Vicious Circle

by Wilbur Smith

  *

  Mario, the restaurant manager, was waiting at the entrance to greet them, beaming with pleasure. ‘Welcome, Mr and Mrs Cross, but it’s been far too long.’

  ‘Nonsense, Mario,’ Hector contradicted him. ‘We were here ten days ago with Lord Renwick.’

  ‘That’s far too long ago, sir,’ Mario protested and led them to their favourite table.

  The room went silent as they passed down it. All eyes followed them. Everybody knew who they were. Even in advanced pregnancy Hazel looked magnificent. The gossamer skirt billowed around her like a rose-coloured cloud, and the handbag she carried was one of those crocodile-skin creations which made every other woman in the room consider suicide.

  Mario seated her and murmured, ‘May I presume that it will be the grapefruit salad for madame, followed by the grilled St Jacques? And for you, Mr Cross, the steak tartare, followed by the lobster with Chardonnay sauce?’

  ‘As usual, Mario,’ Hector agreed seriously. ‘To drink, Mrs Cross will have a small bottle of Perrier water with a bucket of ice. Please fetch a bottle of the Vosne-Romanée Aux Malconsorts 1993 from my personal wine keep for me.’

  ‘I have already taken the liberty of doing so, Mr Cross. Fifteen minutes ago I checked that the temperature of the bottle is sixteen degrees centigrade. Shall I have the sommelier open it?’

  ‘Thank you, Mario. I know I can always rely on you.’

  ‘We try our best to please, sir.’

  As the manager left them Hazel leaned across and placed her hand on Hector’s forearm. ‘I do so love your little rituals, Mr Cross. Somehow I find them very comforting.’ She smiled. ‘Cayla also used to find them amusing. Do you remember how we laughed when she imitated you?’

  ‘Like mother, like daughter.’ Hector smiled at her.

  There had been a period when Hazel had not been able to say the name ‘Cayla’ out loud. That had been from the time of her daughter’s brutal slaying and the mutilation of her corpse by her killers until she had discovered that she was pregnant with Hector’s child. That had been a catharsis and she had wept in his arms and blurted out the name. ‘Cayla! It’s going to be another little Cayla,’ she’d sobbed. After that the wounds had healed swiftly until she could talk about Cayla easily and often.

  She wanted to talk now and when the sommelier had brought her Perrier water she sipped it and asked, ‘Do you suppose Catherine Cayla Cross will have blonde hair and blue eyes like her big sister did?’ She had already chosen the new infant’s name as a tribute to her dead first child.

  ‘He will probably have black stubble on his chin like his father,’ Hector teased her. He also had loved the murdered girl. Cayla had been the magnet that had first brought them together against all the odds. Hector had been head of security at Bannock Oil when Hazel had inherited control of the company from her late husband.

  From the start Hazel had detested Hector, despite the fact that he had been appointed by her own beloved deceased husband. She knew Hector’s record and reputation intimately and was repelled by the hard and sometimes brutal tactics he used to defend the company assets and personnel from any threat. He was a soldier and he fought like one. He showed no mercy. He flew in the face of all Hazel’s gentler female instincts. At their very first meeting she warned him that she was looking for the slightest excuse to fire him.

  Then Hazel’s cosseted and privileged existence was plunged into chaos. The daughter who was the cornerstone of her solitary existence was kidnapped by African pirates. Hazel exerted all her vast fortune and her influence in high places to try to rescue her. No one could help her, not even the President of the United States of America with all his power. They could not even discover where her Cayla was being held. At her wits’ end, she had cast aside her pride and gone back to the cruel, brutal and merciless soldier she so hated and despised: Hector Cross.

  Hector had tracked down the kidnappers to their den in the fastness of the African deserts where Cayla was being held. She was being brutally tortured by her captors. Hector had gone in with his men and brought Cayla back to safety. In the process he had demonstrated to Hazel that he was a thoroughly decent person of high principles; somebody that she could trust without reserve. She had given in to the attraction she had so carefully suppressed at their first meeting and once she had got closer to him she discovered that under his armour-plated exterior he could be warm and gentle and loving.

