Dark Heart

by Peter Tonkin

  And he found himself another twenty dollars poorer by the time he caught up with his cases and effects.

  He re-threaded his belt, slipped his BlackBerry into his breast pocket with his passport and put the Benincom cellphone in his right jacket pocket conveniently to hand. Then he put his laptop bag over his shoulder and hefted his cases into customs.

  The first thing that he saw there was a selection of ladies’ underwear so adventurous as to be almost shocking. It was being held up by the customs official going through a suitcase. And a second glance all too clearly revealed that the case belonged to the woman from the World Bank. Her cheeks were no longer cinnamon: they were mahogany with embarrassed blushes.

  Enough is enough, thought Richard, and he shouldered his way through the hall and slammed his cases down beside hers. The simple noise distracted the sniggering officials. Then they registered his height and his presence. And the look on his face. The woman’s underwear was roughly shoved back and her case closed then marked ‘PASSED’.

  ‘Are these bags yours?’ demanded the tallest of the three in French that was almost as brutal as Richard’s own.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Open them . . .’

  Ten minutes later, sixty dollars poorer and lighter by most of his exclusive toiletries, Richard carried his cases out into the main arrivals hall. This was even busier than the baggage claim had been. It was as much a market as an airport. People ran here and there, jostling the new arrivals, trying to sell them knick-knacks, local fruit and produce. There were men and women, boys and girls all in a jostling crowd offering everything from help with luggage to cigarettes to local currency and promises to guide.

  The woman he had been following was standing, helpless, at the heart of a crowd of feral children who were pawing at her, apparently intent on tearing the very clothing off her back. ‘Hoi!’ bellowed Richard without thinking, using his quarterdeck voice – the one that could carry half the length of a supertanker in the middle of a storm. Every head in the place swivelled towards him. The crowd of boys broke away from her and descended on him like piranhas. She staggered a few steps, only to find herself confronted by a soldier clutching a Ruger MP-9 submachine gun. One of Colonel Kebila’s best by the look of things.

  She looked over her shoulder, her eyes wide and desperate.

  Richard decided that he had had enough. He dropped his cases and reached into his pocket for the Benincom cell pre-programmed with the number of someone capable of getting him out of this.

  But his pocket was empty.

  The phone was gone.

  ‘Stop thief,’ he yelled at once in French. ‘Someone has stolen my phone!’ Quick as a flash, he reached into his breast pocket and pulled out his BlackBerry. He had left it switched on and programmed with the Benincom cell’s own number. He pressed speed-dial and immediately the phone began to ring. ‘Help! Stop thief,’ he yelled again. ‘Au secours! Voleur! Arrêtez le voleur!’

  One of the urchins who had been circling the woman and Richard himself seemed to freeze, then in a flash he was gone. But the ringing carried on.

  ‘It’s here!’ said the soldier with the submachine gun. And several others joined him at once. Numbly, moving like a zombie, the girl from the World Bank reached into her bag and pulled out Richard’s phone. She stood there, gaping at the shrieking instrument, suddenly alone with the accusing soldiers in a widening space in the centre of a vanishing crowd. Richard strode forward, his clumsy thumb fighting to break contact with his BlackBerry.

  And, as he did so, a slim wiry figure in a Colonel’s uniform also stepped into the accusing vacancy. ‘Ah, Captain Mariner,’ purred the familiar Sandhurst-polished voice of his old adversary Laurent Kebila, Chief of State Security. ‘Still having problems with the ladies, I see. Perhaps you had both better come with me.’

  THREE

  Oyster

  Anastasia Asov watched Celine Chaka as she rang the chapel bell. It was six o’clock local time. Sunset would be swift and soon – especially under the gathering western storm clouds and the overspreading forest canopy. It was time for the Christians amongst their charges to hold their shortened Evensong, and for the Muslims to perform their Maghrib or sunset Salat. Then they would all have supper and start to tuck down. During the last twenty minutes or so, the two young women had rearranged the schoolroom desks and chairs into the chapel’s rows of makeshift pews, and had transformed the teacher’s desk on the slight platform in front of the whiteboard into a rudimentary altar. Just as the bell – a school bell in the daytime – was now transformed to a chapel bell at sunset. Now they stood, breathless and running with perspiration in the suffocating humidity of the early evening.

