The Leopard(195)

Harry shoved his foot in the gap. ‘I pay well.’

‘No guns. Van Boorst not here.’

‘When will he be back, Miss?’

‘I not know. I not have time now.’

‘I’m looking for a man from Norway. Tony. Tall. Handsome. Have you seen him around?’

The girl shook her head.

‘Will Van Boorst be coming home this evening? This is important, Miss.’

She looked at him. Weighed him up. Lingered, from top to toe. And back. Her soft lips slid apart over her teeth. ‘You a rich man?’

Harry didn’t answer. She blinked sleepily, and her matt-black eyes glistened. Then she smirked. ‘Thirty minutes. Come back then.’

Harry returned to the taxi, sat in the front seat, told Saul to drive to the bank and rang Kaja.

‘I’m still sitting in the arrivals hall,’ she said. ‘No announcements to say anything except that the Zurich flight is on time.’

‘I’ll check us into the hotel before I go back to Van Boorst and buy what we need.’

The hotel lay to the east of the centre towards the Rwandan border. In front of reception was a car park coated with lava and wreathed with trees.

‘They were planted after the last eruption,’ Saul said, as though reading Harry’s thoughts. There were almost no trees in Goma. The double room was on the first floor of a low building by the lake and had a balcony overlooking the water. Harry smoked a cigarette, watching the morning sun glitter on the surface and glint off the oil rig far out. He checked his watch and went back to the car park.

Saul’s state of mind seemed to have adapted to the sluggish traffic he was in: he drove slowly, talked slowly, moved his hands slowly. He parked outside the church walls, a good distance from Van Boorst’s house. Switched off the engine, turned to Harry and asked politely but firmly for the second third of the sum.

‘Don’t you trust me?’ Harry asked with a raised eyebrow.

‘I trust your sincere desire to pay,’ Saul said. ‘But in Goma money is safer with me than with you, Mr Harry. Shame but true.’

Harry acknowledged the reasoning with a nod, flipped through the rest of the money and asked if Saul had something heavy and compact in the car, the size of a pistol, such as a torch. Saul pursed his lips and opened the glove compartment. Harry took out the torch, stuffed it in his inside pocket and looked at his watch. Twenty-five minutes had gone.

He strode down the street, his eyes fixed straight ahead. But sidelong glances registered men turning after him with appraising eyes. Appraising height and weight. The elasticity of his strides. The jacket hanging slightly askew and the bulky shape in the inside pocket. And dismissing the opportunity.

He went up to the door and knocked.

The same light steps.

The door opened. She glanced at him, then her gaze wandered past him, to the street.

‘Quick, come in,’ she said, grabbing his arm and pulling him inside.

Harry stepped over the threshold and stood in the semi-gloom. All the curtains were drawn, apart from by the window over the bed where he had seen her lying half naked the first time he was here.

‘He not arrive yet,’ she said in her simple but effective English. ‘Soon come.’

Harry nodded and looked at the bed. Tried to imagine her there, with the blanket over her hips. The light falling on her skin. But he couldn’t. For there was something trying to catch his attention, something was not right, missing, or was there and shouldn’t have been.

‘You come alone?’ she asked, walking around him and sitting on the bed. Placing one hand on the mattress, allowing the shoulder strap of her dress to slip down.

Harry shifted his gaze to locate what was wrong. And found it. The colonial master and exploiter King Leopold.

‘Yes,’ he said automatically, without quite knowing why yet. ‘Alone.’

The picture of King Leopold which had been hanging on the wall was gone. The next thought followed hard on its heels. Van Boorst wasn’t coming. He was gone, too.

Harry took half a step towards her. She tilted her head slightly, moistening her full, red-black lips. And he was close enough to see now, to see what had replaced the painting of the Belgian king. The nail the picture had been hanging from impaled a banknote. The face that made the note distinctive was sensitive and sported a well-tended moustache. Edvard Munch.

Harry realised what was going to happen, was about to turn, but something also told him it was far too late, he was positioned exactly as planned in the stage directions.

He sensed more than saw the movement behind him and didn’t feel the precise jab in his neck, only the breath against his temple. His neck froze to ice, the paralysis spread down his back and up to his scalp, his legs buckled beneath him as the drug reached his brain and consciousness faded. His last thought before darkness enveloped him was how amazingly fast ketanome worked.