The Angels Weep

by Wilbur Smith

  ‘Hello, Grandpa.’ Craig climbed out of the Land-Rover, and the old man frowned to cover his pleasure.

  ‘How many times have I got to tell you, “Don’t call me that!” You want people to think I’m old?’ Jonathan Ballantyne was burned and dessicated by the sun to the consistency of biltong, the dark strips of dried venison that were such a Rhodesian delicacy.

  It seemed that if you were to cut him, dust and not blood would pour from the wound, but his eyes were still a brilliant twinkling green and his hair was a dense white shock that fell to his collar at the back of his neck. It was one of his many conceits. He shampooed it every day, and brushed it with a pair of silver-backed brushes that stood on the table beside his bed.

  ‘Sorry, Bawu.’ Craig reverted to his Matabele name, the Gadfly, and seized the old man’s hand. It was mere bone covered by cool dry skin, but the grip was startlingly strong.

  ‘So you got yourself fired again,’ Jonathan accused. Although his teeth were artificial, they were a neat fit, filling out the wizened cheeks, and he kept them so sparkling white as to match his hair and silvery moustache. Another of his conceits.

  ‘I resigned,’ Craig denied.

  ‘You got fired.’

  ‘It was close,’ Craig admitted. ‘But I beat them to it. I resigned.’

  Craig was not really surprised that Jonathan already knew of his latest misfortune. Nobody knew how old Jonathan Ballantyne was for certain, the outside estimate was a hundred years, though eighty-plus was Craig’s guess, but still nothing got by him.

  ‘You can give me a lift up to the house.’ Jonathan swung up easily onto the high passenger seat, and with relish began pointing out the additions to the defence of the homestead.

  ‘I have put in twenty more Claymores on the front lawn.’ Jonathan’s Claymore mines were ten kilos of plastic explosive packed inside a drum of scrap-iron suspended on a pipe tripod. He could fire them electrically from his bedroom.

  Jonathan was a chronic insomniac, and Craig had a bizarre mental picture of the old man spending every night sitting bolt upright in his nightshirt with his finger on the button praying for a terrorist to come within range. The war had added twenty years to his life. Jonathan hadn’t had such a good time since the first battle of the Somme, where he had won his MC one lovely autumn morning by grenading three German machine-gun nests in quick succession. Secretly Craig believed that the first thing any ZIPRA2 guerrilla recruit was taught when he began his basic training was to give King’s Lynn and the crazy old man who lived there the widest possible berth.

  As they drove up through the gates in the security fence and were surrounded by a mixed pack of fearsome Rottweilers and Dobermann pinschers, Jonathan explained the latest refinements to his battle plan.

  ‘If they come from behind the kopje, I’ll let them get into the minefield, then take them in enfilade—’

  He was still explaining and gesticulating as they climbed the steps to the wide veranda and he finished the briefing by adding darkly and mysteriously:

  ‘I have just invented a secret weapon, I’m going to test it tomorrow morning. You can watch.’

  ‘I’d enjoy that, Bawu,’ Craig thanked him doubtfully. The last tests that Jonathan had conducted had blown all the windows out of the kitchens and flesh-wounded the Matabele cook.

  Craig followed Jonathan down the wide shady veranda. The wall was hung with hunting trophies, the horns of buffalo and kudu and eland, and on each side of the double glass doors leading to the old dining-room, now the library, stood a pair of enormous elephant tusks, so long and curved that their tips almost met at the level of the ceiling above the doorway.

  As he went through the door, Jonathan absentmindedly stroked one of them. There was a spot on the thick yellow curve that had been polished shiny by the touch of his fingers over the decades.

  ‘Pour us each a gin, my boy,’ he ordered. Jonathan had stopped drinking whisky on the day that Harold Wilson’s government had imposed sanctions on Rhodesia. It was Jonathan’s single-handed retaliatory attempt at disrupting the economy of the British Isles.

  ‘By God, you’ve drowned it,’ he complained, as he tasted the concoction, and dutifully Craig took his glass back to the imbuia cocktail cabinet and stiffened the gin component.

  ‘That’s a little better.’ Jonathan settled himself behind his desk and placed the Stuart crystal tumbler in the centre of his leather and brass-bound blotter.

