The Uttermost Parts of the Earth Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by Frederic Hunter

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

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  The Permanent Press

  4170 Noyac Road

  Sag Harbor, NY 11963

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hunter, Frederic, author.

  The uttermost parts of the earth / Frederic Hunter.

  Sag Harbor, NY: The Permanent Press, [2018]

  ISBN: 978-1-57962-516-0

  eISBN: 978-1-57962-551-1

  1. Suspense fiction. 2. Romantic suspense fiction.

  PS3558.U477 U88 2018

  813'.54—dc23

  2017047516

  Printed in the United States of America

  In Memoriam Paul and Helen Hunter

  ONE

  When Kwame Johnson stepped off the plane at Ndjili Airport outside Kinshasa, pickpockets, hustlers, and pirate cab drivers studied him from the observation deck. Not one of them mistook him for an African. Not even in the dark of night, shortly after midnight. No, not an African, for what African would return from Europe in less than a business suit and tie? What Zairean would let his relatives think he had failed abroad? This man wore a Ghanaian tie-dye shirt with embroidery at the neck and jeans stiff with newness; he went barefoot in Mexican huaraches. Undoubtedly an American. In one hand he carried a duffel with a Patagonia fleece stuck under his arm. The other held a small padded suitcase. The men on the observation deck inspected that suitcase. Obviously a laptop computer. That would be something to snatch.

  The man had an American way of striding across the tarmac. Tired from the long flight from Belgium, he was still erect, eyes alert, shoulders squared back, seeming taller than his six feet. He carried a passport in his hand, confident of who he was, of his citizenship, and his comparative wealth in this place of poverty. Even so, he glanced about apprehensively. He had heard of the gauntlet of thieves and hustlers that waited to prey on new arrivals as they emerged from customs inspection. Those hustlers raced down to customs to snatch him as he entered the noise and confusion of the preying ground.

  The person who actually snatched him was the embassy greeter. Under the watchful eyes of the giant portrait of Mobutu Sese Seko, Zaire’s president/dictator, behind a hubbub of contending bodies, the greeter held up a sign that read: K. Johnson. Kwame smiled with relief and strode toward him. “Mr. Johnson?” The small man in the safari suit, Lebanese from the looks of him, exuded a presence larger than himself. “I’m from the embassy,” he said. “Follow me.” The man took Kwame’s wrist and pulled him through the mass of touts screaming at him: “Taxi, M’sieur? Hotel? Taxi?” When an arm reached out to grab the laptop, Kwame became aware of men, tall and well-muscled, walking close to him on either side. The reaching arms withdrew.

  Outside, the night air was cooler. Vehicle exhaust fumes replaced the odor of bodies. The greeter led Kwame to a Ford Explorer. The escorts put Kwame’s luggage into the rear of the SUV, accepted their tips, and vanished. The greeter sped Kwame into the city. A cloud layer of what seemed like hot, wet cotton hung so close to the earth that Kwame felt he could touch it. Sprawling shantytowns of cast-off metal and palmfrond shacks stood beside the highway, illuminated by occasional naked light bulbs. Men in shorts, tee shirts, and sandals laughed together. The sharp smell of vegetable decay and cookfires lingered in the air.

  The greeter deposited Kwame at the InterContinental Hotel, its lobby decorated with ersatz Bakuba masks. As he registered, Kinshasa rock ’n’ roll pulsated out of the hotel bar where couples danced. Silk-suited men wearing gold rings and sunglasses stood outside the bar conducting business by phone. Sunglasses at midnight, Kwame thought. Welcome to Central Africa.

  A young Zairean woman in a tight leather dress revealing her thighs approached Kwame, following nodded instructions from a silk suit. She sidled beside him, her push-up bra displaying abundant cleavage, and grazed him with her voluminous headcloth. She whispered in an African language. He examined her: well-modeled face, good cheekbones, and well-turned lips, but with eyes as empty as a vacant house. When he did not answer, she repeated her solicitation, studied him more carefully. She realized that he was a white man, switched to bad French, and asked if she could be of service to him.

