The Leopard Hunts In Darkness Part 4

"I know" he said. "Come straight down." Wipe one out and make another happy, he thought. It should even out, but of course it didn't.

raig lay on his back under a single sheet in the wide bunk with both hands behind his head and listened to the small sounds in the night, the creak of the rudder in its restrainer, the tap of a halyard against the mast and the slap of wavelets under the hull. Across the basin the party on Firewater was still in full swing, there was a faint splash and a distant burst of drunken laughter as they threw somebody overboard, and beside him the girl made regular little wet fluttering sounds through her lips as she slept.

She had been eager and very practised, but nevertheless Craig felt unrequited and restless. He wanted to go up on deck, but that would have disturbed the girl and he knew she would still be eager and he could not be bothered further. So he lay and let the images from Sally-Anne's portfolio run through his head likea magic, lantern show, and they triggered others that had long lain dormant but now came back to him fresh and vivid, accompanied by the smells and tastes and sounds of Africa, so that instead of the revels of drunken yachties, he heard again the beat of native drums along the Chobe river in the night; instead of the sour waters of the East river he smelled tropical raindrops on baked earth, and he began to ache with the bitter-sweet melancholy of nostalgia and he did not sleep again that night.

The girl insisted on making breakfast for him. She did so with not nearly the same expertise as she had made love, and after she had gone ash.o.r.e it took him nearly an hour to clean up the galley. Then he went up to the saloon.

He drew the curtain across the porthole above his navigation and writing desk, so as not to be distracted by the activities of the marina, and settled down to work. He re-read the last batch of ten pages, and realized he would be lucky if he could salvage two of them. He set to it grimly and the characters baulked and said trite asinine things. After an hour he reached up for his thesaurus from the shelf beside his desk to find an alternative word.

"Good Lord, even I know that people don't say "pusillanimous" in real conversation," he muttered as he brought down the volume, and then paused as a slim sheaf of folded writing-paper fluttered out from between the pages.

Secretly welcoming the excuse to break off the struggle, he unfolded it, and with a little jolt discovered it was a letter from a girl called Janine - a girl who had shared with him the agonies of their war wounds, who had travelled with him the long slow road to recovery, had been at his side when he walked again for the first time after losing the leg, had spelled him at the helm when they sailed Bawu through her first Atlantic gale. A girl whom he had loved and almost married, and whose face he now had the greatest difficulty recalling.

Janine had written the letter from her home in Yorkshire, three days before she married the veterinary surgeon who was a junior partner in her father's practice. He re, read the letter slowly, all ten pages of it, and realized why he had hidden it away from himself. Janine was only bitter in patches, but some of the other things she wrote cut deeply.

" You had been a failure so often and for so long that your sudden success clean bowled you-" He checked at that. What else had he ever done besides the book that one s4e book? And she had given him the answer.

You were so' innocent and 2entle. Crai , so lovable in a gawky boyish way. I wanted to live with that, but after we left Africa it dried up slowly, you started becoming hard and cynical-"

" Do you remember the very first day we met, or almost the very first, I said to you, "You are a spoilt little boy, and you just give up on everything worthwhile"? Well, it's true, Craig. You gave up on our relationship.

I don't just mean the other little dolly-birds, the literary scalp hunters with no elastic in their drawers, I mean you gave up on the caring. Let me give you a little advice for free, dart give up on the only thing that you've ever done well, don't give up on the writing, Craig. That would be truly sinful-" He remembered how haughtily he had scoffed at that notion when he had first read it. He didn't scoff now he was too afraid. It was happening to him, just as she had predicted.

"I truly came to love you, Craig, not all at once, but 4", little by little. You had to work very hard to destroy that. I don't love you any more, Craig, I doubt I'll ever love another man, not even the one I'll marry on Sat.u.r.day but I like you, and I always will. I wish you well, but beware of your most implacable enemy yourself." Craig refolded the letter, and he wanted a drink. He went down to the galley and poured a Bacardi a large one, easy on the lime. While he drank it he re-read the letter and this time a single phrase struck him.

"After we left Africa it seemed to dry up inside you the understanding, the genius."

"Yes," he whispered. "It dried up. It all dried up." Suddenly his nostalgia became the unbearable ache of homesickness. He had lost his way, the fountain in him had dried up, and he wanted to go back to the source.

He tore the letter to tiny pieces and dropped them into the sc.u.mmy waters of the basin, left the empty gla.s.s on the coamings of the hatch and crossed the gangplank to the jetty He didn't want to have to talk to the girl, so he used the pay phone at the gate of the marina.

