The Leopard Hunts In Darkness Part 10

"No, Kuphela, rather wish me b.l.o.o.d.y war!" Lookout's scarred visage twisted into a dreadful grin in the reflected headlights.

When Craig looked back, they had disappeared into the darkness as silently as hunting leopards.

-, 4-A.

wouldn't have taken any bets about seeing you again," Jock Daniels greeted Craig when he walked into the auctioneer's office the next morning. "Did you make it up to the Chizarira or did good sense get the better of you?" I'm still alive, aren't ! Craig evaded the direct question.

"Good boy, "Jock nodded. "No sense messing with those Matabele shufta bandits the lot of them."

"Did you hear from Zarich?" Jock shook his head. "Only sent the telex at nine o'clock local time. They are an hour behind us."

"Can I use your telephone? A few private calls?"

"Local? I don't want you chatting up your birds in New York at my expense."

"Of course."

"Right as long as you mind the shop for me, while I'm out." Craig installed himself at Jock's desk, and consulted the cryptic notes that he had made from Henry Pickering's file.

His first call was to the American Emba.s.sy in Harare, the capital three hundred miles north-east of Bulawayo.

"Mr. Morgan Oxford, your cultural attache, please," he asked the operator.

"Oxford." The accent was crisp Boston and Ivy League.

"Craig Mellow. A mutual friend asked me to call you and give you his regards."

"Yes, I was expecting you. Won't you come in here any time and say h.e.l.lo?"

"I'd enjoy that," Craig told him, and hung up.

Henry Pickering was as good as his word. Any message handed to Oxford would go out in the diplomatic bag, and be on Pickering's desk within twelve hours.

His next call was to the office of the minister of tourism and information, and he finally got through to the minister's secretary. Her att.i.tude changed to warm co-operation when he spoke to her in Sindebele.

"The comrade minister is in Harare for the sitting of Parliament," she told him, and gave Craig his private number at the House.

Craig got through to a parliamentary secretary on his fourth attempt. The telephone system had slowly begun deteriorating, he noticed. The blight of all developing countries was lack of skilled artisans; prior to independence all linesmen had been white, and since then most of them had taken the gap.

This secretary was Mashona and insisted on speaking English as proof of her sophistication.

"Kindly state the nature of the business to be discussed." She was obviously reading from a printed form.

"Personal. I am acquainted with the comrade minister."

"Ah yes. P-e-r-s-o-n-n-e-l." The secretary spelled it out laboriously as she wrote it.

"No that's p-e-r-s-o-n-a-I," Craig corrected her patiently. He was beginning to adjust to the pace of Africa again.

"I will consult the comrade minister's schedule. You will be obliged to telephone again." Craig consulted his list. Next was the government registrar of companies, and this time he was lucky. He was put through to an efficiiInt and helpful clerk who made a note of his requirem%nts.

"The Share Register, Articles and Memorandum of a.s.sociation of the company trading as Rholands Ltd, formerly known as Rhodesian Lands and Mining Ltd." He heard the disapproval in the clerk's tone of voice. "Rhodesian" was a dirty word nowadays, and Craig made a mental resolution to change the company's name, if ever he had the power to do so. "Zimlands" would sound a lot better to an African ear.

"I will have Roneoed copies ready for you to collect by four o'clock," the clerk a.s.sured him. "The search fee will be fifteen dollars." Craig's next call was to the surveyor general's office, and again he arranged for copies of doc.u.ments this time the t.i.tles to the company properties the ranches King's Lynn, Queen's Lynn and the Chizarira estates.

Then there were fourteen other names on his list, all of whom had been ranching in Matabeleland when he left, close neighbours and friends of his family, those that grandpa Bawu had trusted and liked.

Of the fourteen he could contact only four, the others had all sold up and taken the long road southwards. The remaining families sounded genuinely pleased to hear from him. "Welcome back, Craig. We have all read the book and watched it on TV." But they clammed up immediately he started asking questions. "d.a.m.ned telephone leaks likea sieve," said one of them. "Come out to the ranch for dinner.

Stay the night. Always a bed for you, Craig. Lord knows, there aren't so many of the old faces around any more." Jock Daniels returned in the middle of the afternoon, red-faced and sweating. "Still burning up my telephone?" he growled. "Wonder if the bottle store has another bottle of that Dimple Haig." Craig responded to this subtlety by crossing the road and bringing back the pinch bottle in a brown paper bag

"I forgot that you have to have a cast-iron liver to live in this country." He unscrewed the cap and dropped it into the waste-paper basket.

At ten minutes to five o'clock he telephoned the minister's parliamentary office again.

"The Comrade Minister Tungata Zebiwe has graciously consented to meet you at ten o'clock on Friday morning.

He can allow you twenty minutes."

"Please convey my sincere thanks to the minister." That gave Craig three days to kill and meant he would have to drive the three hundred miles to Harare.

"No reply from Zurich?" He sweetened Jock's gla.s.s.

"If you made me an offer like that, I wouldn't bother to answer either," Jock grumped, as he took the bottle from Craig's hand and added a little more to the gla.s.s.

Over the next few days Craig availed himself of the invitations to visit Bawu's old friends, and was smothered with traditional old Rhodesian hospitality.

"Of course, you can't get all the luxuries Crosse and Blackwell jams, or Bronriley soap any more," one of his hostesses explained as she piled his plate with rich fare, "but somehow it's fun making do." And she signalled the white-robed table servant to refill the silver dish with baked sweet potatoes.

He spent the days with darkly tanned, slow-speaking men in wide-brimmed felt hats and short khaki trousers, examining their sleek fat cattle from the pa.s.senger seat of an open Land-Rover.

"You still can't beat Matabeleland beef," they told him proudly. "Sweetest gra.s.s in the whole world. Of course, we have to send it all out through South Africa, but the prices are d.a.m.ned good. Glad I didn't run for it. Heard from old Derek Sanders in New Zealand, working as a hired hand on a sheep station now and a b.l.o.o.d.y tough life too. No Matabele to do the dirtV'work over there." He looked at hi black herders with paternal affection.

"They are just the same, under all the political claptrap.

Salt of the b.l.o.o.d.y earth, my boy. My people, I feel that they are all family, glad I didn't desert them."

"Of course, there are problems," another of his hosts told him. "Foreign exchange is murder difficult to get tractor spares, and medicine for the stock but Mugabe's government is starting to wake up. As food-producers we are getting priority on import permits for essentials. Of course, the telephones only work when they do and the trains don't run on time any longer. There is rampant inflation, but the beef prices keep in step with it. They have opened the schools, but we send the kids down south across the border so they get a decent education."

"And the politics?" "That's between black and black. Matabele and Mashona. The white man's out of it, thank G.o.d. Let the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds tear each other to pieces if they want to. I keep my nose clean, and it's not a bad life not like the old days, of course, but then it never is, is it?"

"Would you buy more land?"

"Haven't got the money, old boy."

"But if you did have?" The rancher rubbed his nose thoughtfully. "Perhaps a man could make an absolute mint one day if the country comes right, land prices what they are at the moment or he could lose the lot if it goes the other way."

"You could say the same of the stock exchange, but in the meantime it's a good life?"