Blood Safari (7 page)

The second consequence was that they had to wait until 1972 before they could think of another child. That was the year Emma Le Roux was born. On 6 April, a birthday she shared with the entire Republic in those days.

‘Then they moved to Johannesburg so my father didn’t have to travel so much.’

My own intuition was that Big Bucks no longer felt entirely at home in the middle-class greyness of Vanderbijl Park. Linden was the neighbourhood of the up-and-coming wealthy Afrikaner in those days.

‘And that was where I grew up,’ with an apologetic wave of her hand that said ‘that was my fate’. I could see the earlier heaviness had lifted, as if the telling of her story had somehow freed her. She smiled a little self-consciously, and checked her watch. ‘We must be up early tomorrow.’

We went outside. The night was an incubator of heat and humidity. Far off to the west there was lightning. While we followed the brightly lit pathways back to the Bateleur suite, I considered her story. I wondered whether she ever thought about the source of her wealth, built on the foundation of apartheid and international sanctions and now so wholly politically incorrect. Was it a guilty conscience which made her place so much emphasis on her parents’ poor background?

Was the origin of her wealth the reason she had a career, the reason she did not simply live off her interest?

At our suite I asked her to lock her bedroom door from the inside – which, we were soon to find out, was bad advice.

My cell phone beeped in my pocket. I knew it was Jeanette Louw’s daily ‘
EVERYTHING OK
?’ text. I took it out and sent back the usual ‘
EVERYTHING OK
’. Then I walked around the building
one more time before going to bed. My own bedroom door remained open. I lay in darkness and waited for sleep. Not for the first time, I chewed over the advantages of a respectable family history.

Emma’s cry penetrated the thick sand of sleep: ‘Lemmer!’

I was on my feet and in the sitting room before I was wholly awake, not even sure her cry had been real.

‘Lemmer!’ Pure terror.

I rushed at her door, slammed into it. Locked. ‘I’m here,’ I said, hoarse with sleep and frustration.

‘There’s something in the room,’ she shrieked.

‘Open the door.’

‘No!’

I hit the door with my shoulder, a dull thud, but it stayed shut. I heard a strange, vague sound inside.

‘I think it’s a … Lemmer!’ My name was a frightened scream.

I took a step back and kicked the door. It splintered open. Her room was pitch black. She shrieked again. I banged my palm where the light switch should be and it was suddenly bright and the snake lunged at me, a huge, grey, hissing, wide-mawed monster, the inside of the mouth as black as death. I recoiled into the sitting room. Emma screamed for me again, and for a fleeting moment I saw her in the double bed, pillow and duvet, everything piled up in front of her for protection. The snake lunged at me, striking again and again, the hollow hiss of pure rage. I tripped over a chair, and the snake’s fangs bit into the material millimetres from my leg. As it pulled loose, venom sprayed in a bright mist. I rolled off the chair, across the floor. I had to get a weapon, a club. I grabbed the lamp off the corner table, swung it, and missed.

The snake was incredibly long, three metres, maybe more, streamlined and lethal like a spear. I leapt behind the other armchair, trying to keep it between us; the snake came over the top, it
front end lifted high. The lamp was too heavy, too clumsy, I smashed it against the wall to get rid of the shade, hit a painting, glass and wood shattered, Emma screamed. The snake struck and I hit, grazing its neck. I leapt to the right to get away. Swiftly, it came again, unmanageable, terrifyingly determined, as though my blow had released a deeper rage, a long, thick, elastic projectile, the black eyes relentless, the maw aggressively gaping.

I shook with adrenalin. It struck, pain stabbed my foot, I hit back with the lamp, the metal where the bulb had been struck the reptile’s neck, knocking the head against the wall. For a moment, it was off balance. I struck again. The lamp-stand was long and heavy. It hit the snake’s body where it slid across the tiled floor, and seemed to break something under the gunmetal scales. The snake recoiled, twisted around itself. I hit again and again and again, the head evading me. I saw a line of blood on the floor. It was my foot. The venom would dull me; I must finish it now.

