The Leopard

29
Kluit

It was an unusually mild evening in Hong Kong. The skyscrapers cast long shadows over The Peak, some almost as far as the house where Herman Kluit was sitting on the terrace with a blood-red Singapore sling in one hand and the telephone in the other. He was listening while watching the lights in the queues of traffic twisting and turning like fireworms way below.

He liked Harry Hole, had liked him from the first moment he had clapped eyes on the tall, athletic, but obviously alcoholic Norwegian stepping into Happy Valley to put his last money on the wrong horse. There was something about the aggressive expression, the arrogant bearing, the alert body language that reminded him of himself as a young mercenary soldier in Africa. Herman Kluit had fought everywhere, on all sides, serving the paymasters. In Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, Liberia. All countries with dark pasts and even darker futures. But nowhere darker than the country about which Harry had asked. The Congo. That was where they had eventually found the vein of gold. In the form of diamonds. And cobalt. And coltan. The village chief belonged to the Mai Mai, who thought water made them invulnerable. But otherwise he was a sensible man. There was nothing you couldn’t fix in Africa with a bundle of notes or – at a pinch – a supply of Kalashnikovs. In the course of one year Herman Kluit became a rich man. In the course of three he was wealthy beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Once a month they had travelled to the closest town, Goma, and slept in beds instead of on the jungle floor where a carpet of mysterious bloodsucking flies emerged from holes every night and you woke up like a half-eaten corpse. Goma. Black lava, black money, black beauties, black sins. Half of the men in the jungle had contracted malaria, the rest sicknesses with which no white doctor was conversant and which were subsumed under the generic term ‘jungle fever’. That was the affliction Herman Kluit suffered from, and even though it left him in peace for long periods, he was never completely free. The only remedy Herman Kluit knew of was Singapore sling. He had been introduced to the drink in Goma by a Belgian who owned a fantastic house that had reportedly been built by King Leopold in the period when the country was known as the Congo Free State and was the monarch’s private playpen and treasure chest. The house was situated down by the banks of Lake Kivu with women and sunsets so beautiful that for a while you could forget the jungle, Mai Mai and earth flies.

It was the Belgian who had shown Herman Kluit the king’s little treasury in the cellar. There he had collected everything, from the world’s most advanced clocks, rare weapons and imaginative instruments of torture to gold nuggets, unpolished diamonds and preserved human heads. That was where Herman Kluit had first come face to face with what they called a Leopold’s apple. By all accounts it had been developed by one of the king’s Belgian engineers to use on recalcitrant tribal chiefs who would not say where they found their diamonds. The earlier method had been to use buffaloes. They covered the chief in honey, tied him to a tree and brought along a captured forest buffalo, which began to lick off the honey. The point of this was that the buffalo’s tongue was so coarse that it licked off skin and flesh with it. But it took time to catch a buffalo, and they could be hard to stop once they had started. Hence Leopold’s apple. Not that it was particularly effective from a torturer’s angle – after all, the apple prevented the prisoner from speaking. But the effect on the natives who witnessed what happened when the interrogator pulled the string for the second time was exemplary. The next man asked to open wide couldn’t speak fast enough.

Herman Kluit nodded to his Filipina housemaid for her to take away the empty glass.

‘You remember rightly, Harry,’ Herman Kluit said. ‘It’s still on my mantelpiece. Fortunately I do not know if it has ever been used. A souvenir. It reminds me of what there is in the heart of darkness. That’s always useful, Harry. No, I’ve neither seen it nor heard of it being used anywhere else. It’s a complicated piece of technology, you know, with all these springs and needles. Requires a special alloy. Coltan is correct. Yes indeed. Very rare. The person from whom I purchased my apple, Eddie Van Boorst, claimed only twenty-four had been made, and that he had twenty-two of them, one of which was twenty-four-carat gold. That’s right, there are twenty-four needles as well. How did you know? Apparently the number twenty-four had something to do with the engineer’s sister, I don’t recall what. But that may also have been something Van Boorst said to push up the price. He’s Belgian, isn’t he.’

Kluit’s laughter transmuted into coughing. Damned fever.

‘However, he ought to have some idea of where the apples are. He lived in a splendid house in Goma, in north Kivu, by the border to Rwanda. The address?’ Kluit coughed again. ‘Goma gets a new street every day, and now and then half the town is buried under lava, so addresses don’t exist, Harry. But the post office has a list of all the whites. No, I have no idea if he still lives in Goma. Or whether he is still alive, for that matter. Life expectancy in the Congo is thirty-something, Harry. For whites also. Besides, the town is as good as under siege. Exactly. No, of course you haven’t heard of the war. No one has.’

Dumbfounded, Gunnar Hagen stared at Harry and leaned across his desk.

‘You want to go to Rwanda?’ he said.

‘Just a flying visit,’ Harry said. ‘Two days including the flights.’

‘To investigate what?’

‘What I said. A missing persons case. Adele Vetlesen. Kaja will go to Ustaoset to see if she can find out who Adele was travelling with before she disappeared.’

‘Why can’t you just ring up and ask them to check the guest book?’

‘Because the cabin in Havass is self-service,’ said Kaja, who had settled in the chair next to Harry’s. ‘But anyone who stays in a Tourist Association cabin has to sign the guest book and state their destination. It’s compulsory because if anyone’s reported missing in the mountains, the search party will know where to concentrate their efforts. I’m hoping Adele and her companion gave a full name and address.’

Gunnar Hagen scratched his wreath of hair with both hands. ‘And none of this has anything to do with the other murders?’

Harry stuck out his bottom lip. ‘Not as far as I can see, boss. Can you?’

‘Hm. And why should I decimate the travel budget for such an extravagant trip?’

‘Because human trafficking is a priority,’ Kaja said. ‘Hence the Minister of Justice’s statement to the press earlier this week.’

‘Anyway,’ Harry said, stretching upwards and entwining his fingers behind his head, ‘it may well be that other things come to light in the process, things which might lead to us cracking other cases.’

Gunnar Hagen scrutinised his inspector thoughtfully.

‘Boss,’ Harry added.