The Virus (20 page)

The airstrip rose suddenly to meet them out of the forest. Then they were down. The Zaire Air Force DC8 taxied bumpily to the side and waited. Mugambu remained on board. There was nothing to tempt him out of the plane — the forest which loomed on all sides had a distinctly unfriendly appearance. And besides, the arrangement was that his cargo would remain on board until the other party arrived.

Sweating, now that they were on the ground, and smelling of beer, Mugambu went to stand by the open door of the plane. He lit a cigarette and the tip of it glowed in the night. He could feel the tension mounting inside him. What if the American didn’t come? Should he fly on to Kinshasha? But then what would he do with the animals? How would he dispose of them? What if somebody else came and not the American? He fingered the belt of his service pistol nervously.

He saw the big transport plane almost as soon as he heard it. It was a long-range Lockheed Hercules. He guessed that it had probably flown down from one of the U.S. bases in Southern Sudan. Trust the Americans, Mugambu thought. They never did things by halves.

The big plane landed, rolled down to the end of the tarmac, then turned and came back until it was parked next to the DC8. A side door opened and a man stood there, outlined in the light which came from the interior of the plane. He had a torch in his hand with which he flashed a recognition signal. Mugambu responded. The first man went back inside.

Seconds later, the cargo doors on the Hercules opened and two jeeps drove onto the runway. Mugambu could see that the personnel in the jeeps wore protective clothing.

“All right,” he told his men. “Get on with it.”

The Congolese soldiers let the stairs down and Mugambu descended to supervise the transfer.

When it was finished, the tall balding American, who had first signalled with the torch and who had clearly been in charge on the American side, came over to him.

“I guess that’s it, Albert. We’ll be taking off now.”

He passed over a bulging brown briefcase. “I’m sorry it’s so heavy. We thought you’d prefer small denomination bills.”

“You’re sure they’re genuine?”

The tall American gave a short laugh. “I don’t pay in counterfeit money!”

A minute later, the engines on the Hercules were started for take-off. The big plane lumbered off into the night sky. The DC8 followed a few minutes later.

On the flight back to Kinshasha, Colonel Mugambu sat with the bulging brown briefcase on his lap. Once he opened it to check on the contents. He had never seen so much money in his life. His men would have to have some of it, but the bulk he would keep for himself. He considered it a proper reward for being the right man in the right place at the right time.

They found the boat where they had left it, moored at the water’s edge on the Zairian side of Lake Tanganyika. They began the crossing as soon as it was dark. Four hours later, Stephanie Verusio was back in her old room at the Source du Nil Hotel in Bujumbura. She lay on her bed trying to sleep. But sleep would not come. She was too exhausted to sleep.

In some ways the mental exhaustion was worse than the physical. Her mind kept on going round and round the same set of facts and bumping up against the same inconsistencies.

Fact number one: there had been an outbreak of virus disease in Marburg in Germany in 1967. The episode was not widely reported but it happened.

Fact number two: monkeys were suspected as a cause of the disease. The link had not been investigated at the time because of the desire on the part of the West German authorities to cover-up a politically explosive event.

Fact number three: it subsequently appeared that a green monkey, coming from the Kugumba region of Eastern Zaire, had been implicated in the 1967 deaths.

Fact number four: a green monkey, also coming from the Kugumba region of Eastern Zaire, had been implicated in her sister’s death earlier that year.

Fact number five: a tribe of monkeys existed or (she corrected herself) had once existed in the Kugumba region of Eastern Zaire at precisely the location indicated.

Fact number six: this tribe consisted not of the green monkeys but of grey-green monkeys.

Had the Marburg episode and her sister’s death been caused by the grey-green monkey, not the green monkey? Had there been a mistake in classification? That was one possibility but she doubted it. In any case, the baby monkey which she had found in the crater had now been taken off to Ngenzi’s laboratory in Bujumbura and tests would soon show if the animal was diseased.

If there had been no mistake in the classification of the species, then there must have been some other mistake. Could it be that the Marburg deaths and her sister’s death had indeed been caused by green monkey disease
with the green monkeys themselves coming from somewhere other than the Kugumba region of Eastern Zaire?
If this hypothesis was true, what accounted for the error of location? And how could such an error have been made twice? What did it all mean?

