by Matt Killeen
“Lieutenant . . .” he began, but couldn’t help smiling. He took the pack and stopped. “This is a German brand—”
“The Swiss . . . on everyone’s and no one’s side,” she tutted, and then laughed, trying to let it tinkle the way her mother’s salon laugh could, but in this humid, close darkness, it just rang hollow. He was intelligent and thoughtful, she had to get under that, to something more emotional.
He snorted and tapped one out, gingerly putting it to his lips. Sarah thumbed the lighter, but it didn’t catch. The lieutenant smiled and took it from her.
“Nice and slow, see?” The flame caught and danced briefly as he lit the paper tube.
Sarah held her breath. This was no time to cough.
“Can I ask, what’s going on? No one ever tells me anything . . .” She pulled a theatrical face and made the lieutenant smile again.
“You’re French? You’re not Swiss?” he asked, inhaling deeply. He frowned and looked at the gift between his fingers.
“Yes, we met up with the Bofinger party a month or so back.”
Lies. Watch where they come to rest on the floor, and do not sidestep or retreat without looking.
“What do you do here?”
“Me? Not a great deal! My father is a missionary,” Sarah explained. “The poor victims of this terrible sickness . . . they’re all doctors and things here. No one was taking care of their spiritual needs.”
You sound too old now.
“What are they doing? The Swiss?”
“Trying to treat the sick . . . they don’t let me near, so I don’t know whether they’re succeeding. They’re all pretty sad most of the time . . .”
“Never known missionaries to be much interested in anything but getting sick natives back to work,” the lieutenant muttered, and stared at the glowing cigarette in his hand. “You think they’re Swiss?” he pressed.
“Why . . . wouldn’t they be Swiss?” Sarah replied, trying to sound confused.
“Just because they said so?”
Sarah made a face of curious wonder. “Why would they say they were Swiss, if they weren’t?”
“If they were German, for example.”
Sarah burst out laughing. “You wouldn’t want to be German, we’re at war with Germany!” She stopped and changed expressions like she’d said something wrong. “Or are we? Oh, are you for the Armistice, are you pour les Fishies?”
The lieutenant laughed out loud, causing his subordinate to look around. Sarah caught Claude’s eye for just a moment, the merest hairline crack in his mask revealing his anxiety and concern.
“Vichy, for Vichy, you mean. You know in English you said . . . That’s funny.” He looked at the cigarette again and dropped it into the mud. “No, we are for de Gaulle, until the next meeting, and then we might be for something else. But right now, I think your friends might be German. Some of them, maybe.”
“Oh, you think there’s a German hiding here . . . Oh! Can I guess who it is? Can I?” Sarah clapped her hands together.
The lieutenant sat on his haunches next to her and looked up into her eyes. Sarah was immediately uncomfortable. It was always easier playing the little girl from below, looking up.
“So who is it?” he asked seriously.
“Oh, oh, it could be . . . No . . . maybe . . . no . . . How would I tell?”
The man chuckled. “I don’t think you can,” he conceded. “Maybe their papers are real or they’re not, but I do want to know what they’re doing here.”
“Oh, that’s easy,” Sarah piped. “There’s a disease and it’s spreading south. It’s deadly. The professor and the doctor are trying to stop it.”
“That’s not what the locals think. They think this mission is making people sick.”
“Urgh,” Sarah exclaimed, making a disgusted face. “Why would someone do that?”
“Why indeed?”
“So who is going to check the papers?”
It was a roll of the dice, to present him with a reasonable option, a way out.
He smiled and nodded toward Claude. “He’s a bag of hot air, isn’t he?”
Sarah laughed. “Oh, yes, well, typical jumped-up nègre.”
She shuddered inside, from her feet to her hands, she had to concentrate to stop them shaking. The words came out so easily, she didn’t even know if it was a calculated ploy, or something she actually thought.
Dumb monster.
The lieutenant grunted. “I was going to say a Parisian, but yeah. Worst mix.”
He stood and barked some orders to his officers. They were moving out, taking the Swiss papers back to the town to be checked. Someone pulled the cards from Claude’s hands and headed to the back of the truck.
“Oh, do you have any morphine? We’ve run out and it’s so important . . .” Sarah layered every gram of syrup she could muster onto the request.
“Where are you from? Your accent is all over the place.”
Sarah stiffened.
“Born in Marseille. Never been back. I’m from here.” She made another disgusted face. Again she was guessing what might go down well.
“There’s a kit in the truck, probably been stolen already, but if it’s still there, it’s yours.”
The troops were climbing aboard the Renault. Lisbeth was struggling to hide her relief. Claude was talking the other officers away, like a beater driving birds to a hunter. The lieutenant climbed back out of the cab and handed her a medical kit. It was old and dusty but sealed.
“Good to meet you, Mademoiselle . . . ?” he inquired.
“Urs . . . ssss,”she hissed. Gottverdammten dumme. . . . She held up the kit. “Sss . . . look at this, so old! Thank you, though.” She made a show of putting it under her arm and then offering her hand. “Poulain. Élodie Poulain.”
