“Can we help in any way?”

“I’m not sure. If I can get to the hotel I will contact you from there and let you know the situation. The radio news has been sketchy. I have to tell you that I am not very well informed about what is going on.”

“Well, I want to let you know that we will be trying to do all we can from here to ensure the safety of you and all the employees.”

It was strange: While we spoke, I could not help but see the city of Brussels, where Tatiana and I had been just the week before. I pictured flocks of pigeons bobbing their heads in parks, gray mansard roofs, statues of dead aristocrats on horseback, chocolates under glass, pastel-painted town houses, bars full of carefree young people drinking Jupiler pilsner. It had been spring there and the trees were just coming into bud. It seemed like another existence altogether.

I really should have been dead. In retrospect it is a miracle that my name was not on the lists of the undesirables that the Presidential Guard were sent out to eliminate in the first two days. I had been an irritant to Habyarimana and a member of the moderate party. I had been the one who hosted that conference at the Diplomates called by the hated RPF. Furthermore, I was married to a Tutsi “cockroach” and had fathered a baby-my son Tresor-of mixed descent. They had every reason to behead me. Somebody had recently scrawled a number in charcoal on the outer wall of my house-it was 531. I could only guess that it was a code, and an easy way for the death squads to find me.

Every time I saw soldiers walking down my street I assumed it would be my door they would come knocking upon. My plan was to keep working the phones and hope that the military or the UN could find time to get me and my family an escort to the Diplomates. But the radio made it sound as if all hell was breaking loose in Kigali and it was not clear when the troubles would ebb.

On the morning of April 9 they finally came for me. Two Army jeeps tore into my front yard and a squad of soldiers piled out. The captain walked up to me and poked a finger in my face. He was sweating heavily and had angry eyes. I saw immediately that this conversation could very well end with him shooting me in the face. I looked at him with the calmest expression I could manage.

“I hear you are the manager of the Hotel Diplomates, ” he told me. “We need you to open up the hotel. We want you to come with us.”

Here was my chance. I told him I would be happy to accompany him to the hotel, if only my family could come. What I didn’t tell him was my extremely liberal interpretation of the word family. This was my excuse to load my neighbors and family into the hotel van and my neighbor’s car. I would call them my “uncles, ” “aunts, ” “nephews, ” and “nieces” if challenged. I gave my own car keys to another neighbor named Ngarambe.

“This car could save your life, ” I told him quietly.

We followed the Army caravan on the road out of Kabeza but went only a mile before the captain waved me to pull over at a spot on the road where dead bodies were piled on both sides. It was the scene of a slaughter.

The captain came over to me with a rifle.

“Do you know that all the managers in this country have already been killed?”

“No, ” I said.

“Even if you do not know, this is how it is. And you, traitor, are lucky we aren’t killing you. We have guns and we’re going to kill all the cockroaches in the hotel bar and in your house. You are going to help us.”

The captain held out the rifle and nodded toward the people huddled in the cars. His message was clear: These people were to be killed right now. And I was chosen to be their killer. It would be my rite of passage.

But I noticed something. He would not look me in the eye.

In that one small turn of the face, I saw that there might be some room for me to maneuver. I saw that I had a small chance to save the lives of my family and neighbors. All I needed to do was find the right words. Everything now depended on my words.

I looked at the Kalashnikov rifle this army captain was offering me-bidding me to wipe out the cockroaches like a good patriotic Hutu-and then I began to talk.

“Listen, my friend, I do not know how to handle a gun, ” I told him. “And even if I did, I do not see what would be accomplished by killing these people.”

Surrounding us on every side were the bodies of people who had been freshly murdered. They had been pushed out of the roadway. A few of the lucky ones had been shot, but most had been hacked apart by machetes. Some were missing their heads. I saw the intestines of one man coming out of his belly like pink snakes. This captain had taken me to this spot on the road on purpose, I thought, and was counting on all the bodies and the blood to send a clear message. You will join these corpses if you don’t follow our orders, he wanted me to understand. But he would not look me in the eye when he asked me to kill and that’s how I understood-somehow-there was a crack in his resolve that I could exploit. I wasn’t yet sure how or why, since he and his men could have clearly killed me on the spot without consequence or remorse.

I went over to one of the cars where my neighbors were huddled. I purposely selected the frailest old man I could find and asked the captain: “Look, is this really the enemy you are fighting?” I pointed out a baby in a mother’s arms, and said it again, trying to push all the panic out of my voice: “Is this baby your enemy? I don’t think this is what you want to do. You are what? Twenty-five years old? You are young. Do you want to spend the rest of your life with blood on your hands?”

When I saw this argument wasn’t going anywhere, I switched tactics. I aimed lower this time. Morality wasn’t working; maybe greed would.

“My friends, ” I said, “you cannot be blamed for this mistake. I understand you perfectly. You are tired. You are hungry. You are thirsty. This war has stressed you.”

I wanted just one thing to leap into his mind: cash. But I wasn’t sure this was going to work either. I had only a few minutes to size him up and wasn’t sure where his ultimate interests lay. Maybe he was more hardline than I had thought. I found myself wishing I could put a cognac in front of him to loosen him up. Everything now came down to how well I was reading this man-if the promise of money would be enough to tempt him away from the murders he had been ordered to commit. I was like a Mephistopheles trying to corrupt him. It was a role I was only too happy to play if he would only spare the lives of the people behind me.

“I have another solution, ” I told him. “I know how to solve this problem. Let us talk otherwise.”

We began to talk in terms of cash. It seems strange to say, but putting a price on lives was like a kind of sanity compared to the murders he had been suggesting. At first the captain demanded that each Tutsi cockroach pay every one of his soldiers 200, 000 Rwandan francs in exchange for their lives. This was roughly the equivalent of $1, 500 American per person-many times more cash than an average Rwandan will ever see in their lifetimes. But this was negotiation. You always start with the crazy price and then work downward.

“My friends, ” I said, “even you do not have this much money. You cannot expect these people to be carrying that kind of sum. But I can get it for you. I am the only person who can do this here. It is in the safe of the hotel and you will never be able to open it without me. Drive me to the hotel and I will pay you the money.”

I hustled the refugees into the manager’s house of the Diplomates. In a way, we were going straight into the dragon’s den-these were the men who were ordering Hutu citizens to pick up kitchen knives and machetes and kill anybody in Rwanda suspected of being a descendant of the Tutsi clans or one of their allies. But I knew I would be safe here. Despite the captain’s bluster, I had sized him up as a basically small man. He would not kill me in the presence of his superiors.