Smokescreen

Chapter Thirteen

The next morning, the Iguana management having kindly sent someone with the keys to fetch my hired car from outside Roderick’s flat, I packed what little I would need for the Kruger Park, and chuntered round to Evan and Conrad’s hotel.

The loading of their station wagon was in process of being directed by Evan as if it were the key scene in a prestige production, and performed by Conrad at his most eccentric. Boxes, bags, and black zipped equipment littered the ground for a radius of ten yards.

‘Dear boy,’ Conrad said as I approached, ‘for God’s sake get some ice.’

‘Ice?’ I echoed vaguely.

‘Ice.’ He pointed to a yellow plastic box about two feet by one. ‘In there. For the film.’

‘What about beer?’

He gave me a sorrowful, withering glance. ‘Beer in the red one, dear boy.’

The red thermal box had had priority; had already been clipped tight shut and lifted on to the car. Smiling, I went into the hotel on the errand and returned with a large plastic bagful. Conrad laid the ice-pack in the yellow box and carefully stacked his raw stock on top. The yellow box joined the red one and Evan said that at this rate we wouldn’t reach the Kruger by nightfall.

At eleven the station wagon was full to the gunnels but the ground was still littered with that extraordinary collection of wires, boxes, tripods and clips which seem to accompany cameramen everywhere.

Evan waved his arms as if by magic wand the whole lot would leap into order. Conrad pulled his moustache dubiously. I opened the boot of my saloon, shovelled the whole lot in unceremoniously, and told him he could sort it all out when we arrived.

After that we adjourned for thirst quenchers, and finally got the wheels on the road at noon. We drove east by north for about five hours and descended from the high Johannesburg plateau down to a few hundred feet above sea level. The air grew noticeably warmer on every long downhill stretch, which gave rise to three or four more stops for sustenance. Conrad’s cubic capacity rivalled the Bantus’.

By five we arrived at the Numbi gate, the nearest way into the park. The Kruger itself stretched a further two hundred miles north and fifty east with nothing to keep the animals in except their own wish to stay. The Numbi gate consisted of a simple swinging barrier guarded by two khaki-uniformed black Africans and a small office. Evan produced passes for two cars and reservations for staying in the camps, and with grins and salutes the passes were stamped and the gates swung open.

Brilliant scarlet and magenta bougainvillaea just inside proved misleading: the park itself was tinder dry and thorny brown after months of sun and no rain. The narrow road stretched ahead into a baked wilderness where the only man-made thing in sight was the tarmac itself.

‘Zebras,’ shouted Evan, winding down his window and screaming out of it.

I followed his pointing finger, and saw the dusty herd of them standing patiently under bare-branched trees, slowly swinging their tails and merging uncannily into the striped shade.

Conrad had a map, which was just as well. We were headed for the nearest camp, Pretoriuskop, but roads wound and criss-crossed as we approached it, unmade-up dry earth roads leading off at tangents to vast areas inhabited believably by lion, rhinoceros, buffalo and crocodile.

And, of course, elephant.

The camp turned out to be an area of several dozen acres, enclosed by a stout wire fence, and containing nothing so camplike as tents. Rather like Butlins gone native, I thought: clusters of round, brick-walled, thatched-roofed cabins like pink-coloured drums with wide-brimmed hats on.

‘Rondavels,’ Evan said in his best dogmatic manner, waving a hand at them. He checked in at the big reception office and drove off to search for the huts with the right numbers. There were three of them: one each. Inside, two beds, a table, two chairs, fitted cupboard, shower room, and air-conditioning. Every mod con in the middle of the jungle.

Evan banged on my door and said come on out, we were going for a drive. The camp locked its gates for the night at six thirty, he said, which gave us forty minutes to go and look at baboons.

‘It will take too long to unpack the station wagon,’ he said. ‘So we will all go in your car.’

I drove and they gazed steadfastly out of the windows. There were some distant baboons scratching themselves in the evening sunlight on a rocky hill, and a herd of impala munching away at almost leafless bushes, but not an elephant in sight.

‘We’d better go back before we get lost,’ I said, but even then we only whizzed through the gates seconds before closing time.

‘What happens if you’re late?’ I asked.

‘You have to spend the night outside,’ Evan said positively. ‘Once the gate is closed, it’s closed.’

