The Mammoth Book of Dracula (50 page)

“That won’t do you any good,” Harry says. “Loses its goodness as soon as it leaves my body, turns to black powder in a few minutes. Tricky stuff, blood.”

“We do magic with it,” the woman guard says. “Bad magic.
African
magic.”

Another woman, as monstrous as the first, unlocks manacles Harry could have parted with a twist of his wrists. But there are too many guards and dogs between here and freedom, and some of the guards are as strong as he is.

The guard licks at the weeping sores around the base of her tusks. Her tongue is bright red, and forked at the tip. She says, “The Count comes for you soon. Then maybe we stake you and cut off your head.”

“I look forward to it,” Harry says and straightens up. A mistake. The guard reverses her rifle and thumps Harry in the kidneys and then, when he doubles over obediently, in the back of his head.

“Animal,” the guard says. “Killer.
Leech.”

A human guard fixes a crucifix to the wall and then the door is slammed and double-locked, and Harry is left alone with his shame.

~ * ~

Harry first heard of the Count a month before he was arrested. He had gone to the market to try and buy fresh fish and vegetables for the bar’s kitchens. The war, so long a rumour far away in the south, had finally reached the capital, following on the heels of the swarms of refugees.

The rebels had crossed the border two months ago, had quickly taken the iron mines and begun a slow push towards Lake Albert and the capital. At first the rebels’ advance had followed a strict tempo. They would take a town and pause, regrouping and strengthening their position, then move on again. But recently the rebels had split into two unequal groups, the smaller more disciplined and more efficient (their leader, Prince Marshall, who had taken to telephoning the BBC World Service with boastful accounts of skirmishes inflated to battles, drove about the front in a jeep, shooting any of his troops who paused to indulge in looting), and the pace of the advance had quickened. Before the split in the rebel ranks there had always been food available in the capital if you could pay the price, preferably in US dollars, but now even staples like rice and manioc were running low.

Harry Merrick had done his best to keep his bar operating normally, even if it meant dipping into his reserves to match inflated war prices. It was a matter of keeping up appearances. The bar was Harry’s refuge—had been for thirty years. It was popular with expatriots and the corrupt businessmen, government officials and army officers who had flourished under President Weah. The whores were clean and young; the booze was unadulterated; the food was good, thanks to Francis, the Fela cook. But the army, since the
coup
principally of the President’s tribe, had started to round up Fela men, because both Prince Marshall and Leviticus Smith, the leader of the main group of rebels, were Fela. Harry’s cook refused to go out after two of his uncles were arrested and shot, and so Harry had taken over the buying duties.

The capital’s food market was a maze of tin-roofed stalls beside the ferry terminal, with the eight-storey National Bank, the tallest building in the country, on the other side of the wide lakeside avenue. Normally, the market was bustling from dawn until dusk, but lately less than half the stalls were open, and those half-empty. Harry, in sunglasses and wide-brimmed bush hat to protect him from the early morning light, was haggling over a cage of scrawny chickens when the army truck drove up.

The Bureau of State Research had maintained a low but constant state of terror in the capital since the
coup d’État
five years ago. President Daniel Weah was a vain, badly educated man with an inferiority complex matched only by his greed and ruthless cunning. He had killed all his fellow plotters in the confusion after the
coup
and assumed total power as President-For-Life, although he still held his former army rank of sergeant. One by one, he had removed the government officials and ministers of the old regime and replaced them with badly educated men from his village. The Chief Justice had been shot in court; the Minister for Defence and two senior army generals had died when their helicopter had been brought down by a heat-seeking missile near the border; the head of the TV station had been blown up by a car bomb that killed sixteen passers-by and wounded more than fifty others. Prominent businessmen had been assassinated, too, and the state had appropriated their assets; like many other small businesses, Harry paid his taxes directly to a bagman who came around every week and had an uncanny knowledge of the turnover of the bar.

