The Consignment (23 page)

CHAPTER 28

She was dressed African-style, her hair wrapped in a high turquoise turban, swathes of the same shimmering material were draped over her shoulder and twined around her body. She picked up a glass. “I also do not like the heat,” she said. “Like New York in August, but all the year.”

I said nothing.

She gestured to the far end of the bench. I held up my cuffed hands and she spoke to the warder. He uncuffed me, then stepped back to his place outside the arbor. I rubbed my chafed wrists. Lagundi held out the glass, and I took it and drank the cold water. On the higher ground behind her, obscured by the arbor and the foliage, I glimpsed a large colonial house.

“You have not been to my country before,” she said. I poured myself another water, drank it, then set the glass down on the bench. “You have not chosen the best time,” she added, smiling.

“Did you engineer my arrest?”

“You arrived here illegally.”

“I want to see Trevanian.”

“I, also, would like to see him. Unfortunately, he is busy.”

I picked up the pitcher and swung it against the steel frame of the arbor. The pitcher shattered, the startled warder stepped forward, but when Lagundi cursed him in French, he retreated like a beaten dog. I dropped the pitcher handle at her feet.

“You are tired,” she said.

“I’m not tired.”

“If your cell is not comfortable—”

“If you can’t get me to Trevanian, get me to the U.S. Embassy.”

She turned aside, smiling again.

“Stop playing stupid games,” I said. “Tell me why I’m here. And while you’re at it, maybe you can tell me why you’re here too.”

She rose, stepped around the pieces of broken pitcher, and left the arbor. I had a powerful sense of displacement. The last time I’d seen her she’d been wearing a designer outfit, we’d been up in her suite at the Hallam Hotel in Manhattan.

“I’m a U.S. citizen. I’m being wrongfully detained and I want to contact my embassy.”

She stopped and looked back. “Why were you on that ship?”

“Because I’m a fool.”

“The woman was a Customs officer.”

“There was a query over the shipment. I went aboard with her to check the ship’s manifest.” When Lagundi looked skeptical, I said, “Listen. The Internal Security guy who picked us up, Henri, he spoke with the captain. Go ask him.”

“The captain said you were on board illegally. Accidentally trapped?”

I tilted my head. “Who are you working for?”

“You never asked me that in New York.”

“In New York it wasn’t necessarily in my interest to know.”

“I am working with Trevanian.”

“Who’s Trevanian working for?”

There was a sound of distant gunfire, then the crump of a small explosion, maybe a grenade. Though she glanced in that direction, it really didn’t seem to worry her.

“You don’t seem too concerned,” I said.

“I’m not.” She faced me. “Are you going to be cooperative?”

“Not until I know who you’re working for.”

She considered me a moment, then turned, smoothing a fold of material over her thighs. When she went up through the garden toward the house, the warder squatted on his haunches, waving me on after her, and I went. The house was two stories high, with a sweeping stone staircase leading up from the garden to the ground floor. An armed soldier sat on the bottom step. Parts of the decorative stonework had fallen away, but the place looked pretty much as it must have when the last Belgian colonial master packed his bags and left for home, a piece of European architectural history slowly decaying beneath the African sun.

She led me up the steps, then across the wide covered porch that ran the entire breadth of the house. The room we entered was large, high-ceilinged, with a polished stone floor. The tall windows were shuttered, and in the center of the room a suite of outsized cane furniture sat beneath a slowly revolving fan. It felt cool.

I stopped beside Lagundi. She pointed to some framed photos on the wall.

“My father.”

I didn’t get it at first. I went over to the photos for a closer look.

“The big man with white hair,” she said.

There were a few big men with white hair, but only one who appeared in every photo. Standing in a lineup of suited colleagues. In African dress, shaking Nelson Mandela’s hand. An official pose alongside white guys in suits, vaguely recognizable figures from the past two or three U.S. administrations. Seated beside the current Congolese President.

“Your father,” I said, and she nodded. “Lot of friends.”

“The Minister for Police is always a popular man.”

There was an involuntary spasm in my gut. My arrest. This house next door to Internal Security HQ. Thoughts tumbled, I grabbed at one of them.

