The Boy in the River (28 page)

The address Claude had obtained for me wasn’t far from the Boulevard Kasa-Vubu, in the same area as Pastor Henri’s church compound, which I had visited on my last trip. The neighbourhood didn’t have a lot to recommend it, but at least I was familiar with the area. In the cool cavern of the car, with the competent and laconic crew surrounding me, I began to relax.

It didn’t last long. We hadn’t gone far through the choked streets before a stone was thrown, clunking against the bodywork. A few people jeered. As we crawled through a crowd, horn blaring, someone smacked hard on the shiny window and pressed his face grotesquely against the glass, nose fattened. I could hear angry shouts in Lingala.

‘Bloody Westerners! What d’you want here?’

‘Give us dollars!’

‘Bugger off back to America!’

Inside the car, suddenly there were no more jokes.

‘What’s going on?’ Sacha asked.

I caught Apolossa’s eye in the rear-view mirror. He and I were the only two people who understood the language, and thus the depth of hostility directed against us.

‘We’d better back of,’ I said.

Nobody argued, and Apolossa gratefully swung the car round in a vacant lot. We headed back towards the centre of town more quickly than we had come.

The incident troubled me. I had travelled these streets scores of times, often alone and on foot. But none of that counted for anything when I was insulated inside this arrogant and overbearing vehicle. All the street people saw was our power and insuferable wealth, thrown in their faces. No wonder they wanted to hit back.

I cursed myself. I should have thought of this and briefed the crew more thoroughly.

‘Well, that’s terriffic,’ Sacha was saying. ‘How are we going to find this boy if they won’t even let us drive the streets?’

‘I’ll walk,’ I said.

He looked at me. ‘
Walk
?’

‘I’ll be safer out of this damned great tank. I’ll go this afternoon.’

Boulevard Kasa-Vubu is a long, broad avenue that was once grand. The shady trees had long since been cut down for fuel by this time, and most of the tarmac had gone. A strip of blacktop down the centre had survived, just broad enough for a two-way traffic jam of belching trucks, taxi-buses and motorbikes. The sides of the road and the laneways were covered in grey sand, deep enough in the dry season to bog a regular car. Flanking the boulevard were hideous one- and two-storey commercial buildings, offices and dim shops and garages, and between them private houses and shacks, their multi-coloured doors glaring in the sun.

Londres’ uncle’s place proved to be one of these, a miserable hovel with a red door set back between two lock-ups. I knocked. People jostled past along the crowded margin of the road. Almost in front of the door two women in violently coloured head ties sat at a rough table, chatting and laughing. They were selling – or failing to sell – the ubiquitous trade goods of African stallholders: tiny tins of pilchards in tomato sauce, milk powder, bottles of Fanta. No one took any notice of me. I knocked again.

The sweat was running down my body inside my shirt. I wondered if it would affect the radio transmitter I had taped round my midriff, and which ought to be relaying my every sound and movement to Sacha and the crew in the car, which was parked out of harm’s way half a mile distant.

I knocked for a third time and shouted through the flimsy door.

‘Ko-ko-ko!’

‘Not home,’ one of the trader women called. ‘As you see.’

‘Do you know these people?’ I asked her in Lingala.

She tossed up her chin. No. Maybe. What’s it to you?

‘I’m looking for a boy. From London. A boy called Londres.’

Again the chin came up. ‘There are many boys.’

That was self-evidently true. A gaggle of children had gathered around me, most of them boys in faded T-shirts and torn shorts, barefoot, wide-eyed, laughing and nudging one another, cracking jokes at my expense.

‘Does anyone know a boy called Londres?’ I asked them.

They jostled one another and giggled, all bright teeth and eyes.

‘Londres,’ I tried again, ‘a kid of about fourteen? Speaks like an English boy, maybe?’

They exchanged glances of elaborate puzzlement and several shook their heads. I had no way of telling whether their ignorance was genuine, and I began to feel ridiculous. I was a big rich white man asking questions about one of their own. Whether they knew anything or not, these youngsters weren’t about to help me.

I gave them a few coins and walked away through the hot sandy streets, trailing for a while a comet-tail of children begging for more money until the last of them grew bored and peeled off.

