by Tony Park
‘You’ll be the one who sticks out, not me. Let’s go,’ Sarah said.
14
As they walked into the elegant, cool reception foyer of the Victoria Falls Hotel, Mike saw a large sign on a noticeboard which read ‘Welcome, Mr and Mrs Harold Carter and guests. Congratulations on your wedding day.’ The board also gave the location of the function room where the Carters were having their reception.
‘Looks like you’re not going to be overdressed after all,’ Mike said to Sarah.
‘Told you.’
A shriek behind them heralded the arrival of the newly wed Mrs Carter, an attractive but painfully thin redhead in her early thirties in an ivory mini dress. It sounded like she had just been goosed by one of the wedding party.
A tall young man with pale skin, lank brown hair and a diamond stud earring pushed past Sarah and Mike and strode across the polished floor to a reception desk framed by a portal of antique red mahogany. When he spoke, it was with the plummy, languid drawl of the English upper class.
‘Mr and Mrs Carter have arrived,’ he announced with a pompous flourish of his right hand to the young white woman at reception.
About twenty chattering men and women now filled the foyer. They sounded to Mike like a herd of braying zebra. Sarah’s little black dress, which had stood out like a mink coat in the camping ground, was just one of many in the foyer. From the noise and laughter around them, Mike suspected the wedding party had probably kicked off the day with too much champagne and not enough orange juice.
‘Very good, sir. James will take you through to the Bulawayo Room for cocktails. James?’ The woman behind the desk beckoned to a young African bellboy, decked out in a long-sleeved red mess jacket, cropped at the waist, and black trousers. Mike felt hot just looking at him.
Once the revellers had been led away to their function room, Sarah and Mike approached the receptionist.
‘Good day, can I help you?’ she asked. She took in Sarah’s dress and then added, ‘The wedding reception is through those doors, madam, across the courtyard and to the left.’
‘No, we’re not actually here for the wedding,’ Sarah said. ‘We’re looking for a friend of ours – two, in fact. They’re booked in to stay here, but I’ve lost the fax they sent me with the date that they were due to arrive. Stupid of me, I know.’
‘No problem, madam. The names, please?’
‘Mr Orlov and Mr Hess,’ Sarah said.
Mike looked around the foyer.
‘One moment, please, madam.’ The woman smiled and tapped on a keyboard beneath the reception counter. She consulted a computer screen then looked up and said, ‘Yes, you’ve got the right day. They are booked in to arrive today but . . .’ she checked the screen again, ‘but no, they haven’t arrived yet.’
‘Thanks, we might wait on the terrace. Oh, and please don’t tell them I was asking about them. I’d hate them to think I was careless enough to forget when they were arriving,’ Sarah said with a conspiratorial wink.
‘Not a problem, madam.’
Mike needed a smoke, but, as was his habit, he had left his lighter in the dashboard of the truck again. He walked over to the concierge at the door and asked the man for a light. The concierge produced a Zippo and lit the cigarette with a flourish. As Mike thanked him he looked outside through the glass door and saw a new, but dusty, Toyota Land Cruiser with blue and white South African plates pull up. The concierge dispatched two bellboys to meet the vehicle.
Two white men stepped from the vehicle and stretched their cramped limbs. Mike knew it was them. Orlov was a little shorter than Mike had expected, but the moustache and wavy hair gave him away immediately. Hess was as tall and good looking as Theron had described him. He looked like he had just stepped out of the frame of a Hitler Youth recruiting poster, although Mike reckoned he must have been a few years older than himself.
Mike stared hard at the pair. On the balance of probabilities, these were the men who had killed the woman he loved. Their nonchalant arrogance mocked him, enraged him. What right did they have to walk as free men in public? He wanted to punch the smile from Hess’s face, to see the Russian on his knees begging for mercy.
He turned and strode quickly across the polished floor. Sarah was looking at him with an annoyed frown. He took her by the crook of the arm and felt her flinch at the overly familiar gesture. ‘Let’s get out of the foyer. They’re here.’
‘Where?’ she asked, craning her head to see past Mike’s shoulder. She shrugged her arm from his grasp.
