Christopher knew the story was true; he had seen a heap of severed hands in another part of the Congo.
“‘The horror,’” Nsango said, his lips twisting around the quotation. “You may as well come to my hut and get some sleep. This Manuel is not a very early riser.”
Inside the hut, Nsango handed Christopher a calabash of water. “It’s been boiled,” he said, noticing Christopher’s hesitation. “You gave me your sickly intestines along with your white ideas.”
2
Christopher woke every fifteen minutes and ran his eyes over the interior of the hut; it was about the size and shape of the room in which Frankie Pigeon had been kept. Nsango, his skinny legs drawn up, slept unworriedly, breathing softly. The sun came up and filled the low door with intense white light. There was a burst of birdsong at sunrise. Then the temperature rose twenty degrees in fifteen minutes and the surrounding forest fell silent.
Christopher was astonished to hear a bugle call being played over a loudspeaker. He crawled to the door of the hut and looked out. About thirty young tribesmen, barefooted and bare-chested, were mustering for reveille. A tall black with a Kalashnikov rifle slung over his shoulder and tribal scars on his cheeks called the troops to attention. In the shade of a limbali tree, a bearded Cuban wearing dirty U.S. Army fatigues smoked a cigar and watched. He too carried a Soviet machine rifle.
“That’s the one they call Pablito,” Nsango said. “I’d better explain your presence before you show yourself.”
He ducked through the entrance. As Nsango walked across the parade ground, the Congolese NCO presented arms, and even the Cuban came briefly to attention and saluted. Nsango left his own Kalashnikov behind with Christopher.
Manuel Ruiz was eating breakfast when Nsango showed Christopher into his hut. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. Manuel lived in what had been the chief's compound, in the largest house; the other Cubans were quartered in the adjoining wives’ huts. A half-dozen of the youngest terrorists were hoeing the cassava beds, their faces resentful as they wielded the bent sticks rubbed bare by women’s hands and left behind when the villagers fled.
Manuel Ruiz said, “Have you eaten?”
When Christopher shook his head, Ruiz pushed a boiled yam and a knife across the table and poured warm beer from a liter bottle into a canteen cup. The Cuban was a young man, no more than thirty, with curly hair growing to his collar. He cultivated an air of menace that went badly with his smooth face and his wide frank eyes and snub nose. His skin was pale and he had the tremor of the dysentery victim. He ate and drank efficiently, without pausing to taste, as though to quiet his body in order to go on to more important things with the least possible delay. His eyes never left Christopher’s face. The yam was dry and overcooked; he washed down each bite with a mouthful of beer.
Sunlight fell in splinters through the thatched roof, striping Manuel’s green uniform. He had arranged his belongings around the walls-cases of ammunition stenciled with Cyrillic writing, a rack of weapons, unopened boxes of rifles, an American radio that ran off a gasoline generator. Pictures of Fidel Castro and Lenin, and a poster showing abject prisoners taken at the Bay of Pigs and their outdated American weapons, had been pinned to the sloping ceiling.
Ruiz finished his yam, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, and said, “Now. What are you doing in this installation?” He spoke grammatical French, and mixed with his adenoidal Latin American accent were some Congolese intonations.
“Nsango has explained how I got here.”
“Yes,” Manuel said. “But not why. You and he are old friends.”
“Yes.”
“He says you’re an activist, that you’ve helped him.”
“I’ve always admired Nsango.”
Christopher handed Manuel the knife he had loaned him, handle first. It, too, was American, a new-issue, short-bladed bayonet.
“What I want to say to you has something to do with your work in another place,” Christopher said. “I bring you some help for what you’re doing here.”
“Oh? What are your auspices?”
“I’ve brought you a gift from a friend-Do Minh Kha.”
“Do?” Manuel said. “Do Minh Kha? A gift from him? Where did you see him?”
“I didn’t. He passed it to me through a friend in Saigon. He wanted to bypass ordinary channels. He said you’d understand why.”
“And the friend in Saigon-what was his name?”
Christopher paused to give it weight. “Lê Thu.”
Manuel took the name, but not eagerly. Christopher watched the Cuban’s reaction as an angler watches his line, drawn through the water by a sluggish fish. He decided to let it go for the moment. There was no reason why the Vietnamese would have told Manuel the code name for their operation: he did not need to know. But they would have had to give him some hint, and it was possible they had given him more than that. If they talked not at all to outsiders, intelligence officers talked too much to each other.
“What were you doing in Saigon?” Manuel asked.
“Working. My work is mainly in that camp.”
“And your name, Nsango tells me, is Charron?”
“Yes.”
“You knew where to find me, you knew my name, you knew Nsango could bring you to me?”
“I had some assistance.”
Ruiz drew the dull edge of the bayonet down the bridge of his nose; when he brought the blade away it was filmed with sweat and he shook it off the steel with a snap of his wrist. “That’s a little disturbing,” he said.
“Then you should dress less conspicuously,” Christopher said. “Even operating at night, that costume of yours is easily recognized. You’re in a place where white men draw attention just by being white, and you’re dealing with people who don’t know the meaning of discretion. Nsango’s men are not Nsango.”
Manuel tugged at the lapel of his fatigue jacket and glanced at his tarnished badge of rank, earned with Castro in the Sierra Maestra. “We’re used to these clothes. They symbolize something.”
“Well, it’s no concern of mine,” Christopher said. “You may have better success than others who’ve tried to do what you’re doing. Success is more important than security, after all.”
“Is it not? All right, what does Do want?”
“To thank you. To give you this for your work here.”
Christopher counted twenty thousand Swiss francs, in sodden thousand-franc notes, onto the bamboo table. Ruiz sat with his hands in his lap, gazing at the money.
“Very handsome of Do,” he said. “What’s it for?”
“As I said, for your work-a gesture of solidarity.”
“Yes-but in return for what?”
“Lê Thu,” Christopher said.
“What is Lê Thu?”
“I was told you’d understand. If you don’t, so much the better for Do’s security.”
“I spent ten days in Hanoi. I didn’t become fluent in Vietnamese.”
“In French the name means ‘the tears of autumn.’ ”
Manuel Ruiz’s eyes moved away from Christopher’s. He sat very still, then picked up the stack of pink bank notes. Christopher knew the signs, knew he had been right.
“Las lagrimas del otoño,” Manuel muttered. “How did you come by that phrase?”
“I help out, when I can, with some of Do’s operations. He can’t move freely outside his own country-he stands out, as you do among these blacks. Money, for example, must be carried and delivered.”
Manuel nodded and cleared his throat. “It’s remarkable what they can accomplish, Do and his people. But you’re right, of course, their race limits them. They have to rely on others from time to time.”