Rogue's March (32 page)

He returned to his villa, fixed a drink, and sat in the study, tired, fed up, and lonely. The telephone awoke him three hours later, the drink barely touched on the table in front of the sofa.

“I'm sorry, Mr. Reddish,” the commo watch officer said, “but I thought I'd better give you a call, just in case. We just got it over the ticker. Agence France Presse, Reuters, and AP put it on the wires about five minutes ago.”

“It's all right. Put what on the wires?”

“The executions. They shot the President and six cabinet ministers at zero hours thirty, local, something called the National Revolutionary Court. AFP says the executions took place at the old para camp prison. They also executed fourteen mercenaries for crimes against the people, quote unquote. Do you think I should call the duty officer or do you want to tell the ambassador and Becker yourself?”

Chapter Eight

“Tell me about Lowenthal,” Cecil asked slyly, nibbling a biscuit. “Is he really the Francophile he appears to be?”

“He's nice, actually,” Carol Browning replied.

It hadn't occurred to Cecil that “Francophile” might require definition; he decided to let it pass. He sat propped up in bed, pillows at his back, his nakedness half covered by a spread. She sat on the edge of the bed, hair in disarray, wearing only his wife's dressing gown, a size too large for her. Cecil was helping himself to the biscuits and cheese they'd brought from the kitchen to the upstairs guest room an hour earlier. Two glasses and a bottle of claret sat on the bedside tray with the plate of biscuits.

“Nice? That's a rather bland word, isn't it? Something of a nit, I should say.”

“Besides, he's very intelligent, despite what people say.”

“Oh, I'm quite sure.” He could only guess at what she meant by intelligence, since hers, he'd discovered, seemed almost nonexistent. Cognition was, for her, largely intuitive and tactile, but he had no idea what these signals meant to her as they reached the cerebrum. “What about the colonel, Colonel What's-his-name, the little chap with the buttonlike eyes?”

“Colonel Selvey? He's all right, but he isn't very smart. Diplomatic, I mean.”

“He seems quite pleasant. My wife is quite fond of him, fancies that most Americans should speak that way. He's from the South, isn't he? What about Reddish? Curious man, don't you think? Actually, I've never had much of a conversation with him. Never seems to have much to say.” He cut a slice of Camembert to decorate a biscuit. “Tell me, is it Reddish or Haversham. Or Becker?”

“What?”

“The CIA majordomo. The man in charge.”

“We really shouldn't talk about these things.”

“Really? Not talk about them? Don't be silly. Of course we should talk about them. We have no secrets now, do we? How does Walt get on with him?”

“With who?”

“Reddish. Weren't we talking about Reddish?”

“I don't know.”

“Sees quite a lot of him, does he?”

“No, not at all. Almost never.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I'm sure.”

Cecil brushed the crumbs from his fingers and moved the tray aside. “Really. Then it must be Haversham or Becker.”

“Do we
have
to talk about these things.” She sighed impatiently and let the robe slip from her shoulders.

Cecil looked the other way. “The Camembert is a little dry, don't you think?”

She leaned forward and turned off the bed lamp. Cecil immediately reached down to switch on the radio on the lower shelf of the bedside table.

Her shadow loomed over him. “Why do you always want the radio on?” she demanded from the darkness.

“But I thought you liked it.”

“You're trying to shut me out!”

“Oh, but I'm not at all. It's soothing. Don't you think it soothing?”

“It's awful. It's like a dentist's office.”

“Really? A dentist's office?” His head lifted. Another scrap of Americana. “American dentists have music in their surgery? How extraordinary? You mean to lull one to sleep. Is that how they do it?”

“You want me to go.” Her voice had an edge to it.

“Not at all. Besides, you couldn't possibly go. The curfew has begun. No, on the contrary, I quite enjoy having you here.”

“But not physically. You just want to gossip.”

“My dear, in the physical sense, as you put it, we've been sharing this bed since the nine o'clock BBC. I'm fifteen years older. You must make allowances.”

Furiously, she ripped off the spread.

