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Page 43.

Chapter Congo, 1942: Malone with Mistress

Major Robert Malone had little trouble integrating himself into diplomatic life in Leopoldville.

The tropical heat took getting used to, but Malone had experienced similar extremes in Malaysia and even in Florida. One had to get used to traveling everywhere with bodyguards, given years of growing popular unrest at Belgian mistreatment of their colonial subjects. The bodyguards could be inconvenient at moments when Rob found an opportunity to gamble. The card games were a way to raise cash, keep ahead of his creditors, and listen for interesting intelligence tidbits. Among the floating crap games, he could hobnob with every official of any significance in this part of Africa.

As a cover story, Rob was supposedly a journalist for some obscure news service, drifting among Allied military officers, diplomats, and bureaucrats that swarmed around the rich province. The Belgian exile government’s colonial governor Pierre Ryckmans ran the Congo. Belgian rule had never been a kindly one, though nothing on the scale of the royal depredations in the late 1800s, which had created a world outcry and caused the king’s personal colony to be handed over to the Belgian people as a national fiefdom.

Dozens of miners and other local laborers had recently died in uprisings in Luluabourg and Élisabethville. Relations with the locals remained testy.

Belgium was still in name and reality a Nazi possession, while the Belgian Congo was in reality already a staging area for the Allies in their drive to retake Africa from the Axis. Under cover, Rob was the eyes and ears of Wild Bill Donovan in the Congo. His concern was less with the Nazis, whose star had already badly waned in Africa, than with the incipient efforts by Stalin’s Soviets to create the first atomic bomb and make the world safe for communism.

Rob’s primary technical contact was a Belgian physicist, Henri Brégel, who lived with his wife and daughter in a villa in the resort town of Boma but spent much of his working time in Leopoldville where he served as a scientific advisor to various Allied governments. From Brégel, Rob learned that the United States had interned a shipload of prime Belgian uranium-235 at a dock in New York City. Initial research into using radioactive material was being conducted at a secret facility in Manhattan. That was all Henri Brégel knew, or was willing to divulge. From the importance Donovan placed on this mysterious green glowing watch-dial paint, Rob could readily surmise Brégel knew his health was at stake if he had a loose tongue.

Rob moved easily and elegantly in the frontier society in Leopoldville. He found the wives of European and American administrators were intriguing and bored, and their daughters eager and attractive. He learned who was selling what, and who needed that, while staying as squeaky clean as possible. Most people believed he was a foreign correspondent for several U.S. weekly journals, and probably nobody knew he was a U.S. Army officer, much less an O.S.S. operative.

As far as the women went, everything was “the war.” C’est la guerre. Among the dalliances Rob cultivated was one with the neglected and beautiful wife of a Belgian mining engineer named Simon Clery—a big, brutal man who was away most of the time, usually in Katanga where rubber and coal were mined, along with uranium ore, diamonds, and the other fruits of a jungle paradise spoiled by human greed. Clery’s wife was of no particular intelligence value, but she was beautiful and needy—and, like Rob Malone, had a dark and terrible secret. Rob only saw her occasionally, and he hardly thought of her when they weren’t together, but each time he saw her she roiled up a lot of inner turmoil in him. Their affair was going nowhere, they both knew—among other things, she was married—which made it all the more passionate and pungent between them.

Rob found himself hovering around Brégel’s 23 year old daughter Astrid—no child, certainly, and surely deflowered long since, though she radiated girlish innocence—who had been studying nursing at Louvain, but had fled with her mother and siblings to join their father not long after the German invasion in 1940. Astrid was a willowy blonde with bright blue eyes, a sweet smile, and long slender arms—she looked great holding a drink, and Rob discovered she was something of a lush. That would account for that perennial reddish blush in her creamy peach fuzz cheeks, he thought.

One day, he was invited to tea at the Brégel villa near Boma. This was 60 miles inland from the mouth of the Congo River, on the last upriver tidal beaches of the Atlantic Ocean. Rob, Brégel, Astrid, and several servants and bodyguards drove down to the beach in a white convertible Peugeot driven by a local in black uniform, white billed cap, and white gloves. There were several children along, and the party frolicked down to the tumbling river water. Brégel was a stiff, somewhat dour civil servant who insisted on wearing his suit and tie, though he made a concession by removing his dress shoes and socks. He sat in a beach chair sipping a vinegary Belgian ale and wiggling bluish veiny feet. Rob sat nearby, sipping Campari and soda, while Astrid walked down to the water with several small children. The sun filled her yellow dress, barely concealing in its glow young limbs that invited being touched.

Brégel held forth about Congo politics. A loyal bureaucrat, he assumed the Belgian Congo would return to its timeless colonial torpor as soon as the current Teutonic craziness had been resolved. Rob had been briefed by a midlevel State Department official from Katanga, a gray soul named Sylvester, who, when he passed about the fourth or fifth rum cola, became lubrifaciently detached and scholarly. According to Sylvester, local agitators like Joseph Kasavubu, Patrice Lumumba, and Moïse Tshombe were pressing for independence, at a time when black Congolese were considered primitives and not allowed to own land, purchase alcohol, or similar prerogatives of human dignity. The colonial military had attempted mutiny recently, and there were constant strikes and riots with many deaths across the province. Many black revolutionaries had strong ties to the international workers’ movement centered in Moscow. Rob listened and nodded sympathetically to Sylvester’s barroom conversations at The Yank downtown, but Rob kept his own counsel privately. He had no love for European colonial powers, and felt sympathetic to the blacks, but reflected that in the United States, particularly in the South, a black man could be lynched for looking at a white woman the wrong way. Rob had his doubts about how the black man’s lot could be improved in the Congo if it was still so dreadful in the alleged homeland of modern democracy, the United States. Rob also felt uneasy about staying involved in another country’s colonial morass, particularly when the Belgians had been so arrogant and cruel, and made such a mess of things. Why inherit a century of resentment? Then again, as the Old Man (Donovan) had made clear, it was all about the future world balance of power—a compelling reason to lay prudence aside.

Brégel seemed to feel at ease with Rob, and let slip information that might be considered sensitive. Or was he trying to divert Rob’s attention from Astrid? The girl was on her way back from the water now, toying with a slim bit of driftwood and looking mischievous. Time for her to sneak another glass of sour lambiek.

Brégel talked about yellowcake, the refined uranium ore avidly sought by all major countries. “Down there in Katanga,” he said, “uranium oxide is in the ground and you can practically dig it out by hand. We have locals down there digging day and night, now that we can be certain the Germans won’t be back to take it away. Your country will want the stock that is coming out. We must be careful of the Soviets, and these local monkeys who want to sell their souls to the Communists.” The wattles under his chin shook with outrage, and his bushy gray eyebrows hid glowering steel-blue eyes.

Rob sat back, squinting his eyes shut in the late afternoon sunlight and not reacting, except to swat a large, loud fly.