Red Joker

by Michael Nicholson

  ‘The Will of the People has been the Soviet’s shibboleth since the Russian Revolution was born, and it is unchallengeable. So we have proceeded and so we shall expand. And with caution. And there is nothing you can do to stop us. We are defeating you with words from your own armoury, using your own deceit against you. Suffocating you.’

  There was no sound and no movement in the room. The other soldiers, recognizing something urgent in their leader’s voice, stiffened in response. Outside the seagulls continued their noisy flurry through the warming air.

  The black guy slowly turned again and then leant down, resting his hands on his knees so that his eyes were level with Prentice’s.

  ‘I have one other thing to tell you. It is my reason for visiting you. Within an hour the telex line to Cape Town will be reconnected. I have already seen your message to London, you did well to get it out so soon. We had expected, intended, to close the radio circuit before anyone knew what was happening, but we were a minute or so too late. No matter, what is done is done. But once the line is working again you will all send a message to your separate companies . . . a message sent in your names.’

  He waited but Prentice didn’t answer and he stood up. He undid the top buttons of his tunic and pulled from an inside pocket a sheet of paper. Just as carefully, he unfolded it and gave it to Prentice who, without looking at it, handed it backwards to Faraday.

  ‘Read it out loud, lad. If it bores you sub it as you go along.’ Faraday held up the paper. His hand was shaking and he felt sad and angry that it showed.

  ‘There’s a headline, Alf . . . everybody.’ He turned to show the paper to Protheroe and Doubleday but neither of them was looking. Protheroe was holding his tumbler full of cane rum with both hands and Doubleday seemed still to be praying. He read aloud:

  Counter Coup . . . Spontaneous revolt . . . rejection of quasi-revolutionary neo-colonialist puppet Laurent, defeated bourgeois clique of French Capitalism . . . sudden street fighting and quick victory by workers’ commandos. New People’s Republic established, declaration of Marxist principles.

  ‘It goes on a bit about agricultural and fishing cooperatives and about Imperialist collaborators . . . decisions by workers’ courts . . . Oh my God! . . .’

  ‘What is it, lad?’ Prentice turned and looked up at Faraday who had become suddenly very pale. He took the paper back from him and read the last lines of the final paragraph himself.

  In accordance with the first people’s court yesterday, Laurent was found guilty of treason and in attempting to escape by sea was shot dead, together with his family.

  Prentice let the paper fall on to his lap. It waited there a second and then slipped to the floor.

  Prentice stared at it, and gave a long sigh. ‘You killed them? His kids? Two little boys?’ But it was hardly a whisper.

  The soldier at the doorway came forward, knelt, picked up the paper and handed it to the black guy who held it close to Prentice’s face.

  ‘You will send this the second we connect you with Cape Town,’ he said.

  Prentice held on to the sides of the chair, then very slowly heaved himself up and stood one pace to his right. Just as slowly he smoothed his palms over his head until the hands met at the nape of his neck. Then he put them behind his back and braced his shoulders, like a prisoner seeing the judge’s black cap and preparing for sentence. He breathed in deep.

  ‘God rot you,’ he said. ‘God rot your balls for that.’ He coughed and cleared his throat. ‘None of us will touch that paper. Believe me none of us will read it, none of us will send it. You have my word on it.’

  The black guy nodded and smiled. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I expected that. You see I could easily get one of my own men to send it in your names, but I know, having spent some time in London and elsewhere, that your newspapers have something called a house-style. So I would not expect this,’ he said, waving the paper at Prentice, ‘written rather naively by one of our young political commissars, to pass off as something of yours. What you must do is to rewrite it in your own words so that it will convince your newspapers. Simply that.’

  ‘Look, Blackman. You have our names . . . you know whom we work for. We are non-combatants and we send nothing, absolutely nothing to London for you or any of your child-killers.’

  ‘You will send this.’

  ‘I said nothing. None of us.’

