The Taste of Fear (20 page)

“The room’s empty,” she told them. “Just us.”

“What about outside?” Sal said, the iron timbre back in his voice. “Are we still in the middle of that lake?”

She went to one of the starboard windows. She gasped.

“What is it?” Thunder said.

“We’re on a river, going through a town or city.”

“Tell me everything you see,” Joanna said quickly. “Maybe I’ll recognize something.”

Scarlett gave a running commentary. The river was a few hundred meters wide, the banks silted. Beyond the scattered banana trees and coconut palms, derelict buildings and billboards with faded advertisements rose up against the misty-pink morning sky. A little ways ahead a bridge spanned the river. People were walking along the pedestrian carriageway beneath the road.

“Any ideas, Joanna?” Scarlett said when she’d finished.

She was shaking her head, a frown on her face. “Not without better landmarks, I’m afraid.”

“Dammit,” Thunder said.

“Keep your eyes peeled,” Sal told her.

Scarlett said she would and went to a different window. The orange sun rose higher in the sky, which gradually brightened to a crystalline blue. The air warmed. The buildings became sparser until there was nothing to see but virgin land. She went to the stern window for a change of view. It offered a panoramic view of the river behind them. The river remained on average two hundred meters across, sometimes wider, sometimes narrower, mud brown, slithering this way and that like a long, still snake. The wake churned the mocha-colored water a bubbly white, which fanned away from the stern and washed up against the tussocks of grass, lily pads, and water hyacinths that suckled the shore. The spiral staircase she had climbed the day before was directly to the right of the door. From her vantage point it was impossible to see up to the top deck. Thankfully that worked both ways. She didn’t know how the great Jahja would react if he glanced down and saw her peering up at him.

Every now and then someone would ask her what she saw, and each time she would tell them the same thing: nothing new. Eventually they stopped asking altogether. For the next while the land rolled past flat and unexceptional until, quite abruptly, the riverbanks steepened.

Tall reeds, papyrus, and trees of every shade of green rose to form impenetrable walls on either side of the riverboat, broken only by occasional drainage passages that cut deep scars in the red earth. So hypnotic was the passing scenery Scarlett almost missed the village spread out on a riverfront clearing. When her brain registered what her eyes were seeing, she immediately snapped to attention. She hurried back to the starboard window. Her eyes widened. The huts were perched high on stilts, likely to avoid seasonal flooding. The walls were made from sun-baked mud, the roofs from grass and palm fronds. Fishing nets had been hung out to dry. Several pirogues—dugout canoes—lined the shores. Two African men stood at the edge of the water, watching the riverboat pass. They had perfectly black skin, scruffy Western T-shirts and shorts, and no shoes. One of them held an egg-beater fishing rod, the kind you’d find in any American sporting store.

“There’s a village,” Scarlett said. “Two men are watching us pass. Tribal people.”

Joanna sighed. “We’re going to need more than a couple of natives to pinpoint our location, unfortunately.”

The excitement in the cabin quickly died down. Silence and frowns returned.

Scarlett, however, would not be deterred and kept post. Time dragged. Hours, maybe. Her eyelids became heavy. Her mind wandered. Her knees began to ache. Just as she was considering sitting down, a second village appeared. Children ran along the shore, pointing at the riverboat. Women stood before big cooking fires, dirty clouds of smoke billowing in the air.

Four men jumped in two pirogues, two in each, and began paddling to the center of the river, where they waited, like the pace cars on a racetrack. The riverboat chugged past, and Scarlett saw one pirogue was filled with plastic bottles of what might have been palm oil while the other was stacked with cassava, bread, fruit, fish, and meat. She stared into the eyes of the four men. They stared back at her impassively.

Then they were gone from view.

“Um,” she said uncertainly.

“What is it?” Sal said, turning his head toward her.

“I think we’re about to be boarded.”

Sal and Thunder and Joanna and Miranda all started talking at once, asking questions she couldn’t answer. She hurried to the stern window. The Africans were now paddling furiously to catch up, bobbing and dipping in the churning wake. The man standing at the bow of the lead pirogue leapt, grabbed the stern deck railing, and tied up with a rope made from woven vine. He was very tall and agile, his muscles lean and powerful, his skin wet and glistening like oil. Given his physique and grace, Scarlett thought he likely could have made the NBA had he grown up in the U.S. instead of Africa, making millions of dollars a year playing ball.

Suddenly booted footsteps thumped down the staircase.

Everyone stopped talking.

Scarlett stepped away from the window and sat down, her back to the door, her chin snug against her chest so her hair fell down over her raised blindfold. A red-haired Cousin It. She listened as words in Arabic and some falsetto tonal language shot back and forth. When the bartering or whatever they were doing finished, the door to the cabin opened and something heavy was tossed inside, landing with a thud on the floor. The door closed. The lock clicked.

Scarlett waited several minutes to make certain the men outside had returned to their pirogues and the top deck respectively before brushing the hair from her eyes and turning. A canvas sack lay on the floor, the top open, spilling out overripe fruit.

“Lunch time,” she announced.

All at once Sal and Thunder and the embassy women crawled purposely toward the food. Sal—who owned a walk-in closet full of thousand-dollar suits and who cut his toast and egg into bite-sized pieces—bumped a mango with a knee, found it with his mouth, and tore into it, juice dribbling down his chin. Miranda, unable to peel the skin from a banana with her teeth, squished it with her elbow and licked the meat of the fruit off the floor. Thunder and Joanna chomped back yellow-skinned grapefruit. It was, Scarlett thought, an incredibly depressing sight. Nevertheless, unlike the day before, she knew she could no longer hold out. If she did, she would die. It was as simple as that.

