Winjah leaned across the table again, and his eyes fixed Treacle as a snake might a mouse. The journalist shivered to his desert boots.
“If I pursue the Diamond Bogo,” said Winjah slowly, “and I repeat—if—then the last thing in the world I want is publicity. That would bring hundreds of raving, gunslinging madmen from all over Europe and America into Kansdu, all out to beat me to the bogo. Not only would it ruin the last great hunting reserve in Africa, but it would certainly cost the lives of countless ill-prepared idiots as well. It would lead to the destruction, in the long run, of the Tok, who despite their savagery are still an admirable people, not to be mucked about by modern society. And if—my dear Treacle—if one single, solitary word concerning the Diamond Bogo, or my interest in it, should perchance leak from that poisonous pen of yours, I shall track you down just as surely as you’re sitting here lusting after those innocent little girls out there on the sidewalk, yes, track you down and skin you out and dip your flayed testicles in a vat of spitting cobra venom. Understood?”
Treacle nodded weakly.
“By the way, old chap,” said Winjah. “Here’s that fifty quid I owe you. Sorry to have been so tardy in my recompense.” He slipped a wad of bills under the journalist’s saucer. “You’ll take care of the beers, won’t you? There’s a good chap. Oh, let me introduce you to a friend of mine who’s new in town.” He waved to a lissome blonde hovering beside the mimosa tree at the entrance to the sidewalk café. The girl trotted over, all hip and honey. “Monika,” said the hunter, “I want you to meet my good friend Tony, the best-connected man in all Palmerville. He’s agreed to show you the night spots and even take you to the game park. He knows everything there is to know about Krazy Glue. I’m sure you’ll love him as dearly as I do. And now, my children, I must be off to the airport. I’ve clients coming in from America.”
Treacle watched the hunter amble over to his battered green Toyota Land Cruiser—the infamous Green Turd, as Winjah called the vehicle—and climb in beside his crew of fierce backcountry trackers. Then Treacle turned to the creamy, eager young lady beside him.
“Would you care to meet my friend Abu Said, the merchant?” he asked. “Hmm, hahhh?” The girl rose eagerly, wetting her lips with a slim pink tongue. Her eyes, rimmed in heavy green shadow, fluttered (Treacle thought) like the gold-winged diurnal bats that one met betimes on the game trails of Kansdu. Her breasts bounced as they walked past the legless, grinning, scabbed, and gesticulate beggars toward the costly haven of Abu Said’s emporium. BIGGEST JUGS IN TOWN.
“Diddlediddle,” hummed Tony Treacle.
5
IT ALWAYS EXCITES
“I’ve sent two lorries on ahead with most of the staff,” said Winjah. “They’ll have set up our base camp by the time we arrive. I’m sure the memsahib will find it quite comfortable.” He smiled winningly at Dawn. “King-sized cots, a hot shower, a separate loo for the gentle sex, a spacious mess tent replete with fridge and stereo. Hope you’ve brought along tapes to your own taste, by the way, as I’m partial to your American country-and-western music, and my modest library is dominated by it. By the way, I insist that Joseph, my majordomo, wear black tie every evening while serving dinner. Candles and wine, that sort of thing. Yet you need feel no compulsion to dress for dinner, as I don’t.”
Dawn smiled wanly in reply. She was wedged between Winjah and Donn on the front bench seat of the Green Turd as it bounced up the mountain south of Palmerville. Winjah had met them at the airport, whisked them through customs and immigration, then into downtown Palmerville for a sumptuous luncheon at Salandini’s, the capital’s finest Italian restaurant. Salandini himself had taken their order. Suave and sardonic, with a horrifically scarred face that nonetheless retained a dark, almost evil handsomeness, he was (he explained to her) a defrocked priest who had turned to diamond prospecting until a lion had rendered him hors de combat in the very forests they would soon be hunting around Lake Tok. Cannibalism had been rife in the region back then. Once he had stumbled on a village below the scarps of the Kan River where fully five varieties of human meat, mainly missionary, were for sale.
