The claret however, was to my liking, and I said so.
Bertrand smiled indulgently as the servants cleared the long white table, ridiculously empty with just the two of us seated in the opulent dining hall. As usual, there was nothing behind it. His eyes were dead as a plugged bushbuck’s. They never smiled. He seemed such a soft handed fellow. Certainly he had never known hunger or war. What had earned him his spot in the Bell Club, I wondered?
He rose and gestured for me to do the same.
“Shall we?”
I followed him out of the dining hall, musing on the strange requirements of this, the only club that had so far not blackballed me from prospective membership due to my nefarious exploits with the more colorful members of the infamous Happy Valley set while working as a hunter and guide in Kenya up until a year ago.
Bertrand Grammercy, to whom I had been introduced as ‘a character’ via letter by the graciousness of my friend and benefactor Lord Delamere, had taken an interest in my Happy Valley days that bordered on the unsavory.
He was especially inquisitive about the more seedy aspects of my associations with the notorious Lady Idina Gordon, who regularly received callers to her palatial valley estate, Clouds, in a great green onyx bathtub, wearing no more than the suds.
Long hours he spent listening to my tales of drunken orgies and narcotic hedonism, even getting out of me some of my more bloody excursions with the King’s African Rifles prior to my settling in Wanhoji Valley. He smirked behind his hand when I confessed how Colonel Meinerhatzgen and I had broken the Nandi resistance against the Uganda Railway by inviting their chief to tea and then murdering him and machine-gunning his delegates, and he was similarly amused with my numerous Jerry-killing stories about the War. I told him how the Colonel introduced me to Lord Delamere in the intervening years, and how I took it in my mind to settle on Lake Naivashu and hire myself out to the rich young expats as a safari guide. That had led to my crapulent period, sharing jacks and tinctures with the woman the papers called The Girl With The Silver Syringe, and burning native villages on a champagne whim or passing opiate notion with Raymond de Trafford. I do not know whether I told him these things out of any burden of conscience which my sober mind was perhaps unaware of, or if, like any old soldier, I just liked a willing ear, but Bertrand plied my reserve with bottle after bottle of port, until one blurry evening I happened to relate to him the tale of the slaughter of the watusimba. At that time his perpetual expression of wry curiosity had flattened, and his whole leisurely demeanor toward me had changed. I remember he leaned in on the sofa and proposed in all seriousness that I share my story with the members of the Bell Club and so secure myself a membership.
“Remember, Captain,” Bertrand said as we reached a set of ornately carved double doors with brass handles, “confine your talk to the story you told me.”
“May I smoke?” I asked, feeling in my jacket pocket for my tobacco and Meerschaum.
“Certainly,” Bertrand said. “Make yourself as comfortable as you like. But do not address the other members, except to tell your story.”
Damned foolishness.
“Don’t worry,” Bertrand said. “I guarantee you’ll be on equal terms with them after tonight.”
The morning after I had told Bertrand about the watusimba I had quite forgotten, and only remembered at his prompting. I endeavored to dismiss the whole thing as make believe, but Bertrand insisted he knew it was true as I had showed him the trophy and my scars, affirming the whole affair. I could scarcely deny it.
And now, three nights later, here I was, being ushered like some medical oddity into a parlor full of morbidly curious strangers to recite the tale again.
I felt a bit like a schoolboy delivering a vaguely memorized report to a room of my peers. Though I could not readily see them, mere silhouettes as they were, seated in a semicircle in the surrounding dark of the room, I could practically smell their curiosity. It was like Bertrand’s.
Sort of hungry. Eager, like the feel of some predator lurking unseen in the bush. In my securing Bertrand’s sponsorship, they perhaps understood that whatever I had to tell them, it was not likely to be boring.
“Horror,” Bertrand had said. “The Bell Club’s members have all experienced some great horror which the greater body of citizenry can never understand. Sometimes it is simply too unspeakable, and sometimes it is inexplicable. But in all cases, it is terrible.”
Well, hold onto your long johns, you great pack of ghouls, I thought. I have a tale to tell.
