by Helen Wells
“Take that one outside and gas it up,” Bob said to the salesman, reaching for his traveler’s checkbook. “And where can I get a good, strong two-way radio?”
“We have them here, sir,” the clerk said.
“Fine,” Bob told him. “Send your best model to me at the New Stanley.”
When their new Land Rover, serviced and ready to roll, pulled up at the curb, Bob handed Cherry into the seat.
“Now,” he said, “I promised to show you some animals. So off we go.”
Ten minutes later they were leaving the city behind and driving out into an open plain. At scattered intervals, groves of flat-topped acacia trees gave the landscape the typically African look that Cherry knew so well from adventure movies.
“This is Nairobi National Game Park, only four miles from the city,” Bob explained. “It’s an unfenced zoo. The animals live here just as they do in the wildest parts of the bush, but nobody bothers them. They have a pretty soft life.”
As Cherry watched, a herd of a dozen or so zebras came into view. Grazing among them, occasionally lifting their long necks into the air as if scenting the breeze, were three or four giraffes.
“The zebras like to have giraffes for company,” Bob said. “They’re good lookouts. They can see lions coming from a long way off, and when they run, the zebras run too.”
“But how about those lions over there?” Cherry asked, her voice filled with excitement. She pointed to a pride of lions—two black-maned males and a dozen females—that were dozing in the noonday sun. “The zebras don’t seem to be afraid of them.”
“Lions don’t kill unless they are hungry,” Bob told her. “And zebras seem to know the difference. Don’t ask me why. But they can tell a hungry lion from a well-fed one.”
Cherry was puzzled. “Isn’t it dangerous to have wild lions wandering around so close to town?”
“Not generally,” Bob said. “Oh, once in a great while one strays into the suburbs. But they’re more afraid of people than people are of them. There’s no such thing as a man-eater around here. And anyhow, there are enough zebras and antelopes to keep them well-fed and happy. As I told you, this park is like the wild bush. The grass-eaters eat the grass, and the lions eat the grass-eaters. The only unnatural law that applies here affects people. You’re not allowed to get out of your car.”
All afternoon Cherry and Bob drove along the park’s roads. They passed a number of other tourists’ cars, and several sightseeing buses. Then, as the red ball of sun was settling down behind the mountains to the west, Bob headed back for Nairobi.
Sitting with Bob on the broad hotel veranda in the cool of the evening, drinking lemonade out of a tall ice-filled glass, Cherry noticed a balding, middle-aged man, with two professional-looking cameras hanging around his neck, closely studying all the guests. To her surprise, he came over to their table and introduced himself.
“Excuse me,” the man started out “My name is Ed Smith and I’m here in Nairobi on assignment from Click magazine in New York, just picking up local color. You folks appear to be on your honeymoon, and I wondered if you would let me take your picture and give me a short interview.”
Cherry blushed to the roots of her black hair, and Bob roared with laughter.
“This is the second time today we’ve been taken for married people, Cherry.”
“I beg your pardon,” the man said, apparently embarrassed.
“Sorry,” Bob said. “I’m Dr. Barton and this is my nurse, Miss Ames. We are here in Kenya strictly on business.”
“Oh, yes,” Mr. Smith said, brightening. “I should have known. I read about you in today’s paper.”
“In the paper?”
Smith pointed to a copy of the Nairobi News that had been placed on the tray with their glasses of lemonade. “There is a story about your arrival in town. You’re with the Abercrombie Foundation, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Bob said. “But I’m surprised that we made the paper. Won’t you sit down for a moment and join us in a lemonade?”
“Don’t mind if I do,” Smith said. “It’s a hot evening.” He sat down and unwound the camera straps from his neck, placing them on the back of the chair.
“Speaking of Click,” Cherry volunteered, “I’ve met George Young. One day last winter my brother Charlie took me to lunch with him in New York.”
“George who?” Mr. Smith said, his forehead wrinkling in puzzlement.
“George Young,” Cherry repeated. “Isn’t he the picture editor of Click?”
