The Leopard Hunts In Darkness Part 5

"I need an agent in the field. Somebody with experience perhaps even somebody who once worked in the game and wildlife department, somebody who speaks the local language, who has a legitimate excuse for moving around and asking questions perhaps an author researching a new book, who has contacts high up in government. Of course, if my agent had an international reputation, it would open even more doors, and if he were a dedicated proponent of the capitalist system and truly believed in what we are doing, he would be totally effective."

"James Bond, me?"

"Field investigator for the World Bank. The pay is forty thousand dollars a year, plus expenses and a lot of job satisfaction and if there isn't a book in it at the end, I'll stand you to lunch at La Grenouille with the wine of your choice."

"Like I said at the beginning, Henry, isn't it time to stop being cute and level with me completely?" It was the first time Craig had heard Henry laugh, and it was infectious, a warm, throaty chuckle.

"Your perception confirms the wisdom of my choice. All right, Craig, there is a little more to it. I didn't want to make it too complicated not until you had got your feet wet first. Let me freshen your drink." He went to the c.o.c.ktail cabinet in the shape of an antique globe of the world, and while he clinked ice on gla.s.s he went on.

"It is vitally important for us to have a complete picture of what's going on below the surface in all of the countries in which we have an involvement. In other words, a functioning intelligence system. Our set-up in Zimbabwe isn't nearly as effective as I'd like it to be. We have lost a key man lately motor car accident or that's what it looked like. Before he went, he gave us a hint he had picked up the rumours of a coup d'ftat backed by the ruskies." Craig sighed. "We Africans don't really put much store in the ballot box any more. The only things that count are tribal loyalties and a strong arm. Coup d'gtat makes better sense than votes."

"Are you on the team?" Henry wanted to know.

"I take it that "expenses" include first-cla.s.s air tickets?" Craig demanded wickedly.

"Every man has his price," Henry darted back, "is that yours.

"I don't come that cheap," Craig shook his head, "but I'd hate like h.e.l.l to have a Soviet stooge running the land where my leg is buried. I'll take the job."

"Thought you might." Henry offered his hand. It was cool and startlingly powerful. "I'll send a courier down to your yacht with a file and a survival kit. Read the file while the courier waits and send it back. Keep the kit." Henry Pickering's survival kit contained an a.s.sortment of press cards, a members.h.i.+p of the TWA Amba.s.sadors Club, an unlimited World Bank Visa credit card, and an ornate metal and enamel star in a leather case embossed "Field a.s.sessor World Bank'.

Craig weighed it in his palm. "You could beat a maneating lion to death with it," he muttered. "I don't know what else it will be good for." The file was a great deal more rewarding. When he finished reading it, he realized that the alteration of name from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe was probably one of the least drastic changes that had swept over the land of his birth since he had left it just a few short years before.

raig nursed" the hired Volkswagen over the undulating golden gra.s.s-clad hills, using an educated foot on the throttle. The Matabele girl at the Avis desk at the Bulawayo airport had cautioned him.

"The tank is full, sir, but I don't know when you will get anoffier tankful. There is very little gasoline in Matabeleland." In the town itself he had seen the vehicles parked in -All long queues at the filling-stations, and the proprietor of the motel had briefed Craig as he signed the register and picked up the keys to one of the bungalows.

"The Maputo rebels keep hitting the pipeline from the east coast. The h.e.l.l of it is that just across the border the South Africans have got it all and they are happy to deal, but our bright laddies don't want politically tainted gas, so the whole country grinds to a halt. A plague on political dreams to exist we have to deal with them and it's about time they accepted that." So now Craig drove with care, and the gentle pace suited him. It gave him time to examine the familiar countryside, and to a.s.sess the changes that a few short years had wrought.

He turned off the main macadamized road fifteen miles out of town, and took the yellow dirt road to the north.

