The Quest

Mercado did not respond, but the priest’s warning awakened old and bad memories of that colonial war, and especially of the Gallas. Between 1936 and 1940, they fought the Ethiopian partisans who still carried on the fight against the Italians, and when the British took Ethiopia from the Italians in 1941, the Gallas harassed the retreating Italians as well as the advancing British and the reemerging Ethiopian partisan forces. Wherever there was a clash of arms, the Gallas heard it and rode to it on their horses. This was how they lived; on military plunder. And they didn’t know a white flag or a press card when they saw one. In quiet times, they stayed in the Danakil Desert, near Eritrea, or the Ogaden Desert, near Somalia. But when the dogs of war were let loose, as now, thought Mercado, they were all over the countryside, as though someone had shaken a beehive, and the famine had made them more fierce and more predatory than usual.

Mercado had suspected and the priest had confirmed that the Gallas were in the area, that the battle in the hills between Prince Joshua’s Royalist forces and the army forces of the Provisional government had drawn them like sharks to the smell of blood. They would sit in a place just like this spa and wait patiently for stragglers from one or the other army. Or if an army was badly beaten and retreating, they would attack the whole force. Yes, Mercado remembered them well. They butchered more than one beaten Ethiopian army and never spared the Western reporters who were with the army, and the Azebe Gallas, who populated this region, and who were neither Muslim nor Christian but pagan, were the worst of a bad lot. They hated the indigenous Amhara passionately, but they saved their most creative torture and death for Westerners.

The priest was sleeping again, and Mercado’s mind went back to the first weeks of the Italian invasion, which he had covered for the Times of London. He’d had the misfortune to be with the Amharic Prince Mulugeta in February 1936, at a place called Mount Aradam, a place historically and topographically like Masada, where the Israelites made their last stand against the Romans, and where the prince was making his last stand against the new Roman legions of Mussolini. Prince Mulugeta’s force of seventy thousand was being systematically destroyed by the Italians as the days dragged on. Mercado was with the prince at his headquarters, and with them was a British Army advisor with the evocative name of Burgoyne and a strange Cuban-American soldier of fortune named Captain Del Valle.

The prince, Mercado remembered, was weeping in his tent at the news that his son had been mutilated and killed by Azebe Gallas at the edge of the battle, and he decided to go down to the foot of Mount Aradam to find his son’s corpse. Mercado, Burgoyne, and Del Valle, young and foolhardy and playing the part of Kiplingesque Europeans, volunteered to go with him and his staff. When they got to the area where the scouts-supposedly Gallas loyal to the prince-had said the body was located, they themselves were surrounded by Gallas. The Gallas would have butchered them all, except that a flight of Italian Air Force planes swooped down on them and began machine-gunning the whole area, killing not only the Ethiopians but also the Gallas. Prince Mulugeta was killed and so was most of his staff. Del Valle and Burgoyne were killed also. The surviving Gallas stripped and castrated all the bodies, and Mercado escaped only by stripping himself and smearing blood over his body so that he looked to any passing Galla as though he had already been killed and mutilated.

Mercado suspected, thinking back on it, that the whole thing had been an elaborate trap, perhaps with Italian connivance. But that was another time. The place was the same, however. They were not too far from Mount Aradam, where Mercado had lain naked, trying very much to look dead.

He took a deep breath, then looked at Father Armano, who was awake, and asked him, “Were you at Mount Aradam?”

“Yes. I was there. It was a few weeks before I was captured. It was the biggest slaughter yet. Thousands. I was made very busy in those weeks.”

Mercado thought it was a stunning coincidence that he and this priest were at the same battle almost forty years ago. But maybe not. Priests, reporters, and vultures were attracted to death; they all had work to do.

Purcell lit another cigarette. A false dawn lit the eastern sky outside the gaping windows. He said to Mercado, “People die at dawn more frequently than other times. Ask him to finish.”

“Yes. All right. I was just remembering Aradam.”

“Remember it in your memoirs.”

“Don’t be insensitive, Frank,” said Vivian.

Mercado looked at Father Armano. “Would you like to continue, Father?”