Catacombs (39 page)

"Do you play gin, Willem?"

"
Ja
." Willem looked at Jan-Nic, who nodded his approval.

"Then the evening shouldn't be a total loss," Hecuba said. "Come along."

H
enry Landreth's head ached severely from the long jarring trip by Land-Rover to the base of Kilimanjaro. His driver, an Army sergeant named Humbert Kivinje, was one of those who drove blithely, at fearsome speeds, using his horn instead of his brake pedal to bail him out of the inevitable tight spots. All along the highways of the country one could see the rusting hulks of vehicles come to a smashing bad end, but they provided no object lesson for Sergeant Kivinje. On several occasions, faced with what he thought was disaster, Henry had demanded, and finally pleaded shamelessly, for a reduction in speed. Kivinje had merely grinned at him.

"Sir, you have safe-conduct from Jumbe," he shouted, as if the letter which Henry carried placed them all on the side of the angels, including the people and animals who sauntered obliviously across high-velocity thoroughfares whenever it pleased them to do so.

After that Henry sat with a good grip on the Rover, his eyes closed, until he heard a distant rumble of thunder and looked up to find that they had nearly arrived. Kilimanjaro was directly ahead. It was about five in the afternoon. He could see nothing of the upper reaches of the mountain. To the south and west the skies were clear, an ashen blue over the rainless land. But ominous storms, with flashes of lightning, rumbled over Kilimanjaro. The huge mountain, gradually heating up, spewing invisible gases into the atmosphere, was making its own weather. He felt sick again; but this time it was from the excitement of haying returned.

The town of Moshi, between the plains and peaks of Kilimanjaro, had been taken over, at Jumbe's order, by the military: Families were being relocated from the
shambas
, small homesteads, and
ujamaa
cooperatives on the rich slopes of the lower mountain. The roads in the area were jammed with cars, trucks, and livestock.

The Land-Rover was stopped at a checkpoint on the highway a few miles east of Moshi. An officer in sunglasses and faultless dress greens told them they could proceed no further. Sergeant Kivinje hopped out with his hand suggestively placed on the butt of his pearl-handled revolver and launched a tirade in Swahili, confident that Executive Order had precedence over rank. He jabbed a finger at his passenger in the Land-Rover, imperiously offered the document signed by Jumbe, and promised the officer he would be executed before sunrise if he detained them a moment longer.

How they loved their petty exercises of power, Landreth thought, watching the scene expressionlessly. It was one of the reasons they would never amount to anything.

The officer held the letter gingerly; it was pregnant with the seal of government. He peered at Henry Landreth and shrugged.

"You are going up Kilimanjaro? It is foolish. Above eight thousand feet the tracks are no good. There have already been floods near Marangu. You may not come back alive."

"I know the mountain and its moods very well," Henry said impatiently. "Do you wish to speak to Jumbe himself? He would be very unhappy taking his valuable time to speak to you."

The officer sighed and ostentatiously stamped a document of his own; they were allowed to pass. Sergeant Kivinje returned to the Land-Rover chuckling, and handed Jumbe's letter back to Henry.

"Where to now?"

"Take the Yingi road to the Nyangoro Coffee Cooperative. The manager will still be there. I'll stay the night and outfit myself from their stores."

The trip into Moshi was unavoidable but tortuous, the din terrific. A well-settled, prosperous area of nearly fifteen hundred square miles had been emptied by troops who were too few to do an adequate job, public servants cowed by the size of the ever-swelling mob. Nearly everyone was angry. Loudspeakers on public buildings blared confusing instructions to the refugees. Rumanian-built buses expelled quantities of oily smoke. The displaced persons who had relatives elsewhere were trying to cram themselves aboard the buses or into jitneys, locally known as
matatus
. Owners of private vehicles, even motor scooters, were charging exorbitant fees for transportation.