Evan, as usual, seemed to be drawing information out of the air, though he gave the game away later by producing an information booklet he had been given in reception. The booklet also said not to wind down windows and scream ‘zebra’ out of them, as the animals didn’t like it. Wild animals, it appeared, thought cars were harmless and left them alone, but were liable to bite any bits of humans sticking out.

Conrad had had to unpack the whole station wagon to unload the red beer box, which was likely to reverse his priorities. We sat round a table outside the huts, cooling our throats in the warm air and watching the dark creep closer between the rondavels. Even with Evan there it was peaceful enough to unjangle the screwiest nerves... and lull the wariest mind into a sense of security.

Thursday, the following day, we set off at daybreak and breakfasted at the next camp, Skukuza, where we were to stay that night.

Skukuza was larger and boasted executive-status rondavels, which Evan’s production company had naturally latched on to. They had also engaged the full-time attendance of a park ranger for the day, which would have been splendid had he not been an Afrikaaner with incomplete English. He was big, slow moving, quiet, and unemotional, the complete antithesis of Evan’s fiery zeal for allegory.

Evan shot questions and had to wait through silences for his answers: no doubt Haagner was merely translating the one into Afrikaans in his head, formulating the other and translating that into English, but the delay irritated Evan from the start. Haagner treated Evan with detachment and refused to be hurried, which gave Conrad the (decently concealed) satisfaction of an underdog seeing his master slip on a banana skin.

We set off in Haagner’s Range Rover, accompanied by the Arriflex, a tape recorder, half a dozen smaller cameras, and the red thermal box loaded with a mixed cargo of film, beer, fruit, and sandwiches in plastic bags. Evan had brought sketch pads, maps and notebooks, and six times remarked that the company should have equipped him with a secretary. Conrad murmured that we should be glad that we weren’t equipped with Drix Goddart, but from the sour look Evan slid me he didn’t necessarily agree.

‘Olifant,’ Haagner said, pointing, having been three times told of the aim of the expedition.

He stopped the van. ‘There, in the valley.’

We looked. A lot of trees, a patch of green, a winding river.

‘There, man,’ he said.

Eventually our untrained eyes saw them; three dark hunched shapes made small by distance, flapping a lazy ear behind a bush.

‘Not near enough,’ Evan said disgustedly. ‘We must get nearer.’

‘Not here,’ said Haagner. ‘They are across the river. The Sabie river. Sabie is Bantu word: it means Fear.’

I looked at him suspiciously but he was not provoking Evan in any way; simply imparting information. The slow peaceful-looking water wound through the valley and looked as unfearful as the Thames.

Evan had no eyes for the various antelope-like species Haagner pointed out, nor for the blue jays or turkey buzzards or vervet moneys or wildebeest, and particularly not for the herds of gentle impala. Only the implicitly violent took his attention: the vultures, the hyena, the wart-hog, the possibility of lion and the scarcity of cheetah.

And, of course, olifants. Evan adopted the Afrikaans word as his own and rolled it round his tongue as if he alone had invented it. Olifant droppings on the road (fresh, said Haagner) excited him almost to orgasm. He insisted on us stopping there and reversing for a better view, and on Conrad sticking the Arriflex lens out of the window and exposing about fifty feet of film from different angles and with several focal lengths.

Haagner, patiently positioning the van for every shot, watched these antics and clearly thought Evan unhinged, and I laughed internally until my throat ached. Had the obliging elephant returned Evan would no doubt have directed him to defecate again for Scene I, Take II. He would have seen nothing odd in it.

Evan left the heap reluctantly and was working out how to symbolise it in an utterly meaningful way. Conrad said he could do with a beer but Haagner pointed ahead and said ‘Onder-Sabie’, which turned out to be another rest camp like the others.

‘Olifant in Saliji river,’ said Haagner coming back from a chat with some colleagues. ‘If we go now, you see them perhaps.’

Evan swept us away from the shady table and our half empty glasses and scurried forth again into the increasing noonday heat. All around us, more sensible mortals were fanning themselves and contemplating siesta, but olifants, with Evan, came before sense.

The Range Rover was as hot as an oven.

‘It is hot, today,’ Haagner said. ‘Hotter tomorrow. Summer is coming. Soon we will have the rain, and all the park will be green.’

