The Leopard Hunts in Darkness

by Wilbur Smith

  He dashed his signature across the foot of the contract and on the other side of the table the two men relaxed visibly and Peter Fungabera called for a third bottle of champagne.

  Up to now, Craig had needed only a pen and a pile of paper, and time had been his to squander or use as the fancy led him.

  Suddenly, he was faced with the enormous responsibility of ownership and time telescoped in upon him. There was so much to do and so little time to do it that he felt crippled with indecision, appalled by his own audacity, and despairing of his own organizational skills.

  He wanted comfort and encouragement, and he thought immediately of Sally-Anne. He drove around to her apartment, but the windows were closed, the mail overflowed her box, and there was no answer to his knock.

  He returned to the bed-sitter, sat at his table and pulled a blank sheet from the pile and headed it, ‘Work to be done,’ and stared at it.

  He remembered what a girl had once said of him. ‘You have only done one thing well in your life.’ And writing a book was a far cry from getting a multi-million-dollar ranching company back on its feet. He felt panic rising within him and crushed it back. His was a ranching family – he had been raised with the ammoniacal smell of cow dung in his nostrils, and had learned to judge beef on the hoof when he was small enough to perch up on Bawu’s saddle-pommel like a sparrow on a fence pole.

  ‘I can do it,’ he told himself fiercely, and began to work on his list. He wrote:

  1) Ring Jock Daniels. Accept offer to purchase Rholands.

  2) Fly to New York. a) World Bank meeting.

  b) Open checking account and deposit funds.

  c) Sell Bawu.

  3) Fly Zürich. a) Sign share purchase.

  b) Arrange payment to sellers.

  His panic began to subside. He picked up the telephone and dialled British Airways. They could get him out on the Friday flight to London, and then Concorde to New York.

  He caught Jock Daniels in his office. ‘Where the hell you been?’ He could hear Jock had made a good start on the evening’s drinking..

  ‘Jock, congratulations – you have just made yourself twenty-five grand commission,’ Craig told him and enjoyed the stunned silence.

  Craig’s list began to stretch out, ran into a dozen pages:

  39) Find out if Okky van Rensburg is still in the country.

  Okky had been the mechanic on King’s Lynn for twenty years. Craig’s grandfather had boasted that Okky could strip down a John Deere tractor and build up a Cadillac and two Rolls-Royce Silver Clouds from the spare parts. Craig needed him.

  Craig laid down his pen, and smiled at his memory of the old man. ‘We are coming home, Bawu,’ he said aloud. He looked at his watch and it was ten o’clock, but he knew he would not be able to sleep.

  He put on a light sweater and went out to walk the night streets, and an hour later he was standing outside Sally-Anne’s apartment. His feet had made their own way, it seemed.

  He felt a little tingle of excitement. Her window was open and her light burning.

  ‘Who is it?’ Her voice was muffled.

  ‘It’s me, Craig.’ There was a long silence.

  ‘It’s nearly midnight.’

  ‘It’s only just eleven – and I have something to tell you.’

  ‘Oh, okay – door is unlocked.’

  She was in her dark-room. He could hear the splash of chemicals.

  ‘I’ll be five minutes,’ she called. ‘Do you know how to make coffee?’

  When she came out, she was dressed in a sloppy cableknit jersey that hung to her knees and her hair was loose on her shoulders. He had never seen it like that, and he stared.

  ‘This had better be good,’ she warned him, fists on her hips.

  ‘I’ve got Rholands,’ he said, and it was her turn to stare.

  ‘Who or what is Rholands?’

  ‘The company that owns Zambezi Waters. I own it. It’s mine. Zambezi Waters is mine. Is that good enough?’

  She started to come to him, her arms rising to embrace him, and he mirrored the movement, and instantly she caught herself and stopped, forcing him to do the same. They were two paces apart.

  ‘That’s marvellous news, Craig. I am so happy for you. How did it happen? I thought it was all off.’

  ‘Peter Fungabera arranged a surety for a loan of five million dollars.’

  ‘My God. Five million. You’re borrowing five million? How much is the interest on five million?’

  He had not wanted to think about that. It showed on his face, and she was immediately contrite.