I lifted the lamp high over my shoulders, smashed it down violently. Missed. Gripped it like a baseball bat, swung, hit, swung, grazed the head. Missed. It was retreating now. I held the lamp-stand like a sword, trying to trap the head against the floor. Once, twice unsuccessful, the third thrust of the point was behind the head, I bored it into the tiles. Its long body wound up the lamp and around my arm. With my bleeding foot I tramped the neck down, lifted the lamp again and stabbed the head with all my fear and loathing and revulsion. The snake was coiled around my leg now, the long supple muscle convulsing one last time. As it relaxed, I jerked my foot away and smashed down one last time to totally pulverise the coffin head.

She sat on top of the toilet in my bathroom. I sat on the floor, still in my sleeping shorts. My foot rested on her lap. She carefully extracted the splinter of glass.

‘I’m bleeding on you.’

‘Just keep still.’ Strict, the same schoolmarm who had ordered me to ‘Sit down, Lemmer’ a few minutes ago. I noticed her hand still had an obvious tremor. She pulled the shard out with her fingers and put it carefully on the windowsill. It hadn’t been the
snake’s venomous fangs after all. She rolled paper off the toilet roll and pressed the bundle hard against the cut. The blood soaked through it.

‘Hold this tight,’ she said, and pushed my foot towards me. She got up and went out. I couldn’t help noticing the imprint of her nipples against the big T-shirt she wore for pyjamas which hung to above her knees and exposed her shapely calves. I kept the toilet paper pressed to the cut. My hands were steady. She was away for a while and then I heard her bare feet moving through the disarrayed sitting room with its overturned chair, broken painting and the pieces of the lamp. The snake lay outside on the veranda. Its long scaly body was still supple and smooth when I’d dragged it out. I felt guilty, despite the circumstances, about the indignity, the sharp contrast between that deadly coil and this lifeless ribbon.

Emma was carrying a small leather bag. She sat down again, unzipped it and took out a pair of scissors. Picking up one of the white facecloths, she began to cut.

‘Someone put that snake in my room, Lemmer,’ she said in a matter-of-fact tone.

I just looked at the scissors and facecloth.

‘That’s what woke me. The window … when it slammed shut. Or something. I just went to have a look. The window is shut, but not latched.’

Deftly she cut a long spiral out of the cloth. ‘Give me your foot.’ I put it on her lap again. She took off the bloodstained paper and inspected the cut, which had stopped bleeding. She took the facecloth bandage and began to wind it around the ball of my foot. ‘Someone must have unlatched the window from inside last night. While we were at dinner. It’s the only way, you can’t open the window from outside.’

I said nothing. She wouldn’t want to know how improbable her theory was. How would you handle a reptile like that? How do you slip it through the slot of a half-open window?

How would ‘they’ know we were staying here? How would they have got here from the main road in the night with a three-metre venomous snake and known exactly which window was Emma’s?

Emma took a tiny silver safety pin from the leather bag and pinned the bandage securely. She tapped her palm on my toes. ‘There you go,’ she said, satisfied with her handiwork. I took my foot off her lap. We both got up. At the bathroom door she stopped and turned to me with a solemn expression on her face.

‘Lemmer, thanks. I don’t know what I would have done without you.’

I had nothing to say. I waited for her to leave.

‘How do you do it, Lemmer? Do you run?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘There’s not an ounce of fat on you.’

‘Oh.’ I was caught off guard. ‘Yes … I run. That… sort of thing …’

‘You must tell me about “that sort of thing”, some time,’ and she left with a little smile on her lips.

As I lay on my bed in the dark again and waited for elusive sleep, I pondered the way she viewed the alleged conspiracy with such calm assurance. To her it was completely real, an accomplished fact, an unfortunate reality that she had to live with. It didn’t make her hysterical, merely pragmatic. Someone wants to kill me 1 hire a bodyguard. Problem solved.

It was somehow flattering, her childish trust, her belief in my abilities. But I gained no satisfaction from it, coming as it did from the same woman who was entangled in imaginary plots. Whereas I had initially guessed she was lying, now I suspected her of fantasy, illusions born out of yearning.

I lay in the darkness for a long time listening to the noises of the bush, the nocturnal birds, a hyena. Once I imagined I heard a lion roar. Just as I began to descend into sleep there was another sound: the soft tread of Emma’s bare feet through the sitting room, past me to the other single bed beside mine. There was the rustle of linen and then all was quiet.

I heard Emma breathe out slowly, a sigh of comfort. Or relief.

