The Leopard Hunts in Darkness (10 page)

‘Good boy,’ Jock nodded. ‘No sense messing with those Matabele
shufta
– bandits the lot of them.’

‘Did you hear from Zürich?’

Jock shook his head. ‘Only sent the telex at nine o’clock local time. They are an hour behind us.’

‘Can I use your telephone? A few private calls?’

‘Local? I don’t want you chatting up your birds in New York at my expense.’

‘Of course.’

‘Right – as long as you mind the shop for me, while I’m out.’

Craig installed himself at Jock’s desk, and consulted the cryptic notes that he had made from Henry Pickering’s file.

His first call was to the American Embassy in Harare, the capital three hundred miles north-east of Bulawayo.

‘Mr Morgan Oxford, your cultural attaché, please,’ he asked the operator.

‘Oxford.’ The accent was crisp Boston and Ivy League.

‘Craig Mellow. A mutual friend asked me to call you and give you his regards.’

‘Yes, I was expecting you. Won’t you come in here any time and say hello?’

‘I’d enjoy that,’ Craig told him, and hung up.

Henry Pickering was as good as his word. Any message handed to Oxford would go out in the diplomatic bag, and be on Pickering’s desk within twelve hours.

His next call was to the office of the minister of tourism and information, and he finally got through to the minister’s secretary. Her attitude changed to warm co-operation when he spoke
to her in Sindebele.

‘The comrade minister is in Harare for the sitting of Parliament,’ she told him, and gave Craig his private number at the House.

Craig got through to a parliamentary secretary on his fourth attempt. The telephone system had slowly begun deteriorating, he noticed. The blight of all developing countries was lack of skilled
artisans; prior to independence all linesmen had been white, and since then most of them had taken the gap.

This secretary was Mashona and insisted on speaking English as proof of her sophistication.

‘Kindly state the nature of the business to be discussed.’ She was obviously reading from a printed form.

‘Personal. I am acquainted with the comrade minister.’

‘Ah yes. P-e-r-s-o-n-n-e-l.’ The secretary spelled it out laboriously as she wrote it.

‘No – that’s p-e-r-s-o-n-a-l,’ Craig corrected her patiently. He was beginning to adjust to the pace of Africa again.

‘I will consult the comrade minister’s schedule. You will be obliged to telephone again.’

Craig consulted his list. Next was the government registrar of companies, and this time he was lucky. He was put through to an efficient and helpful clerk who made a note of his
requirements.

‘The Share Register, Articles and Memorandum of Association of the company trading as Rholands Ltd, formerly known as Rhodesian Lands and Mining Ltd.’ He heard the disapproval in the
clerk’s tone of voice. ‘Rhode-sian’ was a dirty word nowadays, and Craig made a mental resolution to change the company’s name, if ever he had the power to do so.
‘Zimlands’ would sound a lot better to an African ear.

‘I will have Roneoed copies ready for you to collect by four o’clock,’ the clerk assured him. ‘The search fee will be fifteen dollars.’

Craig’s next call was to the surveyor general’s office, and again he arranged for copies of documents – this time the titles to the company properties – the ranches
King’s Lynn, Queen’s Lynn and the Chizarira estates.

Then there were fourteen other names on his list, all of whom had been ranching in Matabeleland when he left, close neighbours and friends of his family, those that grandpa Bawu had trusted and
liked.

Of the fourteen he could contact only four, the others had all sold up and taken the long road southwards. The remaining families sounded genuinely pleased to hear from him. ‘Welcome back,
Craig. We have all read the book and watched it on TV.’ But they clammed up immediately he started asking questions. ‘Damned telephone leaks like a sieve,’ said one of them.
‘Come out to the ranch for dinner. Stay the night. Always a bed for you, Craig. Lord knows, there aren’t so many of the old faces around any more.’

Jock Daniels returned in the middle of the afternoon, red-faced and sweating. ‘Still burning up my telephone?’ he growled. ‘Wonder if the bottle store has another bottle of
that Dimple Haig.’

Craig responded to this subtlety by crossing the road and bringing back the pinch bottle in a brown paperbag.

‘I forgot that you have to have a cast-iron liver to live in this country.’ He unscrewed the cap and dropped it into the waste-paper basket.

At ten minutes to five o’clock he telephoned the minister’s parliamentary office again.

