The American Mission Page 16

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  The meal at the Tsiolo home that evening was an achievement. Busu-Mouli was far from wealthy, but Chief Tsiolo knew how to put on a show. The village women had outdone themselves in preparing a feast worthy of their chief. The first course was a fiery muamba nsusu, a kind of chicken soup in a thick peanut-tomato sauce. Next, the women selected for the honor of serving the meal had brought out platters heaped with capitaine, a perch with delicate white flesh sautéed in palm oil with hot pili-pili peppers, and mboto, a long, skinny river fish smoked and flavored with sorrel. Packets of baked banana leaves piled on another plate contained a mixture of beef and mbika, a kind of flour ground from the seeds of pumpkins and squash. A covered ceramic dish decorated with hand-painted birds and flowers held saka-saka, steamed cassava leaves with eggplant and garlic. There were also platters of rice, yucca, fried plantains, and sweet potatoes.

  Chief Tsiolo sat at the head of the long wooden table in the only chair with a back. The other guests sat on benches running along both sides. Alex, the guest of honor, sat on the Chief’s immediate right. Katanga sat next to Alex. Marie and Jean-Baptiste sat across from him. There were a few other village elders at the table, and Alex was introduced to them in a formal and ritualized process.

  Chief Tsiolo himself served Alex from the platter of spiced capitaine.

  Like a dutiful daughter, Marie served Katanga and Jean-Baptiste before helping herself. Capitaine was her favorite fish. These were perfectly prepared and expertly seasoned. She savored the taste.

  “So I understand that you were doing some work on our temperamental rock crusher today,” Chief Tsiolo said as he dropped a generous helping of steamed beans onto Alex’s plate.

  “Not really. I didn’t even get my hands dirty. I just had an idea that I thought might help make the machine a little more reliable.”

  “Are you an engineer by training?”

  “More a mechanic. Cars mostly, and some electronics. But an engine is an engine. The principles are the same whether it’s a car or a boat or Mputu’s troublesome rock crusher. If my ideas help Mputu and his boys get the most out of the machine, I’ll be pleased with that.”

  “And why would that be?” Jean-Baptiste asked, with an air of open hostility. “When your very presence here is an effort to destroy our way of life.” The tendons on his neck stood out in bold relief. Marie was glad that she had insisted that the guests leave all guns on the front porch.

  Alex held his hands out, palm open, in Jean-Baptiste’s direction. “I understand why you think that. But it isn’t true. You have a problem here that you need to deal with that isn’t my creation. It’s not an American creation either. Even so, I think I can be helpful in solving it and I’d like you to hear me out. I have a proposal for you to consider and I’d no more insist that you take it than I insisted Mr. Mputu take his cues from me in fixing the rock crusher. He’s open-minded enough, however, to listen to other people’s ideas and take from them what he likes. Are you?”

  “And if we refuse you and your corporate masters? I, for one, will not give up what is rightfully mine without a fight.”

  As he said this, Jean-Baptiste looked at Marie, who was sitting on his left. It was clear to her that he was talking about more than mining rights. Marie glanced at her father at the head of the narrow rectangular table. He was smiling. You bastard, you’re enjoying this.

  “That may not be your choice to make,” Alex said calmly.

  Marie spoke up, hoping to give Jean-Baptiste’s anger a chance to cool.

  “Jean-Baptiste is right,” she said, as she speared another mboto from the platter in front of her. “At least about the security situation. The Rwandans have been moving farther west, but this is the first time they’ve been seen in the Mongala Valley. The genocidaires are only the most recent problem. We have the Hammer of God to contend with and an alphabet soup of pretenders who would all like to take Manamakimba’s place at the top of the pyramid. The government, meanwhile, is sucking more and more tax money from the villages. But you can only get so much blood from a stone.”

  “What does that have to do with Consolidated Mining and its interest in Busu-Mouli?”

  “It has everything to do with it. Who do you think backed President Silwamba’s rise to power? Consolidated Mining and CentAf Petroleum picked him and then helped him fix the election.”

