Adventures

by Mike Resnick

  “Well, Doctor Jones,” he said after a few minutes, “I've seen enough. Let's get back to Beria and stake a claim to this place before anybody else stumbles onto it.”

  That made a lot of sense to me, especially since there were a few million army ants discussing combat strategy and logistics a couple of hundred yards away. So we went back to the Mangbetu village very slowly, with the Colonel marking things down on his map every half mile or so. We rested up for a day and then, accompanied only by Sam, who came along mainly to guide me back after we'd claimed the place, we returned to Beria.

  I took a room in a local hostelry, Sam hung around a nearby restaurant getting hints on different ways to soften meat, and Colonel Carcosa went to the proper authorities to purchase the tract of land that contained the burial ground. He was in a real good mood when we met for dinner.

  “Did you get it?” I asked as soon as he had pulled up a chair.

  “Of course,” he said.

  “No problems?” I said. “Nobody suspects nothing?”

  “Doctor Jones, you're not dealing with an amateur,” he replied smugly. “The graveyard was in the middle of a privately owned two-hundred-thousand-acre tract of land. I purchased the whole thing at five British shillings an acre.”

  “The whole thing?” I said. “But why?”

  “Because if it were known that I had bought one hundred acres or so in the interior of Portuguese East Africa, it would arouse curiosity. But two hundred thousand acres? It might seem peculiar, but no one is going to race out to search every square centimeter of the land to find out what I want with it.”

  I opined as to how it made a bit of sense at that, and we spent the rest of the evening toasting each other's good health and success in the world of high finance.

  The next morning Sam and I set out for the graveyard, armed with saws and such other equipment as we might need to separate the various tusks from their skeletons. We stopped off at the Mangbetu village long enough to recruit a little help and for Sam to refresh Missus Sam, and then we headed off for the burial ground. Four of the skeletons had tusks, and we removed them and toted them all the way back to Mozambique.

  “Excellent,” said Colonel Carcosa, when the tusks averaged out at one hundred thirty pounds apiece. “I've ordered some earth-moving equipment which should be here in about four months, at which time we can begin digging up all the skeletons that have sunk into the muck and mire.”

  It made sense to me, and I prepared to spend the next four months loafing and sleeping and enjoying the company of the local ladies, but Colonel Carcosa started getting itchy a few days later and sent me and Sam off to pick up the tusks from any new corpses.

  I got back to Beria two weeks later with the news that there weren't any new corpses.

  “That's very odd,” said the Colonel. “After all, it's been almost a month since I was there. You would think some elephants would have died since then.”

  “Maybe this ain't the season for it,” I suggested.

  “And maybe you are being less than honest with me,” he said accusingly.

  “Brother Carcosa,” I said. “I been telling you nothing but God's own truth. If you don't believe me, come on right now and we'll march out there together.”

  He stared long and hard at me, as if he was making up his mind. “I'll trust you for the moment,” he announced at last, “but if I should ever find out that you were stealing ivory from our property, Doctor Jones, I have the power to make the rest of your life very unpleasant.”

  Getting threatened by your partner can be pretty thirsty work, so after he finished talking I moseyed on over to the local pub, where I ordered a bottle of beer, and started carrying it to a table in the corner.

  “Well, if it ain't the Reverend Lucifer Jones!” hollered a familiar voice.

  I turned and saw Capturing Clyde Calhoun sitting at the bar.

  “I sure didn't expect to see you here, Clyde,” I said, walking over and joining him. “I figured your circus would be taking you to Bucharest and Rotterdam and all them other glittering exotic capitals of Europe.”

  “I'll be joining the circus in a couple of days,” said Calhoun, pouring himself a glass of rye whiskey and offering one to me. “I'm just here to ship some survivors back to various zoos in the States.”

  “Well, it sure is good to see a friendly face,” I said. “How's Lord Bloomstoke getting along?”

  “Just fine,” replied Calhoun. “Of course, I've had to land on him a couple of times about organizing the monkeys, but other than that he's doing a right creditable job. And how about yourself, Reverend? You ever get that tabernacle?”

  I told him the sad story of the Tabernacle of Saint Luke, and then he told me the sad story of how he figured out that he had a career waiting for him in the Dark Continent on the day he accidentally shot the mayor's horse back in Billings, Montana, and then I told him the sad story of losing the affections of Miss Emily Perrison to Major Theodore Dobbins, late of His Majesty's armed forces, and then he told me the sad story of his first five wives.

  “We've sure had our share of bad luck, ain't we, Clyde?” I said, starting to feel downright weepy.

  “We sure have,” he agreed.

  “I don't mean to butt in, gents,” said the bartender. “But I got a hard-luck story to match anything you've got. I used to be a hunter like Mister Calhoun here.”

  “What happened?” I asked, ordering another beer and pouring two shots of rye into it, just to bring out the subtle nuances of its flavor.

