“Ah, my father,” Malakai said. “Well, you know, I never knew him. He was an American, you see, an anthropologist. He came to the Congo to study the natives, and I guess he did. He studied my mother, anyway. Then he left.”
“I’m sorry.” “It is nothing,” he said. “He was never there, so how could I miss him? And my uncle was there, my mother’s brother. He raised me as well as any father.”
“I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
He shrugged. “So we’re coming back with the cows, and I’m dreaming of chicken stew with bugari, and we hear these sounds. At first we think we’ve missed a festival of some sort, and we hurry to get closer. But when we realize what we’re hearing, we slow down.
“We are hearing gunshots, and people screaming. The people in our village. We leave the cows and creep down closer, to where the trees come up to the fence. And then we see, you know? There are men with guns, killing everyone. Everything that moves. I see little Marie, she’s five years old. She’s just staring at them, no idea what is going on, and then a bullet hits her, and she’s gone like a broken light bulb.”
“Why?” Clancy asked, her eyes wide. “Why would they do that?”
“At the time I didn’t know. There was a rebellion in my part of the country, by a group called Simba. The leaders were communists, but they attracted a lot of tribal leaders and people who didn’t like what was going on in our new country. It was, as you say, complicated. It made countries like the United States very nervous. Nervous enough to put their support behind pretty much any leader who was not a communist. The men I saw that day were mercenaries. Most were white men from South Africa and Rhodesia, but some were from Europe and America. They were under orders to take no prisoners, to kill everyone, to set an example so that no other village would give aid to Simba.”
“Did your village give them aid?’ she asked.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “Maybe. After it was over, there was no one to ask.”
He paused to give her time to ask another one of her endless questions, but she was silent.
“Anyway,” he said. “Jean-Francis sees his little brother, and he can’t stop himself, he jumps over the fence and runs toward the men. They do not see him until he’s on one of them. But Jean doesn’t know much about fighting, and the mercenary does, and he clubs poor Jean to death with the butt of his rifle. Me, I run when I see this, I run until I remember my mother and my sister are down there, and then I start to go back.
“Our house was a little outside the village, so I was hoping they would be okay. They weren’t—they… Well I told you already. My mother was already dead, but they weren’t finished with my sister yet. When I saw it, I went mad. There were three of them. I was just running at them, screaming, but they knocked me down, and one held me and made me watch. And then they were going to kill me.”
“What happened?”
“What happened is my uncle comes out of nowhere with his machete and kills the one who is holding a gun. The other two didn’t have a chance. I remember…”
He stopped.
“It’s okay,” Clancy said. “You don’t have to.”
He shook his head. “I remember I could smell the bugari scorching, and thinking how it would ruin the whole meal,” he said. “That’s what I remember going through my mind. Anyway, then my uncle grabs me and we run away, up into the hills, where we can hide. We hide in the jungle for more than a week. Hiding like these apes, here, now that I think of it. But we couldn’t climb so well.” He looked at Clancy. “Could you spare another drink of that?”
“Of course,” she said, pouring him another shot.
He took a long swallow, wondering again why he was telling her any of this. But there was something about being here, about the trees, the mist, the men with guns, that was making it swell up in him, that forced him to put it into words.
“What did you do after?”
“We joined Simba,” he said.
“You were twelve!”
“Many men are soldiers by that age,” he said. “On both sides. Many still are. In my group in particular, there were many boys, and girls, too, some younger than me. We were baptized, and shamans chanted, and the shamans told us we were invulnerable to bullets. They gave us marijuana to get us high. We stayed stoned most of the time, which was probably for the best because they armed us only with traditional weapons: spears, clubs, bow and arrow. Although our leaders usually had guns.”
“Oh, my God.”
“I don’t think God had much to do with any of it,” he said. “My first battle—if you want to call it that—was in this little town, not much bigger than the one I was born in. We had rounded up every man, woman, and child that might be ‘westernized.’ Police, public officials, anyone that was white, of course—anyone who knew how to read or write French. Then we executed them with spears, machetes, clubs, and what have you. We wiped out whole villages, just as they did. I was so stoned I barely remember any of it.”
That part was a lie. He remembered the first man he had ever killed. He was a young schoolteacher whose crime was teaching western ideas. He begged for his life, but all Malakai could think of was his mother and his sister and the burnt bugari. The marijuana made everything unreal; the machete in his hand felt like a magic stick as it made pieces of the teacher, and as he did it he remembered butchering gorillas. It was very much the same.
Clancy was studying him, eyes still wide.
“You asked if I was a bad man,” he said. “Now you know.”
“I am so sorry,” she whispered.
“It’s nothing,” he said.
“No,” she said. “I mean I’m so sorry I asked. I’m going back to my room now.”
But then there was the sudden noise of a door opening at the other end of the building.
“Oh, God,” Clancy said. “Is this it?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Hold my hand,” she said.
“What?”
“I don’t want to die alone,” she said.
We all die alone, he thought, but he resisted saying it. Instead he took her hand as they waited.
The man who came in, however, wasn’t one of the Anvil mercenaries—it was a San Francisco policeman in SWAT gear with a respirator pulled over his face.
“Oh, thank God,” she said.
Malakai had no such reaction. A uniform did not signify safety. Usually, in his experience, it was quite the opposite. He waited for the man to raise his weapon, for the muzzle flash that would be the last thing he saw.
But the officer studied them for a moment.
“If you folks would come with me,” he said, “there are some people who want to talk to you.”
They were separated. Malakai was taken to a makeshift shower and scrubbed down by two men wearing hazmat suits. Then he was given a clean orange jumpsuit that reminded him of prison garb.
When he saw Clancy again, her face was pink and she was similarly dressed. She looked scared again. Trumann Phillips’s office was a very different place than when last Malakai had been in it. For one thing, Phillips wasn’t there. In his place was a man he had seen on television, a former chief of police. Dreyfus was his name, he remembered. It was thought he would run for mayor.
“I’m sorry for the institutional orange,” Dreyfus said, when they were brought in. “It’s the only thing we had on hand. Your own clothes are being cleaned and sterilized, and we’ll have them back to you soon.” He folded his hands in front of him.
“I need to make this quick,” he said. “There’s a lot to do, and not much time to do it in. Could you please tell me your names?”
“My name is Malakai Youmans,” Malakai said, nodding.
“I’m Clancy Stoppard,” Clancy said. “We met once at a fundraiser for the zoo, Chief Dreyfus.”