  Above the rhythmic chime of the bell, the call of the camp’s muezzin suddenly rose, the power of it still able to make the hair all over Anastasia’s lean body rise in goosebumps. The two religions covered the majority of the children here – given only, Anastasia suspected darkly, that many of the older boys had already been initiated into the local forms of magic animism of the Poro secret bush societies. Certainly there was a large number of ritual scars on a good few backs and cheeks. And, she suspected, a good few of the older girls had been taken into their female equivalent – the Sande. A percentage of both genders – though blessedly few girls – had been circumcised. This in spite of the fact that most of the children here – the better part of three hundred of them at the last count – were from lost families and ruined villages. Which begged the question of who on earth was out there managing to initiate them. Obi and Ngoboi, perhaps; the great spirits of the dark places.

  But the bush societies, with their emphasis on the separation of body and soul, the presence of spirits and ancestors, shared a sufficient range of ideas with the Western religions they practised here for the children to look up to the cross or bow down to Mecca with a clear conscience, thought Anastasia darkly. But she would hate to test how deep their allegiance to the foreign ideas really was.

  Anastasia had no sense of being watched at all. Nor any feeling of impending danger. Instead, all she felt, as increasingly often in these long, sultry evenings, was a vague, disturbing stirring of desire for her beautiful companion. Celine was tall and slim where Anastasia was slight and wiry. Her skin was café au lait, except in those areas where she had been beaten, burned and tortured in her previous incarnation as a freedom fighter. Her body moved with something close to liquidity, as though her belly, breasts, buttocks and thighs somehow contained viscous oil – palm oil perhaps – which caused them to judder, ripple and sway when Celine moved. Every action she made was performed with an unconscious, almost balletic elegance, except that she limped occasionally, and found unexpected pains in her shoulders where she had been introduced to the strappado. But even her imperfections made her more desirable in Anastasia’s eyes. The way Celine’s sweat-streaked blouse clung to her now, almost transparent in places, especially as her slim arms rose and fell pulling the bell-rope above her head. Her curls glittered with water droplets as though diamonds had been scattered amid ebony shavings. What breeze there was seemed to mould her skirt to her thighs.

  Anastasia sighed. Shook herself a little. Her lazy sapphic lust wasn’t strong enough to get in the way of their friendship yet; for one thing, Celine gave no indication of noticing or returning it – but it was of increasing concern to the Russian woman. An itch she couldn’t scratch, in the old cliché. Made all the more itchy by the fact that the two of them shared accommodation, sleeping quarters, showers, everything. On occasion even clothes and underclothes.

  Anastasia and Celine were by no means the only women in the organization. But they were the only women of the same age. They shared a calling – but not the burning fervour of the others. And, even among the disparate leadership of the church school, orphanage and rescue centre, they didn’t really fit in. Celine, after all, was an ex-freedom fighter, the Mother Teresa of Granville Harbour according to the media, though Anastasia thought Joan of Arc would have b
een more accurate. A survivor of President Banda’s torture cells and daughter of the current president – for all that her father and she had managed to disown each other almost immediately after he assumed power. Largely because he had failed to hold the promised elections.

  Anastasia herself, lean and boyish – scrawny, she thought herself – with her skin dimpled in all sorts of places by piercings for bars, studs and rings she no longer wore, decorated in a wide range of areas with a disturbing array of tattoos, would hardly have fitted in anywhere – other than a Goth festival or a heavy metal rock concert. A fact which underlay the separation from her own billionaire biznizman father and family, and she made no secret of it. For she had indeed been a groupie to a heavy metal band, a drug addict and a crack whore before she managed to pull her life back together through a combination of good luck and sheer grit. And, as with Celine and her survival, through the blessed intervention of Richard and Robin Mariner.

