by W. T. Tyler
But his fatigue was real; so was the lantern. The helper was waiting when he reached the truck. “Start the engine up and let’s have some warm water,” de Vaux told him. “What’s the long face for, lad? Didn’t sleep well or didn’t expect to see me? Should have stayed put, like me. Slept like a stone, I did.”
The lantern was still cold to the touch; he put it on the engine hood before he set to work. He took the spare axle from the work chest, pulled the wheel and wheel bearing, and replaced the broken axle. Afterward, he ate some cold biscuit as he shaved, and finally retrieved the lantern from the hood. It was now neutral to the touch, but on the warm engine cowling was a pool of milky water, larger than any condensation which might have been explained by the damp African night and too curious in color to be the result of any leakage from the lantern well.
“Manioc dust,” de Vaux explained to the curious driver. “Must have been a manioc mill in the next hut, eh? Buggers thought we were going to steal their manioc sacks.”
But when the truck reached Bunia that night, the milky track was still there, although the fluid had evaporated, leaving a foul corrosive scar down the blue cowling.
So de Vaux—mechanic, planter, and petty empiricist—had concluded that something had been with him in the hut that night: a dead man’s spirit, his memory, or some grisly avatar set loose by those tied sticks the village fetisheer had hung from the roof pole. He didn’t know what it was, but it was his business, not to be shared with anyone else. Whenever he passed those bush savages on the track with their grotesquely tied sticks or primitive talismans carried to escape the destinies that stalked them through the thick green African twilight, he was reminded of the lantern.
He thought about it also as he grew to despise those others, the Europeans, for their contempt for what these black men knew, just as he despised them for the superiority of their belief that reality was identical with their own European understanding.
They called it belief. He called it madness, as mad as the fevers of avarice, dogma, art, and redemption that they called civilization.
The Revolutionary Military Council’s security committee met daily at seven o’clock in the evening. The working hours of the first days of the crisis had now become routine. N’Sika worked through the night, slept from noon until five, and returned to work. The other members of the council had adjusted their hours to his.
At six that afternoon, de Vaux left his jeep in the gravel drive in front of N’Sika’s headquarters, climbed the steps past the armed guards, and went down the tiled corridor to his small office directly across the hall from N’Sika’s suite. Inside, he telephoned for the afternoon intelligence summaries and the daily reports from military and police units in the interior. De Vaux prepared from them the daily intelligence brief which would be presented to the seven o’clock meeting of the security committee. N’Sika chaired the committee; de Vaux was the rapporteur.
Dusk was falling outside as he crossed the hall to the committee room adjacent to N’Sika’s office, carrying a map board. In the garden outside, council members were already gathering on the chairs and divans of the small terrace that had become N’Sika’s waiting room. Many sat there through the night waiting for an audience. N’Sika rarely appeared on the terrace, but his presence was there nonetheless, as it was everywhere else in the capital, even as his person had become more elusive than ever.
De Vaux knew N’Sika had always had the ambition for power, but he hadn’t realized until after the coup how completely he commanded its instincts. He’d always kept himself remote from others, not only because of the stammer which had been such a humiliation in his younger days, but because of those warnings of ambition which come to many unique men who believe far more in their own destiny than they’ll ever be able to admit to others, suffering that burden in solitude, as N’Sika once suffered his stammer. Solitude had made him stronger than the other members of the council, who were only now discovering how totally he was their master.
It was N’Sika who’d decided to nationalize the economy, N’Sika who’d ordered the recent executions, N’Sika who’d led them forward by making it impossible to retreat, and N’Sika who now had made them all his hostages. In his own strength, intolerance for their weakness would grow. The old President, hysterical in his last days and final hours, had been the first to feel N’Sika’s malice. N’Sika despised him not only because of his weakness and corruption but because for years his ambition had made him the accomplice of the President’s venality and paranoia. As N’Sika’s strength gave way to grandeur, his colleagues on the council would feel that malice too. In not recognizing N’Sika’s own genius during those long years of suffering and obscurity, they too, like the old President, would be judged guilty by N’Sika, accomplices in his own degradation.
