Lioness

by Nell Brien

  Interesting neighbors for a fancy old English church down on its luck. N’toya grinned to himself, imagining the reactions of the original parishioners to the African tide lapping hard against their once-exclusive fences.

  An hour passed. One by one, a parade of absolved sinners left the church. Mostly women—women seemed to care more about the state of their souls. When the latest penitent opened the door to leave, he saw no others waiting inside. He let fifteen more minutes pass, then dropped the cigarette he’d kept carefully cupped in his hand, ground it under his heel, stepped onto the path.

  He pushed open the door to the church, and for a second stood riveted, staring down the nave toward the enormous figure of the crucified Christ behind the altar. The figure was black, the distinctly African features illuminated by a soft yellow light mounted from a high cross beam, the crown of thorns rammed down over tight, kinky hair. The only other source of light came from two banks of lighted candles, one on either side of the church. The place was heady with the smell of incense.

  A rustle from the confessional broke the spell. N’toya shook his head, clearing the hypnotic image. The Belgian had an admirable sense of drama. He’d provided some great theater for poor black Africans. N’toya crossed the stone floor, his rubber heels soundless, and slipped inside the confessional, pulling the door behind him, but careful not to close it completely.

  Behind the screen he could see a white face. The silver mane of hair told him he was speaking to the right man.

  “You were almost too late, my son. I was about to leave.” Father Gaston kissed the stole he had just removed and replaced it across the back of his neck, allowing each end to lie flat against the front of his cassock.

  N’toya said nothing, listening to the silence in the church to make sure the place was empty. All he could hear was the sound of the priest breathing. The faint sour smell of tobacco-laden breath came from the other side of the screen.

  Father Gaston raised his head. “How long since your last confession?”

  “I am not here to confess my sins,” N’toya said.

  “Are you a Catholic?”

  “I have no religion.”

  “Ah. You are in trouble, perhaps.”

  N’toya gave a short laugh. “No more than any other man.”

  “Then how can I help you?”

  “You can get some information into the right hands.”

  Father Gaston leaned closer to the screen. “Who are you?”

  N’toya put his hand onto the slatted wood, blocking the priest’s eyes. “If I wanted you to know my identity, priest, I would have called first, asked for an appointment. Perhaps you would have invited me to talk over tea.”

  Father Gaston sat back. “You have my attention. Please continue.”

  “Reitholder has been brought to Nairobi—”

  “Should this mean something to me? Who is this man, Reitholder?”

  “Don’t play games with me, Father Gaston. I am talking about the Afrikaner, Dieter Reitholder—”

  “What makes you think I am interested in someone named Dieter Reitholder?”

  “I want you to listen carefully, priest. I know you can get the information I am giving you to the right people. Do you understand?” N’toya nudged the door of the confessional open. “Or would you prefer me to leave?”

  “Well, I suppose if this man Reitholder is in trouble, it may be that I can be of some small help. What information do you have?”

  “Reitholder was taken two days ago at a hunting camp stacked with illegal ivory. He has been brought to Nairobi. He is being held in a warehouse.” N’toya gave the address, a run-down area on the edge of the city. He waited for the priest to ask about the ivory, but he didn’t. “For the next two nights, I will make sure the guards there will be minimal.”

  “Is he being held by the army?” Father Gaston asked.

  N’toya laughed. “No.”

  “What am I to do with this information?”

  “Father Gaston, in your position you have connections to many people,” N’toya said. “Through the confessional, through your parishioners, through your order. Who knows? Just make sure what I have told you gets into the right hands.”

  “My son, you overestimate my influence—”

  Suddenly impatient, N’toya cut him off. “Two nights, tomorrow night and the following night. That’s all. I am leaving now. Stay where you are for ten minutes. I do not wish my identity to be revealed.” He held his PPK automatic flat against the screen. “Do not be foolhardy. Do you understand me, Father?”

  “I think I do, my son.”

