In the weeks following his meeting with Mobutu, Jacques watched and waited, and heard nothing from Bika. There were no more casual stops for late afternoon talks on the terrace, no more invitations to Saturday night parties in the garden.
In mid-March riots broke out in the central market when the price of manioc tripled overnight and the local currency went into a free fall. Along the rue du Commerce gangs of looters pillaged the shops owned by Indians and Pakistanis and Lebanese and beat and killed several Congolese before they could climb aboard the ferry to Brazzaville. On his way back to the cité on his night off Dieudonné was attacked by a roving gang of young hoodlums and the money he had so carefully hidden away in his shoes stolen. Downtown, the cars of expatriates were stoned and surrounded by exasperated mobs. When Josh Hamilton’s car was stopped by an angry surge of people in Binza village, his driver fled into the crowd, and Josh, returning from a dressage class at the Cercle Hippique, climbed out of the back seat and slashed about in the screaming mob with his riding whip, shouting the only word he knew in Lingala, Keba! Keba!—which he had often heard his servants use and which meant “watch out!”—until he could get back into his car and make his way up the hill to Djelo Binza. Europeans remained behind the locked gates of their villas, exchanging rumors of violence picked up from each other and off the street from the radio trottoir, while their embassies worked out evacuation plans. Sarah attended the embassy meetings on emergency procedures, though she knew full well that she would never leave Jacques and his country.
The riots and looting continued for three days, and on the fourth day, Joe Snead sent up his company’s helicopter with someone from the government to get an estimate of the size of the mobs emptying out of the shanty towns along the road to the airport.
And then the rains came. Torrents of rain, a typical rainy season downpour, beginning in midmorning and, unusually, continuing into the afternoon. Better than a firing squad, the rains. The crowds dispersed to the shelter of beer gardens and dank mud-and-wattle huts, and the city waited expectantly for two days, but the riots did not begin again. The price of manioc remained three times what it was before, and the value of the zaïre became so erratic and fragile that each day a half-dozen Lebanese started gathering along the Avenue des Aviateurs with open suitcases of hard currencies and buying and selling local money. By the end of the week everyone was calling the avenue that ran in front of the American Embassy “Wall Street” and went there to shop among the Lebanese in pastel polyester leisure suits with Louis Vuitton luggage filled with stacks of bank notes in red rubber bands for the best rate of exchange for their money.
“The only thing we can do now is to look after our own people,” Jacques said. So every time that Johann Verhaegen flew into the interior, Jacques gave him enough money to buy all the yams he could find to bring back to give to the servants and their extended families. Soon a fine layer of red dust powdered the interior of the small Beechcraft, until it smelled of damp earth and yams like the inside of huts in Iyondo. Sam Wofford, in and out of South Africa, brought back quinine and malarial suppressants. With Dieudonné’s help, Sarah had become an adept nurse, with a good eye for malaria dosages, even with the servants’ children.
After the riots Jacques withdrew into a brooding melancholy that even Sarah could not dispel. He would sit for hours in silence on the terrace, watching the river, and when, nearing sunset, fishermen, black silhouettes against the sky, poled out into the river in their pirogues, he would rise from his chair and stand absolutely still, as if waiting for a message, while the fishermen, in slow, graceful dips and turns, cast their diaphanous nets over the shimmering, sun-struck water.
“Jacques, sometimes I think your mother may be right. You love this country too much. You care too much. Don’t hate me for saying that.”
“Oh, Sarah,” he said, taking her into his arms. “How can I not care for a country where so many I have loved lie buried? My sister, my father, my little Sabine.” He kissed her face gently. “And where, on an idle afternoon, walking across an Italian ambassador’s garden, I looked up and found the woman I love with all my heart.”
He became obsessed with Sarah’s safety—though she was not in the least bit afraid—insisting, in a tone that she had never heard before, that she give up driving her car and accept Louis as her bodyguard and driver when she went to the Cultural Center and on errands around town. His hunger for Sarah, for her body, for her warm, fragrant presence, tormented him. At night sometimes, more and more often now, after making love, a bewildered question lurked in the depths of her clear, candid eyes, he saw it there, but he could not stop himself. The merest brush of her hand aroused his wild beating heart, and he reached out, blindly, voraciously, for the sweet excitement of her body.
More and more spare wheels in the government turned up in the waiting room at his office, ex-secretaries of this or that, who wanted to talk of the hard times and l’effervescence du peuple, as they put it. Jacques could never tell whether they were seeking information from him or some channel to the president or to Boketsu, or whether they were trying to warn him, as old friends and acquaintances, that the jerry-built dam holding back the people’s wrath was about to break.
In the evenings he and Sarah stayed home and saw few people other than Sam Wofford, when he was in town, or Gussie Pearce, in tight-fitting cream jodhpurs, on her way to or from the Cercle Hippique, or Carter Everett, who had lately fallen into a habit of dropping in for a beer and sometimes dinner on his way home from the embassy. They talked of the riots and what faction of malcontents had started them and for what purpose, for no one believed any more that the trouble had truly started over the price of manioc.
One morning at the end of March the older of Jacques’ Rhodesian ridgebacks failed to wake up, and a few days later, Chili Dog, the younger ridgeback, began to struggle getting to his feet. He would straighten his front legs, then whimper and moan as he dragged his rear end along the concrete next to the swimming pool until his hind legs would somehow engage and he could get up on all fours.
