The Perfect Soldier (34 page)

The waiter appeared with the food. Molly reached for her knife and fork. Robbie hadn’t moved.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

Robbie didn’t reply for a moment. He looked suddenly exhausted.

‘Muengo fell this afternoon,’ he muttered. ‘I meant to tell you.’

It was past midnight when the soldier came to look at McFaul. He was sitting on a dirty square of straw matting
at the back of Katilo’s cave, using his fingers to scrape the last of the corned beef from the open tin. The guns had been silent now since noon and in the darkness outside, the camp seemed empty. Even the generator had stopped.

The soldier stepped towards him. The beam of his torch lingered briefly on McFaul’s face then circled slowly round the rough sandstone walls. Katilo was sprawled in an ancient armchair beside a makeshift table, light from a candle shadowing his face. He was watching the soldier carefully, and when the beam of the torch swung towards him he signalled the soldier to switch it off. The soldier muttered something McFaul didn’t catch. Katilo dismissed him with a brusque nod, reaching out for the torch and then returning to the sheaf of maps on his lap. Without the generator, Katilo was unable to use the little CD player propped on a corner of the table. Neither could he amuse himself with the pile of videos at his elbow. For the latter, McFaul was profoundly grateful. While the video-player had been working, he’d been obliged to watch Domingos’s agony again and again, an experience that was worse, in many respects, than the beating he’d taken at the hands of the soldiers.

Katilo was making notes on a map with the stub of a blue chinagraph. After a while, he looked up. Llewelyn’s video was at the top of the pile of cassettes. He picked it up, weighing it in his hand. When he moved his head, the diamond in his ear twinkled in the candle-light. He gestured at the torch the soldier had used.

‘He says you were the one.’

‘The one what?’

‘The one behind the camera. He says he saw you. He says you made the film.’

For a moment, McFaul was lost. For two days, obsessed by what he’d seen on Llewelyn’s cassette, Katilo had wanted
to know who’d been responsible for the pictures. He’d run them again and again, pausing to savour this detail or that. The moment when Domingos had stepped on the mine had especially fascinated him: the tiny, rich blossom of flame, the soil and the dirt blasting skywards, the torn fragments of clothing fluttering slowly back to earth. He’d run the sequence backwards and forwards on the video-player, watching the little Angolan disintegrate and then become whole again. At first, McFaul had put this down to sadism. Katilo was a psychopath. He enjoyed playing God, he revelled in dispensing disfigurement and sudden death, and the glories of Japanese technology gave him the chance to savour his handiwork.

After a while, though, it began to occur to McFaul that there might be some other explanation. Katilo, after all, was no fool. Much of his interest seemed genuinely technical. He wanted to know more about the way the material had been organised, why some sequences were in close-up, why certain actions had been shot again and again from different angles, what the final film might look like. Faced with these questions, McFaul had denied all responsibility. The pictures had been shot by someone else. His own job began and ended in the minefields. Katilo had ignored his denials, telling him there was no shame in pointing a camera at scenes like these, and now he looked immensely pleased with himself, satisfied that at last he had proof of McFaul’s complicity.

‘He saw you,’ he repeated. ‘He was on the front line. You were there on the road, with another man. He was talking to the camera. You made the pictures. He recognised your face.’

Katilo’s hand had strayed to his chin and he tapped it a couple of times, making the point. Scars, he was saying. The scars prove it. You were the cameraman. You made the film.

McFaul had caught up now, finally understanding what he meant. Early on, back in Muengo, he’d driven Llewelyn out of town. The TV man had wanted to describe the way James Jordan had blown himself up. Llewelyn had posed against a likely stretch of bush and McFaul had been behind the camera, pressing the right buttons, making sure it looked OK. Llewelyn’s version of what had happened had been a joke, wildly out of order, and McFaul had never touched the camera again. But Katilo didn’t know that. As far as he was concerned, his soldiers behind the sandbags down the road, glued to their binoculars, had identified McFaul as the cameraman. And that, it seemed, changed everything.

Katilo stirred.

‘You told me you used to be a soldier.’

‘It’s true.’

‘I know.’ He tapped the cassette approvingly. ‘Only a soldier could make these pictures. You have to be strong, a strong man.
Machismo
, no?’