‘The Comrade Minister Tungata Zebiwe has graciously consented to meet you at ten o’clock on Friday morning. He can allow you twenty minutes.’

‘Please convey my sincere thanks to the minister.’

That gave Craig three days to kill and meant he would have to drive the three hundred miles to Harare.

‘No reply from Zürich?’ He sweetened Jock’s glass.

‘If you made me an offer like that, I wouldn’t bother to answer either,’ Jock grumped, as he took the bottle from Craig’s hand and added a little more to the glass.

Over the next few days Craig availed himself of the invitations to visit Bawu’s old friends, and was smothered with traditional old Rhodesian hospitality.

‘Of course, you can’t get all the luxuries – Crosse and Blackwell jams, or Bronnley soap – any more,’ one of his hostesses explained as she piled his plate with
rich fare, ‘but somehow it’s fun making do.’ And she signalled the white-robed table servant to refill the silver dish with baked sweet potatoes.

He spent the days with darkly tanned, slow-speaking men in wide-brimmed felt hats and short khaki trousers, examining their sleek fat cattle from the passenger seat of an open Land-Rover.

‘You still can’t beat Matabeleland beef,’ they told him proudly. ‘Sweetest grass in the whole world. Of course, we have to send it all out through South Africa, but the
prices are damned good. Glad I didn’t run for it. Heard from old Derek Sanders in New Zealand, working as a hired hand on a sheep station now – and a bloody tough life too. No Matabele
to do the dirty work over there.’

He looked at his black herders with paternal affection. ‘They are just the same, under all the political claptrap. Salt of the bloody earth, my boy. My people, I feel that they are all
family, glad I didn’t desert them.’

‘Of course, there are problems,’ another of his hosts told him. ‘Foreign exchange is murder – difficult to get tractor spares, and medicine for the stock – but
Mugabe’s government is starting to wake up. As food-producers we are getting priority on import permits for essentials. Of course, the telephones only work when they do and the trains
don’t run on time any longer. There is rampant inflation, but the beef prices keep in step with it. They have opened the schools, but we send the kids down south across the border so they get
a decent education.’

‘And the politics?’

‘That’s between black and black. Matabele and Mashona. The white man’s out of it, thank God. Let the bastards tear each other to pieces if they want to. I keep my nose clean,
and it’s not a bad life – not like the old days, of course, but then it never is, is it?’

‘Would you buy more land?’

‘Haven’t got the money, old boy.’

‘But if you did have?’

The rancher rubbed his nose thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps a man could make an absolute mint one day if the country comes right, land prices what they are at the moment – or he could lose
the lot if it goes the other way.’

‘You could say the same of the stock exchange, but in the meantime it’s a good life?’

‘It’s a good life – and, hell, I was weaned on Zambezi waters. I don’t reckon I would be happy breathing London smog or swatting flies in the Australian
outback.’

On Thursday morning Craig drove back to the motel, picked up his laundry, repacked his single canvas holdall, paid his bill and checked out.

He called at Jock’s office. ‘Still no news from Zürich?’

‘Telex came in an hour ago.’ Jock handed him the flimsy, and Craig scanned it swiftly.

‘Will grant your client thirty-day option to purchase all Rholands company paid-up shares for one half million US dollars payable Zürich in full on signature. No further offers
countenanced.’ They did not come more final than that. Bawu had said double your estimate, and so far he had it right.

Jock was watching his face. ‘Double your original offer,’ he pointed out. ‘Can you swing half a million?’

‘I’ll have to talk to my rich uncle,’ Craig teased him. ‘And anyway I’ve got thirty days. I’ll be back before then.’

‘Where can I reach you?’ Jock asked.

‘Don’t call me. I’ll call you.’

He begged another tankful from Jock’s private stock and took the Volkswagen out on the road to the north-east, towards Mashonaland and Harare and ran into the first road-block ten miles
out of town.

‘Almost like the old days,’ he thought, as he climbed down onto the verge. Two black troopers in camouflage battle-smocks searched the Volkswagen for weapons with painstaking
deliberation, while a lieutenant with the cap-badge of the Korean-trained Third Brigade examined his passport.

