I started stirring the tea, watching the red color from the rooibos leach out into the hot water.
Jon went into the pantry and came back with a sugar bowl and a carton of milk from his refrigerator and put them in front of me. “I thought you Americans liked everything straight up.”
“Just keeping you on your toes.”
He laughed. “That’s bloody sensible of you.”
He opened the bowl and held out a spoonful of sugar. “One or two?” he asked intimately.
I removed the tea bag and looked at Nigel to see if he caught that tone. “One is fine.”
Jon emptied the spoon into my tea and touched my hand with his while he poured the milk, leaning into me for a moment. I tried not to look at Nigel, who I was sure was watching this exchange. I subtly leaned away from the overture.
Thinking about the possibility of moving in the direction of intimacy was one thing, but acting on it—and acting on it in public—was quite another. I suddenly got scared that I might have encouraged Jon down a path that I wasn’t ready to pursue. Or, rather, I was curious about pursuing something that would most likely become a professional mistake, so I had to keep my distance.
Jon put the milk back in the fridge and went back to anointing his roast.
“Jon, when is the earliest we can do the census?” Nigel asked, taking another swig. “I need to schedule my game guards to make sure they are available for the transects outside the parks.”
Jon looked at me for an answer.
“The plane is ready when you are,” I said. “How soon can you get the avgas?”
Jon wiped his hands on a dish towel. “Not a problem. I’ll have it delivered on the brewery truck tomorrow. Should be here Wednesday. I’ll book the Popa Falls cabin for Friday, and Saturday to do the buffalo side of the Kavango. And then we’ll stay at Susuwe Sunday, and Monday for the core area and outside the Mudumu core, and Tuesday we’ll book Liadura to do the Mudumu-Mamili block.”
“Hold on,” I said. “I’m going to get a map.” I went into the guest room and grabbed the map out of my bag and returned to the kitchen. I opened the map of the region on the table. “I assume we’ll do stratified counts in the low-density inland areas, and total counts in the high-density areas along the river?”
“That’s right.” Jon pointed a garlic clove at Nigel. “The pachyderms are coming up from the delta. They’re concentrating in and around Mudumu. Lots of men in gray suits along the Kwando right now.”
I laughed. “I’m looking forward to that.”
“I’ll make sure to stock up at the butcher. This leg of lamb will be to die for, but my lemon rosemary lamb rib would bring a tear to a glass eye, I promise you.”
“Right.” Nigel took a swig of his beer. “I’ll schedule the game guards for Monday then.”
“Sounds good.”
“Hey, have you been over to the prison this week?” Nigel asked. “Any update about the induna’s son?”
Jon giggled. “Bloody crooked as a crocodile.”
“Seriously? His father says he’s innocent. He insists that the three tusks were put in his son’s yard—that he was set up.”
“He may have been innocent at birth, but he’s now as innocent as the croc with a feather in its mouth.” Jon watched Nigel put his beer down. “Have you been down to Hippo lately?”
“Sure, coupla times, why?”
“How would you feel about taking a job there on the weekends? Geldenhuis has an ad up for a bartender.”
Nigel looked confused.
“I thought maybe if I had someone keeping an eye on him, I’d be able to see what he was bloody up to.”
“I’m no spy, Jon.”
“I’m not asking you to spy, exactly. Just let me know if there’s anything suspect, and I’ll come take a look.”
“I don’t know. What does this have to do with the induna’s son?”
“Not sure yet, but come on. Pretty swank place for a braai. Pop a couple of sundowners for the bokkies on the weekends, couldn’t be too hard.” He looked at Nigel for an answer.
“Okay, I’ll go down and have a look.”
“Thanks, Nigel, you’re one of us.”
—
After eating the best leg of lamb I had ever tasted, I was exhausted and ready to turn in. I collected everyone’s plates and put them in the sink.
Jon held out a hand as I was clearing. “Leave those for Chastity.” He hesitated. “On second thought, just leave them for now. I’ll do them in the morning.”
Jon went into his pantry. “Would anyone like a bit of rooibos and chocolate?”
