by Tamar Myers
He’d been approached by post, by an anonymous source, suggesting what seemed to be a rather easy way for him to kill two birds with one stone. Mastermind had been very thorough in researching the OP’s situation. The Mastermind knew that the OP was not the baby’s father, that the OP loved playing cards in the evening but lost on a regular basis, and that the OP had fewer morals than a bitch in heat. The Mastermind seemed well acquainted with the baba whom Heilewid had employed as their child’s full-time nanny. Well enough, that is, to get her on board with the plan, before even he had been recruited.
Nannies came cheap in the Belgian Congo—real cheap. One could be hired for thirty francs a day, which was far less than an American dollar. The babas were usually more than happy to farm out their own children to relatives and live full-time inside the white man’s sturdy house, sleeping on the floor next to their little pink charges. But that particular nanny, Francine—yes, she had an African name, but it wasn’t wise to encourage its use—Heilewid had done the hiring herself. She’d heard of Francine through Charlotte, the wife of a former Belgian employee of his.
But the plan had failed! The baby’s perambulator had been found empty next to the gravel pit, with a goddamned Bashilele arrow piercing the bonnet. After that, the OP hadn’t heard a peep out of the Mastermind. Not one letter or telegram. Not one message delivered on foot or by cyclist. That’s why now, after all these years, and the almost miraculous—the OP had no use for religion and bonafied miracles—return of the girl to whom Heilewid had given birth, the OP had been able to come up with a plan of his own.
It was similar to the Mastermind’s plan; actually, it was identical to the Mastermind’s plan minus the Mastermind. The girl would go missing, again, ransom would be demanded, and the Consortium would be conned into paying a king’s ransom in uncut diamonds. Most of the details were yet to be worked out, but now—the whole thing was off! And all because the Mastermind decided to surface all these years later, as if lying in wait for the day when Heilewid’s daughter would turn up. It was unbelieveable! What cheek!
So what was there to do now? Should the OP work his butt off for the next two years, until the Congo became independent, and the mines became nationalized and he got thrown out? Should he retire now, even though he was nowhere near the top of his game, if only because the mines had been showing a loss ever since he’d opened a new facility in a box canyon twenty miles to the south? Should he accept a lateral position that had been offered to him in South Africa, even though that country’s take on apartheid disgusted him even more than what he saw implemented here? Plus, he doubted that South Africa could ever function as a free and independent country, given its racial history. Just imagine the kind of man it would take to be able to untangle that bunch of hurts!
On that warm, sticky October night in 1958, the OP sat alone on his terrace and nursed his fifth Johnnie Walker Black. Any minute now he would start to feel the heat in his chest, the mild warning that enough was enough. Then, since having one for the road was just some silly invented idea, he would have two more quick drinks before setting out for the gravel pits. There he would lie in wait and be the element of surprise. Then who would be the Mastermind?
Madame Cabochon loved secrets, and one of her secrets was that she enjoyed herself. Oh not in the obvious hands-on sort of way, but just lying back on her pillows, with her fabulous hair spilling about in molten waves, her alabaster skin gleaming white even in the darkest hours just before dawn. Sometimes she would wake up and hold a mother-of-pearl mirror above her and sigh with satisfaction, while Francois, snoring away next to her, bleated like a goat being led to the slaughter.
This night, Madame Cabochon found that due to the stimulation of the OP’s party, not to mention the powerful, and therefore sexy, OP, sleep had to be chased into the bottom of a half-filled bourbon bottle. Once there, it was fitful; she could hardly tell when her dreams started and stopped, and then started again, or when even more troublesome daydreams began. At one point she began to dream that she was being burned at the stake. That’s when she woke up and discovered that her dream was but a pale imitation of life.
In his house—really a villa, as were all the Belgian residences in Bell Vue—Pierre Jardin slept soundly. He invariably did. Sleep was the one thing that blocked out unpleasant memories: his mother’s death when he was just eleven, the beatings he occasionally received from his father, the unsympathetic nuns and abusive teachers at boarding school, and some really nasty thing he’d seen in his line of work. Sleep obliterated everything for seven or eight hours. Sometimes, if he was lucky, on his day off he was able to sleep even more.