  ‘Now,’ he said. ‘Tell me what happened this time.’ And he fixed Craig with those bright green eyes.

  ‘Well, Bawu, it’s a long story. I don’t want to bore you.’ Craig sank down into the deep leather armchair and became intensely interested in the furnishings of the room which he had known since childhood. He read the titles on the spines of the morocco-bound books on the shelves, and studied the massed display of blue silk rosettes which the prize Afrikander bulls of King’s Lynn had won at every agricultural show south of the Zambezi river.

  ‘Shall I tell you what I heard? I heard you refused to obey the legitimate order of your superior, to wit the head game warden, and that thereafter you perpetrated a violence upon that worthy, or more specifically that you punched him in the head. Giving him the excuse to dismiss you for which he had probably been searching desperately since the first day you arrived in the Park.’

  ‘The reports are exaggerated.’

  ‘Don’t give me that little-boy grin of yours, young man. This is not a matter of levity,’ Jonathan told him sternly. ‘Did you refuse to partake in the elephant cull, or did you not?’

  ‘Have you ever been on a cull, Jon-Jon?’ Craig asked softly. He only used his grandfather’s pet name in moments of deep sincerity. ‘The spotter plane picks a likely herd, say fifty animals, and radio talks us onto them. We go in the last mile or so on foot at a dead run. We get in very close, ten paces, so we are shooting uphill. We use the 458s to cannon them. What we do is pick out the old queens of the herd, because the younger animals love and respect them so much that they won’t leave them. We hit the queens first, head shots, of course, that gives us plenty of time to work on the others. We are pretty good at it by now. We drop them so fast that the heaps have to be pulled apart by tractors afterwards. That leaves the calves. It’s interesting to watch a calf trying to lift its dead mother back onto her feet again with its tiny trunk.’

  ‘It has to be done, Craig,’ said Jonathan quietly. ‘The parks are overstocked by thousands of animals.’ But Craig seemed not to have heard.

  ‘If the orphan calves are too young to survive, we hit them also, but if they are the right age, we round them up and sell them to a nice old man who takes them away and resells them to a zoo in Tokyo or Amsterdam, where they will stand behind bars with a chain around the foot and eat the peanuts that the tourists throw them.’

  ‘It has to be done,’ Jonathan repeated.

  ‘He was taking kickbacks from the animal-dealers,’ Craig said. ‘So that we were ordered to leave orphans that were so young they only had a fifty-fifty chance of survival. So that we looked for herds with high percentages of small calves. He was taking bribes from the dealers.’

  ‘Who? Not Tomkins, the head warden?’ Jonathan exclaimed.

  ‘Yes, Tomkins.’ Craig stood up and took both their glasses to refill.

  ‘Have you got proof?’

  ‘No, of course I haven’t,’ Craig replied irritably. ‘If I had I would have taken it straight to the minister.’

  ‘So you just refused to cull.’

  Craig flopped back in the chair, long bare legs sprawled and hair hanging in his eyes.

  ‘That’s not all. They are stealing the ivory from the cull. We are supposed to leave the big bulls, but Tomkins ordered us to hit anything with good ivory, and the tusks disappear.’

  ‘No proof on that either, I suppose?’ Jonathan asked drily.

  ‘I saw the helicopter making the pick-up.’

  ‘And you got the registration letters?’

  ‘T
hey were masked,’ Craig shook his head, ‘but it was a military machine. It’s organized.’

  ‘So you punched Tomkins?’

  ‘It was beautiful,’ said Craig dreamily. ‘He was on his hands and knees trying to pick up his teeth that were scattered all over the floor of his office. I never worked out what he was going to do with them.’

  ‘Craig, my boy, what did you hope to achieve? Do you think it will stop them, even if your suspicions are correct?’

  ‘No, but it made me feel a lot better. Those elephant are almost human. I became pretty fond of them.’

  They were both silent for a while and then Jonathan sighed. ‘How many jobs is that now, Craig?’

  ‘I wasn’t keeping score, Bawu.’

