The Leopard Hunts in Darkness (14 page)

‘Are there any Shona detainees?’ Craig insisted.

‘Oh, yes,’ Peter assured him. ‘The camps for them are up in the eastern highlands – exactly the same conditions—’

At sunset the generator powering the radio was started and twenty minutes later Peter Fungabera came down to the dugout where Craig was re-reading and correcting his writing of the previous
night.

‘There is a message for you, Craig, relayed by Morgan Oxford at the American Embassy.’

Craig jumped to his feet eagerly. He had arranged for Henry Pickering’s reply to be passed on to him as soon as it was received. He took the sheet of notepaper on which Peter had jotted
the radio transmission, and read; ‘For Mellow. Stop. My personal enthusiasm for your project not shared by others. Stop. Ashe Levy unwilling to advance or guarantee. Stop. Loans Committee
here requires substantial additional collateral before funding. Stop. Regrets and best wishes. Henry.’

Craig read the message once fast and then again very slowly.

‘None of my business,’ Peter Fungabera murmured, ‘but I presume this concerns your plans for the place you call Zambezi Waters?’

‘That’s right – and it puts the kibosh on those, I’m afraid,’ Craig told him bitterly.

‘Henry?’

‘A friend, a banker – perhaps I relied on him too much.’

‘Yes,’ Peter Fungabera said thoughtfully, ‘it looks that way, doesn’t it?’

Even though he had missed the previous night, Craig had difficulty sleeping. His mat was iron-hard and the hellish chorus of the hyena pack in the forest echoed his sombre mood.

On the long drive back to the airstrip at Tuti Mission, he sat beside the driver and took no part in the conversation of Peter and Sally-Anne in the seat behind him. Only now did he realize how
much store he had set on buying Rholands, and he was bitterly angry with Ashe Levy who had refused his support and with Henry Pickering who had not tried hard enough, and his damned Loans Committee
who could not see the ends of their own noses.

Sally-Anne insisted on stopping once again at the mission schoolhouse to renew her acquaintance with Sarah, the Matabele teacher. This time Sarah was prepared and offered her visitors tea. In no
mood for pleasantries, Craig found a seat on the low veranda wall well separated from the others, and began scheming without real optimism how he might circumvent Henry Pickering’s
refusal.

Sarah came to him demurely with an enamel mug of tea on a carved wooden tray. As she offered it, her back was turned to Peter Fungabera.

‘When the man-eating crocodile knows the hunter is searching for him, he buries himself in the mud at the bottom of the deepest pool,’ she spoke softly in Sindebele, ‘and when
the leopard hunts, he hunts in darkness.’

Startled, Craig looked into her face. Her eyes were no longer downcast, and there was a fierce and angry glow in their dark depths.

‘Fungabera’s puppies must have been noisy,’ she went on just as softly, ‘they could not feed while you were here. They would have been hungry. Did you hear them,
Kuphela?’ she asked, and this time Craig started with surprise. Sarah had used the name that Comrade Lookout had given him. How had she known that? What did she mean by Fungabera’s
puppies?

Before Craig could reply, Peter Fungabera looked up and saw Craig’s face. He rose to his feet easily but swiftly, and crossed the veranda to Sarah’s side. Immediately the black girl
dropped her gaze from Craig’s face, bobbed a little curtsey and retired with the empty tray.

‘Do not let your disappointment depress you too much, Craig. Do come and join us.’ Peter placed a friendly hand on Craig’s shoulder.

On the short drive from the mission station to the airstrip Sally-Anne suddenly leaned forward and touched Craig’s shoulder.

‘I have been thinking, Craig. This place you call Zambezi Waters can only be about half an hour’s flying time from here. I found the Chizarira river on the map. We could make a small
detour and fly over it on the way home.’

‘No point.’ Craig shook his head.

‘Why not?’ she asked, and he passed her the sheet of notepaper with Pickering’s message.

‘Oh, I am so sorry.’ It was genuine, Craig realized, and her concern comforted him a little.

‘I would like to see the area,’ Peter Fungabera cut in suddenly, and when Craig shook his head again, his voice hardened. ‘We will go there,’ he said with finality, and
Craig shrugged his indifference.

Craig and Sally-Anne pored over her map. ‘The pools should be here, where this stream joins the main river-course.’ And she worked swiftly with callipers and her wind-deflection
computer.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Twenty-two minutes’ flying time with this wind.’

