The Witch Doctor's Wife (19 page)

A
manda Brown had just stepped through the back door of the kitchen when she heard a loud boom and felt the house shake. Her first thought was that dynamite had been used in the mines, although she couldn’t recall ever reading about explosives being used to extract diamonds from gravel deposits. Then she thought of an earthquake. Her Aunt Doris and Uncle Jimmy had moved to California, and then back to South Carolina just three months later, because Aunt Doris’s nerves couldn’t stand the strain of waiting for the next tremor. But Belle Vue wasn’t in a quake zone. That left option number three: a chunk of the cliff had broken off and fallen into the river far below.

Although they were undoubtedly very nice people, the Singletons had been stupid to build a house on the very edge of a precipice. A view, no matter how fabulous, was not worth the risk to human lives. And what about the children of guests? How was one to safeguard them—lock them in their room? She visualized the youngest tyke falling over the edge, and then the second eldest, who was trying to help her sibling, and so forth, until the entire family plunged over the edge. Finally even Amanda, who’d been lying on her stomach grasping the father’s hand, was pulled kicking and screaming into the watery abyss.

Squashing the thoughts of impending doom, Amanda rushed outside to see what was really going on. From the left she could see hundreds of Africans streaming down the steep hillside, the bright clothes of the women giving the impression of a flock of butterflies. On the right, running toward the bridge—although a few were on bicycles—were more Europeans than Amanda had met so far in Belle Vue. In the middle, where the two groups would converge, was the bridge. A gaping hole in the railing filled in the rest of the story.

A shiver of recognition ran up Amanda’s spine.

Flanders was sitting in his driveway, still in his car, nursing a cup of tepid coffee when he heard the crash. The coffee was in his left hand. With his right he was scribbling furiously on a yellow notepad with a No. 2 pencil.

All but five pages of the tablet were full of scribbles, even the margins. Almost every page bore its own headline. This one read, “The Bastard Tries To Sack Me.”

Tries
. That was the key word. When the OP discovered Flanders rummaging through his private files, he’d let loose with a string of invectives that only a man who’d served in the military would know. He’d even raised a clenched fist to eye level, threatening to punch Flanders all the way back to Bel
gium if he didn’t promptly confess what he was doing with the OP’s papers.

Who was it who said, “Silence is the best weapon”? Probably a mime. Flanders wanted to punch a few mimes himself from time to time. There really was nothing quite as ire-producing as someone who refuses to speak, especially in a heated situation. Bearing that in mind, Flanders had smirked while the OP had sputtered with rage.

Unable to get Flanders to answer, the OP had finally shoved him to the door and shouted: “Damn you, you Flemish imbecile! You’re fired!”

Fired? Ha! It was the OP whose job was at stake. Just as soon as Flanders completed his notes, he was driving to Luluaburg. There, with any luck, he’d be able to make a phone connection to Brussels. If that didn’t work out, he’d fire off the world’s longest telegram. The OP and the idiot postmaster were up to something nefarious.

Possibly a major find
, the OP had written. If that was really the case, why hadn’t he informed the Consortium? That answer to that was obvious. The egocentric OP and the half-witted postmaster—his name had been on the document as well—were planning to reap the benefits of this find by themselves. They couldn’t legally mine the diamonds, of course, but they could smuggle them. And what better vehicle than to use the OP’s comatose wife?

No one in customs would even suspect that the operations manager would stoop to smuggling. After all, if he really wanted diamonds, he could acquire them legally—or so they’d think. Surely he was in cahoots with the big boys back in Belgium. And of course the same thing could be said of his wife. They’d wave the pair of them through the line with smiles and good wishes, while hoping that word of what polite, efficient fellows they were would get back to their bosses.

But if the customs people really knew how the system worked, in this dog-eat-dog world, they’d know that the OP was nothing more than a Chihuahua. They’d put nothing past this twerp at the bottom of the corporate food chain. They’d run their fingers along the hems of every article of his clothing, feeling for lumps. They’d squeeze out his toothpaste and smear it around. They’d shine a flashlight—to search the OP, they’d need the long-handled variety—where the sun never shines.

Flanders smiled. In just a matter of hours that smug, racist son of a bitch was going to get his comeuppance. The OP was about to be yanked back to Brussels so fast that his head would still be spinning when he arrived. How Flanders wished he could see the OP’s face when his plans came crashing down around him.

Imbecile! He scribbled the word on his yellow pad.

And then he heard the crash.

The OP stared out the window at the dry, crackling lawn. The long-tailed birds seemed to have fled the premises along with Flanders. The OP shook his head. He still could not believe he’d found that young man rooting through his filing cabinet. As if that weren’t bad enough, when the OP was giving him a piece of his mind, Flanders had turned around and walked from the room like a rebellious teenager. Well, guess what? The kid was fired. There was a plane due in on the morrow, and if that boy’s skinny ass wasn’t on it, then the OP would see that he was arrested. What’s more, he’d better have cleared his things out of company housing. If not, his belongings would be distributed among the natives.

