Harlan Coben

by The Best American Mystery Stories 2011

  A certain third-world general had once made just such a demand in return for his services as a spy in a country whose annual national product was smaller than that of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. I told him that Benjamin had not struck me as being the type to long for Mrs. Eisenhower.

  My chief said, “You take him seriously?”

  “He’s an impressive person.”

  “Then go back and talk to him some more.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “What about the encouragement?”

  “It’s cheap. Ga is a bad ‘un. Shovel it on.”

  I was cheap too—a singleton out at the end of the string. If I got into trouble, I’d get no help from the chief or anyone else in Washington. The old gentleman himself would cut the string. He owed me nothing. “Brown? Brown?” he would say in the unlikely event that he would be asked what had become of me. “The only Brown I know is Charlie.”

  The prospect of returning to Ndala on the next flight was not a very inviting one. I had just spent eight weeks traveling around Africa, in and out of countries, languages, time zones, identities. My intestines swarmed with parasites that were desperate to escape. There was something wrong with my liver: the whites of my eyes were yellow. I had had a malaria attack on the plane from London that frightened the woman seated next to me. The four aspirins I took, spilling only twenty or so while getting them out of the bottle with shaking hands, brought the fever and the sweating under control. Twelve hours later I still had a temperature of 102; I shuddered still, though only fitfully.

  To the chief I said, “Right.”

  “This time get all the details,” my chief said. “But no cables. Your skull only, and fly the information back to me personally. Tell the locals nothing.”

  “Which locals? Here or there?”

  “Anywhere.”

  His tone was nonchalant, but I had known this man for a long time. He was interested; he saw an opportunity. He was a white-haired, tweedy, pipe-smoking old fellow with a toothbrush mustache and twinkling blue eyes. His specialty was doing the things that American presidents wanted done without actually requiring them to give the order. He smiled with big crooked teeth; he was rich but too old for orthodontia. “Until I give the word, nobody knows anything but us two chickens. Does that suit you?”

  I nodded as if my assent really was necessary. After a breath or two, I said, “How much encouragement can I offer this fellow?”

  “Use your judgment. Take some money too. You may have to tide him over till he gets hold of the national treasure. Just don’t make any promises. Hear him out. Figure him out. Estimate his chances. We don’t want a failure. Or an embarrassment.”

  I rose to leave.

  “Hold on,” said the chief.

  He rummaged around in a desk drawer and, after examining several identical objects and discarding them, handed me a large bulging brown envelope. A receipt was attached to it with Scotch tape. It said that the envelope contained $100,000 in hundred-dollar bills. I signed it with the fictitious name my employer had assigned to me when I joined up. As I opened the door to leave, I saw that the old gentleman had gone back to his Wall Street Journal.

  Benjamin and I had arranged no secure way of communicating with each other, so I had not notified him that I was coming back to Ndala. Nevertheless, the sergeant met me on the tarmac at the airport. I was not surprised that Benjamin knew I was coming. Like all good cops, he kept an eye on passenger manifests for flights in and out of his jurisdiction. After sending a baggage handler into the hold of the plane to find my bag, the sergeant drove me to a safe house in the European quarter of the city. It was five o’clock in the morning when we got there. Benjamin awaited me. The sergeant cooked and served a complete English breakfast—eggs, bacon, sausage, fried potatoes, grilled tomato, cold toast, Dundee orange marmalade, and sour gritty coffee. Benjamin ate with gusto but made no small talk. Air conditioners hummed in every window.

  “Better that you stay in this house than the hotel,” Benjamin said when he had cleaned his plate. “In that way there will never be a record that you have been in this country.”

  That was certainly true, and it was not the least of my worries. I was traveling on a Canadian passport as Robert Bruce Brown, who had died of meningitis in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, thirty-five years before at age two. Thanks to the sergeant, I had bypassed customs and passport control. That meant that there was no entry stamp in the passport. In theory I could not leave the country without one, but then again, I was carrying $100,000 American in cash in an airline bag, and this was a country in which money talked. If I did disappear, I would disappear without a trace. One way or another, so would the money.

