The Diamond Bogo

by Robert F. Jones

  “It’ll be the Last Hunt, Donny Boy,” enthused Bucky over the phone. “Game as thick as anything Selous ever saw. Elephants that would throw Arthur Neumann and Karamojo Bell into a dead faint. Savage cannibal tribes lusting after Dawn’s tender titties; dusky maidens with filed teeth and twitching tails. Diamonds gleaming on the hillsides, gold nuggets rolling down the stream beds. Plenty of bhangi to smoke, and good cold Tusker beer every night around the campfire while the jackals howl and the simbas cough in the writhing dark. How’s that, Donny Boy? The sun-scorched plains shimmering like sleeping lions, the snowcapped light of Kilimanjaro infusing the scene with an astral radiance. All the things you like. It’s adventure, Donny Boy.”

  It would be, Donn thought, rising from the lotus position beside his pond. Cat’s-paws wrinkled its watery skin; a bass leaped in the dark-blue distance, swallowing a frog. If I knuckle under to the stars now, I will be their slaves for the rest of my life. He walked slowly back to the house to deliver his verdict.

  3

  THE GUINEA WORM

  “Wait a minute!” said Bucky Blackrod. “I can feel it moving now. Get ready. Okay, nail the bastard!”

  A group of drunks lunged at his hairy bare leg, propped on the scarred lip of the bar. Clumsy hands snatched and groped. Irish curses blued the air.

  “Missed him!”

  The worm had emerged from the edge of Bucky’s shin, waving up into the boozy light with its pointed eyeless head—a thin red ribbon fully a foot long. But at the attack, it had once again retreated.

  It was a Guinea worm, Dracunculus medinensis, an African parasite that had plagued explorers ever since the days of James Bruce, the eighteenth-century Scot who had been the first white man to reach the source of the Blue Nile in Abyssinia. Bucky had acquired his unwanted passenger during a hunting safari in Central Africa three years earlier. Doctors could do nothing about it. The worm was impervious to drugs or medication of any kind. It lived in his legs, migrating from one to the other in a slow tingly crawl occasionally punctuated by a stab of pain, like a hot needle run through his veins. Toward evening, usually, it would emerge from his skin for a look around. But usually, toward evening, Bucky was halfway in the bag, too slow with drink to catch it. Thus the pursuit of the Guinea worm had fallen to his drinking buddies, who found it an amusing game. Unfortunately, most of them were slower than Bucky. Old men—retired cops, laid-off stevedores, elevator operators, cab drivers, just plain bums—they had been drinking since nine in the morning, when Clancy’s opened. Clancy himself, a tall, cadaverous, big-knuckled man with a slab of patent-leather hair across his pale forehead, never drank. But even he could not catch the Guinea worm and had long ago given up trying.

  “Maybe he’s waiting to get back to Africa,” Bucky said, ordering another shot to go with his beer. “I’ll be over there by the weekend. Maybe he’ll come out and go away. Go get himself a girl friend.”

  “Yes,” said Clancy from behind the bar. “I suppose you’d call a female of the species a Guiness worm.” He adjusted his leather bowtie as they laughed.

  “I still say you should let me try this,” said Riordan, the veinous ex-cop. He patted the .38 Police Special in the quick-draw clip at his hip. The butt of the gun peeked out from under a roll of fat in a dirty shirt. “He can’t be quick as a bullet. We’d let him come out with the bar as a backdrop and I’d blow his soddin’ head off.”

  “Clancy wouldn’t care for that,” said Bucky, tossing off his rye. “And anyway, Riordan, you’d probably blow my soddin’ leg off.”

  Riordan bridled, his red face going purple as the others chuckled.

  “For thirty years I was the best pistol shot in my precinct,” he growled. “From the Bowery to Fort Apache, from Harlem to Sheepshead Bay. I could do it, Bucko me lad.”

  “A sawbuck says you miss,” piped Schultheiss, the crippled ex-elevator jockey. He slapped the ten-spot on the bar. Others chimed in, laying singles and fives on the pile, arguing odds and laying off one another’s bets. Bucky peeled a twenty from the inside of his roll—expense money for the upcoming safari—and smoothed it atop the pile.

  “Half the pot goes to Clancy, to fix the bullet hole,” he said. “And the cops. All right, Clance?”

  The bartender walked to the door, looked up and down the street, then pulled the shades.

  “We can say it was a holdup man,” he said.

