There was a humming and a clicking, like a camera in slow motion, as the wheels were lowered.
Kaja stared out of the window.
‘And I don’t like the shopping, Harry. Why the weapons?’
‘Leike is violent.’
‘And I don’t like travelling as an undercover cop. I know we can’t smuggle our own weapons into the Congo, but couldn’t we have asked the Congolese police for assistance with the arrest?’
‘As I said, we have no extradition agreement. And it’s not improbable that a financier like Leike has local police in his pay who would have warned him.’
‘Conspiracy theory.’
‘Yep. And simple mathematics. A policeman’s wage in the Congo is not enough to feed a family. Relax, Van Boorst has a wonderful little ironmongery and he’s professional enough to keep his mouth shut.’
The wheels emitted a scream as they hit the landing strip.
Kaja squinted out of the window. ‘Why are there so many soldiers here?’
‘UN flying in reinforcements. The guerrillas have advanced in the last few days.’
‘What guerrillas?’
‘Hutu guerrillas, Tutsi guerrillas, Mai Mai guerrillas. Who knows?’
‘Harry?’
‘Yes.’
‘Let’s get this job done quickly and go home.’
He nodded.
It had already grown lighter when Harry walked along the line of taxi drivers outside. He exchanged a few words with each and every one until he found someone who could speak good English. Excellent English, in fact. He was a small man with alert eyes, grey hair and thick blood vessels above the temples and sides of his high, shiny forehead. His English was definitely original, a kind of stilted Oxford variant with a broad Congolese accent. Harry explained to him that he would hire him for the whole day, they quickly agreed a price and exchanged handshakes, a third of the agreed sum in dollars, and names, Harry and Dr Duigame.
‘In English literature,’ the man elucidated, openly counting the money. ‘But as we’re going to be together the whole day you can call me Saul.’
He opened the rear door of a dented Hyundai. Harry indicated where Saul was to drive, to the road by the burnt-down church.
‘Sounds like you’ve been here before,’ Saul said, steering the car along a regular stretch of tarmac which, as soon as it met the main traffic artery, became a moonscape of craters and cracks.
‘Once.’
‘Then you should be careful,’ he smiled. ‘Hemingway wrote that once you have opened your soul to Africa you won’t want to be anywhere else.’
‘Hemingway wrote that?’ Harry queried with some scepticism.
‘Yes, he did, but Hemingway wrote that sort of romantic shit all the time. Shot lions when he was drunk and pissed that sweet whiskey urine on their corpses. The truth is that no one comes back to the Congo if they don’t have to.’
‘I had to,’ Harry said. ‘Listen, I tried to get hold of the driver I had last time when I was here, Joe from Refugee Aid. But there’s no response from his number.’
‘Joe’s gone,’ Saul said.
‘Gone?’
‘He took his family with him, stole a car and drove to Uganda. Goma’s under siege. They’ll kill everyone. I’m going soon, too. Joe had a good car, maybe he’ll make it.’
Harry recognised the church spire towering over the ruins of what Nyiragongo had eaten. He held on tight as the Hyundai rolled past the potholes. There were nasty scrapes and bumps to the chassis a couple of times.
‘Wait here,’ Harry said. ‘I’ll walk the rest of the way. Back soon.’
Harry stepped out and inhaled grey dust and the smell of spices and rotten fish.
Then he started walking. An obviously drunk man tried to ram Harry with his shoulder, but missed and staggered into the road. Harry had a couple of choice words hurled after him and walked on. Not too fast, not too slow. Arriving at the only brick house in the square of shops, he went up to the door, banged hard and waited. Heard quick footsteps inside. Too quick to be Van Boorst’s. The door was opened a fraction and half a black face and one eye appeared.
‘Van Boorst at home?’ Harry asked.
‘No.’ The large gold teeth in the upper set glinted.
‘I want to buy some handguns, Miss. Can you help me?’
She shook her head. ‘Sorry. Goodbye.’
Harry shoved his foot in the gap. ‘I pay well.’