  ‘I can’t believe that anybody with Ballantyne blood in his veins is totally lacking in either talent or ambition. Christ, boy, we Ballantynes are winners, look at Douglas, look at Roland—’

  ‘I’m a Mellow, only half a Ballantyne.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose that accounts for it. Your grandfather frittered away his share in the Harkness Mine, so when your father married my Jean he was almost a pauper. Good God, those shares would be worth ten million pounds today.’

  ‘That was during the great depression of the Thirties – a lot of people lost money then.’

  ‘We didn’t – the Ballantynes didn’t.’

  Craig shrugged. ‘No, the Ballantynes doubled up during the depression.’

  ‘We are winners,’ Jonathan repeated. ‘But what happens to you now? You know my rule, you don’t get a penny more from me.’

  ‘Yes, I know that rule, Jon-Jon.’

  ‘You want to try working here again? It didn’t pan out so well last time, did it?’

  ‘You are an impossible old bastard,’ said Craig fondly. ‘I love you, but I’d rather work for Idi Amin than for you again.’

  Jonathan looked immensely pleased with himself. His image of himself as tough, ruthless and ready to kill, was another of his conceits. He would have been deeply insulted if anybody had called him easy-going or generous. The large anonymous donations he made to every charity, deserving or otherwise, were always accompanied by blood-curdling threats to anybody revealing his identity.

  ‘So what are you going to do with yourself this time?’

  ‘Well, I was trained as an armourer when I did my national service, and there is an armourer’s berth open in the police. The way I see it, I’m going to be called up again anyway, so I might as well beat them to it and enlist.’

  ‘The police,’ Jonathan mused, ‘that does have the virtue of being one of the few things you haven’t tried yet. Get me another drink.’

  While Craig poured gin and tonic, Jonathan put on his fiercest expression to cover his embarrassment and growled, ‘Look here, boy, if you are really short, I’ll bend the rule this once, and lend you a few dollars to tide you over. Strictly a loan though.’

  ‘That’s very decent of you, Bawu, but a rule is a rule.’

  ‘I make ‘em, I break ‘em,’ Jonathan glared at him. ‘How much do you need?’

  ‘You know those old books you wanted?’ Craig murmured, as he put the old man’s glass back in front of him, and an expression of intense cunning came into Jonathan’s eyes which he tried in vain to conceal.

  ‘What books?’ His innocence was loaded.

  ‘Those old journals.’

  ‘Oh, those!’ And despite himself Jonathan glanced at the bookshelves beside his desk upon which were displayed his collection of family journals. They stretched back over a hundred years, from the arrival of his grandfather, Zouga Ballantyne, in Africa in 1860 up to the death of Jonathan’s father, Sir Ralph Ballantyne, in 1929, but the sequence was broken by a few missing years, three volumes which had come down on Craig’s side of the family, through old Harry Mellow, who had been Sir Ralph’s partner and dearest friend.

  For some perverse reason that Craig could not even understand himself, he had up until now resisted all the old man’s blandishments and attempts to get his hands on them. It was probably because they were the one small lever he had on Jonathan that he had held out since they had come into his possession on his twenty-first birthday, the only item of any value in the inheritance from his long-dead father.

  ‘Yes, those,’ Craig nodded. ‘I thought I might let you have them.’

  ‘You must be hard pressed.’ The old man tried not to let his glee shine through.

  ‘Even more than usual,’ Craig admitted.

  ‘You waste—’

  ‘Okay, Bawu. We’ve been down that road before,’ Craig stopped him hurriedly. ‘Do you want them?’

  ‘How much?’ Jonathan demanded suspiciously.

  ‘Last time you offered me a thousand each.’

  ‘I must have been soft.’

  ‘Since then there has been a hundred per cent inflation—’

  Jonathan loved to haggle. It enhanced his image of himself as hard and ruthless. Craig reckoned he was worth ten million. He owned King’s Lynn and four other ranches. He owned the Harkness Mine which after eighty years in production was still producing 50,000 ounces of gold a year, and he had assets outside this beleaguered country, prudently stashed away over the years in Johannesburg, London and New York. Ten million was probably conservative, Craig realized, and set himself to bargain as hard as the old man.

  At last they reached a figure with Jonathan grumbling, ‘They’re worth half of that.’

  ‘There are two other conditions, Bawu.’ And immediately Jonathan was suspicious again.

