Peggy frowned and took a pull at her bottle of Mamba.
“My cousin sometimes has strong opinions,” said Holliday.
“Perhaps your cousin should judge the man in front of her and not the nation’s politics. I am not Fidel.” Captain Eddie stuck the cigar back into his mouth and once again Holliday saw the twinkle in his eye. “I have a much better tan, yes?”
Even Peggy couldn’t help laughing.
“You must not take life so seriously, amorcita,” said Eddie. “After half a century of Fidel, Cubans would have all slit their wrists by now if life was a serious thing. Havana is a city where the flushing of toilets is rationed and it is all the fault of ‘embargo.’ Everything is the fault of ‘embargo.’ Cockroaches are the fault of ‘embargo.’ ” Eddie grinned broadly. “But our prostitutes on the beach at Veradero all have university educations.” Holliday laughed along with the others, but he could see the evening disintegrating into tipsy stories about the ills of the Castro regime.
“How long will it take us to get to the first cataract?” Holliday asked, getting down to business.
“A night, a day and another night,” said Captain Eddie, taking a big swallow of the Chinese vodka. “Pevensey is not as swift as she once was.”
“And from there?” Rafi asked.
“From there I do not go,” said Captain Eddie. “Beyond the first cataract is the province of the Lord’s Resistance Army and Joseph Kony, their madman leader.” He smiled and sucked on his cigar, then blew a huge cloud of smoke into the air. “It is also said the ghost of Dr. Amobe Barthelemy Limbani walks there as well.”
“You don’t seem to be the kind of man who’d believe in ghosts,” said Holliday.
“Travel up and down this river long enough, senor, and you find yourself able to believe anything.”
“How soon can we get going?” Rafi asked.
Captain Eddie puffed his cigar thoughtfully and then emptied his glass of vodka. “Give me time to get steam up. An hour.”
“You travel the river at night?” Holliday asked, surprised.
Eddie smiled. “It is the best time,” he said. “Sometimes the safest. What you can’t see cannot see you in return. Mostly.”
True to his word Eddie had the Pevensey fully loaded, boiler hissing, and pulling into the downstream current of the river almost exactly an hour later. Two crew members kept the boiler fueled, while the third member of the crew stood in the bow using a long pole to check for clearance. Peggy and Rafi had taken one of the two cabins, and Holliday stood beside Captain Eddie at the wheel. There was a simple marine telegraph to the right of the wheel with settings for “full ahead,” “dead slow” and “stop,” and a chain dangling down from the ceiling that was connected to the steam whistle on the roof of the wheelhouse. Night had fallen and the only light came from the red glow of Captain Eddie’s ever-present cigar.
“You’re like Churchill with that cigar,” said Holliday, looking out onto the dark river ahead.
“He was a connoisseur, that man,” said Eddie. “A man of muy good taste. He smoked La Aroma de Cuba and when they stopped making those he smoked Romeo y Julieta.”
“You know a lot about Churchill?”
“I know a lot about cigars. My father ran one of the biggest Habanos factories until the day he died. He knew Churchill personally.” Eddie reached into the breast pocket of his shirt and handed a cigar across to Holliday. “Please, senor, have one. It is a Montecristo No. 3.”
“I’m afraid I quit smoking many years ago.” Holliday sighed. “Although it’s very tempting.”
“If one does not give in to temptation occasionally, how can one appreciate the strength of will it takes to resist it?”
“You sound like a Jesuit professor I know at Georgetown University.”
“There, it is God’s will that you smoke this fine cigar,” said Eddie. Holliday took the cigar and rolled it around in his mouth. The Zippo flared between Eddie’s fingers. He let the kerosene smell fade, then applied the flame to the tip of the cigar. Holliday took a light pull. The taste was honey and rich earth. He could almost believe the stories of such cigars being rolled on the thighs of young virgins. “Not only virgins,” said Eddie, reading his mind. “Pretty ones.” Both men laughed and the engine chugged its regular coughing beat. The jungle on either side of them was dense and dark, wetland vines and roots spilling over into the water. Holliday could feel a steady tension rising out of nowhere, and then he realized he was thinking of being nineteen years old and crouching in the belly of a PBR going upriver on the Song Vam Co Dong in the Angel’s Wing, listening to the jungle and knowing he’d never hear the one that killed him.
“Bad memory?” Eddie said.
“Old memory,” Holliday replied.
“In the jungle?”
“Yes.”
“The worst fighting is in the jungle, always. I have asked myself many times why that is and I cannot think of an answer.”
“I think it’s because the jungle has no history,” said Holliday. “Things live and breed and die all in a day in the jungle and no one remembers. I was on patrol once and we found what was left of an old French fighter from the nineteen fifties, a Dewoitine, I think it was called. The jungle had almost swallowed it up completely; there were vines growing out of the pilot’s eye sockets.”
“What was your rank?” Eddie asked.
“Then? I was a PFC. I came out of it a lieutenant.”
“And now?”
“Lieutenant colonel,” said Holliday.
“Not very far up the ladder for a man of your years.”
“I opened my mouth when I should have had it closed.” Holliday laughed. “You don’t get to be a general by having opinions; you get to be a general by following orders. In my army, at least.”
“Mine, too, I am afraid. I never rose above primer teniente.”
“More opinionated than me, then,” said Holliday.
“There is a phrase in English, I think: ‘to suffer fools badly’? I was very bad at this and there were a great many fools among the Cubanos in Angola and Guinea-Bissau, I can assure you.”
One of the boiler crew, a gray-haired man named Samir, knocked on the wheelhouse door. He rattled off something in Arabic, got the nod from Eddie, then vanished into the darkness.
“What was that all about?” Holliday asked.
“Samir is our cook. He was inquiring about breakfast and asking for permission to take a piece of chicken as bait.”
“Bait for what?”
“Moonfish, perhaps a turtle if we are very lucky.” Eddie dragged on his cigar, lighting up his dark, laughing eyes. “They only bite on white meat, of course.”
“Of course,” said Holliday, and they continued down the dark jungle river.
13
“. . This was certainly true in my case, and I can still remember very little of the intervening years until I came to myself once again as Reinhart Stengl Hartmann in this home for the aged overlooking the mountains of the Oberammergau. May I never leave it or see Africa again except in my dreams.”
Sir James Matheson, Ninth Earl of Emsworth, sat in his London office and closed the old copybook, pushing it to one side of his desk. He reclined in his chair, listening to the distant traffic noise from the Strand. It was this book, with its spidery, old-man’s handwriting, that had introduced the enormous strike-confirmed by the late Archibald Ives-in the first place. The copybook had been lost among the archival files of a minor takeover that had occurred almost thirty years ago, when his father, the eighth earl, was still running the company. Had Matheson Resource Industries not decided to digitize their files, and had a bright junior director not noticed a minor concession within what was once the Ubangi-Shari precinct of French Equatorial Africa, Sir James might have let the opportunity of a lifetime pass him by.