by Nell Brien
“Campbell brings his woman with him into the bush now, does he?” Reitholder said over his shoulder. His breath was foul, the corners of his mouth crusted with dried saliva, lips chewed raw where he’d tried to stop himself from screaming. “Blood excite you, missy? Turn you on? Good for the sex, later, eh?”
He laughed, the glottal sound ending in a gasp as she continued to smooth on the paste—blocking out his voice, blocking out Joel and their father by concentrating on each small section of the oozing meat on which she worked. Finally, she was finished. God, she thought, what a mess. She took a crumpled tissue from her pocket, wiped her hands.
“You want to be careful, missy. You’re a babe in the woods here.” His bloodshot blue eyes moved slowly as if they were glued in place by pain. “Do you think your bwana Campbell will protect you?” He forced a laugh, a strangled sound that ended in a gasp. But he went on. “You will get eaten up, little missy, just like your brother.”
“What do you know about my brother?”
“Aah! So now the dirty elephant killer has your attention. Not too superior to talk now, eh? Not so much the delicate-fingered lady—”
“What do you know about my brother?”
“He was a babe in the woods.” Reitholder gave another strangled grunt of forced laughter. “So he got eaten up.”
“What do you know?”
He regarded her silently, then said, “What are you trading?”
“What do you want?”
“My freedom.”
Cat looked around to make sure Thomas could not overhear and leaned closer, lowering her voice. “I can’t do that. I don’t know how—”
“Find a way.”
“Memsahib!” Thomas called. “You finish here now.”
Under the guise of checking his back, she put her lips close to Reitholder’s ear. “I’ll try to get you untied, but first—”
“Memsahib!” Thomas came toward them.
“So, tell her, kaffir,” Reitholder sneered. “She wants to know about her brother—”
“What the hell’s going on here?” Campbell had approached on silent feet.
Reitholder laughed. Campbell struck him across the mouth with the back of his hand. Blood spurted from Reitholder’s already damaged lips.
The brutality sickened her—the man was already beaten and disarmed. She pushed down her revulsion. “He knew Joel’s name—”
“Christ, everyone in Kenya heard about your brother’s accident.”
“How did he know Joel was my brother?”
“You’re as alike as two peas in a pod. Of course he knows.” He turned to Thomas. “Get these men on their feet. They can dig the graves.”
Cat dropped to her knees in front of Reitholder. “Tell me. What do you know about my brother?”
Campbell pulled her to her feet. Over her head he spoke harshly to Reitholder in a language she didn’t understand. She thought it had to be Afrikaans.
“Reitholder,” she said again. “What about my brother? Why are you after me?”
Blood still trickling from his lips, he stared at her out of stone eyes. He ran his hand across his damaged mouth and spat out a tooth at her feet. Then he laughed.
Seventeen
“Moses,” Campbell shouted.
Moses trotted across the plateau.
“Don’t take your eyes off this bastard,” Campbell said. “If he moves, shoot him.” He took Cat’s arm. “You come with me.” He stopped close to a clump of trees on the other side of the plateau, at the base of an animal track leading up onto the hillside. “Now, look. Reitholder’s a psychopathic bastard. Keep away from him. He wouldn’t know the truth if he fell over it.”
“And you would, I suppose? Who is he?”
“Keep away from Reitholder,” he repeated.
“Or what?”
“Or I’ll tie you to a bloody tree. I don’t want to do that, but you’re giving me no choice. Thomas has other things to do here, I can’t have him wasting his time guarding you.”
She gestured toward the piles of small pathetic tusks. “What’s going to happen to all this?”
“It will probably end up in a government warehouse in Nairobi.”
“You’re not keeping it, of course.”
“No,” Campbell said. “We are not keeping it.”
She wanted to answer, to challenge him, but kept silent. Over his shoulder she caught sight of Moses and Sambeke maneuvering a body down the rocky hillside, toward a clump of trees. Dark curly hair hung over Sambeke’s arm, a bush hat still hung by its strap from an exposed throat. There was a massive bloody wound where his chest should be.