The parlor, as I said, was strictly hearth-lit, there being no light but what was cast by the great fireplace that yawned like a hippo’s jaws, and the dim nocturnal blue that sifted through the heavy red drapes over the panes of the tall window overlooking the benighted grounds. The fireplace cast a reddish glow on its own accompanying iron implements, the poker and shovel in their stand and the copper wood bin, and also on the grand Turkish rug struck through with winding curly cue designs that covered the wood floor.
A chair had been made ready for me, a high backed, lordly red leather affair that sat facing the rest, appropriately enough on carved mahogany lion’s feet. There was a columned table with a marble top beside it, and a silver tray with a single tumbler of ice and a carafe of what appeared to be plain ordinary water.
Propriety and mumbo jumbo be damned, I was not about to tell what I had to tell without a stiff drink.
“I say, Bertie,” I said, grimacing at the water as I settled in. “How about something fit for a man to drink?”
“Of course, Captain,” Bertrand said as he took his own seat among the other waiting shadows.
They were all of them just beyond the firelight, sitting in their chairs, judging me already. I’d been around my so-called betters before, and I’d learned early on you wouldn’t get anywhere with them if you just knuckled under and took whatever scraps they gave you. You’ve got to grab that sort by their turned up noses and bring them eye level or they’ll piss down your back.
The Colonel had taught me that in India; not to look away even from a maharajah’s gaze, not to take guff even from a Sultan, who was just an ordinary man who could bleed and die the same as any London street urchin once you get under the silks. This pack wouldn’t get the best of me.
Out of the shadows stepped a light skinned Negro in a red sash and black tails with a fez upon his shaven head.
He had a bottle of something appropriately dark in his hands, and a white towel in the crook of his elbow. He came before me and bowed at the waist, waiting for me to hold up the glass.
I let him wait a bit. Let them all wait. Because the Colonel had taught me too that just as you don’t let your betters talk down to you, you don’t miss an opportunity to grind your foot in the face of your own inferiors. A place for everyone, he used to say, and everyone in their place.
After he’d held the posture for a bit, I picked up the glass, but I made him lean in further to pour, and I watched his dark eyes as I did for a hint of insolence. He had a look about him, reminded me of somebody. Maybe a wog I’d known in the KAR, or a gun bearer I’d once employed.
“You African, boy?”
I supposed I wasn’t bending any rules by speaking to the help. The servant’s eyes flitted up to mine, but he didn’t miss his pouring, good monkey that he was.
“Yes, b’wana.”
“Kikuyu?” I asked.
“Yes, b’wana.”
My arse. He didn’t look like a Kikuyu. Too finely featured. Too short and broad to be a Maasai though. Somali maybe? They were fashionable as servants, but you didn’t see them much this far from Africa.
“Well...Nzuri kumtia, kijana.”
He held my look a bit, bobbed his head, and finishing up, straightening at last to withdraw.
“Just a minute,” I said, and I let him stand there while I fished out my tobacco and took my time packing the bowl. It was a game we officers used to play in the KAR, a game I’d taught the men in Happy Valley, t
o see how far you could push these golliwogs. Pretty far, in my experience.
Then I put the pipe stem in between my teeth and raised my eyebrows at him.
He took a lighter from his jacket pocket and held it out, lighting my bowl while I puffed.
I nodded and smiled.
“Good boy.”
He didn’t like me, that one. He returned the lighter to his pocket and backed away into his black element, and his eyes held mine until they disappeared.
“What did you say to him?” asked one of the shadows.
A woman’s voice. Bertrand had told me they let birds in this ‘fraternity.’ Well, beggars can’t be choosers.
“I said he was a good boy.”
“I mean, in Swahili. You speak it?”
I followed the sound of her voice to a delicate shape in the dark and I smiled around my pipe.
“Oh that. Yes mum, you pick up a bit of the old gutter talk living in Africa. I told him he was doing a good job. That’s all. And you’re making me break the rules aren’t you?”
I winked at her.
She shifted in her seat. I like to see ‘em squirm like that.