  “I got flim-flammed so bad I had to take this here bartending job to climb out from under a mountain of debts that I had taken on in good faith,” said the bartender. “Seems this fellow hired me to go to some valley out in the middle of nowhere, right next to some cannibal sanctuary about five or six days’ march from here, and offered me a thousand pounds for every elephant I could lure there and shoot. Then, after I'd spent a couple of weeks fighting off mosquitoes and hornets and tsetse flies and black mambas and the like and had actually shot a batch of elephants, I came back to town here and wrote notes against the money I was owed, but the son of a bitch took off and I never saw him or heard from him again.”

  “How much did he owe you?” I asked with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  “Seven thousand pounds!” said the bartender. “And of course we were so far out in the middle of the bush he knew there was no way for me and my one gun bearer to bring any of that ivory back to civilization.”

  “Did he say why he wanted you to shoot the elephants?” asked Calhoun.

  “I gather he'd just bought a couple hundred thousand acres at a penny an acre or some such ridiculous price, and he seemed to think that leaving a bunch of dead elephants at this particular spot would make his real estate appreciate. I told him and told him that ivory ain't like flowers and that you can't just leave it on the ground and hope it'll take root and multiply, but he just kind of chuckled and said he was a patient man and that sooner or later someone would be impressed by the fact that I'd killed all them elephants. I dunno; I guess he thought shooting elephants in that stupid little valley would make it a national historic shrine or something.”

  “This feller's name didn't happen to have a Germanic sound to it, did it?” I asked, feeling kind of weak about the knees.

  “Sure as hell did,” said the bartender.

  “What was it?” I asked.

  “Von Horst,” he replied.

  “Damn!” I moaned. “I knew it!”

  “Yep. Erich Von Horst it was,” continued the bartender. “I'll remember that name to my dying day.”

  “You got lots of company,” I said.

  I explained to Capturing Clyde that I suddenly remembered that I had urgent business elsewhere, and made a beeline toward Sam's favorite restaurant, where I told him that we should give serious thought to leaving the country at the earliest possible opportunity, like right that moment.

  He told me that we'd be better off stopping
by his village one last time so he could pick up some warriors to defend us against the denizens of the jungle and take along enough women to keep us all happy. I told him that I appreciated the thought, but right now I was a little more concerned with one particular denizen of the Portuguese East African government. He told me that he'd like to accommodate me, but it wouldn't be fair to the Mangbetu tribe as a whole for him to leave the country without sharing his newfound cooking knowledge with them.

  Well, I could see I wasn't going to talk him out of it, and it made more sense to start walking toward the village right away than to spend all night standing in the street arguing, so I fell into step and we reached the village some six days later.

  Sam conducted a three-hour graduate cooking seminar, gathered the people he thought we'd be most in need of, and headed off toward Tanganyika. We must have been within two miles of the border when a group of about twenty Portuguese soldiers, all armed to the teeth, intercepted us.

  Sam was willing to fight to the death, but I explained to him that I had a feeling that the soldiers weren't really after the Mangbetu. The soldier nearest to us nodded, so I wished Sam and his people bon appetit as they retreated into the bush. My hands were chained behind me and I was marched all the way back to Beria, where I spent nine days in jail and was then brought to the office of an elderly gentleman named Alfredo Montenegro, who happened to hold the position of Chief Justice.

  “Ah, Doctor Jones,” he said. “I have been wondering exactly what you looked like. Now at long last I have the pleasure of making your acquaintance.”

  “It's a pleasure you could have had eight and a half days sooner as far as I'm concerned,” I told him.

  “You led us a merry little chase,” he noted pleasantly. “There were times when I despaired of ever capturing you.”

  “Come to think of it, how did you know we'd be where we were?” I asked.

  “Most armies travel on their stomachs, Doctor Jones,” he said. “Let us say that a cannibalistic army is just a tad easier to trace than certain others might be.”

  “Poor heathen must of backslid,” I said. “Sam promised me they were only going to practice it as a ritual.”

  “Eating can be as ritualistic as most things,” noted Montenegro. “But here you are safe and sound in Beria, so why bother yourself with how you came to be here?”

  “True enough,” I said. “But perhaps you might tell me why a man of the cloth who never meant no harm to nobody should have been held in durance vile for lo these many days?”

  “My dear Doctor Jones,” he said, “we may be an old colonial power, but we are not yet senile. When we discovered that a block of two hundred thousand acres had changed hands we started piercing through the corporate veil and came up with your friend Colonel Carcosa. We discovered, in tracing back over his actions, that he had spent a considerable amount of time in your company, and began reconstructing what you two had been up to. It all fell into place after we had a little chat with a fellow countryman of yours, a circus owner who thought he was helping your cause and incriminating a gentleman with a Germanic name who is of no importance to this case.”

  “Well, if you know all about it,” I replied, “then you know that we were flim-flammed ourselves, and that there ain't no such thing as an elephants’ graveyard. So that ought to let us off the hook, right?”

  "Wrong!" he thundered. “Doctor Jones, conspiracy with intent to defraud is every bit as much a criminal offense as fraud itself, and is punishable under very stringent laws, as your friend the former officer is currently finding out.”

  “You mean you're going to lock me up for a deal that cost me and my partner a million shillings?” I demanded,

  “We would prefer not to,” he said. “After all, you are an American citizen, and we don't wish to cause your government any distress or embarrassment.”

