by W. T. Tyler
“So what kind of regime are we talking about?” Lowenthal asked.
“N’Sika’s,” Reddish answered laconically. “‘Moderate and pro-Western in its political orientation.’ Isn’t that what you guys wrote in your cable two days ago?”
“Hindsight is twenty-twenty,” Lowenthal said.
“So it’s all fucked up again,” Selvey put in.
“Pretty much,” Reddish conceded.
“How do you write that State Department-style?” Selvey asked Lowenthal. “What do you tell the White House? ‘Dear Doc Kissinger. If you birds think you got troubles in Vietnam, we just wanted to let you know. It’s worse over here, and these bimbos ain’t just wearing black pajamas. It’s all black.’”
“That raises an interesting point.” Lowenthal remembered. “What about the Soviets?”
“Raises shit,” Selvey snorted. “You birds couldn’t raise a bamboo dildo in a Bangkok nooky house, and that’s the best there is. C’mon Andy. I wanna show you a gadget DIA just farmed out.”
“What about the Sovs?” Lowenthal called out.
“We’ll talk about it,” Reddish said.
Selvey found two cans of beer in the closet refrigerator, popped the lids, and gave one to Reddish. He led him into his office, brought a jar of peanuts from his desk drawer, poured them into a clay pot, and closed the door.
“Maybe I’m not smart in the same way you birds are,” he began, sinking down behind his desk, “but I’m not the redneck or the Tennessee plowboy everyone thinks I am. I don’t talk their talk and they don’t talk mine.” He drank from the can, sighed and sat back again, his feet lifted across the corner of his desk. “But I just don’t understand what the hell’s going on. None of it makes any goddamn sense to me. I had a contact up at G-2, a major we sent to the US last year for training who’s been giving us a little stuff. His name’s Lutete. Maybe Les told you.”
“I heard about it.”
“For the past month, this bird’s been after us to give him everything we could on Sov or Chicom arms shipments and military supplies—to Brazza, Burundi, Tanzania, the liberation groups, you name it. So we went along. The whole fucking time GHQ knew Masakita and his crowd were expecting guns from someone, but the little fucker doesn’t say a word about that.” Selvey sat forward suddenly. “You know who his cousin is?”
“N’Sika’s deputy.”
Selvey was disappointed. “Who told you that? Miles?”
“Bondurant. He said you wanted to open up a channel to him.”
“Channel, shit.” Selvey sank back. “Miles saw him at the airport last night when he came in. They’re shipping him out to the command in Bukavu. Miles couldn’t get squat out of him, just that he was being reassigned. They diddled us, diddled us good.”
Reddish said, “That’s the way it goes.”
Selvey studied him morosely, still angry. “Just the same old shit for you, is that it? All the time this shoot-up was coming, this asshole we trained in the States knew something was up and didn’t say a goddamned word.”
That’s not the way it happened, Reddish was tempted to say. He said nothing.
“So answer me this, doctor,” Selvey grumbled, fixing Reddish in his stubborn gaze as he leaned forward. “How the shit do you birds put up with it year after year?” Reddish smiled, not in amusement but in sorrow. “Africa too. How the hell do you get the handle on it, on baboons like this Lutete?”
“Europe never interested me much.” He stood up. It wasn’t an answer but it was as much as Selvey would understand. What could he tell him? As a younger man, he had found the life more interesting out in the hinterlands where there was still a sense of the frontier, of a border not yet crossed, a future still to be made. That was where he’d always gone. The capitals of Europe had never tempted him. The problems there weren’t the problems of order but of arrangement. Along the frontier and among societies still in transition, the risks were what mattered; nothing was ever certain. The man you talked with one day might be in prison the next, hanged the day after. Men risked everything for the sake of a future not yet defined, and when losses occurred they were absolute.
Yet it was a lonely life, whatever its consolations, and the strong paid the price along with the weak. Arrogant or ambitious men were protected by their self-esteem, their triviality, or their pride, but not the others. Semi-exiles, like Reddish, had nothing to insulate themselves against self-discovery. They had only themselves, their memory: it was essential that you never forget who you are. His wife and daughter had been equipped with much less.
