The Leopard Hunts In Darkness Part 2

Craig took the hand and felt the strength of it, the softness of the dry cool skin on the back and the rough places on the palm, and he looked into her face.

She had dark thick eyebrows that stretched in an unbroken curve from the outer corner of one eye to the other. Her eyes, even in the poor light, were green with honey-coloured specks surrounding the pupil. Their gaze was direct and candid.

"Sally-Anne Jay, "Ashe said. "This is Craig Mellow." Her nose was straight but slightly too large, and her mouth too wide to be beautiful. Her thick dark hair was sc.r.a.ped back severely from the broad forehead, her face was as honey-tanned as her hands and there was a fine peppering of freckles across her cheeks.

"I read your book," she said. Her voice was level and clear, her accent mid-Atlantic, but only when he heard its timbre did he realize how young she was. "I thought it deserved everything that happened to it."

"Compliment or slap?" He tried to make it sound light and unconcerned, but he found himself hoping fervently that she was not one of those who attempted to demonstrate their own exalted literary standards by denigrating a popular writer's work to his face.

tv cry good things happened to it," she pointed out, and Craig felt absurdly pleased, even though that seemed to be the end of that topic as far as she was concerned. To show his pleasure he squeezed her hand ante it a itt than was necessary, and she took it back from him and replaced it firmly in her lap.

So she wasn't a scalp-hunter, and she wasn't going to gush. Anyway, he told himself, he was bored with literary groupies trying to storm his bed, and gushers were as bad as knockers almost.

"Let's see if we can get Ashe to buy us a drink," he suggested, and slipped into the booth facing her across the table.

Ashe made his use al fuss over the wine list, but they z ended up with a teri-dollar Frascati after all.

"Nice smooth fruit." Ashe rolled it on his tongue.

"It's cold and wet," Craig agreed, and Ashe smiled again as they both remembered the "70 Carton Charlemagne they had drunk the last time.

"We are expecting another guest later," Ashe told the waiter. "We'll order then." And turning to Craig, "I wanted an opportunity for Sally-Anne to show you her stuff."

"Show me," Craig invited, immediately defensive once again. The woods were full of them as wanted to ride on his strike ones with unpublished ma.n.u.scripts for him to endorse, investment advisers who would look after all those lovely royalties for him, others who would allow him to write their life stories and generously split the profits with him or sell him insurance or a South Sea Island paradise, commission him to write movie scripts for a small advance and an even smaller slice of any profits, all kinds gathering like hyenas to the lion's kill.

Sally-Anne lifted a hard-back portfolio from the floor beside her and placed it on the table in front of Craig.

While Ashe adjusted the spotlight, Sally-Anne untied the ribbons that secured the folder and sat back.

Craig opened the cover and went very still. He felt the goose-b.u.mps rise along his forearms, and the hair at the nape of his neck p.r.i.c.kle this was his reaction to greatness, to anything perfectly beautiful. There was a Gauguin in the Metropolitan Museum on Central Park; a Polynesian madonna carrying the Christ child on her shoulder. She had made his hair p.r.i.c.kle. There were pa.s.sages of T.S. Eliot's poetry and of Lawrence Durrell's prose that made his hair p.r.i.c.kle every time he read them.

The opening bar of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony; those incredible jets leaps of Rudolph Nureyev, and the way Nicklaus and Borg struck the ball on their good days those things had made him p.r.i.c.kle, and now this girl was doing it to him also.

It was a photograph. The finish was egg-sh.e.l.l grain so every detail was crisp. The colours clear and perfectly true.

It was a photograph of an elephant, an old bull. He faced the camera in the characteristic att.i.tude of alarm, with his ears spread like dark flags. Somehow he portrayed the whole vastness and timelessness of a continent, and yet he was at bay, and one sensed that all his great strength was unavailing, that he was confused by things that were beyond his experience and the trace memories of his ancestors, that he was about to be overwhelmed by change like Africa itself.

With him in the photograph was shown the land, the rich red earth riven by wind, baked by sun, ruined by drought. Craig could almost taste the dust on his tongue.

Then, over it all, the limitless sky, containing the promise Of succour, the silver c.u.mulonimbus piled likea snow-clad mountain range, bruised with purple and royal blue, pierced by a single beam of light from a hidden sun that fell on the old bull likea benediction.

She had captured the meaning and the mystery of his native land in the one hundredth of a second that it took the lens shutter to open and close again, while he had laboured. for long agonizing months and not come anywhere near it, and secretly recognizing his failure was afraid to try again. He took a sip of the insipid wine that had been offered to him as a rebuke for this crisis of confidence in his own ability, and now the wine had a quinine aftertaste that he had not noticed before.

"Where are you from?" he asked the girl, without looking at her.

"Denver, Colorado," she said. "But my father has been with the Emba.s.sy in London for years. I did most of my schooling in England." That accounted for the accent. "I went to Africa when I was eighteen, and fell in love with it," she completed her life tory simply.

It took a physical-effort for Craig to touch the photograph and gently turn it face down. Beneath it was another of a young woman seated on a black lava rock beside a desert waterhole. She wore the distinctive leather bunny ears headdress of the Ovahimba. tribe. Her child stood beside her and nursed from her naked breast. The woman's skin was polished with fat and ochre. Her eyes were those from a fresco in a Pharaoh's tomb, and she was beautiful.