  N’toya kept the automatic in his hand as he pushed open the door of the confessional and stepped out into the church. He looked at the black Christ, but the light on the cross beam had been turned off. Only candlelight remained. The crucified figure was nowhere near as dramatic.

  Twenty

  The morning following what Cat thought of as “the episode,” she emerged from her tent to find the camp empty except for Thomas. Campbell returned an hour later, called a normal good morning as if nothing had happened between them, casually informed her they’d be getting a late start, then got back into his Land Rover and disappeared in the direction of the engang. He did not ask her to go with him, and Cat stared after him, not sure whether to be relieved or disappointed.

  Tom rolled into camp just after lunch, apologized briefly for the delay. Camp was struck, and the two Land Rovers packed. They did not see Campbell or the Maasai again until nightfall.

  But she was alive and no one seemed interested in threatening her life.

  Gradually her fear, at least, started to abate. Several times in the next few days, Cat made tentative attempts to speak of what had happened on that nightmare hill, but each time, Campbell or Tom directed the conversation back to the events of the day just past, the plans for the one ahead.

  And Campbell remained as remote as if what had happened between them had been a part of her dreams, a figment of a fevered imagination. Cat found herself watching for a suggestion that he thought about her, that he was seeking her out. But he was as hard as he’d ever been, wrapped in that strange solitude he seemed able to draw around him at will.

  Finally, they got to Mount Elgon, and she found that Campbell had been right. There was nothing there for her. None of the sites Campbell suggested were even remotely like Joel’s sketches, and it was clear that the forests of Mount Elgon could not survive for long.

  A generation ago, it must have seemed impenetrable, inhabited only by wild creatures. Now the trees were gone, cleared for small farms, shambas Tom called them, and only on higher slopes did the huge cedars with strangely twisted trunks still withstand the march of agriculture. A few colobus monkeys, with their long, silky black and white fur, managed to hang on in spite of the pressure from human expansion.

  She was no closer to the truth surrounding Joel’s death. Maybe there was no truth, Cat thought. Then why the note? “Something odd’s going on here, nothing’s what it seems to be.” Why this continuing queasy emptiness in the pit of her stomach? And why had Joel’s route taken in so many borders? Mount Elgon itself straddled the border with Uganda.

  The two men were patient, Tom, as usual, the one to accompany her on her explorations so she had no time alone with Campbell. After two days, she suggested they leave, braced herself for some “I told you so’s.” But Campbell simply nodded without comment, and the next day, they turned south.

  The going was torturous as they traveled heavily rutted roads that were axle deep in red dust for mile after agonizing mile.

  They resupplied at Kericho, a small market town, refilled the auxiliary gas tanks and the extra cans each of the three Land Rovers carried. Cat mailed postcards—to Rosie and Jess, the office and John Rifken. And Paul Neville. As a way of reminding herself that he existed, that they had a relationship worked out that suited them both, she’d been writing a message to Paul every night on postcards she had brought with her from Nair
obi, pictures of baby animals meant for Rosie. In Kericho she wrote on the last of them—an appealing group of tiny baboons, “Love the guy on the right. Got a decidedly Nevillish glint in his eye. Miss you.” But she didn’t, and that, too, made her uneasy. The safari seemed to have taken on a life of its own, sufficient to the day, and she was sleeping soundly now at night, the first time since Joel died.

  Once on the Mara, the game tracks made traveling easier, and they made better time. The Maasai still ranged out of sight, but Cat no longer questioned it. Somehow they managed to rendezvous at the end of the day, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, and Thomas produced enough hot water for tea and a sponge bath. Life was reduced to its simplest elements.

  Their first full day on the Mara, Cat leaned out of the window and filled her lungs. Even the air felt different. The morning was bright, the Land Rovers dwarfed by rolling golden savannah stretching toward the horizon. Red termite hills like dry skeletal fingers pointed at a deep blue bowl of sky decorated with a few light clouds. Campbell and Tom had been talking about the coming rains, but today, at least, rain seemed a distant possibility. The clouds, certainly, held no moisture. The air smelled sweetly of dry grass.