The lieutenant took her hand and gave it a perfunctory shake. “La Roux. How old are you, Élodie?”
“I’m twelve, nearly thirteen,” Sarah squeaked.
“That’s some grown-up makeup you’re wearing,” he said with a frown.
She had forgotten.
“I was just . . .” she managed. No suitable answer came to her.
He leaned in and touched her hair.
“Don’t grow up so fast, little one. There will be plenty of time for that,” he said softly before standing. “I will see you tomorrow morning, Élodie Poulain.”
“So soon, lovely,” she exclaimed, smiling.
TWENTY-FIVE
THEY WATCHED THE truck back up and take several minutes to turn on the muddy road. As it finally disappeared into the darkness, Lisbeth turned and began yelling. Her staff moved in all directions. They were leaving.
Claude was looking at Sarah. Something approaching admiration cut through his habitual sneer.
“That was . . . interesting,” he said, seemingly incapable of following through with the compliment.
“They won’t get the papers back though.”
“They were bad fakes. They’ve done their job.”
“This is for my uncle,” she said, passing him the first-aid kit. “Can you see to it?”
“Bien sûr.”
“What will happen to the village now they’re leaving?” she wondered.
There was a distant roaring. Not a gorilla or an elephant, not thunder or a passing airplane. Something else.
The clouded night sky turned orange.
Lisbeth looked up and swore. She began running.
* * *
The whole jungle was painted in dancing red light. From the edge of camp and up the trail to the village, the trees looked like swaying shadow puppets, telling a story of a cataclysm. The smell of burning wood was thick on the air and made it hard to breathe.
Sarah found her legs reluctant to carry her forward. Her skin prickled where she had been burnt at Christmas, and she felt o
n the edge of hyperventilating. The air grew hot, hotter than the cloying humidity of the Congo autumn. Hot in an aggressive, violent way.
Commit to the move, she remembered. Just keep walking.
She rounded the corner in time to see Lisbeth come to a stop on the edge of what had once been the village. The sound of roaring, the low, throaty scream of the flamethrower drowned out anything she might have been shouting. Clementine was already standing there, silhouetted against the fire, fists balled, watching the horror.
All the huts were alight, billowing painfully bright clouds of incandescence where straw and raffia had been. The gardens and orchards burned, and worst of all, the shelters that had been filled with the sick and quarantined were gone. Nothing remained that wasn’t a black or smoldering pile among the flickering floor of flames.
One figure, draped in tanks and tubes and a long leather coat, conjured an immense arch of fire that almost reached its end before smoke could even fight its way free, and the flames seemed to splash to the ground like water.
Lisbeth took three steps toward the weapon’s operator but was driven back by the smoking turf, heat, and smoke.
“They are not sentimental, are they?” yelled Clementine as Sarah drew level. She was trying to load film into her camera. It wasn’t working.
“Tell me they moved everyone. Tell me they’ve all gone somewhere else,” Sarah howled in desperation.
“They’ve definitely gone, one way or another.”
The roaring stopped, and the operator turned back to them, the mask and goggles making him seem more demonic.
They could now hear Lisbeth screaming in rage. She advanced on the man, her anger overwhelming the sense of danger. The operator removed his mask as she approached. It was Klodt. Too scared to drink the water, frightened-looking, and little more than a child Klodt. He was confused at the reception.
She whaled at him with her fists. He dropped the gun nozzle to cover his face with his gloved hands and arms.
The beating played out, more shadow puppets before the fire. Amidst the scent of burning wood, gasoline, and choking smoke, there was another smell, a stronger, richer, sweeter aroma that Sarah couldn’t identify.
Then she knew what it was. She just didn’t want to.
* * *
The smoke made the camp darker and more opaque, like a factory smog that hurt to breathe. Ash and glowing sparks began to fall like snow.
By the time Sarah had walked the kilometer back to the tents from what remained of the village, most of them were down and packed away. Bofinger’s lab had been the first to vanish. A smaller bonfire had begun on the same patch of ground, with the mission staff throwing papers, rubbish, and other items onto it.
Sarah’s tent had gone, so she returned to the Captain’s to find him dozing on the cot and Claude packing their gear.
“He’s out of it. Where’s your Neger, girl? Why am I acting as his valet?” Claude grumbled.
“They burned the village. The whole thing, the houses, the dead, the dying, the living . . . everything.”
Claude snorted. “What did you think they were going to do?” He shrugged. “There was only one survivor anyway.”
“Just one murder . . .”
“One African, one savage, one native, it doesn’t matter.”
“It matters!” screamed Sarah. “You’re an African, shall I slaughter you?”
“I’m French,” Claude yelled, prodding his finger violently into his chest. “I might be a second-class Parisian, but I’m a Parisian. And you just try.” He flung the Captain’s bag at her. “Here, sort out your own merde.”
They continued in silence for a few moments.
“What do we do now?” Sarah said quietly.
“I’ve not a clue, short of getting out of here. Think those Gaullist troops haven’t seen that firework display Bofinger laid on? We need to be as far from these crazies as we can, or we’ll all end up in the stockade.”
