The Vanishing Tribe

by Alex Archer

  “Stop!” he shouted. “Stop right now!”

  3

  He was a big man, both in height and weight. Annja guessed he was a good six-two, maybe six-three, and an easy three hundred pounds. His blond hair fell just over the collar of his white Panama suit, and his blue eyes, a shade darker than his robin’s-egg-colored shirt, were wide. Annja put his age somewhere around thirty.

  He rushed down the center aisle toward the auctioneer, a mountain of a man moving with far more dexterity than Annja would have imagined possible. “That drawing belongs to me!”

  The auctioneer cocked his head to one side and somehow still managed to look down his nose at the newcomer. “I’m sorry, sir, but you are too late.”

  “Too late?” he shouted. “Do you have any idea who I am? That drawing belongs to me, I tell you!”

  “And I’m telling you, sir,” the auctioneer replied, “that the image belongs to the young lady in the eighth row who just legally purchased it.”

  Annja watched as the big man spun around, his gaze first seeking and then finding her in her seat.

  She watched as the big man stalked toward her. She could see he was younger than she’d first thought, definitely closer to twenty than thirty, but that still didn’t give her any clue as to who he was or why he thought the drawing belonged to him.

  She recognized the type, though.

  Spoiled brat.

  Annja had to hold back a smirk, realizing that any minute she was going to get a good look at that same behavior from a much closer vantage point and she didn’t want to antagonize him any more than necessary.

  He stopped and stood over her, glaring down. “That drawing belongs to me.”

  If it had been any other day, Annja might have let his rudeness go. She might have even tried to work something out with the auction house, as she didn’t have an attachment to the drawing she’d purchased. The man in front of her clearly did. She might have tried to ease herself out of the situation before the confrontation blew up in her face.

  But after the night she’d had, she wasn’t all that interested in playing the peacemaker.

  The idiot in front of her didn’t know when to back off, either. “I said, that—”

  “I know what you said,” Annja replied, letting some steel seep into her voice, “but I’m afraid I have to disagree. The art belongs to me. If you wanted it, you should have been here on time to bid on it.”

  He scowled as he asked, “Do you know who I am? Do you have any idea how difficult I can make things for you?”

  Annja laughed; she couldn’t help it. If she had a dollar for every time a man like him had tried to intimidate her with his wealth or power, she’d be richer than her billionaire friend, Roux.

  He leaned in close and shoved a finger in her face. “You have no idea what you’ve gotten yourself into.”

  Without a change of expression she reached up, grabbed his finger and twisted it. Then she stood. He’d have to be willing to let her break his finger if he didn’t want to move in the direction she forced him to move and it was quickly obvious that he didn’t have the stomach for that.

  Annja applied pressure to his finger in such a way that he was forced to let her lead him.

  “Didn’t your mother teach you not to point?”

  She was about to lead him down the aisle and out the doors when she heard the sound of running. She glanced up as four men in blue shirts and black slacks crossed the room toward her.

  “Security, miss,” one of them said. “We’re here to escort Mr. Porter out.”

  “Be my guest,” Annja told them as they grabbed his arms and pulled him away.

  He didn’t fight them, choosing instead to simply glare at Annja as they led him away.

  She gave him a smile and a wave, just to show she wasn’t intimidated in the slightest.

  “Are you all right, miss?” a man at her elbow asked. She turned to find the auctioneer beside her, a solicitous look on his face.

  “I’m fine. Really.” She paused, then asked, “Did you know him?”

  “Unfortunately. That’s Malcolm Porter, the son of the late Mr. Humphrey. He’s been calling our offices for weeks, ever since his father was officially declared dead, determined to get his hands on the man’s property. But the will was quite clear that it was all to be auctioned off.”

  Family dynamics. Now, there was something Annja would never understand. She hadn’t had one of her own. She’d been raised by nuns in an orphanage in New Orleans and had left as soon as she’d been legally able to. She swept the thought aside; it just wasn’t a part of her life that she liked to think about and now was definitely not the time.

  “Well, thank you for your concern,” she told him. “I’d best be going.”

  “You can pick up your item in the next room,” he told her, pointing to the connecting doorway not too far from where she had been sitting. “And might I suggest using the back stairwell rather than the front one. No telling what Porter will be up to and once you’re off the property there is little we can do to stop him.”

  “Of course. Thanks again.”

  She bid him goodbye, double-checked she had her cell and then headed for the door he’d indicated. Her package was waiting for her as he’d said, wrapped in white paper and tied with a piece of twine to make it easy to carry. That was unusual, she thought, not able to verify she’d been given the correct item. Shrugging, she thanked the clerk and then took the back stairs as the auctioneer had suggested.

  When she got into her hotel room, with some relief she unwrapped and set the framed picture on the table next to the bed, then dug her laptop out of her backpack. Firing it up, she began searching for information on Gilarmi Farini.

  She immediately got a fair number of hits.