Within a mile he reached the boundary, and saw immediately that the gate hung at a drunken angle and was wide open the first time he had ever seen it that way. He parked and tried to close it behind him, but the frame was buckled and the hinges had rusted. He abandoned the effort and left the road to examine the sign that lay in the gra.s.s.

The sign had been pulled down, the retaining bolts ripped clear out. It lay face up, and though sun-faded, it was still legible: King's Lynn Aftikander Stud Home of "Ballantyne's Ill.u.s.trious IV" Grand Champion of Champions.

Proprietor: Jonathan Ballantyne.

Craig had a vivid mental image of the huge red beast with its humped back and swinging dewlap waddling under its own weight of beef around the show-ring with the blue rosette of the champion on its cheek, and

Jonathan "Bawu" Ballantyne, Craig's maternal grandfather, leading it proudly by the bra.s.s ring through its s.h.i.+ny wet nostrils.

Craig walked back to the VW and drove on through gra.s.sland that had once been thick and gold and sweet, but through which the bare dusty earth now showed like the balding scalp of a middle-aged man. He was distressed by the condition of the grazing. Never, not even in the four-year drought of the fifties, had King's Lynn gra.s.s been allowed to deteriorate like this, and Craig could find no reason for it until he stopped again beside a clump of car riel-Thorn trees that threw their shade over the road.

When he switched off the engine, he heard the bleating amongst the camel-thorns and now he was truly shocked.

"Goats!" he spoke aloud. "They are running goats on King's Lynn." Bawu Ballantyne's ghost must be without rest or peace. Goats on his beloved gra.s.sland. Craig went to look for them. There were two hundred or more in one herd. Some of the agile multi-coloured animals had climbed high into the trees and were eating bark and seedpods, while others were cropping the gra.s.s down to the roots so that it would die and the soil would sour. Craig had seen the devastation that these animals had created in the tribal trust lands

There were two naked Matabele boys with the herd.

They were delighted whep Craig spoke to them in their own language. They stuffed the cheap candy that he had brought with him for JOst such a meeting into their cheeks, and chattered without inhibition.

Yes, there were thirty families living on King's Lynn now, and each family had its herd of goats the finest goats in Matabeleland, they boasted through sticky lips, and under the trees a homed old billy mounted a young nanny with a vigorous humping of his back. "See!" cried the herd boys "they breed with a will. Soon we will have more goats than any of the other families."

"What has happened to the white farmers that lived here?" Craig asked.

"Gone! they told him proudly. "Our warriors drove them back to where they came from and now the land belongs to the children of the revolution." They were six years old, but still they had the revolutionary cant word-perfect.

Each of the children had a slingshot made from old rubber tubing hanging from his neck, and around his naked waist a string of birds that he had killed with the slingshot: larks and warblers and jewelled sun birds Craig knew that for their noon meal they would cook them whole on a bed of coals, simply letting the feathers sizzle off and devouring the tiny blackened carca.s.ses with relish. Old Bawu Ballantyne would have strapped any herdboy that he caught with a slingshot.

The herd boys followed Craig back to the road, begged another piece of candy from him and waved him away like an old dear friend. Despite the goats and songbirds, Craig felt again the overwhelming affection for these people.

They were, after all, his people and it was good to be home again.

He stopped again on the crest of the hills and looked down on the homestead of King's Lynn. The lawns had died from lack of attention, and the goats had been in t -le flower-beds. Even at this distance, Craig could see the main house was deserted. Windows were broken, leaving unsightly gaps like missing teeth, and most of the asbestos sheets had been stolen from the roof and the roof-timbers were forlorn and skeletal against the sky. The roofing sheets had been used to build ramshackle squatters" shacks down near the old cattlepens.

Craig drove down and parked beside the dip tank. The tank was dry, and half-filled with dirt and rubbish. He went past it to the squatters" encampment. There were half a dozen families living here. Craig scattered the yapping cur dogs that rushed out at him with a few well-aimed stones, then he greeted the old man who sat at one of the fires.

