Dead of Night

by Michael Stanley

  Chapter 5

  Johannes and Crys sat on the veranda outside the main house and enjoyed a variety of sandwiches with their coffee, entertaining themselves by throwing crumbs to the iridescent birds Johannes called glossy starlings. The veranda overlooked a small waterhole supplied by a solar-powered pump, and while they ate, a parade of impala came to drink. Crys’s face lit up and she couldn’t help pulling her camera out and snapping away with abandon. It was a magical moment.

  ‘I can’t believe I’m in the African bush at last,’ she said. ‘I’ve dreamed about it for so many years.’

  ‘And, of course, you’ve watched all the National Geographic videos and documentaries,’ Johannes said with a smile.

  She nodded. ‘Aren’t they amazing? It’s remarkable how the videographers catch some of those incredible moments.’

  ‘Thanks to satellite TV, we get the National Geographic channel, and the BBC. I also really liked Blue Planet with that oke – what’s his name? David … somebody or other.’

  ‘Attenborough,’ Crys chimed in. ‘He’s fantastic…’

  Johannes nodded, and they sat quietly, enjoying the moment.

  ‘Tell me a bit about yourself, Crys. I’ve never met a Vietnamese lady before.’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘How you got to write for National Geographic – that must be a really hard job to get. What you like to do in your free time. That sort of thing.’

  Talking about herself was not Crys’s thing. But, nevertheless, she took in a deep breath and tried to summarise her career as best she could, and then told Johannes all about competing in the biathlon.

  ‘You mean you ski for several kilometres, then have to shoot a target?’

  ‘Yes – alternating between lying down and standing. Standing is the hardest by far. Your heart is pounding; you’re struggling to breathe normally; and your muscles are exhausted. It’s very tough to hold the rifle steady.’

  ‘That sounds really hard.’

  ‘And if you miss the target, you have to ski several hundred more metres for every miss.’

  Johannes shook his head. ‘It would be like shooting after playing rugby. I don’t think I could do it.’

  Crys smiled and assured him she thought he would.

  Then they lapsed into silence, and Crys soaked in the newness of Africa.

  Eventually, Johannes stood up. ‘Let me show you your accommodation.’

  She was reluctant to move from this perfect spot, but she stood too, and they walked towards a string of five or six chalets.

  ‘Just be careful walking outside at night, and don’t go beyond the electric fence. It’s a single-strand fence about a metre and a half off the ground. It’s designed to keep out the big animals like elephants and buffalo – and the rhino, of course – but occasionally they break through. We don’t have any lions on the property, so you don’t have to worry about them.’

  ‘Who is she and what does she want?’ Johannes’s father, Anton, asked in Afrikaans when Johannes returned to the house.

  ‘Her name is Crystal Nguyen,’ Johannes answered, trying hard to pronounce Crys’s name correctly. ‘She’s writing about rhino conservation. And she’s a real looker.’

  ‘She’s Vietnamese?’

  Johannes nodded.

  ‘How do we know she’s not spying for one of the smuggling gangs?’

  ‘I don’t think she is. She phoned last week to arrange a visit and when I heard her name, I had the same thought. So, I called National Geographic. Turns out she’s fine.’

  ‘If it’s not a cover…’ Anton growled.

  ‘She seems really nice,’ Johannes said. ‘Thrilled to be in Africa, in the bush. She’s never been before. Was very excited when we saw a few kudu, and nearly wet herself when she touched Mary after we darted her. I don’t think we’ve anything to worry about.’

  Anton just grunted.

  Johannes decided to push his luck and see if his father would help out with his contacts.

  ‘She’s keen to visit one of the anti-poaching teams. She wouldn’t want to do that if she wasn’t on the level. Maybe we could see if Hennie would help?’

  ‘Why should we help her? She’d just be a nuisance.’

  Johannes wasn’t sure that he had a good answer to that. He liked her – her enthusiasm and commitment. He wouldn’t mind getting to know her better. None of that would wash with his father, though.

