The music was even louder. The air was the temperature of blood. The odors of sweat and spilled beer were sharp and strong. Guttering candles created a substitute for light. Silhouettes danced on the hard dirt floor, cigarettes glowed. The sensation was something like being digested by a tyrannosaurus rex.
Benjamin, alone again, sat at another small table. He was drinking orange soda again. He, too, wore a uniform. Though made of finer cloth, it was a duplicate of the sergeant’s, except that he was equipped with a swagger stick instead of a baton and the badge on his shoulder boards displayed the wreath, crossed batons, and crown of a chief constable. Benjamin, it appeared, was the head of the national police. He made a gesture of welcome. I sat down. A waiter placed a pink gin with ice before me with such efficiency, and was so neatly dressed, that I supposed he was a constable, too, but undercover. I lifted my glass to Benjamin and sipped my drink.
Benjamin said, “Are you a naval person?”
I said, “No. Why do you ask?”
“Pink gin is the traditional drink of the royal navy.”
“Not rum?”
“Rum is for the crew.”
I had difficulty suppressing a grin. Our exchange of words sounded so much like a recognition code used by spies that I wondered if that’s what it really was. Had Benjamin got the wrong American? He did not seem the type to make such an elementary mistake. He looked down on me-even while seated he was at least a head taller than I was-and said, “Welcome to my country, Mr. Brown. I have been waiting for you to come here again, because I believe that you and I can work together.”
Brown was one of the names I had used on previous visits to Ndala, but it was not the name on the passport I was using this time. He paused, studying my face. His own face showed no flicker of expression.
Without further preamble, he said, “I am contemplating a project that requires the support of the United States of America.”
The dramaturgy of the situation suggested that my next line should be, “Really?” or “How so?” However, I said nothing, hoping that Benjamin would fill the silence.
Frankly, I was puzzled. Was he volunteering for something? Most agents recruited by any intelligence service are volunteers, and the average intelligence officer is a sort of latter-day Marcel Proust. He lies abed in a cork-lined room, hoping to profit by secrets that other people slip under the door. People simply walk in and for whatever motive, usually petty resentment over having been passed over for promotion or the like, offer to betray their country It was also possible, unusual though that might be, that Benjamin hoped to recruit me.
His eyes bored into mine. His back was to the wall, mine to the dance floor. Behind me I could feel but not see the dancers, moving as a single organism. Through the soles of my shoes I felt vibration set up by scores of feet stamping in unison on the dirt floor. In the yellow candlelight I could see a little more expression on Benjamin s face.
Many seconds passed before he broke the silence. “What is your opinion of the president of this country?”
Once again I took my time answering. The problem with this conversation was that I never knew what to say next.
Finally I said, “President Ga and I have never met.”
“Nevertheless you must have an opinion.”
And of course I did. So did everyone who read the newspapers. Akokwu Ga, president for life of Ndala, was a man of strong appetites. He enjoyed his position and its many opportunities for pleasure with an enthusiasm that was remarkable even by the usual standards for dictators. He possessed a solid gold bathtub and bedstead. He had a private zoo. It was said that he was sometimes seized by the impulse to feed his enemies to the lions. He had deposited tens of millions of dollars from his country’s treasury into personal numbered accounts in Swiss banks.
Dinner for him and his guests was flown in every day from one of the restaurants in Paris that had a three-star rating in the Guide Michelin. A French chef heated the food and arranged it on plates, an English butler served it. Both were assumed to be secret agents employed by their respective governments. Ga maintained love nests in every quarter of the capital city. Women from all over the world occupied these cribs. The ones he liked best were given luxurious houses formerly occupied by Europeans and provided with German cars, French champagne, and “houseboys” (actually undercover policemen) who kept an eye on them.
“Speak,” Benjamin said.
I said, “Frankly, chief constable, this conversation is making me nervous.”
“Why? No one can bug us. Listen to the noise.”
How right he was. We were shouting at each other in order to be heard above the din. The music made my ears ring, and no microphone then known could penetrate it. I said, “Nevertheless, I would prefer to discuss this in private. Just the two of us.”
“And how then will you know that I am not bugging you? Or that someone else is not bugging both of us?”
“I wouldn’t. But would it matter?”
Benjamin examined me for a long moment. Then he said, “No, it wouldn’t. Because I am the one who will be saying dangerous things.”
He got to his feet, uncoiled would be the better word. Instantly the sergeant who had brought me here and three other constables in plain clothes materialized from the shadows. Everyone else was dancing, eyes closed, seemingly in another world and time. Benjamin put on his cap and picked up his swagger stick.
He said, “Tomorrow I will come for you.”
With that, he disappeared, leaving me without a ride. Eventually I found a taxi back to the hotel. The driver was so wide awake, his taxi so tidy, that I assumed that he, too, must be one of Benjamin’s men.
The porter who brought me my mug of tea at six a.m. also brought me a note from Benjamin. The penmanship was beautiful. The note was short and to the point: “Nine o’clock, by the front entrance.”
Through the glass in the hotel’s front door, the street outside was a scene from Goya, lepers and amputees and victims of polio or smallpox or psoriasis, and among the child beggars a few examples of hamstringing by parents who needed the income that a crippled child could bring home. A tourist arrived in a taxi and scattered a handful of change in order to disperse the beggars while he made his dash for the entrance. Clearly he was a greenhorn. The seasoned traveler in Africa distributed money only after checkout. To do so on arrival guaranteed your being fondled by lepers every time you came in or went out. One particularly handsome, smiling young fellow who had lost his fingers and toes to leprosy caught coins in his mouth.
At the appointed time exactly Was I still in Africa? Benjamin’s sergeant pulled up in his gleaming black Austin. He barked a command in one of the local languages, and once again the crowd parted. He took me by the hand in the friendly African way and led me to the car.
We headed north, out of town, horn sounding tinnily at every turn of the wheels. Otherwise, the sergeant explained, pedestrians would assume that the driver was trying to kill them. In daylight when everyone was awake and walking around instead of sleeping by the wayside, Ndala sounded like the overture of An American in Paris. After a hair-raising drive past the brand-new government buildings and banks of downtown, through raucous streets lined with shops and filled with the smoke of street vendors’ grills, through labyrinthine neighborhoods of low shacks made from scraps of lumber and tin and cardboard, we arrived at last in Africa itself, a sun-scorched plain of rusty soil, dotted with stunted bush, stretching from horizon to horizon. After a mile or so of emptiness, we came upon a policeman seated on a parked motorcycle. The sergeant stopped the car, leaped out, and leaving the motor running and the front door open, opened the back door to let me out. He gave me a map, drew himself up to attention, and after stamping his right foot into the dust, gave me a quivering British hand salute. He then jumped onto the motorcycle behind its rider, who revved the engine, made a slithering U-turn, and headed back toward the city trailed by a corkscrew of red dust.