The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [102]
In the darkened lobby of a hotel, Christopher drank mineral water and read the two Simenons, dirty and swollen by the rainy climate, that he had bought from a street vendor. At nightfall he went into the men’s room and put on the boots and the bush clothes he had brought with him. He wasn’t used to carrying a pistol, and he had to remind himself not to touch the hard shape of the .22 automatic tucked into the waistband of his trousers.
Nsango was four hours late. He made no apology. Christopher followed him into a quarter where hundreds of his tribesmen, driven out of the bush by war or the hope for money, had settled. Charcoal fires burned down the length of a long street, like a herd of red eyes in the black night. Nsango dropped on all fours in front of a tin hovel and crawled inside. It was constructed of flattened gasoline cans and other bits of scavenged metal, and it stood in a row of houses that looked like mouths with the teeth knocked out.
Christopher crawled in after Nsango. Nsango sent away the people who lived there; they trotted, giggling, into the street and squatted in the dirt. Nsango found the stub of a candle and lit it. It gave little light. Christopher saw Nsango’s gestures but not his face as he told him what he wanted him to say to Manuel Ruiz.
“Why would he believe such a story?” Nsango said. “He’s not stupid.”
“I know enough to bluff him—certain names.”
“It’s dangerous, Paul. I don’t know if I can protect you. These Cubans are quick to shoot.”
“There are still the same number?”
“Only five now. One was shot in the stomach and they couldn’t treat his wounds. The other died of snakebite.”
“You’ve been seeing action?”
“Some. We’re still earning our guns.”
“How many of the Cubans speak French?”
“All, but badly except for this Manuel. I think the others only understand about half of what’s said to them.”
“How are their nerves?”
“Jumpy. Some of my chaps are pretty simple men—they ate the knuckles and the liver of a prisoner not long ago. I wasn’t there. It left Manuel and the others a bit sick.”
“Then it’s you they’re nervous about?”
“Yes, they’ve received a lot of Kalashnikov machine rifles and they know we want them,” Nsango said. “And of course they all have dysentery. Who knows? They may be glad to see another white man.”
“Can we go now?”
Nsango sighed. “All right. It’s a long walk to where I left the Jeep, and we’ll have to find some gasoline and carry that.”
He went outside and shouted. A babble erupted in the darkness, then died down as all but the people Nsango wanted drifted away. In a few minutes Nsango called to Christopher. He stood in the street with four jerry cans at his feet.
“Two for you, two for me,” he said. “Sweat is the fuel of the revolution.”
Walking through a field of coarse grass outside the city, Nsango began to sing in a low voice. Christopher compelled his imagination to form a picture of Molly, walking between high snowbanks in Zermatt, her face pinkened by the wind and the cold. His conversation with Nguyen Kim at the Milan airport kept intruding, like the strong signal of a distant radio station in nighttime. Christopher had gambled Molly as willingly as he would have played the life of an agent. He’d done it on reflex: never let the opposition see that you are vulnerable. Christopher ran operations the way a natural athlete plays a sport: he knew the game in his muscles and in his bloodstream. To change styles was to lose; thought was a handicap, emotion a hazard. His arms stretched by the weight of the jerry cans, he walked on, trusting Nsango to keep alert. The march went quickly.
Nsango’s camp lay to the north, in the upland forest not twenty miles from the Rhodesian frontier. Nsango drove fast through the bush, down narrow paths, and he and Christopher leaned toward the center of the Jeep, their heads sometimes bumping together as they dodged the branches that whipped over the windshield. Nsango, shouting, told Christopher how the Cuban had been killed by a tree