by Predators
“What was in the book?” Brenda steered them to a booth away from the door where they couldn’t be seen from the corridor.
“How would I know?”
“I saw you reading it, so don’t give any of your—”
“Okay, I looked. I couldn’t tell for sure, but I think he has been a naughty boy.”
“Meaning?”
“I could put something really big on permanent hold if I wanted to. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Does it have something to do with the public offering?”
“How’d you know about that?”
“There’s lots of stuff I know, mister. Just because I ain’t been to Yale or someplace like you did, doesn’t mean I’m a complete ditz.”
“I didn’t attend Yale, either. Okay, you called for this meeting. What is it you want from me? I’ve already laid down the rules for redeeming your husband’s stock. You will do me a favor if you will let this all ride for another two weeks at least.”
“I’m okay with that for now. I want you to level with me. What are you up to that needs Bobby’s stock in play?”
Travis weighed his options. He could feed Brenda Griswold a line of complicated nonsense and hope to fool her, he could give it to her straight, or he could shoot for something somewhere in the middle. The fact she’d tumbled on to anything at all persuaded him that nonsense wouldn’t sell and might possibly antagonize her to the point she’d precipitate a move that would be rash, or stupid, or both. Before he decided which way to go, Brenda started to guess. She laced her thesis with more Anglo-Saxon epithets and figures of speech than he’d heard since his days in the army, and he’d heard plenty. And that didn’t include the straight up profanity. His mother, had she been there to hear it, would have described her discourse as “earthy.” Somehow, a business deal as Brenda described it sounded wholly different than when the same deal was presented in a board room with PowerPoint and spreadsheets.
And her guesses were very nearly correct. He looked at her with new respect. Potty mouth or not, this woman had a functioning brain in there with all that organic fertilizer. Clean her up and she’d really be something. Educate her and she’d be dangerous.
He had to interrupt her in midstream.
“You’re close. Do me a favor. Cut out the locker-room language and listen.”
“I didn’t spend much time in locker rooms, pal, at least not since the year I was a junior cheerleader and had some things on with the football team, but that was a long time ago. I learned this way of talking from CEOs, COOs, and other hot shots like you, with alphabets after their names that came to the club and figured they could let go with the girls. You never came to the club, did you?”
“No, never had the pleasure. Unlike the guys who can’t or won’t go home, I live a very full…That’s all neither here nor there, though, is it? The truth is, I can do this without Robert’s stock. It will take a little longer and cost more, but I can still do it.”
“What if Leo finds out you’re trying to move in on him?”
“He won’t unless you tell him, and I’m betting you won’t.”
“Why?”
“Because your stock holdings give you zilch unless Leo drops dead. With that crappy heart of his, that could happen, of course, but if you throw in with me…” he left the rest hanging.
Brenda frowned. “I think we need to take this conversation somewhere private. We can’t go to my room. Bobby’s there and if he gets involved he’ll only screw it up.”
“My room?”
“Sure, why not?”
“You’re not afraid of being alone in my hotel room?”
“I been in plenty of hotel rooms with more guys than I care to count, and I can take care of myself, believe me. If you can show me how this can work so me and Bobby get a bigger payday, I may surprise you with some moves of my own.”
They left the bar and took the elevator.
***
Leo took Bobby’s elbow and steered him out to the lawn to the pool area.
“What did you want to talk to me about?” Bobby’s tone was just short of surly.
“Boy, I promised your mother I would look after you. That job is getting harder and harder. I gave you a job that a high-school kid could do, and the head of Accounting says you’re a slacker with a capital S. You take three-hour lunches, sometimes don’t return. You are over your allotted vacation time. And if you weren’t under my protection, you would have been fired months ago.”
“Yeah, well, since when did you start caring?”
“My God, you are a tiresome boy.”
“I’m not a boy. Why does everybody treat me like a kid?”
