Agents of Treachery Read online

  “Beggars,” Benjamin said. “They are on their way to work.” The beggars limped and crawled according to their afflictions. Those who could not walk at all were carried by others.

  “They help each other,” Benjamin said. He said something to the sergeant in a tribal language. The sergeant put a spotlight on a big man carrying a leper who had lost his feet. The leper looked over his friend’s shoulder and smiled. The big man walked onward as if unaware of the spotlight. Benjamin said, “See? A blind man will carry a crippled man, and the crippled man will tell him where to go. Take a good look, Mr. Brown. It is a sight you will never see in Ndala again.”

  “Why not?”

  “You will see.”

  At the end of the street an army truck was parked. A squad of soldiers armed with bayoneted rifles held at port arms formed a line across the street. Benjamin gave an order. The sergeant stopped the car and shone his spotlight on them. They had not stirred or opened their eyes as when the sergeant drove down this same street the night before. Whatever was happening, these people did not want to be witnesses. The soldiers paid no more attention to Benjamin’s car than the people lying on the ground paid to the soldiers.

  When the beggars arrived, the soldiers surrounded them and herded them into the truck. The blind man protested, a single syllable. Before he could say more, a soldier hit him in the small of the back with a rifle butt. The blind man dropped the crippled leper and fell down unconscious. The soldiers would not touch them, so the other beggars picked them up and loaded them into the truck, then climbed in themselves. The soldiers lowered the back curtain and got into a smaller truck of their own. All this happened in eerie silence, not an order given or a protest voiced, in a country in which the smallest human encounter sent tsunamis of shouting and laughter through crowds of hundreds.

  We drove on. We witnessed the same scene over and over again. All over the city, beggars were being rounded up by troops. Our last stop was the Independence Hotel, my hotel, where I saw the beggars I knew best, including the handsome, smiling leper who caught coins in his mouth, being herded into the back of a truck. As the truck drove away, gears changing, the sun appeared on the eastern horizon, huge and entire, a miracle of timing.

  Benjamin said, “You look a little sick, my friend. Let me tell you something. Those people are never coming back to Ndala. They give our country a bad image, and two weeks from now hundreds of foreigners will arrive for the Pan-African Conference. Thanks to President Ga, they will not have to look at these disgusting creatures, so maybe they will elect him president of the conference. Think about that. We will talk when you come back.”

  In Washington, two days later at six in the morning, I found my chief at his desk, drinking coffee from a chipped mug and reading the Wall Street Journal. I told him my tale. He knew at once exactly who Benjamin was. He asked how much money Benjamin wanted, what his timetable was, who his coconspirators were, whether he himself planned to replace the abominable Ga as dictator after he overthrew him, what his policy toward the United States would be—and, by the way, what were his hidden intentions? I was unable to answer most of these questions.

  I said, “All he’s asked for so far is encouragement.”

  “Encouragement?” said my chief. “That’s a new one. He didn’t suggest one night of love with the first lady in the Lincoln bedroom?”

  A certain third world general had once made just such a demand in return for his services as a spy in a country whose annual national product was smaller than that of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. I told him that Benjamin had not struck me as being the type to long for Mrs. Eisenhower.

  My chief said, “You take him seriously?”

  “He’s an impressive person.”

  “Then go back and talk to him some more.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “What about the encouragement?”

  “It’s cheap. Ga is a bad ‘un. Shovel it on.”

  I was cheap, too—a singleton out at the end of the string. If I got into trouble, I’d get no help from the chief or anyone else in Washington. The old gentleman himself would cut the string. He owed me nothing. “Brown? Brown?” he would say in the unlikely event that he would be asked what had become of me. “The only Brown I know is Charlie.”

  The prospect of returning to Ndala on the next flight was not a very inviting one. I had just spent eight weeks traveling around Africa, in and out of countries, languages, time zones, identities. My intestines swarmed with parasites that were desperate to escape. There was something wrong with my liver: the whites of my eyes were yellow. I had had a malaria attack on the plane from London that frightened the woman seated next to me. The four aspirins I took, spilling only twenty or so while getting them out of the bottle with shaking hands, brought the fever and the sweating under control. Twelve hours later I still had a temperature of 102; I shuddered still, though only fitfully.

  To the chief I said, “Right.”

  “This time get all the details,” my chief said. “But no cables. Your skull only, and fly the information back to me personally. Tell the locals nothing.”

  “Which locals? Here or there?”

  “Anywhere.”

  His tone was nonchalant, but I had known this man for a long time. He was interested; he saw an opportunity. He was a white-haired, tweedy, pipe-smoking old fellow with a toothbrush mustache and twinkling blue eyes. His specialty was doing the things that American presidents wanted done without actually requiring them to give the order. He smiled with big crooked teeth; he was rich but too old for orthodontia. “Until I give the word, nobody knows anything but us two chickens. Does that suit you?”