  The black guy nodded and his face squared as his jaw muscles set hard. His body stiffened and he began to turn the elephant-hair bangles on his wrist picking at the bindings the way some men do with worry beads.

  ‘I will leave this paper with you,’ he said in a low voice, ‘and by the time our radio circuit has been repaired you will be ready to send. I cannot make my ultimatum any clearer.’

  The seagulls were wheeling and swooping in from the sea above the Boulevard.

  Prentice took the paper in his right hand. Slowly he crumpled it tight. Then he threw it out of the window.

  The nearest seagull scooped it up and pivoted in mid-air as others began tearing at the white ball in its beak. And seconds later they scattered high, frightened by the sound of the shot and the crash as Prentice fell, smashing the chair, backwards on to the floor.

  She had waited and then knocked gently on the side door of the hotel courtyard a minute after the black guy and his patrol had left, and she had helped them carry Prentice upstairs.

  Protheroe had poured whisky into the bullet wounds and she plugged them with small wads of cotton-wool to stop the bleeding.

  The black guy had shot Prentice through the instep of his right foot and the single shell would have gone through cleanly, but the stone floor of the bar had deflected it sideways back up through his heel, and shattered the bones.

  He was conscious but only just aware of what was happening as they laid him on his bed. He was white and shaking with the shock of pain and Faraday held his leg tight just above the bloody ankle as he watched Elizabeth cut through the leather of the torn shoe to release it. Protheroe poured the remaining whisky slowly into Prentice’s mouth to try and ease the pain and Prentice tried hard to swallow. But Protheroe, himself unsteady with too much neat cane rum, overdid it and Prentice coughed, turned his head and vomited over his pillow. Protheroe stood there, swaying backwards and forwards on his feet, the whisky bottle upturned and draining on to the floor, gaping, as if Prentice was already dead.

  There was silence in the bedroom. Elizabeth sat at the end of the bed with a large floral patterned china bowl on her lap, washing the blood from the broken foot and Faraday closed his eyes as she began picking tiny splinters of chipped bone from the flesh with tweezers. They watched her and waited for another twenty minutes until she had replaced the first cotton-wool wads with fresh ones which were covered in anti-bacterial cream Faraday had found in the medical cabinet in the manageress’s bathroom. The foot was swelling now and the flesh between the wounds was bruising green and blue as she began binding it tight with narrow strips of sheeting she had dampened so they would bind even tighter as they dried. Finally, as Faraday held the leg up, she piled cushions and pillows under it to reduce the flow and pressure of blood.

  Gradually the pain increased until Prentice, with a quick draw of breath, dug his head back deep into his pillow, his body stiffened and just as suddenly he relaxed, unconscious. Faraday would remember later that in all the time Prentice had been lying there, waiting as his shattered foot was dressed, he hadn’t made a sound, not a protest, not a moan of pain. Only his deep regular breathing and the scuffing as he ran his hands backwards and forwards along the metal sides of his bed.

  11

  Faraday wasn’t sure he could keep up with her for very much longer. She ran fast, dodging and side-stepping along the alleys and narrow streets that spread from the hotel and water-front up the lower slopes of the mountain.

  His shoes had made too much noise on the cobb
les so she told him to run without them. Already his feet were bleeding.

  ‘How will we get there?’

  ‘The way I came.’

  ‘But you came down in the dark.’

  ‘Then we’ll have to be careful.’

  ‘Elizabeth! So will they. And they’ll shoot.as soon as they see us. Isn’t there another . . . ?’

  ‘William. There’s no other way and nothing else we can do. He is up there waiting and you and the rest in the hotel were the only ones who could help. Now there’s only you.’ ‘Wouldn’t it have been better if he’d come down to us?’ ‘No! They know him. And they’re looking for him . . . just him . . . now they’ve got all the others.’

  ‘What others?’

  ‘He’ll tell you.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we wait till it’s dark . . . it might be . . .’

