by Wilbur Smith
‘So you’re thirsty,’ Pickering said. ‘I guessed that.’
‘You said to call you.’
‘Come and see me.’
‘Today?’ Craig asked.
‘Hey, fellow, you’re hot to trot! Hold on, let me check my diary – what about six o‘clock this evening? That’s the soonest I can work it in.’
Henry’s office was on the twenty-sixth floor and the tall windows faced up the deep sheer crevasses of the avenues to the expansive green swathe of Central Park in the distance.
Henry poured Craig a whisky and soda and brought it to him at the window. They stood looking down into the guts of the city and drinking in silence, while the big red ball of the sun threw weird shadows through the purpling dusk.
‘I think it’s time to stop being cute, Henry,’ Craig said at last. ‘Tell me what you really want from me.’
‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Henry agreed. ‘The book was a little bit of a cover-up. Not really fair – although, speaking personally, I’d like to have seen your words with her pictures—’
Craig made an impatient little gesture, and Henry went on.
‘I am vice-president in charge of the Africa division.’
‘I saw your title on the door,’ Craig nodded.
‘Despite what a lot of our critics say, we aren’t a charitable institution, we are one of the bulwarks of capitalism. Africa is a continent of economically fragile states. With the obvious exceptions of South Africa and the oil-producers further north, they are mostly subsistence agricultural societies, with no industrial backbone and very few mineral resources.’
Craig nodded again.
‘Some of those who have recently achieved their independence from the old colonial system are still benefiting from the infrastructure built up by the white settlers, while most of the others – Zambia and Tanzania and Maputo, for instance – have had long enough to let it run down into a chaos of lethargy and ideological fantasy. They are going to be hard to save.’ Henry shook his head mournfully and looked even more like an undertaker stork. ‘But with others, like Zimbabwe, Kenya and Malawi, we have got a fighting chance. The system is still working, as yet the farms haven’t been totally decimated and handed over to hordes of peasant squatters, the railroads work, there are some foreign exchange earnings from copper and chrome and tourism. We can keep them going, with a little luck.’
‘Why bother?’ Craig asked. ‘I mean you said you are not in the charity game, so why bother?’
‘Because if we don’t feed them, then sooner or later we are going to have to fight them, it’s as simple as that. If they begin to starve, guess into whose big red paws they are going to fall.’
‘Yes. You’re making sense.’ Craig sipped his whisky.
‘Returning to earth for a moment,’ Henry went on, ‘the countries on our shortlist have one exploitable asset, nothing tangible like gold, but many times more valuable. They are attractive to tourists from the west. If we are ever going to see any interest on the billions that we have got tied up in them, then we are going to have to make good and sure that they stay attractive.’
‘How do you do that?’ Craig turned to him.
‘Let’s take Kenya as an example,’ Henry suggested. ‘Sure it’s got sunshine and beaches, but then so have Greece and Sardinia, and they are a hell of a lot closer to Paris and Berlin. What the Mediterranean hasn’t got is African wildlife, and that’s what the tourists will fly those extra hours to see, and that’s the collateral on our loan. Tourist dollars are keeping us in business.’
‘Okay, but I don’t see how I come in,’ Craig frowned.
‘Wait for it, we’ll get there in time,’ Henry told him. ‘Let me lay it out a little first. It’s like this – unfortunately, the very first thing that the newly independent black African sees when he looks around after the white man flies out is ivory and rhinoceros horn and meat on the hoof. One rhinoceros or bull elephant represents more wealth than he could earn in ten years of honest labour. For fifty years a white-run game department has protected all these marvellous riches, but now the whites have run to Australia or Johannesburg; an Arab sheikh will pay twenty-five thousand dollars for a dagger with a genuine rhinoceros-horn handle and the victorious guerrilla fighter has an AK 47 rifle in his hands. It’s all very logical.’
‘Yes, I’ve seen it,’ Craig nodded.