“Back in New York,” I said. “That call you made from the Hallam.”

“To my father,” she confirmed, retreating out to the porch. “Are you surprised?”

Surprise did not cover it. I took another look at the photos, then went out to join her. She was seated in one of those cane chairs whose backrest flares like a peacock tail. The soldier had come up from the bottom step, he was slouching against the porch balustrade.

“You remember the final offer I made you at the Hallam?” Lagundi said, and when I nodded, she asked, “What happened?”

“You got what you wanted.”

“You never came back to me with an answer.”

“You got the materiel.”

“I think you lied to me.”

“To you? We thought we’d sold the materiel to Nigeria. Now it turns out we were dealing with the Congolese government.”

“You never believed it was going to Nigeria.”

“It was their End User Certificate.”

She brushed that aside with the contempt it probably deserved. “Why did you come to see me at the Hallam?” she asked.

I didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure what she was after.

“Had Trevanian already paid you?”

“It was confused,” I said.

“It is not possible to be confused about twelve million dollars.”

“I couldn’t get hold of Rossiter. The way you and Trevanian were behaving didn’t make it any easier for me.” I extended a hand. “Look, who’s this for? Your father? Get one of your men to drop me off at the embassy, I’ll send you a statement.”

“Did you take my offer to Rossiter?”

“Why am I being held?”

“I need to know what happened.”

“That’s not a charge.”

“You are charged with importing arms. Illegally.”

“That’s bullshit.” I pointed. “That’s pure bullshit.”

“A capital offense.”

“You imported the arms. You and Trevanian. And you just told me you did it with the full knowledge of your father. What the hell are you talking about, capital offense?”

“What happened in New York?”

“Who cares? Your weapons are here. You got what you wanted.”

There was another explosion in the distance, I turned and looked out across the garden. The flat roof of the Internal Security block jutted above the banana palms. Way beyond, several black pillars of smoke were rising. On the streets of Kinshasa, out past the invisible protective boundary that surrounded us, people were dying.

“You are nervous,” she said somewhat mockingly.

I faced her. “Where’s Trevanian?”

“I don’t know.”

I tossed my head toward the smoke pillars. I asked her if this was going on right across the country.

“Mainly here. Also in Katanga. Mbuji.”

“Mbuji-Mayi?”

She nodded and I hung my head. Where else would they be fighting? There wasn’t a damn thing in the country worth fighting over except the wealth in the ground. I had to find Brad. Get him out.

“If I tell you what you want to know, can I go?”

“If you don’t tell me, the charge against you will become official.”

“The charge is bullshit.” She didn’t respond. She didn’t have to. Finally I dropped into a cane armchair, facing her. I leaned forward, elbows on my knees. “What happened in New York.”

“Please,” she said.

So I told her. I told her about what I’d found at Rossiter’s apartment after leaving her at the Hallam, and about my suspicion that Trevanian, with or without her connivance, had stolen the bill of lading. After that, of course, I lied. Rita Durranti, I said, had informed me that she was going down to the ship, and fearing that the deal was about to collapse, I’d gone with her. “Once we got stuck in the hold, I played stupid. She knows nothing about what’s really been going on. Soon as we got out of the hold, I radioed Rossiter. He told me the deal was clean, that he’d been paid.”

“Who paid?”

“Trevanian. You.” I threw up my hands. “Your old man, for all I know. I’ve been sitting on a goddamn ship since then. That, or walking around in handcuffs. How do I know who paid? Ask Trevanian.” She regarded me closely. The huge mess of the transaction had followed me all the way to Africa. “Call Rossiter and ask him. If you want more from me, you’re out of luck. I don’t know any more.”

“If the bill of lading was stolen, Rossiter would have told the stevedores.”

“Like I said, you’ll have to call him.”

She suggested he might still be awaiting payment.

“Rossiter?” I managed a smile. “If he hadn’t been paid, he would have been here dockside with a bazooka and a lawyer when the
Sebastopol
arrived.” In truth, her suggestion had raised a sudden doubt in me. Was there a connection I hadn’t seen, something going on between Rossiter and Trevanian? An insurance scam, maybe, on the materiel? “Haplon’s been paid,” I told her firmly. “The screwups in the payment—the diamonds, all that crap—that was down to you guys. Trevanian and Greenbaum.” She studied me. I asked her, “Have you had this kind of trouble with Trevanian before?”