She swallowed her pride—her dignity—and got on her knees. She ate.

Today Kalemie resembled a ghost town populated by sad blokes who had no better place to go. The buildings were broken, the corrugated iron roofs rusted, the brick walls crumbling. The people were subdued and quiet. Many were drunk. As Fitzgerald walked down the high street, ragtag peddlers tried to hawk him bottles of soda and knock-off batteries and other junk made in China. Women offered him salted fish wrapped in banana leaves. He told them all to piss off.

No one could afford cars or motorbikes, so the only wheeled traffic was kids on aged bicycles. Sometimes the kids rode close to him and yelled shit, likely trying to spook him into doling out some money. He ignored them but remained vigilant. Desperate people did desperate things, and a public tussle was the last thing he wanted. He didn’t think the locals would react kindly to seeing a white bloke beat the snot out of several black kids. It could start a lynching, and he would be the lynched man.

Eventually he came upon a bar named
Circle des Cheminots,
which was French for Railwaymen’s Club. He stopped out front and tried to imagine the sagging, ramshackle building as it might have been sixty years before, filled with sophisticated people and laughter, a Mercedes Benz 220S parked out front, chrome fenders gleaming. He couldn’t do it. The reality was too far removed from the ideal. It was like looking at pictures of Hiroshima or Nagasaki hours after the bombs were dropped and trying to imagine what the cities looked like days before.

He pushed through the front door. The interior was roughly the same size as the pubs back home in Ireland, the major difference being in an Irish pub you could hardly hear the bloke next to you, whereas here you could hear a pin drop.

The customers were all men. Most were sitting alone, a drink in front of them, a hand-rolled fag hanging from their lips, blue smoke drifting up their despondent faces. They all stared at Fitzgerald with dead eyes. He held each of those stares for several seconds until he was satisfied he had won each pissing contest, or at least managed a draw.

He went to the bar and ordered a beer. The barwoman set a mug filled with dark warm stout in front of him and told him it cost five hundred Congolese francs, which was the country’s highest banknote, worth about ninety U.S. cents. He took his money clip from his pocket, letting the woman see the fold of bills. “I need to rent a boat,” he said.

“No boats here.”

He peeled an American twenty from the wad and set it on the counter. President Jackson stared up at them, somehow managing to appear intelligent and confused at the same time. Likely wondering what the fuck he was doing in the Congo.

“I have no change for that,” she said. It came off her tongue like an insult.

“It’s yours if you can find me a boat.”

She stared hard at the money.

“So?” he said.

“Maybe I know someone who has a boat.” She disappeared into a room behind the bar. Kalemie didn’t have working landlines, and Fitzgerald didn’t think she had a Blackberry or iPhone back there, so she’d probably left the establishment to find her boat friend on foot.

Leaving the beer on the counter, Fitzgerald sat down at an empty table. He took his MacBook out of the small rucksack he’d brought and set it on the table. He took the Glock out and set it next to the laptop, so no one got any funny ideas. He plugged in the Wi-Fi thumb drive and logged into his security-encrypted software. What he saw on the screen pleased him. The tracker was only twenty kilometers away, moving at less than ten clicks an hour down the Lukuga River, a tributary that connected Lake Tanganyika with the headwaters of the Congo River.

He leaned back in his chair and lit a Kent, his hand unconsciously rubbing the scar along his throat. He’d received the scar while he was still a kid, serving as part of the SAS’s 22nd Regiment. The Sin Féin had been holding a meeting in Crossmaglen, a small village in Northern Ireland that bordered County Monaghan in the Republic of Ireland. Special Branch suspected the meeting was cover to smuggle a Provisional IRA bloke responsible for murders in Belfast back into the North. They wanted Fitzgerald’s unit to photograph the man and his car. It should have been simple reconnaissance work.

It wasn’t. The meeting had been a trap, a distraction to stage an ambush. Fitzgerald, who’d been hanging back as emergency cover fire, got a garrote around the throat. He bled a whole hell of a lot—enough that oxygen and glucose stopped reaching his brain and he passed out. Which was lucky for him, because the guy who’d jumped him thought he was dead and didn’t put a bullet in the back of his head. He woke up back at base with twenty-seven stitches across his throat. No one else from his unit survived.

Fitzgerald chain-smoked a couple more fags until some twenty minutes later the someone the barwoman knew showed up at the Railwaymen’s Club, pissed out of his gourd. He was wearing a pair of plaid shorts and an unbuttoned shirt, revealing his hairless chest and belly.

Fitzgerald met him at the door.

“My name is Michael,” the man said. His eyes were bloodshot, his words slurred. “Like Michael Jordan, you know?”

“You have a boat?” Fitzgerald asked.

“I have a boat. Where do you need to go?”

“Up the river.”

“The Lukuga?” The man shook his head. “There is nothing that way but trouble.”

“That’s the way I’m going.”

“You don’t understand. There are Mai-Mai rebels. They will kill a white man if they see one.”

“Guess I won’t let them see me.”

“Hey, your life, my man. I warned you. I am not your mother, yes? What are you offering?”

“Show me the boat first.”

The man named Michael shrugged and led Fitzgerald along the dusty high street. He turned down several side streets until they came to one sad-looking house. The clapboard siding hadn’t seen a fresh coat of paint in decades, and what remained of the peach color was blistered and peeling. Every window was broken. To top it off, the façade was pockmarked with shrapnel from mortar bursts.