  She looked at him now and she reached across the table to take his hand. ‘With you beside me and baby Catherine Cayla inside me, everything is perfect again.’

  ‘It will be like this for ever,’ he assured her and another tiny frisson of dread ran up his spine as he realized he was tempting the fates. Though he smiled tenderly at her, he was brooding on how the rescue of Cayla had not been the end of the affair either. The fanatics who had seized her had not given up. Their hired thugs had come back and murdered Cayla and sent her decapitated head to Hazel. Hector and Hazel had been forced to re-enter the fray and finally eradicate the monster who had ruined their lives.

  Perhaps this time it is really over, he thought as he watched Hazel’s face. She went on talking about Cayla.

  ‘Do you remember how you taught her to fish?’

  ‘She was a natural. With just a little coaching she could cast a salmon fly at least a hundred and fifty feet in most wind conditions and she instinctively knew how to read the waters.’

  ‘What about the big salmon the two of you landed in Norway?’

  ‘It was a monster. I was hanging on to her belt, and it almost pulled us both into the river.’ He chuckled.

  ‘I’ll never forget the day she announced that she was not going to be an art dealer, the career I had planned for her, but that she had decided to become a veterinary surgeon. I nearly had a blue fit!’

  ‘That was very naughty of her.’ Hector pronounced judgement with a stern expression.

  ‘Naughty? You were the naughty one. You backed her up all the way. The two of you talked me right into it.’

  ‘Tut. Tut. She was such a bad influence on me,’ Hector admitted.

  ‘She loved you. You know that. She really loved you like her own father.’

  ‘That’s one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me.’

  ‘You are a good man, Hector Cross.’ Tears welled up in her eyes. ‘Catherine Cayla is going to love you also. All three of your girls love you.’ She gasped suddenly and clutched her stomach. ‘Oh my God! She gave me a mule kick. She obviously agrees with what I just said.’ They both burst out laughing so that the guests at the other tables looked around at them, smiling in sympathy. However, they might just as well have been alone in the room. They were totally engrossed by each other.

  They had so much to remember and discuss. Both of them had filled their lives with strivings and endeavour. They had both experienced soaring triumphs and shattering disasters, but Hazel’s career had been by far the more spectacular. She had started out with little more than guts and determination. At the age of nineteen she had won her first Grand Slam tournament on the professional tennis tour. At twenty-one she had married the oil tycoon Henry Bannock and borne him a daughter. Henry had died when Hazel was almost thirty years old and left control of the Bannock Oil conglomerate to her.

  The world of big business is an exclusive domain. Intruders and upstarts are not welcome there. Nobody wanted to bet on a sometime tennis-player-cum-society-glamour-girl-turned-oil-baroness. However none of them had taken into account Hazel’s innate business acumen, nor the years of her tutelage under Henry Bannock, which were worth a hundred MBA degrees. Like the crowds at the Roman circus, her detractors and critics waited in grisly anticipation for her to be devoured by the lions. Then, to the chagrin of all, she brought in the Zara No. 8.

  Hector remembered vividly how Forbes magazine had blazoned on its front cover the image of Hazel in her white tennis kit, holding a racquet in her right hand. The headline above the photograph read ‘Hazel Bannock aces t
he opposition. Richest oil strike in thirty years.’

  The story described how in the bleak hinterland of the godforsaken and impoverished little emirate named Abu Zara lay an oil concession once owned by the Shell Oil Company. In the period directly after World War II, Shell had pumped the reservoir dry and abandoned the exhausted concession. Since then it had lain forgotten.

  Then Hazel had picked it up for a few paltry millions of dollars and the pundits nudged each other and smirked. Ignoring the protests of her advisors, she spent many millions more in sinking a rotary cone drill into a tiny subterranean anomaly at the northern extremity of the field; an anomaly which with the more primitive exploration techniques of thirty years previously had been reckoned to be an ancillary of the main reservoir. The geologists of that time had agreed that any oil contained in this area had long ago drained into the main reservoir and been pumped to the surface, leaving the entire field dry and worthless.