  ‘I’m sorry. That was insolent. I’m truly happy for you. We must celebrate—’ Quickly she moved away from him.

  In the cabinet in the kitchenette, she found a bottle of Glenlivet whisky with an inch left in the bottom and added it to the steaming coffee.

  ‘Here’s success to Zambezi Waters,’ she saluted him with the mug. ‘Now first tell me all about it – and then I’ve got news for you also.’

  Until after midnight he elaborated his plans for her: the development of the twin ranches in the south, the rebuilding of the homestead and the restocking with blood cattle, but mostly he dwelt upon his plans for Zambezi Waters and its wildlife, knowing that that was where her interest would centre.

  ‘I was thinking – I’d need a woman’s touch in planning and laying out the camps, not just any woman, but one with an artistic flair and a knowledge and love of the African bush.’

  ‘Craig, if that is meant to describe me, I’m on a grant from the World Wildlife Trust, and I owe them all my time.’

  ‘It wouldn’t take up much time,’ he protested, ‘just a consultancy. You could fly up for a day whenever you could fit it in.’ He saw her weaken. ‘And then, of course, once the camps were running, I’d want you to give a series of lectures and slide-shows of your photographs for the guests—’ and he saw that he had touched the right key. Like any artist, she relished an opportunity to exhibit her work.

  ‘I’m not making any promises,’ she told him sternly, but they both knew she would do it, and Craig felt his new burden of responsibility lighten appreciably.

  ‘You said you had news for me,’ he reminded her at last, grateful for the chance to draw the evening out further. But he was not prepared for her sudden change to deadly seriousness.

  ‘Yes, I’ve got news,’ she paused, seemed to gather herself, and then went on, ‘I have picked up the spoor of the master poacher.’

  ‘My God! The bastard who wiped out those herds of jumbo? That is real news. Where? How?’

  ‘You know that I have been up in the eastern highlands for the last ten days. What I didn’t tell you is that I am running a leopard study in the mountains for the Wildlife Trust. I have people working for me in most of the leopardy areas of the forest. We are counting and mapping the territories of the cats, recording their litters and kills, trying to estimate the effect of the new human influx on them – all that sort of thing – which brings me to one of my men. He is a marvellously smelly old Shangane poacher, he must be eighty years old and his youngest wife is seventeen and presented him with twins last week. He is a complete rogue, with a tremendous sense of humour, and a taste for Scotch whisky – two tots of Glenlivet and he gets talkative. We were up in the Vumba mountains, just the two of us in camp, and after the second tot he let it slip that he had been offered two hundred dollars a leopard-skin. They would take as many as he could catch, and they would supply the steel spring traps. I gave him another tot, and learned that the offer had come from a very well-dressed young black, driving a government Land-Rover. My old Shangane told the man he was afraid that he would be arrested and sent to gaol, but he was assured that he would be safe. That he would be under the protection of one of the great chiefs in Harare, a comrade minister who had been a famous warrior in the bush war and who still commanded his own private army.’

  There was a hard cardboard folder on the camp-bed. Sally-Anne fetched it and placed it in Craig’s l
ap. Craig opened it. The top sheet was a full list of the Zimbabwe Cabinet. Twenty-six names, each with the portfolio set out beside it.

  ‘We can narrow that down immediately – very few of the Cabinet did any actual fighting,’ Sally-Anne pointed out. ‘Most of them spent the war in a suite at the Ritz in London or in a guest dacha on the Caspian Sea.’

  She sat down on the cushion beside Craig, reached across and turned to the second sheet.

  ‘Six names.’ She pointed. ‘Six field commanders.’

  ‘Still too many,’ Craig murmured, and saw that Peter Fungabera’s name headed the six.

  ‘We can do better,’ Sally-Anne agreed. ‘A private army. That must mean dissidents. The dissidents are all Matabele. Their leader would have to be of the same tribe.’

  She turned to the third sheet. On it was a single name.

  ‘One of the most successful field commanders. Matabele. Minister of Tourism, and the Wildlife Department comes under him. It’s an old chestnut, but those set to guard a treasure, are too often those who loot it. It all fits.’

