Two of the older village women helped her dress. They braided her hair in a traditional Luba pattern and bound it with a copper chain secured by a gold pin in the shape of a bird. A band of entwined copper and gold sat high on her forehead. Earrings of glass and clay beads and beaten copper disks framed her face. Her dress was made of rich red and black cloth with gold trim that left both her throat and arms bare.
When Marie emerged from her borrowed home, she looked less like a chief than a queen. She stood tall before her people, and she was not unaware of the effect she had on the villagers and Hammer of God fighters who stood in a loose semicircle around the grave site. Alex was there and at that moment she knew that he found her beautiful. That pleased her. Some of the injured were there as well, including Katanga, who sat on a carved wooden chair with his leg heavily bandaged. He had lost a lot of blood and a piece of his thigh, but he would live.
When Marie spoke, her voice was clear and strong, but it also betrayed the anger and profound sadness barely contained beneath her cool exterior.
“My people,” she began, and her words took in the Hammer of God as well as the villagers. “We have suffered a terrible loss. Too many of our fathers and brothers, our friends and neighbors, have died defending their homes and families. Their spirits have gone to the next world, from where I am sure they will do everything in their power to keep us from harm. We honor their sacrifice by living. We honor our ancestors by surviving and prospering and remembering their names and their lives and what they surrendered in our defense. This is our burden and we embrace it joyfully, for we are all of us one people.”
And Marie sang the opening verse of the Kasala, the lyrical death song of Luba tradition. The mournful call and response of the Kasala invited the village to grieve together as a community for the fallen. Manamakimba and those of his warriors who knew the Tshiluba language joined in the singing.
The Kasala ended with a long plaintive note that resonated with all of the hope and sadness of the moment. That note, many of the Luba believed, would reach across to the spirit world and serve to comfort the dead. Almost as soon as the echo from the last note had died away, the drumming began. A dancer stepped forward in an elaborate costume made of raffia palm fiber and bark. He wore an oversize round mask painted ochre and red with a beaten copper border and wild raffia hair streaming behind. Marie recognized the dancer as Mputu. As an addition to his traditional costume, Mputu wore what looked like a showerhead around his neck, a gift from Manamakimba. Two of his sons were the drummers, beating out complicated rhythms on drums made of large gourds with goatskins stretched taut over the tops and bound with rawhide straps.
By ones and twos, as the spirits moved them, the mourners joined in, purging their negative emotions in the ecstatic, transportive experience of communal dance. Marie, Alex, and Manamakimba danced alongside the others, and it was nearly dark before the drumming stopped and the mourners started back to their homes, clustered in family groups. Marie had asked prominent families to temporarily “adopt” members of the Hammer of God into their households to speed their integration into Busu-Mouli, and she made sure that everyone had a home to go to.
Marie needed sleep. Just as she was thinking of making her own exit, Alex touched her lightly on the arm and indicated with a nod of his head that he would like a private word. They walked over to the well in the village square and rested on a mahogany log that had been there as a kind of bench as long as Marie could remember. The moon rising just above the tree line cast long shadows on the ground.
“That was a beautiful ceremony,” Alex told her.
“Thank you.”
“I’m sorry about Jean-Baptiste.”
“So am I. He was a good man.”
“He saved my life at the price of his own. He’s the second man to do that this week.”
“Jean-Baptiste died defending his village,” Marie protested. “He would have considered that an honor.”
“It’s still not safe to be around me. I came back to Busu-Mouli because I needed to warn you about the attack. Now my presence here is nothing but a danger to you and the village. I need to leave. The sooner the better.”
“Where will you go?” asked Marie.
“Into the heart of darkness.”
Marie smiled. “I’ve read Conrad. This is the heart of darkness. You’re on the very stretch of river where Kurtz lost his mind.”
“That was Marlow’s heart of darkness. Mine is somewhere else.”
“Where?”
“Kinshasa.”
