The American Mission (17 page)

J
ULY
7, 2009

K
INSHASA

H
and me the screwdriver, please, Jean-Pierre. The big one with the yellow handle.” Alex was lying flat on his back with his head inside an access panel on the wall of the stable that he hoped would eventually become a dormitory for Jean-Pierre and the other boys living with Father Antoine. The stable was wired for electricity, but the lights did not work. Alex thought he had just found the source of the problem. Jean-Pierre found the correct tool and put it in Alex's outstretched hand. The young mute boy had attached himself to Alex and had proven to be both a quick study and a hard worker. He was older than Anah, but small for his age. Alex hoped the two of them might become friends after a fashion once Anah moved to Kinshasa.

Alex used the screwdriver to tighten the bolt holding the cable that had come loose when the fitting had rusted through. The part he was using for the repair was not quite the right size, but it would probably serve.

As he cranked hard on the screwdriver to ensure the tightest possible fit, Alex felt a stab of pain in his chest where the wound inflicted by Chief Tsiolo four days earlier was beginning to heal. The experience in the cavern in Busu-Mouli still had something of a dreamlike quality about it. If he did not have the circular cut in his chest, he might have wondered whether it had even happened at all.

When he was satisfied that everything was firmly locked in place, Alex slowly pulled his head out of the hole in the wall and coughed some of the dust out of his throat. He took a swallow from a bottle of Bonaqua
water.

“What do you think, Jean-Pierre? Do you want to try it out?”

The boy nodded but said nothing.

They walked over to the fuse box on the other side of the stables. Alex pointed at the master switch.

“Go ahead,” he said.

Jean-Pierre stepped forward tentatively, taking the switch in both hands and pushing it up into the “on” position. Two of the three lightbulbs set in sheet-metal fixtures dangling from the ceiling came on, casting a dull brown light through the room. Alex put both of his hands on Jean-Pierre's thin shoulders and gave them a squeeze. The boy looked up at him and smiled.

“That's good enough for today, J.P. We've got the place cleaned out and the electricity back on. I'll come back on Thursday and we can start taking the stalls apart. We'll need to be careful with the wood, though. I have plans for it. I think you and I can use it to build bunk beds for the boys. How does that sound?”

Jean-Pierre nodded in agreement.

After Alex had cleaned himself up, he joined Father Antoine at a small table under the shade of a palm tree in the church courtyard. The priest was dressed casually in light slacks and a short-sleeved dress shirt. His cane hung from the back of the chair. One of the boys brought them a tray with two cold Turbo King beers. The smell of wood smoke
wafted across the courtyard from the kitchen, where the older boys were preparing the evening meal.

“To the future Alex Baines Memorial Dormitory,” Antoine suggested, raising his beer.

The beer was darker and heavier than Alex might have liked for such a warm afternoon, but it was delicious.

“How long do you think it will take to finish this project?” the priest asked. Alex noted that the way he had said “this” project implied that there would be others to follow.

“With just me and the boys, and assuming that we can get all of the material, it'll probably take at least four months. It's a pretty sizable job.”

“What if I rolled up my sleeves and helped out?”

“Then it'll take six months.” Alex smiled.

“Touché
.
”

The two sat in the heat in a companionable silence.

“So,” the priest said carefully, “I hear that you may have been visiting our old neighborhood.”

Alex was not surprised that Antoine knew this. There were few countries with intelligence services more adept at procuring information than the Catholic Church.

“I was out east for a couple of days, but I didn't get as far as Goma. How'd you hear about that?”

“It's a small town. People talk, especially to priests.”

“There are eight million people in Kinshasa.”

“And I'm on a first-name basis with nearly all of them. How was the trip?”

“Unsettling.” Alex was glad he had a friend with whom he could talk over the experience. After asking him to treat the conversation like something that he had heard in confession, Alex told him about the trip, including Consolidated's plans for Busu-Mouli, Chief Tsiolo's rejection of the mining giant's demands, and his own unwilling induc
tion into the secret society that Tsiolo had called the Brotherhood of the Circle.

When Alex finished, Antoine leaned back in his chair and looked at the darkening sky in contemplation. He pushed his gold-rimmed glasses back up to the bridge of his nose.

“So what are you going to do?” he asked.

“I don't know. I've tried to push the idea with the Ambassador of Sustainable Development for the region, but the mining company seems hell-bent on bulldozing the area flat and digging down from there to see what else they can find. It's an astonishingly beautiful place and it would be a crime to destroy it.”

“Can you stop them?”

“It's hard to say. I know Ambassador Spencer well, but he seems to have changed somehow. Then there's a man named Saillard who heads up Consolidated's operations here in the Congo. There's something vaguely creepy about him, but Spence seems to trust him. I'm frankly a little uncertain about how to handle it.”

“Put your trust in the Lord.”

Alex knew from their time together in the Goma region that Antoine's faith was deep and unshakable. The terrible things he had seen in eastern Congo had done nothing to alter his fundamental belief in the glory of the Almighty. Alex's own faith had been considerably more tenuous than that to begin with. After Sudan, he had none.

“The Lord and I are not really on speaking terms these days, Father.”

“I know that, Alex. Or at least I suspect it. I remain confident, however, that this will change. You are part of His plan after all. In the meantime, you have some pretty serious moral and ethical issues to wrestle with.”

“Tell me about it.”

“If you can't change your Ambassador's mind, is there someone else you can appeal to, either here or back in Washington?”

“I doubt I'll make much headway in Kinshasa. Consolidated is well plugged in here and I am confident they have a network of political patrons on their payroll. In theory, I could go back to Washington on my own and make the case that we should be opposing Consolidated Mining's plans for Busu-Mouli rather than advocating for them. It wouldn't do much good to go back to the Central Africa office at State. They don't have enough clout to overrule the Ambassador on this. I suppose that I could send in a dissent channel message.”