“American, English, Swiss, and German were retailing for ten shillings the pound,” he said, staring straight into her eyes. “Italian, however, was double that price. The meat looked no different, one nationality from the other—it was all slightly green and dreadfully fly-blown—so I asked the butcher why so high a price for the Italian. ‘Did you ever try to clean one?’ he replied.” Salandini slapped the table with his palm so that the silver rattled, and Bucky practically choked with laughter on his fettucini, then grabbed a cheap notebook from his hip pocket to scribble an entry with his well-chewed Bic. Dawn dabbed her lips with a none-too-clean napkin and set her silver aside for the nonce. Her vitello Kansdu had worn an ominous gloss of iridescent green from the outset.
Right now, as the G.T. clanked and snarled its way up the mountain road, she was grimly aware of the veal’s continuing activity in her still-delicate stomach, and even more aware of the sheer cliffs that fell away from the crumbling edges of the road. The corrugated-steel roofs of Palmerville glinted toylike below them in the westering sun, while beyond, to the north, stretched a waste of high desert—dun and thorn-dotted as far as the eye could see. Winjah himself seemed to pay no attention to the road, his right hand resting on the steering wheel as loosely as if it were steering him rather than vice versa. “The G.T. knows the way,” he laughed as he noticed her apprehension. His left hand grasped the knob of the floor-mounted gearshift, stirring it constantly in response to the gradient’s demands. Because of the narrowness of the truck’s front seat, Dawn had to spread her knees on either side of the shift column. Fortunately she had taken the opportunity to change from her soiled travel skirt into a smart set of Abercrombie & Fitch slacks in the ladies’ room at Salandini’s, but nonetheless she could feel her labia twitch anxiously each time Winjah’s hand came slamming back in that direction atop the shift knob. The heel of his hand always halted a few scant millimeters short of the vulnerable target. He seemed well practiced in the art. Donn, still groggy, stared out the window at the awesome mountains, oblivious to her pudendal peril.
Blackrod sat up in the open behind the G.T.’s cab on a wooden bench with the trackers, dozing off from time to time with his load of jet lag and fettucini, then snapping awake with a start to blink wonderingly at the bright, deep, gaudy country around them. The trackers giggled. The big fat bwana snored like a gut-shotfisi. Yet when he worked the sleep from his eyes, they noticed that he had a good grasp of game.
“N’giri,” Blackrod said, pointing to a family of warthogs scuttling buglike up a distant brush-choked draw.
“N’dio, Bwana,” they chuckled.
“N’dofu?” he asked, pointing to a huge mound of droppings on a game trail nearly a mile up the mountain road ahead of them.
“Hapana, Bwana,” they said, denying that it was elephant dung. “Mafi ya kifaru.” Rhino.
“Kubwa sana,” said Bucky. “Very big.”
“’Dio, hah, hah.” Their laughter indicated that everything in this country was very big. The trackers liked Blackrod already. Not only did he have good eyes and a willingness to speak Swahili, but he smelled good, too. It was a strange odor to the boys. The tumbaco they could identify from his cigarettes, but the sickly sweat of too much whiskey was alien to their subtle noses. They knew the smell of pombe, the native beer, but not of spirits. At any rate, the total effect of Blackrod, nasally at least, was strong, and of that the trackers approved. Any man who smelled weak was not a man, and those men who smelled of flowers and spice were doubtless women.
Blackrod concurred. In the course of more than twenty years’ travel through the more remote corners of the planet, he had developed a deep affection for wild places and wilder men. The killing grounds were his favorite haunts—any deer camp, any grouse cover, any battlefield. He loved the stink of gunpowder and the sweet smell of blood, even the harsh, puke-provoking
whiff of opened guts. He enjoyed the way men and other animals smelled when they had been long in the woods: smoky, acrid, sharp with the reek of grease and sweat and rotting leaves. By contrast the clean airs constantly moving through open country tasted infinitely sweeter. It was the extremes of sensation, he mused as he inhaled the odors of rancid fat, unwashed human hide, dust, running water, crushed thorn, exhaust fumes, stale snuff, sun, and rhino shit, that justified, finally, the entire, moderate midrange in which men lived most of their lives. At first, though, Africa came on very strong indeed. His own introduction to the continent, a decade earlier, had been so upsetting that he spent the first two days sprawled in a bathtub at the New Stanley Hotel in Nairobi, keeping the water unconsciously but precisely at the temperature of amniotic fluid, afraid to be born into the reality of Africa. Finally he had emerged, a huge wrinkled washerwoman’s finger, to poke at the rot and the sun.
