The Swiss Air 747 en route to Kinshasa began to nose down, lowering over the Stanley Pool on its way into Njili airport. It was the usual crowd in first class. White businessmen returning from meetings in Europe or the States. Sleek Africans, their broad smiles filled with the confidence of wealth and power, in expensively tailored abascos, the vaguely Chinese-looking suit that Mobutu had decreed must replace the European business suit and called the abascos, short for à bas costume.
“And who do you think is riding in the back of the bus, sitting back there big as life, putting the make on this skinny, little Peace Corps gal? Flat-chested, long, stringy hair. I kid you not . . . I saw him. I was coming out of the john, and I looked way back, and there he was . . . It’s Boketsu. Sure as hell. Fat and shiny as a hog.” Sam Wofford’s bullhorn voice thundered above the soft clatter of the flight attendants suddenly full of energy as they prepared the cabin for landing in Kinshasa.
“Bull,” Joe Snead said. “If Boketsu Bika is on this plane, and if he is heading back to Zaïre, you know for sure he’d be sitting up here with us, swilling champagne and spooning the caviar. All forgiven. That ol’ I.V. full of greenbacks strung back up, drip, drip, dripping into the ol’ Swiss bank account.”
Across the aisle Jacques Delpech kept his eyes closed and pretended to sleep. At the mention of Boketsu, memories swirled around his consciousness, tugging like a floating tree branch that sweeps down the river, hits a snag, then pulls at it, until the branch breaks free and flows along swiftly with the current again. The familiar gossip. And Sam was always on top of it. Who’s in. Who’s out. Very important to the foreign businessman. More important than who’s sleeping with whom. Unless it’s your own wife, of course. And maybe not even then.
Jacques sat upright and disentangled himself from the clutter of blanket and newspapers. The plane bumped its way down through the clouds, losing altitude very fast. The lights in the cabin flickered, and fat drops of condensation fell from the ceiling.
“Oh, merde, la douche!” someone groaned.
“Hey, hold on, fellas, don’t take us down so fast,” Sam Wofford said, ducking his head and reaching for a newspaper.
He and Joe Snead held newspapers over their balding heads. In the silence the water made loud, pinging sounds as it hit the paper.
“It must be hot as hell down there tonight,” Joe Snead said.
Below, Jacques could see a few scattered patches of light in the thick darkness. His mouth and throat felt dry.
Jacques continued to stare at the darkened world below, ignoring the carroty blond stewardess who had been flirting with him since the plane left Zurich. She probably assumes my wife will be standing there at the airport, he thought, waiting to collect her husband, and that I’m making damned sure that I come through the gates clean and innocent. But wives don’t meet husbands at airports in Africa; drivers do that. They arrive hours early, they wait and wait. Before they go to the airport to collect patron, they wash the car, sweep it out, dust and polish, polish and shine. Then after the long, dusty drive to the airport, they clean and polish again. And then they climb the steps to the terrace of the terminal and wait for the lights of the huge plane to pierce through the darkness, ever so slowly at first, then they watch enthralled as, all of a sudden, the giant roars to the ground, speeds past the terrace, and disappears into the night before rolling back slowly, triumphantly, into the light.
No, there would be no wives waiting in the V.I.P. lounge tonight, only drivers and expediters from the companies of the European businessmen, household flunkies for the wealthy Zaïrians, or embassy staff detailed to meet incoming officers and visitors. Wives would already be asleep in the cool bedrooms of villas along the river or in Djelo Binza high on the hill overlooking the city.
Or there would be no wives at all. It had been almost a year since Janine had left Kinshasa, taking Suzanne home to Brussels, for their usual vacation, she said, but the vacation had never ended, she had never returned. She had sent long lists of things to be packed up to Dieudonné, their cook and the only houseboy who could read. Dieudonné had anxiously packed every single item himself, even at such a distance courting Madame’s approval, never allowing himself to wonder about Madame’s absence.
Sam’s husky monologue could be heard over the clickety-clack of seat belts being released as the 747 pulled to a stop obliquely facing the airport. Canned music, an old-fashioned popular song in French, stuttered over the public address. In the pale overhead lights of the cabin the passengers looked tired and disappointed, as if they had been promised that their jolly, boozy afternoon in the skies would never end. Jacques stood leaning against his seat, waiting for the bump of the stairs against the plane.
There was an angry shout outside as the stairs thwacked hard, and a beefy stewardess released the locks and whipped the door open.
Unhurried, Jacques waited his turn to leave the plane, and finally fell in step behind the Pakistani, who had handcuffed his briefcase to his wrist. Without much success, he kept adjusting his coat sleeve and his grasp of the briefcase so that the handcuffs wouldn’t show.
As Jacques stepped outside the plane, the warm, moist air clogged his nostrils with the peculiar smells of dust and smoke, the smells of Africa, and he felt happy. Home. Home again, home at last. He started across the dark tarmac toward the lights of the V.I.P. lounge.
“Patron! Patron!” came a high-pitched African voice. Jacques looked up toward the terrace. His driver Louis stood below a rusty light fixture hanging loosely from the dirty wall.
