by Predators
“David, have you a rich uncle, perhaps, that has died and left you a fortune? Does the Safari Lodge pay you so much you can afford…” She turned the edge of the scarf over to read the maker’s label, “a Dolce and Gabbana scarf? I do not know about these things but I am pretty sure this one cost more pula than I can earn in a month.”
“I did not buy it, Mrs. Sanderson, I found it. I wish I could have bought it. Someday I will buy many wonderful things for Mpitle.”
“Of course you will. Where did you find it?”
“On my way to the bar this morning when I went to work. Just on the path near where there are tree limbs that hang over. I think one of those limbs must have pulled it free.”
“If it was at the lodge, you must return it. Some guest there will be looking for it. It is expensive, not a thing they will dismiss.”
Mpitle looked distressed. The beautiful leopard pattern showed off her dark skin. Sanderson’s heart went out to her. She had so few beautiful things. She remembered the Americans at the scene earlier and their careless, dismissive attitude. She sighed.
“David, tomorrow, you must go to the manager and ask if anyone has inquired about a missing scarf. Mpitle, you take that thing off and fold it away very carefully. We will say that if no one has asked for it in the next week, you can keep it.”
Mpitle’s smile lit up the room brighter than the dim bulb suspended from the ceiling.
“And you, Mr. David Mmusi, what do you mean by showering such expensive things on my daughter? What are your intentions, young man?”
David looked apprehensively at Sanderson, saw her smile and returned it, relieved.
“One hundred percent honorable, Mma Michael.”
“Hah,” said Michael. They all laughed.
“You can resume that music, but softer please.”
The strains of American pop music again filled the room but at a significantly lower volume. Sanderson spooned her stew and wondered about the scarf. If David found it at dawn, it must have been dropped very late at night, or else whoever lost it would have returned to find it. Or…or what? Or it might have been lost during the struggle that happened when that man was stabbed. Sanderson insisted, in spite of Superintendant Mwambe’s refusal to listen, that the man did not fall on a stick. She fingered the spear point in her patch pocket, the weapon she’d retrieved from the dust bin. What if…? Sanderson grimaced and spooned another bite. She was a game ranger, not a detective. It did not fall to her to think about these things.
“What of your lion and dead man, Mma?” Michael had not forgotten even if the young people had. They, like their generation, she thought, were focused almost exclusively on themselves and in the moment. Michael had developed a more philosophical attitude since…
“Was the lion the same one you have been hunting with Rra Kaleke and Mr. Naledi?”
“Ah, that is a puzzle. This man from the lodge met with Sekoa. Do you remember me telling you of the pride that has a range out near Natanga?” Michael nodded. “Well, this lion was pushed out by another, younger male and he found himself near the lodge. I do not know why; that is a mystery. He must have been running from something or been very hungry to come so close.”
“Then it was not the lion you and Rra Kaleke were hunting?”
“No, no, that one is far away by now. No, this is another lion, much bigger. That first lion was young. Anyway he is lying there with his big head on the man’s chest, like he is taking a nap, you know, asleep, only both he and the man are dead.”
“This lion killed the man then?”
The two dancers stopped to hear the story. “No, that was the part that Mwambe refused to hear. The man was dead when the lion found him. The only wound he had were teeth marks in the shoulder where he was picked up and carried.”
“Perhaps the shoulder biting was enough to kill him. It could be. I think I would just die if a lion grabbed me by the shoulder.” Mpitle’s eyes were as large as saucers.
“No, I do not think that is the case. There was almost no blood in that wound. That man’s heart had stopped beating before Sekoa picked him up, I am thinking.”
“So what do you believe happened?”
“Some one wearing a scarf and having a spear point stabbed that man and left him for dead. He…or she—I think the scarf makes us say it is a she—did not know about the lion, or they would not have been out there looking to murder somebody. No person with a working brain would do that.”
