Catacombs (46 page)

They made a great blushing-pink scrawl of bird life, unbroken for miles, fading into the shimmering distances. When they arose in pinpoint flocks to cross the open lake, they flashed like stars returning home for the night.

Her eyes were already tired. There was too much of earth and sky to see all at once. And she was still recovering from the shock of her own face in a mirror. At least her hair was clean, Erika thought. Her skirt and walk shorts were new.

"Erika!"

She turned and saw Clarke coming at a near run from the direction of the lion-fenced animal pens sprawled behind the house. He dusted his hat off on his hip, took a stale cheroot from between his lips and threw it away, ran a hand through his hair in a vain attempt to spruce up. He looked big and dark against the sunset, except for the pearly gash of his grin.

"Hello," she said, and dropped her hands, feeling the weight of the cast on her right wrist and hand.

"It's good to see you up and around so soon. I thought another few days–"

"No, I'm much better. I had to get up. I was worried– "

He joined her on the porch, and Erika caught the tang of sweat. His eyes were rimmed with the caked dust of the plains. The knuckles of his right hand had been skinned. Up close he made her head ache. Too much vitality. It forced sadness on her, whirling into delirium. She had to move off, turn her back on him.

"Brute of a day," he said, slumping into
 
a chair and putting scuffed boots up on the porch rail. He snapped his fingers at a houseboy, who brought him, without having to be told, a fresh pack of his favorite smoke. "The Tanzanian government is making a gift of animals to stock a new park in Ghana. We have the licenses to supply those animals. Today on the Tarangire savanna we sighted a small breeding herd of Grévy's zebra. They're almost unknown this far south."

"That's what you do? Catch animals?"

He nodded. "Two of them gave us an all-day chase. Very hard on the vehicles. I spend nearly two thousand dollars a month to keep my lorries in running order."

"Hard on the zebras as well."

"We take pains with them. It requires ten men to lasso a full-grown Grévy's and rope him before he damages himself. We give them several injections: tranquilizers, cortisone. Even so they often die in captivity. When you're up to it you might like to come with us for a day, if there's time."

"If there's time? What do you mean?"

Clarke took the cheroot from his mouth, the sweet smoke of which had given her sharp hunger for another man. He pointed with it in a northeasterly direction.

"Your mountain, Erika. It's just as you said. She may erupt any day."

Erika was too deeply pained to speak. She had not actively thought about the Catacombs for some time. But images of the place–that everlasting moonglow, spiral caverns of the yellow men–were always in her mind, just at the level of sleep.

Clarke stood up. "We ought to have a talk about it. Over dinner. I'm dead ripe and needing a shower." He grinned. "I can tell you've enjoyed about as much of me as you can stand."

Erika smiled too, but her reaction time was slow–from all the medicine to dull pain, kill infections, give her rest and peace. He was in the house before she could stop him.

"Wait! I wanted to know–have you heard about Chips?"

"Later," he promised vaguely. "Later we'll talk."

After sundown it turned chilly on the high escarpment, a shinbone of antiquity gleaming beneath a three-quarter moon. They had dinner privately, away from his raucous crew, in Clarke's sitting room and office. Here there was a chimney of highly polished stone, a fire of acacia wood. The table was set with real silver; the chair backs were covered with lion skins. The meal was served by the cook: roast Egyptian goose stuffed with bananas, rice, and ginger; chapati bread; a maize dish with savory herbs. There were German wines of no real distinction. Erika was awkward with her left hand. She ate little but drank too much to fill a deepening depression; she drank until the fire blurred and she saw a nimbus around Clarke's combed-out mane. He was a compulsive talker and eater, attacking his plate filling potential silences with anecdotes about wild animals and men. She knew she was, had to be, grateful to this peculiar black Irishman for saving her life, for continuing to protect her at a considerable risk to himself. She was still a fugitive. But he was treating her like a dull child.

