Red Joker

by Michael Nicholson

  The two were pleased. Another four hours under the black plastic, waiting for the last radio contact in the sequence to be made and their vigil would be over. Then they would dismantle the antennae and pack it with the radio and battery into a khaki holdall. They would bury the plastic sheet and their cigarette stubs in the sand, sweep the area clean with grass and leave for the small camp of prefabricated huts hidden in a eucalyptus forest a mile hinterland.

  The man by the radio took off his headphones and disconnected the circuit cables. He rubbed his eyes in a slow, palming movement and then leant forward still on his knees and looked through the opening of the tent to the sea. The moon was bright and along the straight white beach he could see a mile in each direction. Then he reached back and pulled his rifle into his lap and screwed into its muzzle a seven-inch Kechov silencer. Still kneeling, feet together behind him, the toes of his leather boots digging into the sand to give him balance, he took aim. Perfectly still, he gave a small soft sigh and fired.

  There was no sound above the clatter of the crickets and frogs, and only the slightest rustle as the jackal fell dead on to the bed of rotting kelp to wait for the sea to take his slim harmless body away.

  ‘Va ser un abrigo lindapara su mujer,’ said the other man in a whisper.

  ‘Claro que si, si yo sepa donde encontrarla, y si quiera!’ he answered.

  And they laughed quietly at the joke.

  8

  ‘If I stayed a thousand bleedin’ years in this bleedin’ hotel and sent my breakfast back every bleedin’ day, that cook would still send me up the same bleedin’ rubbish! Scrambled eggs? I’ll stuff it up his arse!’

  Faraday had meant to wake up early but not to Prentice’s morning call. He sat up in bed and looked out across the courtyard. Prentice was standing on his bed, dead centre of it, treading the soft mattress like a trampoline to keep himself steady.

  He was shouting at the room maid, a skinny mulatto girl who, Faraday remembered, had quickly changed corridors the second day they’d arrived after an experience delivering Doubleday’s early morning tea.

  She stood a little over four feet five inches high at the foot of his bed, staring respectfully up at him as he bounced with every new obscenity. Unknown to Prentice, the girl spoke no English except for ‘Hullo’ and ‘Goodbye’ and even those she would frequently get in reverse. For Prentice’s entire stay she had taken his scrambled eggs back uneaten to the chef without a word of complaint, taking his behaviour and violent protests very much for granted. Faraday wondered what Doubleday must have done or had tried to do to the girl to make her prefer Prentice instead.

  So it was eventually decided by the three, Prentice, Protheroe and Doubleday, that they would eat their last breakfast together in the dining-room. For spite they sat at J. J. Day-Lewis’s table by the window, deliberately scuffing his chair and stubbing out their cigarettes on an old French ceramic bowl Day-Lewis was known to have been fond of.

  Prentice, now recovered from his loud morning exercises, seemed full of enthusiasm for departure. Once the decision to leave had been made it seemed he couldn’t get away fast enough. It occurred to Faraday that with the one exception of Doubleday’s excursion to the sugar estates, none of them had seen anything of the island other than the nearest beach a hundred yards away.

  It was a few minutes to seven and desperate as he was to leave for the harbour and George, Faraday felt obliged to wait and see them off on the airport coach. He had decided to book seats out that night for himself and his crew at the UTA office on his way to the harbour.

  Prentice still found it difficult to enjoy his breakfast. Not that the eggs weren’t perfectly fluidly scrambled, or his bacon crisp. It was because of the interruptions every minute or so by the cashier.

  Like Protheroe and Doubleday, like all in the trade who prefer to drink their nourishment rather than eat it, Prentice was negotiating with the cashier to change the enormous charges of money spent in the bar to money allegedly spent on laundry, telephones, room service, porters and that invaluable item ‘miscellaneous’ that has helped retrieve so many reputations.

  The cashier, a small white-haired Frenchman in a well- ironed dark suit frayed at the pockets and cuffs, pleaded with Prentice to let the charges stay itemized as they were. To alter them he said would be to break his code of accounting ethics.