  Kwame said, “Merci. But not tonight.”

  He followed a bellhop into the elevator. A young white woman entered beside him. She had blonded hair, a starveling’s figure, and wore a dress so tight she could hardly walk. “Sidanie did not appeal to you?” she asked. “A good thing.” Smiling, she conveyed that she recognized Kwame for what he was: black, but not African. “Her tribe is the BaSida.”

  Kwame leaned tiredly against the back of the elevator. He observed the young woman. She had a Gallic face like that of a fox—pinched mouth, pointed nose and chin—spoke working-class French out of a mouthful of bad teeth and had cash registers in her eyes. Kwame wondered how many men she had crawled across already tonight, how many fingers and toes and other things she had sucked. She smiled knowingly, dissing the competition. “Be careful of the BaSida,” she warned. “They give and they take away.” SIDA was French for what Americans called AIDS. “Me, I am very careful,” the woman said. “I do not intend to die in this place.” She reached a hand toward Kwame’s groin. He covered it with his laptop. He wondered if the woman and the bellhop had an arrangement. She asked, “May I be of service to you?”

  “I am very careful myself,” Kwame told her in French.

  “Here is my card,” the woman said. “I live quite near the hotel.” She stuffed the card into his shirt pocket and let her hand slide against his laptop. As he left the elevator, she sent him a pucker, both sexy and satiric. Kwame followed the bellhop to his room. As soon as the man departed, he tore up the card. Good god, he thought, why am I here? Thieves are everywhere. The women are diseased. What would Joseph Conrad think of this place hardly a century later? He showered, fell into bed, and dreamed of Livie.

  SHORTLY AFTER dawn Kwame left the First World ambience of the hotel, with its perfumed opulence, its quietude and order, its muted colors specified by pale-eyed, pale-faced designers several continents away. He entered the Third World, the yakking and clatter and honking of its waking all about him, its city stench, the odor of things decaying in the heat, freshened by the comparative coolness of the night, his eye delighting in the bright orange-red of its flame trees, the blues and yellows of the mammy cloths passing women wore. The humid hustle of Kinshasa, chaotic even at this hour, replaced the climate-control and soft musical soothings of the hotel. He walked about, feeling the city’s famous combination of dynamism and lethargy, the one produced by the vigor that had market women setting up stalls at dawn, the other by the pauperization inflicted on the populace by the kleptomania of Mobutu Sese Seko.

  Recently America’s establishment press had filled long columns reporting that the Mobutu era was drawing to a close. What lay ahead for the country Mobutu himself had renamed Zaire none of the punditry could surmise. The dictator’s health was rumored to be failing. He lived in seclusion in palaces set away from the shacks of his people, sometimes on a yacht lying off the capital in the middle of the Congo River, which river he called the Zaire, also sometimes in a magnificent and isolated compound in the grasslands of the north near the village where he was born. His army, effective only at plundering and terrorizing citizens, was losing battles in the east of the country. There it had become enmeshed in the Rwandan crisis, the massacres by géno
cidaires of Rwanda’s Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Kwame wondered how Kinshasa would react to Mobutu’s end, be it death, assassination, or flight. Music would reverberate across the city, he supposed. Dancing feet would pound the floors of bars and brothels, the earth of marketplaces and dusty roads. And then what?

  Kwame walked out the Boulevard de 30 Juin away from the city center. When he crossed streets, vehicles honked at him. Cyclists and pedestrians whizzed past, heading toward town. Feeling the contagion of the early morning bustle, Kwame bought bread and coffee from women cooking at a tree-shaded road stand. The patrons sat at crude tables made from packing crates. As Kwame joined them, they stared at him. They perceived immediately that he was not Zairean, not African. Nor working-class like them. He offered, “’Jour. Comment va?” Their frowns showed that his American-accented French—perhaps any French—was incomprehensible to them.

  I am here, he thought, but I am still out of place.

  Even so, he was glad he had come to Zaire. Kinshasa seemed real and African to him in a way that Cape Town never had. He wondered if he would see it become unreal in the rejoicing at Mobutu’s passing.

