You just planned your flights to get back on the ground before three P.M. and if you could arrange it, before two.
A GMC carryall, painted white and with the Air Simba logo on its doors, met them at the airport. The carryall was driven by a squat, very black Congolese wearing a white shirt and a necktie.
He spoke French, but not too well, and he and Jacques Portet carried an their conversation in Swahili. De la Santiago. saw that Portet was as fluent in Swahili as he was in French and English, and this impressed him almost as much as the skill, the professionalism, with which the young pilot flew.
There were customs pasts at bath ends of the iron bridge aver the fast-flawing Ruzizi River. The Air Simba Bukavu chef de station gave a little gift - money and a carton of Camel cigarettes- to. the Rwanda customs officials to. facilitate their passage, and a smaller gift-less money and two. packages of Camels-to. the Congolese customs officials.
The Congolese customs officials required lesser gifts only because of the special relation then in effect between Jacques Portet's father, Jean-Philippe, and certain very high placed and powerful members of the Congolese government.
When Air Simba had been farmed not long ago, the brother in-law of Colonel Joseph-Desire Mobutu, head of the Armed.
Farces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, had been asked to. serve an the Board of Directors, and far his services had been given 10 percent of the outstanding stack. This was far less-than the usual arrangement, but Jean-Philippe Portet had known Colonel Mobutu since the Colonel had been a corporal in the Farce Publique, and they were friends.
Jean-Philippe Portet (wham Santiago. thought of alternately as The Old Captain Portet and Jacques's father) had two jobs. He was Managing Director of Air Simba, which had been in business far five months and had had aircraft far three, and he was Chief Pilot of Air Congo, the international airline of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
As Air Congo's Chief Pilot, it naturally fell to him to. fly the aircraft an which senior Congolese officialdom, including Colonel Mobutu, elected to. travel. He had proposed the formation of Air Simba to Colonel Mobutu one day en route to Dar Es Saloom, while the Colonel was sitting in the copilot's seat and had seemed to. be in a very good mood.
Since it was known to the Governor of the province that Air Simba had friends in high places, it would not have been necessary to give the customs officials any gift at all. It just made sense to be friendly.
Once across the bridge, the Air Simba carryall deposited Portet and de la Santiago. at the Hotel du Lac, a five-story building whose rear windows overlooked Lake Kivu. Congolese in immaculate white jackets (same of them even ware shoes; the Hotel du Lac was a class establishment) opened the door of the GMC, greeted Captain Portet with warmth, took care of the luggage, and rushed to push open the gleaming, brass-framed glass door far them.
The hotel was small but well furnished, and obviously spotless. Jack Portet stopped at the desk only long enough to. ask far messages and to introduce de la Santiago to the desk clerk as someone who would be regularly staying in the Air Simba roams.
Then he led de la Santiago into the bar.
Two bottles of beer and glasses were immediately brought with out ardors, to the table by a very large, and very black, white-jacketed waiter. As de la Santiago waited far his beer to be poured, Jack Portet took a healthy swig from the neck of his battle, and then he burped.
"I've been thinking of that far an hour," he announced. "The first sip is always the best."
A plump woman in her late forties came to the table and kissed Portet an the cheek when he stood up to greet her. Portet introduced Madame Fameir to de la Santiago as his sweetheart.
As they were shaking hands, a European couple walked up to the table. The man was in his early fifties, gray-haired, suntanned, and dignified. He ware a summer-weight gray suit and tie. The woman was in a light summer dress, with black lingerie visible at the neckline. And she was somewhere under forty, de la Santiago. decided, alder than she at first looked.
"I thought that was you flying aver, Jacques," the man said to Portet as he offered his hand.
"I thought you were in the bush," Portet said, as he kissed the woman's offered cheek. And then he made the introductions.
M'sieu et Madame Nininger, who. were not only charming and witty, but new customers of Air Simba.
"I'll go. tomorrow," Nininger said as he sat dawn. "You'll came far dinner?"
"Thank you, but no. We have a little business tonight." At that moment Enrica de la Santiago realized that Jack Portet was going to be unlucky. His friend's husband was not going to be out of town. He had just invited them to dinner.
The Niningers had a drink-Orange Blossoms-and then left. Enrica de la Santiago, wandering if his ego and/or his imagination had run wild, had the idea that Madame Nininger had more in mind than simple courtesy when she asked him to. call whenever he returned to Bukavu.
They sat drinking the beer (which like the airline was also called Simba and which was astonishingly good) until it was time to eat. In the bar, and later in the restaurant (where at Portet's suggestion they both had the broiled filet of a fish that Portet said was found only in Lake Kivu), Portet pointed out which European women were available and which were forbidden.
They went to bed early, leaving a call for half past four in the morning. The call was delivered by a Congolese carrying a tray with a coffeepot, orange juice, and a croissant.
They left the hotel a few minutes after five, and at 5:25 were at the airport. Nininger was there, leaning on the fender of a Mercedes, and so was a Mercedes truck with a refrigerated body.