  I nodded as if my assent really was necessary. After a breath or two, I said, “How much encouragement can I offer this fellow?”

  “Use your judgment. Take some money, too. You may have to tide him over till he gets hold of the national treasure. Just don’t make any promises. Hear him out. Figure him out. Estimate his chances. We don’t want a failure. Or an embarrassment.”

  I rose to leave.

  “Hold on,” said the chief.

  He rummaged around in a desk drawer and after examining several identical objects and discarding them, handed me a large bulging brown envelope. A receipt was attached to it with Scotch tape. It said that the envelope contained one hundred thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. I signed it with the fictitious name my employer had assigned to me when I joined up. As I opened the door to leave, I saw that the old gentleman had gone back to his Wall Street Journal.

  Benjamin and I had arranged no secure way of communicating with each other, so I had not notified him that I was coming back to Ndala. Nevertheless, the sergeant met me on the tarmac at the airport. I was not surprised that Benjamin knew I was coming. Like all good cops, he kept an eye on passenger manifests for flights in and out of his jurisdiction. After sending a baggage handler into the hold of the plane to find my bag, the sergeant drove me to a safe house in the European quarter of the city. It was five o’clock in the morning when we got there. Benjamin awaited me. The sergeant cooked and served a complete English breakfast—eggs, bacon, sausage, fried potatoes, grilled tomato, cold toast, Dundee orange marmalade, and sour gritty coffee. Benjamin ate with gusto but made no small talk. Air conditioners hummed in every window.

  “Better that you stay in this house than the hotel,” Benjamin said when he had cleaned his plate. “In that way there will never be a record that you have been in this country.”

  That was certainly true, and it was not the least of my worries. I was traveling on a Canadian passport as Robert Bruce Brown, who had died of meningitis in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, thirty-five years before at age two. Thanks to the sergeant, I had bypassed customs and passport control. That meant that there was no entry stamp in the passport. In theory I could not leave the country without one, but then again, I was carrying one hundred thousand American dollars in cash in an airline bag, and this was a country in which mo
ney talked. If I did disappear, I would disappear without a trace. One way or another, so would the money.

  “There is something I want you to see,” Benjamin said. Apparently this was his standard phrase when he had something unpleasant to show me. After wiping his lips on a white linen napkin, folding it neatly, and dropping it onto the table, he led me into the living room. The drapes were drawn. The sun was up. A sliver of white-hot sunlight shone through. Benjamin called to the sergeant, who brought his briefcase and pulled the curtains tighter. Before leaving us he started an LP on the hi-fi and turned up the volume to defeat hidden microphones. Sinatra sang “In the Still of the Night.”

  Benjamin took a large envelope from the briefcase and handed it to me. It contained about twenty glossy black-and-white photographs—army trucks parked in a field; soldiers with bayonets fixed; a large empty ditch with two bulldozers standing by; beggars getting down from the truck; beggars being tumbled into the ditch; beggars, hedged in by bayonets, being buried alive by the bulldozers; bulldozers rolling over the dirt to tamp it down with their treads.

  “The army is very unhappy about this,” Benjamin said. “President Ga did not tell the generals that soldiers would be required to do this work. They thought they were just getting these beggars out of sight until after the Pan-African Conference. Instead the soldiers were ordered to solve the problem once and for all.”

  My throat was dry. I cleared it and said, “How many people were buried alive?”

  “Nobody counted.”

  “Why was this done?”

  “I told you. The beggars were an eyesore.”

  “That was reason enough to bury them alive?”

  “The soldiers were supposed to shoot them first. But they refused. This is good for us, because now the army is angry. Also afraid. Now Ga can execute any general for murder simply by discovering the crime and punishing the culprits in the name of justice and the people. The generals have not told the president that the soldiers refused to follow his orders, so now they are in danger. If he ever finds out he will bury the soldiers alive. Also a general or two. Or more.”

  I said, “Who would tell him?”

  “Who indeed?” asked Benjamin, stone-faced. I handed the pictures back to him. He held up a palm. “Keep them.”

  I said, “No, thank you.”

  The photos were a death warrant for anyone who was arrested with them in his possession.

  Benjamin ignored me. He rummaged in his briefcase and handed me a handheld radio transceiver. Technologically speaking, those were primitive days, and the device was not much smaller than a fifth of Beefeater’s, minus the neck of the bottle. Nevertheless, it was a wonder for its time. It was made in the U.S.A., so I supposed it had been supplied by the local chief of station, the man who played ball with Ga, as a trinket for a native.

  Benjamin said, “Your call sign is Mustard One. Mine is Mustard. This is for emergencies. This, too.” He handed me a Webley and a box of hollow-point cartridges.

  I was touched by his concern. But the transceiver was useless—if the situation was desperate enough to call him. I would be a dead man before he could get to me. The Webley, however, would be useful for shooting myself in case of need. Shooting anyone else in this country would be the equivalent of committing suicide.