What the hell was up with headquarters anyway, sending out a punk kid with a chip on his shoulder bigger than Luxemburg? He’d asked for a family man, someone stable. Too bad he knew the answer to that question: Flanders was a spy. That’s just what the OP had thought all along.

The men in suits who ran the Consortium hadn’t a clue about geology, or what it took to oversee a successful long-term operation in the Congo. All they cared about was immediate profits. In a way that was understandable, given the political situation and probable outcome of the independence movement. At the same time, if they could wait just one more year, they would get their damn profits. They would probably even be shocked by how much money the Belle Vue mine was making.

Too bad. They’d had their chance. Screw them now. The OP would continue to run the Belle Vue mine until they forced him out, which would be sooner, rather than later. In the meantime he would arrange a couple of solitary “hunting” trips to the box canyon he’d discovered. Of course he’d bring back a monkey or two, or maybe an antelope, for the houseboys to eat, but he’d also return with his retirement stashed out of sight in his rucksack.

Getting the diamonds out of the country would be the easy part. He’d send Heilewid back home on a visit, with the lining of her suitcase stuffed with a fortune in uncut stones. The beauty of this plan is that Heilewid wouldn’t know, and therefore wouldn’t act suspicious. If he sent her back before he was dismissed, while the customs officials still believed that he was in charge, her bags would not be searched.

The hard part was going to be fencing the diamonds, but it was not insurmountable. He just needed to proceed slowly. Heilewid had a cousin in Antwerp who specialized in shady business deals. The man couldn’t be trusted not to sell his own grandmother as a sex slave, and he was willing to do anything for money.
Anything
. That was going to make him very useful.

A long-tailed bird flitted into view, and the OP smiled. And then he heard the crash.

T
he whites of Belle Vue met at the club that evening to commemorate the passing of Senhor Cezar Nunez. It was a spontaneous gathering, but included virtually everyone except the deceased’s widow and the American. Families brought their children with them to play in the pool, where they splashed solemnly. Women packed sandwiches and cakes—even though the club sold food—and stood or sat in tight clumps, as if seeking safety in numbers. For the most part, the men lined the bar, standing three deep, lost in their thoughts. No one spoke above a whisper.

The blacks of Belle Vue Village congregated around their family hearths, where the story of Senhor Nunez’s suicide—for surely that’s what it was—was told over and over again. There
were manioc mush and cassava greens for the women and children, meat and palm wine for the men. There was even laughter, for death was a frequent visitor who needed to be entertained. Better to divert death’s attention with stories and reenactment than let his gaze wander and settle upon his next victim.

When darkness had fallen completely, extinguishing the last pink streak on the horizon, the village drums began to talk. On their side of the river, the whites heard them too. Old-timers were consulted, but they were unable to decipher the message. Then the Muluba bartender was asked to interpret, which he did, but not without hesitation.

“The drums say that a witch doctor placed a spell on this white man, causing him to drive into the river.” He paused a long time, and shook his head before resuming the translation. “They also say that many witch doctors will work together to put spells on all the white people, not in only Belle Vue, but in all the Congo. If the Belgians do not leave the country by the time the rains come, they too will take their own lives.”

The old-timers muttered words like “nonsense” and “scare tactics,” but the furrows on their foreheads spoke of fear. Young men drained their drinks and asked for more. Mothers pulled their children from the pool and hugged them, oblivious to wet skirts and sodden shoes.

In the hills to the west, the dominant female hyena bared her teeth and flattened her ears. She had just allowed the dominant male to mount her one last time; now she was done with him. He was substantially smaller than she was. If he didn’t take the hint next time he attempted to mate her, he would be painfully rebuffed.

In about four months she would give birth to one or two cubs in the safety of an abandoned aardvark’s burrow. Until then she would gorge at every opportunity, but first she had to kill.

Heilewid was not to be found. After searching their home, the OP had inquired at the homes of neighbors and the few friends Heilewid still had, but no one could remember seeing her. Because no plane was scheduled that day, he could only hope that she’d somehow managed to catch an automobile ride to Luluaburg.

Yes, that had to be it. On average there were two or three housewives a day making that trip with their chauffeurs, and perhaps another half dozen cars belonging to merchants or missionaries passing through town on their way to the big city. Any one of them would have given a ride to a white woman walking along the road. That had to be it, because the alternative was too awful: Heilewid getting too close to the edge of the gorge and losing her balance.

