The Devil’s Kingdom. Scott Mariani

quickly to the far side of the bedroom and raised his hands to show he was no threat to any of them. The soldiers yelled and pointed their rifles and jabbed and prodded him and fired a thousand questions in Swahili and broken English. What had he done to their illustrious leader? What was happening here? Keeping the other hand raised, Ben pointed at the bottles on the floor and told them the General had drunk something that disagreed with him. He was sick. He needed his doctor.

      It took fifteen minutes for the doctor to arrive, by which time another half-dozen soldiers had crowded the suite and more were milling around in the corridor outside. Khosa had long stopped screaming like a mad bull and lapsed back into a comatose state, saliva oozing from his lips and one eye half open. Ben was pinned in a corner of the bedroom by four jumpy soldiers ready to blast him if he moved. He was beginning to worry that if Khosa died, they would accuse him of having poisoned their leader.

      Khosa’s personal physician was tall and thin and stooped, possibly ninety years of age. He was barefoot and wore a long black robe intricately embroidered in gold thread and a necklace of what Ben at first thought were shrunken human skulls, then realised were those of monkeys. The old man appeared quite calm as he entered the room, took one look at the patient slumped full-length on the floor and strolled over to inspect him.

      After a brief examination, the doctor turned, gazed around the room until he spotted the empty bottles still lying where they’d fallen, and in a voice as cracked and dry as parchment asked a soldier to pick one up and bring it to him. After a sniff of the bottle’s neck he nodded sagely to himself and then produced a smaller amber bottle from the folds of his robe and trickled a few drops of liquid into the unconscious Khosa’s open mouth.

      Ben had heard of doctors like this. In French-speaking parts of Africa they called them féticheurs. The nearest English translation would be ‘witch doctor’, a purveyor of magic healing and weird potions of the kind that the patient’s brother had apparently tried to purge from his province of Luhaka.

      Adolf Hitler had taken military guidance from his astrologer. Tsarina Alexandra had hung on every word of the mystic healer, Rasputin. Jean-Pierre Khosa had his witch doctor. It didn’t seem unfitting. With luck, the sorcerer’s medicine would finish the job the Kotiko had started, and then nobody could blame Ben for the General’s demise.

      The old man creaked to his feet, his medical examination of the Supreme Being concluded. ‘There is nothing wrong with him,’ he declared, in the same hoarse, dry croak. ‘He has tired himself and needs to rest.’

      ‘That, and a good dose of lithium,’ Ben said.

      The witch doctor motioned to the nearest group of soldiers to pick Khosa up and place him on the bed. It took three of them to heave him onto the rumpled four-poster. Khosa was still out for the count. With long, bony hands the witch doctor performed a series of strange gestures over his inert form, rattled his monkey skulls and uttered some sort of incantation in a language Ben had never heard before. Satisfied, he turned away to let his patient sleep off the booze. His wizened gaze scanned the room and fell on Ben. He gave an odd little smile. ‘I know who you are. You are the white warrior who has come to help us.’

      ‘I suppose I get pleasure from helping the needy,’ Ben said.

      ‘I am Pascal Wakenge,’ the old man said. He walked towards Ben, fixing him with an intense stare. ‘You can leave now. There is nothing for you to do,’ he told the guards crowded around Ben. The soldiers dispersed and filed out of the bedroom, just a couple of them hovering in the doorway. Evidently, the witch doctor carried some weight of authority around here.

      Ben stood up. Wakenge watched every move he made with great fascination. Something in the old man’s glittering eyes made Ben’s flesh creep. It was easy to understand the sway he would hold over someone who believed in sorcery and witchcraft.

      ‘Jean-Pierre sees much in you,’ he said. ‘You should not hate him so.’

      ‘Oh, I’m full of human understanding,’ Ben replied. ‘No hard feelings. He’s only trying to do his job, after all.’

      ‘He sees much, but I see more.’

      ‘You do, do you?’

      ‘I see much death in you, white man. You have killed many. And you will kill more. But there is one you wish to kill more than any other. It is your greatest desire to look this man in the eye as you take his life.’

      Ben said nothing. He was positive that Wakenge could tell no such thing. The crafty old man was using what he knew to psych Ben out in search of a sign that he could be a threat. Fortune-tellers and other such cranks, at any rate the more successful ones, were often excellent psychologists and extremely devious at winkling out useful information without their victims realising they were being manipulated.

      ‘I’m afraid you must have me confused with someone else,’ Ben said. ‘I don’t want to kill anybody.’

      Wakenge went on staring at him for the longest time. Ben returned the eye contact, not wanting to be the first to look away. For a few moments it seemed to have become a battle of wills, one Ben was determined not to lose to this creepy old charlatan.

      Then Wakenge said, ‘Be warned, white man. You have saved many lost souls in the past. But you should be careful, or you will not be able to save your own.’

      Ben gave him a dry smile. ‘I’m going to die?’

      ‘Soon,’ the old man said.

       Chapter 11

      It was lunchtime in Kinshasa, too, and the bar at the Grand Hotel in the Presidential district of Gombe was crowded with well-to-do locals, bureaucrats and visiting business executives. It was more or less the most prestigious environment that the capital had to offer, even if the electricity went off several times a day, and César Masango fitted into it well. He was perfectly groomed in a handsomely tailored double-breasted suit of light grey silk, tan leather brogues polished into mirrors, and a Rolex Daytona that was even bigger and glitzier than the model that his friend and business associate, Jean-Pierre Khosa, liked to flash around. None of the corporate types milling around him could have guessed that he’d returned only hours ago from a militarised stronghold deep in the jungle. Any more than they could have guessed what his business was here today in the city.

      Masango and his two associates had occupied a corner table by the window, where they sat in silence as Masango scanned the busy street and sipped on an $8 cappuccino. His associates didn’t get any, because they weren’t paid to eat, drink, or speak on his time unless specifically permitted.

      Masango was waiting for Marius Grobler, a fifty-six-year-old white South African who labelled himself a consultant in international import/export but who was in fact a criminal fence specialising in converting dubiously obtained diamonds, gold and other such high-end commodities into untraceable cash. He was effective, discreet, and had been the first name to come up when discussing the various options for selling Jean-Pierre’s wonderful new acquisition.

      The purchase deal had been brokered on Khosa’s behalf by Masango, his political attaché. ‘Political attaché’ might have been an accurate term, if indeed Khosa had anything much to do with politics – which for the moment he did not, although that didn’t deter Khosa’s small but rapidly growing legion of followers from viewing César Masango as the man who would one day put their exalted leader in power. While both men believed that day would eventually come (and all the sooner now that Khosa was set to become much richer), for the moment Masango was happy to act as his universal aide, fixer and back-door man. In return for these services, he received more than the General’s gratitude and the future promise of a top ministerial job when Khosa grabbed the presidency. For brokering this deal, setting up the meeting with Grobler in Kinshasa and attending to all associated matters, Masango’s slice of the diamond sale proceeds would be a lordly five per cent. Which was as generous a percentage as anyone was likely to get from Khosa; in this case, anyhow, it still amounted to a nice little payday for