Rogue's March (17 page)

“Those days are gone,” Lowenthal replied from the darkness. “These are the days of coalition politics, consensus, nation-building.”

“With ten political parties paralyzing this country? That's coalition politics? What the shit's wrong with you, Lowenthal?” Selvey demanded, his drawl cracked in exasperation. “What books do you goddamn city boys read, anyway? They didn't get the goddamned defense appropriation out of the cabinet until the army threatened to mutiny in the south! The staff up at GHQ hadn't been paid in six weeks! No wonder the old bird is dead on his feet!”

Selvey turned up the sedan radio. “
Citoyens, citoyens
!” the President pleaded. “
C'est votre président! Déposez vos armes
!”

The car turned away from the river. From the radio receiver on the floor, Reddish heard voices replace the static of the embassy communications net. A young Marine was talking carelessly to someone nearby, the circuit left open in the confusion: “Yeah, they're on the way back, keep an eye out at the gate. Squirrel Balls and Gomer too. Tell Gunny. Charlie Chan's with them. He didn't stay—”

Lowenthal turned. “What are they saying?”

“That we're on the way back,” Reddish answered wearily, turning down the volume. “Becker must have called in from the residence.”

Chapter Thirteen

Ambassador Federov stood on the roof of the Soviet Embassy, a pair of binoculars to his eyes as he scanned the ribbons of fire dancing along the horizon to the south, beyond the commercial district. The rattle of small-arms fire had grown fainter. At his side was Klimov, his counselor but also the KGB
rezident
, who carried a portable radio tuned to the national station. The President's voice had been replaced by band music.

The two Russians had been drawn aloft by a Bulgarian report that the Belgian Embassy had been set ablaze by the rebels. If true, both men had seriously miscalculated the street disorders in the capital, and they too might be swept up in the anarchy, not a prospect they welcomed.

Below them, the embassy gates were locked and chained, the barrier reinforced from within by the three oldest embassy Volgas, driven parallel to the gate and left there. The shutters on the first two floors had been drawn closed, the ground-floor doors locked, and the small embassy staff told to stay off the balconies and away from the windows.

But the Bulgarian report was false. From the top of the building, the lights of the Belgian Embassy showed clear and distinct over the treetops, the vessel of Western interests, riding serenely intact, no flames in its vicinity, no gunfire in that part of the city at all. Klimov pointed off over the rooftops toward a building partially ablaze on the fringes of Malunga, an old ramshackle Portuguese-owned hotel where government ministers and politicians entertained their mistresses. It lay along the line of sight looking north from the windows of the Bulgarian commercial attaché, who'd telephoned in the report to Markov, the young cultural attaché.

“Probably Markov will be disappointed,” Klimov said dryly from the shadows. Markov had been convinced the news was true.

“Just confused,” Federov replied, lifting his binoculars again, “like the Cuban.”

Before the Volgas had been driven behind the embassy gate, a frightened Cuban had scrambled over the fence to take refuge, pulling free from the local policeman who'd tried to detain him. He was now downstairs in the canteen with others from the embassy staff, listening to the national radio. When Federov had first learned of the Cuban's presence, he'd feared that the Cubans from across the river were somehow involved with the
jeunesse
rioting in the capital. Like his colleague Ambassador Priapkin in Brazzaville, Federov had little use for the Cubans. The Cuban military and guerrilla advisers to the Brazzaville Défense Civile were swaggering Marxist buccaneers from the Caribbean, opportunists from the left who were greedy for new romantic successes, like Che, and who threatened to drag the Russians into their hotheaded brothel brawls. The blackest of them were also racists, claiming that their African blood somehow gave them a superior insight into Africa's dialectical problems.

Federov's quickest contact with Priapkin across the river in Brazzaville was the sideband radio which was seldom used because the frequencies were monitored. He used it that afternoon, but Priapkin was in the interior. Klimov contacted his KGB colleague instead and was assured that Federov had nothing to fear: “Our warm-blooded friends are quiet this afternoon, even if the disinformation agents are at work with their lies. The Cuban protocol is being honored to the letter.”

