Reckoning (17 page)

“The Belgians had rubber plantations here,” one brother said. “These are plantation roads to ship the rubber out. The Belgians
were cruel. They flogged us. When a man did not collect enough latex, they cut his hand off. After the First World War, they
left. The forest people still talk about the time the demons came here. The stories are handed down.”

This was not the kind of talk Dockrell wanted to hear. “If we set out on foot, can you two find the way?”

The brothers were evasive. One offered, “There will be villages and hunters’ camps. They will point the way. We are BaLese.”

“Will they feed us and not interfere?” Dockrell questioned.

“They are BaLese,” the men said. “We are BaLese.”

“What about me?”

The brothers looked at one another.

“Well?” Dockrell asked.

“They will run away.”

Dockrell sensed the truth in what they told him. He would like to crack their heads together and stomp them in the gut to
shape them up and stop their snickering. He had been careless about that outdated map and now he was paying for it. He needed
new information. If he was going to learn anything, it would
have to be through these two brothers. He would have to be nice.

Dockrell smiled at them. It was a cold smile which made them uneasy. He asked, “Where does this road lead to?”

They spent some time arguing with the taxi driver in Swahili, then one turned to Dockrell and said, “Nowhere.”

Dockrell could feel his patience wearing thin as he stood here on a dirt road in the eerie stillness in the half-light at
the base of towering trees. At the same time, it was this threatening spookiness of the deep forest which kept him in check.
“There must be something along the road,” he said.

“No. Only the’mission school and hospital.”

“Where you went to school?”

They nodded.

“We’ll go there.”

The first thing Dartley went about was securing the village of Diku. He put Dieudonne in command, at twenty zaires a day,
which was a week’s wage in these parts. He hired every able-bodied man in the village at three zaires per day. There were
twenty-two of them, plus eight pygmies. The BaLese men were divided into three shifts. Dartley was warned that if he tried
to set up working hours for, the pygmies, they would disappear into the forest. They would come when they wanted to, and only
then. Although barter was the normal mode of exchange, they all accepted zaires.
Dartley tested his system from time to time. The village was completely encircled by eagle-eyed forest men with superkeen
hearing, armed with spears and bows and arrows. Like the leopard, they could fade in and out of the brush before Dartley’s
eyes.

“Shit, I’d love to have seen these jokers rip into the Cong,” Dartley remarked to Paul Egan. “I’d back them against Charlie
with Kalashnikovs.”

Egan gave him a sour look. “I might have guessed you were in Vietnam. You’re a real loser, ain’t you?”

“If I am, Egan, your fat ass is grass.”

Egan laughed and took a toke from the earthenware jug.

From what Dartley could figure, Egan thought the way most merchant seamen did. He was used to spending weeks at a time in
a hostile environment, working nonstop and living on bare essentials. Then when he hit port, he drank, whored and whooped
it up until it was time to ship out again. He had no family that he ever heard from; his friends lived like he did; for him
there was no real difference between Oklahoma, Zaire and the China Sea. He’d been living like this for so long now, it seemed
ordinary to him.

And like many hard-fisted, scarred merchant seamen, he was a keen observer and had interests wider than most people would
have guessed from looking at him. He’d have been a mighty tough customer for that bastard Dockrell to handle if he’d stuck
by his own rules. But he’d brought a bottle on board—a sure sign that a seaman was beginning to crack. Except it wasn’t
one bottle, and it wasn’t palm wine as Dartley had first thought, but distilled juice from the manioc root—African white lightning.
Dieudonne said he had a stash of it buried in the floor of his hut. If the villagers’ count was right, he should be running
low on his jugs and there was no local bootlegger. Dartley had no tranquilizers but plenty of aspirin. He’d dose him with
those when he ran out of booze, take his gun from him and boil him plenty of drinking water. If he got crazy, Dartley would
whup him. He wouldn’t be the first guy Dartley had shaped up this way. His message was direct and clear no choice and no shit.

Dieudonne came with the news. The pygmies had disappeared. Their camp was empty. The villagers did not know when they would
be back. In an hour. In six weeks. Pygmies were like that.