  The man born William Leonard Hunt took the stage name Farini the Great for his tightrope-walking act over Niagara Falls. As his fame increased, he legally changed his name to Gilarmi A. Farini and moved his shows to Coney Island. When they did particularly well, he took them on the road, often to London.

  He made several trips to Zimbabwe and South Africa, and it was after one of these trips that he returned to London with six bushmen, members of the Khoikhoi tribe from the Kalahari region. Farini convinced them to work for him as part of a show entitled Farini’s African Pygmies, which was essentially an exposé of life in the Kalahari. It proved very successful in London.

  Farini’s relationship with the bushmen made him privy to many of their legends. He was particularly interested in their stories of a lost city deep in the Kalahari, especially after they told him the city was full of diamonds just waiting to be picked off the streets.

  Annja smiled. If it wasn’t gold, it was diamonds. When will these guys learn?

  Farini, his son, Lulu, and a hired associate sailed for Cape Town in January 1895. They arrived by month’s end and by mid-February they were headed for the Kalahari. They spent six months in the desert, returning in July claiming to have found a lost city of epic proportions. Annja was surprised to learn that they had accompanying photographs to support their claims.

  She spent some time digging around on the net until she found the photographs. They showed massive stone blocks stacked on top of one another in what looked to be man-made fashion. In fact, it reminded her of the Great Wall of China.

  Had Farini actually found something in the depths of the Kalahari?

  It certainly was starting to look that way.

  Farini had returned to London and given several lectures on his discovery, most notably to the Royal Geographic Society and later to the Berlin Geographic Society. A book, Through the Kalahari, which included those same photographs taken by Lulu, and a London-based Lost City Exhibition soon followed. After that Farini faded from public until he died on his ranch in Ontario in 1929. Without ever having returned to the Lost City.

  He did, however, pen some poetry about the place in his later years. She read one of his poems aloud into the empty room.

 
A half-buried ruin, a huge wreck of stones,

  On a lone and desolate spot.

  A temple, or tomb for human bones,

  Left by man to decay and rot.

  Rude sculpted blocks from the red sand project,

  And shapeless uncouth stones appear.

  Some great man’s ashes designed to protect,

  Buried many a thousand year.

  A relic, maybe, of a glorious past,

  A city once grand and sublime.

  Destroyed by earthquake, defaced by the blast,

  Swept away by the hands of time.

  Annja sighed. Good thing he hadn’t given up his day job. Robert Frost he was not.

  She picked up the framed map and compared it to some of the hand-drawn images Farini’s son had included in Through the Kalahari. The style was the same—swift, sure pencil strokes with an occasional finer detail. If she had to guess, Annja would have said the drawing was most likely done by the son rather than the father. Still, the subject matter was unusual. Why draw what the lake might have looked like thousands of years earlier when sketching the flat pan of the lake bed would have made more sense in a map, given that they would have been staring at it during much of their expedition. They had probably crossed straight through the center of it, in fact.

  No matter. It was a nice piece and would look good in her apartment back in Brooklyn.

  Her curiosity satisfied on one account, she turned her attention to Malcolm Porter.

  There wasn’t as much information on Porter as there had been on Farini. Which was the opposite of what Annja had expected. Porter lived in the era of Google, Facebook and the paparazzi, after all. The son of a celebrity, even one known more for his general wackiness than anything else, should have generated more than just the occasional note in the society pages. There was no background data or information on what he might have been involved in at the time of his social notices. It piqued Annja’s curiosity. How had he escaped notice with such a notorious father?

  Then her eyes fell on the word used to describe him in each of the articles she’d managed to dig up.

  Estranged.

  “‘Malcolm Porter, the estranged son of Robert Humphrey,’” she read, “‘was seen tonight at the gala opening of Chef Hiroto’s new restaurant. Hiroto, a three-time Michelin-star winner, was...’”

  Because the two of them hadn’t been speaking? Was that why Humphrey had left him out of his will? It seemed harsh, but she didn’t know the story behind their estrangement. She had to believe it was something big that had set the two of them at odds. After all, Porter had apparently taken his mother’s last name in protest against his father.

  4

  She couldn’t stay angry at Lenny for doing what Doug had ordered him to do, so Annja agreed to have dinner with him that night. As it turned out she arrived at the restaurant—a quiet little place a few blocks away from their hotel—before he did. She took a table in the back away from most of the other patrons and ordered a glass of wine.

  She was lost in thought, thinking about the sketch she’d purchased earlier that day, when she sensed someone approaching her table. Expecting to find the waiter with her glass of wine, she was surprised to see Malcolm Porter, dressed in the same tropical-weight suit she’d seen him in earlier.

  Annja tensed. She didn’t know what Porter wanted, but he’d already caused a scene in a public place once today. She was already thinking about ways to subdue him quietly if things got out of control when he held up his hands in a placating gesture.

  “May I speak with you a moment, Ms. Creed?” he asked. He kept his tone conciliatory.

  Annja hesitated. At last she indicated the chair opposite her.

  “Thank you,” Porter said as he settled into the seat. He glanced around for a waiter and waved one over. Annja raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything. Porter asked for a seltzer and a lime. Then he turned to face her, with what he probably thought of as a disarming smile on his face.