  But she clamped her hand quickly over his mouth and kept him still, holding his elbow. And then he too heard them and they stepped back into a shallow doorway as the soldiers passed by five yards ahead, where four alleys crossed, hardly glimpsing left or right, six of them, two abreast in their column, walking in step and with the same slow amble Faraday had seen from the hotel window. Elizabeth held back for another minute or more until they could no longer hear the squeak of their boots on the cobbles. ‘Where are all the people?’ he whispered to her.

  ‘At the airport, most of them. I could see them last night from the mountain . . . thousands of them, children as well.’

  ‘Prentice said they’re extending the runway.’

  ‘It’s almost finished,’ she said. ‘The rest of the people are at the harbour, emptying the fishing boats.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. But everything is out of them piled up on the quayside, nets, trawls, pots . . . everything. They’re going to use them for something but I can’t think what. William . . . I’m not certain of anything anymore . . .’

  She left the doorway and edged along the wall to the corner and he followed. But there was nothing to see, nothing to hear. There had been total evacuation, not a bird flew, not a dog barked, not a shutter creaked. No breeze moved the curtains in the open windows, or swung the washing-lines that hung across the alleys.

  ‘It’s unbelievable,’ he said.

  ‘They’ve put the old people into the hangars on the airfield . . . the small children too. The lorries were moving them non-stop all yesterday.’

  ‘But why? Why have they done it? Why do they need to move them out. . . why do they need to empty the place?’ But she didn’t answer. She turned her body to the wall and leant her forehead against it so that her hair fell and hid her face.

  ‘William, they’re shooting people. People who won’t work. I heard the shots yesterday . . . and again this morning. And the screaming afterwards.’

  She turned to him suddenly and pushed herself against him. He put his arms around her and felt how stiff and tight her body was. Her heart was thumping fast against him and he could smell the scent of her hair. He kissed her forehead at the hairline and tasted salt. Then she pressed her stomach hard against his and he had the sensation of exchange.

  She whispered into his neck and he felt her warm breath. ‘William . . . I’m managing to do this because it’s unreal. I’m seeing it and hearing it but something’s missing that would make it real and I’m afraid I’ll not be able to cope when it is. Do you understand?’

  He lifted her chin. She was crying and he nodded. He knew exactly what she meant, he had been suffering the same numbness. Every voice had been an echo, every touch had been like dead skin, every happening was at third remove. He kissed the wetness on her cheeks and then her lips and there was no going back.

  A minute ago he might easily have confessed the same fear but not now. Not now and maybe never again.

  ‘I know, I know,’ he said softly to her, touching her ear with his lips. ‘I feel strong inside but I don’t know whether that’s because I really know what’s happening or because I haven’t really realized yet how desperate it is.’

  She put her arms around him and held on to his belt in the nape of his back and pulled him closer to her.

  ‘I remember,’ he said, ‘one of the people in London, one of our war reporters, telling me that being a journalist makes it easy at first . . . doing this thing. He said that because you’re a spectator, not involved, you can’t believe you can get hurt. The bullets and the shrapnel will get the others ’cos they’re fighting but you’re not so you won’t get killed. He said you can be right in the middle of it but still feel safe because you imagine, somewhere inside you, that you are transparent and the bombs won’t see you. He said it makes you appear very brave.’

  He paused.

  ‘Go on, William.’

  ‘Until,’ he said, ‘the day someone, one of you, gets killed near you, another reporter or a cameraman, and all of a sudden you get the message. I remember him telling me about the Americans in Vietnam. They used to say that somewhere there was a shell or a bullet or a mortar that had their name on it and just as long as it wasn’t fired you were safe. But he said he wasn’t worried about the one with his name on. He worried about the one labelled “To whom it concerns”.’

  For a minute or more they stood there hugging each other listening to the noise of gunfire and mortar blasts. Then she let go and leant back against the wall.

  Faraday looked around and remembered the alley from the day before when he and his crew had followed Prentice to the Square. He and Elizabeth were standing at the same corner and he could see on the wall opposite the marks of the map Prentice had scratched into the brown stucco. To the left, a bridle was hanging from a stable door and a bag of hay where a horse had been.