They moved near the doorway which led from reception to the hotel’s inner tree-lined courtyard and the terrace bar and restaurant beyond. Sarah sauntered over to one end of the foyer, to a display of tourist brochures advertising elephant-back safaris and various other activities around Victoria Falls. Mike followed her and also pretended to browse.
‘Karl, I need a drink, to celebrate our day’s work,’ the Russian said loudly in heavily accented English. From his expansive manner and flushed face, Mike guessed Orlov had already started his celebrations during the road trip from the hunting lodge where they had stayed.
‘Yes, Vassily,’ the tall blond man said patiently. ‘Of course, but I would like to shower and change first. I will join you in twenty minutes.’ He turned to a tall African man in khaki trousers and short-sleeved shirt who had followed him into the foyer.
Mike looked the man up and down. An Ovambo, he thought. Also from Namibia. Despite the heat, the man looked as cool and impassive as an ebony statue.
‘Klaus, have the vehicle cleaned and ensure security keeps a close eye on it. I will come with you to deliver the trophies tomorrow. Pick me up at eight in the morning.’
‘Yes baas,’ Klaus said with a nod and left the foyer. Hess moved to the reception desk with the angular grace of a giraffe, tall and aloof from the lesser creatures around him.
‘Very well, Karl, I will see you in the bar,’ Orlov said, leaving the other man to see to the formalities of checking in.
‘The Russian’s half cut already,’ Sarah whispered. ‘This is going to be easier than I thought.’
‘You’re sure you want to go through with this?’ Mike asked. Her proposed approach had sounded risky, even foolhardy. But his military training had taught him that sometimes the boldest plans had the best chance of success.
‘Definitely,’ she said.
She led the way, following Orlov out into the late afternoon sunshine. The pathway from reception bisected the manicured lawns of the hotel’s inner courtyard. Nearly a century old, the hotel was only two storeys high. The white-painted walls gleamed like pale gold with the reflected rays of the descending sun.
Once across the courtyard they entered the building again and passed between a restaurant on their right and the Bulawayo Room on the left. In the function room the wedding guests were snatching drinks and canapés from silver platters with the tenacity of yellow-billed kites attacking roadkill. Young men in dinner suits, no doubt chafing in the afternoon heat, and pretty young women in short dresses stood and chattered amongst the chintzy, over-stuffed sofas, antique side tables and potted palms.
Sarah’s dressy sandals tapped on the gleaming wooden parquetry floor as she and Mike followed Orlov out onto the terrace. The Russian sat down at a shady table in the covered section. His uninterrupted view took in Batoka Gorge and the Victoria Falls Bridge, stretching between Zimbabwe on one side and Zambia on the other. It was the same bridge where Mike and Sarah had stood watching George make his bungee jump earlier in the day. From where they now stood, while they waited for their table, Mike could see yet another daredevil parting with a large chunk of her travelling budget. Thankfully the diners on the terrace couldn’t hear the screams from the bridge.
They chose a table three away from the Russian and settled into deep wicker armchairs. Mike pretended to study the cocktail menu and ordered a beer when the waiter appeared. Sarah ordered a mineral water with a slice of lemon.
‘Put your cigarette
out,’ she ordered him.
‘Why?’ he asked. ‘You smoke, it shouldn’t bother you.’
‘Just do it, OK?’
Reluctantly, he stubbed it out.
‘Here goes,’ she whispered. Sarah stood and started walking towards Orlov, who had just taken delivery of a double scotch on the rocks in a heavy tumbler.
He was dressed in khaki trousers and a grey long-sleeved shirt. The trousers were dirtied at the knees and pocked here and there with little holes and scratches, as though he had been in thorn thickets. His boots were heavy brown leather, and looked almost military. His hair was dry but plastered back and unkempt. There were sweat stains on the armpits of his shirt, but other than that, it appeared to be clean.
Despite his concern for Sarah, Mike couldn’t help but let his eyes linger on her shapely backside, accentuated as it was by the slow rise and fall of the thin material of her short dress as she sashayed across to Orlov’s table. Her legs were long and tanned. In the slender fingers of her right hand was an unlit cigarette. He hoped she was having the same effect on Orlov as she was on him.