Paul Egan laughed. “Those little critters come as near to living like Adam and Eve as I’ve ever happened on. They have all
our bad habits except they’ve turned them into things useful for them. They’re like friars with a vow of poverty—they refuse
to weigh themselves down with possessions. They work in the BaLese gardens but they never grow anything for themselves because
they feel it would tie them to one place. They told me this themselves. The dealings between them and the BaLese gives a pygmy
a metal arrowhead or a hunting dog, the BaLese owns a certain percentage of all the game that arrowhead or dog helps bring
in. Same thing if a pygmy works in a BaLese garden, he gets a certain amount of vegetables. But the BaLese can’t
control the pygmies. They don’t even try. Know what the big difference, apart from size, is between them?”

Dartley said he didn’t.

“The BaLese are like us, they are basically afraid of the forest. The pygmies are not.”

“That’s very true,” Dieudonne said after Egan translated his statement into French for him.

Switching back to English, Egan said, “You know how the little fuckers live for half the year? Like bears on honey. First
they smoke some pot, which is called
bangi
hereabouts. Though the BaLese hardly ever use it, they grow it to trade for meat with the pygmies. You’re lucky I’m of a
generation too old to think of enjoying that stuff.” He gave Dartley a sly smile and swigged on his earthenware jug. “Then
if they don’t overdo it with the
bangi
—and it’s likely they will—they head out to find honey. The bees here don’t mess with low flowers, they’re up in the canopy
and that’s where their hives are, in the hollows of trees. A pygmy listens at the base of the tree for their humming or he
sees them streaming in and out of a hole a hundred feet up. If that tree is too hard to climb, he finds one nearby that is
easier. When he gets up on top, he builds little bridges from the canopy of one tree to another until he gets where he wants.
You should see it. You and me will go out with them when they come back and you’ll see it.”

“Sure,” Dartley said.

“The climber carries up two baskets with him, one filled with burning, smoking grass and leaves, the other
for the honeycomb. He smokes the bees out, chops open the hive entrance and takes anywhere from ten to thirty pounds of honey.
The little buggers live on this—honey and
bangi
—for months on end. You want to talk about Adam and Eve?”

“I want to talk about diabetes,” Dartley said.

“They never heard of it.”

Dieudonne woke Dartley at first light. “Monsieur Egan, he is gone. Vanished.”

Dartley crawled out of his tent. “Let’s look at his hut. Someone must have seen him go.”

Some villagers stood outside the empty hut. The floor inside was ripped up as if a bear had been foraging for roots.

Dieudonne translated some of the village people’s remarks. “He ran out of liquor pots. We counted but he did not. Only a crazy
man tears at the earth with his fingernails.” They all denied they had seen or heard him leave.

“The sentries,” Dartley said to Dieudonne. “They must have seen him go.”

Dieudonne looked ashamed. “I told you that I could not persuade them to keep Monsieur Egan in Diku.”

“Yes you did. I’m not blaming you.” Dartley had had no trouble in getting the men on sentry duty to accept orders to allow
no strangers in the village and to aim to kill cannibal
muzungus.
But he had no success in persuading them to keep Egan captive inside the encircled
village. He had been here before Dartley and for much longer. Dartley could understand why they would not take his orders
to detain someone they knew better. However, Dieudonne said this was not the case.

“Here in the forest, only chiefs and very powerful men can afford to be idle,” Dieudonne explained. “Everyone else must work
or hunt or search for food, and moving about in the heat keeps a man thin. Only a very, very powerful man, only a very great
chief, could be idle long enough to grow fat. Monsieur Egan, he is fatter and softer in the belly than any man they have ever
seen in the Ituri. They know that where he comes from he must be a king. They know that he is more powerful than you. So they
pay heed to him more than to you. So they let him through.”

Dartley had to smile as he cursed them. Their logic was good.

“But none of the BaLese would go with him,” Dieudonne said in his and their defense. “That they would not do.”

“Then who went with him?”

Dieudonne pointed dramatically into the bush. “The pygmies.”

“They’re back? Where did they go?”