“Oh, sure. Good old George,” Smith said. “Finest editor in New York.” He took a sip of the lemonade the waiter had brought him. “Ah-h! Nothing like a cold drink to take the edge off a warm day.”
“Now that’s strange,” Cherry thought. “A photographer from Click who doesn’t recognize the name George Young!” She had an overpowering hunch. “And Hank Bloom was there too,” she added. “He and my brother Charlie went to college together. He’s the assistant editor, isn’t he?”
“He sure is,” Ed Smith replied heartily. “He snaps the whip on us poor photographers every hour on the hour.”
“What a phony!” Cherry said to herself. Hank Bloom was a name that she had made up on the spur of the moment! She made a mental note to talk about this to Bob. But for the life of her she couldn’t see why a photographer like this Ed Smith should be in Nairobi flying false colors. Then she remembered what Bob had said last night in Cairo. Maybe she had been seeing too many Grade-B spy movies. And, of all places, Nairobi was the perfect stage setting!
Just then Long Jack Robertson came sauntering along the veranda. He was dressed in spanking clean, stiffly starched khakis, and he carried a riding crop under his left arm.
“Cheers, folks,” he said. “I won’t be able to have dinner with you, but I’ve got a minute or two to have a chat.”
Bob made the introductions, and Smith and Robertson shook hands in the stiff manner that strangers often do. Smith collected his cameras from the back of the chair and arose to go.
“I’d better be running along,” he said. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”
“Odd duck,” Long Jack said when Smith had gone. “But then we get all kinds here in Kenya. Glad to see that you’re looking so fit, Bob. How’s your dad, by the way?”
For a while Bob and the hunter swapped stories about their safari, as Cherry listened. Then Robertson noticed the newspaper on the tray.
“I see you’ve got the News here. Did you read the story about my client?”
“I haven’t had a chance to see the paper yet,” Bob replied, “although I understand that my name is in it. What’s all this about your client?”
Long Jack grinned. “I’ll never hear the last of it if I live to be a hundred. This character had made reservations for a hunting safari. But when we got out in the bush, hunting seemed to be the last thing on his mind. He spent all his time loafing around camp, reading and snoozing. And it didn’t take me long to find out that he hardly knew which end of a gun fired the bullet.
“Anyway,” Long Jack continued, “one day he suggested that it wouldn’t do for him to go back to England without some kind of trophy to show his friends—and how would I like to go out and bag him one or two? So I took my number-one boy, Jimmo—you remember him, Bob, he was with me when I took out you and your dad—and we had the jolly good luck to kick up a prime sable antelope and a better-than-average kudu. They seemed to satisfy my client to the nines, and the next morning we broke camp and safaried back here to Nairobi.”
“Well,” Bob said, “I guess it isn’t unusual for a man to make a safari, have his hunter shoot the game, and then hang his trophies on the wall of his living room and brag about them all the rest of his life.”
“Yes, that’s so,” Long Jack agreed. “But there apparently was more to this character than met the eye. When we got back here, he asked me to take the heads to old Ali Hadj, the Mzabite taxidermist, to be mounted, and…”
Cherry, who had been l
istening with only half an ear to the men’s hunting talk, suddenly perked up and took notice. There was that word again—the one in Kyrnos’ telegram. Mzabite!
“What’s a Mzabite?” she asked eagerly.
“Well,” Jack said, “Mzabites are a desert tribe that live in the middle of the Sahara. But instead of being nomadic herdsmen, like most Arabs, they are a merchant people. Their young men go out to all the cities of Africa, and even southern Europe, and set themselves up as merchants and traders. A young Mzabite may be gone from his home for as long as twenty-five or thirty years. And by the time he returns—they always go back to their homeland in their old age—he has made his fortune. Then his son, or another young man from his village, goes to take over the business.” Long Jack shrugged. “They’re unusual types, no getting around that.
“Anyhow,” Long Jack went on, “my client left his heads with the Mzabite, with instructions to have the trophies air-expressed to him in London. Then my client paid his bill, took off for England, and that’s the last I heard of him—until this morning.”