‘No guns. Van Boorst not here.’
‘When will he be back, Miss?’
‘I not know. I not have time now.’
‘I’m looking for a man from Norway. Tony. Tall. Handsome. Have you seen him around?’
The girl shook her head.
‘Will Van Boorst be coming home this evening? This is important, Miss.’
She looked at him. Weighed him up. Lingered, from top to toe. And back. Her soft lips slid apart over her teeth. ‘You a rich man?’
Harry didn’t answer. She blinked sleepily, and her matt-black eyes glistened. Then she smirked. ‘Thirty minutes. Come back then.’
Harry returned to the taxi, sat in the front seat, told Saul to drive to the bank and rang Kaja.
‘I’m still sitting in the arrivals hall,’ she said. ‘No announcements to say anything except that the Zurich flight is on time.’
‘I’ll check us into the hotel before I go back to Van Boorst and buy what we need.’
The hotel lay to the east of the centre towards the Rwandan border. In front of reception was a car park coated with lava and wreathed with trees.
‘They were planted after the last eruption,’ Saul said, as though reading Harry’s thoughts. There were almost no trees in Goma. The double room was on the first floor of a low building by the lake and had a balcony overlooking the water. Harry smoked a cigarette, watching the morning sun glitter on the surface and glint off the oil rig far out. He checked his watch and went back to the car park.
Saul’s state of mind seemed to have adapted to the sluggish traffic he was in: he drove slowly, talked slowly, moved his hands slowly. He parked outside the church walls, a good distance from Van Boorst’s house. Switched off the engine, turned to Harry and asked politely but firmly for the second third of the sum.
‘Don’t you trust me?’ Harry asked with a raised eyebrow.
‘I trust your sincere desire to pay,’ Saul said. ‘But in Goma money is safer with me than with you, Mr Harry. Shame but true.’
Harry acknowledged the reasoning with a nod, flipped through the rest of the money and asked if Saul had something heavy and compact in the car, the size of a pistol, such as a torch. Saul pursed his lips and opened the glove compartment. Harry took out the torch, stuffed it in his inside pocket and looked at his watch. Twenty-five minutes had gone.
He strode down the street, his eyes fixed straight ahead. But sidelong glances registered men turning after him with appraising eyes. Appraising height and weight. The elasticity of his strides. The jacket hanging slightly askew and the bulky shape in the inside pocket. And dismissing the opportunity.
He went up to the door and knocked.
The same light steps.
The door opened. She glanced at him, then her gaze wandered past him, to the street.
‘Quick, come in,’ she said, grabbing his arm and pulling him inside.
Harry stepped over the threshold and stood in the semi-gloom. All the curtains were drawn, apart from by the window over the bed where he had seen her lying half naked the first time he was here.
‘He not arrive yet,’ she said in her simple but effective English. ‘Soon come.’
Harry nodded and looked at the bed. Tried to imagine her there, with the blanket over her hips. The light falling on her skin. But he couldn’t. For there was something trying to catch his attention, something was not right, missing, or was there and shouldn’t have been.
‘You come alone?’ she asked, walking around him and sitting on the bed. Placing one hand on the mattress, allowin
g the shoulder strap of her dress to slip down.
Harry shifted his gaze to locate what was wrong. And found it. The colonial master and exploiter King Leopold.
‘Yes,’ he said automatically, without quite knowing why yet. ‘Alone.’
The picture of King Leopold which had been hanging on the wall was gone. The next thought followed hard on its heels. Van Boorst wasn’t coming. He was gone, too.
Harry took half a step towards her. She tilted her head slightly, moistening her full, red-black lips. And he was close enough to see now, to see what had replaced the painting of the Belgian king. The nail the picture had been hanging from impaled a banknote. The face that made the note distinctive was sensitive and sported a well-tended moustache. Edvard Munch.
Harry realised what was going to happen, was about to turn, but something also told him it was far too late, he was positioned exactly as planned in the stage directions.
