by W. T. Tyler
“I’ll look at it,” he said finally, folding the slip away. “But don’t tell me what the commo people told you—me or anyone else.”
Sarah hadn’t arrived in the second-floor suite. The offices were empty, the coffee maker cold. He took a coffee mug from the table and went down the corridor to the defense attaché’s suite. Colonel Selvey’s office was deserted; so were the cubicles where the army and air attachés sat. A solitary Air Force corporal sat at a lighted desk in the outer office as he typed a cable, a dictionary open on the desk in front of him.
“How are you making it, Mr. Reddish?”
“All right, I guess.” He crossed to the coffee table, dropped a dime in the saucer, and drew coffee from the urn.
The corporal bent forward at the keyboard, fingers lifted, hesitated, and then brought his fingers down, his head ducking forward immediately to look at the typed word. “God damn it. I knew I shoulda looked that little mother up. How do you spell guerrillas, Mr. Reddish? Not the ape kind, either.”
“Two r’s and two l’s.”
“I shoulda known. The colonel can’t spell for shit.” He pulled an eraser pencil from the drawer and scrubbed at the cable. Reddish sipped the hot coffee, studying the wall map with the plastic overlay. Marked with a grease pencil were the locations and command structures of the army units in the interior. He searched for the units that hadn’t answered the National Revolutionary Council’s request for support two days earlier, wondering if the release of the names of the council members meant that they’d fallen in line.
“Is this map up to date?”
“Pretty much. Major Miles keeps it up pretty good.”
“Where is Major Miles? I haven’t seen him.” He put down the cup and brought from his pocket the forgotten routing slip he and Sarah had puzzled over.
“He’s in Jo-burg. Went down on a MAC flight last week and now he’s busting his ass to get back. Wants us to hold up the goddamned coup for him.”
“Do you type Major Miles’s reports?”
“Yeah, most of them. You think DIA reads all that shit?”
Miles was an over-age major a year away from retirement unless he was promoted. Now he was a compulsive report writer and busybody, trying to overhaul his career in a flood of make-work, all of it useless.
“Maybe. See if you can read this for me. It’s a note from Miles to Selvey. Haversham left it, but I can’t read the writing. That’s Miles’s handwriting, isn’t it?”
The corporal took the slip and held it closer. “Yes, sir, that’s his scratching. He’s left-handed.”
“What’s this word here—‘avoiding’?”
“What’s it say? ‘Re Major Lutete: we’ve been [something] this guy for ten months. Can Les help out. We need more stuff.’ No, not ‘avoiding.’ Couldn’t be. ‘Stroking.’ That’s it. ‘We’ve been stroking this guy for ten months. Can Les help out.’ That’s what it says.”
Reddish took back the slip. “Stroking? Stroking Lutete?”
“Yes, sir. That’s one of the major’s buzz words.”
“What the hell’s it mean?”
“Lutete’s a major up on the GHQ G-2 staff, foreign intelligence, I think. Major Miles got him a training tour back in the States last year, Leavenworth, I think it was, and Miles has been in his britches ever since he came back. Only don’t say I said so. Lutete’s responsible for most of the shit Miles grinds out—order of battle, new weapons talks with the Europeans, all of it.”
“So Major Lutete’s on your payroll, a controlled source?”
The corporal glanced uneasily toward the open door, and his voice dropped. “Yes, sir. Only don’t say I said so. Miles has been feeding him stuff too.”
Startled, Reddish said, “What kind of stuff?”
“He’s been bootlegging DIA studies to him. From what I heard, G-2 and the foreign intelligence staff was in piss-poor shape when Lutete got assigned there, so Miles was helping him out. You know, giving him DIA staff studies on the Middle East, the Arabs, the Chicoms, and Soviets. DIA gave him the go-ahead, but it was pretty low-grade shit. Most of it had been cleaned up, sanitized.”
Reddish looked at the slip again. Can Les help out? We need more stuff. “How did it work, did Lutete ask for material or did Miles just bootleg what he thought would be useful?”
“Both ways, I think.”
“Did he ever give him any of our material?”
“You mean Agency stuff? I don’t know.”
“I’ll ask Selvey then.”
“O.K., but don’t forget.”