  “There is something I want you to see,” Benjamin said. Apparently this was his standard phrase when he had something unpleasant to show me. After wiping his lips on a white linen napkin, folding it neatly, and dropping it onto the table, he led me into the living room. The drapes were drawn. The sun was up. A sliver of white-hot sunlight shone through. Benjamin called to the sergeant, who brought his briefcase and pulled the curtains tighter. Before leaving us he started an LP on the hi-fi and turned up the volume to defeat hidden microphones. Sinatra sang “In the Still of the Night.”

  Benjamin took a large envelope from the briefcase and handed it to me. It contained about twenty glossy black-and-white photographs—army trucks parked in a field, soldiers with bayonets fixed; a large empty ditch with two bulldozers standing by; beggars getting down from the truck; beggars being tumbled into the ditch; beggars, hedged in by bayonets, being buried alive by the bulldozers; bulldozers rolling over the dirt to tamp it down with their treads.

  “The army is very unhappy about this,” Benjamin said. “President Ga did not tell the generals that soldiers would be required to do this work. They thought they were just getting these beggars out of sight until after the Pan-African Conference. Instead the soldiers were ordered to solve the problem once and for all.”

  My throat was dry. I cleared it and said, “How many people were buried alive?”

  “Nobody counted.”

  “Why was this done?”

  “I told you. The beggars were an eyesore.”

  “That was reason enough to bury them alive?”

  “The soldiers were supposed to shoot them first. But they refused. This is good for us, because now the army is angry. Also afraid. Now Ga can execute any general for murder simply by discovering the crime and punishing the culprits in the name of justice and the people. The generals have not told the president that the solders refused to follow his orders, so now they are in danger. If he ever finds out, he will bury the soldiers alive. Also a general or two. Or more.”

  I said, “Who would tell him?”

  “Who indeed?” asked Benjamin, stone-faced. I handed the pictures back to him. He held up a palm. “Keep them.”

  I said, “No, thank you.”

  The photos were a death warrant for anyone who was arrested with them in his possession.

  Benjamin ignored me. He rummaged in his briefcase and handed me a handheld radio transceiver. Technologically speaking, those were primitive days, and the device was not much smaller than a fifth of Beefeater’s, minus the neck of the bottle. Nevertheless, it was a wonder for its time. It was made in the U.S.A., so I supposed it had been supplied by the local chief of station, the man who played ball with Ga, as a trinket for a native.

  Benjamin said, “Your call sign is Mustard One. Mine is Mustard. This for emergencies. This too.” He handed me a Webley and a box of hollow-point cartridges.

  I was touched by his concern. But the transceiver was useless—if the situation was desperate enough to call him, I would be a dead man before he could get to me. The Webley, however, would be useful for shooting myself in case of need. Shooting anyone else in this country would be the equivalent of committing suicide.

  Benjamin rose to his feet. “I will be back,” he said. “We will spend the evening together.”<
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  When Benjamin returned around midnight, I was reading Sir Richard Burton’s Wanderings in West Africa, the only book in the house. It was a first edition, published in 1863. The margins were sprinkled with pencil dots. I guessed that it had been used by some romantic Brit for a book code. Benjamin was sartorially correct as usual—crisp white shirt with paisley cravat, double-breasted naval blazer, gray slacks, gleaming oxblood oxfords. He cast a disapproving eye on my wrinkled shorts and sweaty shirt and bare feet.

  “You must wash and shave and put on proper clothes,” he said. “We have been invited to dinner.”

  Benjamin offered no further information. I asked no questions. The sergeant drove, rapidly, without headlights on narrow trails through the bush. We arrived at a guard shack. The guard, a very sharp soldier, saluted and waved us through without looking inside the car. The road widened into a sweeping driveway. Gravel crackled under the tires. We reached the top of a little rise and I saw before me the presidential palace, lit up like a football stadium by the light towers that surrounded it. The flags of all the newborn African nations flew from a ring of flagstaffs.

