The Devil’s Kingdom

Chapter 56

‘I told you before what I had in mind.’

‘I didn’t think you were serious.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s such a ridiculous idea.’

‘Then what else can I do?’

‘We’ve been here before, Jude. When you took the damn thing, didn’t you have a better plan than this for getting shot of it?’

‘Won’t you help me out here?’

The argument had been going on all through their breakfast of French toast, scrambled eggs, and café au lait in Mama Lumumba’s homely but tiny kitchen, where all twelve of them were crowded around the table. Jude had got up that morning with an unusually rosy glow about him, mysteriously shared by Rae, though both were acting innocent; but ever since the matter of the diamond had been raised, Jude and Ben had been back at loggerheads over what to do with it and the atmosphere had grown tense. Jude was sick to death of carrying the thing around. He certainly didn’t want to keep it, however much it was worth, and he could see only one viable option for getting rid of it.

Ben and Jeff were firmly opposed to the idea of handing it over to the police.

‘Why don’t you let Jude do what he wants with it?’ Rae challenged Ben. ‘And if he needs your help, why don’t you help him?’

Jeff said through a mouthful of egg, ‘Because the cops will magic it away faster than… Tues, who’s that Yank magician we saw on the TV?’

‘David Blaine,’ Tuesday said.

Jeff nodded. ‘Right. Faster than David Blaine.’ He made an exploding motion with his hands. ‘Poof. Now you see it, now you don’t.’

‘But I have to say…’ Tuesday added, frowning. He was eating with one hand, his bad arm in a sling.

‘What?’

Tuesday shrugged his good shoulder. ‘At least then it’s out of our hair. Who really cares what happens to it, as long as it’s gone, and as long as Khosa can’t get his mitts on it again?’

‘There. See?’ Rae said, pointing at Tuesday and looking fiercely at Ben.

‘Besides, we don’t know for sure that it would just somehow vanish into the system,’ Jude said. ‘Why are you being so cynical?’

‘T.I.A.,’ Jeff said. ‘This Is Africa.’

Ben looked across the table at Sizwe. ‘What do you think?’

‘I have no opinion on this,’ Sizwe said.

‘Three against two,’ Rae said, still looking fiercely at Ben.

Ben put up his hands in submission. ‘Fine, you win. We’ll drive into the city this morning, find the police headquarters, assuming there is one, ask to see whoever’s in command and hand the diamond to him. Then it’s gone, come what may. Happy?’

‘And afterwards we’ll take you to the US Embassy and get you sorted out for a flight home,’ Jude said, looking at Rae. The two of them exchanged a lingering gaze that everyone except the children pretended not to notice. Sefu nudged Fabrice with his elbow and flashed a covert grin. Kids.

‘And then it’s a trip to the nearest bank,’ Jeff said. ‘Or Mama will nail our bollocks to the wall.’

‘You shouldn’t use language like that in front of them,’ Rae said, pointing at the boys.

‘Can’t take me anywhere, can you?’ Jeff grumbled.

‘What is bollocks?’ Juma asked, blinking.

The plan started out with just Ben and Jude going to the police on their own, but quickly grew from there. Rae wanted to spend every available moment with Jude before she left, and nobody was about to deny her. Jeff was set on going along as backup. Tuesday, despite being bandaged and on painkillers, insisted on being present when the diamond was finally squared away. Meanwhile Mani, who appeared not to want to leave Ben’s side, kicked up a fuss about being left behind, which meant Juma and the others all wanted to be there as well, which in turn meant that Sizwe decided to tag along in order to be close to Juma.

In the end, after helping Mama do the breakfast dishes, the whole motley band of twelve set off into Brazzaville in the stolen Land Rover which, Rae kept reminding Ben, was only borrowed and would have to be returned to the golf club later.

Jeff rolled his eyes at Ben, as if to say, What a ball buster. But Ben was liking Rae more all the time. And he could tell from the look on Jude’s face that this was more than just some passing fling for him. For just one good thing to have come out of the horror and suffering they’d all been through, was more than Ben could have wished.

A little self-consciously, just after nine o’clock that morning, Ben parked the stolen vehicle outside the Brazzaville Police HQ in a district called Makalele. The brickwork still bore the scorch marks and bullet craters from the violent riots that had broken out in the ROC capital a few months earlier in protest against alleged fiddling of election results, during which the angry mob had set fire to government buildings. Nobody had bothered to clean up the damage to the outside of the police HQ, just as nobody on the inside paid the slightest attention to the twelve of them as they walked in.

At what appeared to be a reception desk, Jude cleared his throat to get the attention of the somnolent duty officer and asked to speak to whoever was in charge. A conference between several policemen followed, none of whom looked more than about fifteen years old, as if Jude had requested an audience with the president. Finally, one of them said in English, ‘You want to see Chief Zandu?’

‘If Chief Zandu is the most senior person in the place,’ Ben said, ‘that’s who we want to see.’

‘Let me do the talking,’ Jude hissed as they followed the juvenile cop up a grubby, stuffy passage into the bowels of the police headquarters.

‘Sorry.’

They were shown into Chief Zandu’s poky office, which suddenly became badly crowded as they all filed inside. The children were awed to be inside a police station. The office smelled of mildew and ashtrays. The Brazzaville police chief was a small, pear-shaped man in a paramilitary uniform that was wide open at the neck. On the battered desk in front of him lay a report he’d been examining, concerning the unexplained appearance of a severely damaged military cargo gunship on the Brazzaville golf course the night before. He brushed that to one side, leaned back in a tatty chair and eyed them impassively.