“Don’t worry. Mum’s the word. Thanks for the coffee.”
Sarah was standing at her desk as he went by angrily, her face fresh, her purse open on the desk in front of her as she rubbed her hands with lotion, her typewriter still covered.
“Open my safe, will you. Bring me those reports we found in Haversham’s safe.”
She lifted her head, following his plodding back. “Do you know how long I waited for you to come back last night?”
“I told you not to wait.” He moved behind his desk.
She stood in the door.
“You most certainly did not.”
“Then I told someone to tell you. It comes to the same thing. Bring me those reports. My box too.”
“What’s so special about these all of a sudden?” she asked as she left the six reports on his blotter. “I thought you’d forgotten about them or that they didn’t matter.”
“They matter. Major Miles passed them to someone up at GHQ, a major at G-2, foreign intelligence staff.”
“Isn’t that usual?”
“Sometimes.” Intelligence liaison with G-2 required Washington’s interagency approval, granted for DIA documents but not for CIA material. He scanned each report in turn, moving them aside. When he’d finished, he read them again, this time arranging them in three separate piles. Only a single report remained on his desk as he returned the others to Sarah. “This one may be it. The others are too old, too vague, or too far away.”
“May be what?”
“Where the guns came from,” Reddish said. “Shut the door.” He picked up the packet of letters he’d found in Masakita’s jacket and sorted through them until he found the pale blue envelope postmarked from Algiers three weeks earlier. Dos Santos had written in French, very good French, but the stubby, fluid script was hard to read. He’d recently finished a training school in Algeria and was bound for São Salvador in Angola. He would be arriving at Pointe-Noire, Congo, and needed help in arranging his return to São Salvador, but the nature of the assistance he was asking wasn’t at all clear. At that point, the narrative thread vanished—the French illegible, the words hasty, the reminiscences too furtive for Reddish to follow.
“Maybe and maybe not,” he puzzled, frowning as Sarah watched, returning again to the CIA report obtained in Algiers a few weeks earlier. The report was attributed to a lower-level Algerian official with good contacts in military and shipping circles whose reporting had been consistently substantiated. It read:
1. THE EAST GERMAN FREIGHTER POTSDAM TO BE OFF-LOADED AT POINTE-NOIRE, CONGO, CARRIED THE FOLLOWING ORDNANCE FOR THE POPULAR MOVEMENT FOR THE LIBERATION OF ANGOLA [MPLA]:
—650 MAKAROV PISTOLS
—500 AK-47 ASSAULT RIFLES
—50 DEGYAREY LIGHT MACHINE GUNS
—20 81-MM MORTARS
—1,500 GRENADES
—UNSPECIFIED QUANTITIES OF AMMUNITION FOR THE ABOVE WEAPONS.
2. THE ABOVE LISTED ORDNANCE WAS SHIPPED IN WOODEN CRATES MARKED “AGRICULTURAL IMPLEMENTS” AND CONSIGNED TO BERNARD DELBEQUES, FRÈRES, POINTE-NOIRE. [HEADQUARTERS NOTE: BERNARD DELBEQUES, FRÈRES, IS A BRAZZAVILLE FREIGHT FORWARDER WHICH HAS COOPERATED IN THE PAST WITH FOREIGN SHIPPERS SENDING MATERIALS TO THE MPLA.]
3. THE MPLA ARMS WERE LOADED ABOARD THE POTSDAM ON SEPTEMBER 15 AT MERS-AL-KABIR, ALGERIA. THE ORDNANCE WAS ACCOMPANIED BY AN UNKNOWN MPLA OFFICER WHO RECENTLY COMPLETED TRAINING AT THE ALGERIAN SKIDA COMMANDO SCHOOL.
> “If you’d explain to me what you’re doing, maybe it would help,” Sarah offered, sinking slowly into the chair at the side of the desk.
“I don’t need help. I need a goddamned Ouija board.”
“You said, ‘where the guns came from.’ What guns? The ones in Malunga?”
