Catacombs (17 page)

"It's thievery," the old man said sadly.

"But they're so eager to give us credit–the World Bank regularly comes begging to bury us in dollars."

"In the end we are only robbing ourselves. We can't hope to repay the debt we have now, although I've tried to keep it within a few zeros of reality. And as long as our economy is subordinate to international capitalism, we will always be an indentured nation." Jumbe
 
coughed raspingly. "Another failure to leave behind me."

"I don't want to hear any more talk like that today," Kumenyere told him, a hand at Jumbe's wrist as he clocked his pulse. "Your prognosis–"

"My prognosis, I should hope, is in the pouch that's just arrived from the airport."

"Nothing ever escapes you," the doctor said admiringly.

"Let's see what your colleagues in Houston had to say," Jumbe said, his smile overcast by dread.

"I feel that I ought to have time to–"

"We'll study the medical report together. My pulse?"

"Altogether unsatisfactory. I've cautioned you before, anxiety can be more of a danger at this stage than the aneurysm itself. Now I'm going to give you Valium, and I want you to rest quietly for two hours. Then you may read the conclusions which the doctors Tustin and Grunewald have reached. You know that I'll keep nothing from you, Jumbe."

The old man grasped his arm, an affirmation of friendship, of dependence.

"Just keep me alive–until South Africans are free: Then nothing can matter."

"I promise you."

Jumbe took the tablet of Valium, twenty-five milligrams, with a small glass of wine.

"And no one must find out–how ill I really am."

"Trust me, Jumbe. You know how much I love you."

"Remember. We need time tonight to prepare my speech. I want you to read it over several times. You'll be standing in for me before parliament, and the world."

Kumenyere smiled diffidently. "I'm willing to die for you. But a speech–I'm no politician. I'm afraid I'll make a fool of myself."

After leaving Jumbe's guarded bedroom he collected the sealed diplomatic pouch, courier delivered from the Houston Medical Center in Texas, and took it to his bungalow. There he mixed a drink and examined the contents of the pouch.

The world-famous heart specialists in Houston, Tustin and Grunewald, had returned the X rays which he had personally made, in great secrecy, at the Kialama hindi Hospital in Dar. They showed a dilation the size of a peach pit on the wall of one of the great arteries feeding the heart in question; death would occur almost instantaneously following a rupture. He leafed through the long evaluation by the surgeons, who were prepared to fly to Tanzania to perform the operation that would save the patient's life. In his precarious condition, they concluded, Jumbe could not safely be brought to them.

A knock on the door. Kumenyere left the papers and X rays on his desk and went to open it.

Henry Landreth stood outside in the stinging heat, his face twitching unhappily beneath a wide-brimmed bush hat. He had a glass of pink gin in one hand.

"There are problems," he said. "We must have a chat."

"Come in," Kumenyere said impatiently, and went back to his studies.

Henry wandered into the bungalow behind him, wincing at the drafty chill from the air conditioner. He picked up one of the X rays. In its black-and-white simplicity, it looked like a brooding thunderstorm.

"Devastating" he said. "Even a layman like myself can tell that's no good. Can it be fixed?"

"Bypass operation." Kumenyere gave him a look at the doctors' letterhead. "Almost routine for these chaps. But they're the best."

"What was Jumbe's reaction?"

"He hasn't seen the X rays yet. I've gradually prepared him for the worst."

"What about the poor bugger who actually needs the operation?"

"Ah, but he no longer needs it. He died ten days ago, in hospital."

"Unattended and unmourned?"

"I made it easy for him. After all, he did me a good turn. By presenting me with just the symptoms I needed, at the right time."

Henry studied the doctor's smoothly handsome, pious face.

"As long as we're talking about murder–"

"Are we?"

Henry shuddered. "Let's continue our conversation outdoors. The bloody cold in here will have me croaking like a frog."

