Bitter Chocolate (32 page)

GAK had become one of the country's leading experts in primary commodities, and he specialized in the cocoa and coffee trade. He learned the basics working as a business reporter, providing information useful to investors and traders. But his curiosity had led him deeper and deeper into the shadows of the cocoa industry and into a dark underworld occupied by the clique whose members dominate the
filière
. He took up the cause of the cocoa farmers the day he arrived in Côte d'Ivoire, and he was determined to expose their oppressors—in his mind, the regime of Laurent Gbagbo with its ties to the big multinational cocoa companies. To that end he unearthed a lot of information, perhaps too much for his own good.

Kieffer was at the Prima Centre to meet Michel Legré, a man he disliked though still called his friend. During these sinister days in Côte d'Ivoire, the word “friend” had multiple meanings, especially when your “friend” was married to the younger sister of Simone Gbagbo, wife of the president and one of the fiercest ultra-nationalists in the country. Michel Legré was the type of friend who could indeed protect Kieffer. But in the wrong circumstances, he could also help to destroy him.

Friends of all kinds were important to Kieffer. The whorl of people he contacted regularly were the sources of the energy that drove his life. And yet few could claim to know him well, or understand what motivated him. He ate too much, he smoked heavily, he thrived on stress, he obsessed over details. As he forced his way into the inner sanctums of Côte d'Ivoire's cocoa world; as he pursued the cocoa bosses and exposed their corruption; as he disseminated damning information about the most dangerous people in the country, all of his “friends” began to wonder if he had a private death wish.

Legré finally showed up, but he wasn't alone. The eight uniformed men accompanying him materialized as though from nowhere. They grabbed Kieffer, forced him into one of two four-by-four vehicles with no licence plates and fishtailed out of the parking lot at top speed. Kieffer's two mobile telephones—his lifeline—suddenly went dead. He was marooned, isolated from the protective circle of collaborators, colleagues, spies, informers, former wives, lovers, journalists and cocoa bosses who made up his complex and treacherous universe.

GAK disappeared into the haze of the hot subtropical afternoon. His phlegmy, cigarette-singed voice would never be heard again; his round fleshy face would never be seen again. The bear of a man who never stopped moving and never stopped asking questions would never exasperate his friends again. The last, best champion of the cocoa farmers of Côte d'Ivoire vanished without a trace, as completely and unexplainably absent as if he'd never been there.

Baudelaire Mieu was surprised when he didn't hear from GAK on Friday, and when Saturday morning rolled around without a call he became alarmed. Mieu is an Ivorian journalist, an impish-looking man in his twenties with a mouthful of conflicted teeth
that he covers with his hand when he smiles. He is one moment bashful and the next aggressive, but under Kieffer's influence he had become more confident. He collaborated with his mentor on many touchy stories that Mieu wouldn't have had the courage to do alone, and they put out some damning reports together. But the partnership went deeper than just publishing: Mieu admired GAK more than anyone he had ever met. And Kieffer thought of Mieu almost as a son.

Baudelaire Mieu was twenty-two when GAK came into his life and his neighbourhood. Kieffer moved into an apartment in the Cocody district with his most recent wife, a Ghanaian princess named Lady Atta Afua, better known as Rita. She had three children whom Kieffer had adopted. GAK was a bon vivant and a bundle of contradictions. He passionately loved both fine wine and cold beer, Handel and John Lennon, contemporary politics and medieval history.

Mieu became a fixture in Kieffer's home, hanging out whenever he could. GAK would talk endlessly while he lit one Dunhill cigarette off the butt of the previous one, letting the ashes fall on the carpet. He sat on the floor, eschewing furniture as too conventional. His friends often had the impression that Kieffer considered himself more African than European or Canadian, a simple peasant and not a middle-class bourgeois. But he always had his computer on, another link with his Network, through which he shared information and challenged authority any way he could. His mobile phones were constantly ringing. Kieffer would leap to his feet and move around the room like a restless animal but would quickly end up wheezing, his weak heart pounding. Though he was only fifty-four, Kieffer's lifestyle had taken a toll on his body.

As for Mieu, his life was at a difficult crossroads. His father had just died. His wife and little girl had been caught up in the violence of western Côte d'Ivoire during a visit there, and they were forced to flee. What Kieffer was able to give Baudelaire
was hope—filling his heart and soul with the idea that things in Côte d'Ivoire could change.

“A lot of journalists hated GAK because of the way he worked,” Mieu says. “But I loved it.”

When explosive documents materialized, Kieffer would publish quickly just to get the information before the public. He barged around the precincts of the cocoa industry, demanding answers from people known to kill for less than being asked irritating questions by nosy journalists. He went far beyond the boundaries of what other reporters considered “objective” journalism. According to Mieu, Kieffer adamantly believed that the Ivorian miracle could and should be revived. But it had to be redirected to profit the primary producers and reduce the privileges of the cocoa bosses and the multinationals. He was an idealist, and the young, impressionable Mieu loved him for it.