He sensed more than saw the movement behind him and didn’t feel the precise jab in his neck, only the breath against his temple. His neck froze to ice, the paralysis spread down his back and up to his scalp, his legs buckled beneath him as the drug reached his brain and consciousness faded. His last thought before darkness enveloped him was how amazingly fast ketanome worked.
84
Reunion
KAJA BIT HER LOWER LIP. SOMETHING WAS WRONG.
She called Harry’s number again.
And got his voicemail yet again.
For several hours, she had been sitting in the arrivals hall – which, as far as that went, was also the departures hall – and the plastic chair rubbed against all the parts of the body with which it came into contact.
She heard the whoosh of a plane. Immediately afterwards the only monitor present, a bulky box hanging from two rusty wires in the ceiling, showed that flight number KJ337 from Zurich had landed.
She scanned the gathering of people every second minute and established that none of them was Tony Leike.
She phoned again, but cut the connection when she realised she was doing this for the sake of doing something, but it wasn’t action, it was apathy.
The sliding doors to baggage reclaim opened and the first passengers with hand luggage came through. Kaja stood up and went to the wall beside the sliding doors so that she could see the names on the plastic signs and the scraps of paper the taxi drivers were holding up for the arriving travellers. No Juliana Verni and no Lene Galtung.
She went back to her lookout post by the chair. Sat on her palms, could feel they were damp with sweat. What should she do? She pulled down her sunglasses and stared at the sliding doors.
Seconds passed. Nothing happened.
Lene Galtung was almost concealed behind a pair of violet sunglasses and a large black man walking in front of her. Her hair was red, curly, and she was wearing a denim jacket, khaki trousers and solid hiking boots. She was dragging a wheeled bag tailor-made to the maximum measurements allowed for hand luggage. She had no handbag, but a small, shiny metal case.
Nothing happened. Everything happened. In parallel and at the same time, the past and the present, and in a strange way Kaja knew the opportunity was finally there. The opportunity for which she had been waiting. The chance to do the right thing.
Kaja didn’t look straight at Lene Galtung, just made sure she was to the left of her field of vision. Stood up calmly after she had passed, took her bag and began to follow her. Into the blinding sunlight. Still no one had addressed her, and judging from her quick, determined steps, Kaja assumed she had been schooled down to the last detail about what she was to do. She walked past taxis, crossed the road and got into the back seat of a dark blue Range Rover. The door was held open for her by a black man in a suit. Slamming it after her, he then walked round to the driver’s seat. Kaja slipped onto the back seat of the first taxi in the queue, leaned forward between the seats, reflected quickly, but concluded that basically there was no other way of formulating it. ‘Follow that car.’
She met the driver’s eyes and arched eyebrows in the rear-view mirror. Pointed to the car in front of them, and the driver gave a nod of comprehension, but still kept the car in neutral.
‘Double pay,’ Kaja said.
The driver jerked his head and let go of the clutch.
Kaja rang Harry. Still no answer.
They crawled their way west along the main thoroughfare. The streets were full of lorries, carts and cars with suitcases tied to the roofs. On each side, people were walking with huge piles of clothes and possessions balanced on their heads. In some places the traffic had come to a complete standstill. The driver had obviously got the point, and he was keeping at least one car between them and Lene Galtung’s Range Rover.
‘Where are they all going?’ Kaja asked.
The driver smiled and shook his head to signify that he didn’t understand. Kaja repeated the question in French with no luck. In the end she pointed to the people shuffling past their car with an interrogative grimace.
‘Re-fu-gee,’ the driver said. ‘Go away. Bad people come.’
Kaja mouthed an ‘Aha’.
Kaja texted Harry again. Trying to stave off panic.
In the middle of Goma the road forked. The Range Rover swung left. Further on it took another left and rolled down towards the lake. They had come to a very different part of town with large detached houses behind high fences and surrounded by well-tended gardens with trees to offer shade and keep out prying eyes.
‘Old,’ the driver said. ‘The Bel-gium. Co-lo-nist.’
