“Don’t call me mzungu.”
“Bwerani,” the boy said — come with me — no apology. Perhaps he didn’t speak English.
Hock followed as the boy had asked, leaving the lantern, walking behind the scuffing boy, through the garden, tramping among the furrowed dimbas of pumpkins and corn stalks, so as not to be seen, but traveling in the general direction of the road beyond the village. It was the road that led to Gala’s hut, but they were walking in the opposite direction.
Ever since arriving in Malabo, he had been dictated to by the young and the ragged and the insolent. And here I am again, he thought, a big fool, fumbling after a boy on a moonlit path. The seat of the boy’s trousers was torn, exposing the muffin of one skinny buttock.
“Come,” the boy said again in his language.
Overwhelmed with helplessness, and without any faith, Hock had simply stopped in the cornfield. Hearing that the sounds of brushed and trampled corn stalks had ceased, the boy had turned and seen Hock, his hands on his hips, standing in the field, sighing.
“What’s the point?” Hock said, not caring that the boy didn’t understand. But when he sighed again and made a move to return home, the boy spoke again.
“Aubrey,” he said, but in three syllables, pronouncing it to rhyme with “robbery.”
“Where is he?” Hock asked in Sena.
“He has a vehicle,” the boy said in Sena. But the word garimoto could mean anything with a motor — a car, a bus, a tractor.
Doubting, stepping slowly, he obeyed the boy, and past a row of trees, in the frosty glow of the moon, he saw a van parked at the entrance to a path just off the side road.
Even if the night had been moonless he would have seen the van, a model known as a combi, because it gleamed white, and on a side panel, inside a gold shield, was the large double-A of L’Agence Anonyme. The whole name was picked out on the rear doors. It was the only four-wheeled vehicle Hock had so far seen at Malabo — a novelty, of improbable size, and seemingly new: no dents, perhaps polished, like the powerful instrument of a dramatic rescue.
Inside, one small red light burned, went dim, and brightened again, and on closer inspection Hock could see it was a cigarette that Aubrey was puffing in the front seat.
Seeing Hock, he said, “Get in — hurry up.”
The ragged boy who’d led him there stepped beside Hock and pushed at him.
“You give money,” he said, his first words in English.
Hock nudged him aside and spoke to Aubrey: “We’re going now?”
“Yes, yes. Come inside. We go.”
The dimness of the pale moonlight exaggerated the shadows on Aubrey’s face, making it skull-like, bonier, more like a mask. The glow on his dark skin and the streaky froth of his sweat on the creases of his neck were greenish.
“I can’t leave everything behind.” He was thinking of Zizi.
“You have your money?”
Hock had all his money — always had it, because he had ceased to trust — and with it his passport and wallet in a pouch in his fanny pack, the only safe place.
“Some money. Not all,” he said, though they probably knew he was lying.
His clothes, some papers, his knife, his stick, his shaving kit, his medicine, his duffel. The snake in the basket. He could leave all of it. But Zizi: once again she was unaware she was being abandoned. Nothing he owned mattered when he realized his life was at stake, and as for Zizi — he’d do something, send her money through Gala, get her to safety, away from the dead end of Malabo.
The ragged boy had pressed himself against Hock’s legs, pleading for money. Hock pushed him, and then, in a twitch of superstition, he handed over the Bic lighter he found in his pocket.
“No,” the boy objected, and gestured with it, as though to hand it back.
But by then Hock was in the van, in the sudden comfort of a seat with springs, a cushion, a handle he grasped to steady himself. He was momentarily reassured. Aubrey started the engine, slipped the gearshift down, and, rocking the van across some ruts, jounced onto the road.
“Put on your headlights,” Hock said.
“No lights.”
“You’ll drive into the creek.”
“Lights are bad. The others will see us.”
Aubrey drew his lips back, as if it was an effort to speak. His teeth were long, exposed almost to their roots, the gums shrunken — another revelation of the moonlight. He was nervous and sounded weary, and perhaps it was also the slow bumping progress of the vehicle in the moon-frosted darkness that made it seem that he was driving badly.
Without warning, Aubrey threw his skinny shoulders at the steering wheel and pulled the van to the side of the road. He cut the engine and rolled down his side window and listened.
“What is it?”
Saying nothing, he opened his mouth wider, as though his gaping mouth, his long bony teeth, helped him hear better. And perhaps they did, because, straining to listen, he began to nod.
“The fishermen are just now going out.”
A group of young men in Malabo kept a canoe on the embankment at Marka. They sometimes set off in the middle of the night to walk the twenty miles to the riverside village so they could launch their boat before dawn, enter the channel, and be on the mainstream of the river in daylight.
“So what?”
“Moon,” Aubrey said, and made a sweeping gesture with his hand.
The ruts on the dusty road had the whiteness of new ashes, and the bushes beside them were blue in the moonlight. The tree branches were iced with the same eerie light, for though the moon was a crusted disk, half in shadow, no clouds obscured it. The sky was clear, and the whole landscape glowed, seeming to lie under a coating of frost.
“They can see,” Aubrey said, without moving but still breathing hard.
One of the characteristics of the Sena people that Hock had noticed was their ability to sit without stirring for long periods. It was not repose; it was an almost reptilian trait. They kept alert — watchful, anyway — like bush creatures, snakes in dead leaves, lizards on rocks, blending with their surroundings and only their eyelids flicking. Aubrey seemed to slip into this state of immobility, resting against the steering wheel, his head tilted to the side windows, his eyes on the landscape of cold lunar phosphorescence.
They were near enough to the shallow creek that ran along the right-hand side of the road to hear the gulp of frogs, the odd suck and chirp of insects, and another noise, a rattling like pebbles in a pot, which Hock knew to be the vocalizing of a certain nocturnal heron, with a fish in its throat.
Hock whispered, “Did you give my message to the Americans?”
Aubrey sniffed, an ambiguous reply that in its evasiveness Hock took for no.
“But that’s what I paid you to do.” Hock was still whispering, but more harshly.
“This is more better.”
That was a definite no. “So you read my message,” Hock said, louder now. “I gave you something simple to do, but you didn’t do it.”
“I am helping you,” Aubrey said, and he wheezed the words so softly they were scarcely audible.
“Where’d you get this van?”
“The Agency.”
Now, parked at the edge of the road, Hock felt only confusion — the uncertainty of night and the seeming indecision of Aubrey. He felt that he was about to be subjected to a greater ordeal, perhaps robbed.