These thoughts went round and round in her head as she lay there. Finally, as the dawn was beginning to break on the mountains across the lake, she fell asleep.

Several hours later she woke with a start. The sun was streaming in through the window and the telephone was ringing.

She immediately recognized the deep kindly tones of Michel Ngenzi.

“How are you, Stephanie? Recovered?”

“Recovering, thanks.” She shook herself awake.

“We just had the first results of the tests at the laboratory. That monkey is not diseased. It’s as healthy as a newborn baby. I just thought you would like to know.”

“Phew!” Stephanie could not honestly say that Ngenzi’s news helped to clarify the situation. But she felt deeply relieved that Ngenzi and the others who had risked their lives bringing the animal back were not in jeopardy.

“What are you going to do with it now you’ve finished the tests?” Somehow, Stephanie minded a great deal about what happened to the animal.

“I’m going to keep it,” Ngenzi said. “It can run around with the donkey and the peacocks.”

Stephanie went to Ngenzi’s house that afternoon. They sat together on the veranda. Stephanie cradled the little monkey in her arms, happy to see it safe. But Ngenzi seemed ill at ease. He nodded in the direction of his two Hutu servants who were, as usual, down at the bottom of the garden slashing away with their pangas at ever-threatening weeds.

“There seems to be trouble brewing among the Hutus. I don’t like the smell of it. Those two are loyal to me; I’m sure of that. But they’re under pressure. Someone is trying to stir the Hutus up.”

He changed the subject.

“What are you planning to do now, Stephanie?”

Ngenzi’s question gave her a chance to formulate an idea which had been hovering at the back of her mind since she had woken up that morning. It was really nothing more than a wild hunch, inspired by a few moments of conversation with Kodjo, the “monkey man”.

“Michel, could I ask you a great favour?”

“Go ahead.”

“I wanted to know if I could go with Kodjo to his village. Can you spare him? He’s really anxious for me to come. I think he wants to show me his family. He says they’ll make a ‘mwemba’ for me!”

Ngenzi laughed. “Of course you can go. You
must
go. You can have my car and my driver for a few days. Charles will be glad to take you.”

For a fraction of a second Stephanie wondered how sure Ngenzi was of Charles. She remembered the exchange she had seen him have outside the hotel with Victor Mtaza and his subsequent denial of it. But the offer seemed too good to be questioned.

She flung her arms round Ngenzi’s neck.

“That’s marvellous.”

Two days later, seated in style in the back of Professor Ngenzi’s car, Stephanie set off up country. Charles, Professor Ngenzi’s chauffeur, took the wheel. Kodjo, whom Stephanie continued to think of as the “monkey man,” sat up in front beside him.

Stephanie had been invited to stay by a German couple, friends of Michel Ngenzi.

“You have to meet Peter and Helga Lustig,” Ngenzi had said. “They’re delightful. And they know as much about Burundi as I do myself. He’s been out here fifteen years with one international assistance project or another. He started with tea, I believe. But now he’s moved on to coffee. He’s done very well. Burundi coffee is some of the best in the world. He works hard. They both do. But they play hard too. You’ll see the place they’ve built up there. They’ve taken one of the old colonial houses and transformed it.”

When she arrived at the Lustigs’, Stephanie immediately understood what Ngenzi meant. They had driven in a north-easterly direction from Bujumbura. In early afternoon, climbing all the time, they had left the main road — if such it could be called — for a dirt track which curled up towards the treeline. Two miles later they turned into the drive of the Lustig estate.

Her hosts came out to greet her, and they stood for a while talking on the terrace.

“How is Michel? He is a marvellous man, isn’t he?” Helga Lustig had fair close-cropped hair and a warm enthusiastic voice. She managed to make it plain that it was as much pleasure for her to receive visitors, as it was for them to be received in her magnificent home.

Stephanie agreed wholeheartedly with Helga’s verdict on Michel Ngenzi.

“He’s almost like a second father to me,” she said simply.

They spent some time on the terrace admiring the view.

Peter Lustig, a dapper fifty-year-old who clearly believed that style was the essence of life, pointed out the geography.

