Oddly enough, there were tons of bars and nightclubs in La Cité—many of them operating in open air and almost all of them throbbing with live music that, to my ears, sounded like the very hottest hot salsa. I wondered how people living in such soul-crushing squalor could produce music that is just purely wild, exciting fun—then I decided maybe the music is their antidote to soul-crushing squalor. Seeing that I was taking it in, Glen noted (with a touch of irony, I thought) that Kinshasa is the live-music capital of Africa. I wasn’t tempted to pause for a closer look and listen.
After driving half an hour we were still nowhere near the city center, where the government buildings, museums, and European-style shops are, but were in a better class of slum, which is where Glen lived and where I’d spend the night. He and his girl, Kitoko, had an apartment in a house dating from the colonial era, once elegant but now pretty bedraggled. Even here, there were people scattered around cooking over open fires, and we had to climb over some to get to the outside staircase that led to Glen’s apartment on the second floor.
I liked Kitoko as soon as I saw her. She was about twenty-five, skinny, no great beauty, but with a huge, friendly smile. Like Mafuta, she spoke only Lingala and French, but she didn’t need me to draw pictures to know that I craved a bathroom, which, luckily, they had. I was relieved to learn they had a kerosene stove—no cooking with garbage here! The place was also equipped with kerosene lamps (and plenty of kerosene smell) for when the electricity went off, which was often.
Kitoko was cooking moambé—chicken and rice with a peanut- and palm-oil sauce that filled the tiny kitchen with a wonderful fragrance. Glen showed me his collection of cassettes—half rock ‘n’ roll, half current Zairean music—and invited me to make a choice. I always hate it when people do this, so I just grabbed some cassettes at random and handed them over.
As we listened to music and waited for the moambé, Glen explained that he’d met Kitoko while flying and doing other odd jobs for the Republic of Mabili. Turns out she is the daughter of Luk’s wife’s cousin—a relation I have to admit is way beyond my comprehension. She worked downtown for an import-export firm and also served as Luk’s fixer, arranger, and eyes and ears in Kinshasa.
Art was right about one thing. I’d slept all the way to Zurich and most of the way to Zaire, and by nine o’clock Kinshasa time I was just perking up for an all-night poker game or something. However, after downing a couple of giant bottles of the local beer with dinner and after, I started to mellow out, so that by one in the morning I was ready for a nap. Eight hours later we breakfasted on bananas from their stash and Oreo cookies from mine, and Kitoko gave each of us a hug good-bye. Mafuta was waiting for us downstairs with the car, and we made it back to the airport without getting mugged, stoned, shot at, pounced on, bombed, shelled, garroted, gassed, pitched into, caught in a cross fire, sniped at, blockaded, napalmed, or trip-wired. No one even hit us with a water balloon.
All the same, overnight someone had siphoned off the gas from the helicopter, parked in plain view at the airport under guard the whole time by an airport mechanic specially bribed for that purpose. Just business as usual as far as Glen was concerned, and he had us under way after an hour’s delay.
Once we were in the air and stabilized, Glen remarked that I was now in a position to tell my friends back home that I’d met a real, live spy.
At first I thought he was referring to himself, but that didn’t make any sense. After thinking about it for a second, I said, “Oh—you mean Mafuta.”
“No, not Mafuta. He’s just muscle. I’m talking about Kitoko. Most spies that operate in real life are nothing like the ones you read about in spy novels.”
Lukambo Owana
The general route to Bolamba was simple enough: Follow the Zaire River northeast for five hundred miles, turn left at the Mongala, and after fifty miles there you are. The Zaire part would be easy enough—it’s a huge river, as big and muddy as the Mississippi. Turning left at the Mongala would be easy too—if it were marked by some nice monument like the World Trade Center. It wasn’t my problem to worry about. Obviously Glen had some way of knowing how to pick the Mongala out of all the other tributaries that wander off and disappear into the rain forest every few miles.
Even if we could have taken a direct beeline route, I’m glad we didn’t, because then I would have missed seeing one of the coolest things in the world, a sort of floating village that travels back and forth between Kinshasa and Kisingani. From what I could make out, it’s a steamboat pushing a collection of barges so totally loaded with trade goods and people that you can’t actually see the barges at all. There were live crocodiles, chickens, and goats, an overstuffed sofa and chairs being transported upriver (and meanwhile providing seating for a dozen people), boxes, bundles, crates, bales of clothes, a rusty Jeep, a stack of coffins, an upright piano, people everywhere, babies and children everywhere, women pounding something I later learned was manioc in big enamel tubs, people cooking, people trading, people gambling, people scrambling from barge to barge. Every barge has a bar, and music and dancing are nonstop day and night. Traders from interior villages paddle down tributaries to reach the river and meet up with the steamer—it can take them days. Along the way, folks paddle out and tie up to the barges to sell stuff like bananas, fish, monkeys, and parrots and buy stuff like enamel pots and bowls, razor blades, and cloth to take back to their villages. Glen said it almost is a village, with kids being born and growing up seldom setting foot off this steamer barge-train that shuttles perpetually between Kinshasa and Kisingani. I wished Ishmael could see it, it was such a great demonstration of the idea that there is no one right way for people to live—certainly not to everyone’s taste, but I have to admit it had a powerful attraction for me.