“Put him down, Jacques,” the young Belgian veterinarian said. “That’s what you have to do.” Gérard Wanzoul, dressed in well-worn cowboy boots and blue jeans and a white tee shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled up in one sleeve, stood next to the swimming pool, rippling dark azure in the late afternoon breeze off the river. His faded blue jeans were skin tight and had bleached, or rubbed out, in revealing lines over the bulge of his crotch. “The old lady died of old age, but this one has a tumor wrapped around his spine. It’ll only get worse. Put him down.” Wanzoul flicked his cigarette into a hibiscus bush.
The air was filled with the tangy aroma of freshly cut grass. Célestin, the frail, diminutive yard boy, who had never used a lawnmower and would not learn to use one, crouched close to the ground, and with methodical side steps, swished his sharpened coupe-coupe across the grass.
Jacques looked down at Chili Dog, swaying a little on his front legs against the dead weight of his rear end. Jacques had gone with little Suzanne to fetch him as a puppy from an elderly German woman who ran a curio shop on the Route des Poids-Lourds, and Suzanne had named the coppery brown pup Chili Dog, because that was her favorite treat when she went with her nanny to the American Club on Saturday mornings to watch her father play tennis. Jacques bent down and rubbed the dog’s head. Chili Dog gave a tentative thump of his tail and slowly eased down onto his stomach.
“Can’t be removed, believe me,” Wanzoul said. “I don’t like to put them down, but for this one, it would be a blessing.”
“Well,” Jacques said, trailing his hand along the thick ridge of hair along the dog’s back, “Do it then.”
Wanzoul walked to the drive and lifted a bag from the rear of his station wagon.
“That’s fine just the way he is,” Wanzoul said, loosening a leather case. “Hold him that way. But, here—” He took Jacques’ hand and moved it back from the dog’s head. “After the shot hits him, he’ll try to bite. It’s a reflex. Just keep your hand back.”
Wanzoul shook a vial back and forth a few times, filled a large hypodermic needle, dropped to his knees quickly, and inserted the needle. As the needle burrowed into his muscles, Chili Dog twitched a little and yelped faintly, as if his lungs were being squeezed. Jacques stroked his back and murmured reassuringly.
It seemed a long time before Wanzoul slowly withdrew the needle. A hind leg pumped furiously in the air as if trying to reach a flea on the belly before going limp and dropping to the ground, and just as Wanzoul was getting to his feet, Chili Dog jerked his head back toward Jacques’ hand and bared his teeth. His neck arching rigidly, the dog looked at Jacques, his eyes filled with the awful bewilderment of betrayal. Straining, Chili Dog held his head up a moment longer, then the menacing mouth disappeared, his jaws closed, and his eyes darkened with sorrow. With an imperceptible sigh Chili Dog slumped down, his brass tags . . . clink, and again clink . . . rattling against the concrete, as his head settled down to rest.
Wanzoul had taken out a cigarette and was trying to extricate his lighter from the pocket of his tight jeans when a hideous sound broke from Jacques Delpech’s chest, and he flung himself prostrate in an attitude of protection over the dying dog’s body.
In the kitchen where she was explaining a recipe to Dieudonné, the hoarse, bellowing sound came to Sarah as something inhuman, a déchirement, a fierce, husky, inarticulate bark. She and Dieudonné looked up, astonished, at the same moment, and she turned and raced from the kitchen, down the long hallway, and out the French doors of the living room to the swimming pool terrace.
To Sarah the scene in the garden looked like a melodrama of catastrophe and doom. Purple black clouds had suddenly cloaked the skies and a slow, soft rain was falling. Wanzoul, embarrassed, gazed toward the river and stood flicking and shaking his lighter as the unlit cigarette in his mouth soaked up the rain. Célestin, on his knees, his hands drawn up to his mouth in an attitude of prayer, his arms so thin and his elbows so knobby that he looked like a stick man in a child’s drawing, whimpered, “Oh, non, patron, oh, non, oh, non, oh, non, patron, s’il te plaît, patron! s’il te plaît!” And Jacques lay sobbing, hunched over the dog, his tanned shoulders showing through his rain-soaked shirt.
“Jacques. Jacques,” she whispered, pulling at his shoulders. “Come in out of the rain. Jacques. Come away.”
He rose to his feet, stumbling awkwardly as he turned away from Chili Dog.
“He sure must have loved that dog,” Wanzoul said.
“Yes,” Sarah said, guiding Jacques toward the steps of the terrace, though she knew that for Jacques the two dogs had simply been a part of the place, little more than the frangipani and the flame trees and the brilliant swirls of magenta bougainvillea drooping over the walls. The dogs came, drooling and humble, for his absentminded caresses under the breakfast table in the mornings and spent the heat of the day with the servants in the breezeway of the boyerie and their nights snoring and snuffling around the swimming pool.
Inside the house Jacques stared out the window as Wanzoul and Dieudonné carried the limp body of the dog across the grass and lowered it into the back of the station wagon, while Célestin, still kneeling in the rain, his fist rammed into his mouth, turned his head fearfully and watched.