“Patron! Patron!” Jacques waved at the tall, lanky black man, scrawny as a child, who stood flailing both arms, jangling from side to side, and smiling as if he could not contain his jubilation. Jacques lifted his head, and as always, grinned in return. The rituals of the airport.
Inside the V.I.P. lounge Jacques dropped his briefcase and sat down beside Sam Wofford on one of the dingy white overstuffed divans that were spread in clusters about the room. They had turned over their tickets and baggage stubs to their expediters who had gone off to collect their bags in the chaotic baggage room, where boys ran down the broken conveyer belt to fetch bags from the Swiss Air trolley for the expediters who would then take them to waiting drivers and cars.
Tall women in dark print tops and long, ankle-length skirts called pagnes twisted about the waist in what President Mobutu had decreed as “authentic” dress circulated among the rumpled-looking passengers taking orders for beer and whisky. The women swayed as they passed by on their high-heeled shoes with pointed toes, their massive rumps rising and falling beneath their tightly wrapped pagnes.
“Did you really see Boketsu on the plane, Sam, or were you just trying to get a rise out of the boys?” Jacques asked.
Sam had subsided into a half-doze, abandoning for the moment the strenuous gregariousness he assumed with his cronies. He was a bulky man, tall—over six feet three—and barrel chested from incipient emphysema as a result of smoking three packs a day since he was sixteen. In the Vietnam War his right leg had been badly mangled, but his slight limp did not dispel a sense of his tremendous athletic power. He ate hugely, drank everything in sight, and screwed just about anything that moved, black or white. He was the only man Jacques knew who had come down with the clap seven times in one year. The threat of AIDS in Africa had done nothing to slow him down.
From lowered lids Sam, like a somnolent crocodile, watched the room. “Yeah. It was definitely Boketsu,” he said, turning his large head slowly to face Jacques.
“Then, why wouldn’t he be in here with us?” Jacques said. “It’s not likely that he would queue up with the riffraff to clear immigration.”
“He’s not here because he got into a black Mercedes parked next to that C-130 over by the fence.”
“Then he and the Old Man must have kissed and made up,” Jacques said.
“Yeah. You know the Old Man. He’d rather have the camel inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.”
Sam sighed and lowered his eyelids again and settled back to watch the movements of one of the serveuses.
In 1982, Boketsu had been one of the youngest, brightest and most trusted members of Mobutu’s regime, until the bright young man had started a rumble to overthrow the president and take over the country. When Boketsu lost control of his men and his plot unraveled, he had been lucky to get away to the safety of exile in Switzerland, and, later, Brussels. There, he had become one of the most vociferous critics of the president and his regime. American congressmen courted him and quoted him. Capitol Hill found in him the kind of wisdom and insight that Americans always attribute to foreigners who speak fluent English with an American accent. Boketsu became a favorite with the press, particularly with the Belgians, and they crowded around him at his beck and call as he lamented the waste and corruption in his native land under the disastrous leadership of Mobutu.
Jacques had not seen Boketsu Bika in two, perhaps three years. It seemed longer than that, after that furtive meeting in New York on the Staten Island Ferry. Bika had been furious with him, spitting out his venom in a wild mixture of Lingala, Mongo, and French, the crazy language that they had used as lonely boys at boarding school in Belgium, shut away from their families, from their country, from Zaïre.
“He’s a good guy, Boketsu,” said Jacques. “Really smart.”
“Good-looking girlfriends, too,” Sam said, putting down his beer and heaving himself up from the low divan. “Is your car here, Jacques?” Sam’s protocol man, stood bowing and smiling before them. Sam handed over to him his magazines and briefcase.
“How long will you be in town this time? Or are you just passing through on your way to Johannesburg?”
“Three weeks, maybe four. How about some tennis on Saturday before lunch? American Club.”
“Fine. I’ll meet you there at noon,” Jacques said, though he dreaded the battering Sam would put him through. He could not recall ever playing a game with Sam at a decent hour when the sun was not biting through the sweat and blurring his vision. Like some madman, Sam preferred to play in the blazing heat, claiming that this kind of sweating kept his weight under control.
There were only a few stray diplomats from the Turkish embassy still waiting in the lounge when Louis appeared at the door with Jacques’ luggage.
It was past midnight as they walked through the dimly lit and deserted rotunda of the airport. There would be little activity until dawn when passengers would begin arriving for the Swiss Air turnaround departure at six. The dingy little boutiques of African handicrafts, masks, ivory and dusty malachite were closed. The lights in the sign over one shop still burned; the glass of the sign had been broken and the bare bulbs showed through the cracks. The sign was written in bad French and worse English: “Souvenirs d’Africain/Vente d’objets d’art. African Rememberings/We sell things of art.” A couple of vendors selling cigarettes with names like “Good Look” and “Pink” had settled down for the night with their cardboard and rags; they sprawled near the entrance steps and played a game of cards.