When Pierre woke up in the darkest part of that morning, he wasn’t sure if he was dreaming. It felt as if Sister John the Beloved was whipping the soft skin at the backs of his knees with the plastic tubing that came from the aerator of the classroom aquarium. That had become an almost daily ritual, just like morning mass. After catechism came math, French, geography, science, and then Pierre’s whipping.
The reasons for Pierre’s daily whippings varied, ranging from incomplete assignments to accusations of spitball throwing, but the aftereffects were always the same: Pierre’s legs felt like they were on fire, while Sister John the Beloved’s face seemed to glow beatifically. She began to refer to Pierre as her “little cabbage” and at Christmas gave him a real Timex watch, which his father later confiscated. When he returned to school for the next term he learned that Sister John the Beloved had been transferred.
But tonight—tonight the stinging sensation moved rapidly until it reached Pierre’s crotch. At that point he realized that it was not a dream. He reached for the lamp switch beside his bed.
“Mon Dieu!” he cried. His bed was crawling with driver ants. He leaped to the floor. It was an automatic response. However, what was normally a cool concrete floor now crunched under the weight of his feet. There were so many of the wretched creatures that the ones that escaped being squished clambered aboard immediately and enmeshed themselves in his hairy legs. It was impossible to dislodge them as fast as they climbed on, and anyway, no matter what one did, their ugly, brutish heads still stayed behind embedded in one’s flesh.
Pierre had gone to bed naked; he was a firm believer in giving the “boys” some air. But the boys were on fire now; it was excruciating pain. Unbearable pain. Worse than anything Sister John the Beloved could ever dream up. He raced to the bathroom and turned the knob that switched on the lights. It was roiling with ants but he ignored them long enough to complete the task. He pushed them off as well as he could with this other hand and climbed into the claw-foot bathtub. There was no time to close the curtain before turning the shower knob to its hottest setting.
It took what seemed like hours for truly hot water to dribble from the mineral-encrusted showerhead, and even when it seemed hot enough to blister his skin, the little demons held tight. What’s more, the buggers were now dropping on him from the ceiling of the bathroom like miniature kamikaze pilots, not only aware of their upcoming deaths, but actually anticipating them.
“Merde!” Pierre roared, and that was just the first of many invectives.
Captain Pierre Jardin was not a superstitious man, but at the peak of his desperation, when he was reduced to swearing, the lights went out. There was no warning flicker. Just inky darkness. And the constant bombardment of insects equipped with pinchers as sharp as swords and the fighting will of Spartacus, every one of them bent on his destruction.
There was nothing left for Pierre to do but grab a towel, feel for the closest flashlight, and flee the house.
The stumbling band of refugees had just crossed the bridge in the moonless predawn light and had turned right onto the road that would taken them to the gravel pit when Cripple bade them stop.
“Listen,” she said, “do you not hear that?”
“I hear only the waterfalls,” the white mamu said. Husband failed to understand how it was that a woman who could be so annoying could at the sa
me time be so rich and so powerful.
“I hear the beating of my heart,” he said. After all, Husband had been pushing both Cripple and the white mamu in the wheelbarrow. His wife, of course, was unable to walk that far, that fast. As for the white mamu—he had felt obliged to offer her the ride, and she had felt obliged to accept. In the old days it would have taken four men to carry her in a sedan chair. The young Ugly Eyes, being both a white and a Mushilele savage, was left to get by on her own pair of legs.
“Tch,” said Cripple impatiently, “listen closely.”
“It is the luhumbe,” Ugly Eyes said.
“Yes, yes,” the white mamu said. “That is the sound that Cripple heard at the place of the elephant.” Muaba wa kahumbu.
“The place of the elephant?” Husband asked. There had been no time to talk to Cripple, to hear about her trip to the territory of the Bashilele, and the sacrifice of this great and generous elephant.
“E,” Cripple said. “It was the luhumbe that drove the elephant out of the thickets and into the short grass so close to the white man’s road. With my own eyes I could see that these most vicious of all ants had dared to climb into the elephant’s trunk, its ears, and even its eyes. They drove it half mad so that it was an easy mark for the bullet that followed.”
