The Smoke Jumper Read online

  ‘He says the people from Bysenguye are camped half a mile from here.’

  ‘Can he take us there?’

  She asked him and the man shrugged and nodded.

  They followed him on foot through the labyrinth of smoke-veiled paths, past bodies neatly bundled in rush matting for collection and naked children sifting the filth for food, scenes that Connor had photographed all week and of which the world by now was doubtless growing weary. At last they came to a large tent of pale blue plastic and the man told them that this was where they would find those in charge of the Bysenguye refugees and he left them there. Connor found the flash in his camera bag and fixed it to one of the Nikons that hung around his neck.

  Inside, there was nobody to be seen. There was a table made out of crates with a gas light upon it and piles of papers weighted with stones and a bowl that was being used as an ashtray with a half-smoked cigarette burning on its rim. The place was full of crates and bags and boxes, many of which looked unopened. At the back of the tent was a long flap of plastic and from behind it came the sound of laughter and voices and an odd metallic scraping.

  Marijke called hello but no one came and so Connor walked to the flap and opened it. And staring right back at him was Emmanuel Kabugi.

  He was standing in a narrow, improvised courtyard that was walled with crates and lit by another gas lamp and he looked as if he had just stepped off a golf course. He was wearing neatly pressed slacks and a spotless white sports shirt with a little crocodile logo on it. He was taller and more imposing than he looked in the picture.

  There were four other men, all younger and more poorly dressed, sitting or standing around him and there were two women, both of them young and pretty. One of the men was sharpening a machete and laughing with one of the women but when he saw Connor he stopped doing both and suddenly there was silence, all of them just staring at him and at his cameras. Kabugi suddenly smiled and said something in French, but as Connor turned to Marijke for a translation he spoke again, this time in English.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Emmanuel Kabugi?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Connor introduced himself and showed him his UN press card. The man with the machete said something in Kinyarwanda and Kabugi turned to him sharply and replied with what was clearly a reprimand. Connor had been wondering whether to ease his way by pretending he wanted to talk about food distribution or conditions in the camp. But he’d never been too good at lying and when Kabugi asked a second time if he could help, he reached into his bag and pulled out the picture of the church massacre that he’d ripped from a magazine. He handed it to Kabugi.

  He looked at it and the others looked over his shoulder and when the man with the machete saw what it was he started shouting at Connor. Kabugi told him to be quiet and studied the picture again, sadly shaking his head.

  ‘Why do you bring me this?’ he said softly.

  ‘You don’t need reminding?’

  ‘These were my people, many of them my friends. How could I forget?’

  He handed the picture back, but Connor wouldn’t take it.

  ‘Which of them did you kill? I mean, personally.’

  Kabugi frowned. ‘What?’

  ‘I guess it’s a little hard to tell with them all hacked up like that.’

  Connor was aware of Marijke shifting nervously beside him.

  ‘Come on, man. You were there. You sent them all to the church and then you came with others to murder them.’

  ‘You are mistaken, sir.’

  ‘No, I’m not. There are witnesses. I spoke with them. You did a pretty good job but not quite good enough. You missed some. They saw you.’

  ‘Then they are mistaken. Of course, I heard what happened and it made me very sad and very angry. These people were killed by the RPF to blacken our names and to seduce foreign journalists such as yourself into supporting them. Why would I do this? Why would one kill one’s own people?’

  ‘I don’t know. Why? You tell me.’

  Kabugi stared at him for a long time. Then he scrunched the picture into a ball in his fist and dropped it on the ground. He lifted his chin a little.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’

  ‘Sure I do.’

  ‘I am the bourgmestre of Bysenguye. I am an educated man. I have studied literature and art and philosophy at the university of the Sorbonne in Paris. I go to Mass. I pray for my enemies. I have devoted my life to the service of my people. I tell you this, you understand, not to boast, but so that you may know to whom you speak. You understand?’

  Connor shrugged.

