Rogue's March (3 page)

“I don't know that I disagree,” Federov replied politely.

“Oh, but you must disagree,” the Pakistani chided, “otherwise what would Moscow say?” His brown eyes darted toward Reddish, inviting his complicity. “Isn't it Moscow that supplies those MPLA chaps across the river with rockets?” Reddish said nothing, looking away. A provoked Soviet diplomat was one who'd stopped thinking, retreating clumsily into the trenches, dug in behind the official line, but it wasn't the thunder of cold war artillery Reddish wanted to hear. Federov was only interesting when he thought quietly aloud, as he sometimes did when he and Reddish talked together, but the Pakistani's vanity made that impossible.

Federov asked the Pakistani when his home leave commenced.

“Oh you can't slip out of it that easily, old chap.” The Pakistani laughed.

“How is the weather now in Karachi?” Abdul-Aziz asked.

“Islamabad,” the Pakistani corrected immediately.

Federov's reticence was characteristic. He had nothing to gain from cocktail party debates, unlike the Pakistani, who thrived on them. The latter's principal task was to sell used and obsolete textile machinery to the Africans while keeping open the local market to cheap Pakistani textiles made on more modern Swiss machines. Apart from that, his diplomatic triumphs were merely personal, like the silver-plated cups and cigarette cases he won playing bridge at the Belgian Club, where he could be found four nights a week.

Federov's situation was more delicate, the tactics more complex, the stakes higher. The government was hostile, the Soviet mission small, his staff curtailed, his front gates monitored, like his telephone and his small talk. If he erred, the Soviet mission would grow smaller. So in his silence Federov belonged much less to the gossip of the moment than the other diplomats; in his presence Reddish sometimes sensed a figure of more remote but no less certain future expectations, like a priest practicing among lepers.

“It will be splendid in the hills,” the Pakistani was saying, “a relief from this terrible heat, but then I'd fancy anyplace else on earth these days, wouldn't you?”

Federov offered no comment. Reddish looked with Abdul-Aziz across the terrace toward the french doors where more guests were emerging. More than a hundred were already assembled, but Reddish saw no local military officers. Federov, his glass empty, gestured to a white-coated Congolese waiter carrying a tray of drinks, but couldn't catch his eye. From ten feet away, Richter, the East German chargé, saw the motion, plunged after the waiter, and fetched him back.

“Please,” Federov insisted, embarrassed by Richter's deference, offering the lowered tray to his companions, “after you.”

Richter remained with them, tall and dour, saying nothing. A minute later the Spanish Ambassador joined them too, but by mistake. He'd seen the Pakistani but not the others, whose backs were turned; now he was trapped with Federov and Richter, two men he scrupulously avoided. He'd served in an Eastern European capital, and the experience had been a humiliating one. He made the most of his current ambush, however, shaking hands all around, slavishly following protocol. He was small and dark-haired, nattily dressed in a blue blazer and ascot, as if he'd just come from his boat on the river, where he entertained the Scandinavian secretaries and the nurses from the Swedish hospital. His energies were much more muscular than inquisitive, probably the source of his embarrassment in Bucharest, Reddish sometimes thought. A hunter and horseman, he kept an Arabian stallion stabled near the coast on a Belgian-owned beef ranch. In Karachi, he'd played polo and learned to shoot from a pony. The protocol dispensed with, he disappeared immediately, pulling the Pakistani after him. Richter's reproachful eyes, unlike Federov's, moved with them.

“What was it we were talking about?” the Russian now asked, turning to Abdul-Aziz.

The Egyptian couldn't remember. “The American in Khartoum?”

“Before that.”

Federov looked at Reddish.

“Tribes,” Reddish said, naming a small rebellious tribe living high in the hills near Lake Tanganyika on the remote eastern frontier. An article in the daily
Le Matin
a few days earlier had claimed Peking was smuggling them guns from across the lake. The story had been planted by the Republic of China's embassy press officer, but Reddish doubted that Federov knew that. The President feared Peking as much as Moscow, and the Taiwanese Embassy did what it could to keep those fears lively.

“You've been there?” Federov asked.

“No, no one's been there for years.”

“Bandits then?”

Reddish said, “The Belgians were never able to pacify them. They just left them alone, like this government.”