“Because you act like a teenager who’s had too much money and not enough responsibility, which in fact is the case, only you are not a teenager anymore, and you have no excuses. I’m tired of putting up with you, to be honest. I might like to see if you can live off the dividends from your stock and that little trust fund you have. I’m done with you.”
“What?” Bobby turned away. Leo saw the panic in Bobby’s eyes.
“You just realized that you wouldn’t last a week on what you draw down from that. Am I right?”
“You’re firing me?”
“The minute we get back.”
“But…”
“But what?”
“I need a loan.”
“A loan? You’re kidding. I just fired you and you ask me for a loan? I have to hand it to you kid, you got balls.”
“I need it. I’ll pay you back.”
“How? You don’t have a job after next month. You don’t have even the minimum skills to land employment at one third what I pay you now, and even if you did, that skank you married will have you broke inside a week.” Bobby seemed close to hyperventilating. “What is it? You look like you just soiled yourself.”
“I don’t have any stock and my trust fund doesn’t even pay the rent.”
“What do you mean you don’t have any stock? Of course you do.”
“I had to sell it to Travis Parizzi.”
Leo studied the boy-man in front of him, guessed he told the truth, and took his elbow again. “My room, now. You need to tell me everything.”
Brenda and Travis, their backs to the corridor, were entering Travis’ room when the elevator doors slid open and Leo Painter and Robert Griswold stepped out.
CHAPTER 13
The sun had set hours earlier, and torches and a few dim electric bulbs lighted the area. With the help of the neighborhood boys, Michael had finally finished the repairs on the Toyota HiLux, and now the villagers gathered around the vehicle, waiting. It had taken him hours to do what he could have done in minutes before. He reached in the cab and turned the key in the ignition. It took some doing, but the motor finally coughed to life. The HiLux’s engine roared and produced a huge plume of gray exhaust. Michael sat down in a chair in the court yard, grinned, and made an attempt to wave.
“You cannot destroy a HiLux,” he said, his voice weak but clear.
The men from the village cheered even as the smoke from the exhaust pipe spread across the ground and drove them back. A beaming Sanderson climbed into the cab and positioned herself behind the truck’s cracked steering wheel.
“Drive it,” A man shouted. She smiled and put the pickup, her bakkie, in gear and let out the clutch. The vehicle lurched forward and steadied. She drove it in a wide circle past the houses and huts that constituted her small village. The headlights wobbled and blinked off and on, but the truck moved. The younger men and women cheered, but some of the older men stood back in the shadows and looked on disapprovingly. It was not the place for a woman to be driving about in such a machine, they seemed to be saying. She pulled up in front of her house, set the brake, but left the motor running. Michael said they needed to be charging the battery.
“We will paint it next,” she declared. “I will go to the store and buy a great can of red paint and we will make this a beautiful truck, you will see
.”
The men, and a few women, walked around the truck, banging on the side panels, squinting at the interior, kicking the tires, and muttering their approval. Mma Michael and her poor son had performed a miracle for certain.
Sanderson sat down next to him and patted his knee.
“I will need your help on this next thing I must do.”
“To paint?”
“No, no, I will need you to talk to those old men and the others who know hunting. I must find a bad lion and kill it. It is a thing I do not know how to do. They will listen to you. They will do it for you. I am not so sure they will become hunters for me.”
“Mma, you are old-fashioned. They will listen to you.”
“It is not I who am old-fashioned. These men are from the days before. They are not ready to listen to this woman. If you ask, they might.”
“And they might not.”
“Yes, that is so, but if I am the one to ask and I fail the first time, there will be no second. But if you ask, there will always be a chance.”
“Mma, this is not necessary. They must hear you. It is the way, now.”
“Do this favor for me, Michael. I cannot be taking a risk. If they do not go hunting with me, I am lost. Mr. Pako is sure I will fail and will report it. I might lose my employment. You must do this for me, please.”
