My question hung in the air for a few seconds, then there was a low chuckle from across the embers and a reply in Pik’s Afrikaans-inflected voice.
“Freddie, you can go back home and tell your people we are going to destroy the lot.”
So much for an elaborate cover story. The old buzzard knew exactly what I was, who I was asking for, and what they wanted to hear. I tried to share the joke.
But, to be fair, they did. Before the de Klerk government handed over power, they destroyed all six. Three of the casings are on display somewhere, but that is all. Three of the Buccaneers still fly out of Cape Town airport, but only for tourist rides.
FROM MAIKO TO MONKS
Over many travels I have had the chance to attend a variety of religious ceremonies in rites far different from my own Anglican background. These have included Russian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim, and in some of the finest cathedrals, synagogues, and mosques of those faiths. But my wife, Sandy, has always been fascinated by the Orient and by Buddhism.
In 1995, my Japanese publishers, Kadokawa Shoten, invited me once again to be their guest in Tokyo to promote the latest novel, and Sandy came with me. Going all that way, it made a lot of sense to extend the visit after the publicity work to see more of the real Japan.
So when the usual round of interviews and book signings in Tokyo was over, we took the bullet train west to the former capital of Kyoto. This is a beautiful little city, full of parks, gardens, temples, and shrines, both to Buddhism and Shintoism. But Buddhism could wait; there was another aspect I wanted to explore.
With a guide, we penetrated the small area known as Gion, the home of the geisha culture. Contrary to a common misconception, the geisha is not simply a prostitute, but a highly skilled entertainer dedicated to restoring the exhausted male client with what is best described as relaxation therapy. Bedtime may follow, but it is by no means inevitable.
There are only about 120 true professional geishas left, perhaps because they are multitask-skilled after years of training, which costs about half a million pounds. The training madame will hope to recoup this, fee by fee, when her charge starts to earn professional commissions.
A geisha can sing, dance, recite poetry, flatter, and play the samisen, a sort of medieval lute with strings plucked only by the fingernails. To listen to and understand her client’s possible financial woes, she reads all the commercial pages in the daily papers and keeps abreast of current affairs.
The geisha’s uniform is the full kimono with obi sash, bouffant jet-black hair (a wig), bright-red lips, and a bone-white (powdered) face. Many clients will not wish any of it to be removed. In Gion, one can see many of these practitioners of the ancient arts, in full regalia, click-clacking along on their wooden sandals, heading for their nightly engagement, eyes cast down in order never to make eye contact with anyone but the client.
Sandy and I were lucky as we were invited to visit a geisha training school, something a gaijin (foreigner) rarely manages to do. It took a password to gain entry through the heavily timbered door.
The geisha usually comes from the most deprived rungs of society, from parents so poor they are content to sell their daughter into a world from which she will never emerge. But not just any girl will suit. A skilled madame, running such an academy, will look for exceptional beauty, grace, a clever mind, and a singing voice that, with schooling, will become crystal pure. The parents are paid off and never see their daughter again.
Once a young woman is absorbed into the geisha world, it is virtually impossible for her to leave it, marry, and become a mother, let alone a housewife. Something about her can be instantly recognized and will never leave her.
A husband would immediately know and feel shamed. His colleagues would spot it and may be tempted to become lascivious, or at least mocking. Their wives would become instantly hostile. Conventional suburbia is not for the geisha. It is a closed world with a long, hard road in and no way out.
Some madames run agencies of only skilled geishas; a few run training schools, such as the one we visited. The trainees are called maiko, meaning “dancing girl,” but they are taught much more than dancing, and that includes knowledge of every detail of the male body and the male psyche, specializing on the erogenous and susceptible points. The only aim is to please the male. The maiko paint only the lower lip as a sign of virginity. The client who will one day take that will be charged a huge premium.
Considering we were in a sort of bordello, the polite proprieties were scrupulously observed. Anything else would have been crude, rude, and offensive. Incidentally, when a Japanese girl laughs or giggles, she may not be amused. She may be profoundly embarrassed. Laughter is also a defensive shield.
So we squatted on cushions on the floor and conversed through the interpreter with the madame while her trainees, in their “apprentice” kimonos, served small cups of saké. They are taught to seduce with their eyes alone, eyes made large and docile with skillfully applied makeup, and I have to admit they are extremely disconcerting. Sandy kept shooting me warning glances.
Finally, it was time to go, with copious and mutual bowing. Years later, I know I could never find it again.
There was a visit to a saké factory, where, hidden behind the modern machinery of stainless-steel vats and hissing steam is a small, separate enclave where saké is still made by the old medieval processes involving the transformation of the rice into the purest saké possible, all by hand and therefore immensely slowly and carefully. The product is tiny and dedicated only to the use of the emperor and the royal court. Nevertheless, we were permitted a few cups in tiny ceramic thimbles, and it really was like no other saké I had ever tasted.
But the pinnacle (literally) of our tour was to proceed toward Osaka and then, just short of the teeming city, to divert to the mountaintop monastery shrine of Koyasan. This peak is so hard to get to that the railway line runs out and the last section is accomplished by funicular.
