The air hung heavy over the Thames, a misty halo of ghastly reflection. We were five: the Director of Companies, our Captain and host, the lawyer and accountant, toying at bones, Marlowe, sitting cross-legged like a lascar, and... myself.

"I think of old times," Marlowe pronounced as the sun went down - and we gathered close at the prospect of a tale, for he had floated on strange tides, foraged in stranger interiors.

"You ought to know how I went up there," said he, "and how that poor chap seemed to throw a sort of glamour over common avarice, making his duty almost heroic." We grunted and huddled, he lifted a hand and crossed his arms, like one of those heathen idols.

"When I was a wee chap, I had a passion for Africa - that stain of darkness upon which so many boys have placed fingers, saying: 'I want to go there!' Understand, this was no childish reverie, for I discerned, at an early age, that even locales of mystery and peril have commerce; perforce, I applied myself to figures and geography, the letters of law and law of the companies.

"Upon my majority, I went to American Express, and expressed myself formidably - I cajoled myself into believing. Perhaps it was merely Fortune's paw - one of their agents had met with a lethal accident upriver. I was given papers to sign and an appointment with a grim old policeman who never removed his hat - he bade me memorize six Core Values, then handed me a pale green card, flecked with clotted, greasy cream.

"'Last joker threw a pie when I said he'd be going upriver. So you are going in his stead - with this! Don't leave home without it!"

"Van Morrison's "Crazy Love" pounding in my ears, I ran to catch a French steamer that called on every bloody port of the Dark Continent. A grim, monotonous jungle broken only by threadbare settlements of tin huts under flags of dubious civilizations! We dropped off faceless clerks by dozens and took on burlap sacks of yellow receipts, portaged on the glistening, oiled backs of blackfellows with gleaming teeth and bulging eyes who shook their African faces at us and sang African songs.

"It was on the Swedish steamer that took me thirty miles inland that I first heard the name Kurtz... also, how my predecessor had been killed and eaten, and his predecessor had hanged himself in despair. 'Kurtz is Superman,' the Swedish captain averred. I demurred, I'd dipped into Nietzsche during my ocean voyage, but the old Viking would not be contradicted. 'Not a Superman, skraeling, Superman!'

'So I went ashore at Outer Station. A procession of unhappy, starving savages, chained at the neck and ankles, driven by flabby, rascally, weak-eyed devils through a sort of open-air graveyard for men and machinery. I reached for my Green Card, but was interrupted by a white man so elegant in his high collar, white suit and varnished boots, that I took him for an Angel of Death.

"Not creditworthy, he sniffed, revolving a green and white American Express parasol between his fingers. 'Those upriver, with ivory to trade on their accounts, they're your customer base! Kurtz's men! Not these!' He was Platinum Express - that was the reason John Cleese stayed so impeccably attired in so humid a climate, among so many flies and walking cadavers. The native laundries were part of his Blue Zone, 'blue for business, sir. The groanings of sick people', he added with gentle annoyance, 'make it difficult to transact business. But we quest, continuously, as Core Value Two decrees, for quality in everything we do'.

"Next day I set out with a caravan of sixty on a hellish two-hundred mile tramp. No need to speak of that! After fifteen days, we hobbled into Central Station, whose manager informed me that my steamer had torn her bottom out on some stones and lay at the bottom of the river. He just inspired - uneasiness! - that man, perhaps because he never fell ill, which is accounted an accomplishment in Africa. 'Jennifer Capriati sends oranges, directly from Manhattan, that's my secret. Your Kurtz,' he smirked, 'is rumoured to be unwell.'

"I passed three months awaiting the steamer's repair. Various things happened. David Lynch, the moviemaker, was introduced as a visionary, but deigned speak only German. Two lesbians made passionate love on the riverbank. Every radio stayed tuned to the sole African station, with its playlist of only Sheryl Crow's "Soak Up The Sun".

"Before the steamer was repaired, there came plague - an infestatation of pink-cheeked, chubby white men on donkeys, all flouting Discover cards like sordid buccaneers as they were. They dubbed themselves the Eldorado Exploring Expedition and passed two weeks backbiting and conspiring, buying up every scrap of provision on credit... then disappearing into the patient wilderness which covered them over like painters' dropcloth.

"Going up that big river to Inner Station was like traveling back to a primitive epoch when credit was reckoned in handwritten ledgers, and fearful respect was tendered American Express Travelers' Checks. An implacable stillness, brooding over inscrutable intentions. We'd enlisted cannibals for a crew, provisioned with rotten hippo meat, and... with our pink-pajama'd, Winchester-toting pilgrims for passengers... the steamer crawled onward, like a beetle, towards the heart of darkness.

"Fifty miles below Inner Station was a ruined hut with the meanest signs of a white man's habitation - a rude table, a pile of rubbish, a placard of our Fourth Core Value: "Treating our people with respect and dignity". Suddenly, while crawling in stinking river fog, there came a tumultuous, unexpected uproar - whizzing, plocking noises. Golf balls, by Jove! The pilgrims fired their Winchesters, our crew gestured towards shore and one shouted 'Catch 'im! Eat 'im!' The helmsman fell at my feet, a Titlist rolling round the deck. I jerked out screech after screech from the steam whistle. From the depths of the bush went out tremulous wails of mortal fear. And then - utter, absolute silence. Those pilgrims positively danced in their pink pajamas, gingery beggars, when I said it was the whistle, not their popguns, that had caused the duffers' retreat. I rolled the helmsman overboard before someone thought to eat him, and threw my bloodied shoes after - a pair of new shoes! Absurd!"