“So don’t tell me,” Selvey said, putting down the beer can. “I wouldn’t understand anyway.”
An hour later Reddish drove to the flat. Masakita had gone. He’d left behind no message, only the houseboy’s borrowed trousers and shirt, neatly folded in the center of the bed. On the kitchen counter was the radio and alongside it a pad with a few scribbled notes, probably written by Masakita as he’d listened to N’Sika’s speech. The scribbling grew more fragmentary down the page and finally trailed off altogether, as if he’d realized that, like most demagogues, N’Sika had reduced his own elusive lien upon the truth to inconsequentiality.
The apartment smelled of stale air, medicine, tobacco, and the dusty vacuity of safe houses everywhere. The futility of his detective work was also there, smelling very much like the rubbish of old scholarship in dusty old libraries, of gray, desiccated men prowling the past, where their minds fed and their bodies lived because more audacious and cunning men had denied them presence among the living.
Reddish wasn’t sorry to see him go. He’d become a burden and a nuisance. He was tired of himself, the embassy, and his solitude. He wanted to buy a woman a drink, listen to her voice, and take her home afterward, to think about other things during these last few weeks left to him.
Chapter Ten
“I’m divorced,” Gabrielle Bonnard said after her second drink. “Madame Houlet is my aunt. Does that surprise you.”
“Which?”
“Either.”
“I’m always surprised,” Reddish said. “I’m a professional at it.”
“I came here for a vacation of sorts. I intended to do some traveling in the interior. We were going to a lodge near Goma, the Houlets and I, but then the fighting broke out.”
“So now Houlet wants to put you on a plane.”
Her fingers were long, the nails unpainted. She wore a sleeveless white dress, sandals, and a small scarf about her neck. For the first time he’d noticed the gray streaks in her hair where it was cut short above her neck.
“He worries a great deal. She has a car, but he won’t let her drive alone.”
“The interior is quiet these days, not like this.”
“No gunfire at night?”
“No. You could probably still take that trip.” Their talk had been random, desultory, an escape from performance. Their initial self-consciousness overcome, they were two strangers in a mirror-less room.
“Do you come here often?” she asked.
“Not too often.”
The bar in the cité where he’d intended to take her was closed.
“Because it’s a European bar?”
“Probably—now that you mention it.”
It was still early evening. A fat Portuguese money changer in a shiny silk suit sat hunched at his usual table near the door, a Robusta coffee and brandy glass on the table in front of him. A tall Senegalese sat with a West African in a tailored suit too warm for the season. He was sweating and mopping his face as he argued with a dark-skinned Greek. At the bar, two Belgian planters in khaki shirts sat on stools staring at their faces in the tinted glass behind the bar as they talked in moody exchanges punctuated by silences as deep as the snows of the Ardennes. In the nearby dining room, a Congolese marimba band was playing “Lady of Spain” to a dozen empty tables.
“Armand is often at the Houlets’,” Gabrielle said, lighting a cigarette. “It’s impossible to avoid him. Do you kno
w him well?” She held the cigarette inexpertly, like the minister’s wife at the local bridge club.
“Not too well. Just professionally.”
“I think he’s probably typical of a certain kind of Frenchman who’d been a diplomat too long. I don’t mean to be unkind, but I doubt that the work interests him any longer.”
“He’s worn out, I suppose,” Reddish said. “When did you tell him about being in Malunga?”
“The other night at dinner. They were quite surprised, Armand as well as the others. They’d assumed it was total chaos.”
“It was. How did you happen to be talking about it?”
“I shouldn’t have?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“You’re not angry? I should feel terrible if you were.”
“No, there’s nothing to it.”
“Was it indiscreet?” Her eyebrows lifted.
Reddish smiled, aware of a spontaneity long suppressed. “No, not at all.”
