Vicious Circle

by Wilbur Smith

  Then she was shot and her body left beside the track as an example and a warning to those who followed. The road to Kazundu through the forested hills soon became clearly defined not only by the passage of thousands of feet but also by the stench of the decaying corpses that lined the verges.

  Very soon the first full load of coltan ore was ready for the Antonov Condor to carry to Hong Kong. On the return journey the Condor was ordered to stop over in Thailand to refuel and take on board a number of young Thai prostitutes, both male and female. Both Johnny and Carl found the Thai faces and petite bodies particularly pleasing. Johnny and Carl were particularly enamoured of the Thai ladyboys who pandered so perfectly to Johnny and Carl’s penchant for either or both sexes.

  Johnny and Carl had assiduously shunned physical contact with the local Kazundians, who were, in contrast to the carefully screened Thai prostitutes, walking skeletons riddled with venereal disease.

  After the first two years of King John’s rule, when the profits of the trade in the conflict minerals and Carl’s financial genius were reluctantly quadrupled by the trustees of the Henry Bannock Family Trust, Carl and Johnny turned their combined energies and vast fortune to transforming the castle on the hilltop from a pestilential ruin into a bright jewel mounted in the stupendous setting of lake, mountains and verdant jungle.

  Over the next four years they flew in architects, landscape designers, hydro-engineers, master builders and others with specialized skills to help them to realize this vision. They shipped in high-quality building materials across the lake. They collected rare and beautiful artefacts, various types of exotic timber, paintings, silks and ceramics and other works of art and decorations from around the globe. They pumped up the lake waters to irrigate their hanging gardens on the hilltop, and to flow through subterranean caverns and pools, and then to tumble down artfully contrived cascades and waterfalls back into the mighty lake from which they had arisen.

  To assist them in the realization of this masterpiece Carl Bannock selected the celebrated award-winning American architect Andrew Moorcroft of Moorcroft and Haye, who had designed the mansion on Forest Drive that Henry Bannock built for his family.

  It gave Carl malignant pleasure to employ the man originally selected by his adoptive father and benefactor who he had destroyed, and whose family he had decimated.

  *

  Carl had carefully transferred to DVD several copies of the documentary movie that he had commissioned Amaranthus, the Mexican pornographic film maker, to shoot for him. Carl and Johnny never tired of watching it. Every few weeks they would sit entranced for a whole evening running and re-running the video. They always laughed delightedly at Bryoni’s final struggles in the mud and filth of the hog pen with the great black boar Hannibal.

  Then at the end they joined in unison to mimic her death cry to her father; the cry that had killed Henry Bannock.

  ‘Daddy!’

  It was Johnny who made the momentous suggestion. ‘Why don’t we build our own death pen?’

  Carl seized upon the idea with glee. ‘Blackbird, you are a genius. It’s a brilliant idea. We could have our own live show whenever we wanted it.’

  ‘It would also be great for the discipline around here. Anybody who pisses us off, we just feed him to the pigs and make the others watch it.’ Johnny expanded the proposal, and Carl giggled like a teenage girl and hugged himself at the thought.

  ‘We could build an amphitheatre like the Colosseum in Rome; you know, where the ancient Roman emperors made the gladiators fight each other to the death and where they fed beautiful women to the lions and good stuff like that.’

  ‘I never heard about these guys before, but I like what you tell me about them. They must be real hectic dudes. We should go and see them sometime.’

  ‘We’re about two thousand years too late for that,’ Carl told him. ‘But we are just as cool as any spic with a bunch of leaves on his head. Like the man said, we can have anything we want because we are mega rich and super cool.’

  ‘You think pigs are that super cool, white boy?’ Johnny scoffed. ‘Surely we can do better than a bunch of pigs. How about a few lions, man? This is Africa, for Chrissake! Lions are cooler than pigs any day of the week.’

  Carl thought about the suggestion for a moment and his expression sobered. ‘I don’t like lions.’ He shook his head. ‘They are dangerous, man.’

  ‘What’s so dangerous about a bunch of lions in a cage?’ Johnny demanded.