‘We had the same thing in Kenya. Poaching was big business and it was run from the top. I mean the very top. It took us fifteen years and the death of a president to break it up. Now Kenya has the strictest game laws in Africa – and, more important, they are being enforced. We had to use all our influence. We even had to threaten to pull the plug, but now our investment is protected.’ Henry looked smug for a moment, then his melancholia overwhelmed him again. ‘Now we have to travel exactly the same road again in Zimbabwe. You saw those photographs of the kill in the minefield. It’s being organized again, and once again we suspect it’s somebody in a very high place. We have to stop it.’
‘I’m still waiting to hear how it affects me.’
‘I need an agent in the field. Somebody with experience—perhaps even somebody who once worked in the game and wildlife department, somebody who speaks the local language, who has a legitimate excuse for moving around and asking questions – perhaps an author researching a new book, who has contacts high up in government. Of course, if my agent had an international reputation, it would open even more doors, and if he were a dedicated proponent of the capitalist system and truly believed in what we are doing, he would be totally effective.’
‘James Bond, me?’
‘Field investigator for the World Bank. The pay is forty thousand dollars a year, plus expenses and a lot of job-satisfaction, and if there isn’t a book in it at the end, I’ll stand you to lunch at La Grenouille with the wine of your choice.’
‘Like I said at the beginning, Henry, isn’t it time to stop being cute and level with me completely?’
It was the first time Craig had heard Henry laugh, and it was infectious, a warm, throaty chuckle.
‘Your perception confirms the wisdom of my choice. All right, Craig, there is a little more to it. I didn’t want to make it too complicated – not until you had got your feet wet first. Let me freshen your drink.’
He went to the cocktail cabinet in the shape of an antique globe of the world, and while he clinked ice on glass he went on.
‘It is vitally important for us to have a complete picture of what’s going on below the surface in all of the countries in which we have an involvement. In other words, a functioning intelligence system. Our set-up in Zimbabwe isn’t nearly as effective as I’d like it to be. We have lost a key man lately – motor car accident – or that’s what it looked like. Before he went, he gave us a hint – he had picked up the rumours of a coup d’état backed by the Ruskies.’
Craig sighed. ‘We Africans don’t really put much store in the ballot box any more. The only things that count are tribal loyalties and a strong arm. Coup d’état makes better sense than votes.’
‘Are you on the team?’ Henry wanted to know.
‘I take it that “expenses” include first-class air tickets?’ Craig demanded wickedly.
‘Every man has his price,’ Henry darted back, ‘is that yours?’
‘I don’t come that cheap,’ Craig shook his head, ‘but I’d hate like hell to have a Soviet stooge running the land where my leg is buried. I’ll take the job.’
‘Thought you might.’ Henry offered his hand. It was cool and startlingly powerful. ‘I’ll send a courier down to your yacht with a file and a survival kit. Read the file while the courier waits and send it back. Keep the kit.’
Henry Pickering’s survival kit contained an assortment of press cards, a membership of the TWA Ambassadors Club, an unlimited World Bank Visa credit card, and an ornate metal and enamel star in a leather case embossed ‘Field Assessor – World Bank’.
Craig weighed it in his palm. ‘You could b
eat a man-eating lion to death with it,’ he muttered. ‘I don’t know what else it will be good for.’
The file was a great deal more rewarding. When he finished reading it, he realized that the alteration of name from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe was probably one of the least drastic changes that had swept over the land of his birth since he had left it just a few short years before.
Craig nursed the hired Volkswagen over the undulating golden grass-clad hills, using an educated foot on the throttle. The Matabele girl at the Avis desk at the Bulawayo airport had cautioned him.
‘The tank is full, sir, but I don’t know when you will get another tankful. There is very little gasoline in Matabeleland.’
In the town itself he had seen the vehicles parked in long queues at the filling-stations, and the proprietor of the motel had briefed Craig as he signed the register and picked up the keys to one of the bungalows.