“One never knows with diplomats,” she admitted. “Perhaps it was indiscreet. Houlet was very cross about my being in Malunga, very upset about everything, as if my being there was somehow a reproach to the embassy for not having someone there too. I think diplomats prefer not to have problems—don’t they?—not to be reminded that they may sometimes be remiss or mistaken. Have you found that? You think of diplomats as someone prepared to take risks, but I find that isn’t true at all. They’re as conservative as doctors or lawyers. I’m sure Houlet is counting the days until I return to Paris. My ticket is for next week, but I’ve seen nothing of this country, nothing at all. Armand told me you’ve traveled widely in the interior, more than anyone else.”
“I once did. Not much any more.”
“You’ve tired of it then?”
“I haven’t had the time.” His eyes wandered the room. Cailloux, the middle-aged Belgian hotel manager, sat drinking and smoking at his table near the cash register.
“Are you expecting someone?”
“No.” He turned back to her. “I’m sorry. I was wondering what brought you to Africa. There are better places for vacations.”
“I suppose I’ve been to most of them.”
“Something new this time?”
“Not really. I took a trip last summer to the Greek islands—Paros, Naxos, Santorini. I’ve forgotten some of the names now. I was alone, the first time I’d taken a vacation alone for almost fifteen years. I enjoyed it. I made no bookings beforehand, just discovered the pensions and hotels as I needed them. I could always catch a boat in the morning or evening when I was bored. There was always a boat going someplace and when I was tired of one place, I could always imagine something extraordinary waiting elsewhere. I found sometimes that just getting on a boat was enough. Travel has a momentum of its own, don’t you think?” She looked at him for a response, but he wanted to listen, not talk.
“I think so. I discovered the new excavations on Santorini—the Minoan ruins. I took a few books with me, not many, just a few, books I’d put away years ago and hadn’t looked at since.” Her eyes were turned away. “I reread Stendhal. Do you know Stendhal?”
“I’ve heard of him.”
“I reread a fragment of his autobiography in the Pléiade edition. It was rediscovering Stendhal that started me off. It’s rather odd, the way it happened.” She was looking down at her glass, twisting the stem slowly, her voice fading.
“Odd how?”
“Finding the book. It was just after the divorce and I was sorting books on the shelves, trying to decide which to keep for myself, which Robert might want, which to give away, when I found the Stendhal. I was kneeling on the floor, all dusty, the teakettle was whistling, and the apartment was empty. It was a depressing day, nothing was going right, the packers were coming, and I only wanted it all to be over. Then I found the Stendhal. I couldn’t remember ever looking at it. On the first page I found why he was writing it—not an autobiography but a fragment. It gave me the most curious feeling. One October day in 1832 he found himself standing on the Janiculum Hill in Rome and remembered he’d soon be fifty.” Her dark eyes were still lowered to the glass, still puzzled, her lips touched by the faintest of smiles, as if hardly conscious of Reddish at all.
“So what happened?”
“Nothing, really. Just that. He couldn’t believe the years had gone by so quickly. His best works were behind him, but he decided it was time he got to know himself—just then, at that moment. Then that night, alone in his rooms, he did a very curious thing. He wrote a note to himself in the waistband of his trousers—just to himself, no one else—contracting the words, like a code, so no one else could read them. ‘I’m going to be fifty,’ he wrote, just as simply as that, but I understood. It was exactly what I might have done—what I felt like doing—that moment, all dusty, strangers coming, the teakettle whistling. A month later I went to the Greek islands. Now I’m in Africa. Perhaps it was childish of me. In Henri Brulard, Stendhal tells us he was still a child during most of his life.”
“Most of us are, but you’re not going to be fifty.”
“At the time, I felt like it. Fifty, sixty, it doesn’t matter. I’m sure most women feel that way after a divorce. Women much more than men. Suddenly discovering how quickly time has passed is a very personal thing. Was it too impulsive?”
“I don’t know about the Greek islands. Africa isn’t the same. There’s no boat every night. No, I understand what you felt.”
“But I didn’t come simply as a tourist. Last winter I attended the lectures at the Sorbonne’s African studies center. I didn’t expect the Greek islands again.”