  ‘They run faster than pigs, if they escape from their cage. What if one got out of the cage? What about that, man? I don’t want to be there when that happens.’

  ‘Okay, what runs slow but eats people,’ Johnny pondered his own question.

  ‘How fast does a crocodile run, Johnny? Do you have any idea?’

  ‘I seen pictures of them crocodiles, man. They got short legs. I guess they don’t run so fast as no lions.’

  ‘Where would we get a couple of big man-eating crocodiles, Johnny?’

  ‘If you turn your head real slow and look behind you, man, you’ll see the biggest goddam lake in the world.’

  Carl did as he suggested and swivelled around in his chair. They were sitting out on the castle battlements and the view across the water was stupendous. Nevertheless Carl corrected him primly. ‘That is not the biggest; it’s only the second biggest lake in the world.’

  ‘Looks like the biggest to me.’ Johnny brushed aside his protest. ‘I bet there are some monster crocodiles in there, white boy.’

  ‘I’ll go online and find out.’ Carl stood up and went into the throne room, which he had converted into his communications centre. He came back onto the battlements a few minutes later with a smug expression. ‘Pour me another Tusker beer, Blackbird,’ he said as he sat down opposite Johnny. ‘Give yourself one as well. You deserve it. You were right on both counts. Crocodiles can’t run as fast as a man, and anyway they would never run after you. They are stealth killers, not chasers. You just never see them coming, especially if you are near water. That’s score one to you.’ Carl took a pull at the beer can and belched. ‘Score two to you is that Lake Tanganyika and its tributary rivers…’ he indicated the inland sea with a sweep of his arm ‘… is the absolute homeland of Crocodylus niloticus.’

  ‘What the shit is that?’

  ‘That is the Nile crocodile, Johnny boy. There is one in that lake there that they say is twenty-five feet long. They call him Gustave. They say he could swallow even a big sucker like you without chewing.’

  ‘Just let one of those scaly bastards try that on me,’ said Johnny belligerently, then he threw back his head and let out a bellow. ‘Sam! Samuel! Get your lazy black ass out here!’

  Sam came sauntering out onto the terrace, totally unperturbed by the wording of King Johnny’s summons. Johnny had only started referring to him in truly pejorative language after they had become true and trusted comrades in arms. Sam had signed on as Johnny’s second in command after the capture of Kazundu, when all the other Zimbabwean troops had been repatriated. Johnny had promoted him immediately to the rank of colonel. His scale of pay was several times greater than he had received in the Zimbabwean army. Among his other side benefits and perks he was granted third shot at any of the visiting oriental ladies or ladyboys after Carl and Johnny moved on down the line. Samuel Ngewenyama was a happy man.

  ‘Hello, Mr King. Did you call me?’

  ‘You know I did, you black bastard.’ Johnny handed him a can of Tusker beer. ‘We need some crocodiles, Sam.’

  ‘How many, boss?’

  ‘I don’t know, for sure. Let’s say two for a start, but make sure they are really big suckers, and make sure they are alive and hungry.’

  ‘I’ll put the word around, but it might take some time. Not a lot of people around here are happy to mess with crocodiles.’

  ‘That’s okay, Sam. We have still got to build a croc pen.’

  Over the next few months they spent a great deal of time and energy pl
anning and building the crocodile arena. The forced-labour gangs laboriously excavated the circular pit halfway down the front slope of the newly named Castle Hill. It did not have to be spacious, but Carl insisted that it was deep enough to prevent any of the inmates escaping and engaging him in a speed trial.

  The walls of the arena were lined with stone blocks and flared inwards to make them unscalable. One of the artificial waterfalls was diverted so that the stream fell into the large pond that took up almost half the total area of the arena. The dry ground was strewn thickly with the golden brown beach sands of the lake. This would provide a basking ground on which the cold-blooded reptiles could sun themselves, and a wallowing basin in which to cool down again. On the stone coping that surrounded the top of the pit was seating for a hundred spectators and a special royal box for King John and his prime minister, which gave them an unimpeded overview of everything that happened on the floor of the amphitheatre. There was also a camera platform from which the action could be filmed.

