The Knowledge

by Martha Grimes

  Ernest said, “There is one rule—”

  Melrose bet there were many.

  “You must be accompanied to your tents after dark. Animals, you know.” He smiled as if he’d just yanked his shotgun to his shoulder and fired.

  Mildred gasped. “You mean they come here to the camp?”

  Before Ernest could start walking back the cat, Melrose put in, “But isn’t it rather we who have come here, Mrs. Attaboy?” At her uncomprehending look, he plowed on. “It is their country.”

  “What? Africa?”

  “If Africa were a country, the answer would be yes.”

  More and more inscrutable, the Attaboys’ eyes were telling him.

  Said Ernest, “I believe Lord Ardry is speaking of the continent and colonization.”

  Oh, thank you, Ernest. Had I known rudimentary history and geography were not on the menu I’d have shut up. No, he wouldn’t. “Actually, I mean Joseph Conrad.”

  Ernest’s too-well-plucked eyebrow rose. “Joseph Conrad?”

  Melrose didn’t enlighten him. The others were bothered that not even Ernest had managed to penetrate this opaque British peer-talk.

  Trish, finding that the new arrivals were neither tenting nor drinking yet, started to shepherd them toward the living room, before stopping and saying, “Oh, just a moment.” She then went to a small table near the front door, picked up little squares of plastic and came back.

  To his horror, Melrose saw that these were name tags she was now pinning to the Attaboys’ clothing and that the other guests were wearing them.

  To his double horror, he saw her hand closing on his lapel. He shoved it away.

  Her smile-mask cracked. “But everyone’s wearing them just to make it easier.”

  “I’d much rather make it harder.” He walked off toward the drinks.

  He saw as he passed others that each tag was plastered not only with a name, but also with the Mbosi Camp logo, a crouching lion, clearly unfamiliar with a drinks party. Melrose wondered if the man-eating lions of Tsavo had scheduled themselves for an appearance and would soon send the whole lot of them into the sweet hereafter.

  Trish Van der Moot had taken herself off toward the innards of the building, probably to deal with a chef who was going mad and tossing the chicken tikka out the door to the zebras.

  Melrose himself made his way toward the drinks-laden table, edging past strangers and the inevitable, “How was your flight?”—a question put to him by a thin reed of a woman with sharp features and a tiny mouth.

  “Awful.”

  That was not the right answer. Melrose should have known that to jump the ordinary stream of small talk only made him wade straight into a sea of conversational shallows. As she looked as if she’d been mugged, the gentleman behind her took up the oars of convention and cliché and plowed them through the water. Comments about the flight from Cape Town, the beastly conditions of the Nairobi airport, and so forth. The woman was searching Melrose’s jacket for an identifying tag. Her own read Sally Sly.

  Pouring himself a stiff whisky, he said, “Ms. Sly, are you—”

  “Slay,” she corrected him. “Pronounced like s-l-e-i-g-h.” She looked down at a child beside her. “And this is my daughter, Savannah. She’s eight.”

  Eight? Savannah should have been in bed a week ago, not embedding herself in a roomful of boozing adults. And talking. Talking as if she were a windup doll and they were at a birthday party, all holding balloons instead of whisky glasses.

  “I kn-kn-know all about wild an-animals,” she stuttered. And clearly meant to impart her fund of knowledge. “I kn-kn-know about l-lions and tigers—”

  And bears, tra-la. “There are no tigers in Africa,” Melrose remarked, satisfied that this had stopped her talk dead. But how could an eight-year-old with a pointy little face and a stutter like a buzz saw possibly be named Savannah?

  Behind them, a bellicose man was laughing and interspersing his talk with “damns” and “hells.”

  “Mommy, that man back there is saying bad words.”

  “Savannah is very sensitive to language,” said Sally Sly.

  No, she isn’t, or she’d shut up. “Hell’s bells,” said Melrose, taking a sausage from a passing plate.

  Savannah plastered her small hand across her mouth. Sally looked uncertain.

  Melrose ate his sausage, and then saw Etta Attaboy carving her way through the crowd, unresponsive to whatever smiles and greetings were aimed at her.