  Father Antoine, who doubled as head teacher and had been camp doctor until Celine arrived, came into the chapel then, followed by Sister Faith, who doubled as deputy head and nurse, laden with service sheets. In the absence of indigenous animal life nearby – hunted to extinction by starving villagers with access to guns rather than crops – he was a giraffe and she a hippopotamus. Brother Jacob, a water buffalo, who doubled as technology teacher and camp maintenance man, was unlikely to be joining them as he had more earthly responsibilities – to wit the generator, which had not liked the wet weather at all. He and the three eldest boys, whom he was training, would be labouring to ensure that there was light to combat the gathering darkness.

  Sister Hope and Sister Charity were on dinner duty tonight, hovering like superannuated vultures over their task. There were nearly three hundred to feed, after all. And they too had half a dozen helpers from amongst the older girls. Working in parallel with them, the brawny elephant Ibrahim and his boys would be preparing halal food for the elegant leonine Imam Mohammed, the songbird Muezzin Samir and their flock. Neither of these enterprises relied on Brother Jacob’s power, physical or electrical – all the cooking was done over traditional fires, though what was cooked was by no means always so traditional for it depended on what the enterprise’s sponsors in America, Europe and Russia could send – and what of that made it through Granville Harbour and up on Nellie, the bizarrely named riverboat that laboured upstream from Malebo, the nearest outpost of civilization, and kept the place supplied. Tying up at the little pier down-slope from the chapel – a rickety little construct which had only just survived the floods – or sitting out mid steam if she was too heavily laden to risk the shallows, loading goods into the little rowing boat they kept tied to the pier to act as a lighter. Celine and Anastasia taught, doctored, nursed, and provided public faces for the enterprise. They were as adept at raising cash as they were at healing and teaching the children.

  Immediately after Father Antoine and Sister Faith, the first of the children arrived. There was an instant, lively bustle. These youngsters were not the desperate, downtrodden, diseased charity cases of the big charity adverts. The jungle sanctuary gave them hope, health and training. And, above all, a way out, for twice a year at least – four times in the last eighteen months. Anastasia and Celine had taken twenty or thirty of the eldest downriver with them aboard Nellie all the way down to Granville Harbour – a journey of three days going and four returning, never to be undertaken lightly – and passed them on to the seminaries, colleges and university there.

  Those voyages haunted Anastasia, not merely because they took her away from the solitude she enjoyed and thrust her into the bustle she increasingly hated, but because of the simple depression that they brought to her spirit. For they took her through a journey into desolation as well as memory. Past roadways that had been eight- and sixteen-lane highways in the seventies but, with only the rarest exceptions, were overgrown now and impassable to everything except motorbikes. Under Captain Christophe’s gentle tutelage, she learned to con Nellie past ruined villages and towns. Past mouldering jetties, port facilities and the rotting corpses of boats – even ships – that had once plied these waters to supply a burgeoning economy. An economy gone the way of the dinosaurs. Past the greatest folly of all: Citematadi, a piece of urban development to rival Paris, its parks and boulevards all deserted and overgrown. Its buildings vacant and rotting.

  Celine and Anastasia had on more than one occasion taken the opportunity to explore the riverbank and the strange ruins that sometimes clustered round it. Awed, saddened, spooked; like barbaric Anglo-Saxons wandering amidst the ruins of the Roman empire, wondering what terrifying giants could have created such things.

  For it had been there in the city-scale ghost town – and near there, in the rebel camps upriver – that Anastasia had been held captive with Robin Mariner. Kidnapped and held to ransom by the freedom fighting army of General Dr Julius Chaka, as a gambit in the campaign that would eventually lead to the death of President Banda and Chaka’s assumption of total power. It was partly a reaction to that, she supposed – to the sense of helplessness, the terror, the soul-destroying tension of knowing nothing but imagining every physical and sexual horror that might be possible – which finally knocked her off the rails. The appalling experience and the discovery that her father, deeply involved with President Banda, would have been happy to bomb the living daylights out of her kidnappers, no matter what the risk to her. In the face of the near-certainty, in fact, that if he did so, then she would die.