At last his mood, on a full belly, became less hectic. He paused to light a cheroot. Erika, exposing terror in a quick lift of her eyes, said what she'd been saving up to say.

"Chips is dead, isn't he?"

He reached behind him for another bottle of wine, Madeira this time, poured it into a clean glass. "Better drink this."

"I don't want it!"

Clarke pushed his plate aside and clenched his hands on the table.

"They're all dead, Erika. Ivututu Mission is deserted. The hospital closed."

She had two places to go to with her grief, back to bed or out into the luminous night. He let her go, allowed her a spell of privacy, then found her by one of the lion-proof fences at the' back end of the ranch, where the air was warmer from the gamy heat of the pens. He put an arm around her. It was, unexpectedly, what she wanted.

"Erika, you are in no way responsible for the deaths of your friends."

She shook her head, the motion accompanied by little rusty cries.

"The government of Tanzania will be held accountable. You have the means to make them pay dearly."

"How?"

"They have attempted to conceal the existence of the Catacombs. Why, we don't know. But the Catacombs are an archaeological treasure, you say. You deserve to share the credit for discovering them."

"I have no proof of what we found there."

"Get more proof, Erika."

"I can't go back. You said the mountain–"

"Is touchy, yes. Even now it may be too late. But worth the gamble. For his sake. If you loved him."

"Putting together an expedition of any size would take–"

"No expedition, Erika. You. Myself. A couple of men we'll need to pack in gear. What would you require? Cameras?"

"Yes, and hundreds of rolls of film." For a few moments her eyes cleared, her face took on a shine. Then she held up the cast on her right arm. "But I– The climb would be too difficult, I don't have the strength. What am I thinking of?"

"You could locate the Catacombs again."

"Yes. The site is easily recognizable."

"How did you find your way in the first time?"

"With ultrasonic equipment that revealed the structure of the Catacombs inside the mountain."

"Ah." Clarke looked pleased. He backed off to light a cheroot. "The sort of thing used in oil exploration?"

"Yes."

"That is ingenious."

"The Lords of the Storm left symbolic messages, chiseled into a rock face that endured for ten thousand years on the mountain. Macdonald Hardie wasn't the first man to see the symbols, but he was the first to realize what was meant by them."

"In two days, three at the most, I can obtain everything we'll need. Beginning with a long-range helicopter that will set us down wherever you say. Erika, Kilimanjaro is less than an hour's flying time from here."

"So close!"

He saw her leaning, tense with the expectation of it.

"But if we don't make up our minds now–" Clarke rolled the murky cheroot between his fingers, letting her think about it just long enough. Then, casually, came the coup de grace.

"I think your Chips would have said–Go, Erika. Go to it old girl."

O
liver stayed the day in his drainpipe, undetected, although construction work went on around him. At noon the machines were stilled and the workmen ate, then napped head to toe in the narrow shade of jacarandas across the highway. When they left for good he came out cautiously in the pink of sundown and found a swallow of soda left in a can, crusts of bread in a wrapper with a little meat and grease. The ants had got there first, but he brushed them off and wolfed the bites, sitting behind a piece of pipe while traffic went by on the unpaved highway.

At dusk a car came up the road with a tire flapping and pulled off at the construction site. Oliver stuck his head around the lip of the drainpipe just as a pair of headlights rounded on him. He pulled back quickly and crawled to the other end of the pipe.

A car door opened, closed. He heard footsteps. Then a gruff but feminine voice.

"You!"

Oliver started but made no sound.

The footsteps came toward him.

"I saw you when I drove off the roadway. Come out, I won't eat you." She repeated this in Swahili, and added, "I have a flat tire. I am unable to change it myself. I have a shilling for you, if you'll be kind enough to lend a hand. But don't think you can take advantage of me because I'm alone, and a woman. I also have a rifle, and I am a crack shot. Now, if you don't show yourself promptly in order to earn a shilling for a few minutes' honest labor, I shall think you're up to some mischief. In that case I shall pot you now, and ask questions later. Am I understood?"

