“Among them, they pretty much covered all the possibilities except Africa,” I decided. “So I guess that's where I’ll head. There’s a tribe of Niger Pygmies in Equatorial Africa that I’ve heard about. Where do I contact you if I succeed?” I asked Leila.
She gave me an address and phone number in Cairo. Then she left, wishing me good luck. I’d sure need it, I decided as I packed to catch a plane to Lagos, Nigeria.
Lagos was the closest I could get by air to the village of the Pygmy tribe I was seeking. The situation in Nigeria being what it is, I anticipated I’d have rough going when I got there. But my troubles started before that, when I boarded my flight at Orly Airport outside Paris.
The seats in the plane were three across. I had the window seat. As I was strapping myself in, the two other seats were filled. I did a double take.
Next to me was Natasha Jambonski, the statuesque Russian blonde I’d last seen on Paradise Island. And beside her, in the aisle seat, was Krapinadytch, the Commie commissar charged with landing the toilet deal for his country. They both smiled greetings at me. Krapinadytch’s upper plate wobbled with his smile, but aside from that minor comic effect, he still had the austere and inhumane look of Cossack aristocracy planning a pogrom, rather than Commie proletariat distributing welfare-state sunshine. Natasha, on the other hand, smiled to the strains of balalaika music, conjured up visions of the quiet-flowing Don and the slow, dignified bounce of an imperial feather bed.
So much for appearances. I did not smile back. What the hell were they doing there anyway? Following me?
“What the hell are you doing here anyway?” I asked. “Following me?”
“Of course not,” Natasha reassured me.
“Why would we follow you?” Krapinadytch wondered.
“We have no reason to follow you,” Natasha told me when we disembarked from the plane in Lagos.
“Simply because our business has brought us to the same general locale is no reason to jump to conclusions,” Krapinadytch insisted as they checked into the same hotel I was registered at.
“Coincidences are coincidences, and one should not attempt to make a pattern of them,” they both insisted when their safari party arrived at the same jungle campsite my guide had selected for our first stop.
“And we should look to closer relations between our two countries,” Natasha called to me as her party forded the river a bit upstream from where my party was fording the river.
Two weeks into the interior, with the light of their campfire flickering a short distance away, I reviewed their protestations. I tried to be fair about it. But the conclusion was inescapable. The Russians were so following me! Obviously they were stymied at the task of signing up a Pygmy princess for Sheikh Ali Khat’s harem. So they must have decided that their best bet was to let me find one for them. Then, I had no doubt, they’d improvise some means of getting me out of the way and grabbing off the princess for themselves. Implicit in all this was their conviction that I was on the trail of something.
I was. Back in Lagos I’d managed to shake my Russian tail just long enough to establish contact with Josef Dorembi, the man who was now serving as my guide.
Josef was an Ibo—in other words, a member of the leading tribe of Biafra, and therefore a rebel liable to the death penalty if the Nigerian government caught him in Lagos. The supposition would be that his presence this deep in federal territory must be for purposes of espionage. The supposition in the case of Josef Dorembi was correct.
I had learned about Josef inadvertently. After I checked into my hotel, my first stop in Lagos had been the Explorers’ Club. Here, a remnant from the days of white colonial rule, a small and aging group of Britishers and Dutchmen congregated to lie to each other about their past adventures in darkest Africa. With the Russians observing me from a table, I stood at a bar and bought drinks for a few of these creaky explorers and milked them for information about the Niger Pygmies.
“They’re an offshoot of the Batwas, a large Pygmy tribe that originated in the great bend of the Congo,” I was told by one knowledgeable and venerable anthropologist.
“How do I go about locating them?” I asked.
“Oh, they’re not hard to locate,” a onetime wildlife expert cackled. “They’re right smack in the middle of where the fighting’s going on right now. All you’ve got to do is get past the Nigerian troops, avoid the Ibo guerillas, look out for the cannibal tribe—about the only remaining cannibal tribe in Africa, by the way—that lives in that general area, steer clear of lions and poisonous snakes, manipulate a river filled with crocodiles, and survive the tsetse flies.”
“A snap,” I observed dryly. “Could you recommend a guide?”
“Negative,” a former safari organizer told me. “The government has forbidden all guides to take parties into that part of the country. Even if they hadn’t, though, you’d be hard put to find a guide who’d take you there. None of the white hunters would chance it. In the past maybe an Ibo guide might have chanced it. But today there are no Ibos in Lagos.”
I kept fishing with no results. Finally I paid my check—-man, how those old b.s. artists could drink! When the black bartender handed me my change, there was a slip of paper between two of the bills. There was an address on it. That was all.
The next day I ducked out of my hotel by the servants’ entrance, made sure I wasn’t being followed, and went to the address. The man I met there asked more questions than he answered. But it was through him that I arranged for a safari to take me into Ibo country. Two days out on the trail, Josef Dorembi joined us as I’d been promised he would.
Josef was a tall and extremely good-looking Ibo who had been educated in Germany. In his late twenties, he’d been a safari guide before the Biafran revolution had brought down slaughter on all Ibos caught in northern Nigeria. He’d gone underground and engaged in espionage for the last two years. Now, with a price on his head, with his small band of rebels decimated by a series of government crackdowns, with his communications to Biafra effectively cut and supplies to carry on his activities shut off, Josef had decided the only thing to do was to make his way back to Biafra and join his fellow tribesmen fighting Nigerian genocide there. This was his only reason for agreeing to be my guide. Alone he would never be able to make it through the jungle. With the armed porters it had been arranged for me to hire, there was a chance. In exchange for that chance, he’d put me in contact with the tribe of Niger Pygmies I sought. He was acquainted with the tribe from previous expeditions into the area.
Josef was as good as his word. Sixteen and a half days out of Lagos we made contact with bombs dropped by European mercenary pilots employed by the Nigerian government, with Biafran artillery, with Nigerian infantry, with cannibal spearmen, with poison darts from the blowguns of the Pygmies, and with the suddenly revealed hostility of the Russians breathing down our necks.
It all happened so fast! Let me see if I can unravel the sequence. It was morning when we entered the Pygmy village. Josef was known there, and our greeting was friendly. We were taken to the hut of the Chief—the King, really, as regarded this domain. Josef and the Chief embraced. I was introduced, and then we got down to business.
“My friend here,” Josef told the Chief, translating for me as he went along, “would like to acquire one of your daughters. He is willing to pay a handsome dowry.”
“You wish to marry one of my daughters?” the Chief asked me through Josef.
Josef smiled, shook his head, and explained the proposition to the Chief quite honestly. I would pay five thousand dollars in gold to the Chief for the privilege of enlisting one of his daughters in the harem of Sheikh Ali Khat. The Chief’s brow furrowed, and at first he didn’t reply.