The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [103]
They were challenged twice by sentries, boys wearing torn bits of camouflage uniform, before they reached the camp. It was an abandoned village with a large open space, beaten shiny by bare feet, in the center of a ring of conical wattle huts.
“This used to be a prosperous place,” Nsango said. “I passed through here in ‘62 and found a pile of right hands—men’s, women’s, children’s—in the middle of the village, on the open ground. A hundred people had been dismembered. It was propaganda. In the old days the Belgians used to cut off the right hands of a whole village if one man committed a crime. During the fighting someone revived the practice. I think it was the mercenaries—some of them were Belgians, after all. The whites said it was the Chinese and their Simbas, who wanted the whites to be blamed. It could have been either. In any case, that’s where the population went.”
Christopher knew the story was true; he had seen a heap of severed hands in another part of the Congo.
“‘The horror,’” Nsango said, his lips twisting around the quotation. “You may as well come to my hut and get some sleep. This Manuel is not a very early riser.”
Inside the hut, Nsango handed Christopher a calabash of water. “It’s been boiled,” he said, noticing Christopher’s hesitation. “You gave me your sickly intestines along with your white ideas.”
2
Christopher woke every fifteen minutes and ran his eyes over the interior of the hut; it was about the size and shape of the room in which Frankie Pigeon had been kept. Nsango, his skinny legs drawn up, slept unworriedly, breathing softly. The sun came up and filled the low door with intense white light. There was a burst of birdsong at sunrise. Then the temperature rose twenty degrees in fifteen minutes and the surrounding forest fell silent.
Christopher was astonished to hear a bugle call being played over a loudspeaker. He crawled to the door of the hut and looked out. About thirty young tribesmen, barefooted and bare-chested, were mustering for reveille. A tall black with a Kalashnikov rifle slung over his shoulder and tribal scars on his cheeks called the troops to attention. In the shade of a limbali tree, a bearded Cuban wearing dirty U.S. Army fatigues smoked a cigar and watched. He too carried a Soviet machine rifle.
“That’s the one they call Pablito,” Nsango said. “I’d better explain your presence before you show yourself.”
He ducked through the entrance. As Nsango walked across the parade ground, the Congolese NCO presented arms, and even the Cuban came briefly to attention and saluted. Nsango left his own Kalashnikov behind with Christopher.
Manuel Ruiz was eating breakfast when Nsango showed Christopher into his hut. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. Manuel lived in what had been the chief's compound, in the largest house; the other Cubans were quartered in the adjoining wives’ huts. A half-dozen of the youngest terrorists were hoeing the cassava beds, their faces resentful as they wielded the bent sticks rubbed bare by women’s hands and left behind when the villagers fled.
Manuel Ruiz said, “Have you eaten?”
When Christopher shook his head, Ruiz pushed a boiled yam and a knife across the table and poured warm beer from a liter bottle into a canteen cup. The Cuban was a young man, no more than thirty, with curly hair growing to his collar. He cultivated an air of menace that went badly with his smooth face and his wide frank eyes and snub nose. His skin was pale and he had the tremor of the dysentery victim. He ate and drank efficiently, without pausing to taste, as though to quiet his body in order to go on to more important things with the least possible delay. His eyes never left Christopher’s face. The yam was dry and overcooked; he washed down each bite with a mouthful of beer.
Sunlight fell in splinters through the thatched roof, striping Manuel’s green uniform. He had arranged his belongings around the walls