In fact, unable to read the train signs at Osaka station, we missed the fast connection and found ourselves on the slow train with more than thirty stops to our destination. But it proved to be an advantage: throughout the journey the train labored from halt to halt with local peasants getting on and off, clutching baskets of eggs, cages of live chickens and ducks, all the paraphernalia of market day in rural Japan. After recovering from the shock of seeing two gaijin sitting in their train, the locals chattered and beamed away, even though we understood not a word, an experience very few tourists achieve on the streets of Tokyo, particularly since only about 15 percent of the Japanese are rural anymore, the huge majority now urbanized.
Koyasan is a monastery of immense age and holiness, featuring the graveyard where the remains of the founder of Shingon Buddhism are laid. It takes paying guests in the form of pilgrims who wish to spend a long weekend living in the style of the old medieval monks.
The first stop was to meet the abbot, who greeted us in broad American. No need for an interpreter this time. He had fought with the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Second World War, been captured, and imprisoned in California and stayed there until the fifties.
The living accommodations were literally unheated cells, and the diet various cold foods, but nothing hot. The better news was that one could place an order for warm saké, which we did, in quantities that raised a few eyebrows.
There is a small town grouped around the monastery, something that enabled us to wander and see a side of Japan not to be observed in the cities.
At one point, I asked the abbot if his own monks confined themselves to the cold vegetarian food that we were being served.
“Good God, no,” he said. “I wouldn’t have a congregation at all if I demanded that. No, they just serve you pilgrims, then go around to McDonald’s.”
It may have been the altitude or the saké or both, but we slept soundly on our futon mats and were up before dawn fo
r the early-morning service in the temple. I’m afraid I made an ass of myself.
Squatting on the heels with the buttocks just off the floor and the knees under the chin was the required posture, which Sandy could manage with ease. Before we met, she had spent twenty years in the film business, ending with over two years as PA to Elizabeth Taylor. To stay sane in a completely crazy world, she had taken up kundalini yoga. This included retaining her British calm while attending the garden funeral of the Taylor family goldfish with complete Judaic rite presided over by a rabbi. As for me, after a few minutes, my old knees were on fire.
I had no choice but to let my backside hit the floor and take the weight, and straighten the knees. But that posed another problem. It is very rude to point the soles of the feet at fellow worshippers, so I had to squirm until the soles were pointing at each other and I was squatting like a frog on a lily pad. At the end, it took four other pilgrims to help me up.
That apart, it was a beautiful service, all in Japanese of course, with copious helpings of joss and incense, bells and chanting. Among the several hundred worshippers, we were the only other gaijin present, and therefore objects of some curiosity.
But top of the range in the hilarity stakes was the ritual communal bath. This was absolutely crucial to the worship, the ritual washing of every part of the body. The women went one way, the men the other.
The Japanese regard dunking a dirty body in unmoving water as peculiar. The washing comes first, then the immersion. I was shown where to strip, given a towel to wrap around the waist, and a small booth with a showerhead, soap, and a scrubber. The booth faced away from the open piping-hot water of the pool.
I noted that there were half a dozen middle-aged businessmen in the pool, just disembodied heads on the surface of the water, staring at me. So I faced the wall, dropping the towel, and scrubbed from chin to feet. Finally, I had no choice but to turn around and face the pool.
The six heads were still staring, but not at my face. Two feet further down, and the expressions were of considerable worry. As I turned, the six expressions changed; not to horror but to the most profound relief. Someone had clearly told them something about naked Europeans that was completely untrue.
After that, it was a farewell to the abbot, then the train (the fast one this time) down the mountain to the railhead and the bullet train back to Narita Airport and home.
A VERY UNTIDY COUP
With hindsight, it was probably a mistake to go researching cocaine shipments through Guinea-Bissau, and I certainly never intended to land in the middle of a coup d’état.
The reason for the visit to this West African hellhole of a place was simple. I had spent months researching a novel, which became The Cobra and was based on the enormous criminal world behind the cocaine trade. These quests had taken me through Washington and the DEA, London, Vienna, Hamburg (again!), Rotterdam, and finally to Bogotá and Cartagena in Colombia, source of most of the white powder.
But there was something missing. In South America, I had discovered that much of the cocaine destined for Europe did not take the direct route at all. Ships with very large consignments left the coast of Colombia and Venezuela to steam due east to West Africa and unload their cargoes in the creeks and mangrove swamps of countries where the entire law-and-order infrastructure could be purchased with bribes.
Then the cocaine bales could be broken down to smaller loads and taken north, via the land trains across the Sahara to enter Europe from the south. Foremost among these African transshipment points was Guinea-Bissau.
This is the former Portuguese colony where I had staged through forty years earlier, perched on a crate of mortars, when a bullet came through the floor and went out the ceiling. Since then, it had had twenty more years of independence war and twenty of civil war that had left the capital, Bissau City, pretty much gutted. There was (and for all I know still is) a community of Colombian gangsters who have built themselves seaside palaces and oversee the cocaine operations. As the Michelin Guide used to say, “worth a detour.”