• • •
Alex made plans to leave. It was not as straightforward as it seemed. For one thing, Busu-Mouli was a long way from Kinshasa and there were no airports or major roads anywhere nearby. For another, he was a fugitive and he had no way of knowing how wide a net the Embassy might have cast. At a minimum, there would be a reward. It was Uncle Sam’s standard MO.
Air travel was too risky and overland was too slow. The river itself was his best bet. He learned from Mputu that the Nkongolo would be traveling downriver in the morning with a load of copper for trade. It could take him as far as Mbandaka. From there, he could get a commercial ferry to Kinshasa.
He was packing his meager belongings when Marie walked into the house where he was staying. She had traded in her ceremonial dress for work clothes and steel-toed mining boots. Even dressed like a laborer, Alex thought, she was still extraordinarily beautiful.
“I’m going with you.”
“To Kinshasa?” Alex asked.
“Yes.”
“Why would you want to do that, Chief? Your responsibilities are here.”
“My responsibilities are to my people, who will never be safe until the mining company and its political proxies are brought to heel. Ngoca is dead and we have hurt the Rwandans badly, but they will be back. I can sit here and wait for that day, or I can go with you and try to finish this. The snake has a head and that head is in Kinshasa.”
“Who will be in charge when you are gone? Manamakimba?”
“No. That would be putting the fox in charge of the henhouse. Katanga is well enough to serve as Acting Chief until I return.”
“The mine?”
“Mputu can take charge of it. He knows as much as most mining engineers by this point. I have confidence in him.”
“I don’t know how long this will take.”
“This is the Congo, Alex. We have learned to be patient. Our most important resource is not copper or coltan; it is time.”
• • •
At least they would travel in style. Marie had the Nkongolo scrubbed clean from top to bottom and a fresh coat of paint applied to cover the fishy odor that had worked its way deep into the timbers of Busu-Mouli’s most riverworthy craft. As a finishing touch, Mputu had cut the letters of the boat’s name out of a thin sheet of copper and hammered them into the wood on the stern. His oldest son had carved a turtle head from iroko wood and mounted it on the bow. In the stories, Lolo Ina Nombe, the founding ancestress of the Luba clan, often appeared in the form of a turtle. The Nkongolo was now, Mputu averred, fit to transport a chief.
Most of the village was there to see them off. Katanga, who was sitting on a stool with his injured leg elevated, had brought Marie a gift—a flat, oblong object wrapped in an embroidered cloth that looked antique. Marie took the gift from her uncle with reverence.
“Where did you find the time, Almost Father?” she asked.
“I have not had so much to do over the last few days,” Katanga said, looking pointedly at his leg. “I needed to find some way to keep busy.”
Marie unwrapped the gift. It was a dark wooden panel with convex sides about two feet long and one foot across. It was elaborately carved, with cowry shells, clay beads, and bits of polished metal set into the wood. Marie gasped for joy at the sheer beauty of the object.
“Thank you, Unc
le. I will treasure this. Keep it safe for my return.” And she bent to hug her last surviving relative close.
“What is it?” Alex asked.
“A lukasa memory board,” Mputu explained. “We use them to record the history of our people. This one that Katanga has carved tells the story of the defense of Busu-Mouli. The figure in the middle represents Marie. You are there as well, as am I, Manamakimba, Jean-Baptiste, and others. It is a magnificent tale.”
Alex could see the artistry in the lukasa, but he could not see what Mputu was describing.
“How can you tell what it says?”
“Some of us have learned to read the lukasa. I know how. Marie knows.” Mputu turned and looked him hard in the eye. “Someday . . . maybe . . . you will as well. Take care of her.”
“You know I will,” Alex promised.