  “Most people in Kinshasa think it was the army that put Silwamba in power in exchange for a free hand in the east.”

  “And a healthy dose of money, courtesy of the extraction industries. Nothing happens in this country that isn’t connected somehow back to mining and drilling. It’s all we have to offer.”

  “It’s the resource curse in operation,” Alex agreed.

  “What do you mean?” Chief Tsiolo asked.

  Marie answered. “It means, Papa, that if a country has a wealth of resources like oil or gold and a weak government, it may never develop naturally. People don’t make things, they just dig money out of the ground, and it’s too easy for big men to come along who think it all belongs to them by right.”

  “I understand that problem all too well,” her father replied. The Chief looked at Alex. “So what would you suggest we tell our new friends from Consolidated Mining?”

  “Chief Tsiolo, your people need a secure home. The wealth locked in these mountains means that this village is no longer that place. If what Jean-Baptiste says is true, that only adds urgency to the problem we all understand. Only you can know what’s right for your people. But if I were in your position, I would ask for land on the river where you could build a new village. Not far from Busu-Mouli because you will want to keep an eye on the mine, which should be operated by a joint partnership between Consolidated and the Luba people. You can use your share of the profits to build a school and a health clinic. You can also buy a generator and a new fleet of fishing boats to keep your economy diversified and avoid becoming overly dependent on the price of copper. It will be a hard transition, but I believe your people can prosper under a fair arrangement.”

  “Perhaps you are right,” Chief Tsiolo conceded. “But I think I have a better idea.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “We stay in our homes and Consolidated provides the equipment and technology we need to mine and smelt the ore without destroying the valley.”

  “That would be better for the village. But isn’t that the deal that Consolidated already rejected?”

  “This time will be different,” the wizened chief replied.

  “Why?”

  “Because this time you are going to convince them.”

  15

  JULY 3, 2009

  BUSU-MOULI

  They came for Alex in the middle of the night, moving quietly to the large bedroom at the back of the house that ordinarily was Chief Tsiolo’s. It was the only room in the village with floorboards, a sign of the Chief’s wealth and prominence. One of the men stepped on a loose board that creaked loudly in the dark room. Alex, lying on a thin mattress on the floor, woke with a start and sensed that he was not alone.

  “Chief?” he asked, rising onto one elbow and peering into the inky darkness.

  Several figures rushed at him in the dark. Alex swung his fists, connecting with the side of one man’s head and another man’s rib cage before strong hands grabbed hold of his arms and legs and pinned them to the mattress. He tried to shout for help, but a sharp punch to his solar plexus knocked the wind from him. A gag was stuffed in his mouth. One of the attackers slipped a canvas bag over his head and tied it around his neck with a thick cord. The bag was damp and smelled of mold and fear.

  Alex tried once more to get away, twisting his body for leverage and freeing his right arm. He lashed out blindly, hoping to connect with a face or a throat. Instead, his fist glanced harmlessly off a muscular shoulder, and he was quickly wrapped up in the bedsheet with his
arms pinned at his sides.

  He flashed back on the hostage survival training course that the State Department had made him take before sending him to Khartoum. The instructor had been an unassuming middle-aged man with a walrus mustache named Walter Hurd, who, along with fifty-one colleagues, had spent 444 days in Tehran as a guest of the ayatollah. Rule number one, he had stressed to the group of twenty or so Foreign Service Officers headed out to difficult and dangerous places around the world, was to stay alive. “If they are going to kill you,” he said, “they are most likely to do this in the first ten minutes. Make it through the first couple of minutes and you have a very good chance of surviving the experience.” Rule number two had been, when the time came, to die well as a representative of the United States. There was no rule number three.

  Alex consciously relaxed his body and did what he could while hooded and gagged to make sense of what was happening. He guessed that there were six people carrying him, three to a side. They carried him through the middle of the Chief’s house without any effort to disguise their presence. Once outside, they turned right and walked for about twenty minutes over irregular ground. Most of the time the path seemed to be going up. No one spoke and he had no way of knowing who had taken him hostage. Even the exchange of a few words might have answered this question for him. The language they spoke or their accent if they spoke French would have been a giveaway. For Anah’s sake as well as his own, he hoped like hell that his captors were not Rwandan genocidaires. If so, he was almost certainly as good as dead.

