The Lunatic Express

by Carl Hoffman

  PILOT: Flaps one.

  COPILOT: Speed checked.

  PILOT: Clear status.

  COPILOT: Clear status. Clear.

  CONGANHAS TOWER: TAM three zero five four, reduce speed for the approach, and call the tower on frequency one two seven one five, good afternoon.

  A grinding sound—flaps extending and landing gear coming down.

  PILOT: Good afternoon. Landing gear down.

  COPILOT: Landing gear down.

  PILOT: Flaps three.

  COPILOT: Speed checked. Flaps three.

  Sitting over the wings, I looked out the window and watched the flaps extend.

  PILOT: Flaps full, standby final checklist.

  COPILOT: Standing by.

  The rooftops were even closer now. The woman next to me closed her magazine. I noticed a man in front of me, through the crack in the seats, checking his watch. We’d be there in a few minutes, another flight over.

  “Cabin crew,” said the pilot over the PA system. “Clear to land.”

  Back in the cockpit, the pilot said, “Auto thrust. Speed. Landing.”

  COPILOT: Landing.

  PILOT: Okay.

  COPILOT: Final checklist complete.

  PILOT: Runway in sight, landing. Ask the tower about the rain conditions, the runways and if the runway is slippery.

  COPILOT: TAM on final approach, two miles away. Could you confirm conditions?

  TOWER: It’s wet and it is slippery. I will report three five left clear, three zero five four.

  PILOT: Wet and slippery.

  TOWER: TAM three zero five four, three five left, clear to land, the runway is wet and is slippery and the wind three zero at eight knots.

  PILOT: Checked. Is the landing clear?

  COPILOT: Clear to land.

  PILOT: Land green, manual flight.

  COPILOT: Checked. One now, okay.

  PILOT: Okay.

  We touched down, the wheels making that familiar and comforting bump on hard pavement. We were safe, which is exactly what everyone thought on flight 3054. But we were still traveling at 160 mph, and the controlled but frantic ritual and dance up front in the cockpit was in full motion. Time was ticking. Our fate, the fate of 187 passengers, was sealed; we—they—were all alive, all comfortably seated and strapped in, seatbacks up, novels tucked away, watches ticking and hearts beating and lungs taking in air, everyone thinking about love and work and traffic and if they’d be able to get a taxi quickly, and they had seconds left.

  COPILOT: Reverse number one only. Spoilers nothing.

  PILOT: Aiii! Look this …

  COPILOT: Decelerate, decelerate.

  PILOT: It can’t, it can’t. Oh my god, oh my god. Go, go, go, turn, turn turn turn.

  COPILOT: Turn turn to … no, turn turn.

  Crushing noises.

  “Oh no!” a male shouted.

  A woman’s voice screamed.

  More crushing noises, and the recording ended. Silence. Flight 3054 skidded off the end of the runway, bore left, hopped over a road, and plowed into a TAM warehouse at a speed of 103 mph. All 187 passengers died, as did twelve on the ground.

  I felt rattled as we slowed and taxied toward the gate. A few seconds of braking and deceleration—that’s all that had separated this uneventful flight from the one that killed 199. The more I traveled on dangerous conveyances, conveyances that were so like ones that had crashed, the more it seemed such a narrow line between life and death, a matter of luck and timing, or simple fate. Of course, my flight wasn’t going to crash. My ferry on the Rio Madeira wasn’t going to sink. My bus in Peru, crossing the Andes, wasn’t going to plunge off a cliff in the night; I had dismissed Carleton’s worries without a thought. But not a single person, I’m sure, had thought they were on their last bus ride or ferry ride or plane flight, either. I was playing it close, I realized. Walking through the crowded terminal I wanted to hug my family, to feel human warmth and comfort and life.

  I was alone, though, and thought of what Darryl Greenamyer had once told me. Greenamyer had been a test pilot and airplane racer; he’d flown the CIA’s precursor to the SR-71 Blackbird, had won the Unlimited division of the National Championship Air Races in Reno, Nevada, six times, had broken both the piston-engine airplane speed record and the jet speed record, flying a home-built F-104 Starfighter at nearly 1,000 mph thirty feet off the ground, and he’d once planned to take wing from a frozen lake in northern Greenland in a World War II–era B-29 bomber that hadn’t moved in forty-seven years. He’d seen pilots die and he’d done crazy stuff and lived. “Either your time comes or it doesn’t,” he’d said to me, “and when it does there’s just not anything you can do about it.”

