Venom

by Alan Scholefield

  Howard thought he had never been so pleased to see anyone. That night they’d sat up drinking whisky and swapping stories about the District Commissioner’s wife.

  Somewhere around midnight Howard had confessed that if Harry had not arrived when he had he, Howard, would have been drunk by now and would have stayed that way for a week and Harry had said that habits were the most dangerous things for a lonely bachelor. “If you get into the habit of boozing by yourself, you’re done for,” he said. “I try not to drink every day. Jour sans. Jour avec. That sort of system.” It was a system that Howard had followed from then on, except for a while in Kenya.

  The following morning they had decided to go out with the guns for a few hours’ sport while their combined staffs put together a meal worthy of the festival.

  Howard remembered the morning vividly. An early mist on the river which had been burnt away by eight o’clock and then the wet heat of the valley closing in on them. They had taken shotguns to see if they could get a couple of duck or guinea fowl for the larder, for Marshall was staying for at least a week.

  * * *

  Howard did not tell the story in this detail, instead he filtered out the personal memories, hardening the facts, telling it briefly as it happened.

  “We never saw a guinea fowl,” he said, “but I remember Marshall shot a couple of francolin.”

  “Francolin?” Jacmel was squatting down in front of the sofa, his head cocked on one side.

  “Red-legged partridge.”

  “What then?”

  They had been a good way from the river when Harry had shot the birds, more open, less bush, and they were coming home when he was bitten. He had either tramped on the snake or very near it; it had probably been asleep at the edge of the path. Anyway, it had hit Harry in the left calf, just a smack, as though someone had softly clapped his hand; then the shining whiplash through the grass and it was gone.

  “We tied ligatures above and below the wound,” Howard said, “and I cut it and sucked it and let it bleed. We weren’t more than half a mile from home and I had serum there and I gave him a shot and I also rubbed permanganate of potash into the cuts. I put on two more ligatures, one above the knee and one at the top of the thigh. Then I put him to bed and wrapped him in blankets.”

  Neither of them had been unduly apprehensive, Howard thought. They had done everything: anti-venene, potash crystals, four ligatures which he released every few minutes so the limb wouldn’t die from lack of blood. All they could.

  “He wanted brandy. I tried to talk him out of it because alcohol’s not too good for snakebite but I remember him saying it was Christmas and he had walked fifty miles for a drink with me and that’s what he was going to have.

  “He’d been bitten around ten o’clock and for the first hour he was somewhat excited, talking a lot and laughing, I thought it was the reaction to the fright. Then he seemed to calm down and was perfectly normal except he had a touch of diarrhoea. He also said that the muscles in his mouth and tongue were twitching a bit.”

  Howard had sat by the bedside as the hot noon hours came and went. Christmas lunch was announced but Harry had said he didn’t feel like it and had asked if it could be kept until evening. He was sure he’d be ready for it then. They chatted, rather like two people in a convalescent home where the patient is almost whole again.

  “About four o’clock in the afternoon he became less talkative,” Howard said. “I noticed that his eyelids were getting puffy. He seemed rather tired. Then at five o’clock, without any warning, he grabbed at his throat and jumped out of bed. He tried to hold out his hands to me but couldn’t leave his own throat. I think he was trying to force air down it. He shouted my name once, then fell down and was dead in five minutes.”

  There was a complete silence in the room as Howard paused. Then Jacmel said, “Were there black marks, you know, like Louise?”

  “For Christ’s sake!” Dave shouted. “Leave it alone!”

  Howard nodded. “When I laid him out I noticed that the left side of his body was stiff and rigid, the right side quite relaxed. When I took off his clothes I saw a dark purple line–”

  “Stop it!” Dave shouted and swung the shotgun. “Stop your fucking mouth or I’ll shoot you, you bastard!”

  Howard dropped his eyes. He doubted very much that Dave would use the gun with Jacmel in the room. “–a dark purple line,” he went on, “about two inches wide running up the left side from the bite, over the left shoulder, up behind the ear to the base of the skull.”

