It happened at secular buildings as well, and there, too, death was usually preceded by a betrayal.

A rumor went around in the suburb of Kicukiro, for example, that the UN troops stationed at a technical school would offer protection from the mobs. There were indeed ninety commandos at the school, but they were less than eager to offer any protection. Nonetheless, about two thousand of the hunted took shelter in the classroom buildings behind the very thin layer of safety afforded by the blue helmets and their weapons.

On April 12, the same day my family and I reached the Mille Collines, the order was given for the UN troops to abandon the school and help make sure that foreigners got out of Rwanda safely. The mission had changed. As the country slid further and further into mass murder, the Security Council, Kofi Annan, and the United States decided that the mandate of the UN troops was not to halt the killings but to ensure an orderly evacuation of all non-Rwandans. Everyone else was to be left behind. Anyone with white skin or a foreign passport was given a free trip out. Even their pet dogs were evacuated with them.

The nation of Belgium was more than happy to go along; the grisly torture slayings of the ten soldiers assigned to protect Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana had shocked the public back home. The former colonial masters could no longer stomach the quagmire they had helped create. As it happened, the ninety UN troops at the vocational school were native Belgians. They must have heard the stories of the militia at the roadblocks making sawing motions across their throats with machetes whenever they spotted a Belgian uniform. Most of the Interahamwe, in fact, would be given standing orders to kill any person found carrying a Belgian passport. The militias surrounding the school did not have the firepower to take on the UN soldiers, so they lay on the grass drinking beer and chanting slogans and making threatening gestures. It must have been something of a relief for those Belgian soldiers to move out, knowing they would be killed cheerfully if they ran out of ammunition in a firefight. This was the clearest signal yet that the world was preparing to close its eyes, close its ears, and turn its back on what was happening.

The refugees knew what lay in store. Some begged the departing soldiers to shoot them in the head so they would not have to face slow dismemberment. Others tried to lie down in front of the Belgians’ jeeps so they could not leave. Still others chased after the vehicles screaming, “Do not abandon us!” The soldiers responded by shooing the refugees out of the way and firing warning shots to keep them from mobbing the departing convoy.

The massacre of two thousand people began immediately after the last UN jeep had disappeared down the street.

I decided to get rid of that roadblock outside the hotel. It was a danger to everyone inside the Mille Collines. Anybody trying to come inside would have to show their identity book. Those who could not prove their Hutuness would be murdered on the spot, barely fifty yards from temporary refuge.

After I made sure that my wife and children were safely behind the doors of Room 126 I retreated into the manager’s office with what would turn out to be one of the most formidable weapons I had in my possession. Its existence was kept secret from just about everybody I knew. It was taken out only in moments of complete privacy.

It was a black leather binder that I had purchased many years ago on a trip to Belgium. Inside were about a hundred pages of closely written script, arranged in three columns on each page. There were entries for name, for title, and for phone number.

This was my personal directory of numbers for the elite circle of government and commerce in Rwanda. For years I had made a habit of collecting the business cards of local people who passed through the Diplomates or the Mille Collines and then entering their information in pencil in my binder at the end of the day. If they came into the hotel often enough, and if I liked them, I made sure that they occasionally received little gifts from me. Almost everyone in this book had a favorite drink and I tried to keep that information memorized. If I heard gossip that a particular person had been demoted, promoted, transferred, fired, or jailed I made a change to their title. Army officers, managers, doctors, ministers, professors-they were all listed in neat phalanxes, and the eraser marks and crossed-out titles next to their names were a rough map of the shifting sands of Rwandan politics. My binder may have been one of the better registries of power in the capital. I could never be certain about this, of course, because nobody would talk about keeping such a thing. It could be used as evidence if you were found to be connected to a person who fell from grace.

Now, of course, I had no idea who in this book was still in power-or even alive.

Many of the lines rang without anybody picking up. There were a handful of busy signals and quite a few tonal patterns that indicated phones were out of service. But then I found myself talking to a young military camp chief named, as it happened, Commander Habyarimana, though he was not related to the assassinated president. After a few minutes of conversation, I began to recall what I had heard about him, and I realized that I had come to the right place. The commander was an angry young man, but not for the same reasons that the Interahamwe were angry. His fury was directed at the presidential cronies, who he felt were responsible for turning Rwanda into an armed hothouse of people who hated one another for no good reason. Commander Habyarimana had wound up on the wrong end of a dispute with a superior and had been thrown into Kigali ’s notorious jail for political prisoners, which was nicknamed “1930” for its year of construction. He was eventually released and had been able to climb back up the military ladder. He was just as disgusted as I was at the recent outbreaks of murder, and he promised to send me five of his men to help protect the hotel from invasion.

It was a good start, but I still wanted that roadblock gone.

I made a few more calls and finally got on the line with General Augustin Ndindiliyimana, a man whom I had known for several years. He was the commander of the National Police. I did not envy him his position. The army had drafted thousands of his best officers and appropriated a large part of the police arsenal, leaving him with a squad of, at most, a thousand poorly trained and unequipped recruits to get control of the violent capital streets. Whatever he could do for me was going to be a major gift.

“Now, general, ” I said quietly, in the voice of a man calling in a chip.“We have some refugees over here, as you know, and that militia outside can come inside here anytime they want.”

I knew that he was afraid of the Interahamwe himself, and perhaps also of being accused of not supporting the pogroms that had recently become the law of the land. It seemed that such a perception could spell death in these times. But I kept at him.

“General, you know we are friends and will always be friends. You know that I would not ask this if I weren’t in great danger. Something must be done about that roadblock. You could send some officers to encourage those boys to move elsewhere. There doesn’t need to be bloodshed in front of my hotel.”

It continued on like this for a while, and he agreed he would help me. I wasn’t certain if he was going to come through. But within a few hours the roadblock had disappeared.

Having won that temporary respite, I turned my attention to another problem. I had to get hold of the master keys that opened everything in the hotel. These were the tools that a hotel manager cannot afford to be without.

Bik Cornelis had told me that he had entrusted the keys to the reception staff, and so I approached one of the supervisors there, a man I’ll call Jacques.