Night of Knives

by Jon Evans

  "But what?"

  Veronica decides she owes him the truth. He's a reasonable, logical man. Once he recovers from this period of shock he'll surely come to his senses, do the reasonable thing and go back to Canada. "On the helicopter, right after he saw Athanase - did Strick and Prester come to you too?"

  "Yeah. They debriefed me. I knew Prester already, he was Derek's partner, I met him in Kampala. What happened on the helicopter?"

  "Derek got all… weird… and asked me if it was me who set him up."

  "If it was you?" Jacob asks incredulously.

  "Yeah. And when I said it wasn't, he asked about my ex-husband. He said his name. Danton DeWitt. I'd never told him or any of you about Danton, not by name."

  Jacob stares at her.

  Veronica continues, "He must have known before he ever invited me to Bwindi. Probably before he ever met me. I think, I think maybe that's why he met me. We were at a party, he seemed to, like, single me out." She grimaces. "I thought he liked me. Now I think it was because he knew I was Danton's ex-wife."

  "Danton DeWitt," Jacob repeats. "Tell me about him."

  "There isn't much to tell. He's not interesting. He's rich, he was born rich. He's a commodities trader. He is involved in a lot of African charities, his mother was born here. That's kind of why I'm here, I got involved in them, and then after the divorce I sort of talked one of them into bringing me over. I'm sure they ran it by him first. He probably okayed it because he didn't want me around. Too embarrassing."

  "Did you tell Strick and Prester?"

  "Of course. But they don't believe me. They think it was my head injury, my memory got messed up. But it wasn't. He said Danton's name, I'm sure of it. But listen, I promise you there's no way Danton is involved with terrorists. There's just no way. Derek must have made some kind of mistake."

  Jacob says, "We'll see."

  Footsteps click up the stairs that lead to the patio, and Irene appears, holding a big bundle of clothing.

  "What's this? Flying the coop?" she scolds them gently. " I brought you clothes, but I'm not giving them to you until you're back in bed where you belong."

  Feeling a bit like a high-school student caught cutting class, Veronica shuffles guiltily back to her room. Jacob is two doors over. Pain is beginning to gnaw at her from a dozen places. She lowers herself wearily back to bed, turns on CNN, and lets sleep wash over her again.

  * * *

  When she wakes up Veronica doesn't know how long she has slept, whether it has been hours or days. The light and TV clock tell her it is late afternoon. She hurts almost everywhere, inside and out, but she feels a little stronger too, the food helped. She decides to get dressed. When she strips off her hospital grown she sees her body has shrunk amazingly, she has lost at least ten pounds in only a week.

  The clothes Irene brought are ill-fitting but better than nothing. She dons the slippers and shuffles back outside. No one is in sight on the walkway or the deck. Stairs lead downwards, and she descends them with the banister's help. At their base, a leopard-skin rug awaits, complete with head and jaws. Beyond is the small, clean hotel lobby. The sign on the desk indicates that this is the Hotel VIP. The young and well-dressed woman behind the desk watches her with undisguised curiosity. Jacob sits on the couch near the main entrance, reading a thin, cheaply printed French-language newspaper.

  "Hey," Veronica says. "What's news?"

  "Hard to say. This is two months old, and my French isn't great. From what I can tell it's mostly complaints about how the elections aren't worth the paper the ballots are printed on." He puts down the newspaper. "Prester's going to take me to an Internet café to check mail and make some phone calls. The lines here aren't working, some technical glitch. Want to come?"

  She nods and sits next to him. They don't speak, but their silence is companionable. After what they have been through together she feels closer to Jacob than to any of the friends back in America she has known for many years.

  She wonders who she should call. Her parents, she supposes. She hasn't been spoken to them much for years now, since her marriage. Her aging ex-hippie parents hated Danton, took her wedding as a slap in their face. When the divorce hit she couldn't bring herself to go to them for support. It would have been too much like admitting they were right all along, and she had just crumpled up and flushed away the prime of her life. She tried to leave everything behind when she went to Africa, including her family, but they're still her parents, they must be deathly worried about her, and right now it feels like they're the only people in all the world who might care what happens to her.

