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“C’mon, Mike,” Nicole said, and she reached out to pat his hand but he snatched it away in a rage. “C’mon, baby, it’s not the end of the world.” He looked at her in that moment, the triumph shining in her eyes, and he wanted to slap her, choke her, get up from the table, snatch a rifle from the rack and pump a couple slugs into her.

He was about to snap back at her when the swinging doors to the kitchen parted and the colored guy came in with a pot of coffee and set it on the table. Roland, that was his name. He was surprised they didn’t call him Zulu or Jambo or something to go along with the silly skirts that were supposed to make him look like a native. Christ, he’d like to get up and drill him too, for that matter. About the only break he’d had on this trip was that Jasmine Honeysuckle Rose had taken to sleeping till noon.

“Mike,” Nicole pleaded, but he wouldn’t hear her. Brooding, burning, plotting his revenge on every lender, shopkeeper and homeowner from the San Fernando Valley to Hancock Park, Mike Bender sipped moodily at his tepid instant coffee and awaited the great white hunter.

Puff was late to breakfast, but he looked rejuvenated — had he dyed his hair, was that it? — beaming, a fountain of energy, as if he’d stolen the flame from the King of Encino himself. “Good morning,” he boomed in his phony West End accent, practically inhaling his mustache, and then he gave Nicole a look that was unmistakable and Mike felt it all pouring out of him, like lava from a volcano.

“No more lions, right?” Mike said, his voice low and choked.

“Afraid not,” Puff answered, sitting himself down at the head of the table and smearing a slab of toast with Marmite. “As I told you yesterday, we’ve got all the females you want, but the males are juveniles, no manes at all to speak of.”

“That stinks.”

Bernard regarded Bender for a long moment and saw the child who’d never grown up, the rich kid, the perennial hacker and duffer, the parvenu stifled. He looked from Bender to the wife and back again — what was she doing with a clown like that? — and had a fleeting but powerful vision of her stretched out beside him in bed, breasts, thighs, puffy lips and all. “Listen, Mike,” he said, “forget it. It happens to everybody. I thought we’d go for eland today—”

Eland. Shit on eland.”

“All right, then — water buff. A lot of them say Mbogo is the most dangerous animal in Africa, bar none.”

The sunny eyes went dark with rage. “This isn’t Africa,” Bender spat. “It’s Bakersfield.”

Bernard had tried hard, and he hated it when they did that, when they punctured the illusion he so carefully nurtured. It was the illusion he was selling, after all — close your eyes and you’re in Africa — and in a way he’d wanted the place to be Africa, wanted to make the old stories come alive, wanted to bring back the thrill of the great days, if only for a moment at a time. But it was more than that, too: Puff’s African Came Ranch stood as a testament and memorial to the towering figure of Bernard’s father.

Bernard Puff, Sr., had been one of the last great white hunters of East Africa — friend and compatriot of Percival and Ionides, host to some of the biggest names of American cinema and European aristocracy. He married an American heiress and they built a place in the White Highlands, dined with Isak Dinesen, ate game the year round. And then the war turned the place on its head and he sought refuge in America, losing himself in the vastness of the Southwest and the pockets of his in-laws. As a boy, Bernard had thrilled to the stories of the old days, fingering the ragged white scar a bush pig’s tusks had left on his father’s forearm, cleaning and oiling the ancient weapons that had stopped rhino, elephant, leopard and lion, gazing for hours into the bright glass eyes of the trophies mounted on the wall in the den, the very names — sable, kudu, bushbuck, kongoni — playing like an incantation in his head. He’d tried to do it justice, had devoted his life to it, and now here was this sorehead, this condominium peddler, running it all down.

“All right,” he said. “Granted. What do you want me to do? I’ve got more lions coming in at the end of the month, prime cats they’ve trapped and relocated from Tsavo East…” (He was fudging here: actually, he had an emaciated sack of bones lined up at the San Francisco Zoo, a cat so old the public was offended by it, and another that had broken its leg three times jumping through a hoop with a West German circus.) “Eland we have, water buff, oryx, gazelle, hyena — I’ve even got a couple ostrich for you. But unless you want a female, no lion. I’m sorry.”

And then, a light shining up from the depths, the glitter came back into the dealmaker’s eyes, the smile widened, the tennis pro and backyard swimmer climbed out from behind the mask of the petulant real estate wonder boy. Bender was grinning. He leaned forward. “What about the elephant?”

“What about it?” Bernard lifted the toast to his lips, then set it down carefully again on the edge of his plate. The wife was watching him now, and Roland, refilling the coffee mugs, paused to give him a look.

“I want it.”

Bernard stared down at the plate and fussed a moment with the coffeepot, the sugar, the cream. He hated to part with her, though he was pretty sure he could replace her — and the feed bills were killing him. Even in her dotage, Bessie Bee could put away more in an afternoon than a herd of Guernseys would go through in a winter. He gave the wife a cool glance, then shot his eyes at Bender. “Eighteen grand,” he said.

Bender looked uncertain, his eyes glittering still, but sunk in on themselves, as if in awe at the enormity of the deal. “I’ll want the head,” he said finally, “the whole thing, stuffed and mounted — and yes, I know it’s big, but I can deal with that, I’ve got the space, believe me…and the feet, I want the feet, for those, uh, what do you call them, umbrella stands?”

They found her in a brushy ravine, just beyond the swimming-pool-cum-water-hole. She was having a dust bath, powdering her pitted hide with fine pale dirt till she looked like an enormous wad of dough rolled in flour. Bernard could see where she’d trampled the high grass that hid the blue lip of the pool and uprooted half a ton of water lily and cattail, which she’d mounded up in a festering heap on the coping. He cursed under his breath when he saw the stand of eucalyptus she’d reduced to splinters and the imported fever tree she’d stripped of bark. It was his policy to keep her tethered — precisely to avoid this sort of wholesale destruction — but when there were guests on the ranch, he let her roam. He was regretting it now, and thinking he’d have to remember to get Espinoza to call the landscaping company first thing in the morning, when Bender’s voice brought him back to the moment. The voice was harsh, petulant, a rising squawk of protest: “But it’s only got one tusk!”

Bernard sighed. It was true — she’d broken off half her left tusk somewhere along the line, but he’d gotten so used to her he hardly noticed. But there was Bender, sitting beside him in the Jeep, the wife in the back, the guns stacked up and the cooler full, and Bender was going to try to gouge him on the price, he could see it coming.

“When we said eighteen, I assumed we were talking a trophy animal,” Bender said, and Bernard turned to him. “But now, I don’t know.”

Bernard just wanted it over with. Something told him he was making a mistake in going after Bessie Bee — the place wouldn’t seem the same without her — but he was committed at this point, and he didn’t want any arguments. “Okay,” he sighed, shifting the weight of his paunch from left to right. “Seventeen.”