  There was a subterranean tunnel through which the floor of the pit could be reached via a sturdy croc-proof iron gate. In the stone lintel above this gate was chiselled the stern admonition: ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE.

  When Johnny read it for the first time he demanded, ‘Who the hell is Ye?’

  ‘Ye is anybody who goes through the gate,’ Carl explained patiently.

  ‘Did you think up that shit yourself?’

  ‘What a silly question, Blackbird. Of course I did,’ Carl assured him, and Johnny shook his head in admiration.

  ‘You pretty smart for a white boy; you know that, Carl baby?’

  *

  They heard the drums and the ululation in the harbour area, even from high up on the castle battlements.

  ‘We better go down and see what the hell is going on down there!’ Johnny suggested. The climbed into the brand-new white Range Rover that Carl had recently imported as Johnny’s birthday gift. Johnny took the wheel and they hurtled down the hill to the port, and parked on the wharf. The crowd had been driven back by the rifle butts of the Royal Bodyguards to leave them space.

  Carl and Johnny stood on the edge of the stone wharf and shaded their eyes to stare out across the lake. A flotilla of native dugout canoes was coming down from the north. It was impossible to count them at this distance, but Carl estimated that there were at least twenty smaller craft, surrounding and escorting two much larger war canoes.

  The drummers were seated amidships in the smaller canoes. They were pounding out a triumphant and primordial rhythm. The rowers were standing upright in bows and sterns, the long paddles dipping and swinging to the beat of the drums, tall lean men whose naked bodies gleamed in the sunlight like freshly washed anthracite. They chanted as they rowed.

  The two great war canoes in the centre of the formation were deeply laden; each had only a few inches of freeboard. There were a dozen or more paddlers aside. As they came abeam the harbour they turned and headed in towards the beach. The crowds on the shore ran down the wharf and jumped onto the beach to meet them. Johnny and Carl followed them with Sam and his men running interference for them, whacking woolly heads and bare black shoulders with the heavy bamboo rods they always carried to clear the way.

  They arrived at the water’s edge just as the largest war canoe ran its bows ashore. The spectators plunged waist deep into the lake to help run both the long canoes high and dry. Then they crowded around them laughing and jabbering with excitement and amazement as they saw the cargo that they carried. The bodyguards cleared them away to allow Carl and Johnny to come forward and stare down on the massive beasts that lay in the bottom of the canoes. Their jaws had been roped closed with plaited papyrus reeds, and they had been blindfolded with old maize sacks to keep them quiescent.

  Johnny paced out the length of the largest crocodile, and then he whistled with awe. ‘This sucker is five paces long, that makes him over sixteen feet. How the hell did they catch him?’

  ‘They built a long trap of poles and put a goat into it for bait,’ Sam Ngewenyama explained. ‘Once they cover his eyes the crocodile goes to sleep.’

  It took a gang of twenty men to drag the quiescent monster up the loading ramp of one of the Russian landing craft, and only then could they motor him up to the crocodile arena. Another gang of fifty men lowered him into the pit on the ropes.

  The second crocodile was a mere twelve feet long. She was a presumed female, although in the absence of external genitalia it was not possible to be certain. They laid them side by side on the basking sands of the arena beside the pool while Carl and Johnny leaned over the railing around the top of the arena, shouting instructions.

  ‘Take the blindfolds off their eyes now!’ Johnny gave the order in Swahili. Two of the bolder spirits obeyed and the rest of them scattered and fled, jamming in the exit tunnel in their haste to return to safety.

  The two monstrous saurians sluggishly roused themselves from their stupor. Then they waddled on their stubby legs to the algae-green pool and slid down the bank into the lukewarm water. There they lay submerged with only their eyes and nostrils showing above the surface.

  Johnny shouted at Sam to pay the croc hunters their bounty. Sam counted out the thick wads of Tanzanian shillings into the hands of the tribal headman who had commanded the capture operation. It was sufficient cash to buy a large herd of cattle. The headman marched away down the hill, followed by his men singing and drumming with exultation.

  Johnny and Carl were left alone on the stone seats of the royal box to gloat over their new pets.

  ‘We have to give them names,’ Carl mused. ‘What do you suggest?’