“When you’re ready, Captain,” said Bertrand.
“Ah right. My story. Well, here we go.”
I filled my lungs and let the smoke spill from my nostrils, floating over my eyes. The smell of it took me back, and when I took a drink of scotch it was 1926 again. I was there on the wide veranda of Clouds with all the old gang. There was our wicked madonna Alice playing In The Good Old Summertime on her ukulele, making fists with her toes in the fur of her tame lion cub Samson, the lazy thing tongue-lolling drunk with scotch thanks to her husband the Count, who was passed out beside it, one arm flopped over its neck like a lover, his mustache salted white with cocaine. The Earl of Erroll and Raymond were both fondling Alice’s breasts and kissing her long neck as she played, while Lady Idina giggled into a champagne glass and played with Bernice’s hair and Gerry and Malcolm took turns tossing grapes to the monkeys on the lawn and then blasting at them with my big howdah pistol.
That was the afternoon I went into the kitchen to replace a broken glass and found Frank tying off Kiki’s thin, pale arm, that sweet smell in the air. He’d excused himself then, the obnoxious old peddler, slunk out like the rat he was, leaving me to stand there watching her loosen the hose and plunge the heroin into her blood.
Then she’d smiled at me coquettishly and lay back on the table like a lazy cat and tented her knees beneath her dress and said,
“You like your pigeons with their legs up don’t you, Cap?”
After that it’d been one party after another, me jumping between the girls like a honeybee. We were all friends.
No one cared about bands or vows or God. “To hell with husbands!” Joss used to say.
“Captain?” Bertrand pressed.
I must have been smiling, thinking about it.
“Right. It was 1926 and I’d been living in the Wanhoji Valley since the end of the war. I worked out of the Muthaiga Country Club, hiring myself out as a sort of guide to the local expats. Little fishing, little hunting. Mostly waterbuck and serval, sometimes Black Rhino and elephants.” I puffed and considered my next words. “Lions on this occasion.
“It was an intimate party. Only myself, two gents with their wives, eight askaris...ah, that is, guards, culled from the Maasai, and about fifty Kikuyus, including the cook, bearers, and horse trainers. Quite a small entourage, really, for a hounding party.”
“Huh-huh-hounding pah-pah-party?” asked another of the unseen audience, this one a man, younger than Bertrand, it sounded like, and a bigger stutterer than Moses.
“Yes sir,” I said. “Like your fox hunt, but we use gundogs. African Lion Hounds. Bloody beautiful animals, stiff ridgebacks and fine red coats, like proper British soldiers, bred for the purpose. They flush ‘em out, keep ‘em at bay till we can come up with our Express Rifles and blast ‘em.”
I guess there was nothing in the club charter about not speaking to members when spoken to first.
I took a sip of scotch and went on.
“Anyway, the dogs had surprised a lioness with her kill, and they surrounded her. You could hear the barking and her roar way at the back of the train, a real hullabaloo boiling over. She killed two hounds by the time we got to her. Big, yellow thing she was, magnificent, her shoulders and her whiskers painted red with blood. Gerry shot her first with his .404 Jeffrey, right there,” I said, pointing to my own left shoulder. “Clipped her just enough to make a blood trail for us to follow, really.
Of course, most of the Maasai wouldn’t follow. They’re against killing a lioness unless out of necessity.”
I recalled arguing with the Maasai, when Kiki and her husband Gerry and Malcolm and Bernice rode up to see what was the bother.
It was barely noon, but we were all of us drunk already, and Kiki and Bernice were giggling as Gerry sloshed most of a bottle of gin over the lip of her glass, it being deucedly hard to pour on horseback.
“What’s all the hubbub, bub?” Gerry snickered.
I waved my hand dismissively at Leebo, the headman.
“Ah, these black devils don’t want to chase her. Something about the area they don’t like. They’ve just got a thing against killing females.”
“Aw, that’s so chivalrous of them,” Bernice remarked, pouting her lips. She reached down and patted one of the bearers’ heads, even though it was the askari who were refusing.
“Yeah, knights in shining loincloths,” Gerry remarked.