  After a time, the air grew still and the footsteps of his captors seemed to echo. Alex sensed they had gone inside some kind of structure. After a few minutes he was stood upright. The sheet was unwrapped from his body, the bag was removed from his head, and the gag was loosened. Alex saw that they were in a cave. It looked like a natural cavern with a dry sand floor and elaborate stalactite rock formations hanging from the ceiling. A large fire filled the cavern with a dull red light. A man stood near the fire wearing the skin of a leopard and carrying a short wooden staff mounted at the top with what looked like a monkey’s skull. He was bent forward and Alex could not see his face. In the dim light he seemed to have the head of a leopard. The man straightened and the hollowed-out leopard’s head fell onto one shoulder. He looked Alex straight in the eye. It was Chief Tsiolo.

  Alex was shirtless and he wore only a pair of loose cotton pants. The fire, however, kept the cave from feeling cold or damp. He looked quickly around at the others in the cavern. As near as he could tell, they were all men. Jean-Baptiste was standing ten feet away looking intently at his Chief. Alex saw the mechanic Mputu from the smelter and at least one of his sons. He also saw Tsiolo’s brother-in-law, Katanga, who had been at the dinner. The rest were strangers to him.

  There were approximately fifty men in the cavern standing in a half circle around the fire. All of the men were naked from the waist up. Many had elaborate decorative scars or tattoos that crisscrossed their torsos. There were at least a dozen conversations under way, some lighthearted and some intense. Some were in Lingala, some in Luba, at least one in French, and others in tribal languages Alex didn’t recognize. Whatever this was, it was not a strictly local event, he realized. A good percentage of the men gathered in the cavern were from different villages, even different tribes.

  A few moments later, Tsiolo called out in Lingala for silence, and the babble of conversation halted abruptly.

  No one was looking at Alex. They were focused on Chief Tsiolo.

  The Chief reached into a leather pouch at his waist and pulled out a handful of powder that he threw into the fire. The flames glowed green and purple, and a sweet-smelling smoke suffused the air of the cavern.

  A group of four men with drums of various sizes began to beat out a steady rhythm. The Chief led the men in a chanted counterpoint to the drums that started low and soft but began quickly to build in pitch and intensity. Alex didn’t recognize the language, but he knew what he was looking at. This was a ritual ceremony of a secret society. Before Islam, before Christianity, secret societies were the storehouse of tribal lore and ritual practice. The vast diversity of Africa produced thousands of variations on this theme. Some societies were focused on hunting rituals, others on fertility or the passage into manhood. Many involved ritual sacrifice: animal or, in the distant past, human.

  Some of the men watching were clapping their hands in time to the drums. Others were swaying from side to side. As the chanting rose to a crescendo, a man wearing a carved wooden mask with a protruding snout jumped out in front near the Chief. He had patches of what Alex took to be zebra skin wrapped around his waist. The man crouched low near the fire, and he and Chief Tsiolo began a delicate and graceful dance. The Chief advanced and the masked man retreated with a series of spins and twists. It was a hunt, Alex realized, with the leopard in pursuit of what he now understood was an okapi. The “leopard” was circling his prey now, forcing the “okapi” into a narrow stretch of ground between the fire pit and the far-right flank of the audience. Chief Tsiolo feinted left with the skull-mounted staff and then moved right in one fluid motion, grabbing the bare shoulders of the okapi dancer and guiding him gently to the sandy floor of the cavern. The man lay still. The hunter was victorious.

  The chanting stopped abruptly.

  Another man stepped out of the circle of watchers into the open space in the center. Alex thought he recognized him from the smelter. The man was leading a large bullock by a white rope wrapped around its neck. He held the rope in his left hand. His right held a gleaming machete with a three-foot blade. It looked wickedly sharp. The man presented the rope to Chief Tsiolo and clasped his left hand over his heart. Tsiolo raised his staff over his head and gave a high piercing cry. Slowly and deliberately, the man raised the machete over his head and, with a shout, brought it down. The blow was strong enough and the blade sharp enough that the bullock’s head was nearly severed from its body. Black blood spurted from the neck. The animal staggered forward on spindly legs before collapsing to the sand floor of the cavern. It was a clean kill. The approving murmurs from the crowd marked this as a good omen.