  Almost immediately after her release, she had run off with the rock band Simian Artillery; becoming their groupie, pet and plaything. It had all been downhill from there. Until the moment she was rescued from the addiction to crack cocaine and the lifestyle she had adopted to support her habit. Not by her outraged father but by Robin Mariner, who had shared her terrible kidnapping ordeal but had been rescued – as had Anastasia herself – by Richard. She had never asked how Robin came to find her – or why she had even bothered to look for her. But the fact that the Mariners cared so much for her had given her the strength at last to start to care for herself. And then to care for others.

  As Celine stopped ringing the bell and went forward, surrounded by children, to sit at the front of the church, Anastasia felt a hand on her shoulder. She turned, to confront Ado, one of her favourites. Ado was rising fifteen – ten years Anastasia’s junior – but she was wise in the ways of the forest. Wisdom garnered at the price of scars on her cheeks, back and chest – the devil’s tooth marks of Sande initiation ceremonies. And Anastasia had helped Celine treat the girl for a botched circumcision. Luckily botched in Anastasia’s opinion. The mutilation was minimal. Ado, in due course, would be able to take pleasure in the act of love-making where many of her tribal sisters never would. The tall, self-possessed teenage girl was silently holding out a pile of black stones towards her. It took a moment – and a whiff of fishy odour – for Anastasia to realize that Ado was holding a handful of oysters. Anastasia’s black brows arched in surprise. She knew that oysters were a delicacy down in Granville Harbour but she had never seen any this far upriver. ‘Where did you find these?’ she asked in her rough Matadi – the local dialect.

  ‘Down by the river,’ Ado answered. ‘Come and see.’

  Anastasia nodded and the pair of them left together. Anything to get out of one of Father Antoine’s sermons, thought the Russian woman cynically. It was already dark outside, and the weather seemed threatening. The compound, with its dormitory buildings, palm-thatched lean-tos that doubled as outside classrooms and refectories, was lit by a combination of flickering electric lights and candles – both now attracting the first evening moths but not – blessedly – mosquitoes. The lack of mosquitoes was the deciding factor in their choice of location. The river flowed too swiftly here for them to breed; and even after floods such as they had just experienced, the gradient of the land between the chapel and the river was too steep to allow any dangerous pools of standing water.

 
; Beyond the illuminated area, down towards the river, there was only a deepening, velvety darkness. Anastasia and Ado crossed to Brother Jacob’s generator hut, therefore, and Anastasia reached in to grab the big black steel Maglite torch that the engineer kept for emergencies. It was nearly fifty centimetres long and weighed a kilo and a half. Jacob kept the massive torch in a presentation box with an equally outsized Victorinox knife. She took that for good measure – if they found many more oysters, then she would want to start opening them. In her days as a billionaire oligarch’s beloved princess, she had indulged quite a penchant for oysters, caviar and pink champagne.

  Side by side, the two young women ran down the steep riverbank to the edge of the water. Anastasia did not switch on the torch at first, for she really did not want to be summoned back to the Evensong service, and her prickly conscience told her it would only take a word from Sister Charity to call her to heel. With a sense of guilty excitement, the truants ran down the bank in breathless silence until the busy chuckling slithering of the river warned them they were in danger of getting their toes wet. Then Anastasia pushed the Maglite’s switch forward and shaded the eye-watering dazzle with her hand. The red mud of the riverbank slid into the darker rush of water with hardly any differentiation. There were no deep banks or riverine cliffs here. And yet there was flotsam piled along the smooth mud as far back as the roots of the trees above them and the roots of the mangroves that spread away downstream. Like the ubiquitous water hyacinth, the freshwater mangroves were the result of an experiment in the seventies that had got out of hand in the last forty years. The river flooded regularly enough to support them and in places the huge bushes grew to more than fifty feet in height. But there was a strange, unsettling foreignness about them.