  At the Centre Culturel Américain, his colleagues, the American officers, had not yet arrived for work. He found a computer, logged on, and e-mailed Livie to let her know that he had arrived. He reported that Kinshasa was an electric power plant that might—bang! explode! or whimper!—collapse from exhaustion. That he missed her. That he could not wait till he saw her in Paris at Christmas.

  THE VIEW from the twelfth-story balcony in the heart of the city caused the Zairean lunch guests to exclaim with amazement, “Ooo! C’est Brazza là-bas?” Kwame’s host, the embassy’s public affairs officer, who was also his boss, assured them that the city visible across Pool Malebo was, indeed, Brazzaville, capital of the old French Congo, known as Congo-Brazzaville. The Zairean guests giggled with delight. They included an official of the Education Ministry, a vice-chancellor of the university, and a professor of Francophone African literature. All three men wore suits to indicate their position as professionals and glasses to prove their status as intellectuals. The Education Ministry official and the vice-chancellor were both burdened by diamond-studded rings and gold wristwatches. Each man had perfumed his cheeks with French aftershave to show himself an homme du monde. Each managed to receive prearranged telephone calls while the guests had drinks.

  Warren Judkins, the host, wore neither suit nor glasses, but smiled his lined face beneath an unfortunate African haircut. He introduced Kwame as a newly arrived officer, a specialist in comparative literature, formerly a professor of African literature in the American intellectual capital, Boston. He was, enfin, an intellectual like the Zaireans themselves. Kwame offered proof in the flesh, Judkins said, that Americans esteemed African writing. He was also a resource, an accomplished lecturer on works by both African and African American writers. Judkins hoped that his guests would take advantage of Kwame’s expertise and arrange lectures for him.

  Kwame quickly hit it off with the professor of Francophone African literature. Drinking infusions after the meal they chatted about African cinema, about Idrissa Ouedraogo, Djibril Diop Mambéty, and Ousmane Sembène and compared notes on Sembène’s Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu, about which the professor had done some writing. The man offered to take Kwame to see the university that very afternoon. But Judkins shook his head. He whispered: “We need to talk—if we can ever get these fellas to leave.”

  The guests gone, Judkins said, “These fellas mean well and, believe me, surviving in Mobutu’s chicken coop requires better political instincts than either of us has got.” He slipped out of his seersucker coat, pulled off his tie, and indicated that Kwame should do the same. He added, “You’ll have plenty of chance to see the university.”

  Kwame sensed that Judkins was about to spring something on him. He shed his coat, but remained in his tie. Moments like this called for protective coloration—PC, as he thought of it—his strategy for coping with the white world. It and its namesake, political correctness, had much in common. The rules were these: Appear to share the attitudes of those with whom you associate. Agree with thine adversary whilst he is in thy way. Blend with thine environment so that others can assume thou art “on the team.” Kwame blandly smiled. He told Judkins, “It isn’t as if I haven’t seen an African university.”

  Judkins locked the door and continued to watch his guest. Kwame continued to smile. “What made you agree to come here?” Judkins asked, stretching out on a government-issue sofa and gesturing Kwame to a chair. The question’s directness surprised Kwame. He took a slow look around for a place to set his coat. “I trust it wasn’t to further American policy,” Judkins said. “Which is a little confused.”

  “To be truthful, I’ve asked myself why I’m here,” Kwame admitted. “It wasn’t easy to explain to my girlfriend or my family.”

  “Explain it to me,” Judkins suggested. When Kwame shrugged, he smiled and suggested, “Perhaps it was personal. You looking for—”

  “Myself? I don’t think so.”

  “You never know,” Judkins said. “Nothing like an overseas post to reveal you to yourself. Sometimes you’re pleased. Sometimes not.”

  “I guess I wanted to see more of Africa.” A fumbling start. He shrugged. “Maybe I thought I could help these people.” Judkins studied Kwame in the afternoon silence. Kwame felt as he had in graduate school oral exams when he’d fielded an unexpected question.

