Jo Nesbo - The Leopard

‘Next.’

Harry stepped forward to the window, presented his passport, landing card, copy of the visa application he had printed off the Net and the crisp sixty dollars the visa had cost.

‘Business?’ the passport official asked, and Harry met his eyes. The man was tall, thin and his skin so dark that it reflected light. Probably Tutsi, Harry thought. They controlled the national borders now.

‘Yes.’

‘Where?’

‘The Congo,’ Harry said, then used the local name to distinguish the two Congo countries.

‘Congo Kinshasa,’ the passport official corrected.

He pointed to the landing card Harry had filled in on the plane. ‘Says here you’re staying at Gorilla Hotel in Kigali.’

‘Just tonight,’ Harry said. ‘Then I’m going to the Congo tomorrow, one night in Goma and then back here and home. It’s a shorter drive than from Kinshasa.’

‘Have a pleasant stay in the Congo, busy man,’ the uniformed official said with a hearty laugh, smacked the stamp down on the passport and returned it.

Half an hour later Harry filled in the hotel registration card at Gorilla, signed it and was given a key attached to a wooden gorilla. When Harry went to bed it was eighteen hours since he had left his at home in Oppsal. He stared at the fan howling at the foot of the bed. It provided hardly a puff of air even though the blades were rotating at a hysterical speed. He wasn’t going to be able to sleep.

The driver asked Harry to call him Joe. Joe was Congolese, spoke fluent French and rather more halting English. He had been hired by contacts at a Norwegian aid organisation based in Goma.

‘Eight hundred thousand,’ Joe said, guiding the Land Rover along a potholed but perfectly navigable tarmac road winding between green meadows and mountain slopes cultivated from top to bottom. Occasionally, he was charitable and braked so as not to run down people walking, cycling, wheeling and carrying goods at the edge of the road, but as a rule they made a life-saving leap at the very last second.

‘They kill eight hundred thousand in just few weeks in 1994. The Hutus invade their kind, old neighbours and cut them down with machetes because they Tutsis. The propaganda on the radio say that if your husband is Tutsi it is your duty as Hutu to kill him. Cut down the tall trees. Many flee along this road…’ Joe pointed out of the window. ‘Bodies pile up. Some places it is impossible to pass. Good times for vultures.’

They drove on in silence.

They passed two men carrying a big cat bound to a pole by its legs. Children were dancing and cheering beside it and sticking pins into the dead animal. The coat was sun-coloured with patches of shade.

‘Hunters?’ Harry asked.

Joe shook his head, glanced in the mirror and answered in a mixture of English and French: ‘Hit by car, je crois. That one is almost impossible to hunt. It is rare, has large territory, only hunts at night. Hides and blends into environs during the day. I think it is very lonely animal, Harry.’

Harry watched men and women working in the fields. At several points there was heavy machinery and men repairing the road. Down in a valley he saw a motorway under construction. In a field children in blue school uniforms were kicking a football about and shouting.

‘Rwanda is good,’ Joe said.

Two and a half hours later Joe pointed through the windscreen. ‘Lake Kivu. Very nice, very deep.’

The surface of the huge expanse of water seemed to reflect a thousand suns. The country on the other side was the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Mountains rose on all sides. A single white cloud encircled the peak of one of them.

‘Not much cloud,’ Joe said as if intuiting what Harry was thinking. ‘The killer mountain. Nyiragongo.’

Harry nodded.

An hour later they had passed the border and were driving into Goma. On the roadside an emaciated man in a torn jacket was sitting and staring ahead through desperate, crazed eyes. Joe steered the vehicle carefully between the craters in the muddy path. A military jeep was in front of them. The swaying soldier manning the machine gun looked at them with cold, weary eyes. Above them roared aeroplane engines.

‘UN,’ Joe said. ‘More guns and grenades. Nkunda come closer to the city. Very strong. Many people escape now. Refugees. Maybe Monsieur Van Boorst, too, eh? I not see him long time.’

‘You know him?’

‘Everybody know Mr Van. But he has Ba-Maguje in him.’

‘Ba-what?’

‘Un mauvais esprit. A demon. He makes you thirsty for alcohol. And take away your emotions.’

The air-conditioning unit was blowing cold air. The sweat was running down between Harry’s shoulder blades.

They had stopped midway between two rows of shacks, in what Harry realised was a kind of city centre in Goma. People hastened to and fro on the almost impassable path between the shops. Black boulders were piled up alongside the houses and served as foundations. The ground looked like stiffened black icing and grey dust whirled up in the air that stank of rotten fish.

‘La,’ Joe said, pointing to the door of the only brick house in the row. ‘I wait in the car.’

Harry noticed a couple of men stop in the street as he exited the car. They gave him the neutral, dangerous gaze that relayed no warning. Men who knew that acts of aggression were more effective without a warning. Harry headed straight for the door without looking either side, showed that he knew what he was doing there, where he should go. He knocked. Once. Twice. Three times. Bollocks! Bloody long way to come just to The door opened a fraction.

A wrinkled white face with questioning eyes stared at him.

‘Eddie Van Boorst?’ Harry asked.

‘Il est mort,’ said the man in a voice so hoarse it sounded like a death rattle.

Harry remembered enough school French to understand that the man was claiming Van Boorst was dead. He tried in English. ‘My name is Harry Hole. I was given Van Boorst’s name by Herman Kluit in Hong Kong. I’m interested in a Leopold’s apple.’

The man blinked twice. Stuck his head out of the door and looked left and right. Then he opened the door a little more. ‘Entrez,’ he said, motioning Harry in.

Harry ducked beneath the low door frame and just managed to bend his knees in time; the floor inside was twenty centimetres lower.

There was a smell of incense. As well as something else, familiar – the sweet stench of an old man who had been drinking for several days.

Harry’s eyes became used to the dark, and he discovered that the small, frail old man was wearing an elegant, burgundy silk dressing gown.

‘Scandinavian accent,’ said Van Boorst in Hercule Poirot English and placed a cigarette in a yellowing holder between his thin lips. ‘Let me guess. Definitely not Danish. Could be Swedish. But I think Norwegian. Yes?’

A cockroach showed its antennae through a crack in the wall behind him.

‘Mm. An expert on accents?’

‘A mere pastime,’ said Van Boorst, flattered, pleased. ‘For small nations like Belgium you have to learn to look outwards, not inwards. And how is Herman?’

‘Fine,’ Harry said, turning to his right and seeing two pairs of bored eyes looking at him. One from a photo above the bed in the corner. A framed portrait of a person with a long grey beard, powerful nose, short hair, epaulettes, chain and sword. King Leopold, unless Harry was much mistaken. The other pair of eyes belonged to the woman lying on her side in the bed with only a blanket draped over her hips. The light from the window above her fell on her small, supple young girl’s breasts. She responded to Harry’s nod with a fleeting smile that revealed a large gold tooth among all the white ones. She couldn’t have been more than twenty. On the wall behind the slim waist Harry glimpsed a bolt hammered into the cracked plaster. From the bolt dangled a pair of pink handcuffs.