Rogue's March (6 page)

Michaux smiled as he noisily refilled his glass. “Chasseurs d'Ardennes? Never! Don't be fooled. A chaser of women was all he was in those days, women and money. A handsome lad, bright as a penny, but a thief. Stole the Pakistani bankrupt, they say, but no one minded. Good riddance, some said. After that a Belgian took him on. That would have been forty-eight or forty-nine. I think it was a Belgian, but he could have been a Greek. Took him on as overseer and mechanic. No—wait! He was Greek, that's right, an old Greek who married late, the way they do. From Rhodes I remember. He brought a Greek wife from there, a widow and her daughter, all in black. Pretty, both of them. Before the old man knew it, de Vaux had made a mistress of the wife. After he got tired of her, he had a go at the daughter.

“By God, there's a lad from Antwerp for you. His old man must have been a sailor, eh, off the ships. Anyway, de Vaux finally ran off with the girl and took over an abandoned tin mine up in the Kivu. Bought it for a song—but why not?—it was worthless, an old shaft filled with tailings and a smashed lift. Tried to sell shares in it, I remember, tried to create a world out there. That was the second time he came to see me.
Shares
! Had the Greek girl's baptism card with him, all gold and gilt, flowers on the margin, cupids blowing kisses through silver clouds, the way the Greek churches do it. Found his pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, he had. He was going over to Kampala to have it copied up, printing and artwork both. I had to laugh when I saw it—shares like a bloody baptism card.

“Anyway, all he got out of it was the three hundred thousand francs the Greek paid to get his stepdaughter back. De Vaux didn't care, not a man like that. He knew enough chiefs in the bush by then to pick his crop when the young lasses bloomed—jungle poppies, eh? What age would that be, twelve or thirteen? Next thing I heard he'd bought a tea plantation on the track to Goma, right at the edge of the lake. After that he bought another mine and lost everything again. It was as worthless as the first.”

The waiter brought chicken and rice. Michaux began to eat hungrily, without waiting.

“So he was here in the bush all those years,” Reddish said.

“He was here, no place else. Had a way with the blacks, no doubt about it. Hard worker too and clever as a snake. Went after what he wanted, but a swine too, for all the honest ambition he ever had. What good is his kind of ambition out here? Brings you closer to the grave, that's all. Take my word for it—leave your ambitions in the old world. Take this one as you find it. Don't try to make another. Battle of Algiers? Never. Did he graduate from Saint-Cyr too?

“He did disappear for a few years, that much I remember. Some thought he was dead, killed while poaching the King's elephants up in Parc Albert. Nothing was out of bounds for him in those days. Others told me he went up to Juba in the Sudan, as bold as brass, trying to corner the ivory trade. Tea prices had fallen. They say he had a fleet of lorries up there. Whatever it was, when I saw him again he'd learned a little English. Spoke it well too—talked like a limey though, dockside style. Maybe he picked it up in prison in Entebbe or Khartoum. Does that make him an Oxford man too?”

Michaux laughed, eyes lifted as he brought knife and fork together again on the plate in front of him.

“When did you last see him?”

Michaux raised his knife, waving it toward the dark courtyard behind Reddish. “Outside the gate there, during the rebellions. He was commanding a merc unit. Lost track of him after that.” He frowned as he drank from his glass, memory fading again. “What happened to him after that?”

“He went up north,” Reddish replied, “to Orientale.” Michaux was curious, listening silently as Reddish explained. De Vaux had bought a coffee plantation in the north after the Simba rebellions were put down. When his old mercenary colleagues had rebelled against the central government, he'd refused their appeals to join them and had retreated with his African wife to a remote village on the Sudan frontier. Returning after the mercenaries were defeated, he'd found his house burned, his trees ravaged, his trucks stolen, and the bodies of his wife's two sisters rotting in the coffee-drying sheds, murdered by the retreating mercenaries and their Katangese soldiers. De Vaux had dropped from sight, reappearing a year later when he'd been named to the training staff of the old general who commanded the northern sector. A few months afterward, the old general had been killed in a plane accident, his small aircraft mysteriously blown apart as it descended through a rain squall to the Mbandaka airstrip. De Vaux had accompanied the general's deputy, N'Sika, to the capital as his aide. Among the Belgian commercial community in the north, a rumor had circulated claiming that sabotage was responsible, a bomb rigged to the aircraft's landing gear and wired to detonate as the wheels were lowered.

