The Secret Chamber (8 page)

Fabrice signalled to one of his men, hidden by the shadow of the speakers. Louis watched him take the package, retreating towards the office at the rear of the club, and wondered if this would be the last time he would see it.

‘Whatever it is, we’re fifty-fifty, right?’ he said, offering Fabrice his hand.

Fabrice ignored him, attention suddenly focused on the entrance to the club. He straightened his suit, tightening the jacket across his athletic shoulders, and adjusted his sunglasses once again.

‘Hey, Fabrice, we’re cool, right?’

Louis fell silent as he followed the direction of Fabrice’s gaze. Four Chinese men were pushing their way through the noise and commotion of the club towards their table.
They
had the same military bearing as the MONUC forces but these men were squatter, with jet black hair cropped so short the skin was visible underneath. Three of them were shunting couples out of the way on the dance floor, clearing a path for the man at the back. Only his silhouette was visible as he approached, but then the dance-floor lights turned full circle, washing his face with a searing white beam. He was much thinner than the others; his face long and gaunt, with hair receding from the crown of his head. As he came closer, they saw he walked with sharp, jerking movements as if his joints were fractionally too tight.

The three other men stood in a semi-circle in front of Fabrice’s table, arms tightly folded across their chests. They all wore loose-fitting khaki jackets as if they had recently returned from a safari. They were armed and none too concerned about concealing it. A low stool was drawn up and the thinner man gingerly sat down, perching himself on the edge of the seat and crossing his legs. The movement was as slow as it was effete. The man’s lips pursed as he finally raised his eyes.

‘Give it to me,’ he said, rocking his body in time with the words. His eyes were a pale shade of grey, almost translucent in the dimly lit club. They moved slowly, the watery pupils only just reaching up to Fabrice before sinking back down to the floor.

Fabrice beamed his wide smile.

‘What do you want? Drugs? Girls?’ he said, leaning back in the sofa seat and draping his arms over the backrest. ‘You want girls, right?’

The man recoiled slightly.

‘Do not play games. Give back what you took.’

Fabrice smiled like a naughty schoolboy and shrugged several times. The Chinese man seemed to try to restrain himself, then jerked open the breast pocket of his jacket and slid the contents across the table. Three images fanned out in front of them.

‘The handler.’

Fabrice and Louis leaned forward to see a picture of a man lying face down by the side of the lake, the entire back of his skull caved in. The rocks and water surrounding him were tinged pink from blood and his right arm was twisted unnaturally behind his back.

‘Sailing accident?’ Fabrice asked facetiously, his forehead creasing as if in concern. ‘Yeah, that’s right. I heard the lake can be dangerous this time of year.’ Then he leaned forward, peering over the tops of his sunglasses as his eyes suddenly drained of humour. ‘You guys really should be more careful. Remember – you’re in Africa now.’

At first, the man in front of them didn’t react. Then he rocked forward again, hissing the words through clamped lips.

‘You have no idea who you are dealing with,’ he said. ‘This is your last chance.’ One of his men unfolded his arms, his right hand slipping inside the folds of his jacket.

‘Wait, wait,’ Fabrice called out, holding his palms up. ‘You haven’t heard my story yet.’ He took off his sunglasses, pointing with them towards the assembled men, then cleared his throat theatrically. ‘Trust me, you’re going to love this.

‘So, when all the Chinese miners came to the Congo a few years ago, aside from all the machinery and bulldozers, do you know what they brought with them?’ Fabrice paused, waiting for suggestions, but the man in front only listened. ‘Condoms! That’s what they brought with them! Hundreds and thousands of condoms in their little silver wrappers. Can you imagine it? Rubbers everywhere. They must have been thinking that you boys would be pumping every Congolese girl from here to Lubumbashi.’ Fabrice clapped his hands loudly together in rhythm, the noise cutting above the music. He smiled wider, so that the two gold fillings at the back of his mouth caught in the light. ‘And we thought you guys were just here for the mining …’

‘Enough of this,’ the man opposite began, but Fabrice continued, wagging his finger as if chiding him.

