Jules, who served as the gunner, asked Blanchard with his eyes if he should try again, but he shook his head no. He didn’t want to risk sinking them. He wanted to trap them and throw them in the dungeon in chains.
Then they were right at the bow of the fugitive launch. The bow light of the Charlotte swept over its deck, but between the rocking and the screen of splashing water in front of the patrol boat, he could only make out a few indistinct black lumps.
Convinced they weren’t going to stop on their own, Blanchard ordered his men to open fire on the launch’s outboard motor with their sidearms. He didn’t want to cut them in half with the 20 mm by accident.
The patrol boat got close enough for the five men and the commissar himself to shoot at the stubborn fugitives’ motor, and twenty, thirty shots later, the outboard motor coughed a cloud of smoke and the launch stopped after a few yards.
While three men pointed their weapons at the launch, the other two used boathooks to keep it from being taken by the current.
Blanchard looked over the boat’s gunwale, shining his flashlight inside the launch.
The black lumps turned out to be just that—lumps of bundled life jackets wrapped in black cloth.
A rope held the helm steady, and the gas to the outboard motor running.
There was no one aboard.
“But what the hell?” Blanchard asked loudly, stunned.
“I don’t get it, Commissar,” Jules said, as stupefied as his boss.
“Commissar,” Lambert called from the bridge.
“Not now, Lambert,” Blanchard said without turning, pointing at the launch and barking out an order to his men: “Two of you go and tie the launch. Search and see if you can—”
“Commissar,” the captain insisted.
“Wait, Lambert!” Blanchard spat. He addressed Jules. “Tie the launch to our bow. I want to go back to Léopoldville and see who it—”
“Commissar,” he repeated a third time.
Blanchard turned toward the man. “What the hell’s going on, Lam—”
He stopped talking when he discovered there were four strangers dressed in black on the deck of the patrol boat. One of them, a guy almost six-five, pointed a pistol at Lambert’s head while his other hand held a Thompson submachine gun with the barrel pointed at them. The other three—one a young woman—also held pistols, all pointed at the commissar and his men.
The tallest of the three, a thin man with a kind face, took a lighter out of his pocket with his left hand and lit a cigarette he already had in his mouth. “Ahhhh . . . I needed that,” he said with a strong British accent, after exhaling the smoke with delight. “It was incredibly hot with the four of us covered in canvas under the lifeboat,” he said, pointing the cigarette toward the bow. “What took you so long to catch the launch?”
“But . . . how?” Blanchard stammered while he tried to put the pieces together in his head. He looked at his men, the empty launch, and the bow lifeboat, where it seemed they’d been hiding from the beginning. “Why?”
“Questions later, Commissar.” He raised the hand holding the cigarette. “Now, please, put down your weapons,” he added, pointing at them with his small Walther PPK. “My big friend is trigger happy, and it’d be a pity to cover this beautiful boat in bullet holes, don’t you think?”
River Diary
DAY FIVE
January 30, 1942
Mongala River
If yesterday was strange, today is off the charts.
It started raining in the morning and kept up the whole damn day. I can’t believe there’s so much water in the clouds. The pounding on the roof and the curtain of rain that keeps you from seeing more than ten or fifteen yards could drive anyone insane.
To top it all off, this morning we hit a sandbank, and I finally understood the usefulness of having those eight cannibals with us. Verhoeven unrolled two ropes from the bow, and without him having to give orders, the eight jumped in the water and started pulling the boat to get it free. Their combined effort wasn’t enough, so we all had to go in the water and pull the cables by our waists while watching out for crocs and hippos.
It took us nearly an hour to free the boat from the sandbank, but somehow the exertion helped us out of the slump we’d all been sinking into, and despite everything, good cheer reigned during the rest of the morning. Even Jack lightened up enough to tell a little war story, the one during the Spanish Civil War when we both crossed enemy lines disguised as monks.
Hudgens refused to believe a word, and when Jack asked me to back him up, I shrugged, saying I didn’t know what he was talking about. The commander shook his head, implying Jack had made it all up, so Jack grabbed my collar, urging me to tell the truth or he’d throw me overboard. When he turned around, I made the universal lost his marbles gesture, and everyone laughed. I had to run away so my old friend wouldn’t throttle me.
Later, sometime in the afternoon, we saw on the south bank a new commercial outpost in the middle of a cleared area, and Verhoeven decided to stop the boat and bring on more wood for fuel. Though we had reserves for at least eight days, he argued that given how much it was raining we could have serious difficulties getting dry wood farther ahead, so we shouldn’t miss the chance.
This time when we tied the boat to the dock, no one came to meet us. No tradesman anxious to receive visitors, not a line of children, nor curious old people. Verhoeven sounded the ship’s whistle, but even then, no one appeared.
Confused, we got off with our weapons ready. That wasn’t normal, and Hudgens said we were already in Mangbetu territory. Jack complained that he should have told us earlier, while I thought of the sea of bodies from the day before and wondered if they were related to the apparent abandonment of that outpost.
