Rogue's March (51 page)

“You're a bloody liar!” de Vaux shouted.

“So there you are,” Dr. Bizenga said with a sigh. “You grope for these things as best you can. I'm sorry, Pierre. A man believes what he wants to believe these days. God knows things are bad enough out here with what modernity has brought us—evangelists, proselytizers, Baptist pagans who have no place in their countries but rural kingdoms in ours, mullahs, Peace Corps anarchists, socialist savants, and UN macroeconomists, thousands of them, all running amok through the bush waving a new set of scriptures at every starving black man they meet. Add to that the neo-colonialists, the neo-imperialists, east and west, the neo-fascists, the Cassandras, futurologists, poets, and seers, all nightmares inherited from the Western mind, concentrations of spiritual capital that can't be rooted out, and what have you got? No, Pierre, if each of us were to try to discipline the rubbish in another's skull with the sanctimonious nonsense in our own, where would it end? Turmoil, you see. Absolute chaos. And you were always against that, weren't you? So you see how the law of
lex loci
has come to apply.”

Dr. Bizenga took off his glasses and wiped them carefully with his handkerchief.

“You haven't changed,” Masakita said.

“You either,” Bizenga replied regretfully. “It's a pity. At a time when weak men are becoming stronger because of their presumption, their arrogance—like Major de Vaux there—stronger men such as yourself are becoming weaker because of their silence, their virtue, their righteous scrupulosity. In times like these, that's self-indulgence, Pierre, not social action at all. Autoeroticism. Onanism, pure and simple. But what can one do? Paris would have been better for you, Brussels even. There that raw talent might have been civilized for social use. You could have opened a bookshop, written epistles to Pascal—”

“You chase after words. You always have.”

But Dr. Bizenga only shrugged, already beginning to show his boredom. “What else is there these days? What have they taught us, East or West? To use their words while they steal our country.”

He turned to his Senegalese companion, nodded, and they went out.

The three prisoners returned in silence to the stone wall, dragging their chains behind them, de Vaux carrying the burlap that had wrapped Masakita's face. He sat looking at it silently, knowing then what Bizenga had been talking about, what it was in this man Masakita the council feared—not N'Sika, perhaps, but the others, who feared N'Sika too but Masakita more. How would men like Fumbe or Kimbu explain Masakita's elusiveness all those years—gliding through the green shadows of the Kwilu, claimed dead at Kindu, but alive again the following morning in Idiofa, in Peking one week, in Moscow the next, and now disappearing without a trace from the gutted workers party compound in Malunga.

The answer lay in his hands, in the burlap hood he'd picked up from the floor. During the days of the rebellions, a few of the rebels had presented de Vaux's mercenaries with special problems. Their power was real enough to send a village into frenzy, so he'd covered their heads with rice sacking or old burlap bags, as he had his father-in-law's once, the sight denied those fierce manic eyes, recognition denied their crazy tattered heads, sprigged out with all sorts of weird magical filth. He'd cloaked the heads of those witch doctors the same way Pierre Masakita's head had been hooded as he was brought into the old prison that morning.

Chapter Seven

Bondurant listened silently as Reddish finished his story, the entire story, no details suppressed this time, the letter Masakita had given him lying on the desk blotter in front of him. His eyes were sometimes drawn away from the worried, stubborn face to the scarred hand holding the cigarettes and stubbing them away, one by one, in the deskside ashtray, two fingers broken and twisted in a way Bondurant had never noticed before.

Reddish had made a few mistakes, a few errors of judgment or perception, but now he was under no illusions. N'Sika would get the letter only if the ambassador delivered it himself.

He'd thought he could scare off the coup plotters, but that hadn't worked: he was wrong, just as he'd been wrong in his suspicions that the defense attaché's office or even the station might have been involved, perhaps even his headquarters itself. After he'd sent in his cables reporting the details, he'd gotten no reply for almost ten days. Washington's silence had made him uneasy, as if he'd dug up the bodies, bodies that were supposed to stay buried. But that wasn't it either. He'd been wrong again.