  ‘Number one, you leave them to me in your will, the whole set, Zouga Ballantyne’s and Sir Ralph’s journals, all of them.’

  ‘Roland and Douglas—’

  ‘They are going to get King’s Lynn and the Harkness and all the rest – that’s what you told me.’

  ‘Damn right,’ he growled. ‘They won’t blow it all out the window like you would.’

  ‘They can have it,’ Craig grinned easily. ‘They are Ballantynes as you say, but I want the journals.’

  ‘What is your second condition?’ Jonathan demanded.

  ‘I want access to them now.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I want to be able to read and study any of them whenever I want to.’

  ‘What the hell, Craig, you have never given a damn about them before. I doubt you have even read the three you own.’

  ‘I’ve glanced through them,’ Craig admitted shamefacedly.

  ‘And now?’

  ‘I was up at Khami Mission this morning, in the old cemetery. There is a grave there, Victoria Mellow—’

  Jonathan nodded. ‘Aunty Vicky, Harry’s wife, go on.’

  ‘I had this strange feeling as I was standing there. Almost as though she was calling to me.’ Craig plucked at the thick forelock over his eyes and could not look at his grandfather. ‘And suddenly I wanted to find out more about her, and the others.’

  They were both silent for a while, and then Jonathan nodded.

  ‘All right, my boy, I accept your conditions. Both sets will be yours one day, and until then you can read them whenever you wish to.’

  Jonathan had seldom been so pleased with a bargain. He had completed his sets after thirty years, and if the boy was serious about reading them, he had found a good home for them. The Lord knew, neither Douglas nor Roland was interested, and in the meantime perhaps the journals might draw Craig back to King’s Lynn more often. He wrote out the cheque and signed it with a flourish, while Craig went out to the Land-Rover and dug the three leather-bound manuscripts from the bottom of his kitbag.

  ‘I suppose you will spend it all on that boat,’ Jonathan accused as he came in from the veranda.

  ‘Some of it,’ Craig admitted. He placed the books in front of the old man.

  ‘You are a dreamer.’ Jonathan slid the cheque across the desk.

  ‘Sometimes I prefer dreams to reality.’ Craig scrutinized the figures briefly, then buttoned the pink cheque i
nto his top pocket.

  ‘That’s your trouble,’ said Jonathan.

  ‘Bawu, if you start lecturing me, I’m going to head straight back to town.’

  Jonathan held up both hands in capitulation. ‘All right,’ he chuckled. ‘Your old room is the way you left it, if you want to use it.’

  ‘I have an appointment with the police recruiting officer on Monday, but I’ll stay the weekend, if that’s okay?’

  ‘I’ll ring Trevor this evening and fix the interview.’

  Trevor Pennington was the assistant commissioner of police. Jonathan believed in starting at the top.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t, Jon-Jon.’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ Jonathan snapped. ‘You must learn to use every advantage, my boy, that’s the way life works.’

  Jonathan picked up the first of the three volumes of manuscript and gloatingly stroked it with his gnarled brown fingers.

  ‘Now, you can leave me alone for a while,’ he ordered, as he unfolded his wire-framed reading-glasses and perched them on his nose. ‘They are playing tennis across at Queen’s Lynn, I will see you back here for sundowners.’

  Craig glanced back from the doorway, but Jonathan Ballantyne was hunched over the book, transported by the entries in yellow faded ink back to his childhood.

  Although it shared a common seven-mile boundary with King’s Lynn, Queen’s Lynn was a separate ranch. Jonathan Ballantyne had added it to his holdings during the great depression of the 1930s, paying five cents on the dollar of its real worth. Now it formed the eastern spread of the Rholands Ranching Company.

  It was the home of Jonathan’s only surviving son, Douglas Ballantyne, and his wife Valerie. Douglas was the managing director of both Rholands and the Harkness Mine. He was also Minister of Agriculture in Ian Smith’s UDI government, and with any luck he might be away on mysterious government or company business.

  Douglas Ballantyne had once given Craig his honest appraisal. ‘At heart you are a bloody hippie, Craig, you should get your hair cut and start bracing up, you can’t go on dawdling through life and expecting Bawu and the rest of the family to carry you for ever.’