“You’re making it sound like a real mystery, Mr. Robertson,” Cherry said.
“Well, it was,” the hunter said. “Something made the customs people up in London suspicious—I still don’t know all the details. But for some reason or other they examined the heads closely, and found that the antelope’s horns were filled with a small fortune in uncut diamonds.”
Bob whistled. “Whew! Rough diamonds in Nairobi!”
“A real puzzler,” the hunter said. “But apparently the Mzabite had gotten the word, and by the time the police went around to pick him up, he had disappeared. Probably scooted back into the Sahara where he’d be as hard to find as a particular grain of sand.”
Like a blinding light, the words of the telegram she and Bob had seen in the Cairo café flashed through Cherry’s head. How did they go? “Mzabite failed to deliver. Order stopped.” Yes, that was it! Could there be a connection somewhere? It seemed preposterous. And yet…
When her whirling thoughts came back to the present, Long Jack was still talking.
“Of course the local constabulary questioned me, and even though I couldn’t tell them much, I got into the papers as the hunter who had bagged the sable in the first place.”
“Well, Jack”—Bob laughed—“it will be good advertising for you. All your clients will expect you to find them trophies full of diamonds.”
“I can do without that kind of publicity,” Long Jack said, smiling wryly. “I’ll be mocked about it for years.”
Bob looked at his watch.
“Cherry,” he said, “you and I had better start thinking about dinner. I expect you’ll want to powder your nose and freshen your lipstick.” He turned to the hunter. “Are you sure you won’t join us, Jack?”
“Thanks, no,” Robertson said, getting to his feet. “I’m taking out my party in a couple of days and I’ve got some arrangements to make. But thank heaven these are people who want a camera safari. No mounted heads this trip.”
Half an hour later, Cherry stepped from the old-fashioned hotel elevator on the way down from her room to join Bob in the restaurant. There was the usual dinner-hour gathering in the lobby—the mixed assortment of Arabs, African Blacks, and Europeans that is so typical of postindependence Kenya.
As she made her way through the crowd, she caught sight of a familiar figure out of the corner of her eye. Standing under a potted palm at the side of the room was the tall figure of Long Jack Robertson, and he was talking intimately and nervously to—Why, the second man was Ed Smith, the photographer.
Taking care not to look directly at them, Cherry stopped, took her compact from her bag, and pretended to touch up her lipstick. The little mirror afforded a perfect view—a clear reflection of Robertson and Smith engaged in deep conversation. Putting her compact away, she went on to the dining room where Bob was waiting at the door.
A headwaiter showed them to their table, and they were just starting in on the soup course when the photographer appeared and said hello. Bob asked him to join them.
“Sorry,” Smith said. “I have another appointment. But since talking to you folks a while ago, I’ve had what I think may be a great idea.”
Both Cherry and Bob looked quizzically at him.
“It occurred to me,” Smith went on, “that I might get a whale of a picture story at this clinic you two are setting up. Place called Ngogo, didn’t the news item say?”
Bob nodded.
“Well, it struck me that if I should drive down there after I’ve finished my assignment here in Nairobi—and of course if you don’t mind—I might get some interesting sidelights about what Americans are doing to help the people of the new African nations.”
“Not bad,” Bob agreed. “Not a bad idea at all. And it ought to be good publicity for the Foundation. What do you think, Cherry?”
“Yes, it should,” Cherry said. But she was really thinking that it might give her a chance to see something more of this mysterious Ed Smith, the magazine photographer who didn’t even know his own editors.
“Then fine,” Smith said, getting up. “I’ll be popping in on you one of these days soon.”
CHAPTER IV
Ngogo
BY MIDMORNING THE NEXT DAY CHERRY AND YOUNG BOB Barton were bouncing along a rough dirt road—little more than a wide trail—southward from Nairobi to Ngogo. Both were dressed in their spanking new safari clothes, and Cherry was grateful for the wide-brimmed felt hat that protected her face and the back of her neck from the blazing rays of the sun. A bright silk kerchief was knotted about her neck, and she wore dark sunglasses.