“Sure, that would be great.” I was looking forward to having something sweet for dessert.
Nigel nodded. “Cheers, Jon, yes.”
“Auh!” Jon gasped from the dark.
A small hunched-over man stepped out from the shadows, wringing his hands.
“Why do you always hide like that?” Jon barked.
Nigel leaned over to me and whispered, “That’s the gardener.”
I nodded.
“What now, Joseph? What have you done?” Jon put his hands on his hips.
Joseph tried to utter a few words, but nothing came out.
“Where’s Chastity? Is she okay?”
Joseph nodded.
“Well, then, how’s the baby?”
Joseph shook his head back and forth slowly.
“What do you mean?”
The man mumbled weakly, “She couldn’t take the crying.”
Jon’s tone turned somber. “Joseph, what do you mean, ‘She couldn’t take the crying’? She was out trawling the Zambezi tonight, what would she know about a crying baby?”
Joseph drew a hand across his neck.
“Come on, Joseph, you’re joking.”
Joseph shook his head. “It happened yesterday.”
“Really, hey?” Jon whispered, staring at Joseph intently as he groped for a cigarette.
Joseph nodded sadly, staring at the floor.
“Oh, Jesus.” Jon lit up, allowing a palpable pause. “What are you going to do?”
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean, ‘Nothing’?”
Joseph looked at the floor, while Jon took a long drag and exhaled. “Well, are you going to turn her in?”
Joseph shook his head, hands still wringing. “No one will believe me.”
Jon softened. “We can report it together.”
Joseph shook his head. His eyes were cast down and vacant. He whispered, “Mr. Jon?”
“You need money?”
“Yes, boss.”
Jon walked to the kitchen, opened a coffee tin above the refrigerator, pulled out a few bills, and handed them to him. “Be careful.”
Joseph bowed his head. “Yes, boss. Thank you, Mr. Jon.” Joseph crouched and clapped one hand on top of the other as he backed out of the room.
Jon stared out the window into the night, cigarette tip glowing. “Imagine a place so dark that a mother is driven to turn her baby’s neck in the night.”
Nigel shook his head. “Christ, Jon, I’m sorry.”
“Do you think you could make a case for him?” I asked hopefully.
“Maybe.” He combed his fingers through his hair. “Bloody darkness.”
Nigel sat up. “You mentioned you saw Chastity on the Zambezi?”
Jon dismissed Nigel’s question with a hand wave. “She’s doing some grocery deliveries for Alvares. Bloody thought she was trying to pinch something off my boat.” He took another drag and then spoke in a slow, monotonous tone. “Pink palms pinching in the night,” he said as if reciting a line from a famous poem. He giggled. “Sounds poetic, don’t you think?”
I couldn’t think of anything to say. Clearly Jon was trying to derail a conversation about whom and what we saw in the mokoro earlier. I couldn’t help noticing that Jon had become more cautious about telling even his close allies the details of his investigations. It still stung that he hadn’t mentioned that he k
new the witch doctor was dead. This made me wonder if he had any idea how much I knew about what was going on. As I looked at him, the Jon that I had been so tempted to kiss on his houseboat seemed worlds away, and I was glad we had managed to avoid taking that step—as much as I had wanted to at the time.
After we all sat in silence for a while, I finally excused myself. “I hope you don’t mind me turning in. It’s been a long day. And I haven’t been able to sleep very well lately.”
We all said our good nights and retired to our separate sleeping quarters, Nigel in the living room, me in the guest room, and Jon in his room. I tried not to have anxiety about how the night might go sleepwise, but I couldn’t help it. The dreams and visions from the antimalarial drugs were getting more and more explicit and disturbing.
Chapter 30
It was dusk on a new-moon night. I was several kilometers away from the road, completely lost after searching for an elephant carcass to no avail and somehow breaking my arm in the process. I had wrapped it in a piece of my shirt that I had torn off from the bottom, leaving my stomach exposed to the thorns.
