Golden Fox
Page 47
Still the fish stood in the water and opened wide its mighty triangular beak and kept shaking its head, and Shasa was helpless in the face of such power. He could not control it. The rod was jerked back and forth in his grip, and he watched the steel trace flog like the last of a bullwhip.
With a sense of despair he saw the long shank of the hook twist and flick in the hinge of the open jaw. The gyrations of the fish were working it loose from the bone.
‘Stop it!’ he gasped at the fish, and tried to haul it over on its side. He felt the hook come loose and slip and skid across the bone, before it caught again. The fish gaped at him, and he saw the hook still holding lightly on the very flip of the iron black beak. One more shake of the head and the hook would be catapulted away on the swinging steel trace.
Shasa rose up in the chair and gathered the last of his strength. He hauled the marlin backwards, and it toppled and crashed back into the sea in a smother of foam.
‘The trace,’ he crocked at the deckie. ‘Get the trace.’ A direct pull on the steel wire trace would bring the fish under control.
During all four hours of the struggle, no person other than the angler had been permitted to touch the rod or the line to assist in the capture. Those were the rules of the sporting ethic laid down by the International Game Fishing Association.
Now with the fish played out and lying beaten on the surface the crew were permitted to handle the thirty-foot steel trace, which was attached to the end of the line, and to hold the fish with it while the flying gaff was driven into its flesh.
‘Trace!’ Shasa pleaded, as the deckie with heavy leather gloves reached out over the stern and tried to get a hand to the top swivel of the trace. It was just beyond his fingertips.
The marling wallowed on the surface, rolling and pitching like a dead log in the swells.
‘One more time.’ Shasa rose up and braced himself behind the rod. He pulled with a steady even pressure. The hook was holding only by its needle point, the barb was not buried – the slightest twist or jerk could free it.
The second deck-hand stood ready with the flying gaff, a massive stainless-steel hook on the end of a detachable pole. Once that hook was plunged into the marlin’s shoulder, the struggle would be over.
The top swivel of the trace was six inches from the fingertips of the gloved hand, and the marlin fanned its tail, a last exhausted effort. The tip of the rod gave a little nod, almost as though approving the gallant spirit of the fish – and the hook came free.
The rod snapped straight and the hook flicked through the air and clattered against Le Bonheur’s gunwale. Shasa fell back with a crash into the chair. Only forty feet away the marlin lay on the surface with its back and the tall dorsal fin exposed. It was free but too spent to swim away; its tail made only convulsive spasmodic movements.
They all stared at it, until Martin the skipper recovered his wits. He slipped Le Bonheur into reverse and backed her up on the wallowing monster.
‘On l’aura! We will have him!’ he yelled at the gaff man, as the marlin bumped against the stern. The deck-hand sprang to the transom and raised the gleaming hook high to drive the point into the fish’s unprotected hump.
Shasa tumbled from the chair, his legs buckling weakly under him. Only just in time, he managed to seize the deckie’s shoulder and arrest the blow before it was struck.
‘No,’ he croaked. ‘No.’ He wrested the gaff from the man’s hand and flung it on the deck. The crew stared at him in astonishment and chagrin. They had worked almost as hard as Shasa had done for this fish.
It did not matter. He would explain to them later that it was unethical to free-gaff a fish. The moment the marlin threw the hook, the contest was over. The fish had won. To kill him now would be a deadly offence to all the ethics of sportsmanship.
Shasa’s legs could no longer support his weight. He collapsed across the transom. The fish still lay on the surface beneath the stern. He reached down and touched the colossal dorsal fin. The edge was sharp as a broadsword.
‘Well done, fish,’ Shasa whispered, and his eyes stung with the salt of his own sweat and with other things. ‘It was a hell of a fight. Good for you, fish.’
He stroked the fin as though it were the body of a lovely woman. His touch seemed to galvanize the marlin. The strokes of his tail became stronger and more regular. His gill plates opened and closed like a bellows as he breathed and he moved away slowly.
