by Nell Brien
“Jambo, Miss Cat. Kawaha,” Thomas called.
“Jambo, Thomas.” She opened the door.
Thomas’s startled eyes took in the chaos of the tent, the riot of tangled blankets and scattered pillows. An empty Tusker bottle. Plastic glasses tipped on their sides. Laughter rippled silently through her as a blank, well-bred curtain fell over his face. Thomas placed the coffee on the camp table.
“You get big push from mad nyumbu, eh, Miss Cat? Maasai Spring fix you good, though.”
Cat thought she caught a glimpse of amusement in his black eyes, gone before she was sure. “Yes, it was a young bull, I think.” She kept her voice neutral. That was what the Maasai called their virile young warriors. Young bulls. “I tried to shoot it, but it got me instead. I’m fine now, though.”
“Ah,” Thomas said, nodding seriously.
Cat stepped outside into an unfamiliar landscape. Gone were the bright pools of water. Instead, the world was clothed in drifting, eerie wetness. The site was still phenomenal, but this kind of weather would be a handicap. She’d have to find out how often this happened. Please God, she thought, only in the rainy season and then only occasionally. She sipped coffee and looked around, waving to Moses and Olentwalla, dim figures wreathed in mist. Sambeke was nowhere to be seen. Neither was Campbell. She glanced at the sketches in her hand.
“Where’s Campbell?”
“He gone, Miss Cat. Gone to Nairobi.”
Cat was not sure whether the thunder was in her head or rolling across the country. The coffee cup tilted and the hot liquid splashed on her bare feet.
“Nairobi? When?”
Thomas took the tilting cup from her fingers and turned to refill it. Rain sputtered against the canvas sheet above their heads.
“He leave soon as he hear. Early. We come at five, tell him message on radio from Bwana Jock. He gone in quarter hour.”
Cat waited for an explanation, wanting to shake him as he clattered with dried milk and sugar. “Why did he go to Nairobi?”
“Miss Morag gone.”
Pain opened like a chasm in her chest. “Jock Campbell called you on the shortwave?”
“Say boss not answer his radio call. He call us, say drive like hell, tell boss Miss Morag gone.”
Thomas fiddled with the coffeepot, checked its contents. Every word he said was acid dripped into her heart.
“He try raise Bwana Jock when we get here, but now our radio flooded. He swear big, the boss. Swahili. Maa. Kiingereza.” Thomas shook his head in admiration.
She remembered the portrait over the fireplace in Nairobi, the snapshots stuck in the frames of old pictures in Campbell’s office, the young woman storming out of the house. “Did he leave a message for me?”
“He call you on radio.”
“That’s all?”
“No one talk much. Keep head down, Miss Cat. Talk soft. Bwana Dan bad when he get angry like that. No one talk.”
How could he have gone without a word? She looked at the sketches still clutched in her hand, glad she hadn’t shown them to him.
“Well, you’d better take it easy today, Thomas. You must be tired after driving all night.” She was pleased to hear that her tone was easy. Nothing wrong here, Thomas, old buddy. “Bwana Tom should be back in a couple of days. He took some women to their village.”
“We stay close with you until he get here.”
Cat put the coffee down and turned to enter the tent. Her stomach writhed with disgust. The place reeked of stale sex and spilled beer and looked like the scene of a debauch.
“Get this place cleaned up, please, Thomas. If you brought the rest of the gear with you, put some furniture in place.”
He had entered the tent behind her and picked up the empty Tusker bottle and the plastic glasses.
“You eat breakfast, Miss Cat, and this all be neat and set up.”
“Keep something for me. I’m going to soak in one of the pools first.”
As she walked into the mist, she stumbled over tussocks of dried grass where she remembered only a soft green smoothness underfoot. Nothing was as it seemed. Exactly what Joel had said. Color had been drained from the landscape, everything now was in shades of gray.
Campbell’s guard had been down, and she’d missed an opportunity that would never come again because she had wanted the time with him for herself, to feel there was no one in the world but the two of them. She had never asked about Joel’s death.
