There Fell a Shadow (16 page)

“The rest of us,” he said, “the Westerners—the press—we left according to our ambitions and our fears. I filed stories until the electrical lines went down. Then I grabbed a camera and took pictures of the chaos in the streets. Finally the shells began to score on the city. I knew I had to go.”

The FDR wound south. Manhattan welled up beside us like a stone sunrise. Holloway kept the Lincoln in the right lane, moving slowly. For the first time, I noticed how tightly he was gripping the wheel.

“There was an airlift on,” he said. “American choppers had flown in to take embassy workers and the rest of us. I got back to the hotel, packed what I could. I went downstairs, out past the bar. And as I passed the entranceway, I saw a solitary figure sitting in the empty room. Sitting at a table, smoking a cigarette, staring into space.”

“Colt.”

“Yes. He'd come back.”

“Alone.”

“Yes. Without Lester Paul. Without Collins.”

“Without Eleanora.”

“Yes. Collins, I gather, had stayed behind, trying to file dispatches somehow. We later found out he was killed by shellfire. Paul—until the other night, we assumed he'd died, too.”

“And Eleanora?”

“Colt spent months, almost a year, trying to find her. The word was she'd been captured by the rebels. Died at their hands. Colt would never tell me what had happened. Why he'd come back like that, alone. He just sat there in the bar with the cigarette, as if he were waiting for the place to sink into the earth, taking him with it. I screamed at him. I said, ‘Colt, we've got to go! Now, man, now!' He just waved at me vaguely. I grabbed him by the arm. He didn't resist. He didn't do anything. I dragged him out into the street.”

Holloway stared out the windshield. His stare was hard. His mouth was tight. I saw his throat working under his tie. “The sky—it was night, Wells—and the sky was red with fire. I fought through the crowd toward the embassy compound where the choppers were. The streets were jammed solid with people. All I could feel was that soft-hardness of flesh pressed against me. All I could smell was the sweat and the terror. Sometimes my feet didn't even touch the ground as the crowd carried me. Sometimes I could fight for a yard and then another. Sometimes … sometimes I only saw the sky—the red sky—floating over as the crowd closed in.”

He nodded curtly. “I just held Colt's arm. I held it and held it. He was like a rag doll. I held on to him and pushed toward the embassy. Eventually—like when you get close to the shore of the ocean—eventually, the tide carried us. The people—in their panic—were trying to get onto the American airlift. Trying to get out of the country any way they could. They carried us to the embassy compound. There was a fence around it. Marines stood behind it, their rifles raised. The marines …” He snorted. “Teenage boys. Under their helmets, they looked like they wanted to bury their heads in their mothers' laps and cry for mercy. They stood behind the fence, fighting off this … this tidal wave of humanity. It kept crashing against them and they kept pushing it back. Only when they saw a white face would they open the gate and let it pass.”

I saw sadness in his eyes. I saw bitterness in his smile. “I dragged Colt to the gate,” he said. “They opened it and pulled him in. Then one of the marines hit me in the chest with the butt of his rifle, shoved me back. The gate slammed in my face.”

“Oh man,” I said.

“The crowd, then, the crowd started to pull at me, to pull me away from the fence. Clawing at me, trying to get around me, trying to get close themselves, to talk, to beg, to bribe the marines standing guard. And I just started to scream.” His voice melted away on the word. He spoke in a near whisper. “I started to scream, ‘Reggie Jackson! Reggie Jackson! Reggie Jackson!' It was the only ballplayer's name I could think of. I just kept screaming. I just kept fighting off the hands that were pulling me away from the gate. And finally … oh God, finally … the gate cracked open, and a hand reached out. And I screamed and screamed, ‘Reggie Jackson! Reggie Jackson!' And that reaching hand grabbed me—grabbed me right by the front of my shirt and pulled me through the gate. And, Wells, I was looking into the whitest, roundest midwestern face of a marine you ever saw in your life. And the tears were streaming down those pink, pink cheeks of his, and he said to me, ‘Pete Fucking Rose, man. Pete Fucking Rose.'”

We pulled off the drive. The city surrounded us. We drove beneath vaulting walls of concrete. Holloway's hands had relaxed on the wheel now. His stare had softened. His mouth relaxed, too. He lifted his eyes to look at the buildings looming above us.

Softly, he said to me: “All these people, Wells. They just don't know.”

“So what was it?” I asked him.

“Hm?”

“Between Colt and Paul? What was between the two of them?”

For a moment Holloway didn't answer. He seemed lost in his own reflections. Finally, though, he blinked. He glanced at me.

“I can't say for sure,” he said. “But if I had to guess?”

“Yeah?”

“I'd say it was Eleanora.”

She is a woman who lives in the shadows, who lives with fear. In this small country where the fabric of daily life is often torn to pieces by the sudden cruelties of war, she is a source of hope to some and the target of others' hatred. In a nation where there seems no middle ground between oppressive government and savage revolution, Eleanora Richardson is that middle ground—gone underground.

I sat in the reading room of the public library. A vast room that soared over towering mullioned windows up to ornate ceilings far distant overhead. At the bottom of that cavernous space, I sat hunkered before a microfilm viewer. I squinted through its glare at the newspaper page projected onto the surface below. It was a copy of the
Boston Globe
, over a decade old. The
Globe
had picked up a series Colt had sold to the wires. His series on the underground in Sentu. This was the lead piece on Eleanora.

I went back to the story.

Virtually single-handed, Miss Richardson oversees a secret network of safe houses through which pass revolutionaries targeted for arrest and torture, petty government officials targeted for assassination, and, most frequently, some of the vast number of homeless refugees left orphaned, widowed, and injured by war. With Miss Richardson and her people, they find medical attention, solace, and, sometimes, a chance to resettle elsewhere.