  “Help them to do what?” Judkins asked.

  Protective coloration, Kwame realized, would advise him to acknowledge that Foreign Service officers were charged with furthering American interests. But he was a scholar, presently an FSo of the US Information Service, charged with a cultural mission. Traditional embassy concerns—consular affairs, politics, regional security, commercial arrangements—did not involve him. “Help them become educated,” he replied. “Modern, but still African. To get a sense of the bigger world beyond the village, the town, or even this city. To realize that other Africans are wondering the same things they are, raising the same questions. That’s what literature can do.”

  “Literature did that when you were teaching in Boston?”

  Judkins was certainly appraising him, Kwame thought. Because he was black? Maybe, but maybe not. “In Boston I was cajoling undergraduates to read books that bored them,” he said. “Hardly noble work.”

  “You expect to do noble work for us here, do you?” Kwame shrugged again, snagged by the words “for us.” The point he had just made was that he hoped to do it “for them.” He felt caught looking naive. Judkins smiled. “I used to teach myself,” he confided. “Perhaps education really is wasted on the young.”

  “Even here?” Kwame asked. “There’s been so little of it here.”

  Judkins shrugged. He looked supportive. Kwame decided to relax about the color of his skin. They became, more or less, just two Americans in a strange country who had once shared the same profession. “You’ve gotten a taste of the place,” Judkins observed. “Willing to spend two years here?”

  “I think so,” Kwame said.

  Judkins nodded, pleased.

  THE TWO men moved out onto a balcony overlooking Pool Malebo. Under the canvas awning the air was hot and motionless. Kwame stood in the sun by the railing where a slight breeze stirred. He gazed at Brazzaville obscured by haze on the opposite bank of the great river. Below the balcony, idle wharves and shanties clustered; they looked like the leavings of a garbage truck. The stench of the shanties rose twelve stories to assail his nostrils. He moved under the awning where Judkins sat, but remained standing, looking across the river.

  “Sorry to bring you out here,” Judkins said, “but I don’t want the cook hearing what I have to say. He doesn’t seem to understand much English, but you never know.”

  Judkins was in his early fifties, Kwame estimated, with graying hair surrounding a bald spot, tired eyes, and an expression of resignation that bespoke a career sp
ent mainly in Africa dealing with crises, large and small. He had settled himself into one of the peculiarly African chairs that graced the balcony. It was formed of tree branches steamed and bent into chair-like shapes. It offered seat cushions and back rests made of foam rubber covered with mammy cloth bargained for in the markets. Beside the chairs stood a collection of drums on which guests could rest drinks. A gathering of African sculptures, weathered by rain and sun, clustered in one corner of the balcony as if to welcome benevolent spirits and ward off evil ones.

  Quietly and without looking at him Judkins spoke the words the servant was not to hear. “Embassy’s guessing that Mobutu’s all but finished,” he said. “After stamping his image across the entire country. After renaming the Congo Zaire and the river too. These days he’s almost never seen.” Judkins scanned Pool Malebo as if searching for Mobutu’s yacht. “We’re betting he’s sick, very sick. We could be wrong.” He shrugged. “You never know out here. In any case, we’re not offering him medical treatment. We’re thinking of what comes next.”

  “What does?” Kwame asked.

  “Things fly apart,” Judkins said. “Isn’t that the title of one of the books you lecture about?”

  The title was, in fact, Things Fall Apart, but Kwame would not be pedantic. “There’s also one called No Longer at Ease,” he remarked. “Same author.”

  “Achebe knew the territory,” Judkins said. “But things flying apart doesn’t serve our interests. Or anyone else’s. Look at what’s happened up at the Lakes. I’ve seen footage of Hutus and Tutsis opening each other’s heads with pangas as if they were melons. Hacking up pregnant women. Smashing babies against walls. Slicing heads off. Stuff that makes you sick.”

  Judkins acknowledged that this was not a phenomenon unique to Africans. “But what happens,” he asked, “if disruptions start popping across this entire country?”

  Kwame said nothing, watching a ferry leave its wharf and start across the Pool.