"Denver, Colorado, forsooth!" Craig thought and was surprised at his own bitterness, at the depths of his sudden resentment. How dare a d.a.m.ned foreign girl-child encapsulate so unerringly the complex spirit of a people in this portrait of a young woman. He had lived all his life with them and yet never seen an African so clearly as at this moment in an Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village.

He turned the photograph with a suppressed violence.

Beneath it was a view into the trumpet-shaped throat of k the magnificent maroon and gold bloom of kigelia Africana, Craig's favourite wild flower. In the l.u.s.trous depths of the flower nestled a tiny beetle likea precious emerald, s.h.i.+ny iridescent green. It was a perfect arrangement of shape and colour, and he found he hated her for it.

There were many others. One of a grinning lout of a militia man with an AK 47 rifle on his shoulder and a necklace of cured human ears around his neck, a caricature of savagery and arrogance; another of a wrinkled witch doctor hung with horns and beads and skulls and all the grisly accoutrements of his trade, his patient stretched out on the bare, dusty earth before him in the process of being crudely cupped, her blood making s.h.i.+ny dark serpents across her dark skin. The patient was a woman in her prime with patterns of tattoos on her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and cheeks and forehead. Her teeth were filed to points like those of a shark, a relic of the days of cannibalism, and her eyes, like those of a suffering animal, seemed filled with all the stoicism and patience of Africa.

Then there was another contrasting photograph of African children in a school-room of poles and rude thatch.

They shared a single reader between three of them, but all their hands were raised eagerly to the young black teacher's questions and all their faces lit by the burning desire for knowledge it was all there, a complete record of hope and despair, of abject poverty and great riches, of savagery and tenderness, of unrelenting elements and bursting fruitfulness, of pain and gentle humour. Craig could not bring himself to look at her again and he turned the stiff glossy sheets slowly, savouring each image and delaying the moment when he must face her.

Craig stopped suddenly, struck by a particularly poignant composition, an orchard of bleached bones. She had used black and white to heighten the dramatic effect, and the bones shone in the brilliant African sunlight, acres of bones, great femur and tibia bleached like drift-wood, huge rib-cages like the frames of stranded ocean clippers, and skulls the size of beer barrels with dark caves for eye sockets. Craig thought of the legendary elephant's graveyard, the old hunters" myth of the secret place where the elephants go to die.

"Poachers," she said. "Two hundred and eighty-six carca.s.ses," and now Craig looked up at her at last, startled by the number.

"At one time?" he asked, and she nodded.

"They drove them into one of the old minefields." Involuntarily, Craig shuddered and looked down at the photograph again. Under the table-top his right hand ran down his thigh until he felt the neat strap that held his leg, and he experienced a choking empathy for the fate of those great pachyderms. He remembered his own minefield, and felt again the slamming impact of the explosion into his foot, as though he had been hit by the full swing of a sledgehammer.

"I'm sorry," she said saO. "I know about your leg."

"She does her home*ark,"Ashe said.

"Shut up," Craig thought furiously. "Why don't you both shut up." He hated anyone to mention the leg. If she had truly done her homework, she would have known that but it was not only mention of the leg, it was the elephants also. Once Craig had worked as a ranger in the game department. He knew them, had come to love them, and the evidence of this slaughter sickened and appalled him.

It increased his resentment of the girl; she had inflicted this upon him and he wanted to revenge himself, a childish urge to retaliate. But before he could do it, the late guest arrived, diverting them into a round of Ashes introductions.

"Craig, I want you to meet a special sort of guy." All of Ashes introductions came with a built-in commercial.

"This is Henry Pickering. Henry is a senior vice-president of the World Bank listen and you'll hear all those billions of dollars clas.h.i.+ng around in his head. Henry, this is Craig Mellow, our boy genius. Not even excluding Karen Blixen, Craig is just one of the most important writers ever to come out of Africa, that's all he is!"

"I.

read the book," Henry nodded. He was very tall and thin and prematurely bald. He wore a dark banker's suit and stark white s.h.i.+rt, with a little individual touch of colour in his necktie and twinkly blue eyes. "For once you are probably not exaggerating, Ashe." He kissed Sally-Anne's cheek platonically, sat down, tasted the wine that Ashe poured for him and pushed the gla.s.s back an inch. Craig found himself admiring his style.

"What do you think?" Henry Pickering asked Craig, glancing down at the open portfolio of photographs.

"He loves them, Henry," Ashe Levy cut in swiftly. "He's ape over them I wish you could have seen his face when he got his first look loves them, man, loves them!"

"Good, Henry said softly, watching Craig's face. "Have you explained the concept?"

"I wanted to serve it up hot." Ashe Levy shook his head.

"I wanted to hit him with it." He turned to Craig.

"A book, he said. "It's about a book. The t.i.tle of the book is "Craig Mellow's Africa". What happens is you "A rite about the Africa of your ancestors, about what it was and what it has become. You go back and you do an in depth a.s.sessment. You speak to the people-" "Excuse me," Henry interrupted him, "I understand that you speak one of the two major languages Sindebele, isn't it of Zimbabwe?" Fluently, Ashe answered for Craig. "Like one of them."

"Good," Henry nodded. "Is it true that you have many friends some highly placed in government?" Ashe fielded the question again. "Some of his old buddies are cabinet ministers in the Zimbabwe government. You can't go much higher." Craig dropped his eyes to the photograph of the elephant graveyard. "Zimbabwe," he was not yet comfortable with the new name that the black victors had chosen. He still thought of it as Rhodesia.