All three of them suddenly looked up, and I followed the direction of their gaze. Roderick and Katya were standing out on the balcony, calling down. I was too far away to hear the exact words, but the gist was entirely guessable. The quarry had got away, and none of them was pleased.
Melanie and the two men turned and walked in my direction, but only as far as the other two beside my car. They all five went into a huddle which could produce no happiness, and in the end Melanie walked back alone and disappeared into the flats.
I sighed wryly. Roderick was no murderer. He was a newspaperman. The four men had come armed with cameras. Not knives. Not guns.
Not my life they were after; just my picture.
Just my picture outside a block of flats at night alone with a beautiful girl in a totally revealing dress.
I looked thoughtfully at the four men beside my car, decided the odds were against it, turned on my heel, and quietly walked away.
Back at the Iguana Rock (by taxi), I telephoned Roderick.
He sounded subdued.
I said, ‘Damn your bloody eyes.’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you got this telephone bugged?’
A pause. Then on a sigh again he said, ‘Yes.’
‘Too late for honesty, my friend.’
‘Link...’
‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘Just tell me why.’
‘My paper...’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Newspapers don’t get up to such tricks. That was a spot of private enterprise.’
A longer pause.
‘I guess I owe it to you,’ he said slowly. ‘We did it for Clifford Wenkins. The little runt is scared silly by Worldic, and he begged us, in return for favours he has done us from time to time, to set you up for him. He said Worldic would sack him if he couldn’t persuade you to do a girly session to sell their twenty-rand seats, and he had asked you, and you had absolutely refused. Melanie is our top model girl, and he got her to help in a good cause.’
‘That Wenkins,’ I said bitterly, ‘would sell his soul for publicity stunts.’
‘I’m sorry, Link...’
‘Not as sorry as he will be,’ I said ominously.
‘I promised him I wouldn’t tell you...’
‘Stuff both of you,’ I said violently, and rattled the receiver into its cradle.
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.