Mieu knew that Kieffer was meeting with Legré on Friday afternoon, and he was also aware that Kieffer planned to leave soon after to go to Ghana for the weekend. Rita returned home often, and Kieffer would occasionally join her in Ghana when he felt the need to “lay low” for a while. Mieu went around to Kieffer's house, but there was nobody home. A domestic worker knew only that he had left for work as usual on Friday morning in his car. Mieu contacted Rita in Ghana, but Kieffer wasn't there. Word of his absence spread quickly. The silence from his lifeline—the cellphones and the laptop—was uncharacteristic and ominous.

“He never went one day without calling me,” says Mieu. “I knew there was something wrong.” Mieu called the French Embassy.

Guy-André Kieffer had been a thorn in the side of French diplomats for a long time, sometimes making life miserable for bureaucrats as far away as the foreign ministry at the Quai d'Orsay in
Paris. France was trying to hold on to its influence in Côte d'Ivoire, formerly the jewel in its colonial crown. Ideas of Empire die slowly, and Côte d'Ivoire bequeathed to France some fading sense of its former grandeur. It's true that Côte d'Ivoire contributed billions of euros in profits to French businesses, but the country is also a hub of French influence in West Africa, a distant outpost of French language and culture. Recent discoveries of significant oil deposits in Côte d'Ivoire were also of great interest to international businessmen.

The Linas-Marcoussis Agreement, signed and dated in a Paris rugby arena, was supposed to heal the wounds of the warring north and south, but it had given Paris a questionable amount of sway over Ivorian affairs of state. What worried the French government more than the war was the ultra-nationalism stirred by Simone Gbagbo, given forceful expression in the racist ideology of Ivoirité, which was also turned against the French. Into these troubled waters, where everyone was accustomed to swimming cautiously, splashed Guy-André Kieffer.

In particular, Kieffer had incurred the wrath of Paul Antoine Bohoun Bouabré, the Ivorian Minister of Finance and the Economy and among the richest and most powerful people in the country. Bohoun Bouabré was one of GAK's chief targets. Kieffer exposed the minister's business deals and reported on his known—and previously unknown—diversion of cocoa funds into private interests. He often buttonholed the man in public places, mostly in the minister's own office building, where, much to the chagrin of the minister, Kieffer had many “friends.” Bohoun Bouabré had threatened Kieffer in the past, and most Ivorians knew he was not a man to mess with.

But Kieffer also pursued Victor Nembellissini, the director of the National Investment Bank and the man who had his hands on Côte d'Ivoire's vast cocoa fortunes, which Kieffer believed should be in the hands of the cocoa farmers. Both of these men were tight with Kieffer's arch-enemy, Simone Gbagbo, whose
persuasive powers over the president were considered the reason the head of state had abandoned his plans for reforms to limit government corruption. GAK couldn't have picked a more menacing group of people to antagonize. The French Embassy had grown accustomed to their complaints.

Now Kieffer had disappeared, which was a problem for French President Jacques Chirac and the Foreign Office. The disappearance of a French national, well known to the international media, possibly kidnapped on orders from the highest offices in the government of Côte d'Ivoire, presented delicate diplomatic challenges. And the situation was being complicated by reports from Ivorian journalists that two members of the French foreign ministry had arrived in Abidjan just hours before Kieffer was kidnapped and probably knew more about the abduction than they were prepared to admit.

The French Embassy did what embassies do when pressed for answers to awkward questions: It went silent. Kieffer's friends—his Network—were calling embassy contacts, but nobody was answering the phones. It was, after all, the weekend.

On Sunday, someone in the Kieffer Network intercepted a police radio report about the discovery of a body on a road on the outskirts of Abidjan, that of a white man. After further inquiries, the police said they had taken the corpse to the hospital at six in the evening and that a representative from either the French or the Canadian Embassy was on the way to help with formal identification.

By seven that evening, the body of the still unidentified dead white man had vanished.

On a late Monday afternoon, Sébastien Kieffer was finishing another in a long series of exasperating days when the phone rang in his east-end Montreal apartment. His young daughter,
Vivienne, born when Sébastien was only twenty-three and not yet ready for large responsibilities, needed a lot of time and attention. Besides being a single father, Sébastien was studying for a physiotherapy certificate. He was exhausted from daily classes and his nighttime job as a waiter. The phone call was about his father.

Guy-André Kieffer had moved to Canada in 1971 to study at McGill University in Montreal, a time of his life that few people know much about. He married a Canadian woman, presumably to get citizenship, and they divorced soon after. He left Canada after obtaining his degree—and his first divorce—to go on to Cuba and possibly China during the 1970s, always travelling on his Canadian passport, which carried less political baggage than that of his home country. He eventually resumed his studies in France, where he met Marie-André Lecompte at journalism school. Marie-André was a Québécoise-Mohawk woman from Valleyfield. It was a tumultuous relationship between two “very strong people” as their son Sébastien characterizes them.