The Mission Song

by John le Carré

  But Hannah, as I might have guessed, is less impressed than I am by my courtroom oratory.

  “Salvo. You have robbed powerful employers of something that is precious to them. The question is whether they will find out, and if they catch you, what will they do to you? You said they will attack Bukavu in two weeks. How do you know this?”

  “Maxie told me. On the plane home. It's about taking the airport. Saturday's a football day. The white mercenaries will arrive by Swiss charter, the black mercenaries will pretend to be a visiting football team.”

  “So now we have not two weeks but thirteen days.”

  “Yes.”

  “And not certainly but possibly, you are a wanted man.”

  “I suppose I am.”

  “Then we must go to Baptiste.”

  She takes me in her arms and for a time we forget everything but one another.

  • • •

  We are lying on our backs, both staring at the ceiling, and she is telling me about Baptiste. He is a Congolese nationalist who is passionate for a united Kivu and has recently returned from Washington where he was attending a study forum on African consciousness. The Rwandans have sent their thugs several times to track him down and kill him but he is so smart that he has always outwitted them. He knows all the Congolese groups including the bad ones. In Europe, in America, and in Kinshasa.

  “Kinshasa where the fatcats come from,” I suggest.

  “Yes, Salvo. Where the fatcats come from. Also many good and serious people like Baptiste who care about the Eastern Congo and are prepared to take risks to protect us from our enemies and exploiters.”

  I want to agree unconditionally with everything she says. I want to be as Congolese as she is. But the rat of jealousy, as Brother Michael used to call it, is gnawing at my entrails.

  “So even though we know that the Mwangaza has cut a dirty deal in Kinshasa,” I suggest, “or Tabizi has, or his people have, you still think it's safe to go to the Mwangaza's representative here in London and blow the whole story to him? You trust him that much.”

  She lifts herself onto her side and stares down at me.

  “Yes, Salvo. I trust him that much. If Baptiste hears what we have heard and decides that the Mwangaza is corrupt, which I do not yet believe, then Baptiste, because he is honourable and dreams of peace for all Kivu as we do, will know who to warn and how to prevent the catastrophe that is round the corner.”

  She flops back and we resume our study of Mrs Hakim's ceiling. I ask the inevitable question: how did she meet him?

  “It was his group who organised the coach trip to Birming ham. He is Shi as the Mwangaza is, so it was natural that he saw the Mwangaza as the coming man. But that does not blind him to the Mwangaza's frailties.”

  Of course not, I assure her.

  “And at the last minute, just before our coach departed, completely unexpectedly he jumped aboard and gave an impressive address on the prospects of peace and inclusiveness for all Kivu.”

  To you personally? I ask.

  “Yes, Salvo. To me personally. Out of thirty-six people in the coach, he spoke only to me. And I was completely naked.”

  • • •

  Her first objection to my preferred champion, Lord Brinkley, was so absolute that it smacked to me of Sister Imogene's fundamentalism.

  “But Salvo. If wicked people are dragging us into war and stealing our resources, how can there be grades of guilt among them? Surely each one is as evil as the next, since all are complicit in the same act?”

  “But Brinkley's not like the others,” I replied patiently. “He's a figurehead like the Mwangaza. He's the kind of man the others march behind when they want to do their thieving.”

  “He is also the man who was able to say yes.”

  “That's right. And he's the man who expressed his shock and moral outrage, if you remember. And practically accused Philip of double-dealing while he was about it.” And as a clincher: “If he's the man who can pick up the phone and say yes, he can also pick it up and say no.”

  Pressing my case harder, I drew on my wide experience of the corporate world. How often had I not observed, I said, that men at the helm were unaware of what was being done in their name, so preoccupied were they with raising funds and watching the market? And gradually she began nodding her acceptance, in the knowledge that there were after all areas of life where my grasp exceeded hers. Piling on the arguments, I reminded her of my exchange with Brinkley at the house in Berkeley Square: “And what happened when I mentioned Mr Anderson's name to him? He hadn't even heard of him!” I ended, and then waited for her response, which I sincerely hoped would not include any further advocacy for Baptiste. Finally I showed her my letter, thanking me for my support: Dear Bruno, signed, Yours ever, Jack. Even then she didn't totally give up:

  “If the Syndicate is so anonymous, how can they use Brinkley as a figurehead?” And because I had no good answer ready: “If you must go to one of your own, at least go to Mr Anderson whom you trust. Tell him your story and place yourself at his mercy.”

