Sean administered another dose of penicillin through the cannula of the drip set. Then he, Job, and two of the camp skinners gently lifted Shadrach into the aircraft and settled him on the mattress.
Shadrach's wife was a sturdy Matabele woman with an infant strapped to her back with a length of trade cloth. They loaded her considerable baggage, and she clambered up and sat beside Shadrach on the mattress, placed the infant on her lap, opened her blouse, and gave the child her milk-engorged breast to suckle. Job filled the aircraft's empty luggage compartments with sacks of dried game meat, a valuable commodity in Africa. Then Job drove the Toyota to the far end of the runway to give Sean the headlights for takeoff.
"Job will look after you while I'm away, Capo. Why don't you take the shotgun and go for dove and sand grouse down at the pools? Best wing shooting you'll ever have, better than white winged dove in Mexico," Sean suggested.
"Don't worry about us. We'll be just fine."
"I'll be back as soon as I possibly can. Tukutela won't be crossing before the new moon. I'll be back before then. It's a promise, Capo."
Sean held out his hand, and as Riccardo took it he said, "You did good work with the lions, Capo, but then you were never short of bottom."
"What kind of Limey word is that?" Riccardo asked. ""BottOM
"How about a good Yankee word then? Cojones?"
"That'll do." Riccardo grinned at him.
Claudia was standing beside her father. Now she smiled hesitantly, almost shyly, and took a step forward as if to offer her hand. She had released her hair from its plait and brushed it out into a dense, dark mane around her head. Her expression was soft and her eyes big and dark and lustrous. In the Toyota headlights her classical Latin features went beyond the merely handsome, and Sean realized for the first time that she was truly beautiful. Despite her beauty and her penitent attitude, he kept his expression cold and forbidding, nodded at her curtly, ignored the tentative offer to shake his hand, climbed up onto the wing of the Beechcraft, and ducked into the cockpit.
Sean had cut the airstrip out of the brush himself and leveled it by dragging a bundle of old truck tires up and down it behind the Toyota. It was narrow, rough, and short, with a gradient falling toward the river. He lined up with the Beechcraft's tail backed into the bushes and, facing down the slope, stood on the brakes. He aimed at the lights of the Toyota at the far end of the strip while he ran up to full power on both engines and then let the brakes off.
Just short of the trees at the end of the strip he pulled on the flaps and bounced the Beechcraft into the air. As always he crossed himself blasphemously with mock relief as he cleared the treetops and turned on course for Harare.
During the flight he tried to plan his strategy. The director of the game department was an old friend, and Sean had successfully dealt with him in equally serious circumstances. The deputy, Geoffrey Manguza, however, was a horse of literally another color. The director was one of the few white civil servants still in charge of a department of government. Manguza would succeed him soon, the first black head of the game department.
He and Sean had fought on opposite sides during the bush war, and Manguza had been an astute guerrilla leader and political commissar. The rumor was that he did not like the safari Concension owners, most of whom were white. The concept of private exploitation of state assets offended his Marxist principles, and he had shot too many white men during the war to have any great deal of liking or respect for them. It was going to be a difficult meeting. Sean sighed.
Reema was waiting for him as he taxied in. A modern Indian woman, she had abandoned the said in favor of a neat pant-suit. She was not so modern, however, that she wished to choose her own husband. Her father and her uncles were working on that at the moment and had already come up with a likely candidate in Canada, a professor of Oriental religions at the University of Toronto.
Sean hated them for it. Reema was a great asset to Courtney Safaris, and he knew he would never be able to replace her.
She had the ambulance waiting on the tarmac beside the light aircraft hangars. Reema regularly bribed the guards at the main gate with dried game meat from the concession. In Africa, meat or the Promise of meat opens all gates.
They followed the ambulance to the hospital in the Kombi.
While Sean sat in the passenger seat glancing through the most urgent mail she had brought for his attention, Reema recited a list of the important developments during his absence.
"Carter, the surgeon from Atlanta, canceled.. That was a twenty-one-day safari, and Sean glanced up sharply, but Reema soothed him. "I phoned the German soap manufacturer in Munich-Herr Buchner, the one we turned down in December? He jumped at it. So we are full, back to back, for the rest of the season.
"How about my brother?" Sean interrupted. He didn't want to tell her it was touch and go that there was going to be an abrupt end to the season. "Your broth eris expecting your call, and as of six o'clock this morning the telephone was still working." In Zimbabwe that was something that couldn't be taken for granted.
At the hospital there were at least fifty seriously ill patients awaiting admission ahead of them. The long benches were full of huddled, miserable humanity and the stretchers were blocking the aisles and doorways. The admissions clerks were in no great hurry and waved Shadrach's stretcher to a far corner.
"Leave it to me," said Reema, and she took the senior admissions clerk by the elbow and led him aside with an angelic smile, talking to him sweetly.
Five minutes later Shadrach's admission papers had been processed and he was being examined by an East German doctor.
"How much did that cost?" Sean asked.
"Cheap," Reema answered. "A bag of dried meat."
Sean had picked up sufficient German from his safari clients to be able to discuss Shadrach's case with the doctor. The man was reassuring. Sean said good-bye to Shadrach.
"Reema has your money. She will come to see you each day. If you need anything, tell her."
"I will be with you in spirit when you hunt Tukutela," Shadrach said softly.
Sean had to clear his throat before he could answer. "We will hunt many more elephant together, old friend." And he walked away quickly.
The next morning, when at last he got through to Johannesburg, the telephone line was crackling with static.
"Mr. Garrick Courtney is in a board meeting," the girl on the switchboard at Centaine House, the Courtney Group headquarters, told him. "But he gave orders to put your call through directly." In his mind's eye, Sean saw once again the boardroom paneled in figured walnut, the huge Pierneef canvases framed by the elaborate panels, and his brother Garry sitting at the head of the table in the chairman's high-backed throne, beneath the crystal chandelier his grandmother had imported from Murano in Italy.
"Sean!" Garry's voice cut through the static, bold and assured.