by W. T. Tyler
“Son adjoint,” de Vaux said, moving his gaze from the scissors to the terrified President. “He’d like to talk to you, but in a few minutes—”
Entering the anteroom from the terrace were two paras from the presidential gate guard, prodding along a frightened technician and announcer from the national radio, carrying their portable gear for the President’s appeal to the nation.
Chapter Eight
“Oh, quite. A damned nuisance! Yes, still corked in! Bit of bad luck. Chucked out? His own car! You don’t say?” Cecil, the British Ambassador, stood talking on the phone to his deputy, still wearing his sailing togs from the river as he held the drape aside to look out beyond his front garden toward the road, where a barricade of army trucks, lights on, was interdicting traffic. “No, I’ll be quite safe here, I assure you. It’ll all blow over in a few hours. Not our worry, old boy. Let the Americans bother it, eh. Yes, stay in touch. Tell Gresham I shall need my car tomorrow, eleven sharp. Vin d’honneur, yes. Cheerio.”
A young American secretary, hair limp from the river, in shorts and a halter, but her bare shoulders now decently covered by Mrs. Cecil’s gardening cardigan, watched Cecil tremulously, lip quivering. “What am I going to do?” she asked, close to tears.
“I haven’t the foggiest,” Cecil answered brightly, trying to put the best face on it, “but I’m sure we’ll manage something. The first thing you should do is to ring up your embassy and tell them you’re safe.”
“But I’d be so embarrassed.” She seemed to have an exalted notion of diplomatic rank and privilege, as if she had no right being there. Even after she’d driven her moped over to Cecil’s residence that morning, invited by Cecil’s secretary to accompany a small group out on the river aboard Cecil’s boat, she’d left her vehicle outside the gate, waiting for them in the drive.
“Don’t be silly. Of course you can.”
He called the number himself but the line was busy.
“No answer?” She seemed relieved. Cecil found her little girl’s sense of propriety touching.
“Busy. We’ll call back later.”
“I really feel so terrible, such a terrible nuisance.” She seemed on the verge of tears again. Cecil had only that day met her. She was a secretary in the American Embassy economic section, substituting for Bondurant’s own secretary who’d left a week earlier for home leave in advance of Bondurant’s own. The invitation that day had been tendered by Cecil’s secretary as a kind of introduction to the senior members of the diplomatic corps who sometimes congregated aboard each other’s boats on Sundays for picnics on the islands. She’d called the ambassadors she’d met there “sir” or “your excellency” in the case of the Swede. The Spanish Ambassador had suggested she water ski from his craft, but Cecil’s secretary, a watchful matron, had waved him off. She was in her late twenties with a pretty face, full cheeks, and dark liquid eyes—rather like a lost rabbit, Cecil thought; a bit buxom too, he’d discovered, heavy in the hips as well; but his attention was avuncular, nothing more.
Cecil was in his late forties. He was tall and boyish-looking, his youthfulness in part the reflection of the age of his ambassadorial peers, most of whom were much older, in part his refusal to take his responsibilities too seriously. He often felt younger for both, still a spry young Oxford undergraduate, moving among creaking dons. His wife, now visiting the children in England, had no such advantage. She looked her age. Without her methodical gray-haired presence stalking the house, the servants, and the garden, Cecil felt even younger.
“I think I shall have a word with those chaps out there in the road,” he now told Miss Browning. “Sometimes, you can solve these little misunderstandings with a bit of firmness. They’re out of place, no question about that. Belong down at the boulevard, I dare say.”
He crossed the dark lawn to the gate while Miss Browning watched from the window. “Look here, Lieutenant, Captain, you have my gate blocked off. Can’t get in or out. That’s not what you wanted, was it? Move, yes. There’s a good fellow. Yes. Move. You speak French, don’t you? Motocar te! Te! Vous comprenez! Ayebez?”
The soldiers sitting in the jeep looked at him blankly. Beyond the jeep an army truck was pulled across the road with a second backing it up. A pair of flares burned brightly in the turf of a bank across the road where a few soldiers sat. They watched him silently and finally a lieutenant crossed the road, stuck his automatic rifle through the palings and pointed back toward the residence.