‘Excuse me, do you have a light?’ she said to Orlov, in a low, husky voice.
‘Pardon me?’ Orlov said in his heavily accented English.
‘A light, for my cigarette,’ she said, leaning closer to him, holding out her cigarette.
Mike imagined the great white hunter was a little taken aback by the perfumed beauty who hovered above him.
‘Of course, of course,’ he said, reaching into the top pocket of his shirt for a gold lighter. He lit her cigarette and she straightened her lithe body so the first puff of smoke didn’t go into the Russian’s face.
Mike sipped his beer and strained to hear their conversation.
‘You look like you’ve been in the wars,’ she said, placing her left hand on her hip.
‘Excuse me?’ he asked, puzzled by the idiom.
‘In the bush, you look like you’ve been out exploring,’ she said with a girlish laugh.
‘Oh, of course. No, I have been hunting,’ he replied, leaning back in his chair so he could appraise her better.
‘I love hunting,’ she cooed.
‘Really? I think we are, how do the English say, a “dangerous species”,’ he said.
Sarah giggled again. ‘Endangered species, you mean. But, yes, I suppose we are also dangerous as well!’
Now Orlov laughed. ‘I see your joke. A play on words. Endangered and dangerous, that is us, no?’
‘That is us, yes,’ she said.
‘And what does a beautiful young woman hunt?’ Orlov asked, raising his tumbler to his lips and downing the remains of his scotch.
‘Foxes, mostly. I love the hunt. I love the baying of the hounds, the chase, the excitement. I even love . . .’
‘The kill?’
She smiled a slow, wicked grin and drew heavily on her cigarette. She blew the smoke out slowly towards the Russian and said, ‘Especially the kill.’
‘Can I buy you a drink, Miss . . .’
‘Grey, Sarah Grey. Yes, please. Gin and tonic, and please, call me Sarah, Mr . . . ?’
‘Vassily Orlov.’ The Russian beckoned a waiter over.
Orlov stood and pulled out a chair for Sarah. She eased herself down with catlike grace and crossed one leg over the other, doing nothing to stop the hem of her short dress sliding further up her thigh. Mike watched Orlov. He reluctantly lifted his gaze from her legs as she replied to his question.
‘And your . . . companion? Will he be joining us?’ he said.
‘Yes, I suppose so. He’s not my companion, by the way. He’s my driver, my safari guide, actually.’ She beckoned with an imperious wiggle of her finger for Mike to join them, and he walked over, self-consciously, drink in hand.
‘You are hunting here, also? But not, I think, dressed like this?’
Sarah gave her girlish chortle again and said, ‘No, sadly. Though I wish I were hunting here. I’m on a photographic safari.’ She held up the camera slung over her shoulder. ‘As for my clothes, Mr Orlov, a hunter dresses to match his or her environment, don’t you agree?’
A lascivious smile crossed Orlov’s face as he caught her meaning. ‘I wish you well in your hunting this evening, Sarah, and please, call me Vassily. And this is . . . ?’ he asked, turning to Mike.
‘Mr Wilson. Michael, this is Mr Orlov. Say hello to Mr Orlov, Michael, there’s a good boy.’
‘Good afternoon, Mr Orlov,’ Mike said, biting his tongue.
‘Please, it is all informal here, yes, Sarah?’ Orlov asked.
Sarah nodded.
‘Call me Vassily, please. A drink, Michael?’
Orlov’s face was redder now and Mike could tell he was a man in the mood for celebration. He asked for a beer and Orlov placed the orders with the hovering waiter, who scooted off.
‘So, Sarah, do you shoot, as well as ride?’ Orlov asked, turning away from Mike.
‘Since I was eleven years old. Daddy insisted on it. Mummy was horrified, but then older men always seem to know what’s best,’ she said, leaning back in her chair. ‘Shotguns, mostly. We shoot pheasant and grouse, occasionally stags on the estate,’ she said languidly.
‘Your estate?’
‘One day,’ she said, and winked theatrically at him.
The waiter brought the drinks and laid them with slow, deliberate care in front of them, halting the conversation temporarily. When, at last, the waiter departed, Orlov was eager to pick up where he had left off.