  ‘When the army of the cockroaches drove my people from their homes, I helped them and protected them and led them to safety. Many died on the way, children, babies, trampled underfoot in their terror. And now we are here in this lower circle of hell and we have nothing, not even our dignity.’

  He spoke quietly and precisely but with a gathering intensity. There was something chilling in his eyes now and Connor had to summon all his strength to hold his stare.

  ‘And you dare to come before me with your false accusations and your high moral outrage while outside our wives and our children lie dying in the dirt from cholera and starvation? ’

  ‘All I come with is the truth.’

  ‘The truth? What do you know of truth? What do you know of my country, of my people? How long have you lived there? A week? A month? If the truth is a loaf of bread and you pick up a crumb, do you have the truth? If not the truth, then it is as worthless as a lie. You are American, I think.’

  Connor nodded.

  ‘Then tell me, what is the “truth” about your country? About your people? About the millions you have murdered, the millions of my people that you stole and turned into slaves? Many of whom are still your slaves. Tell me the truth about them.’

  ‘You want to make a speech, that’s fine by me. I just came to take your picture.’

  Kabugi didn’t seem to hear. His anger was uncoiling and wouldn’t be stopped.

  ‘The truth is that there is no truth. Only crumbs. You have yours and I have mine. But I have more of them and mine are gathered with knowledge and experience, not under a false banner of piety and prejudice. So I will share them with you. These Tutsi cockroaches and their Belgian paymasters want to turn us, to turn my people, once more into slaves, to reimpose their old feudal domination over us. And in the face of this what are we supposed to do? Tell me. Please tell me.’

  Connor nodded at the machete.

  ‘Hell, I guess you just hack ’em all to pieces. Is that the one you used? Or is that his? I guess you’d need a fair few.’

  Whether or not the man holding it understood, he stepped toward them, but Kabugi held out an arm to stop him. Marijke touched Connor on the arm.

  ‘I think we should go now.’

  ‘I think she is right,’ Kabugi said.

  ‘Sure,’ Connor said. He lifted his camera and started to focus, and immediately two of the men came at him. One tried to grab him but Connor lashed out at him and shoved the other away. They started to come at him again but Kabugi shouted and they stopped. Connor adjusted his camera.

  ‘I mean, hey, seeing as you’re such an upright pillar of society and a hero and all, you surely can’t mind having your picture taken, can you?’

  He didn’t wait for an answer, just took the picture. The flash seemed to startle and freeze them and he was able to take two more before Kabugi gave an order and they grabbed Connor’s arms and Marijke’s too and pushed them roughly back toward the tent flap. One of them tried to take his camera but Connor lashed out again and swore at him and was amazed at the effect it had. As he was being pushed through the flap he managed to twist around and take a final picture of Kabugi. The next thing he knew they were sprawling in the dirt outside the front tent, looking up at the amused and puzzled faces of the small crowd that had gathered.

  Driving him back to his UN tent, Marijke said he sure knew how to give a girl a good night out. He
said he was sorry and then for some reason they both started to laugh and couldn’t stop. The lens and the flash of his camera had been broken. But the body had stayed shut and the film was safe.

  He left Goma the next day, hitching a ride to Nairobi on a relief agency plane. As it banked away over Lake Kivu the clouds cleared and Connor craned his neck to look back toward the camps. He watched the sun and shadow chasing each other across the living sea of victims and killers and across the flanks of the volcano smoldering in judgment above. And he thought of what Kabugi had said about truth and wondered if he was right. Maybe there was no such thing.

  When he checked into the Norfolk Hotel they handed him the mail they had been keeping for him. He thumbed through it while he followed the boy carrying his bag to the room and found what he was looking for, a white envelope from Missoula, Montana, addressed to him in Julia’s broad, elegant handwriting. He didn’t know why, but he didn’t want to open it right away so he showered and washed his hair, sluicing away the smell of death.

  And only when he had dried himself and combed his hair and put on some fresh clothes and settled in a chair by the window, with the evening sky glowing pink and orange above the silhouetted palms, did he open it.