“Agricultural implements again,” Reddish mumbled disagreeably. “Coincidences all over the place—too goddamned many. Street brawls don’t happen that way.” He sat hunched over the Agency report, then turned aside to the blue envelope, puzzling over the Algiers postmark dated September 12, the bright green stamp, and the watermarked envelope. Something else caught his eye. A coffee ring stained the right center of the envelope, washing away a few letters from Masakita’s name and title. His own coffee cup was empty; yet he reached for it. How long had Masakita said he’d had it? A week? He put his mug on top of the envelope. The base was too large. Puzzled, he picked up the letter again and reread it slowly. Suddenly he frowned, turned to the back of the first page, looked at the last word, glanced at the top of the second page, and then quickly at the back, sitting up startled. “For Christ’s sake, you stupid pilgrim, don’t you read your own bloody mail! A page is missing!”
Chapter Six
The local office of Bernard Delbeques, Frères, was closed and locked, a heavy chain shackling the iron shutter. The small fenced yard behind the office, opening to the alleyway behind the port, was also closed, the gate padlocked. Two empty lift vans stood on the loading dock, but Reddish saw no trucks. He returned to his car and drove on to the apartment house.
“They were reading your mail,” he told Masakita in the sunny silence of the kitchen, still sweating from his jog up the stairs. He wiped his brow and neck, still standing as Masakita gazed up at him blankly from the kitchen table, where he’d been reading. “It was dos Santos.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The letter from dos Santos, remember? Someone got his hands on it. My guess is that the help dos Santos wanted was getting guns to Angola. The missing page may have told you that, or it may have given you more details than they wanted you to know. How long was the letter on your desk?”
“A week, maybe more. What difference does that make?”
“Who had access to your office?”
“At party headquarters? Everyone. The door was never locked. What difference does it make? Dos Santos didn’t say anything about guns. If he had, I would have remembered. I would have told him it was impossible—”
“Read the goddamned letter!” He pulled the envelope from his pocket and thrust it at Masakita and stood watching as he read it slowly. He read it a second time, even more carefully, puzzling as Reddish had between the first and second pages.
“It doesn’t make sense,” he admitted finally. “Something has been left out.”
“A page is missing.” Reddish lit a cigarette impatiently. “They pulled a page, the one that probably talked about the guns dos Santos wanted help with.”
“But this was the letter in my office—just two pages.”
“Then they intercepted it before you got it. They had you on a watch list at the post office and maybe the ministry too. This thing was probably cooking a long time. These guys may not be bright, but they’re not stupid. They had the dos Santos letter asking for your help with the MPLA guns. They knew about the hand tools you were expecting from the East Germans. Someone had told them that a few jeunesse in the compound had guns of their own and were ready for a fight. You put all that together and you’ve got what they had—a scenario for wiping out this regime.”
He took the letter back, disappointed at Masakita’s reaction.
“So you know about things like this. You said yesterday that was how it was done.”
“I told you—it’s not something you know; it’s something you smell. There were too many coincidences. That’s not the way things work. Someone was pulling the strings.”
“But not just Colonel N’Sika and his council. More men were involved. If my mail was being intercepted, then the internal security directorate was involved. Kadima.”
“Probably,” Reddish conceded. “People from your own party too.”
“How did they get these MPLA guns?”
“I’m not sure. Bought them maybe, stole them. Who the hell knows?” He doused his cigarette under the tap. “You’d better start thinking about what you’re going to do. The radio bulletin this morning announced a mass rally tomorrow. N’Sika’s going to show the nation the traitors and their guns at Martyr’s Square. This crowd is still running scared. Maybe they’ll come running here. They’re looking for you—”
“So now that you know how it was done, you no longer feel cheated, is that it?” As his strength had returned, so had Masakita’s anger; Reddish felt it now.
“I told you. It’s not over yet.”
“But you have the advantage now—you, the Americans. You know how it was done. You could expose these lies for what they are. That gives you the advantage.”
“What advantage?” Reddish said with quiet contempt. “Use your head. This wasn’t a very popular regime this past year or so. Look at the headlines—strikes, student riots, the threat of an army mutiny. It was dead on its feet. So we know how they buried it? Fine, but who gives a shit? Where’s the proof? A screwy letter with a page missing? But even if we had the proof, who cares? A few journalists maybe, not because they liked the old President but because it grabs an editor’s eye back in Paris or Brussels, where they’re trying to sell papers. No one out there in the streets is going to worry about the old regime and how N’Sika put the gun to its head. They’re going to start thinking about whether rice prices or cooking oil prices are coming down.”