She thought about that, then turned her head.

“Good at his job,” I said.

“He understands guns.”

“Why’d he choose the Haplon materiel over Fettners’?” When she squinted, I said, “Fettners. The company Dimitri Spandos was with.” She looked at me, puzzled. I repeated his name, it still didn’t register, so I said, “The salesman who got shot at the Springfield fair.”

“Why didn’t Trevanian buy their weapons?” She opened her hands and shrugged as if it was none of her business. The name Fettners clearly meant nothing to her. Dimitri’s name, likewise. I was watching her eyes the whole time and I knew that she wasn’t deceiving me, she wasn’t even aware that maybe she should be deceiving me. The ground moved beneath me. She hadn’t killed Dimitri.

She called to the soldier in French. He went down the steps into the garden, then she looked at me again and I held her look. The rule of law. In my entire life that phrase has never meant to me what it meant in those few moments. Cecille Lagundi was judging me. The realization went through me like an arrow, fixing me to the chair. Unelected by any democratic authority, unappointed by any legitimate judiciary, yet she was sitting in judgment over my story about the payment and there would be no court of appeal. She hadn’t killed Dimitri, but she might yet kill me. She was the daughter of the Minister for Police and I was no one, an American arms salesman, adrift in a strange land. I did not move a muscle.

At last she rose and went to speak with the warder, who was coming up the steps. I got to my feet. My shirt, clammy with perspiration, clung to my back.

“What now?” I said.

“He will take you,” she told me over her shoulder.

“To the embassy?”

“I have told him not to handcuff you.”

“Where am I going, to the embassy?”

She spoke to the warder again. I was not going to the embassy.

“I’ve got nothing more to tell you,” I said. “There’s nothing more I know.”

She faced me. “I will have a statement prepared. If you sign it, you will be taken to your embassy.”

“Give me a pen and paper and I’ll write it now.”

“It will be prepared for you.”

I asked what the statement would say. When she smiled, I got the idea. “Okay, I don’t care what it says. When will I have it?”

She gathered up a swathe of blue material that was slipping, then pushed it back over her shoulder.

“When?” I said.

She nodded to me gracefully and disappeared inside.

CHAPTER 29

The warder took me back through the garden to the Internal Security HQ, and as I passed through the upstairs hall I took a good look around. There were uniformed guys everywhere, regular soldiers and Internal Security. Some were roughing up their manacled prisoners, others strutted around with weapons slung from their shoulders, spoiling for a fight. Apart from the dismembered AfricAid guy, I hadn’t seen one white face.

When the cell door closed behind me, I sat down with my back to the wall. She hadn’t killed Dimitri. Something wasn’t right about the payment for the Haplon materiel. There was fighting where Brad was working at Mbuji-Mayi.

“Hey, Ned. Ned, that you, man? They brung you back?”

I got up and went to the peephole just as the warder shouted and came running. He unlocked Jay’s cell and went in, swinging a wood truncheon. Jay screamed.

“Hey!” I yelled. “Leave the kid alone!” I banged the door with the heel of my hand, helpless. “Hey, you! Over here!”

I heard the truncheon hit hard, and Jay crying “No!”

I kicked my door in fury and frustration. He hit the kid again, and I rolled around, my back against the door, and closed my eyes. Jay was wailing now, the blows thudding into him like the warder was banging on a drum. One hit on the wrong place, on his head or neck, and the kid was dead. I listened to it and listened to it, then I suddenly spun around and shouted through the peephole, “Lagundi! Lagundi!”

Jay went on wailing, I shouted the name again, and the beating slowed, then stopped. I looked through the peephole. The warder came to Jay’s door, perspiring. He stared across at me, his eyes bloodshot with exertion.

“That’s right, you bastard! You hit him once more, Cecille Lagundi’s going to hear about it. And her father. Old man Lagundi. Papa Lagundi.”

The warder pointed the truncheon at me and shouted in French. He didn’t understand what I was saying, but he understood the name Lagundi. The name rattled him. He’d seen me with Cecille. He knew I had some kind of access.