  There was a letter and a photograph of Julia sitting up and smiling in a hospital bed with Ed perched grinning beside her and the baby wrapped and pink and crumple-faced in her arms.

  The letter said that she had been born on the fifth of July, weighing in at seven pounds and twelve ounces. After debate, verging on divorce, they had settled on calling her Amy. Her middle name was to be Constance, which was as near to Connor as they could think of. Julia hoped that was okay. They wanted him, of course, to be the child’s godfather and were going to wait until he next came home to christen her.

  20

  A six-figure salary and a fancy new Manhattan lifestyle didn’t seem to have altered Linda Rosner at all. In fact, from the various combinations of black clothes that she had been wearing all weekend, Amy’s newly recruited godmother appeared to be revisiting the Land of the Neo-Gothics. Nor did her lawyerly qualifications seem to have instilled in her any kind of verbal restraint. In church yesterday she had taken one look at Connor and sotto voce to Julia adjudged him as fine a piece of ass as she’d seen in years. The only discernible change was that instead of rolling her own cigarettes, she now bought them ready-made, long and thin but still with licorice paper. She had one dangling from her lips now while she stacked the dishwasher. Across the kitchen Julia was fixing coffee.

  The christening, for which Linda had flown in on Friday, had evolved into a weekend party marathon and this was the last lap: Sunday supper for what Ed called ‘Amy’s inner circle - parents real, godly and grand.’ Assembled around the candlelit table outside on the deck were Ed and his parents, Connor and his mother and Julia’s mother, Maria. By the sound of it, they still hadn’t run short of conversation.

  Ed’s dad had taken a serious shine to Connor’s mother and all evening had been asking her about her golden days on the rodeo circuit. Susan Tully and Julia’s mom hadn’t stopped talking all weekend. And, since Linda had left the table to help Julia in the kitchen, it sounded as if Ed was at last getting a chance to talk with Connor. Amy was upstairs, asleep in her crib.

  ‘He doesn’t even have a girlfriend?’ Linda said.

  Julia shrugged. ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. Ask him. Tell him you’re available.’

  ‘Yeah, but the thing is, I wouldn’t be any good at all that outdoors stuff. I don’t do outdoors. I mean, horses? Can you see me and a horse within a hundred yards of each other?’

  ‘I know what you mean. You’re dropping ash into the dishwasher. ’

  ‘Babe, it’s a dishwasher.’

  ‘Put the glasses on the top, you’ll get more in. Anyway, he’s never here. He’s always in Africa or somewhere.’

  ‘He says he might buy an apartment in New York.’

  ‘He said that?’

  ‘Uh-huh. So maybe I wouldn’t have to come out here and play Annie Oakley. I could just be, like, his indoor city squeeze or something.’

  ‘Excuse me? “Squeeze”?’

  ‘Or something.’

  ‘That won’t clean if you put it in that way. Look, let me.

  There. You know, he can probably hear every word you’re saying.’

  ‘I hope. It’ll save time.’

  Linda leaned against the divider, smoking her cigarette and sipping a glass of wine, while Julia rearranged the dishes.

  ‘Well,’ she went on, dropping her voice now. ‘All I can say, babe, is that you sure picked some good genes there.’

  Julia gave her a look. When Linda was on this kind of riff, there was no knowing where she might take it.

  ‘I mean, I tell you, in your shoes, I wouldn’t have bothered with all that clinic shit. I’d have insisted on firsthand delivery.’

  ‘Linda. That is so out of order.’

  Linda held up her hands. ‘I know. I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me.’

  ‘I mean. Really.’

  There was a pause. The last of the coffee gurgled through the machine and Julia lifted the pot and put it on the tray with the cups.

  ‘Didn’t you even think about it though? Be honest.’

  ‘Linda!’

  ‘Sorry, sorry.’

  Julia felt herself blushing and saw Linda register this. She silently cursed herself for being such an open book. On cue, as if to rescue her, Amy started to cry upstairs. Julia asked Linda to take the tray out to the deck and hurried up to the bedroom.