  ‘If she sees what it takes to stop the poachers, she may be more willing to see rhino conservation from our point of view,’ he said.

  ‘Nothing to do with her being a real looker?’ Anton replied with a little smile.

  Johannes laughed. ‘She’s more than that, Dad. She just won a big biathlon competition.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  Johannes explained as well as he could what winning a biathlon entailed. ‘So, you see, she must be really tough. And she can shoot.’

  ‘With a .22?’ Anton scoffed. ‘That’s no more than a peashooter.’ He paused. ‘Ag, okay. I’ll see what I can do.’

  After unpacking, Crys went outside and settled on her porch. It was hotter than Pretoria, but there was a freshness to the air, carrying with it a beautiful scent, which seemed to come from a nearby tree covered in lemon-coloured flowers. She made a mental note to ask Johannes what it was.

  She opened her laptop and navigated to the folder that contained the photos Michael had asked Sara Goldsmith to store. Starting with the most recent, she flipped through them, paying closer attention than she had when she looked at them on the flight over.

  Michael was a prolific picture-taker, but he had outdone himself during the short time he’d been at the rhino farm. There were photos of everything, from the entrance to the farm to the chalets; from a variety of views of the exterior of the house to shots of the interior rooms. There were even several of Anton being served by a black man at the dining-room table. There were photos of the game vehicles, the electric fence, various trees and, of course, rhinos.

  Why were there so many of Tshukudu?

  Crys decided that Michael must have been doing something similar to her – also writing for his main employer, the New York Times. The good news was that if she missed something, she would be able to find it in Michael’s collection.

  When she finished looking at the photos, she worked on her notes and photos for a while, and since Tshukudu had Wi-Fi, she was able to catch up on stuff from home. Pretty soon the afternoon was gone. She took a shower and changed, and headed across to the main lodge for dinner.

  Johannes and his father were already in the living room.

  The older man stood up and introduced himself as Anton Malan. Crys guessed he was mid-sixties and he looked fit.

  He shook her hand and kept hold of it. ‘Please say your name again. I didn’t quite catch it.’ His accent was even rougher than Johannes’s.

  ‘Crystal Nguyen. But call me Crys. Everyone does.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Ms Nguyen.’ He pronounced it carefully, then let go of her hand. ‘Let’s sit down. Boku will get you a drink.’

  Crys walked over to a handsome black man dressed in formal waiter attire and stuck out her hand. ‘Pleased to meet you, Boku. I’m Crys Nguyen. Please call me Crys.’

  Boku looked very uncomfortable, but eventually he shook Crys’s hand with the weakest handshake possible.

  ‘I’ll have an orange juice, please,’ she said hastily, then turned back to the others, frowning.

  ‘He’s not used to being treated like that,’ Anton said. ‘He’s been one of our servants for fifteen years. We treat them well, but not as equals.’

  Crys opened her mouth, but then closed it again. She realised she had a lot to learn about this country, which only twenty years earlier had forcibly kept the races apart.

  Crys was astonished when they moved through to dinner. It reminded her of old British movies set in the colonies. She’d never encountered anything like it – its formality made her uncomfor
table.

  They sat at a beautiful table made from a yellow wood, with the white-jacketed Boku waiting on them. When he wasn’t serving, he stood quietly in the corner of the room. Johannes and Anton ignored him, except for an occasional thank-you.

  ‘You are obviously from the USA, Ms Nguyen,’ Anton said. ‘Whereabouts?’

  ‘Well, actually I was born in Saigon – Ho Chi Minh City now. My family left after the war and settled in Minneapolis in Minnesota. There are a lot of Vietnamese people there.’ Crys purposefully kept the statement bland, trying to stop any further personal questions. Fortunately, Anton was just making small talk and didn’t really want to hear her life story.

  ‘Bit of a change of scene for you here,’ he went on.

  ‘You have such a beautiful place,’ Crys said. ‘And I was so lucky to see them taking the snare off Mary.’

  ‘Bloody poachers,’ Anton growled in reply. ‘They shoot them in the national park, you know, but we have to use kid gloves or there’s no end of trouble.’