  “Hello,” she said to Melrose, as if he were the only person in the room worthy of a shout. “What’s to drink?” She was eyeing Sally’s white wine with suspicion. Every woman in the room was holding a glass of some white nonsense.

  “Everything,” said Melrose. “What’ll you have? I’ll be barman.”

  “Double whisky,” said Etta.

  He tried to be more affable when the next guest approached him, introducing herself as Mrs. Rose Campanelli, a name with a vaguely Roman air, though there was nothing Italianate about Mrs. Campanelli, who hailed, she told him, from Cumbria. She was a very large woman with a shelf of bosom and bright green earrings, not emerald.

  “Ah, the Lake District!” said Melrose, with more enthusiasm than he really felt, recalling his sojourn there. “Near Windermere? Buttermere?”

  “No, no. We’re quite tucked away in Outer Otter. Quite all to ourselves.”

  “Utter Outer?”

  “No. Outer Otter.”

  Melrose was sorry the Attaboys didn’t live there. What fun: I’d like you to meet the Attaboys from Outer Otter. Better still: This is Etta Attaboy from Outer Otter.

  Melrose asked, “In the shadow of Scafell Pike perhaps? Skiddaw? Grasmoor?”

  “Oh, no.”

  Melrose was resolute. He needed to place Outer Otter in some Cumbrian scene. He did not want to revise his mental map of the Lake District—those gleaming and sanguine waters and those majestic fells—as having “tuckings.”

  He found it odd that Mrs. Campanelli, a woman who did not strike him as enjoying solitude, would come by herself into the vast nowhere of Africa. She answered this unasked question by telling him that at the last minute Mr. Campanelli had decided to stay in Outer Otter.

  Was this it, then?

  Was this, then, it?

  Was it, then, just this?

  Here he was in the wilds of Kenya, on Conrad’s unimaginably dark continent, and he might as well have been in the Long Pidd post office buying stamps.

  At dinner, he had at least the good fortune to be sitting next to Etta Attaboy, who immediately held her hand to the corner of her mouth in one of those stage-whispery gestures and said to him, “Only thing worse than this layout is sharing a table with my family.” She sipped from a goblet of some lemony fizzy stuff after removing the miniature skewer stabbed through bits of fruit. Etta made a face. “This could be improved with a couple of shots of gin.”

  As a fancily garbed waiter ladled out an ambiguous soup, Melrose and Etta exchanged comments about the setups that had brought them (perhaps unwisely) to this safari and to where they sat.

  “It was either Kenya or staying with my nincompoop grandchildren. Ha! Leopards I’d sooner.”

  Melrose waited for her to complete the sentence, but she was done with it.

  Leopards I’d sooner—what? It was apparently a comment with the blood expunged.

  “Your grandson Mitchell does strike me as a handful.”

  “How polite of you. He’s a holy terror.” She shuddered. “Neither of the children wanted to come. Certainly not Mona, who is professionally bored. Never have I seen a child from whom the sense of wonder is so absolutely missing. Even as a baby, she was bored. So when I said to Mitchell and Mildred that I intended to go along on this trip, they were utterly astonished.”

  A blond-beyond-reason American woman named Bobbi North with a perhaps ruby on a chain around her throat and ruby blots on her ears leaned across the candlelight and said to Etta, “I think you’re very brave.”
She smiled. Her surly teenage son sat beside her. His name was Jefferson and he didn’t smile.

  “Brave?” said Etta. “About what?”

  “Why, coming to Kenya.”

  Etta looked around the table. “You regard all of these people, all of us here, as somehow heroic?”

  Melrose ate his salad (that had come from the local Sainsbury’s) and wondered when this ruby-throated blonde was going to twig it.

  “Oh, of course not; I meant you.”

  “Why?”

  No use, Bobbi, thought Melrose. She’s going to force you to say it.

  The blonde clutched at the red stone at her throat, as if strangling were the only way out of this. “Oh, you know—”

  “No, I don’t. That’s why I’m asking.” Etta plunged her little bread knife into a knob of butter.