“Won’t kill females,” Malcolm grumbled. “How little they understand the fairer sex, eh Ger?”
“I think it’s sweet,” Bernice said, now twisting her finger in the African’s curls. “Tell b’wana,” she cooed silkily, to the man’s obvious embarrassment.
“It’s bibi, for you, you numbskull,” Gerry snickered, shaking his head. “Bea, you’re scandalous. What’s it gonna take to get them moving, Cap?”
“Well the bearers’ll stick with us,” I said, “but half the Maasai won’t go.”
“Bullshit!” Gerry snarled suddenly. “We’re payin’ them aren’t we? Listen up, you apes....”
“Oh, let ‘em be, Gerry,” Bernice said, knocking back her glass and wiping the hand that had been stroking the Negro’s head on her khaki riding pants. “They wouldn’t be any help anyway.”
“She’s probably right, Gerry,” I allowed. “No help at all’s better than reluctant help in this case.”
“Oh but I so wanted a lion skin for the sitting room,” Kiki whined.
“I don’t know, tootsie wootsie,” I said. “Going into the bush after a wounded lioness with half the askari...”
“Can’t you all just see me laid out on a lion skin in front of the fire?” she mused, stretching suggestively in her saddle and lacing her fingers beneath her chin like a calendar girl.
“Can’t I!” I grinned.
“Oh brother,” Bernice said, rolling her eyes. “Theda Bara over here.”
“Well let’s send these wogs packing, and press on, chums,” Malcolm said, draining the last glass and tossing it over his shoulder.
As I explained to Leebo the headman that I was discharging him, Kiki let out a wail.
“What’s the matter?” We all of us asked at once.
She was rifling through her bag and I knew right away what it was, because the hard little velvet lined case that contained her famously silver syringe was already in her hand.
“I don’t have anything! Not a bindle!” she screeched, throwing things out of the purse.
“Aw, daddy’s little hop-head can’t get snowed for the big bad lion?” Bernice sneered.
“Shut up, you bitch!”
“Now now,” said Malcolm.
“Kiki,” I said, “you don’t really wanna go after a lion on that stuff do you?”
“That’s easy for you to say, Cap, you’re already plastered,” she snarled.
“Oh and you’re
not?” Gerry prodded.
I knew I was. I had lost count of the bottles we’d left lying in the bush behind the train. Wine, scotch, absinthe, vodka...
“Well I’ll just have to go back and get Beryl to fly to Nairobi and get some more,” she said, turning her horse around.
“Hey Kiki, what about the lion?” I called.
“Oh bring it back for me won’t you, Cap? I’ll give you a big kiss!” she called over her shoulder as she bounced away.
“Better give me more than that,” I called after her, watching the swell of her hips.
“Hey, that’s my wife you’re talking about, you limey profligate,” Gerry grinned, his eyelids wavering.
“I’m surprised you got that word out in your condition. Go catch her before she rides off a cliff,” I said.
He smiled and winked at me as he turned his horse toward the back of the train.
“Bag her for me, Cap.”
“Clean up your mess, you mean,” Malcolm shouted after him as Gerry joined the sacked askari heading home with their spears over their shoulders.
“Yes,” I chimed in, “if you’d of shot straight to begin with we’d be back at the Count’s laying around playing sheik and Sheba right now.”
“Gimme a break, chum,” he said in parting. “I’m drunk.”
“Well,” said Malcolm, once they’d gone. “A-hunting we will go.”
I finished my pipe and knocked it on the heel of my shoe, sprinkling ash on the rug.
The African came forward with a copper dustpan and brush. As he knelt before me I continued.
“It wasn’t hard to track her. She was bleeding like a stuck pig from the .404 and I figured she’d exsanguinate before we even found her. I went ahead of the train with the four askari who’d remained and my gunbearers and the dog handler. Malcolm and Bernice came behind. They weren’t as serious about hunting as Gerry and Kiki, which wasn’t saying much. It was all a day trip for them, maybe a little blood to make it interesting, lots of booze if it wasn’t.
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