“Now come the presidents,” the sergeant said. “President for Life Ga will be first, then the others.” Then, even though we were alone in the car with the windows rolled up, he dropped his voice to a whisper and added, “Watch very carefully the road ahead of his car.”
Ga’s regal snow-white Rolls-Royce materialized out of the dust. There were a few grunts from onlookers but no ululations or other such behavior. The masses merely watched this strange alien phenomenon, and no doubt they would have reacted in the same way if a spaceship had been landing among them. Not that the occasion was wholly lacking in ceremony. The soldiers posted along the street at ten-foot intervals came to present arms. The sergeant leaped out of the car, and he and the two constables stood to attention, saluting. I got out too. No one paid the slightest attention to me. But then, only a few of the onlookers were paying very much attention to President Ga. The Rolls-Royce continued its stately approach, flags flying, headlights blazing. The crowd stirred and muttered.
Then, without warning, the crowd suddenly broke and began to run in all directions—men, women, children, the decrepit old borne aloft by their sons and daughters, everyone except the dancers, who had by now fallen into a collective trance and went right on dancing, oblivious to the panic all around them. Everyone else scattered as fast as their legs would carry them. The presidential Rolls-Royce slammed on its brakes and stood on its nose. Inside it, President Ga or one of his doubles, dressed in a white uniform, was thrown about like a rag doll.
It was impossible not to see Benjamin’s hand in all this. A single thought filled my mind: assassination. He was going to kill his man in full view of thirty other presidents for life.
I leaped onto the hood of the Austin, then scrambled to the roof. From that vantage point I saw what all the fright was about. A black mamba at least ten feet long was slithering with almost unbelievable swiftness across the road in the path of the white Rolls-Royce. Suddenly half-a-dozen brave fellows, half-naked all of them, leaped out of the crowd and attacked the serpent with pangas, cutting it into pieces that writhed violently as if trying to reconnect themselves into a living reptile. The crowd uttered a loud, collective basso grunt. This was a huge yet subdued sound, like a whisper amplified to the power of ten thousand on some enormous hi-fi speaker yet to be invented.
The Rolls-Royce, klaxon sounding, sped away. The sergeant said, “Get into the car. We must go.”
I did as he ordered. Inside the sweltering, buttoned-up Austin, I asked if the mamba crossing President Ga’s path on his day of triumph would be seen as a bad omen.
“Oh, yes,” the sergeant said, grinning into the mirror. “Very bad. No one who saw will ever forget.”
Darkness fell. The sergeant did not take me home but drove me to a different safe house on the outskirts of the city. As soon as we were inside I switched on the English-language radio. The opening ceremonies of the Pan-African Conference were now in progress at the soccer stadium. Announcers shouted to be heard above the blare of bands and choirs, the boom of fireworks, and the noise of the crowd. Needless to say, not a word was uttered over the airways about the meeting between the mamba and Ga’s white Rolls-Royce. Everyone knew all about it anyway by word of mouth or talking drum or one of the many Bantu tongues that could be signed or whistled as well as spoken.
In all those minds, as in my own, the questions were, What happens next and when will it happen? I left the radio on, knowing that the first word of the coup would come from its speakers. Second only to the capture or murder of the prince, the broadcasting station was the most important objective in any coup d’état. Obviously Benjamin and his coconspirators—assuming that he had any—must strike tonight. Never again would he have such an opportunity to destroy the tyrant before the very eyes of Africa. He would want to kill Ga in the most humiliating way possible. He would want to show him as weak, impotent, and alone, without a single person willing or able to defend him.
Promptly at eight o’clock, the sergeant carried a cooler into the house, rattled pots and pans in the kitchen, and served my dinner, all five courses at once. The food was French. “This is the same food that all the presidents will be eating at the state dinner,” the sergeant said. I ate only the heated-up entrée, medallions of veal in a cream sauce that had separated because the sergeant had let it boil.
Around two in the morning, the sergeant’s walkie-talkie squawked. He lifted it to his ear, heard what sounded to me like a single word, and replied with what also seemed to be a single word. The conversation lasted less than a second. He said, “Come, Mr. Brown. It is time to go.”