They followed him for almost half a mile as he swam upon the surface with his fin standing in the blue like a tall tower. Shasa and Elsa stood hand in hand at the rail in silence and watched the strength and vigour return to the great fish.
Faster beat his tail, and he steadied in the water and pressed against the swells with all his former majesty. Gradually the tall fin sank below the surface, and they saw the long dark shape of his body recede into the depths. There was one last flash of light like the reflection from a mirror deep in the blue water and then the fish was gone.
On the long run back to port, Shasa and Elsa sat very close together. They watched the lovely emerald gem of the island grow before them, and once or twice they smiled at each other in quiet and perfect accord.
When Le Bonheur ran into the Black River harbour and came into the dock, the other boats of the fleet were already tied up alongside. On the scaffold in front of the clubhouse hung the carcasses of two dead marlin. Neither of them was half the size of the fish that Shasa had lost. A small admiring crowd was gathered around them. The successful anglers were posing with their rods. Their names and the marlin’s weights were chalked on the glory-board. The Indian photographer from Port Louis was crouched over his tripod recording their moment of triumph.
‘Don’t you wish that your fish was hanging there?’ Elsa asked softly, as they paused to watch the scene.
‘How beautiful a marlin is when he is alive,’ Shasa murmured. ‘And how ugly he is when he is dead.’ He shook his head. ‘My fish deserves better than that.’
‘And so do you,’ she said, and led him to the bar in the clubhouse. He moved stiffly, like a very old man, but his bruises gave him a strange masochistic pride.
Elsa ordered him a Green Island rum and lime.
‘That should give you strength to get you home, old man,’ she teased him lovingly.
Home was Maison des Alizés, the House of the Trade Winds. It was a rambling old plantation-house, built a hundred years ago by one of the French sugar barons. Shasa’s architects had renovated it and restored it in authentic detail.
It sat like a glistening wedding-cake in twenty acres of its own gardens. The old French baron had begun a collection of tropical plants, and Shasa had added to these over the years. The pride of the collection was the Royal Victoria waterlilies whose leaves floated on the gleaming fish-ponds. The leaves were four feet across and curled at the edges like enormous platters, and the blooms were the size of a man’s head.
Maison des Alizés was situated below the massif of Le Morne Brabant, only twenty minutes’ drive from the clubhouse at Black River harbour. This was the main reason that Shasa had purchased it. He referred to it as his fishing shack.
As they drove up under the spreading canopy of the ficus trees, Shasa remarked: ‘Well, it looks as though the rest of the party has arrived safely.’
Half a dozen cars were parked along the curve of the driveway, in front of the main portals of the house. Elsa’s pilot had ferried the two engineers from Zurich in her personal jet. They were the technical directors of Pignatelli Chemicals who had developed the process and designed the plant for manufacturing Cyndex 25. Shasa had met Werner Stolz, the German director, during the delicate preliminary discussions in Europe. These had gone smoothly, under Elsa’s skilful direction.
The technical directors and engineers of Capricorn Chemical Industries had come in from Johannesburg to attend this conference. Capricorn Chemical Industries was a fully owned subsidiary of Courtney Industrial Holdings. Under Garry’s chairmanship, Capricorn w
as the largest manufacturer of agricultural fertilizers and pesticides on the African continent.
The company had its main plant near the town of Germiston in the industrial triangle of the Transvaal. The existing plant already incorporated a high-security section which manufactured highly toxic pesticides. There was adequate space available to double this facility. The Cyndex plant could be set up without any fuss or undue public speculation.
The technical representatives of Pignatelli and Capricorn had come together here to discuss the blueprints and the specification for the new plant. For obvious reasons, it would have been unwise to conduct this meeting on the site in South Africa. In fact Elsa had insisted that none of her staff should ever visit the plant or have any connection with the enterprise that could be traced back to Pignatelli.