Michael nodded and signaled to Rra Kaleke, the oldest and therefore the man held in highest esteem in the village, to come over. The old man approached and saluted them.
“Dumela, Mma, Michael, o tsogile jang?”
“Ke teng, Rra Kaleke, tanki.”
“You wish to speak to me, then?”
“My mother begs you to do a thing for her.”
“What sort of a thing?”
“Her boss, Mr. Pako, requires her to hunt a lion and to kill him.”
“This Pako, he asks this of a woman?”
“Yes. He is sure she cannot do it, and it will be hard for her if she fails. As you can see, she must not lose her employment.”
“That Pako is a foolish man. Hunting ditau is not a suitable occupation for women. I am admiring you, Sanderson, but this is a very bad thing for you to be doing.”
“Thank you, Rra Kaleke. You are correct, but it is so. I know you and the other men of the village know of hunting lions. I wish you to ask them if they will help in this.”
The old man scratched his head. “We have not been permitted to hunt ditau for many years. Young people today, they do not know how. We hunted them before. My father used his army issue Enfield to kill a lion, and his father, my rremogolo, killed a lion with a lerumo, with his spear, you understand? We have hunted the lion for many generations. It is not a thing to take lightly. This Pako must be very stupid. Hunting lions must be done by the man who knows how to do it. It is very dangerous.”
He closed his eyes and Sanderson thought he must be traveling back in years to when he was young and alive, before Independence, before the new way of doing things, back when he might have led a party of English hunters into the bush.
“We will meet in the kgotla and talk of this, Mma Michael.Sala sentle.” He nodded, turned, and shoulders back, strode away.
***
The men of the village gathered in the kgotla later. They sat on an assortment of chairs, some wood, several plastic in a variety of garish colors, and upended crates, Michael sat at their center, Sanderson at the extreme end of the semicircle. A late arrival required her to give up her chair and so she sat on the ground, legs extended,
As he was the oldest, Rra Kaleke assumed the leadership of the group.
“We are being asked by Mma Michael to hunt a rogue lion. This lion has killed a man, and the government wants it removed. She has sensibly asked us to help in this hunt. I ask you, now, Missus, where is this lion doing his killing?”
Sanderson pointed east. “The boy ran into the bush at night near Kazungula.”
“When did this take place, and why would he do such a foolish thing?” a tall man with a scraggly beard asked.
“This boy ran into the lion over a week ago. He wished to avoid punishment by the men of his village. They caught him stealing.”
Sanderson did not mention that the items the boy stole were now mounted on the truck they’d admired earlier that evening.
“Kazungula is on the other side of Kasane and away from the park. He will be a Zimbabwe lion, I think.” The man said. The others murmured in agreement.
Mr. Naledi, Michael’s boss, turned to the assembly. “You are better at hunting than I. You have tracked the lion in your youth. I have not. I speak with respect to you, therefore, but does it not seem that by this time that lion is back in Zimbabwe. Have there been any more reports of him? Are there goats missing, cattle, and other sightings since this event?”
Sanderson shook her head.
“Mr. Naledi says the truth. There is game in Zimbabwe, dipitse ya naga and dikolobe.” The men grunted their agreement. There would, indeed, be zebra and warthogs over the border, impala, too. Game a lion could track and kill.
“Perhaps,” a third man said, “but if this lion has been run off by the old man of the pride, he might not be so happy to go back to Zimbabwe so soon.”
“You are right there, but if he did or did not, Mma Michael is still burdened with the task of finding him and sending him to his ancestors. We must at least look at the place where the death happened and see,” Mr. Kaleke said.
“I can take you there.” Sanderson said. The men seemed to hesitate. “Mr. Naledi will drive the truck.”
Mr. Kaleke shook his head in approval. “Tomorrow we shall visit the place where the lion killed the man, and then we will see.”
The men nodded their heads and disappeared into the night to their homes. One by one the torches guttered out leaving the sky brilliant with stars and a three-quarter moon.
