by W. T. Tyler
“I’m not looking for revenge, so get that out of your head. I’ve been screwed before, by people a lot quicker than the fuck-ups that pulled this job off, so there’s nothing personal in all this. If someone had told me Sunday before I drove into Malunga that I’d be bringing you out, I’d have told him he was crazy. Nyembo must have thought so too, because he took off like a jackrabbit in the other direction, and now no one can find him. O.K. I’m stuck with that.”
“So now it’s your problem to solve, eh, your problem to liquidate—”
“Just shut up for a minute and listen!” he said. “You’re right about one thing. I’m nobody’s Good Samaritan, not Nyembo’s, not yours, not anyone’s. You’re a private pain in the ass as far as I’m concerned. I’ve got enough headaches just sticking to what I know. What I know is that I went into Malunga, saw some people get shot down because they had guns they didn’t know how to use. And now you’re here, everyone else is either dead or gone to ground, and the ones still on their feet are lying about what happened in the streets two days ago. So my ass is half in, half out. If I quit now, maybe next time it might be the embassy holding a smoking gun it didn’t use.”
“So you’re talking about injustice.”
“Let’s just keep it simple and say I want to keep it honest, like Nyembo did when he called me.”
“What is it you want to know?”
“Where the guns came from,” Reddish mumbled, pulling his glasses on to sit in the armchair across the room, idly turning the pages of his small notebook. The glasses were repaired with adhesive tape at the bridge.
Masakita waited, weary of questions he’d already answered that would lead them nowhere.
“How do your radical friends in exile see you these days,” he began quietly, “still the leader of the cause?”
Puzzled, Masakita didn’t reply.
“You keep in touch with them, don’t you?” The gaze lifted calmly. “You had a few letters with you the other day. One from this MPLA officer dos Santos, another from someone in Paris ready to lead an army into the Kivu. What is it they’re asking—help, support, tactical advice, a few dollars?”
“They ask for advice, sometimes money. Some ask about local conditions, whether they should return or not.”
“No grudges?” Reddish waited. “You left a few of your exile friends high and dry when you came back here from Cairo.”
“Grudges? No. A few misunderstandings, that’s all. That’s what some of the letters are about.”
“But some still see you as the hero of the rebellions, the leader of the opposition.”
“If they do, they don’t understand my position.”
“Sure,” Reddish offered dryly. “You set them straight on that, do you?” He got up restlessly to wander the room, jacket left behind. “Like this fellow who wrote you from Paris, ready to begin a new peasants’ war in the north. Let’s say he tells you he’s got a warehouse of guns in Bujumbura and a thousand guerrillas back in the bush behind Goma, ready to go, what advice are you going to give him? To give up the guns and throw in with national reconciliation?”
“Under certain circumstances.”
“And if he doesn’t, what do you do then—tell the internal security directorate or the army that there’s some lunatic with a warehouse of rifles in Bujumbura ready to shoot his way to the capital?” Reddish turned, waiting.
“Certainly not.”
“So you haven’t come that far yet, have you?”
“I don’t stir up needless suspicions, no.”
“So you’re a vice minister but not a loyalist, a sympathizer but not a fanatic, a radical but not a radical. What the hell are you?” He moved away to the glass door overlooking the balcony, where the haze of fading sunlight fell like smoke, obscuring the streets below.
“I don’t understand these questions.”
“Just shut up for a minute. Neither do I.” He stood at the glass door silently studying the river. “A few weeks ago I was over at Kindu,” he began again, “looking at a cache of guns uncovered on a trader’s truck south of Uvira. Chinese guns, the army command over there said. Just a clutter of old mercenary hardware, half gone to rust, most of it. But let’s say they found new guns someplace close by—the same idiot officers—still in oil, still in crates, intercepted maybe on the river north of here, on their way to Angola, where most of the clandestine trails lead. But this time they don’t tell the President at the morning cabinet meeting, they don’t raise the hue and cry, not a freaking word. The army just keeps it to itself, hides the guns away for a few weeks, bides its time, waits for its opportunities.”