Evan, alarmed, said, ‘No, no. The park must be burned up, just like this. Inhospitable land, bare, hungry, predatory, aggressive and cruel. Certainly not soft and lush.’

Haagner understood less than a tenth. After a long pause he merely repeated the bad news: ‘In one month, after the rains start, the park will be all green. Then, much water. Now, not much. All small rivers are dry. We find olifant near bigger rivers. In Saliji.’

He drove several miles and stopped beside a large wooden sun shelter built high at the end of a valley. Below, the Saliji river stretched away straight ahead, and the olifants had done Evan proud. A large family of them were playing in the water, squirting each other through their trunks and taking care of their kids.

As it was an official picnic place especially built in an area of cleared ground, we were all allowed out of the car. I stretched myself thankfully and dug into the red box for a spot of irrigation. Conrad had a camera in one hand and a beer in the other and Evan brandished his enthusiasm over us all like a whip.

Haagner and I sat in ninety degrees in the shade at one of the small scattered tables and ate some of the packed sandwiches. He had warned Evan not to go too far from the shelter while filming as it presented an open invitation to a hungry lion, but Evan naturally believed that he would not meet one: and he didn’t. He took Conrad plus Arriflex fifty yards downhill into the bush for some closer shots and Haagner called him urgently to come back, telling me his job would be lost if Evan were.

Conrad soon climbed up again, mopping drops from his brow which were not all heat, and reported that ‘something’ was grunting down there behind some rocks.

‘There are twelve hundred lion in the park,’ Haagner said. ‘When hungry, they kill. Lions alone kill thirty thousand animals in the park every year.’

‘God,’ said Conrad, visibly losing interest in Evan’s whole project.

Eventually Evan returned unscathed, but Haagner regarded him with disfavour.

‘More olifant in the north,’ he said. ‘For olifant, you go north.’ Out of his district, his tone said.

Evan nodded briskly and set his mind at rest.

‘Tomorrow. We set off northwards tomorrow, and tomorrow night we stay in a camp called Satara.’

Reassured, Haagner drove us slowly back towards Skukuza, conscientiously pointing out animals all the way.

‘Could you cross the park on a horse?’ I asked.

He shook his head decisively. ‘Very dangerous. More dangerous than walking, and walking is not safe.’ He looked directly at Evan. ‘If your car break down, wait for next car, and ask people to tell rangers at the next camp. Do not leave your car. Do not walk in the park. Especially do not walk in the park at night. Stay in car all night.’

Evan listened to the lecture with every symptom of ignoring it. He pointed instead to one of the several un-metalled side roads we had passed with ‘no entry’ signs on them, and asked where they led.

‘Some go to the many Bantu ranger stations,’ said Haagner after the pause for translation. ‘Some to water holes. Some are fire breaks. They are roads for rangers. Not roads for visitors. Do not go down those roads.’ He looked at Evan, clearly seeing that Evan would not necessarily obey. ‘It is not allowed.’

‘Why not?’

‘The park is 8,000 square miles... visitors can get lost.’

‘We have a map,’ Evan argued.

‘The service roads,’ Haagner said stolidly, ‘are not on the maps.’

Evan ate a packet of sandwiches mutinously and rolled down the window to throw out the plastic bag.

‘Do not do that,’ Haagner said sharply enough to stop him.

‘Why not?’

‘The animals eat them, and choke. No litter must be thrown. It kills the animals.’

‘Oh very well,’ said Evan ungraciously, and handed me the screwed up bag to return to the red box. The box was clipped shut and tidy, so I shoved it in my pocket. Evan polished off the job of being a nuisance by throwing out instead the half eaten crust of his cheese-and-tomato.

‘Do not feed the animals,’ said Haagner automatically.

‘Why not?’ Evan, belligerent, putting on an R.S.P.C.A. face.

‘It is unwise to teach animals that cars contain food.’

That silenced him flat. Conrad twitched an eyebrow at me and I arranged my face into as near impassiveness as one can get while falling about inside.