There was no traffic in the residential area and Kaja signalled that they should hang back further, even though she doubted Lene Galtung had any schooling in detecting tails. When the Range Rover stopped a hundred metres ahead, Kaja motioned to the driver to stop, too.
An iron gate was opened by a man in a grey uniform, the car drove in and the gate was closed again.
Lene Galtung could hear her heart pounding. It hadn’t beaten like this since the telephone had rung and she had heard his voice. He had told her he was in Africa. And said she should come. That he needed her. That only she could help him. Save the fine project that was not only his, but would become hers, too. So that he could have work. Men needed work. A future. A secure life, somewhere children could grow up.
The chauffeur opened the door for her, and Lene Galtung stepped out. The sun was not as strong as she had feared. The house that stood before her was magnificent. Solid, built at leisure. Brick by brick. Old money. The way they would do it themselves. When she and Tony had met he had been so intrigued by her family tree. Galtung was a Norwegian aristocratic family, one of the very few that had not been imported, a fact Tony repeated again and again. Perhaps that was why she had decided to postpone telling him that she was like him: of normal, modest origins, a grey rock in the scree, a social climber.
But now they would create their own nobility, they would shine in the scree. They would build.
The driver went ahead of her, up the brick steps to the door, where an armed man in camouflage opened it for them. A genuine crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling in the entrance hall. Lene’s hand squeezed the sweaty handle of the metal case containing the money. Her heart felt as if it would explode in her chest. Was her hair alright? Could you see the effects of the lack of sleep and the long journey? Someone was coming down the broad staircase from the first floor. No, it was a black woman, probably one of the servants. Lene gave her a friendly but not an exaggeratedly welcoming smile. Saw the glint of gold teeth when the woman acknowledged her with a cool, almost impudent smile and left through the door behind her.
There he was.
He stood by the banisters on the first floor and looked down at them.
He was tall, dark and draped in a dressing gown. She could see the attractive thick scar gleam white against his tanned chest. Then he smiled. She heard her breathing quicken. The smile. It illuminated his face, her heart, held more light than any crystal chandelier could.
He strolled down the stairs.
She put her case on the floor and flew towards him. He opened his arms and received her. And then she was with him. She recognised his smell, stronger than ever. Mixed with another strong, spicy aroma. It had to come from the dressing gown, for now she saw that the elegant silk garment was too short in the arms and not at all new. It wasn’t until she felt him freeing himself that she realised she had been clinging to him, and she let go abruptly.
‘Darling, you’re crying,’ he laughed, stroking her cheek with a finger.
‘Am I?’ She laughed too, drying under her eyes and hoping her make-up hadn’t run.
‘I have a surprise for you,’ he said, taking her hand. ‘Come with me.’
‘But …’ she said, turning to see that the metal case had already been removed.
They went upstairs and in through a door to a large, bright bedroom. Long, gossamer curtains swayed gently in the breeze from the terrace door.
‘Were you asleep?’ she asked, gesturing to the unmade four-poster bed.
‘No,’ he smiled. ‘Sit here and close your eyes.’
‘But …’
‘Just do as I say, Lene’.
She thought she could hear a suggestion of annoyance in his voice and hastened to do what he said.
‘They’ll soon be arriving with champagne, and then I want to ask you something. But first I’m going to tell you a story. Are you ready?’
‘Yes,’ she said, and knew. Knew this was the moment. The one she had been waiting for. The moment she would remember for the rest of her life.
‘The story I am going to tell you is about me. You see, there are a few things you ought to know about me before you answer my question.’
‘I understand.’ It was as if the champagne bubbles were already coursing through her veins, and she had to concentrate in order not to giggle.
‘I’ve told you I grew up with my grandfather, that my parents were dead. What I omitted to say was that I lived with them until I was fifteen.’
‘I knew it!’ she exclaimed.
Tony cocked an eyebrow. A delicately shaped, oh-so-beautiful eyebrow, she thought.