The idea of a lady murderer brought the music and dancing to a dead stop. Murder is not unknown in Botswana, just rare, and this close to home, unique.
CHAPTER 42
As it happened, Brenda spent the afternoon alone. Her efforts to seduce her husband and wheedle information from him fizzled. Her invitation to a couple’s shower failed. She stripped and stood under the hot water for fifteen minutes. He never showed up. She dried off, wrapped a towel around her waist and stepped back in the room. No Bobby. No note, no goodbye, nothing. The draperies to the deck were not drawn and she looked out toward the trees and the river beyond. A gray monkey sat on the deck staring at her.
“See anything you like?” she asked, dropped the towel, and gave it a very professional grind and bump. The monkey put a finger in his nose. Brenda knew nothing at all about monkey communication but she was pretty sure it did not intend the gesture as a compliment. She gave him a one-fingered salute. The monkey returned it.
She spent the remainder of the afternoon shifting through her clothes and packing some of them. Rose Hayward messaged they would be flying out in two days. Brenda sorted and packed things she knew she’d not be wearing again. She held up a simple black dress, her jacquard Dina Bar-el with a scoop neckline. She couldn’t remember why she packed it. It had been on sale for five hundred dollars, and she thought she heard they might meet the President? Something like that.
The missing items still rankled. What happened to her cell phone? She used the land line and tried to call it again. The local phone system could not connect to her cell. And what happened to her other glove? Then she realized her Dolce and Gabbana scarf had gone missing as well. The thing cost over three hundred dollars. Bobby had flipped when he’d seen the bill. The clothing, she guessed, might have been left in Travis’ room, but the cell phone?
Then she got it. Bobby, the master dolt. He’d taken it so she couldn’t call anybody. He did that once before when he got angry about something she did. What now? Travis probably, but with Bobby, you could never tell. She’d get even when he came back. She’d freaking lay into him like the time when he’d skipped the hit and run.
The sun set and still no Bobby. Probably drinking in the bar. Too bad the lion died. She’d like to feed him to it.
***
Leo, Travis, and Greshenko spent the afternoon looking at properties. They stopped for lunch at the Old House Restaurant. Travis thought it was a mess, although the food tasted good and the size of the steak seemed gargantuan.
“This country produces some of the finest beef in the world,” Greshenko said. “They ship most of it to Europe, where it is sold as Scotch beef. Apparently the French and Germans think only Scotland or the British Isles can breed cattle up to their standards, and certainly nothing this good could possibly come from Africa. That attitude is the sad residue of colonial bigotry, by the way. They came to this continent, exploited its people, its natural resources, obliterated its history, and practiced genocide in places. Yet, even now, they think of this part of the world as backward and benighted.”
“Does anybody have it right?”
“America, a little, Russia, maybe more so, and the Chinese, Japanese, absolutely. Asians understand how it feels to be discounted by white people. Europeans and Americans have always missed the Asian genius. And now they, we, will pay for our stupidity. China and Japan will own this continent if they want to.”
“Little strong there, Yuri.” Leo had heard all this before. His contacts with the State Department prior to their visit ha
d included a thorough briefing, at which the poobahs had admitted some of their past errors but still maintained the US had not been tarred with the same brush as the former colonial powers. He hoped they were correct. He, for one, wanted to invest in the country in a modest way.
“It’s just that I have such wonderful memories of this country. You should have seen it. Gaborone was barely a village. What you see of the capital has all been built since the early sixties. Sir Seretse Khama, who would become the country’s first president, was knighted by the British, and independence was brand-new. It used to be called Bechuanaland before, and Lobatse was no more than a collection of rondevals, lots of them.” Greshenko’s focus shifted to long distance, back in time. “The changes that have occurred in the years since the Brits left are nothing short of phenomenal. You Americans think you define the cutting edge of nearly everything, but you are beginning to look and act more and more like tired Europeans. You want to see the future? Look no farther than this country.”
“Perhaps you’d like to immigrate?”
