Rogue's March (50 page)

It was midnight when he was awakened, a cold gun barrel against his ribs. The other passengers had already left the truck and were standing in the weak electric light of the corrugated metal shack where police, army, and
sûreté
officials were examining documents at the final checkpoint before the capital. The two soldiers prodded him from the truck and motioned for him to get in line with the others. Another squad of soldiers circulated beyond the shack, herding those who'd already passed through to the debarkation point down the tarmac where they would rejoin the trucks. The soldiers' voices were strong, their movements quick, their guns and uniforms well kept, not at all like the indolent, disheveled police and soldiers of Funzi and Benongo. With a vague, uneasy premonition, Masakita felt again the raw cold will of N'Sika's revolution here on its periphery, the lights of the capital a bright glow in the distance six kilometers away.

“Your face is familiar,” the
sûreté
captain said, holding the tattered identity document as he studied Masakita's face. “Where are you coming from?”

“Benongo.”

“Benongo itself or nearby?”

“Funzi.” The identity card gave his village as Funzi. It belonged to his wife's cousin. He'd intended to use it only as far as the capital, where he would talk first with Reddish before giving himself up at the para camp.

The
sûreté
captain looked at the card, nodded, and again lifted his eyes. “I know your face, but I've never been to Funzi or Benongo.”

The dark eyes waited. It was for Masakita to explain. How could the officer know him if he'd never been those places? He was the government, Masakita the supplicant. If what the government knew wasn't consistent with what this indigent dressed in someone else's rags could explain, then he was lying. That was the power of his office, a power that made the weak ignorant and the helpless guilty.

“I once worked in the capital,” Masakita said.

“Where?”

“In the ministry of interior.”

“In the ministry?” The eyes seemed skeptical, then triumphant. “Albert! Oh, Albert.” He called through the door behind him, and a bespectacled clerk joined them from the adjacent office. “You worked in the ministry for ten years. This man says he worked there too. Do you know him?”

Masakita looked silently at Albert N'Kuba, whom he hadn't seen since his transfer to provincial travel control. N'Kuba didn't move for a moment, brown eyes fixed on Masakita's face, lips parted, the light of recognition still suspended. It would mean so much to be right—a promotion, a cash bonus, as the secret
sûreté
bulletin promised; yet it would be humiliating to be wrong, the butt of every cruel joke for years to come.

“You worked in customs control,” Masakita said.

N'Kuba's fingers touched his chin in reflex. “The beard … the beard … is new.”

The eyes fixed then, pupils dilated, and he took a step backward. “Yes,” he murmured. “I know him. Could I speak to you … in my office,” he told the captain, still backing away.

An hour before dawn an automobile came from the capital traveling at high speed, followed by a second automobile and an army jeep. Masakita was blindfolded before he was led from the clerk's office, where three soldiers had guarded him, and shoved into the second sedan, a black Mercedes. He was pushed forward in the seat and his hands were tied under his knees, a rope around his ankles.

Sitting in the front seat, he recognized something familiar in the scent of the upholstery—in the talcum, the bay rum perhaps, or the spice of a European air sweetener. He knew it was a Mercedes and that it was black.

“Oh, no, it's not disloyalty,” the car's owner once explained to him, “not at all. It's just a car—a matter of utility, that's all. But let's not argue about it.”

“But I'm not arguing,” Masakita had said.

“Criticizing then. But you own a Mercedes as well.”

“The government owns it. It belongs to the ministry—”

“
Ah ha
! So you see. A matter of utility again.”

So there it was—the heart of their differences. To Masakita, his alliance with the old President in the government of national reconciliation had been contrary to his conscience but necessary for the country. To the Mercedes owner, these were personal matters, unmortgaged by moral claims.

“If you're going to pose theological arguments in terms of owning a Mercedes and advancing the revolution, between moral chastity and utility, Christ and the devil, then I'm not going to argue with you, Pierre—never. No, no. My wife's brother sold me this car. He needed the money for his cottonseed plant.”

So Masakita, even blindfolded, knew the car, knew it before someone sat forward from the seat behind him and wiped away the odor of the upholstery with a crude burlap bag pulled roughly over his head and tied around his neck with a sisal cord. The dust filled his nostrils and punished his mouth and throat with the dry, acrid powder of old palm husks.

The Mercedes belonged to Dr. Bizenga.