Under normal circumstances—but when were they ever normal?—the OP would have contacted the police captain, and together the two of them would have organized a search party. Maybe they would have found her, soused, sleeping off her drunk under a mango tree, or passed out in a tool shed. The captain was a good man, a friend, and he wouldn’t have written an official report on their little adventure. As for the OP’s white underlings—well, in normal times they would have been too afraid for their jobs to say anything directly to his Consortium superiors. That wouldn’t have stopped them from gossiping to their relatives back home in Belgium, but by then it would be idle third-party gossip, something the board members eschewed.

Of course, these weren’t normal times. The Africans were restless, needlessly energized by independence fever, and the bigwigs in Brussels were putting the pressure on all their companies to squeeze every last drop of profit out of the Congo before they had to turn the power over to the indigenous people. As if that weren’t enough, the pimple-faced spy from Flanders was out to get the OP. That had been the case from day one, but was especially so now that the kid had been fired.

Given that the world was as mean and ugly a place as it ever had been, was it really so awful if Heilewid had slipped and fallen into the churning waters of the gorge? Wouldn’t death by nature be preferable to death by bottle? If it put her out of her misery, her unbearable pain, then one was forced to view it as a blessing. There were far worse ways to die in Africa, and Belgium, with its murders and automobile traffic, was hardly better. Besides, if she fell into the gorge, death would come instantly, and by the time the crocs fed on her, she would be just a corpse. This would not be the case if she lay drunk, in her own vomit under a hedge somewhere, and the hyenas got to her.

The OP made an appearance at the club, said some general words of comfort to the assembled throng, and then made his exit as soon as possible. The mood at the club was depressing as hell. The somber colonialists, faced with the death of a white man, reminded the OP of a movie he’d seen set in America’s frontier West. The whites in the film had been butchering Indians for years, and now they were on the defensive, huddled behind a wooden stockade waiting for dawn to come. For most, it came too late.

The OP returned to a darkened house—the servants had long been dismissed—and set about polishing off a full bottle of Irish whiskey. Even out on the patio, the OP could barely see his outstretched hand, which he’d extended in a toast.

“To my Heilewid,” he said. “May the angels ease your fall, even as they take your soul to be with your beloved Geete.”

With his headlights illuminating her, Flanders immediately recognized the woman by her walk. Roads in the bush were not paved, just two dirt tracks with a strip of elephant grass growing down the middle. The woman was in the left track, but staying as close to the center of the road as possible. This was wise at night, when predators were about, but during the day it was better to
keep one’s distance from the median, because that’s where snakes preferred to lie in wait of their prey.

When she heard Flanders’s car, she automatically stepped over to the bush to let him pass. The woman only turned to look when Flanders stopped the car adjacent to her.

“Where are you going?” he asked in French.

“Luluaburg.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? I would have given you a ride.”

“I don’t mind walking.”

“But at night! Isn’t it dangerous?”

“At night I have only animals to worry about, not people.”

“Touché. But not from this one.” He leaned over and opened the passenger door. “Get in.”

They rode in silence for several kilometers. Once a nightjar, blinded by the headlights, seemingly flung itself at the car, its wings brushing Flanders’s arm through the open window. Finally he spoke.

“How long were you going for?”

“I don’t know. The talk in the village scares me; I no longer feel safe there.”

“
Oui, je comprends
. But why did you leave without saying good-bye? Don’t I mean anything to you?”

“I was going to write you once I got settled.”

“But do I
mean
anything? Don’t you care about me at all?”

“Non,”
she said quietly.

He waited for a few minutes before glancing her way. Even in the dark he could see the tears streaming down her face.

“You lied back there; I do mean something to you. Monique, I love you, and I know that you love me too. I want us to be together—to be a couple. Maybe even get married someday.”

“That can never be.”

“Why not?”

“You will suffer for it.”

“Fine, then I’ll suffer. That’s what I want.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because I know that without you, I will suffer anyway. Without you I will always be weak.”

He felt her hand touch his shoulder, alighting there for just a second. He turned to see her smiling through her tears.

“Then we will be strong together,” she said.

Flanders knew that the culture she’d been raised in didn’t subscribe to the concept of romantic love. Marriages were arranged, alliances were formed, and children brought into the world. Love was sometimes a by-product, but never the instigator of the union between two people. Yet what he had just heard was, in its own way, an unequivocal declaration of love.

It was time to change the subject, before she could take it back. “Did you hear about the truck going over the bridge?”

“I saw it. It was terrible.”

“Strange how that happened, if you ask me. You would think that even if the brakes failed, he’d still be able to steer the truck, and then once he got to the other side, there’s another bit of hill that would have slowed way him down, maybe even stopped him. Then again, it is impossible to really understand those Portuguese—unless you are one. Which I’m not, I’m glad to say.” He laughed, feeling surprisingly happy. “And neither are you—Portuguese, I mean.”

She smiled.