‘The Maputo rebels keep hitting the pipeline from the east coast. The hell of it is that just across the border the South Africans have got it all and they are happy to deal, but our bright laddies don’t want politically tainted gas, so the whole country grinds to a halt. A plague on political dreams – to exist we have to deal with them and it’s about time they accepted that.’
So now Craig drove with care, and the gentle pace suited him. It gave him time to examine the familiar countryside, and to assess the changes that a few short years had wrought.
He turned off the main macadamized road fifteen miles out of town, and took the yellow dirt road to the north. Within a mile he reached the boundary, and saw immediately that the gate hung at a drunken angle and was wide open – the first time he had ever seen it that way. He parked and tried to close it behind him, but the frame was buckled and the hinges had rusted. He abandoned the effort and left the road to examine the sign that lay in the grass.
The sign had been pulled down, the retaining bolts ripped clear out. It lay face up, and though sun-faded, it was still legible:
King’s Lynn Afrikander Stud
Home of ‘Ballantyne’s Illustrious IV’
Grand Champion of Champions.
Proprietor: Jonathan Ballantyne.
Craig had a vivid mental image of the huge red beast with its humped back and swinging dewlap waddling under its own weight of beef around the show-ring with the blue rosette of the champion on its cheek, and Jonathan ‘Bawu’ Ballantyne, Craig’s maternal grandfather, leading it proudly by the brass ring through its shiny wet nostrils.
Craig walked back to the VW and drove on through grassland that had once been thick and gold and sweet, but through which the bare dusty earth now showed like the balding scalp of a middle-aged man. He was distressed by the condition of the grazing. Never, not even in the four-year drought of the fifties, had King’s Lynn grass been allowed to deteriorate like this, and Craig could find no reason for it until he stopped again beside a clump of camel-thorn trees that threw their shade over the road.
When he switched off the engine, he heard the bleating amongst the camel-thorns and now he was truly shocked.
‘Goats!’ he spoke aloud. ‘They are running goats on King’s Lynn.’ Bawu Ballantyne’s ghost must be without rest or peace. Goats on his beloved grassland. Craig went to look for them. There were two hundred or more in one herd. Some of the agile multi-coloured animals had climbed high into the trees and were eating bark and seedpods, while others were cropping the grass down to the roots so that it would die and the soil would sour. Craig had seen the devastation that these animals had created in the tribal trustlands.
There were two naked Matabele boys with the herd. They were delighted when Craig spoke to them in their own language. They stuffed the cheap candy that he had brought with him for just such a meeting into their cheeks, and chattered without inhibition.
Yes, there were thirty families living on King’s Lynn now, and each family had its herd of goats – the finest goats in Matabeleland, they boasted through sticky lips, and under the trees a homed old billy mounted a young nanny with a vigorous humping of his back. ‘See!’ cried the herdboys, ‘they breed with a will. Soon we will have more goats than any of the other families.’
‘What has happened to the white farmers that lived here?’ Craig asked.
‘Gone!’ they told him proudly. ‘Our warriors drove them back to where they came from and now the land belongs to the children of the revolution.’
They were six years old, but still they had the revolutionary cant word-perfect.
Each of the children had a slingshot made from old rubber tubing hanging from his neck, and around his naked waist a string of birds that he had killed with the slingshot: larks and warblers and jewelled sunbirds. Craig knew that for their noon meal they would cook them whole on a bed of coals, simply letting the feathers sizzle off and devouring the tiny blackened carcasses with relish. Old Bawu Ballantyne would have strapped any herdboy that he caught with a slingshot.
The herdboys followed Craig back to the road, begged another piece of candy from him and waved him away like an old dear friend. Despite the goats and songbirds, Craig felt again the overwhelming affection for these people. They were, after all, his people and it was good to be home again.
He stopped again on the crest of the hills and looked down on the homestead of King’s Lynn. The lawns had died from lack of attention, and the goats had been in the flower-beds. Even at this distance, Craig could see the main house was deserted. Windows were broken, leaving unsightly gaps like missing teeth, and most of the asbestos sheets had been stolen from the roof and the roof-timbers were forlorn and skeletal against the sky. The roofing sheets had been used to build ramshackle squatters’ shacks down near the old cattle-pens.
