Slaves to Fortune. Tom Lanoye
beat off a few mosquitoes and took aim.
To his dismay, he saw the zebra stallion he’d just heard braying many times appear some way behind the hunched back of the rhinoceros cow. The stallion was the first to descend a low ridge; the herd followed in his footsteps, in dribs and drabs, in a messy line. A family of giraffes ran along with them at a slow gallop, thirsty, majestic. Tony had been so focussed on his prey, he hadn’t seen them coming. He suppressed an expletive. What else was about to turn up? A herd of gnus? A watering hole like this could be incredibly busy at this time of day, and that made all of the animals nervous. They were venturing into treacherous terrain. Lions often lay in wait here. Tony needed to strike before the rhino cow cleared off. Rhinos liked their privacy; it wasn’t in their nature to share a lair or a watering hole. There you go! The cow was getting restless. Her large pointed ears turned in all directions; she sniffed for hostile odours again. Stepping backward, she began to rock her massive head to and fro.
Tony cursed and followed her with his gun. He couldn’t get the eye cleanly in the cross hairs anymore. I should have pulled the trigger just now, he muttered. At the same time, he was overwhelmed by the hefty grace of his prey. Her nervous stamping carried all the way over to him; he saw quivers run across her dusty flanks. In her neck, under her legs, and in her groins there were folds like an old leather armchair, her armoured skin stretched between them, pockmarked like magnified, concrete-coloured orange peel. He saw the shaking of her heavy, hanging belly, the curling of her short but powerful tail. What an awe-inspiring, beautiful creature she was! Millions of years of precarious evolution and an irrepressible survival instinct.
Tony’s own Klara flashed through his mind; he’d only spoken to her a couple of times in the past year. Surreptitiously and briefly, via Skype and all kinds of false accounts and digital back doors. His wife and his daughter were the bait he would have chosen, himself. Not only the government would be looking for him. The bank had a different name by now—its relaunch had been generously subsidized by the government—and it had hired not only most of the old bank directors but most of the researchers, too. Those Judases were good at their jobs. They had given Tony hushed-up information about clients often enough, or insider knowledge that bordered on the illegal. He couldn’t be too careful.
But it was also high time he took the step toward his potential deliverance, towards rehabilitation, however bloody and difficult that step had to be. His odyssey had lasted long enough. His life’s course couldn’t just end here. He’d already given up too much, invested too much for that. He had the right to a second chance. A future, just like everyone else.
He determinedly took aim again, gritting his teeth with determination. And at last a crisp shot rang out at the foot of God’s Porch.
Tony was surprised. He wasn’t the one who had fired it. He let his gun drop and looked at the rhino in disbelief. One of her temples had been blown away, eye and all. Blood gushed out. An expert shot.
For the moment, the cow remained on her feet, shuddering. She bellowed briefly but dolefully, stamping her back legs truculently as the wading birds rose up above her, the zebras and giraffes fled around her in disarray, and the echo of the shot rumbled behind her, ever deeper and higher into the ravine.
Then she fell with a dull thud. In the distance, a songbird made its presence known again.
◆ ◆ ◆
It wasn’t a large gang that had stolen a march on him, as Tony feared for a split second—his heart skipping a few beats at the thought that he had accidentally found himself face to face with half a dozen poachers. Imagine if he had been the first to shoot, and they’d fired at him after that! With their superior numbers and undoubtedly automatic weapons! He could have been dead by now. Helplessly riddled with bullets, left behind to disappear without a trace, twelve thousand kilometres from home, eaten by vultures and worms, a carcass of uncertain origin.
But soon his panic ebbed away. It was replaced by a cautious sense of relief. His opponent turned out to be a lone man, just like himself. And, judging by his bold act, he hadn’t even noticed Tony.
Even before the shot had died away, a safari jeep raced to the watering hole with a shadow at the wheel. The canvas protecting the back seats featured the same logo as the bonnet: a graphic representation of a springbok, with the words Nasionale Krugerwildtuin underneath it.
For a moment, Tony thought that his opponent was simply better prepared than he was. This fellow hadn’t bought a stolen four-by-four in Jo’burg; he’d carjacked one in the vicinity. An entirely appropriate vehicle, which no one would frown at if it were spotted, parked on the forbidden byroads of a neighbouring safari park. Brilliantly planned.
But when the man got out, surrounded by the cloud of dust his abruptly braking jeep had thrown up, Tony’s mild admiration turned into enmity. This wasn’t fair. It was Tony’s right to be standing there, he thought, down there in that dust cloud, down there by that water. His right—after all the trouble he’d gone to to get this far, a foreigner in a remote, unpredictable country, and a numbers person at that, which meant he rarely came into contact with animals, and certainly not in order to kill them. His opponent, on the other hand, was a professional park guide. That was much easier.
Tony watched the man through his telescopic sights with increasing dismay. A black giant of around 50 with a gammy leg and bloodshot eyes, creamy white teeth, grey stubble, and a grimace that looked as gloomy as it was grim, he was wearing the uniform that came with the job: sturdy shoes, knee-high green socks, a dark pair of shorts with pockets on the thighs, and a khaki-coloured shirt with breast pockets and green epaulettes on which the reserve’s emblem was repeated in miniature.
Tony remembered that uniform only too well. He had admired it, not two years ago, during his stay in Africa’s largest wildlife park with Martine and Klara. They may even have met this man in his capacity as guard.
That possibility made Tony’s blood boil.
For ten days, they had exchanged their converted barn in Belgium for a country as big as Western Europe. They hadn’t nearly enough time—they’d realized that right away. They hadn’t seen much more than the Kruger Wildlife Park, two vineyards in Franschhoek, and the view of Table Mountain from Cape Town.
But what a staggering panorama that had been! The bright-blue bay with its V&A Waterfront, the lattice of the busy streets in the City Bowl, wedged between Devil’s Peak and Lion’s Head, the elongated Parade with its palm trees, the smoggy patches on the northern horizon… After the immense, ever-changing landscape that he and Martine had admired from the hire car for hours on end, this lavish vista made them feel even more regretful. They resolved to return as soon as possible and do this magnificent country justice.
Nothing ever came of their resolution. They just didn’t have time. The ten-day trip was one of the very few real trips Tony had ever allowed himself. Martine had pressed for it for so long, and the bank, back then, seemed to be heading toward double-digit profit growth. They could, briefly, do without him. For once, he even accepted the risk that, while he was gone, the newly recruited whiz-kids would steal his niche. These days they were snatched from university even before their finals and given a five-year contract straight off, in exchange for that period in their lives when they didn’t yet have a time-consuming family, but did have the endurance of an athlete. Those pups could work for two nights in a row without losing any of their enthusiasm. Well, just let them try it, the suckers. Let them muddle along without him for once. Just to play it safe, he’d stowed away a few files behind double passwords. There were others he’d failed to mention during the briefing. They’d just have to get on with it. He’d had to do that, too, when he joined the bank.
Klara had just turned four back then, during their jaunt, but two years later she still remembered the herd of elephants and the one lion they’d seen close up, not to mention the family of amusing meerkats, and the warthog with eight piglets. And the hippos! Once Klara got going about them? Their wide-open mouths with birds in, pecking between their teeth? And her very own pink Hello Kitty binoculars, used to spot everything? After that, Tony could just sit back and listen for a few minutes. Klara would rattle on endlessly to oblige Daddy.
At