Rogue's March (14 page)

Reddish refused. “She's sick,” he told the captain. He examined her face in his flashlight beam, reconsidered, and waved them on angrily. Six dead
jeunesse
lay along the road beyond the truck, lying in a row, their green tunics pulled over their faces, revealing their naked rib cages. A kerosene lantern blazed at the foot of a compound wall behind them, where a small crowd of Africans had gathered, watching them silently. A few small boys darted along the ditches, some still wearing the paper hats passed out by a local beer company at the stadium during the soccer games. More lay scattered along the road.

He turned off into the back lanes to avoid those roadblocks where groups of
jeunesse
were under siege, but when he finally reached the debouchment into the commercial section he found that blocked off too. The paras were permitting Europeans to depart on foot, most of them Portuguese merchants and garage owners, but without their vehicles. The potholed road was filled with abandoned cars and trucks. He turned around and drove south, following the road toward Yvon Kadima's villa. The rear gate entered into Malunga, but the front entrance faced the arc-lit boulevard of the commercial section. He found the narrow lane and drove back to the screen of shrubbery. The night guard's fire burned in the cinder drive beyond the sagging gate shackled with a heavy chain.

“
Patron, azali awa
?” Reddish called, standing at the gate, asking if Kadima had returned. The old sentinel moved to the gate, peering suspiciously through the palings. He recognized him and unshackled the chain.

“
Ehhh. Kufi.
” Reddish heard him sigh grievously. “
Kufi.
”

“Dead?”

“
Kufi.
” The lips barely moved.

Many of Yvon Kadima's tribal kinsmen had taken refuge in his compound from Malunga, fearing the worst. They moved between the porch of the decaying old villa under the trees and the surrounding outbuildings; more gathered in the brightly lit rooms inside, where Kadima's body lay. Reddish found Kadima's chauffeur in the rear salon helping Mrs. Kadima's younger sister pack her bags. The room was in disarray. On the plush divan were two valises filled with clothes. A few European suits hung over a nearby chair, topped by a dusty tuxedo with satin lapels. A young African girl in a faded cotton dress brought freshly ironed dresses from the rear porch, where a shirtless African youth pushed an old charcoal iron over Mrs. Kadima's
waxes
. Two radios were playing simultaneously, one tuned to the national radio, the other to Congo-Brazzaville. On the table next to the divan were Kadima's blue-jacketed passport, his yellow shot card, a thick manila envelope, an airline ticket, and an opened bottle of Courvoisier.

The chauffeur, his eyes still red, told Reddish that a para jeep had arrived shortly after four, just as Kadima was about to leave for the airport. The para captain had insisted Kadima accompany him to the Bakole police camp to talk to the police. Kadima had argued with the captain in the drive, refusing to accompany him. The captain had shot him and sped off.

“Just shot him—without warning?”

The chauffeur nodded miserably, holding his hands to his face to describe the terrible wound.

“But why was he packing? Where was he going?”

“To Brussels—for a holiday.”

The body lay in the rear bedroom, face covered. Reddish glanced in, saw the grieving relatives gathered there in the shadows around the bed, knew there was no time, and ran back the corridor. At the top of the steps, he collided with a small African just arriving. He was a gray-haired man wearing gold-rimmed spectacles.

“Banda!” he cried, his hands out to steady him. The eyes were hidden, but as they lifted, Reddish recognized his mistake. “Sorry!” He released the man and leaped down the outside steps.

Chapter Eleven

The Frenchwoman stirred as Reddish slammed forward through the gate and out into the boulevard.

“I must go to Bois du Fleuve,” she muttered weakly, “to the Houlets'.”

“I can't get you there. There's no time. The curfew's about to begin.”

He circled the tall cenotaph in the square near the railroad station, tires shrieking. The massed flower beds were black in the moonlight. Two army trucks were unloading troopers in front of the stucco station. A block beyond, the boulevard was blocked by a third army truck, but he veered around it and sped past before the soldiers dropped to the ground.

“I'm sorry, but I've forgotten your name.”

