“How’re you doing?” I asked him. I wasn’t totally devoid of sympathy for the bruiser, even though he had just threatened to push me overboard.
“They’re not trying to hit us,” Jaegar managed to get out from between gritted teeth, his eyes opening a sliver. “If we stay down and out of the way, we won’t be shot.”
Uh, excuse me, did you notice the bullets? “What are you talking about?”
“They are aiming for the engine. Easier to hit.”
“Oh shit,” I heard Cassandra proclaim.
I agreed but wasn’t quite up to snuff on the import of what he’d said.
“They want us dead in the water,” Cassandra uttered, a trail of dread following her words like slime from a snail.
The phrase sounded worse than the reality. So what if our engine got knocked out? Given the choice, I’d rather the engine take one for the team than me get a hot piece of lead in my butt cheek. Or worse.
“Couldn’t we just release the anchor,” I suggested, “or whatever it is that’s keeping us tied to this bloody island, and float away from these guys?”
“If the boat goes adrift, if we cannot use the motor and steer it away, it will float into hippopotamus territory,” Jaegar explained, sounding a lot like Arnold Schwarzenegger with a particularly difficult script line to deliver.
“I thought we were in hippo territory,” I countered, then added with a bit of sass, “Remember when you were gonna feed me to them?”
Jaegar shook his head. “I lied.” He motioned with his head to somewhere up river and closer to the shoreline. “Over there is where the hippopotamuses live. They are everywhere. They float below the water….”
“Did you know hippopotamuses can hold their breaths for several minutes?” This helpful bit of information came from the prone body (but not so prone lips) of Cassandra. It was beginning to dawn on me what it was they were getting at, but I didn’t want to let it in just yet.
“You never know they are there,” Jaegar continued as if telling a scary story around a campfire. “They come up below boat. Without motor we cannot get away. If boat is small enough—a boat like this—they will capsize it and throw us into the water. And they will attack. And we will die.”
I did not particularly like this story. “So we stay here then. We won’t let the boat go adrift.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Cassandra said with resignation.
“They will come,” Jaegar agreed. “The hippopotamuses will come for us. Without motor, we cannot escape.”
Oh dear.
“So, we can’t drive this thing outta here because they’ll shoot us. If we set ourselves adrift, the hippos will get us. If we stay the way we are and they shoot out our engine, the hippos will still get us. Do I have the situation pretty much summed up? Basically you’re saying we’re damned if we do, damned if we don’t? Is that about it?”
Jaegar shrugged his agreement.
“Who are these bastards who are shooting at us anyways?” Cassandra demanded, as if one of us should know. It was obvious they weren’t friends of Jaegar’s. And certainly not mine. “Why are they doing this? Are they marauders of some sort?”
“Not robbers,” Jaegar said. “They would want the boat, and the engine, for themselves, not destroyed by their guns.”
“Then who?”
Jaegar and I exchanged looks.
“These might be the same people who blew up the Jeep,” I said, knowing Jaegar had seen exactly what we had. “They want us dead. They want me dead. By gunfire or hippo; one way or the other.”
I knew that if we were going to get out of this without ending up full of holes or as hippo chow, we needed to stop the shooting and save our engine.
“Where’s the gun?” I asked Jaegar.
He didn’t answer immediately, which I took to be a sign that he either didn’t know or didn’t want to tell me. The bullets were whizzing through the air with alarming regularity. I’d been unable to find a break in the gunfire to reach up to extinguish the lamp. I feared our time was running out. I repeated the question. “Jaegar, where is the gun? We have to defend ourselves; we have to defend the engine!”
“I don’t know,” was his mumbled reply.
“What do you mean? You just had it. I saw it. It was very close to my face as a matter of fact.”
“It is gone.”
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to be a little bit more specific than that,” I said through tight lips, barely keeping my frustration in check. “I don’t have to do the shooting if you don’t want me to have the gun. If that’s the problem, I can understand that, but somebody needs to start shooting back. Now!” Another especially vociferous volley of gunfire punctuated my point.
“It is gone,” he said, “overboard.”
Cassandra weighed in with an, “Oh fuck.”
“It fell into water when I hit the floor,” he explained.
I had to concur with Cassandra’s take on the situation.
The shooting stopped momentarily. Maybe they were reloading. It was time for Plan B, which, come to think of it, was why I was spooning with this German hooligan in the first place.
Finding my mark first with my eyes, I rapidly reached up, found the lamp’s knob, and turned it to extinguish the flame, throwing us and the boat, mercifully, into total blackness. “Shhh,” I told the others.
They shushed, and we listened.
Immediately the sound of gunfire resumed, filling the air with its deadly retort, then began to peter out, and, eventually, halted.
For a moment, the echo of bullets zipping over our heads remained with us, then that too was gone. Plan B had worked. I was tentatively and quietly elated. I’m sure the others were too, but the only thing I could hear in the damp, dark air was the jagged, uneasy breathing of Jaegar and Cassandra. Mine too.
For a long time we lay there, not daring to move because there was a chance the shooters were still out there, waiting for us to show ourselves. We did not talk, afraid the sound of our voices would carry over water and act as a targeting device. We breathed. In and out. In and out.