“To buy liquor. Once each moon, people come to a village a half-day’s walk from here to receive medicine. The bootleggers
come too to sell liquor to those who need something to help the medicine.”

“The hell with him,” Dartley said.

* * *

Dartley was lying morosely in the shade when he noticed the arrival of some BaLese men he had not seen before. The villagers
crowded around them, as they did every new arrival who spoke their language, demanding to know what was happening in other
places. The sight of it would have melted the heart of the most hardened TV news anchor.

Dieudonne listened and came right away to Dartley. “I don’t like what I hear. Among the things these men tell is how they
met two brothers who are famous in the western part of the Ituri for the palm wine they make. They said a policeman forced
them to bring a Frenchman into the Ituri. When they brought him to the mission school where they and I once went—I know these
brothers but not their wine—he gave the nuns a large amount of money and said he admired their work and wanted to help them
more. They agreed to show him some of their field work in the jungle. The nuns were very grateful to this generous man. But
the brothers heard two Belgian nuns laugh at him behind his back because he spoke backward Canadian French.”

The word “Canadian” hit Dartley like a club. He struggled to keep his face straight as Dieudonne watched him closely and needlessly
added, “These nuns will distribute the medicine in the village where Monsieur Egan has gone to meet the bootleggers.”

More intense staring from Dieudonne.

Dartley sighed and pulled himself together. Dieudonne had stuck by him and done his best. The man had long since stopped believing
that Dartley had come
here to help Egan look for oil. He had picked up information valuable to Dartley which he need never have mentioned if he
had relied on the story he had been fed. He was due an explanation.

“This Canadian has come to kill Paul Egan. I am here to kill the Canadian before he can get to Egan. The Canadian is a very
great warrior, with many victims to his name. I too am a warrior. Paul Egan is not.”

Dieudonne shook his head.
“Muzungus
can be very strange.”

Dartley turned his back on him. He extracted a wad of zaire notes from his moneybelt, sheared a quantity off the top and replaced
the rest. Then he turned around to face Dieudonne. He counted off three hundred zaires in one pile to his left, and threw
the rest of the notes, four or five thousand zaires, uncounted to his right.

Dartley pointed to the three hundred zaires. “I recommend that you take this money and go home. We will part friends.”

Dieudonne was staring wide-eyed at the big pile of notes.

“This over here is blood money,” Dartley went on, pointing to his right. “You might have to kill or be killed to earn that
money. But if you and I both survive, I will pay you this amount again.”

Dieudonne, who had been squatting in the dust, rose to his full height with offended dignity. He said, “I will help you any
way I can. You do not buy my loyalty with money.”

Dartley hurriedly stood and shook his hand. “Thank you. I didn’t mean to offend you.” He took Dieudonne by the arm and led
him away. After a few paces he looked back. “There are many ants under that tree. Do you think they will eat the money left
on the ground?”

Dieudonne paused to consider this. “For you and I, it must be that these ants ate this blood money.”

He waited until Dartley had left the clearing before he picked up the banknotes.

Douglas Dockrell had no wish to see sick people suffer. He would have taken them, one by one, and put them out of their misery.
He would have put a bullet in the back of their heads from a silenced gun, so they would not have known what was happening
to them. He thought it was worth going out of his way to be humane, if it didn’t require much effort.

He was surprised by the nuns, whom he hadn’t taken too seriously until this point. There were black ones and white ones, and
they carried on about being handmaidens of the Lord while in his opinion they all needed a good fuck. They lived in their
own little world, their ivory tower convent, far from the realities of the world. Yet here were those same sisters dressing
horribly suppurating sores, blue tumors, scaling rashes—he had seen tiny white maggots in the torn belly of a child. The foul
smells made him gag, yet here were these otherworldly sisters washing these loathesome, half-rotten creatures, injecting them,
talking with them, even laughing…

The sisters wouldn’t miss him until it was time to move on to the next medical aid station in a couple of hours. He had work
to do. There were several hundred people spilling in all directions over the village, which was no more than a dusty clearing
containing a couple dozen mud-walled huts and small gardens cut out of the surrounding forest. Many of the people seemed to
have nothing to do with the medical aid being offered, having come instead to talk or trade.