An Englishwoman, Miss Richardson came to Africa seven years ago, a twenty-two-year-old missionary for the Anglican Church. She found herself on a continent volcanic with revolution. In Rhodesia first, and later Zambia and Angola, she made attempts to operate openly under the auspices of the church, helping to run schools, infirmaries, and food centers. Soon, however, various victims of national violence began coming to her for help, attracted by her nonpartisan sense of charity. They came one by one, and then by the dozens. She found herself operating subterranean sanctuaries while maintaining a public show of aboveboard missionary work.

In the last four years, however, this has become impossible. Hounded from nation to nation, Miss Richardson has been forced to sever all ties with the church, and to relinquish much of her contact with the everyday life of men and women.

The cellar of her quiet suburban home has been turned into an infirmary of fifteen beds. Some of the people there on one recent day were suffering from gunshot wounds. Some of them were children. Miss Richardson assured them that a “safe” doctor would be with them before the day was done.

Sitting upstairs in a living room darkened by drawn curtains, with her hair disheveled, her forehead grimy, and her white apron stained with blood, she consented to an interview. She was reluctant to speak in detail about her life, fearing she would inadvertently reveal information that might make her or her operation more vulnerable. She did, however, discuss her past and present situation in general terms, saying that the greatest difficulty of the life she has chosen is her separation from her home, her parents, two brothers, and a sister.

“The worst of it, believe it or not, is not being able to keep in touch with your loved ones,” she said. “Letters get through now and then, but you can go as long as six months, more, without a word. It gets terribly lonely sometimes, and that's when the fear gets to you. You find yourself thinking, ‘All right, I'll pack it in.' But, of course, you don't, do you?”

I sat back in my hard wood chair. I looked around me. There were rows and rows of viewers on the desk. There were rows and rows of desks. There were people passing among the shelves. There was steady movement, steady murmuring.

For a second I felt as if I had come up from underwater, or out of a movie in the afternoon: I was surprised to see the light. I'd been involved in the piece. I'd imagined Eleanora sitting in the darkened living room. I'd heard her voice. I'd heard it very clearly, in fact. It was a calm, gentle voice. It had no fear in it.

I blinked the feeling away. I leaned forward.

Nothing in her background prepared her for this life. The daughter of an Essex County minister and his wife, she grew up in the rectory of a rural church. She speaks fondly of playing with the sons and daughters of farmers.

“I was a bit the P.K., you know,” she said, smiling. “The preacher's kid. The other children accepted me well enough, but I was always the one they turned to to settle their arguments or make the rules of the game. It gives one a tremendous sense of gravity and responsibility very young. Not easy to get rid of it, I suppose.”

Strongly influenced by a father she describes as “witty, unpretentious, and kind,” she became intensely religious in her youth. She left the country shortly after graduating from Girton with the idea of spreading the gospel among the disadvantaged.

“I'm afraid I was not very enlightened,” she says now. “I had this idea that there were all these unhappy Africans, you know, and they were just waiting for me. I suppose I felt that all they really wanted was for someone to come along with the love of Christ in her satchel and sort of spread it around here and there.”

She says she is still religious, but that she does not preach much or teach the Bible anymore. “I can't tell a five-year-old who hasn't eaten for a week about the love of Christ. I can't tell a woman who's just seen her daughter bayoneted that He works in mysterious ways. I just can't. One simply reaches a point, you know, where one feels that if Christ is anywhere, He's in one's hands. One's actions. If He wanted His name mentioned all the time, He would have gone into films.”

I laughed softly. Then I stopped laughing, the smile pasted to my face. I thought about her talking like that, with her golden hair disheveled and her forehead begrimed. I thought about her white skin and how it blushed red when she made love.

I shifted uncomfortably on the chair. I took a breath, focused my attention, and leaned into the glare of the machine again.

In Sentu, Miss Richardson's organization is thought to be particularly pervasive. She is spoken of in almost legendary terms among natives and Westerners alike. She shrugged off such celebrity and declined to discuss the extent of her network. She did admit that she did not “start from scratch here,” and used experience and the remnants of previous networks to establish herself quickly.

In Sentu, she said she has found a situation that is far from unique in Africa, or in the world: a mixture of real injustices and ambiguous politics boiling over into violence. Again and again, she has refused to take sides, and she said she has even rejected appeals by several governments to allow them to use her network as a base for undercover operations.

“Each side always seems to feel that this or that adjustment to the local machinery will make things all right,” she said. “Even when they recognize the complexities, they still see no alternative but to operate within that machinery, to tinker with it this way or that. That's what justifies the violence in their minds: the seeming nearness of the goal. But, of course, the machinery of injustice, of hatred, of cruelty—these aren't local at all, are they. They're worldwide. They're not built in Sentu or Rhodesia or Zambia. We build them here—in the heart. My heart. All of ours.”

She paused, reflected, then let out a surprisingly girlish giggle, bringing one hand to her mouth with the modesty of a preacher's daughter.

“Listen to me go on,” she said, laughing. “I suppose I'm still a missionary, after all. Only it turns out I didn't come here to save Africa, did I? I came here to save myself.”

I shook my head. My hand went out to touch the last words of the article. The shadow cast by my fingers wiped the words away. I gazed at that shadow. I was not thinking of Eleanora now. I was thinking of Colt. I was thinking of him again as he stumbled to the door of his bedroom on the last night of his life. Staggering under the weight of alcohol, and under the burden of his loss.