That was, until Jude produced the diamond and set it down on the chief’s desk for effect. The police chief rocked forward in his chair, planted his elbows on the scarred desktop either side of the diamond and boggled at it.

‘What — is — this?’ he asked, very slowly.

‘Stolen property,’ Jude said. ‘Which I’m duly handing over to the authorities so that it can be returned to its rightful owner. We think this diamond was taken by thieves somewhere in Africa, though we can’t be sure. Maybe in Oman. But it can be traced, can’t it? I mean, something like this would have been reported missing, for sure.’ Jude glanced around the office, as though a state-of-the-art mainframe computer giving access to all the international crime databases and INTERPOL records of known fugitives and villains across the world might be in evidence somewhere nearby.

‘It is plastic,’ Zandu said, poking the diamond with a stubby fingertip. ‘It cannot be real.’

‘I can assure you it’s not plastic,’ Jude told him.

‘Wish it was bloody plastic,’ Jeff muttered in the background.

It took a long time to explain the chain of events to the police chief. Jude stuck to a simplified version of the true facts, which centred around the US cargo ship on which he’d been employed as an able seaman before it went down in a storm off the African coast, the theft of the diamond from its presumed original owner by a white American called Pender, and its subsequent theft from Pender by one Jean-Pierre Khosa (at the mention of whose name Chief Zandu showed no flicker of reaction). Now here it was, back out of criminal hands and ready to be reunited with its proper owner, whoever they might be.

Jude kept it simple because he saw it that way. Ben had feared that the police chief’s response would be anything but straightforward, and he’d been right. Once Zandu was persuaded that the object on his desk wasn’t a fake lump of plastic, he jumped to the opposite conclusion and seemed to imply heavily that, for all he knew, Jude himself had stolen this diamond from its owner and was now trying to worm his way out of the consequences by posing as an innocent tourist. He asked a hundred conflicting questions and made Jude repeat his story any number of times, like some clever interrogator trying to catch his suspect in a stumble. He kept demanding to see Jude’s passport, which Jude explained over and over again had been lost at sea: that would be a matter for the British Embassy here in Brazzaville. Jude explained that as a hired hand on a US merchant navy vessel he had been allowed to enter various African countries without a visa. Which didn’t explain how he came to be this far inland, but Zandu seemed to have lost interest in pursuing that line of questioning any further, to Ben’s relief as he’d been thinking Jude was digging himself in too deep, and the rest of them with him.

Finally, the police chief declared in a severe tone that he would need to pass the matter on to the appropriate authorities, and required Jude to stay in town for a few days in case they needed to question him further.

‘No problem,’ Jude said cheerfully.

Zandu asked for a contact address, and Jude wrote the name of Mama’s place on an official form, signed and dated it. Next, Jude signed a lost property form waiving all claim of ownership, then another form, then another.

‘Watch what you’re signing,’ Ben warned Jude quietly. But Jude would happily have signed away his parents’ old house just to be shot of the burden that had been burning a hole in his pocket.

Zandu produced a rubber stamp and proceeded to thump away at the forms until Jude’s signatures and most of the print were obliterated with ink smudges. Then the forms were duly stored away among the midden of paperwork inside the chief’s overflowing desk drawer, probably never to see the light of day again.

At that point, they were dismissed. Jude turned, took Rae’s hand and walked out of Zandu’s office without another glance at the diamond, which the police chief had assured them would go straight into his personal safe pending a thorough investigation.

‘I can only hope you didn’t just open a great big can of worms there, mate,’ Jeff said to Jude as they were escorted from the building.

‘I don’t care,’ Jude replied. ‘I’m just glad to be rid of it. It’s in good hands now.’

Ben said nothing to that.

When the foreigners were gone, Chief André Zandu sat alone in his office, sipping from the bottle of Johnnie Walker he kept hidden behind an ancient copy of the Congolese Penal Code on his bookshelf and toying with the unbelievable diamond that had just, almost literally, landed in his lap. He took off his cap and scratched in consternation at the greying stubble on his head.

Of course, all that about it being a fake had been bullshit, just like all the crap he’d fired at the kid about him having stolen it. It was just well-practised bluster, meant to confuse and intimidate. Zandu had known what the diamond was the instant he’d laid eyes on it.

The whole Kinshasa — Brazzaville criminal fraternity, with whom the chief was very well acquainted — and through which connections he had been supplementing his meagre police salary for many years — had lately been buzzing with rumours about the sudden appearance of the fabulous stone in neighbouring DRC and the much-feared individual who, according to the same sources, had now laid claim to the diamond and was using it to scam money left and right with a little help from his equally well-known and feared associates.

Until now, Chief Zandu hadn’t known whether to believe the rumours. But here was the proof, glittering in his hands. An unimaginable fortune sitting right in front of him. Zandu shut his eyes, and for a few blessed moments he was wafting down Avenue de la Paix in a gold-plated Rolls Royce Corniche convertible with Scarlett Johansson at his side, gazing adoringly at him, the wind in her hair…

Whoosh. Back to reality. Zandu knew only an idiot would fall for the temptation that had come his way. Steal from César Masango? Worse still, steal from General Jean-Pierre Khosa? Forget it, man. There wouldn’t be a rathole in Africa where they wouldn’t find you, drag you out and crucify you, and then your family, and your friends, and everyone you’d ever known. Police chief or no police chief, he knew better than to mess with such lunatics.

But there could be a big reward for a faithful senior official who showed his loyalty to them. This idea made Zandu smile, even as the vision of untold riches crumbled before his eyes. He nodded to himself thoughtfully. Yes, that was it. His only option.

Scarlett would have to do without him.

Zandu heaved a wistful sigh and picked up the phone.