The Angels Weep - Smith Wilbur - Страница 123

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Craig followed Jonathan down the wide shady veranda. The wall was hung with hunting trophies, the horns of buffalo and kudu and eland, and on each side of the double glass doors leading to the old dining-room, now the library, stood a pair of enormous elephant tusks, so long and curved that their tips almost met at the level of the ceiling above the doorway.

As he went through the door, Jonathan absentmindedly stroked one of them. There was a spot on the thick yellow curve that had been polished shiny by the touch of his fingers over the decades.

"Pour us each a gin, my boy," he ordered. Jonathan had stopped drinking whisky on the day that Harold Wilson's government had imposed sanctions on Rhodesia. It was Jonathan's single-handed retaliatory attempt at disrupting the economy of the British Isles.

"By God, you've drowned it," he complained, as he tasted the concoction, and dutifully Craig took his glass back to the imbuia cocktail cabinet and stiffened the gin component.

"That's a little better." Jonathan settled himself behind his desk and placed the Stuart crystal tumbler in the centre of his leather and brass-bound blotter.

"Now,"he said. "Tell me what happened this time. "And he fixed Craig, with those bright green eyes.

"Well, Bawu, it's a long story. I don't want to bore you." Craig sank down into the deep leather armchair and became intensely interested in the furnishings of the room which he had known since childhood. He read the titles on the spines of the morocco-bound books on the shelves, and studied the massed display of blue silk rosettes which the prize Afrikander bulls of King's Lynn had won at every agricultural show south of the Zambezi river.

"Shall I tell you what I heard? I heard you refused to obey the legitimate order of your superior, to wit the head game warden, and that thereafter you perpetrated a violence upon that worthy, or more specifically that you punched him in the head Giving him the excuse to dismiss you for which he had probably been searching desperately since the first day you arrived in the Park." "The reports are exaggerated." "Don't give me that little-boy grin of yours, young man.

This is not a matter of levity," Jonathan told him sternly. "Did you refuse to partake in the elephant cull, or did you not?" "Have you ever been on a cull, Jon-Jon?" Craig asked softly. He only used his grandfather's pet name in moments of deep sincerity. "The spotter plane picks a likely herd, say fifty animals, and radio talks us onto them. We go in the last mile or so on foot at a dead run. We get in very close, ten paces, so we are shooting uphill. We use the 458s to cannon them. What we do is pick out the old queens of the herd, because the younger animals love and respect them so much that they won't leave them. We hit the queens first, head shots, of course, that gives us plenty of time to work on the others. We are pretty good at it by now. We drop them so fast that the heaps have to be pulled apart by tractors afterwards. That leaves the calves. It's interesting to watch a calf trying to lift its dead mother back onto her feet again with its tiny trunk." "It has to be done, Craig," said Jonathan quietly. "The parks are overstocked by thousands of animals." But Craig seemed not to have heard.

"If the orphan calves are too young to survive, we hit them also, but if they are the right age, we round them up and sell them to a nice old man who takes them away and resells them to a zoo in Tokyo or Amsterdam, where they will stand behind bars with a chain around the foot and eat the peanuts that the tourists throw them." "It has to be done, "Jonathan repeated.

"He was taking kickbacks from the animal-dealers," Craig said.

"So that we were ordered to leave orphans that were so young they only had a fifty-fifty chance of survival ". So that we looked for herds with high percentages of small calves. He was taking bribes from the dealers." "Who? Not Tomkins, the head warden?" Jonathan exclaimed.

"Yes, Tomkins." Craig stood up and took both their glasses to refill.

"Have you got proof?" "No, of course I haven't," Craig replied irritably. "If I had I would have taken it straight to the minister."

"So you just refused to cull." Craig flopped back in the chair, long bare legs sprawled and hair hanging in his eyes.

"That's not all. They are stealing the ivory from the cull. We are supposed to leave the big bulls, but Tomkins ordered us to hit anything with good ivory, and the tusks disappear." "No proof on that either, I suppose? "Jonathan asked drily.

"I saw the helicopter making the pick-up." "And you got the registration letters?" "They were masked," Craig shook his head, "but it was a military machine. It's organized." "So you punched Tomkins?"

"It was beautiful," said Craig dreamily. "He was on his hands and knees trying to pick up his teeth that were scattered all over the floor of his office. I never worked out what he was going to do with them." "Craig, my boy, what did you hope to achieve? Do you think it will stop them, even if your suspicions are correct?" "No, but it made me feel a lot better. Those elephant are almost human. I became pretty fond of them." They were both silent for a while and then Jonathan sighed. "How many jobs is that now, Craig?" "I wasn't keeping score, Bawu." "I can't believe that anybody with Ballantyne blood in his veins is totally lacking in either talent or ambition. Christ, boy, we Ballantynes are winners, look at Douglas, look at Roland--2

"I'm a Mellow, only half a Ballantyne." "Yes, I suppose that accounts for it. Your grandfather frittered away his share in the Harkness Mine, so when your father married my jean he was almost a pauper. Good God, those shares would be worth ten million pounds today." "That was during the great depression of the Thirties a lot of people lost money then." "We didn't the Ballantynes didn't." Craig shrugged. "No, the Ballantynes doubled up during the depression." "We are winners," Jonathan repeated. "But what happens to you now? You know my rule, you don't get a penny more from me." "Yes, I know that rule, Jonjon." "You want to try working here again? It didn't pan out so well last time, did it?" "You are an impossible old bastard," said Craig fondly. "I love you, but I'd rather work for Idi Amin than for you again." Jonathan looked immensely pleased with himself. His image of himself as tough, ruthless and ready to kill, was another of his conceits. He would have been deeply insulted if anybody had called him easy-going or generous. The large anonymous donations he made to every charity, deserving or otherwise, were always accompanied by blood-curdling threats to anybody revealing his identity.

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