“Very well, Bosco.”
She turned back to the pastor. “I’ll try to follow your advice, Reverend. I have to go now,” she said and stood up. “May the Lord bless you.”
“I am going to pray that—” was all the pastor could answer.
The door closed in the middle of his sentence, cutting him off brusquely. Stunned by the abrupt intrusion, he, the man of God, no longer felt so well. He felt a little like anyone else right after an unforeseen coitus interruptus. It was nothing; he would manage, he told himself, waiting for it to pass.
On the thirty-second floor of the United Nations building in New York, a frowning Chiara Argento was studying the Kamituga file. She closed it with a deep sigh. She removed her tortoise-shell glasses, removed the clip from her thick black hair, shook her heavy locks, and formed them into an easy ellipse at her neck. Then she leaned back in her seat more comfortably and reached for the cup of coffee on her desk. This couldn’t work, she told herself. You couldn’t have an army that functioned with troops coming from so many different places under various commands. Ever since the fall of the Roman Empire, people still weren’t getting this. Today, again, the failure of the system had become clear. On the one hand, through the intervention of accords ratified by the international community, there were the armed forces of the DRC, infiltrated by rebels of indeterminate nationalities who could revolt whenever it suited them; on the other hand, you had an intervention force, also consisting of disparate troops, each with its own notion of things. And all of them assembled in the same country. The result was here: catastrophe for a long time to come.
Chiara Argento didn’t even get incensed anymore; where Congo was concerned she had definitively adjusted to the state of affairs. They needed to move ahead, but methodically, as when you walk on glass with bare feet. The massacre of Kamituga wasn’t easy to explain. Everybody was lying; you never knew with whom you were dealing, who was behind whom. It was the same at the French National Assembly, one hidden agenda replacing the next. Chiara was in charge of maintaining the peace in one of the largest vipers’ nests history had ever produced, so vast that it managed to smother the screams of its millions of victims.
On the other hand, where the six Blue Berets were concerned, she had listened carefully all the way to the end of their death throes. She had summoned her collaborators as soon as the phone call from Kivu was received. Through the speakers scattered around the spacious office everyone was able until the very end to hear the crackling of the machine guns, the desperate shrieks of the soldiers, and the bark of the RPG-7. The six Uruguayans were stuck in a recess and resisted as best they could, but the assailants outnumbered them and Chiara had helplessly witnessed their extermination. She would never forget it. From that moment on, action was called for. The incident had shredded the institution’s image, and to have it restored the perpetrators had to manifestly be arrested. Killing soldiers working for peace was like a crime against humanity; the guilty would not avoid trial by the International Criminal Court. But in the complicated game of the alliances in Congo, charging someone was one thing, but catching and incarcerating him was another kettle of fish. They had to act cleverly and with sangfroid, and until now that’s what Chiara Argento had been striving to do.
The young woman rose, briefly arching her back to stretch her muscles. She was slender as a reed, wearing a short black dress, and her silhouette stood out against the backlight of the large window. Thirty-two floors below her, the East River was teeming with pleasure boats, barges carrying materials, ferries that from the distance looked like particularly well made miniatures. On the other bank was Long Island. To the right, beyond Belmont Island, you could see the steel arches of Gantry Plaza Park and the huge Pepsi-Cola sign, languid as a streetwalker waiting for the night to display her red neon lights.
Those responsible for the massacre were well known. Before they died, the Uruguayans had mentioned their names: Bizimungu and Commander Bob, the sector leader. But they had to be collared first—hard to do when the commonly accepted principle entailed sacrificing justice for peace. But to make peace it was often necessary to know how to wage war. Chiara Argento needed months of perseverance to wage hers. In narrow cohesion with her closest collaborator, Celio—an enigmatic Congolese who was keenly interested in mathematical concepts—they had done outstanding work: with false declarations, emails, and fanciful communications, they had managed to make Bizimungu a key player in the inter-Congolese dialogue. They’d succeeded in finding him a position in Kinshasa. The fish was finally drawn into the net. It was now a matter of closing it gently, of making as few waves as possible until the bastard could be transferred to the criminal court in The Hague. Still missing was a motivation for his actions. The fact that the incident had occurred in a place where they mined gold was certainly not irrelevant. Chiara sensed there was something shady going on, but, never mind, she would take it all the way, even if it would tarnish her administration.