Greg. Hospitality manager. He had thin blond hair and his red complexion did not respond well to the sun. His olive-and-khaki uniform was a little tight around the waist. ‘My most sincere apologies, this is totally unacceptable, we will move you, of course, and there will be no charge for your accommodation.’ He looked down at the lifeless snake.

It was very early and the veranda was packed. Beside the dead reptile stood Dick. Senior Game Ranger.

‘It’s a black mamba, awesome animal,’ Dick said to Emma, as if the snake belonged to him. He was her type and he knew it – a thirty-something Orlando Bloom clone, tanned, a big conversationalist. Once he realised that Emma had been alone in the double bed behind lock and key when the incident with the snake had occurred, he focused all his attention on her.

The black ranger (Sello. Game Ranger) and I looked at the dead animal. The morning was hot already. I hadn’t slept much. I didn’t like Dick.

‘You don’t have to move us,’ Emma said to Greg.

‘Most feared snake in Africa, neurotoxic venom, lung failure within eight hours if you don’t get the anti-venom. Very active, especially this time of year before the rains. Very aggressive when confronted, the best thing is to step back …’ motormouth Dick said to Emma.

The best thing is to step back. What did he think we’d done? Invite it to dance?

‘Then we will have the place sorted out. As good as new by lunchtime. I’m very sorry,’ said Greg.

For the first time Dick looked at me. ‘You should have called us, dude.’

I just looked at him.

‘I don’t think that was an option,’ said Emma.

Greg gave Dick a stern look. ‘Of course it wasn’t.’

Dick tried to regain lost ground. ‘Just a pity it had to be killed, such an awesome animal. They are very territorial, you know, and they usually avoid contact with humans, unless they’re cornered. Hunts by day, mostly. Far out, man, real far out, never happened before. How the hell did it get in? They’re so damn agile, can get through the smallest of holes or gaps or pipes, who knows? Sello, do you remember that one we found in the anthill last month? Huge female, maybe four metres, one minute she was there, the next she was gone, just slipped away somewhere.’

‘We’ll have to go for breakfast,’ said Emma.

‘And that will be on the house too,’ said Greg. ‘Please, if there’s anything …’

‘Mamba in the bedroom,’ said Dick, shaking his head. ‘It’s a first for us, but hey, it’s the bush, right. Africa is not for sissies … I suppose it had to happen some time or other. Radical. Just such a pity …’

Inspector Jack Phatudi was a block behind the desk, a bodybuilder who resisted the urge to boast, since his snow-white shirt fitted loosely. He had a permanent frown on his broad forehead, unfriendly grooves that broke the glossy sheen of his shaven head. His skin was the darkest shade of brown, just short of black, like exotic polished African wood. In the pressure cooker of an office he was the only one not perspiring.

He held the twenty-year-old photograph of Jacobus le Roux between his thick, strong fingers and said, ‘This is not him.’ He irritably pushed the photo back across the surface of the government-issue table.

‘Are you absolutely sure?’ asked Emma. We were sitting opposite Phatudi. She left the photo lying on the table.

‘You cannot ask me that. Who can say they are absolutely sure? I do not know what he looked like twenty years ago.’

‘Of course, Inspector, I …’

‘How will this help me?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘The suspect has killed four people last week. Now he is gone. Nobody knows where he is. You bring me this photograph from twenty years ago. How will it help me find this man?’

She was momentarily halted, yielding to his onslaught. ‘Well, Inspector, I don’t know,’ she said pleasantly. ‘Perhaps it won’t help you. And I don’t want to waste your time. I have too much respect for the role of the police. I was just hoping that you might be able to help me.’

‘How?’

‘I saw the picture of the man on television for just a few seconds. Would it be at all possible to see it again, to put it next to this one …’

‘No. I cannot do that. It is a murder docket.’

‘I understand.’

‘That is good.’

‘May I ask you one or two questions?’

‘You can ask.’

‘The television news said the man, Jacobus de Villiers, worked at an animal hospital …’

‘The TV people, they don’t listen. It is not a hospital, it is a rehabilitation centre.’

‘May I ask what the name of the centre is?’

He was reluctant to name it. He adjusted his bright yellow tie, rolling the huge shoulders under the white shirt. ‘Mogale. Now you will go show your photograph there?’