Craig drove down and parked beside the dip tank. The tank was dry, and half-filled with dirt and rubbish. He went past it to the squatters’ encampment. There were half a dozen families living here. Craig scattered the yapping cur dogs that rushed out at him with a few well-aimed stones, then he greeted the old man who sat at one of the fires.
‘I see you, old father.’ Again there was delight at his command of the language. He sat at the fire for an hour, chatting with the old Matabele, the words coming more and more readily to his tongue and his ear tuning to the rhythm and nuances of Sindebele. He learned more than he had in the four days since he had been back in Matabeleland.
‘They told us that after the revolution every man would have a fine motor-car, and five hundred head of the best white man’s cattle.’ The old man spat into the fire. ‘The only ones with motor-cars are the government ministers. They told us we would always have full bellies, but food costs five times what it did before Smith and the white men ran away. Everything costs five times more – sugar and salt and soap – everything.’
During the white regime a ferocious foreign exchange control system and a rigid internal price control structure had isolated the country from the worst effects of inflation, but now they were experiencing all the joys of re-entering the international community, and the local currency had already been devalued twenty per cent.
‘We cannot afford cattle,’ the old man explained, ‘so we run goats. Goats!’ He spat again into the fire and watched his phlegm sizzle. ‘Goats! Like dirt-eating Shona.’ His tribal hatred boiled like his spittle.
Craig left him muttering and frowning over the smoky fire and walked up to the house. As he climbed the steps to the wide front veranda, he had a weird premonition that his grandfather would suddenly come out to meet him with some tart remark. In his mind’s eye he saw again the old man, dapper and straight, with thick silver hair, skin like tanned leather and impossibly green Ballantyne eyes, standing before him.
‘Home again, Craig, dragging your tail behind you!’
However, the veranda was littered with rubble and birddroppings from the wild pigeons that roosted undisturbed in the rafters.
He picked his way along the veranda to the double doors that led into the old library. There had been two huge el
ephant tusks framing this doorway, the bull which Craig’s great-great-grandfather had shot back in the 1860s. Those tusks were family heirlooms, and had always guarded the entrance to King’s Lynn. Old grandpa Bawu had touched them each time he passed, so that there had been a polished spot on the yellow ivory. Now there were only the holes in the masonry from which the bolts holding the ivory had been torn. The only family relics he had inherited and still owned were the collection of leatherbound family journals, the laboriously hand-written records of his ancestors from the arrival of his great-great-grandfather in Africa over a hundred years before. The tusks would complement the old books. He would search for them, he promised himself. Surely such rare treasures must be traceable.
He went into the derelict house. The shelving and built-in cupboards and floor-boards had been stripped out by the squatters in the valley for firewood, the windowpanes used as targets by small black boys with slingshots. The books, the portrait photographs from the walls, the carpets and heavy furniture of Rhodesian teak were all gone. The homestead was a shell, but a sturdy shell. With an open palm Craig slapped the walls that great-great-grandfather Zouga Ballantyne had built of hand-hewn stone and mortar that had had almost a hundred years to cure to adamantine hardness. His palm made a solid ringing tone. It would take only a little imagination and a deal of money to transform the shell into a magnificent home once again.
Craig left the house and climbed the kopje behind it to the walled family cemetery that lay under the msasa trees beneath the rocky crest. There was grass growing up between the headstones. The cemetery had been neglected but not vandalized, as had many of the other monuments left from the colonial era.
Craig sat on the edge of his grandfather’s grave and said, ‘Hello, Bawu. I’m back,’ and started as he almost heard the old man’s voice full of mock scorn speaking in his mind.
‘Yes, every time you burn your arse you come running back here. What happened this timer
‘I dried up, Bawu,’ he answered the accusation aloud and then was silent. He sat for a long time and very slowly he felt the tumult within him begin to subside a little.