McFaul was thinking of Llewelyn again. Only a soldier, he thought. Or some burned-out journalist, prepared to trade another man’s life for a day or two back in the limelight.

Katilo was on his feet. In a recess beside the entrance to the cave, a blanket hid a portable fridge. With the gennie turned off, the ice in the freezer was fast melting but the fridge was still stacked with beer. Katilo pulled out two cans, tossing one across the cave towards McFaul. It bounced a couple of times on the hard rock floor and when McFaul tugged on the ring-pull he covered himself with foam. Katilo watched him, roaring with laughter, then selected another can, opening it himself and passing it across.

The beer was colder than McFaul expected. He took a mouthful, letting his head sink back against the damp sandstone, allowing the beer to trickle slowly down his throat.
The worst of the pain from the beating had gone now, dulled by sleep, and for the first time he found himself contemplating the possibility of survival. Not by doing anything heroic but simply by going along with whatever fantasy role Katilo was planning to offer him.

The rebel commander was back in the armchair now, sitting sideways, his legs hanging over one arm. Half-warrior, half-child, he picked up the cassette again.

‘Where’s the camera?’ he asked suddenly.

‘I don’t know.’ McFaul shrugged. ‘Back in Muengo.’

‘We’ll find it. Tomorrow.’

McFaul looked at him a moment, understanding now why the camp felt so deserted. Muengo had fallen. The trucks had left for the city. The gennie, too. McFaul took another mouthful of beer.

‘OK,’ he said.

‘You’ve got more of these?’ Katilo tapped the cassette. ‘We can shoot some more pictures?’

‘Sure.’

‘In Muengo?’

‘Wherever you like.’

Katilo fell silent, brooding, and McFaul looked at his plastic leg, propped against the table next to Katilo’s armchair. The soldiers had unstrapped it after they’d dragged him back from the anthill. Evidently it saved them the chore of having to rope him up. Not that McFaul had been in any state to contemplate a bid for freedom.

Katilo was looking at the maps, still deep in thought.

‘This film,’ he said at last, ‘you take it back to England?’

‘Of course.’

‘Where? Who wants it?’

‘BBC.’ McFaul shrugged, warming to his new role. ‘ITV. Everyone.’

‘They’ll show it?’

‘Yes.’

‘You know that?’

‘Yes.’

‘How? How do you know it?’

McFaul thought about the question, trying to anticipate where the conversation might lead. Katilo held the rank of Colonel. UNITA discipline was strict but rivalries between senior officers were intense. Taking Muengo would have done him no harm. Maybe he wanted to cash in. Maybe he wanted to become a major player. Maybe he even fancied stardom.

‘Western television likes pictures like those,’ McFaul said carefully. ‘They’re worth a lot of money.’

‘You sell them?’ Katilo was looking at the cassette. ‘You can sell this?’

‘Of course.’

‘How much? How much money?’

‘Thousands of dollars.’

‘And they show it? On television?’

‘Yes.’

Katilo nodded, impressed, and McFaul remembered a story he’d picked up in Luanda from an American diplomat. The man had been working in Liberia, a couple of thousand miles north, until the country had erupted in civil war. Rival armies had descended on the capital, capturing the president. Within hours they’d tortured him to death, cutting off his ears, hacking him to pieces, and a video of the proceedings had become Africa’s hottest-selling item. At the time, new to the continent, McFaul had found the story hard to believe but now he knew it was probably true. Like Bosnia, and parts of the old Russian empire, Africa seemed to glory in slaughter. It was everywhere, utterly commonplace. It was the currency
brokered by rival warlords. It went with the heat and the harsh, pitiless midday light. Blood, for so many, was how you measured respect.

Katilo stood up, returning to the fridge. Bottles of Glenfiddich lay side by side in a tray at the bottom. Katilo took one out, breaking the seal, and in that single action McFaul recognised the shape of the deal he was offering. First they’d talk about making a film. Then they’d get drunk. And by tomorrow, if he played his cards right, they’d be back in Muengo looking for Llewelyn’s precious camcorder. The camcorder was the key to McFaul’s survival. The pictures he’d shoot might even take him back to the UK. Katilo wanted to be famous and McFaul was the man he’d chosen to make it happen.

McFaul looked up. Katilo was standing over him, the bottle in one hand, a glass in the other. McFaul blinked. The big gold Rolex was inches from his face.

‘You like Scotch?’

