Sundowner Ubunta (22 page)

I watched dispiritedly as he began sweeping and mopping (I hoped the storage room was on his list), and given his shuffling gait, the process took an excruciatingly long time. Eventually he moved on to pushing a large baggage cart, slooooooowly, from the front of the building to the back of the building where the planes pull up. Although I would have preferred if he had pulled out a cellphone and dialled 9-1-1 (or at the very least called me a cab to go back to camp), I took the fact that he was doing stuff with baggage carts as a very good sign. Could this mean the impending arrival of an aircraft and more people?

It did.

At about one-thirty, Garry arrived from Mashatu with a Jeep full of outgoing passengers, including the four Australians, Sylvia Dinswoody, Scotland, and her heretofore unseen husband.

“How did you get here, Mr. Russell?” Garry asked me when I ran up to him as if he was a long-lost paramour whom I’d just spotted across a sun-dappled field of waving grass and graceful daisies swaying in a gentle, flower-scented breeze.

“Water? Do you have water?” I sputtered with desperation. I’d already decided that recriminations and confrontation were not my best course of action if I wanted to get out of Botswana alive.

He gave me a concerned look and told me to sit down and wait for him. In a minute he was back with a bottle of liquid gold he’d retrieved from the cooler at the back of the Jeep. He stood above me, regarding me carefully, but did not ask the question again; it would be a waste of words he’d already used. (I’d noticed that Garry spoke as if every person were allocated only so many words for a lifetime and he did not want to run short.)

“I was dropped off here yesterday afternoon,” I told him between deep, satisfying slurps. “Apparently Richard was
confused
…” A little sarcasm here. “…about when the next flight to Johannesburg was.”

“I see,” he said darkly. Garry knew exactly what I was saying. I got the feeling he knew all about what was happening here and that maybe, just maybe, he didn’t agree with it. “That is unfortunate,” he added.

Understatement.

“You are feeling all right now?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Give me your return ticket. I will talk to these men and tell them to make sure you are on this next flight, okay? It leaves for Johannesburg right at two o’clock, okay?”

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“Garry…” I began, searching his face for some sort of sign telling me he would be willing to help me with more than my ticket.

“No,” he said quickly, a hand raised in a gesture that told me to back off. “This is all I can do for you.”

I handed over my ticket, happy to have him deal with the authorities (the same two guys as when I’d arrived) who’d pulled up just as the incoming plane became visible in the sky, skimming the bottom edge of a light skiff of cloud. I watched as Garry approached the men, they spoke a few seconds, then Garry stood back to allow them to unlock the door to their booth and prepare for the new arrivals and departures before addressing my request. It wasn’t a bad system really, kind of like just-in-time air travel, they show up only when needed; and given the isolated location it’s not as if there was any possibility of waylaid passengers needing assistance…unless someone planned it that way….

I watched as the tiny plane, the same one I’d arrived on the day before yesterday, touched down and rolled toward the terminal. The Australians, endlessly giddy with adrenaline or perhaps an early afternoon shot of something or other, were making happy noises while Sylvia sat almost motionless behind a pair of dark, round sunglasses so big they covered three-quarters of her face. Next to her, her husband looked interminably bored. This was going to be a fun trip.

Garry came back and handed me a boarding pass and another bottle of water. “Safe trip, huh?”

“Thank you, Ghakarhi.” I must have come close to pronouncing it correctly because he smiled appreciatively. He gave me a cautioning look and said, “Be careful, Mr. Russell.” And with that he returned to his Jeep to await the arrival of his newest charges.

Returning to Johannesburg that Monday afternoon, I felt as if I’d been gone from civilization for a month rather than two days. Although I was beat and sore from my night on the cement floor fearing for my life, the large and noisy modern airport and the fact that Jaegar had not been on the return flight reinvigorated me. In the real world, wild animals and menacing German guys were not hunting me down, and I was safe and sound.

If only for a short while.

I had to go back. I had to return to Botswana, to a place called Chobe, where I would find Matthew Moxley’s boyfriend, Kevan, and through him, Matthew himself.

Now how the heck was I going to do all that?

As I meandered down the wide, shop-and-café-lined hallways of the bustling Johannesburg airport, looking, no doubt, like some poor, lost waif, I realized: that’s exactly what I am. I had no idea where I was going, or how to get there, I had nowhere to go to get cleaned up, I knew no one, except…. There was someone.

