Rogue's March

by W. T. Tyler

  “No,” Crispin said.

  “The man who gave me this letter said he was a Protestant.”

  “Where did he give you the letter?”

  “On the lake at Benongo.”

  Kalemba’s wife returned and gave the pastor a few coins, which he silently counted as he pinched them into his leather purse. “God be with you,” he said, nodding to Mrs. Kalemba.

  The letter was from Pierre Masakita:

  Dear Crispin:

  I passed Kimpiobi on the track today, and he told me you were safe under Kalemba’s roof. I have no news of any of the others.

  If you’re able, I would appreciate it if you would begin to make discreet inquiries as to the whereabouts of the old members of the political bureau of the party.

  Decisions need to be made within the next few weeks. All of us must recognize the new reality which faces us and come to terms with it. An accommodation must be made which enables you, and others like you, to take up their work and their lives again.

  I will be in touch with you again.

  Pierre M.

  Thirty minutes later, Crispin was crossing the grand marché on his way to a small bar on the edges of the commercial section, Masakita’s letter in his pocket. The owner of the bar was a cousin of the politburo’s recording secretary. The burden lifted from his shoulders, he strode through the clutter of stalls and babbling old women as he had once marched through the back lanes of Malunga; but at the rear of the market he was brought up short by a small poster tacked to a telephone pole. He identified the face even before he read the name and inscription:

  PIERRE MASAKITA

  1,000,000 Francs

  Ya Matabisi

  Sambu Na Mtu Na

  Pierre Masakita had a price on his head. The poster was new, so new that it still attracted some curiosity, including that of two policemen who stood in the shadows of a nearby stall, unseen to Crispin. A few urchins gathered to look too, standing with Crispin. Perhaps it was their presence which provoked his response. Angrily, he ripped the poster from the post and stuffed it in his pocket.

  The two policemen saw him and immediately blew their whistles. Crispin bolted away into the marché, the urchins after him. Hearing the policemen’s whistles and seeing the fleeing figure, others took up the chase, believing him a thief. A dozen African workers unloading a truck jumped to the ground to block his path. He leaped sideways into a stall, fell over the counter, and sprawled among cassava and beans. Before he could regain his feet, a dozen youths had tackled him while the old woman who owned the stall beat him savagely with her staff.

  He was bleeding, his nose and mouth dripping blood, his shirt torn, as the two policemen and the largest of the pursuing youths led him off to the police station.

  In his pockets they found a nickel-plated Belgian revolver, the poster he’d torn from the post, and a letter. The revolver had been stolen from a Belgian shopowner almost a year earlier; the poster was government property. The letter interested no one until it was discovered by the lieutenant at the central prison.

  Book Three

  Chapter One

  Reddish spent the third night of his trip at a palm oil plantation on the banks of the Kwilu River, hundreds of miles to the east of the capital, the guest of his old friend Faustin Kaponji. He arrived at dusk, driven in the old Landrover Kaponji had sent to Kikwit to fetch him.

  Kaponji was waiting for him on the porch of the guest cottage, eager for news from the capital. He was a Maluba. “A Jew of the Congo,” he’d called himself when they’d first met three years earlier. A small man in his early fifties, with a dark puckish face and a lively imagination, Kaponji was a man of parts. He was a businessman who professed no interest in politics, but he had an insatiable curiosity, as well as a great deal of money. As a youth he’d been a diamond smuggler in his native Kasai and had accumulated enough capital to launch his career as trader, planter, and businessman. He owned the palm oil plantation, which included a half-dozen Belgians on the staff, had a small office in the capital where he traded in German steel, Thai sugar, Japanese appliances, and Czech hand implements, as well as an office in Brussels, where his Belgian wife lived. His Maluba wife lived with their children on a second plantation in the Kasai. His plump métisse concubine kept another home for him in the capital. He was also a Rosicrucian.

  Kaponji had assembled the Belgian and African staff in the plantation recreation center for a small cocktail party. In the muggy African twilight, Reddish shook their hands and answered their questions, Kaponji at his elbow. The Belgians had brought their wives, tired middle-aged women who sat silently to one side, anxious to return to their own cottages, where their dinners were waiting. Their husbands gave to Kaponji the same extravagant servility they’d once given their Belgian overseers.