We waited.
And waited some more.
Although my head told me it might still be too soon, my aching muscles could no longer stay in the same position. Inch by painful inch, I raised myself up until I was resting on numb forearms and elbows. My head bobbed above my shoulders, at the ready to disappear like a turtle into its shell at the first sign of gunfire. It was still black as crow out there, and scanning the horizon did little to appease my concern that we might still not be alone.
“It will be light soon,” I heard Jaegar whisper from the shadows.
“He’s right,” this from Cassandra.
Obviously neither of them had fallen asleep either. Who could?
I slipped back down into my position as a human rug and waited for dawn.
In the end, despite the seemingly endless barrage of bullets, all of us—the engine included—came away without injury. The distance from shore to boat must have been too great for whatever type of weapons they were using, and I guessed there were probably a good number of unfortunate fish with lead in their bellies in the water below us.
In some peculiar way, our harrowing escapade had knit us together as a trio with a common goal rather than the original gun-toting maniac against two captives. With the first light of dawn, Jaegar recovered enough to get us and the boat to shore, returning to the same spot at the base of the Chobe camp where we’d left from the night before. It might not have been the wisest move, but none of us knew the river well enough to know where else to go. Jaegar’s original plan was to take Cassandra and me to the little island in the middle of the Chobe River, scare me into agreeing to stop seeing Mrs. Wellness, scare Mrs. Wellness into agreeing to stop bumping bellies with me or anyone else ever again, then take us back. Nowhere in his plan was there a harried escape down the convoluted waterways of Africa. We all knew what a hard time Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn had
had of it, and none of us was in the mood to try it for ourselves.
When we arrived at the shore, with barely a word shared between us during the return trip, the sun was just poking its cheery head above a gloomy horizon congested with a melancholy, blue haze. The air was chill and oddly flavoured with the scent of stale mud, hickory fire, and fresh coffee. The fine folks at Chobe were oblivious to the adventure in terror carried out not far from their safe bedroom suites. Back on dry, hard earth, we unanimously agreed that we did not feel safe remaining at Chobe. Obviously the gunmen—whoever they were—knew it as a place where we might be found should they want to make good on their marksmanship. We were fortunate enough to land the scow without a greeting from an unwelcome landing party with guns, but it would be plain stupidity to press our luck by hanging around.
With no other obvious choice, the three of us made the trek back to the village where Cassandra and I had planned to spend the night in the first place. As far as we knew, only Jaegar had successfully tracked us there.
“So that wasn’t you in the black truck that pulled up behind the burning Jeep?” I asked as we trudged along the uneven path, having gotten far enough away from Chobe to conclude we weren’t being followed and could risk making some noise other than the sound of our feet.
“No,” Jaegar answered. “I have no truck when I cross the water.”
That jibed with his earlier story that he was working for Cassandra’s husband. He’d turned up at Livingstone airport because he was following Cassandra, not me; he’d lost my trail in Mashatu; there had been no collusion with Richard Cassoum, the camp manager. That being true, Jaegar couldn’t have known where we were going, and to have a truck on the other side of the river after we left Zambia would have meant he wasn’t working alone—or was a very convincing and speedy negotiator, which I doubted. He’d made it across the river on the speedboat, but then what? “So how did you find Cassandra in the village?”
“I run. I get off the boat, and I run. This was my only chance to catch you.”
I grunted. His chances were darn good, I thought, given the lightning speed (not) at which the vehicles around this place seem to travel.
“I run to where the Jeep burns,” Jaegar recounted his chase. “I saw you in bushes. Hiding. I was in bushes too.”
Of course. He hadn’t been in the mean-looking SUV that pulled up just after our Jeep exploded, but rather far enough behind and in the perfect position to witness our escape. We’d been too focused on trying to avoid being seen by whoever was in the black-hearted truck to notice him.
“Why Sal Island?” I questioned, now that he was in a talkative mood. “And why follow me to Mashatu when Cassandra wasn’t even with me?”
“I start by following Mrs. Wellness. Until I learn about you. Then I chase you.”
“But why me?”
“You were together on plane. You were together in Cape Town. You were the one. The lover. It was you Mr. Wellness wanted me to scare off. So I chase you.”
Jaegar was better at his job than I gave him credit for. Had he found some way to see into my room? Did he catch me with my hands and mouth where they shouldn’t have been on that drunken night at the Table Bay Hotel? Or was he bluffing? I didn’t think I’d ever learn the answer to that one. “That still doesn’t explain why you got on the plane at Sal Island. If you were hired by Cassandra’s husband, I assume you live in Atlanta, right? And I didn’t even know Cassandra yet. You couldn’t have suspected me yet.”
“I take a different flight from Atlanta. I then wait for Mrs. Wellness’s plane in Sal. I get on at Sal to avoid as much as possible being seen by her until I find out about the man she is meeting with. But I didn’t have to wait until she get to Africa. You were already sitting with her on the plane.”
That was true. It was all innocent, but I could see how he could make the mistake…well, sort of mistake.