Just in case, we decided Madimba and Carmen would guard the Roi des Boers, covering our backs if we had to leave there in a hurry. Verhoeven ordered the cannibals to go in the storehouses to look for dry wood but not to go near the huts.
So, shoulder to shoulder and with our weapons at the ready, we reached the middle of the clearing, where the main house stood. It appeared abandoned just like the adobe huts nearer by, whose walls, partially eroded by the rain, had not been maintained in a long time.
“There’s no one here,” Jack concluded, looking up at a post flying the remains of a Congolese flag. We decided to divide into two groups, and while Jack and Mutombo made sure there really was no one in the adobe huts, Verhoeven, Hudgens, and I headed for the house, approaching with caution. The Afrikaner assured us, not for the first time, that there were cases in which an official had gone crazy after a long stay in the jungle, and, holed up in his trading post, had shot at anyone who got close.
The wooden steps of the entrance groaned painfully under our weight. When we reached the door, we discovered it was secured with a chain.
Verhoeven tried to uncoil the chain while Hudgens and I stayed alert with our weapons ready, looking out for the slightest movement. But it turned out the chain was fixed to a padlock on the other side of the door. Someone had locked themselves inside.
We knocked on the door again and made all the noise we could by shouting, but no one answered. It seemed that whoever had locked themselves inside was no longer there. Or at least they weren’t alive.
Given that the windows were blocked too, we decided to force the door and enter however we could.
The wood of the frame was rotten, so it wasn’t too hard to knock the door down.
We went in the house eagerly, protected from the storm but dripping water that made three big puddles by our feet. The place was almost completely dark, so we lit an oil lamp that was next to the entrance.
The wavering yellow light revealed a pretty small interior that was half house, half office. The only furniture was a modest bunk, a cupboard with cans of food, half a dozen books, a couple of chairs, a rough table, and a rusted filing cabinet next to it. The wooden walls had a small mirror and a couple of moldy posters with images o
f Bruges, as well as a flag with a black lion on a yellow background, which Verhoeven pointed out was from the Flanders region.
Otherwise, the house was completely empty. There was no sign of its occupant, apart from a duffel, some boots, and a pile of clothes at the foot of the bed. It was as if someone was getting ready to leave but changed their mind at the last minute. The many spiderwebs in the corners and table legs showed that whoever had been living here had left a long time ago.
The question was, where had they gone and why?
And more disconcerting, how had they been able to seal the doors and windows before doing it?
Driven by curiosity, I went up to the table, where I saw some disorganized papers next to a Bible, but in the semidarkness my foot hit something metal that bounced against the door. I bent down, picked it up, and when I brought it to the light, found it was a brass cap. The floor was covered in them.
Verhoeven took one of the caps, weighing it as if it could give him a clue to what had happened there.
Just then we heard Jack’s voice, calling us urgently to come.
A moment later I rushed outside, and in the rain I put my hands around my mouth and called him so he’d know which direction I was in. He immediately responded with a “Here!” and I ran to the Galician, followed closely by the others.
The voice came from behind the house, where there were some simple structures about a hundred fifty yards away: wooden ceiling posts with thatched roofs that once housed merchandise. In one of them was a large pile of elephant tusks, looking snowy against the dark background of the jungle. Under another were hundreds of wild animal skins, the majority of them leopard. But Mutombo and Jack were standing quietly in front of something I couldn’t make out.
When I got up to them, I asked what was wrong, but before I could finish the sentence, I had the answer in front of me.
Even seeing it with my own eyes, I refused to believe it was real.
As if they were hunting trophies like skins or ivory, dozens of amputated hands were piled haphazardly over a base of dry branches. Dozens and dozens of hands, large and small. Men’s hands, women’s hands, children’s hands—amputated at the wrist. All with black skin.
I heard Hudgens behind me have a retching fit and Verhoeven murmuring a prayer.
I couldn’t conceive of the evil in that vile act of indiscriminate mutilation. It wasn’t the result of a prompt punishment like some Arab countries dole out to thieves. No, this was a systematic act of evil, premeditated too. I looked at the children’s and even baby’s hands revoltingly mixed with those of the adults, and I felt an uncontainable well of rage grow inside me.
If the perpetrator of that slaughter had been nearby, I’m sure I would have had no regret killing him slowly and painfully.
Jack asked Verhoeven if he knew what it all meant, and with a painful nod the Afrikaner explained that decades ago, when the Congo had just been a piece of King Leopold II of Belgium’s private property, it was custom to cut off the hands of all natives who didn’t meet their ivory quotas. He then quickly assured us that, nonetheless, the white colonists’ horrible practice had been banned for almost thirty years, and since he’d arrived in the Congo he’d never seen anything like it.
“I heard rumors sometimes . . . ,” Verhoeven murmured. “But I never thought they were true.”
And just then, from somewhere not far off, we began to hear drums.
The rhythmic beat of wood on hollow wood came from inside the jungle—a pounding that was grave and throbbing like the heart of a man frightened by his own actions.
Verhoeven opened his eyes wide as if he’d received an electric shock. “We have to go,” he burst out, scared. Hudgens started to disagree, but before he could say anything the Afrikaner insisted, pointing anxiously toward the beach like a man who just remembered he left the oven on. “We have to go right now.”