“And the story in
Le Matin
?”

“Very doubtful.”

Federov nodded, satisfied, the fact tucked away. Ethnology interested him; so did geography; he never asked the same question twice, an uncommon talent in a capital where the memory of small talk seldom survived from one cocktail party to the next. After a year in the country, he understood far more of its tribal divisions than the other diplomats Reddish knew. He'd once told Reddish that he'd taught geography and natural sciences in a small town in the Urals before joining the diplomatic cadres. His interest wasn't merely scholarly: internal politics made little sense without some sense of the more complex tribal declensions. He'd also admitted that he read a great deal to keep himself occupied, as genuine a concession of professional failure as Federov had ever made to anyone—the hostility of the government, separation from his wife in Moscow, and the small prison his local world had become, no larger than his tiny office, the small flat in the chancellery a few steps away, and the dusty compound yard outside, where he'd planted a small garden, trying to grow tomatoes and cucumbers. At receptions such as this one, where the Eastern European diplomats greeted him like curates receiving an archbishop, his power seemed more real; but the impression was illusory, surrendered as quickly as the trailing car from the internal security directorate picked up his limousine outside the front gate and returned with him to the Soviet mission.

“Would the Tanzanians allow them to send guns?” Abdul-Aziz asked. Federov had served in Dar es Salaam before his current posting.

The eyebrows lifted. “The Chinese? No. Never.” His voice was brusque. Reddish never talked to Federov about Peking. Soviet and Chinese troops had clashed along the Ussuri River earlier in the year and along the Sinkiang frontier a month later. Moscow's diplomatic offensive to further isolate China in Europe and the Third World was then under way, the principal priority of Soviet foreign policy.

Reddish said, “The problem is that Dar can't control its frontiers any better than this government can.”

“True, but they can control the Chinese.”

“But you're no longer in Dar to remind them.”

“But this government doesn't recognize Peking either,” Federov replied with a smile. The moon broke from behind the clouds, lighting up the sloping hillside behind the terrace. “Would you say that was my doing?” he added wryly.

“Maybe it was you that planted that story in
Le Matin,
” Reddish suggested.

Federov laughed, his eyes lifted toward the tropical moon. He'd fared as poorly at the hands of
Le Matin's
editors as Peking had. Richter said something in Russian, but Federov only shook his head. “Mr. Reddish was making a joke,” he explained in English.

“
Georgy
! Oh, Georgy!” Cecil, the British Ambassador, raised a gangling arm from a circle of diplomats nearby and came to fetch Federov. “Sorry, but we've a bit of a problem with the Bulgarian. I wonder if I might borrow your good offices.” The diplomatic corps was meeting at Monday noon, a
vin d'honneur
for a departing envoy, but the Bulgarian chargé, newly arrived, was reluctant to cooperate, since Sofia didn't maintain diplomatic relations with the envoy's nation. “I wonder if you might talk to him. I suspect he may be a bit confused.”

Left alone, Reddish moved away from the rear wall, drink in hand, searching for a familiar African face. He saw no army officers. Most of the Africans present were the young technocrats the departing Belgian had cultivated, the ex-socialists from the university who were now part of the detribalized intelligentsia, men vaguely anti-Western in everything but style and taste.

Bena Mercedes
, his friend Nyembo called them—the Mercedes clan.

He made his way around the edge of the terrace, moving toward the side entrance from which he could slip away into the darkness without being noticed.

“Not leaving already, are you, Reddish,” a sly voice called to him from the dark corner near the terrace steps. “How lucky you are. That late already?” Guy Armand, the French counselor, leaned indolently against the stone wall, ankles crossed, drink against his chest. A dark-haired woman stood with him, her face partially in shadow. Reddish joined them in passing, and Armand introduced them with a casual wave of his hand. “Madame Bonnard has just arrived from Paris, visiting the Houlets. I was pointing out the celebrities while we waited for the ambassador to leave. Were you at the Houlets' for drinks the other evening?”

“No, sorry.”