‘But, of course, your government didn’t want you all getting infected, did they? All our girls are dirty, dirty. Not like you lovely clean Orientals. But as a gesture of goodwill, condoms were given to every tribe; the Lendo, Hema, Bantu, everybody got them. There was going to be no more AIDS thanks to our new Chinese friends. We were saved! But, you know, there was just one problem …’

Fabrice stood up and, widening his stance, pushed his hips forward and unzipped his fly. He reached inside to his crotch, casually pulling out his penis and letting it fall down one leg of his white trousers. The man in front flinched, pulling away from him with rare speed and losing his balance on the stool. As he half crouched on the floor, he stared up at Fabrice from waist-height, eyes wide with surprise and disgust.

‘But the condoms were too small!’ Fabrice exclaimed. ‘We couldn’t fit into your little Asian condoms!’

He pumped his hips, swinging his penis in time with the motion. The Chinese stared in mute fury, their faces already reddening. Without waiting for an order, the man closest to Fabrice pulled out the snub nose of a Glock 17 pistol from his shoulder holster, but before he could level it at him, there was the sound of shattering glass and chairs being overturned. Men sprang out from behind two of the nearby speakers and surged towards the table, AK-47 rifles held high.

The Chinese swivelled in surprise, the first still going for his pistol. Just as he brought his arm round to fire, one of Fabrice’s men whipped the barrel of an AK across his jaw, sending him crashing down on to the low plastic table and spilling ice from the vodka bucket across the floor. After a few seconds, the man managed to pull himself back on to his knees. His right hand was clamped to his face, blood seeping out between his fingers.

There were shrieks at the sudden commotion, but Fabrice raised his hands for quiet and then signalled to the DJ to continue playing. As people warily returned to the dance floor, he zipped himself up, eyes still fixed on the thin Chinese man at his feet.

‘You think you can scare us with your guns and threats,’ Fabrice said, crouching down so that his head was only a few inches away from the man’s. ‘Scare us? I saw my parents murdered when I was twelve years old. The Mai-Mai took their pangas and … chop-chop! They killed them. And what was their crime? They were from the Hema tribe, that
is
all. Then they took the rest of us into the long house and set it alight. They burned the whole village.’ He raised his hands to his lips and blew softly through his finger. ‘And just like that, everyone was gone.’

A bitter smile passed across his face as he pulled the Chinese man to his feet. Fabrice gently slapped his cheeks, as if he were an old friend.

‘This is Africa, my friend. AFRICA.’ He drew out the word, stretching each syllable. ‘And out here, you got to remember one thing – you ain’t the guys with the biggest dicks.’

THE DULL GLOW
from a computer screen flickered across Bear Makuru’s face. She yawned, stretching her back, and stared into the bottom of the cold cup of coffee wondering if she dared take a sip. An insipid brown film clung to the surface of the liquid and she swirled it around for a moment, before carefully balancing the cup back on the pile of food wrappers stacked at the corner of her desk.

Eight padded folders lay on top of one other in a crooked heap, with sheaves of paper poking out at different angles. Each was emblazoned with a heavy stamp reading ‘Accident Report’ and contained confidential information drawn from their mining archives. Bear had been steadily working through them all day, noting down details until the A4 pad perched on her thighs was a mass of scrawls and underlined words.

The files showed that two of the biggest coltan mines in Australia had suffered compressor explosions similar to their own. Another had been hit by a sudden contamination leak
which
had effectively halted all production since earlier that year, forcing Minecap, one of Australia’s foremost mining companies, to turn to the government for a bridging loan.

As she trawled further through the archives, Bear found that there were others too – a coltan mine in Brazil, two in Canada, and finally a sketchy report from somewhere in northern Mozambique about an explosion in one of their mines.

Bear reached forward to her laptop, pulling up the coltan figures for the first two quarters. There had been an overall fall in production of twenty-three per cent, with only mines in China, the Congo and a smaller one in Indonesia remaining unaffected. Drawing a circle on her notepad around the number 23, she then drew a big arrow pointing downwards.