“Only one officer,” Cecil explained in the front salon, looking out the window again. “I suppose that’s the problem. Out of place and they won’t admit it. When their officers come, they’ll get a boot in the backside and get sent off again, I’d say. Terribly mixed up place, isn’t it? I don’t suppose you speak Lingala, do you?”
He heard a low moan from his side and turned. “But what’s this? No crying now.”
“It’s awful.”
“We mustn’t have that, no, no. Chin up now. It’s going to be all right. Certainly. We’ll call your embassy, tell them you’re here, and before you know it they’ll have sent a car.”
“But they won’t understand.”
“Won’t understand? Won’t understand what? Of course they’ll understand. Who won’t understand?”
“The girls in the embassy.”
“No crying now. It’s quite all right. Nothing is going to happen now. In a few hours, you won’t even remember it. Oh look here now, you mustn’t cry. We must do something to cheer you up. We’ll have a drink first of all, how’s that? We’ll have a drink while we’re waiting for the car and in a few minutes you’ll have forgotten all about it. The trick is to put your mind on something else.”
He led her down the dark hall to the huge kitchen, conscious of her suntan lotion, no longer aware of his own discomfort, of the wet bathing trunks under his shorts, the grit in his sandals, the river sand in his hair.
“We’ll imagine it’s not our worry for the time being. How about that, eh? Just the usual Sunday tedium outside. Sunday evenings tend to be dreadful here, don’t you think? I mean you’ve had your Sunday on the river and quite suddenly it’s all over, isn’t it? Another Monday gathering itself out there in the darkness. What would you fancy? Gin, whiskey, a spot of vermouth? White wine? Gin then. Tonic? A slice of lemon?”
“I usually go to the USIS movies on Sunday night,” Miss Browning said, drying her face.
“Do you? Takes your mind away, does it? I don’t go much myself. Terrible films, really—I mean the British Council, not your own. Then the Baptists come too and you can’t laugh at all. No, I prefer my Sunday evenings here, on the back terrace. Quite peaceful, actually. Then there’s a Sunday evening program from Johannesburg, dance music by request. Curious names, though. After a time, you get to know them. It’s quite pleasant. Soothing, I should say. Brings back younger days. Would you like to see the terrace?”
He turned on the outside terrace lights and led her out into the warm, fragrant African evening.
“It’s lovely.”
“’Tis, isn’t it?” Cecil was pleased. Her composure seemed to have returned.
“You even have a pool.”
“Yes, didn’t I mention that?” The swimming pool lay at the foot of the terrace steps, dark and cold in the shadows. A few erratic gunshots rattled in the distance, and Cecil lifted his voice to smother them: “Yes, I swim quite often. Keep fit that way. My wife enjoys it too. She’s quite a gardener too, you know.”
“It’s awfully dark in the back.”
“Yes, I suppose it is. Needn’t be. We’ll fix that.” He came back to the terrace, opened the switch box, and turned on the pool lights. The pool and garden beyond softly came alive, shadows melted along the rear wall. The bright aquamarine swimming pool had the transparency of glass.
“If I had a pool like this, I’d never go anyplace else,” Miss Browning murmured. “Never.” Putting down her drink, she boldly shed his wife’s cardigan and her sandals, stepped out of h
er shorts, and slipped down the steps to stand at the edge of the brightly lit pool, again clad, as she had been on the river, only in her bikini. “A pool like this really gives me courage. It really does.”
“Does it?” Cecil murmured in turn, stirred by Miss Browning’s transformation. He’d been glad to see the cardigan go, a sacklike garment in which his wife puttered around the side garden, pockets stuffed with crumbs for the finches, peanuts for the gray parrots, and a plastic-enclosed thermometer with which she took the daily temperature of her compost bed, a smelly treaclelike mound that lay behind the trellis near the back wall.
“You’re not leaving me?” Miss Browning called in alarm as Cecil turned back to the house.