All of their gear, including the new two-way radio, was neatly stowed in the back of the Land Rover. Bob had surprised her when he had included two gun cases.
“Are we going to need guns?” she had asked, a little uneasily.
“Not for the reasons you might be thinking of,” Bob reassured her. “One of these is a 20-gauge shotgun and the other is a. 30–06 sporting rifle. The shotgun I’ll use to bag us a few sand grouse every now and then. There are millions of them down in this part of Kenya, and when they’re broiled over an open fire they taste ten times better than the partridge or pheasants your twin brother probably hunts every fall back in Illinois. And compared to a brace of sand grouse, a Thanksgiving turkey hardly seems fit to eat.
“Now with the rifle, I’ll go out into Nature’s great supermarket once in a while and bring home an occasional antelope steak. Before our assignment here is finished, my girl, you’re going to welcome a change of pace in the menu.” He laughed. “So don’t let the guns worry you.”
Cherry glanced at Bob as he sat behind the wheel of the Land Rover. The thought occurred to her that, at the moment, he looked more like a professional hunter than a doctor. Odd—but she had never realized before just how really handsome he was. He was tall and straight and trim in his open-necked bush jacket. And the deep brown of his face and forearms, nearly as dark as that of Long Jack Robertson, was accentuated by his light-blond hair.
“How did you get such a good tan working in a hospital in Washington?” Cherry found herself saying.
Bob laughed. “Well, we research doctors don’t exactly stay holed up in a lab twenty-four hours a day. And the summer sun at the Rock Creek golf course can get almost as hot as it does here on the equator.”
“Well, I’m glad. I brought along a good supply of suntan cream,” Cherry said brightly. “I don’t tan. I burn.”
“In Africa,” Bob informed her, “you’ll soon tan.”
They drove along for a time in silence, looking out at the broad grassy plains and the occasional herds of antelopes that scampered by in the distance. All the while, Cherry’s mind kept churning over the puzzling happenings of the past couple of days.
“Look, Bob,” she said at last, “I’ve got a funny feeling.”
Bob slammed on the brakes, and looked at her closely as the car skidded to a stop.
“I
t’s probably the sun,” he said anxiously. “I’ll pull over into the next stand of trees we see, and you can rest a while in the shade.” He took a Thermos of cold water out of the door compartment. “Here,” he told her. “Take a pull at this.”
Cherry had to laugh. “No, it’s not that kind of funny. I’m not going to faint from the heat. It’s all the peculiar things that have been going on ever since we came to Africa.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Bob said. “Peculiar things like what?”
“To begin with,” Cherry began, “there was that night in Cairo.”
First she recalled to him the telegram that had apparently fallen out of Spiro Krynos’ wallet, and the cryptic message it contained, and the fact that it had been signed “Smith”—then Ed Smith, the photographer, who didn’t recognize the name of the editor of Click, but who had quickly pretended to know the nonexistent Hank Bloom—then the attempt to smuggle diamonds out of Kenya in the horns of a mounted antelope head—and finally the earnest conversation she had observed in the hotel lobby between Smith and the hunter.
“What I meant,” she finished, “is that it all gives me a feeling that something funny is going on right under our noses.”
Bob thought about it for a minute, then he said, “Cherry, they don’t call Africa the ‘Dark Continent’ or the ‘Land of Mystery’ for nothing. Something happens to people when they first come here. I don’t know what it is, but I know what it feels like. Maybe it’s compounded of the smell of elephant grass browning in the sun, and the sweet scent of mimosa in the hedgerows. Or the sight of zebras and antelope ranging wild across the bush. Or the strange people and their strange customs. Or, perhaps most of all, the fact that primitive Africa is only just emerging from the Stone Age. It’s all different from anything you’ve ever been used to.”
“I’m not saying that your imagination is running away with you,” he went on. “But let’s look at these things one at a time. First, the Mzabites are the merchant class of Africa. There are thousands of them, and they have shops and stores from Algiers to Zanzibar and everywhere in between. Second, Smith is the commonest name in the English language.