  Again he paused. “How old was he, your friend?” Jacmel said.

  “Same as me, early twenties.”

  “What did you do?*

  What was there to do, Howard thought? He’d sat with Marshall all that night and into the next morning. He hadn’t wanted to bury him on Christmas Day; he’d not known why, just that the feeling was strong. He had drunk the rest of the brandy and almost a bottle of whisky and had become maudlin with loneliness and shock and found himself crying like a child. Later, when dawn came, they had carried the body to the far side of the boma and dug a grave. “I buried him,” he said, “just as someone has to bury Louise.”

  Jacmel shrugged and resumed his pacing. Dave turned and looked out of the window again. Silence crept back. Howard and the boy sat holding each other’s hands on the sofa. All was as it had been before except that Dave had developed a nervous habit of drying the palm of his right hand on the side of his trouser leg. It was a movement that Jacmel missed, but Howard did not.

  Jacmel reminded him of an animal in a small enclosure, the sort they had put the leopards into at the safari park hotel. It had been about the size of a tennis court, big enough one would have thought, for a couple of leopards, but the male had never got used to it. He had paced up and down the side of the wire until he had worn out the grass and formed a wide dirt path. Like the leopard, Jacmel did not pace through nervousness but restriction. After a few moments he went and stood at the other window, hidden from anyone in the street by the curtains.

  Howard could not make him out. With Louise he had seemed almost gentle, now he could shrug off her death as though it had not happened or did not really matter. There was something very hard about him, Howard thought, which made Dave’s tough-boy bravado seem childlike by comparison. He wondered what his background was. Marseilles? Paris? Corsica? His accent was thick enough to be almost incomprehensible. It was said that the French were experts at kidnapping, that it was a French crime, but apart from that Howard knew very little about the French underworld except what he had gained from movies and books. But he knew one thing: France was one of the few countries in the West that retained the death penalty, the guillotine tried and true, and there had to be good reasons for retaining it. There was a streak of brutality in the French, he thought, which had come out in Indo-China and Algeria and he knew that if he had eventually to face either man in the room he would rather it was not Jacmel.

  He looked over at Dave and thought he was the kind of person who could not stand silence. He was reminded of several of his safari clients: big men in their own fields, from Germany and America, tycoons–you had to be a tycoon these days to afford to shoot big game in Africa–people you’d have thought might have welcomed the solitude and quiet of the African bush. But some had brought cassette recorders and others fancy Japanese radios and one or two even radio telephones that would keep them in touch with their nearest office. They couldn’t keep still, talked all the time, nervous, brittle talk; always fiddling with the radios or the recorders or trying to get in touch with Cable & Wireless in Nairobi.

  Perhaps it was fear. The biggest talkers were the most afraid, that was an equation Howard had solved early on. They were the ones who wanted to shoot from the Land Rover or sleep in the back of the truck away from the creepy crawlies or the hyenas that might come into camp and snatch off a toe from a sleeping body with their powerful jaws. They were the ones who drank too much, who called him Dick in the first five mi
nutes. Dick this . . . and Dick that . . . Whose voices were a shade too loud, who couldn’t sit still, who were most like Dave. Was that where it had begun for him, he wondered? Was fear something you could pass on, not just for a moment, but for ever; did one get it, like leprosy, from being so often in contact with it, or had it started for him long before he became a white hunter, when he was still a young man in the Colonial Service watching Marshall die of mamba bite.

  If Dave was like many of his clients, Jacmel was like very few. Perhaps more like Blanchet than most. Which was odd because the French were supposed to be emotional and highly-strung and one could not possibly say that about Jacmel or Blanchet.

  Blanchet had come to him about ten years before with one simple demand: he wanted an elephant. Nothing else. Didn’t matter about lions or any of the buck, didn’t want a buffalo, just an elephant; which was like saying you wanted Marilyn Monroe and no one else would do. It was not possible to get a licence to shoot an elephant at that time. The Game Department had made a count the year before and they had found that stocks were down by nearly twenty-five per cent because of an increase in poaching.