  “Shhhh,” said Bucky, pulling up his pants leg. “He likes the quiet.”

  The other drunks staggered off away from the bar. Riordan drew the pistol and crouched on the hardwood floor, clearing a space for his shoes in the sawdust. He held the pistol in a double-handed grip, his elbows locked and lying across his knees, the muzzle far enough away from Bucky’s bare leg to avoid flash burn. Clancy poured a shot for Bucky and another for Riordan. The Irishman shrugged it away. He wanted to be dead calm.

  Silence fell over the saloon, apart from the odd hiccup—Maynard the onetime bicycle racer. They heard a siren go up Eighth Avenue. They heard two hookers giggle down the avenue. Flaherty, who had flown thirty-six missions as chin-turret gunner in a B-17 during World War II, struggled to stifle a beer fart. They waited.

  The Guinea worm poked its head out of Bucky’s knee. It swayed in the dim light, retreated a bit, then emerged slowly. It came out like a cobra from a fakir’s basket, weaving to a music beyond the range of human ears. It was actually quite beautiful—slim, sinuous, graceful almost, a nearly translucent red, like a living thermometer. It hypnotized them with its dance.

  Riordan shot.

  They all jumped at the bark of the revolver. Bottles shivered on the bar. The clouded mirror shifted an inch to the left. Clancy’s black leather bow tie took a ride on his Adam’s apple. Flaherty cut his fart.

  The Guinea worm, minus its head, whipped back into Bucky’s knee like a snapped rubber band.

  Later, walking up Eighth past the fag movie houses and the hooks and the muggers, who paid him no attention because of the blood and beer stains on his clothing, Bucky thought that the Guinea worm would either die inside his leg and rot there, or else grow a new head. It would probably grow a new head. It was that sort of animal. Anyway, he hoped it would. He had come to like it.

  He was glad to be heading back to Africa. New York had gotten boring in the past few years. Everybody whined, or snuck around behind your back. Even the muggers were yellow. They cut first and took your money afterward. But they didn’t bother him because he was too much of a slob. Only the grungiest of whores would have anything to do with him. He used to be a good-looking guy, but now he was getting fat and he didn’t care about anything anymore. The job bored him: It was games. Politics put him to sleep. He liked to read, but he could do that anywhere. He carried his own music inside his head. His movies, too.

  In Africa everything was strong and it changed all the time. Everything bit. He knew that inside his fat and his lethargy there was a thin, eager young man waiting to be unzipped. The Guinea worm had told him. He knew that once he got to Africa, the man inside would jump out and go running over the game plains, buck naked, with the Guinea worms waving a weird dance around his ankles.

  He could see the buffalo ahead of him, through the heat haze, its huge black head shining, shimmering, waiting.

  4

  KRAZY GLUE

  “The entire affair is shrouded in mystery,” said Treacle. “I have it on the best authority—and of course I cannot disclose my source—that even the Russians are puzzled as to how he brought it off. Hmmm, hahhhh, diddlediddle. Haven’t a bloody clue. All that is known for certain is that the stone was mounted between the horns of the largest Cape buffalo known to man. And that Rokoff then released the creature—the Mbogo ya Almasi, as the Kaffirs call it, the Diamond Bogo—in a patch of wild country near the secret site where the stone was found.”

  Winjah listened in silence on the veranda of the Baobab Bar & Grill in downtown Palmerville, contemplating the bubbles in his glass of Tusker beer. Tony Treacle, an
expatriate Fleet Streeter and Old Africa Hand, hummed and diddlediddled a while longer, contemplating the firm buttocks of passing European girls. It was a good year for tourism, this. Slim, wheat-haired Swedish flickas and pudendally perfect German Mädchen sinuated the sidewalks in front of the New Clapperton Hotel, their unrestrained breasts wobbling enticingly through diaphanous and provocatively titled T-shirts. JERSEY MILK BAR. Treacle shivered uncontrollably as the harmattan brought to his nostrils a whiff of girl-crotch and Lady Dior. Perhaps with the few quid he should realize from the story of the Diamond Bogo he might…

  “And what of Rokoff himself?” The white hunter had looked up from his beer and was staring, with a playful smile, at the daydreaming journalist. His eyes, even in this relaxed mood, were unflinchingly hard—like blued steel, thought Treacle, like gun barrels, shivering again though this time not with lust. The hunter’s mighty thews rippled beneath the sun-faded corduroy of his bush jacket as he leaned forward on the table. His tousled blond locks shook beneath the push of the desert wind. A handsome devil, thought Treacle. More devil than handsome, though, if one were to believe the tales told round the Long Bar at the Chiperone Club.