  ‘They weren’t after the rhino, Dad,’ Johannes interjected. ‘It was a snare for a kudu.’

  ‘They’d take the rhino if they could. Even for the stump of horn that’s left.’ Anton turned to Crys. ‘Did he tell you what they’d get for a horn?’

  She nodded, and then asked: ‘According to a World Wildlife Fund survey I read, fewer Chinese now believe that rhino horn is a medicine. Will that help, do you think?’

  ‘Nearly fifty percent of Chinese still believe in it, though,’ Johannes replied. ‘And that’s a lot of people. A lot of people.’

  Anton went on eating for a while, then put his fork down with a clunk. ‘Surveys are rubbish. People changing their beliefs?’ He shook his head. ‘Look at the locals here. They are trustworthy, good workers, Christians. But they still believe in witchcraft.’

  Boku cleared away the plates, apparently oblivious to Anton’s comments. Crys felt embarrassed for him and wanted to change the subject. In any case, she was really keen to ask Anton about Michael. This was her best chance of discovering something useful, since no one had picked up his trail after Tshukudu. She was almost scared to ask, though. What if he had nothing to add to what he’d told Sara Goldsmith?

  ‘I wanted to ask you about a colleague of mine,’ she said to Anton after a pause. ‘A man called Michael Davidson. He works for the New York Times.’

  Anton looked up. ‘Davidson? Yes, he was here about a month ago. Wasn’t he also supposed to be investigating the rhino-horn trade or something? Also for National Geographic, I think.’

  ‘That’s right. Do you know where he went after he left Tshukudu?’

  Anton signalled with his glass for Boku to bring him more wine. ‘Well, he was here for a few days then said he was going up to Mozambique. I told him to watch his step. They don’t like newspaper reporters over there. I told all this to the police when they contacted me. You know anything more about this, Johannes?’

  Johannes shook his head. ‘Crys already asked me. I was taking a group of tourists on a camping trip when he visited, I guess. Why did the police get involved?’

  ‘He never came back to the States from South Africa,’ Crys responded. ‘No one knows where he is. National Geographic asked the police to try and trace him.’

  ‘Are you a friend of his?’ Anton asked, taking a sip of his wine.

  Crys nodded. There was a good chance they’d end up more than friends, she thought.

  ‘Did the police come up with anything?’ Johannes asked.

  ‘Basically, that he did go into Mozambique and returned to South Africa about ten days later. After that nothing.’ She paused. ‘How can someone just vanish and no one knows what’s happened to them?’ She didn’t mention Lieutenant Mkazi’s theory of a random hijacking.

  Anton shrugged. ‘We’re a long way from anywhere here, you know. If you head into the bush you could lose cell phone signal, break down, I don’t know. It could be a long time before you’re found.’

  It all seemed very casual to Crys. People had GPS these days. In the twenty-first century, you didn’t just get lost and disappear.

  ‘Didn’t he tell National Geographic what his plans were?’ Johannes asked.

  Crys shook her head. ‘When National Geographic asked me to take over this project, they sent me all his notes for the article, but they were all about the interviews he’d done and so on. Nothing about what he was planning next. There is one thing. Michael sent me an email saying he was onto something big – smuggling horns out of South Africa – but I’ve no idea about the details.’

  ‘Something big?’ echoed Anton. He sat back, pushing himself away from the table. ‘Something big can be dangerous…’ He stared at Crys as though he didn’t like the taste of this conversation very much.

  ‘You think he might have been talking about rhino-horn smugglers?’

  Anton signalled to Boku to bring dessert. ‘Can’t say. But those are not good people to mess with.’

  ‘How do you think—’

  ‘Look,’ Anton interrupted. ‘I told that lady who phoned from your magazine everything I knew about Davidson. Was it worth you coming all the way out here and going through everything all over again?’

  ‘Well, I needed to talk to you about your rhino farming anyway,’ Crys said, taken aback by Anton’s reaction.

  ‘Didn’t he have all that in his notes?’

