Jacques left Bika’s party in Djelo Binza early. Somehow he had been reassured by the looks of Bika’s house with its bug-splattered fluorescent lights overhead, its plastic furniture and ugly, tasteless lamps with their plastic shades awry, its untidy ashtrays. There were few if any signs of twenty-million-dollar affluence there, and he began to take heart that Carter Everett’s information might be unreliable. But the atmosphere at the party threw him off. Something seemed wrong. For one thing, he was the only European. There were too many men and only a sprinkling of women, not one of whom he recognized, and so young that Jacques suspected that they were prostitutes brought in especially for the night. He was struck by the fact that all the men, most of whom he had known since he was a small boy, were Mongos, Bika’s tribe. It was odd, for at most gatherings in the years since Mobutu came to power, tribes mixed together quite casually. The men, including Bika, did not seem focused on the gathering as a party. They drank, smoked, laughed, flirted with the girls, but somehow Jacques had the impression that the real business of the evening was elsewhere: in the privacy of the kitchen, out on the terrace.
He circulated perfunctorily among the guests, vaguely ill at ease, and made arrangements with Bika, who listened enthusiastically but distractedly, to meet privately during the coming week.
Called away to a last-minute appointment, Carter Everett left Bill Donovan and George Kowalski to set up the food and drinks for the poker party. Kowalski was a young paramilitary man on a temporary duty assignment with a dozen or so other CIA men sent out to train a cadre of anti-terrorists for Zaïre. Rumors of Libyans making their way from eastern Zaïre to the capital had flared up again. The paramilitary mission was Washington’s way of stroking Mobutu.
The Chief of Station’s residence was located on a dimly lit, potholed street within a stone’s throw of the Playboy Club. It was a rather peculiar house, for sections of the ground floor were mirror images: there were two entrance doors, two foyers, two sitting rooms, and two smaller alcoves for more intimate conversations. In this way, Carter Everett, as that night, could have guests come and go on the West side, while other, more public guests were being received and entertained in the other set of rooms on the East side.
A houseboy brought in a steaming dish of chicken mwambe and placed it on a heating tray on the buffet. Donovan and Kowalski finished setting out cards and ashtrays on a table in a circular screened porch at the back of the house. The evening was humid but pleasant; a large fan whirred overhead and gently ruffled a stack of paper napkins on the sideboard.
It was close to midnight when Jacques Delpech decided to join the poker game. He lowered the windows of his car and drove along the river in the soothing damp of the night. A convivial quiet had settled over the mango-arbored streets; the large villas behind white walls looked a ghostly blue in the glare of fluorescent guard lights. At the American ambassador’s residence, two men played tennis under floodlights. The fronds of palm trees made dry, rustling sighs as a fresh breeze swept in from the river.
He passed under a grove of overarching mango trees where two small boys, street kids, were trying to shake loose fruit that they would sell along the roadside the next day. One boy had climbed onto the shoulders of the other and with a long bamboo cane whacked at the thick foliage of a tree.
Up ahead, he saw the Playboy Club with its burnt-out bulbs nervously blinking “layboy lu” into the darkness, and turned into Carter Everett’s street. Several cars were still parked along the wall, and he was glad, knowing that he could delay for another few hours the emptiness of the house on the river.
That evening most of the players were regulars who turned up at Carter Everett’s gates on Saturday nights whether a poker game was going on or not, a part of the ebb and flow of temporarily unattached men in any African city. They came to talk and to drink under the mimosas by the pool, and then around one or two in the morning they went with Carter to the cité to drink and dance and listen to Papa Wembé’s music in dusty beer gardens.
Sam Wofford was in his usual place, and Jacques could see that his pendulum had for the moment swung to sobriety. He studied his cards with his sleepy crocodile eyes and grinned. He was winning a little tonight. The young CIA men called Carter “chief” and kept the refreshments flowing. Remnants of the chicken mwambe bubbled on the hot tray.
“Jesus!” Donovan said. “Listen to those frogs! Don’t they ever quit?”
The wheezing, rasping, croaking, chirping cacophony of creatures in the garden pelted the house like stones.
“The other night out in the bush, coming back from Kikwit, in the middle of nowhere, you’d have to have ear plugs to get to sleep. Gimme good ol’ Times Square any day of the week,” Kowalski said.
“It’s the rainy season. When the rains stops, they ease up,” Jacques said.
“It’s sex,” Sam Wofford said. “It’s all sex. I read it somewhere. Even the mosquitoes, that high-pitched whine of those mosquitoes coming at you, it’s all those mosquitoes out to score. Especially the females, they shut up when they’ve got what they were looking for.”
Jacques dealt another hand.
“Speaking of females,” Donovan said, his pink face eager in the lamplight. “I’ve got some intelligence here.” He did a drum roll with his fingers. “New girl in town, fellas, heads up! A luscious new babe!”
“Yeah, who’s that?”
“USIA has a new lady. Cultural attaché.”
“Oh, USIA,” Sam Wofford said, disappointed. “Not my type.”
“A widow,” Donovan said.
“A widow?” Sam said.
“Yeah. A young widow. What’s wrong with that?”
Jacques laughed and yawned.
“Gussie Pearce brought her around early this evening,” Carter said after a moment, without looking up. “She’s lovely. Really quite lovely.”