‘Well, you tried,’ Sacha said consolingly, as I climbed into the chill cavern of the Toyota. ‘But what do we do now?’

‘I’ve got an idea,’ I said, and pulled out my mobile.

At his run-down compound near the stadium Remy greeted us like long lost friends.

The courtyard still swarmed with threadbare children, a few more roofs had fallen in, more walls had crumbled, but otherwise little had changed since my last visit. Remy’s courage and his devotion to Kinshasa’s street kids were as extraordinary as ever. Sacha, Petra and Andy had experienced many of the world’s incredible people, but they were uncharacteristically quiet as we sat in Remy’s office, sipping Coke we’d bought from a hawker. I could tell they were awed by the scale of the problem and by this man’s determination, against all the odds, to tackle it.

‘You think you can get this boy – this Londres – back to London?’ Remy’s glasses flashed eagerly at me.

‘I don’t know, Remy. This film’s for the BBC, so at least we can publicize the story and make the British public realize this is going on. Maybe help stop it. But we won’t know any of that until we find him.’

‘It’s the street kids themselves who’ll know where he is,’ Remy said. ‘I’ll put a team onto it.’

‘A team?’

‘Sure.’ He waved airily. ‘We’re used to tracking down missing kids. We’ll have someone set up nearby as a street trader ask some questions. Have someone else cycle past every couple of hours. That sort of thing. If he’s there, they’ll spot him sooner or later. Meanwhile, we should ask some questions ourselves.’

‘I tried that. I think I scared them off.’

‘No,we won’t ask at the uncle’s house.’ Remy leaned forward. ‘Richard, did you know a street child was killed by some soldiers yesterday?’

‘No. That’s terrible.’

‘Of course, and it’s one of the reasons the kids are wary about sharing information with people who look official. I hear there’s going to be a big funeral for this child tomorrow. There’ll be a lot of street children around. We should go. Keep our ears open.’

‘You’d come with us?’

‘Sure. I know these kids. They won’t talk to four whites.’

Sacha picked up on this at once. ‘Will we be able to film? That’s what we’re supposed to be doing.’

Remy thought about it for a moment. ‘You’re here for the BBC,’ he said. ‘That should help, so long as they understand we’re on their side. You have to be careful, though. People don’t like cameras being pushed in their faces.’

‘The vehicle’s not very discreet,’ I said. ‘We’ve already discovered that.’

‘We’ll leave the car in a side street and go in on foot.’ Remy said. ‘You should be all right with me. I’ve never had any trouble.’

The funeral was to take place in a slum east of Kinshasa centre, a place of shanty buildings and dirt streets.

It was very hot when we got there. An open space between the buildings was seething with people, their backs to us. A dull roar rose from this mass, a threatening sound that I could feel in the pit of my stomach, not unlike the hum of a disturbed hive on the point of swarming.

We started through the crowd, with me and Remy in the lead. Just behind us Petra, half hidden by our bodies, was already filming. Andy was manoeuvring his cumbersome sound gear behind her. Remy, who knew more about the street kids of Kinshasa than anyone alive, was speaking gently and respectfully to the people around him in Lingala, parting the mob, looking for anyone who had authority.

All at once, through the shimmering heat, I caught a glimpse of the murdered child’s body. He lay on a makeshift bier, a boy of five or six, killed the day before by a Congolese soldier. I didn’t know why he had been killed – I didn’t even know the poor child’s name – but I could see the livid machete wound on his head.

We pushed on. Remy and I had come up with a plan of sorts. If we could find a relative, or a pastor who held some sway here, we’d give them money to see the child got a church burial. That at least would show our good faith. But I was already having my doubts. In the gathering glare of the Kinshasa morning, tempers were beginning to fray. There were outbursts of angry shouting up ahead and some hysterical weeping. We were well into the crowd by now, and the mass had begun to close behind us. I didn’t like it. I had been around danger in Kinshasa before and I could smell it in the air, like high-octane fuel, waiting for a spark. People started to notice us. One or two pointed and others called questions.

I began talking in Lingala to the people in front of me, trying to explain that we only wanted to help. Beside me I could hear Remy doing the same. But I knew we weren’t getting through to them. I could see that these people were in no mood to trust our motives, no matter what we said.