Astringent water bubbled against her skin, heat seemed to melt her flesh. The truth was Morag had done her a favor—given her the chance to step back and reclaim herself. Unlike her mother who had surrendered herself body and soul. She and Joel had never had anyone to stand between them and the harsh reality of life—and never needed it. Illusion was dangerous.
But in the light of a dreary morning, the passion of the night before had left her defenseless, and pain was bleeding through the membrane between past and present. Her mother slipped into her mind only in dreams, but suddenly she couldn’t escape the sun-filled kitchen in Malibu, the sound of the Pacific Ocean sparkling outside the window, her own young accusatory voice breaking the unwritten rule of silence.
“You never even try to protect us. We’re pawns in some terrible game he plays with you, and you let him torture us.”
“How can you say that?” Karen Stanton said. “What does he do to you that’s so bad? He just wants you to grow up strong. He’s your father. He loves you. Children need their father—”
“We tried to kill him when we were ten. Didn’t that tell you anything?”
“You did no such thing! That’s a terrible thing to say! It was an accident—”
“It wasn’t an accident, Mother. You know that, you’ve always known it. We tried to kill him. And he knows it, too, and that’s when he started on Joel, calling him a little sissy-boy, the little homo because he wouldn’t kill those poor cubs. All those jokes about me being weak. Don’t you care what he does to us?”
“They’re just his jokes—”
“They are not jokes,” Cat shouted.
“What do you want me to do? He’s your father—”
“God, you’re pathetic. He’s destroyed you and you’ve helped him do it. Bit by bit. Year by year. You were a real person once. You had a career, you taught history. You could leave him, go back to it. Other women have.”
“Why would I leave him? He loves me, and I love him. More than—” Karen Stanton stopped.
“Go on, Mother. More than me and Joel. Is that what you were going to say? We don’t even exist for you, do we? We never have.”
Her mother turned to look out of the kitchen window at the pelicans diving for fish just beyond the breaking surf.
“As long as he keeps fucking you, that’s all you care about, isn’t that right, Mother? It doesn’t matter how he treats your children.” Cat felt incandescent with rage. “Nothing matters, as long as he keeps fucking you—”
Cat felt again the pain of her mother’s hand striking her face, first one cheek then the other, the rain of fists on her shoulders and chest.
Cat’s face was wet, not only from the moisture-laden air. Her breath caught in her chest, then sobs wrenched her body. She pressed the heels of her hands hard into her eyes to blot out the image of her mother’s poor drained body, the slashed wrists, the photographs of Derek Stanton in bed with different women floating on top of the water like poisonous flowers. She and Joel guessed their father had sent them to her himself, another knife turned in their mother’s heart. She’d left a note thinking he would find her body. The ultimate move in their terrible game. Instead, it was Cat who’d come home to try to patch up their quarrel.
It wasn’t her fault, she knew that. It wasn’t her fault. But sometimes…
“Goddammit,” she said aloud. “Goddammit.” She hated crying, hated being out of control. Hated being sodden with self-pity. Hated being weak. But she couldn’t stop it. She wept like an abandoned child. The sobs deepened, reaching into th
e well of grief she had kept contained for so long it had neither name nor form. Grief for the lost woman whose desperate need for love at any cost had ultimately destroyed her. For the children they had been. For Joel, who had never been free of his father’s shadow. For herself, a tough little girl who had survived yet had still to find her own way out of that same shadow.
The sobs slowed. Cat splashed her eyes. Her fear had been that if she ever started, she would cry forever—she hadn’t even been able to cry for Joel. But it was over now. It would not be repeated.
She hauled herself out of the pool, slipped on her robe and made her way over the tussocks without stumbling.
The mist turned to drizzle. Sambeke appeared and for the next several hours, the three heavily armed Maasai kept up separate patrols, appearing through the rain every thirty or forty minutes, then, just as mysteriously, vanishing. Cat spent the morning walking the site, making notes about the terrain, with Thomas dogging her every footstep. She kept Joel’s sketches in her hand, compared them to a distant escarpment, but the mist made it difficult to be sure of what she was seeing.