  The soldiers guarding the front door—white belts, white gloves, white bootlaces, white rifle slings—came to present arms. We walked past them into a vast foyer from which a double staircase swept upward before separating at a landing decorated by a huge floodlit portrait of President Ga wearing his sash of office. A liveried servant led us up the stairs past a gallery of portraits of Ga variously uniformed as general of the army, admiral of the fleet, air chief marshal, head of the party, and other offices I could not identify.

  We simply walked into the presidential office. No guards were visible. President Ga was seated behind a desk at the far end of the vast room. Two attack dogs, pit bulls, stood with ears pricked at either side of his oversize desk. The ceiling could not have been less than fifteen feet high. Ga, not a large person to begin with, was so diminished by these Brobdingnagian proportions that he looked like a puppet. He was reading what I supposed was a state paper, pen in hand in case he needed to add or cross something out. As we approached across the snow-white marble floor, our footsteps echoed. Benjamin’s were especially loud because he wore leather heels, but nothing, apparently, could break the president’s concentration.

  About ten feet from the desk we stopped, our toes touching a bronze strip that was sunk into the marble. Ga ignored us. The pit bulls did not. Ga pressed a button. A hidden door opened behind the desk, and a young army officer in dress uniform stepped out. Behind him I could see half-a-dozen other soldiers, armed to the teeth and standing at attention in a closetlike space that was hardly large enough to hold them all.

  Wordlessly, Ga handed the paper to the officer, who took it, made a smart about-face, and marched back into the closet. Ga stood up, still taking no notice of us, and strolled to the large window behind his desk. It looked out over the brightly lit, shadowless palace grounds. At a little distance I could see an enclosure in which several different species of gazelle were confined. In other paddocks—too many to be seen in a single glance—other wild animals paced. Ga drank in the scene for a long moment, then whirled and approached Benjamin and me at quick-march, as if he wore one of his many uniforms instead of the white bush jacket, black slacks, and sandals in which he actually was dressed. Benjamin did not introduce me. Apparently there was no need to do so, because Ga, looking me straight in the eye, shook my hand and said, “I hope you like French food, Mr. Brown.”

  I did. The menu was a terrine of gray sole served with a 1953 Corton-Charlemagne, veal stew accompanied by a 1949 Pommard, cheese, and grapes. The president ate the food hungrily, talking all the while, but only sipped the wines.

  “Alcohol gives me bad dreams,” he said to me. “Do you ever have bad dreams?”

  “Doesn’t everyone, sir?”

  “My best friend, who died too young, never had bad dreams. He was too good in mind and heart to be troubled by such things. Now he is in my dreams. He visits me almost every night. Who is in your dreams?”

  “Mostly people I don’t know.”

  “Then you are very lucky.”

  During the dinner Ga talked about America. He knew it well. He had earned a degree from a Negro college in Missouri. Baptist missionaries had sent him to the college on a scholarship. He graduated second in his class, behind his best friend, who now called on him in dreams. When Ga spoke to his people, he spoke standard Africanized English, the common tongue of his country, where more than a hundred mutually incomprehensible tribal languages were in use. He spoke to me in American English, sounding like Harry S. Truman. He had had a wonderful time in college—the football games, the fraternity pranks, the music, the wonderful food, homecoming, the prom, those American coeds! His friend had been the school’s star running back; Ga had been the team manager; they had won their conference championship two years in a row. “From the time we were boys together in our village, my friend was always the star, I was always the administrator,” he said. “Until we got into politics and changed places. My friend stuttered. It was his only flaw. It is the reason I am president. Had he been able to speak to the people without making them laugh, he would be living in this house.”

  “You were fond of this man,” I said.

  “Fond of him? He was my brother.”

  Tears formed in the president’s eyes. Despite everything I knew about his crimes, I found myself liking Akokwu Ga.

