The Crabs of Bangui

Chapter Thirty Five

239 Chapter Thirty Five T he crook was certainly not in the country. As a matter of fact, at that moment when they were worrying about where he could be hiding, he was having supper with his family in Washington. He was one of the passengers on board the Swiss Air jet that left for Zurich at 7.30 on Thursday morning, the same Thursday morning that the suckers were to leave for Bangui. He had left nothing to chance, having cleaned all his bank accounts and safe deposits in advance of his departure. Even if their investigations were finally very good, they would never know the precise figure that he had made. Their investigators would definitely continue to have nightmares trying to come up with precise information. The cashier’s register would show a certain number of persons and a certain amount of money, probably not exceeding 100 million francs. But that could only be part of the truth. What becomes of the very big personalities and Government, the Secretary Generals, Colonels and bigwigs who got registered by proxy, attended meetings by proxy and received their dividends by proxy. He simply kept a diary as they never wanted their names to be publicized. Now more than ever, they even had a better reason to dissociate themselves from the company. These were never to be known, the better for him. Hansel wondered how much was known and how much would ever be known about his activities. One thing was certain, he owed nobody apologies or explanations. It was the only thing to do. His people would grumble, whine and curse that he refused to accept their money at a time when 240 Linus T. Asong he was minting money and throwing about at relatively unfamiliar persons, they would blame him for denying them the opportunity to share in those generous dividends which had become the talk of the town. But in their heart of hearts, in the comfort of their beds and the secret of their homes, and in the light of how things had now turned out, they would admit that in the final analysis he did them well in preventing them from sinking their money into a bottomless pit. There was one very important of fleeing the country, quite apart from the fact that it put him completely out of the reach of his pursuers: his affair with Salomey. There was no way they were to meet again, and that was very good news for Marion. Their marriage was finally saved, although it would leave an indelible scar on the psyche. Undeniably, he had given the police something to worry about, some food for thought. If their investigations were good enough, they would sooner or later discover that all those phone calls made each time he was in council emanated from the small documentation office on the other side of the street, and that the owner had been given a list of addresses to use each time he made a call. They would discover that Lee Ping Yung, Bangui, Crabs and Shells and the like were simply fictions of his fertile imagination. Again, if their investigations were good enough they would sooner or later discover that all the e-mails came from one single person, Hansel Bolingo who prepared them in his laptop, stored them in a diskette and then dispatched them to himself each time he thought necessary. He felt no moral scruples about what he had done. God was on his side. The fact that he had done all that and had got away with it without any embarrassment, meant that his actions had the blessings and the protection of God. For one thing, he had made sure that he did not take money from anybody for whom that money was his all. He did not 241 The Crabs of Bangui take money from anybody poorer than himself. He did not take from personal friends and relatives. As far as his good old sweetheart Salomey was concerned, he was happy that he had, in lay man’s language, “settled her.” A less careful man finding himself in so much money would have made it a point to keep a girl in every street. But he hadn’t done that. He had stuck to his old friend, turning a blind eye on any other women. He had simply put his money into use. People who...