She picked up the phone. In a soft voice, almost a whisper, she said, “Celio, could you set up a video-conference for me with Kinshasa? I’d like to speak with Mirnas. I’d like him to clarify one or two things for me. Could you arrange that? See you later. Whenever you want. Thanks.”
Isookanga had just finished his day and sold his whole supply of Pure Swiss Water. He needed to increase the production again, he thought. With a surplus balance, he and Zhang Xia expected to look for additional partners soon. Isookanga was thinking of Little Modogo and Trésor. Even if it meant carrying boxes of merchandise for the others, it was better that Isookanga stimulate their enterprising spirit by granting them a franchise on Pure Swiss Water. He would suggest the plan to them when they returned.
One of them wasn’t long in coming. As if ejected by the crowd, Modogo suddenly appeared exactly where Isookanga had just put down his cooler beside Shasha, who was cooking. She called out, “What’s wrong with you, Modogo? Did you finally meet up with the devil?”
Before the boy could answer, Mukulutu Blindé, one of the nastiest shégués, came running after him, looking less than pleased. He rushed forward to grab Modogo. Fortunately, Isookanga, Shasha la Jactance, and Gianni Versace—testing his new approach in front of Marie Liboma—were present, or the kid would have had a rough time of it.
“Hey, calm down!” Isookanga commanded, arms spread wide to keep the fighters apart. “What’s going on?”
“Vieux na ngai.2 You know where I’m coming from?” Mukulutu raged.
“Explain, but calmly.”
“From jail, Old One! Because of him!”
And Mukulutu Blindé shoved his fist in the direction of Little Modogo, who dodged him and snapped, “Lââs perses, si elaï!”3
“You see?” the fighter railed, beside himself. “Because of his curses I just spent a day in a jail cell.”
“How come?” Isookanga asked.
“This morning I was going out to sell my ready-to-wear. You know very well, Old One, there’s no one in all of Kinshasa who sells secondhand pants with the same fine names as I do. So this morning, just before I left to sell my stuff, this little asshole flung one of those spells he’s used to casting on people in my face. So I said to myself, ‘Mukulutu, stay calm.’ I controlled myself and said nothing. But as soon as I got to the Avenue du Commerce, the cops and some business agents were all over me and hauled me off to jail. They said I had no vendor’s permit and took away everything I had!”
“But what’s Modogo got to do with that?”
“He’s a sorcerer, Isoo! Don’t you hear how he talks? He put a curse on me!”
Isookanga had mixed feelings. Mukulutu was exaggerating, but perhaps, yes, Modogo’s words might have a harmful effect on someone who knew how to listen. When a rating agency speaks, maybe nothing happens right away, but the butterfly effect will be immediate. Everyone starts giving you funny looks, loan maturities are suddenly fraught with astronomical interest rates, and sometimes, even before you can seek any financial protection in a f
iscal paradise, you could easily—like Madoff or Mukulutu4—find yourself in prison without a parachute, without anything, ruined. Mukulutu was right: depending on who uttered them, words could sometimes bear a disastrous weight and have an even greater effect than the shock of a photograph of oneself in handcuffs, unshaven, unkempt, on the front page of every newspaper.
“Yo, Modogo!” Shasha la Jactance called out, back on her stool. “Stop with those evil maxims of yours. Can’t you see you’re beginning to scare everybody?”
“I’m sick of it! Just wait till I’m grown up. I’m going to be part of the kuluna. Every gang wants me: the Benghazi, the Bétons Noirs, the Chinese, the Tcha-Batchuba; they’re begging me to join. The Maï-Maï have water to defend themselves against bullets, the kuluna told me they’d have me—me and my dialogues—for protection.”
“Do whatever you want; I’m going to see Zhang Xia. Mukulutu, the cops don’t need anyone else to give you a hard time. Modogo, I’ll see you in a bit. I have a proposal for you.”