  Servants arrived with coffee and a silver dessert bowl. “Ah, strawberries and crème fraîche!” said Ga, breaking into his first smile of the evening.

  After the strawberries, another servant offered cigars and port, discreetly showing me the labels. Ga waved these temptations away like a good Baptist. I did the same, not without regret.

  “Come, my friend,” said Ga, rising to his feet and suddenly speaking West African rather than Missouri English, “it is time for a walk. Do you get enough exercise?”

  I said, “I wish I got more.”

  “Ah, but you must make time to keep up to snuff,” said Ga. “I ride horseback every morning and walk in the cool of the evening. Both things are excellent exercise, and also, to start the day, you have the companionship of the horse, which never says anything stupid. You must get a horse. If you are too busy for a horse, a masseur. Not a masseuse. They are too distracting. Massage is like hearty exercise if the masseur is strong and has the knowledge. Bob Hope told me that. Massage keeps him young.”

  By now we were at the front door. The spick-and-span young army captain who had earlier leaped out of the closet behind Ga’s desk awaited us. Standing at rigid attention, he held out a paper for Ga. Benjamin immediately went into reverse, walking backward as he withdrew from eyeshot and earshot of the president while the latter read his document and spoke to his orderly. I followed suit.

  Staring straight ahead and barely moving his lips, Benjamin muttered, “He is charming tonight. Be careful.” These were the first words he had uttered all evening. Throughout dinner, Ga had ignored him entirely, as if he were a third pit bull lying at his feet.

  Outside, under the stadium lights, Ga led the way across the shadowless grounds to his animal park. Three men walked in front, sweeping the ground in case of snakes. As I knew from rumor and intelligence reports, Ga had a morbid fear of snakes. Another bearer carried Ga’s sporting rifle, a beautiful weapon that looked to me like a Churchill, retail in London £10,000.

  The light from the towers was so strong that everything looked like an overexposed photograph. Ga pointed out the gazelles, naming them all one by one. “Some of these specimens are quite rare,” he said, “or so I am told by the people who sell them. I am preserving them for the people of this nation. Most of these beasts no longer live in this part of Africa, but before the Europeans came with their guns and killed them for sport, we knew them as brothers.”

  Ga was a believer in raising a mythical African past to the status of reality. The public buildings he had built during his brief
reign featured murals and mosaics depicting Africans of a lost civilization inventing agriculture, mathematics, architecture, medicine, electricity, the airplane, even the postage stamp. In his mind it was only logical that the ancients had also lived in peace with the lion, the elephant, the giraffe—everything but the serpent, which Ga had exiled from his utopia.

  We tramped on a bit, to an empty paddock. “Now you will see something,” he said. “You will see nature in the raw.”

  This paddock was unlighted. Ga lifted his hand, and the lights went on. Standing alone in the middle of the open space was an animal that even I was able to recognize as a Thomson’s gazelle from its diminutive size, its lovely tan-and-white coat, the calligraphic black stripe on its flank. This one was a buck, something like three feet tall, a work of art like so many other African animals.

  “This type of gazelle is common,” Ga said. “There are hundreds of thousands of them in herds in Tanganyika. They can outrun a lion. Watch.”

  The word suddenly does not convey the speed of what happened next. Out of the blinding light in which it had somehow been concealing itself as it stalked the Tommy, a cheetah materialized, moving at sixty miles an hour. A cheetah can cover a hundred meters in less than three seconds. The Tommy saw or sensed this blur of death that hurtled toward him and leaped three or four feet straight up into the air, then hit the ground running. The Tommy was slightly slower than its predator, but far more nimble. When the cheetah got close enough to attack, the little gazelle would make a quick turn and escape. This happened over and over again. The size of the paddock—or playing field, as Ga must have thought of it—was an advantage to the Tommy, who would lead the cheetah straight at the fence, then make a last-second turn. One or twice the cheetah crashed into the wire.

  “This is almost over,” Ga said. “Usually it lasts only a minute or so. If the cat does not win very quickly, it runs out of strength and gives up.”