  Prester appears at the entrance, jangling keys in his hands. He doesn't look enthusiastic about Veronica's presence, but accedes to her company and leads them out into the parking lot. Two jeeps full of American soldiers are waiting for something, along with the two guards at the gate. Prester leads Jacob and Veronica to a green Mitsubishi Pajero. The American soldiers nod at Prester and swing open the hotel gate, and they advance into the streets of Goma. To Veronica's amazement, the two jeeps of soldiers roll out behind them. A military escort.

  The Hotel VIP is an island of luxury in a sea of poverty. They turn onto a boulevard divided by a wide grassy meridian strewn with trash and plastic bags, occupied by vendors selling airtime cards, cigarettes, and avocados big as grapefruits. They share the potholed road with trickling streams of ragged pedestrians, hordes of cheap motorcycles, battered cars, less-battered SUVs, and a few angelically white UN jeeps. The high walls of the estates on either side are topped by barbed wire and broken glass. Curiously, Veronica doesn't feel overwhelmed by the in-your-face poverty, the way she always did in Kampala. It doesn't seem so bad compared to what she's seen in the last week.

  She sees a helicopter pass above, heading south, towards the lake. The sun has disappeared behind the high bluffs to the west. The boulevard ends at a large roundabout surrounded by big colonial-era buildings that claim to be banks, a post office, and the Hotel du Grands Lacs, but whose shambolic, half-collapsed appearance make Veronica doubt they function at all. The roundabout also boasts a brightly coloured Vodacom store with glossy new ads and posters advertising new SIM cards for two US dollars.

  "Dollars?" Jacob asks, pointing out Vodacom as they pass. "Not francs?"

  Prester says, "It's a dollar economy. You only use francs for small change."

  As Veronica stares out the window she begins to realize Goma is not quite the wretched wasteland it first seemed. Its buildings are low battered concrete, mostly unfinished, but some these drab shells contain flashy boutiques selling stuffed toys or designer clothes. The streets throng with pedestrians: gangs of skinny teenagers selling gasoline from yellow jerrycans, men in sharp suits, young women with basins full of goods on their heads and babies strapped to their backs, elegantly dressed women hiding from the sun beneath rainbow-coloured parasols. A man chatting on a brand-new Razr cell phone is surrounded by street urchins playing soccer with a ball made of rags. It is a surreal mélange of hypermodern and postapocalyptic, but it's not near as overwhelming as it would have been just a week ago. In fact the idea of going out and exploring this urban maelstrom would actually have some appeal, if she were stronger.

  There is an Internet café next to the shuttered marble building that was once a post office, when the Congo was a nation-state in more than name. Shrivelled beggar women nursing malnourished infants hiss at Veronica, Jacob, and Prester as they enter. One jeepful of soldiers remains outside; the others enter and take up stations at the door. The other customers look up briefly, then go back to their work. Detachments of armed men are apparently not unusual here. The café's fifty computers are named after the US states, and CNN plays on TVs in the corners. Veronica is glad to see neither she or Jacob is onscreen.

  The bored young woman at the counter wears Parasuco jeans, a Versace shirt, and diamond earrings. Her entire right eye is obscured by a milky cataract. Veronica writes down her parents' phone number and goes into a tiny phone bo
oth. A minute later the phone rings, and when she picks it up, her mother is on the other end.

  "Hello," Veronica says. "It's me. I'm fine, I'm safe."

  "Veronica?" her mother gasps. "Oh, Veronica, oh thank God, oh thank God."

  Their conversation is brief. Her mother's voice is difficult to decipher, partly because it is tinny and faraway, partly because she starts weeping almost immediately. When her father takes the phone he too is crying. Their voices are frail, and Veronica knows it isn't just the connection. Her parents have grown not just old but feeble, fragile. She hasn't talked to them much in the last seven years. Maybe it happened then and she didn't notice. Maybe it happened this week, and the catalyst was the very public kidnapping and presumed murder of their daughter. Veronica has to cut the conversation short, she can't bear it. She puts down the phone feeling like a miserable failure as a daughter and a human being.

  When she emerges from the phone booth, Prester gives the one-eyed girl a five-dollar bill, and she returns four filthy hundred-franc notes. He offers to them to Veronica. "Keep 'em. Souvenir."