“Thomas, I’d like to get a bit farther afield.”
Thomas shook his head. “You wait. Bwana Tom here soon.”
“I don’t think so, Thomas. He’s going to be a couple of days at least. I think we could just try that escarpment up there. The views must be sensational.”
Thomas shook his head, turned to look out at the wet landscape, making it clear that he did not intend to answer questions.
As the day wore on, the drizzle stopped. Emerging from the mess tent after lunch, Cat checked the location of the men—Thomas at the kitchen fire, smoking and drinking tea, Sambeke and Olentwalla hunkered down beside him, still eating. Moses was somewhere out of sight—she’d have to take a chance on him.
Casually, she made her way to the lone Land Rover, slid behind the wheel and turned the key. The noise was deafening in the silence. Thomas appeared in the rearview mirror, Uzi in one hand, alarm written clear on his face. Olentwalla and Sambeke, similarly armed, were hard on his heels. Moses came into view from behind the towering cluster of gray rock.
“Back in an hour, guys,” she yelled. “Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”
Quickly she slipped the clutch into gear, and pressed a foot on the gas. The mist had lifted, and the ridge of the escarpment was now clearly visible.
The Land Rover skidded through pockets of mud, jounced heavily over half-exposed rock. Just being free of watching eyes was a relief. Since leaving Nairobi, she hadn’t made a single move without being told what to do, when to do it. She had felt like a prisoner in the middle of nowhere.
The escarpment was much farther away than it appeared, and it was well over an hour before she reached it. At the approach to the cliff, she hit a game trail. Each time it branched, she took the fork to the right, closer to the hills. When she returned, it would be simple to reverse the process—getting lost in the African bush was not part of her plan. At least she had nothing to fear from the mysterious Reitholder.
Brush was now scraping against the sides of the Land Rover. The path wound gently uphill, then switchbacked. She made the turn, then another. The path became a series of tighter and tighter switchbacks, the gradient steeper. She stopped and looked behind. The back wheels of the Land Rover were dangerously close to the edge. The drop was dizzying. There was no way to make a turn, impossible to reverse back down the trail. She was locked into going on.
The grind of the engine seemed lost in the great silence. No birds swooped across the sky, no animals darted from the underbrush causing her to brake, not even the ever-present vervets.
The higher she climbed, the more breathtaking the view over the plains. The sun had broken through, throwing distinct paths of light across the golden grassland, picking out the striped backs of zebra among the black bodies of migrating wildebeest and the soft brown counterpoint of impala. Far below, the pools of Maasai Springs sparkled like jewels—green, turquoise, blue, set among silvery towering rocks.
Cat halted on the next switchback, picked up the folder of Joel’s sketches from the seat beside her. She checked the terrain against the drawing in her hand.
He had been here.
Her brother had seen what she was seeing now. But for some reason, he’d left out the identifying pools and rocks of Maasai Springs on the plains below—almost as if he didn’t want anyone to know exactly where he was.
For a moment she listened to the silence, and she was suddenly aware of how alone she was. Gently she let in the clutch.
Ten minutes of rough driving later, the game trail switch-backed again, then funneled into a giant bowl. A hundred yards across, she calculated. Three hundred from end to end. The size of two football fields. Cat brought the Land Rover to a halt. Nothing stirred. White birds skittered across the packed earth, as if blown by the wind. Then, incredibly, the white birds morphed into scraps of paper. Up here, as far from human habitation as she had ever been, scraps of paper lifted into the breeze, settled, lifted again to dance across the packed earth.
Packed earth. The huge flat area was an anomaly, carved out of the brush surrounding it. Deliberately cleared and flattened.
Cat kept her eyes on the scene in front of her and leaned over to feel beneath the dash—all of the safari Land Rovers had a specially built compartment tucked away, fitted to hold binoculars and a pistol. She found the catch and pressed it. The compartment sprang open at her touch. She took the pistol, placed it on the seat next to her, then reached for the binoculars. She raised them to her eyes, swept the glasses over the enclosing brush, went back and focused steadily on the far end.
