The Twain Maxim (14 page)

A Congolese boy of about fifteen came into the room, dressed incongruously in a green pinafore. He scanned the room, bug-eyed. “Yes?” he said. His voice was guttural, but with a French intonation.

“MBD, I might have a job for you.” Baz looked at Jim. “This kid practically runs the place. He’s in and out of the fucking jungle every day, bringing bush meat for us and the soldiers. He’s our Mr Fix-it. If you want to go walkies, he’s as good a guide as anyone.”

“Is his name really MBD?” asked Jim.

“Yes,” said Higgins.

“No,” said the boy. “it’s Man Bites Dog.”

Jim saw Higgins wince.

“So we call him MBD,” said Baz.

“Hi, Man Bites Dog, I’m Jim. Can you take me into the jungle to look for my friend?”

“You want to look for the man that fell?” said Man Bites Dog. “Forget it – he’s dead.”

“I’d like to try to find him. Recovering his body would mean something.”

The boy’s eyes swivelled to Baz and Higgins. “I’ll take you, but we will find nothing.”

“Thanks,” said Jim.

“Must look to the food.” Man Bites Dog’s eyes swept the
room and he bounded out.

“‘Man Bites Dog’?” said Jim to Baz and Higgins.

“Filthy war name,” said Higgins.

“The kids picked them up during the Mai-Mai conflicts so that if they ever get to go home they can revert to their old ones and no one will know what they’ve done.”

“Is he a soldier?”

“Around here everyone’s been a soldier,” said Higgins. “Every village and tribe broke up into little armed groups. If you want to know what ‘anarchy’ really means, this place has had it taped.”

“Now he’s just a camp follower,” said Baz. “Poor kid’s probably got nothing to go back to.”

“But he’s solid,” said Higgins, “worth more than our entire flea-bitten platoon put together.”

Baz agreed: “Yup, he’s a good boy, which is why we don’t call him by his war name.”

“He needs to drop it,” said Higgins.

“Right,” said Jim. “Well, I’ll go with him. If there’s a chance that Terry’s still alive it must be shrinking fast. We’ll need to set off tomorrow.”

“He can’t be alive,” said Baz. “You can’t fall a thousand feet from a helicopter and live.” An image of the chopper, maybe only fifty feet above the tree-line, flashed into Baz’s mind, with the impression of what might have been Kitson in the canopy.

“I mean,” said Baz, “has anyone fallen that far and survived? It’d be a one in a million chance.”

“Well,” said Jim, “he’s got a family and right now they’d probably like to bury him, if nothing else. I’m not going to leave him there to be eaten by wild animals because no
one can be bothered to find his body.”

Baz shook his head. “It’s a fucking jungle out there, mate. You could be standing three feet away from his body and never know it was there. We can’t even spot our drilling rigs from the air, bloody great lumps of metal they are, bigger than a fourteen-wheeler. Chances of finding a body are next to nothing. We tried, you know – we have a pretty good idea of where he went out of the chopper. I was sat right next to the bloody idiot. You’ve heard the expression ‘impenetrable jungle’? Well, there it is,’ he jabbed a finger at the map on the wall, “fucking miles of it.”

Jim sighed. “At least I’ll be able to say I did my best.”

“Yeah,” said Baz, “and I respect you for that, I really do, but you have to remember that this is Africa. Miracles don’t happen here.”

Man Bites Dog came in with a big dish of rice and vegetables, then disappeared and returned with a bowl of steaming stew and a pile of plates. He put the bowl to one side and spread out the plates then disappeared again. He came back this time with knives and forks.

To Jim the stew smelt tasty but unfamiliar, rather like a curry he had never come across before.

“Man Bites Dog, what is this?” asked Jim, as the boy brought three beers to the table.

“Stew.”

“I guessed that, but what’s in it?”

Man Bites Dog rolled his eyes. “Porcupine.”

“Rat,” said Higgins.

“Really?” Jim felt a little shaken.

“Porcupine,” reiterated Man Bites Dog, his chin jutting forwards.

