by William Boyd
There was a rattle of falling stones from somewhere high on the kopje. They all looked up at once.
“Get him!” von Bishop shouted excitedly at the started ruga-ruga. They had seized their rifles. “Go on, you idiots!” von Bishop shouted again. He tried Swahili. “Get him I tell you!” What was Kikuyu for ‘catch’?
One of the ruga-ruga yelled something in their gibberish language. He brandished his rifle in the air like a spear. Von Bishop mimed grabbing movements in desperation. Why couldn’t they understand? How did Deeg speak to them? Dutch? Afrikaans? “Yes,” he yelled exasperatedly, baffled by their reticence. Every second counted in this darkness. “Go on, yes?” he gestured at the black mass of the hill. “Catch?” He tried Swahili again. No effect. “Quickly, for God’s sake catch him.” This was ridiculous. Cobb was getting a head start while he floundered around with languages.
Then one ruga-ruga suddenly turned and shouted something to the other two. The three of them scrambled off into the dark, up the rocky slope of the hill. For several minutes he could hear them calling out to each other, and heard the slither and fall of the stones dislodged by their feet. Then their cries became fainter. It sounded to him as if they were now on the other side of the hill. Soon he could hear nothing above the endless noise of the crickets.
He threw some more wood on the fire and sat down. He stared glumly at the flames. He felt tired. He still held the book, he realized. He reached forward and dropped it on the fire. It burnt away to ashes very quickly. It was a kind of evidence, he supposed. Theoretically, he shouldn’t have destroyed it. He pursed his lips and rubbed his nose.
He poked at the ash brick which was all that remained of the book, letting the flakes crumble and fall into the embers of the fire. He thought suddenly of Cobb, out there alone on the dark plain, running. Running frantically from the ruga-ruga. He shivered with sympathy. The man would be terrified out of his wits, any man would. You could die from that sort of terror. Racing blindly through the night, heart pounding, lungs bursting, tripping and falling over, the shouts of your pursuers in your ears.
Von Bishop woke up just before dawn. He felt stiff and hungry. There was a lemon-grey lightening in the east. He relit the fire, took some mealie-flour cakes from his saddle bag, spread them with the last of his raspberry jam and ate a lonely breakfast.
The ruga-ruga didn’t return for another hour or so. Von Bishop saw them first in the distance, coming round the side of the hill, just the three of them in single file. So Cobb got away, he thought, briefly elated for some reason. But then the prospect of another day’s chase made him miserable again. Still, Cobb knew about the China Show. He had his duty to do.
He built up the fire and then took his rifle from his saddle holster. He would try and shoot a bird or a small antelope for the ruga-ruga. It was a safe bet that they wouldn’t move off again until they had eaten.
The ruga-ruga marched into the hollow between the two spurs of rock ten minutes later. Von Bishop sat on a boulder, his rifle between his knees. The leading man, he noticed, had unslung his blanket and carried it over his shoulder like a sack. Perhaps they’ve got their own food, he thought, bending down to remove a speck of dust from his rifle bolt.
There was a soft heavy thud and von Bishop looked up. A yard from the toe of his left boot lay the severed head of Gabriel Cobb, his nose pressed uncomfortably into the dusty earth, his staring eyes and gaping mouth swarming with tiny insects.
Chapter 10
25 November 1917,
The Makonde plateau, German East Africa
Temple rode between Wheech-Browning and Felix. A hundred yards up ahead his two askari trackers paced easily along, leading their mules, following the conspicuous trail left by von Bishop and his men. They had been up early that day and had made good progress. Temple calculated that they were only two or three hours behind von Bishop now. He stood up in the saddle and stared ahead over the grass plain. Up here on the plateau the morning mists lingered. There was still something of a haze on the horizon, softening the details of the landscape.
He looked round at the faces of his two companions: Wheech-Browning sleepy and stupid; Felix tense and expectant. They made a strange group, he thought.
“You said this von Bishop man was the same one who commandeered your farm, didn’t you?” Wheech-Browning asked.
“That’s right.”