“Don't know anything about that,” Michaux admitted. “A man's bound to make enemies, I suppose, but when Jean-Bernard is around, you have to be doubly careful. The last time I saw him he was outside the gate there”—he lifted the knife again, pointing off through the darkness—“standing on the front seat of a mercenary jeep with a captured Simba witch doctor in the back seat, a manioc sack pulled down over the poor bugger's head. There were flowers all over the bonnet, thrown there by the villagers as they'd driven in. He had twenty mercs with him, the worst of the bunch, I'd say. The Simbas were on the run, the last of them around here smashed just on the other side of the ferry by de Vaux and his unit. The blacks who'd stayed loyal wanted to put the torch to the poor old bastard de Vaux had in the back seat.”

Michaux smiled with the recollection, gazing beyond Reddish toward the gate. “He wouldn't hear of it. Reading the riot act to them, Jean-Bernard was, giving them a piece of his mind. He was a merc captain by then. They say he'd been a real soldier too, all spit and polish, not one of those cutthroats or thieves masquerading as a Sandhurst field marshal amongst the bow-and-arrow savages of the bush, but a real soldier. Shot a Rhodesian corporal, they say, after he'd raped a young girl. So there he was, standing up for discipline again, standing up for that ignorant savage in the back seat with the manioc sack pulled down over his head. I called out to him from just inside the gate over there, wearing the same filthy rags I'd been wearing for three months dodging the rebels. They'd have had my tongue on a skewer if they'd caught me, same as they'd have had Jean-Bernard's. ‘Jean-Bernard,' I called out to him. ‘Hey there, Jean-Bernard! What's tin bring in the Kivu these days?'

“Everyone was a little out of his head that morning, and maybe I was too. I'd been burned out like everyone else, but that was all right too. I was alive, like them, and we were all delirious that morning. ‘What are you cooking up now?' I shouted to him. ‘What's next for you—a seat on the Brussels bourse?' I thought maybe the rebellions had changed things for him, everyone in town kneeling down to him and his men that way. Maybe he thought I was a ghost. Maybe he never saw me, I don't know, but he never said a word, not a bloody word. He just looked at me like I wasn't even there, still in the iron grip of whatever it was that brought him out here in the first place.

“So after a while the jeep went away with him in it, up the track like it was the road to Goma and Bunia again back in forty-six, the witch doctor on the back seat not moving a muscle, and that was the last time I set eyes on him. Now he's back in the capital, eh? Working for the paras?” Michaux laughed. “That's Jean-Bernard, all right, the same man. Make of him what you will, he'll never change.”

Chapter Five

Reddish left his Fiat in the oyster-shell drive next to a para jeep. A black trooper sat slumped behind the wheel, dressed in the leopard-spot fatigues of the para battalion, sunglasses across his eyes, a red beret on his head. An American-made M-16 lay across his knees. A second para lounged against the front fender, ankles crossed, weapon in his arms, his eyes moving with Reddish as he passed in front of them. Reddish nodded, but the paras didn't acknowledge the greeting. Annoyed with himself, he crossed the drive to the gravel path under the palm trees. The paras were the pampered hoodlums of the presidency, insolent, brutal, and vain, eager to test their skills whenever GHQ turned them loose, as it had against the striking students and transit workers, but more often in the ugly ceremony of crowd control, clubbing a path for the President and his retinue through a mob of the urban poor already whipped to frenzy by the loudspeaker trucks and the paid political claques of the communes.

He followed the path toward a whitewashed cottage roofed in red tile, similar to the dozen or so other cottages scattered among the trees along the sand road. The hilltop had once been a Belgian police cantonment. A few of the cottages had fallen into disrepair, gutters gone, windows cracked, gardens unweeded, and the turf trampled to sand under the raffia palms; but de Vaux's cottage was bright and neat, freshly painted. Red blossoms bloomed in the flower beds along the foundation wall; a poinsettia tree stood near the front steps.

De Vaux waited for him on the porch, a slim figure in starched khaki drill shorts and shirt, knee-length tan hose, and high-topped boots. A red beret was stuck in his belt.

“Worried about terrorists, are you, Reddish? I wouldn't have thought it of an old bush sergeant like you.” He didn't misplace the accent, like most French speakers.