Getting up from her chair, Bear kicked off her high-heeled shoes and moaned softly as she stretched out her toes, splaying them against the threadbare office carpet. She twisted her thick hair around her fingers before piling it on top of her head and pinning it back with a well-chewed Biro. Gently massaging her neck, she felt the knots running deep into the muscle. She just wasn’t cut out to be in an office all day. It always made her feel cramped and tired.

Pinned to the wall above her computer was a small Polaroid of her husband and their three-year-old son, Nathan. She let her eyes linger on the boy’s smile for a moment and sighed heavily, her shoulders finally relaxing. There was always something so uncomplicated in the way he smiled. Nathan lived every moment in the present, happy or sad, unburdened by the weight of life that seemed to suffocate so many people as they grew older.

Bear’s gaze traced over his soft cheeks and the black, curling locks of his hair. Her husband, Jamie, always tried to get her to cut his hair short, claiming that the other kids would tease him for looking like a girl, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it yet. It was one of the greatest pleasures in her life, Nath drinking his bottle in bed with them each morning, his soft hair brushing against her neck as she cuddled him close. He was a perfect mixture of them both, not just the colour of his skin, which was lighter than Bear’s and a few shades darker than Jamie’s suntanned white, but in his eyes, the oval shape of his face, even his slightly misshapen big toes.

Bear looked at the wall clock and cursed out loud. It was 7.30 and she had promised Jamie she would be back in time to put Nathan to bed. Closing her eyes, she exhaled deeply, breathing out all the dry office air. It wasn’t just the fact that she would miss Nath this evening, it was Jamie’s inevitable disapproval. She could picture his face as she came through the front door, filled with unspoken disappointment. Nathan was always vaunted as the victim of her working late, used as camouflage for Jamie’s own emotions. Guilt: that was the only thing she seemed to feel these days; guilt that she didn’t spend enough time with her son, guilt that she apparently valued work over family, guilt that she had emasculated her husband by earning more than he did.

For so many months now, she and Jamie had led almost separate lives, speaking to each other but never really communicating. Their focus always seemed to be around the child, leaving unfinished business that exploded into arguments
each
time they had a moment to themselves. Bear opened her eyes again and, after a moment, sat down and turned back towards the screen of her computer. If he was going to give her a guilt trip anyway, she might as well get a little more work done.

The phone rang and it took her several seconds to find it under the piles of paper.

‘Madame Makuru,’ came the voice of the security guard on the front desk. ‘I’ve a Lieutenant William Cooper on the phone for you. Shall I put him through?’

‘Yes, thanks, Sepo.’

Bear sat forward in her chair, instinctively reaching for the pen tucked into her hair.

‘I got you working late, Coop?’ she asked, smiling slightly. Lieutenant Cooper had been a friend of her father’s in the early days, serving in the British army in Sierra Leone. He was one of the few English officers who had any time for mercenaries, and while Bear waited for her father to return from the bush, Cooper had been a regular at the Kimbima Hotel. In the old, vaulted dining room, he’d even spent some time helping her with her English. With three daughters of his own, Cooper had always had a soft spot for her.

‘Listen, Bear, I need to know exactly where this stuff came from,’ he said, dispensing with their usual chatter. Usually, Cooper was nothing but hi-jinks and gentle teasing. She had rarely heard him sound like this.

‘It’s like I told you. I got a sample of it, going through our coltan mine explosion. Why? What’s happened?’

There was a long pause as Cooper hesitated.

‘Eh!
Dis-moi
!’ Bear protested. ‘Come on, what have you found?’

‘I’ve found something that definitely shouldn’t be in a South African mine,’ Cooper said slowly. ‘It took me a while to pin it down, but after looking through the aerial footage you sent, I thought you might be right. The compressors didn’t trigger the blast. They were part of a secondary explosion. So I started looking at a few different options.’