Snakepit (14 page)

“A man needs his friends. It is a cold, mean world out there,” he said complacently, almost amusedly, knowing that he could take care of himself in said world.

“You are right, sah.”

The General looked at the man's clothes: a bad-fitting suit, a cheap shirt, cheap shoes. The man was developing a bald patch despite being so young. He lacked the gleam of well-being on his forehead; in fact, he looked as if he had not been paid for years. The large scuffed hands that used to steal mangoes, the sunken eyes, the clothes hanging sadly on his frame, made the General wonder what the man's wife looked like. Another sad-eyed case left behind by the revolution, he thought. He wanted to ask him where his parents were, but he decided to wait. He wanted to remind him of some of the escapades of their youth, but he did not want to bring him too close too quickly, at least not before knowing what he wanted from him.

“What can I do for you?”

“I have a very big problem, General. My son got himself in big trouble. He joined a group of bad people and they tried to ferry coffee to Kenya,” the man said, looking fixedly at the table.

“Smugglers! Smugglers!”

“I failed in my parental responsibility. I was too busy trying to make ends meet to keep track of what the boy was doing. Now he is in police custody. Who knows what the Anti-Smuggling Unit people will do to him? They might burn him as they have done others.”

“Those people are sick, I can assure you,” the General said, thinking about his days as king of the lake. He remembered seeing all those beautiful little islands from his helicopter and feeling that he owned each and every one of them. He remembered thinking that he owned all the fishes, the crocodiles, the tadpoles swimming in the lake. He remembered thinking that he owned the air everybody on the lake breathed. Now it was all gone. Stripped from him in front of his mother. He kept quiet for such a long time that the man thought he had fallen asleep. He coughed a few times in a bid to remind him of his presence.

“You are my last hope, General.”

“What do you expect me to do?” he asked, looking at the stars. The Southern Cross constellation always reminded him of his favourite islands. The water used to look that icy at times.

“I am sure that if you ordered a soldier to move, he would move without question, sah, General.”

The General kept quiet for a long time. He took a swig from his glass. Why should he help this man? Was his son the only one with the threat of death hanging over his head? “Do you realize what you are asking me to do? Do you want me to break the law? And interfere in the affairs of another ministry?”

“Sah, if my cow fell in a pit, I would call friends with ropes and try to pull it out. I would lower myself in and do what I could. In this case I just can't.”

“Well said, cowboy,” laughed the General. Here was his chance to fuck Ashes. This he would do for fun. It was high time his men did something dramatic. It would wake them up; maybe even whet their appetite for something stiffer. “I don't condone smuggling. It is treason. It is punishable by death. However, I make an exception. I will free the boy. Warn him never to sin again. Next time, it will be the bullet. A bazooka shell. There would be nothing left to bury, I can assure you.”

“I am in your debt, General,” the man said, kneeling down and placing his palms on the table, face upturned as if for a slap or a string of spittle. Peasants always greeted the king prostrate; kneeling was not a bad substitute for a prince.

“Get up and go and enjoy the party. You owe me nothing. I don't have time to collect debts.”

“I will send you a bull, General. You deserve a bull, a very big bull, sah.”

Trembling with relief, the man almost fell over as he tried to rise and walk away.

The second man to be called was a tribesman. The mothers of the two men had been friends. Twice before, the General had helped this man. The problem was that he had too many troubles, too many debts. He had helped him to get a business, which had run aground. He had bought him cows on credit, but the money never got repaid, and he had to force the bank to cancel the loan at gunpoint.

“I am not worthy to be in your presence, General. Tolerating me is a sign of your magnanimity.”

“You are right. Twice I used my good offices to help you, all in vain. What do you want now?” he roared, and banged the table.

“I need help,” the man said, trembling.

“You need locking up and learning some discipline. Do you know how much a common soldier makes a month? No, you don't. Very little. My father was a soldier. He got nothing from the service except a drinking habit. I had to organize his funeral and pay off his debts. Such a humiliation after decades of selfless service. Do you expect me to pay your drinking debts for you? The best thing I can do is to organize your funeral, I assure you.”