De Vaux wondered who would be next. In the dimming light of the garden, he watched Majors Fumbe and Kimbu, N’Sika’s closest confederates, talking quietly with the three Belgians sent from Brussels to open compensation negotiations resulting from the nationalization of the copper mines. Both were still useful to N’Sika—Kimbu for his brutality, Fumbe for his blind obedience.
Major Lutete sat near the arbor smoking as he edited a news release. Lutete was a question mark, like Dr. Bizenga, who waited in the shadows far to the rear, listening to a tall Senegalese in a white boubou—probably the envoy sent secretly from the Organization of African Unity in Addis Ababa to pledge support but to insist that the executions cease. Dr. Bizenga wasn’t a member of the council but an economic adviser and gadfly. His bony repellent face, steel-rimmed spectacles, and obsequious manners set him apart from the soldiers. He might be useful in the copper negotiations. Already he’d suggested through Lutete that N’Sika give him a diplomatic post abroad, either at the UN in New York or in Paris.
At the front of the garden two council members were talking heatedly to N’Sika’s personal secretary. Both were members of the security committee, both clumsy and thick-witted, their only advantage to N’Sika the troops they commanded. But N’Sika’s popularity in the army made them less important now. As de Vaux watched, they turned, walked to their separate jeeps, and were driven away.
Did that mean N’Sika had canceled the seven o’clock security meeting?
He went back to his office, where his aide was waiting with the folder containing the reports from the interior.
“Anything more from Funzi?” de Vaux asked. Funzi was on the fringes of the old rebel areas; a police post at Funzi had been raided for weapons the night before. Near Funzi were the forests where Pierre Masakita’s rebels had launched the old rebellions.
But the aide said nothing, looking at de Vaux in confusion.
“What is it? More attacks near Funzi?”
He shook his head and gave de Vaux the folder. It was empty. On the outside cover leaf where the names of the security committee members were listed, de Vaux’s name had been struck off by a single stroke of N’Sika’s felt-tipped pen.
Chapter Twelve
“I don’t wonder they’re behind barbed wire,” Bondurant declared nervously as they drove through the steel gates of the para compound. He’d been summoned by N’Sika following Washington’s request that he urge the council to cease the executions. Three days had passed before N’Sika had answered the ambassador’s request for a meeting. It was almost midnight. Soldiers with automatic weapons were strung out along the road under the palm trees. Muzzles were three times lowered against the hood at internal checkpoints. Despite the calm in the city, the para hilltop resembled a night bivouac for an army doing battle somewhere out in the darkness.
“You’d think they would have sent someone to meet us,” Lowenthal complained.
“It’s over there,” Reddish told the uneasy Congolese driver, pointing off through the trees, “where the floodlights are.”
Paramilitary troops cordoned the side terrace to which the major who’d met the car led them. A row of old armchairs was lined up on a strip of red carpeting u
nder the trees, feebly lit by double strands of electric lights strung from the trees and a few iron poles.
They waited in the armchairs while the major went back through the arbor and disappeared up the steps to N’Sika’s office. Guns surrounded them in the shadows. Soldiers patrolled the villa perimeter; others stood just beyond the wash of electric light, silently facing the terrace. Overhead the dry palm trees rattled in the throat of the night wind.
Bondurant sat back woodenly, hands folded. Lowenthal’s head was set, chin propped against his closed fists, staring at the red carpet. Reddish looked up through the palm trees, searching for stars.
“A little like Baghdad after the revolution,” he recalled.
Someone coughed in the darkness behind him and he turned. Beyond a small wall screened with potted plants was a second terrace where members of the new government were waiting to be received.
“Like a dentist’s waiting room,” Reddish suggested, sitting forward and searching for a cigarette. “I hope to hell this is the head of the queue.”
“A little macabre, isn’t it?” Bondurant asked in distaste.
“Think about Kissinger,” Reddish proposed.
Bondurant was intrigued. “In what sense?”
“The statesman as hero,” Reddish said.