Dawn had come as the Mercedes raced through the front gate of the para camp and sped back under the palm trees, the hooded figure on the front seat. The jeep and one sedan turned aside at Colonel N'Sika's headquarters, but the Mercedes continued down the sand road toward the maximum security prison, which had been emptied this past week, the felons transferred to the old jail at the edge of the
cité
.

Masakita was led from the car and down through the wire dogtrot, through the heavy door, and to the right along a stone corridor to a heavy iron grating covered over with steel mesh where the public cell block lay, its ceiling two stories high, like the prison itself, a square smoke hole in the center of the roof—a vestige of colonial days, when the prisoners prepared their own meals.

Only two prisoners lay in the enormous cell, backs against the stone wall, knees lifted, legs chained by ankle irons to an iron ring sunk in the center of the floor.

De Vaux watched as the burlap bag was lifted from Masakita's face, leaving the wet cheeks and forehead powdered with palm grit, the short woolly hair sprigged with husks. The two turnkeys shackled irons to his ankles and led him forward to padlock the last link to the iron ring in the floor. They replaced the cord on his wrists with handcuffs and went out, locking the iron door behind them.

Masakita stood looking about him, eyes moving along the stone walls, the wall of steel bars faced with mesh, and high into the shadows of the trussed roof where a patch of blue sky showed through the smoke hole.

“Masakita,” de Vaux muttered finally through his broken teeth, his head cocked upward, one eye closed. “Am I right?”

“That's right,” Masakita said, studying de Vaux's cruelly punished face. One eye was swollen closed, the face bruised and cut; dried blood crusted his nostrils and stiffened the front of his khaki shirt.

“Who?” Nogueira asked.

“The bloke they're looking for,” de Vaux said, still squinting up. “De Vaux here. This is Lieutenant Nogueira, late chief of the MPLA cadres for the southwest sector, Cabinda front, now retired.”

“Who did that to you?”

“Someone who wanted to find out something, where I'd hidden it. Didn't see his face, though.”

“Hidden what?”

De Vaux shrugged. “The past, where I'd buried it. ‘Rest in peace,' I told them. Who wants to dig up the past. Hyenas, that's all. That's what they were.”

“What about this man Nogueira?”

“Scared of him, that's all I know. Found him here and didn't know why. That scared them. Do you have a cigarette?”

“No.” Masakita slumped down against the wall.

“Books maybe. Newspapers.
L'Express? Paris Match
?”

“Nothing.”

“Shit. Same as us.” His eye fell for a moment on the burlap that Masakita's captors had dropped to the floor and which now lay on the stone floor near the door. A hood or just a blindfold? He stared at it silently, sighed, and sank back again, looking at Masakita, examining the small nose, the beard, the brown eyes, and finally the patch over his pocket. “You ever hear of Robinson Crusoe?” he asked.

“The book? Yes.”

“The book, that's it. A bloke shipwrecked on a desert island. You heard of it?”

“I've heard of it.”

“I told you,” de Vaux said to Nogueira. “You think my head's full of shit. So is his then. I was telling him about it,” he said to Masakita. “I just got to the part about the goats.”

It was late afternoon when they heard a car on the road above and stopped talking, eyes lifted silently toward the high window. Car doors slammed and footsteps came down the clay path into the wire cage, the iron hinges creaked open, and two figures emerged into the shadows of the corridor. The light was dimming and Masakita got to his feet, followed by de Vaux and Nogueira. They moved as far across the stone floor as their leg chains permitted, standing some six meters short of the bars. Masakita saw a tall figure in a white robe, but couldn't identify his black face or the face of the second man, which was only a broken mosaic through the heavy mesh. But then he saw the glint of the steel-rimmed spectacles and the small white pebbles of the familiar bifocals.

“Bizenga. I knew it was your car.”

De Vaux knew too, suddenly coming alive: “Bizenga! You bloody, filthy bastard!” He tried to pull free of his leg chains, tried to tear his wrists from the steel manacles, but his feet twisted and he fell against the floor, but still crawled forward, pulling himself on his elbows. “I'll kill you, both of you!”

Dr. Bizenga gazed down sympathetically. “But I'm sorry, Major. I have no idea what you're talking about.”

“You liar! You goddamn liar! Where'd he come from—that zombie with you! Where'd you dig him up!”

Dr. Bizenga glanced at the tall Senegalese at his side. “I don't know who you're talking about, but this is Dr. Ba. Dr. Ba is a surgeon and pathologist, brought by Major Fumbe from Dakar to be his adviser. As you know, Major Fumbe now has all security responsibilities and he's a firm believer in fighting fire with fire, as they say. From Dakar, yes, where they maintain the best traditions of pathology—and of African folklore too, I should say. But what did you think he was? What's come over you, Jean-Bernard? What sort of seizure have you suffered here, eh? Jumping at shadows again?”

