The Leopard (23 page)

‘Have a pleasant stay in the Congo, busy man,’ the uniformed official said with a hearty laugh, smacked the stamp down on the passport and returned it.

Half an hour later Harry filled in the hotel registration card at Gorilla, signed it and was given a key attached to a wooden gorilla. When Harry went to bed it was eighteen hours since he had left his at home in Oppsal. He stared at the fan howling at the foot of the bed. It provided hardly a puff of air even though the blades were rotating at a hysterical speed. He wasn’t going to be able to sleep.

The driver asked Harry to call him Joe. Joe was Congolese, spoke fluent French and rather more halting English. He had been hired by contacts at a Norwegian aid organisation based in Goma.

‘Eight hundred thousand,’ Joe said, guiding the Land Rover along a potholed but perfectly navigable tarmac road winding between green meadows and mountain slopes cultivated from top to bottom. Occasionally, he was charitable and braked so as not to run down people walking, cycling, wheeling and carrying goods at the edge of the road, but as a rule they made a life-saving leap at the very last second.

‘They kill eight hundred thousand in just few weeks in 1994. The Hutus invade their kind, old neighbours and cut them down with machetes because they Tutsis. The propaganda on the radio say that if your husband is Tutsi it is your duty as Hutu to kill him. Cut down the tall trees. Many flee along this road . . .’ Joe pointed out of the window. ‘Bodies pile up. Some places it is impossible to pass. Good times for vultures.’

They drove on in silence.

They passed two men carrying a big cat bound to a pole by its legs. Children were dancing and cheering beside it and sticking pins into the dead animal. The coat was sun-coloured with patches of shade.

‘Hunters?’ Harry asked.

Joe shook his head, glanced in the mirror and answered in a mixture of English and French: ‘Hit by car,
je crois
. That one is almost impossible to hunt. It is rare, has large territory, only hunts at night. Hides and blends into environs during the day. I think it is very lonely animal, Harry.’

Harry watched men and women working in the fields. At several points there was heavy machinery and men repairing the road. Down in a valley he saw a motorway under construction. In a field children in blue school uniforms were kicking a football about and shouting.

‘Rwanda is good,’ Joe said.

Two and a half hours later Joe pointed through the windscreen. ‘Lake Kivu. Very nice, very deep.’

The surface of the huge expanse of water seemed to reflect a thousand suns. The country on the other side was the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Mountains rose on all sides. A single white cloud encircled the peak of one of them.

‘Not much cloud,’ Joe said as if intuiting what Harry was thinking. ‘The killer mountain. Nyiragongo.’

Harry nodded.

An hour later they had passed the border and were driving into Goma. On the roadside an emaciated man in a torn jacket was sitting and staring ahead through desperate, crazed eyes. Joe steered the vehicle carefully between the craters in the muddy path. A military jeep was in front of them. The swaying soldier manning the machine gun looked at them with cold, weary eyes. Above them roared aeroplane engines.

‘UN,’ Joe said. ‘More guns and grenades. Nkunda come closer to the city. Very strong. Many people escape now. Refugees. Maybe Monsieur Van Boorst, too, eh? I not see him long time.’

‘You know him?’

‘Everybody know Mr Van. But he has Ba-Maguje in him.’

‘Ba-what?’

‘
Un mauvais ésprit
. A demon. He makes you thirsty for alcohol. And take away your emotions.’

The air-conditioning unit was blowing cold air. The sweat was running down between Harry’s shoulder blades.

They had stopped midway between two rows of shacks, in what Harry realised was a kind of city centre in Goma. People hastened to and fro on the almost impassable path between the shops. Black boulders were piled up alongside the houses and served as foundations. The ground looked like stiffened black icing and grey dust whirled up in the air that stank of rotten fish.

‘
Là
,’ Joe said, pointing to the door of the only brick house in the row. ‘I wait in the car.’

Harry noticed a couple of men stop in the street as he exited the car. They gave him the neutral, dangerous gaze that relayed no warning. Men who knew that acts of aggression were more effective without a warning. Harry headed straight for the door without looking either side, showed that he knew what he was doing there, where he should go. He knocked. Once. Twice. Three times. Bollocks! Bloody long way to come just to—

The door opened a fraction.

A wrinkled white face with questioning eyes stared at him.

‘Eddie Van Boorst?’ Harry asked.

‘
Il est mort
,’ said the man in a voice so hoarse it sounded like a death rattle.