“Papa Lagundi! You don’t like that, do you, you cowardly prick. Papa Lagundi!”

He shouted at me again, took a last swipe at Jay, then exited the cell and relocked the door.

“Minister for Police,” I called. “He’d squash you like a bug.” He waved his truncheon, I shouted, “Papa Lagundi!” and he whacked the truncheon against my cell door and retreated along the passage to his office.

“Jay!” I called across. There was no answer, so after a few moments I called again. “Jay! He’s gone. You okay?” Still no answer. I didn’t know if he was hurt bad, or just too frightened to speak. “He won’t hit you again,” I said. “But best you stay quiet now, anyway. When I get out, I’ll give your details to the embassy. Just hang in there.” No face appeared at his peephole. There was absolute silence from his cell. “Hang in there,” I said, then I stepped back and slumped down by the wall.

Time passed slowly. Prisoners were led to their cells past my door and others were taken away, the basement cells seemed to be a holding area, a staging post on the way to another part of the compound where the full nightmare occurred.

Minutes turned to hours. The first warder went off duty. His place was taken by an older and bigger man who took regular tours of inspection along the passage, looking in at the peepholes. I asked this second warder for water, I mimed a drinking action, and he went away and brought back a canteen. I had to hold out a cupped hand to catch the water as he poured it through the peephole. When I’d had my fill, I gestured for him to give some to Jay, who I still hadn’t seen or heard since his beating. The warder corked the canteen and went back to his room.

As time went on, it got harder to believe that Rita had reached the embassy, or that Lagundi was going to collect my signature then let me go free. Other grim possibilities went through my mind like poisoned darts, sapping my energy, wearing me down.

At times I lay on the concrete floor, I even slept for a while, but the sleep was shallow, broken by the low moans of prisoners and keys turning in locks. Mostly I just sat up and stared at the wall. From time to time I got to my feet and walked around the cell, pausing by the door to look out through the peephole.

Nobody threatened me. No soldiers appeared at my door with electric cattle prods. No one waved a machete in my face. But I’d seen enough by then to imagine all that, and I did imagine it, and more. In my worst moments I imagined Brad. Brad at the Dujanka mine, stumbling over rocks toward me, eyes rolling, both his arms severed, lying behind him on the ground.

After an eternity my cell door opened. As I got up, some prisoner was shoved in. He collapsed on the floor, then the door closed and the lock turned. I went to the peephole. Jay’s cell door was open, and five manacled prisoners were being shoved in there.

“Jay!” No answer. The guy on my floor was moaning. “Jay!” I called through the peephole. “You okay?”

“I’m fuckin’ dyin’.” The guy on my floor rolled over, I turned and looked at him. Jay? His right eye was swollen shut, and there was a deep cut on his cheek. He held a hand to his ribs, clearly in pain, and examined me with his left eye. “I’m fuckin’ dyin’, man.”

I knelt by him. When I lifted his arm off his chest, he winced, then I opened his shirt. There were three livid welts across his chest and one across his stomach. None were bleeding.

“Where’s it hurt worst?”

His hand went to the lowest welt on his rib cage, then he couldn’t help it, tears rolled down his cheeks. “Shit, man. Shit.”

“You bringing up any blood?”

He shook his head.

“Passing blood?” I said, and he shook his head again. I pressed gently on his top rib, then on down. When I pressed on the second-to-last rib, his head jerked up, he opened his mouth in silent agony.

“It’s okay.” I put my hand behind his head, eased it back to the floor. “Anywhere else bad?”

“Everywhere.”

“But that’s the worst.”

He made a face and tipped his head a fraction, yes. I sat back on my haunches, and he put a hand over his eyes and wiped the tears. “You a doctor?”

“No.”

“I don’t wanna die in this fuckin’ place.”

“You’ve busted a rib. You’re not going to die.”

He turned his one good eye on me, mistrustful yet desperate to believe. It was a look I’d seen on the face of every new black recruit I’d dealt with in the Army. This time, against the evidence of his entire life, a bruised hope that the white world might not let him down. I squeezed his shoulder, then went to the peephole and hollered for water until it came.