While they flew, and Sally-Anne studied the terrain and compared it to her map, Craig brooded over the Matabele girl’s words. ‘Fungabera’s puppies.’ Somehow it sounded
menacing, and her use of the name ‘Kuphela’ troubled him even more. There was only one explanation: she was in touch with, and was probably a member of, the group of dissident
guerrillas. What had she meant by the leopard and crocodile allegory, and Fungabera’s puppies? And whatever it was, just how unbiased and reliable would she be if she were a guerrilla
sympathizer?

‘There is the river,’ said Sally-Anne as she eased the throttle closed and began a shallow descending turn towards the glint of waters through the forest-tops.

She flew very low along the river-bank, and despite the thick cloak of vegetation, picked out herds of game animals, even once, with a squeal of glee, the great rocklike hulk of a black
rhinoceros in the ebony thickets.

Then suddenly she pointed ahead. ‘Look at that!’

In a loop of the river, there was a strip of open land hedged in with tall riverine trees, where the grass had been grazed like a lawn by the zebra herds who were already raising dust as they
galloped away in panic from the approaching aircraft.

‘I bet I could get down there,’ Sally-Anne said and pulled on the flaps, slowing the Cessna and lowering the nose to give herself better forward vision. Then she let down the
landing-gear.

She made a series of slow passes over the open ground, each lower than the previous one, until at the fourth pass her wheels were only two or three feet above the ground and they could see each
individual hoofprint of the zebra in the dusty earth.

‘Firm and clear,’ she said, and on the next pass touched down, and immediately applied maximum safe braking that pulled the aircraft to a dead stop in less than a hundred and fifty
paces.

‘Bird lady,’ Craig grinned at her and she smiled at the compliment.

They left the aircraft and set off across the plain towards the forest wall, passed through it along a game trail and came out on a rocky bluff above the river.

The scene was a perfect African cameo. White sandbanks and water-polished rock glittering like reptiles’ scales, trailing branches decked with weaver birds’ nests over deep green
water, tall trees with white serpentine roots crawling over the rocks – and beyond that, open forest.

‘It’s beautiful,’ said Sally-Anne, and wandered off with her camera.

‘This would be a good site for one of your camps,’ Peter Fungabera pointed at the great lumpy heaps of elephant dung on the white sandbank below them.

‘Grandstand view.’

‘Yes, it would have been,’ Peter agreed. ‘It seems too good to pass up – at that price. There must be millions of profit in it.’

‘For a good African socialist, you talk like a filthy capitalist,’ Craig told him morosely.

Peter chuckled and said, ‘They do say that socialism is the ideal philosophy – just as long as you have capitalists to pay for it.’

Craig looked up sharply, and for the first time saw the glitter of good old western European avarice in Peter Fungabera’s eyes. Both of them were silent, watching Sally-Anne in the
river-bed, as she made compositions of tree and rock and sky and photographed them.

‘Craig.’ Peter had obviously reached a decision. ‘If I could arrange the collateral the World Bank requires, I would expect a commission in Rholands shares.’

‘I guess you would be entitled to it.’ Craig felt the embers of his dead hopes flicker, and at that moment Sally-Anne called, ‘It’s getting late and we have two and a
half hours’ flying to Harare.’

Back at New Sarum air force base Peter Fungabera shook hands with both of them.

‘I hope your pictures turn out fine,’ he said to Sally-Anne, and to Craig, ‘You will be at the Monomatapa? I will contact you there within the next three days.’

He climbed into the army jeep that was waiting for them, nodded to his driver, and saluted them with his swagger-stick as he drove away.

‘Have you got a car?’ Craig asked Sally-Anne, and when she shook her head, ‘I can’t promise to drive as well as you fly – will you take a chance?’

She had an apartment in an old block in the avenues opposite Government House. He dropped her at the entrance.

‘How about dinner?’ he asked.

‘I’ve got a lot of work to do, Craig.’

‘Quick dinner, promise – peace offering. I’ll have you home by ten.’ He crossed his heart theatrically, and she relented.

‘Okay, seven o’clock here,’ she agreed, and he watched the way she climbed the steps before he started the Volkswagen. Her stride was businesslike and brisk, but her backside
in the blue jeans was totally frivolous.