“If I could, I would.” Greshenko looked wistful.
“Greshenko, how did you come to your present…ah, occupation?”
“When the USSR, as you called us then, became just R and F, Russia and friends, so to speak, it created an economic cataclysm. You cannot go from state socialism to capitalism in a period of months or even years. The whole infrastructure my generation had come to accept and rely on collapsed before our eyes. Before, we had employment, housing, all of the necessities. Not in abundance or necessarily the in the manner we might have wished, but all preordained and certain for most of us. Party loyalty produced security. Then, nothing. As a…government functionary…”
“You mean out-of-work spy.”
“That would be an oversimplification, but yes, I suppose that would be one way to put it. I had no, how do you say, marketable skills. I tried many things, and one day I came to a fork in the road. I chose one way. Perhaps I should have gone the other. Who knows? Sometimes the choices we make have consequences we cannot predict until it is too late.”
Greshenko shrugged and changed the subject. “So, Travis, tell me about the gas reserves and mineral possibilities here. You understand, I hope, that if your company were to come into Botswana to exploit the minerals or gas, the government would be a major stakeholder in the enterprise?”
“What? Why?”
“They believe that the minerals, the diamonds, this country’s wealth, you could say, belong to the country and to its people. The profits from the exploitation or sale must benefit the owners, not the exploiters.”
“That’s crazy.”
“As I said, if you want to see the future? Look no farther than this country.”
They spent the rest of the afternoon discussing extraction of minerals and the outside possibility of franchising the Old House in both Botswana and in the States.
Toward evening they parted, each to his own room. Leo let himself in and reached for his pills. His indigestion had not improved; his headache had started up again, and he had cold sweats to go with the belly ache and angina. Great. His supply of nitroglycerine tablets down to three. He’d have the pilot bring some from the states when he flew in to pick them up in two days. He popped several pain killers and antacids. Getting as bad as Farrah…no, not Farrah, Farrah had had a blind date with a lion. Poor Henry.
He stretched out on the bed and closed his eyes. When he was a child, his grandmother would put a damp washcloth on his forehead. That would have been nice, but he hadn’t the energy or inclination to fetch one for himself.
As he relaxed, he had his epiphany. Not a near-death experience, although that’s what he thought at first. To have a near-death experience, the logic goes, you have to be near death. And he was not going there. Not yet. Not today. But he did realize that he’d made the correct move setting Travis in place. He needed to step back. Lucille had been after him to slow down since his last coronary. He guessed he should. He could function as the chairman of the board and use what time he had left to travel and play at his real estate speculation. Maybe he should join Greshenko and move here. That assumed the Russian could separate himself from his masters. He wondered if Lucille would like to live in Botswana. Probably not.
Before he slipped into unconsciousness, in that no-man’s-land between waking and sleeping, an image flitted through his mind. He, not the lion, lay flat on the grass, his head resting on Henry’s chest. The image cased him to groan. Then he drifted off to sleep. A sleep so complete that he did not hear someone knocking at his door or an attempt to open the slider to the deck. He had double-locked it after the monkey nonsense.
CHAPTER 43
Mma Santos heard about the dead American from her neighbor. She made a determined nod of her head at this most satisfactory news. The man who murdered Sesi with his big automobile had been punished. That was as it should be. She had visited the moloi and bought a talisman. The old man’s eyes had lighted up like ditshikanokana, like fireflies , in the gloom of his hut, at the sight of the strange currency she’d pulled from the front of her stained mosese.
It had taken her several days to locate the automobile. She’d slipped the bit of beloi behind the back seat. Still, it came as a surprise that the magic had been so strong. She assumed it would affect the vehicle, which she believed had done the actual killing, and it would crash, so it came as a great shock when she learned the man’s death had been the result of a lion attack. She supposed that since she had paid the witch with one of the bad man’s bills with all the zeros on it, she’d purchased more power than she might otherwise have if she had bartered some cheese and milk for the charm.