  But I was able once more to outmanoeuvre her, this time with my knowledge of the secret world. “Anderson washed his hands of me before I ever left his safe flat. The operation was deniable, I was deniable. Do you think he's going to un-deny me when I walk in and tell him the whole thing was a scam?”

  Side by side before my laptop, we went to work. Lord Brinkley's website was reticent about where he lived. Those who wished to write should do so care of the House of Lords. My Brinkley press cuttings came into their own. Jack was married to one Lady Kitty, an aristocratic heiress involved in good works on behalf of Britain's needy, which naturally commended her to Hannah. And Lady Kitty had a website.

  On it were listed the charities that enjoyed her patronage, plus the address to which donors could send their cheques, plus a notification of her Thursday coffee morning At Homes to which benefactors were invited by prior arrangement only. At Home being Knightsbridge, the heart of London's golden triangle.

  • • •

  It is an hour later. I lie awake, my head super-clear. Hannah, trained to sleep whenever she is able, does not stir. Silently pulling on my shirt and trousers, I take my cellphone and descend to the guest lounge, where Mrs Hakim is clearing away breakfast. After the mandatory exchange of commonplaces, I escape to the little garden which lies in a canyon among tall brown buildings. Printed into me is a running awareness of what our One-Day trainers would term Penelope's trade routes. After her torrid weekend with Thorne, she will be putting in at Norfolk Mansions for a morning refit before embarking on the rigours of the week. Her best telephoning is done from taxis paid for by her paper. Like all good journalists, she has thought a lot about her opening line.

  And fuck you too, Salvo darling! If you'd waited another week I could have spared you the bother! I won't enquire where you spent your weekend after making a laughing-stock of me in front of the proprietor. I just hope she's worth it, Salvo. Or should I be saying he? Fergus says he's afraid to go into the same loo with you . . .

  I returned to the bedroom. Hannah lay as I had left her. In the summer's heat, the bed-sheet was draped like a painter's veil across one breast and between her thighs.

  “Where were you?”

  “In the garden. Getting divorced.”

  10

  “Gentlemen. I give you Monsieur le Colonel!”

  The light of battle gleams in Maxie's washy blue eyes as he towers before the easel, hands on hips: three years to go before his Borodino. He has thrown aside his jacket but left his tie in place. Probably he wears one so seldom that he's forgotten about it. Our numbers have shrunk. The Mwangaza, once a veteran of the barricades but now a Prophet of Peace, has withdrawn to the seclusion of his royal apartments, taking his pigtailed acolyte with him. Only Tabizi — boxer's shoulders hunched, gaze lidded, dyed black hair scrupulously swept back to camouflage a bald crown — has stayed behind to see fair play.

  But it's not Maxie I'm staring
at, not Tabizi, not the delegates. It's my childhood. It's the large-scale military map of the town of Bukavu, jewel of Central Africa and some say all of Africa, set at the southern tip of Africa's highest and therefore coolest lake. And this lake, swathed in mist and cradled by smouldering hills, is magical, ask my dear late father. Ask the fishermen he gossiped with at the dockside while they picked the sambaza from their nets and tossed them into yellow plastic buckets, where they flipped for hours on end, hoping someone like me will put them back. Ask them about mamba mutu, the half crocodile, half woman; and the bad people who creep down to the shore at night and, by means of witchcraft, trade the living souls of innocent friends in exchange for favours in this world and retribution in the next. Which is why Lake Kivu is whispered to be cursed, and why fishermen disappear, dragged down by mamba mutu, who likes to eat their brains. Or so the fishermen assured my dear late father, who knew better than to mock their beliefs.