He turned back to the chair, threw his coat on the floor, and leafed idly through his notebook, puzzling over the page he finally found.
“Someone called me on Saturday night, someone from customs. He said the army had guns and was going to overthrow the President. He said two trucks had gone out, two more to be sent on Sunday. I didn’t know what he was talking about. He didn’t either. What he was talking about were the trucks you thought came from customs. They were army trucks. Somehow he’d found out what was in the crates they were carrying, knew they were para trucks, and thought they were on their way to the para camp. But he had it backwards. The trucks were headed for your compound in Malunga, with the crates to be left there until the paras moved against your compound on Sunday afternoon. Why two more trucks on Sunday, I don’t know, but it’s academic. Everything had been worked out, the powder primed.”
He raised his head from the notebook. “I think the guns in the compound were hijacked guns, guns the paras or the army found someplace else, sat on, and then delivered in place of those East German agricultural implements. They probably weren’t meant to be used, not all of them anyway, just found there. That would have been enough. At the same time the paras were shooting up your compound they were sneaking in the back door at the presidential compound. That’s what they were really after. You and your party were just the excuse, the casus belli, as the experts say—that’s Latin for small beer.”
Reddish put the notebook away indifferently, looking at his watch.
“How do you know this?”
“How the hell do you think I know it?” he said. “I just know it. You don’t have to find the body to know it smells. This one smells all over town. It’s the only way it makes sense.” His voice faded away and he got to his feet again, relentlessly prowling the room, glancing occasionally at his watch.
“Where did they find the guns?” Masakita asked.
“I don’t know.”
“From outside the country?”
“Probably. What about this rebel leader, the old guy that wrote you from Paris. Did he say anything about guns?”
“No.”
“Dos Santos, this MPLA officer?”
“No.”
“So you know as much as I do.”
“Then you have no proof, no evidence,” Masakita concluded, disappointed.
“I don’t have a leg to stand on—nothing.” He stood at the window again, hands thrust in his hip pockets, gazing at the sheen of river. “But we’re dealing with a state of mind here, like that old mercenary iron at Kindu, like you, the rebellions, and everything else. When you understand that, everything falls into place.” He might have been talking to himself. He glanced at his watch again and grunted. “It’s six o’clock, time for a drink.”
Masakita watched him turn back across the room and disappear through the door toward the kitchen, like a businessman meeting a long-awaited mistress on a late-arriving train. He understood his restlessness. Wearily, his shoulder stiff, he rose and followed him, wiser now, his suspicions gone.
Darkness had fallen beyond the windows. Reddish had gone out and brought back a roast chicken and rice from a Belgian restaurant. As Masakita finished the chicken, Reddish’s questions had taken a different turn. Masakita thought the questions irrelevant; Reddish, that he was being evasive.
“You were brought up a Catholic. Do
you still go to church?” Reddish asked randomly. Masakita said he didn’t. “A Catholic who doesn’t go to church, a revolutionary who no longer believes in revolution. Are you still a Marxist?”
“I’ve been asked that question so many times I don’t know how to answer. Each time, I find myself answering in a totally different way, which means that for me it’s no longer a meaningful question.”
“So it’s not important to you now.” A hint of cynicism lingered.
“If it weren’t, why would you be asking?”
“Call it habit,” Reddish said nonchalantly, emptying the plates.
They returned to the small living room, where Reddish took up his place in the cloth-covered American armchair opposite the couch, notebook on his knee, as detached as a credit clerk filling out a questionnaire. Most of his questions had been provoked by the Agency’s Secret personality profile on Masakita which he’d looked at in his office.
“Others still think of you as a Marxist,” he resumed deceptively, as if it were someone else’s question, scanning myopically a scrawled page.
Masakita sat uncomfortably on the couch. “In public, you accept the fact that you’ll be misunderstood. You accept that, but it’s not important. The work is.”