Mauritius had offered a perfect venue for this meeting. Shasa had owned Maison des Alizés for over ten years. He and his family and their guests were frequent visitors. Their presence here was unremarkable, and Shasa was on excellent terms with the Mauritian government and most of the influential figures on the island. The Mauritians treated the family as honoured and privileged guests.
Before his illness Bruno Pignatelli had also been a keen big-game angler who visited Mauritius regularly. So Elsa was also well known and respected on the island. Nobody was going to pry into her affairs or make awkward enquiries about her reasons for being at Maison des Alizés with a team of her engineers and consultants.
Shasa and Elsa were still keeping up appearances and exercising elaborate decorum, ever to the extent of occupying separate, but interconnecting, suites on the top floor of Maison des Alizés. The family thought this little charade was hilarious. They were all waiting for the two of them in the gazebo on the lawn above the fish-pools when they came down for evening cocktails.
Elsa had bathed Shasa and anointed his bruises and scrapes, so he looked very dapper and refreshed, and limped only slightly as they strolled down the front steps together. He was dressed in a cream tropical silk suit with a crisp new eye-patch, and she wore a full-length gauzy chiffon with a frangipani spray in her hair.
‘Look at the little devils. Do you really believe that they are just jolly good pals?’ Garry demanded with a twinkle in his eye, and Isabella and Holly had to cling to each other for support. Even Centaine covered her smile with the Japanese fan and turned away to speak to one of the engineers.
Isabella had every reason to be at Maison des Alizés even though the Senate was in session. She was on the board of directors of Capricorn Chemicals. Since the trip to Chizora Concession when she had first learnt of the Cyndex project, Isabella had shown a sudden interest in CCI. She had succeeded in having herself appointed to the Senate standing committee on agriculture, and after that it had required only a few subtle hints for Garry to offer her a seat on the CCI board. She had rapidly become an active and valuable addition to the management team of Capricorn and had never missed a meeting of the board. She had taken a particular interest in the Cyndex project, and Garry had naturally included her in this gathering.
Garry had also seized the opportunity of bringing Holly and the children along for an unscheduled holiday. Although he would be heavily occupied with the technical discussions, he hoped to be able to spend some time each day with his family. Holly had been complaining recently that they saw so little of him, and the children were growing up so quickly that he was missing a big slice of their childhood. These days Centaine Courtney-Malcomess never missed a chance to be with her great-grandchildren, and she had insisted on boarding the Lear when it took off from Lanseria private airport outside Johannesburg.
Indeed, so large had been the family contingent and the weight of the luggage that the other Capricorn directors had been obliged to catch the next commercial flight.
Maison des Alizés was bursting at the seams, every bed was occupied and they had set up two extra cots in the nursery for the babies. Centaine had borrowed extra trained staff from La Pirogue, the five-star beach resort just down the coast at Flic and Flac to deal with the invasion. Then she had sent the Lear back to Johannesburg to bring in supplies of such essentials as Imperial caviare and vintage Krug and fresh fruit and baby-foods that were unobtainable on the island.
The Krug was flowing freely now as Shasa and Elsa joined the party under the frivolous fretwork roof of the gazebo. There was an exuberant orgy of kisses and hand-shakes and back-slapping and happy cries of greeting.
Elsa had been presented to Centaine only briefly the previous evening when the old lady arrived at Maison des Alizés. Even though Centaine had been tired by the long jet flight, they had warmed to each other immediately. Centaine had squinted at her in that particular way she had when she was concentrating deeply. Then her eyes had straightened and she had smiled and held out her hand.
‘Shasa has told me many good things about you, but I suspect that’s not half of it,’ she said in Italian, and Elsa had smiled with pleasure at the compliment and at Centaine’s command of her language.
‘I did not know you spoke Italian, Signora Courtney-Malcomess.’
‘There is still much we have to learn about each other,’ Centaine nodded.
‘I look forward to that,’ Elsa replied. They had recognized kindred spirits and now, under the gazebo, Elsa moved naturally to Centaine’s side and kissed her cheek.