“Monkey,” said Baz.

“Maybe,” said Man Bites Dog. “Maybe Porcupine.”

“Great. Ebola casserole again,” said Higgins, spooning some on to his vegetable rice. “Bloody tasty, though, I bet,” he said.

Jim forked up a small piece of meat and sniffed. It smelt hearty. He tasted it. “Pretty good rat,” he said.

Baz had filled his plate. “Maybe it is porcupine.”

Jim helped himself and began to eat.

“We’ll take you up on to the kimberlite in the chopper – it’s less than a mile to where Terry fell. If you don’t find him in a couple of days, you never will. We’ll come and pick you up when you’re done or, failing that, MBD’ll walk you out. Just head downhill and you’ll come out somewhere you can get back to us.”

“Uphill bad, downhill good,” said Higgins, with his mouth full.

“I’ve got GPS,” said Jim.

“You’re sorted, then,” said Baz. “We’ll give you the
coordinates
of where we lost Terry. When you get there you’ll see what we mean. And if you haven’t had enough in a day or two you need your head examining.” The chances were that, in roughly eight hours, Jim Evans would be so fucking sick they’d have to air-ambulance him out of Goma to the Hospital of Tropical Diseases in London. He and Higgins had had years of eating native grub that would kill a normal Brit stone dead. The next morning Jim would be able to do nothing, except shit and puke. He wouldn’t be able to even stand, let alone go yomping around the jungle.

He snapped himself out of his thoughts. “We’re pretty much fucked on the cobalt, so we’ll have to do another
money raise, probably about another ten mil – deeply discounted, of course – thirty or forty p. Now you’ve pushed the price up to a hundred and ten we’ve got to make the most of the panic. You good for your three or four million of it?”

Jim was chewing a stringy yet satisfying piece of meat. He swallowed before he spoke. “Sure,” he said, “no problem.”

Baz laughed. “You must have a lot of fucking money.”

“Yeah,” said Jim, “I do.”

Baz fixed him with a cheeky stare. “How much?”

“Enough,” said Jim.

“Well, hats off to you” said Baz. He smiled again. He had been selling short Barron stock hard into the ridiculous rally that Jim had fired off and would cover his short in the rights issue for a thumping profit – another few million into the fuck-off-permanently fund. It wasn’t the way he’d planned it but a profit was a profit.

Jim helped himself to more of the flavoursome rice and stew. He hoped it wasn’t a monkey he was eating – that would be really sad.

“This isn’t monkey, it’s pygmy,” Baz declared. “Ker, ker, ker.”

“Shut up, Baz,” said Higgins.

Jim’s fork had arrested in the air. “Pygmy?”

“They eat ’em here,” said Baz, with a cold glint in his eyes.

“It’s not pygmy,” said Higgins, “but they do get eaten – well, they did. Or so they reckon.”

“Fucking hell,” said Jim. “I thought that kind of thing was a myth.”

“Maybe it is,” said Higgins, “but the militias have been said to kill and eat them because pygmies are magical people and by eating them you get their magic. They even
complained to the UN. Didn’t read that one in your London newspapers, did you?”

Baz was laughing – Jim couldn’t understand why. “That’s horrible,” he said.

“There have been plenty of horrible things around here,” said Baz, suddenly serious.

“That’s another thing about wandering around the jungle,” said Higgins. “The pygmies don’t take shit any more. If they get pissed off, they’ll have you – and I don’t blame them. There they are, happy chappies living in the Garden of Eden, and all these fuckers keep coming along to fuck them up. If it is not loggers, it’s militias. If it’s not militias, it’s farmers burning their forest down. If it’s not farmers its gorilla conservationists trying to boot them out because they might eat one occasionally.”

Man Bites Dog was standing in the doorway and when Jim caught his eye he turned and vanished.

“That’s why it’s so hard to bring a mine into line here. The country’s like a big bag of sharp rusty nails – you have to stick your hand in it and ferret around.”

“So why are we here?” asked Jim.