  The main avenue is lined with classic colonial houses with rounded corners and oblong windows overhung with tulip trees, jacaranda and bougainvillea. The hills around bulge with banana groves and tea plantations like so many green mattresses. From their slopes you can count the town's five peninsulas. The grandest is called La Botte, and there it is, on Maxie's map: a boot of Italy with fine houses and pampered gardens descending to the lake's edge — le Marechal Mobutu himself had deigned to have a villa there. To begin with, the boot shoots boldly into the lake, then just when you think it's headed straight for Goma, it crooks its foot sharp right and lashes out at Rwanda on the eastern shore.

  Maxie's paper arrows are of strategic practicality. They point to the Governor's house, the radio and television stations, the United Nations headquarters and the army barracks. But none to the roadside market where we ate goat brochettes when my father brought me into town for my birthday treats; none to the green-roofed cathedral, built like two washed-up ships turned upside down, where we prayed for my immortal soul. None for the grim-stoned Catholic university where one day, if I worked hard, I might get to study. And none for the White Sisters' Mission where they fed sugar biscuits to the secret child and told him what a dear kind uncle he had.

  Maxie stands with his back to us. Philip sits at his side, his features so fluid that you have to be quick to catch a particular expression. You think you see one, but when you look again, it's gone. Our three delegates sit where they sat before, Franco at their centre. Dieudonne has acquired a harder face. The muscles of Franco's neck are braced. Haj alone displays a provocative disdain for our proceedings. Zegna-clad elbows on the baize, he appears more interested in the window than in his own fiefdom on the easel. Does he care? Does he love Bukavu as much as I do in my memory? It is hard to believe so.

  Enter Anton, bearing billiards cue. His appearance confuses me. Why isn't he out there with his watchers where he belongs? Then it dawns on me that, for as long as our delegates are in the conference room, there's nobody left for him to watch, which only goes to show that when you're geared up to peak performance with your nerve-ends out and your interpreter's third ear on red alert you can still be thick-headed when it comes to common sense.

  “Bit of soldier talk coming up, old boy,” Maxie warns me in a murmur. “That going to be all right for you?”

  All right, Skipper? You asked, can I do military, and I can.

  Anton passes Maxie the billiards cue as a replacement weapon for the Mwangaza's magic stick. A drill movement, man to officer. Maxie grasps it at its point of equilibrium. Clipped, clear voice. Plain words and good pauses. Now hear this. I hear it and render it with everything I've got.

  “First things first, gentlemen. There will be no, repeat, no armed intervention by non-Congolese forces in the province of Kivu. Make sure they've got that loud and clear, will you, old boy?”

  Surprised though I am, I do as I am asked. Haj lets out a yip of delight, giggles and shakes his head in disbelief. Franco's gnarled face stirs in perplexity. Dieudonne lowers his eyes in contemplation.

  “Any uprising will be a spontaneous, brushfire outbreak of traditionally opposed tribal groups,” Maxie goes on, undeterred.

  “It will occur without, repeat, without involvement of non-Congolese forces — or none that are visible — whether in Goma, Bukavu, or wherever. Make sure Haj gets that. It's what his father signed up to. Tell him that.”

  I do. Haj returns his gaze to the world outside the window where an air battle is raging between rival squadrons of crows and gulls.

  “A delicate domestic balance of power will have been temporarily disturbed,” Maxie resumes. “No outside agency, national, mercenary or otherwise, will have fanned the flames. As far as the international community is concerned, it will be Congolese business as usual. Ram that home for me, will you, old boy?”

  I ram it home for the skipper. Haj's crows are in retreat, outnumbered by the gulls.

  “UN headquarters in Bukavu is a pig's breakfast,” Maxie declares with mounting emphasis, though I am careful to use a less emotive term. “One mechanised infantry company with mine-protected armoured personnel carriers, one Uruguayan guard company, one Chinese engineering unit, Rwandan and Mai Mai representatives bumping into each other in the corridors, one Nepali half-colonel soon to be retired running the shop. Smallest thing happens, they're on the satcom yelling at headquarters to tell 'em what to do. We know. Philip's been listening to their conversations, right?”

  Philip takes a bow in response to the merriment occasioned by my rendering. A freelance consultant who eavesdrops on UN headquarters? I am secretly flabbergasted, but decline to let it show.