“Wait! Moses, wait!”
“Cat.” Campbell made a grab for her but she shook him off and rushed after the two Maasai through the small patch of scrubby trees. She stopped, shocked.
Two rows of bodies were lined up, too many to count at first glance. The two Maasai had lowered their burden at the end of the first row, and Cat dropped to her knees beside him.
“I know this man!” Campbell had followed her and she looked up at him. “My God! I know him. His name’s Bobby Watson. He comes from Adelaide.” Two weeks ago, less than that, she’d laughed with him, flirted a little. Now his chest was a gaping hole, and his dancing brown eyes were filmed with dust. She put out a hand to close them. He was still warm. She looked at the body lying next to him and gagged. Most of the head was missing. Blowflies had already found him.
“And this is Peter Stone. I think he comes from Adelaide, too.” Suddenly she felt as if she could smell evil in the very air she breathed. In the stink of blood from the men stretched in rows in front of her, in the rotting flesh of animal carcasses. “Who will tell their families?” As she had been told about Joel. A spurt of terror chilled her blood. She rose to her feet.
“We’ll let the authorities know about them,” Campbell said.
Cat heard the strike of metal on rock, glanced over at the group of poachers digging graves, every movement watched by Olentwalla, an AK held across his chest.
A sob broke from her control, and another. She put a hand to her mouth. Incredibly, Campbell put an arm around her, his touch gentle. Reitholder’s ugly words resonated in her head—sex and blood and killing—and she moved away from him.
Campbell let his arm drop. “Don’t waste your tears on them, Cat,” he said. “Africa’s full of men like this, black and white. Mercenaries, poachers, murderers. They take their chances. Today these two lost. They knew the risks.”
She wondered where he fit on that grim list. She said, “I don’t want to know anymore.”
A low moan came from one of several men lying separate from the others. “Can you do anything for them?”
He shook his head. “Not much. They’ll survive or they’ll die.”
She nodded, turned away, then made her way on shaky legs through the trees to the resinous little refuge at the edge of the plateau, as far from the charnel pit as it was possible to get.
For the next hour she sat, leaning against the trunk of her tree, listening to the captive poachers digging graves with the tools used at the hunting camp for digging latrines. She looked for a chance to speak again to Reitholder, but Moses lounged against a rock only a few yards from him, his Uzi in one hand, his eyes locked on his prisoner. Someone had provided cover for the wounds Campbell had inflicted—a T-shirt taken from a body, by the look of the bloodstained holes in it, but it protected the damaged flesh from most of the flies.
Thomas came by to offer another thermos of coffee, a sandwich crumpled from hours in his backpack. Cat shook her head at the food but took the coffee gratefully. She noticed that Reitholder was offered nothing and found she didn’t care.
Gradually the heat went out of the day, small creatures appeared, tiny vervet faces peering from the branches above her head. But the little green monkeys, usually so friendly, refused to leave the safety of the tree, probably fearful of the activity on the plateau, the smell of blood that attracted predat
ors.
The entire camp was dismantled. Blackened hearthstones used for cooking were dispersed, wood from the drying racks carefully stacked—Thomas said the Maasai women from the engang would pick it up later and use it for fuel. Sometime during the afternoon, the moran had appeared as silently as before. They did no work, but squatted on their haunches, watching Campbell and Tom sort through the tusks, pile them by size.
Crimson streaks appeared high in the sky, birds squabbled as they started to settle for the night. Tom stood in front of her.
“We’re ready to leave.”
Cat stood, sent a glance toward Reitholder. Moses had not left his post. She looked back over the plateau, said a silent goodbye to the two young men who’d once been so filled with life and laughter. Would the authorities really be informed? Their people in Australia? Would she herself live to tell them?
A shot echoed across the plateau, followed by another. Birds rose screaming into the air. She felt rooted to the spot.
“Someone just shot the wounded men,” she said. She was empty of emotion and didn’t really care about it. Too much had happened. It just seemed necessary to keep straight with what was happening here. “You just killed two men as if they meant nothing.”