  Craig read the name aloud softly, ‘Tungata Zebiwe,’ and found that he didn’t want it to be true. ‘But he was with me in the Game Department, he was my ranger—’

  ‘As I said, the keepers have more opportunity to despoil than any other.’

  ‘But what would Sam do with the money? The master poacher must be coining millions of dollars. Sam lives a very frugal life, everybody knows that, no big house, no expensive cars, no gifts for women nor privately owned land – no other expensive indulgences.’

  ‘Except, perhaps, the most expensive of all,’ Sally-Anne demurred quietly. ‘Power.’

  Craig’s further protestation died unuttered, and she nodded. ‘Power. Don’t you see it, Craig? Running a private army of dissidents – takes money, big, big money.’

  Slowly the pattern was shaking itself into place, Craig admitted. Henry Pickering had warned him of an approaching Soviet-backed coup. The Russians had supported the Matabele ZIPRA faction during the war, so their candidate would almost certainly be Matabele.

  Still Craig resisted it, clinging to his memories of the man who had been his friend, probably the finest friend of his entire lifetime. He remembered the essential decency of the man he had then known as Samson Kumalo, the mission-educated Christian of integrity and high principles, who had resigned with Craig from the Game Department when they suspected their immediate superior of being involved in a poaching ring. Was he now the master poacher himself? The man of fine compassion who had helped Craig when he was crippled and broken to take his single possession, his yacht, with him when he left Africa. Was he now the power-hungry plotter?

  ‘He is my friend,’ Craig said.

  ‘He was. But he has changed. When last you saw him, he declared himself your enemy,’ Sally-Anne pointed out. ‘You told me that yourself.’

  Craig nodded, and then suddenly remembered the search of his deposit box at the hotel by the police on high orders. Tungata must have suspected that Craig was an agent of the World Bank, would have guessed that he had been detailed to gather information on poaching and power-plotting – all that could have accounted for his unaccountably violent opposition to Craig’s plans.

  ‘I hate it,’ Craig muttered. ‘I hate the idea like hell, but I think that you just may be right.’

  ‘I am sure of it.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to Peter Fungabera with what evidence I have.’

  ‘He will smash Sam,’ Craig said, and she came back quickly, ‘Tungata is evil, Craig, a despoiler!’

  ‘He is my friend.’

  ‘He was your friend,’ Sally-Anne contradicted him. ‘You don’t know what he has become – you don’t know what happened to him in the bush. War can change any human being. Power can change him even more radically.’

  ‘Oh God, I hate it.’

  ‘Come with me to Peter Fungabera. Be there when I put the case against Tungata Zebiwe.’ Sally-Anne took his hand, a small gesture of comfort.

  Craig did not make the mistake of returning her grip.

  ‘I’m sorry, Craig.’ She squeezed his fingers. ‘I truly am,’ she said, and then she took her hand away again.

  Peter Fungabera made time for them in the early morning, and they drove out together to his home in the Macillwane Hills.

  A servant showed them through to the general’s office, a huge sparsely furnished room that overlooked the lake and had once been the billiard room. One wall was covered with a blown-up map of the entire territory. It was flagged with multi-coloured markers. There was a long table under the windows, covered with reports and despatches and parliamentary papers, and a desk of red African teak in the centre of the uncarpeted stone floor.

  Peter Fungabera rose from the desk to greet them. He was barefooted, and dressed in a simple white loin-cloth tied at the hip. The bare skin of his chest and arms glowed as though it had been freshly oiled, and the muscles moved beneath it like a sackful of living cobras. Clearly Peter Fungabera kept himself in a warrior’s peak of fighting condition.

  ‘Excuse my undress,’ he smiled as he came to greet them, ‘but I really am more at ease when I can be completely African.’

  There were low stools of intricate carved ebony set in front of the desk.

  ‘I will have chairs brought,’ Peter offered. ‘I have few white visitors here.’

  ‘No, no.’ Sally-Anne settled easily on one of the stools.

  ‘You know I am always pleased to see you, but I am due in the House at ten hundred hours—’ Peter Fungabera hurried them.

  ‘I’ll come to it without wasting time,’ Sally-Anne agreed. ‘We think we know who the master poacher is.’