Federov was thus persuaded that the recent protocol of understanding initiated in Moscow and reluctantly agreed to by Havana was still intact. The top-secret protocol restricted Cuban activities in the region to cadre formation in Brazzaville, nothing more. Interrogation of the Cuban seemed to confirm it. The Cuban who'd sought refuge in the embassy was an X-ray technician from the Cuban medical clinic in Brazzaville. A confused, frightened little man, oblivious of the politics of the region, he'd foolishly accompanied a group of Brazza youths to the local stadium for the soccer game, borrowing a Brazzaville identity card for the visit. Returning to the ferry after the match, he found the port closed and the Brazzaville spectators being rounded up by the army. He'd slipped away, asked directions to the Soviet mission, and climbed over the side wall.

With Cuban involvement repudiated and the Belgian Embassy intact on the horizon, Federov and Klimov remained on the roof, spectators at events they had no part of, kept aloft by the night breeze and the bright moonlight on the river.

Despite what their Western diplomatic colleagues whispered of the two, if either of the Russians had an advantage over other diplomats, it was a simple one, stronger in its simplicity than the dogma both lived by or the conspiracies others credited to them: they knew what they believed. What they believed at this hour was that a military coup d'etat was taking place, its leadership that of colonels and majors, probably Western-endorsed, if not planned, provoked by the paralysis of an inept, corrupt civilian regime. The workers party in Malunga was resisting it, like the police, but the opposition would soon be swept away.

Federov wasn't involved in the anarchy, didn't welcome it, and had had no warning that it would occur. True, Klimov had heard some bizarre prophecies from an African official and informant supposedly under his control, but they put as little stock in his confused mutterings as they did his outrageous plea that for $500,000 he could ensure, for Moscow, “desirable results.” “Results of what?” Klimov had insisted. His agent refused to be specific.

“It would be just as easy to buy the President for this half-million dollars,” Federov had told Klimov, “and then, what would you have? What you have now, a nation headed for disaster.”

Regardless of the ideological claims of some members of the so-called workers party, Federov had little sympathy for the
jeunesse
rabble of Malunga. If they'd now gotten guns, so much worse for them. They would be smashed, quickly and brutally, a fate some deserved, especially the hotheads and opportunists, whose disappearance would make the disciplined work of cadre formation that much easier. But the majority would remain confused and misguided for some time to come, as young Markov had been about the destruction of the Belgian Embassy.

As cultural attaché, Markov maintained discreet contact with students, so-called intellectuals, and the more progressive politicians of the capital. If Markov secretly believed those few intellectual sparks he'd nourished might take flame this dark night to deliver a unified nation intact to the future it deserved, Federov knew with the same dispassion that told him this was a military coup how deeply deceived he was. He sometimes met with Markov's students, most recently at a small reception given by the minister of education for ten university students whom the embassy had been permitted to give scholarships to the Komsomol Center School in Moscow. The ministry had delayed its consent for over a year, but had finally acceded on the President's instruction—out of pique, Federov had learned, at the reduction of the US AID educational grant. But even then, official annoyance wasn't so great that the ministry had paid for the food and drink at the reception. Federov had been billed for them.

Ten scholarships would be useful, but only a few would survive the school in Moscow. Others were also eager to go to Russian universities, just as they were equally willing to go to Brussels, Paris, or Geneva, not for ideological reasons but for subjective ones. Whatever their puffed-up professional ambitions, most were rabble, crowding the Russian cultural center as they crowded the French or American, eager for free films, free books, free lectures, and free educations, smelling of hunger, cramped quarters, foul beds, and dog pee. Federov knew what they were. They were rootless, self-deceived young men who hadn't yet understood their destinies. They wolfed down the fattest scraps of Marx and Lenin like starving street dogs, but left the hardest gristle on the bone. They had no teeth to find the marrow. Weak with hunger, self-pity, and self-indulgent sentimentality, how could they? Few would understand their fates during their lifetimes; most would carry their misery to their graves.

He searched nevertheless for those who would serve without self-delusion or self-pity, as he had served, but he'd identified only a few. Pierre Masakita might be one, but he was too singular. He was also a racist, and for that reason too a man whose time would never come.