  As the two men returned to the main house, Kaponji tried to cheer Reddish up, convinced he was depressed by the overthrow of the old President.

  “Well, everything has its dark side, but that’s not what you should look for. I suppose the old man got what he deserved, the others too, but it’s bad enough just remembering your own youth, isn’t it?—the tricks, the deceit, the sharp practices. Crimes too, of course. We’ve all committed them, no doubt about that. But we’re lucky, each of us. The mind’s recuperative powers are enormous, André. Thank God for that. You see the new boiling vat over there, still in the crate. Just arrived—from Germany. So just be thankful for the power you have in your own head! It’s enormous! Positively immoral, the strength there! Guilt is only in books, mon ami. Only in books, thank God for that. Otherwise we’d all be dead—dead of grief or remorse. Any one who says differently is a fraud—intellectual trash. I’d rather be a Rosicrucian these days than these grief-stricken Catholics or socialists. Better social doctrine than what these communists or capitalists have to offer, too. No one’s putting Rosicrucians in jail these days, are they? Of course not. There’s no reason to—no intellectual pretense to it at all. It’s all just mumbo-jumbo, simple humbug, that’s all. So it frees your head for other things.”

  In the salon of the main house, Kaponji rummaged through a drawer and brought out an old bottle of Indian elixir to add to their gin glasses. “This will bring your spirits up. In five minutes you’ll be a new man, freshly minted.”

  During dinner alone in the dining room, Kaponji talked about the new Revolutionary Council. He knew a few of the names. Major Fumbe was too stupid to be a rascal, like the old President. He didn’t know Lutete. Colonel N’Sika was a strange man. Perhaps a little primitive, but not stupid. No, he certainly wasn’t stupid. When you find a politician who isn’t merely stupid or venal, that makes you uneasy. So he was uneasy about N’Sika.

  Kaponji explained that N’Sika credited his uncle, an elderly chef coutumier or traditional chief from the north, with lifting his career out of obscurity. But de Vaux was probably behind it, the eminence grise of this new regime.

  “In what way?” Reddish asked.

  “The plane crash,” Kaponji said. “You remember the plane crash in the north, the one in the storm at Mbandaka where the old general was killed?”

  Reddish remembered.

  “The old general was N’Sika’s enemy, the man who’d been blocking N’Sika’s career. So there you are—the plane carrying your worst enemy blows up in a rain squall. Was it lightning or a bomb? Who knows? Not N’Sika. But if you can manage both, dynamite and a detonator, a fetisheer and his power, you have the best of both worlds, don’t you? And this fellow de Vaux can, believe me. But not N’Sika. You see the power that gives him? Of course, quite simple.”

  The following morning, Kaponji took Reddish on a tour of the plantation and pressing factory. At ten o’clock, the launch was ready at the boat landing to take him upriver to the missionary landing strip. A pilot would fly him from there to Lutu at the end of the lake, where he’d catch the evening packetboat for Benongo.

  Kaponji was still reassuring him as they walked down to the river: “… put all
this business out of your head, André. It happens and then it’s all over. There’s only one law—decay and regeneration. We’re all freshly created creatures. You can’t change the rest, never. Wars, crimes, obscenities, executions—they all happen. We recreate ourselves every day, in the wink of an eye. The past is no more. Otherwise how could you walk back through that village along the river, looking at its poverty, its disease, its superstition and filth. All those wretched creatures. Can we die every day? No. Be grateful for it. Commerce recreates you every day in the same way. A new man is what you are. Politics will kill you before your time in this country, mark my words. Don’t think about the old President—that shyster! Politics was what he wanted, politics was what he got—a bullet in the head. Yesterday’s cruelties and abominations are forgotten, of course. Let your recuperative faculties work, your brain cells regenerate. Commerce! Commerce is the answer, André!”