“What you’re looking at straight ahead is the Nile-Zaire ridge. It’s one of the great watersheds of Africa. Rain which falls one side of the ridge ends up in the Nile; rain which falls on the other side ends up in Zaire — in the Congo River.”

He saw that Stephanie was looking at a towering crest in the middle of the ridge almost opposite the house.

“That’s Mount Lwungi,” Peter Lustig explained. “It’s one of the highest summits in the Nile-Zaire ridge, with the finest stand of primeval rain-forest in the whole country. It’s also the site of an
ibigabiro.”

“What’s an
ibigabiro
?” Stephanie asked.

“A royal burial ground. Sacred to the ancient kings.”

“Oh, yes, I heard a bit about that already.” Stephanie recalled the conversation she had had with Kodjo a few days earlier.

If the distant view was spectacular, so too was the nearer. The lawns in front of the house stretched for two full acres; there was a tennis court and swimming pool, and a paddock for the horses which were Helga Lustig’s pride and joy.

“If you marry a man who decides to make his life in the bush, you may as well make the most of it,” she exclaimed. “I’ve got my horses; I’ve got my garden. This is a wonderful climate for growing flowers. It’s high; it’s moist. There’s a freshness in the air.”

Stephanie nodded. “I’m beginning to love it.”

“And I’ve got my stereo too,” Helga Lustig continued. “I don’t know where we would be without the tapes.”

They went inside. Charles and Kodjo departed with the car into the nearby village of Bugamba.

“We won’t see them again till the morning,” Peter Lustig said. “This is Kodjo’s home village, isn’t it? There will be a lot of beer drunk tonight.”

They had dinner, just the three of them, rather solemnly in the dining-room. Seeing that both of the Lustigs had changed for dinner, Stephanie had done the same. Afterwards, Helga dismissed the servants. They had coffee outside. Darkness had long since fallen and they felt rather than saw the loom of the mountains across the valley.

“What would you prefer?” Helga Lustig asked. “Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven? We have everything. As long as I have my tapes, I can live anywhere.”

Soon the evening was full of sounds. Stephanie leaned back in her chair and took it all in. A week earlier she had been marching through the jungle a couple of hundred miles to the east, sweating and uncomfortable. Tonight, she was bathed and clean; had had an agreeable dinner with two charming people; and now she was listening to the finest offerings of that great flowering which was German music in the nineteenth century.

“How long are you visiting Burundi?” Helga Lustig asked.

“I can’t really say for sure. I’m looking for something but I haven’t found it yet.”

For the next hour, with occasional interruptions while Helga Lustig refilled the coffee cups or changed the background music, Stephanie told them the story of the last month of her life. She began with the tale which Lowell Kaplan himself had told her about the outbreak of disease in Marburg in 1967. She continued with her sister’s death and with her own decision to come to Africa. Finally, she came to the events of the last few days: the trek into Zaire and the slaughter at the crater.

The Lustigs, as she had known they would be, were horrified.

“What a pointless massacre!” Helga exclaimed. “Even if those monkeys had been carrying the virus, they had no right to kill them. What harm were they doing to anyone up there in the crater?”

What astonished the Lustigs most of all was the fact that, even though they were Germans, they had never heard about the Marburg affair.

“Fancy that!” exclaimed Helga. “Of course, 1967 was after we left. Peter and I were already married by then and we were on our first assignment — in South West Africa. Right out in the bush about three hundred miles from Windhoek. It’s not surprising that we never heard. And then when we did go back to Germany on home leave in 1971, well, I suppose by then everyone had forgotten.”

“I don’t think many people knew about the outbreak anyway,” said Stephanie. “The German authorities kept very quiet about it.”

“I’m surprised the old woman didn’t mention it, though.” Peter Lustig pulled reflectively on his pipe. “She must have been in Marburg about then. I gather she came here some time towards the end of the ’sixties.”

It was one of those moments when Stephanie knew, intuitively, that something important had just been said. For the last several days she had, mentally, been trying to fit the pieces of the jigsaw together. But she hadn’t managed to do so. Either the pieces weren’t all there; or else she wasn’t looking at them the right way up. Now, suddenly, she realized that the casual reference to an old woman who had lived in Marburg at the end of the ’sixties could be the clue she was looking for.