  PART TWO

  AFRICA

  Police in Kenya say twenty-three people, including ten children, were killed when the minibus they were traveling in swerved off the road and plunged into a river southeast of the capital, Nairobi. The minibus was licensed to carry twenty-three passengers, but there were fifty-eight people on board at the time.

  —BBC, August 16, 2001

  FOUR

  Agents of Death and Destruction

  OF ALL THE FABLED CONVEYANCES in Africa, the train on the 600-mile line from Mombasa, Kenya, to Kampala, Uganda, stood out. Over a span of eight years in the 1890s, nearly 32,000 imported Indian coolies, overseen by British engineers, built the railroad. So many men died during its construction of disease, exhaustion, and hungry lions, it was dubbed the Lunatic Express. The historian Elspeth Huxley called it “the most courageous railway in the world;” at its finish in 1903, as Charles Miller wrote, “the Union Jack flew over 3.7 million square miles of African soil—one third of the continent’s total area.” These days the train only went as far as Nairobi twice a week, and it was reputed to be a long, hot, slow journey, but at least it was still running; many of the continent’s trains had simply fallen into such disrepair they’d eventually stopped completely.

  I hailed an auto rickshaw for the train station. Mombasa was sticky, humid, and chaotic, but I liked it. Arabs had been crossing the Indian Ocean to the East African coast for centuries, joined by Indians in the nineteenth century, and the streets were packed with women in loose, flowing, burkha-like robes called buibui, with ornately hennaed feet, and Indians in gold and blue saris, and men in skullcaps. But when the rickshaw dropped me off at the train station, something felt wrong. The old, one-story brick building lay behind a wall and a fence in a beaten dirt and gravel yard, and it was deserted. SAY NO! TO BRIBERY AND CORRUPTION! announced a battered blue metal sign. PLEASE DO NOT GIVE OR RECEIVE BRIBES. DO NOT NEGOTIATE FOR UNDUE FAVORS!

  A guard stood at the gate. “Oh, many troubles,” he said, sweating under a white shirt and tie over a second collared shirt, with pink and blue stripes. “The train is canceled now because we care too much about our customers.” That was a bit too enigmatic for me, so I pressed on, and found a woman behind steel bars at the ticket office. “They have suspended service because of the kills,” she said. “For the time being there is too much risk to human beings.” The recent elections in Kenya had unleashed a wave of ethnic cleansing around Nairobi and the Rift Valley, which had mostly calmed. Now the trouble lay with the Mungiki, a mafia-like organization linked to Kenya’s most numerous tribe, the Kikuyu. They were referred to as a sect and shrouded in myth: Mungiki sniffed tobacco standing in rivers wearing loincloths. They bathed in blood mixed with urine and goat tripe. They stripped women of short skirts in public, and forcibly circumcised them. In fact, the Mungiki received most of their income from Nairobi’s matatu industry, the private minibuses notorious for overcrowding and murderous traffic accidents, and claimed two million members, including high-ranking members of the government and the police. Their leader had recently been jailed and then his wife murdered; the current riots were blamed on the police’s refusal to let him attend her funeral. “The train was attacked last week by those Mungiki people and the tracks removed and the train capsized,” the woman
in the ticket office said. “It is terrible; the coaches just climb all over each other.”

  “So there are no trains going?” I asked.

  “The cargo is going, we can pick that up and we are working on the tracks. But we care a great deal about our passengers. Traveling by air, my good sir,” she said, “is much safer these days. We will review the situation on Monday.”

  It seemed worth waiting to find out, so I settled into the Castle Royal Hotel. A long veranda ran the width of the hotel, buffered from the street by planters with mother-in-law-tongue and hibiscus. Ceiling fans stirred the thick humidity; little groups of Indian businessmen huddled together drinking glasses of fluorescent orange passionfruit juice. When the waiter came over I ordered a Tusker beer. “White Cap!” a man sang out at the table next to me. “White Cap is the only good beer in Kenya. It’s like a German beer!”

