The Consignment (31 page)

“You fucking prick.”

“That’s more than you gave Dimitri.”

We could both hear the engines now. He wanted to kill me, I could see that. He wanted to, but he knew I’d kill him first, so in the end he just swore and turned heel and ran for the truck. I kept him in my sights the whole way. He connected the battery, then dropped the hood and scrambled into the cab. He hit the ignition, pumped the pedal, and hit the ignition again. Three times the engine turned over then died, but the fourth time it caught, the engine screamed, and the first Congolese army vehicle appeared on the track at the mouth of the valley.

Trevanian hadn’t seen it, he hauled on the steering wheel, one eye on me, I still had my gun trained on him. Then he swung his truck onto the track. He must have seen the convoy then, they were dead ahead of him, a hundred yards. The lead army truck stopped, an officer got out and raised his hand, signaling for Trevanian to stop too. But Trevanian must have seen what I’d seen, the Internal Security vehicle right behind the officer. If Trevanian stopped, Lagundi would have him. It was too late to turn back. He hit the accelerator and hunkered down.

The officer didn’t hesitate, he shouted to his men and they jumped out and opened fire.

I dropped to my belly. “Get inside!” I shouted to Fiona and Brad. She had her arm around his waist, they shuffled off the porch, inside.

Trevanian’s truck was racing down the track now, the firing became a barrage. Bullets thudded into the truck, smashing the windshield, tearing the metal, and loose shots zipped over my head and clanged against the corrugated iron of the camp buildings.

Trevanian’s truck left the track. It hit the dirt embankment, jolted, and ran on thirty yards, then smashed head-on into a tree, and stalled. The firing from the soldiers died away. As one group of soldiers ran to the truck, another followed the officer, who was walking down the track toward me. I pushed my gun aside and got slowly to my feet, my hands raised.

I watched the soldiers put another few rounds into the cab of Trevanian’s truck, then they went up to it and opened the door. Trevanian’s body flopped out, they pulled on one arm, and the body dropped like a crumpled rag to the ground.

Then behind me Brad shouted, “Dad!” and I looked around. He was standing in the office-block doorway with Fiona, their arms around each other’s waist. I glanced at the advancing officer and his men, then walked over to the office block, keeping my hands up. When I got closer I saw the look on Brad’s face, my heart lurched. Fiona staggered, I ran up the steps and grabbed her and helped Brad ease her down onto the porch.

“Oh, God,” said Brad. “Oh God, oh Jesus.”

Blood was seeping through Fiona’s shirt, just beneath her right breast, it wasn’t a flesh wound like Brad’s. When she was propped against the porch rail, I withdrew my arm from her back, and my arm was bloody. Her face was turning white. Her mouth was open, she was trying to speak, but nothing was coming.

“Mom?” said Brad.

I leaned in close to her face. Her eyes were glazing over. “Hang on, Fiona. I’ll get a medic for you. Just hang on.” Her head seemed to dip. “Keep talking to her,” I told Brad, then I got up and went down the steps, and the officer and his men raised their guns at me.

“Medic!” I gestured to the blood on my arm, pointed behind to where Fiona was lying. I made frantic hand signals, and kept talking at the officer, and after a few moments he got it. He ordered the men to lower their guns, then he took me back to one of the vehicles in his convoy. He reached in by the driver, unstrapped a small metal box with a red cross painted on its lid, and gave it to me. I flipped the box open. Bandages and unmarked bottles of medicines and pills.

“Don’t you have a medic?” I asked in despair. He looked blank. “Doctor?
Monsieur le docteur, ici?
”

“Non,”
he said, and shrugged.

I put the box under my arm and ran.

She wasn’t propped against the porch rail now, she was lying on her back, and Brad was kneeling beside her, holding her hand. I leaped up the steps, opening the box, grabbing at the bandages.

“We can stop the bleeding. Undo her shirt,” I told Brad. “Come on!”

He lifted his face to me, it was contorted with pain, and he looked down at his mother again. Then I looked down at her. Her eyes were wide open and lifeless, and her face was white and still. I slumped against the porch rail. Brad held both her hands in his, and wept. She was gone. The metal box fell from my hand. I lifted my eyes and stared at the sun.

CHAPTER 40

My memories of what followed are blurred, but I know we were taken back to Mbuji-Mayi by the Congolese army. From there, contact was made with the U.S. Embassy, and a few hours later a U.S. Navy chopper arrived, it ferried Brad and me, and Fiona’s body, out to the carrier where Channon was waiting. I stayed close to Brad the whole journey. He was in shock, like me, but I forced myself to talk to him, told him to stay focused on himself, assured him that the Navy doctors would take care of him. In truth, neither of us was really there. We were still where we would be for months, years, or maybe even the rest of our lives, back on the porch at Dujanka, with Fiona, dead, lying at our feet.

Her death overwhelmed everything.