“We have a saying amongst my people,” Ugly Eyes said. “The smaller the animal, the more dangerous it is.”
“Unless it is a mamba,” Husband said. “They are much larger than any ant, and far more lethal. I get many requests for amulets to ward off mamba bites, but to tell you frankly, it cannot be done. And yet, the little pouches of anti-mamba powder remain my best-selling potion.”
“Husband!” Cripple said, for she was genuinely shocked. Never had she heard him make such an admission. Although Cripple had never put much stock in Husband’s magical potions—how could she, when she knew him so intimately?—neither had she dismissed him as a complete charlatan. Was not Husband a man of integrity?
“Cripple,” Husband said sharply, “we will speak more of this at a later time—but only if it is necessary.”
“Indeed it is, Husband.”
“Tch.”
Cripple’s cheeks burned, for she felt shamed in front of the white mamu and Ugly Eyes, who was almost a white mamu herself.
“Look,” the white mamu cried. “All the lights in Belle Vue have gone off! What does that mean?”
“It means we must hurry, Mamu,” Cripple said pragmatically. She had no doubt but that the driver ants were somehow to be blamed for the sudden power failure. The details, however, were something that had to wait. For now, her only job was to get Ugly Eyes to the gravel pit and show her the aquatic path that would lead her back home.
Chapter Twenty
Having grown up the daughter of a tugboat captain in Antwerp, Madame Cabochon was a woman of many fine and varied curses. These she hurled at Monsieur Cabochon, and not at the vicious intruders. After all, the ants were merely doing what they’d been created to do: eat. It was Monsieur Cabochon who’d talked her into moving to a bush town where such invasions by wildlife were commonplace.
Of course the curses hurt M. Cabochon’s feelings; he was only human, was he not? Oh how he hated his wife, but at the same time, he cherished her beauty. During his many years in Africa, M. Cabochon had observed many species of animals that were deadly, and thus deserved to be hated, but nonetheless were really quite attractive. He particularly admired the big cats. He’d once stalked a lioness with such skill that he’d gotten close enough to smell her breath. C’est vrais, even in that moment he’d been reminded of Madame Cabochon.
At any rate, now that he was an old colonial hand, the first thing M. Cabochon did was rip off his wife’s negligee and the bedclothes. She beat him about the head and shoulders as he did this, and clawed his face and bare arms with her long red fingernails (what exquisite instruments of torture they were!) but it was a job that needed doing. The next thing that M. Cabochon did was run to the kitchen, from whence he momentarily returned bearing a large canister of wheat flour. Enduring all manner of bodily pain to his person, he pushed their monstrous bed into the middle of the room and sprinkled a barrier of flour around its perimeter.
Apparently these insidious tiny creatures, capable of felling even a mighty elephant under the right conditions, cannot, or will not, cross such a barrier. The theory is that the fine flour plugs up their breathing apparatus. The curious thing is that one would expect to find thousands of flailing and dying ants along the perimeter of this sort, as opposed to the dozens that one does find. But as Monsieur Cabochon was soon to discover, those that didn’t perish in the vanguard merely turned around and headed for the walls. Soon they were dropping from the ceiling like the black sleet of a November’s day in Brussels.
“Mon Dieu, Madame Cabochon shrieked, “we are going to die! And it is your fault, you imbecile with turds for brains!”
Monsieur Cabochon did not respond but ran from the room again. He pulled a well-used folding cot from the storage shed and set it up on the south terrace, which seemed to be the only place in all of the Belgian Congo that was free of the damn ants. At least that much was good.
Then he raced back into the house and scooped up his hysterical wife and carried her to her new canvas bed. By this time she was writhing in agony and most of what she said made no sense, so he gave himself permission to ignore the words that did.
“Why did you leave me alone, you sniveling coward?”
He’d forgotten to fetch a kerosene lantern, and since he was trying desperately to pick the ants off her exquisite body before they did any more damage, he had to hold the flashlight in his mouth. A few torturous, gagging sounds escaped his mouth, but apparently they were just enough to further inflame her rage.