  “In Los Angeles we say at least we get to see the air we breathe,” she said to Tom.

  Tom took his eyes from the game track. “What?”

  “It’s a sort of joke. Smog, you know.”

  “Why do you live in such a place?”

  “Be it ever so smoggy, there’s no place like home. What about you? Where’s your home?”

  “Nairobi.”

  “Your people are from the city?” She thought of the old photographs of generations of M’Balas and Campbells hunting together.

  “No. My mother comes from the Cameroons. She was fourteen when she became my father’s fourth wife. My father’s people, though, are Maasai. Sooner or later they usually return to the old life, adding cattle to their herds, becoming respected elders.” He grinned. “Buy a new young wife to warm them in their old age.”

  “Bet you can’t wait to do that,” she teased.

  He frowned, considering her question. “It has a certain appeal.” He shook his head. “But I don’t think I could get Miriam to roam from waterhole to waterhole with a load of cattle. We’d have to take the kids out of school for one thing, and, anyway, she prefers to practice medicine in Nairobi.” He grinned, pretending to flinch as Cat punched his arm playfully. “Besides that, she’d kill me if I even looked at another woman.”

  For a moment Cat watched a dozen vultures in a drought-stricken tree, their unblinking naked eyes tracking Campbell’s Land Rover as it passed. Bare, wrinkled pink skin covered their heads in place of feathers. They looked like characters in a horror movie. But at least on the Mara Reserve they hadn’t been feasting on elephants slaughtered for their tusks.

  “Reitholder knew my brother.” Suddenly she was tired of being careful, waiting for the right moment to broach the subject of her brother. Since they’d been on the Mara, she had felt Joel’s presence more and more. He had died somewhere on these grasslands; she was sure of it. “Reitholder said Joel was a babe in the woods who got eaten up. Did you know that?”

  “Reitholder didn’t know your brother.”

  “Then how did he know we were as alike as peas in a pod? Campbell said that’s how he recognized me. But that doesn’t add up if he didn’t know my brother. Does it, Tom?”

  “He didn’t know your brother,” Tom said again.

  “Stonewalling. A word for your list.” Tom had been teaching her a little Swahili, names of animals, some simple phrases, and she’d been teaching him American slang. It was hard to stay aloof, locked as she and Tom were for hours alone together in the Land Rover. He was charming, a good companion, easygoing and humorous, full of information. She had to keep reminding herself he was probably also a poacher, and certainly a killer.

  “What does it mean, stonewalling?”

  “Think about it. Or ask Campbell. He’s an expert at it.”

  Tom spun the wheel to avoid a large rock. The breeze changed direction, bringing a strong bovine smell from the great black stream of wildebeest thirty yards away, coming north from the Serengeti in Tanzania in search of grass.

  “Why did my brother and Campbell dislike each other?”

  “They liked each other—”

  “Oh, please! Campbell makes no secret of it. Why should you? Campbell told me Joel got out of the Land Rover to take pictures. I don’t believe that. I’d like to know why there was bad blood between them. What did Campbell do to him?”

  Tom glanced at her face, then leaned out the window. He signaled to Campbell, shouted a few words in Swahili. Campbell waved and went on. “I told him to go on, we’d be just a few minutes.”

  He eased the Land Rover into the shade of a baobab tree. Vervets scattered, disappearing into the intricate root system. Tom groped in his pocket for a cheroot, lit it.

  Suddenly the sun on her neck lost its warmth. Tom never smoked during the day.

  “Joel wasn’t an easy man to deal with,” Tom said. “He took too many risks.”

  She knew he was looking at her, waiting for her agreement, and she refused to meet his eyes. “What risks? You were searching for a hotel site. What’s the risk in that?”

  “Did you know your brother?” The expression on his face was difficult to read.

  “No one knew him as I did,” Cat said.

  “You are lucky, indeed.” Tom puffed on the cheroot. Blue smoke wreathed his head. “Then you know why he had to prove himself. All we knew was that he refused to listen. Refused to be warned. That he seemed to think it would be cowardly to show caution. He was foolhardy.”