We drove through a maze of streets, but on this night of revelry saw no sleepers by the wayside. Everybody was still celebrating. Oil lamps and candles glowed in the blackness like red and yellow eyes, as if the entire genus Carnivora was drawn up in a hungry circle on the outskirts of the party. Music blared from loudspeakers, people danced, thousands of shouted conversations stirred the stagnant, overheated air. The city had become one enormous, throbbing Equator Club. The sergeant maneuvered the Austin through the pandemonium with one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the hooter, constantly beeping to let people know that he wasn’t trying to sneak up on them and kill them. Not since Independence Night, I thought, could there have been so many witnesses awake at this hour, ready to observe whatever Benjamin was going to do next.
At last we drove out of the crowd and into the European quarter. Through the rear window I could see the distorted smoky-red glow of the city. I imagined I could feel the earth quivering in rhythm to the innumerable bare feet that were pounding it in unison a mile or so away. The music and the shouting were very loud even at such a distance.
The sergeant drove at his usual brisk pace, lights off as usual. He parked the car and switched off the engine. By now my eyes had adjusted, and I could see another police car parked a few yards away. We were parked on a low hilltop, and the red glow of the city caught in the mirror-shine of its metal. Soon a third car drove up and parked close beside us. It was Benjamin’s Rover, identifiable by the baritone throb of its engine. The driver’s cap badge caught a little light. A large man who might have been Benjamin sat in the backseat alone.
Moving swiftly, Benjamin got into the backseat with me. The dome light blinked. He wore the dress uniform I supposed he had worn to the state dinner—long pants, white shirt with necktie, short epauletted mess jacket that the Brits call a bum freezer, decorations. Benjamin smelled as usual of starch, brass polish, soap, his own musk.
Headlights swept up the hill, turned sharp left into the street that paralleled the one on which our own cars were parked, then stopped. Car doors slammed, men moved quick-time, a key turned in a lock, a door squeaked as it was opened, a scratchy Edith Piaf LP played five or six bars of “Les amants de Paris.”
We were parked behind the house into which Ga had gone to keep his rendezvous for tonight. Jumpy light showed in an upstairs window, dim and yellowish, as if filtering down a hallway from another room. The back door opened. A flashlight blinked. The Rover’s headlights flashed in reply.
“Come,” Benjamin said. He got out of the car and strode into the darkness. I followed. The sergeant got something out of the trunk, then slammed the lid. Behind me I heard his brogans at a run. We went through the open door. Inside the house, the record changed on the hi-fi and Piaf’s recorded voice began to sing “Il Pleut.” Benjamin, entirely at home, strode down a hallway, then up a stairway. At the top, in half-shadow outside a half-open bedroom door, a policeman stood at attention as if he did not quite know exactly what was expected of him or what would happen next.
In a mirror I saw a man and a woman engaged in vigorous coitus and heard the woman’s moans and outcries. The sergeant marched into the room. Benjamin gave me a little push, and I marched in behind him. The room was full of burning candles. The smell of incense was strong. Smoke hung in the air. The woman shouted something in what sounded to me like Swedish. She was quite small. President Ga,
lying on top of her, covered her completely. Her legs were wound around his waist, ankles crossed, feet in gilt shoes with stiletto heels. I looked into the mirror in hope of seeing the girl’s face. My eyes met Ga’s. The candlelight exaggerated the size of his startled, wide-open eyes. His face twisted into a mask of furious anger, and he rolled off the woman, knocking off one of her shoes. Now I saw her face, smeared lipstick and tousled hair. She was a cookie-cutter blonde, as flawless as a dummy in a store window.
I knew what was coming next, of course. The sergeant took one step forward. In his outstretched hands he held the valise that I remembered so well. Evidently that was what he had retrieved from the trunk of the Austin. The snap of brass latches sounded like the metallic one-two of the slide of an automatic pistol. The sergeant opened the valise and turned it upside down. The mamba flowed out of the bag with the same unbelievable swiftness, as if it were coming into being before our eyes. I tried to leap backward, but Benjamin stood immediately behind me, blocking the way. President Ga and the blonde froze as if captured in a black-and-white photograph by the flash of a strobe light.