When the surgeon aboard the carrier took Brad into the operating theater, Channon showed me to a private cabin. He asked me if I wanted him to stay, I told him no, so he left me. Without Brad to tend to, I had nothing to hold it off any longer. I dropped into my bunk and felt the consuming wave of grief rise up and break over me. Fiona was gone. I had lost my wife. Brad had lost his mother. The why of it wasn’t anything like clear to me, but I’d played some part in putting her in front of the bullet, I knew that.

I pressed my forehead hard against the steel bulkhead till the pressure burned. She was gone for all eternity. Inside me, my soul began to shrivel up and die.

“We don’t have to do this now,” said Alex Channon when I appeared at his cabin door with a five-page handwritten report. It had been nearly twenty-four hours since I arrived on the ship. In that time I’d grieved till exhaustion overcame me, then I’d slept. On waking, I’d gone down to check on Brad. He was still sleeping after minor surgery on his wound, but the doctors assured me he was fine, so I’d returned to my cabin. There my mind began circling, spiraling inward. I kept having thoughts I couldn’t control. To distract myself, and break the cycle, I sat down and played it just like a soldier returning from a mission. I wrote my own debrief, scribbling it out on a few loose pages. Just the facts, from the
Sebastopol
’s departure from New Jersey, to Trevanian’s death. It was a kind of shallow therapy, a way of seeing what had happened while keeping my feelings at bay. But when it was done, my mind immediately started circling again, so I gathered the pages up and brought them to Channon. Now he swiveled around in his chair, spreading his hands. “Leave it till we get home. You’ve got plenty enough to deal with.”

I stepped across the small cabin and dropped the pages on his fold-down desk. I told him that it was done. I said that he might as well read it.

He fingered the pages. “Anything I don’t already know?”

I shrugged a shoulder. Probably not.

“Okay.” He pushed the pages to one side of his desk. “I’ll take a look at it tonight. Now, how about you go back and do like I said, get some rest.”

I started to nod, then everything seemed to disconnect and I touched my fingers to my forehead. My eyes clouded over, I shook my head.

“You want some water?”

I shook my head again, no.

“Something stronger?”

“Just give me a second.”

“Sure.” He nodded to his bunk, and I sat down. He gave me a minute. “How’s Brad doing?” he asked finally.

“He’s still down in the infirmary. He’s okay.”

“His wound wasn’t too bad. In a year, he’ll be bragging about it.”

I looked up. “How in hell did I let it happen?”

“Hey.”

“I was standing right there.”

“Don’t start down the blame road. You’ve got nothing to blame yourself for.”

I made a sound.

“I mean it,” he said. “Look at it this way. If you weren’t there, you’d have lost Brad too.”

“I lied to her.”

“You were protecting her.”

“If it was all about protecting her, how come she’s dead?”

Alex pursed his lips together. He knew I was really talking to myself, not to him. He stayed silent, gave me a minute to collect myself. Finally I hauled myself up from the bunk.

“The ship’s chaplain dropped by,” Alex said. “He thought you might want him to call in on you later.” When I turned my head, no, Alex said, “I’ll let him down easy.”

I lifted my chin to the report on his desk. I suggested I might come by in the morning to talk it through.

“If you feel up to it. Sure we can.”

“I’ve made Rita a copy.”

He made a face. “Really, Ned. This stuff can wait.”

I looked at him, expressionless. Suddenly disconnected again.

“Ned?”

“Sure,” I said, nodding, but not knowing why. I told him I’d come by in the morning.

Just past Channon’s cabin the passage led onto a few square yards of steel plate that were railed like a balcony, I went and stood at the rail. The wind was getting up, and the waves were building like maybe a storm was coming in from farther out at sea. The ship rose and dipped, an oil drum floated past in a wide pool of slick, and I stood silent and watched the endlessly rolling water. Somewhere down in the bowels of the ship, in the mortuary, Fiona’s body rose and fell with the waves.

CHAPTER 41

“I moved your son across to the IC unit,” the ship’s chief surgeon told me, then he saw my alarm and added hastily, “Nothing wrong. Just quieter over there, I thought he could do with the privacy.”

He led me out of the general ward, where half a dozen civilian evacuees were being treated for minor injuries or shock. He assured me again, just as he’d assured me when he finished operating on Brad, that the only long-term effect of the wound would be the external scars. “Neat holes,” he remarked to himself. “He was lucky.”

A few yards down the passage, he shouldered open the door to the Intensive Care unit. Propped on his pillows, Brad was watching a TV that sat on a trolley at the end of his bed. When he saw us, he hit the remote, the sound on the TV died.

“CNN,” Brad said tiredly. “They’re saying the coup’s over.” He dropped the remote on the bedside locker, and winced. The doctor asked if he needed more painkillers, but Brad shook his head and shuffled himself a little more upright against the pillows. Then the doctor asked him some questions about how he felt. Any dizziness? None, Brad said. Any internal pain? Brad told him there was just a dull ache in the immediate region of the wound. Satisfied, the doctor said someone would be along shortly to check the dressing, then he bobbed his head to me and withdrew.