  Joaquin Fechner was chubby and pale and wearing a khaki fishing vest over a pink shirt. He was sweating profusely, a Swiss native who’d been living in Africa for twenty-five years, and in Mombasa the past six. “Come join me,” he said.

  Fechner was having a few beers before jumping on a night bus to Nairobi, and he wasn’t too enthusiastic about the train. “It’s very dangerous,” he said. “I would not travel on that train right now. The Mungiki are uneducated. Fanatical. Obsessed. You know what they do?” He leaned forward. A drop of sweat slid off his chin and splashed on the table. “The Mungiki will cut your penis off. With a machete!” The bus, he thought, would be okay. “The buses wait outside Nairobi and then travel into the city in a convoy.”

  We had another round and Fechner started to talk, to loosen up. He’d led a routine life in Switzerland, a solid middle-class citizen. Then he’d become obsessed with business books. He couldn’t put them down. And one thing stood out to him: “The most successful businesses never paid taxes!” He liked that idea. He loved it so much, in fact, that he went to an accountant and asked, “How do I make money and never again pay any taxes?” The accountant told him to start an import company in one country and an export company in another, and to live in a third. Fechner bought a motorcycle and shipped it to Durban, South Africa, and ended up on Zanzibar, where he opened a dive shop in 1983.

  He paused, sucked down half a sixteen-ounce White Cap, scanned the veranda. “This is the only place a respectable man like me can drink in Mombasa. Not seven hundred feet from here is the Casablanca. It’s got the worst prostitutes in all of Kenya!”

  On Zanzibar he became rich. “But then I lost it all! Every penny!” He laughed. “I’ve been a multimillionaire at least twice, but I have never, ever paid any taxes!” It was his life’s biggest accomplishment. For the past decade he’d been importing used food-processing equipment from Germany into Africa, mostly the Hobart brand. “They think it’s English and they pay more for it used than they would for new stuff from Korea or Japan.” Before he came to Africa he spent four years in New York City. “You know what I learned in America? Five words that transformed my business: ‘Take it or leave it.’ I learned to say those five words and they work in every business deal anywhere in the world. You must do your research, you must know your customer’s bottom line, but then you have to say those words to get the deal done.

  “Oh, the tales I could tell you!” He nodded toward an African man sitting alone, impeccably dressed in a dark blue, pinstriped suit, a leather briefcase at his feet. “Those men,” he said, “we call them ‘headhunters’ and ‘air businessmen.’ They are here looking for a mark. They have nothing but a briefcase and the clothes on their backs. You must be careful of them or they will take you. I know, because I learned the hard way.

  “And Zanzibar. You know who lives on Zanzibar? It is filled with American mafia. There are hotels there that never have guests.”

  As dusk came and went and the night got black, Fechner’s Conradian tale unfolded. Men like him lived in unlikely holes all over the world, in war zones and turbulent cities and jungle outposts. They lived remarkable lives of tremendous risk and adventure, and once they’d tasted it they couldn’t live without it. They knew it, were aware of it, reveled in it, but were also isolated, lonely, and they would always be lonely. I understood Fechner because I was a little like him. I, too, craved adventure and even risk, and loneliness was its by-product. Usually they weren’t braggarts—boastful men didn’t prosper in the twisting, labyrinthine worlds in which they dealt—but when they found an appreciative listener, their stories could spill out with the force of a gusher of oil.

  Half a dozen White Caps in, Fechner rattled me with his sadness. “I spent three years in Uganda before coming to Kenya, and those were the best three years of my life,” he said. “In Kampala I met a woman. It is the only time I have been in love. She was thirty-five, from the Rwenzori mountains. She couldn’t read or write, but she was a born trader. She knew it deep in her blood. And she was beautiful. She said, ‘Give me two thousand dollars.’ I did. She traded in charcoal, and every night she arrived with a pile of Ugandan money on my table.” As he talked I pictured the pale, overweight Fechner in the dim light of a Kampala apartment, admiring the piles of tattered, dirty banknotes, and I could almost feel his admiration and strange love for her; it was such an African tale. “She would be down in the dirt for me,” he said, smiling, remembering. “On her knees. She cooked and cleaned and I lived like a king. But I wanted to go to Kenya to trade. It is in my blood, as it was in hers. I must trade. I asked her to come with me. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t speak the language and I cannot read, and I have a brother in London.’ I had given her shares, and by then she had four thousand dollars in her account. From trading charcoal! I bought her a ticket to London and she went.”