Well rehearsed, Reddish thought idly, crossing out a line. “Quite a few European journalists still look you up. What kind of questions do they ask?”
“Always the same: Why did I return? What are my political beliefs? Why do I cooperate with a regime which continues its corruption—”
“Continued,” Reddish corrected, head down, drawing loops in the margin. “Past tense.” He didn’t look up.
“—under another name. Do I consider myself a socialist, a Marxist, correspond still with Fanon, write essays, believe in violence? Always the same.”
“What do you tell them?”
“What I’ve told you—that I can’t declare myself on these questions, that a man who can’t declare himself shouldn’t be in politics, but that this isn’t important. Others can do these things.”
“You said that before. So they misquote you, do they?”
“Accuracy can be trivial. No, they don’t misquote me.”
“But they get under your skin. Why do you agree to the interviews?”
Sometimes he didn’t, refusing to talk with journalists, rejecting dialogue completely, as he always did when words had grown stale—refusing to attend meetings, draft speeches or party position papers, going for days clothed in silence, rejecting himself like a Trappist, until something would unexpectedly arouse him—a word from his wife, a smile from an old woman in the marché, a witless remark by the President at a cabinet meeting, or even the sight of Dr. Bizenga, the party ideologue, standing ridiculously in the sunlit yard of the compound, chamois in hand, wiping away the fingerprints from the polished chrome door handle of his Mercedes. “Sometimes it’s simply enough to have eyes,” he concluded.
“What about your old Marxist friends?” Reddish asked. “How do you manage their questions?”
“I listen, as always.”
“What do they say?”
“What they always say,” Masakita said without enthusiasm, as if he’d repeated it many times. “They talk of state ownership of land on a continent where communal land has been traditional for centuries, of nationalizing industry where none exists, of trade union movements that mean nothing to rural peasants. They talk as they’ve always talked, of a world that doesn’t exist.”
“Here maybe,” Reddish agreed, “but not Russia or China. They talked of those things too. Now they exist.”
“The party exists.”
“And what the party has done.”
“They’re the same,” Masakita corrected. “The party is whatever it says it is.” He recognized Reddish’s puzzlement. “If you were blind and I weren’t, I could describe this room to you in any way I liked and you would accept it. That’s what happens in China or the Soviet Union when the party tells the masses that it has achieved this or that. The same thing happens in Africa when the party ideologues tell the party faithful that conditions now exist for the revolution.”
“And you don’t believe they do.”
“Not yet.”
“No faith in the ideology?” Reddish asked, smiling.
“Possibly not.”
“In what then?”
“Hope I don’t understand the pathological element,” he answered.
“What the shit’s that mean?”
“The two of us sitting here the way we are, talking about who or what I am, questions which are totally without significance.”
“Fancy words,” Reddish muttered absent-mindedly, as if they were of no importance. His eyes returned to the pages of the notebook. “When you were in exile in France, you were close to the Algerians. You worked for the Exterieur Division of the Algerian Liberation Front, a courier apparently.” He lifted his gaze. “Are they the ones who gave you your start, taught you your bag of tricks?”
“In what way?”
“Insurgency, terrorism, how to plant plastique, how to run a clandestine network.”
“I learned a few things, yes.”
“You knew Ben Bella in Paris?”
“Slightly. He had a flat in Rue Cadet and so did I. At the time I didn’t know who he was.”
“Did the Algerians recruit you in Brussels and bring you to France?”
“No.”
“But you worked for them in Paris?” He watched Masakita nod. “Doing what besides dropping a few satchels of explosives around Paris—in parked cars, Métro entrances, civil servants’ flats?”
“I was a courier for the most part, smuggling currency up from Marseilles or from Geneva.”
“Just currency?”
“I didn’t always know what I was carrying, what the satchels contained,” said Masakita uncomfortably.