Harry remembered enough school French to understand that the man was claiming Van Boorst was dead. He tried in English. ‘My name is Harry Hole. I was given Van Boorst’s name by Herman Kluit in Hong Kong. I’m interested in a Leopold’s apple.’

The man blinked twice. Stuck his head out of the door and looked left and right. Then he opened the door a little more. ‘
Entrez
,’ he said, motioning Harry in.

Harry ducked beneath the low door frame and just managed to bend his knees in time; the floor inside was twenty centimetres lower.

There was a smell of incense. As well as something else, familiar – the sweet stench of an old man who had been drinking for several days.

Harry’s eyes became used to the dark, and he discovered that the small, frail old man was wearing an elegant, burgundy silk dressing gown.

‘Scandinavian accent,’ said Van Boorst in Hercule Poirot English and placed a cigarette in a yellowing holder between his thin lips. ‘Let me guess. Definitely not Danish. Could be Swedish. But I think Norwegian. Yes?’

A cockroach showed its antennae through a crack in the wall behind him.

‘Mm. An expert on accents?’

‘A mere pastime,’ said Van Boorst, flattered, pleased. ‘For small nations like Belgium you have to learn to look outwards, not inwards. And how is Herman?’

‘Fine,’ Harry said, turning to his right and seeing two pairs of bored eyes looking at him. One from a photo above the bed in the corner. A framed portrait of a person with a long grey beard, powerful nose, short hair, epaulettes, chain and sword. King Leopold, unless Harry was much mistaken. The other pair of eyes belonged to the woman lying on her side in the bed with only a blanket draped over her hips. The light from the window above her fell on her small, supple young girl’s breasts. She responded to Harry’s nod with a fleeting smile that revealed a large gold tooth among all the white ones. She couldn’t have been more than twenty. On the wall behind the slim waist Harry glimpsed a bolt hammered into the cracked plaster. From the bolt dangled a pair of pink handcuffs.

‘My wife,’ said the little Belgian. ‘Well, one of them.’

‘Mistress Van Boorst?’

‘Something of that kind. You want to buy? You have money?’

‘First I want to see what you’ve got,’ Harry said.

Eddie Van Boorst went to the door, opened it a crack and peered outside. Shut it and locked up. ‘Only got your driver with you?’

‘Yes.’

Van Boorst puffed on his cigarette while studying Harry through the folds of skin that gathered when he squinted.

Then he went to a corner of the room, kicked away the carpet, bent down and pulled at an iron ring. A trapdoor opened. The Belgian waved Harry down into the cellar first. Harry assumed it was a precaution based on experience, and did as he was told. A ladder led into pitch darkness. Harry reached solid ground after only the seventh rung. Then a light was switched on.

Harry looked around the room; the ceiling was full height and there was a level cement floor. Shelves and cupboards covered three of the walls. On the shelves were the day-to-day products: well-used Glock pistols, his Smith & Wesson .38, boxes of ammunition, a Kalashnikov. Harry had never held the famous Russian automatic rifle known officially as the AK-47. He stroked the wooden stock.

‘An original from the first year of production, 1947,’ Van Boorst said.

‘Seems like everyone down here has got one,’ Harry said. ‘The most popular cause of death in Africa, I’ve heard.’

Van Boorst nodded. ‘For two simple reasons. Firstly when the Communist countries started exporting the Kalashnikov here after the Cold War, the gun cost as much as a fat chicken in peacetime. And no more than a hundred dollars in wartime. Secondly, it works, no matter what you do with it, and that’s important in Africa. In Mozambique they like their Kalashnikovs so much it’s on their national flag.’

Harry’s eyes stopped at the letters discreetly stamped on a black case.

‘Is that what I think it is?’ Harry asked.

‘Märklin,’ said Van Boorst. ‘A rare rifle. It was manufactured in very limited numbers as it was a fiasco. Much too heavy and large a calibre. Used to hunt elephants.’

‘And humans,’ Harry said softly.

‘Do you know the weapon?’

‘World’s best telescopic sights. Not exactly something you need to hit an elephant at a hundred metres. Perfect for an assassination.’ Harry ran his fingers along the case as the memories streamed back. ‘Yes, I know it.’

‘You can have it cheap. Thirty thousand euros.’

‘I’m not after a rifle this time.’ Harry turned to the shelving unit in the middle of the room. Grotesque white wooden masks grimaced at him from the shelves.