“I wonder what poor Federov is doing,” he muttered, trying to ignore her as he groped in the darkness for the spread, sitting up. “He was always out of it, you know.” His fingers touched her naked midriff, as soft as velvet. “Sorry. It must have been quite humiliating for him, posted here with absolutely nothing to do.”

“Don't you ever stop talking shop?” He heard her angry breathing.

“Is that what you think? Oh, but you mustn't. I'm not at all as serious as some make me out to be.” Her naiveté, deliberately cultivated, seemed to him not so much innocence as a grosser form of stupidity. He imagined that she was in love with him and he found that touching. He was moved not to dalliance so much as gallantry, treating her with a tenderness which might awaken a spoiled sensual child to finer things. “Do you hear that?” he now asked.

“What?” The phone had rung three times since they'd climbed the dark stairs for the guest bedroom. They'd let it ring without answering.

“The radio. It's Brahms, isn't it? The variation on Haydn?” He lay back. The music filled him with peace.

She leaned across him, her soft, fragrant body crushing his, and snapped off the radio.

The room was dark and silent. Still she lay across him, obliterating all else with her sheer physical presence. He didn't want to offend her, but he was physically exhausted. He didn't have the strength to begin. At last she moved and touched him where he wasn't accustomed to being touched; he waited, like a passer-by on a beach watching a drowned man being revived. Then, from deep in the ashes, that old flicker of heroism lifted once again. As she moved to position herself, the blood throbbed in his ears, the tide lifted, and he knew that one simply couldn't help loving a woman like that, stupid or not, just as some old soldiers loved war, a gross, sensual, fickle, brutal woman too for all the heroism she occasionally inspired.

Ambassador Federov, like Reddish, had been awakened with the news of the executions. An old cardigan pulled over his pajama top, he sat at this desk on the fourth floor of the Soviet mission, his short fingers tracing out the lines of the teletyped message in front of him, just brought from the
rezidentura
teletype, his hair still tousled from sleep.

“Shot.
Shot
! Still more? How many? Six?
Fourteen
? By whose authority?”

Klimov sat fully dressed in the deskside chair. Slightly behind him stood Ryabkin, the Tass correspondent, wearing trousers and a pajama top.

“The Revolutionary Court,” said Klimov. His blond hair was combed back over his skull, his blue eyes pale, the jaw muscles standing out as powerfully as biceps. Federov looked up quickly to catch the irony in his face, but it was the Tass man's tired face that drew his attention.

“All right. Yes, go back to bed—go on. Button your trousers too, or your wife will think something else of these midnight messages. We've had enough scandal here. Thank you, yes. We can manage now. Go back to bed.”

Ryabkin nodded gratefully and backed out, shutting the door behind him.

“You know them, the six?” Federov asked, still astonished.

“The worst, the most corrupt—like the President.”

“So they did it, just as he told you they would,” Federov marveled, “just as he predicted.” His eyes were still fastened to the press report as his right hand fumbled with the middle drawer of the desk. He paused, hand groping inside the drawer, then brought out a bottle of brandy, which he passed to Klimov. “
Shot
them—just like that? Something called the Revolutionary Court? Did he predict that too?”

“He simply said it would be done.” Klimov rose to fetch the tumblers from the glass-fronted cabinet against the opposite wall. “He said six would be executed with the President.”

“Six? Why six? Because they were the most corrupt?”

“He said there would be six. But the numbers don't matter. He told us it would be done, and so it was. ‘Properly,' he said. ‘In ways Moscow would understand.'”

Federov's skepticism returned. “So just like that, a revolutionary court materializes out of thin air, like this magician himself, and shoots the worst of them. In the worst of prisons. Materializes like this mysterious Revolutionary Military Council, like this phantom Colonel N'Sika, of whom nothing is known! No, no, Aleksandr, he's a charlatan, this man of yours—a circus performer. Just tricks, nothing else. So he pretends Colonel N'Sika and these others are his revolutionaries. All right. So let him pretend. But nothing will come of it—nothing at all. So six men are shot, six ministers. The President was executed too. So what does it mean? What does he want now? Money?”

“Patience, that's all he asks. To be patient, not to be concerned about the guns, they will show tomorrow. He said that it will be managed, managed in ways we will support.”