Africa was different. It bestrode the equator, a suntanned Colossus. The sun pounded down on this huge landmass, the second largest on the planet, and the sun made changes. The vast weight of its energy, more powerful in a single instant than all the hydrogen bombs in the human arsenal, worked constantly—altering life-forms even as it altered landforms. It scorched the world’s largest desert, the Sahara, and fed the world’s strongest jungles. It melted the ice from the peaks of the Ruwenzori and Kilimanjaro and sent it coursing down the great rivers—the Congo, the Nile, the Zambesi. It spawned the rain that fed the Niger, the Tana, the Senegal. It made Africa the Bright Continent—not the Dark one they used to write about, before they knew how great and horrible and wonderful it was.
And now I’m hooked, he thought happily. What a marvelous addiction. Why in the hell should I ever go back? I’m sick of that world back there—a world of failed marriages, eroding values, bucks and bosses. I’ve probably earned half a million dollars in my working career, and I’m worth about the price of a ticket to the Knicks game. Taxes, alimony, booze sucked up the rest. I haven’t owned a car in five years, a house in fifteen. My only really close companion is the Guinea worm. He peeked at his leg surreptitiously, hoping that perhaps the worm had its head out. It would probably enjoy the scenery, if it had eyes. Which he doubted.
Anyway, Africa was his Holy Land—his Golden Fleece, his Grail, his Land of Milk and Honey—and Blood and Smoke and Fiery Sun. Here, he knew, he could find the redemption that had eluded him in the civilized world, even if that redemption was death. He felt the Guinea worm writhe pleasurably in his thigh under the scratch of light and heat and anticipation.
The G.T. had wound along the northern lip of the Kansdu Range, heading east toward a pass that crossed the mountains just below the Great Tirika Swamp. Mount Baikie loomed to the left, fully twelve thousand feet tall, its icy skullcap haloed with turbulent, purple-black clouds, its shoulders humped with bamboo and glinting with runoff. Gerenuk browsed on the thorn in the dry river edges, giraffelike antelopes with huge dark eyes, the males with their short backward-curved horns looking as vulnerable as the hornless females—standing erect in the spiny foliage, forefeet braced against the trunk, munching mouthfuls of needle-sharp wood and bitter leaves. Lithocranius walleri, Blackrod thought. They drink no water.
He slammed his hand hard on the roof of the G.T.’s cab.
“Yes, Bwana,” said Winjah, halting the truck and leaning out with a cherubic smile.
“How about that swala twiga back there?”
“He was good enough. We’ll see better farther on, but we need meat for the kampi.”
“I’ll take him,” said Buck. He might as well get over the first bloodletting as soon as possible. It was always a baptism. The trackers twitched and quivered like gun dogs as they leaped from the truck bed. Blackrod fell in behind the leader, a tall, almost frail-appearing Dorobo named Lambat, who carried the 7-mm. magnum Schultz & Larson. They walked in single file, crouched, shuffling along stiff-legged for speed and bent-backed for cover, to within two hundred yards of the gerenuk buck singled out for slaughter. Groucho Marx on a murder mission, thought Blackrod. He almost laughed, but the lads would not approve. He could feel the seriousness of the stalk vibrating off them in great wicked waves. This was death they intended. It always excites.
At the edge of a tall gray boulder he dropped to his haunches, then to a sitting position. Lambat handed him the rifle. The gerenuk was alert now, standing foursquare beneath the tree on which it had been feeding. Its large eyes studied the rock face for movement. Blackrod waited until it turned its head to search for its does, then brought the rifle to his shoulder. He wound the sling around his forearm and placed his elbows slowly, ever so slowly, on his knees. The image through the four-power Redfield scope was flat but clear at this range: The big black eyes focused bulbously in their direction, the ruddy brown hide of the antelope grainy on the field. Blackrod laid the tip of the post on the gerenuk’s shoulder and began his squeeze.
At the shot, Dawn thrust her pelvis forward involuntarily. Her box slapped once, lightly, against Winjah’s wrist. He turned and smiled.
“Nice shot,” he said. “We’ll have meat for the pot tonight.”
Bucky felt something tickle the back of his knee. Looking down, he saw the Guinea worm. He smiled at it.
6
BUCKY’S UNDERPANTS
“Seku yake na kwisha,” said Lambat. “His day has come.”