• • •
Their first day on the river was uneventful. The captain, a weathered old man named Philippe, was a skilled and experienced pilot. It was almost like a pleasure cruise. Alex and Marie spent most of the day on the fantail talking. That night they tied up at a communal pier a little more than one hundred miles downriver from Busu-Mouli that served as a rendezvous point for traders. The river here was wide and flat and calm, almost like a lake. Philippe had cousins at a small settlement about a twenty-minute walk from where they had tied up. Marie gave him leave to visit, with the proviso that he be back by sunrise. She and Alex ate fish stew and watched the sun go down as they drank Primus beers that had been cooled in the river.
Alex had strung on the fantail a pair of hammocks that they used as chairs, and they sipped their beers as the sky turned from red to purple and the waters of the Congo River from brown to black. A night heron flew over the boat and lit in the shallows, where it could hunt for frogs and small fish. As the sky grew darker, the jungle grew louder. The deceptively deep calls of the tiny tree frogs mixed with the higher-pitched trills of the cicadas and the chattering of a troop of mangabey monkeys.
“Anah would love this,” Alex said. “I wish she were here to see it.”
“I hope that she visits Busu-Mouli soon. Since my father made you a citizen of Busu-Mouli, that makes Anah one of us as well. She will be most welcome.”
“She would like that.”
Marie lit a lamp hanging from a hook on the bridge. It cast an orange glow that just barely offered enough light to read by. She used a screwdriver from the Nkongolo’s tool kit to open another pair of beers and settled back into her hammock directly across from Alex.
“So what’s your plan?” Marie asked. “I realize I should have asked this question before we left, but I was afraid that I might not like the answer.”
“I need to find proof of my innocence.”
“What about proof of Consolidated’s guilt?”
“I expect that they will be one and the same.”
“How are you going to do it?”
“I’m not entirely certain yet, but I have some ideas. And I think I have some allies. Do you remember Albert Ilunga?”
Marie smiled ruefully at that. “Of course I do. The only vote I’ve ever cast was for him as President. I even took a break from my studies to work on his campaign. For a brief moment it looked like the Congo would have a future, and many of us believed that Ilunga was the man who could lead us there. We won that election fairly, and as far as I’m concerned, he is the duly elected President of the Congo. But when the election was stolen from him, I stopped paying attention to politics. It just seemed as if one group of jackals was trying to outmaneuver another group. I haven’t heard anything about Ilunga for years. I wasn’t even certain if he was still in the country.”
“Well, Ilunga has been keeping a low profile, but I’m not sure that he’s given up on playing a political role.” Alex told her about his meeting with Ilunga and Ilunga’s membership in the Brotherhood of the Circle.
They sat in silence for some time as Marie thought over what he had told her.
“And what will you do about your Ambassador?” she asked finally. “You do accept that he’s involved in something . . . wrong.” The word seemed wholly inadequate. “Evil,” she corrected herself.
Alex looked stricken.
“Spence’s role in this is the hardest thing for me to get my mind around. He was more than just my mentor. In some ways, he was like a father to me.”
“A father who framed you and set you up for murder?”
“I hope that there’s another explanation for that, but I agree that it’s hard to see one. I owe him so much. When I was at my lowest point after the Sudan, Spence stood up for me. He was the only one.”
“What happened to you in the Sudan, Alex? What did you see that had such an effect on you?”
Alex closed his eyes and told her the story. It was the first time he had spoken about the Sudan to anyone other than Dr. Branch. Even Spence didn’t know the whole story. As he spoke, the past broke through the walls that he had carefully constructed to separate it from the rest of his life. It rushed forward and tried, as it had tried before, to consume him.
After Alex finished, it took some time for the arid desert to fade from his mind and be replaced by the humid jungle night. He had been running from the trauma of the events at Camp Riad for the better part of three years. In the lamplight, Alex could see that Marie was crying.
She reached across the narrow gap between them to take Alex’s hand. Her fingers were calloused from working in the mine, but they were gentle and she stroked the back of his hand, offering him the simple comfort of human touch. Impulsively, Marie leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth, softly and questioningly. His fierce response was a definitive answer to her unspoken question. He reached one hand up behind her head and held her tightly as his lips and tongue explored her mouth.