  Benjamin rose to his feet, “I will be back,” he said. “We will spend the evening together.”

  When Benjamin returned around midnight, I was reading Sir Richard Burton s Wanderings in West Africa, the only book in the house. It was a first edition, published in 1863. The margins were sprinkled with pencil dots. I guessed that it had been used by some romantic Brit for a book code. Benjamin was sartorially correct as usual—crisp white shirt with paisley cravat, double-breasted naval blazer, gray slacks, gleaming oxblood oxfords. He cast a disapproving eye on my wrinkled shorts and sweaty shirt and bare feet.

  “You must wash and shave and put on proper clothes,” he said. “We have been invited to dinner.”

  Benjamin offered no further information. I asked no questions. The sergeant drove, rapidly, without headlights on narrow trails through the bush. We arrived at a guard shack. The guard, a very sharp soldier, saluted and waved us through without looking inside the car. The road widened into a sweeping driveway. Gravel crackled under the tires. We reached the top of a little rise, and I saw before me the presidential palace, lit up like a football stadium by the light towers that surrounded it. The flags of all the newborn African nations flew from a ring of flagstaff’s.

  The soldiers guarding the front door, white belts, white gloves, white bootlaces, white rifle slings, came to present arms. We walked past them into a vast foyer from which a double staircase swept upward before separating at a landing decorated by a huge floodlit portrait of President Ga wearing his sash of office. A liveried servant led us up the stairs past a gallery of portraits of Ga variously uniformed as general of the army, admiral of the fleet, air chief marshal, head of the party, and other offices I could not identify.

  We simply walked into the presidential office. No guards were visible. President Ga was seated behind a desk at the far end of the vast room. Two attack dogs, pit bulls, stood with ears pricked at either side of his oversize desk. The ceiling could not have been less than fifteen feet high. Ga, not a large person to begin with, was so diminished by these Brobdingnagian proportions that he looked like a puppet. He was reading what I supposed was a state paper, pen in hand in case he needed to add or cross something out. As we approached across the snow-white marble floor, our footsteps echoed. Benjamin’s were especially loud because he wore leather heels, but nothing, apparently, could break the president’s concentration.

  About ten feet from the desk we stopped, our toes touching a bronze strip that was sunk into the marble. Ga ignored us. The pit bulls did not. Ga pressed a button. A hidden door opened behind the desk, and a young army officer in dress uniform stepped out. Behind him I could see half a dozen other soldiers, armed to the teeth and standing at attention in a closetlike space that was hardly large enough to hold them all.

  Wordlessly, Ga handed the paper to the officer, who took it, made a smart about-face, and marched back into the closet. Ga stood up, still taking no notice of us, and strolled to the large window behind his desk. It looked out over the brightly lit, shadowless palace grounds. At a little distance I could see an enclosure in which several different species of gazelle were confined. In other paddocks—too many to be seen in a single glance— other wild animals paced. Ga drank in the scene for a long moment, then whirled and approached Benjamin and me at quick-march, as if he wore one of his many uniforms instead of the white bush jacket, black slacks, and sandals in which he actually was dressed. Benjamin did not introduce me. Apparently there was no need to do so, because Ga, looking me straight in the eye, shook my hand and said, “I hope you like French food, Mr. Brown.”

  I did. The menu was a terrine of gray sole served with a 1953 Corton Charlemagne, veal stew accompanied by a 1949 Pommard, cheese, and grapes. The president ate the food hungrily, talking all the while, but only sipped the wines.

  “Alcohol gives me bad dreams,” he said to me. “Do you ever have bad dreams?”

  “Doesn’t everyone, sir?”

  “My best friend, who died too young, never had bad dreams. He was too good in mind and heart to be troubled by such things. Now he is in my dreams. He visits me almost every night. Who is in your dreams?”

  “Mostly people I don’t know.”

  “Then you are very lucky.”

  During the dinner Ga talked about America. He knew it well. He had earned a degree from a Negro college in Missouri. Baptist missionaries had sent him to the college on a scholarship. He graduated second in his class, behind his best friend who now called on him in dreams. When Ga spoke to his people he spoke standard Africanized English, the common tongue of his country where more than a hundred mutually incomprehensible tribal languages were in use. He spoke to me in American English, sounding l
ike Harry S. Truman. He had had a wonderful time in college: the football games, the fraternity pranks, the music, the wonderful food, homecoming, the prom, those American coeds! His friend had been the school’s star running back; Ga had been the team manager; they had won their conference championship two years in a row. “From the time we were boys together in our village, my friend was always the star, I was always the administrator,” he said. “Until we got into politics and changed places. My friend stuttered. It was his only flaw.

  It is the reason I am president. Had he been able to speak to the people without making them laugh, he would be living in this house.”

  “You were fond of this man,” I said.

  “Fond of him? He was my brother.”

  Tears formed in the president’s eyes. Despite everything I knew about his crimes, I found myself liking Akokwu Ga.