  Blanchet had come to see him in his office in Nairobi one burning hot afternoon when the blinds were down and Howard was hungover from a too-hectic night in the Stanley the night before.

  “Can’t be done,” he had said. “Could get you a lion. Buffalo. Kudu. Tommie, of course. Pig.” The little Frenchman had stood on the other side of the littered desk and shaken his head.

  “I will give you five hundred American dollars above your price.”

  “Could probably get you a zebra; oryx too.”

  “I will give you a thousand American dollars.”

  Christ, Howard thought, anger rising to make his hangover worse, you bloody little turd. Slowly he picked up Blanchet’s business card from the top of his desk and flicked it over so he could see the name. It was a gesture filled with angry contempt.

  Why the hell did these little turds always want to shoot the biggest bloody things on Earth?

  “Look, Blanchet,” he said, enunciating his words with care, “I said it can’t be done. No can do. It’s not bloody on, old sport. Absolument pas. Comprendo?”

  “I understand but. . .”

  “Not for five hundred. Not for fifty thousand bloody American dollars.” His voice had been steadily rising.

  Blanchet seemed unaffected by his emotion. “Not here, perhaps.”

  “Where then?”

  “Mozambique.”

  “Mozambique! That’s on the other side of Tanzania.”

  “I know.”

  “It’d cost you a fortune.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, why not go there and hire yourself a white hunter?”

  “Because I want you.”

  “But I haven’t a licence to operate there.”

  “We go as two friends, two hunters. Cannot we do that?”

  “I suppose so. But, look, it’d be a hell of a lot cheaper . . .”

  “I am not worried about the money.”

  “You just want an elephant, is that right? Nothing else. All that way just for one elephant. And when you drop it, we come home? Have I got it straight?”

  “That is correct.”

  Howard shrugged. “It’s your funeral.”

  For the first time Blanchet smiled, it was thin and rather wintry. “That is not a good joke, M Howard. It is to avoid the funeral that I wish you to come.”

  So they had gone down south of the Rovuma River and Blanchet had shot his elephant, or rather Howard had shot it for him, a female carrying less than thirty pounds of ivory a side. But it turned out that the elephant was only one of Blanchet’s ambitions, he also wanted to bag a big game hunter. They hadn’t been together more than a day or two, when Howard found himself being carefully scrutinized and judged, and it was towards the end of the two-week trip that Blanchet had begun to talk about his concept of a safari hotel, rather like the famous Tree Tops, except that guests would not only have a night view over a waterhole but during the day they would be conducted through a small game park owned by the hotel where a certain number of animal sightings was guaranteed and where the feeding of the big cats in the open would be the centrepiece of the entertainment. He wanted Howard to take over the running of the park.

  On the last evening in camp before returning to Nairobi, Blanchet was sitting upright in his canvas safari chair drinking a whisky, neat and dapper even in the bush, and Howard said, “You knew there was a moratorium on shooting elephants in Kenya.” The Frenchman had nodded. “So the business of the five hundred and the thousand dollars was just so much blah.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “And if I’d said all right, I’ll take your money, you’d have disappeared into the hills, wouldn’t you?”

  Blanchet had looked surprised. “Why?” he said.

  “Because it was a bribe.”

  “But I have no objection,” Blanchet said. “Why should you?” Howard had not pursued it; the French were a strange, impenetrable people.

  At the end of a year the Gametrails Safari Hotel had been built eighty miles from Nairobi and Howard was its first Park Director, making more money than he had ever made as a white hunter and having some of it paid into an account in Basle which Blanchet had suggested he open on his first European leave. That alone made the job worthwhile, for Kenya’s exchange control regulations were ferocious and ever since he had been forced to sell his farm at a loss after independence he had begun to plan for the time when he would leave Kenya. The problem had always been–until Blanchet came along–finding a way to get money out.