  Fechner paused. Wiped his brow with a damp paper napkin. Took a breath and then a long swig of beer. “If I close my eyes I can see her,” he said, looking at me, holding my gaze. Memories, years, deep human yearnings, regret—I could see them in his eyes. No matter the inequality of their relationship, no matter his insistent and constant roaming, he had paused and loved for a time. “I am with her. She was so good to me.” He grew silent again. Took another swig. And then said, “I heard she’s married now to a British guy.”

  It was nine o’clock; hours had passed and Fechner’s bus was leaving at ten. He had to go. “But let me tell you something,” he said, leaning close. “In Nairobi I have an old rusty shipping container. I haven’t opened it in two years. It sits in a yard with many other containers under floodlights and walls and towers and men with guns. I keep things in it. It is safe, safer than a bank. In Africa you must take care of everything.”

  WAITING ON THE TRAIN, I decided to find a beach north of Mombasa. A travel agent said one called White Sands was the closest, and the next day I was squished into the Hungry Vulture—one of the thousands of minibuses that careen through the streets of Kenya’s cities and are the only public transportation for two-thirds of Kenyans. Called matatus, after the Swahili word for the three ten-shilling coins that a ride originally cost, they were some of the most dangerous and crowded conveyances in the world. The country’s former president Daniel Arap Moi once called them “agents of death and destruction.” Mombasa’s streets were so thick with them you could walk around town on their rooftops. Officially known as PSVs—passenger service vehicles—their accident rate climbed so high—3,000 deaths a year and 11,989 accidents in the first eleven months of 2004—that the transport minister forced a law that year requiring speed governors and seatbelts. Just the day before, the insurance industry had rescinded a 15-percent premium break given after the law was imposed. The minister who pushed the law was gone, and the Transport Licensing Board told the Daily Nation newspaper that most of the matatus’ speed governors had been “tampered with,” and that “most PSVs were moving at speeds between 140 and 160 kmh, instead of the stipulated 80 kmh.”

  “Travelers on Kenya’s roads,” the licensing board’s chairmen told the Nation, “are increasingly being put at risk because
of the matatu madness.”

  Mad but efficient.

  We were nine, and then in rapid succession ten, twelve, and fourteen, plus driver and boy.

  “Malindi, Malindi, Malindi,” the bus boy—who was a man, not a boy—shouted so fast it was all one singsong word. He rode with his head and shoulders out of the open door window, scanning the crowded streets. He wasn’t just collecting money and operating the door, he was actively selling, cajoling, sniffing for the slightest sense of someone, anyone, waiting for a ride. Two hard bangs with his knuckles and the matatu swerved to the curb; the door slid open and out he jumped. A woman leapt in, stepped on my feet—wide hips and thighs pushing against my shoulders—and squeezed into the seat behind.

  Two more hard, fast raps and the matatu was off. The boy swung in, slid the door forward with a bang, soiled bills folded lengthwise between his pinky and ring finger. A tap—he didn’t even make eye contact—and we handed over our forty shillings, about sixty-five cents.

  Had we been shot into space to a distant planet, we would have been the perfect sample of African humanity, conveniently packed into a can.

  Next to me was a woman covered from head to toe in black, only her eyes darting about, her left hand covered in an intricate and graceful henna design. Behind us a dark black woman with an almost shaved head, a baby on her back, with long, dangling star-shaped earrings and red beads around her neck. In front of me a woman with her arms covered in silver bracelets and a purple turban around her head, clutching a bucket wrapped in plastic, a Rasta guy next to her, and men in ubiquitous T-shirts and flip-flops. And me. The smell of humanity as raw and acrid as a Delmarva Peninsula chicken house.