With these words Isookanga cut through the crowd, still dense in the late afternoon, and headed for the Avenue du Commerce.
Along the way he was thinking about Raging Trade, which was bothering him more and more. Lately Congo Bololo was having nothing but problems. He was no longer able to make any headway. The levels were constantly increasing, and he was paralyzed by the UN decisions because of maneuvers by American Diggers, Skulls and Bones, and the GGAP, all of whom were allies of that son of a bitch Kannibal Dawa. They were after his head; that was clear. Negotiations were in progress with Hiroshima-Naga, Blood and Oil, and Mass Graves Petroleum, to counter their strategy, but that would take time. Each was in it for himself.
Isookanga thought of a different, faster solution: reinforce his aerial capacity once again. He knew that Uranium and Security had managed to break the codes of his aviation by default and had developed a new version of the Rafale plane. Substantially improved, it was a variant of the real Rafale: baptized Rafale 2.0 it had the original characteristics pushed to the extreme. The virtual mode was selling like hotcakes on the Internet and—in all kinds of video games—equipping the armies of those who wanted to maintain supremacy in the air and destroy anybody and anything in air combat. He had managed to penetrate most of the defense lines, and his antimissile protection safeguarded him from the majority of the projectiles. As for his maneuverability, it was like a wasp’s at Mach 1.4 speed. Isookanga had to obtain some of these technological wonders. He would check the Net later to find out how to proceed.
“Old Tshitshi, how’s it going?”
“Fine, Little One.”
Old Tshitshi was busy sweeping the slab he used as a lookout post. Zhang Xia was sitting on the chair, the cooler by his side. Having crisscrossed the center of the city all day long, he was resting his legs.
“How’s everything, Zhang Xia?”
“Fine, Isoo.”
He sat down on the ground next to his friend.
“You have any news from home?”
“No, nothing. What I do know is that I should be there, with them.”
“No doubt, Zhang Xia, but sometimes you have to make sacrifices.”
“Easy for you to say. You don’t have a wife, you don’t have a child, you don’t understand.”
“I don’t understand? Kolela ya mbisi na kati ya mai, emonanaka? Do you notice when a fish cries in the water? Please know that I’m quite capable of loving. If I don’t have a wife, it’s because they’re only interested in my body, and I’m not circumcised, Zhang Xia. The worst possible curse for a man. And all because of my mother.”
“Your mother? She did that to you?”
“When I was very little she forgot to take me to the circumciser, and now women disparage me. It gives me complexes. And that’s very serious, so I’ve read; white people, when they have them, are never cured. I’m sure that this Oedipus Wikipedia talks about must have been in the same predicament as I. His mother surely must have abandoned him when she forgot to have him circumcised—even though that’s not what it says there. It made him very strange, though.”
“Isoo, don’t think about your mother like that. You know what Prozac is?”
Isookanga shook his head.
“If you keep this up, it’s the medication you’ll need to take someday. It’s like a drug that makes you forget.”
“But the women in Ekanga will never forget. So how does it change things?”
“Precisely! You’ll be like those Westerners with never-ending psychological problems. It was simple before, with the great Mao Tse-Tung; they sent everyone like that to be reeducated. They came back cured. With scientific socialism we’ve accomplished miracles as well.”
“Mao had healing gifts? More effective than Freud’s?”
Isookanga considered this for a moment. “Tell me, this product … its producer in the West must be making tons of money. How many millions over there are unloved and uncircumcised? Just figure out the number of doses a day. It’s like Pfizer; you know them?”
“I’ve heard of them.”
“They’re something else. You realize that with a molecule they call Viagra they managed to commercialize erections? Those pharmaceutical groups will end up by imposing their law on our behavior, Zhang Xia. I believe we should think about reducing the psychotropic drug market and investing in other areas—in personal development, for example. In any event, affected or not, I don’t care. If I have a daughter, I’ll call her Antigone in protest, like the daughter of Oedipus. She’ll be the lineal heiress to Pure Swiss Water and not just foolishly sentimental like the other one.
