When I saw this argument wasn’t going anywhere, I switched tactics. I aimed lower this time. Morality wasn’t working; maybe greed would.
“My friends, ” I said, “you cannot be blamed for this mistake. I understand you perfectly. You are tired. You are hungry. You are thirsty. This war has stressed you.”
I wanted just one thing to leap into his mind: cash. But I wasn’t sure this was going to work either. I had only a few minutes to size him up and wasn’t sure where his ultimate interests lay. Maybe he was more hardline than I had thought. I found myself wishing I could put a cognac in front of him to loosen him up. Everything now came down to how well I was reading this man-if the promise of money would be enough to tempt him away from the murders he had been ordered to commit. I was like a Mephistopheles trying to corrupt him. It was a role I was only too happy to play if he would only spare the lives of the people behind me.
“I have another solution, ” I told him. “I know how to solve this problem. Let us talk otherwise.”
We began to talk in terms of cash. It seems strange to say, but putting a price on lives was like a kind of sanity compared to the murders he had been suggesting. At first the captain demanded that each Tutsi cockroach pay every one of his soldiers 200, 000 Rwandan francs in exchange for their lives. This was roughly the equivalent of $1, 500 American per person-many times more cash than an average Rwandan will ever see in their lifetimes. But this was negotiation. You always start with the crazy price and then work downward.
“My friends, ” I said, “even you do not have this much money. You cannot expect these people to be carrying that kind of sum. But I can get it for you. I am the only person who can do this here. It is in the safe of the hotel and you will never be able to open it without me. Drive me to the hotel and I will pay you the money.”
I hustled the refugees into the manager’s house of the Diplomates. In a way, we were going straight into the dragon’s den-these were the men who were ordering Hutu citizens to pick up kitchen knives and machetes and kill anybody in Rwanda suspected of being a descendant of the Tutsi clans or one of their allies. But I knew I would be safe here. Despite the captain’s bluster, I had sized him up as a basically small man. He would not kill me in the presence of his superiors.
I told the captain to stay where he was-I now felt confident enough to command him-and got his money out of the safe. It was the price we had finally agreed on: a million Rwandan francs for everyone. It was the end of the week when we always had a stockpile of liquid cash. It was supposed to have been converted into foreign currency and wired to the corporate office in Belgium. Now it was going into the pockets of killers, but I think it was the best use of that cash anybody could have imagined.
I went and paid off the captain. He drove away with his death squad and I never saw him again.
It was later suggested to me that I could have broken my agreement with this killer, simply refusing to pay the money once I and my neighbors and family were safely inside the Diplomates. But this was inconceivable. He would have remembered me and surely taken revenge, for one thing. And I had given him my word. Even if it was loathsome to reward him for being a potential killer and to measure human lives in cash, I never make promises I cannot keep. It is bad policy. There is a saying in Rwanda: With a lie you can eat once, but never twice.
He left me with something valuable, too. He told me that I was not powerless in the face of the murderous insanity that seemed to have descended over my country in the last seventy-two hours.
With that brief refusal to meet my eyes, he told me that I might be able to negotiate with evil.
I soon discovered the true reason why I had been brought to the Diplomates and not killed. It was solely because of the keys I had been holding. The interim government of Rwanda -a rump committee of the very same men who had organized the militias-had taken over all the rooms as a temporary headquarters of the new government. But they needed the keys. Once I had opened the suites and the bar, my life was expendable. I tried my best to keep myself and my family out of sight and they seemed to forget about me in the chaos, for which I was deeply grateful.
The rebels soon learned what was happening at the Diplo-mates and started firing mortar shells at the hotel, which was all too exposed on the hillside. They had an easy shot from their stronghold near the Parliament building. Bullets started whizzing through the windows and I couldn’t go into my office because it faced the direction of fire. The crisis government hastily started packing supplies and papers into boxes and prepared to decamp to the city of Gitarama, about fifty kilometers southwest. They also looted bedspreads, pillows, television sets, and other items from their rooms, but it seemed best not to complain about this small larceny. There was my own life to think about. I made a show of preparing to evacuate with them and they seemed not to mind-although what they would want with a hotel manager I have no idea.
It did not matter: I had a secret plan in mind. My family and I would pretend to follow the military train, but then split off almost immediately. We would use the cover of the government convoy as a safe way to get to Sabena’s other luxury property, the Hotel Mille Collines. This was a place I knew very well from my time there in the 1980s and there were four hundred refugees who had taken shelter there. Barely a half mile of hillside separated the two properties; I could have walked it in ten minutes during peaceful times. But it would have been inviting death by machete to do it now while the Interahamwe were running about. We would have to leave my neighbors hidden inside the cottage-it was too dangerous to try to move them out now-but I resolved not to forget them. I would simply have to come back later and rescue them by other means. But I wasn’t sure I could even save my family, or myself. I would be leaving the Diplomates, where I was technically still the manager, and going over to the Mille Collines, where I had plenty of friends and a long work history but was technically not the boss. What kind of reception was I going to get over there? I had no idea what would happen.
On the morning of April 12 the government leaders started their trip to the emergency capital and I rolled out with them behind the wheel of a Suzuki jeep. On that brief five-minute trip I kept seeing patches of red on the dirt of the shoulder. Days later I would see trucks that would normally have been used to haul concrete blocks or other construction material. They would be stacked high with dead bodies: women, men, children, many of them with stumps where their arms and legs had been. Somebody with the city sanitation department apparently had the foresight to clean them off the roadways and take them for burial in mass graves all over Kigali.
For now, though, there were only the bloodstains on the side of the road.“Don’t look, ” I said to my children and my wife. But I had to keep my eyes open to drive.
SIX
I PEELED AWAY from the killers and turned the car toward my beloved Hotel Mille Collines.
A squad of militia had set up a roadblock right in front of the entrance. I had come to dread them on sight-young boys, many no older than fourteen, dressed in ragged clothes with red, green, and yellow stripes and carrying spears and machetes and a few battered rifles. These boys had liberated some Primus beer from someplace and were guzzling it down, though it was early in the morning. They were checking the identification papers of everyone attempting to get inside the Mille Collines. But they had not yet entered the hotel itself.