The whole area was dense thorny scrub, not a climbable tree in sight. If only I could get myself up higher out of the bush, I thought, I might be able to see the road in the distance.
My body was sore from too many scratches, and I was dying of thirst. There was no way I could get back to my vehicle safely in the dark with a broken arm and only two bullets left.
Not ready to give in, I walked faster, the strap of my .458 rifle digging into the shoulder of my good arm. I had to find a way to the road. I could move a lot faster that way and would be confident that I wasn’t going in circles.
As dusk turned to pitch-dark night and the creaking, crackling sounds of the bush closed in around me, I ended up climbing a termitarium, wedging the rifle next to my good shoulder. It felt better up there, even if it was only a few meters off the ground. I spent much of a sleepless night trying to tame my vivid imagination, until a lioness came prowling.
She had crept up behind me and grunted. I was so surprised that I fired a shot to chase her off, which nearly blew out the shoulder of my good arm. I dropped the rifle and it skittered to the ground below me. “Damn it!”
I waited a while to move, but eventually retrieved the rifle and settled back on my perch. Then the hyenas came. First there was a whoop from a distance. Although my arm was broken and in a sling, it wasn’t bleeding, and I was determined not to fall asleep. I could handle this, I thought.
A while later, there was another whoop and then that dreaded, horrific giggling hyenas make when excited, often about food. The hair on the back of my neck rose as I sensed movement all around me. Another call at close range and, suddenly, they closed in on me from three directions, giggling, laughing, and moaning demonically.
I braced myself and shot my last bullet. The hyenas scattered.
Finally there was silence and I lost track of time and nodded off, only to wake without being able to take a breath. I was surrounded again by demonic giggling. One of the grimacing devils grabbed my hand and another my foot, as a third delivered the crushing bite to my windpipe.
—
I woke at dawn in a cold sweat, totally disoriented, the sound of hyenas becoming the loud barking and yipping of a pack of dogs running down the street. I rolled onto my side, holding the arm that had been broken in my dream.
The vivid nightmares were getting more elaborate. And it was getting harder and harder to shake them when I woke up. They stayed vivid throughout the day, and it was affecting my judgment. I had to get some better sleep and hoped to switch to doxycycline, but I didn’t want to have to go back to Geldenhuis to get it. I’d have to get Craig to deliver a supply.
I lay there for a few minutes, breathing as slowly as I could, trying to rid my mind of the horrific bloody images of being torn apart. The damp air was cool this time of morning, before the heat took over. Although we were heading into the full-on dry season, the humidity still lingered. That would change soon as June approached.
I sat up when I heard Jon groaning at the dogs from his room. He was cursing the incessant barking as he turned the radio on. I heard a BBC radio newscaster’s voice reporting continued gross violations of human rights in South Sudan…Misconceptions fuel Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
I could hear Jon get up and shuffle through the concrete hall toward the kitchen, where it sounded like Nigel already had the kettle on.
Syrian refugees in Tripoli and their Lebanese supporters protest the election expected to give the president a third seven-year term.
I got up and put on a short-sleeved nylon shirt and a thin cotton wrap skirt. I combed my hair out and put it up with a chopstick. Then I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth and splash water on my face. After brushing my teeth and thinking I looked like hell after all the nightmares, I turned on the tap and splashed my face with cold water. Mid-splash I heard a voice behind me.
“I trust you had a terrible night?”
Startled, I looked up in the mirror to see Jon’s unexpectedly handsome torso above a kikoy sarong.
He leaned against the doorway provocatively. “Dogs penetrating the REM and nipping at the heels of sanity’s unsuspecting Achilles tendon?”
I couldn’t help staring for a second and then put my head down again and continued splashing. “Worse.” I spat water out of my mouth. “Hyenas.”
“Catherine, you are one of us!” Jon beamed, holding out a fresh towel. “Come, I’ve made tea.”