  Two younger men stepped forward from the crowd with knives and began butchering the animal. They worked quickly and with practiced skill.

  Suddenly, Alex felt strong hands grip his arms from both sides and push him into the center of the circle. Looking over his shoulder, he could see it was Katanga and Mputu who had him firmly in their grip. Together, the two men marched him forward to face Chief Tsiolo, who looked every inch the king in his ceremonial regalia. They forced Alex to his knees in front of the Chief. Mputu pulled a thin-bladed knife from his belt and handed it to Chief Tsiolo. The Chief ran the blade across his forearm to test its edge. He seemed satisfied. Alex thought about what he had just seen happen to the steer. Then he thought about rule number two.

  Acting on some invisible signal, the drums and chanting abruptly stopped. A preternatural silence fell over the cavern.

  Tsiolo raised both arms over his head. His left hand held the staff. In his right was the knife. He shouted, in a language that Alex could not understand, at the assembled members of the secret society that he led. He spoke in short bursts of speech, and the circle of men responded with appropriate grunts of agreement or hoots of derision.

  Tsiolo paused and looked at Alex, who could see neither anger nor compassion in the Chief’s face. He seemed completely impassive. Tsiolo turned back to the assembly and resumed his address, this time in Lingala.

  “This man,” he said, pointing the skull toward Alex, “tells me that the people of Busu-Mouli and the other villages in the valley must leave their homes. That the rich and powerful from Kinshasa and Europe and America will not let us stay. He tells us that we have no choice. Does he even have a heart?” The onlookers hooted and jeered.

  “Should we find out?” he asked, brandishing the razor-sharp blade in his right hand. The
men in the cavern laughed and cheered.

  “I think maybe yes,” Tsiolo said, stepping forward and raising the knife. Alex didn’t flinch. He looked Tsiolo square in the eye. Even at that moment, he could not bring himself to believe that the Chief meant to kill him.

  The knife stopped halfway and Tsiolo looked at the blade in mock surprise. “But wait,” he continued. “This man does have a heart. I have seen it. I saw it when he rescued my daughter, your sister Marie, from the demon in human form, Joseph Manamakimba. He did not have to do this thing. He could have freed only his own countrymen, but he did not. He saved my Marie as well and for this I owe him a debt.

  “So why then,” Tsiolo continued, “would a good man with a big heart plot the death of our village and our way of life? I can only believe it is because he does not know us and he does not know the Luba people or the Chokwe or the Kasai. He does not know that we are worth saving. Tonight that will change.” He looked at Alex. “You will be changed.”

  Tsiolo moved close to Alex and lowered the knife to his chest. “Alex the American,” the Chief said, speaking to Alex but directing his speech to the onlookers. “You see your mission as the protection of your own tribe. So be it. But in saving my daughter’s life, you have also chosen to join the Luba people. As Chief, I recognize you as a citizen of Busu-Mouli and a brother to every man in this room.”

  Before Alex could react, Tsiolo brought the knife to his chest and cut a nearly perfect two-inch circle in his pectoral muscle just above the right nipple. The cut was so quick and the blade so sharp that at first Alex felt nothing. This was quickly followed, however, by a searing pain that brought tears to his eyes. He did not cry out, however, or struggle against the men holding him down.

  Mputu’s enormous hand slapped red clay onto the fresh wound, and the Luba mechanic drove the dirt into the cuts with a powerful twisting motion. The cool clay offered some relief from the pain of the incision, but Alex understood that the clay was intended to leave the permanent raised welts that were critical to ritual scarring. That was when Alex noticed that among the various scars on his body, Tsiolo had the same nearly perfect circle that he had carved into Alex’s chest. Others did too, he noticed, including Mputu and Katanga.