17

I crossed the river in the uncertain hope of being able to see Hammad. Nor was I certain of what I hoped to achieve by the visit, other than to make a plea on Frere’s behalf, or to better understand Hammad’s own involvement in the affair. He would certainly have known of our coming investigators by then, and perhaps – or so I also tried to convince myself – the situation might now be sufficiently altered for him to divulge something or other to me. Such was the flimsy and desperate nature of my hope. I told no-one in the Station of my intentions.

I crossed with the old man, having the previous evening sent the deformed boy to make arrangements.

It was not an easy crossing and we were forced to manoeuvre among unfamiliar channels and currents before making landfall a mile downriver. I was warned that our return would need to be undertaken before the day’s rain came. Neither the man nor the boy said much to me on the crossing. I asked the boy how he found Frere, but he told me nothing I did not already know. He was reluctant to talk in front of the old man and so I did not pursue the matter. They left me where I was landed.

I arrived at the centre of the Belgian Station and stood for a moment watching all that was happening there. There was a lively air of commerce about the place, and their wharves, in stark contrast to our own, were crowded with vessels being loaded and unloaded. I walked among the market stalls and the tables of their own rubber-buyers. I met several officers I knew and they invited me back to their quarters with them. They repeated the tales they had heard about famine and fighting, about the falling-off of the season’s rubber.

Those who knew him, asked about Frere. They said they did not believe the stories they had heard, assuring me that he would soon be exonerated and released. I said nothing in return to either fuel their speculations or to bolster my own long-dead hope. Instead, I remarked on how much trade there was, allowing them to instantly divert their talk and to make the usual traders’ complaints – too much, too little, prices too low to sell, prices too high to buy. It was a capricious whim of the river that had forced this difference in our fortunes, and they understood this as well as I did. The balance of profit and loss was seldom still.

I told them why I was there, hoping that one or other of them might be able to help me, but at the mention of Hammad they became evasive, apologetic, saying there was nothing they could do. It was Cornelius’s opinion that the Belgians had no intention of handing over any powers to a native government, but that it was currently in their best interests to appear to be about to do so, and that the handing over of Frere to a native court for trial was all a part of this greater subterfuge. It was something I would put to Hammad if I saw him, if he had not already long since worked this out for himself, and now looked upon Frere and his trial in the light of his own ambitions. I saw again how we were all – the Belgians as much as ourselves – in thrall to the man, that he remained at the pivot of that balance, whatever other swings of fortune we endured.

Declining all their offers, I made my way to Proctor’s garrison.

I found the man alone in his office, sitting with his feet on his desk reading a newspaper.

Upon hearing me enter, he swung his feet to the ground, but then seeing me he made a great play of lifting them back up and of continuing with whatever he read.

‘Six weeks old,’ he said. ‘The London Times.’

At first I did not believe him. He saw this and showed me the heading. It cannot be imagined or overestimated what a sudden dart of longing seeing that title and its date sent through me. Our own papers, when they came, were invariably six months old, and though we treasured them for what they were, their primary purpose was denied to us. Men who had died were rotting in their graves while we thought them still alive; new-born babies were not yet conceived; civilized wars were started and ended before we even knew any hostility existed; the jigsaw of nations was shaken apart and re-assembled by new hands.

‘New man in yesterday,’ Proctor said. ‘Four weeks at sea, two weeks straight here on the river. Gave me this without even knowing what it was worth.’

I considered asking him if he would sell it to me. Or if not the whole paper, then a page of it, and it was with a great effort that I said nothing, doing my best to not even look at the sheets he folded so carelessly to examine.

I told him my intentions.

‘No chance,’ he said immediately.

‘He may see me out of curiosity,’ I suggested.

He shook his head at me, as though I were a child incapable of understanding the simplest thing. ‘No chance. A mile up that road – ’ he motioned in the direction of Hammad’s home ‘ – he’s got a dozen of his own men stopping everyone from going any further. Lot of activity up there for the past week and now not a single one of us is allowed to go near the place, not even the Station Manager.’

‘What do you think is happening?’ Several barely formed ideas ran through my mind.

‘Obvious, I would have thought.’ He took great pleasure in my ignorance. He put down the paper and again swung his feet from the desk so that we might face each other directly.

‘Not to me,’ I said.

‘He’s been on one of his own trading missions. That’s what he calls them. Or if not him, then one of them’s come back to him.’

‘Trading in what?’

‘What do you think? What do you think those dozen Arabs are stopping us from seeing?’

‘You think he’s gathering slaves?’

‘Indentured labourers, if you don’t mind. All you ever see of his palace is what he shows you. Walk a mile beyond it and you’ll see another side of our Mister Hammad entirely. Buildings for men, buildings for women, buildings for all their screaming brats.’

‘And none of this trade comes down through here?’

He laughed. ‘Course it doesn’t. You’re talking about a man who might one day soon – one day very soon – wash his hands, sign his name to a piece of paper, raise a flag, and become the king of a new country.’

‘Do you really think so?’ I made my scepticism clear.

‘Why not? He’ll be perfectly suited to the place. The talks are going on. What did you think, that we’d get to lord it over them for ever? Perhaps if Hammad does take over, then the rest of us can go home and leave them to it. Place’d be a blood-bath within days while everything got settled.’

I considered the likelihood of all this. I knew what growth this mulch of conjecture and rumour supported, that what Proctor said, despite his own lurid emphasis and my own reluctance to believe it, was not so unbelievable.

It was by then midday and the room in which we sat was an overheated vault.