The gerenuk lay on its side, its inky eyes taking the glaze of death, one leg still kicking feebly. Blackrod reached for the .22 magnum rifle to finish it, but then decided not to waste the bullet: The animal was done, all right.
“I wonder what he sees,” said Donn. He had come up from behind with his Nikon to film the death scene. “It must be frightening, these skinny upright figures on two legs coming toward him. Probably never seen men this close before.” He leaned in close on the unfocused eyes and clicked the shutter. “His last sight on earth: a man taking his picture.” Donn’s voice was doleful.
Lambat grabbed the buck by a horn and slit its throat with his hunting knife. The halal. There were Moslems on the staff, and unless the animal was bled before it died they could not eat of the flesh. Blackrod cupped his hand and filled it with some of the slackly flowing blood, then lapped up a mouthful.
“Could be dangerous, Bwana,” warned Winjah. “They carry a lot of parasites.”
“You have to taste the first blood,” said Bucky. “At least we always do back home. Anyway, I’ve got plenty of tetracycline.”
The first blood was very important to Blackrod. At the age of twelve, his father had taken him deer hunting in northern Wisconsin. They stood in the tamaracks beside a confluence of trails until a young spike buck happened by. With his father whispering encouragement and calm into his ear, young Bucky had dropped the spike with one shot from his 30-30 Winchester, dropped it kicking and eye-rolling at a range of nearly a hundred yards. Then his father had opened the deer’s gut, cut loose the bladder, and spilled the blood and urine all over Bucky’s beardless face.
“I don’t know why we do this,” his father said, “but we’ve always done it this way with the first deer a man kills. I suspect it’s a reminder of some sort. That you don’t kill lightly. That what you’ve killed was alive and hot and full of piss, just like you, the hunter. I hope you’ll remember this all your life.”
Standing there in the freezing woods, with the stink of cooling deer piss in his nostrils, tasting it on his lips, shaking with the letdown of the kill and the shock of the baptism, Bucky figured he never would. He could do without the urine, but from that day on he always tasted the blood of the first animal he killed in any hunting season, or on any long hunting trip. The mysticism of it no longer reached him in the form of the shakes, but rather in a warm memory of his father, and of all those other fathers down through time who had taught their sons what it was to kill. A sadness that tasted of blood.
Back at the truck, Dawn was giggling on the edge of hysteria. She pointed to Blackrod’s bush shorts. He had
pulled them on over a pair of white boxer underpants, and with the crouching required by the stalk the outer shorts had hiked up, so that now the wrinkled legs of his undershorts were showing.
“You looked so silly,” laughed Dawn. “So serious, so stealthy, and so silly with your little white flags showing. ‘I see London, I see France, I see Bucky’s underpants.’”
“I guess you should go bare ass from now on, Bwana,” said Winjah, laughing along with the rest of them. “Selous hunted that way, with just a long-tailed shirt and a pair of veldschoens. The looser you hang, the tighter you shoot.”
The echoes of the shot that had slain the gerenuk rolled out over the mountains, reverberating from bamboo slopes and lichen-clad cliffs, spreading and diminishing as it climbed, filling the quiet air with—finally—just a shiver of noise, a hollow, fading thump. The backwash of the shot rolled down, finally, like waning surf at the far side of a sandbar, into the Great Tirika Swamp.
Butterflies roused to the echo. They lifted from the piles of buffalo dung on which they had fed and rested, swirling briefly in a spin of purples, golds, and reds. Not a breath of air stirred in the glade. Bees hummed busily through the piles of dung, sucking up sustenance and looking for color. A swarm of bees hovered over a bright spot hidden in the tall, saw-edged grass at the far end of the glade—a brightness that changed color slowly, as the sun moved across its faceted face. As the dim thump passed through the glade, passed over and under and whirled its way through the glade, the bright spot grew suddenly agitated. A pair of ears, hung with ticks as juicy as grapes, perked to the sound. A pair of piggy bloodshot eyes blinked under the gleaming boss. The Diamond Bogo, his hide bald beneath its coating of swamp mud, rose to a kneeling position. His shiny nostrils flexed to suck the air. The faintest molecule of gunpowder tickled its way up his nose. His tiny brain read the message.
He rose to his great, splayed, two-toed feet.
The Diamond Bogo Page 4