None of this was particularly exceptional for a post-revolution African country in the early 1980s, but after the rebels took the south, the army began its own terror campaign. Soldiers of the two tribes which had previously held power in the country were disarmed and herded into camps; more than a hundred were killed when they had tried to break out of their barracks. Bodies appeared at intersections with their severed heads in their laps, seeming to watch the thin traffic go past. No one dared remove them. A missionary was shot in his church because he had given shelter to the families of two disappeared army officers. Checkpoints were set up at every road out of the city and if someone was detained they were never seen alive again.

Despite the terror and the pincer-like advances of the two groups of rebels, most of Harry’s acquaintances in the golf club, the focal point of the expatriate community, were of the opinion that the President would survive. These were men who had lost almost everything as the economy dwindled away into the pockets of a very few, but like a gambler who stakes everything on a final throw, they refused to believe that they were out of the game. Harry himself thought that the President was smarter than he looked. Daniel Weah might be a swaggering bully who behaved like a cattle herder who had just come to the big city, but that was an act. He played dumb, but was shrewd and well advised, and always pretended to listen to the elders of his own tribe. Now, though, it seemed that he was losing his grip; a few nights ago he had had to appear on TV and explain that the massacre at the barracks had been due to rebel infiltrators, which no one believed at all.

When the army truck pulled up by the side of the road, the crowd parted for it with alacrity. It was a Bedford ten-tonner with a heavy grill over its radiator, its cab and the canvas cover over its loadbed splotched brown and green. Soldiers jumped down, lifted a man’s corpse out by its arms and legs, and dropped it onto the tin counter of an empty butcher’s stall. Then the truck pulled away, soldiers clinging to its sides and whooping with laughter at their joke and firing their Ml6s into the air even though so-called happy shooting had been banned to save ammunition.

The corpse wore only ragged trousers. It had been severely beaten, and shot in the back of the head. An iron rod had been pounded into its chest, and its hands and feet had been cut off. Something horrible had happened to its mouth; it looked like someone had broken the jaw and stretched it, then hammered crooked ivory nails into the gums and through the cheeks. The crowd looked at the mutilated corpse, murmuring to each other. Harry, shocked, pushed his way out of the circle, and was hailed by the French journalist, René Sante.

As usual, Sante was brimming over with gossip and rumours. He was indefatigable, a stringer for half a dozen newspapers and one of the major American TV networks. He had been at a dinner for the remaining ambassadors last night, he said. The President had worn his sergeant’s uniform, his blouson heavy with ranks of medals he had awarded himself. Before the dessert course he had made a speech.

“He said he would deal the rebels a blow from which they could not recover,” Sante told Harry. “There’s talk he plans to napalm the frontline villages. He also said that there were no shortages, that thieves had stolen the riches of the country and he would soon arrest them all, and all would be well. Then he took a spoonful of his dessert and got up and left. He gets bored at those things, my friend. I’ve been to about twenty, and I’ve never once had dessert. It was ice cream, too—I haven’t had ice cream for a month. I think,” Sante said, lowering his voice, “that there is not long left. They say he has brought mercenaries in, and that’s always a desperate move. The population never likes it because it reminds them of the worst excesses of colonialism, and there’s always the risk that they’ll go out of control.”

Harry and René Sante were sitting at a cafe table on the other side of the market. The journalist was sipping from a beer; as usual, Harry had bought iced tea which he didn’t touch, except occasionally to hold to his forehead. He was grateful for Sante’s chatter because it helped him not to think about the corpse and what it might mean. The day was brightening, and splinters of light penetrated the lenses of his dark glasses like slivers of hot silver; he could feel his exposed skin begin to tighten. He told Sante that last night a TV journalist from CBS had been drinking at the bar.

Sante nodded vigorously. He was a small wiry man, full of energy. He wore a travel-stained safari jacket, its pockets bulging with canisters of film, cassette tapes, spare batteries. He had set his three cameras on the rickety tin table. He was pleased to have caught the dumping of the body; he thought he could sell it to
Paris Match.
It was a parable of the African situation, Harry thought. The army and the journalists fed on horror, and the ordinary people went hungry.

Sante said, “I know the guy from CBS. He’s just been with Leviticus Smith. Smith is boasting that the war will be over in six months. He says he will be President for two years, and then he will think about elections. You should consider of getting out, my friend.”