“No, no. I’d better fetch the radio.” He brought the shortwave radio from the kitchen and put it on the table at the top of the terrace steps, next to the outside telephone. The national radio was broadcasting an old march tune. “A nuisance,” Cecil said, “but there may be a communiqué.” He called his office but the line was busy. He couldn’t reach the American Embassy either. “Oh well, no use bothering about that, is there? Glass empty? What about another drink?”
“If you don’t mind.”
“I’ll just be a minute. No cause for alarm now.”
Like most women with a strong libido, Miss Browning had a clear eye for masculine guile but was perfectly innocent of her own. Ambassadors, especially English ones, were new game for her. Now she watched helplessly as Cecil returned to the pantry for more gin.
Chapter Nine
“It’s a fucking coup,” said the Marine corporal, “that’s what it is.” He stood with Corporal Martinez atop the embassy roof, both wearing flak jackets and helmets, their figures clearly outlined in the light of the tropical moon that lit the sheltering trees and the wide pool of river. The warm African night smelled of decaying blossoms mixed with the mold of dead and decaying leaves. The dark streets below were silent except for the occasional rattle of army trucks filled with khaki-clad soldiers and a few jeeps carrying red-bereted paras in battle dress. From the distance came the intermittent crump of mortars and the crack of small-arms fire.
“Some bad shit out there,” said Martinez. “Who’s watching the back wall?”
“Tucker’s doing it. Hey, Tucker, baby? What you see back there?”
A third Marine crouched behind the rear coping holding a tear gas gun. “Ain’t shit back here. Ain’t no mother fuckers trying to climb no wall neither. What’s Gunny wanna go and send us up here for?”
“Cause that dude told him to.”
“What dude, Shaky?”
“Squirrel Balls.”
The side streets were empty, the street vendors gone, vanished with the mini-skirted prostitutes who habitually skulked under the trees along the avenue and the blond-faced colons who gathered at the nearby sidewalk café on muggy African nights. In front of iron-shuttered shops and garages, only the night sentinels remained, dark bags of bones crouching as silent as corpses on their pasteboard or raffia mats in front of guttering wood fires, clutching primitive spears or machetes.
In this neighborhood near the port, only the embassy was ablaze with light, the windows lit to the top floor. On the roof, the dark masts of antennas, the microwave dish, and the transmission towers were visible against the stars and the frail glow of Magellanic cloud to the south. A red eye atop the tallest tower opened and shut. Security lamps flooded the inner embassy wall from the border of flower beds; in the front the iron gate was shut and shackled closed. A block to the north, a flood of dark river moved from the jungles and savannahs toward the rapids, by day an ocean of swift brown water laden with rafts of water hyacinth, by night a cold dark channel where no lights were. A Panhard armored car interdicted access to the quay, the customs houses, and the creaking ferries that stirred with the current against their hawsers.
“Hey, baby? Habla español? See any Cubans yet?” Martinez called to Tucker.
“Screw you.” Tucker had wanted to bring a carbine aloft, but the Marine Gunny had given him a tear gas gun instead. “I got sum-pin that’ll wipe you out, baby.”
“What’s that?”
“What’ll take care of all you wetback greasers—a shit-seeking asshole reamer that don’t leave nothing but piss socks and pucker strings.”
Martinez laughed. “This is the place for it, sucker. Din’t they tell you that in Nam? The big A, the big asshole. It’s all shit, ain’t none of your jungle bunny cunt sacks told you that?”
“They ain’t like your women. They don’t wanna talk to my dick, baby. They just wanna listen to the music.”
An embassy sedan spun into the drive and stopped at the gate; a dark face lifted into the headlights from the shadows of the bougainvillea inside. “Fungola!” the driver called. “Fungola!” The gateman dragged away the chain as the two Marines watched, and the sedan idled into the courtyard. The sedan belonged to Lowenthal, the political counselor, returning from the French Embassy a few blocks away.
“Who is it?” Tucker called from the rear coping. “Captain Cheese?”
“Shut up, God damn it. He’ll hear. It’s Squirrel Balls.”
Lowenthal looked up toward the whispered voices as the two Marines stumbled backwards into the shadows. Martinez dropped his tear gas gun as he fell over an antenna guy wire and it clattered across the roof.
“What is it up there,” Lowenthal called.
