Herman Kluit

Herman Kluit is a wealthy former mercenary living in Hong Kong, a man whose polished comforts and casual business dealings rest on a past of fighting for pay across several African conflicts. He becomes important to Harry Hole twice over: first as a source of information about the torture device Leopoldsapfel and its Belgian seller, Eddie van Boorst, and later as the employer who gives Harry work finding debtors. Kluit’s life connects paid violence in the Congo-Kinshasa with the calculated risks of Hong Kong’s debt and horse-racing worlds.

Identity and Mercenary Past

Kluit’s introduction places him on the terrace of his villa on an unusually mild Hong Kong evening. He holds a blood-red Singapore Sling in one hand and a telephone in the other, watching car lights wind through the city below. The view and the drink suggest comfort, but his conversation with Harry Hole draws attention to the history behind that comfort: Kluit had fought in Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, on different sides and always for whoever paid him. His loyalty, as the narration presents it, is transactional rather than political.

He takes an immediate liking to Harry, whom he first noticed at Happy Valley Racecourse. Harry was a tall, athletic Norwegian, visibly drunk and preparing to stake his last money on the wrong horse. Kluit recognizes in him a combative gaze, an arrogant bearing, and watchful body language reminiscent of his own younger years as a mercenary. The attraction is not based on shared ideals; it is a recognition of a familiar posture, the wary readiness of men accustomed to danger.

Wealth, Illness, and the Congo-Kinshasa

Kluit’s account of the Congo-Kinshasa explains how he acquired his wealth. He describes the country’s mineral riches—diamonds, cobalt, and coltan—and recalls dealing with a village chief belonging to the Mai-Mai armed faction, whose people believed water made them invulnerable. Kluit calls the chief reasonable and describes the arrangements in bluntly commercial terms: money could settle matters, while a crate of Kalashnikovs could serve when cash ran short. Within a year Kluit had become rich; within three, he was extremely rich. The compressed progression makes the violence and extraction behind his fortune feel like ordinary business to him.

Once a month, Kluit and his associates travelled to Görna to sleep in beds rather than on the jungle floor. His recollection of the place is a catalogue of danger and appetite: black lava, black money, beautiful women, and black sins. In the jungle, half the men contracted malaria; others suffered illnesses unfamiliar to white doctors and collectively called jungle fever. Kluit himself acquired one of these diseases. It left him alone for stretches but never disappeared entirely, and he says the only relief he knew was a Singapore Sling.

That drink links his Hong Kong terrace to an earlier refuge beside Lake Kivu. Kluit had first encountered it at a Belgian’s villa, a place said to have been built by King Leopold when the Congo was the Belgian Congo and the monarch’s private domain. Women and sunsets there could, for a while, make the jungle, the Mai-Mai, and the flies seem distant. The remembered beauty does not erase the setting’s colonial history or the violence that financed Kluit’s life; it shows how he learned to place moments of luxury beside brutality without treating them as contradictions.

The Leopoldsapfel and Harry’s Inquiry

When Harry asks about Leopoldsapfel, Kluit confirms that he still keeps one on his mantelpiece. He calls it a souvenir and a reminder of what waits in the heart of darkness, while carefully saying that he is fortunate not to know whether his own device was ever used. The distinction matters: Kluit possesses an object associated with torture, but the evidence does not establish that he used it.

Kluit describes the device as technically complicated, with springs and needles requiring a very particular alloy: coltan. He attributes the story of its manufacture and scarcity to Eddie van Boorst, the Belgian from whom he bought it. According to the seller, only twenty-four had been made and twenty-two were in his possession, including one fashioned from twenty-karat gold. Kluit knows that the device has twenty-four needles, but cannot recall the claimed connection between that number and the engineer’s sister; he allows that van Boorst may have invented the explanation to raise the price. His account therefore supplies Harry with useful particulars while preserving uncertainty about the seller’s claims.

Kluit believes van Boorst would know where the other devices were. He places the man in a villa in Görna, in North Kivu near the border with Rwanda, but cannot provide a reliable street address: the city acquired new streets continually, and lava had buried half of it. The post office, he says, knew its white residents. He is also unable to say whether van Boorst still lived there or was even alive. The city was effectively under siege, and Kluit remarks that even white people in the Congo had a life expectancy of only a little over thirty. His information points Harry toward a dangerous and unstable region, rather than offering the certainty of a clean lead.

Hong Kong, Work, and the Game

By the time Harry returns to Hong Kong, Kluit has offered him work locating people who have defaulted on debts and disappeared. Kluit can otherwise sell such debts to the Triads at a substantial discount; finding the debtors himself means he need not hand the problem over to their brutal methods. Harry’s assignment is limited: he is not required to collect the money, only to locate the people who owe it.

Harry finds the job neither especially appealing nor difficult, but it pays well. His physical presence often does much of the work: at 193 centimetres, with a prominent scar running from the corner of his mouth to his ear, he can make debtors hand over the money as soon as he finds them. He only occasionally uses the search engine on a server in Germany. His own practical formula for staying functional is to avoid drugs and alcohol, a discipline he has so far managed to maintain. Kluit supplies the employment; Harry’s imposing appearance and restraint make the arrangement work.

Kluit’s maxim that it is only a game returns in the setting of the racecourse, where Harry is reading the evening programme and has received a tip about a promising horse in the third race. The remark fits both the betting world and Kluit’s larger habits: he has repeatedly treated danger, money, and human relationships as wagers whose outcomes can be managed. The narration adds a qualification—he usually wins. That qualification gives the maxim its edge. Kluit’s confidence is grounded in a history of profit, but his own account also reveals the costs that confidence cannot undo: disease that never quite leaves him, a fortune built amid armed conflict, and a past in which survival and success depend on what can be bought.