Once again Craig rejoiced in the family tradition whereby all the expectant mothers in his family, on both the Mellow and Ballantyne side, had been sent home to England for the event. That
little blue booklet with the gold lion and unicorn and
Honi Soit Qui Mal y Pense
printed on the cover still demanded a certain deference even at a Third Brigade road-block.

It was late afternoon when he crested the line of low hills and looked down on the little huddle of skyscrapers that rose so incongruously out of the African veld, like headstones to the belief
in the immortality of the British Empire.

The city that had once borne the name of Lord Salisbury, the foreign secretary who had negotiated the Royal Charter of the British South Africa Company, had reverted to the name Harare after the
original Shona chieftain whose cluster of mud and thatch huts the white pioneers had found on the site in September 1890 when they finally completed the long trek up from the south. The streets
also had changed their names from those commemorating the white pioneers and Victoria’s empire to those of the sons of the black revolution and its allies – ‘a street by any other
name’ – Craig resigned himself.

Once he entered the city he found there was a boom-town atmosphere. The pavements thronged with noisy black crowds and the foyer of the modern sixteen-storied Monomatapa Hotel resounding to
twenty different languages and accents, as tourists jostled visiting bankers and businessmen, foreign dignitaries, civil servants and military advisers.

There was no vacancy for Craig until he spoke to an assistant manager who had seen the TV production and read the book. Then Craig was ushered up to a room on the fifteenth floor with a view
over the park. While he was in his bath, a procession of waiters arrived bearing flowers and baskets of fruit and a complimentary bottle of South African champagne. He worked until after midnight
on his report to Henry Pickering, and was at the parliament buildings in Causeway by nine-thirty the next morning.

The minister’s secretary kept him waiting for forty-five minutes before leading him through into the panelled office beyond, and Comrade Minister Tungata Zebiwe stood up from his desk.

Craig had forgotten how powerful was this man’s presence, or perhaps he had grown in stature since their last meeting. When he remembered that once Tungata had been his servant, his
gunboy, when Craig was a ranger in the Department of Game Conservation, it seemed that it had been a different existence. In those days he had been Samson Kumalo, for Kumalo was the royal blood
line of the Matabele kings, and he was their direct descendant. Bazo, his great-grandfather, had been the leader of the Matabele rebellion of 1896 and had been hanged by the settlers for his part
in it. His great-great-grandfather, Gandang, had been half-brother to Lobengula, the last king of the Matabele whom Rhodes’ troopers had ridden to an ignoble death and unmarked grave in the
northern wilderness after destroying his capital at GuBulawayo, the place of killing.

Royal were his blood-lines, and kingly still his bearing. Taller than Craig, well over six foot and lean, not yet running to flesh, which was often the Matabele trait, his physique was set off
to perfection by the cut of his Italian silk suit, shoulders wide as a gallows tree and a flat greyhound’s belly. He had been one of the most successful bush fighters during the war, and he
was warrior still, of that there was no doubt. Craig experienced a powerful and totally unexpected pleasure in seeing him once more.

‘I see you, Comrade Minister,’ Craig greeted him, speaking in Sindabele, avoiding having to choose between the old familiar ‘Sam’ and the
nom de guerre
that he now
used, Tungata Zebiwe, which meant ‘the Seeker after Justice.’

‘I sent you away once,’ Tungata answered in the same language. ‘I discharged all debts between us – and sent you away.’ There was no return light of pleasure in his
smoky dark eyes, the heavily boned jaw was set hard.

‘I am grateful for what you did.’ Craig was unsmiling also, covering his pleasure. It was Tungata who had signed a special ministerial order allowing Craig to export his self-built
yacht
Bawu
from the territory in the face of the rigid exchange-control laws which forbade the removal of even a refrigerator or an iron bedstead. At that time the yacht had been
Craig’s only possession, and he had been crippled by the mine blast and confined to a wheel-chair.

‘I do not want your gratitude,’ said Tungata, yet there was something behind the burnt-honey-coloured eyes that Craig could not fathom.

‘Nor the friendship I still offer you?’ Craig asked gently.

‘All that died on the battlefield,’ Tungata said. ‘It was washed away in blood. You chose to go. Now why have you returned?’

‘Because this is my land.’

‘Your land—’ he saw the reddish glaze of anger suffuse the whites of Tungata’s eyes. ‘Your land. You speak like a white settler. Like one of Cecil Rhodes’
murdering troopers.’