  “If the fighting is reckoned to be Congolese on Congolese, the only thing the UN in Bukavu or Goma or anywhere else will do is bellyache, evacuate the civilians, withdraw to their installations, and leave it to the hellraisers to slog it out. But — and make it a bloody big but, will you, old boy? — if the UN or anybody else get the idea we're coming from outside, we're fucked.”

  Swahili possessing a rich store of equivalents, I do not presume to water down the skipper's raunchy language. Yet if my rendering wins more approving laughter from Franco, and a wan smile from Dieudonne, the best Haj can offer is a war-whoop of derision.

  “What the hell does he mean by that?” Maxie snaps out of the corner of his mouth, as if I, not Haj, had offended.

  “Just high spirits, Skipper.”

  “I'm asking him, not you.”

  I pass the question to Haj, or more accurately to the back of his Zegna.

  “Maybe nobody feels like rioting that day,” he replies with a lazy shrug. “Maybe it's raining.”

  On cue as ever, Philip glides into the breach. “All the colonel is talking about here, Haj, is a few smashed shop fronts. A little looting and shooting, I grant you. A burning car here or there, but nobody's asking you to set your own town alight. Your father is quite determined there should be an absolute minimum of destruction in Goma, and I'm sure you feel the same about Bukavu. All we're looking for is enough fireworks — enough disturbance generally — to create a situation where a charismatic and popular leader with a message to impart — in this case, your father's old comrade the Mwangaza — can emerge triumphantly as the peacemaker. Luc had the rather good idea, for Goma, of kicking off with a protest rally that goes mildly wrong, and letting the beer do the work thereafter. You might consider taking a leaf out of his book for Bukavu.”

  But not even Philip's diplomatic skills can put an end to Haj's tantrums. In fact they have the opposite effect, prompting him to wave his floppy hands above his head in a kind of universal dismissal of everything that is being said. And this in turn provokes Felix Tabizi to erupt in guttural, Arabic-flavoured French. “It will be a [?]yollowi,” he thunders all on one note as if to an erring servant. “At the propitious moment, the Mwangaza and his advisors will quit his secret location outside the country's borders and arrive at Bukavu airport. A tumultuous crowd provided by your father and yourself will receive him and bear him into town in tri
umph. Got that? On his entry into Bukavu, all fighting will cease immediately. Your people down arms, stop looting and shooting, and celebrate. Those who have assisted the Mwangaza in his great cause will be rewarded, starting with your father. Those who haven't, won't be so lucky. Pity he's not here today. I hope he gets better soon. He loves the Mwangaza. For twenty years they've owed each other. Now they're going to collect. You too.”

  Haj has abandoned the window and is leaning on the table, fingering a large gold cufflink.

  “So it's a small war,” he ruminates at last.

  “Oh come, Haj. Scarcely a war at all,” Philip reasons. “A war in name only. And peace just round the corner.”

  “Where it always is,” Haj suggests, and seems at first to accept the logic of Philip's argument. “And who gives a shit about a small war anyway?” he continues, developing his theme in French. “I mean what's a small death? Pfui. Nothing. Like being a little bit pregnant.” In support of which assertion, he treats us to a rendering of war-sounds similar to the ones I have already endured below the waterline: “Fowl Vrump! Ratta-ratta!” — then drops dead on the table with his arms out, before bouncing up again, leaving nobody the wiser.

  • • •

  Maxie is going to take Bukavu airport and to hell with anyone who wants to stop him. Kavumu, as it is named, lies thirty-five kilometres north of the town and is the key to our success. An aerial photograph of it has appeared on the easel. Did Bukavu have an airport twenty years ago? I have a memory of a bumpy grass field with goats grazing, and a silver-ribbed biplane piloted by a bearded Polish priest called Father Jan.

  “Commandeer the airport, you've got South Kivu on a plate. Two thousand metres of tarmac. You can bring in what you like, who you like, when you like. And you've blocked the only airport where Kinshasa can land serious reinforcements.” The billiards cue smacks out the message: “From Kavumu you can export east to Nairobi” — smack — “south to Johannesburg” — smack — “north to Cairo and beyond. Or you can forget sub-Saharan Africa altogether and hightail it straight for the markets of Europe. A Boeing 767 can take forty tons and do the job non-stop. You can give two fingers to the Rwandans, the Tanzanians and Ugandans. Think about it.”