Although I was never to meet him in person, dealing only with his disembodied voice-soft, with a clipped Afrikaner accent-over the phone, I could easily have fallen in love with Roy Hearn that day. God bless Sereena Orion Smith for giving me this guardian angel, this travel guru and resourceful Africa-know-it-all, who’d been charged, by Sereena, with providing me with assistance as I needed it. And boy, did I need it.

And boy, did he come through. Again.

By dinnertime that night I was in a small, inexpensive hotel not far from the airport, enjoying a bath and room service, while he was behind a computer monitor somewhere in the city, busily pulling strings to arrange transportation for me to Chobe Game Reserve. By nine o’clock he had my itinerary fully arranged 99 of 170

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and called my hotel room with the details, beginning with an 11:20 a.m. Nationwide Air flight the next morning to Livingstone, Zambia.

When I got off the phone with Roy, I calculated that it was about one p.m. in the afternoon in Saskatoon and placed a call to my client. I reached Clara Ridge’s answering machine, and left a detailed message about my African adventures to date and told her that I was now heading to the northern edge of Botswana, via Zambia, where I hoped to track down a masseur named Kevan who would lead me to her son. It sounded daunting as I gave her the particulars, but hey, I bolstered myself, I’m Russell Quant, intrepid Saskatoon PI extraordinaire!

Sometimes you just have to tell yourself stuff like that.

“What a sight for sore eyes!” the familiar voice rang out from somewhere within the mess of bodies crowding around me in the thirty-two degree Celsius heat of the unairconditioned Livingstone airport.

The day had started out well enough. I had had a pleasant, leisurely breakfast at my hotel, a van arranged by Roy Hearn had taken me to the Joburg airport, and a nice big plane had ferried me quite comfortably the hour and twenty minutes from South Africa to Zambia. The aircraft was crammed with tourists, mostly elderly Brits, Americans and a handful of Canadians, on vacation and heading for Victoria Falls, one of the seven natural wonders of the world, so named after the British Queen Victoria by the famed explorer David Livingstone. The falls are situated on the border of Zimbabwe and Zambia, where the powerful Zambezi River plunges down a series of basalt gorges creating a never-ending mist that can be seen quite clearly even twenty kilometres away. When the river is in flood, the falls are the largest curtain of water in the world. Due to the current political conditions, most of the travellers on my flight were heading for resorts on the Zambian side of the falls, but some were not, swearing that, politics be damned, the view from Zimbabwe is the more stunning to behold.

Given the tourist popularity of the area (and the nice big plane), I expected the Livingstone airport to be considerably bigger and more modern than the Limpopo airfield. It was. But not by much.

We had filed off the plane into what looked to be a Customs and Immigration line-up, where a very young man in a tattered army-fatigue-green uniform made quite a production of checking names on a typed list attached to a well-worn clipboard. Whereas a number of guests ahead of me in the line were making a fuss about having to pay this guy off, Roy had warned me: regardless of whether or not my name was on the list, I would be charged ten US dollars to enter the country (even though I was not staying in Zambia and was immediately transferring to Botswana). So I was ready for this guy, I thought.

When it was my turn, the man asked me several unintelligible questions and no amount of “excuse me”s or “I don’t under-stand”s cleared up his English. At the end I simply shrugged my shoulders and accepted a charge of
twenty-five
US dollars to get him to allow my ass into Zambia. I had the feeling I’d been taken, but it’s not as if I was buying jeans at The Gap; Rule Number One when travelling in foreign countries: don’t argue with profiteers who carry shotguns.

Once through, and after waiting an exceedingly long time for my bag at the luggage carousel, I had entered the melee of the main terminal. It was crowded; and it didn’t help that many of the vacationers were quite elderly, moving very slowly, with countless pieces of luggage that were also elderly and moving slowly. It was hot hot hot and didn’t smell too good either. It was so hot, that when I heard the voice, I thought I might be hallucinating.

“Russell Quant, how the hell are you?” came the familiar voice once again.