“I thought he was your neighbour. Did you have some kind of feud going, or something?”
“No,” Temple said. “Not until he destroyed my farm.” Temple looked grim. “What kind of man is it, I ask you, who one day can talk to you about sisal farming—in a perfectly interested and friendly way—and then, the next moment, steal away your livelihood?” Temple looked to Felix for a reassuring reply but he clearly wasn’t listening.
“Sounds like a shrewd businessman to me,” Wheech-Browning said with a squawk of laughter.
“Just what do you mean by that?” Temple said in a steely voice. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sorry, I’m sure,” Wheech-Browning said huffily. “But you did ask.”
Their argument was interrupted by a shout from one of the askari scouts. The man stood at the base of a stone kopje a little way to the right. They wheeled their mules and rode over. In a hollow between two spurs of rock were the remains of a camp fire. Temple dismounted and ran his fingers through the ashes.
“Ouch,” he said. “Still hot. They can’t be more than an hour away.” He picked something out of the ashes. “Looks like a piece of leather binding from a book. What do you make of that?”
Felix held up a sack. “Empty. Is this von Bishop’s camp? Or Gabriel’s?”
Temple looked around. There was a pile of droppings from a mule. “Von Bishop’s,” he said. There was also a small rough mound of freshly dug earth. “I don’t think your brother would bother to bury his rubbish.”
“Who left the sack then?”
There was a shout from Wheech-Browning who hadn’t dismounted.
“About half a mile away,” he called. “Masses of birds wheeling around.”
Temple and Felix remounted and trotted after Wheech-Browning. True enough, a dozen kites and vultures circled and flapped above something in the grass. They saw Wheech-Browning get off his horse and run forward, windmilling his arms and shouting. Five or six birds shrugged themselves awkwardly into the air. Temple and Felix dismounted a few yards off and walked through the grass towards Wheech-Browning. A subdued droning noise filled the air from thousands of flies. The grass sterns all around them were blackened and weighed down with a fruit of shiny bluebottles and duller blowflies. Each step raised a temporary cloud, like a thick animated dust.
Wheech-Browning stumbled towards them, his face white.
“Good Lord,” he said. “Christ. It’s a body.” He put his hand on his throat. “No head.”
“No head?” Felix said with alarm.
“Bloody flies!” Wheech-Browning said. “Where do they all come from? A huge empty plain. That’s what I want to know.”
Temple walked forward with Felix. He looked across at him. His face was slightly screwed up, as if he were walking through a cloud of smoke or gas.
The body lay on its belly in a wide clearing of violently torn and trampled grass. The birds had already pecked away both calves and the porcelain gleam of exposed ribs shone beneath the tattered shirt.
“Army boots,” Temple said, not wanting to speculate further.
“Looks too small for Gabriel,” Felix said bravely. “He was a big chap, Gabriel.”
Wheech-Browning rejoined them. By now they were all covered with flies, flies crawling all over their faces, oblivious to their waving hands. Temple took some paces to one side.
“It’s been chopped off,” he said. “That wasn’t an animal.”
“My Christ,” said Wheech-Browning. He suddenly leant forward from the waist and vomited. He straightened up unsteadily, wiping his mouth. “Phew,” he said. “Th
ere goes breakfast.”
As if on some unspoken order they withdrew to the mules.
“What the hell is going on?” Temple said. “Who chops off a man’s head in the middle of the veldt?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s not Gabriel,” Felix said. He swallowed heavily. “I think. I mean you can’t tell. Without…”
“Who is it, then?” Temple said. “Von Bishop?”
“Where’s the head, though?” Wheech-Browning asked. “Why carry off the head? I don’t understand.”
Temple suddenly recalled the mound of earth at the camp. “You stay here,” he said to Wheech-Browning. “Keep the birds off. We’re going back to the camp-site.”
“Scarecrow,” Wheech-Browning said, holding his hands out from his side. “That’s what the chaps called me at school.”
Temple and Felix rode back to the camp-site.
“What is it?” Felix asked.
“I think they’ve buried the head there,” Temple indicated the mound.