Kumenyere picked up a heavy rifle and they walked down a rough track toward Big Momela, where islands of pink flamingos shimmered in the sun. All around them, for several square miles, was the Chanvai Game Sanctuary. A warden in a Land-Rover went bumping across a stretch of short grassland still wet in low places; the meadow was populated with buffalo and
kongoni
, a type of antelope with a sloping back like a giraffe's, and curly horns. Directly behind the crater lake, and fifty miles away, Kilimanjaro was slightly beclouded in an otherwise perfect sky.

Even as they walked in the humdrum noon of sun and insects, Henry slipped into a state of meditation, his mind filled with a vision of bloodstones. He had spent weeks in the Repository deep in the throat of Kilimanjaro, studying the stones for twenty hours a day. He had come to think of them as living entities, with intelligence, will, even the power of life and death over those who came into contact with them. His fellow explorers had faded to unimportant shadows in the radiance of the stones, and after a while they ceased to exist for Henry. When he decided to remove some of the stones and reveal what he had learned about FIREKILL to Kumenyere, he experienced no difficulty in murdering Jack Portline, who attempted to stop him from leaving the Repository with the diamonds.

But now, when he was in the doldrums, a sink of anxiety, Henry was frequently concerned that he'd made a mistake in taking away even a necessary handful of the bloodstones. He was neither superstitious nor inclined to occult explanations for the mysteries and paradoxes of existence, but he felt that if the stones had not been missing, the mountain would be quiet. He had experienced the power of the long-dead cat people, the Lords of the Storm, from the unimaginable distances of their tombs. While in the Catacombs he had been susceptible to the flood of imagery and perceptions that followed unwise eye contact with the creatures. Transformation, Erika had called it. One did not actually change shape or sprout catlike whiskers; but one became, for moments or even hours at a time, more animal than human. He'd been away from the Catacombs for several weeks, but he felt the haunting pressure of their eyes in his mind, their fierce disapproval. If he could put the bloodstones back, then perhaps– But that was idiotic. And not at all possible; things had gone too far, the stolen bloodstones were hostage to implacable ambitions: his own, and Robeson Kumenyere's.

"The mountain's heating up," Henry said forebodingly. "And the Kibo glaciers are already melting. Seismic activity is stronger than it's been at any time since 'sixty-six."

Kumenyere was gently incredulous. "You're worried that Kilimanjaro will erupt?"

"It won't take a major eruption. With the ice retreating, a million tons of rock could be loosened by the continuing jolts and come tumbling down from the rim. And the entrance to the Catacombs will be buried forever."

"I think Kilimanjaro has been in this state many times during the last ten thousand years. Yet the entrance was there to be found, by the clever Dr. Hardie."

"It was pure luck on his part," Henry snapped. "He had very little to go on. Some rock paintings above Nyangoro that seemed to be the faces of cheetahs, but were language, a schematic drawing, symbols he had the wit or inspiration to interpret as ultrasonic frequencies. A bright child with the proper sonar equipment could then have found his way to the Catacombs."

"He was the first. But you'll have the credit."

"Even if the Catacombs could survive a really serious upheaval, we ought to remove the FIREKILL bloodstones from the Repository. Without delay. There's too much at stake."

"You shouldn't be a worrier, Henry. It gives you no opportunity to enjoy life. You're going to be a very rich man, your past dishonor willingly forgiven."

"Forgiven! I was misjudged, falsely accused, shamed, ruined! You have no conception of the work I was capable of doing, the discoveries I might have made if they'd left me alone. England has despised me for thirty years. But someday they'll appreciate how deeply I loathe them all!"

"I'll personally supervise the erection of monuments to you all over the East African Federation; perhaps there'll even be one back home in Trafalgar Square, ha-ha. Now I have some good news. The fever at Ivututu has claimed more victims. Two are dead, two more in a condition that might be described as hopeless idiocy, their minds burned up."

"'Chapman?" Henry said, too eagerly. "Is he dead?"