  “It’s just,” Bobbi whispered, “not many women your age—”

  “Oh. I get it. It’s because I’m an old woman.” Etta had raised her voice at this so that the comment sailed up and down the table, earning Bobbi North looks that implied she had just disemboweled a baby monkey on her dinner plate. She quickly turned to the old geezer on her right, realized that was not the best choice and that she was pretty much stuck with the monkey on the plate. She asked the waiter for wine.

  The menu appeared to be much like, but inferior to, one Melrose’s own cook, Martha, would have served: the soup was replaced with a steak fancily garbed in bits of parsley and thyme resting on a bed of greens. He assumed it was beef, but how did he know it wasn’t zebra?

  Two servers were passing round plates of vegetables. Melrose was hoping for something exotic—rootlike sprigs from a baobob tree, perhaps, or something bulbous and orange yanked up from a Okavango puddle.

  What he got were roast potatoes and—could he believe it?—green peas. Peas! If he went into the kitchen would he find empty Libby’s cans? The peas were greener than the Campanelli woman’s earrings, suspiciously green. He remembered Martha’s comment, “Add a pinch o’ bakin’ soda, y’r lordship, though of course a body’s not supposed to …” And she had been called away by Ruthven before he got an explanation of this.

  “Tell me, Mrs. Van der Moot—”

  “Trish, please.”

  “These are the greenest peas I’ve ever seen. Does your chef add baking soda?”

  If Etta snickered, it would confirm Martha’s “a body’s not supposed to.” Etta snickered.

  “Why, I don’t believe so.” She pinked up.

  Apparently, she did believe so, given that she hadn’t even questioned his reference to baking soda.

  “I hope not,” said Etta. “It’s illegal, adding baking soda to green vegetables to keep them from turning pale.”

  Melrose smiled and ate his peas.

  The other people sitting around the table stared at him. Here he was, their single peer of the realm, the one who might have offered up a bit of gossip from the House of Lords or about the PM and all he came up with was peas and baking soda.

  A heavy, gloved silence fell until a voice broke it with, “We’ve always loved Botswana, Donald and I,” from a middle-aged woman Melrose hadn’t met who was sitting down toward the end of the table.

  Recognizing this as condescending—“I’ve been here before, unlike you lot”—Melrose said, “I myself prefer the Comoros.”

  “Where?”

  Melrose raised an eyebrow. “You know: they’re islands. Where else can you see a baby mongoose lemur?” He’d picked up this bit of arcana from Diane Demorney, who’d also offered the nugget, “Except in Mauritania.” He smiled. “And then there’s the grizzled okapi. There is nowhere else to see that.” That bit was not Diane’s, but Melrose’s invention. Surely, Ernest would question it.

  He did, but Little Mitchell got there first. “What’s that?” he asked, looking dumb.

  “A ruminant.” Melrose drank his wine.

  “A which?” Mitchell looked dumber.

  “A kind of antelope.”

  “You’d go all the way to some African island just to see a stupid antelope?” said Jefferson North, pulling himself out of the slough of boredom.

  “I came all the way to Kenya just to see you, didn’t I?”

  There were looks exchanged, some laughter broken like china, an Etta snicker.

  Ernest said, “Grizzled okapi? First time I’ve heard of that, Lord Ardry.”

  “They’re quite rare.” He wondered how well the Internet worked out here in the wild, because he bet there’d be fingers hitting iPhones.

  Ernest gazed round the table. “Any of you ever heard of this antelope?”

  Oh, for God’s sake, the need to be right! And why didn’t he ask the Masai warriors this question, instead of a tableful of white-faced whelps? Melrose, prepared to be generous, reopened the Botswana subject. “How often have you been to Botswana?” he asked Donald’s wife.

  It was Donald who answered. “Once. We were in Gaborone for two days.”

  Two days in Gaborone didn’t quite do it, since most of them had never heard of it. Botswana was dropped.

  So it was just as well they were on their dessert, some sort of currant-infused pudding with (God help them) a custard sauce.

  “This here’s Spotted Dick!” announced Little Mitchell.

  Looking a bit pink, her default position, Trish said, “Oh, no, no. It’s a Chablis flan with raisins. An old European recipe.”

  Etta said, “Isn’t there a Kenyan cuisine, then?”

  Little Mitchell was not to be stopped. “Call it what you want, it’s still Spotted Dick.”