“Well, Zhang Xia, there’s no point in adding that what I’ve told you about my anatomy is strictly between us. All of it just to explain to you that you’re here for the welfare of your family. Stop dreaming. You’re like everyone else: you need Congo to develop yourself. In fact, there’s something I want to talk to you about.”
“Go ahead,” Zhang Xia answered tersely.
“Commander Bizimungu, the visionary in the field of minerals I told you about, remember? They’ve given that guy control over my region, and he’s as ready as I am to get rid of a lot of trees to exploit that part of the land legitimately.”
“Exploit the minerals?”
“Yes, but that’s not all; they’ll have to build roads, establish infrastructures.”
“Wait, I may have something for you.” Zhang Xia pulled up his T-shirt. He wore a small plastic bag around his neck containing documents and a red passport with Mandarin ideograms on it. He took out a CD-ROM showing the same kind of characters. “See this? Everything you want to know about the location of minerals is here, on this disk.”
Isookanga’s eyes opened wide. “You’re kidding! And you had that on you, all this time?”
“Of course.”
“But Zhang Xia, that’s worth a fortune! You can buy yourself a ticket back to China with that.”
“You think I could trade it in for a ticket?”
“I’m sure Commander Bizimungu would be happy to pay just to find out what’s on that disk. With that information he’ll know exactly what’s underneath every tree.”
“Isoo, I think you’re imagining things about that guy. I don’t really feel the same way. He’s a warlord. I know them well. It’s in China that they went to work for the first time—and in the service of the same imperialists as in Congo. These people have a very short view of things. While they wreck the country, they still find good reasons for doing what they do. Anyone can make a mistake in the belief you’re taking the right path. Even the Great Helmsman was wrong at least once.5 Wanting to free himself from Soviet socialism, he tried an alternate route. That cost China millions of lives as a result of famine and malnutrition.”
“Are you sure there weren’t any plusses at all?” Isookanga tried to play it down. “Surely the nation must have benefited from the experiment somehow, because from then on you’ve been able to accumulate one success after another and buil
d the new Chinese socialism.”
“I don’t see it that way. Nothing can rationalize the suffering that was inflicted; you can’t justify disaster.”
“Fine, we’ll go see the commander. You who are in public works, you could do construction in Ekanga. In the meantime, you don’t have to hang out with him. He trusts me. He knows that I’m up on the ancestral technologies, that because I’m familiar with the trees, I also anticipate what’s below them. I’ll tell him I know how they spot manganese, for instance. With your disk and my computer, I’ll know where. I’ll tell him that, and he’ll pay us to get more information. We can make a lot of money, Zhang Xia. In the underground in the East he was involved in strategic matters. He’s a pro, a major player in globalization.”
The young Chinese couldn’t stop thinking, “Globalization is crap to me.”
As the sun began to set, relative calm had returned to the Great Market. Shasha was in front of the nook engrossed in her cooking. She was preparing antelope meat, moto moko,6 on two braziers, bitekuteku,7 and steamed fresh manioc. She was being especially meticulous, for the dishes were meant for Waldemar Mirnas, the peacekeeper. The two of them had something like a contract. Once a week she was his. He would come for her and take her to his house in Gombe. They had met one night in the rainy season, when the air was sticky and thick with humidity. She’d been oddly impressed with his immense height, but also with his hair, the color of dry straw. As for his icy blue eyes, until now she hadn’t been able to gaze at them yet.
When they arrived at his place, he had been considerate and even treated her with kindness—until the moment when he ordered her to take off her clothes and put on a white apron, the kind maids wear. He came from the heart of the Baltic and had arrived in Congo with the same clichés that live in the collective unconscious of a large part of the planet with regard to African docility—both male and female. In view of the notorious insubordination of the people with whom Waldemar Mirnas was made to rub shoulders, he quickly realized these ideas were a bit obsolete. The malleability of the Congolese eluded all analysis. The major wanted to understand and had picked Shasha as a sample of the population. She had the temperament of a lynx, and Waldemar Mirnas wouldn’t rest until he’d molded her according to his wishes. Dollars were the appropriate tool for this purpose, and his money managed to ease the doubts one might have about oneself.
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