“Bonnard. Gabrielle Bonnard.”

“Bonnard, that's right.”

A caravan of troop carriers moved toward him, dropping off squads of soldiers at the deserted intersections. The lead jeep blinked its lights as he approached. He didn't stop and a second jeep swung out from behind the first and turned on its siren.

He spun into the next side street, smashing through the improvised barricade at the same instant he saw it, lifting aside the two-by-four and capsizing the two lanterns, spilling the kerosene in a sheet of fire along the gutter. He jolted the wheel to avoid the two leaping soldiers and immediately spun the wheel again, sending the sedan hurtling into the dark alleyway parallel to the boulevard.

“You know the route?” she said, her voice coming back.

“Yeah, but it changes after dark.”

He kept to the alley for three blocks, lights out, entered an empty street and turned toward the river. The watchman came to the gate of the apartment compound, opened it, and Reddish drove down to the underground garage.

“This is your building?” she asked as she got out.

“A friend's flat. He's on leave.” He swung back the seat, dumped the burlap bags in front, and pulled away the raffia mat.

She saw the wounded man, looked at Reddish in surprise, and then back at him, her lips pursed sympathetically. “He's wounded?”

“A little. Would you get the elevator?”

“My sacks?”

“I'll bring them later.”

Stiff with his wounds and semi-conscious, Masakita was barely able to stand. Reddish carried him quickly to the elevator, held him upright inside, and unlocked the stainless steel control panel. He tripped the circuits closed, and sent the elevator creaking toward the fifth floor.

“So it is your building,” she said coolly, lifting her eyes, almost like a stranger again.

“Not the building, just the elevator,” he answered, closing the panel and locking it. She studied the wounded man silently, his face still hidden by the bloody scarf.

The apartment was airless, the air conditioners turned off. The flat was carried on the books as transit quarters, but was used sometimes as an accommodation flat, a kind of safe house. Reddish carried the wounded man into the small bedroom behind the kitchen, turned on the air conditioners, and led her to the bedroom down the hall at the rear.

“This is about as good as I can do. I'm sorry. I can take you to the embassy with me, but it's better not to be out on the streets. I can't get you to the Houlets'.”

“I understand.”

“We could make a run for the French Embassy. It's a couple of blocks away.”

“I'd prefer not to go there,” she replied, her voice as cool as the night before when she'd rebuked Armand.

“You're a guest of the Houlets'?”

“Yes.”

“You're better off here—safer too, five floors up.”

“With a wounded man in the flat?” She looked at him dubiously.

“He's an old friend.” Reddish lied. “He used to be my driver. Now he has a taxi fleet. I'm leaving and he wanted to buy my car. When I got to his garage he was bleeding like that. Maybe a fight, I don't know.”

She nodded, as if details didn't interest her. “I'm suddenly very tired,” she murmured, her eyes closing for an instant. “I think I'd like to lie down.”

“You feel sick?”

“No, I'll be all right. But I'd like to lie down.”

She went into the bedroom, closing the door, and Reddish returned to the front bedroom, where he helped Masakita remove the bloody Mao jacket. The machete wound began at his shoulder and traveled down the outside of the upper arm, curving across the white bone of his elbow.

“It should be stitched up.”

“It can be closed without stitches,” Masakita said. “There's a trick to it. The Chinese taught us how.”

Reddish lifted the table lamp to look at the scalp wound. The laceration was superficial, beginning at the hairline and ending in the brow above the right eye.

“You're Reddish, aren't you?” Masakita said. He was a small man with a thin face and wiry arms, his physical appearance usually a disappointment to those who knew him only because of the lore of the rebellions. His black face had a slightly Asiatic cast, the eyes hooded at the outer lid by a crease of skin. His enemies claimed his grandfather was Chinese, one of the laborers brought in by the Belgians at the turn of the century to help build the railroad up from the coast. The nose was small and flat. The mouth was full, the white teeth irregularly spaced.

“Reddish, that's right. Who told you?”

“Nyembo.”

“When?”