I turned around and looked at his torso again before wiping my face and following him to the kitchen, now getting the chance to admire his back. I had the sudden urge to be alone with him again, like in that intimate moment back on his houseboat. This thought surprised me, as I had gone to bed relieved that that moment had passed without being realized. But there it was again. Somehow his regular clothes made him look unkempt, more wiry than muscular, more hopeless than controlled. But seeing the muscles on his back move made me want to touch them, to have them take control of me. I hadn’t felt this vulnerable in some time.
Jon handed me a mug, and I sat down at the table. “Thanks, Jon. Good morning, Nigel.”
“Morning, Catherine. Sorry about the dogs.”
“Me, too.”
Jon stared at me as I took a sip. He winced. “Would you like a dollop of cream?”
I smiled and shook my head as there was a knock at the door.
Jon looked down at his watch and moaned. “Come in.”
The knocking became banging.
“Bloody hell.” Jon marched through the empty living room to the front door. From the kitchen, I watched him peer out through the louvers and then open the door.
He shook a finger at the youth standing on the porch, wearing an untucked brightly colored shirt. “I told you not to come here. I thought I had made myself abundantly clear.” Jon fumed and waved the boy off. “Now, go! If you have information, I’ll see you at the wholesaler at noon.”
“Chief, it’s bigger this time.”
“Damn it. I will see you in town, later. Leave now!”
“But, Chief, it’s tonight. If you want in, you know where you have to be.”
Jon shook his finger again. “Stop calling me ‘Chief.’ See me in town around lunchtime.”
Jon slammed the door and marched back into the kitchen. “Bloody clueless.” He poured himself more tea and dug his hand into a box of rusks as there was a tapping at the kitchen window louvers.
“Ernest is involved,” said the boy.
Jon spun around and shooed him off. “Ernest has been incorporated into the flesh of a crocodile, now, get out of my garden!”
I assumed that Jon didn’t want this boy knowing that he knew that Ernest was alive.
The boy spoke quickly. “The doc’s got a new deal with UNITA. Four hundred tusks this time. Be ready at the Piggery with backup.” Jon tried to grab the youth between the broken louver and torn screen, and caught his hand
for a second, but the boy ran off.
Jon clenched his fist while he gulped down his tea. “Cream of this country’s youth. They should be out inventing things!”
I watched the boy disappear through the neighbor’s hedge. “Do you think he’s telling the truth?”
“He’s a chancer. They’re all bloody chancers, these smart youths with their dark sunglasses and bad Salvation Army shirts.” He slammed down his mug. “Four hundred tusks! They all think they’re so very clever.”
“And Ernest?” Nigel asked. “I thought it took a month for a crocodile to digest a whole body,” he said with a smirk.
Jon swung at Nigel in jest and marched off to his bedroom. He called back to Nigel, “You don’t want to think about how fast the crocodile can digest a meal.”
Nigel and I sat in silence, listening to Jon’s murmurings from the other room until he reemerged in his ministry uniform just as the cricket scores were announced on the BBC. India had beaten Jamaica again. “Yes!” Jon clapped his hands in triumph.
Nigel got up to leave. “Jon, I’ll see you this afternoon?”
“Yes. After three. Have a meeting with the magistrate at two. We’ll get to the bottom of this evidence debacle with the good doctor’s case.” He looked at me. “You haven’t lived until you’ve experienced our fine legal system.”
I tried to smile, but in the back of my mind, I was worried about Craig’s concerns about the evidence I obtained illegally in Zambia holding up in court. “Just let me know if there’s anything more WIA can do. In the meantime, I’ll work on coordinates for the census areas.”
Jon grinned. “Catherine, you’re a good man in Africa.”
Chapter 31
As I drove back to Susuwe, I passed a woman on the side of the road asking for a ride. When I realized it was Nandi, I slowed to a stop. I almost didn’t recognize her dressed in a smart, brightly colored Western-style dress. “Good morning, Nandi. Where are you heading?”
Nandi clapped one hand over the other and crouched. “Good morning. I’m asking for a lift to Liadura.” She held her hand up to block the late morning sun while trying to get a closer look at me. “Oh, Miss Catherine. It is you.”
Ivory Ghosts Page 19