"Not yet. But it's only a matter of time for all of them. It was certainly worth the great risk I took to introduce the virus; we've learned a great deal about it, and we may well develop an antivirus that will save countless black lives in future. So your friends will have been sacrificed in the service of two causes–oh, Henry, now look what you've done! All of your expensive cigarettes are in the dirt."

Kumenyere, rifle in the crook of one arm, bent gracefully to help the Englishman replace the unsoiled Dunhills in his gold case. He observed Henry's trembling hands. "Do you know what it is they say in the States? 'You're climbing the walls, man.' Ha!" Henry straightened, and screwed a gritty cigarette into his ebony holder.

"Does Jumbe know about the epidemic?"

"I've kept it from him. He would bear the responsibility for all those lives much too heavily."

"Yet he'd willingly blast half a million white South Africans into radioactive moonbeams, given the chance." Henry shook his head, dismissing the incongruity."It doesn't help us if all the fever victims die. Not if Erika Weller is roaming around free."

"I rather doubt that she is. She took off in a crippled aircraft in the middle of the night, and nothing has been heard from her since."

"Sheer incompetence, letting her get away like that!"

"An unfortunate combination of circumstances. We had no idea she could fly an airplane. Obviously she couldn't fly very well."

They broke through a living curtain of small dotted butterflies dancing in their path; the track took them downhill, past groundwater forest thick with tamarind and wild orange trees. A big green monitor lizard, bulbous with jowls, squinted at them from atop a termite-infested log. Henry stumbled over a root in the track, and Kumenyere put out a hand to keep him from falling.

"I think, Henry, that you should return to seclusion in Dar and let Nyshuri amuse you during these long days. The waiting is difficult. Even for me, and I have a great deal of preparation to do before I assume the presidency. Let the Russians and the Americans conduct their frantic investigations. They'll waste their energies looking six hundred miles in the wrong direction for the Catacombs. It's safe to presume that Erika Weller is dead. At your insistence, I passed on instructions concerning Raun Hardie to some capable friends of mine in America."

"There's only a possibility," Henry brooded, "that she knows where the Catacombs are. Hardie doesn't mention her in his account of the discovery. But it's common knowledge that she was raised and educated by her father; she accompanied him nearly everywhere until the day he was killed. I have this feeling in my bones–it's better to do away with the girl, before the Americans have a chance to interrogate her."

"So there are no more 'flies in the ointment.' Who else can find the Catacombs? Just you and I."

As they rounded a bend near the lakeshore, Kumenyere paused in a patch of shade and suddenly shouldered his high-powered rifle, throwing back the bolt, seating a cartridge designed to blow the heads off most game animals. Henry looked around in astonishment, then fear.

Kumenyere grimaced and waved him aside. "Get behind me. But move slowly and then keep still."

Henry Landreth looked back over his shoulder, seeing for the first time the old female elephant blocking the track ahead of them. She was chocolate colored from mudbaths, with a pitted raspy forehead and huge tusks turning gunmetal gray. She stood in a shifting pattern of light and shadow in a threat display, her trunk raised, one foot swinging. In Africa elephants are sized according to their estimated tusk weight: The matriarch might have been carrying a hundred and eighty pounds in matching ivories.

"
Hnyu mbaya sana
," Kumenyere murmured. "That one is very bad.

"Why don't we just go back now?" Henry said timidly, unnerved by the size of the elephant, knowing how fast she could charge if provoked.

"No. She's in my path. And I don't stand aside for elephants."

Kumenyere took aim with his .470 rifle. "They tramped my brother, and they nearly ruined my father's farm. They can be hunted to extinction, and I wouldn't care."

He fired. Henry cringed.

The old elephant roared and turned away, a foot and a half of her left tusk shot off, the pulp and nerve exposed. In her agony she reared up on her back legs, to a height of fifteen feet, and lost sight of them. She went crashing off into the swampy brush beside the track, sending flocks of rails and black-winged stilts into the air.