  “Shut up, Mitchell,” said Etta.

  He sank into a small fury, but he shut up.

  Round-eyed, still blushing, Trish said, “To answer your question about cuisine, Mrs. Attaboy—” coward that she was, pronouncing it bois. “—since our guests come from so many different places, we attempt to keep our menu international.”

  Melrose threw another look round the table to see if he’d missed some Argentine, some Roman, Latvian, Czech, or Inuit. No, British and American faces beamed back, unexotic and barely international.

  Coffee was served. He wondered if that, at least, was Kenyan.

  Nairobi, Kenya

  Nov. 5, Tuesday night

  19

  Patty had no idea where she was or how to get out of it. It was one of the few times she had doubted the wisdom of what she’d done; she should have lifted another boarding pass at the airport in Nairobi to get back to London. Or anywhere but where she had wound up after leaving Hemingways, after her final breakfast in bed and shower. She felt she had walked the entire length of Nairobi.

  London was never dead dark. She had heard people speak of the darkness when there were lights showing everywhere: in windows of terraced houses, in tall office buildings, lampposts, pubs, cafés—everywhere. The best London could boast was a watery dark, a dark you could see through.

  She kept walking away from Kibera. She was familiar with London slums, but Kibera was a world of slums, a slum universe. Little brown shacks of wood and metal siding stretched for what appeared to be miles away from the spot where she had been standing just off the road leading out of Nairobi. Walking and walking, stopping now and again to eat or drink something, she had finally stood on a dirt road on the city’s outskirts.

  Patty had left the dirt road and wandered into Kibera, wondering how a slum so vast could exist side by side with Kenya’s biggest city.

  * * *

  She had brushed aside washing drying on a line—there were endless lines of clothes hung out to dry. She was walking through an alley-like opening between the backs of wood and corrugated-iron shacks. Beside her, a sluggish rush of creek-like water passed through low banks. She bet it wasn’t mineral water.

  “Jambo.” This came from a little girl backed up against a shack on the other side of the foul creek. It hadn’t much purchase on the banks. Patty hadn’t seen her because the child’s clothes were so dark against her dark body.
r />   “Jambo,” said Patty. Then she added as clearly as she could, “Ninaitwa Patty.” She’d no idea if she was pronouncing that correctly.

  The little girl answered, “Pat-ti. Ninaitwa Alala.”

  Patty nodded and held out her hand, motioning for Alala to jump over the water to her side. The girl hesitated.

  “Alala,” said Patty, not knowing how to say, “Come on.”

  The girl didn’t move, so Patty unhitched her backpack and set it on the ground. Leaving her backpack was never a smart move, but it would weigh her down in any attempt to bridge the little waterway.

  Which she did, in one well-placed step. On the other side, she said again, “Jambo.”

  The girl giggled. “Jambo, Pat-ti.”

  Patty nodded. “Now, we go back.” Patty pointed her finger first at the girl, then at herself, saying, “You? Me? First?”

  But Alala only laughed, bewildered.

  Patty pointed again to the other side of the stream. “Back.”

  The girl nodded. Patty pointed to her own chest, then to Alala’s. Then she jumped over the water. She turned, held out her hand and this time Alala jumped. The two of them laughed again and set out, continuing through the backs of shacks, Alala in the lead, as she seemed to know where she was going. They passed a dozen or more random people before they came out on a clearing, not clear at all but littered with debris, strewn with broken bits of unidentifiable objects: dishes or dolls. Kibera’s dwellers, and there were many of them, walked in groups or sat idly in doorways, unoccupied, mournful or angry, Patty thought, and why not, considering this place? A white girl in this black place—she wondered how long it would have been before she was accosted, mugged or kidnapped had she not been in the company of Alala.

  Alala stopped before her and waved to someone across the clearing. In a semicircle around this empty space sat another row of shacks, more tents than shacks, their canvas roofs shaking in a wind that had come up across the vast field. Patty craned her neck up and back. What had been blackness was now a moonlit, starlit sky. A windblown African sky. Even the moon seemed to scud along, voyaging behind the clouds, and that was as much travel as Patty felt she needed.