“I lost my stripes, I suppose. Like you.”

“I heard about your bloke in Khartoum. On the wireless. Too bad. Didn't know him, did you?” He was ivory-skinned, thin-faced, and slightly built, but tightly muscled, the sharp features under the blondish hair lit by eyes as cool as sea water. Size belied his strength. He had quick hands, as quick as his temper, which had once been unpredictable. At Goma, Reddish had once seen him drop an unruly mercenary corporal to the floor, jaw broken, so quickly he hadn't believed it had happened.

“No, I don't, but he's not dead yet, is he?”

“You're the expert, not me.”

It was sweltering in the midday heat, and Reddish mopped his face and neck as he climbed the steps. At the gate he'd been kept waiting inside his boiling car for twenty minutes while the guard phoned ahead.

“Come inside. It's cooler on the side porch.”

“Not on duty today, are you?”

“Always on duty. Why?”

“The uniform.”

“My Sunday kit.”

“I was thinking at the gate I should be playing more tennis,” Reddish said, following de Vaux's trim figure, which reminded him of his own lack of conditioning. His blue tennis shirt clung to his wet back, sweat rolled from his cheeks and neck. He was annoyed at himself again. Small talk too was a surrender of strength, and de Vaux would surely recognize it.

“Tennis won't do. Not diplomats' tennis. Don't even chase their own balls at the Belgian Club do they? Not unless there's a thousand-franc whore at the end of it.” De Vaux laughed, opening the screen door, and Reddish was conscious of the poor teeth, the result of his years in the bush. The trace of Cockney in the English was as strong as ever, but with an exaggerated nasality which bordered on parody, a navvy's version of how a sergeant-major talked.

“The ball boys go with the club. I don't think they'd chase them off, not with unemployment what it is.”

“Frightened, are they? What do they think, those dips of yours, that ball boys will solve the bloody labor problem?” He laughed again.

“It's hard to tell what they think.”

The sitting room was small and sparsely furnished. A few children's toys lay abandoned on the worn Wilton carpet. An expensive cabinet radio and phonograph sat against the wall below a dusty mirror and a reproduction of a painting of a Normandy cottage and hedgerow. On the footstool nearby someone had left a rag doll and a half-eaten croissant. There was no air conditioning. From the rear of the cottage drafted a babble of voices, children, women, and men, all gossiping together in an African dialect Reddish couldn't identify and which, for that very reason, sounded aggressively loud. It was likely that de Vaux's African wife, a cousin of Colonel N'Sika, the para commander, had brought a few of her family with her to the capital.

They moved to the side porch, separated from the living room by the dining area and a pair of louvered doors. “Something to drink?” de Vaux asked. “Or is it too early yet? Whiskey, beer?” The nasality again, the exaggerated manners.

“Beer would be fine, thanks.”

He sat back as he waited, his shirt wet against his back. Beyond the white-enameled iron latticework the sunlight drifted through the trees, splintered in bright patches; but over the distant city, visible from the porch, it paled like smoke over rubble in the gaseous heat. A metal coffee table with a glass top sat in front of the rattan chair where Reddish waited. Nearby was a small bookcase, the lower shelves crammed with local and Belgian newspapers, together with the daily mimeographed bulletins circulated by the ministry of information, many yellow with age. Two books lay on the top shelf next to a candlestick, the only books Reddish saw. Behind the empty rattan chair at the far end of the coffee table was a reading light. Alongside was a table holding a telephone, yellow legal pads, and a clay pot filled with pencils.

He supposed de Vaux used the porch as a study, shut away from the distractions of domestic life. The two books drew his eyes. They were dog-eared, their bindings tattered, the cloth covers ringed with watermarks. He couldn't read their titles, but they interested him, clues to the man many had heard of but few knew. He'd been collecting the odd pieces for years, and now he leaned forward and was putting on his steel-rimmed reading glasses as de Vaux returned carrying glasses and beer bottles.

“The UN left them here,” he explained, guessing Reddish's intentions. “A crate of them. That's all that's left, those two. Used this place as a reading room, game room. Even had an Indian librarian. That's the UN for you, wogs everywhere. This was the place where a soldier could write home, feel sorry for himself after the sun went down.” He lifted one of the books from the shelf and pushed it across the glass-topped table. “You'll know this one. They say there's not an Englishman that doesn't.”