“But not injustice,” Masakita asked, “not your government either?”
“For Christ’s sake,” Reddish said, searching for another cigarette. “Do I have to explain your own people to you?”
“Explain to me why your embassy can’t confront N’Sika and his council with what you know.”
“Because that’s not the way the game is played, not yet anyway. It depends upon N’Sika, what kind of man he is. When we know that, maybe we can start thinking about a way out. But right now I wouldn’t bet on it. In the meantime you’d better start thinking about where you want to go and what you want to do.”
“But you know what N’Sika’s going to say,” Masakita said. “Of course you do. Why should that matter? I listened to Nasser in Cairo for years. Strong words every time, and next month even stronger. This nation is weak. The people are poor, every day growing poorer. N’Sika will speak tomorrow, strong words, but in a month nothing will have changed, and so his next speech will be even stronger. Do you think I haven’t made such speeches myself in the interior during the rebellions? So regardless of what kind of man this N’Sika is, every speech will be stronger than the last. N’Sika will understand that too, and at last he’ll realize that there is nothing he can do to change their condition or his, not in their lifetime. So regardless of what he hopes to do, he will change, only he, not the condition of the people; and he’ll end up what Nasser is, a demagogue. There’s no escape from it.”
He looked at Reddish as if he were expecting him to deny it. Reddish said nothing.
“It doesn’t change,” Masakita said hotly.
“I suppose not.” Reddish looked at his watch. “I’ve got to go.”
Masakita followed him. “I remember a time during the rebellions when a delegation of churchmen came to talk to us at the headquarters of the new provisional government in Stanleyville—the rebel government. All faiths were represented—the Catholic fathers, the Baptists, even two sheikhs from the Moslem commercial community. Suddenly they’d felt the change in the air, a new beginning, the old despotism dead, and they’d all become millennialists, all leaving their pulpits to join the masses in the streets, all expecting a new era of social and economic justice.
“They were disappointed. In a week nothing had chan
ged. In two weeks it was worse than before. In three it was intolerable. Why? Because we were weak, their leaders, because the people were still poor, justice still an abstraction, and Caesar still Caesar except more tyrannical than ever, which was why the pulpits were there in the first place. But they were churchmen, churchmen, men of the cloth! What right had they to be there! What could we say to them? Nothing! The expectation never dies, you see, buried even in those who’ve forsworn it, men of the cloth! It doesn’t change. The rebel government lasted two months, you remember? It was over then, all over. And when the government troops took Stanleyville, you remember what happened, don’t you?”
Reddish was at the rear door of the kitchen, the limits of Masakita’s world, anxious to go. “I remember.”
“They hanged the churchmen with the rebels,” Masakita said. “Do you understand? They hanged the churchmen with the rebels, those men who had no right to ask anything of us!”
Chapter Seven
Reddish thought the diplomatic life something of an anachronism, in style, ceremony, and much of its substance. The personification of its archaic order was the ambassador himself, who—in an age that had leveled empires, titles, and the cutaway coat—still survived at the very core of diplomacy’s mystique, pursuing an elaborate code of preening manners and wooden decorum as alien to the workaday world as an aviary of tropical birds. The few aviaries Reddish had seen were in public zoos; the few ambassadors he’d known had been resident in gardens like this one where he sat now examining the bright banks of flower beds as he waited for Bondurant to conclude his conversation with Cecil, the British Ambassador.
It was late afternoon; the day was hot. They sat at poolside where the two Americans had been deep in conversation when Cecil had interrupted them, desperate for information on the new National Revolutionary Council, whose leadership had been revealed that morning. Bondurant was trying to be responsive to Cecil while at the same time attempting to conceal those ugly details he’d just learned from Reddish, who sat to one side saying nothing. Embarrassed by Bondurant’s predicament—his attempting to be forthcoming enough not to be thought totally ignorant of what had happened, as Cecil was, yet circumspect enough not to yield his diplomatic advantage—Reddish had tried to excuse himself for a walk about the garden, but Bondurant had waved him back to his chair.