“They didn’t,” Tom said.
Cat bent to pick up her sweater, stood to find Campbell had joined them. She stared at him, and he said, “Cat, this is Africa, not some Hollywood set with tailored grass and toothless animals.” His voice softened. “It’s better this way, believe me. They would not have survived the night.”
“What about Reitholder? Are you going to kill him?”
“We’d have done it by now if we were going to do that, don’t you think?”
“What will happen to him?”
“He’s going to Nairobi.”
The moran were leaving by the same route they had used earlier, tall black figures climbing the hill, silhouetted briefly against the reddening sky, each man carrying a pair of tusks across his shoulders. They disappeared over the brow of the hill, in the direction of the engang.
Cat turned without comment, allowing Tom to help her over the lip of the plateau, too tired, too dispirited to insist that she did not need help. She did, and desperately. But there was no one to ask.
Eighteen
Cat opened her eyes, the image of Reitholder’s face, the ugly voice, the poisonous words, echoing in her brain. She fumbled on the camp table for her watch: 2:00 a.m. Inside the enclosure of the mosquito net, the smell of crushed grass mingled with the dry dust and a faint trace of soap. Outside the tent, the watch fire flared as one of the men replenished it.
Far-off sounds reached her—the cry of an animal suddenly silenced, the ululation of the triumphant predator. Jess had suggested she bring sleeping pills. She wished she hadn’t been so stubborn. Every time she closed her eyes, the scene on the plateau—dead men, tusks, small bodies of cubs, the whip rising and falling on a reddened back—played and replayed against her eyelids.
Drained when she and Tom got back to camp with Thomas, she’d longed for the oblivion of sleep. But she’d forced herself to eat a sandwich in her tent, then use the hot water Thomas brought her for a sponge bath before turning in, only to drift in and out of uneasy sleep.
About midnight, Campbell had returned, and she’d heard the murmur of voices. An hour later a Land Rover left.
Suddenly cold, she pulled the brown blanket up around her chin. In daylight she’d have a clearer head. There had to be a way to get to Reitholder if he was still alive. Maybe in Nairobi—Stephen would know his name, or even Father Gaston, or Brian Ward, or the police.
She closed her eyes, confused images playing in her mind: Peter Stone with half of his head missing, Bobby as she’d seen him in Nairobi, dancing brown eyes, bush hat on the back of dark curls, laughing when she tried to tell him that he had a hole in his chest. Reitholder, Campbell, sjambok in hand, Tom leaning over wounded men, carefully shooting each one and toppling them into the graves Moses was digging.
And then she was running across the savannah, stumbling over tussocks of grass…trying to reach Joel, shouting at him…warning him…Joel turned, waved…oblivious to the buffalo bearing down on him…massive horns lowered…their father behind them, firing above their heads, driving them faster and faster…she could hear herself shrieking at Joel, warning him…struggling to reach him…then he went down, under the hooves…and she was screaming…screaming…
“Shh, shh. It’s all right. Shh.”
A voice pulled her free from the horror. Instinctively, she wrapped her arms around the solid comfort of human contact.
“Shh. It’s all right.” Campbell stroked her back. “You’re having a nightmare. You’re all right.”
Her panting breath was labored. Dread hovered over her. He was warm and alive, smelling of moist night air, the sweet reality of wood smoke. She pushed her face against his chest, her eyes still clenched tight against the dream.
Campbell murmured wordlessly, lifting the hair from her damp neck, tugging at the strands clinging to her throat. “That must have been some nightmare. Are you all right?”
His hand on her back was soothing. Cat nodded without releasing him. Her panic was receding, the harsh gasping breath had started to ease, but she was unable to open her eyes. She was so tired, she thought. Tired down to the bone. Tired with the weight of years behind it.
“What was it?” Campbell put a hand on the back of her head, holding her against his shoulder. “Tell me about it.”
“It’s Joel.”