Roy Hearn had told me to look out for a man with a name placard who would help me with my transfer to Botswana, but I didn’t think he’d be using such a familiar tone and besides, this voice definitely belonged to a woman. I scanned the bobbing heads and grinned when my eyes fell upon none other than 100 of 170

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Cassandra Wellness. She was wearing movie star sunglasses and a khaki out-fit that would have been bland on anyone else but looked superb on her; nothing fancy, mind you (except for a leopard print, silk scarf artfully arranged around her neck), just perfect. Her luxuriant auburn hair fell lush and shiny about her shoulders where she’d slung the straps of her well-worn but pricey travelling bags. She was struggling to slide her way through the crush of bodies to get to me.

“Cassandra, what are you doing here?” I called out to her.

“
Mosi-oa-Tunya
,” she said to me as she arrived breathless at my side.

“
Molo
?” I responded, displaying my enviable command of African languages.

Cassandra let out a raspy laugh and said, “
Mosi-oa-Tunya
; it means ‘the smoke that thunders.’ It’s the name given Victoria Falls by the local Kololo tribe for the thundering roar of the falls. You can hear them long before you see them.”

“You’re visiting the falls, then?” I took a wild guess.

She nodded and lifted her ever-present camera cases. “Photos. The river level is high this year, so the magazine editor thinks there should be some wonderful shots. I suppose I could probably just send her the shots I did the last time I was here, or the time before that, or the time before that,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “I’m at the Royal Livingstone Hotel,” she told me with a hopeful note in her voice. “Where are you? Care to meet for drinks tonight? I hear the vervet monkeys at the Sundowner bar are particularly mischievous this year. We can throw peanuts at them and see if they attack. Now that should make for some interesting shots! Canadian mayor attacked by African monkeys!”

“Actually, I’m not staying in Livingstone,” I told her as we continued being jostled about by the crowd, as though we were in a Hong Kong subway station at rush hour. “I’m off to Chobe Game Reserve.”

“I’m going with you!” she announced without a second’s thought, her bright eyes dancing with exuberance. “What an outstanding idea. I’ve never been to Chobe. I hear it’s marvellous. I’m coming with you; you don’t mind, do you?”

“Ah, but, er, ah,” I enunciated clearly. “What about the photos of the falls?”

“The falls aren’t going anywhere. I’ll come back for them.”

It was about then that I noticed a change in Cassandra’s facial expression. And it was also about then that I felt something hard being pressed into the small of my back, and it wasn’t moving.

“Let’s go outside,” a slithering voice filled my left ear.

My eyes never left Cassandra’s, and in the reflection of her shades I saw the ugly puss of Jaegar, who suddenly knew quite well how to speak English. I could just hear his mother saying: “If you can’t say something threatening, don’t say anything at all.”

So how the hell had he gotten from Mashatu to Livingstone? He hadn’t been on my flight to Johannesburg, and it certainly wasn’t as if there was a flight leaving every hour from the Limpopo airfield (I’d learned
that
the hard way). Had he driven? Had Richard Cassoum, the Mashatu camp manager, lied to me? Was there another, easier and quicker way to get here from Mashatu that he didn’t want me to know about? The possibility that Richard and Jaegar were in this together seemed more and more likely; how else would Jaegar have known where I was going? But why? I still had no idea what their connection might be, but now was not the time to ask questions.

By thrusting what I was guessing was a gun against my back, Jaegar had suddenly ratcheted up the stakes a notch or two. It was a daring move, in a crowded airport, and quite possibly a stupid one.

Assuming (hoping) he wouldn’t murder me in front of all these people, I realized that right at that very 101 of 170

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moment might be my best and only chance of escaping him.

But what about Cassandra? I didn’t want to put her in danger.

I scoured my surroundings for ideas for a heroic plan to get us away from the gun-toting Jaegar. I found what I was looking for right over Cassandra’s head. There was only one way out of this.

With a sudden, sharp thrust backwards, I shoved Jaegar far enough away from me so I could whirl around-all interpretive-dance-like-and land a sharp-toed jab directly in his crotch. I twirled again (I’m hoping it didn’t look as flitty as it sounds), grabbed Cassandra’s arm, and dashed towards the exit. The mass of people was still thick and slow as molasses in January. I hoped the crowd cover would work to our advantage as I encouraged a rather dumbfounded Cassandra to keep her head low and crouch-run as fast as she could.