The United Kingdom has no embassy there, nor even a consulate. Nor does Guinea-Bissau have representation in London. But I traced a consulate in Paris and was duly issued a tourist visa. The only air passage is from Lisbon (the old colonial connection) to São Tomé island with a stopover at Bissau.
Finally, the honorary British vice consul in Bissau was a very nice Dutchman with a franchise for Japanese off-road SUVs. I had been in e-mail contact with Jan out of London and he kindly agreed to meet me on landing and show me around.
My TAP airliner took off from Lisbon at eight thirty p.m. What I did not know was that hardly had it turned south than, in the Guinean army HQ, a large bomb went off, blowing the chief of staff into several artistic pieces all over the office. That was the start of the coup.
Later revelations showed that those responsible were probably the Colombians. The timer and trigger mechanisms were assuredly too sophisticated for local assembly. But that was not the view of the army, which wanted revenge and suspected President João Bernardo Vieira. It was all tribal; the bulk of the army are Balanta, but the president and his entourage were Papel. There is no love lost. So at 33,000 feet, I sipped my champagne and tried for a couple of hours’ shut-eye before landing at two a.m. local time.
On touchdown, the aircrew clearly did not want to hang around and did not even shut down the engines before leaving. Those descending were three or four Guineans and me. I entered passport control quite prepared for the long hassle of luggage search and bribe contributing that are habitual between touchdown and car park.
Then Jan came bustling through, waving his diplomatic passport, and whisked me out in double-quick time. We made the usual introductions, he grabbed my valise, and strode to his SUV. When we were bowling along the high road to the city, I remarked that he seemed to be in something of a hurry.
“Look in the rearview,” he said.
The horizon behind us was awash with oncoming headlights.
“That’s the army,” he said, and told me about the army chief six hours earlier. “They are coming into town from their bases.”
“What do they want?”
“Revenge,” he said, and stepped on the gas. We made it to the center of the shattered city ahead of the army and he deposited me at the only hotel in town a European would be wise to stay at. Then he left in a hurry to return to his wife and family to lock themselves in. Considering that he knew about the assassination, it was extremely decent of him to have come to the airport at all.
I checked myself in, went to my room, and tried to sleep. But to no avail. At four a.m., I put on the bedside light, hauled myself upright, and started to read a paperback I had already started on the airplane. At four thirty, about five hundred yards down the street, there was one almighty bang.
There are three reasons for noises that big in an African city in the darkness before dawn. One is the first thunderclap of a tropical storm. The second is a head-to-head crash between two speeding vehicles. The third is a bomb. This was a bomb. Only later was I able to piece together the events of the night.
The local authorities—army, navy, port and harbor, customs, police—were all on the Colombian payroll, but the payoffs are not in the worthless local currency but in a “skim” of the cocaine shipments themselves. It looked as if the chief of staff had been skimming too much, and paid for it. But for the Balanta tribesmen who made up the army, it was the Papel president they wanted. So they left their out-of-town barracks and came to get him.
The poor old booby was fast asleep in his bed. Because the once-grandiose presidential palace, former home of the Portuguese governor, was a ruin, his residence was a low-build hacienda-style complex in a walled garden. The bedroom was on the ground floor.
The army trucks smashed down the gate and someone put a rocket-propelled grenade through the bedroom window. That was the bang. The seventy-one-ye
ar-old politician must have been tough. As his bedroom wing collapsed around him, he stumbled through the rubble and out into the garden. The soldiers put three bullets through him.
But still he would not die. Then they realized what a foolish mistake they had made. He clearly possessed a juju that kept him immune to death by bullet. But there is one thing that no juju can proof against. They went to the gardener’s store, got a machete, and chopped him to pieces. Then he died. The soldiers went off into the night to break into a bar or two and celebrate. And Bissau City waited for dawn.
Before dawn arrived, the rest of the government had vaporized and headed for their indigenous villages where they would be safe. I descended to the dining room and asked for breakfast. Jan appeared an hour later to say the city was quiet, apart from patrolling jeeps of army men looking for Papel victims but not interested in whites. So we got into his SUV and drove to his home.
Business would be very slight that day, he opined, so he could drive me out into the area of the creeks and swamps to get an idea where the cocaine cargoes came in and see the Colombians’ mansions by the beach. This we did. While we were away, other things happened. At sub-politician level, various functionaries closed both the land borders, north and south, and the airport. The tiny republic was sealed off.
In London, my wife, Sandy, knowing nothing of this, e-mailed a girlfriend to set up a lunch date. Part of her text read: “I’m free this week ’cos Freddie is in Guinea-Bissau.”
Someone in Fort Meade, Maryland, or maybe Langley, Virginia, intercepted this and her screen went berserk. Her message disappeared. Things flashed up with the insignia of the Great Seal of the United States warning her not to use her laptop under any circumstances. She had not the faintest idea what she had done. I was later advised it was those two words “Guinea-Bissau” that did the trick. Word had leaked out. You can close borders nowadays, shut the telephone switchboard and the cable office, but you cannot silence the Internet.