“You think you're at the center of their universe back there,” he concluded, moisture glistening on his high forehead, his gaze moving to the side window of Bondurant's office and the lilac-colored clouds blooming high over the river in the setting sun, “every cable on the director's desk or in the evening brief for the White House before the circuits are even cold, but that's not the way it happens. It's the way you get after a while, being so far away. You know so much one day, and the next you're bankrupted, wiped out. You think it's deliberate, calculated, another conspiracy, that you've been conned, used, forgotten, tossed away. But that's not it either. You forget how much there is back there every day—how many cables, how many crises, how many people, how much confusion, how short the Washington memory is. Washington didn't know any more than I did. There was too much going on—the Khartoum kidnapping, the SALT openings, the Chinese business, everything else that no one could get a handle on. It was a bloody vacuum all that time, just a couple of us sitting here. They just didn't bloody well care.”

He'd been alone all that time. He shook his head hopelessly, still in despair.

“It's often that way,” Bondurant said quietly, “but sometimes for the better too. The bureaucracy wouldn't understand all these things any more than they would understand a letter like this one.”

He lifted the letter from the blotter, looking again at the fine dark handwriting. He had read enough to feel depressed—the letter of an intellectual, too gnomic, too convoluted for N'Sika's direct, brutal mind; but he would deliver it nevertheless, perhaps his endorsement making it simpler. It was Reddish's plight he was drawn to.

“I think it was Macaulay who once said that historians are seduced not by their imaginations but by reason,” he offered reflectively, rising at last from behind the desk. “Diplomats are very much the same way—diplomats, civil servants, bureaucrats, whatever name they go by. The ablest bureaucrat, the cleverest, would never knowingly fight a battle he couldn't win, and that's why he's successful. But truth by consensus isn't a real world at all. It's an artificial one, a shadow world that reflects nothing of ourselves.” He looked at Reddish for some flicker of response but saw nothing. “The life outside is much more substantial. So you were right, I suppose, not to trust the bureaucracy. Their strength is collective, not individual, which means simply that they're weaker than you. They'll betray you. Call it Bondurant's law. I learned it years ago.”

He peered at Reddish sympathetically, his despondency releasing certain axioms long contemplated but rarely confessed. Still he waited, a huge hulking wintry man, thawing suddenly, like an old glacier giving up its bones.

“A bureaucrat's logic is something like a bookkeeper's,” he resumed, “or an accountant's. A matter of keeping the ledgers and totaling up the balance sheet. It doesn't require brilliance, just that one not be abysmally stupid. No imagination at all. They never need lift their heads. What is it, Miss Browning?”

He looked impatiently toward his substitute secretary, who stood just inside the door with that innocent calf-eyed look he'd come to recognize.

“I thought you buzzed me,” she whispered soulfully.

“I did. Call Colonel N'Sika's protocol chief and tell him I want to see the colonel immediately. Better still, have Becker do it. His French is more reliable.

“It's a pity,” Bondurant continued ruefully. “Imagination is what we most need, imagination is what we don't get. We don't think of international politics that way at all. We leave foreign policy to drab little bureaucrats, geopolitical lunatics, or professional theorists, most of them behaviorists, none of whom are imaginative in the least. They have no idea of how vast the theater is in which they're working, how imaginative its demands are, or how infinitely cunning the historical process they're all trying to outwit, East and West alike. Did you ever think of international politics that way—as one giant theater?”

“I don't think I have.”

“You should. My daughter is in Off Broadway theater. I tried to tell her once. Nothing touches more lives—not subscription concerts, chamber music societies, or anything else. There's nothing else that compares with it. Half the world is strutting around its stage, declaiming from a primitive nineteenth-century text, utterly discredited, utterly bowdlerized, while the other half—our half—simply doesn't know whether they're part of the audience or part of the company. The truth is that neither seems to know what it's doing. Those that do are selling programs in the aisles.”

