Elephant Song - Smith Wilbur - Страница 61

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You're good.

You have an eye and an instinct for the light.  You're very good.  So are you.  Her grin widened.  I'd like to work with you some time.  She was direct, unaffected.  He liked her even more.

Then he smelt her.  She wore no perfume.  It was the true undisguised smell of her skin, warm, strong and aphrodisiac.

It could happen, he told her.  It could happen sooner than either of us suspects.  He was still holding her hand and she made no effort to withdraw it.  They were both aware of the sexual ambiguity in his last remark.  He thought that it would be exciting to take this woman to Africa with him.

Some miles north of where Daniel and Bonny stood on the terrace and appraised each other both professionally and physically, another person had watched the first episode of Africa Dying.

Sir Peter Tug Harrison was the major shareholder and CEO of British Overseas Steam Ship Co.  Ltd.

Although BOSS was still listed under Shipping on the London Stock Exchange it had changed its nature entirely in the fifty years since Tug Harrison had acquired a controlling interest in it.

It had started out in the late Victorian era running a small fleet of tramp steamers to Africa and the Orient, but it had never prospered greatly and Tug had taken it over at the outbreak of the Second World War for a fraction of its value.  With the profits of its wartime operation Tug had branched out in many directions and BOSS was now one of the most powerful conglomerates listed on the London Stock Exchange.

Tug had always been sensitive to the vagaries of public opinion and to the image that his company projected.  He had as strong an instinct for these subtleties as he had for the commodity index and the fluctuations on the world stock markets.  It was one of the reasons for his huge success.  The mood is green, he had told his board only a month ago.

Bright green.  Whether or not we agree with this new passion for nature and the environment, we have to take cognisance of it.  We have to ride the green wave.  Now he sat in his study on the third floor of his home in Holland Park.  The house stood in the centre of a row of magnificent townhouses.  It was one of the most prestigious addresses in London. The study was panelled in African hardwood from BOSS's concessions in Nigeria.  The panels were selected and matched and polished so that they glowed like precious marble.  There were only two paintings hanging on the panels, for the wood grain itself was a natural work of art.  The painting facing the desk was a Madonna and Child from Paul Gauguin's first sojourn in the South Pacific islands, and the other painting, which hung behind him, was a Picasso, a great barbaric and erotic image of a bull and a nude woman.  The pagan and profane set off the lyrical and luminous quality of the Mother and God-child.

Guarding the doorway was a set of rhinoceros horns.  There was a burnished spot on one of the horns, polished by Tug Harrison's right hand over the decades.  He stroked it each time he entered or left the room.

It was a superstitious ritual.  The horns were his good-luck charms.

As an eighteen-year-old lad, penniless and hungry, owning nothing but an old rifle and a handful of cartridges, he had followed that rhino bull into the shimmering deserts of the Sudan.  Thirty miles from the banks of the Nile, he had killed the bull with a single bullet to the brain. Blood from a severed artery in its head had washed a little runnel in the desert earth, and from the bottom of the shallow excavation Tug Harrison had picked out a glassy stone with a waxy sheen that had almost filled the palm of his hand.

That diamond was the beginning.  His luck had changed from the day of the rhino.  He had kept the horns, and still be reached out to them every time he was within arm's length of them.  To him they were more valuable than either of the fabulous paintings that flanked them.

He had been born in Liverpool's slums during the First World War, son of a drunken market porter, and had run away to sea at the age of sixteen.

He had jumped ship at Dares Salaam to escape the sexual attentions of a brutal first mate, and had discovered the mystery and the beauty and promise that was Africa.  For Tug Harrison that promise had been fulfilled.  The riches that he had wrested from the harsh African soil had made him one of the hundred richest men in the entire world.

The television set was artistically concealed behind the hardwood panelling.  The controls were set into the intercom panel on his desk-top.  Like most intelligent and busy men, he shunned the mindless outpourings of the television programmes, limiting his viewing to selected programmes, mostly the news and current affairs items.

However, anything African was his vital interest and he had noted the title Africa Dying and punched the programme time into his desk-top alarm.

The discreet electronic chimes aroused him from his study of the financial statements which lay on the pigskin blotter in front of him.

He touched the controls, and the panel in the wall directly across the figured-silk Quin carpet from his desk slid open.

He adjusted the volume of sound as the theme music floated into the room.

Then the image of a great elephant and a snowy peak filled the screen, and instantly he was transported back fifty years and thousands of miles in time and space.  He watched without moving until the final frame faded.  Then he reached out to touch the controls.  The screen went black and the silent panel closed like a sleepy eyelid.

Tug Harrison sat for a long time in silence.  At last he picked up the eighteen-carat gold pen from the desk set and scribbled a name on his note-pad.  Daniel Armstrong.  Then he swivelled his chair and took down his copy of Who's Who from the bookshelf.

Daniel walked from Shepherd's Bush to Holland Park.  just because he was a potential millionaire didn't mean he should toss away a fiver on a few minutes taxi ride.  The weather was bright and warm and the trees in the squares and parks were decked in early summer greenery.  As he strode along, glancing with abstract appreciation at the girls in their thin dresses and short skirts, he was thinking about Tug Harrison.

Ever since Eina Markham had phoned him to pass on Harrison's invitation, he had been intrigued.  Of course, he knew of the man.

Harrison's tentacles reached into every corner of the African continent, from Egypt to the banks of the Limpopo river.

Daniel knew the power and wealth of BOSS and its influence in Africa but little about the man behind it.  Tug Harrison was a man who seemed to have a knack for steering well clear of public controversy and the attentions of the tabloid press.

Wherever Daniel travelled in Africa these days he could discern Tug Harrison's influence, like the Spoor of a cunning old man-eating lion.

He left his tracks, but like the beast he was seldom seen in the flesh.

Daniel pondered the reasons for Harrison's peculiar success on the African continent.

He understood the African mind as few white men could.  He had learned as a lad in the lonely hunting and prospecting camps in the remote wilderness, when his only companions for months on end had been black men.  He spoke a dozen African languages but, more important, he understood the oblique and lateral reasoning of the African.  He liked Africans, felt comfortable in their company, and knew how to inspire their trust.  On his African travels Daniel had met men and women of mixed blood whose mothers were Turkana or Shana or Kikuyu, and who boasted that Tug Harrison was their true father.  There was never any proof of their claims, of course, but often these people were in positions of influence and affluence.

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