The Fury and the Terror (11 page)

"Shungwaya. The game preserve my grandfather founded on Lake Naivasha."

"Oh, back to the bush. I see." Bloodsaw glanced at the cane, a thick length of hand cut African ironwood, topped with a gold lion's head, which was leaning against the side of a chair. "How's the leg, Tom?"

"Seventy percent, I reckon. About as good as it ever will be, according to the docs."

"Have you spoken to anyone at Manhattan North recently?"

Sherard sipped his scotch. Bertie reached up to squeeze his free hand. Sherard turned his head to look out the window, at the droop-nose Concorde nestled against the mouth of a jet-way. Between himself and the freedom he craved stood his own reflection, a shade of what he used to be. He cringed inwardly, but nothing showed on his face. Bertie, serenely gorgeous, squeezed his hand, drawing his attention back to her. He smiled tensely. "I talked to the homicide guys two days ago. Nothing new, as usual. No leads." He shrugged, as if to hide a shudder. "A man steps out of the back of a green Cadillac sedan on Madison Avenue, in full daylight, and guns down my wife while I'm buying a paper at the corner kiosk. He fires a dozen rounds. I know the weapon by the bloody sound of it. H and K MP5 submachine gun. And I see his face, every day. Turning to look at me as I run toward him. I have no gun. No gun. Gillian didn't like for me to carry one, even though we both knew she might ... Every day. Every fucking day I see it all again with perfect clarity. The gunman has a steak tartare face, like a burn victim's. The eyes of a dead carp. A toupee that looks as if it were purchased from a taxidermist. He takes his time with me. His pleasure to let me live and never forget him. The bastard merely cuts the legs from under me with another burst, steps back into the sedan and is driven away. Tinted windows. Stolen plate. I never see the driver. Someone is screaming. It must be me. Then I'm crawling toward Gillian. I have to get to her. Though I already know, from the way she lies there. I know."

"Tom," Bertie said pleadingly.

He glanced at her, took a breath, took another, finished his drink, studied Bloodsaw.

"Tell Katharine there's nothing more to be said. She never wanted me to marry her daughter. Let her blame me all she wants, I don't give—"

"It's something else," Bloodsaw interrupted. "Something very urgent, as I said. She needs for you to listen."

"She hates my—"

Bertie said, "Tom? Go."

S
herard and Bloodsaw walked out of the British Airways terminal into late-afternoon glare and airport miasma. The other two lawyers were five servile paces behind them.

Two black limousines and two black Suburbans were parked at curbside. Strict no-parking area, but both limos had United Nations DPL plates and small plastic American flags on the front fenders. There were six NYPD motorcycle cops watching over the vehicles, deployed with a State Department security detail in the Suburbans.

Otis Bloodsaw, in spite of his years, could still cover ground in a hurry. Sherard had to concentrate to keep up on his bad leg, and the effort aggravated a deep-lying ache. Sherard had taken the lawyer on a photo safari nine years ago, in the Yambio region of southern Sudan, near an area of Congo that was now a bloody war zone. Primeval forest alternated with glistening savannahs, numerous glades of tall swaying bamboo. A lot of tracking had been necessary to find the elephants Bloodsaw wanted to photograph, but he had stood up well to the hours on foot.

One of the State Department security men opened a back door of the second limousine. Sherard glanced at Bloodsaw, who motioned him inside.

"Please take the jump seat, Tom," Katharine Bellaver said. "It's easier to talk face-to-face. Also, you might want to stretch out your leg. It's the left one that was so badly damaged, wasn't it?"

"Yes." Sherard made himself as comfortable as possible, not taking his eyes off Katharine. He was one of those men who, because of their builds—flesh close to the sturdy bones—look taller than they actually are. As it was, he stood almost six-two with a three-quarter-inch lift in the left boot to equalize the length of both legs. "How have you been, Madame Ambassador?"

"No need to be so formal, Tom."

