In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz Read Online Free Page B

of your international call right and you could eavesdrop on the telephone conversations of guests down the hall, being monitored by the switchboard operators. The room cleaners showed a disproportionate level of interest in guests’ comings and goings. There was always a sense of being under surveillance. ‘We don’t hire them as such, but what can we do if the staff work as spies?’ a hotel executive once acknowledged, with a philosophical shrug of the shoulders.
    By the mid-1990s the Intercontinental had, like the country itself, hit hard times. Zaire had become an international pariah and few VIPs visited Kinshasa any more. With occupancy below 20 per cent, service was stultifyingly slow. The blue dye came off the floor of the swimming pool, leaving bathers with the impression they had caught some horrible foot disease. The aroma of rotting carpet—blight of humid climates—tinged the air, the salade niçoise gave you the runs and the national power company would regularly plunge the hotel into penumbra because of unpaid bills. The first time I used the lift it shuttled repeatedly between ground floor and sixth, refusing to stop. ‘Yes, we heard you ringing the alarm bell,’ remarked the imperturbable receptionist when I finally won my freedom. After that I used the emergency stairs.
    But there were considerations weighing against the growing tattiness, which accounted for the hotel’s small population of permanent residents. We were betting on the likelihood that if Kinshasa were to be engulfed in one of its periodic bouts of pillaging, the DSP would secure the hotel. They had done so twice before, in 1991 and 1993, when the mouvanciers had slept in the conference rooms, sheltered from a frenzied populace which was dismantling their factories, supermarkets and villas.
    The hotel’s long-term guests were a strange bunch, representative in their way of the foreign community that washes up on African shores: misfits of the First World, sometimes intent on good works but more often escaping dubious pasts, in search of a quickkilling, or simply seduced by the possibilities of misbehaviour without repercussions—that old colonial delight.
    There was the ageing Belgian beauty, still sporting the miniskirts of a thirteen-year-old, who relentlessly sunbathed her way through every crisis, her appetite for ultraviolet seemingly insatiable. On the pool’s fringes hovered the skinny Chinese acupuncturist, whom everyone mistook for a cook because of his starched white hat. He had come to work on an aid project in Zaire which had never seen the light of day. Given the prevalence of HIV in Kinshasa, demand for acupuncture was minimal. But he had stayed on rather than return to communist China. ‘Here, it is bad. But in China, I think, maybe worse,’ he confessed.
    On first name terms with most of the mouvanciers was the blond, big-hearted American with a southern drawl who slopped around in flip-flops and T-shirts. Just what he was doing in Kinshasa was a mystery, but he would often use a vague, collective ‘we’ when referring to those in power. The Zairean staff referred to him openly as ‘the CIA man’, although the American embassy claimed to be unaware of his existence. Somehow, one couldn’t help feeling that a real CIA man would have been a bit put out at having his role so universally recognised.
    There were bored foreign pilots who flew supplies into UNITA-held territory in Angola, busting UN sanctions on salaries generous enough to merit turning a few blind eyes. ‘I have told my bosses, the one thing I will never do is fly arms,’ said Jean-Marie, a charming Frenchman. ‘They can ask me to do anything else, but not that.’ I would nod sympathetically, pretending to believe him.
    Jean-Marie looked great in his pilot’s uniform and spent a lot of time gently chatting up aid workers around the pool. He had shown me a photograph of his