Its air-conditioning diesel engine was idling, but it roared into action when cooling was needed.
The previous evening Portet had explained why there would be a refrigerated truck here: Nininger had a cattle operation in the hills above Bukavu. What he was trying to do now with Air Simba was deliver fresh meat to Stanleyville and (most importantly) to Leopoldville cheaper than it could be obtained elsewhere. Most of the fresh meat-all of the quality fresh meat-now obtainable in Leopoldville came from South Africa.
Some of the meat was flown in and some was sent by train; but all of it came to the capital alive, where it was then butchered. It was a seller's market, and the South Africans took full advantage of it.
Nininger's idea now was to butcher and chill his beef, lamb, and swine at his own plantation, and then air-freight it to Stanleyville, Leopoldville, and ultimately elsewhere. The problem was refrigeration, which was to say the temperature of the Congo, which lay on the Equator.
The meat could not be frozen because there was already an adequate supply of South African, European, and even Argentinean frozen meat in Leopoldville. Nor could it be iced down or shipped in insulated containers by air, because of the weight.
The solution they had found was to chill the meat to several degrees above freezing, transport it to the Kamembe airport in a refrigerated truck, and quickly load it aboard an Air Simba Curtiss cargo plane. For the past three weeks this solution had worked. The plane would quickly take off, and then climb quickly to an altitude which would keep the meat chilled en route.
If there was a delay, the meat would of course be ruined. And a close watch had to be maintained on outside temperature to make sure the meat didn't become frozen en route, either.
Before Nininger's workmen loaded the airplane with the contents of the truck, Jack and Enrico made very sure to check that the airplane was ready to go. They even fired up the engines and put the needles in the green, then shut down only the port engine.
The cheesecloth-wrapped meat, some of it roughly butchered into loins and large parts and some of it in sides, was quickly laid on a sheet of plastic on the cabin floor, then strapped in place.
As soon as the door was closed, even before the port engine had been restarted, the plane moved to the threshold of the runway. It paused at the end of the runway only long enough to start the engine and check the mags; and th
en it roared off, heading northwest toward Stanleyville in a steep climb.
Stanleyville (estimated 1963 population 150,000) is 350 miles from Bukavu at the head of navigation for the middle portion of the Congo River. It is also very close to the exact center of Africa, equidistant from the Indian and Atlantic oceans" and from Cairo, Egypt, and Cape Town, South Africa.
The city sits surrounded by hundreds of miles of jungle-an island of apartment houses on wide boulevards, office buildings, hotels, warehouses, large villas, and shops. In Stanleyville in 1964, it was possible to buy Buick automobiles; Swiss watches; couturier clothing from Paris; and oysters, lamb chops, and newspapers (including the Times of London and the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune) flown in daily from Brussels.
When arriving passengers descended from Sabena or KLM or UTA jets at Stanleyville, they were greeted with a multicolored neon sign urging them to FUMEZ LUCKY STRIKE!
The United States of America maintained a consulate general in Stanleyville, a large, white, red-roofed villa with a lovely swimming pool, as well as a splendid view of the white-water rapids of Stanley Falls (named, like the town itself, after the intrepid "Doctor Livingston, I presume" journalist-explorer Henry Morton Stanley).
Stanleyville proved to have what Enrico de la Santiago thought of as a real airport. For one thing, the moment he tuned in the ADF, there was a strong STN signal. And when Portet called the Stanleyville tower an hour and fifteen minutes into the flight, there was an immediate response, in English, from a tower operator who left no question that he knew what he was doing. "Simba One Oh Four, Stanleyville. We have you on radar.
You are cleared to descend to two thousand five hundred on your present heading. The winds are five to ten from the north. The altimeter is two niner niner four. You are cleared as number one to land on runway zero five. There is no commercial traffic in the area, but please be on the lookout for light aircraft operating under visual flight rules. Report at flight level two five hundred and when over the outer marker." And a minute later he was back.
"Simba One Oh Four, Stanleyville." Portet, who was flying, nodded at Enrico to work the radio.
"Stanleyville, Simba One Oh Four-go ahead."
"Simba One Oh Four, Stanleyville, in flight advisory. You will be met by a refrigerated truck and a fuel truck."
"Roger, Stanleyville, thank you very much," Enrico replied.
"I have to figure out some way to RON here," Portet said:
Remain Over Night. "Nice town. And we rented an apartment in the Immoquateur that's just going to waste."
"In the what?"
"The Immoquateur," Jack Portet explained. "It's a new apartment building, ten, twelve stories, on the river. Very classy."
"And you have friends here, no doubt?" de fa Santiago asked.
"Two. Neither of whose husbands can be called stay-at homes."
The radio came to life.
"Stanleyville, Sabena Six Oh Five, sixty miles north of your station for approaching and landing."
"Stanleyville gave Sabena 605 essentially the same information he had given Air Simba 104, except of course that he had told them that "Air Simba, a Curtiss C-46 aircraft is number one to land."
