Though I had never been to Mogado, I knew what to expect. All African provincial capitals are much the same, both in essence and particulars, and Mogado’s downtown area of dusty, potholed streets, a scattering of leafless, skeletal trees, and shabby buildings with cracked stucco facades, was not in any wise distinctive. Just enough people about to give the impression of squatters in a ghost town: a barefoot woman in a faded dress peering from a dark doorway; three skinny kids squatting in the dirt, tormenting a captive mouse snake; a toothless old man sitting at a window, gazing blankly into the past. Everyone else hiding from the heat. In the central square, dominated by a plaster fountain decorated with faces from which all features had eroded, a pariah dog with a pelt the color of blanched almonds was poking about for bugs in a patch of sere grass. When my car passed close to him, he skittered away sideways, dragging behind him a shadow as thin as a wire animal.
The street sign on the corner nearest the jail was dented and weathered, almost unreadable. Peering closely, I saw it was inscribed with a date; I could just make out the month, November, and the slightest suggestion of a numeral—doubtless commemorating some brilliant revolutionary passage whose spirit had suffered a comparable erosion of clarity. The jail itself occupied the basement and ground floor of the provincial offices, which were housed in a four-story edifice of pastel green stucco. A potbellied Congolese policeman with blue-black skin, a presidential air of self-importance, and a wen under his left eye sat in the anteroom behind a flyspecked desk, reading a French-language newspaper whose headline proclaimed a ferry disaster on the Kilombo River, the same muddy watercourse that flowed past Mogado. The crack-webbed wall at his back was figured by a large rectangle paler by several degrees than the remainder of its dingy surface; I took this to be the space where for three decades a portrait of the late unlamented dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, had hung. A ceiling fan stirred the air, but the faint breeze it created served merely to make me more aware of the humidity and the acrid stench of cleaning agents mixed in with a mustier scent, one I imagined to be that of blood and urine and sweat, the smell of old sufferings.
Rawley, the policeman told me, had been detained; he would join me that evening at the hotel. However, I could see the prisoner now if I wished.
I had presumed that Rawley would want to speak to me before my initial meeting with Buma; but now I suspected that his absence was by design, that he preferred to have my first impressions of the man be untainted by any further briefing on the case. I was tired from the flight and the drive, but I decided there was no point in putting things off.
A second policeman accompanied me down the stairs to a freshly whitewashed interrogation room at the rear of the building, furnished with a rough wooden table and two folding chairs. As I waited for Buma, I picked at the whitewash with my fingernails and succeeded in scraping away a sizable flake, revealing a dark undercoat dappled with rust-colored spots that were almost certainly dried blood. It would be nice, I thought, if Mobutu were doing time someplace a touch more tropical than Mogado, capering madly about in a red-hot iron cell, with snakes’ heads protruding from his eyes and rats playing tug-of-war with bloody strips of his tongue.
The door creaked back, and the policeman, wearing an agitated expression, ushered an elderly white-haired man into the room and locked the door behind him. The man was dressed in a tattered shirt and trousers of flour sacking, his arms and legs in manacles. His head was down, and he did not look at me. He stepped behind the chair opposite, repositioned it so that it was sideways to the table, and sat, affording me a view of his left profile. Only then did he dart his eyes toward me, engaging my stare for a few beats before fixing his gaze on the wall. He smiled, showing a sliver of discolored teeth—or perhaps it was not a true smile, for the expression held, as if this were the natural relaxed position of his jaws. His skin was coffee-colored, so crisscrossed with wrinkles that I initially assumed him to be in his eighties; but his musculature gave the lie to this impression. His forearms and biceps were those of someone who had thrived on a lifetime of physical labor, and his features were firmly fleshed and strong. It seemed that age had merely laid a patina upon him, and that if you could erase the wrinkles, you would be face to face with a man of hale middle age.
“Mr. Buma,” I said. “My name is Michael Mosely. I’d like to ask you some questions.”
He was slow to respond, but at length, as if it had taken several seconds for my words to penetrate his cerebral cortex, several more for the brain to interpret them, he said in a baritone of such resonance he might have been speaking through a wooden tube: “They tell me you are another doctor.”
“Yes,” I said. “But not the same sort of doctor who interviewed you previously. My discipline is herpetology. The study of snakes. To be precise, I’m an ethologist specializing in the behavior of pythons.”
This appeared to interest him. He turned the full force of his liverish eyes on me—when I say “force,” I am being literal, for I could have sworn I felt a sudden cold pressure on the skin of my face. That and his thin, false smile combined to instill in me a sense of unease.
“Pythons,” he said, and gave an amused grunt. “You will learn nothing about pythons from me.”
“As you probably know,” I said, “that’s not the subject of my inquiry.”
He lifted his large head a few degrees and appeared to be studying something in the corner of the ceiling. The most interesting thing about him to this juncture, I thought, was his stillness. After each movement, he seemed to freeze, not a muscle or a nerve twitching, and I wondered if this might not be the symptom of some pathology.
“Where were you born?” I asked.
“Along the river. A few days from here.”
“What’s the name of your village?”
“It no longer exists,” he said. “It has no name.”
Mobutu, I thought. Under Mobutu, many things in the Congo had ceased to exist.
“I’m going to assume,” I said, “you committed the murders you’ve been accused of. If that’s the case, why did you confess?”
He lowered his gaze to the wall. “Because I wished to announce myself. Because I am not afraid of what may follow.”
From his answer, I thought I understood him. Either he had participated in the murders, or else they had been done by someone else, and he had seen them as an opportunity. He was a witch man. A member of a crocodile cult. He wanted an acknowledgment of his power; once that acknowledgment had been made, and the cult’s authority affirmed, he believed that no Congolese court would have the courage to convict him—they would be intimidated by the threat posed by his sorcery. The entire process of accusation and confession had in effect been a public relations stunt designed to elevate the cult from a bush-league operation, so to speak, to a place of honor in the complicated hierarchy of witches and sorcerers that had always flourished in the country, no matter what political regime occupied the halls of power. While Mobutu was in office, this sort of stratagem would have been met with swift violence—no one was permitted to practice greater juju than the president-for-life; but now, with lesser monsters in control, it stood a chance of success. What I didn’t understand, however, was whether he was a con man or if he actually believed his own bullshit.