Abruptly, Marie pulled away. She touched Alex’s cheek with the back of her hand.
“Are you sure you are ready for this?” she asked.
“No. I’m not sure. I’m not sure of anything. But I’m willing to take a risk.”
Marie stood and moved to sit beside him on the hammock.
29
JULY 31, 2009
KINSHASA
The port at Kinshasa was unbelievably chaotic. The Nkongolo’s captain expertly piloted the fishing boat through the congested waterway and moored at a pier on the edge of the marina. They hoped to remain relatively inconspicuous as they looked into the question of how high a profile Alex had as a fugitive. In penance for his status as an alleged criminal mastermind, Alex stayed belowdecks on the Nkongolo while Marie went into the city to look around. He did not relish the idea of a day in the ship’s hold. The smell of fish was beginning to work its way through the layer of fresh paint.
Philippe bought a stack of local papers and news magazines at a kiosk near the entrance to the port, and Alex spent the afternoon thumbing through them. There was no mention of the fight at Busu-Mouli. Neither was there anything about the incident at the UN roadblock. Alex allowed himself to hope that Viggiano and Saillard had decided to keep everything under wraps. This hope was crushed when Marie returned from her surveillance mission with several samples of a “wanted” poster that she said was posted prominently around the town. The picture of Alex was from his embassy ID. It was not a particularly good photo, but it was good enough. So was the reward of ten thousand dollars offered for information leading to his arrest. Perversely, Alex was somewhat put out that he did not rate a larger amount. The money was likely coming out of some kind of unaccountable slush fund, either the Embassy’s or the mining company’s. Ten thousand dollars might well be the largest amount they could offer out of pocket. It was still an awful lot of money for the Congo.
“So what do you think we do about it?” Alex asked.
“I think we need to change your looks, as much as that pains me . . . because you are exceedingly cute.”
“Or silicon breasts and a platinum blond wig.”
“I prefer my idea.”
“I’m sure.”
Instead of plastic surgery, Marie cut Alex’s hair short and dyed it black before styling it to look more European. He had not shaved since leaving Busu-Mouli, and a week’s worth of growth would help to hide the line of his jaw. A beard, a new hairstyle, and a pair of sunglasses was not, Alex knew, much of a disguise. Using the small mirror in the Nkongolo’s head, he compared his new look with the picture on the wanted poster. His best defense was almost certainly the low resolution of the embassy ID photo.
“You still look cute,” Marie offered, and because Philippe was on deck, she took the opportunity to kiss him. The physical part of their relationship was still new enough that each kiss was a discovery.
“You ready to hit the town tonight?” Alex asked, sliding the back of his hand affectionately across her bare upper arm.
“What do you have in mind?”
“I’d like to take you to a friend’s place. Introduce you.”
“What friend?”
“Albert Ilunga.”
“I’d like that.”
• • •
With a price on his head that was more than most locals could hope to make in a lifetime, Alex was a marked man. Money, however, was a shield as well as a sword, and he still had a small war chest from the diamonds he had sold before parachuting into Busu-Mouli. Marie did the shopping. For three thousand dollars in cash, she bought a midsize Mitsubishi Carisma with patched seats and a balky transmission.
They waited until after eleven to make their move, on the theory that traffic would be light enough so they would not have to stop but not so light that they risked attracting unwelcome attention from late-shift cops looking for a shakedown and a bribe. Marie parked as close as possible to the Nkongolo. Alex tried to look unconcerned on the short walk to the car. He felt foolish wearing sunglasses in the dark, but he was hardly the first hipster or gangster to affect them as fashionable evening wear. There were few other cars on the street and even fewer streetlights. Although Marie drove carefully, she still felt the muscles in her back tense when they drove past a police car idling on a side street like some kind of ambush predator. There were no sirens and no lights, however, and within twenty minutes they had reached Ilunga’s villa and the headquarters of the Freedom Coalition. They left the car in the alley alongside the building.
The American Mission Page 31