  Elizabeth led him past the crossroads, and fifty yards on she suddenly turned into an arch and pushed open a door just inside it. They went through a small parlour, with breakfast things still on the table and a Bible by a small statue of the Virgin Mary on the dresser. Then into a backyard past a dead budgerigar in a brightly painted cage hanging from the door frame and a tabby cat sitting perfectly still beneath it.

  Elizabeth moved as if she was following an invisible marker, without looking, without hesitation and always deliberately. Then they were away from the alleys, away from the maze of houses and suddenly the mountain was there up ahead of them.

  ‘William, we can stay here until it gets dark and start up the slope then. Or we can use the vines and go now.’

  ‘The vines?’

  ‘Crawl up. Through the vineyard. Between the rows we’ll be hidden.’

  William looked back down and he could see the Square now a half mile below. The perfect circle of hibiscus bushes and the ornamental fountain in the centre and soldiers . . . very small black dots . . . but soldiers certainly . . . moving

  slowly around the perimeter. Then he turned again and looked up towards La Souffrière. Small white puffs of cloud hovered at the peak.

  ‘Your father’s up there?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, William.’

  ‘And he doesn’t know what’s happened to you?’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘So up we go my sweet,’ he said. ‘You may have forgotten, but he owes me a breakfast.’ And she held out her hands to him.

  For over an hour, crawling, crouching, in single file, with Elizabeth leading, they moved slowly up the slope of La Souffrière under the cover of the vines until they came to the last of the rows of wooden staves that held them. Ahead was open ground covered in blue slate and lava- stone and scatterings of grass, ferns and the varieties of mountain herbs and flowers that gave the mountain the splashes of colour Faraday had first seen from the Boulevard a thousand feet below.

  ‘William, look . . . you can see the coral.’ Elizabeth shielded her eyes from the sun and pointed across the tops of the houses to the sea.

  �
��Can you see how it curves like a horseshoe? And there, on the right, you can just make out the beginnings of the Guano rocks . . . those white specks in the sea.’

  ‘Icing on the fruit cake,’ Faraday said. ‘That’s how I saw it when we were coming in to land that first evening.’

  They sat down on the soft heathery grass to rest, feeling safe. She ran her hand over the mountain flowers massed around her.

  ‘This was one of his favourite spots,’ she said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘President Laurent’s. We would come here on Sundays sometimes for picnics with his two little boys. He would let them sip his wine. They’d think it terribly naughty and I’d scold them and pretend to be shocked.’

  ‘Elizabeth,’ he said.

  ‘Yes?’

  But he turned to the sea again. He couldn’t tell her. Maybe somebody else might. Perhaps she would never need to know until afterwards when it was all over and they were out of it.

  ‘I just wondered,’ he said, ‘just wanted to know where he is hiding, how much farther we have to go.’

  ‘There,’ she said and pointed across to the face of the rock. ‘Do you see that overhang of granite just above some bush and trees . . . to the right?’

  He nodded. Then she whispered and pointed. Five feet from them up the slope, surrounded by bright yellow buttercups, was a ground-squirrel, grey and tan with a tail that curled over his back like a question mark. He was standing on his hind legs staring at them, raising his nose, sniffing them out, friend or foe. Then with his tiny paws he began picking the yellow flowers and popped them into his mouth, and they thought they could smell the sweet petal scent of his breath as he ate.

  ‘How did you get up there? When?’ he asked.

  ‘In the morning, early.’

  ‘He promised me breakfast.’

  ‘But you knew something was wrong.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘He told me that Laurent had received a radio message from Maputo, from a friend in the French Embassy, warning him that an invasion was being planned . . . might even be under way, he wasn’t certain. But the Frenchman told him to leave immediately. He refused but he told father to fill up George and leave with his two boys and his brother. And me. It was an order.’