Nze started to answer and his voice cracked. He wet his parched lips, tried again.

“Gerard Fáton,” he rasped.

The white continued regarding him steadily.

“There you go,” he said. A trace of a smile on his lips. “Monsieur Nze, you should be honored that I’ve come down to say good-bye to you, and capture the moment so that it will be remembered and appreciated.”

Nze’s trembling worsened. He couldn’t make it stop.

“I’ve done nothing . . .”

“And your doing nothing has cost me.”

Nze shook his head.

“What happened in Libreville . . . I did my best,” he said. “My arguments were defeated . . . but your desires weren’t made clear to me until very late. Too late. I had to rush to understand them . . . to prepare. If I’d had more time—”

Fáton vented a sibilant breath through his teeth.

“Lie to me once more, and I’ll have your hands separated from your wrists to make the burning worse.”

Nze was shaking uncontrollably. There was no denying what was planned for him. He felt his bladder release and hardly cared that his abductors could see the moist stain spreading across the crotch of his pants. He could live with the shame, if he could somehow find a way to live at all.

“You changed your vote to curry favor with some no-rate government connivers,” Fáton said. “Vulgar rustres. Rubes and yokels who play act at being Mandarins.”

“I’ll try again,” Nze said. “I can do better. Much better. I never meant to give up, you must believe that—”

“Stop. Now. You offend me.” Fáton shut his eyes, inhaled through his mouth, stood quietly holding his breath. After a long while he expelled the air from his nostrils, raised his eyelids with a kind of reptilian slowness, and went back to staring at Nze.

“ ‘I don’t see any chance of making inroads’,” he said. “Does that statement ring familiar to you?”

Nze’s face showed the anxious terror of a captured animal. Familiar? Of course it was. Of course. Here was another piece of the trap’s framework. Fáton was simply repeating words that the assistant minister himself had spoken to Etienne Begela over the telephone what seemed a hundred years ago.

Fáton stared at Nze for a brief moment longer before turning to the small group of men beside him.

“Let us necklace this faithless swine and be done here,” he said.

Even as he spoke, one of Fáton’s armed guards went to the tire, crouched over it, and began filling it from the can, working the spout through a hole that had been gouged into the tire’s sidewall. He poured until the can was almost empty, took a handkerchief from his pocket, soaked it with whatever was left of its contents, and wadded it into the hole, leaving a small wick of cloth hanging out. Finally he tossed the can into the brush and was joined by another of the guards, who helped him lift the tire off the ground and carry it toward the patch of blackened sedge where Nze knelt helplessly and watched.