It was easier than he expected. The girl on the switchboard put him through to Henry Pickering's secretary.

"I'm not sure that Mr. Pickering is available. Who is calling, please?"

of

"Craig Mellow." Pickering came on almost immediately.

"There is an old Matabele saying, "The man who drinks Zambezi waters must always return to drink again"," Craig told him.

"So you're thirsty," Pickering said. "I guessed that."

"You said to call you."

"Come and see me."

"Today?" Craig asked.

"Hey, fellow, you're hot to trot! Hold on, let me check my diary what about six o'clock this evening? That's the soonest I can work it in." Henry's office was on the twenty-sixth floor and the tall windows faced up the deep sheer creva.s.ses of the avenues to the expansive green swathe of Central Park in the distance.

Henry poured Craig a whisky and soda and brought it to him at the window. They stood looking down into the guts of the city and drinking in silence, while the big red ball of the sun threw weird shadows through the purpling dusk.

"I think it's time to stop being cute, Henry," Craig said at last.

"Tell me what you really want from me."

"Perhaps you're right," Henry agreed. "The book was a little bit of a cover-up. Not really fair although, speaking personally, I'd like to have seen your words with her pictures-" Craig made an impatient little gesture, and Henry went on.

"I am vice-president in charge of the Africa division."

"I saw your t.i.tle on the door," Craig nodded.

"Despite what a lot of our critics say, w e aren't a i i charitable inst.i.tution, we are one of the bulwarks of capitalism. Africa is a continent of economically fragile states. With the obvious exceptions of South Africa and the oil, producers further north, they are mostly subsistence agricultural societies, with no industrial backbone and very few mineral resources." Craig nodded again.

"Some of those who have recently achieved their independence from the old colonial system are still benefiting from the infrastructure built up by the white settlers, while most of the others Zambia and Tanzania and Maputo, for instance have had long enough to let it run down into a chaos of lethargy and ideological fantasy. They are going to be hard to save." Henry shook his head mournfully and looked even more like an undertaker stork. "But with others, like Zimbabwe, Kenya and Malawi, we have got a fighting chance. The system is still working, as yet the farms haven't been totally decimated and handed over to hordes of peasant squatters, the railroads work, there are some foreign exchange earnings from copper and chrome and tourism. We can keep them going, with a little luck."

"Why bother?" Craig asked. "I mean you said you are not in the charity game, so why bother?"

"Because if we don't feed them, then sooner or later we are going to have to fight them, it's as simple as that. If they begin to starve, guess into whose big red paws they are going to fall."

"Yes. You're making sense." Craig sipped his whisky.

"Returning to earth for a moment," Henry went on, "the countries on our shortlist have one exploitable a.s.set, nothing tangible like gold, but many times more valuable.

They are attractive to tourists from the west. If we are ever going to see any interest on the billions that we have got tied up in them, then we are going to have to make good and sure that they stay attractive."

"How do you do that?" Craig turned to him.

"Let's take Kenya as an example," Henry suggested. "Sure it's t sunshine and beaches, but then so have Greece and Sardinia, and they are a h.e.l.l of a lot closer to Paris and Berlin. What the Mediterranean hasn't got is African wildlife, and that's what the tourists will fly those extra all, hours to see, and that's the collateral on our loan. Tourist dollars are keeping us in business."

"Okay, but I don't see how I come in," Craig frowned.

"Wait for it, we'll get there in time," Henry told him.

"Let me lay it out a little first. It's like this unfortunately, the very first thing that the newly independent black African sees when he looks around after the white man flies out is ivory and rhinoceros horn and meat on the hoof. One rhinoceros or bull elephant represents more wealth than he could earn in ten years of honest labour.

For fifty years a white-run game department has protected all these marvelous riches, but now the whites have run to Australia or Johannesburg; an Arab sheikh will pay twenty-five thousand dollars for a dagger with a genuine rhinoceros, horn handle and the victorious guerrilla fighter has an AK 47 rifle in his hands. It's all very logical."

"Yes, I've seen it," Craig nodded.

"We had the same thing in Kenya. Poaching was big business and it was run from the top. I mean the very top.

It took us fifteen years and the death of a president to break it up. Now Kenya has the strictest game laws in Africa and, more important, they are being enforced. We had to use all our influence. We even had to threaten to pull the plug, but now our investment is protected." Henry looked smug for a moment, then his melancholia over, whelmed him again. "Nqk we have to travel exactly the same road again in Zi1pbabwe. You saw those photographs of the kill in the minefield. It's being organized again, and once again we suspect it's somebody in a very high place.

We have to stop it."

"I'm still waiting to hear how it affects me."