by W. T. Tyler
His caller was the Belgian Ambassador, who told him that fighting had broken out in the native commune of Malunga, where the socialist workers party was believed to be in armed revolt. Fighting had also erupted at the sprawling Bakole police camp on the outskirts. Two Belgian police advisers had been seized as hostages; a third had escaped and was in critical condition at the Swedish hospital. The Belgian military attache believed Cuban infiltrators had come from Brazzaville during the night and had joined the socialists, reinforced that afternoon by a ragtag group of political exiles hidden among the crowds who’d come over on the ferry to see the soccer match at the stadium.
“I’ve asked to see the President,” the Belgian shouted above the turmoil in his own suite. “I’ve just spoken to Bintu, the chef du cabinet. We’ve scheduled a meeting for six o’clock. Could you join us?”
“Yes, certainly,” Bondurant agreed, perplexed. “How did the fighting start?”
“No one is sure, but it seems to be spreading. Can you hear me?”
“Yes, I hear you.”
“The paras are trying to close off Malunga, but some of the insurgents have fled to other communes. Hello! Have you heard anything?”
“No, nothing at all. At six, you say? Yes, I’ll join you at six. I’ll call my people in the meantime. Yes, at six.”
He put the phone down uneasily and turned back up the flagstone walk toward the house. In the center of the drive he paused, head lifted, listening; but he heard only the sound of the breeze from the river rustling high in the trees. The iron gates were pulled closed, and the African watchman sat dozing in his wicker chair, his transistor radio on his lap. He listened for another minute and continued on into the house, entering through the reception hall and following the black and white marble floor along the corridor to his right to his study, a deep high-ceilinged room with white woodwork and white bookshelves cluttered with the memorabilia of thirty years of diplomatic service. On the walls were prints from Berlin and Vienna, consular exequaturs from his early posts, and ambassadorial commissions from his recent ones. Two colorful modern abstractions on loan from a New York gallery hung behind the long couch. Behind the desk was a fragment from a Roman mosaic, retrieved from the southern coast of Turkey by his children during a holiday after the war.
The study that afternoon might have been in Newport or Palm Beach on a gentle summer day, with the blue sea bickering on the ceiling and the tanned guests changing upstairs, up from the tennis courts or the bay after an afternoon of sailing. On the malachite table next to the couch stood a silver-framed folio of color photographs taken in the White House Rose Garden, the ambassador and his wife smiling luminously, standing next to a now dead President.
The ambassador was a large man, well over six feet tall, his face broad, the jowls and lower lip drooping, pregnant with disapproval. He was sixty but looked younger, his gray hair as thick as it had been at thirty. Reserved, distant, and autocratic, he was as remote from most of the diplomatic staff as his study was from Africa. On Sundays he dismissed the servants, even the cook, making the most of his holiday privacy. But this Sunday his wife wasn’t there, returned home a week earlier to prepare their house on Library Place in Princeton for their coming home leave; and the emptiness of the residence had driven him into the garden that afternoon with her pruning shears.
At his desk he telephoned the embassy, but the line was busy. He got no answer when he rang Becker, the deputy chief of mission, at his hillside house above the city. He was looking up the number of Haversham, the station chief, when he remembered that he was in Nairobi attending a CIA African Division conference.
Before he could find Andy Reddish’s number, the phone rang and Lowenthal, the political counselor, was on the line. “I’m afraid I’ve got some dismal news,” he began. “We’ve been trying to reach you—”
“I’ve just tried to call the embassy. I understand fighting has broken out in Malunga.”
“I’m afraid so. Malunga’s in open revolt, they say, and it appears to be spreading. I tried to send your car for you, but it was turned back by an army roadblock near the parliament building—”
“Open revolt? Who’s seen the fighting?”
“No one yet. The paras have closed off Malunga, but you can hear the shooting from the boulevard. The French have had a few eyewitness accounts. So have the Belgians.”
“How much have our people seen?” Bondurant asked. “I want to be sure we know what we’re talking about.” For Bondurant, Lowenthal was cleverer with words than with facts. Born in Germany, educated in France, and imprisoned with his parents in fascist Spain, he was a linguistic chameleon. Verbal agility had been his law of survival—German, French, and Spanish, all with equal fluency—but he’d paid a price, taught that all ambiguities could be resolved with a quick, facile tongue. After the President had thrown one of his political opponents in prison on a trumped-up charge, Lowenthal had reported to Washington that he had “temporarily quarantined political dissent among local elites in the service of national consensus and/or nation-building.” Bondurant thought him an obscurantist, his quickness verbal, not conceptual, spawned in the stagnant ponds of the bureaucracy that overflowed every day in cables, instructions, and staff studies from the Potomac, polluting every well.
“I’d be skeptical of what the French told me. The Belgians too. What about Colonel Selvey and Reddish? Are they on the streets?”
“They’re out now.”
“Good. Are our people safe?”
“Yes, sir. So far as we know.”
“All right. Send my car back. I’ll call the President myself.”