“But so far you’re disappointed?”
“Yes,” she said slowly, “yes, but only because what’s happened here this past week has shut me away from things I’d like to discover for myself. I went to Chad first with a group of friends. Then to Uganda. It was impossible there. My English is very poor. My friends went on to Nairobi and Capetown. That didn’t interest me so I came here to see the Houlets and to travel in the interior. A mistake, you see.”
“Not a mistake, just poor timing.”
They finished their drinks. The Portuguese money changer had gone. The Congolese band was playing “Ticket to Ride.” As they crossed toward the door, Cailloux lifted his sleepy eyes from the Belgian newspaper and asked Reddish if he’d heard the N’Sika speech in Martyr’s Square.
“I heard it.”
“Another thief,” Cailloux muttered disagreeably, looking briefly at Gabrielle and then back at Reddish. “A big-time thief, like Leopold. Now it’s the copper mines.”
They went out through the great Moorish lobby to the street, where a warm rain-laden wind blew from the west. The streets were quiet. Two African prostitutes in mini-skirts and white doeskin boots leaned against a nearby car watching them sullenly.
“How did you happen to go to Chad?” Reddish asked as he drove away. “There’s a civil war in Chad. It doesn’t make the headlines, but it’s still there.” She was leaning forward, looking up through the windshield at the few stars that showed just beyond the scalloped edge of a thunderhead moving in from the sea.
“I wanted to see the Tibesti Mountains.” She sank back against the seat, already a voyager, no longer earthbound, her face bathed in the amber glow of the dashboard, a traveler again, high above the equatorial forests and the canyons of cloud, far above the wrinkled waters of Lake Chad, and the stony wind-swept silence of the Tibesti. How many times had Reddish made that same flight?
“They were always something I wanted to see,” he recalled.
She sat alongside him, head back against the cushion, looking out the windshield. “If I’ve told you something about myself, it’s by way of apology,” she said after a minute. “I had no right to violate your privacy in that way. Your being in Malunga that night to help your friend was entirely your own affair.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“But it’s still a terrible thing—to take away some
one’s privacy, to have your private life violated by others, by those who care nothing.” She sat up. “That night at dinner, I was suddenly very tired of everything that was being said. They talked as if no one knew what had happened in Malunga except themselves. For someone to have been shopping, a tourist too, and to have gotten where she didn’t belong was a scandal, especially since she was probably hysterical at the time.”
Reddish laughed.
“But I am very angry about that,” she continued. “Very angry. Must one be a diplomat to understand what has happened? I told them the three men I saw had been shot down in cold blood, unable to use the heavy guns they carried. They said I was imagining it, that if a woman sees someone being shot, which she has no right to see, she will naturally sympathize with the victim. How can they be so narrow-minded? It seemed to me that their premises are quite false. If they are so wrong about what happened that night in Malunga, then they are wrong about other things too. But it was cowardly of me to speak out like that—very foolish, very selfish.”
They had dinner at a hilltop restaurant overlooking the city, sitting outside on the deserted terrace, watching the rain clouds move in. She told him about the lectures she’d attended the previous winter in Paris. He described a few of the more remote regions of the interior that interested her. As they left the restaurant, the rain began to fall, huge sporadic drops at first, but then in sheets as they reached the old Belgian residential section, flooding the tarmac and flailing green leaves and purple blossoms from the trees. The Houlets hadn’t returned.
“Please, come have a brandy,” she suggested. “It’s raining so terribly.”
He had no interest in seeing the Houlets. “It will pass in a minute. Thanks for the evening. I enjoyed it.”
“But I must ask you something. Please. It’s quite important.”
He let her out at the front door, drove forward to park his car at the edge of the drive, and ran back through the rain to join her in the hall. She led him to the front salon. The green marble fireplace held a small grate piled with kindling and ceremonial logs. A felt-covered card table had been readied nearby, decks of cards, coasters, and ashtrays in place. An Empire sofa faced the fireplace across a small Chinese carpet.