  Crys met Anton’s eyes without blinking. ‘Yes, but they were sketchy. And it is better for a writer to form their own impressions – you can’t write an article like this from someone else’s notes. Not if you’re a professional.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Johannes soothed. ‘You’re very welcome here, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ Anton agreed, but he didn’t sound as though he meant it.

  Crys felt a wave of disappointment. Again, she’d learned nothing more. Michael had been here. He’d asked questions. He’d left for Mozambique and when he came back, he’d disappeared.

  And somehow, she seemed to have upset Anton in the process of asking about it.

  Boku served the dessert – a sort of filled tart that he said was called melktert. ‘That means milk tart,’ Johannes chimed in. ‘It’s a traditional Afrikaner farm dish.’

  Crys took a forkful and liked it immediately. It was smooth and deliciously creamy. After she’d enjoyed a couple more forkfuls, she thought that asking Anton about the business might lighten things up. ‘I’m interested in your business model,’ she said to him. ‘Is it mainly tourists coming to see the rhinos?’

  But Anton looked annoyed and gave a sour laugh. ‘Business model? Let me explain something, Ms Nguyen. If I want a business model, I have real businesses in Joburg, where I make good money. Here, I don’t make money – it costs a fortune to run this place.’ He paused. ‘So, you’ll want to know why I do it, then. Well, I’ll tell you. They’re predicting that the white rhino will be extinct in fifty years. But they’re wrong. It isn’t going to happen, because I’m not going to let it happen. That’s my business model.’

  Crys didn’t respond and focused on finishing her dessert.

  After dinner, Johannes walked outside with Crys. The moon was setting, and once they were away from the lights of the house, the stars were incredible – so many more than she saw in the northern hemisphere, and seemingly so close.

  ‘My father’s quite passionate,’ Johannes said at last. ‘We both are. You can think what you like, but it isn’t selling the rhino horn that motivates us.’

  ‘But you support legalising the trade?’

  He nodded in the darkness. ‘It’s the only way of replicating our model. Others will start doing the same thing – breeding rhinos. It’ll create an industry and provide jobs. And we can flood the market with horn and crash the price, and then poaching will become much less attractive.’

  ‘And then you will make money.’

  He shrugged. ‘We’re stashing away a lot of horn that could be worth something one day. But right now?’ He
shook his head. ‘That’s not why we’re doing this.’

  They continued to walk, gazing upwards.

  Then Johannes said, ‘The good news is that I’ve been able to set up a visit for you with one of the anti-poaching teams in Kruger. I know the guy who leads it. The even better news is that they’re flying a helicopter in tomorrow afternoon and can pick you up here on the way. You’ll fly over the national park. You’ll be able to get some super pictures.’ He smiled broadly. Crys could see he was pretty pleased with himself.

  ‘That’s really great, Johannes. Thank you so much. I really appreciate all the trouble you’ve taken to help me.’

  ‘I want you to see what it’s really like out there, Crys. What the alternative to our approach is. Once you’ve seen that side, I hope you’ll at least give us the benefit of the doubt when you think about ours.’

  ‘You’ve already done so much for me, Johannes, but can I ask you one more favour? I need some really good rhino pictures to illustrate my article, and your rangers know where to find them. Is there any chance one of them could take me out at dawn tomorrow – just to get some shots?’

  ‘Sure. No problem. In fact, I’ll take you myself – I’m always up early.’

  He stopped and looked up, pointing to a group of stars. ‘There’s Orion, the hunter. You see those three bright stars in a line? That’s his belt. And the three small ones are his sword.’ And if you look at that very bright star – that’s Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. That’s the eye of Orion’s dog.’

  Crys knew the constellation well, but hadn’t seen it with such a backdrop. She gazed in awe at the Milky Way cutting a bright path across the sky.

  They didn’t have a sky like this in Minnesota.

  It’d been quite a day, and Crys was really tired, but she felt she was getting somewhere, at least for the article. Johannes had gone back to the house, and she was walking back to her chalet. It was easy to spot – just fifty metres across the lawn, the porch light still on.