With the thunder of the mountain in the background, rumors of a cataclysmic eruption imminent, the swirling gray clouds pressing down toward the town, lightning like cannon fire in the gloom, Henry Landreth was reminded of the Malay Peninsula before World War Two, of a panicked populace fleeing the Japanese. But all this was happening at his instigation, arising from his obsessive need to stand, alone, on the threshold of the Catacombs. Discoverer of the great achievements of the Lords of the Storm.
Possessor
. As close to the infinite and the godlike as a man can come. When the Land-Rover was rocked in the street, when anxious black men attempted to come aboard, Henry ordered Sergeant Kivinje to draw his pistol and shoot the next man who dared.

Fortunately no homicides resulted from their ordeal. West of Moshi traffic quickened, though it remained heavy going to Arusha, where more accommodations were available in the abandoned towers of a noble but failed experiment, the East Africa Community. They soon reached the Yingi road, meeting another barrier. But their documentation was accepted without question by the soldiers stationed there, and they were waved through a crowd of evacuees waiting for transportation, carrying everything from babes in arms to zinc washtubs.

Not far along the Yingi road, in the cultivated foothills, they were jarred by an earth tremor of short duration. It was the first real evidence of what might be seething deep within Kilimanjaro.

Sergeant Kivinje pointed solemnly in the direction of the invisible summit of Kibo.

"Not so good for you to be up there if the mountain explodes."

"The mountain will not explode," Henry said calmly.

Above their heads a helicopter flapped. He looked up and caught a glimpse of it circling above the treetops at six thousand feet, just before it vanished in a drizzling mist.

"W
hy do you have so many snakes?" Willem said, looking around at the terrariums in Lady Hecuba's boudoir. Some of them were brightly lit, simulating desert sunshine; others were as shadowy as a jungle.

"I'm fond of them," Lady Hecuba said. She placed a sealed deck of cards on the little baize-covered game table. "They make intriguing pets."

"Dangerous, no?"

"Some are. You recognize the infamous boomslang, of course."

Willem grunted.

"And the saw-scaled viper."

Willem broke open the cards; he frowned and placed a finger in the crook of his elbow. "I saw a man die once. Bitten here. Thirty seconds he lived, no more."

"An extremely venomous specimen, no doubt. Only one milligram of the venom of the krait is enough to kill the average man."

She studied Willem for a few moments, wetting her frosted red lips, smiling. He was wearing a loose fitting shirt with belled sleeves; the shirt was unbuttoned to the shiny notch of his diaphragm, and tucked into his trousers. His chest was bare, hairless, well-tanned.

"Will you excuse me for a few moments? I have a rather sick Boaedon libeatus. He has nematodes, I'm afraid, and he's also having trouble molting. I'd hate to lose him–they are rather difficult to come by."

Hecuba selected drops from a medicine cabinet and opened the cage of the African house snake, a three-foot specimen, its skin half peeled, its color a brownish black. She picked up the snake from its bed of rocks, holding it with one hand just behind the head.

"He's not dangerous at all," she assured Willem.

"But he hates to take his medicine. Would you lend a hand? Just hold him carefully about the middle and I'll do the rest."

Willem gingerly accepted responsibility for half of the snake. Hecuba measured and squeezed two drops of viscous liquid into the open mouth.

"Good. Now if you will gently take him behind the head, just as I am holding him, and keep his head up so the medicine goes down in good order, I'll ruck out his cage."

With a little cordless vacuum cleaner Hecuba removed the rock-hard crystals of uric acid and bits of shed skin that had collected in the cage. Then she changed the drinking and bathing water.

"You're doing very well," she said to the stolid but perspiring Willem. "Now just lay him back on the rocks, poor old darling, while I swiftly attend to another matter."

As soon as she was certain that Willem was fully occupied with the business of getting the large and unyielding house snake back into his habitat, Hecuba slid open the door of another terrarium which, on casual inspection, looked empty. But she knew just what she wanted and where it would be concealed. She reached in and withdrew the coiled, beautifully- banded little thing, bracelet size and small enough to fit in the palm of her hand. At a glance its head was indistinguishable from its tail.