  "Thanks."

  They return to Jacob, who is sitting at the computer labelled IOWA.

  "Have a seat, check your mail, but make it fast," Prester says quietly. "I want to be out of here in five minutes."

  "What for? We just got here." Jacob looks upset.

  "We need to talk. In private. Without them listening."

  Veronica stares at Prester. "Them who?"

  "Strick and his boys."

  "Talk about what?"

  "Five minutes," he repeats.

  Chapter 13

  The Pajero, followed by the two Jeeps, drives along a crowded road, past vegetable and cigarette stalls, until the street commerce suddenly ends and is replaced by – nothing. The road opens into a vast blasted field of jet-black rubble. A few shattered, burnt, half-buried skeletons of houses emerge from the dark landscape, as do, unexpectedly, a few bright new half-constructed buildings. Men with picks chip languidly away at ridges and shoulders of the black rock. The field is littered with neat piles of shadow-coloured stones the size of watermelons; the walls going up around the new houses are made of those stones, mortared thickly together. In the pinkish sunset light the whole scene seems eerily unreal.

  "What is this?" Jacob asks, astonished.

  Prester halts his vehicle in the middle of this strip of wasteland that runs through the heart of Goma like an inky river, all the way to Lake Kivu, severing the city into two halves. It is wider than a football field. To the left, the waterfront is dominated by a massive, black-walled complex surrounded by a rickety collection of crude huts where women sit mending fishing nets. Further inland, the rusted remains of several dozen vehicles lie jumbled like children's toys. The wide strip of jagged black continues inland towards the nearest mountain: a huge, looming, flat-topped presence maybe fifteen miles north. A plume of cloud rises from the edge of its summit.

  "Mount Nyiragongo," Prester says, pointing at the mountain. "You've read your Tolkien? Four years ago Mount Doom went boom."

  Veronica understands. That isn't cloud above the mountain. It is smoke rising from a live volcano. Four years ago it erupted, disgorged a red river of lava that cut this city in two and cooled into the field of black rock around them.

  "Let's go for a walk," Prester says. "But first, do me a favour, go through the pockets and seams of your new clothes, check your slippers, everything, see if you find anything hard and metal."

  Jacob stares at him. "What is this?"

  "Humour me."

  Jacob begins to feel along the seams of his clothes. Veronica does the same. Neither of them find anything.

  "Maybe I'm just being paranoid," Prester says. "Maybe not. Bet there's something in the car." He chuckles. "Which totally makes my day, it'll piss Strick off no end to know we talked but not know about what. Come on. Walk with me."

  First he goes over to the Jeeps that have stopped behind them, and explains that they're going for a short walk; then he leads Veronica and Jacob over the uneven, night-dark terrain. Veronica has to walk slowly and carefully in her thin slippers. Jacob at least has sandals. The vast field of black lava with the blue lake beyond, all limned in crimson sunset light, is beautiful in a stark and inhuman way. The workers are packing up their picks and departing. They walk about two hundred feet inland, to the piled mound of rusting vehicle carcasses that emerge like dinosaur bones from the solid lava.

  "Goma's one tourist attraction," Prester says. "The car graveyard. Lava came spilling down, ran right through and blew up all the gas stations, picked up all these cars and for some reason dumped them all here. There's probably dozens more underneath."

  "What's that big compound by the water?" Jacob asks.

  "MONUC headquarters. The UN peacekeeping mission."

  As if to underscore his words, the gates to the complex open, and three huge white UN vehicles, an armoured personnel carrier followed by two oil tankers, begin to climb towards them along the road carved into the lava field.

  Prester offers them cigarettes. Veronica accepts. Prester lights up and looks around as if he is staring into a parallel dimension. Veronica shudders minutely as the smoke abrades the back of her throat, and again as the nicotine hits.

  "So why did you drag us out here?" Jacob sounds a little exasperated.