He lifted himself again from his chair. “The only consolation I can find in all this is that the Russians are in far worse shape, their own bureaucracy even more incoherent, continuing to rationalize their insolvency year after year in ways we seem to be imitating. Whatever our moral claims—and I believe they're legitimate ones—I suspect that in the political realm at least we're institutionally incapable of acting in any way other than the way we do—as a vast conservative third-rate mediocrity. We should let the Israelis or the Cubans manage our foreign policy for us. Neither can risk failure, which means they must be imaginative. What is it, Miss Browning?”

“Is Mr. Becker to go with you.”

“No, I'll go alone, and I would hope that Colonel N'Sika will see me alone.”

Looking at the closing door, Bondurant was suddenly aware of a more familiar ghost prowling these chilly pedagogic fogs he'd conjured up: an old man sitting at hearthside in the house on Library Place, cruelly editing his old journals, once vivid and fresh, in the morosity of old age.

“I should tell you,” he said finally to Reddish, coming directly to the point, “that I haven't the slightest hope that we'll be successful in all this.”

Sarah Ogilvy was waiting for Reddish as he returned to his office. The suite was deserted. He'd been with Bondurant for two hours.

“What are you trying to do, set some kind of longevity record?” she asked, slamming her safe drawer closed. “Haversham went home. He wants you to call him, maybe stop by for a drink so he can find out what the
h
is going
on
.”

Reddish searched his jacket pockets, making sure he'd left the envelope with Bondurant.

“What are you looking for?”

“I thought I forgot something. Did you pick up my airline ticket?”

“It's on your desk. I'll tell you something you did forget—Taggert. He waited here for an hour, something about a special lock. What was that about?”

“For Carol Browning—a combination lock. There have been a few break-ins at her apartment house and she's worried.”

“I'll bet she's worried.” She followed Reddish to his office.

It was late and Gabrielle was waiting for him at the Houlets'. He grabbed his briefcase and headed for the door. “Lock me up, will you? Thanks for the ticket.”

“I'll bet she's worried,” she persisted, trailing him to the door. “The only trouble with her lock is she forgot who she gave the key to. Do you know who was banging on her door at two o'clock last night? The British Ambassador! Cecil!”

Reddish glanced at her as he went out the door. He'd barely heard a word. “The poor bastard,” he said.

Chapter Eight

“What does this man Masakita mean to you?” N'Sika demanded harshly. “Why do you come here to speak for him? You didn't speak for the others.”

“Because I want to see justice done,” Bondurant replied uneasily, the protocol dispensed with.

“He will have a trial by the Revolutionary Court. You saw the dossier. Lutete offered to show it to you, but you said it didn't interest you.” N'Sika pointed at the empty chair where Lutete had sat that night, shoulders thrust forward.

“The letter is written to you, not the court,” Bondurant persisted. “It is a personal letter to you.” He hadn't worn a coat and tie, as Reddish had suggested, and now he felt silly for it.

N'Sika studied Bondurant's face sullenly, his gaze finally returning to the letter on the table in front of him. “I receive hundreds of letters every day, but not like this.” The letter was three pages long, written in longhand. He lifted the first page contemptuously. “He tells me that he will live in peace, that he will work and live in peace. What are the rest of these words he writes? If I am to explain to the people and the council why I am to trust him now, what words can I use? My words? My words about Masakita are finished, eaten up. Nothing is left. His words? Are his words stronger? What words—French words? How can I feed the people his words when in three pages he tells me he isn't even sure himself? Is that his conscience? If that is his conscience, let him keep it. Only he will understand it, not the people. If you have something to tell the people, make it easy for them to hear you, not in letters like this one, foreigners' letters, which begin at
a
and go on to
b
and every other letter of the alphabet but always end not at zed but back at a again. The Belgians send me such letters every day, only about copper and diamonds and foreign exchange, technical matters. Is his conscience a technical matter? Let him hire a board of Belgian directors to administer it then, not me.”

He got up rudely, turning his back on Bondurant, and walked to the door, calling out into the darkness in Lingala. Two bodyguards entered quickly, carrying rifles. He gave them an order and returned to the chair, his face even more bellicose than before.