She beamed. Justice.
***
Inspector Modise spent a fruitless day asking area headmen and subchiefs about witches, diviners, and purveyors of magic. They all claimed to know nothing. They were either stupid, liars, or reluctant to tempt fate. People crossed one of those at the risk of life and limb, or all of the above. He decided the only thing left for him do was take the bit of skin to Gaborone and have tests run. Tracking down a ritual killing presented a two-fold problem. First, the difficulties presented by a superstitious populace, to risk magical retribution if they revealed a local practitioner, and secondly, how to assure the report had any substance in the first place. This same populace would as likely ascribe magical intervention as not, particularly when anything untoward befell them. Who better to blame than a neighbor with whom they’d had a falling out?
His next task required speaking to Superintendent Mwambe. The man had been in the force for a long time. Perhaps, too long. He represented old thinking. Modise did not wish to aggravate him. This was Mwambe’s district, after all, but to insist that a thing was black when it was clearly white, and only because he did not want to acquiesce to a woman…well, he could not let that pass. That Sanderson woman, she had a head on her shoulders. She knew something of animals and she should be listened to. If she said the lion did not kill the man, it was so. And, well, she was a handsome woman, and that was the truth.
“Mwambe, There must be an investigation. The examining physician says that the man had a deep puncture wound to the stomach area and this puncture went into his heart. He is bleeding to death before the lion goes to him.”
“But he has a great wound on his shoulder. You saw it, Modise.”
“I saw the wound being made by the lion that is picking the man up to take him into the bush. I also see that it does not bleed very much. You know what that means? It means the heart is not beating and so no blood is being moved about. You see?”
Mwambe did see. He also saw he would have to work with Sanderson on the investigation. That did not please him. But he was a policeman and his personal displeasure at the effects of modernity could not interfere with that. He clenched his jaw in a small effort to dissipate his annoyance at this turn of events and nodded his agreement.
“Also, I am required to return to Gabz this afternoon.
I will take the sample of beloi with me for testing. If you can please keep your ears open for any hint of a ngaka. The government is concerned about even the possibility of ritual killing, even of the monkeys. Also, keep your man on Greshenko. I cannot determine what he and the party of Americans is about, but until they leave I want to know everywhere they go and who they meet. I do not think it is just a coincidence that the dead man traveled with them. And finally, there will be an attaché from the American Embassy here this afternoon to enquire into the death as well.”
Mwambe had shifted from nodding to making entries on a note pad. The words American Embassy required double underlining.
***
If Mma Santos was pleased, Bobby Griswold was anything but. He faced a huge dilemma. He could dummy up and let the whole scenario play out, and Farrah’s death would remain an accident. That would put him back where he started, no better but no worse off than before. Alternatively, he could proceed with his plans. Make sure Brenda took the rap for a murder, apparently accidental murder, of Henry Farrah. If he could mistake Henry for Leo in the dark, so could she. That would get rid of her without the bother of divorce. Botswana was a country with capital punishment. She’d be a swinger alright, only this time at the end of a noose. He smiled at his pun. He’d use it when he returned home. Brenda was a swinger right up to the end!
But suppose they just put her in jail?
He could also try for Leo again, but that would be pushing it. Why didn’t Leo just go on and have a heart attack? Could there be a way to get that done? Well, why not? What happened when you had one of those? With his bad heart, how much longer could he last? Bobby had looked up coronary infarction and heart attack on Wikipedia once. If he could catch Leo unawares, say, and wrestle him around, he could, maybe, make him have a coronary. Maybe just get him on the bed and put a pillow over his face. Heart attacks caused something called cerebral ischemia. He’d looked that up too. Not enough blood to the brain. He sat in the Sedudu Bar and turned his options over in his mind. He hadn’t seen the scarf on the path where he’d left it. That must mean the cops had it. That and the spear point. So if they were to put two and two together, Brenda could be in big trouble.
