‘You know very well what the problem is!’ Ivan’s words echoed. ‘Simian Artillery. Or, more particularly, the lead singer, Boris whatshisname!’
‘He left his brains on the ceiling,’ Max had answered almost incoherently. ‘That’s all there is to him! He was lucky we didn’t just stake him out and pile his guts on his chest so he could watch himself die in the old way …’
It was the phrase, ‘He left his brains on the ceiling …’ It seemed to Richard that there was a problem with the grammar there. A conundrum that took him back to the half-forgotten Latin lessons of his schooldays. For Russian, like Latin, had a range of cases from which words acquired subtleties of meaning as well as of ending and pronunciation. The main grammatical cases through which nouns declined were Nominative, Accusative, Genitive and Dative. In Latin as well as in Russian, they all had the same basic functions. Nominative for the subject of a sentence. Accusative for the object.
‘The nominative cat sat on the accusative mat,’ he had learned to chant while he still wore short trousers. Genitive to show possession: ‘The genitive cat’s bottom was on the mat,’ his Latin teacher used to joke.
But this Russian grammar lesson was anything but funny. He — the Russian ‘oh’, was in the Nominative. It was the subject of the sentence. He left his brains. That was the start of the problem. ‘His brains …’ ‘Yuvan mosk …’Somehow the second his ‘yuvan’ had become moved into the Genitive. And Richard’s understanding of the Genitive case in Russian was that it described the possession of someone other than the subject of the sentence. So the he and the his could not refer to the same person, as they could in English. There had to be two people in that sentence. And, now he came to think of it, Russian was a reflexive language. Shouldn’t it be his own brains?
So, parsing the sentence like his Latin master had taught him to do, the meaning seemed to be something that the bellicose Julius Caesar or the equally gory Homer would have approved of: Man One had left Man Two’s brains on the ceiling. Man Two, the possessor of the brains, seemed to be Boris.
Was it, therefore, possible that the ‘he’ who was the subject of the strange first sentence wasn’t Boris at all — the possessor of the brains on the ceiling — but someone else? A murderer, in fact, that both Max and Ivan knew had caused Boris’s brains to be placed on the ceiling. An assassin who had shot the unfortunate singer through the head.
But was all this semantic supposition an irrelevancy? An indulgence? A simple waste of time and mental effort? Perhaps it was — except for the damage the whole incident had done to Anastasia, who in the end had blamed herself for the deaths of her brother and her lover. Who had, indeed, discovered both corpses. No wonder she had gone off the rails. But, in Boris’s case at least, had she been pushed off the rails? By Ivan and her father?
For the next section of the patrol, therefore, Richard followed the greeny-black shapes around him silently but automatically, his mind wandering in and out of immediacy into increasingly lurid speculation. Like Anastasia, he had always assumed that Simian Artillery’s lead singer had chosen to end his own life. But now he wasn’t quite so certain. There were one or two questions he would like to ask. To ask Ivan, certainly. To ask Max, if he could get him in the right frame of mind. Perhaps even to ask Anastasia herself …
Richard’s thoughts were interrupted when Ado held up her hand forcefully and the whole patrol came to a silent stop. She motioned forward with one finger and Esan joined her. Then she motioned again with a second finger and Sergeant Tchaba limped soundlessly up beside them. For a moment or two they all remained even more motionless than the wind-stirred trees whose restless rustling had more than covered the sounds of their careful movements so far. Then there was a more general direction to move forward.
Tchaba signalled them all to raise their night-vision goggles, then he produced a torch which he shone around with a carefully shaded beam. Richard saw at once that Ado had discovered a carefully prepared bivouac — one that had been used on more than one occasion by the look of things, by more than one secret observer. Not so much a point man as a forward outpost. And if whoever had made and used the bivouac was with the Army of Christ the Infant, then that made it an extremely sinister discovery.
The torch went out at once. The night goggles came down over their eyes once more. Everyone stayed still until their vision readjusted and the green world reassumed its ghostly forms around them. Then Tchaba gave a series of silent signals and his patrol fanned out — except for Anastasia and Richard. Richard saw the sergeant’s point. Gifted amateur he might be — competent soldier he was not. And where he went, Anastasia went; where he stayed, she stayed. They both hunkered down silently, side by side, until Richard’s knees started complaining, then he knelt on the soft, cool ground. But Richard was never one to waste his time. He looked around the bivouac with his night goggles in position one, straining to discern anything unusual in the green maze beneath his knees. Then he switched over to the infrared.
At once the picture changed — and more than simply in its colour. Anastasia burned at his side like a molten figurine beginning to sink into the cold, dark ground. Cool trees soared, slightly warmer than the ground, the heat of the afternoon still being transmitted through their trunks by faintly glowing sap. Sun-warmed leaves became things of gold and red in the kind of autumn even New England could only dream of. Almost dazzled, Richard looked down at the cool darkness of the ground again. The warmth of the patrol’s footprints was fading in parallel pairs out into the gently glowing bush. One set showed only one print and Richard had a ridiculous image of someone hopping away towards the river — until he remembered Sergeant Tchaba’s prosthetic foot.
But then, nearer at hand there was something else; proof that they were near the place from where Anastasia had thought her girls were being spied on. The floor of the jungle had been disturbed. It was a different colour to the surrounding area. Someone had been digging here. Richard also began to burrow with his fingers and it was only when they touched something hairy and prickly that he jerked back, suddenly fearful of spiders and scorpions. After a moment, when nothing moved, he reached back into the hole and pulled out the thing he had discovered. It was a fetish. A ju-ju. A magic manikin, like a voodoo doll from Haiti. It was crudely made but he recognized it — it was Ngoboi, deity of the dark places. The Poro god he associated most closely with the Army of Christ the Infant.
Therapy
Colonel Kebila frowned silently at the manikin of Ngoboi standing on the briefing table of his newly erected tent. Richard and Anastasia stood with Sergeant Tchaba, waiting to hear his thoughts. The night wind that had stirred the jungle at the river’s edge flapped the canvas walls. The bustle outside was quietening down sufficiently for Richard to hear the steady tread of the inner and outer security guards. Always out of synch — one nearby and the other further away.