“And you didn’t look either, did you—like those crates in your compound? You are a bloody intellectual, aren’t you? Dry hands, dry socks, just delivering a little mail-order homicide around town on your way to the Sorbonne or the Louvre. How long did you work for them?”
“A year.”
“Another myth,” Reddish said cynically, drawing a heavy line through a scrawled sentence in the notebook. “What about your French wife. Wasn’t she a member of the French communist party?”
“I lived with a Frenchwoman who was a communist, yes, but we weren’t married.”
“Did she push you politically?”
“She was an influence, the way most women are. I’m not sure about her ideas.”
“You still keep in touch with her?”
“She writes, yes.”
“Still active in the party?”
“She was never very active in the party. Her father left her a little money—he manufactured plumbing appliances—and she lives as she pleases, generous with both her life and her money.”
“What’s she doing now?”
“I’m not sure. The last time I heard from her she was living with a blind man she met on a train.”
Reddish looked up, annoyed.
“These are trivial questions,” Masakita said. “Why do they matter?”
“They matter. Don’t think they don’t. I want to tell my people something about you. The only thing they’ve got is secondhand.”
“Biographies are always false, always fictitious. Why create another?”
“For Christ’s sake,” Reddish muttered in dismay, closing the notebook. “Go ahead, tell it your own way.”
There was little to tell.
He hadn’t been brought to France by the FLN but had gone there on his own, to Paris, to finish his education and find work in heavy industry. Later he’d met a few Algerians at a small cafe off Rue Cadet, where he’d taken rooms, just as he’d met a few communists at the evening study groups held periodically at a small socialist reading room nearby, including the woman he later lived with for a few months. But all these were temporary arrangeme
nts. He’d helped the FLN because he sympathized with their goals and they trusted him; but more importantly because he was free to move about, as they weren’t. The associations he’d formed with the Algerian Exterieur Division of the FLN would be useful for the decolonization of his own country and all of sub-Saharan Africa. He thought the Algerians he’d met were committed to far more than their own national struggle.
He’d associated with communists and socialists, true, in the small study groups and elsewhere; but his studies in Paris went far beyond the study of Marxist texts.
One night that first winter he was sitting at the front table of the socialist reading room—where he went to escape the cold, his isolation, and the poverty which allowed him few newspapers and fewer books—when a little Frenchman paused near his chair, pulling on his beret and scarf and looking scathingly at the books and newspapers on the table—Kautsky, Lenin, Rosenberg’s History of Bolshevism, Souvarine’s Stalin, among others. The old man was as small as a dwarf, his fingers stained with nicotine. “There is much more to our bookshelves than what you have on your table,” he’d told Masakita censoriously, and with that pulled a small book from his pocket, very dog-eared, the spine torn, the title unreadable. Masakita thought he meant merely to show him the book, but he gave it to him. It was a copy of Pascal’s Pensées. He never saw the man again, but he kept the book and read from it too, just as he read from the old editions of Montaigne and Saint-Simon he’d brought with him from Brussels.
“Why’d you leave Belgium in the first place?” Reddish interrupted.
“I was expelled from the university.”
He had been sent to Belgium to study engineering, but had changed to the economics faculty the third year. The summer before he was to receive his degree, he’d joined in a student demonstration in Brussels, was arrested and released to the university officials, who ordered his expulsion. His passport was withdrawn and he was put on a ship to be returned to the Congo. He jumped ship at Dakar and two months later reached Spain, smuggled in with a group of Senegalese workers bound for France. They were led over the Pyrenees in early autumn by their Corsican passeur when the first snows were on the peaks but not yet in the passes. In Paris he shared a room in a bidonville with a fellow Congolese, sleeping in shifts on a single cot. He found work in a slaughterhouse, hauling away the bloody skins from the butchering rooms, while he continued to search for work in heavy industry. With a little money saved, he found a room in Rue Cadet. A few weeks later he left the slaughterhouse and took a job as a sweeper and laborer in a foundry that cast linings for industrial furnaces.
