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  “Do you want me to arrest him?” the captain asked me in French. As I have only a nodding acquaintance with the language, Tabitha translated.

  “You’re damn right!” I said. “He tried to kill me. Ask any of these people.”

  “All right.” He gave orders to his men, who moved near Pierre. He said to me, “You’ll have to pay two hundred thousand zaires.”

  I was flabbergasted. “Pay! What for?”

  He shrugged. “There’re many costs involved. May I see your passports?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Everything’s in order. We have visas, too, everything.”

  He scanned them and stuck them in his pocket.

  “I think we’d all better go back to town together until this is sorted out,” he said.

  This meant going seventy miles on to Ilebo, a good-sized regional town with a military garrison, which at least was in our direction. Hating any delay, I argued we had to be on our way, that we had a schedule to meet, but even in my fervor I realized that the bubble-of-the-Antarctic-winter-looming-at-the-southern-tip-of-South-America argument was not going to be a persuasive one here at the African equator.

  Ilebo had one main drag, dirt, of course, or rather, mud. In the center of town stood a police stand, one of those overturned garbage cans policemen stand on and direct traffic, but no one had used it in years.

  We got the best room in the town’s main hotel, the Hotel du Palme, which the colonialists had built for a visit from the King of Belgium in the early 1920s. The richly paneled rooms were gigantic and surrounded by large open terraces. The huge bathrooms sported fixtures from the twenties. Downstairs was a dining room, but it served virtually nothing.

  “Sir,” asked the houseman in stiff English, “how many buckets of water do you want?”

  A bit startled, I asked Tabitha how many. We settled on two.

  We soon found out why we had been asked. While our bathroom had in fact been the king’s, it no longer had running water. To wash, take a bath, or flush the toilet, we had to use river water from the dozens of buckets we finally had lined up across the tile.

  The Palme had its advantages, though. It cost only a dollar a night. As in the Soviet Union, the rates had been set a long time before and hadn’t been adjusted during the collapse of the currency.

  The first order of business was getting out of there. We hot-footed it over to the captain’s command post.

  The captain’s position was that we had to pay for all the trouble we’d caused, for all the expenses we’d run up, and that two hundred thousand zaires would cover it.

  “What expenses?” I asked.

  Tabitha translated. We had to pay for Pierre to be in jail, pay to feed him, and pay to guard him. I could pay in zaires, although he would rather have dollars. He was no dummy. His country’s currency was collapsing at the rate of 1 percent or 2 percent a day.

  I asked for our passports back.

  He said they would be safer with him. Whenever I asked him his name, he changed the subject or ignored me.

  I asked to call the American embassy in Kinshasa. The captain’s face lit up—what a wonderful idea! He himself would take us to the town’s telephone.

  I would get the ambassador on the blower and insist he get someone down here to straighten out this mess.

  With the captain at my side, I marched triumphantly through the sun to the town’s single phone, located in the community center, a compound with a swimming pool, basketball court, and bar, none of which was open.

  The captain picked up the instrument and fiddled with it. “It’s not working,” he said with an apologetic shrug and a smug smile.

  Back at the Palme, I gave the problem more thought.

  I rummaged in my saddlebags for a pen and stationery. I ambled over to the post office, little more than a twenty-by-twenty-foot shed. I stuck my head into the clerk’s cubby hole and handed him a letter to the United States embassy in Kinshasa, a few hundred miles back north.

  “You can’t mail this,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “You don’t have the right postage.”

  “What’s the right postage?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “You can’t mail this. We don’t send letters to that embassy.”

  By now everybody in Ilebo knew of our situation. Nobody wanted to cross the captain, whom Tabitha and I had dubbed El Capitan for lack of any better name.

  Outside I looked around to see if there was a postal box into which I could drop a letter, but there wasn’t one, nor would it matter if there were, because this lone bird was in charge of the town’s entire postal system. Like Mrs. Campion back in Dunquin, no letter or postcard went in or out that he didn’t know about.

  Number two in the Ilebo police system was a thin, mean guy with a pencil mustache who was introduced as the town’s immigration officer. The purpose of an immigration officer this far inland was never explained. Several times he told us with a vicious smirk that he was going to put us in jail. Here in the middle of the jungle we were getting the good cop-bad cop routine.

  Like El Capitan, he wouldn’t give us his name. Between ourselves, Tabitha and I called him Rayon because he always wore slick rayon shirts and pants in gaudy African colors.

  These two were cops on the make, cops after cadeaux big-time, not like the street hustlers who’d demanded a few dollars in Bangui. If they never gave us their names, they would more easily dodge trouble from their higher-ups in case we pressed the matter. I fully intended to.

  The next night El Capitan ate with us as our guest at the Palme.

  As always, he was in uniform and carried himself with dignity. We learned he was from another part of Zaire, and was not a member of the local tribe.

  Unfortunately, it was hard to put on the dog for him when there wasn’t much to eat. The hotel offered wild boar, manioc, pig, and chicken. After dinner he took us to a disco next to the police station.

  The disco was an open space surrounded by a wall. A band played on one side, and under a covered area in the center stood the bar. Hundreds of people danced here until three or four in the morning to a combination of Western and African music.