  Johnny frowned with concentration and then said, ‘How about we call them Big Sucker and Little Sucker?’

  ‘Not a bad idea! Very poetic!’ Carl nodded thoughtfully. ‘But I like the name Hannibal the same as in the Daddy video.’

  They both laughed at the memory, and Johnny punched his arm fondly. ‘That’s cool, Carl baby. I am glad you thought of that one. We call the big sucker Hannibal and the little sucker Aline.’

  ‘Who?’ Carl looked puzzled.

  ‘Aline, man, Hannibal Gaddafi’s wife. She was a super cool chick. She liked to pour boiling water on the heads of her servants if they pissed her off.’

  ‘I thought we were speaking about Hannibal the son of Hamilcar Barca the scourge of Rome, not Hannibal the son of Muammar Gaddafi,’ Carl chuckled. ‘But never mind me, anybody can make a silly mistake. Aline, the lady crocodile shall be.’

  ‘I love her already,’ Johnny confessed.

  ‘Let’s prove your love. Have you got anybody in mind for dinner with our Aline? Has anybody pissed you off recently?’ Carl asked. ‘People are always pissing you off, aren’t they, Johnny baby?’

  ‘You are right on, white boy. I don’t know why they always take advantage of me. I guess I am just too kind to all these assholes.’

  ‘Pick one of them, any one of them.’

  ‘Sam caught one of them in the grain store last night stealing a bucket of maize meal. Stupid cow claims her snivelling kids were starving.’

  ‘That’s unforgivable,’ Carl agreed. ‘Anyone in their right mind gotta be pissed off at that kind of behaviour. Tell Sam to bring her up here.’

  The woman was so paralysed with fear that she could not walk. Two of Sam’s men dragged her up the hill to confront King John.

  ‘Do you know what is in that hole?’ Johnny pointed at the pit. The woman shook her head.

  ‘Well I am going to put you in there to find out for me.’ The woman stared at him in dumb incomprehension.

  ‘Her expression is so beautifully comical. Does she know what’s going to happen, do you think?’ Carl asked.

  ‘No,’ Johnny replied. ‘Sam has had her chained in one of the castle dungeons since her arrest. She hasn’t seen the crocs yet. It will be a nice surprise for her.’ Johnny turned to the men that held her and told them, ‘Get her clothes off. Take her down the steps and
put her into the hole.’

  They stripped the woman’s limbo cloth off her body and dragged her down the stairway to the barred gate. While Carl and Johnny hung over the rail to watch they opened the gate and thrust her through it, then slammed it shut behind her.

  She beat on the iron bars of the gate with her bare fists until her knuckles bled. Then she looked up at the men above her, wailing and pleading for mercy.

  ‘Come here,’ Johnny called to her in Swahili. ‘Come and I will lift you up.’ She left the gate and went hesitantly towards where he was leaning over the coping of the stone wall and beckoning to her. She skirted the edge of the pool without looking down at the water.

  Suddenly the algae-green surface of the pool exploded with such violence that the two men leaning over the rail high above were dashed with spray. Hannibal launched himself from the pond like a great grey torpedo.

  He did not open his jaws to seize his victim; instead he kept them tightly closed so that the protruding fangs in his top jaw overlapped his lower lip in a fixed sardonic grin. He swung his whole head at her. The scales that covered his skull were tough as chain mail. He hit the woman in her rib cage as she lifted her arm towards Johnny Congo. She was hurled by the blow into the stone cladding of the pit wall. Her ribs crackled like fire kindling as they snapped. She fell in a heap at the foot of the wall.

  Hannibal opened his jaws to their full gape as he reared over her, and then he locked his long yellow fangs into her body. His jaws clashed together like the slamming of the iron-barred gate. Hannibal lifted the body high, holding it crosswise in his jaws, so that just the woman’s toes and fingertips dragged in the sand as he carried her back towards the pool.

  Then the green water erupted a second time.

  ‘Here comes the gorgeous Aline to join the fun,’ Carl shouted with excitement. The female rushed out of the pond at Hannibal, but he made no move to avoid her. Instead he checked and turned his head towards her, almost as though he was offering her the naked body he held in his jaws.