Sanderson was pleased.
CHAPTER 14
“She went into his room. She said she had some business to attend to but that’s Travis’ room. Why did she do that?”
“Pipe down and follow me.” Leo steered Bobby down the corridor to his suite.
“I need to go see what she’s doing.”
“Don’t be stupid, son. You know what she’s doing. I told you about her before you let your hormones dictate to your brain and went ahead and married her anyway.” Leo shoved Bobby toward the couch.
“But—”
“Shut up and listen to me. That woman is nothing but trouble.”
“She’s okay. It’s just…I need to see—”
“Tell me she hasn’t spent every dime you’ve got and some you don’t. You stay with that slut and you are doomed. Now, tell me about the stock that Travis Parizzi bought.”
“I told you, I sold it to him. I have an option to buy it back, though.” Leo stared at the boy and waited. “I can have it back inside a year.”
“What’s he charging you to take it back?”
“He said there were fees and things. I don’t know, transfer fees and stuff. He said I could buy it back for what he paid for it plus ten percent.”
“That’s a nice return on investment in a year, especially since I bet he squeezed you on the price and he knows you’ll never find the funds to do it. Not with that whore you’re married to raiding the cookie jar all the time.”
“Brenda’s not a whore.”
“No? Then what’s she doing now in Travis’ room, playing canasta?”
Bobby slumped down in the sofa and hung his head. His hands dangled between his knees. “I don’t know.”
Leo lighted a cigar and paced the room. Something was up and he needed to know what. He’d scoped out Farrah’s scheme early on and believed he had it under control, tumbled to it early, by God, the dumb suck. But Travis cutting in behind his back, he had not seen that coming.
“What’d he say to you when he asked about the stock?”
“What?”
“I said, what did he say to you then? Did he mention what
he wanted it for?”
“Something about a vote. He wasn’t very clear. Hell, I don’t know. I had debts and at least one loan shark on my case. I needed the money, so I sold it.”
“He said a vote. You’re sure of that?”
“Yeah, I’m sure, like, there’s a meeting coming up soon or something. Maybe it had to do with the IPO.”
“And you thought you’d let him play with your stock for a year and then you’d buy it back.”
“Well—”
“Shut up and let me think.”
“I need to find out what Brenda is doing.”
“Sit still. You want to know what she’s doing? Put your ear to the wall. They’re next door. But don’t you leave this room. I’m not done with you.”
Bobby seemed to consider putting an ear to the wall, rose, and then sat down again with a groan. Leo studied the young man on the sofa and scowled. He didn’t like Bobby very much. He thought him a fool for marrying the tramp from the night club and an even bigger fool for letting himself fall into the kind of debt he acquired. His promise to the boy’s mother notwithstanding, his first impulse was to toss him to the wolves. But as he had learned from one moussed, moronic, motivational speaker, that every failure carries within it the seeds of an equal or greater benefit. Bobby Griswold could be useful at the moment. He would help him.
“Listen to me, boy. Here’s what you need to do.”
***
Travis Parizzi and Brenda Griswold were within fifteen feet of Leo and Bobby. Had they been aware of that fact, they might have been more discreet. But they were caught up in their own conniving and sublimely unaware of their potential for destruction. Brenda might have discounted the danger, but Travis had been around Leo Painter long enough to recognize it, had he known.
Travis decided the woman could be trusted with what he planned. He did not fool himself about her fundamental dishonesty. She would sell him out in a New York minute, but he also knew she would be driven by self-interest and would work with him as long as the rewards outweighed the consequences.
“It’s like this,” he said, “Leo is losing his grip. Somehow, he’s got it in his head that licensing ActiVox will save the company’s copper and nickel division. A down economy doesn’t even register on him. ‘Cheap nickel and copper,’ he says. ‘We capture the market by selling low. Low enough to stay in business until things get back to normal.’”