‘The Mai Mai tribe’s spiritual masks,’ said Van Boorst. ‘They think that if they dip themselves in holy water, the enemy’s bullets cannot hurt them. Because the bullets will also turn to H
₂
O. The Mai Mai guerrillas went to war against the government army with bows and arrows, shower hats on their heads and bath plugs as amulets. I am not kidding you, monsieur. Naturally, they were mown down. But they like water, the Mai Mai do. And white masks. And their enemies’ hearts and kidneys. Lightly grilled with mashed corn.’

‘Mm,’ Harry said. ‘I hadn’t expected that such a basic house would have such a full cellar.’

Van Boorst chuckled. ‘Cellar? This is the ground floor. Or was. Before the eruption three years ago.’

Everything fell into place for Harry. Black boulders, black icing. The floor upstairs that was lower than the street.

‘Lava,’ Harry said.

Van Boorst nodded. ‘It flowed straight through the centre and took my house by Lake Kivu. All the wooden houses around here burned to the ground; this brick house was the only one left standing, but was half buried in lava.’ He pointed to the wall. ‘There you can see the front door to what was street level three years ago. I bought the house and just put in a new door where you entered.’

Harry nodded. ‘Lucky the lava didn’t burn down the door and fill this floor too.’

‘As you can see, the windows and doors are in the wall facing away from Nyiragongo. It’s not the first time. The bloody volcano spews lava on this town every ten or twenty years.’

Harry cocked an eyebrow. ‘And still people move back?’

Van Boorst shrugged. ‘Welcome to Africa. But the volcano is bloody useful. If you want to get rid of a troublesome corpse – which is a fairly normal problem in Goma – you can of course sink it in Lake Kivu. But it is
still
down there. Whereas if you use Nyiragongo … People often think that volcanoes have these red-hot, bubbling lava lakes at the bottom, but they do not. None of them. Apart from Nyiragongo. A thousand degrees centigrade. Drop something down there and, pouf, it is gone. It returns as a gas. It is the only chance anyone in Goma has to reach heaven.’ He broke into a hacking laugh. ‘I witnessed an overenthusiastic coltan-hunter drop a tribal chief ’s daughter on a chain into the crater up there once. The chief wouldn’t sign the papers giving the hunters the right to mine on their territory. Her hair caught fire at twenty metres above the lava. At ten metres above, the girl was burning like a candle. And five metres further down she was dripping. I am not exaggerating. Skin, flesh, it flowed off her bones … Is this what you were interested in?’ Van Boorst had opened a cupboard and taken out a metal ball. It was shiny, perforated with tiny apertures and smaller than a tennis ball. From a slightly larger opening there hung a wire loop. It was the same instrument Harry had seen at Herman Kluit’s house.

‘Does it work?’ Harry asked.

Van Boorst sighed. He stuck his little finger in the loop and pulled. There was a loud bang and the ball jumped in the Belgian’s hand. Harry stared. From the holes in the ball were protruding what looked like antennae.

‘May I?’ he asked, and put out his hand. Van Boorst passed him the ball and watched with great vigilance as Harry counted the antennae.

Harry nodded. ‘Twenty-four,’ he said.

‘Same as the number of apples made,’ said Van Boorst. ‘The number had some symbolic value for the engineer who designed and made it. It was the age of his sister when she took her own life.’

‘And how many of them have you got in your cupboard?’

‘Only eight. Including this
pièce de résistance
in gold.’ He took out a ball which gleamed matt in the light from the electric bulb, then returned it to the cupboard. ‘But it is not for sale. You would have to kill me to get your paws on that one.’

‘So you’ve sold thirteen since Kluit bought his?’

‘And for ever increasing sums. It is a guaranteed investment, Monsieur Hole. Old instruments of torture have a loyal body of followers who are keen to pay,
croyez-moi
.’

‘I believe you,’ Harry said, trying to press down one of the antennae.

‘Spring-loaded,’ Van Boorst said. ‘Once the wire has been pulled, the victim will not be able to remove the apple from their mouth. Nor will anyone else for that matter. Do not take step two if you want to retract the circular ridges. Don’t pull the wire, please.’

‘Step two?’

‘Give it to me.’

Harry passed Van Boorst the ball. The Belgian carefully threaded a biro through the loop, held it horizontal and at the same height as the ball and then let go of the ball. As the wire became taut there was another bang. The Leopold’s apple jiggled fifteen centimetres below the biro and the sharp needles sticking out of each of the antennae glistened.