In the
rezidentura
section was a dossier on Masakita, prepared as a result of his visits to the USSR. His most recent visit had taken place after he'd fallen out with the rebel leadership during the rebellions and gone into exile, resuming his old position in Cairo on the staff of the Afro-Asian Secretariat. He'd visited Russia this second time to examine the situation of African students granted scholarships under the aegis of the Secretariat. He'd visited Moscow and Frunze, in Kirghiz. He'd returned to Cairo after a month and submitted a report to the secretary general recommending that only engineers, scientists, and medical students be nominated for Soviet scholarships. A staff member had given a copy to the Soviet cultural attaché in Cairo, who'd found it offensive.

According to the report, the Soviet Union had depressed Masakita, who'd found most African students unhappy, a few despondent enough to attempt suicide. He'd argued that engineers and medical school candidates fared best in the Russian environment, their discipline self-imposed. The social science students struck him as hypocritical, but then hypocrisy was an asset in professing a faith in which one didn't believe. The simple-hearted and the idealistic fared worst of all, the former because of their simplicity, the latter because they found themselves despising the Russians as much as their former colonizers and thus had reached an emotional cul-de-sac confronting their own self-hatred.

The Russian attaché had had a confrontation with Masakita in the latter's office.

“You'd exploit our sciences but not our social sciences,” the Russian had argued. “It's something we can't agree to. It's the one that built the other.”

“It will reduce the health problems.”

“You gathered statistics?”

“I talked with the students.”

“You're a psychologist then, a psychiatrist?”

“No. I faced the same problems.”

“How? As what? Not as a psychologist. How can you speak?”

“No,” Masakita had replied, “as an African in a white man's civilization.”

So Masakita was a racist, incapable of rigorous objectivity. Useful perhaps, but not dependable.

“Has the firing died down or am I imagining it?” Klimov asked, turning.

“I believe it's quieter now, yes.”

Federov lifted the binoculars away from the river and toward Malunga. A pity about the bloodshed in the city, he agreed, but even victims, innocent ones at that, had their role. He believed in justice even more passionately than Markov and knew it was being denied. But injustice aroused in him neither indignation nor bitterness, only dedication and discipline. He had only contempt for those who savored the self-proclaiming virtue of their own compassion—“the smell of decadent roses,” his Armenian counselor would say, playing Armenian folk tunes on his concertina; “crocodile tears,” Klimov, a less sentimental fellow, put it.

Federov looked without despair at the present because he recognized the future. Justice and history were what he believed in, not poetry or pity. Patience was what he practiced. Impatience was heresy to him. The rootless rebels of Malunga, like the Cubans, were heretics who would postpone the future by mindlessly smashing the present. Order was what was needed, even a cruel one, like that now being imposed by a brutal army which served the same destiny Federov served.

An army truck rattled along the silent street below, and Federov looked down from the roof's edge. The truck hurtled on. The curb opposite the entrance was deserted, the policeman gone. Had he been frightened away or withdrawn?

“Probably we'd better go down,” he suggested.

“There may be some news,” Klimov agreed.

But Federov remained at the roof's edge, binoculars lifted again, this time in the direction of the old Belgian residential section along the river where most of the Western ambassadors had their residences.

Like the Cubans, they debased his beliefs. Through their hirelings in the local press, they accused him of fomenting sedition and subversion; yet if there were guns on the street this night, it was because the Western ambassadors had sanctioned them. A recent article in
Le Matin
had identified the Moscow Komsomol School as a “spy center” where KGB officers “like the current Soviet Ambassador” sent their “stooges” for training. There were such schools, but Federov sent no students there, and he wasn't a KGB officer. He was a diplomat, despite what many of his colleagues believed. He saw the suspicion in their faces and heard it in their innuendoes: they saw him as a sour, evil little man, practicing deceit. Cruelty and ignorance he could ignore, but these lies enraged him, not merely because they were false, but because they were malignly perverse, denying all that gave meaning to his career. He was a silent witness to the truths that events disclosed, not their satanic mechanic.