Bondurant laughed. Lowenthal smiled.
“He gets a good press, doesn’t he?” Bondurant mused. “Much better than the Secretary.”
“Why not? His answers are better-educated than the reporters’ questions,” Reddish said. “He’s trickier with words.”
The major reappeared. They followed him back through the arbor and up the steps between two red-bereted bodyguards with M-16 rifles. The high-ceilinged room they entered was empty except for a small group of plush armchairs surrounding a low coffee table in the far corner. The room was lit by fluorescent tubes along the wall and ceiling. An old carpet with its nap worn to fiber led to the group of chairs. At the head of the low table was a larger red plush chair with a yellowing antimacassar over its back.
Colonel N’Sika took the chair after he entered a moment later, motioning to them to sit down. Bondurant sat to N’Sika’s right, Lowenthal and Reddish next to him. N’Sika was accompanied by Major Fumbe and Major Lutete. He wore a Colt .38 in an open holster on his right hip and was dressed in wrinkled khakis, dark with sweat at his neck and under his arms. The two majors also wore side arms. The three men looked tired and smelled of their fatigue, of sweat, gunpowder, lack of sleep, and missed meals. N’Sika and Fumbe both carried portable radio receivers opened to a security channel. Both put them at their feet as they sat down.
N’Sika sat for a few minutes without speaking at all, head thrust forward, reading without enthusiasm a few handwritten notes prepared for him. He was in his late thirties, his skin jet black and unmarked, heavy in the jowls and neck. His face was wooden. No animation showed in the thickly lidded eyes, only a weariness that bordered on sullenness, but he dominated the room. His two majors were smaller, their eyes livelier, but it was fear that moved their muscles, and it was N’Sika they feared. He rarely looked at them; their eyes seldom left his face.
The palm trees outside clattered in the wind as they waited. The static from the radio stirred from beneath the table. Finally he folded the notes away in his shirt pocket, took out a crushed package of cigarettes, and put them on the table.
Then he began to speak, slowly and laboriously, telling Bondurant why he’d decided to abolish the old regime and nationalize the economy. He spoke French, not Lingala, and he spoke it clumsily, his monologue broken only by an occasional pause for a forgotten word, which Major Fumbe supplied in a whispered voice. As he spoke, he didn’t once look at Bondurant, Lowenthal, or Reddish. His eyes brooded instead across the table in front of him, traveling across the watermarks, the peeling varnish, and the cigarette burns, which he occasionally covered with his long fingers, the nails as strong and smooth as soapstones. He smoked continually.
He might have been talking to himself. Nothing in his voice or face conceded any recognition to his three visitors. The battered old table was more real to him, its scars familiar, its history known. It was as if he’d decided that these three white men could never understand what he had done or experienced, his world as closed to them as theirs to him. To Reddish, it was obvious that this long, tiresome monologue he was dutifully performing as chief of state was as dead to him as the three men to his right were dead to him.
A bodyguard brought Coca-Cola and Fanta, the bottles uniced, like the glasses. A second bodyguard fetched N’Sika a fresh package of cigarettes and emptied his ashtray.
He waited until the two men left the room before he resumed. He didn’t like the Belgians, he began again, but the interruption had broken his train of thought. “The dwarf of Europe,” he summarized. “A white pygmy in our forests. They are nothing—ticks on an elephant. Leeches. Like that. Rien plus.”
He asked for continued American support; he expected more from the Americans than the others. The United States had never been a colonizer. Its hands weren’t stained by the blood of the past. He hoped the United States wouldn’t join with the Belgians in forcing harsh terms as compensation for the nationalizations. The Belgians weren’t to be trusted. Belgian guns had been identified among those seized in Malunga. Now the Belgian Embassy was spreading lies about that too, saying that only Soviet guns had been found. The dossier was there, with Major Lutete, who would discuss it with them. The fact was that the provocateurs in the workers party had been in touch with many imperialist agents, not only African—like the Angolan turncoat in the MPLA—but European as well.