“Well,” said Baz, “there are three kimberlites jam-packed with diamonds out there – worth suffering a whole lot of shit for. Ker, ker, ker.” That awful quacking noise was beginning to irritate Jim. “For diamonds you can put up with almost anything.”

A hill packed full of diamonds and the future Barron stock chart he had imagined suddenly fused in Jim’s mind. Suddenly it all made perfect sense. A diamond was just a piece of carbon crushed under a huge amount of pressure till it formed a clear crystal. Volcanoes did that and he was sitting
next to the most amazing set of volcanoes imaginable. Diamonds were compressed wealth, tiny crystals of a valueless element that became the earth’s ultimate treasure. And Baz Mycock must indeed have located a major diamond deposit. What a tragedy that Kitson had had to come out to prove what Jim had already known from looking at the chart. The chart said that the Barron mining claim was worth a fortune and so it would be. The charts never lied to him – he had all the money in the world to prove that – so why hadn’t Kitson or Sebastian listened to him? Jim sighed. He was about to make a pile more money that he didn’t need. He started on his second beer.

Man Bites Dog came in with a large plate of fruit. There was sliced pineapple, bananas, oranges, melon and, unexpectedly, two avocados. He trotted out with the dirty plates and came back with some clean ones.

“Now there’s one good thing about this place,” said Higgins. “The fruit’s great.”

“Yeah,” sniggered Baz, “so long as you’ve got someone like MBD to get it for you.”

Jim bit into the pineapple. It was like he had never eaten it before. It was so sweet and soft and wholesome. He wiped the juice from his chin with his shirt cuff for want of anything else. “Amazing,” he said.

Man Bites Dog was watching them from a corner of the room. This time when Jim met the boy’s gaze he didn’t disappear.

“People always wonder why Africa’s such a shit hole,” Baz observed, “and you know why it is?”

“No idea,” said Jim, now gnawing a slice of melon.

“It’s classic mercantilism.”

 Jim shrugged. “I don’t know what that is,” he said.

“In a nutshell, industrial nations keep these guys in a vicious circle of poverty and war.”

“I’m not an economist,” said Jim.

“It’s salt,” said Higgins. “There’s no fucking salt here. No salt, no civilisation, full stop.”

What the hell had he got himself into? Jim wondered. He finished his beer. “Well, guys, I’m going to get some shut-eye. It’s going to be a big one tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” said Baz.

The air was heavy and full of the sounds of night creatures. He felt a tinge of excitement, this place really was something. He walked into his bungalow.

There was a girl in his bed.

In his bedroom the mosquito net was open and she was asleep. She looked adult yet childlike. She had a boyish face and her curly hair was cut short, a beaded tuft poking out at one side. Her shoulders were those of an adult, sturdy and toned. He thought for a second, then closed the door behind him. He coughed, hoping to wake her. She didn’t stir.

“Excuse me,” he said. When there was no response he repeated it, louder this time.

The girl made no move.

He walked to the bed and touched her arm. “Excuse me.”

She rolled over, wide awake now, and regarded him silently.

She seemed about the same age as Man Bites Dog and he knew exactly why she was lying naked in his bed. He stood back, shaking his head. “No,” he said. “I think you’d better get dressed and leave.”

She smiled at him pleadingly.

“No,” he said. “You’d better go.”

She said something in her own language, then lay back and turned on to her side.

This was Mycock’s idea. Jim scratched his head. What to do? He could stalk into Mycock’s bungalow and tell him to get the girl out of his room, but that might get her into some
kind of trouble. He decided to strip down his rucksack and then, if she hadn’t got the message, he’d ask her again to go away. It didn’t seem like much of a plan but he was stumped for anything better.

He laid out the rucksack’s contents on the floor and went through the inventory printout. All of a sudden everything seemed potentially useful. Forty cigarettes had struck him as unnecessary when he was on the plane but now, with his upcoming jungle adventure, he remembered that cigarettes were a kind of international currency that might come in useful. He thought about the ten days’ worth of rations: might he need them, after all? He studied the packing diagram, which showed the order of things inside the pack. It made perfect sense – but would his body stand the weight? He looked at the list again. It would take him ages to break it down and he might end up with roughly the same stuff but in a different order.