  “I want to apologize. My behavior today was unacceptable. I trust you will forgive me.”

  Annja was already regretting her decision to invite him to sit. While his words formed an apology, they were anything but.

  “I’m willing to give you twice what you paid for the drawing,” he continued, reaching into his suit coat for a checkbook. “Just tell me how you would like me to make it out.”

  Annja shook her head. “It’s not for sale.”

  Porter gave her a fifty-megawatt smile. “Not enough, then? You drive a hard bargain, Ms. Creed. Three times what you paid, then!”

  Annja hesitated again. She still didn’t intend to sell it, especially not to Porter, but he had piqued her curiosity. What was it about the map that made him want it so badly?

  “You seem to be going to an awful lot of trouble for such an innocuous item, Mr. Porter,” she said. He wasn’t the only one who had done his homework. “May I ask why?”

  “It has a great deal of sentimental value to me.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. My father gave it to me when I was a child and for many years I thought it was lost. That in my youth, I had mislaid it. I only recently found out that it was on the list of items to be auctioned, and hurried here to claim it before it went on the block.” He grimaced. “Clearly my frustration got the better of me when I was too late.”

  “Seems an unusual gift for a young boy.”

  Porter spread his hands and shrugged. “I was enthralled with maps and images of faraway places as a child. My father knew that a drawing of a special location in the heart of ‘deepest darkest Africa,’ as they used to say, would interest me.”

  He paused before plunging ahead. “So, three times what you paid seems very fair. Do we have a deal?”

  Annja shook her head again. “As I’ve already said, the image isn’t for sale.”

  Porter’s demeanor instantly changed. “I dislike being denied, Ms. Creed. Very few people get in my way and come out better off.”

  Annja’s eyes narrowed. “Is that a threat?”

  Porter shrugged. “Take it however you want. I’m just stating facts.”

  Annja leaned back in her seat. She let her right hand slip casually down into her lap where it was hidden from the sight of both Porter and the other restaurant patrons. With the barest of thoughts she reached into the otherwhere and called her sword to her, the hilt sliding smoothly into her waiting hand, the blade extending beneath the table toward Porter.

  Annja pushed her arm forward just far enough that the point of her sword poked Porter in his ample gut. “If you so much as look at me the wrong way again, I’ll make sure you come to regret it.”

  He glanced down, saw the tip of her sword and blanched. He looked up to find Annja staring at him.

  “Get out of here before I have you thrown out of a second place,” she said.

  Porter scrambled from his seat and took several steps away. Annja thought that was going to be the end of it, but apparently Porter was too stubborn for his own good.

  “No one threatens me. I’ll have that drawing one way or another.”

  Annja’s grip tightened on her sword, but she kept it beneath the table. “The next time I see you I won’t be so forgiving.”

  The waiter appeared with Porter’s water and Lenny in tow. Porter angrily pushed past them and headed for the exit.

  Lenny watched him go. “Was that Malcolm Porter?”

  “Unfortunately.” She sent the sword back to the otherwhere before anyone could see it.

  The waiter, an older gentleman with a thick shock of white hair, glanced after Porter uneasily. “Is everything all right?”

  She nodded and waited for him to leave with Lenny’s order before she filled her cameraman in on what had happened earlier in the day.

  “Weird,” Lenny said. “With all the stuff Humphrey collected before he disappeared, you’d think his estranged son would want something more valuable, you know?”

  Annja nodded in agreement. “There w
ere some really nice pieces up for auction, any one of which commanded a lot more than what I paid for that little drawing. If I was going to claim my old man left me something without telling anyone else, it certainly wouldn’t have been that.”

  “I don’t think anyone would have believed him if he’d tried,” Lenny said. “There aren’t too many fathers out there who wind up leaving the family fortune to a son who curses their name in public.”

  Interesting. “Do tell,” she said.

  “He and Daddy had a major falling-out several years ago, right about the time Humphrey went public with all that craziness of his. Seems Junior didn’t like Daddy turning his legacy into a joke.”

  Lenny paused to sip his drink before continuing. “To make a long story short, the two of them ended up taking their argument to the media, sniping at each other every chance they could get. Daddy eventually had enough and wrote Junior out of his will. Junior, in a very public meltdown, cursed his father seven ways from Sunday, declared he was no longer his son and took his mother’s maiden name.”

  “I’ll bet that was effective.”

  Lenny laughed. “And you’d be right. Daddy barely noticed before he was off on another expedition, hunting a furry something-or-other halfway across the globe.”

  Annja thought about the kind of anger it took to drive a feud like that. “Do you think he had anything to do with his father’s disappearance?”

  “Nah,” Lenny said, waving the suggestion aside. “You’ve seen him in action. Not exactly the mastermind type, now, is he?”

  But that didn’t mean he wasn’t capable of malice. His obsession with the painting was proof enough of that.

  It seemed there was more to Mr. Malcolm Porter than she’d first expected.