  However, when Hazel’s drilling team pierced the impervious salt dome of the diapir, a vast subterranean chamber in which the principal oil deposits had been trapped, the gas overpressure roared up through the drill hole with such force that it ejected almost eight kilometres of steel drill string like toothpaste from the tube, and the hole blew out. High-grade crude oil spurted hundreds of feet into the air. At last it became evident that the old Zara 1 to 7 fields which Shell had abandoned were only a fraction of the total reserves.

  Recalling all this seemed to draw them closer to each other over the lunch table, fascinated by the reminiscences they had repeated many times before but in which they still discovered things totally new and intriguing. At one point Hector shook his head in admiration. ‘My God, woman! Have you never been daunted by anything or anybody in your life? You have done it all on your own, and you have done it the hard way.’

  She slanted her startling eyes at him and smiled. ‘Don’t you see, life was never meant to be easy; if it was, we would place no real value on it. Now that’s enough about me. Let’s talk about you.’

  ‘You already know everything there is to know about me. I have told you fifty times over.’

  ‘Okay, let’s make it fifty-one. Tell me about the day on which you took your lion. I want all the details again. Take care. I will know if you leave anything out.’

  ‘Very well, here I go. I was born in Kenya, but my dad and mum were both Brits, so I am a genuine British citizen.’ He paused.

  ‘Their names were Bob and Sheila…’ she prompted him.

  ‘Their names were Bob and Sheila Cross. My father had almost twenty-five thousand hectares of prime grazing land abutting the Maasai tribal reservation. On this he was running over two thousand head of prize Brahman cattle. So my boyhood companions were mostly Maasai boys of my own age.’

  ‘And your little brother, of course,’ said Hazel.

  ‘Yes, my little brother, Teddy. He wanted to be a rancher, like our father. He would do anything to please the old man. On the other hand, I wanted to be a warrior like my uncle who had died in the war fighting Rommel at El Alamein in the North African desert. The day my father sent me to the Duke of York School for boys in Nairobi was the most devastating experience of my life to that date.’

  ‘You hated it, didn’t you?’

  ‘I hated the rules and the restraint. I was accustomed to running wild and free,’ he said.

  ‘You were a rebel.’

  ‘My father said I was a rebel and a bloody savage. But he said it with a smile. Nevertheless, I was third from top of my class and captain of the first fifteen rugby team in my final year at the Duke. That was good enough for me. That was when I was sixteen years of age.’

  ‘The year of your lion!’ She leaned forward across the table and took his hand, her eyes shining with anticipation. ‘I love this part. The first part is a little tame. Not enough blood and guts, you know.’

  ‘My Maasai companions were coming of age. So I went to the village and spoke to the chief. I told him I wanted to become a Morani with them. A warrior.’

  She nodded.

  ‘The chief listened to everything I asked for. Then he said that I was not a true Maasai because I had not been circumcised. He asked if I wanted to be cut by the witch doctor. I thought about it and then declined the offer.’

  ‘And a good job too,’ Hazel said. ‘I prefer your whistle the way that God originally designed it.’

  ‘What a kind thing to say. But to return to the story of my life; I discussed this rejection with my companions, and they were almost as distressed by it as I was. We argued about it for days and in the end they agreed that if I could not become a true Morani, at least I could take my lion, then I would be more than halfway a Morani.’

  ‘But there was just one little problem, wasn’t there?’ she reminded him.

  ‘The problem was that the Kenyan government, in which the Maasai tribe was poorly represented, had banned the lion ceremony of manhood. Lions were now strictly protected throughout the entire territory.’

  ‘But then came some divine intervention,’ she said, and he grinned at her.

  ‘Straight from heaven!’ he agreed. ‘In the Masai Mara National Park, which adjoined the tribal lands, an old lion was driven out of his pride by a younger and stronger rival. Without his lionesses to drive the hunt he was forced to leave the protection of the park, and to seek easier prey than zebra and wildebeest. Firstly, he started on the Maasai cattle herds, which were the tribal store of wealth. This was bad enough, but then he killed a young woman as she came down to the waterhole to draw water for her family.