“I’m comfortable here.”

After the
coup,
Harry had been tempted to give up the bar and start over somewhere else, but things had quickly settled down. Humans were creatures of habit, and old habits and customs persisted despite the bursts of energy which suddenly and unpredictably overwhelmed their precarious social structures. They had no patience; they didn’t have the long view. They saw only what was before their noses, and lived for the day. Harry was able to live amongst them so easily because they twisted facts in their own minds to fit their preconceptions.

Even René Sante, who lived off his wits, was easy to fool. He saw Harry as a kind of fellow traveller, not exactly an ally, nor even a friend, but someone who had a common interest in the mixed currency of gossip and rumour and fact by which stringers survived. To Harry, the journalist was neither prey nor a threat. Harry would never drink from him, but René yielded to Harry all the same, too ready to spill what he knew.

“There’s a new thing I saw,” Sante said, drawing his chair closer to Harry. “It was in front of the army barracks. Three men, on stakes.”

At first, Harry thought Sante meant that the men had been tied to posts and shot and left as a warning; a few days ago a dozen men had been hanged from lampposts along the main commercial street, with placards tied to their chests proclaiming them to be saboteurs. But Sante said no, this was different.

“These are stakes about eight feet long, sharpened at one end. The men have been lifted onto them and dropped so the stake pierced the—how do you call it?—the asshole. It went all the way through one, came out of his chest. All three were officers. One was a major I knew vaguely. They say it’s the President’s new adviser, the mercenary they call the Count.”

~ * ~

Harry is left alone in the small square room for ten days.

The bars at the window are coated with silver. He burns his left hand badly; the old wound in his side, between the fourth and fifth ribs, aches in sympathy.

At intervals guards bring in vegetable slop heavily flavoured with garlic. Another pointless insult, like the crucifix. Harry has not needed to eat for forty years.

He managed to drink a little from one of the dying men in the cell in Block A before the guards pulled him out, but in a few days his thirst begins to return. He catches a rat on the first night, but after that the rats keep away, although they had the run of the cells in Block A. He keeps the worst of the thirst at bay by eating the cockroaches and centipedes which infest the room, crunching down a dozen at a time, savouring the small bitter sparks of life and spitting out pulped chitin, but the thirst persists, a low-level ache, a hollow in his belly. His bones feel brittle, their cores hollow. He tries to exercise. His muscles clench weakly, like tattered grave shrouds on his dead bones, but he knows he has to keep up his strength. Someone has been turning humans, making an undead elite within the army. The Count, the President’s adviser. Harry has a black dread that he knows who the Count is, but he tries not to dwell on it. He’ll find out soon enough.

He spends most of the time in deep black dreamless sleep, curled up tightly in the corner beneath die oblong slot of die barred window, where the hot, heavy African sunlight cannot find him. Where he is safe from the memories of what he did to the twenty men in die cell in Block A. Where he is safe from his past. Still he weakens, hour upon hour. He needs the life in hot sweet salty human blood. Even in his sleep he can feel the tides of blood moving through die bodies of die guards and the prisoners in this terrible place, each a secret sundered sea. The thirstier he grows the more sensitive he becomes. He can hear the wary rustle of the rats in the spaces behind die walls, die conversations and laughter of the guards, the sighs and moans and rattling breaths of the prisoners in the cells in Block A, die music played by a radio in die old gymnasium on die other side of die compound where die officers lounge, drinking beer and whisky, and the rattle of the vultures on the tin roof. Every night two or three prisoners are tortured until they confess to die truth of the accusations made against diem by die security force (and everyone screams, and pleads and finally confesses to stop the torture; Harry can hear every word) and then are led out—either to the cinder track behind the prison block where they are made to kneel in front of the wire fence in the harsh glare of the lights on the tower and are shot in the back of the head by an officer, or to a waiting truck which drives them off to some public place where they are impaled as a lesson to the populace. Harry hears it all, and wider, further, the agitated stir of the city, and the rattle of small arms fire and crump of mortar rounds in the suburbs as the two groups of rebel forces engage with the army to the east and west.