“Oh God.”
“Shall I do it or will you?”
“I think you should.”
Temple got down on his knees and began digging away the loosely tamped earth with his hands. Six inches down his fingers struck something soft. He felt his mouth swim with saliva. He dug some more. The head was wrapped in a square of blanket.
He turned round. “It’s here,” he called to Felix, who was standing some yards away. Felix came over. Temple could see his jaw muscles were clenched with effort. His top lip and growth of beard were dewed with sweat. He looked down at the blanket-wrapped head. He took a long quivering breath.
“Could you…please.”
Temple reached down into the hole and carefully un-wrapped the head. He saw a squarish handsome face, very white and thin, with open eyes and mouth. He wiped away some of the larger ants. The hair was pale brown and tousled. Something about it made it looKARtificial.
He looked round and saw Felix crying silently, his hands over his face, his shoulders shaking.
“Poor Gabe,” he heard him say.
Temple wrapped up the head again. Then he stood up and walked over to Felix. He put his hand on his shoulder for a second. He didn’t know what to say. He felt an inexpressible sorrow for the young man. He walked away from him, past the two scouts who tended their mules, kicking savagely at the grass as he went. He took some deep breaths, looked up at the sky, beat some dust from his trousers. Off in the distance he could see Wheech-Browning capering madly around the corpse, waving his long arms at the wheeling birds as if he were putting on a performance for them. His yells and whoops carried faintly across the grass.
Temple walked back to Felix.
“What made him do that?” Felix asked hoarsely. “Why did he need to do that?”
“I don’t know,” Temple said. “I don’t have any idea.”
“What’s his name?”
“Von Bishop.”
“I just don’t understand,” Felix said softly, a tremor distorting his voice. “What would make anyone do a thing like that?”
“I don’t know,” Temple said with some vehemence. “It just doesn’t make any kind of sense at all.”
PART FOUR
After the War
Chapter 1
15 May 1918,
Boma Durio, Portuguese East Africa
“Snap!”
“Eh?”
“Snap. I win,” Felix said. “Ganhador. Me.”
“Oh. Oh, sim.”
“Terminar?”
“Sim. Sim.”
Felix noted down his victory. It took his score to 1,743 games of snap. His opponent, Capitao Pinto, had won thirty-four. Felix put the cards away. The capitao turned for consolation to his erotic books.
Capitao Aristedes Pinto was dying of tertiary syphilis. Or so he said. This fact didn’t bother Felix so much as the histrionic way the captain flicked through his small but well-handled collection of pornography. As he turned the pages of dim photographs and extravagant etchings he would sigh wistfully and shake his head as if to say, “Look at the trouble you naughty girls have got me into.” Occasionally he would give a fond chuckle and pass one of the books over to Felix for his perusal. Initially, Felix had indeed been intrigued to look at the pictures—mainly of plump girls in bordellos, with their breasts hanging out of satin slips, or skirts routinely raised to reveal huge creamy buttocks or luxuriant pudenda—but now it was just another irritation. The girls all smiled and posed with little coquettishness, almost as if they were drugged. Felix thought of his own solitary encounter with a prostitute in Bloomsbury Square. It seemed like decades ago, in another world.
Pinto was a small fat man with a pencil moustache, a festering sore in one nostril and one smoked blind eye. His uniform was constantly smeared and dirty, but for all that he was an amiable sort of fellow, Felix thought, and he seemed to find it not in the slightest bit out of the ordinary that he—a non-English speaker—should have to liaise with an English officer who in turn spoke no Portuguese. Felix had been sharing quarters with him at Boma Durio for getting on for three months and, thanks to the absence of a common vocabulary, they had never had a cross word.
Pinto pushed the book across the table and Felix obligingly scrutinized the picture.