It was then that N’Sika’s disability betrayed itself. He’d been talking for forty minutes without interruption, and he faltered over a word—a momentary block that crippled his palate and jaw for an instant before it released them. He had a stutter.
“The dossier is there,” he concluded finally, waving toward Lutete and sitting back in his chair, as if the subject didn’t interest him.
Major Lutete sat forward, lifting a thick dossier to the coffee table, his hot eyes on Bondurant. “It is all here, Mr. Ambassador, as the President says. The complete file, which will be turned over to the Revolutionary Court. It includes the serial numbers of the guns, a letter from the Angolan turncoat the chairman mentioned, dos Santos, to Masakita, promising to supply the party with weapons, as well as the import licenses from the European firm, Societé Générale d’Afrique—”
“I’m sure it’s complete,” Bondurant interrupted, “and I appreciate your willingness to discuss it, but it’s a matter for your courts, not for me.”
Reddish had stirred forward at the mention of dos Santos, only to sit back in disappointment.
Major Lutete was confused: “Excuse me?”
“This is an internal matter. It’s not one that concerns my government.”
No one spoke. Bondurant waited patiently, turned again toward N’Sika, who muttered something in Lingala to Lutete. The major sat back in relief, returning the dossier to his briefcase. N’Sika sat in silence, head forward, studying the table. Finally he lifted his eyes, examining Lowenthal and Reddish.
“Why did you bring these two men?” he asked Bondurant.
“They’re my counselors,” Bondurant replied, surprised.
“Which one is Reddish?”
“There, at the end.”
N’Sika looked closely at Lowenthal: “Olobaka monoko nini ndako na yo?”
Lowenthal flushed. “Sorry—”
“I regret he doesn’t speak Lingala,” Bondurant explained.
N’Sika studied Reddish coldly. Abruptly he launched into a long tirade in Lingala, his anger sometimes carrying him to the edge of his chair and back again as he complained bitterly of the crime and corruption of the old regime, crimes which the Americans had allowed to go unnoticed, unpunished. He sometimes jabbed his finger in Reddish’s direction, as if he held Reddish personally responsible. He held one hand out, f
ingers apart, and with the other counted off the names of those who’d cheated, embezzled, and thieved from their ministries. Was the embassy blind? Was Washington blind? How could it be blind? Its agents were everywhere. Of course it knew what was going on, just as Reddish had known that Sunday morning when he’d come to talk to de Vaux about the workers party guns. Yet all Reddish was protecting was his own people, his embassy, his ambassador. Didn’t the embassy or Washington care about the people who were suffering? All the people, everywhere! In his village in the north, all one saw was sickness, hunger, death! Why? Was the United States a pygmy, like the Belgians? Why hadn’t the Americans done something?…
N’Sika’s two majors sat sweating in terror. Bondurant, watching N’Sika’s angry face, was frightened himself.
At last N’Sika sat back. Bondurant asked Reddish to give him the gist of N’Sika’s words, but N’Sika interrupted him. He could talk to Reddish later. Weary of the meeting, he asked Bondurant if he had anything to say. Bondurant raised the points supplied by his instructions as N’Sika listened sullenly, without comment. Only when Bondurant asked that the executions cease did N’Sika’s face come alive again. He hunched forward eagerly, interrupting Bondurant.
Did the ambassador want to talk about the executions? Very well, he would talk about that. He waved to Major Lutete and told him to translate from Lingala into French. He was tired of French. For three minutes he harangued Bondurant in Lingala and then sat back.
Major Lutete took a deep breath and moved forward in his chair. “Monsieur l’Ambassadeur,” he began in a faint, dry voice, “notre président a dit que … il a dit que nous, nous—we understand, yes. It is logical and natural, Mr. Ambassador, that you should be concerned about these men—these thieves, rapists, killers, and so on who were sentenced by the Revolutionary Court. Certainly, Mr. Ambassador, we well understand, since this is your responsibility, to preserve order and to improve understanding among nations. That is a diplomat’s responsibility. But here on this hilltop, Mr. Ambassador, the President has his own responsibilities, but there is a great difference—”
