In the distance, a songbird made its presence known again.
◆ ◆ ◆
It wasn’t a large gang that had stolen a march on him, as Tony feared for a split second—his heart skipping a few beats at the thought that he had accidentally found himself face to face with half a dozen poachers. Imagine if he had been the first to shoot, and they’d fired at him after that! With their superior numbers and undoubtedly automatic weapons! He could have been dead by now. Helplessly riddled with bullets, left behind to disappear without a trace, twelve thousand kilometres from home, eaten by vultures and worms, a carcass of uncertain origin.
But soon his panic ebbed away. It was replaced by a cautious sense of relief. His opponent turned out to be a lone man, just like himself. And, judging by his bold act, he hadn’t even noticed Tony.
Even before the shot had died away, a safari jeep raced to the watering hole with a shadow at the wheel. The canvas protecting the back seats featured the same logo as the bonnet: a graphic representation of a springbok, with the words Nasionale Krugerwildtuin underneath it.
For a moment, Tony thought that his opponent was simply better prepared than he was. This fellow hadn’t bought a stolen four-by-four in Jo’burg; he’d carjacked one in the vicinity. An entirely appropriate vehicle, which no one would frown at if it were spotted, parked on the forbidden byroads of a neighbouring safari park. Brilliantly planned.
But when the man got out, surrounded by the cloud of dust his abruptly braking jeep had thrown up, Tony’s mild admiration turned into enmity. This wasn’t fair. It was Tony’s right to be standing there, he thought, down there in that dust cloud, down there by that water. His right—after all the trouble he’d gone to to get this far, a foreigner in a remote, unpredictable country, and a numbers person at that, which meant he rarely came into contact with animals, and certainly not in order to kill them. His opponent, on the other hand, was a professional park guide. That was much easier.
Tony watched the man through his telescopic sights with increasing dismay. A black giant of around 50 with a gammy leg and bloodshot eyes, creamy white teeth, grey stubble, and a grimace that looked as gloomy as it was grim, he was wearing the uniform that came with the job: sturdy shoes, knee-high green socks, a dark pair of shorts with pockets on the thighs, and a khaki-coloured shirt with breast pockets and green epaulettes on which the reserve’s emblem was repeated in miniature.
Tony remembered that uniform only too well. He had admired it, not two years ago, during his stay in Africa’s largest wildlife park with Martine and Klara. They may even have met this man in his capacity as guard.
That possibility made Tony’s blood boil.
For ten days, they had exchanged their converted barn in Belgium for a country as big as Western Europe. They hadn’t nearly enough time—they’d realized that right away. They hadn’t seen much more than the Kruger Wildlife Park, two vineyards in Franschhoek, and the view of Table Mountain from Cape Town.
But what a staggering panorama that had been! The bright-blue bay with its V&A Waterfront, the lattice of the busy streets in the City Bowl, wedged between Devil’s Peak and Lion’s Head, the elongated Parade with its palm trees, the smoggy patches on the northern horizon… After the immense, ever-changing landscape that he and Martine had admired from the hire car for hours on end, this lavish vista made them feel even more regretful. They resolved to return as soon as possible and do this magnificent country justice.
Nothing ever came of their resolution. They just didn’t have time. The ten-day trip was one of the very few real trips Tony had ever allowed himself. Martine had pressed for it for so long, and the bank, back then, seemed to be heading toward double-digit profit growth. They could, briefly, do without him. For once, he even accepted the risk that, while he was gone, the newly recruited whiz-kids would steal his niche. These days they were snatched from university even before their finals and given a five-year contract straight off, in exchange for that period in their lives when they didn’t yet have a time-consuming family, but did have the endurance of an athlete. Those pups could work for two nights in a row without losing any of their enthusiasm. Well, just let them try it, the suckers. Let them muddle along without him for once. Just to play it safe, he’d stowed away a few files behind double passwords. There were others he’d failed to mention during the briefing. They’d just have to get on with it. He’d had to do that, too, when he joined the bank.
Klara had just turned four back then, during their jaunt, but two years later she still remembered the herd of elephants and the one lion they’d seen close up, not to mention the family of amusing meerkats, and the warthog with eight piglets. And the hippos! Once Klara got going about them? Their wide-open mouths with birds in, pecking between their teeth? And her very own pink Hello Kitty binoculars, used to spot everything? After that, Tony could just sit back and listen for a few minutes. Klara would rattle on endlessly to oblige Daddy.
At least it had once been that way. At home and on the phone. And recently, again, though much more briefly, on Skype. There was hardly time to talk about anything else; Tony didn’t dare to speak to her or his wife for longer than ten or twelve minutes at a time.
Maybe it was better that way—Klara talking about the trip again. He wouldn’t have known what to say if she had pestered him with questions like she usually did. He was already feeling sick about the fact that, in the space of three minutes and with her prettiest pout, she’d twice asked him when he was coming home, at last.
One consequence of Klara’s extended safari story was that Martine barely had the chance to break into the conversation. As a mother, she clearly considered it more important that their sensitive daughter got to talk to her father than that she unburdened her sorrows as a wife. When Tony had cautiously sounded her out on the progress of the investigation, Martine had reacted strangely. She had gone white as a sheet, stuttered, stumbled over her words, and been completely incomprehensible. Was this his Martine? Where was her self-control, the sangfroid he’d always admired? From the dismal sob in her voice and the sidelong, fearful glances she’d cast at her daughter, only visible to him, Tony concluded that she and Klara were still under surveillance, and that they were trying to track him down through his family. They were being tapped, watched, downright spied upon.
He not only cut the connection immediately, he logged off completely and left the internet café without paying, disappearing into the ambling crowds in Istanbul’s Old City. Two hours later, he had checked in at Atatürk airport, completing his stopover of almost a full day. Two hours later, and he was taking off in a Turkish Airlines Airbus A330 to O.R. Tambo airport, Johannesburg.
The uniformed black giant had hardly looked around as he got out, maddeningly calm, as though any cause for concern were unimaginable. He threw back the canvas of his jeep, tossed his safari hat onto the back seat, and still with the same air of appalling unflappability, got out a chainsaw. The rhino cow lay convulsing on her side next to the jeep. Blubber welled out of the hole in her head while her fat legs continued to move, slowly struggling as though making their way sideways through a sea of clotting mucus. The bottom of the sun touched the horizon. A sickly smell reached Tony’s nostrils, carried on the evening breeze. Birds hovered high in the sky; Tony wasn’t sure if they’d already been circling before, or not.
The birds flapped away when the man set off his chainsaw with a tug of the starter cord. The hysterical roar of the machine not only cleaved the newly regained Arcadian silence with just a few bird and insect sounds, it also cut Tony’s heart in two. He no longer knew what he felt, watching motionlessly from his hiding place. Outrage? Jealousy?
Or was he simply angry?
Even as a student, he’d had a predilection for black people. Their history was deeply tragic; it seemed to cry out for vengeance. The nice thing