We edged on just a little further. Out of the corner of my eye the red light glowed on Petra’s camera as she filmed from the shoulder. Sacha shouted from behind us, a warning of some sort. I could hear the tension in his voice. All at once a wild-eyed Congolese man in a faded AC Milan T-shirt materialized in front of me.

‘Thief!’ he shouted in my face. Then he screamed at all of us, ‘Thieves!’

Was that what we were? Thieves? Was this entire exercise for our benefit rather than theirs? I caught a glimpse of a twenty dollar bill being incautiously offered by one of the crew, presumably to demonstrate our good intentions. Then someone stole Petra’s cigarettes out of her jacket and I knew it was all going to go badly wrong. I heard, or sensed, the small commotion behind me as Andy cursed at the pickpocket, I half turned and the hot Kinshasa sky fell in.

The twenty-dollar bill was snatched from the upraised hand. Someone jumped on me and I staggered and almost fell, catching a glimpse of Remy going down and the crowd surging around him, suddenly frenzied,kicking and screaming. I tried to straighten up. Another man got hold of my jacket, and another and another. I felt myself being smothered by their weight and their fury, their hands ripping at my clothes, the rank smell of their bodies stifiling me. Someone was wrenching at my finger, trying to get my wedding ring of and prepared to take the finger with it.

A couple of yards away Petra and Andy were in retreat, dragging what they could of their gear with them, Sacha struggling to help,everyone shouting. My wallet went, then my new mobile phone, followed by anything else I had in my pockets. My shirt was literally torn of my back, and after that I only cared about getting my head down and somehow barging and shouldering my way through the screaming throng, with bodies hanging of me, pummelling and gouging at me. My only advantages were my size and the strength of my desperation. I had a feeting vision of a bison dragged down by wolves, and I knew I was fighting a losing battle.

Without our driver, Apolossa, we would all have been torn apart. He had stayed with the car, parked in an alley a few metres away. Suddenly he reversed hard into the crowd, the Land Cruiser’s doors flying open, and somehow we all scrambled into or onto the vehicle. He then floored the accelerator and we took off, bouncing down the rutted alleyways of Kinshasa’s slums with men from the mob still insanely hanging on to the swinging doors, clutching at us. As we pulled out of the slums and on to the main road they eventually dropped off.

Apolossa had gone to a roadside stall and brought back cigarettes and drinks. The drinks were the usual African selection – Coke, Fanta orange, Primus beer. I took a beer and leaned against the hot bonnet of the car. I hadn’t tasted anything as good as that beer in a very long time, and I lingered over it, drinking in sips.

For a long while we were very quiet. We all had scratches, cuts and bruises. We’d lost most of what we’d been carrying – money, watches, bits of clothing and quite a lot of the gear, including Petra’s $20,000 wide-angle camera lens.

Petra, who had filmed under fire in Iraq, Afghanistan and Bosnia, told me through the smoke of her third cigarette that this was the nearest she had ever come to death while on an assignment. Andy was visibly shaking as he busied himself with his equipment to keep his hands occupied. Sacha, who had managed to hang on to his mobile, was speaking into it, his voice quivering a little. He was talking to London, filing an incident report. After a moment he took the phone away from his ear and asked if any of us had any messages to pass on. I said I’d be grateful if someone from his office could put in a call to Faith and tell her I was ok. This was a mistake, since Faith had no reason to think otherwise, but I wasn’t exactly thinking straight.

Sacha said, ‘Sure. Anything else?’

‘How’s England doing in the Ashes?’

Sacha smiled wanly and went back to the phone to file his incident report.

I stole a glance at Remy. He was deeply shocked. He had worked with Kinshasa’s poor for thirty years and nothing like this had ever happened to him. I could see he felt responsible. At that moment none of us had enough spare courage or generosity to contradict him.

He looked up and met my eye. He had got it badly wrong and we both knew what that meant: Kinshasha was no longer a place that even a man with Remy’s matchless experience could fully understand. It was a frightening thought. When I’d last been here, no one would have thought the city could get much worse. But it had.

Petra leaned against the bonnet beside me and tapped the ash from her cigarette.