  Peter had been about to seat himself at the desk, but now he leaned forward with his fists on the desk-top, and his gaze was sharp and demanding.

  ‘You said I had only to give you the name and you would smash him,’ Sally-Anne reminded him, and Peter nodded.

  ‘Give it to me,’ he ordered, but Sally-Anne related her sources and her deductions, just as she had to Craig. Peter Fungabera heard her out in silence, frowning or nodding thoughtfully as he followed her reasoning. Then she gave her conclusion, the last name left on her list.

  ‘Comrade Minister Tungata Zebiwe,’ Peter Fungabera repeated softly after her, and at last he sank back onto his own chair and picked up his leather-covered swagger-stick from the desk. He stared over Sally-Anne’s head at the map-covered wall, slapping the baton into the rosy pink palm of his left hand.

  The silence drew out until Sally-Anne had to ask, ‘Well?’

  Peter Fungabera dropped his gaze to her face again.

  ‘You have chosen the hottest coal in the fire for me to pick up in my bare hands,’ he said. ‘Are you sure that you have not been influenced by Comrade Zebiwe’s treatment of Mr Craig Mellow?’

  ‘That is unworthy,’ Sally-Anne told him softly.

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is.’ Peter Fungabera looked at Craig.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘He was my friend, and he has done me great kindness.’

  ‘That was once upon a time,’ Peter pointed out. ‘Now he has declared himself your enemy.’

  ‘Still I like and admire him.’

  ‘And yet—?’ Peter prodded gently.

  ‘And yet, I believe Sally-Anne may be on the right spoor,’ Craig conceded unhappily.

  Peter Fungabera stood up and crossed the floor silently to stand before the vast wall-map.

  ‘The whole country is a tinder-box,’ he said, staring at the coloured flags. ‘The Matabele are on the point of a rebellion. Here! Here! Here! Their guerrillas are gathering in the bush.’ He tapped the map. ‘We have been forced to nip the plotting of their more irresponsible leaders who were moving towards armed revolt. Nkomo is in forced retirement, two of the Matabele Cabinet members have been arrested and charged with high treason. Tungata Zebiwe is the only Matabele still in the Cabinet. H
e commands enormous respect, even outside his own tribe, while the Matabele look upon him as their only remaining leader. If we were to touch him—’

  ‘You are going to let him go!’ Sally-Anne said hopelessly. ‘He will get away with it. So much for your socialist paradise. One law for the people, another for the—’

  ‘Be silent, woman,’ Peter Fungabera ordered, and she obeyed.

  He returned to his desk. ‘I was explaining to you the consequences of hasty action. Arresting Tungata Zebiwe could plunge the entire country into bloody civil war. I didn’t say that I would not take action, but I certainly would do nothing without proof positive, and the testimony of independent witnesses of impeccable impartiality to support my actions.’ He was still staring at the map across the room. ‘Already the world accuses us of planning tribal genocide against the Matabele, while all we are doing is maintaining the rule of law, and searching for a formula of accommodation with that warlike, intractable tribe. At the moment Tungata Zebiwe is our only reasonable and conciliatory contact with the Matabele, we cannot afford to destroy him lightly.’ He paused, and Sally-Anne broke her silence.

  ‘One thing I have not mentioned, but which Craig and I have discussed. If Tungata Zebiwe is the poacher, then he is using the profits to some special end. He gives no visible evidence of extravagance, but we know there is a connection between him and dissidents.’

  Peter Fungabera’s expression had set hard, and his eyes were terrible. ‘If it’s Zebiwe, I’ll have him,’ he promised himself more than her. ‘But when I do, I’ll have proof for the world to see – and he will not escape me.’

  ‘Then you had best move pretty damned quickly,’ Sally-Anne advised him tartly.

  Well, you’ve picked a good time to sell.’ The yacht-broker stood in Bawu’s cockpit and looked nautical in his double-breasted blazer and marine cap with golden anchor device – seven hundred dollars from Bergdorf Goodman. His tan was even and perfect – sun-lamp at the N.Y. Athletic Club. There was a fine web of wrinkles around his piercing blue eyes – not from squinting through a sextant nor from tropical suns on far oceans and coral beaches, Craig was certain, but from perusing price-tags and cheque figures.