  “So, that’s it? That’s why Campbell disliked him? Because he was difficult. I’m difficult—a lot of people are difficult. I know you’re a killer, Tom, but it doesn’t stop me from liking you.”

  For a moment he stared at her, his mouth slightly open, the cheroot motionless in his hand. Then he said, “If you knew your brother as well as you think, then perhaps you can tell me why he lost all control when Dan had to shoot a lioness.”

  Cat’s breath left her body. She couldn’t speak. Her eyes felt fixed on Tom’s face. Zuma Canyon. With their father in the Jeep.

  “And why,” Tom continued, “after that, Joel never let an opportunity pass to rub our faces in his anger. Sadistic savages. Barbarians. Digs about men who killed to prove their masculinity.”

  They were supposed to be shooting rabbits. Somehow they always managed to miss. Their father knew how much they hated it. He’d excused her—all she’d had to do was handle the small dead bodies, endure the feel of the blood her father rubbed on her face. Blooding her, he’d called it. They did it in England, he said, fox hunting. But not Joel. Joel was forced to handle a rifle. To make a man of him, their father said…

  “Why did he kill the lioness?” Cat demanded. “How could that be necessary? You’re not supposed to, Thomas told me—” She broke off.

  “He had to.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Tom! You’re supposed to be experts or something. What’s a good enough reason for killing a lioness? He’s a butcher, Tom.”

  Tom looked at the end of his cheroot. “Then you’re saying that I, too, am a butcher. And that may or may not be true, but it was not true that day. I’ll tell you what happened, but you’re not going to like it.” He looked at her, expecting an answer, but she kept her eyes on him without speaking, so he went on. “We’d come on a couple of lionesses dragging a kill, a zebra. Joel wanted pictures. Dan warned him they were dangerous, but he said he knew what he was doing. He got out of the Land Rover, and he got closer and closer.”

  The mountain lion was one of the few left in the Santa Monica Mountains. They saw it at the same moment; their eyes met, immediately agreeing without words not to speak. Their father was looking in the other direction. Then he’d turned, caught sight of it. He’d wheeled the Jeep, gunning the engine, trying to run i
t down. Two cubs ran from cover. Whooping and laughing, their father twisted and turned, trying to cut them off. He never stopped shouting and laughing. Making a game of their deaths. The mountain lion loped along, running just hard enough to allow her cubs to keep pace with her.

  “Joel refused to return to the Land Rover. He got to within a few feet of them, and his presence, the scent of him, forced them to drop their kill. Dan called to him to back up slowly. But he kept clicking away. Then they started toward him. Dan fired over their heads. One turned off, but the other kept coming.”

  The mountain lion stopped finally and turned, managing to keep her cubs behind her. Derek Stanton picked up the rifle. He shot her. Point-blank. In his excitement it was a messy shot. She screamed once, tried to keep on her feet, get at the Jeep before she collapsed.

  “The next shot killed her. There was no choice. And then Joel lost control. He threw himself at Dan. I went after him, and Moses. It took us both to drag him off. If he’d been armed, he’d have killed Dan. But finally we got him quieted. Then we found out why she wouldn’t stop. She was lactating—there must have been cubs close by. He went insane. Four men had difficulty holding him. He was truly a madman.”

  Their father pushed the rifle into Joel’s hands. “Get them! Get the cubs!” Their father was wild with excitement. Joel lifted the rifle. Cat watched his finger curl around the trigger, tighten. He glanced at her. The moment was suspended in time…Joel’s finger tightening on the trigger. Herself staring at his finger, then raising her eyes, looking straight into his. Their father grabbed for the rifle. “I’ll do it, you little coward. I can get them both.” And then Joel lowered the rifle until it aimed at their father’s chest and he pulled the trigger.

  Cat fumbled with the door of the Land Rover, wrenched it open, almost fell from the vehicle. She leaned against it, trying to get air into her lungs…