"I see you, old father." Again there was delight at his command of the language. He sat at the fire for an hour, chatting with the old Matabele, the words coming more and more readily to his tongue and his ear tuning to the rhythm and nuances of Sindebele. He learned more than he had in the four days since he had been back in Matabeleland.

"They told us that after the revolution every man would have a fine motor-car, and five hundred head of the best white man's cattle." The old man spat into the fire. "The only ones with motorcars are the government ministers.

They told us we would always have full bellies, but food costs five times what it did before Smith and the white men ran away. Everything costs five times more sugar and salt and soap everything." During the white regime a ferocious foreign exchange control system and a rigid internal price control structure had isolated the country from the worst effects of inflation, but now they were experiencing all the joys of re-entering the international community, and the local currency had already been devalued twenty per cent.

"We cannot afford cattle," the old man explained, "so we run goats. Goats!" He spat again into the fire and watched his phlegm sizzle. "GoA! Like dirt-eating Shana." His tribal hatred boiled, ll his spittle.

Craig left him muttering and frowning over the smoky fire and walked up to the house. As he climbed the steps to the wide front veranda, he had a weird premonition that his grandfather would suddenly come out to meet him with some tart remark. In his mind's eye he saw again the old man, dapper and straight, with thick silver hair, skin like tanned leather and impossibly green Ballantyne eyes, standing before him.

"Home again, Craig, dragging your tail behind you!" However, the veranda was littered with rubble and bird droppings from the wild pigeons that roosted undisturbed in the rafters.

He picked his way along the veranda to the double doors that led into the old library. There had been two huge elephant tusks framing this doorway, the bull which Craig's great-great-grandfather had shot back in the 1860s.

Those tusks were family heirlooms, and had always guarded the entrance to King's Lynn. Old grandpa Bawu had touched them each time he pa.s.sed, so that there had been a polished spot on the yellow ivory. Now there were only the holes in the masonry from which the bolts holding the ivory had been torn. The only family relics he had inherited and still owned were the collection of leather bound family journals, the laboriously handwritten records of his ancestors from the arrival of his great-great-grandfather in Africa over a hundred years before. The tusks would complement the old books. He would search for them, he promised himself. Surely such rare treasures must be traceable.

He went into the derelict house. The shelving and built-in cupboards and floorboards had been stripped out by the squatters in the valley for firewood, the window, panes used as targets by small black boys with slingshots.

The books, the portrait photographs from the walls, the carpets and heavy furniture of Rhodesian teak were all gone. The homestead was a sh.e.l.l, but a st.u.r.dy sh.e.l.l. With an open palm Craig slapped the walls that great-greatandfather Zouga Ballantyne had built of hand-hewn gr stone and mortar that had had almost a hundred years to cure to adamantine hardness. His palm made a solid ringing tone. It would take only a little imagination and a deal of money to transform the sh.e.l.l into a magnificent home once again.

Craig left the house and climbed the kopje behind it to the walled family cemetery that lay under the msasa trees beneath the rocky crest.

There was gra.s.s growing up between the headstones. The cemetery had been neglected but not vandalized, as had many of the other monuments left from the colonial era.

Craig sat on the edge of his grandfather's grave and said, "h.e.l.lo, Bawu. I'm back," and started as he almost heard the old man's voice full of mock scorn speaking in his mind.

"Yes, every time you b.u.m your a.r.s.e you come running back here. What happened this time?"

"I dried up, Bawu," he answered the accusation aloud and then was silent. He sat for a long time and very slowly he felt the tumult within him begin to subside a little.

"The place is in a h.e.l.l of a mess, Bawu," he spoke again, and the little blue, headed lizard on the old man's headstone scuttled away at the sound of his voice. "The tusks are gone from the veranda, and they are running goats on your best gra.s.s." Again he was silent, but now he was beginning to calculate and scheme. He sat for nearly an hour, and then stood up.