“And what does that mean?”

“After the executions, there will be no turning back. N'Sika will make that clear tomorrow. Disengagement with the Belgians and the others will take time. Patience is what he is asking.”

“Patience?” Federov leaned forward scornfully. “Patience? What does he know of patience? To shoot six or seven corrupt politicians is nothing at all! He's playing with words, this man of yours. And what is it that N'Sika will say tomorrow? What can he say? Nothing at all!”

“N'Sika will nationalize the economy, the extractive industries first, then the waterways and railroads.”

Federov laughed. “And did he tell you who will manage this new revolutionary economy? The Bulgarians? The North Koreans? Are trained cadres going to materialize out of thin air too, like this phantom Revolutionary Court? The man is a charlatan, admit it! Disengage? Disengage from what? Who'll buy the copper, eh? He's a fool!”

“He says they'll need help, managing the economy. N'Sika will send for you.”

“N'Sika will send for me and then it will all come easily, eh, this new revolution.”

“He said there will be a few problems,” Klimov admitted. “‘African problems,' he said. But after these problems are disposed of, the revolution will follow its own course.”

“What African problems?”

“Some council members are weak. There's the Belgian, de Vaux, but N'Sika will handle them in his own way.”

“So he speaks for N'Sika?”

“N'Sika knows he's been in contact with us,” Klimov said.

Federov smiled. “So you're tempted, is that it? You're tempted to believe this liar and hypocrite?” He left his desk to open the shades at the rear window, where dawn had begun to show in the eastern sky. “So he tempts you, does he? You need more activity, that's all—more to do, like all of us. Shut up like this, day after day, boredom makes us stupid, tempts us with imaginary excitement. It's the tedium. Like the code clerks upstairs. Shut up all day with their machines, they're like monks cloistered inside, pretending they talk only to Moscow or to God. No wonder the prophets' imaginations were so lively. Men in prison show the same disorders. When I was in the Urals, it was that way too—cut off from everything else. So what shall we do?” He smiled ambiguously. “Shall we pave the tennis courts, put a duckpin court in the basement, or give this little charlatan a few rubles, pretending that the hour of our deliverance is at hand?”

Within the confines of the small Soviet mission—his cramped office, and the shabby living quarters where he dined alone not because he despised the comforts the Western envoys enjoyed but because he couldn't reciprocate their invitations in a style that would do credit to Moscow—Federov's tone was often one of self-mockery. Admitted to his tiny little flat, smelling of cabbage and garlic from the Armenian's rooms across the hall, how could one take seriously either his ministry or that of Moscow's imperial city.

In his self-effacement, Federov would never substitute his ambitions for Moscow's, but Moscow was far away on that gray African morning. Watching him as he plodded back and forth across the worn carpet, Klimov suspected he was also tempted.

Chapter Nine

The African youth sat sleepily at the dirty wooden table, his dry mouth foul with sleep, his long black arms folded across its grimy surface, warm with morning sunshine. The closed courtyard was bright beyond the open window. He could smell the cooking charcoal from the morning fires, hear the chattering women in the compound yard and the sound of the faucet filling the pots and jugs from the pipe in the center of the lot. His room was small and dark, with unplastered concrete-block walls and a hinged wooden window opposite the door to the passageway. A wooden cot covered by a straw-filled pallet lay in one corner. Two folding wooden chairs stolen from an open-air bar leaned against the wall. A tin lantern stood on the wooden stool next to the bed. The concrete floor was littered with flattened cigarette butts; more filled the sardine can on the table next to the enamel bowl crusted with manioc from yesterday's meal.

He tried to forget his hunger and concentrate on the dog-eared paperback pressed open by his folded arms. On the wooden shelf above the window were a dozen more paperbacks. On the wall over the cot were a few yellowing newspaper clippings torn from the Sunday soccer supplement, one of which showed him standing with his
cité
teammates at the stadium after they'd won the President's trophy. Next to the clippings were pictures of Pelé, Che, Nkrumah, Mao, and Patrice Lumumba. Bright light filtered through the incomplete construction at the top of the wall, where the tin roof and wooden beams atop the concrete block shell were without a fascia.