Sally-Anne suggested a steakhouse where she was greeted like royalty by the huge, bearded proprietor, and where the beef was simply the best Craig had ever tasted, thick and juicy and tender.
They drank a Cabernet from the Cape of Good Hope and from a stilted beginning their conversation eased as Craig drew her out.

‘It was fine just as long as I was a mere technical assistant at Kodak, but when I started being invited on expeditions as official photographer and then giving my own exhibitions, he just
couldn’t take it,’ she told him, ‘first man ever to be jealous of a Nikon.’

‘How long were you married?’

‘Two years.’

‘No children?’

‘Thank God, no.’

She ate like she walked, quickly, neatly and efficiently, yet with a sensuous streak of pleasure, and when she was finished she looked at her gold Rolex.

‘You promised ten o’clock,’ she said, and despite his protestations, scrupulously divided the bill in half and paid her share.

When he parked outside the apartment, she looked at him seriously for a moment before she asked, ‘Coffee?’

‘With the greatest of pleasure.’ He started to open the door, but she stopped him.

‘Right from the start, let’s get it straight,’ she said. ‘The coffee is instant Nescafé – and that’s all. No gymnastics – nothing else,
okay?’

‘Okay,’ he agreed.

‘Let’s go.’

Her apartment was furnished with a portable tape recorder, canvas-covered cushions and a single camp-bed on which her sleeping-bag was neatly rolled. Apart from the cushions, the floor was bare
but polished, and the walls were papered with her photographs. He wandered around studying them while she made the coffee in the kitchenette.

‘If you want the bathroom, it’s through there,’ she called. ‘Just be careful.’

It was more dark-room than ablution, with a light-proof black nylon zip-up tent over the shower cabinet and jars of chemicals and packets of photographic paper where in any other feminine
bathroom there would have been scents and soaps.

They lolled on the cushions, drank the coffee, played Beethoven’s Fifth on the tape, and talked of Africa. Once or twice she made passing reference to his book, showing that she had read
it with attention.

‘I’ve got an early start tomorrow—’ at last she reached across and took the empty mug out of his hand. ‘Good night, Craig.’

‘When can I see you again?’

‘I’m not sure, I’m flying up into the highlands early tomorrow. I don’t know how long.’ Then she saw his expression and relented. ‘I’ll call you at the
Mono when I get back, if you like?’

‘I like.’

‘Craig, I’m beginning to like you – as a friend, perhaps, but I’m not looking for romance. I’m still hurting – just as long as we understand that,’ she
told him as they shook hands at the door of the apartment.

Despite her denial, Craig felt absurdly pleased with himself as he drove back to the Monomatapa. At this stage he did not care to analyse too deeply his feelings for her, nor to define his
intentions towards her. It was merely a pleasant change not to have another celebrity boffer trying to add his name to her personal scoreboard. Her powerful physical attraction for him was made
more poignant by her reluctance, and he respected her talents and accomplishments and was in total sympathy with her love of Africa and her compassion for its peoples.

‘That’s enough for now,’ he told himself as he parked the Volkswagen.

The assistant manager met him in the hotel lobby, wringing his hands with anguish, and led him through to his office.

‘Mr Mellow, I have had a visit from the police special branch while you were out. I had to open your deposit box for them, and let them into your room.’

‘God damn it, are they allowed to do that?’ Craig was outraged.

‘You don’t understand, here they can do whatever they like,’ the assistant manager hurried on. ‘They removed nothing from the box, Mr Mellow – I can assure you of
that.’

‘Nevertheless, I’d like to check it,’ Craig demanded grimly.

He thumbed through his travellers’ cheques and they tallied. His return air-ticket was intact, as was his passport – but they had been through the ‘survival kit’ that
Henry Pickering had provided. The gilt field assessor’s identification badge was loose in its leather cover.

‘Who could order a search like this?’ he asked the assistant manager as they relocked the box.

‘Only someone pretty high up.’

‘Tungata Zebiwe,’ he thought bitterly. ‘You vicious, nosy bastard – how you must have changed.’

C
raig took his report of his visit to Tuti Rehabilitation Centre for Henry Pickering up to the embassy, and Morgan Oxford accepted it and offered
him coffee.

‘I might be here a longer time than I thought,’ Craig told him, ‘and I just can’t work in an hotel room.’