The snake, a blur as it attacked, struck at the nearest target, Pres ident Ga. He grunted as if a bullet had entered his body. His mouth opened wide and he shouted, in English, “Oh, Jesus, sweet Jesus!” It was a prayer, not a blasphemy. In the same breath he uttered a tremendous sob. Between these two primal sounds, the woman, screaming, threw her body over the foot of the bed. Somehow she landed behind us on all fours in the hallway. Still shrieking, still wearing one gilt shoe, she sprinted down the hallway. The constable in the hall pursued her for a step or two, picked up the shoe after she kicked it off, and caught her by the hair, which was very long. Her head jerked back, but she kept going, leaving the constable with a handful of blond threads in his hand. He stared at these in puzzlement, then blew his whistle. At the head of the stairs the woman was captured by a second constable, a man almost as large as Benjamin. He carried her, squirming, kicking, screaming, back toward the bedroom. Her skin was so white that I half expected powder to fly from it. She bit his face. He twisted her jaw until she let go, and when he saw his own blood on her teeth he slammed her twice against the wall, then let go of her, throwing his hands wide in disgust that a woman should have attacked him, should have bitten him. Her limp, unconscious body slid to the floor. She landed with a thump on her round bottom, her back against the wall, her head lolling inside its curtain of hair. She twitched as if dreaming, and I wondered if her spine was broken. She had shapely breasts, pretty legs, peroxided delta, and it looked as though she had lipsticked her nipples. For some reason—maybe because this touch of perversity was so unimaginative, so innocent, such a learner’s trick—my heart went out to her, if only for a moment.
Behind me I heard a gunshot. In the confined space of the bedroom it sounded like an artillery round going off. The stink of cordite mingled with the incense. Benjamin stood over the bed with a smoking Webley in his hand. The headless snake in its death throes whipped uncontrollably over the bed, spraying blood on Ga and the sheets. With his hands protecting his genitals, Ga scooted rapidly backward over the bed to escape the serpent, even though he must have known that it was now harmless. What a seed God planted in the human mind on the day that Adam ate the apple! From the look on Ga’s face it was clear that he believed that he himself was dying almost as fast as the snake had just done, but his instincts, from which he could not escape, instructed him to cover his nakedness and flee for his life.
Ga’s eyes were now fixed on Benjamin. The question in them was easy to read: Had Benjamin murdered him or rescued him? Benjamin made a gesture to Ga: Come.
Ga, strangling on the words, said, “Doctor!”
Benjamin ignored him. Silently he pointed a finger first at the sergeant, then at Ga. Then he whirled on his heel and left the room. The sergeant picked up the writhing snake and threw it into the hallway, then grasped Ga’s left arm, turned him onto his stomach, and expertly cuffed his hands behind him.
Surprised, then outraged, Ga shouted, “I order you—”
The sergeant punched him hard in the kidney. Ga shrieked in pain and subsided, gasping. The sergeant shouted an order in his own language. Two constables—the one who had been posted in the hallway all along and the one the blonde had bitten—came into the room, pulled Ga to his feet, and marched him naked down the hallway, past the headless mamba, past the crumpled blonde, and out the back door. The mamba, still twitching, would be the first thing the girl would see when she opened her eyes.
In the bedroom the hi-fi played the last words of the Piaf song that had begun as we entered the house. It had taken Benjamin three minutes and twenty seconds to carry out his coup d’état.
Outside, Ga struggled with the two constables who were trying to stuff him into the trunk of Benjamin’s Rover. He kicked, squirmed, butted. One of the constables struck him on the hipbone with his baton. Ga collapsed like a marionette whose strings had been cut. The constables heaved him into the trunk and slammed it shut. One of them locked it, and then, in his jubilation, knocked on it to make a little joke. The sergeant spoke an angry word to him.
Benjamin had already taken his place in the backseat of the Rover. I expected to be put into another car or to be left behind, but the sergeant opened the door for me and I got in and sat beside Benjamin. We heard Ga in the trunk behind us—groans, childlike sobs, whisperings, appeals to Jesus, an explosive shout of Benjamin’s name, so throat-scraping in its loudness that I imagined spit flying from Ga’s mouth. If Benjamin derived any satisfaction from these proofs that his enemy was entirely in his power, he did not show it by sign or sound. He sat at attention in his Victorian dress uniform—silent, unmoving, eyes front.