McFaul watched the pale single malt slipping into the glass. The decision was made already, negotiations over, the deal concluded.

‘Sure,’ McFaul muttered, ‘why not?’

Robbie Cunningham stood at the open door of Molly’s bedroom. Slanting bars of sunlight striped the wooden floor and the growl of Luanda’s morning rush hour drifted in through the half-open shutters.

Molly peered up, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, surprised to find a cup and saucer on the chair beside her bed. Morning tea was a luxury in the Terra Sancta house.

Robbie was settling himself in the bedroom’s only chair. He looked, if anything, shamefaced.

‘I’ve got to meet a friend,’ he murmured. ‘Wondered if you might come along.’

They drove the half mile to the Meridian Hotel. The lobby was full of money-changers, energetic young men with bulging briefcases and battery-powered ultraviolet machines for checking foreign currency. Molly settled herself on a low sofa, watching the men parcelling out huge wads of red kwanza notes.

‘Room 1440,’ Robbie said, returning from the reception desk. ‘She’s invited us up.’

They took the lift to the fourteenth floor. The door was opened by a young Angolan, a man in his early twenties. The dressing gown was several sizes too small for him and there was a wisp of cotton wool on his chin where he’d nicked himself shaving.

Alma Bradley was sitting at a table by the window. She was wearing jeans and a baggy white shirt and her shoulder-length hair was gathered at the back by a twist of scarlet ribbon. Hunched over a small portable typewriter, she barely looked up as Molly and Robbie stepped into the room.

‘Manoel.’ She gestured vaguely towards the Angolan. ‘He’s from the Press Centre.’

Manoel produced bottles of Coke from the mini-bar. Molly stood by the window looking out at the view. Across the city, on the hill behind the fort, she recognised the pale sandstone of the embassy building where she’d met the ambassador. At the foot of the hill, on the causeway that connected the
Ilha
to the city, she could see a knot of men in blue manning a road-block. Larry Giddings had pointed them out to her yesterday. They wore Ray-Bans and chunky bullet-proof waistcoats and seemed to be a law unto themselves. The locals called them Ninjas.

Robbie was sitting on the unmade bed, describing their
week in Muengo. Alma Bradley was still typing, a cigarette burning in the ashtray beside her elbow. From time to time she’d raise an eyebrow, or mutter a question. Finally, she pulled the sheet of paper from the machine and handed it to the young Angolan. He took it into the bathroom and shut the door.

Molly was still standing by the window. Alma glanced up at her.

‘Sorry about your son,’ she said briskly, ‘must have been awful.’

‘It was.’

She nodded, turning to Robbie again. On the pillow by his knee was an open packet of dates.

‘Help yourself. You say there are pictures?’

‘Llewelyn shot pictures, certainly. Sony Hi-8.’

‘Of what? Exactly?’

‘I don’t know. I never saw them.’

‘Great. Nice pitch. Really whets a girl’s appetite.’

Alma ground the unsmoked half of the cigarette into the ashtray and stood up. She had a lovely figure, Molly thought. Willowy yet firm. She checked her watch then shouted something in French at the bathroom door. The door opened. Manoel was washing his hair. Robbie started to laugh and Alma rounded on him.

‘What’s the secret?’ she demanded. ‘How the fuck do you get anything done round here?’

Molly was still thinking about the tape. She knew exactly what was on it. Bennie had told her. Shot by shot. Twice.

‘It’s about James,’ she murmured, ‘and the minefields.’

Alma broke off.

‘What is?’

‘That videotape.’

Molly described the shots on Llewelyn’s cassette. He’d
gone back over the accident, telling the story as best he could. He’d shot on the street in Luanda. He’d taken pictures the day they’d landed at Muengo. He’d done stuff in the schoolhouse where the mine people lived. Then he’d taken Bennie and Domingos to one of the minefields. Something out of the window had caught Alma’s attention and she was half-turned in her chair, staring down at the city below.

‘Then Domingos got blown up,’ Molly said quietly.

‘Where was Llewelyn?’

‘Filming it.’

‘What?’ Alma looked round. ‘What did you say?’

‘He was filming it. There. While it happened. It’s all on the video.’

‘Are you serious? Guy gets blown up? On camera?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’ve seen it?’

‘No,’ Molly shook her head, ‘but I know it’s there.’