“You fool! You imbecile, Maurice! Papa was right about you! Take those handcuffs off me, right now!”
Monsieur Cabochon’s heart sank. Who the hell was this Maurice that he should come to mind when his wife was in the throes of delirium? Furthermore, the sounds he now heard at the edge of the lawn confirmed his wife’s earlier accusation; he did have turds for brains.
Being the Great White Hunter that he fancied himself to be, M. Cabochon had insisted that they live in the house closest to the bush on the south side of town, where the land lay undisturbed for tens of kilometers, almost to the Angola border. The proximity to nature allowed M. Cabochon to hunt for either francolins or guinea whenever he heard them calling, and there were a number of occasions when they obliged him by coming right onto his front lawn to feed in the early-morning or late-afternoon hours. The same thing applied to antelope—just not quite as often.
One day, even, a troop of baboons, hunting for grasshoppers, made it as far as the rear of the house, where they stole half of the laundry hanging out to dry. Although the damn monkeys dropped the clothes before disappearing into the tall tshisuku, the houseboys nearly burst their guts laughing, and almost overnight an urban legend developed amongst the white children that there existed a troop of baboons thereabouts that dressed in human clothes.
This is to say that the Cabochon residence may as well have been built in a game reserve. Monsieur Cabochon was properly terrified, but not surprised, when a pack of laughing hyenas came loping out of the high grass and headed straight for the cot. Madame Cabochon, on the other hand, was, mercifully, protected by her delirium.
“Why, it’s my friends, Papa! Why didn’t you tell me you were throwing me an eighteenth birthday party? And I’m not wearing so much as a touch of rouge.”
What? Only her eighteenth birthday party? Was that all Madame Cabochon was raving about? Well, Monsieur Cabochon hadn’t even met her until she was twenty-six! Pff! Then that was nothing; he could forgive that. But first he needed to defend her against the hyenas, which had begun to circle the cot, prancing and nipping at the air, just centimeters away from Madame Cabochon’s once lovely limbs.
And then too, for the first time Monsieur Cabochon becam
e acutely aware of the hundreds of bites he’d suffered during the savage driver-ant attack; indeed the ants were all still clinging to him.
Mrs. Gorman had never felt so much alone. Although to her credit she’d managed to put on a good show after the servants had been dismissed for the night, and the girls had been picked up by the handsome Belgian police captain and taken across the river to the OP’s party. If only she knew Mr. Gorman’s whereabouts. She’d had to lie at dinner, to make up some story about him deciding to pay an impromptu visit to the village because the Lord had laid it on his heart to pray with so-and-so there. They bought her story, of course, because it was bald-faced and outrageous, but couched in familiar language.
Mrs. Gorman had managed to get a ride back early from the party whereupon she immediately began a thorough search of the Missionary Rest House property. She knew it was only a silly notion, but she began with Amanda’s room anyway. Then on to Dorcas’s room, the other empty guest rooms, her daughter’s room, the pantry, and then the outbuilding with the woodshed where the strange white girl and her savage father were quartered. How odd, Mrs. Gorman thought, that there should be a mattress on the floor but no sheets, no blanket, and not a speck of clothing. There was not one piece of evidence in that stifling little room to indicate that someone was living there. Had Amanda moved the girl inside, into white quarters, without telling anyone?
Mrs. Gorman shivered at the thought. What an awful thing to have done—if indeed that was the case. Just because the young woman had a white skin did not mean that she was civilized. What if she rose up in the night and murdered them in their beds? And where was her father to stay? Surely in the village somewhere, because if Amanda even thought to bring him under the same roof—now what was that? Mrs. Gorman whirled, and seeing nothing, stepped quickly outside.
There it was again; the same sound. An anguished cry—not unlike Mr. Gorman sounded last year when he received the telegram informing him of his mother’s passing into Glory. In fact, so similar was the cry that Mrs. Gorman’s pulse raced with excitement at the discovery, although her heart sank with the foreknowledge that the details were not going to be entirely pleasant. Keeping that in mind she followed the familiar sounds around the corner of the outbuilding.