It wasn’t until we were actually racketing along half a mile above the Zaire that I understood what Glen had been telling me about night flight over the rain forest without loran or weather forecasts. The forest is just solid from horizon to horizon, and it grows right up to the river’s edge. Caught in a thunderstorm and forced to land, you’d have only two choices—to consign yourself to the forest canopy or go straight into the river itself. The first would be almost certain death and the second not too much more promising for survival. In daylight the problem could be solved easily enough by landing in the clearing of any riverside village; at night those clearings would be all but invisible.
We were in the air about three hours, I guess, when we turned north to follow the Mongala. On this tributary we saw a trio of dugouts being poled downriver toward the Zaire, where they would hook up to the floating village when it came abreast of the Mongala early the next morning. Glen said they were carrying yams and dried manioc, which he explained is a root that is pounded into flour and cooked into a sort of tropical equivalent of potato dumplings.
After another half an hour we were in sight of Bolamba. At first I thought Glen was putting me on, and that the real Bolamba was probably another thirty or forty miles upriver. But no, he was perfectly serious. This crummy little village, about the size of a baseball field, was the capital of the Republic of Mabili. I know it sounds stupid, but I felt insulted. Like, if I’d known this was all there was to it, I would have said, “Hey, look, don’t send me over to Bolamba, send Bolamba over to me.”
Sensing my outrage, Glen explained that it had been a much larger town during the colonial era and in spite of its unimpressive appearance was still a major trading center for the entire region. We landed in the school playground—and dozens of kids and grown-ups showed up to see who or what Glen was bringing in. Among them was a youngster who stepped forward to introduce himself as Lobi, the minister’s assistant, and to invite me to follow him to the official residence a block away. He grabbed my suitcase and my backpack before I could get it on and said, “Is this all you brought?”
I admitted it was, and we got under way. He asked politely, in heavily accented English, if I’d had a pleasant flight and if my stay in Kinshasa was “satisfactory.” I assured him I had and it was, and that was it, so far as conversation went.
The official residence was a collection of buildings known as the Compound, left over from colonial days—very pleasant looking from the outside, with nothing but a bronze plaque at the gate to indicate its governmental function. The building at the front actually looked like a less well-kept version of the Zairean embassy in Washington. We went in and Lobi nodded to someone at the front desk, took me up to the second floor, showed me the location of a bathroom, and sat me down on a bench.
“The minister knows you’re here,” he said, “and will come for you soon. Meanwhile I’ll take your things to your room. Is that all right?”
I said that was fine, and he nipped off down the hall. Ten minutes later he was back, looking surprised to see me still sitting there.
“Hasn’t the minister come for you?” he asked, rather unnecessarily, I thought.
I told him he hadn’t.
He said he’d see what was keeping him and disappeared through a d
oor down the hall. After about three minutes he stuck his head out into the hall and beckoned me over.
“He was on the phone,” Lobi said, “but he’s ready for you now.”
He led me through an outer office—like, designed for a receptionist but presently empty of receptionists—and into the inner sanctum, where a man who was unmistakably Luk Owona unfolded himself from his chair and rose to give me a formal bow. “Welcome to Bolamba, Miss Gerchak,” he said, in a not-very-welcoming tone, and invited me to sit down. Without showing much interest, he went through the usual rigmarole of hoping I’d had a pleasant flight and a satisfactory stay in Kinshasa, then got right down to business.
“I understand,” he said, peering at me disdainfully through his thick glasses, “that you are looking for some help in finding a home for a lowland gorilla.”
Sitting there listening to him go through all this, I finally realized how far off base Art Owens was in his estimate of this situation. I might have worked it out from the fact that Luk didn’t meet my plane in Kinshasa (and probably never had any intention of doing so). I might have worked it out from the fact that he didn’t walk a block down the street to meet the helicopter—or stick his head out into the hallway or even move out from behind his desk to greet me. But I had certainly worked it out by now.
Contrary to everything Art took for granted, his brother Luk was not our friend. I didn’t know if he was an enemy, but he was certainly not an ally.