  Reddish made the overnight trip to Benongo in a creaking fetid cabin, the wooden bunk airless, the mattress under him as thin and stiff as a copra rug. The warped door to the cabin wouldn’t close and was slammed to and fro constantly by the movement of the dogwatch hands from the fo’c’sle as they shuffled barefooted back and forth. The matchwood walls shuddered and pounded from the vibrations of the pistons below.

  On the other side of the cabin wall the Belgian first mate blew and spat, thrashing in his bunk and grunting hoarsely from time to time, as if a woman were with him, one of those cool, dusky, long-legged girls who had silently moved aboard at Lutu, an isolated village where the women were unspoiled by bars, beer, or the single white man who lived there, an elderly Swiss pharmacist who lived in eccentric celibacy with his malarial dreams and his collection of old masks. Reddish had caught sight of the first mate at Lutu—a sixty-year-old flamand with jaundiced eyes and tobacco-stained whiskers who’d watched hungrily as the girls came aboard and squatted down in the evening shadows of the deckhouse, unburdening their shoulders of the freshly fermented palm wine they’d brought aboard in wicker-wrapped bottles cooled with damp palm leaves.

  Reddish slept for only an hour or so, defeated by the hellish heat of the cabin, and spent the remainder of the night in a canvas chair behind the wheelhouse watching the white billows churned up by the paddlewheel. On the deck below dark figures lay sprawled on mats. He fell asleep finally, but awoke to watch the dawn leach the horizon, draining it blood-red at first, then pink; soon the night was gone and the silver bowl of sky was the color of mackerel from the gulf.

  The packetboat docked at Benongo, south of Funzi, in the early-morning sunshine. A crowd of fifty or sixty Africans waited on the collapsing wooden pier as Reddish crossed the timbers, climbed the path up through the palm trees, and carried his bag down the dusty lakeside road to the old mission house, where the Catholic brothers were expecting him.

  Two hours later he was at the grassy airstrip south of town. The small twin-engine plane circled the field twice and drifted in from the lake, kicking up dust and chaff as it scuttled across the field. He watched from the shadow of a tulip tree as the plane unloaded, his rented Italian jeep behind him with the other vehicles from town. Near the metal utility shack lay the weed-grown hulk of a T-26 trainer used during the rebellions, the victim of a foul-weather landing and a permanent reminder of the lake country’s unpredictable weather.

  Two Belgian priests came alert as the door opened. Two provincial officials alighted first, followed by Gabrielle, who paused uncertainly, her eyes searching the faces waiting near the wing. The two Belgian priests saw her too and dropped their thumb-crushed cigarettes into the dust. “Tiens,” the shorter one exhaled sharply.

  “Mais non, non—pas possible,” said his companion.

  He was right. As Reddish reached Gabrielle, a stout Belgian sister left the cabin door, sharp-chinned and sharp-eyed, her face as yellow as a brick of cheese. She carried a small medical bag and wore white stockings over her bulging calves.

  It was dark and the equatorial heat lay like a blanket over the second-story gallery where they sat—Reddish, Gabrielle, and a Catholic brother—looking out over the black lake. The trees hung still, their leaves motionless. Not a breath stirred. The chairs were wooden, with stiff cane seats, dressed from the logs cut and planed in the sawmill at the rear of the station. The floor was wooden, like the gallery, which traveled the length of the brick mission house two degrees south of the Equator.

  Frère Albert described the recent raid on the police post at Funzi—a local dispute, nothing more. The policemen at the post had confiscated smoked fish and beer from a passing truck, and the villagers had retaliated, making off with the police rifles.

  He was Flemish and spoke French with careful precision, like an old servant handling ancestral china not his own. He was lean and gnarled, with gray teeth, a gray beard, and bright brown eyes, as bright as those of the hawks they’d watched with Gabrielle’s binoculars on the marshes that afternoon. He smoked a pipe, a thumb-worn briar held loosely between his calloused fingers, oil-stained by the repairs he’d been making in the mission generator room. The current pulsed feebly through the naked bulbs overhead.

  Beyond the mission gate the native women plodded by on the dusty road, black shadows swaying against the moonlit lake. Heavy wicker baskets bent their faces into the road. Their backs were laden with firewood gathered along the shore and in the stump-filled fields nearby.