He'd last seen her three months after Gillian's funeral, at the cemetery in northern Westchester County near the farm where he and Gillian had spent much of their time when she wasn't in Washington. He was just beginning rehab then, determined to walk again but barely able to stand upright with the aid of aluminum crutches. The pain like being burned alive at the stake. They had barely spoken. Absorbed in their grief, but not united by it. The bad blood was flowing once more.

In the limo Katharine sat to Sherard's right on the red velour seat, her head beside a midnight-dim window. She wore her lushly silvered hair in a psyche knot. Otis Bloodsaw leaned in to thank Katharine for their lunch at the Ambassador Grill, nodded good-bye to Tom. The roar of an outbound jet was reduced to muffled thunder as Bloodsaw closed the door. A chauffeur and security man in the front seat were vague presences behind soundproofed glass.

"I heard the President was coming to the U.N. tonight," Sherard said to Katharine. "I'm surprised you could spare the time to look me up."

"Doofuses sometimes win, Allen Dunbar is living proof. I'm meeting him here, at JFK, in forty-five minutes. But he is not and never should be the true President of the United States. Unfortunately for our country Clint Harvester, a man whom I admire as much as I despise his wife, is unable to resume his duties. The stroke spared his body but left him with an infantile brain and a vocabulary of six or eight words, most of them scatological. This is not something you want to gossip about, Tom. The situation is far too serious."

"I'm not a blabbermouth, and I seldom take an interest in politics. Does sound serious, however. Anything to do with me?"

Katharine sighed and pressed two fingers beside her mouth, to quell an agitated muscle there. "No, I wanted to see you because I've been thinking a lot about you, Tom. Since Gillian was murdered."

Sherard said nothing.

"Tom, is it ridiculous of me to say now that I've ... had longings, after all these years of our ... hostilities?"

"I don't know," Sherard replied, feeling uncomfortable but not too surprised. "What do you want me to say, Katharine? We had an affair. More like an idyl. Three weeks together, in the bush. But I was twenty-three, and you were—

"Much, much older," she said, with the beginning of a smile she covered gently with her hand, an old-fashioned gesture, an affectation, but never mind: it had captivated him a long time ago and he didn't find it unpleasant to discover that he was still susceptible.

"I didn't think about the years you had on me. You were quite simply the most vital woman I had ever met. I'd had a few girls, in Nairobi, away at school in the States. None of those ... encounters had ever prepared me for someone like you. The seduction of Tom Sherard. That was a rousing success, wasn't it?"

"Africa. The last, secret glow of a spent day. The night wind begins. One loses one's sense of inwardness; the soul is released to the stars. Huddled close to the warm stones that surround the fire pit, there is food and wine and talk. And more wine, until one is cozy-drunk, well fortified against the night chill."

He recognized the lines, from the book about her experiences that Katharine Bellaver had published some years later. A modest best-seller. He had not been included in this memoir. She was including him now.

"I loved the notion that your eyes never left me when I went off to piss bare-assed in the shadows. You were such a lean, serious boy. So angry when I became the least bit reckless, trying to get great photos that I hoped the
Geographic
would use. I think I may have been ... trying too hard to prove myself to you."

"Would have put quite a dent in my reputation to have a client trampled underfoot in elephant country or dragged to the bottom of a swamp by a flat dog."

"'Elephants don't fancy being stared at,' I believe is the way you put it. Close call. You were pale to the tips of your ears. And so angry that you stuttered."

"No, the stutter was from sheer terror. A white hunter who claims never to have been afraid in the bush is either hopeless braggart or a madman."

"Remember what you said I ought to do if I wanted to sneak into their midst for some close-ups?"

Sherard thought for a few moments, and startled himself by laughing. She hadn't put that in her book, either. "I said that you must first strip naked, roll yourself in fresh elephant dung to disguise your natural odor, then creep on your belly for a hundred yards until you could shoot the angles you wanted."

"Of course I took that as a dare."

"I was convinced you were flaming nuts when you came running into camp waving your Nikon over your head, with that ecstatic smile, oblivious of the flies and midges. Dried shit darkening your hide. Except for the butch haircut you'd given yourself, and the painted toenails, you could have passed for a Noruba woman. I was exhausted and terrified again, because I'd tramped everywhere and hadn't found you."