What was he going to do with the girl?

He got up and went over to the bed. He tapped her arm. She rolled over. He pointed at the door. “You have to leave,” he said. He waved his arm commandingly. “Go.” He held her shoulder gently and pointed at the door.

She began to babble at him, looking scared.

“Christ,” he muttered, stepping back. He looked at the bare chair. Sleeping in that would be hard. Sleeping on the floor would be hard too, but there was a bed roll in the rucksack and a blanket. She fell back on to the bed and turned away from him.

He could confront Mycock, but he could see the bastard’s laughing face. “Don’t you like girls?” he’d say, and Jim would want to punch his lights out. He could sleep on the floor and
feel like crap in the morning when he had to be rested.

He walked out of the bungalow. In the distance a shadow stood up. It was Man Bites Dog. Jim went over to him. “Want anything?” said the boy.

“What are you doing there?” Jim muttered, aware that if he spoke any louder his voice might carry straight to Mycock and Higgins.

“Waiting for you.”

“Why?”

“In case you need things.” Man Bites Dog seemed to be staring at him as if he presented some kind of challenge.

“You speak really good English,” said Jim, trying to be friendly.

“Yes,” said Man Bites Dog.

“Where did you learn it?”

“When I was little,” said the boy.

“OK,” said Jim, “right.” He looked over his shoulder. “I’ve got this problem, and maybe you can help me.”

“I try.”

“There’s this girl in my room and I need to get some sleep. Can you get her to leave?”

“No,” said Man Bites Dog.

“No?” said Jim.

“No,” said Man Bites Dog.

“Why not?”

“Because she is a present from the army over there.” He gestured to the dim lights of the barracks.

“Why would they give me a present?”

“Because Mr Baz will have paid them to give you a present.”

“I don’t want the present.”

 “She is better with you than with them. Maybe she can run away tomorrow.”

“Run away where?”

“Home.”

“Where would home be?”

“No home.” He cocked his head. “You shouldn’t turn down a virgin. That’s special money.” He looked Jim up and down. “You must be a big man.”

Jim took a deep breath. “Let me ask you something. If I was the biggest man in the world, what would I do?”

Man Bites Dog squatted and picked at the earth. He looked up at Jim, the whites of his eyes glittering in the darkness. He stood up. “Send her to America.”

That would be easy, Jim thought. It would cost him a grain of sand from the desert of his money. “OK,” he said, “I’ll do that, but you’ll have to explain I don’t want to have sex with her and what I’m going to do.”

“You don’t lie?”

“I don’t lie.”

“See,” said Man Bites Dog, pointing to his right eye, “I look and I listen. I see everything, I know everything. Show weakness here, only once, and you will die.” He stared right into Jim’s soul. “You understand?”

Jim nodded. He held out his hand and the boy shook it. “What’s your real name?” he asked.

“Dog Bites Man,” said the boy.

Jim hesitated. “Right. I’ll stick with Man Bites Dog for now.”

“Let’s talk with the girl.”

“Wait,” said Jim pulling out his sat phone. “Let me make a call.” He went back to his bungalow and sat on the floor of
the rough wooden veranda. The boy squatted down by him. He rang Stafford.

“Everything all right?” said Stafford, before Jim could say anything.

“Fine,” said Jim. “Got a young girl here in a spot of bother. I want her taken care of.”

“Very well, sir.”

“I can get her to Goma, but we need someone to meet her at the airport early tomorrow morning and take her out of town somewhere.”

“As it happens, I’ve managed to arrange an agent for us in Goma, in case you needed things done – a lawyer chap. I’ll arrange for the jet to be there in the morning to pick her up. Failing that, our man will be waiting for her. I’ll email details.”

“Great.”

“Does she have a passport?”

“I doubt it.”

“May I suggest we fly her to Kinshasa and look after her there?”

“Sounds good.”

“Apart from that, how are things?”