  The captain didn’t come here much, as this was a younger crowd. We all sat at a table and had big brown bottles of beer. Naturally we paid for everything, straining to be his friend, trying to jolly him into giving us back our passports and speeding us on our way.

  Pierre’s passport was held, too, and he was put up in a low-rent hotel. None of us was going anywhere. My conversations with the captain made me understand that in addition to his wanting money, he claimed to be genuinely perplexed about what to do with us.

  He could read the intentions of his own people and make moral adjudications, but we were so different from his usual disputants that he wasn’t sure who was right and who was wrong. He came up with what he thought was a brilliant idea. He would take us to the local Catholic missionaries, who would help him interpret the situation.

  Father Jean-Pierre and two other Belgian priests, in their seventies, had lived in Ilebo since World War II. Their compound contained a big house and several guest houses, all erected fifty and sixty years before. They generated their own electricity.

  These three priests educated and healed only on the side. Their main calling was managing the local beer monopoly. Perhaps on Sunday they performed a mass, but the other six days they distributed beer, as if malt were doing more to further their purposes than sacramental wine.

  We told them our story, that Pierre had been hired to carry extra supplies, that he’d run out of money and attacked me, and that he now insisted on money to use to return to France.

  Father Jean-Pierre said, “Let’s get everybody together—you, the captain, this young Frenchman—and sort this out.”

  We were elated. This sounded like local justice, jungle style, and perhaps with their favorable endorsement we’d shortly be on our way.

  A day or two later we all gathered at the priests�
� compound. Tabitha had been tense and anxious throughout our stay, but had kept a stiff upper lip. As her French was far better than mine, she was needed here to translate even though she would rather have stayed back in the hotel.

  While we were standing around, we were drawn aside by an elderly Belgian, Monsieur Gilbert Tilburg, who told us he lived a hundred miles away. He was waiting for the diesel-fuel shipment to come in, which he needed for his mining operation. He was staying with the priests, who were old friends and the only white people for hundreds of miles.

  “Let me alert you to two or three things about disputes and problems here,” said Monsieur Tilburg in a low growl that didn’t carry to the others. “If you get into them, it’s best to work them out quickly. If you fall into the local courts, it’ll go on forever, maybe years. You’ll never get out.” He paused, reflecting. I had a sudden vision of a mountain of cadeaux needed to prize ourselves out of the clutches of local lawyers and judges. “We who are here—there aren’t many of us left—never want anything to happen to the few foreigners that come through. It makes things more complicated for us.”

  I saw what he was saying. If we lost in court, the idea that the foreigners could be preyed on would take further root. If we won, the Zairians would lose face and want to take it out on somebody, probably him and the priests.

  “These things are best resolved as speedily and simply as possible,” he said.

  I heard him loud and clear: Pay up and get out. Forget about being a man of principle.

  I offered to give Pierre enough money to get back to Kinshasa. He could go to the French embassy there, and it would help him get back to Paris.

  Father Jean-Pierre asked him if it had been in our agreement that we’d pay his way back to Paris. To his credit, Pierre didn’t lie. No, he said, it wasn’t.

  The priest asked me, “Have you paid him all you owe him?”

  “Yes,” I said, “and more.”

  Father Jean-Pierre asked him where the money was, and he shrugged. The priest asked me what he’d done with it. I told them he’d spent it throughout Africa on booze and women. With sullen braggadocio, Pierre acknowledged as much in what seemed a fear of lying to three priests.

  They retired to deliberate. After a bit, we got a verdict.

  Father Jean-Pierre said we didn’t owe Pierre anything, that his being stuck here was his problem. If we would help him get back to Kinshasa, it would be generous of us.

  Of course, this was an informal ruling, as the father had no legal authority. I’m convinced there was no such thing as a true legal authority in Zaire. The entire country was Mobutu’s rundown plantation, and anything he or his thugs said went.

  Father Jean-Pierre told the captain we were honorable, legitimate, and responsible people and ought to be let go. Back in town the captain smiled and said he agreed with the priests’ decision. As soon as we had paid for the operation of justice in Ilebo, we were certainly free to leave.

  In short, no matter what the priests decided, he still wanted his bribe of hundreds of thousands of zaires, a sum that escalated with other charges as each day passed.

  Like vultures settling near a dying calf, more of the captain’s staff gathered each day during our visit to the station. They, too, wanted in on the captain’s good fortune.

  Tabitha and I had a complicated discussion about skipping town. We’d heard that we couldn’t go any farther south on our bikes, that from here to Lubumbashi, six hundred miles distant, the roads had been officially closed until the end of the rainy season and that there was no gas.

  I wanted to hot-rod it back to the American embassy in Kinshasa.

  Tabitha said that was stupid. El Capitan would surely race after us in a four-wheel-drive patrol vehicle, or he would use the radio, drums, or some mysterious other means of African communication to have us snared along the way.

  I had to admit she was right, and I gave in.