I looked at Brad’s face. His expression was vacant, totally washed out, like he’d hit bottom and stayed there, like grief had finally numbed him. He picked up the remote and seemed to stare past the TV at the empty IC beds. There were cardiac and respiratory monitors on the trolleys, and on the arms of the trolleys, opaque liquid inside clear plastic sacs. Everything had a spotlessly clean stainless-steel gleam.

“You see this?” said Brad. He pointed to the TV with the remote, turning up the sound. “Listen to this jerk.”

It was still CNN, more news from the Congo. According to the journalist, life in Kinshasa was returning to normal. Reports from the east of the country confirmed that the rebels had either fled or been defeated. The government was firmly in control again. Western evacuees had begun returning to the city.

“He’s makin’ it sound like nothin’ happened,” said Brad in disgust.

We watched the rest of the report in silence. There was the inevitable mention of diamonds and cobalt, the mineral wealth of the country, then a brief interview with the U.S. ambassador. The ambassador explained that he was in close contact with the Congolese government, he indicated that the Congolese President had requested assistance to help maintain peace in the country. The ambassador had apparently promised the services of several hundred U.S. Marines who would enter the country under the UN flag just as soon as the appropriate resolution was passed by the UN Security Council. He confirmed that the coup was over. The rebellion, he said, had been quashed.

Brad hit the remote and the TV screen went blank. His head fell back into the pillows.

“Gotten any sleep?” I asked him.

“Some. Not much.”

I told him it was the best thing, if he could manage it.

His head rolled, he looked at me. “How about you?”

“Sleep?”

“Yeah.”

“A few hours. Enough to keep me going.”

He faced the blank TV screen. “I keep seein’ her,” he said. “I keep seein’ Mom back at Dujanka.” I couldn’t look at him, I faced the TV too. “It’s like in a crummy movie or something. I close my eyes, she’s right there.” He fell silent. When I glanced back at him, tears stood in his eyes. “Christ. And that jerk, talkin’ like nothin’ happened.” He threw the remote, it cracked against the corner of the TV and went clattering across the floor. I put a hand on his shoulder. “It should have been me,” he said. “If it wasn’t for me, she’d never have been there.”

“That’s crazy.”

“If I hadn’t taken the job—you didn’t want me to take it.”

“You can’t hold that against yourself. Nobody can.”

“Mom didn’t want me to come out here either.”

“She got you the offer.”

“Yeah. But I knew she had second thoughts, and I came anyway.” He looked up at me. “You know why I came, Dad?”

I lifted my hand from his shoulder. I suggested we leave this for another time.

“I came because of you,” he said. “Because I knew you didn’t want me to come. I came because I thought that might piss you off, because I thought you were hurtin’ Mom.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Yes it does. You weren’t even havin’ an affair, that was bullshit, right? You’re still in the Army. You were just doin’ your job all along. Every damn thing you said about the Congo, what you warned me about, it was all true. Everything. It was just like you said.” He pushed his head back into the pillows and looked past me. “If I’d listened to you, none of this would have happened.”

I sat down on the edge of his bed. I thought a moment, then I said, “I gave up the right to be listened to by anyone the day I left West Point.”

“You were doing your duty.”

My duty. I bowed my head and waited for the wave of shame to subside.

“Mom would never have stopped you doin’ anything you wanted,” he said.

“I know.”

“She hated it when you joined Haplon. I could see she really hated it. I bet she never told you that.”

“No,” I agreed.

“She kept that kinda stuff to herself.” When I nodded, I felt him studying me. Then he said, “How did Barchevsky die?” I faced him. “Mom told me,” he said. “She was tellin’ me how you got out of Kinshasa. She said he was trapped or somethin’. She said you found him.”

I nodded, wary.

“Rebels?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Was he shot?”

“Head and throat.”

“Was he dead when you found him?”

When I nodded again, his eyes stayed on me. I told him the fighting in that area had been fierce. He lifted his chin.

“I was kinda surprised when she radioed me from his place.”

“She hitched a ride up from Johannesburg.”

We looked at each other. My willful misinterpretation had not gotten past him. My heart thumped hard. He suspected. Talk at the mine? Pieces he’d seen and heard, then put together? Somewhere along the way, Brad had picked up on the possibility of a relationship between Barchevsky and his mother. But he couldn’t say that to me. Then I glimpsed another thought lurking way back.

“He was dead when I found him,” I said.

Brad considered that, then nodded. Of course. He’d never thought any different.

But this was territory we were never going to revisit, and even if we couldn’t talk openly, I didn’t want to leave it now quite so equivocally, with Brad feeling that Fiona had in any way tarnished her life with me, or that I nursed any rancor or grievance. That wasn’t what I believed. That wasn’t what I truly felt.

I put my hand on his arm. “If you knew a month back what you know now, Brad, you would have made some different choices, wouldn’t you?” He looked from my hand up to me. He cocked his head. “Wouldn’t you?” I asked him.

“Thousands.”

“Me too,” I said. “And if Fiona was here, I like to think maybe she might have said the same.”

He looked at me in that same piercing way his mother had. Piercing. Down deep. Then he put his hand on my hand. “She would never have done anything to hurt you, Dad,” he said, and at that moment I felt my heart gently break.