  Amy had her own room but had been evicted for the weekend. Only her godparents were staying at the house, Linda in Amy’s room, Connor in the guest room. Everyone else was at the Red Lion in town - all except Connor’s mother, who had to get back to the ranch. Amy’s crib was temporarily parked in the corner of Julia and Ed’s room and as soon as Julia appeared above it the baby stopped crying and gave a burbling, gummy grin.

  ‘You little monkey. You just wanted company, didn’t you, huh?’

  She lifted her out and snuggled her and breathed the wonderful, sweet milky smell of her. She carried her over to the window and stood there in the dark, looking down at the table on the deck where everyone sat talking while Linda poured the coffee. Jim Tully was still locked in conversation with Connor’s mother and Susan was still talking with Julia’s. Connor had moved into Linda’s seat to sit next to Ed who was at the head of the table, telling a story, the candlelight flashing in the lenses of his dark glasses. He wore them nearly all the time now because he didn’t like people to see the way his eyes flickered.

  She couldn’t hear what anyone was saying and she found herself staring at Connor. It was exactly a year since they had last seen him. He looked different. He was tanned and his hair, which he wore shorter now, was bleached almost white. But it was more than that. He looked older or maybe it was just more serious or sad. There were lines around his eyes and Julia wondered if this was only from squinting in the African sun or from what he’d had to squint at.

  As if hearing her thoughts, he suddenly looked up and even though she had thought herself invisible in the darkness he saw her and smiled. And no one but she saw him do so, just the two of them together in that moment. She smiled back and not for the first time that weekend felt something quicken within her, which, whatever it was, she hastily repressed. And she turned away and sat on the bed and uncovered her breast to feed Amy and soon, in the streaming intimacy, found calm and comfort.

  Linda had stolen Connor back again and was asking him about his work. And from her voice Ed could picture the expression on her face. Those big gray eyes fixed on him, leaning close, hanging on his every word, going Reeeally? How fascinating? You diiid? No! Wow, that must be soo dangerous! As he stood up to go find Julia, Ed couldn’t resist saying:

  ‘Hey, Linda, you used to do some nude modeling at college, didn’t you? You sho
uld get Connor to take some pictures of you.’

  ‘Edward!’ his mother called from across the table. ‘You’re outrageous.’

  ‘I know. I have nothing to declare but my outrageousness.

  Is she blushing?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I am,’ Linda said.

  ‘Hey! Well, that’s a first.’

  He went into the house and called Julia and she answered from upstairs. He found her in their bedroom, trying to settle Amy who sounded as if being settled was about the last thing on earth she had in mind.

  ‘Did you feed her already?’

  ‘Yeah. She’s wide awake.’

  ‘Bring her down.’

  ‘Do you think?’

  ‘Yeah, come on. It’s her party after all.’

  Ed carried Amy out onto the deck and all the women started oohing and aahing and competing to hold her and Ed said he was going to have to organize some kind of ticketing system. He held Amy’s face to his ear as if she were whispering something to him.

  ‘Really? Okay, you’re the boss. You know whose knee she says she wants to sit on?’ He started humming the theme tune from The Godfather and handed her to Connor.

  ‘I made her an offer she couldn’t refuse,’ Connor said.

  Ed cuffed him over the head, harder than he should have. ‘Hey, pal, that’s my line. If you’re not careful, you’ll be sleeping with the fishes tonight.’

  The joke didn’t come out well either. His voice had a harsh edge to it. He found his seat and reached for his wineglass. It wasn’t where he had left it.

  ‘Hey, did someone move my glass?’

  Nobody heard him. He tried not to get annoyed when trivial things like this happened, but that’s how he felt. Maybe it was the wine. He’d had quite a few glasses already. Maybe someone had deliberately removed his glass to stop him having more. It was the kind of thing his mother would do. He asked again, more loudly, and Linda, who had been busy making baby talk with Amy, heard this time and said she had moved it. She apologized and filled it and handed it to him then went right back to talking with Amy and Connor.