‘No, Hammad keeps himself clean here. He’ll send most of them east, I imagine, where they still fetch a good price. That’ll be the men, mostly; the women and children he can still sell on the more specialized markets. Still a big call for some of those women in Port Elys or Petit Coeur. And some of those girls, ten or eleven they are, bet you or me wouldn’t say no to getting our hands on one of them for an hour. Word is that Hammad likes to break some of them in himself. Either him or one of his guards. Get them trained up, worth a bit less in the short run, but more in the long, if you know what I mean.’

I understood him perfectly, and I saw how he was goading me. The brothels at Port Elys and Petit Coeur were filled to overflowing and their trade never slackened.

Before we put an end to it under Company orders, caravans of these women and children were moved along the paths on our side of the river, sometimes being brought into the garrison yard or compound to await some vessel or other. They were a pathetic sight. Most were bound and yoked, and some were shackled. The mothers and children were kept apart, and despite how they were treated and what they must have suspected lay ahead of them, they were inevitably acquiescent in their behaviour. I learned later that some of the women were drugged before being bound. Worse, I learned that they were told they would only be allowed to remain with their children if they complied with everything they were told to do. They were also warned that they were resting in our Station under sufferance from us and that we would punish them ourselves if there was any disturbance.

I remember visiting one of the landing stages where seventy or eighty of these women were being guarded while they waited for a boat. They all froze as I went close to them, and some closed their eyes to deny my presence completely. Most of them were naked except for cloths fastened between their legs, and this, I imagined, was done more for our sakes than their own. They might have been so many boulders resting there in the night for all the noise they made. Occasionally, one of the women would be untied and taken elsewhere by the men who traded and escorted them. We knew better than to intervene when we saw this happening, or when a woman or a child was beaten for some transgression.

Cornelius in particular had complained to the Company Secretary that our involvement in the trade, whatever the women were called, and even if only by this association, was detrimental to us. The Company had always replied that they were assessing the situation and that wider considerations further complicated our own apparently simplistic understanding of the matter. Cornelius tore up these answers as soon as they were received. I had not known then about his own lost ‘wife’ and dead daughter, but I understood afterwards what a large part their memory played in his frustration.

‘So?’ Proctor said loudly, invading my thoughts.

‘And everyone here condones this activity,’ I said absently.

‘What’s it got to do with condoning? Never been made illegal here – not the way these men do it. You have to admire them for that. Highly respected men, some of them, and none more so than our friend Hammad.’

‘Highly respected by whom, though?’ I said.

‘There you go again. You still think it matters to make that distinction. Wait until he’s king and ask me again.’

‘And whatever I think of him, I’m not going to get to see him.’

‘You were never going to get to see him. Who do you think sees him by knocking on his door and shouting in that that’s what they want? The old Queen herself could come and this bastard would keep her waiting just long enough to let her know how far from home she was.’

Hammad, who was reputed to have once lined up a dozen slaves, one behind the other, and fired through them with a newly bought rifle to see how effective it was, disappointed and angry when only the first three fell, then leaving the others standing for a day and a night while he decided whether or not to repeat the experiment at closer range.

Hammad, who substituted dynamite for gunpowder to teach a team of idle stump-clearers a lesson they were able to remember only for the final agonizing seconds of their lives.

Hammad, who once lost a canoe of twenty bound men over the vicious Ngula Falls, and afterwards telling the story and saying, ‘What a pity, it was such a well-built canoe.’

‘Then I’ve come on a fool’s errand,’ I said eventually, more to myself than to Proctor.

He surprised me then by asking me how Frere was.

I told him, detailing the preparations Bone had made and what new airs and graces he gave himself. Proctor smiled at the predictability of it all. He opened up and refolded the newspaper. He said he would sell it to me, but that he could get a better price for it among the Belgians for the European news it contained. I asked him if there was anything of any great significance I ought to be aware of, but when he pushed the paper towards me, I found myself reluctant to pick it up and search it, only too aware of the pleasures and pains it might simultaneously inflict on me. I declined his offer, and because he understood why I had declined, he took it back immediately and put it in a drawer.

‘I could get word to Hammad that you wanted to see him. What is it – that you humbly beseech an audience with him?’

‘Then he’ll know I’ve been and he’ll know what’s happening here.’

‘Too clever for me,’ Proctor said, though he understood me perfectly. ‘Besides which, he’ll already know that you’re here and that I’m filling you in on everything.’

‘Paid informants?’

‘Paid favours, it’s all the same.’

‘Then do you know about the men coming to investigate Frere?’

‘The men coming to solve all your problems.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘Meaning you haven’t been able to wash your hands of him without someone else telling you what to do.’

‘Is that what you thought would happen?’

He considered this for a moment and then nodded. ‘They were at the Black River outflow two days ago.’

That meant they were less than five days away from us.

‘Why did no-one tell us?’

He spread his hands.

I rose to leave him, conscious of the coming rain. He held out his hand to me, and I could not help but think that I had misjudged the man, equating him with Bone when they were in fact two completely different creatures.

As though reading my thoughts, he said, ‘Send my regards to poor old Bone.’

I smiled at this and told him I would. Then he offered me the newspaper for nothing and again I declined.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’s full of everything elsewhere. Bring tears to your eyes reading about a cold spring morning.’ Then he grabbed my arm and said, ‘Don’t get slack with Frere. You aren’t going to be able to hold his hand and walk him through this one.’

I asked him what he meant by the outburst.

‘What I said,’ he said. ‘Man from Stanleyville said they spoke to next to no-one all the time they were there.’ He released his grip on me.

I acknowledged this warning and left him.

My return journey was as prolonged as my earlier one, and again neither the man nor the boy made any effort to speak to me. Still angry at having achieved nothing by the crossing, I resented this behaviour, and when the time came to pay I deliberately tossed my coins towards the boy knowing that he would not be able to turn smoothly enough to catch them and that he would then have to search for them in the silt at the bottom of the boat.