“God damn it, that mother was pointed at me!” Tucker whispered angrily, rising from the coping. “You coulda blowed my fucking head off, you goddamn Cuban—”
“Shhh.” The two corporals crouched in the shadows out of Lowenthal’s line of sight, laughing.
Lowenthal continued to look skyward, puzzled, but saw nothing. He was short and small-boned, wearing a dark turtleneck sweater under a bush jacket. A scalp disorder had compelled him to have his head shaved shortly after his arrival, and his hair had returned very slowly. “Just like his balls, I’ll bet,” the Marine Gunny had said morosely to himself one day as the small, fuzzy partially bald head disappeared down the corridor after the Marine sergeant had received one of Lowenthal’s fatuous peremptory orders. Lowenthal’s nickname was announced over a game of hearts at the Marine house bar the same night.
A siren wailed in the distance and Lowenthal turned away from the roof toward the street. The siren moved away from the embassy, but the headlights of a car came closer and turned into the gate. The sedan belonged to Colonel Selvey, the defense attaché, who parked behind Lowenthal’s vehicle. As the engine died away, a voice from the car radio drifted into the courtyard: “Citoyens! Citoyens! Déposez vos armes! Déposez vos armes!”
It was the voice of the old President, urging the rebels to put down their guns. A volley of rifle fire echoed through the streets from the direction of the port; as the reverberations died away, a Panhard armored car lumbered slowly around the corner in low gear. A dozen soldiers trotted alongside.
“Je répéte! Déposez vos armes! C’est votre président qui parle!”
Colonel Selvey reached through the window and turned off the radio. The rear window had been smashed.
“What happened?” Lowenthal asked.
“Someone clobbered it when I came through a roadblock.” He was Lowenthal’s size but trimmer. His square saturnine face under his military brush cut was the color of old saddle leather. He wore a white tennis shirt, red plaid golfing trousers, and white loafers with tassels.
“How are the paras doing in Malunga? Are they holding?”
“How the shit do I know,” Selvey drawled. He wasn’t unfriendly, just a Tennessee country boy with a soldier’s disdain for nervous State Department diplomatists who wanted to fire off a cable to Washington every time a rifle shot rattled a window. He didn’t know what was happening and he didn’t think anyone else did either.
“You didn’t get anything?”
“I couldn’t get near GHQ. They got it bunged up tighter than an old maid’s asshole—roadblocks all over t
he place. One thing I do know is an awful lot of folks out there are toting guns. Malunga looks like the worst. You can see the fires burning from the boulevard. I heard the President’s gonna parlez-vous over the radio at nine, a special announcement. Maybe he’s gonna tell us.”
A crippled wind moved from the river, stirring through the trellised roses of the compound wall, dimming the distant sounds of gunfire and the baffled crump-crump of mortars from the besieged police camp at Bakole.
In the embassy reception hall, a dozen staff members were milling about in confusion. The Marine receptionist told Lowenthal the duty officer had been looking for him.
“Tell him I’ll be upstairs. Any word from the ambassador?”
“Negative, sir. We sent the car back, like you asked, but the driver got turned back again.”
“What about the DCM, Mr. Becker?”
“He’s with the ambassador. He got stopped too, but he turned back and hot-footed it over to the ambassador’s. That’s where he is now. The duty officer says they got three roadblocks between here and the parliament building, closing off the downtown, real pissers too, with BAR’s, shooting people.”
“Any word from the foreign ministry?”
“Negative, but a whole bunch of people have been calling in about the evacuation. The phones have been tied up—”
“No one’s said anything about an evacuation.”
“Yes, sir, but everyone’s been asking. We got almost a hunnert people back in the dispensary and motor pool, scared to go home.”
“No decision’s been made,” Lowenthal said, “but tell them to stay calm. We’ll keep them informed.”
“Yes, sir, that’s what I’ve been telling them. The Gunny wants to know can he take his guys off the roof?”
“What the hell are they doing on the roof?” Colonel Selvey broke in.
“I told them that’s where they should be,” Lowenthal said briskly, “commanding the optimum field of fire.” In the absence of the ambassador and Becker, Lowenthal was in charge.
