Charles Mccarry - The Tears Of Autumn

They left in darkness, but when the light plane rose to its cruising altitude they could see the sunrise. It wasn’t a long flight, along the brown Kafue River, above tan plains, and then, beyond the Congolese frontier, over a higher savannah that was the color of cheap green paint.

The pilot sideslipped between the trees and landed on a straight stretch of clay road. A herd of black and white goats, no larger than spaniels, bounded out of the way of the taxiing plane.

“That was Kipushi you saw up ahead,” the pilot said. “It’s an hour’s walk. You can catch a ride to Elisabethville from there. I daren’t land you closer without papers-they’re hateful bastards, the Baluba.”

The day went by slowly, fried by the morning sun, flogged by the afternoon rain. The war had not been over for long, and Elisabethville had the atmosphere of a city whose residents, driven out by a plague, had only just found the courage to come back and claim their possessions.

In the darkened lobby of a hotel, Christopher drank mineral water and read the two Simenons, dirty and swollen by the rainy climate, that he had bought from a street vendor. At nightfall he went into the men’s room and put on the boots and the bush clothes he had brought with him. He wasn’t used to carrying a pistol, and he had to remind himself not to touch the hard shape of the.22 automatic tucked into the waistband of his trousers.

Nsango was four hours late. He made no apology. Christopher followed him into a quarter where hundreds of his tribesmen, driven out of the bush by war or the hope for money, had settled. Charcoal fires burned down the length of a long street, like a herd of red eyes in the black night. Nsango dropped on all fours in front of a tin hovel and crawled inside. It was constructed of flattened gasoline cans and other bits of scavenged metal, and it stood in a row of houses that looked like mouths with the teeth knocked out.

Christopher crawled in after Nsango. Nsango sent away the people who lived there; they trotted, giggling, into the street and squatted in the dirt. Nsango found the stub of a candle and lit it. It gave little light. Christopher saw Nsango’s gestures but not his face as he told him what he wanted him to say to Manuel Ruiz.

“Why would he believe such a story?” Nsango said. “He’s not stupid.”

“I know enough to bluff him-certain names.”

“It’s dangerous, Paul. I don’t know if I can protect you. These Cubans are quick to shoot.”

“There are still the same number?”

“Only five now. One was shot in the stomach and they couldn’t treat his wounds. The other died of snakebite.”

“You’ve been seeing action?”

“Some. We’re still earning our guns.”

“How many of the Cubans speak French?”

“All, but badly except for this Manuel. I think the others only understand about half of what’s said to them.”

“How are their nerves?”

“Jumpy. Some of my chaps are pretty simple men-they ate the knuckles and the liver of a prisoner not long ago. I wasn’t there. It left Manuel and the others a bit sick.”

“Then it’s you they’re nervous about?”

“Yes, they’ve received a lot of Kalashnikov machine rifles and they know we want them,” Nsango said. “And of course they all have dysentery. Who knows? They may be glad to see another white man.”

“Can we go now?”

Nsango sighed. “All right. It’s a long walk to where I left the Jeep, and we’ll have to find some gasoline and carry that.”

He went outside and shouted. A babble erupted in the darkness, then died down as all but the people Nsango wanted drifted away. In a few minutes Nsango called to Christopher. He stood in the street with four jerry cans at his feet.

“Two for you, two for me,” he said. “Sweat is the fuel of the revolution.”

Walking through a field of coarse grass outside the city, Nsango began to sing in a low voice. Christopher compelled his imagination to form a picture of Molly, walking between high snowbanks in Zermatt, her face pinkened by the wind and the cold. His conversation with Nguyen Kim at the Milan airport kept intruding, like the strong signal of a distant radio station in nighttime. Christopher had gambled Molly as willingly as he would have played the life of an agent. He’d done it on reflex: never let the opposition see that you are vulnerable. Christopher ran operations the way a natural athlete plays a sport: he knew the game in his muscles and in his bloodstream. To change styles was to lose; thought was a handicap, emotion a hazard. His arms stretched by the weight of the jerry cans, he walked on, trusting Nsango to keep alert. The march went quickly.

Nsango’s camp lay to the north, in the upland forest not twenty miles from the Rhodesian frontier. Nsango drove fast through the bush, down narrow paths, and he and Christopher leaned toward the center of the Jeep, their heads sometimes bumping together as they dodged the branches that whipped over the windshield. Nsango, shouting, told Christopher how the Cuban had been killed by a tree mamba that had fallen into the speeding Jeep a few days before. “A one-minute snake,” he said. “He was dead before they could put on the brakes and run away.”

They were challenged twice by sentries, boys wearing torn bits of camouflage uniform, before they reached the camp. It was an abandoned village with a large open space, beaten shiny by bare feet, in the center of a ring of conical wattle huts.

“This used to be a prosperous place,” Nsango said. “I passed through here in ‘62 and found a pile of right hands-men’s, women’s, children’s-in the middle of the village, on the open ground. A hundred people had been dismembered. It was propaganda. In the old days the Belgians used to cut off the right hands of a whole village if one man committed a crime. During the fighting someone revived the practice. I think it was the mercenaries-some of them were Belgians, after all. The whites said it was the Chinese and their Simbas, who wanted the whites to be blamed. It could have been either. In any case, that’s where the population went.”

Christopher knew the story was true; he had seen a heap of severed hands in another part of the Congo.

“ ‘The horror,’” Nsango said, his lips twisting around the quotation. “You may as well come to my hut and get some sleep. This Manuel is not a very early riser.”

Inside the hut, Nsango handed Christopher a calabash of water. “It’s been boiled,” he said, noticing Christopher’s hesitation. “You gave me your sickly intestines along with your white ideas.”

Christopher woke every fifteen minutes and ran his eyes over the interior of the hut; it was about the size and shape of the room in which Frankie Pigeon had been kept. Nsango, his skinny legs drawn up, slept unworriedly, breathing softly. The sun came up and filled the low door with intense white light. There was a burst of birdsong at sunrise. Then the temperature rose twenty degrees in fifteen minutes and the surrounding forest fell silent.

Christopher was astonished to hear a bugle call being played over a loudspeaker. He crawled to the door of the hut and looked out. About thirty young tribesmen, barefooted and bare-chested, were mustering for reveille. A tall black with a Kalashnikov rifle slung over his shoulder and tribal scars on his cheeks called the troops to attention. In the shade of a limbali tree, a bearded Cuban wearing dirty U.S. Army fatigues smoked a cigar and watched. He too carried a Soviet machine rifle.

“That’s the one they call Pablito,” Nsango said. “I’d better explain your presence before you show yourself.”