, at five in the morning, he showed up at the safe house for breakfast. He said he had been up all night. There was no outward sign of this. He was fresh from the shower, his starched uniform still smelled of the iron, and he sat up straight as a cadet in his chair. But he was not his usual masked self. There was an air of excitement about him that he did not bother to conceal.
He spoke in a low tone. It was difficult to hear him because a Benny Goodman record was playing on the phonograph—the usual precaution against eavesdroppers—and Harry James and the rest of the trumpet section were playing as if their four or five horns were a single instrument.
I said, “Upset? Why?”
“He has discovered the fangs and the poison sac of a black mamba on his desk.”
“Goodness,” I said. “No wonder he’s upset.”
“Yes. He found these things when he came back from one of his women last night. They were right in the center of the blotter, in his coffee cup. If someone had poured coffee into the cup he might well have drunk it absentmindedly. He said so himself.”
I could think of nothing to say. Certainly Benjamin needed no encouragement to go on with his story.
He said, “He flew off the handle and called me immediately. He screamed into the telephone. He was surrounded by traitors, he said. How could anyone have gained access to his office in his absence, let alone smuggled in the coffee cup? How could no one have noticed this coffee cup and what was in it? There are soldiers everywhere in the presidential palace. Or were.”