up with the rain of blows. All of a sudden, they’d had enough, and raced off, arguing.
Tony had been so aghast that he hadn’t tried to stop the brutes, something he would feel guilty about for years. At crucial moments, he was clearly less decisive than he would have expected himself to be. He’d walked guiltily up to the horse, which had remained rooted to the spot, only its flanks quivering. He spoke soothingly to the animal without touching it, so as not to frighten it even more.
The horse neither started nor moved. It gave Tony a sad, human look. He felt doubly conscience-stricken. Would anyone—would he?—be capable of braving such torment without collapsing in pain, or going crazy with anger? This broken, tortured nag embodied something so noble, it was almost offensive. A sober heroism that Tony doubted he would ever be capable of.
Now, in Krokodilspruit, placing his finger back on the trigger, he tried to convince himself that such considerations were just mere projections, based on a deep longing for kinship. Show a man a stray cat, a cumulus cloud, or a weeping willow, and he will find something of himself in each of them. And each time it will be baloney.
And a rhinoceros was especially far from being human. A sea lion’s brain was a hundred times more sophisticated than the grey matter of this stinking colossus, which should have become extinct thousands of years ago, along with the dinosaurs and the mammoth. It was an oversight of nature that it was still wandering around, serving the tourist industry. In the Middle Ages, knights had scoured the Old World looking for unicorns—elegant white stallions that could charm virgins with the twisted horn on their foreheads. In the modern Middle Ages, the era of globalization, Joe Sixpack could lay his eyes on the unicorn’s cumbersome grey kinsman in any zoo in the world. Few people, virgins or otherwise, fainted at the sight of its squat double horns. If the rhinoceros possessed any charms, they were hidden beneath its robust hideousness, its surprising girth, its threatening, primordial strength. A primitive tank on four legs; it was hard to believe it would let itself be taken out by a single person with the right gun and a steely set of nerves.
Before the arrival of men with guns, rhinos hadn’t even had any natural enemies. Wherever they weren’t hunted, they thrived and flourished. They were the only species of tropical animal not to suffer from the Arctic winters and eternal nights of the menageries in the Far North, as long as they had creature comforts and a decent roof above their heads.
In that respect, they were only too human. All the rest was sentimental fantasy.
Tony had no time for sentiment. There was a knife at his throat. He had to bring off this appalling job or go under, himself, dragging everything he loved down with him. He wanted his family back, his reputation, and his old life. That creature, there, was the key. Backing out was no longer possible anyway. He was already guilty of fencing, breaking and entering, and attempted poaching, plus illegal arms possession and forgery. And that was just the South African stuff.
It wasn’t fair, though. This animal was simply unlucky enough to be the first rhinoceros to turn up at the watering hole. ‘But hey, that’s life! Things are tough for everyone!’ The head of the trading floor had shouted that at the first furious clients who had telephoned to complain about Tony, and the inexplicably falling prices of the stocks recommended to them on the basis of his prognoses.
‘When the prices inexplicably rise, you lot never call. Drop dead, you bunch of losers!’ For a whole week, he’d had to maintain his defensive line of scorn and threat.
Then he’d begun to telephone Tony himself to complain about his own shrinking portfolio. He, too, called Tony a conman and a leech. Another week later, something happened that no investment fund, ministry, or rating agency had wanted to consider. The bank went bankrupt and pulled all its foreign affiliates down into the black hole with it. A fortune larger than the budget of some European industrial powers disappeared into the void, leaving behind as much of a footprint as a fart in outer space.
The night before, Tony had gone into hiding. Disappeared off the radar, along with his laptop and his twelve memory sticks. They contained encoded company secrets from throughout the years. Activities that had been kept off the balance sheets. Toxic investment products, cut with clean ones and then oversold as reliable derivatives. A list of demanding clients and their exotic bank-account numbers. A demanding client—and this could be a person, a fund, a country, or another bank—didn’t like to share where the money came from or where it was going next, but demanded the highest interest rates and, if they didn’t get them, put their eggs in the competition’s basket.
The memory sticks were supposed to be a private database, nothing more—a way of keeping track in the growing rat’s nest of data. Tony only consulted them when his laptop was offline, that was how worried he was about hackers and extortionists. He had installed all the firewalls possible, but didn’t trust any of them completely. He had never wanted to use the sticks for criminal purposes. The thought hadn’t even occurred to him. His loyalty and sense of duty were too great for that. Now, in retrospect, he could no longer imagine it, but as long as he’d worked for the bank, gratitude for his job had won out over doubts about his role. He had shown respect because he thought he was respected. Extremely proud was how he had felt about his career, his salary, and his domestic happiness, even though he seldom got home before eleven at night and usually left again by seven in the morning. His weekends were one day long—unless there was a crisis, then they lasted an afternoon. His holidays in Provence were never longer than seven days, one of which was spent travelling there and another getting back. For ten years, he’d begged his wife to be patient. Just before she turned forty, he’d granted her a pregnancy. After the birth of their daughter, he’d had himself sterilized.
The more blood he shed on the altar of his profession, the more fanatically he took up its defence. He even protected his employer from slander on internet forums, albeit under a false name. He didn’t want be known as a toady. Toadies didn’t survive in investment banks. Indispensability depended on hard figures, not on soft-soaping.
On the Net, he had used ten pseudonyms in rotation to attack each new critic. He had the nine other usernames give his first alias the thumbs up, accompanied with little commentaries that attacked the details in the post but backed up the general gist. Sometimes the discussions between his aliases were longer than their collective brawls with the slanderers. This was how he conducted his chorus of swelling counter-voices to a climax: the detractors would grow tired of the unexpectedly large blowback and go and mouth off elsewhere, about some other financial mastodon.
Their departure filled him with more disappointment than triumph. He didn’t have any other hobbies.
Now he, too, had departed. He was in exile. He took his incriminating memory sticks and his laptop with him in a sports bag bearing the bank’s logo. He wasn’t intending to do any harm with them. He wasn’t a rancorous person; he found revenge barbaric. But he didn’t feel like paying for what was on his sticks. They would be his life insurance, nothing more.
His real life insurance would be shut down a few days after his disappearance, he was certain of that. Not everyone found revenge repulsive. He had many superiors, and the urge to retaliate increased the further up the food chain you went. His good name would be dragged through the mud, his bank accounts and his credit cards blocked, his shares, warrants, and options would be confiscated or forfeited. Whatever value they still had.
He stamped his BlackBerry to smithereens in the main station in Brussels, right after he’d used the phone one last time to say goodbye to Martine, his shocked wife. He hadn’t had Klara, their six-year-old daughter, on the line. She was still with the mother from the babysitting co-op, Martine sobbed. Tony didn’t know whether to believe his wife or whether she wanted to spare Klara the trauma of two tearful parents. Klara was a hypersensitive child.
But Tony was the person who would have been able to calm