  The irony was that Blanchet had been grateful. Whether it was for the elephant or for his decision to join him, Howard had never known, but Blanchet had made his gratitude felt in the only way he knew and that was by giving Howard a salary far in excess of anything he might have expected. The real irony was that Blanchet could have had him for half the money. He was ready and willing to pack in the white hunter bit. He knew his nerves had gone, frayed by years of living in the bush, starting perhaps when Marshall had been bitten by the mamba. Of late he had been drinking too much. No jours sans, all avec. That was a classic symptom. Luckily he had been given the opportunity in time. A few months more and Blanchet would have heard the bar stories and he would not have come to Howard.

  He’d never been so happy in his life as he was in the hotel. He knew where every meal was coming from, didn’t have to prepare it himself, didn’t have to worry about his laundry, or his clothes, or his quarters; all the boring details taken care of and a whopping salary on top of it. It was like boarding school all over again; he’d loved school. And the animal side was easy to someone with his experience. The park was about twenty thousand acres with the hotel built at the side of the main waterhole. The rest of the land was light bush, low hills, scrub. He’d created a series of camps cut off from each other by high game fences and he had brought in wildebeeste and eland, impala, kongoni, sable, puku, roan and oryx and separated them from the cats, lions, leopards and cheetahs which had a camp to themselves. He had managed to lay his hands on a pair of giraffes, and a few crocodiles for the waterhole. Hippos were already there and George Biddle, an old friend of his and now Director of National Parks, had heard of a baby rhino being bottle-fed at Tsavo after her mother had been killed by poachers. Howard had taken the truck and fetched her and they’d called her Rosie, given her a small enclosure to herself and she’d been a star turn.

  No, there had been no danger there. No one was shooting at anything except with telephoto lenses and the animals soon got used to the powerful arc lights that lit them up at night when they came down to the waterhole to drink, and soon got used to the convoys of cars led either by Howard or one of his black game rangers that drove through the camps–eland became so accustomed to them that they would poke their heads through the windows whenever the cars stopped. The only real danger was the hotel guests. The rules were that no car
windows were to be opened and no one was to get out to take pictures. In the ten years that Howard was at the hotel they had several accidents. In one case a baboon playing on the roof of a car had bitten a woman’s hand to the bone when she opened the window and offered it a banana. In another a Japanese guest had gone down to the waterhole late at night to try and photograph a Greater Kudu and had nearly been undone by one of the crocs which had stalked him round the water’s edge and had been frightened away just in time by a second guest who had seen what was happening and thrown an ice-bucket at it.

  They’d been lucky. He'd been lucky. Until that last day.

  * * *

  The picture reared itself in his mind and this time did not go away at his command. It was an Englishman named Prentiss who had started it. Howard could remember him clearly: fat, pink-fleshed from sunbathing in the unfamiliar heat, stripped to a pair of blue linen slacks, his hairy gut spilling over the waistband, two wobbly tits. Bald, but wearing a sun-visor. Expensive Japanese single-lens reflex with telephoto slung around his neck and a pair of Zeiss binoculars. He had spoken with the flat accents of the Midlands where he’d made his money selling ballbearings. Howard had had a drink with him the evening before and all he’d talked about was his bloody Jaguar and the beat he had on the Spey and the grouse he shot over on the hills of Strathdearn. Very nasty. He’d got drunk the first night at the hotel and abused one of the black waiters for imagined insolence to his wife, who had ordered a whisky-mac and had got something else because the bartender had never heard of it.

  He remembered the wife, too. Her body shape was almost the twin of her husband’s but she exaggerated it by wearing shorts. She had an arse on her like a Bushman woman Howard had once seen down in Bechuanaland; stuck out like the haunch of a mare held up by corrugated naked thighs. Ghastly sight. She’d had a conversation trick that the other guests had quickly discovered and had become a kind of hotel joke for a couple of days. Each time her husband said something, she confirmed it.