  “Well, then, just let me go and we'll let bygones be bygones and I'll forget the whole thing ever happened,” I said magnanimously.

  “It's not as easy as all that,” said Montenegro. “Your presence is no longer desired in Portuguese East Africa.”

  “Never fear,” I said. “I'll just take my copy of the Good Book and such members of my Mangbetu flock as remain loyal to me in my hour of need and clear out lock, stock, and barrel.”

  “I'm afraid that's out of the question,” he said, shaking his head slowly.

  “What's the problem?” I said. “There's lots of other countries around that'd be proud to have a missionary preaching the Word to the poor uneducated heathen.”

  “Doctor Jones,” he said slowly, “while you were our ... ah ... guest, we made certain inquiries of our neighboring nations concerning their reaction should we decide to expel you.”

  “And?” I said.

  “You are wanted in South Africa, Bechuanaland, and the Transvaal for selling fraudulent treasure maps. There is a warrant out for your arrest in Egypt for slave trading and certain illegal practices involving a mummy. You are wanted in Morocco and Algeria for grand larceny involving the theft of a diamond known as the Lion's Tooth.”

  “But I didn't steal it!” I protested. “Hell, I didn't even know I had it!”

  “Please don't interrupt. You are wanted in the Lado Enclave and Uganda for ivory poaching. You are wanted for removing certain national treasures in the form of precious stones from Nyasaland. The nation of Southwest Africa has issued a warrant for your arrest for killing whales without a license.”

  “A series of misunderstandings, nothing more,” I said.

  “Let me continue,” he said. “You are wanted in Kenya for operating a bawdy house. The Congo has issued a warrant for your arrest for possible complicity in the disappearance of a gentleman named Burley Rourke. The Sudan wishes to speak to you about slave trading and impersonating a British officer and war hero, and Tanganyika is after you for consorting with known criminals.” He paused and stared at me. “Frankly, Doctor Jones, I wonder where you find the energy to get through the day.”

  “How about Rhodesia?” I said. “I ain't never been there.”

  “Both Rhodesias have extradition treaties with all of the nations I have mentioned.”

  “Then what are you going to do with me?” I asked.

  “It is my opinion that the entire continent of Africa will be better off without your particular brand of salvation,” he said slowly. “Therefore, if you will agree to accept passage out of here tomorrow morning, I'll see to it that you are placed aboard a ship before any other African government can officially request that we detain you.”

  “I don't see as to how I've got much of a choice,” I said. “As long as I've got to go, Brother Montenegro, how about getting me on a boat today so's I don't have to spend another night in jail?”

  “Nothing would make me happier than getting you out of Beria today,” he said, “but the only passenger ship currently in port is The Dying Quail, and for reasons I can only guess at, they refuse to allow you aboard.”

  So I spent my last night in Africa pretty much the same way I had spent some of my first ones.

  My spirits were at an all-time low when they took me to the ship the next afternoon. I'd made three or four quick fortunes, only to be gulled out of them by sinful, godless men, and I had even had my beloved tabernacle ripped from my hands by a cruel and unfeeling Fate.

  "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?" I muttered as I started climbing up the gangplank without a penny to my name and carrying no luggage except my well-worn copy of the Good Book.

  I paused halfway between shore and ship and turned to take a last look at the Dark Continent. I'd met a lot of interesting folk there, and done most of them more good than they had done me. If it hadn't been for me and me alone, Herbie Miller and the Rodent would still be looking for jobs, and the Dutchman, Ali ben Ishak, Major Theodore Dobbins, Ishmael Bledsoe, and Luthor Christian would all still be hunting for spouses. Rosepetal Schultz would still be selling her dubious services in the back alleys of Cairo, Friday would be
wearing a loincloth and living out in the bush, Lord Bloomstoke would still be hiding from his creditors, Capturing Clyde Calhoun would have lowered the world's gorilla population by half, and Mademoiselle Markoff wouldn't have seen the Glory and the Light.

  All in all, I decided, it wasn't a bad four years’ work at that. I'd left my mark on a whole bunch of previously worthless lives, and I was still young and vigorous and with my whole life ahead of me.

  “You can keep this damned hellhole, Von Horst!” I hollered into the wind. “I'm going off to strange new lands where a God-fearing Christian can still make an honest living!”

  I climbed up the rest of the gangplank and was about to hunt up my cabin when my eyes fell on one of the passengers, a vision of loveliness who looked like a redheaded version of Rosepetal Schultz, and the human spirit, glorious and unquenchable thing that it is, began to soar within me once again, especially after I saw the size of the diamonds on her necklace. I stopped to introduce myself and offer her any form of spiritual comfort or uplifting that might appeal to her. She giggled and agreed to discuss the matter more fully over dinner, and by the time the voyage was over we had become fast friends. In fact, truth to tell, it was occasionally a race between us to see just which of us was the faster.

  We landed in the far exotic Orient, where sinful and mysterious cities like Hong Kong and Macao and Singapore and Shanghai, all filled with godless men and women and dens of vice and rebel armies and the like, were just waiting for a handsome young buck like myself to come and bring the Word to them, a task to which I dedicated the next few years of my life with considerable success.

  But that, of course, is another story.

  THE END

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