"And is that all you felt?" Katharine asked, her voice a murmur, wanting to tease the answer from him.

"You know better. I was . . . ungodly aroused. A thoroughly unorthodox seduction technique. Nevertheless I knew I was going to have you before another night passed." He cleared his throat. "After a lengthy scrub and shampoo, needless to say."

She took a few moments, as if the mood she had deliberately created possessed her too powerfully. She chose a different mood, with appropriately downcast eyes. "I was so lost then. You must have recognized that. My husband had died, and my daughter was . . . well, you know. Stunned by events, as unreachable as an autistic child."

"Katharine, God knows we were an unlikely pair. The aphrodisiac effects of the African bush on newcomers is almost a sure thing. You offered yourself to me. I took you. I was never in love with you."

"You've let yourself get too thin, Tom."

"But I fell in love with your daughter the first time I clapped eyes on her. Getting off that plane in Nairobi. Hesitating, stalled by heat and light. Lowering that neat, cropped head of hers to slip on sunglasses. As pretty, and remote, as a Degas dancer. You sent Gilly to me, hoping a hunt would be the tonic for her it had been for you. What the hell did you expect? That I wouldn't make love to her?"

"Go on. Be a bastard." But there was rueful acknowledgment in her tone, the momentary elevation of her chin.

"Then you had the bad grace to call me a fortune hunter, and other bitch epithets. You shut both of us out of your life. God, but that wounded Gillian. You've never known how much."

"Wrong. But I've always been difficult and obstinate. Was I jealous? A twinge or two. For the most part, please understand, I reacted out of fear. Not wanting Gillian to grow up. I got that from a Park Avenue shrink I went to and was able to tolerate for a couple of months. What a loathsome profession. Anyway. I talked myself into believing you really were an asshole to take her away from me."

"Your opposition only made us more sure of ourselves."

"After what she'd been through, I didn't want Gilly marrying anyone. I didn't think there could be a man who would understand how different, how very exceptional and altogether fragile my daughter was."

"You refused to accept that I could be good for her. As for Gillian's ... talent, and the problems it might cause. Right, that was beyond my ken, but I wasn't afraid of it. I was raised in Kenya. My father's chief tracker, who was Bertie Nkambe's grandfather, taught me lessons other than bushcraft. I learned there was more to native forms of worship and ritual than superstition stemming from primitive ignorance. I reckon it takes only one full moon in Africa to disabuse the most hardened skeptic. We are awash in an ocean of telemagical sympathies that infuse all living things. Katharine, I'm on my way home. I
need
to go home, or go mad from rage. You didn't send for me to hash over old times. Why don't you tell me what you really want?"

"I want my granddaughter. I'm very much afraid harm will come to her, as it came to Gillian."

"What are you saying? Gillian couldn't have children."

"After the first one, no. It was a difficult birth. She couldn't run the risk of becoming pregnant again. Things were done to ensure—"

"What child? When was it born? Gillian and I shared everything, we wouldn't have lasted otherwise."

"Gillian didn't know."

"That she'd been pregnant, given birth? Oh,
come on
."

"It happened. Try to take this seriously, Tom."

"Do I look amused?"

Katharine had had expert work done to her face: lasers, silicone. The surgery had frozen her looks at a certain unguessable age, immune to the years that ordinarily would have been clawing at her. All mask now, suitable to the status she retained in her social tribe. But her eyes had not changed; they were pale but spirited, always up to something, her gaze moving through air like a welder's flame, torching away resistance to her desires and needs.

"All right," Sherard said, hating what was coming; but he had to hear it. "When, and where?"

"Her daughter was born in the sanitarium where Gillian was being treated for the deep depression she slipped into after the events at Lake Celeste. Seven pounds two ounces. The correct number of fingers and toes. Adorable. The sun was coming up. I was tired to the bone. As physically used up as if I had been in labor. I looked out a window, at an Indian-summer morning in an old-world place of stone cottages, purple vineyards, a mist-shrouded river, geese on a wild spree across the sky. I thought, Eden. And that's what I named the child."