De Vaux lunged hopelessly toward the bars.

“Try to show a little hospitality for Major Fumbe's surgeon, Major. All Dr. Ba desires is your cooperation. He simply wants to know what happened to Colonel N'Sika's poor uncle. Is he dead or have you hidden him away somewhere? And if he is dead, as some of us suspect, what was the nature of his influence? Or his illness? Was it something Fumbe can cope with? A very superstitious fellow, this Fumbe. A simple exercise in pathology would tell Dr. Ba immediately whether Major Fumbe had anything to fear or not. So why not cooperate with him?”

“Never!
Surgery
? Never! That hyena wants his bones, that's what he wants—bones and everything else. He'll never get them, not from me. The old man's in peace, wherever he is. You'll never get your filthy, butchering hands on him.”

“What's this about?” Masakita broke in. “Why is de Vaux being held here?”

“He hasn't told you? That surprises me,” Bizenga said. “But I'm sure he will in time. Such men always do. Ask him about his past. He'll tell you—his vulgar little triumphs, his sadistic little conquests. Like a lamppost in the rain, eh Jean-Bernard? All scratched and nicked. Did someone walk into you? All iron-ringing, those molecules of yours, but hollow. Who can change you? What can change you? Nothing, fortunately.”

“The amnesty was announced days ago,” Masakita said, “but we're kept here. Why?”

“Oh but there's no amnesty for you,” Bizenga said, surprised. “Oh, no. Not for you. You haven't discovered that?”

“A general amnesty was announced. I saw the circular myself.”

“Oh yes, you saw the circular yourself. There is a general amnesty and quite a successful one. Very successful. You see how it came about, don't you? The council was quite worried about you, Pierre, on the loose again, on the prowl—Moscow this week, Peking the next. What were you planning back there in the bush, another guerrilla war against the central government like the one you led in sixty-four and sixty-five. So you see why an amnesty was inevitable, don't you, why it was necessary to liberate that rag-tag army back there in the interior from your ranks, to let them live in the peace you would deny them—”

“You don't know what you're talking about.”

“Oh no, perhaps not. But the council was worried, very worried. Crispin Mongoy received a letter. You remember Crispin, don't you, the ex-soccer player. You sent him a letter asking him to contact the other members of the political bureau. That sounded suspiciously like sedition to the council. What your intentions were—well, that doesn't matter. The council doesn't trust you, Pierre, that's the sum of it. They'll never trust you, you see. Never. You're far too clever for them. Too clever for all of us. So we have our amnesty now, but it's not for you. No, no. Here in prison the law of lex loci rules. Hasn't Major de Vaux explained all this to you—
lex loci? lex talionis
? Come, come, Major, I'm surprised at you. What have you been prattling about these past few hours—your picaresque redemptive adventures in darkest Africa, ten thousand black savages starved, lashed, and crucified to stir again that liberal heroic soul that bourgeois Europe starved to extinction? Come, Major—”

“What does the council fear?” Masakita interrupted.

“What do they fear? They fear you, quite obviously. Why? Well, because of what I've already told you. Apart from that, I wouldn't presume to know what Major Fumbe's beliefs are, or even Colonel N'Sika's. No, no, once a belief has taken root, who am I to deny it? Would I cut down every tree in the forest because it's not mimosa, which my wife prefers? No, let's be reasonable, Pierre. Once a man believes what he believes, who am I to take it from him? Isn't that what you once told me—that I judged in you what wasn't mine to judge? It's the same case here. You and I were educated in Europe, so it's different for us. Some of these esteemed members of the council had no such advantage. Take Colonel N'Sika, for example. What Colonel N'Sika believes is his own business. As it happens, that's a mystery to the council too. Ask Major de Vaux what the colonel believes—Major de Vaux who helped nourish the root once he planted the seed. Didn't he once convince N'Sika that his power could do anything—blow up a petit porteur in a rainstorm in Mbandaka, whether by dynamite or demonology no one ever knew. Perhaps de Vaux can tell you. Certainly it's something N'Sika never talks about—not with any of us. That worries the council too. Tell us, Major, tell us le secret de l'
Afrique noire
, which you may have so cunningly planted in Colonel N'Sika's skull. Or did you? Tell us now. All of us would rest easier if we knew what you know—”