“No, we need to follow them and—”
“You need to follow them, maybe. I’ve had more than enough already—”
“But you’ve got a job to do—” she interrupted, only to be interrupted in her turn.
“You’ve an intelligence officer who’s une junkie, for a mission I don’t understand, and the only asset that remotely works is twelve years old.”
“I’m sixteen,” she snapped. “And I thought you were his friend?”
“Which is why I’m driving you to Libreville or wherever in Vichy territory and you can get a boat back to Germany, but we leave this horror show behind. Maybe then I can report any of this to London in a way that makes any sense. I don’t know what you’ve done to him—I barely recognize the man.”
Clementine stuck her head through the flap.
“Not sure I can hear you arguing clearly enough outside,” she reproached. “Lisbeth wants you, Ursula.”
Sarah looked to Claude, who nodded.
“The truck leaves in ten minutes. You, bamboula,” he sneered at Clementine. “We’re helping him onto it. Do some work for once in your life.”
* * *
The dining tent was being lowered to the ground, and most of the other shelters had already gone. Lisbeth was coordinating as the last of the covered animal cages were being loaded onto a truck.
Her eyeliner had run in long streaks down her face, then been swept aside along with much of her greasepaint by the back of her hand. The effect wasn’t the least comic. It spoke of pain and tragedy. Sarah noticed her knuckles were bruised. She saw Sarah and smiled sadly, reaching out for her hand. Sarah did not take it.
“Ursula, we’re headed for Libreville. There’s nothing to be done in Free French territory now, unless we all want to be interned. We’ll just have to sit and wait in Vichy-controlled Gabon for the disease to get that far.”
“You torched the village,” Sarah said coldly.
“My father ordered it.” She shrugged. The act was supposed to signify disinterest, but it lacked conviction. “I wouldn’t have done.”
“And you still think your father couldn’t be infecting people on purpose?”
She closed her eyes and winced, touching her necklace. Then she was back, certain of herself.
“He couldn’t leave that place to be found by a bunch of people who had no idea what they were dealing with, to get infected and take it back to the nearest town. If this got to Bangui or Brazzaville, can you imagine? Tens of thousands of people.”
“But all the Bateke . . .”
“The living dead, Ursula. I told you, he makes the hard decisions, while I get to be upset.”
“You’re upset because you know it was wrong,” Sarah cried.
“It wasn’t wrong. We got everything out that we needed first. It’s for the greater good.”
“The man in quarantine, he wasn’t sick,” Sarah hissed. “He was murdered.”
“He . . . he’d had multiple tests using the same needles as the sick, he wouldn’t have lived, any more than the sick would have.”
“So, what, this is triage? On a village-wide scale . . . on a country-wide scale?”
“If the Free French weren’t prowling the countryside, we wouldn’t have to leave . . . Look, I don’t like this either, Ursula, I am not having a nice time.”
Lisbeth’s voice broke, and another tear ran down her face.
Sarah found the tear a solvent to her anger, much like her mother’s anguish and lamentation. Overcome with the need to do something, Sarah took two steps forward and wrapped her arms around Lisbeth’s waist.
Sarah felt larger arms wrap about her and squeeze.
“Oh, I’m sorry, you shouldn’t have to look after me,” Lisbeth whispered. “It should be the other way around.”
Yes. Yes it should. It hadn’t been for as long as Sarah could remember, but it definitely should.
Dearest Mouse,
Does anyone look after you? Your parents, do they care?
I didn’t look after you.
Because my job was so gottverdammt important.
I saved dead babies and flattened cities, but I bought them with you.
I wanted my mother to care, really actually care, to make me the most important thing in the world, instead of just saying it.
Because that’s how it’s supposed to be, isn’t it? That’s the story we’re told.
But in the end I let you down, for the job, for the show, for what I needed to get done.
Just like my mother.
I am trying to do better. I am trying to look after my friends. For you.
Alles Liebe,
Ursula
TWENTY-SIX
October 17–22, 1940
THEY ARRANGED TO meet in Libreville a week later. Lisbeth did not want to go home, but she accepted that the Captain might be able to help them when they got to Gabon’s capital. Sarah just hoped they would show up. She trusted the doctor, but Bofinger might have other plans. Sarah would have stayed with the mission, but knew she couldn’t leave the Captain in his condition and could not care for him alone. Claude might just dump him somewhere for all she knew.
The Parisian, anxious to put distance between them, drove north, hoping to find a better road into Gabon. The jungle of the Congo Basin sat like an implacable obstruction all around. The movement of the truck over the ruts and holes and mud should have made Sarah motion sick, but now it was as if all of her nausea had been exhausted.
The sky was lightening ahead of them, but Sarah couldn’t help but look back. The flames and glowing ash were now far behind.
“We should have gone with them.” Sarah sighed. “We may not find them again.”
“If they’re not intending to show up in Libreville, then they’re up to something, and maybe we don’t want to be around when that happens. We also don’t want to get interned with them. Your uncle needs medicine. Hospital care. He needs it now. You’re lucky I’m considering going southwest at all.”