Owing to an olifant waving its ears at us within cricket ball distance we did not get back to Skukuza before the gates shut. Evan, oblivious to the fast setting sun, saw allegories all over the place and had Conrad wasting film by the mile, taking shots through glass. He had wanted Conrad to set up a tripod in the road to get steadier than hand-held pictures, but even he was slightly damped by the frantic quality in Haagner’s voice as he told him not to.

‘Olifant is the most dangerous of all the animals,’ he said earnestly, and Conrad equally earnestly assured him that for nothing on earth would he, Conrad, leave the safety of the Range Rover. Haagner wouldn’t even have the window open and wanted to drive away at once. It appeared that when olifants waved their ears like that they were expressing annoyance, and since they weighed seven tons and could charge at 25 m.p.h., it didn’t do to hang about.

Evan didn’t believe that any animal would have the gall to attack such important humans as E. Pentelow, director, and E. Lincoln, actor. He persuaded Conrad to get clicking, and Haagner sat there with the engine running and his foot on the clutch. When the elephant finally took one step in our direction we were off down the road with a jolt that threw Conrad, camera and all, to the floor.

I helped him up, while Evan complained about it to Haagner. The ranger, nearing the end of his patience, stopped the car with an equal jerk and hauled on the hand brake.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘We wait.’

The elephant came out on to the road, a hundred yards behind us. The big ears were flapping like flags.

Conrad looked back. ‘Do drive on, dear boy,’ he said with anxiety in his voice.

Haagner folded his lips. The elephant decided to follow us. He was also accelerating to a trot.

It took more seconds than I cared before Evan cracked. He was saying ‘For God’s sake, where is the Arriflex?’ to Conrad, when it seemed at last to dawn on him that there might be some real danger.

‘Drive away,’ he said to Haagner urgently. ‘Can’t you see that that animal is charging?’

And it had tusks, I observed.

Haagner too decided that enough was enough. He had the hand brake off and the gears in mesh in one slick movement, and the elephant got a trunkful of dust.

‘What about the next car coming along?’ I asked. ‘They’ll meet it head on.’

Haagner shook his head. ‘No cars will come this way any more today. It is too late. They will all be near the camps now. And that olifant, he will go straight away into the bush. He will not stay on the road.’

Conrad looked at his watch. ‘How long will it take us to get back to Skukuza?’

‘With no more stops,’ Haagner said with bite, ‘about half an hour.’

‘But it is six fifteen already!’ Conrad said.

Haagner made a noncommittal movement of his head and didn’t answer. Evan appeared subdued into silence and a look of peaceful satisfaction awoke on the Afrikaaner’s face. For the whole of the rest of the way it stayed there, first in the quick dust, then in the reflected glow of the headlights. Before we reached Skukuza he swung the Range Rover down one of the no entry side roads, a detour which brought us after a mile or two suddenly and unexpectedly into a village of modern bungalows with tiny little flower gardens and street lighting.

We stared in amazement. A suburb, no less, set down greenly in the brown dry veldt.

‘This is the ranger village,’ Haagner said. ‘My house is over there, the third down that road. All the whites who work in the camp, and the white rangers, we live here. The Bantu rangers and workers also have villages in the park.’

‘But the lions,’ I said. ‘Are the villages safe, isolated like this?’

He smiled. ‘It is not isolated.’ The Range Rover came to the end of the houses, crossed about fifty unlit yards of road and sped straight into the back regions of Skukuza camp. ‘But also, no, it is not entirely safe. One must not walk far from the houses at night. Lions do not normally come near the gardens... and we have fences round them... but a young Bantu was taken by a lion one night on that short piece of road between our village and the camp. I knew him well. He had been told never to walk... it was truly sad.’

‘Are people often... taken... by lions?’ I asked, as he pulled up by our rondavels, and we unloaded ourselves, the cameras, and the red box.

‘No. Sometimes. Not often. People who work in the park; never visitors. It is safe in cars.’ He gave Evan one last meaningful stare. ‘Do not leave your car. To do so is not safe.’

Before dinner in the camp restaurant I put a call through to England. Two hours’ delay, they said, but by nine o’clock I was talking to Charlie.

Everything was fine, she said, the children were little hooligans, and she had been to see Nerissa.

‘I spent the whole day with her yesterday... Most of the time we just sat, because she felt awfully tired, but she didn’t seem to want me to go. I asked her the things you wanted... not all at once, but spread over...’

‘What did she say?’