  Prentice loudly asked him if he’d sworn the Hippocratic oath. The little man said he didn’t understand, he was sorry.

  ‘Well understand this, old Matey,’ said Prentice, ‘and I’ll say it slowly in simple English. No manipulation, no money. No cook ze books, no bleedin’ ackers. Simple. Savvy?’

  The cashier, made impotent by his honesty and pidgin English, retreated and went off to find the manageress. She, he knew, would know how to deal with such things. He’d never seen her fail.

  The delay made Faraday anxious, ten minutes had been wasted already. Had he left at seven he would have been at the harbour by now and known whether George had sailed or not. Another few minutes more and he’d have smelt the bacon frying and known that things were all right again.

  There was a shout and a sudden commotion in the hotel doorway. Excited shouting, a single voice, a man’s. Then Faraday saw the manageress on her way to Prentice, dressed in black as she always was, stop by the dining-room door and she looked to the voice, then quickly covered her ears with her hands. She began shaking her head and her face went grey, and Faraday saw the cashier behind her standing quite still and staring. He was holding Prentice’s bundle of cash slips and one by one, as his fingers relaxed, the slips floated zig-zag to the floor until they were spread around him like monster confetti.

  Then more voices, also hidden, began shouting, a woman screamed somewhere and then there were more screams and Faraday saw his room maid carrying the small boy he’d seen a week ago hosing the courtyard. She was running towards the kitchen doors to the left, and the child, frightened by his mother’s panic, was hitting her shoulders with his fists and kicking her in the stomach. Still the man’s voice continued shouting, and louder now above the commotion it was creating.

  And then Faraday heard him clearly for the first time. The ramble of words, staccato phrases, jumbled and confused, suddenly came together as a sentence in his mind.

  ‘What the bleedin’ hell’s going on?’ asked Prentice, his mouth so full of egg it was leaking from the corners of his lips.

  ‘They’re going bonkers over your bill, Alf,’ said Protheroe, pouring tea.

  Faraday rose from his chair - half standing, half sitting.

  ‘No. No it’s not about your bill.’ His voice seemed not to be his. Prentice looked up suddenly anxious and stopped chewing. Protheroe held the teapot still in mid-air.

  ‘It’s French,’ said Faraday very quietly to them.

  ‘Yes, me old luv, we know that much. But what’s it all about? What are the bleeders saying?’

  Faraday sat down again slowly at the table. He looked across to Prentice. ‘They’re saying there’s a crowd in the Place de la République. And the women are crying. They say President Laurent is hanging from a lamp-post. Dead. They say he’s dead.’

  The bullet hit the plate glass window of a chemist’s shop two yards ahead of them, dead centre, exploding bottles of Faberge on to the pavement.

  ‘Freeze!’ shouted Prentice. ‘Wasn’t meant to hit. . . just warning us not to go forward. Effective stop sign, so stay absolutely bloody still.’

  Faraday looked left across the Boulevard for the sniper, but saw nothing. Prentice was leaning against the wall, panting, also looking for movement opposite. He still had his breakfast napkin tucked into his trouser top. It looked like an apron.

  ‘We passed an alley, ten, fifteen yards back,’ he said. ‘But take it easy lads, don’t hurry. Make him think we’ve got the message and we’re calling it a day. Follow me and keep your hands out of your p
ockets.’

  The alley ran at right-angles to the Boulevard and they walked into it as fast as they could without running. Faraday’s steel-tipped shoes clattered along the cobbles and the noise echoed, bouncing off the tall houses that formed the narrow corridor of stucco walls. It was the only sound in streets and alleyways that had always been so full of sound and smells, full of people, shouting at greengrocers pushing their barrows, shouting at broom sellers, at the butcher who carried cuts of meat on a stone slab tied to the chassis of an old pram, at their children and their husbands. And always the sound of accordion music from the tiny radios perched on the sills of the open windows.

  But now the windows were shuttered, and as they passed they could hear whisperings inside, sometimes a child crying and a second bolt drawn.