“Would you two twerps stop talking about me as if I’m not here?” Cassandra piped up with a flip of her hair, her voice dripping with molten lava. “Or better yet, stop talking altogether. I’m sick of discussing this. Let’s just get back to the room and get some sleep. I am so bloody tired, I’m about to drop on the spot and use one of you for a pillow. If I hear one more peep out of either of you, that’s exactly what I’m going to do!”
The rest of the trip was spent in quiet contemplation. For some reason I was still carrying both my luggage and Cassandra’s.
We spent what was left of the night (or rather, early morning) in our messed up little hovel. Cassandra was no longer in the frame of mind for sharing the bed (which was too small for all three of us anyway), leaving Jaegar and me to snuggle up on the floor at her feet (which I think she took perverse pleasure in).
Later that morning, with little protest, for she knew the jig was up and it was time to face the music, Cassandra agreed to accompany Jaegar back to Livingstone and eventually home to Atlanta.
We were at the Kasane jetty when she hugged me goodbye for the last time.
“The only part of marriage I enjoy,” she whispered into my ear as we embraced, “is escaping it.”
I pulled back and looked at her in dismay.
“Take my word for it, Mayor Russell,” her voice huskier than usual that morning, “never surrender adventure for the simple life.”
Cassandra stepped away and allowed Jaegar to help her into the waiting speedboat. As the sputtering craft began its short voyage across the Zambezi, neither passenger looked back. I felt a murmur of sadness run through me as I watched her being taken away. Cassandra Wellness was a wild animal of Africa, captured and being returned to the cage of domesticated marriage.
Good luck with that.
I returned to the village to collect my things and tidy up the small room as best I could. I was preparing to head out when Masha came in with a bowl of fresh, sliced fruit for my breakfast. Where she got fresh fruit in the middle of that arid land, I do not know, but I ate it ravenously and with gratitude.
With renewed energy and hope for a successful day, I set out with my bags in hand and once again made the by now all-too-familiar trip back to Chobe. I had unfinished business there.
When I entered the front lobby of the main lodge building, it was busier than before, but not by much— mostly scurrying employees doing whatever scurrying employees do. Most of the guests had either gone off on morning game drives or water safaris or were lazing over a leisurely, late breakfast in the dining room.
I headed directly up the set of stairs that I knew would take me to the second level where Matthew Moxley’s boyfriend worked as a masseur. The dismal, break-of-day sky to which we’d awakened on the boat, seemingly forever ago, had disappeared. It was a warm, cloudless day, and sunshine filled the hallway that led to Kevan’s work area. A pleasing scent of jasmine, lavender, and something spicy mixed together beckoned me to the room, and I could just make out the pleasant tinkling of spa muzak as I padded toward the open doorway of the massage room.
I stepped into a small, square room that acted as a waiting area. Empty. A door to my right was partially open, and I laid a hand against it to push it inwards. This room was also empty. But I was definitely in the right place, and quite a lovely place it was. In the middle of the room, surrounded by the tools of a masseur’s trade—luxurious white towels, sparkling stainless steel receptacles of various sizes for various purposes, bottles and jars of creams and lotions and oils, tissues and cotton batting and pillows and other soft things—was a massage table. Beyond the table, a set of double doors, open to an outdoor balcony brimming with potted plants and a bistro table with two chairs, invited one to sit down for a chilled glass of iced tea or lemonade. A playful breeze floated through the room, promising a hint of coolness in the typically hot climate. It was a charming, pleasant place to spend one’s work day.
“Hello. Can I help you? Would you like to make an appointment?” The voice was soft and low and, like the breeze, contained a hint of coolness.
I t
urned to face a man who’d just come through the doorway. He was holding a cup of steaming tea in one hand and a plate of crusty lumps of dough in the other. He was a unique-looking man with a long, narrow face that would have appeared feminine were it not for the strong angles of his cheekbones and flared jaw line and a generous nose and forehead. His head was shaved, and by the strain of the white polo shirt across his chest and arms I could tell he was an athlete, or at least someone who paid close attention to his physical fitness. His skin darkened to near black around hooded eyes, giving him a look of mystery, offset by the warm curve of a smile that was, at the moment, only tentative as he regarded me.
“Are you Kevan?” I asked, although I was almost certain of the answer.
He nodded, suspicion washing over his face. “I am. Kevan Badanga. And you are?”
“I am Russell Quant.”
Kevan’s eyes moved away from me momentarily as he looked for a place to set down his tea and biscuits. When that was done he wiped his hands against each other as if preparing to use them for…?
“I’m a—”
He cut me off. “I know who you are.”
I cocked my head to the side as if it might help to figure that one out. A trick I’d learned from Barbra.
“You were in Khayelitsha,” he said in explanation. “Looking for Matt.”
Surprise spread over my face. And just how did he know that? I was finding out that in Africa, news travels faster than Jeeps. This certainly made things a bit easier if I didn’t have to explain myself to him. “That’s right. Do you know where he is?”
“You must be joking,” Kevan said, a slight snarl curling his upper lip.
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