Jay was sleeping when the statement arrived. The warder opened the door, dropped the stapled pages, and a pen, on the floor, then withdrew. I scrambled to my feet and looked out the peephole but there was no one in the passage.

“Cecille!” I called. “Cecille Lagundi! I know you’re there.”

Nobody answered. Jay twitched in his sleep then lay still.

I picked up the stapled paper. Six pages, in English. A three-page statement in duplicate, each copy with my name typed in bold at the end and two blank spaces for me to sign. I sat down by the wall and read the damn thing.

It was my account, supposedly, of the twists and turns the Haplon deal had taken in New York. I read it once, then after some consideration, read it again. The blend of fact and fiction was seamless, I read it a third time before I could fully unravel the strands. When I’d done that, I sat down on the bare, cold concrete and thought it over. It took me a good few minutes to figure it out. When I did, I hung my head. Then I got up and went to the peephole. “Cecille?” I didn’t raise my voice. “Cecille, I won’t be signing this before I speak to you. So do you want to speak to me now, or do you want to wait?”

Then I waited. At last she came into my line of sight, wearing a different outfit than she’d had on in the garden. African-style again, but bright red, with a white shawl. Was it nighttime?

“I’m not going to speak to you through this goddamn door.”

The warder opened the door at her signal, she came and stood in the open doorway. We faced each other across the cell. She glanced at Jay, curled in sleep on the floor, then back to me. I held up the statement.

“This isn’t accurate.”

“Oh?”

“It isn’t meant to be accurate, is it?”

“You said you would sign it.”

“Things like when you sat in my car and told me Greenbaum and Trevanian were cooking up a private side deal. You told me they were ripping you off.” I flicked the statement. “Here it’s the other way around, you’re not telling me, I’m telling you. That’s not how it happened.”

“Sign it, then you can go.”

“And the first time at the bank. According to this statement, Trevanian never showed up. How I remember it is, it was you who never showed up.” She stared at my pointing finger. “You know what I think?”

“I don’t care what you think, Mr. Rourke.”

“I think you’re stitching Trevanian up. I think you’re making it look like he was the one screwing things up in New York. Like he was trying to hang on to the diamonds. That story you spun me about Greenbaum and Trevanian doing a private deal, that was bullshit. Just like this.” I slapped the statement.

“Are you going to sign it?”

“There’s only one reason I can figure you’d want to do all that. Maybe Trevanian wanted to hang on to the diamonds, but if he did, he wasn’t the only one, was he, Cecille? You wanted those diamonds too. You personally.”

She spoke to the warder over her shoulder, he stepped around her.

“Knocking me around isn’t going to do it,” I said. “Unless that’s how you get your kicks, Cecille, you’ll be wasting your time.”

“You will get nothing.”

I took a moment with that. “You think I want to be cut in? You honestly think I’m that stupid?”

“I think you want to get out of here.”

“What I want is to know why I’m here in the first place. I’ve been shipped halfway around the world, then dropped into a Congolese jail cell, for chrissake. Now you’re telling me to put my signature to a pack of goddamn lies.”

Her eyelids drooped, her anger poorly concealed by the feigned show of boredom.

“This statement’s for the Congolese government,” I said. “That’s how I read it. It’s something for your father to show the President. You and your father have got the country’s diamonds in a strongbox in New York. The Congolese government’s lost them, and they’ve had to pay twelve million dollars to Haplon. When the guns stop firing, you’re going to point the finger at Trevanian. He’s your scapegoat. You’ll say he took the diamonds. And this”—I flicked the statement—“this is the independent corroboration for your story.” We looked at each other. Then she turned sharply on her heel. “Wait,” I said, and she stopped and looked back.

I had hit the target. Maybe not the bull’s-eye, but close enough to shake her, and pushing her further wasn’t going to help my cause. I stooped and picked up the pen. I knew that if I signed it, she still might decide it was safer to have me executed on the arms importation charge than to let me go free. But if I didn’t sign, I certainly wouldn’t get out, and if I didn’t get out, then Brad was on his own in Mbuji-Mayi.

I rested the statement on my knee, and signed.