The Redundancy of Courage by Timothy Mo

Author:Timothy Mo [Mo, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature
ISBN: 9780701137489
Publisher: Unknown
Published: 1991-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

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Osvaldo had left reception parties for us along his route. Oh, how thoughtful of him, might be your first reaction. Well, it was, of course. But, looking back, there was a military police element about it, too. I mean, he wanted to be damn sure there was someone covering his ass. For some things he had a sixth sense. Outwardly serene, aloof, he was anything but remote from what was going on underneath him. The good thing about arriving at these staging-posts was that the work of bivouacking had already been done for us. I suppose we should have camped elsewhere to minimise the risk of aerial detection, but that was Danu for you. In hindsight again, I guess Osvaldo wouldn’t have been too sorry had the malais exposed their hand early and hit his rearguard while he was sited near the protection of the forest. We were out to discover what the hell was going on, in any case.

No sooner had we put out our sentries and commenced preparing food (this level of the forest not having been so thoroughly scavenged as the higher and yielding a somewhat better provision) than the noise of men moving carelessly through the undergrowth impressed itself upon our heightened senses. No prizes for guessing: it was Martinho and his merry men. Those few who’d remained with him were the worst soldiers in the camp; they really were god-awful apologies of combatants, worse than yours truly, who could be credited with possessing some intelligence even if he was a true coward: in fact, cowardice enhanced the workings of the brain. If there’d been any malais nearby, the crashings, the crackings, and—Jesus Christ—the loud conversation, would have alerted them to our presence long ago. It was so outrageously inept that I couldn’t forebear from snickering. But X. Ray was mad as you could want. So should I have been—they’d endangered us all. Martinho wasn’t a stupid man; I can only presume he had a strong death-wish. They strolled into the camp as if they were boy-scouts on a weekend excursion. A positive way of looking at it was that if they’d come in stealthily, like the African professionals, they might well have got themselves shot to pieces, for so angry had X. Ray been, so pompous Martinho at the time of the original departure that there’d been no times fixed or passwords agreed.

Martinho blinked in the light of the little clearing. He appeared quite unflustered, absolutely unembarrassed. As X. Ray bore down on them, he nodded coldly. His whole demeanour was one of injured magnanimity. When X. Ray got within about ten feet of him, he stuck out the flat of his hand and said: ‘Father Molloy died three hours after you left.’ It wasn’t as bad as it might have been. I guess he could have put it worse: e.g., ‘Father Molloy has passed away,’ ‘Father Molloy has gone to his reward.’ X. Ray, I know, would have liked to say, ‘Fuck Father Molloy,’ but he had sufficient self-control.

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