Campbell bent his head closer.
“I should have been with him. I could have stopped him. Now it’s too late.”
“You couldn’t have done anything, Cat.”
“You don’t understand.” She was alive and he was dead. She was always the only one who could stop him taking risks, stop him proving over and over that he was more than his father said he was. She could have stopped him, and she hadn’t. She’d wanted him to do it, she’d wanted him to kill their father. So he’d pulled the trigger. And he’d borne the guilt for them both.
“I do understand. I was there,” Campbell said. “I know you could have done nothing. You must believe me.”
If only she could. Cat opened her eyes to search his face. She felt the thump in his chest as he stared back at her, then a change in the steady rhythm of his heart.
He tightened his arms around her, and suddenly she was aware of her bare legs, the thin T-shirt only just covering her, the fire outside glowing through canvas walls and throwing diffused golden light onto the white mosquito net enclosing them.
Campbell’s breathing deepened. Her own heart started to beat with a heaviness to match his. She raised her lips, drew his head toward her, opened her mouth to his tongue. For a brief moment, she welcomed passion that would mask the pain and grief and loss.
Gradually Cat became aware of a skittering on the roof of the tent, the rustle of breeze in the thorn trees, the distant high-pitched call of an animal sounding like the cry of a lost soul.
A cool draft of air touched her damp skin, and she shivered and opened her eyes, looking over Campbell’s shoulder into the mosquito netting above them.
What was the matter with her? she thought. She could not believe what she had just done. And there was a woman waiting for him in Nairobi. She felt sick with guilt. “Campbell. Come on. You’ve got to leave.”
He lifted his head. “Wait a minute. Give me a minute to catch my breath, for God’s sake.”
“No. You’ve got to leave.”
She shoved at his shoulder, and he shifted his body, rolling to the edge of the narrow camp bed.
“Are you always this tough?”
“Come on, please.”
Campbell raised himself on one elbow, tugged at the sheet covering her, touched his tongue to her nipple. She jumped again at the shock of it. She felt him begin to harden, and she pushed a hand into his hair, pulling his head away from her breast.
&nbs
p; He looked into her eyes. “Is this the same trembling, frightened woman who clung to me such a short time ago?”
“Next time you hear me having that nightmare, walk away. I don’t want a repeat performance.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but you sounded to me as if you rather liked it.”
“The earth moved, I liked it. Thank you. Good night.”
“I’ll be damned.” He started to laugh, then swung his feet to the ground. He walked with an easy grace to pick up his clothes, pulled on his pants.
“Campbell?”
He turned, looked at her inquiringly.
“Don’t let’s speak of this again,” she said. “Not a look. Not a hint. Nothing. This never happened. Okay?”
He kept his eyes on her while he buttoned his shirt, his eyebrows raised, as if considering her words. He tucked the shirt into his pants, buckled his belt, then walked over to the camp bed and separated the white netting. He bent over her, kissed her, dropped the mosquito net back into place and was gone.
Nineteen
The heavy wooden door of the church swung open, allowing a dim arrow of light onto cracked paving stones. A stout Kikuyu woman, head bound in brightly patterned cotton, hands clasped piously in front of her, stepped across the threshold. The door closed behind her, and she made her way down the path through the churchyard, passing within feet of where he stood.
Stephen N’toya melted deeper into the shadow of the large angel weeping over an ornate tomb. When the door opened, he’d managed to catch a glimpse of the interior, parishioners still waiting to make their confession. He settled down for a long wait. Gaston was the only priest serving the church, and in this neighborhood, the amount of sin to confess would be considerable.
The raucous noise of a bar blasted from just outside the very British lych-gate. Music, heavy on the beat, women squealing as men slapped at their rumps, laughter at the ribald shouted comments of patrons lounging around tables made from giant wooden cable spools. Hurricane lanterns swung in the breeze, throwing a moving pattern of light and shadow over the scene. The scent of the roses edging the churchyard was overwhelmed by cigarette smoke and the deep sweet smell of reefer.