No one understood why he was in such a state of alarm, but seeing how the Boer veteran’s face contorted was enough to make us listen.
We quickly headed toward the dock, but when we passed the house again, I remembered the filing cabinet and ran toward it to take the documents from inside. For some reason I thought there’d be an answer in them about what happened in that place.
When I went back in, I realized Verhoeven had taken the lamp, leaving the place in darkness again. Even so I entered the place and found the cabinet, finding the handle and pulling hard, only to discover it was locked. Without a thought I put the end of the machete I’d brought from the ship in the crack, trying to force it.
Then the Roi des Boers’s whistle sounded impatiently from the river.
Ignoring it, I pushed the handle harder, convinced by some irrational impulse that there was something important in that container.
A spring creaked from inside the filing cabinet, but it didn’t move an inch. I’d forced safes stronger than that damn cabinet.
The whistle blew again, pressing me. The ship’s boiler was at maximum pressure.
I cursed that damn piece of furniture, giving it a slap and made to leave. But in the last moment I remembered the papers on the table, and I blindly took them along with the Bible.
A second later I left the cabin and ran for the dock, a bumbling bank robber with the saddest booty in the history of crime.
An hour later, I spread the fruits of my plunder on one of the tables with the pride of an archeologist. Hudgens, Jack, and Carmen were next to me, along with Verhoeven, who’d left Mutombo at the helm.
Though the majority of the papers were wet from the downpour, there were some legible fragments in a language only Verhoeven could understand. After studying it for a moment, he said it was Flemish, a dialect from the Netherlands. While it was similar to Dutch, he admitted to being able to translate only a few words here and there.
Savages, ivory, contract were some of those he could understand, but they didn’t tell us much about what we’d seen.
Then we asked him about the drums we’d heard and why they’d scared him so much.
The Afrikaner tried to diminish their importance and denied they’d frightened him, as he explained that some African tribes used drums to communicate, like the telegraph of the jungle, he said. But there’s more to it, I’m sure. I don’t understand why he’s hesitant to talk about it.
As I write these last lines, the sun has already disappeared behind the horizon, and I’m making use of the light from the dim oil lamp hanging from the ceiling. The drums have not stopped, and at times they sound closer. I guess it’s because of the irregular path of the river constantly turning.
Jack’s asleep, and Hudgens is studying a dog-eared map while I distractedly flip through the Bible I found in the house, a shabby leather-bound volume with an embossed cross and the inscription Heilige Bijbel in gold letters.
Its final pages are more rumpled than the others, and their corners are folded over. On each of those pages is a word written in red ink over and over again. Always the same: schimmen.
Ghosts.
River Diary
DAY SIX
January 31, 1942
Ebola River
I woke at dawn to a bolt of lightning that hit the water a few hundred yards from our bow. It was like a bomb went off in the middle of the river.
The persistent rain of recent days finally stopped around midnight but only to give way to a showy electric storm that seemed determined to fry us with a lightning bolt. I’m discovering that everything in this place seems larger than life, like another world, or maybe we all accidentally shrunk. The trees are taller than anything I’ve ever seen, the rain more intense, and now this storm exploding from black clouds is closer to the earth than in any other place.
I recalled a fragment from Conrad’s book: “We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet.”
The banging of the drums didn’t stop at all during the night, adding to the cacophony of the thunder bursting in the air over our heads.
I heard Mutombo say the drums caused the storm, and the truth is, it isn’t so hard to believe. The cadence kept changing, but for some reason we never got farther from them.
Carmen even implied that the drums are following us and I comforted her, assuring her it was only an illusion caused by the zigzagging river. But that’s exactly how it seems—that they’re following us.
Our travels were tedious and humid today. It started to rain again, but this time lazy gray rain that seemed to fall in no hurry. It was as if the Congo decided to show us all the types of rain it was capable of creating.
Our soaked clothes from yesterday are still wet. Though Jack and I were still in the clothes we’d been wearing since our rescue, everyone else had to take their clothes out of their bags to keep them from getting soggy like rotten fruit. The boat’s two decks are now crossed with lines of laundry to air them out.
Problems started when afternoon came, a little after we left the Mongala River and entered an even narrower and more winding tributary, the Ebola.
The rhythmic tapping of the aft paddles against the water stopped suddenly. The sound was so embedded in our subconscious that when it stopped, we all looked up at the same time as if we’d heard a gunshot.
Voices in Lingala sounded from the lower deck, and Verhoeven came out of the wheelhouse in a rush, followed closely by Mutombo. The rest of us stayed back, secretly excited for the break in routine.
It got a lot less interesting when we realized the countercurrent was carrying the ship despite our having thrown in the two fore anchors to stop it. The Roi des Boers was drifting, and if we weren’t able to get it going again, we’d hit a sandbank or slam into the bank.
The issue turned out to be a steam leak from the boiler’s main pipe. A crack no larger than the slot in a piggy bank, but big enough to allow all the steam pressure that moved the ship to escape.
Darkness: Captain Riley II (The Captain Riley Adventures Book 2) Page 31