“I am sorry, General. I just need another chance.”

“You don't have any sense. Now go. I don't want to see you again.”

Next the colonel in charge of his security, his chief advisor, came. They had known each other for a long time, and he was the man behind the colonel's promotion. The General saw more of this man than he did his own family. He liked the colonel's advice because it was always sound, even if it was repugnant at times. He was a university graduate, the only learned man close to him. He was the one who handled the most sensitive assignments.

“What a fetid asshole!” the General complained lightheartedly as his last visitor disappeared.

“Some people are not worth anybody's time, General,” the colonel said, smiling. He knew that the General was in a good mood. It was a good omen.

“Are you having a good time yourself ?”

“Of course. There is a lot of booze, meat and music. What more does a man want?”

“Getting down to business, Colonel. I still want to kill Bat. The quicker the better,” the General said, looking very businesslike.

“We still don't know the whole story, General.”

“Since when does one need to know the whole fucking story in order to act? You see a traitor, you hit him. That is our way.”

“Rabid Dog knows a lot about the ministry. We need him. He is our tool. We can punish him, but killing him would be a waste. Ashes is bluffing. If we kill this man, that reptile wins. Remember he tried to threaten you with investigation. Why didn't he do it if he knew so much? He is winding you up. Don't fall into his cheap traps.”

“Rabid Dog is a thief. I don't even know why we hired him in the first place, I can assure you.”

“It was because he is brilliant.”

“On whose side are you, Colonel?”

“Ours, of course.”

“Rabid Dog is the worst example of a southerner. He got everything for nothing. Nothing. He just walked in from Britain and got this wonderful job. What hardship has he ever undergone? Wiping his ass, I guess,” he said morosely, maliciously. He signalled a soldier to bring him a joint. His wife would complain about it, but he could live with that. He needed the topper.

“Give him some more time while we watch the developments, General,” the colonel said, aware that his boss would relent. It was a personal matter, after all, not treason, not smuggling, not plotting a coup. General Bazooka was not the only one; many others had grudges like this one to settle, and some settled them at the cost of national interest. After all, the Marshal was the biggest grudge-settler of them all. The colonel was at times surprised by how petty some of these top leaders were, how insecure they felt because of their lack of education. Many suspected that their underlings despised them and it hurt, because they were the rulers, exposing their inefficiency day by day. He intervened whenever he could; sometimes it worked; sometimes it didn't. This time he had hope. He felt very good whenever he could get somebody off because he had studied law, although he was involved more in breaking it than upholding it.

“I won't give him forever, I can assure you, Colonel,” the General said aggressively, the strain of holding back visible in his dilated eyes and exaggerated gestures.

“Reptile is the real trouble-causer as far as I am concerned.”

“I am auctioning him tonight. Do you hear me, Colonel? Any man who brings me his dick gets ten thousand dollars. American. Cash. Day or night. Rain or shine. Do you hear me? Ten thousand. Plus promotion. I want him that badly, I can assure you.”

“You can rely on me, General,” the colonel said stiffly, wondering where the escalation of hostilities would lead. He had told his boss time and again to ignore Reptile most of the time, not to feel unnecessarily provoked, to accept that he was part and parcel of the power structure, without much success.

“Bomb his house. Ambush him. Cut out his tongue, anything. I want to shake the hand of the man who will rid me of this scourge and give me back my peace of mind. Everywhere I look I see that snake, crawling, slithering, smearing everything with slime. Bring me its head and I will make you a cabinet minister, man of the books. This snake wants to investigate me! Who is investigating it? What does it want from me? Tell me, what does that snake want from me?”

“He is bluffing.”

“Well, he won't bluff when he is dead. I can assure you.”

“True.” The colonel wondered how many times he got to hear the words “I can assure you” in a day. If only each assurance delivered!

“Now tell me, who do you think poses the biggest threat after Ashes?”

“The Vice President.”

“How high do you rate his chances?”

“If he mobilises from other tribes, the non-Muslims, malcontents, he can stage a coup. He is that popular, that close to the soldiers, that anti-you and anti–Marshal Amin.”