“Francez,” Pinto moaned. He parted his lips in a grimace of ecstatic pain, exposing his four silver and two gold teeth. “Diabolico!” He blew on his fingertips and launched into a lengthy reminiscence in Portuguese. It was an impossible language, Felix thought, full of thudding consonants and slushing noises. He’d been trying to learn it for three months with the aid of a crude dictionary he’d bought in Porto Amelia but he couldn’t even pronounce it. Pinto had been making better progress with his English and spoke a little French, and through a combination of all three languages they just about managed to communicate. It was almost as difficult as talking to Gilzean. Felix shifted in his seat uncomfortably. He worried that he’d let Gilzean down rather, given him false hopes. His gloomy sergeant had died of blackwater fever three days before Christmas 1917. Poor Gilzean.
Pinto went back to his book and Felix took the opportunity to stroll outside.
Boma Durio was a huge earthwork fort, roughly two hundred yards square, set on a hill a mile away from Durio village somewhere in the middle of Portuguese East Africa. In one corner of the square was a red-bricked tin-roofed building which was Felix’s and Pinto’s quarters. Nearby were half a dozen large but flimsy grass huts which housed Pinto’s servants, his three young negro concubines and the half company of Portuguese native troops and their camp followers. The rest of the square was empty. That morning it had been filled with six hundred potters and their loads of yams, manioc, rice, sugar cane and sweet potatoes—provisions for some of the twelve thousand British and Empire troops still chasing von Lettow and his small army up and down Portuguese East Africa.
It was late afternoon. The light was soft and damp. Noting Felix emerge from his quarters Human came over to see if there was anything he wanted. Human was Felix’s sole remaining contact with the Nigerian Brigade, all of whom had been shipped home some months previously. Human had volunteered to follow Felix in his cross-posting, and Felix had been touched and surprised by his loyalty.
Back in November 1917, after von Lettow had successfully crossed the Rovuma at the Ludjenda confluence, the Nigerian Brigade had been recalled to Lindi. There, after a few weeks, they had learnt they were to be sent back to Nigeria. Felix had immediately applied for a cross-posting to the King’s African Rifles—now some twenty battalions strong—on whom the future brunt of the war in East Africa was to rest. For some mystifying reason it had been turned down. In desperation he recalled Wheech-Browning’s offer of a job with GSO II (Intelligence). He got in touch with Wheech-Browning, applied and was immediately accepted. He became a Special Services officer seconded to the Portuguese army. No-one ever thought to check up on his qualifications. “Believe me, Cobb,” Wheech-Browning had said with great enthusiasm,
“your Portuguese is going to be the most tremendous asset.”
Felix imagined he would be in the front line liaising between the KAR and the Portuguese units who were being led a merry dance by von Lettow. In a confident mood he sailed from Lindi to Porto Amelia in northern Portuguese East Africa. It was from Porto Amelia that the main thrust in-land by the British columns—designated ‘Pamforce’ by the ever-imaginative army staff—was issuing. But, instead of fighting, Felix discovered that he was to be a requisitions officer organizing food supplies for the KAR troops. He had been sent to Boma Durio, some hundred and fifty miles from Porto Amelia in Nyana Province, which was in the midst of a fertile area of farm land. Here he received his instructions for supplies for ‘Pamforce’. Pinto and his men collected the food from surrounding farms and native settlements and carriers transported it to whichever area the British army happened to be fighting in.
Anguished complaints and protests to Wheech-Browning at headquarters in Porto Amelia had achieved nothing. “You’re doing a vital job, man,” Wheech-Browning said. “You can’t treat the war as a personal vendetta.”
So Felix lingered at Boma Durio, unable to pursue von Lettow, feeling frustrated and hard done by. Pinto did all the real work with surprising efficiency. Felix signed requisition orders, paid for the food and kept accounts. Every fortnight or so he received a visit from Wheech-Browning who kept him in touch with the course of the war and brought him a few home comforts from Porto Amelia.
But for all the deadening monotony of the work and the steamy lethargic atmosphere of Boma Durio Felix found his hatred of von Bishop never left him. He thought about Gabriel’s death constantly, trying to puzzle out what had happened on the plateau: what dreadful struggle had torn up the grass, why his brother’s body had been mutilated. His desire for revenge never left him. It was like the nagging pain of an ulcer: some sort of normal life was possible, but the pain never went away.