The sergeant’s Austin, driven by one of the constables, tailgated us as we rolled through the wide-awake city. It was just as noisy as before but more drunken, more out of control. What must Ga be thinking as he lay in pitch darkness in his tiny cell, folded like a fetus, naked and in shackles? Ten minutes ago he had been the most powerful man in Africa. Not now. He was silent. Why? Did he fear that the crowd would discover him and drag him out of the trunk and parade him naked through the howling mob? Did he imagine photographs and newsreels of this appalling humiliation being seen by the entire world?
We arrived at a darkened building I did not recognize. Somewhere above us a red light pulsed, and when I got out of the car I looked upward and realized that it was the warning beacon on the tower of the national radio transmitter. I made out the silhouettes of an armored car and maybe a dozen men in uniform.
The constables hauled Ga out of the trunk. He struggled and shouted words in a language I did not understand. A door opened and emitted a shaft of light. To my eyes, which had seen nothing brighter than a candle flame all evening, it was blindingly bright. We went through the door, a back entrance, into a cramped stairwell. A young chief inspector came to attention and saluted. He looked and behaved remarkably like the spick-and-span army captain I had met at the presidential palace. Other constables were posted on the stairway, one man on every other step. Incongruously for men who dressed like British bobbies and were trained to behave like them, each was armed with a submachine gun. I wondered what would happen if they all started shooting at once in this concrete chamber.
Ga screamed a question: “Do you know who I am?”
No one answered.
In a different, commanding tone, Ga said, “I am the president of this republic, elected by the people. I have been kidnapped by these criminals. I order you to arrest them at once.”
Ga sounded like his newsreel self, voice like a church bell, and in spite of his abject state looked like that old self, blazing eyes, imperious manner. However, the reality was that two large policemen had hold of his arms. He was naked and in chains and spattered with the blood of the mamba. A string of spittle hung from the corner of his mouth. The constables gave him a shove in the direction of the stairs. He stubbed his naked toes on the concret
e step and sucked a sharp breath through his clenched teeth. This sound turned into a sob of frustration. The men to whom he was giving orders would not look at him.
I wondered if the next event in this Alice in Wonderland scenario might involve sitting Ga down at the microphone and ordering him to tell the nation that he had been removed from power. But no, he was frog-marched up the stairs and into the control room by his escorts. I remained with Benjamin and the sergeant in the studio. The control room was brightly lit. It was strange to gaze through the soundproof glass and see the wild-haired, glaring, unclothed Ga looking like one of his ancestors from the Neolithic.
The engineer switched on his mike and said, “Ready when you are, chief constable.”
Into the open mike Ga shouted, “You will die, all of you! Your families will die! Your tribes, all of you will die!”
The engineer, quaking with fear, switched off the microphone, but Ga’s mouth kept moving until the bigger constable put his hand over it, gagging him. Eyes rolling, chest heaving as he fought for breath, he kept on shouting. The constable pinched his nostrils shut, and the dumb-show noise behind the soundproof glass ceased.
Detecting movement near at hand, I shifted my gaze. A man in nightclothes was seated at the microphone. He was at least as nervous as the engineer. Benjamin handed him a sheet of paper. It was covered by Benjamin’s perfect penmanship. Benjamin, a man who delegated nothing except, apparently, the most important announcement ever made over Radio Ndala, gave the engineer a thumbs-up signal. The engineer counted off seconds on raised fingers. He pointed to the announcer, who began reading in mellifluous broadcaster’s English.
“Pay attention to this message from the high command of Ndala to all the people of our country,” he said, voice steady but head twitching and hands trembling. ” The tyrant Akokwu Ga is no longer the president of Ndala. He has been charged with mass murder, with treason, with corruption, and with other serious crimes and will be tried and punished according to the law. The functions of the government have been assumed for the time being by the high command of the armed services and the national police. The United Nations and the embassies of friendly nations have been informed of these developments. The people are to remain calm, obey the police, and return to their homes at once. An election to select a new head of state will be held in due course. The people are safe. The nation is safe. Investments by foreign nationals are safe. The treasure stolen by Akokwu Ga from the people is being recovered. All guests in our country are safe, and they are at liberty to remain in Ndala or leave Ndala whenever they wish. Additional communiqués will be issued from time to time by the high command. Long live Ndala. Long live independence and freedom. Long live justice. Long live democracy.”
Harlan Coben Page 37