  ‘Much to the joy and feverish excitement of my friends the Maasai, the Government Game Department was forced to issue a licence to eradicate the old rogue. Because of the links that I had forged with the tribe over the years, and because I was big and strong for my age and the elders knew just how hard I had trained with the fighting sticks and the war spear, they invited me to join the hunt with the other young Morani candidates.’

  Hector paused as the sommelier added half an inch of red wine to his glass and then topped up the Perrier water in Hazel’s. Hector murmured his thanks and then wet his lips with the Burgundy before he continued.

  ‘The lion had not killed and eaten for almost a week and we all waited in an agony of suspense for his hunger to force him to kill again. Then on the sixth evening, as the light was fading, two little naked herdboys came racing back to the village with the glad tidings. As they were bringing the herd down to the waterhole the lion had waylaid them. He had been lying in ambush in the thick grass on the downwind side of the path, and he charged out at the herd from a range of only ten paces or so. Before the cattle had time to scatter he had leapt onto the back of a five-year-old cow that was heavy with calf. He sank his fangs into the base of her neck while he reached around with one great paw and sank his long yellow claws into her snout. Then he heaved back with all the massive strength of his forearm against the lock he had on the cow’s neck. The neck vertebrae parted with a crack, killing her instantly. She went down nose first as her forelegs collapsed and she somersaulted in a cloud of dust. The lion jumped clear before he was crushed by her fifteen hundred pounds of dead weight.’

  ‘I still can’t believe he was strong enough to kill a huge animal so easily,’ Hazel said in awed tones.

  ‘Not only that, but he was able to lift her in his jaws and carry her into the grass, holding her so high that only her hooves dragged in the dust.’

  ‘Go on!’ she urged him. ‘Don’t mind my silly questions. Get on with the story!’

  ‘Well, it was already dark, so we had to wait for the dawn. None of us slept much that night. We sat around the fires and the older men told us gleefully what to expect when we walked up to the old lion on his kill. There was not much laughter from any of us, and our chatter was subdued. It was still dark when we dressed in our black goatskin cloaks against the chill of dawn. We were naked under the cloaks. We armed ourselves with our rawhide shields and our short stabbing spears
, which we had sharpened so that we were able to shave the hair off our forearms with the bright edge. There were thirty-two of us, a band of brothers. We went singing in the dawn to meet our lion.’

  ‘You’d think that would have warned the lion and driven him away,’ said Hazel.

  ‘It would have taken much more than that to drive a lion off his kill,’ Hector told her. ‘We sang a challenge to him. We called him to battle. And of course, we bolstered our own courage. We sang and we danced to warm our blood. We stabbed at the air with our spears to loosen the muscles of our arms. The young unmarried girls followed us at a distance to see who would stand to the lion and who would break and run when he came in all his noble might to answer our challenge.’

  Hazel had heard the story a dozen times already, but she watched his face so raptly that it might have been the very first telling of it.

  ‘The sun came up and showed its upper rim above the horizon directly in front of us, bright as molten metal from the furnace. It shone into our faces to dazzle us. However, we knew where we would find our lion. We saw the tops of the grass move where there was no wind, and then we heard him growl. It was a terrible sound that struck into our hearts and into our bowels. Our legs turned to water and each dancing pace was a conscious effort as we went forward to meet him.

  ‘Then the lion stood up from where he had lain flat behind the carcass of the heifer. His mane was fully erect. It formed a majestic corona around his head. It burned with a golden light, for he was vividly backlit by the sun. It seemed to double his bulk. He roared. It was a gale of sound that swept over us and our own voices faltered for a moment. Then we rallied and shouted back at him, calling on him to pick his man and come against him. The flanks of our line started to curl in around him, surrounding him and leaving him no escape route. He swung his head slowly from side to side, surveying us as we closed in.’