What had appeared to the naked eye to be brush now became mud colored walls, roofs of thatch.
Cat put the binoculars on the seat with the pistol, let in the clutch and drove slowly around the perimeter. The ground was dry and hard, baked in the sun, as if the storm had never passed this way—quite possible, the way she had seen the storm system move. As she got closer, the small thatched huts became clearer, and behind them, against the hillside, was a larger building.
It looked as if she had come across an abandoned village, larger than she had first thought, with rows of houses built around some kind of community center, or communal kitchen.
But why had Joel sent her sketches of the surrounding country, and not a single drawing of the place itself? And what use would a village have for such an enormous piece of open ground? A place for dancing? She shook her head. This was not the National Geographic. There had been nothing of that sort in the engang, no “meeting hall,” no “dancing ground.” Certainly nothing this large. A small army could be paraded here.
She drove closer to the group of huts. Out of the corner of her eye she caught a flash of movement and her heart stopped, then raced. She was not alone. And whoever shared the village with her did not want to be seen.
Twenty-Four
Cat eased her foot off the gas, made sure the pistol was on the seat beside her, then turned, lifting an AK-47 from the gun rack behind her, and held it across her lap. Slowly, she drove closer to the cluster of round thatched huts, then allowed the Land Rover to coast to a stop in front of the large building, although with a closer view she could see it was merely four large posts supporting a shaggy thatched roof.
Engine idling, foot ready to jam, she studied the rows of huts. Nothing moved in the silence, but she felt the pressure of eyes on her. She slipped off the AK’s safety. Warily, she got out of the Land Rover, alert for the slightest movement among the huts. She moved to the hut nearest, bent to look inside.
Light streamed through cracks in walls woven from branches and leaves. The hut was empty.
Sound erupted behind her—someone moving on the other side of the meeting hall. She whirled around but saw nothing.
“I’m armed,” she shouted. Her voice was shaky. “Come on out.” She started to walk toward the sound. This was crazy, she thought. She was crazy. Joel wouldn’t e
xpect her to hang around here. Even he wouldn’t be this stupid—
Suddenly, she was surrounded by noise. Heavy bodies crashed from dwellings all around her. She brought up the AK. Before she could fire, a large brown baboon burst from the hut to her right. The animal leaped by her, and she caught a glimpse of the wide eyes of the baby clinging to its back. Then the troop was gone, the sound fading as they disappeared into the brush on the hillside.
Cat withdrew her finger from the trigger, took several noisy panting breaths. She’d damn near killed a mother baboon and her child! Shakily, she went back to the Land Rover, took a moment to lean against it, waiting for her heartbeat to return to normal. Then she ducked under the overhanging thatch of the meeting hall. Papers littered a long rough trestle table left in place at the far end. Holding the AK across her chest, she walked cautiously to the table, picked up what looked like a page out of a book.
It was covered in what appeared to be Chinese lettering. Puzzled, she turned it over. On the other side was a drawing of a gun with arrows pointing to different parts and more Chinese lettering.
She was looking at instructions on how to field-strip a semiautomatic weapon. She picked up another page. The drawing was the same. These instructions were in Swahili.
Joel had found this place. And he had died because of it.
Her breath caught in her chest—she could hardly hear over the pounding of her heart. Nothing was what it seems, he’d said in his note. Will call you. Then he’d been killed. By buffalo, they said.
She had to get away from here, Cat thought. Weapon in hand, she ran to the Land Rover, remembering to slip the safety back on the AK before she put it on the seat beside the pistol. The engine roared to life. Her foot was pressed so heavily on the gas the vehicle lurched forward, skidded as she swerved to avoid a clump of thatch knocked from one of the huts by the fleeing baboons. Somehow she managed to catch at her panic, and she eased up on the accelerator. An accident up here would be disastrous.