  “Hummm, hah, diddlediddle,” said Treacle. “Vanished, one surmises. The secret police have no inkling as to where. Sold out the balance of the stones to Diamang, at a goodly profit, no doubt, and fled the country before the United Front’s victory. Murdered his Kaffirs before he left—Kiratu, the chief of special branch, was up there himself, saw the scorched skeletons in the ruin of the bungalow. No doubt to keep them from talking once the Commies came in. As to the location, hmmm, hahh …”

  “Fiddlefaddle,” said Winjah. “He must have left some spoor. Where is Kiratu just now?”

  “Still here in Palmerville,” said Treacle. “Saw him this morning at the ministry. Hasn’t a bloody clue.”

  “So you said.” The hunter drummed his hard, broad-tipped outdoorsman’s fingers on the table so that the beer bottles rattled. Treacle resumed his perusal of the passing quim. The girls’ eyes were a study in themselves. Coming up the broad beggar-and-gift-shop-studded sidewalk from the Palmerville Hilton to the New Clapperton, walking in pairs for safety here in the heart of the Dark Continent, the girls and their eyes ran a gauntlet of visual inputs ranging from the sublime to the sick-making, each impression limned indelibly in those deep, wet kohl-rimmed orbs. At Abu Said’s display window, the eyes would widen with cash-register delight at the offerings within: earrings and necklaces of multicolored semiprecious Kansdu stone, lions’ teeth and leopard claws; elephant hair bracelets filigreed in gold for a quarter the price to be found anywhere in Europe or America; razor-sharp Turkana wrist knives for the libbers amongst them; letter and bottle openers fashioned from the tusks of warthogs; exotically carved elephant tusks; heavy, ironshod Waziri and Samburu war spears; delicate snuffboxes hand-hollowed from ivory nuts; wallets and change purses and handbags fashioned from the scrota of buffalo and rhino; gazelle-hide vests and jackets and cute little caps….

  Then, in the next glance, shuffling toward her on calloused stumps, his few brown teeth bared in a revolting, deathlike rictus, his leathery writhing monkey’s paw extended in supplication, came old Wamatitu the beggar prince, gurgling in Kiswahili—and the girl’s eyes would flash terror, desperately out of focus, the delicate feet dance either into the cool incense-scented interior of Abu Said’s or on anxiously away, toward the next magnetic shop window. Treacle had timed it once. Each girl was granted precisely 1 minute and 32 seconds in the shade beneath the shop window before the beggars began their crablike advance. That was the deal they had with the shopkeepers. If the girl had not entered the shop in that space of time, the beggar’s approach would either drive her through the door, or send her scuttling along to the next one. It was a sound business practice, and the beggars themselves received a share of the profits. Old Abu Said stood at the door, his gold teeth flashing in the dim, and nodded slyly to Treacle. Yes, ’twas a good year for tourism, this. As soon as he got his next check from The News of the World …

  “How big is the stone?” asked Winjah.

  “The Rokoff Diamond, mined by Nikolas Nikolaivitch Rokoff in 1961 at a site as yet undisclosed, but probably either in eastern Angola or western Kansdu, three hundred carats of the first water, a blue-white stone of unparalleled clarity, absolutely flawless as they say, valued at last reckoning—that would have been 1970—at four million pounds on the London market, or nearly twelve million dollars American.”

  Treacle had details like this at his fingertips. That’s what being a journalist was all about.

  “Be a lot more now, though, wouldn’t it?”

  “I expect so. Rumor is that Rokoff turned down ten million American for it shortly before the end of the Angolan war.”

  “Why would he do it?”

  “He’s quite mad, you know,” answered Treacle. “Like his father before him, who played the Tsar’s game throughout Central Africa before the Great War, skulduggery of all sorts, then continued after the Revolution on his own, out of sheer wanton perversity. Young Rokoff—he’s not really so young anymore, of course, about sixty, I’d reckon—was shaped on the same last. Known as ‘the Mad Russian’ from Addis to Zimbabwe. His hand evident in nearly every major coup d’etat or assassination—except for the CIA ones—from Mogadiscio to Mali. He simply resented the United Front and refused to knuckle under to them. A lone operator like Rokoff need not sell out to the Socialists, like Diamang did, or like Gulf is doing. He packed it in, and knowing he could never get the Big Stone out himself, decided to let it remain where he’d found it—with a bodyguard. The Diamond Bogo.”

