The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [17]
Christopher paid the impassive waiter and walked away. The unlighted streets were deserted except for an occasional Congolese, asleep in the dirt. By day, the concrete buildings, painted white or rose or pale blue like the Belgian sky, showed tropical sores and lesions. Now they were dark shapes, too geometrical to be natural, but emitting no more light than the forest that lay a few hundred yards away. Christopher walked in the middle of the street, to avoid the doorways. When he looked back, he saw the faint reflection of the fire in the high branches of the tree by the café.
It was too dark to see the river, but he could hear it. A power launch passed, showing no lights, and Christopher heard the canoes rattling at their moorings in its wake. He walked along the bank until he saw the outlines of a river steamer; it had once been white and its blunt stern was clearly visible against the sky. Christopher, leaning against a piling, waited until he saw a tall man go aboard the steamer. Then Christopher climbed the gangplank, crossed the deck, and went down a ladder into the interior of the boat. A candle burned in a stateroom at the end of a narrow gangway, and Christopher walked toward its nervous light. He heard Nsango behind him, and stopped.
“My friend,” Nsango said.
Christopher turned around. The black, wearing the khaki shorts and torn singlet of a workman, embraced him. He took Christopher’s hand in his own dry fingers and led him to the stateroom.
“I’m sorry to make you wait,” Nsango said. “Did you come every night?”
“Yes,” Christopher said. “Four times, but I never saw the light.”
Nsango laughed. “I was in the bush. I was waiting, too. But I knew you would come back tonight. I saw you in the café, reading your book.”
“Yes, I saw you across the boulevard.”
“Ah, what eyes!” Nsango spoke rapid French at the back of his throat, with many extra m sounds as if his own language struggled to reveal itself. “Well, what news?”
“The Congolese think you’re in Angola. Someone told the Portuguese you were camping along the frontier, and they told the police.”
“Are they looking for me there?”
“They’re watching the crossing points.”
“Good. I’ll go the other way.” He laughed again.
“How did you explain this journey?”
“I told them in the camp that political organization was needed in some villages I know about. They probably think I have a woman somewhere.”
“What’s going on in Katanga?” Christopher asked.
“It’s very quiet, my friend. I lose five or six men a week— they go back to their villages.”
“Do you tell them to go?”
“Yes, they’ll wait for me there. They don’t like the new foreigners.”
“There are new foreigners?”
“Yes, the Chinese have all gone away. They took their aspirin that made men bulletproof with them. But now we have others—some of them are black men.”
“Stop talking like a native, Nsango. Who are they?”
Nsango guffawed. “They fell from the sky on great white leaves, master. Oh, we were frightened!”
Christopher had seen this man, who had the best political brain in black Africa, trembling in fear because he believed a spirit had entered his body as he slept; he felt it devouring his liver like a maggot. Christopher had brought a juju man from the Ivory Coast and he removed the spirit, sending it into the body of the man who had cursed Nsango. Christopher had given the juju man fifty ounces of gold for his work. He and Nsango had used the sorcerer again to carry out an operation they hoped would result in Nsango’s becoming, in time, the prime minister of his country. They failed, and Nsango had gone back into the forest. Christopher knew he would never come out again, and Nsango, despite his diploma from the Sorbonne and his name that was known throughout the world, still feared enchantment and blamed it for his bad luck. Nsango was not, however, afraid of foreigners.
“They’re Cubans,