  Prester takes a long drag from his cigarette and says, distantly, "Sometimes I think this whole country is cursed. First the Belgians, then Mobutu, now sheer fucking anarchy. Even nature. You see the lake? Pretty, ain't it? That's Rwanda across the bay there. See that hotel? That's where they planned the genocide. Well, that pretty lake builds up volcanic gases inside, and every thousand or so years they blow, suffocate everything within a hundred miles, then wipe it all clean with a tidal wave. Could happen any moment if there's an eruption beneath the lake. Would kill two million people in ten minutes." He shakes his head. "Some ultra-badass witch doctor must have cast the spell to end all spells on the whole Congo watershed. We had one hope, Lumumba, fifty years ago. But the CIA took care of him in a hurry."

  "We?" Veronica asks curiously. "I thought you were American."

  "Kinda. I was born here. Kinshasa anyways, the capital, not that it's really the same country, that's a thousand miles west, there aren't even any roads there from here. But we moved to New York when I was eleven."

  "What brought you back?"

  Prester sighs. "I used to deal on the Lower East Side. Had to do it to pay my way through Columbia. Just little stuff at first. Then more and bigger. Then one day I had to get out, and all America was too fucking small. Came back here, never even got my degree. That's me in a nutshell. I'll spend my whole life two credits short of the Ivy League. Ain't life a joke?"

  "Hilarious," Jacob says curtly. "Why are we here?"

  Prester favours him with a dark look. "You got somewhere else to be?"

  "I'm just wondering if you have a point."

  "I'll get there when I get there. I'm doing you a fucking favour, man. I shouldn't be talking to you at all."

  Jacob looks unconvinced.

  "Prester," Veronica says the name slowly, remembering something. "Prester John was a king, wasn't he?"

  Prester blows a smoke ring. "That he was. The legendary king of a fabulous Christian nation hidden deep in the dark continent. A kingdom of peace and love where the roads were paved with ivory and gold. Never existed, of course. But a whole shitload of crazy motherfuckers came here to look for him. And just look what they found instead." He waves his arm to take in all of the country around them. "Found and founded. Genocide and civil war. About four million dead untimely in the last twelve years, between Congo and Rwanda."

  For a little while he and Veronica smoke in silence.

  Jacob asks, "And now you work for the US government?"

  "No no no. Bite your tongue, wash out your mouth. Not for. With. Independent contractor. Professional go-between. Protocol man. Human bridge between the Congo and America,
providing that invaluable extra edge of local knowledge, cultural understanding, and most important of all, connections to everyone who's anyone. Least that's what it says on my business cards. Azania was a two-man shop. Me the protocol guy, Derek the security expert." Prester hesitates, and his voice drops. "We had real clients. Mining companies. But mostly, in practice, for real? Me and Derek were a deniable front for the CIA."

  The three letters seem to echo.

  "You wouldn't believe all the shit going down out here nowadays," Prester says. "The new race for Africa is on. America, Britain, France, China, Russia, the Saudis, the South Africans, there's a whole new twenty-first century Great Game going on, and everybody wants to win. That's the thirty-thousand foot view. Sounds romantic, don't it? But zoom in close enough and what you see on the ground is a whole lot of people getting very fucking dirty." He smiles sardonically. "The funny thing is, Strick thinks I'm one of them. He will be so pissed that I'm talking to you in camera. But Derek said you were his best friend." He turns from Jacob to Veronica. "And if you were faking it when they put that panga to your neck, then you deserve all the Academy Awards ever made. So what the hell. Let's spread a little home truth around for once."

  "What truth?" Veronica asks.

  "Ay, well, there's the fucking rub." Prester drops his cigarette and grinds it out beneath his heel. "Derek was set up. You know that. He knew too much. But what did he know? Not that terrorists were working with interahamwe. They went out of their way to make that very public themselves, didn't they? Told the whole fucking Internet. No, what Derek knew was that one of our bosses, one of our real bosses, in Charlie Indigo Alpha, was covering up a small mountain of smuggling money. Just imagine. An American intelligence officer raking in profits from illegal cross-border trading by genocidaires. Working hand in hand with Athanase Ntingizawa, Captain Interahamwe himself. Definite first-ballot member of the all-time bad-guy hall of fame, even before he jumped into bed with Al-Qaeda. Bit of a resume stain if that comes out, you know? The kind of thing that might drive the officer in question to some seriously extreme extremes, in order to sweep all the blood back under the carpet. Like cutting a deal with Athanase to murder the guy investigating the smuggling."