Oliver failed to move. A shot rang out, chipping concrete above his head. He sprang up instantly, raising his hands.

"That's better. Come around to me, now, slowly, and let's have a look at you."

He could see her in the beam of the lights from the car. She was a tall woman, almost as tall as Oliver, with a nose sharp as an elbow and high color in her cheeks. She had gray hair rather badly pinned up, so that strands of it fell over her ears and face. She was wearing a denim culotte, almost ankle length, and a cheap porkpie canvas hat with a red-and-green striped band. Her rifle, steadily held, was an old Enfield.

"I am Emma Chase. From Njombe. Who are you?"

"Oliver, I."

As he approached with the wind she got a whiff of him, and frowned.

"What's this? Were you in a fire?"

Oliver nodded, dejectedly. Emma Chase set the butt of her rifle on the ground.

"Why didn't you say something? I'm a medical missionary. Go on, put your hands down, and come with me to the car."

She had Oliver sit on the front seat with his feet on the ground and take off his suit coat and shirt remnant. She used a flashlight to examine his skin and then his broken fingers.

"What a mess. I can clean you, bandage you, give you antibiotics and something for the pain. But those fingers should be attended to in hospital, otherwise I'm afraid they won't be of much use to you ever again. Did you catch them in a, press?"

Oliver nodded; then his head remained bowed and he dripped tears.

"Not. likely! These other marks–here, around your neck, on your wrists. They were caused by restraints of some sort. Oh, don't think I haven't seen it before. Uganda. The Central African Republic. You were tortured. Why? Was it the police?"

"No."

"You're in trouble, though, aren't you? Well. Tell me about it. You're my patient, Oliver, and I have sworn the Hippocratic oath. That is powerful
juju.
Should I betray you, my ears would fall off my head."

While she worked on him, and coaxed him, Oliver parted with bits and pieces of his story.

"So you want to kill this man. If you find him. Well, I don't think you will. It's a wild goose chase. You won't get to Kilimanjaro in the shape you're in, and penniless to boot."

She stood back, lips pursed, to look at him.

"There. You'll bear a few scars. Your hair will grow back in a few weeks where it was singed. Do you feel up to helping me with the tire?"

When they had the old tire off and the new one, nearly as bald as chicken skin, in its place, Emma gave Oliver his shilling, two sandwiches she'd brought with her, and a cup of hot coffee from her thermos.

"My advice is to forget about it. You're lucky to be alive. You'll find more gold. If you should catch up to this man, and I don't concede there is the remotest possibility of that, you'd only be helpless again with that hand as it is. At his mercy."

"No. Not helpless. This time, surprising him."

"So your mind is made up. You won't listen to common sense. I suppose you could ride with me as far as Dodoma–I don't relish making the drive alone at night. Dodoma will put you closer, but not all that close, to Kilimanjaro. Tomorrow, if you'd care to stay around until the end of our meetings, I might be able to persuade another of our society's delegates to drive you as far as Arusha. That's not a promise, but I–"

Emma was astonished to find Oliver on his knees in front of her clutching at her hand, a sheen of fresh tears in his eyes.

"Oliver, stop this ridiculous display! If I thought there was any chance you might succeed in getting close to this man, and be killed for your pains, I'd leave you right here. Now get up. I'll need a full night's sleep in the capital if I want to have my wits about me in the morning."

Kilimanjaro, Tanzania

May 23

Nine twenty A.M.

D
uring the past twenty-four hours Henry Landreth had developed either pneumonia or a pulmonary edema caused by the altitude. His symptoms were fluid in the lungs, weakness, a bad and sometimes bloody cough, blue lips and nails, a pulse of 120 when he exerted himself even slightly. He had a fever. Henry's condition was a drain on the small cylinder of oxygen Belov had with him; but there was nothing else he could do for Henry except keep him warm and out of the weather.