  There were four of them - Prentice, Faraday and his camera crew, who were carrying khaki rucksacks full of film stock and auxiliary equipment, which had annoyed Prentice. He said it looked too military and they could be mistaken for something they were not.

  Protheroe had stayed in the hotel to file the story for all of them as soon as the telex came on, and it was decided Doubleday should take the sheets off his bed and paint a large Red Cross on them.

  They came to a crossroads of alleys but the names high up on the walls meant nothing to them. Each alley was a replica of the other, the same coloured houses, the same cobbles, the same lines of washing hanging from window to window. They reminded Faraday of the flags in Jubilee Year.

  Twenty yards down the alley to the left, a horse, tied by its bridle to the handle of a stable door, was tugging to get its neck low enough for the bag of hay that had been hurriedly dropped just out of its reach. They stopped at the corner and Prentice scratched at the soft brown stucco of the wall with a coin.

  ‘We ought to be here,’ he said, pointing to the rough outlines he’d drawn. ‘The harbour curves round like this and comes back on itself . . . like a horseshoe, at least that’s what it looks like on the map in Reception. So we keep going this way and we cut off the corners. Place de la République should be straight ahead.’

  Faraday suddenly ducked before he realized why. Out of sight to the right there was a quick burst of gun-fire, silence, then an explosion. The sounds ricocheted off the walls towards them, but Prentice didn’t move. He just looked at his map, spat at it and watched the long dribble of phlegm down the wall as if there was nothing else to do.

  The morning sun was hot now and in the narrowness of the alley there was no movement of air. Prentice was breathing heavily, his shirt was soaked in sweat, his hair was wet and his face blotchy red. Some way ahead of them Faraday could hear bursts of what he assumed was a machinegun, followed by a single shot and then more automatic fire. Then nothing. He’d never seen or heard street fighting before and in an oddly detached way which surprised him, the sounds, some high some low, were like a modem symphonic conversation. He couldn’t believe that stomachs and the heads of men were bursting open because of it.

  ‘They’re on the far side of the Square . . . by the Governor’s Fort.’

  ‘Or in it,’ said Faraday.

  Prentice nodded. He held up his hand to stop, leant against a wall and began breathing in deeply, regularly, as if each breath was the last.

  ‘Sorry! But you’ve got a few years on me and a fair bit of gin to catch up on.’

  ‘Who are they, Alf?’

  ‘Christ knows.’

  ‘A counter coup?’

  ‘’Course. But whose? No one from this island. And who from outside? And when did the bastards get here? Jesus! Half an hour ago I was on my way out and now look at it. I tell you lad, I should have known.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Every time I make a decision there’s a DFA.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A Different Fucking Arrangement.’

  Prentice tried to smile but the sweat stung his eyes. He held his right side.

  ‘Stitch. No need to worry. You won’t lose me. Anyway, while we’re doing this we’re not doing anything worse, eh?’

  Faraday watched Prentice. In charge of himself and them all. Infectious confidence.

  They walked on for another ten minutes, through the criss-cross of deserted streets and alleys waiting at each one until Prentice had checked them clear, careful to stay on the one that headed north. And all the time the sound of gunfire and occasional grenade explosions came closer. Prentice stopped. Ahead of them, on the far side of the Square, they saw the high walls of the Governor’s Fort. Prentice waved his right hand low behind him and they fell into single file close to the houses until they came to the corner and the tree-lined square of the Place de la République. And there, in front of them, four hundred or more people were kneeling in silence. It could easily have been, at some other time, a religious service, a thanksgiving, except there was fear.

  The four moved slowly forward, still one behind the other, keeping close to the walls under the cover of the shop awnings behind the cars parked along the edge of the pavement. They’d gone twenty yards when they saw it, its outline blurred by the jacaranda trees and the coloured lightbulbs that were strung from one to the other.