  “You’ve been here a long time?” Gabrielle asked cautiously.

  “Since nineteen thirty-two.” He’d made only two trips to Belgian since then. One to visit his dying mother. The other? He’d forgotten—a lung infection perhaps. But he was content here. Where else could a man his age go these days? As a young man, he’d visited North America. He nodded toward Reddish and said he’d forgotten that during their last talk. When was that, two years ago?

  “North America?” Gabrielle asked.

  North America, but not the United States—his English was much too poor for that. Quebec City and Montreal were the two cities he’d visited. The recollection of that frozen, sepulchral countryside had haunted his imagination ever since. He would like to see the snow again before he died, but he supposed that was impossible. The purity perhaps—that was what had haunted him, seeing that virgin frontier as the first French missionaries and trappers had seen it. As a young man, he’d read of the martyrdom of the first Jesuits by the Hurons and Iroquois. That was what he’d wanted to ask Reddish. Were there Hurons and Iroquois near his home? “Where was it—Wisconsin?”

  “Wisconsin.” Reddish was surprised he’d remembered.

  Frère Albert turned toward the women moving along the road. The country had changed since he’d left the boat at Matadi so many years ago. Perhaps he had changed too. He’d seen many strange things—lightning bolting from a blue sky to strike an isolated hut at the edge of a village where an old sorcerer lay ill. Did madame believe the impossible? The impossible sometimes happened. There were many things not written, many things witnessed by the priests themselves, who refused to write about them. That merely meant they hadn’t been understood. One found in books only answers for which an age, epoch, or civilization had questions. But the minds of those Africans out there in the road carried another civilization, richer in many ways than their own. Much remained to be explained—ways of perception, for example. Two days before Reddish’s message had arrived, the wash boy in the scullery had told him that he would be coming.

  His chair creaked. His gray pipe smoke lifted into the flickering yellow light. The husbands of the lake tribe killed their wives with labor and fished only sporadically now. The lake was poor in fish. There was no way to evacuate their meager catches. The Portuguese trader in town had a dozen flatbottom scows that arrived three times a week with wares, all the scows equipped with new outboard motors. A virtual monopoly. Remarkable entrepreneurs, these Portuguese.

  Reddish remembered that AID had supplied outboard motors for the fishing cooperative they would visit tomorrow.

&
nbsp; The bell from the refectory rang for dinner. Gabrielle and Reddish followed Frère Albert across the porch and watched him go down the outside stairs. He invited them to join him if they returned early from the commissioner’s dinner. He had a bottle of brandy. They would see his light.

  “He’s lonely,” Gabrielle said. “Could we walk along the lake? Do we have time?”

  They left the compound and crossed to the beached dugouts and canoes where a few fires still smoldered and the fishermen were folding their nets. She walked to the end of the small jetty, looking up at the stars. The moon was a full, brimming silver disc high over the lake. The far shore was hidden from them.

  “It isn’t what I imagined. It’s different—strange—but so lovely, so peaceful.”

  “Stagnant.”

  “I would hate it if it were like the capital. There’s life here, but it’s gentler. Would you change everything?”

  “No, not everything.”

  Their adjoining rooms off the second-floor gallery of the mission house were identical: whitewashed walls, high narrow beds covered with mosquito netting, wash tables, and tin shower stalls. Lodged adjacent to Reddish was the Belgian sister.

  Gabrielle was ready before Reddish and stood in his doorway waiting, her hair combed, wearing a white dress, conscious too of the sister who sat next door in the lamplight reading from a small book.

  “What are you doing?” she called in a whisper.

  He was studying a typewritten list in the light of the table lamp. “It’s a list of provincial officials,” he explained. “They’re going to ask me for everything from nylon nets to Landrovers.”

  The sister next door noisily cleared her throat.

  “Shhh—” Gabrielle whispered.

  “So I want to know who I’m dealing with. What’s the matter?”

  A black sedan waited in the sand road at the foot of the gallery steps, sent by the district commissioner. His chef du protocol was extravagantly servile, holding the rear door open for them. “M’sieur l’ambassadeur,” he breathed, bowing into the dust.