  On the sixth day, the captain took us home to dinner, where we met his family. All the while that we were his semi-official prisoners, under hotel arrest, I suppose, with our passports in his desk drawer, he was unfailingly dignified and polite. Scuttlebutt said not only was his salary fixed, a big problem in a hyperinflating economy, but that he hadn’t been paid in months. In a major financial bind, otherwise honest, upright people will do unprincipled things. Possibly, preying on us was his sole means of economic survival.

  After all, he told everyone we bumped into—we were a source of enormous curiosity for everybody: grandmothers, shopkeepers, schoolchildren—that we were civilized, cultured people, that Rogers here was a professor, not an evil person. The bad guy in this situation was Pierre, a crook. Yet the captain still wanted the money and wouldn’t let us go. Once he suggested he’d use some of the money to put Pierre on a barge heading back to Kinshasa—the opposite direction from us—thus guaranteeing our safety by putting more distance between Pierre and us.

  So I put my pride in my pocket and made a deal with him for a couple of thousand dollars in zaires that would allow us to leave Ilebo.

  I didn’t have enough zaires to pay the “expenses,” but he would solve that problem. The banks might be closed, but a local money changer would open up for him.

  At the money changer’s, stacks of hundred-dollar bills and zaires were brought out. After some dickering I exchanged dollars for what was needed.

  Once the captain had the zaires in hand, he said all we had to do now was be vetted by the town’s immigration officer.

  Vetted? Immigration officer?

  He meant … Rayon!

  We’d been tricked! Over the past few days, Rayon had been giving us greedy looks, and now I knew why. He wanted in on the hot action. Doubtless he had worked out an arrangement for this pair of plump geese to be shuttled to him as soon as his crony, the captain, had done his plucking.

  My temper hadn’t been in good shape throughout this ordeal, and now my outrage exploded, breathing fire and sprouting horns and hooves.

  “Don’t worry,” said the captain, his tone soothing. “It’s over. Let him check your passports and off you go.”

  My new friend put a gentle hand on my shoulder. At the touch a tremor went through me. I couldn’t tell if he was being friendly or guiding a truculent lamb to the slaughter.

  “I’ll take you over there,” he said with his usual broad smile.

  …

  Rayon worked out of his house in the sparsely furnished office favored by all country Zairian officials: a desk, a couple of chairs, nothing on the walls, and of course no glass in the windows, only wooden shutters when there was anything at all.

  Rayon was a man who looked seedy, whose every movement shouted “shifty character.” He would look seedy in New York, he would look seedy in London, and he looked particularly seedy here in the outback of Zaire.

  A room off to the side of his office was the jail. As we passed, the door opened and I glimpsed a prisoner. He was in his underwear, his briefs, without other clothes. Soldiers went in and started beating him. This was the jail they hadn’t put Pierre into, too terrible for a European.

  I asked a guard what this fellow had done. He had stolen four pigs. He had to stay there until he paid for them, one hundred thousand zaires.

  From behind his desk, delight exuded from every shiny fold of Rayon’s face and slick clothes at having us in his clutches. Right off he asked for our papers.

  I almost laughed. If papers were his game, he was in trouble. Ours were in perfect order.

  He went through the documents one by one, then again.

  “This can’t be right!” he exclaimed.

  He went back over them a third time, page by page, card by card, slip by slip. Yes, we had visas. Yes, we had permission to travel in this section near the diamond mines. And, yes, we had all the special permits and carnets for our vehicles.

  I felt a bit smug. I was glad now I had listened back in Kinshasa when a consular official had asked, “Oh, by the way, do you have your economic-s
ector permit?” It had taken us another day to get that particular document, but better to have spent the day there than here, where it would cost a hundred times as much.

  Rayon now insisted that everything of ours be searched. He had our bikes brought over, and under his supervision his minions took our luggage apart. We scrutinized the searchers to make sure no contraband was slipped in. They missed the money we had squirreled away in various places on the bikes. He could find nothing about which to raise even an eyebrow.

  Unable to find so much as a comma out of order, Rayon reevaluated the situation and charged us with having two persons of the same sex in a room. Several days before, two male travelers, an Australian and a New Zealander, had shared a room at the Palme. Now they were gone.

  “Those guys weren’t in our party,” I told him. “We don’t even know them.”

  “But you were there,” said Rayon in a triumphant tone. “You knew about it.”

  “But this doesn’t make sense,” I said. “If you knew about them, why didn’t you arrest them?”

  “They didn’t have any money,” said Rayon.

  For once in my life I was too flabbergasted to speak. I remembered seeing people of the same sex in the same room in other parts of Zaire and said so.

  “On top of that, you’ve changed money illegally,” said Rayon, ignoring my response and rearing back with an even greater flourish.

  “The zaires—we used for the captain’s payoff?” I stammered.

  Smugly, he nodded. I was even more flabbergasted. According to every guidebook and bit of scuttlebutt, this was perfectly legal. He was inventing charges, hunting for something, anything, with which to stick us.

  “That can’t be illegal,” I told him. “The captain himself took us there.”

  “I’m in charge of immigration,” he said, “not the captain.”

  We showed him several guidebooks that said changing money was legal.

  “I don’t care,” he responded. “I am the law in those matters.”

  I held out. He insisted on a fine. I refused. He shouted. I shouted back.