Across the parking lot Jacques saw the blond stewardess bend down and slip into the back seat of Sam’s Mercedes.
Louis kept silent, steering the big black car out onto the broad road leading to town, waiting for Jacques to ask how things were at the house and what had happened during his absence. Louis could remember—that was before Madame married patron and changed the big black lettering on the gate to Villa Beau Rêve—when the immense house on the river had been called Villa Bondeko, which meant friendship and brotherhood in Lingala. Some of the fishermen on the river still called it the Bondeko.
People, mostly men, still swarmed along the sides of the road, lit by the dusty orange light of street lamps. Laughing and shouting at each other, they strolled along in the debris-littered sandy shoulder of the road. Their skinny, spindly arms gesticulated toward the dark trees. The roiling rhythms of Kinshasa music, monotonous and sensuous, spilled from roadside beer gardens and cafés.
It was a long way to the big house on the river, almost an hour, and it seemed longer to Louis because patron was in one of his quiet moods.
Along the roadway women crouched in the warm sand behind makeshift tables of crates and wooden boxes on which they displayed their wares: a half-dozen packs of cigarettes intricately arranged in a pyramid, boxes of matches, small stacks of canned tomato paste, a dented, misshapen tin bowl of palm nuts, mangoes. Short white candles stuck into a splash of wax spread small circles of light in the darkness where the light of street lamps did not reach. Some women nodded in sleep in the candlelight. They were always there, these women, silent, patient, watchful, along the streets and roadways of Africa, arranging their pitifully small supply of items into elaborate patterns of shape and color.
Once they had passed through the noisy, turbulent cité and approached the center of Kinshasa, the raucous nightlife disappeared. The streets were quiet and deserted, except for a few chauffeur-driven Mercedes slipping along the wide avenues lined with trees and the high white walls of villas.
Louis turned into the Avenue de la Justice, where prostitutes in bright spangled hot pants and boots and garish wigs leaned against mango trees. As the car came into view, they sprang forward dangling condoms, grayish white, like underwater creatures, and shouted their invitations. Jacques looked up as they passed on the left the walled villa where Boketsu Bika used to live, just before he left the country. It was a monster of a house around which the former owner, a colon, had built a high stucco fence, a rarity before Independence. Now all the great houses crouched behind their walls. On the corner the colon had proudly had his initials, G.O.D., worked in fancy Portuguese tile inlaid in the wall. When they were still boys, after peace came to their country, and they could leave their gray stone boarding school under the leaden skies of Bruges, Bika had said that he would one day live in the house of G.O.D. And he had. Bika had been so proud to be a member of the government, working until all hours of the night, pushing and scheming to get his reforms approved by Mobutu.
Jacques lit a cigarette. The International Monetary Fund representative lived in the house now.
As soon as Jacques stepped into the foyer, he could smell the sweet odor of Dieudonné’s hemp. Every room was open and lighted. The polished marble floors glowed. Music played softly in the lamplight, and the night breeze fanned the gauzy draperies back and forth through the rows of open French windows along the terraces. A Simon and Garfunkel tape, Dieudonné’s favorite, played on the stereo. The rituals of homecoming. Light fell from windows around the swimming pool. All was peaceful and quiet. Expectant. As if the rooms had just emptied a moment before. As if little girls with shining, mischievous faces and broad snaggle-toothed grins would burst in at any moment, crying “Surprise! Surprise! Welcome home, papa!”
“Bienvenue, patron,” Dieudonné said, his grizzled head bobbing from left to right, his eyes yellow and glazed from an evening of smoking. “Bienvenue.”
He straightened the decanters along the bar and watched Jacques warily as he dropped his jacket and tie on a chair before going to close the windows to the terrace, shutting out the swimming pool, the swimming pool out there in the darkness beyond the lights.
“It is going to rain. For sure it will rain tonight, patron.”
As if in answer, a jagged flash of heat lightning cut across the moody black skies.
“Fix me a whisky before you go to bed, Dieudonné.”
“Oui, patron.”
Behind him, Jacques could hear Dieudonné’s bare feet slapping against the floors as he moved unsteadily about the house, closing the doors to the terrace and turning out lights. Paul Simon sang “Same Old Tears” to the empty room. Jacques could hear his two Rhodesian ridgebacks snuffling in their sleep alongside the pool. They always slept there during the rainy season.
In the bedroom Dieudonné had set out a decanter of scotch and a pitcher of ice water. Jacques looked at his watch. Twenty past one. He picked up the telephone and dialed, staring at the blank white walls as the telephone faraway rang and rang.
“Allô? Oui?” Nicole croaked, her voice choked with sleep.
Jacques stared at the walls. “I wonder if you could come over and be of service tonight?”
“What kind of service?”
He waited. “I thought you might have the answer to that.” There was a long pause, and Jacques could imagine the flash of hot anger storming across her high, broad forehead. He wished that, for once, she would be angry enough to refuse. But Nicole was too ambitious for that.
“Okay . . . Give me some time.”
“Sure,” he said, placing the telephone in the cradle, and stretching out on the bed.