The General pulled hard on his joint. “The Marshal seems to think so too.”

“Is he on the red list already?”

“He is nowhere. He is nothing. One grenade; one car crash is enough, I can assure you,” said the General contemptuously.

“This government is expert at traffic control,” the colonel joked. He liked this kind of talk, reading intelligence reports, knowing who was on the way up and who was speedily descending.

The General burst out laughing and said: “One more small business. A little rescue operation to warm your hands for the big task. Get the boy out before Reptile's men burn him.”

“You mean the smuggler?”

“A greedy, brainless bastard who thought he could make easy money.”

“No problem. We will get him out.”

“Now let us go and get drunk. I am a happy man. Reptile stands on the auction block. What a prospect!”

A very costly one, thought the colonel, biting his lower lip. He liked action and enjoyed to the full being the General's brain, planning, advising, organizing, delegating authority to the men on the ground who carried out the General's will. He knew that Amin and his regime would not last; unlike most henchmen, he had his certificates; he could go anywhere and begin anew.

The General never discussed details with the colonel. He had discovered that the more leeway you gave a man, the harder he worked trying to please you. The system had worked remarkably well. General Bazooka had in fact copied it from the Marshal.

General Bazooka was in the mood for his gun pranks, but at the same time he did not want to quarrel with his wife in front of his men. He would have wanted his eldest son to shoot a few glasses, but the boy's mother would raise so much hell that it would not be worth the bother. Those things the boy would have to learn later in the company of men. What does she teach the children? What do they learn at school? It is definitely not to shoot a piece of chalk out of a teacher's hand or a pen from behind his ear or a cigarette from his mouth. It struck him that his children might have a different future, a more sedate life. His wife and mother seemed to prefer that to the rigours of army life. But he did not want a teacher for a son, a nurse for a daughter. Except if they were army teachers and nurses. I will look into that, he thought.

He looked forward to a long hot night. A groany, sweaty, satisfactory affair. He liked tilling familiar ground after weeks away. The waiting created a change, a razor edge. It made the familiar sex sounds rendered in his mother tongue, laced with his earliest memories of the act, all the more fulfilling. They would bounce, roll, turn and milk each other like donkeys. Then he would lie in her arms, a delicacy uneroded by the years, watch the light going out of her eyes like receding stars, and feel reconnected to the past in sleep.

At daybreak he would rise, the past night an oasis in an encroaching desert, a lingering of fatigue in his veins, a bunch of memories in his pulsating head, a trace of sweet pain on his sex skin. He would rise out of it tentatively, a plant shooting out of a swamp, and climb into the new day, rejuvenated, invigorated. Ready for business as usual.

COLONEL ROBERT ASHES OFTEN THOUGHT of himself as an airborne bird, an eagle cruising, surveying its domains. His meteoric rise felt like a huge thermal thrust keeping him in the air with minimum effort. He had settled into the fast life. He enjoyed the banquets, the fleet of Boomerangs, the cameras, the sabre-rattling, the marriage, the wealth amidst poverty, the envy he generated and wore like an eagle's monstrous wings. Only in Africa, he continually said to himself, can a man be reborn this fully, this gloriously.

When he set out for Uganda on the trail of the elusive Irish bomber Williams, he knew that everything was on the line. It was the watershed in his frantic effort to enter Uganda, and at the same time it was like a death sentence. The cover of the delegation could get blown; somebody could cave in under pressure; they could be shot by trigger-happy soldiers; Amin could fail to take the bait. He remembered arriving in Kenya and thinking fleetingly that he had made a mistake and should have remained in Britain or gone back to South Africa. He remembered the sleepless nights in a Kenyan hotel while they waited for a plane. In those days he subsisted on whisky, cigars and biscuits, the food too unpalatable to swallow. He remembered stepping on the plane with the words of his handler ringing in his ears: “You are on your own. If caught, we will deny any knowledge of you. Your head will probably end up in Amin's fridge, your balls on his breakfast fork.”