“Grim.”

“And are you safe and well?”

“I’m not sure of the percentages. I’ll keep you posted.”

“Jolly good.”

Jim hung up. “Man Bites Dog, this is what we’re going to do. In the morning, I’m going to get Higgins to fly the girl to Goma in the helicopter. Someone will meet her at the airport and fly her to Kinshasa. We’ll look after her there for a bit. I’ll take care of the rest once I’m finished here.”

“And you send her to America?”

He wanted to say something vague, like, “We’ll see” or “It depends”, but Man Bites Dog’s comment about weakness was in the front of his mind. “Yes.” He stood up. “Now you’re going to have to explain to her what’s going to happen and get her to agree to it.”

“Yes,” said Man Bites Dog.

“Tell her I don’t want to sleep with her and that I’m going to look after her away from this place.”

Man Bites Dog’s head tilted back and he looked at the canopy of stars above as they appeared between the clouds. “She won’t believe but I will make her,” he said.

The girl was still lying in the bed but sat up clasping the blanket when they came into the room.

Man Bites Dog started shouting at her in a kind of
speechmaking
way. Jim had no idea what he was saying. The boy was waving his arms, his words bubbling out in a deep, pounding rap.

The girl shouted back at him, clasping the sheet with one hand and waving her right arm to punctuate her sentences. She didn’t seem that happy.

Jim sat down on the chair.

Man Bites Dog was being very adamant.

“What’s she saying?” asked Jim

“She is scared.”

“I can imagine.”

“I’m trying to make her understand.”

“What’s her name?” said Jim.

“Hélène.” Man Bites Dog pointed at Jim with one hand, at her with the other and broke into more protestations.

Suddenly the girl seemed happier. She gabbled incomprehensibly back at Man Bites Dog, who was underlining what she said with gestures and exclamations. He smiled. “I’ve lied something, “he said. “I told her you need a maid, and she likes that but she still thinks she has to sleep with you or she will be in big trouble.” Then he twitched, as if an idea had flown through his head from left to right. He was shouting again. He seemed to quell the last embers of resistance in her. “I told her she would be in bigger trouble if she tried. I’ve told her to sleep on the floor.”

“What did she say about that?”

Man Bites Dog looked at him as if he was a cretin. “Better the floor than with soldiers. If you like she can sleep in the toilet.”

“No,” said Jim, “in here’s fine. I might need to go in there.” He got up, fished in his trouser pocket and pulled out a bundle of money. He peeled off a couple of hundred-dollar bills and gave them to Man Bites Dog.

Man Bites Dog looked at the money and then at Jim. He gave a short high-pitched chuckle and stuffed the money into a small pocket on the arm of his shirt. “I’m going,” he said, with a broad smile.

As soon as Man Bites Dog had loped out of the room, the girl got out of bed and went to get dressed. Jim had an idea. He went to his pack and pulled out the inventory with its map of contents. He unzipped the top, fished halfway down and retrieved a little orange plastic packet. He dropped it on to the floor and dug down for the all-weather blanket.

The girl was dressed now and stood like a statue, watching him. He took the pack, about the size of a paperback, opened it and shook out the inflatable mattress. Then he blew it up,
closed the valve and laid it on the floor at the end of the bed. He pulled the blanket out of its pouch and laid it on top of the mattress.

He should sleep on the mattress, he thought, then imagined the confusion that would ensue. He pointed at her and it. The girl stripped off again, to her underwear this time, and climbed under the blanket. He turned off the main light, took off his trousers and socks and got under the sheet. The bed had an earthy perfume. He switched off the bedside light, the glow from outside illuminating the room.

There was a rustle from the foot of the bed and the girl stood up, outlined in the shadow. Oh dear – what now? He thought he knew.

She walked up to the side of the bed and reached forwards. He didn’t move. She took the mosquito net and pulled it closed around the bed, then went back to her mattress.

With a bit of messing around he set his alarm for six on the sat phone. He wanted to be up at first light to download Stafford’s arrangements. What a freaky day, he thought.