“What is that?”

“It's something that goes back to the last days of the Vietnam War. About fifty American diplomats quit their jobs to protest the bombing of Cambodia. The way they saw it, the bombing campaign was both immoral and bad national strategy, and a public resignation was the only way they could get anyone in power to pay attention to their views. It cost the Service a lot of experienced officers and was something of an embarrassment for the administration. So Henry Kissinger, who was Secretary of State at the time, decided that we needed a vehicle for expressing what he called ‘disciplined dissent.' The dissent channel is a way of letting the higher-ups know that we aren't happy about something without having to make a public stink.”

“How does it work?”

“It's pretty simple, actually. All I have to do is write a cable to Washington and send it out with some special captions. I can write anything I want and send it myself without having it approved by anyone else in the mission. By regulation, the Secretary of State is required to read it and respond personally. Most of the time it's pro forma, but a couple of times dissent channel messages have actually resulted in a change in policy. Not often, mind you, but it's happened.”

They had both finished their beers, and the boy reappeared with two more icy Turbo Kings.

“Sometimes,” Antoine observed, “it's important to do the right thing even if it doesn't materially change the situation.”

“I know that's true, Father, but there's also the issue of my relationship with Spence. He went out pretty far on a limb to get me this job and bring me back from professional purgatory. Going over his head would be a betrayal of that confidence.”

“That seems a small issue when compared to the future of an entire village.”

“Is it? I don't know. That relationship means something to me. And the Congo's problems, Africa's problems, are so vast that what happens to Busu-Mouli seems almost incidental. Millions of people have been killed in this war already, and there's no end in sight. The Congo War is the worst, but it's hardly the only one in Africa.”

“There are some people working for a better future for the Congo, including your new friends in the Brotherhood of the Circle.”

Alex looked up in surprise, and his eyes narrowed slightly as he considered what his friend had just told him.

“What can you tell me about the Brotherhood?” Alex asked. “The rituals seemed typical of a secret society, but I've never heard of one that was pan-tribal. They're supposed to be vehicles for bonding kinsmen and passing on tribal knowledge.”

“The Brotherhood is different,” Antoine asserted. “The very fact that they welcomed you into the fold should at least make that clear. Your story isn't the first time I have heard about this group.”

Antoine paused as though considering his next thought. Alex knew better than to rush him.

“There are those across the Congo who are angry about what has happened to our country and the collective failure of our political leaders to set it right. They have built a network that spans the breadth of the country and integrates people of vision from all levels of society. They are chiefs and truck drivers, teachers and soldiers. They are deliberately trying to break down barriers of class and tribe that have contributed so much to the Congo's suffering. They are modeled on the secret societies that you and I both know, but they are looking forward
to the twenty-first century rather than back to an ideal golden age in the past. The group is secret because some in power would see them as a threat. To the extent they know they exist, they do see them as a threat.

“This group has many names. One of them is the Brotherhood of the Circle. The hierarchy is looser than in many of the more traditional secret societies. From what you tell me . . . and from what little I know . . . it sounds like Chief Tsiolo is a fairly important man in the Brotherhood.”

“You call them men of vision. What is the vision? What are they working for?”

“Peace, first and foremost. An end to tribal violence. Then justice. Beyond that, democracy of a sort, development, a place for the Congo in the region, and a position on the global stage that is something other than supine.”

“Sounds appealing. But how do they plan to carry that out? Some local leaders and a few intellectuals can't really take on the army and the political class in Kinshasa. President Silwamba and his supporters are at the heart of the Congo's problems. They have made themselves enormously rich at the public's expense, and they have done nothing to bring an end to the wars in the east.”

“Not all politicians are cut from the same cloth.”

“Who are you thinking of.”

“Albert Ilunga.”

Alex almost laughed. “Ilunga? Is he even a politician anymore? He hasn't been part of the political scene in years. It's like he went into hiding when he got out of prison. I'm afraid Silwamba broke him.”

Albert Ilunga and his Congolese Freedom Party had won a surprise victory nearly six years earlier in the last reasonably democratic elections that the country had held. He had never taken office. While the votes were being counted, the establishment organized to protect itself. Before the official results were announced, Ilunga was accused of “sedition” and “conspiring with foreign forces against the government.” The
charges against him were obscure and the evidence gossamer-thin, but Silwamba controlled the security services as well as the courts, and the protests organized by Ilunga's supporters were quickly snuffed out. The trial of Albert Ilunga was held in secret, but his sentence of twenty years at the notorious Makala Prison in the jungles of central Congo was public knowledge.

After three years, Silwamba released him from prison. By then, however, Ilunga was a visibly broken man. Mistreatment, malaria, and isolation had taken a toll on him. As a condition of his release, Ilunga had agreed not to run for office or head a political party. He seemed to have dropped off the map and Alex had trouble imagining him making a political comeback.

“I assure you that Ilunga hasn't gone into hiding . . . and he's far from broken. It's true that he hasn't been politically active, at least in public, but he is still engaged in helping the less fortunate. He and his organization are doing the Lord's work with wounded war veterans, helping them reintegrate into society. There are many who still view Ilunga as the legitimately elected president and Silwamba as a usurper.”

The boy who had been waiting on them reappeared and informed them that dinner was ready. Dusk was beginning to settle over the city. The sky had turned from blue to purple, and the buzz of insects competed with the sounds of Kinshasa's traffic coming from the other side of the courtyard walls.

“I'd like you to meet Ilunga, Alex. I know him reasonably well, as our work sometimes overlaps. I think that you might find he restores some of your faith in what you call the political class.”