‘And why are you not hunting in Africa?’
‘Not enough time, really. I’m here for a wedding – friends from England – and some photography, of course. Then it’s back to work in a couple of days’ time.’
‘And what do you do?’
‘Photographer. Fashion magazines, mostly, but I’m doing a book of female nudes at the moment,’ she said deadpan.
Orlov took a long drink from his tumbler and Mike thought he was about to choke on an ice cube. ‘How interesting,’ he said.
Mike reflected that the pig was almost drooling now as he stared at Sarah’s cleavage.
‘But tell me, Vassily, what are you hunting? Have you had luck today?’ she asked, leaning forward in eager anticipation of his answer while at the same time allowing him a better view of her breasts.
‘Today has been most excellent for me. Today I bagged a sable antelope with the most magnificent horns you will ever see. A perfect shot, if I do say so myself. A clean kill.’
Sarah gave a little shudder. ‘How exciting. I’d love to see the trophy.’
‘I wish you could, but it is on its way to the taxidermist. He will ship it back to Russia for me.’
‘I’d love to visit Russia one day.’
‘Well, my dear, if you do I would be most glad to show you my collection of trophies. I think you would be impressed.’
‘I’m sure of it,’ she said coquettishly from across the rim of her glass. ‘What next?’
‘Ah, next are two of the famous big five. Lion and buffalo. We are going to a safari area south of the Zambezi. Near Chizarira.’
‘What about leopard?’ Sarah asked.
‘Already in the bag, as they say. I took a beautiful male at my professional hunter’s lodge, down in South Africa, just the other day.’
‘How wonderful. And rhino?’ she asked.
Orlov seemed to mull over his answer. ‘The most difficult and expensive of the big five, I fear.’
‘What about elephant? And please, let me get the next round of drinks.’ She was matching him sip for sip, and made a circular motion with her hand over the table to let the waiter know it was the same again all around.
‘No, I will pay. I insist. Yes, elephant I bagged last year. Such a bull you would not believe,’ he said proudly.
‘Gosh. But it must have been dangerous,’ she said in well-acted awe.
‘What is life without danger, Sarah? Yes, it was dangerous, but in the end it was worth it,’ he said, a
s he took his fresh drink off the table.
‘In the end?’ she probed.
‘There were . . . complications. Even the best-planned safaris can sometimes, what is the phrase – come unstuck?’
‘Where were you hunting elephant? Here in Zimbabwe?’ Mike asked. It was the first time he had joined the conversation and he noticed Orlov was surprised by the question.
Orlov turned and fixed Mike with steel-grey eyes. The short breath he took, as if he were about to say something else, and the split-second pause before he finally said, ‘South Africa,’ told Mike what he needed to know. Orlov was lying.
Mike gripped his glass so hard he thought it might shatter in his hands.
‘That’s only four of the big five, Vassily. You can’t go home without a rhino,’ Sarah interjected from the other side of the table.
Orlov turned back to Sarah and said, ‘You are right, of course, but these days it is an expensive business to hunt rhino. They are few and far between and it is hard to find someone who is willing to part with one.’
‘But where would you hunt a rhino?’ she asked.
‘On a private game reserve. Some owners will let you shoot one, usually an old bull past his prime.’
‘Personally, I can’t see what satisfaction a hunter would get out of shooting an old half-tame white rhino. They’re practically blind and most of the ones on private reserves have been hand reared,’ Mike chimed in.
He knew it was foolish to goad Orlov, in case he dismissed them or, worse, became suspicious, but he couldn’t help himself. This man had been involved in Isabella’s death – he was sure of it – and he wanted to see him squirm.
‘Perhaps you’ve never tracked a rhino before,’ Orlov replied.
‘I’ve walked to within ten metres of a white rhino before it even knew I was there. Where’s the skill in taking a shot from ten metres? Shooting a white rhino’s like shooting a cow. I don’t know how anyone could even consider it a worthy trophy,’ Mike said.
‘Clearly, Mr Wilson, you’ve never stalked a black rhino. They are much more aggressive than the white and will often charge. A fitting challenge for any hunter, I assure you.’