  “How did he procure the buff?”

  “His boys—pardon me, his ‘men’—had it staked out somewhere in the bush, or at least knew its hangouts. It’s a mean, smart sod, this bogo is. Wounded twice by safaris out of Zambia, I hear, and killed five professional hunters already. The latest was Mike Reilly; you knew him, didn’t you?”

  “Not much of a hunter.”

  “Well, Mike had a rich bitch from Brussels as a client. She liked to shoot light, nothing heavier than seven-mil magnum. Dropped a dofu that went eighty pounds the tusk with that peashooter, and figured that if she could kill elephant with it, why not a mere buff? Well, they stumbled on the Diamond Bogo up around the Tirika Swamp, quite unawares, and before Mike could stop her she’d put one through his paunch and he’d gone off into some high grass. The rich bitch insisted on going in with Mike, and when the bogo came out at them she simply froze. Mike got up ahead of her but before he could shoot, the bloody sod had him. The rich bitch ran out of there, and for the next half hour they could hear the bogo punching Mike through the thornbush, grunting and barking like, the boys said, and Mike screaming for someone to come in and kill the both of them, him and the bogo. But the boys had got the wind up and the rich bitch just sat in the truck slugging brandy. When they went in finally, Mike was in six pieces. The bloody bogo had eaten his face off, the boys said, and his family jewels to boot. All they brought back was his watch—that Rolex he was so proud of, you know? Still running nicely, I’m told. The boys said he was one hell of a bogo, sixty inches if he’s a foot, with a boss on him like the bumper on a Bedford lorry. And that great bleeding stone there in the crotch of the boss, winkin’ and flashin’ like a great bloody star.”

  “Hard to swallow,” said Winjah. “How in hell could that stone stay put, with all the pounding that a buffalo does with his head, just in routine living much less killing people?”

  “Humm, huh, diddlediddle,” said Treacle. “Krazy Glue. From America. It’s so strong that if you get some on your finger and then go to pick your nose, you’re stuck like that for life. Wouldn’t mind a dab on the old hogsticker though, don’t y’know, hmmm, hahhhh … but seriously, it’s powerful stuff. The lads managed to shoot the bogo with a tranquilizer dart, and then Rokoff chipped out a seat between the horns for the Big Stone. They Krazy Glued it in there, and I gather it�
��s stuck for good. Rather like the unfortunate couple named Kelly, don’t y’know? They always walked belly to belly, because in their haste they used library paste instead of petroleum jelly?”

  “Yes,” said Winjah, grinning now for the first time during the interview. As an incorrigible limericist, Treacle knew, Winjah could always be reached by means of a five-line stanza of Rabelaisian anapestic trimeter if not by reason. Treacle sensed that the time was right for the question that would make or break his story—and the immediate future of his sex life.

  “Are you going after him, Bwana?”

  “Wouldn’t know where to begin,” said Winjah, the gun-barrel eyes resuming their glint. “If Reilly wounded him three months ago in the Tirika, the bogo could be long dead by now, or else skipped across the border into Ethiopia. And as you well know, the last safari that went into Kansdu ended up in the cooking pots of the Tok. The country is virtually inaccessible by vehicle, and nobody wants to pay for a foot safari these days. Too bloody costly. God knows I’ve no desire to see that country again.” Treacle remembered: Some fifteen years ago, Winjah had gone up into Kansdu on police business and come out on a litter, a Tok spear wound through his chest and fevered to the eyeballs. “No,” Winjah continued, “I’m afraid Rokoff’s Diamond Bogo is safe from me, safe indeed from any sane white hunter.”

  “But Bwana,” Treacle pleaded, his eyes flashing helplessly at the parade of passing pulchritude, “couldn’t I at least hint at it, in a story to The News of the World? I’m a bit short of funds, don’t y’know, hummm, hah. Could be good publicity for the old firm, don’t y’see. ‘Bwana Winjah May Seek Diamond Bogo.’ Big headlines. Lots of customers for next season. Mad Russian. Priceless Gem. Dauntless Pursuit. Mystery Tribesmen. It’s got all the elements, Bwana.”