There was a moment of profound stillness, then Marlowe lit a match and drew at his pipe vigorously. "Absurd!

"You can't understand - how could you imagine such utter stillness, without a policeman, without, even, anybody knowing me. Desthpicable! It's the little things that make all the great differences. Mind... I only try to account for Kurtz - his shade, that is - not excuse his methods. A Division for the Suppression of Delinquent Accounts had commissioned him to write a report upon collections; it vibrated with eloquence and good sense. But at the foot of the manuscript, scrawled in an unsteady hand, was the charge: 'Sue the brutes!'

"Then, we came to Inner Station, more ruins and rows of posts topped with rounded orbs, quite larger than golfballs. A white man called out: 'Come along! He's up there!' A theatrical pirate in a ragged shirt with puffy sleeves. I said I'd come to talk to Kurtz and the comedian did a sort of jig in his motley trousers - 'You don't talk to Mister Kurtz, you listen.'

"'Why did they attack us?' I pursued, then deduced: 'They don't want him to go?'

"'Take him away - quick!' He'd nursed Kurtz through two illnesses, narrowly escaped being shot for the meager accounts he'd scrounged up on his own. 'But you can't judge Kurtz as an ordinary man! He's shown me things - things!' I ventured that he was mad, and was told only that his appetite for new accounts had got the better of - what shall I say? - good citizenship (for, by that time, I'd discerned the nature of those round balls). 'But Mister Kurtz never violated the Core Values!' the harlequin appealed, 'our charge is to put clients and customers first, we've no responsibility for the misfortune of those who will not take the Card!'

"Suddenly, a group of naked savages appeared bearing a sort of litter, and Kurtz sat up. He'd been a handsome, muscular fellow - once - but blue and red Spandex now hung loosely over his ribcage, his heart heaved piteously under an inexplicable "S" painted over his breast. A tattered cape flapped in the humid breeze behind him as a native brought his mail; he grimaced, then sighed: 'I am glad!' His voice! So grave, profound, vibrating - Wall Street wise, Main Street Smart!

"The comedian waved a lacy sleeve towards the river, and I discerned the wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman treading the earth proudly with barbarous ornaments jingling. She had amulets, bracelets and bizarre charms, gold and ivory, credit cards dangling from her neck like human teeth, and flung her arms upwards before turning and disappearing into the brush. Tiger Woods followed after, shaking his putter in my direction, malevolently. So Kurtz had ordered the attack, after all!

"I slept and woke, and when I woke after midnight, there was a great fire blazing up the hill and Kurtz was gone - from an outcropping I viewed the shouting, drumming, the savage rites of dancing to boomboxes booming out "I Am Free". The natives - thrusting American Express cards upwards time and again, like so many Zippos at Ozzfest. And then Kurtz, rising from a pile of decaying vegetation on unsteady, tottering limbs, fixed me a stare of stupid wistfulness that made my blood run cold.

"He challenged me with a riddle: 'Who is the father's son, father and Godfather, also? It is I!' We left at noon, next day, laden with ivory and jewels, and more burlap bags of receipts for charges, I knew, that would never be honored - those savages holding up their cards of darkness in contemptuous homage. I answered with a blast on the steam whistle, sending all flying save the barbarous woman, who stretched her arms out after us as we disappeared downriver.

"We sped swiftly away. Kurtz discoursed - sometimes childish, sometimes diabolic, on skymiles, Annie Liebowitz, on his Intended. 'Would she recognize me if I came knocking at her door?' His speech dropped to intimations, then whispers until, one flyspecked night, he admitted he'd reached a village, far inland, that would not honor American Express: "The horror! The horror!"

"I left him smiling that peculiar smile of meanness and, the next day, one of my cannibals muttered insolently - 'Mistah Kurtz, he dead.' Leaving me to dream the nightmare out to its end, and to ponder destiny. Destiny!

"Ashore, I was cruelly interrogated by that old, behatted policeman until I capitulated in reciting: 'It's everywhere you want to be!' (though I could no longer imagine any sane person wishing to be at Inner Station) and suffered the cutting-up of my Green Card. Discharged, I made my way, broke and humiliated, to Kurtz's Intended who asked after his mission and last words. I said it was - her name!"

Marlowe took another draught on his pipe, then leered wolfishly. "She had a Platinum Express, so we made merry for awhile; by the time we were over limit, she was into her sixth month. Gone to the workhouse - I shipped out, myself, had other scrapes but, as for that... Th-th-that's all, folks!" And the Thames ebbed, Marlowe pointed, and we beheld yet another congerie of cut-up plastic drifting past, borne away by the tide towards the heart of an illimitable darkness.

RETURN TO THE PRODUCT PLACEMENT HOMEPAGE