  It was hanging by a length of bright orange cord from the cross bar of a lamp-post in the Square’s centre, perfectly still, hands and feet tied by the same coloured cord, the head twisted at right-angles to the shoulders by the force of the death fall. Then Faraday saw the face and he went down on one knee, his hands on the pavement supporting him as he felt the gorge rise. He was looking at the face of the tall, tanned man who had smiled at him on that warm summer evening a week ago from the deck of the yacht, who had waved and proudly held up the large marlin he’d caught, with his two small sons laughing and waving beside him. The face of President Albert Laurent was puffed and tinged blue, and the grey hair was matted with blood. The tongue had been almost cut in half by his teeth and it hung tom from one side.

  Faraday’s mouth filled with vomit and then it spewed out on to the pavement, splashing him, and he looked away from the eyeball that was hanging by its sinews down the dead man’s cheek.

  Faraday’s cameraman was filming inside a shop doorway so he didn’t see the woman move at first. But the murmur of the crowd as she pushed her way through alerted him and he swung round and followed her with his lens.

  She was a mulatto, forty years old, no more, heavily built but handsome and dressed in black as all widows and unmarried women did on the island. Her face was wet with tears and as she moved closer to the lamp-post her sobbing got louder and more uncontrollable and she held both her arms out in front of her, hands open and reaching as if she was offering something.

  The crowd moved in front of her, clearing a path, many hands steadying her as she passed. Perhaps she had hoped others would follow, perhaps she no longer knew who she was or where. She stumbled but the arms held her and she moved on.

  Faraday, his face and shirt front wet with vomit and dizzy with sickness, crawled across the pavement between two cars and sat low by the side of a man at the edge of the crowd. And then he saw what it was the woman was walking towards. Standing under the hanging body were soldiers, black soldiers, dressed in light green camouflaged uniforms, holding their rifles with one hand, the butts resting on. their hips. There were twelve by the lamp-post and another fifteen or more by the ornamental fountain.

  The woman was within a few yards of the hanging body when she began screaming, her right hand making the sign of the cross. A soldier moved forward, and hit her hard in the stomach with his rifle butt. She fell backwards into the crowd but quickly she was up again and charged him as he turned to walk back. Her fingernails dug into his eyes and his cheeks and she began biting his face and head. Five seconds only she had him, but nothing of his face could be seen for blood. Then all the soldiers were on her, punching her and swinging their rifles at the back of her legs, and she went down under them
.

  They dragged her to the lamp-post and stood her directly under the body, its feet touching her head and they pulled her arms back behind her so tight she couldn’t breathe. Her mouth was wide open as she grunted and tried to suck in air.

  Then the soldier she had attacked was helped up off the ground and he slowly walked towards her, his lips broken, his right ear bitten almost in two. Blood from it splashed his shoulder. He stood in front of her, kicked her hard in her crotch, grabbed her long black hair and jerked her head back. Her chin jutted out and up and her long brown neck suddenly broke open as the blade of his knife slit it from side to side.

  They let her drop and the blood gorged from her, her legs kicking, her heels scraped the cobbles and her hands clawed at nothing. Her killer watched her writhing, then he turned, held his knife high to the crowd, waved it backwards and forwards and began shouting ‘Mapanouzi! . . . Mapanouzi! … Mapanouzi!’

  And the soldiers behind him and those by the fountain shouted with him ‘Mapanouzi!. . .’ and fired their guns low over the heads of the crowd.

  The white doves rose at the noise from the walls of the Governor’s Fort and began their traditional low spiral above the Square and the silent people kneeling in its centre.

  Prentice, crouching, helped Faraday back through the cars, guided him to the cover of the alley and held him against a wall. ‘You’ve just been bloodied lad,’ he said. ‘Take it easy.’ He gave Faraday a large, clean white handkerchief to cover his face and his tears.

  ‘It’s Swahili for Revolution . . . saw it in Kenya during Mau-Mau and later Tanzania. “Mapanouzi” painted on the roads, car roofs, scrawled on walls, everywhere. Then suddenly the graffiti became “Uhu”, “Freedom” on their bleedin’ Independence Days.’

  Prentice lit a cigarette from the stub of another. They were sitting in the bar waiting, though only Prentice knew for what. It was all familiar to him. Only the names changed and the crimes became progressively more hideous, but he knew the routine.