The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [106]
“I’d like to see Manuel Ruiz live for a while—a month or two.”
Nsango lay against the twigs and clay of the wall, his legs stretched before him, his hands clasped behind his head.
“Manuel wants to live, too,” he said. “He has zeal for the idea of what he’s doing—not, I think, for the act itself. That’s only a means to an end. He wants to go back to Cuba and tell how black men died like flies for his idea. As I’m the only one who understands the idea, or even knows what Communism is, he needs me. Mine is the only black name he can remember. To him, the others have no names, any more than lions or porcupines have names; they’re fauna. But my name is known in the world, thanks to another white man—you. ‘I led Alphonse Nsango’s revolution, I am the white explanation for his victory,’ Ruiz will say.”
“Don’t blame me for your fame.”
“No? Then who hired all those boys to paint ‘Nsango’ on the walls in Léopoldville and Brussels, who bribed the journalists and wrote their stories of my heroism, who carried my book through the jungles to a publisher?” Nsango pointed both index fingers at Christopher and laughed. “To whom do I owe this life of adventure and idealism, to whom do I owe Manuel, if not to you?”
“If I’ve done all that for you, then keep Manuel Ruiz alive for me. I may need him again.”
“I don’t know if I can keep him alive, and you, too. He’ll kill you when he’s had time to think.”
“He mustn’t be killed until he’s talked. It may be necessary for him to talk again.”
Nsango’s smile had not left his lips. “All right,” he said.
4
Christopher knew that a man who is trained to keep secrets can be counted upon, when at last he breaks his oath of silence, to tell everything he knows. The spoiled spy will reveal the true names of his superiors and his agents, he will suggest ways to destroy his own networks. He will bore his interrogators, who until the day before were his enemies, with the details of his thefts, betrayals, unauthorized murders, sexual vices.
Manuel Ruiz had not reached that point, but he was at a more dangerous one: he was an idealist who had done a great thing for his cause. Idealists make brave agents, but they are bad intelligence officers. They cannot exist for long without the company of like minds; they have a need to speak their beliefs and to hear their beliefs spoken. Ruiz wanted to talk and he had no one to talk to.
He did not trust Christopher, but Christopher was white and he knew Ruiz’s ideological vocabulary. Besides, Christopher was in Ruiz’s camp, surrounded by Ruiz’s men, miles from safety. Ruiz imagined that he could kill him whenever he liked.
Ruiz was drunk. Christopher had gone to his hut in the dark, following another Cuban who carried a lantern. Ruiz opened tins—sardines, tuna fish, pineapple, cheese, round un-salted biscuits. They ate from this Utter of food with their fingers and drank Christopher’s vodka, warm in tin cups. For hours they talked about places they had been, Ruiz testing Christopher to see if they knew the same people. Christopher knew some of them in fact and others from hearsay; a few he knew more intimately than Ruiz ever would because he had run agents against them. Ruiz wore a .45 Colt automatic, U.S. Army issue, in a shoulder holster; its butt, like Ruiz’s fingers after dipping into the canned fish, shone with oil.
Manuel left the hut frequently to empty his bowels; he had a bad case of dysentery and it carried the oily food through his body in a torrent. It was after Ruiz came back from one of his trips to the latrine that Christopher saw the idea come into his eyes. It amused Ruiz as an idea for mischief will amuse an intelligent boy. He knew what Christopher wanted to talk about; he would talk. Then he would keep Christopher until he could authenticate him, or kill him.
“These blacks of mine sometimes eat