‘Well... You were right about some things. She did tell Danilo she had Hodgkin’s disease. She said she didn’t know herself that it was fatal when she told him, but she doesn’t think he took much notice, because all he said was that he thought only young people got it.’

If he knew that, I thought, he knew a lot more.

‘Apparently he stayed with her for about ten days, and they became firm friends. That was how she described it. So she told him, before he went back to America, that she would be leaving him the horses as a personal gift, and also, as he was all the family she had, all the rest of her money after other bequests had been met.’

‘Lucky old Danilo.’

‘Yes... Well, he came to see her again, a few weeks ago, late July or early August. While you were in Spain, anyway. She knew by then that she was dying, but she didn’t mention it to Danilo. She did show him her will, though, as he seemed interested in it. She said he was so sweet when he had read it, and hoped not to be inheriting for twenty years.’

‘Little hypocrite.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Charlie doubtfully, ‘because although you were right about so much, there is a distinct fly in the wood pile.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It can’t be Danilo who is making the horses lose. It simply cannot.’

‘It must be,’ I said. ‘And why not?’

‘Because when Nerissa told him she was worried about the way they were running, and wished she could find out what was wrong, it was Danilo himself who came up with the idea of sending you.’

‘It can’t have been,’ I exclaimed.

‘It definitely was,’ Charlie said. ‘She was positive about it. It was Danilo’s own suggestion.’

‘Blast,’ I said.

‘He wouldn’t have suggested she send someone to investigate, if he’d been nobbling them himself.’

‘No... I suppose not.’

‘You sound depressed,’ she said.

‘I haven’t any other answers for Nerissa.’

‘Don’t worry. You weren’t anyway going to tell her her nephew was up to no good.’

‘That’s true,’ I agreed.

‘And it wasn’t difficult for Danilo to read her will. She leaves it lying around all the time on that marquetry table in the corner of the sitting-room. She showed it to me immediately, as soon as I mentioned it, because it interests her a lot. And I saw what keepsakes she is leaving us, if you’re interested.’

‘What are they?’ I asked idly, thinking about Danilo.

‘She’s leaving you her holding in something called Rojedda, and she’s leaving me a diamond pendant and some earrings. She showed them to me... they are absolutely beautiful and I told her they were far too much, but she made me try them on so she would see how I looked. She seemed to be so pleased... so happy... isn’t she incredible? I can hardly bear... oh... oh dear...’

‘Don’t cry, darling,’ I said.

There were some swallowing noises.

‘I... can’t... help it. She is already much worse than when we saw her before, and she’s very uncomfortable. One of her swollen glands is pressing on things in her chest.’

‘We’ll go and see her as soon as I get back.’

‘Yes.’ She sniffed away the tears. ‘God, I do miss you.’

‘Me too,’ I said. ‘Only one more week. I’ll be home a week today, and we’ll take the kids down to Cornwall.’

After the call I went outside and walked slowly past our rondavels and out on to the rough grassy area beyond. The African night was very quiet. No roar of traffic from any distant city, just the faint steady hum of the generator supplying Skukuza with electricity, and the energetic music of cicadas.

Nerissa had given me my answers.

I saw what they meant, and I didn’t want to believe it.

A gamble. No more, no less.

With my life as the stake.

I went back to the telephone and made one more call. Van Huren’s manservant said he would see, and Quentin came on the line. I said I knew it was an odd thing to ask, and I would explain why when next I saw him, but could he possibly tell me what size Nerissa’s holding in Rojedda was likely to be.

‘The same as my own,’ he said without hesitation. ‘She has my brother’s holding, passed to her by Portia.’

I thanked him numbly.

‘See you at the premiere,’ he said. ‘We are looking forward to it very much.’

For hours, I couldn’t go to sleep. Yet where could I be safer than inside a guarded camp, with Evan and Conrad snoring their heads off in the huts next door?

But when I woke up, I was no longer in bed.

I was in the car I had hired in Johannesburg.

The car was surrounded by early daylight in the Kruger National Park. Trees, scrub, and dry grass. Not a rondavel in sight.

Remnants of an ether smell blurred my senses, but one fact was sharp and self-evident.

One of my arms lay through the steering wheel, and my wrists were locked together in a pair of handcuffs.