He was unable to reach the President. Standing at the front window, he waited for his car, searching the skies above the front gate for signs of smoke. Only a few clouds moved there. The sunlight was fading, the house silent, and he felt his isolation like a kind of fear. His wife gone, he had felt it earlier that afternoon as well, but in a different way: his age, his geographical isolation, the career that was now all but over. He’d attended, a month earlier, a NATO session in Brussels, invited out of courtesy by his old friends in the European Bureau to talk about Soviet strategy in Africa. The meeting had gone badly for him. He’d caught cold, the old friends he’d hoped to see were absent or retired, the remarks he’d prepared were no longer fashionable, heard too often in the past to stir younger imaginations now. Political fashions changed as much out of boredom as obsolescence. Kissinger was now in fashion, Kennan wasn’t; but only the historically ignorant could be flattered into believing that the Kissinger NSC was now saying something new. The language was as old as Metternich’s, attempting to impose a static order on a dynamic world, but no one he’d talked to at Brussels had seemed to count it important.
After his return, he’d summarized the NATO conference for a country team meeting, concluding that his remarks were old hat and out of tune, that he’d felt like a solitary flautist in a citadel of brass, listening to his young State Department colleagues talk so hawkishly about Vietnam and Cambodia. In a cable circulated from Washington a week later, State had told the field that an aging European diplomat, a man of Bondurant’s generation, wasn’t “hard-nosed” enough to carry out the Moscow negotiations entrusted to him by his government. Bondurant had underlined the locution, one he despised, and in the margin had commented in his own microscopic handwriting:
In Washington’s parlance these days, I take it “hard-nosed” describes a disposition that will snarl after every bone atop the global table, like a Carolingian mastiff who would devour bone, gristle, and master alike to prove his ferocity. The Celts were ferocious; so were the Visigoths; Roman law is what we remember. Ferocity for its own sake, particularly among liberals, is suspect. It’s also primitive. Washington’s failure to recognize this is a symptom of its present distress, as the Cambodian bombings now make clear.
The marked-up cable had been circulated among the senior officers and returned to him three days later. Rereading it, he saw behind the
words a man deeply wounded, isolated an ocean away from policy councils which had once consulted him. As a younger officer, he had been contemptuous of that weakness in ambassadors he saw dawdling into old age with nothing left but their pedantic self-conceit. Finding it in himself, he was ashamed.
The phone rang. It was the Belgian Ambassador, reporting that his appointment with the President had been abruptly canceled by an aide at the President’s office. The Belgian military attaché had tried to reach the minister of defense, but had been turned back by roadblocks. “We’ve just learned that he was shot down near the presidential compound, Walter. It’s serious, very serious.”
A coup, Bondurant thought for the first time. A coup d’etat. “It certainly sounds that way,” he muttered in confusion.
“Has your own staff learned anything?”
“Very little, I’m afraid.” Had it come to that—the Belgians keeping the American Embassy informed?
“You’ll get back to me if you have any news?”
“Indeed I will, yes. Certainly.”
He hung up and immediately dialed the embassy again. Where was his car? Where were Becker, Selvey, Lowenthal? He got a busy signal, hung up angrily, and climbed the stairs to his bedroom to fetch the emergency radio from the bedside table.
He supposed he should have been more aggressive in using his Agency resources, he thought, descending the stairs. Haversham, the station chief, briefed him weekly on internal stability and had offered to give him more on Soviet and Eastern European activities, but he’d declined. He had little interest in the peccadilloes of the Russians and East Germans. Although the CIA station had once played a certain reckless role in internal politics and with the President, its operations were now confined solely to Soviet bloc activities. Les Haversham understood that, but he had his doubts about Reddish, his deputy, a holdover from the old days.
Turning on the radio at the desk in the study, he could hear Lowenthal’s voice over the emergency communications net. He opened his microphone, but he had forgotten the call signals. He was searching the instruction card on the rear panel when the phone rang again.
“Oh Walter, John here,” the British Ambassador drawled from his residence down the road. “Bit of a mess, isn’t it? That’s what my chaps tell me. Malunga has guns—you heard, I suppose. Ugly business. The army is having a go at them, I’m told. I suppose we’re in for rather a bloody bash, don’t you think? Are you buttoned up? How’s the staff faring—any casualties?”
“I don’t think so. I’m trying to get more information.”
“Aren’t we all, yes. Look here, are they outside your gates too? I’m corked in—jeep in my drive. Can’t get in or out. Don’t know why. Can’t imagine, as a matter of fact. Not personal, is it? Any suggestions?”
“I’m trying to get my car from the embassy, but it was turned back by a roadblock. Possibly the roadblock in front of your place.”
“Could be, yes. They’re turning back vehicles. Camped out all over the road, as a matter of fact, like a gypsy caravan. A little embarrassing too, I must say—”
“Sorry, John, but I’ve got a call on the emergency net. I’ll call you back.”
Lowenthal was at the microphone. He couldn’t locate Becker or Reddish, but everyone else seemed to be accounted for. The embassy families living in apartments inside the military checkpoints had taken refuge in the embassy compound. Those in the suburbs had been told to stay in their residences and await word from their evacuation wardens over the commo net.