Well, Centaine thought complacently as she took Elsa’s arm, Shasa took long enough to find this one, but she was well worth waiting for.
Garry’s children were chasing each other around the gazebo, and their shrieks and howls detracted a little from the sophisticated ambience of the gathering.
‘I must admit,’ Shasa remarked as he regarded his grandchildren balefully, ‘that I’m becoming more like Henry the Eighth every day – I prefer small children in the abstract.’
‘As I recall, at that age you were every bit as bad,’ Centaine rallied immediately to the defence of her brood of great-grandchildren, but at that moment a particularly piercing squeal made Shasa wince.
‘For that one alone you would have boiled me in oil. Mater, you are in danger of becoming a doting great-granny.’
‘They’ll soon have enough of it,’ Centaine smiled down on them fondly.
‘Not before I do, I assure you,’ he muttered, and went off to where Bella was chatting to the Pignatelli engineers.
Isabella had set out to be charming to the German director, and by this time he was throwing off sparks. For Isabella there was a bizarre sense of unreality about the scene. She felt like an actress in a Franco Zeffirelli movie. The gleaming ivory house, the weird shapes of the trees and tropical plants, the gigantic fronds of the Royal Victoria waterlilies floating on the ponds and the shoals of multicoloured ornamental carp sailing beneath them, all contributed to a fantastic dreamlike setting. The laughter and the disjointed enigmatic conversations in different languages and the cries of the children were all so inconsequential when set against the true reason for this gathering.
There was Nana holding court like a dowager empress, and Holly and Elsa Pignatelli wearing precious chiffons and silks that cost a working man’s wages for a year. While somewhere far away her little Nicholas dressed in combat camouflage and played with the ghastly weapons of war, with soldiers and terrorists for companions.
Here she flirted with this balding middle-aged man who looked like a grocer or a barman, but who was in reality the purveyor of death in one of its least attractive guises. Here she smiled at her big teddy bear of a brother and linked arms with her beloved father while she conspired to betray them both, and her country to boot. Here was the shell, the beautiful, groomed, intelligent, successful young woman, fully in control of her destiny and the world around her. While within was the terrified confused creature, suffering and bereaved, the pawn of powerful shadowy forces in a game that she did not understand.
‘One day at a time,’ she warned herself. ‘One step at a time.’ And the next step was the Cyndex 25 project.
The conference began the following morning in the dining-room of Maison des Alizés. They sat beneath the revolving punkah fans at the long walnut table which extended to seat thirty persons and they talked about death. They discussed the mechanics and the chemical structure of death. They argued the packaging and the quality control and the cost-efficiency of death, as though talking about manufacturing potato crisps or face cream.
Isabella steeled herself to show no reaction to the things she heard discussed at the long table. She had learnt never to underestimate the powers of observation of her brother Garry. Behind the horn-rimmed spectacles and bluff genial façade he missed very little. She knew that he would pick up any sign of horror or revulsion that she showed. That would probably be the end of her involvement in the project.
The Pignatelli technicians had prepared a dossier. The copies were contained in untitled but handsome pigskin folders which were placed on the dining-room table in front of each of them. The dossier was exhaustive and covered every aspect of the problem of manufacturing, storing and deploying the nerve gas.
Werner Stolz, the technical director, took them through the dossier a paragraph at a time. As horror unfolded on horror, read out in Werner’s clipped sibilant German accent, Isabella found that she had to exercise all her self-control to keep her expression neutral and businesslike.
‘Cyndex 25 is a volatile gas consisting of an organophosphorous compound of the Alkylphosphonic Fluoridic Acid Group. Gases of this composition are known as G agents and include Sarin and Soman.
‘However, Cyndex 25 has desirable features that differ distinctly from these older types of nerve gas. . . .’ As he enumerated these features Isabella was appalled by his choice of the adjective ‘desirable’, but she nodded thoughtfully and kept her eyes on the dossier.