“Then you and Madame Bonnard haven't met. I was trying to identify a few cabinet ministers for her, but none seems to have come.” Armand was tall, his pale skin as dry as parchment, the color now gone from thinning hair that had once been blond. In the lapel of his jacket was a French military rosette, like the souvenir of some lost childhood. He was a faithful disciple of de Gaulle's
stratégie tous azimuts
, the enemies everywhere policy which allowed him to treat American diplomats with as much suspicion as the Russians; in his case, the practice not only promoted French grandeur but gave full rein to his talent for duplicity and conceit. “I've known such men,” the American Ambassador, Walter Bondurant, had once scrawled across a memo of conversation with Armand sent him by Simon Lowenthal, the embassy political counselor, “an exhausted, malicious mind, drinking its own hemlock. Please send me no more of these Cartesian epigrams.”

“We came early, God knows why,” Armand continued, looking sleepily at the Frenchwoman as if she might remember.

“The Houlets brought us,” she reminded him.

“Oh yes, so they did. In the absence of the cabinet, I suppose Mr. Reddish might pass for a celebrity. I should have mentioned that.”

“Oh? Is he?”

“Oh yes. He's been here longer than any of us,” Armand said dryly. “The senior American diplomat north of the Zambezi, a virtual walking encyclopedia of all that's happened here. Only he never shares it with us, you see. Quite selfish in his seniority.”

“And how long has it been,” asked Madame Bonnard. Her hair was dark and cut short. Reddish was uncomfortably aware of her perfume.

“Almost four years.”

“Four years.” Armand gave a brittle laugh, and Reddish saw her mouth stiffen, her eyes still lifted toward him. “And I believe Lowenthal told me you were leaving soon. Is that true? Lucky fellow. Where will they send you next—Africa again? You've earned your pardon, God knows. All of us have.”

“Is it so bad as that?” she asked, turning to confront Armand.

“Oh I'm absolutely the wrong person to ask. Reddish is leaving. Ask him. Going to an embassy of your own now, are you?” He put down his drink carelessly and opened his cigarette case. “An African embassy, no doubt. That's the recognition we get, isn't it? Twenty years in a brothel and they promote you by making you its mistress.” He laughed and turned away to light his cigarette. “But we must have a long talk before you go,” he resumed, suddenly serious, “just the two of us. Or maybe you'd prefer a small dinner.”

He turned to the Frenchwoman. “Diplomats tend to be much more frank with one another on the eve of their departure, much more honest. In places like this, we all tend to become very much the same, very old, very dull, very cynical. But I wouldn't say Reddish has become the oldest of us all. No—quite the contrary. He's managed to keep quite young, but then most bachelors do, don't they?”

“And honest too, I suppose,” she said calmly, “or is he like you?”

“Oh no, not like me.” Armand laughed, surprised but pleased. “Not at all like me—”

“Only because you're not a bachelor?” she said coolly, looking away across the terrace, her interest in the conversation ended.

“Armand speaks for himself,” Reddish told her. “I hope you enjoy your visit.”

“Thank you. That's very kind.”

Reddish moved down the steps and across the lawn. On the dark road outside the gate, he heard a rumble from the east and stopped to listen. It came a second time, but he ignored it, walking on toward his car. It was the sound of a thunderstorm moving out across the savannahs.

Chapter Three

Reddish didn't sleep well. It was a little after five o'clock on Sunday morning when his bedside phone woke him. He groped for the receiver on the bedside table and rolled to his side without turning on the light. The communications watch officer was calling from the embassy. “Sorry to get you up like this but I thought I'd better call. I've got something.”

Reddish sat up. “Local?”

“No, sir. Khartoum. I've got an instruction for you.”

“That's all?”

“Yes, sir. That's it.”

“Thanks. I'll be in about eight.”

He dressed in the darkness and went downstairs to put the coffeepot on while he shaved. Nothing during the night at the embassy, he thought, standing at the bathroom mirror. Banda hadn't telephoned again; neither Kadima nor Bintu had returned his calls. Even the villa seemed unnaturally silent. If there were those within the army plotting to bring down the government, the Americans would be the last to know, as much a target as a corrupt president or a paralyzed parliament. Isolation was the price most often paid for political success, and the embassy had been successful. In their success, they'd come to know everything about the country but the secret despairing faces of the opposition, those who mistrusted the Americans as much as Banda and others mistrusted the Russians and Cubans across the river.