Sabena 605, a Douglas DC-8, swooped in to land as Jack and Enrico were being driven to the terminal in a Peugeot station wagon. They picked up coffee and jelly doughnuts in the coffee shop, carried them to Weather for a briefing on en route and destination conditions to Leopoldville, filed their flight plan, visited the gentleman's rest facility, and started back across the terminal to where the Peugeot waited for them.
As they passed' the newsstand, stacks of newspapers and magazines fresh from the belly of the morning Sabena flight from Brussels were dropped on it and cut open. Jack Portet stopped and bought the Paris Edition of the New York Herald Tribune and Playboy.
And then a woman rushed up to him, kissed him on both cheeks, and in an accent Enrico de la Santiago found enchanting called him "Jacques, mon amour." After that she expressed apparently genuine delight to find Jacques in Stanleyville, especially since her husband had been delayed in Brussels. This woman was younger than the blonde in Bukavu, and French, Enrico decided, rather than Belgian.
And she seemed disconsolate when Portet told her he had a planeload of fresh meat he had to get back in the air in the next five minutes. And so, vicariously, was Enrico disconsolate for Jack Portet. It was not at all hard to imagine what pleasures with the French blonde the planeload of fresh meat would cause him to miss.
After they were in the air again and approaching twelve thousand, when it would become necessary to go on oxygen, Enrico asked the question that had quite naturally come to him.
"What's the secret of your success?"
"Seriously?"
"Yeah, sure, seriously. If it's some kind of cologne, I want to know what kind."
"Aside from my charm, good looks, and all-around overwhelming masculinity," Jack said, joking, and then grew serious, "the greatest risk a woman having an affair here runs is that the guy will get serious. There's a great shortage of European women here, of course, especially in the bush-the deeper in the bush, the greater the shortage of women-and after they diddle some guy and then go home, the guy sits around alone in his house, or his apartment, and decides that his quick piece of ass is the greatest love affair since Romeo and Juliet, and that he has to have her permanently. People go crazy here anyway, and it gets messy.
They know that I'm safe, that I'm not going to appear wide-eyed at their door and tell their husband I can't live without them. If you play your cards right. . ."
"I'm married," Enrico said. "My wife and my kids are still in Cuba."
"My father told me," Jack said.
"I'm working on getting them out."
"You are Catholic, Enrico?"
"Yeah, sure."
"When Catholic priests come to work down here, they are relieved of their vow of celibacy." Enrico looked at him in astonishment. He saw that Portet was again quite serious. He was unable to accept that a priest would be allowed to have sex-with the approval of the Church, but it was evident that Jack Portet believed what he was saying.
"A piece a day keeps the madman away," Jack Portet said solemnly, and then tapping the altimeter, which showed they were still climbing at 13 ,000 feet, he pulled a black rubber oxygen mask over his mouth.
It was almost eight hundred miles from Stanleyville to Leopoldville. The flight took a little more than three hours and fifteen minutes. Frequently there was no sign of civilization beneath them at all, not even the trace of a road. Even at 25,000 feet, Enrico reasoned, there should be some sign of civilization down there, but there wasn't, just green, broken every once in a while by a river.
A refrigerated truck pulled up to the airplane as soon as they landed. Jack felt the meat through the cheesecloth. It was cold but not frozen. Air Simba had done it again, which meant a profit and not the loss they would have had if the meat had been spoiled or frozen.
He got in his Volkswagen Bug and drove home.
He parked his car in the garage and entered the house via the kitchen. His stepmother, a statuesque blonde, was checking the bill from the grocery store against the groceries themselves. She suspected the grocery store of charging her for imaginary goods.
"You have a letter from the government in St. Louis," Hanni Portet said. She spoke in English with a strong but not unpleasant German accent.
"Oh, shit!"
"Cursing won't change anything," Hanni said, and went to him and kissed his cheek. "Your father's out by the pool. I think he would like to play tennis." Jack looked out the kitchen window. His father was sitting at one of three umbrella-shaded tables by the side of the pool. On the table beside him were two tennis racquets and two cans of balls.
When the Second World War had broken out, Jean-Philippe Portet had been the age Jacques was now and had been in America with his father. His father, Jacques' grandfather, an official of the Societe Anonyme Belge d'Explo
itation de Navigation Aerienne (Sabena, the Belgian State Airline), had been sent to the United States on a purchasing mission. Sabena wanted to replace its Lockheed transports with Douglas DC-3s, and to issue orders for the not-yet-in-production four-engine Douglas DC-4.
When Belgium fell to the Germans, Grandfather Portet made himself available to the Belgian government-in-exile in England.
He was ordered to stay where he was and to continue doing what he was doing. Which he did. But Jean-Philippe Portet announced he was going to join the Royal Canadian Air Force and become a fighter pilot.
Grandfather Portet, who believed that most of the young fighter pilots being raised in Canada would soon be dead, reasoned with him to join the U.S. Army Air Corps. So did Patricia Ellen Detwiler, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a Douglas engineer who had decided to marry Jean-Philippe Portet the moment she laid eyes on him. If Jean-Philippe went off to the RCAF, God only knew when she would see him again. If ever.
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