“In the wash house.… He said he'd called you … that you were coming.” He tried to lift his head but sank back, his black face leaking water to the pillow.

Reddish brought the first aid kit from the bathroom and cleaned the shoulder wound with alcohol as Masakita lay on the bed, eyes closed, his mouth twisted as the alcohol seared the raw wound. He dressed the shoulder and bandaged it crudely, as best he could.

“Nyembo has often told me of you,” Masakita said with difficulty.

Reddish ignored him, raising the lamp again to look at the scalp wound.

“He's a simple man, Nyembo, an honest man,” Masakita continued, watching Reddish's fingers the way a frightened patient watches the dentist's drill. He closed his eyes as Reddish cleaned the laceration, only opening them again as the bandage was pressed in place. “What does he make of men like us?”

“Save it.”

“For what, for when the army comes here too?”

He closed his eyes. Reddish ripped the adhesive tape from the spool, looking down at the man who'd been the most feared of the rebel leaders in the interior during the uprisings against the central government. A peasants' war, the sympathetic Belgian scholars from L'Institut National d'Etudes Politiques now wrote, the revolt of the countryside against the new class of black bourgeois civil servants and administrators who'd replaced the departing Belgians with a colonization of their own, oppressing the countryside from the capital as the metropole had once done. Masakita had been the boldest of the rebel leaders as well as the most elusive. A hapless army command invariably reported him on all fronts simultaneously—in the Kwilu, where the first outbreaks began, in Maniema, West Kasai, or far to the east at Kindu.

The army feared him, originally because of his popularity in the bush but as the rebellions had spread because of the myths their clumsiness had created, making him the legend of local folklore wherever he appeared—the man they couldn't kill, who changed shape whenever capture seemed imminent, now a serpent, now a leopard, now a wisp of smoke or a toothless old man on a stick, melting away through the thick green twilight as the futile ambushes were sprung, leaving the terrified soldiers fleeing the smoke of their own batteries.

After the rebels had run amok and begun the systematic extermination of their government prisoners, Masakita had broken with the Simba leadership and again disappeared into exile. With the help of foreign mercenaries, the rebellions were put down, the leaders executed or driven abroad. Masakita was the most legendary of those who survived. The old superstitions persisted, fed now by faulty intelligence, local paranoia, diplomatic confusion, and cold war gossip. He was reported to be in Moscow one week, Peking the next, and Cairo the third, soliciting political and financial support to resume the guerrilla war in the more remote regions of that sprawling, ramshackle collection of tribes, tongues, and ancient animosities that independence had labeled a nation. But whatever his wanderings during those years, he was again working in obscurity on the staff of the Afro-Asian Secretariat in Cairo when the President had secretly offered him amnesty and a cabinet position in his newly formed government of national reconciliation, designed to bring to an end those old tribal and political rivalries that had devastated the countryside.

Reddish had never understood why Masakita had accepted the President's offer. He knew why the offer had been made. Despite the end of the rebellions, the interior was still in turmoil; pockets of resistance remained, ready to be exploited by outside powers. The radical leadership abroad was attempting to form a government in exile with political and financial support promised by a few African progressive nations, by a few Arab radicals, and possibly the Soviet bloc; but the radical leadership abroad was in disarray. Twice the leaders of the two opposing factions had met with Masakita in Cairo, offering to unite under his leadership, twice he refused.

After the President had learned that a third appeal would be made to Masakita, he made his own, sending word secretly to Masakita that he would form a new regime of national reconciliation if Masakita would return to take a cabinet post. To Reddish's astonishment, Masakita had accepted. The radicals in exile were outflanked, a few followed Masakita home, and the clandestine plans for a government-in-exile collapsed.

Reddish hadn't understood Masakita's acquiescence then and he didn't understand it now, a man as elusive to him as he'd once been to the army, which feared him as much as ever.

“I've heard of you,” Masakita muttered, his eyes flickering open, “but not just from Nyembo.”

“Bloody good,” Reddish said. “That'll make it simple then, won't it?” He saw only confusion and pain in the dark face.