Hecuba took two quick steps and with the stealth of a pick-pocket reached deep inside Willem's unbuttoned shirt. She deposited the snake in a loose pouch of silken material, inches from his liver.

Willem dropped the African house snake and straightened with a snort of surprise and fear as Lady Hecuba stepped nimbly back out of his reach. His little eyes widened as he felt the body of the wormlike snake against his flesh. His hand jumped to the opening of his shirt.

"NO!" Hecuba said. "Don't make any abrupt moves. Do nothing to startle him. He is a little sluggish from having been kept a degree or two colder than he likes. But he will soon warm up from your body heat. Then he will be unpredictable."

"What is it?" Willem said in a strangled voice.

"A coral snake. Highly venomous but not unusually disagreeable. As long as you are very careful you may coexist with him indefinitely. But if you try to remove him, unless you have exceptional nerves you will undoubtedly botch the job. That means death."

She saw, in his eyes, the momentary urge to kill her that was almost stronger than his fear of the lethal nudging coldness. His sweat had begun to run in streams. Hecuba smiled, thinking that a muscle might soon begin to twitch uncontrollably and attract the reprimanding sting.

Then she heard Nyshuri crying for her outside the villa, a desperate, wounded cry.

S
he had wrecked the Toyota, almost within sight of Villa Bib-Shala. Run off the road by a grimy hooting tanker coming around a stalled vehicle abandoned in the southbound lane, the car had caromed and smashed its way down a slope paved with a jumble of rocks strewn there during construction of the highway. Everything from a front wheel to the oil pan, the transmission, and the tailpipe assembly was ripped away, but the Toyota didn't roll over, nor did it meet a rock big enough to punch the engine back into the passenger compartment. The gas tank remained intact, but there wasn't enough gas left to consume the wreck even if it had caught fire.

Nyshuri sat perfectly still for thirty seconds, bruised and shaken, a death grip on the wheel, staring at a wedge of blue sea visible through one side of the smashed windshield.

The door on her side grated open. She felt a hand on her shoulder.

"How badly are you hurt?" she was asked in English.

Nyshuri turned her battered face slowly to Michael Belov. Her vision was blurred; she ought to have recognized him, but saw only that he was nicely dressed, deeply tanned, from his manner a man of substance, perhaps a diplomat.

He seemed truly concerned. She tried to answer him, but no words came out.

"Your car's a total loss, I'm afraid. Where are you going? Can I take you?" He touched her face Despite the angle of the late afternoon sun her skin was cold, dotted with pinpoints of perspiration. Then his hands were all over her, feeling her bones, pressing gently into the muscled areas of her stomach and abdomen.

"Does that hurt? Here? Good. Listen to me. You've had a narrow escape. I don't think your injuries are too serious, but there's a danger of shock reaction. I want you to come with me."

Nyshuri licked her lips. "No. My . . . friend's house. Expecting me."

"Where?"

She nodded fractionally toward a fingerlike oasis of trees between the blazing land and the foaming edge of the sea three hundred yards distant "Just there."

"I'll take you."

"Thank you. Kind."

Belov reached around Nyshuri to get a hand under her arm so he could help her out of the car. Her head drooped. Looking down, she saw the pistol tucked into his waistband beneath his striped jacket. She was turning numb, and felt colder still.

"No..."

"Don't worry. The trick is to get moving. Lean against me. Have a go at it. There . .

"W-who . . . are you?"

"Your friend. Don't talk. Conserve your strength. Breathe deeply if you can."

They left the wreck behind. She was a big girl and she wore platform shoes, which were of no use in negotiating the rocky downslope. For the better part of the way he had to haul her along, her head nodding vertiginously against his shoulder. But when they reached a narrow track winding through groves to the wall of Hecuba's villa, she seemed slowly to come around.

"I know you," Nyshuri said suddenly.

"Do you?"