Kinshasa is a stop on Lin’s expanding passport-running circuit, and its Lapierre Hotel gives the city a defining place in that phase of his life: a temporary base for illicit work where a violent disturbance in the corridor exposes the danger surrounding him and his fellow guests.

Setting and Accommodation

Lin stays at the Lapierre Hotel during a passport run to Kinshasa. The three-storey building stands in a laneway parallel to the city’s long main street. Although his mattress is clean, the worn interior and poor conditions make the hotel an uncomfortable refuge. Rat-catchers patrol its corridors, while cockroaches have occupied the dresser drawers; Lin keeps his belongings on hooks and nails rather than storing them there.

The hotel is more than a backdrop to the work. It is the place where Lin’s movement through an international criminal circuit brings him into close proximity with other European men, all of them temporary occupants whose presence does not make the surroundings safer.

Gunfire at the Hotel

On Lin’s first night, gunshots in the corridor wake him. He hears a thump and the sound of something heavy being moved along the floor, then opens his door with a knife in hand. Three other European guests have also come out to investigate. Two carry pistols, and another has a knife. The men look toward one another and the blood marking the corridor; without speaking, they return to their rooms and close their doors.

The episode ends not with an explanation but with collective withdrawal. The identity of the person involved and the reason for the gunfire remain undisclosed. The guests’ armed response suggests that they recognize the danger, but their silence leaves the incident unresolved and isolates each of them behind a closed door.

Place in Lin’s Criminal Circuit

After the loneliness that follows Prabaker’s wedding, Lin takes the jobs offered to him and pursues further deals. Kinshasa is one of several destinations in his overseas passport work; he later recalls travelling to Zaire, Mauritius, and Singapore on forged passports without attracting suspicion. By the time he meets Lisa Carter at the Oberoi Hotel in Bombay, he has five passports bearing his photograph under different names and nationalities, and sees new possibilities opening before him.

Kinshasa therefore marks both the reach and the precarity of Lin’s new livelihood. The passport runs take him far beyond the slum where he had been scraping by on small commissions, yet the hotel encounter offers no sense of security or control. The city’s role in the narrative lies in that contrast: Lin’s criminal opportunities are widening even as the danger around the work remains close, unexplained, and easy for everyone present to ignore.