“What about Malunga?” Bondurant asked.
“It looks very bad. Some of the rebels have broken out through the paras’ cordon and seem to be infiltrating guns into other communes. The French say a clandestine radio is operating from inside Malunga, proclaiming a peoples republic and appealing for foreign support. They think the radio is located in the workers party compound. Agence France Presse in Brazza picked up the report and put it on the wires. So did Reuters.”
Bondurant was upset. “What about my car?”
“We tried again, but no luck. The soldiers wouldn’t let your chauffeur through.”
“All right, but try again. I’ll speak to the President. Keep me informed. I’ll leave my radio on.”
Dusk was falling. He turned on the lamps in the study and carried the radio out into the drive, listening for gunfire. The evening wind from the river stirred high in the trees. Far in the distance he could hear for the first time the muffled detonations. On any other evening he would have identified them as thunder from an evening storm high on the savannahs. Troubled, he moved out to the gate, where the guard was standing uneasily, listening. The road beyond was empty.
He returned to the residence and unlocked the combination safe hidden away behind the card tables and folding chairs in the study closet. His confidential notebook and the embassy evacuation plan were inside. The notebook contained the President’s confidential phone number at the private suite at the President’s villa but Bondurant had never used it—a point of honor. The Agency had installed the line and had used it to deal with the President during times of crisis in the old days. He had never dealt with the President in that way—speaking to him over the phone while his sycophants, courtesans, and bodyguards listened from nearby.
Now he called the number, but it was busy and he waited, receiver in hand, phone button depressed, watching the sweep of the second hand across the face of the brass-mounted ship’s chronometer on the desk. The clock had been a gift from a New York yacht club, aboard the winning vessel in the Newport to Bermuda race the year his son had died at the Inchon reservoir in Korea as a Marine second lieutenant. His son had once sailed under the same colors, aboard the same yacht. From beyond the window the reverberations came again, but he was still watching the clock, past and present mixed now—thunder, gunfire, dirty skies, high seas, and the cold, cruel heave of the Atlantic that last season they had sailed together in Maine. Nothing had ever made up for that loss. In his time, he’d seen Munich, the Anschluss, Yalta, the Truman Doctrine, and the creation of the Common Market. As a young vice consul, he’d learned Russian at Riga, and toured Manchuria before it fell to the Japanese. His wife thought he should have retired after Stockholm, others that he should have never accepted a non-European post, that his conceptual vision had died with the Treaty of Rome and lay buried at Bandung. They meant by that that the Third World meant little to him, that it lay outside his own historical memory.
They were wrong. After so many years of effort, he’d achieved a certain view of history, of events and men whatever their nationality. It had enabled him to value the past and understand the present, as he also hoped that it would give courage to the reflections of his final years. Implicit in that view was a certain order, certain values, and a certain tradition, all sustained by a certain continuity of change. Without such an order, neither the heroism of action nor of intellect was possible. He knew how delicate was the civilizing balance. Aberrations would occur, but fifty years later they would only appear as oddities of style, and the tradition would endure. He had never feared the future. Death didn’t frighten him. What he feared most was that which had the awful power to wipe out that tradition and let him live on buried in the tomb his civilization had become. He didn’t know Africa well enough to fear it, as some of his colleagues did, but he had seen enough to make him uneasy. He knew Africa had that awful power—its senseless suffering, its crushing poverty, the mortal helplessness of its people, and the awakening passion for retribution—cruelty groping toward consciousness—quick to be blown to flame by anarchy as mindless as this.
He waited, the receiver still lifted, still listening to the distant gunfire. Again he dialed the President’s number. He didn’t recognize the voice that answered. It was cool, distant, unhurried, its French not that of an African, but a native speaker’s, a man in full control of himself, calmly mixing diplomatic proprieties with local colloquialisms in the nasal accent of the Antwerp slums.
“May I ask w
hom I’m speaking to?” Bondurant asked, troubled and uneasy.
The phone was still sticky with blood. The body of Bintu, the chef du cabinet, lay twisted in the white chair, his feet caught in the desk well, his black skull crushed, nose and mouth leaking blood to the carpet beneath.
The room was gray with cordite, as rank as ammonia. The President shrank against a damask sofa opposite, naked beneath his claret-colored dressing gown, spitting and gagging into the bloody towel the black para corporal had thrown to him. His lip was bleeding, his forehead gashed, and he was spitting out piece by piece the fragments of a shattered tooth crown.
A dead woman lay sprawled across the carpet, face down, her nakedness half covered by a satin sheet Major Fumbe had brought from the bedroom. The pair of gilt scissors with which she’d tried to protect her lover lay on the carpet just beyond her outstretched hand.
The man at the phone stood looking down at the scissors—gilt-handled, encrusted with stones, like her dark fingers. They stirred in his memory for a moment: a pair of cheap scissors lying on a wicker table in an alcove, a sewing basket and a few cards of cheap wool and thread nearby, the winter darkness of the Antwerp streets just beyond, through the small window.
“You said the President was with you,” Bondurant’s voice came again. “I’d like to speak with him. May I ask who this is?”
