Slaves to Fortune. Tom Lanoye
across the globe.
On Tony’s memory sticks there were constructions and trajectories that undeniably fingered him as the architect and route planner. But why should he put on the hair shirt? He had been an errand boy, nothing more. He had followed his masters’ marching orders without insubordination. If they’d been hoping he’d be the get-out clause that would ensure their collective impunity, they had the wrong man. For the first time in his life, he was going to categorically follow their beloved principle: ‘Help yourself, no one else will.’
They had tried to hammer in the unwritten rule—‘the Law’—from his first workday onwards. Each employee, they had warned him, would be judged on his quarterly results, not on the vague feelings of satisfaction of some client or other. This was neither cheating nor negligence, they thought. In the long term, it was the client in particular, each client, who was better off with a stronger bank. That was how it worked, the Invisible Hand, the tentacle that governed the free market better and more rationally than God his Creation. Help yourself, and the whole world would be better for it.
Tony hadn’t openly protested, even though the Law clashed with his ethics as a programmer, his principles as a dyed-in-the-wool democrat, and his sense of duty as a spouse, and later, a father. And, above all, he didn’t like to be forced to do anything he didn’t believe in one hundred percent.
This internal conflict was the only thing that irritated him about his job. Ostensibly, he had submitted meekly to the banking uniform—a tie and designer labels. Internally, and that was what counted, he had continued to see himself as some kind of rebel. A latent anarchist. However fiercely he defended his corporatist pride to the outside world, it didn’t prevent him feeling on the inside that he was a missing link. An autonomous pivot between the normal tribe he came from and the master race of high finance to which he would never be admitted.
And which he’d never wanted to belong to, in the first place. He was neither one nor the other. He was himself. And that secret feeling of honour was something no one could take away from him.
His latent resistance had turned into overt revolt shortly after his department head had called him a leech and a conman down the phone. The heads of other departments had come to threaten him, too, all the way to his office, which they had never set foot in before. One of them, a red-faced brute in a double-breasted suit, foaming at the mouth, had unexpectedly taken a swing at him with a balled fist covered in rings. The fellow was probably still coked up, too. Once one party drug wears off, you need another.
Tony had been able to turn his face away in a bewildered reflex. The punch had grazed his jaw without doing any visible damage, but his cheek was still sore a week later. A humiliating phantom pain that only let up when Tony made up his mind what to do. You couldn’t even call it rebellion. It was more about finding an antidote for the poison.
From now on, he swore—as he emptied his drawers and collected his memory sticks, packed his laptop in the sports bag, not forgetting his framed photo of Martine and Klara—from now on he would live life the way he’d been brought up. Help yourself? You could say that again. He didn’t just know the programmes for embellishing bank balances and pimping up long-term government budgets.
He also knew the paths a person of flesh and blood could take to go up in smoke.
And even here, Tony thought—sweating on this hilltop in Mpumalaga at the foot of God’s Porch—even here, the Law worked. Even here, I and I alone am the master of my own destiny. He wiped his sweaty palms on his cotton safari trousers and shouldered his gun again. He hadn’t been a bad marksman during his military service. According to his training officer, he possessed all the qualities you needed to become a sniper in urban combat. Accuracy plus patience, patience, patience.
It wasn’t the kind of thing you could forget. It was a gift. The only thing you had to do was pull the trigger at the right moment. What could go wrong? There was hardly any wind; there wasn’t a single reason to believe that the bullet would miss its target. Its head had been notched with a cross so as to burst behind the eye socket on impact. The animal would die instantly with a minimum of suffering. It sounded cruel but it was humane.
For minutes on end, Tony stood there, trying to gird his loins, but again he didn’t manage to pull the bloody trigger. He was forced to watch helplessly through his scope as the rhino cow turned her head away again. She revealed the contours of her magical, majestic double horn, the price of which, per kilo, exceeded that of gold. She sniffed around suspiciously, her head back, her nose in the air. Then she bent down toward her baby. He was standing next to her, panting away after frolicking in the mud of the watering hole. The place where his own horn would grow was marked only by a small bump. How old was this calf? A few weeks? Months?
Tony let his gun drop. He couldn’t do this. His right leg was shaking, sweat was running into his eye again. His armpits stank. Thank God the light breeze was blowing in his direction, away from the watering hole; otherwise his presence would have been betrayed long before. He rested his back against the pickup and rolled his shoulders around to relax them, breathing deeply in and out. A zebra stallion brayed in the distance, a family of warthogs trotted toward the waterline at a respectable distance from the rhinos, the wading birds were still pecking away like crazy, and the colossal red sun sank ever deeper into the horizon. How much time was left until darkness fell? Which escape route should he choose?
And what would happen if he missed the eye, and the animal was only wounded? That wasn’t an option. He had to hit his target with the first shot.
He pulled himself together and aimed again.
His heart winced. The endearingly clumsy rhino calf was searching between its mother’s back legs for a nipple. It wasn’t easy, with all those skin folds and layers of fat. The calf just kept on feeling around, searching.
The rhino cow didn’t interfere. She stood there with her legs wide apart, somewhat peevishly—or was that more silly anthropomorphism? A little bird with a red beak was sitting on the cow’s hunched back, pecking away at parasites. The cow just let it all happen.
Again, Tony had her right eye in his sights; again, his finger failed him. Now he was paralyzed by the thought of the suckling calf. What would happen to a calf like that in the African night? He shuddered to think. Next to a corpse that would attract scavengers from kilometres and kilometres away? God, he wasn’t about to sentence one living being to death, but two. He could picture it already. The baby would be snatched and dragged off by a crocodile because it had dared to venture too close to the water’s edge. Or it would be attacked in the middle of the night by hyenas with slimy, already-bloodied maws. Or by a pack of Cape hunting dogs. In ten minutes they could tear an impala to bits. They might need slightly longer for such a thick-skinned baby.
He wiped the sweat off his top lip with his wrist. Should he shoot twice, then, so as to grant the baby a merciful death, too? That would be even harder for him. He was no brute. Two shots would result in lost time and a racket, with all the attendant risks. The fight against poaching had been drastically stepped up in recent years. You could read all about that online, too. The government and the game managers were co-operating more closely. As well as night vision goggles and reconnaissance planes, they now possessed the most modern forms of communication, and had even gone so far as to acquire munitions, recently—the poaching gangs were becoming so foolhardy. In the Umfolozi game reserve, the former hunting ground of King Shaka Zulu, there had been a bloody clash between a poaching gang and a surveillance patrol, with deaths on both sides and a fuss in the international press.
It could actually be considered a miracle, Tony realized, that he hadn’t already been caught red-handed. The risks he was running were outrageous. That was why he’d cooked up the plan on his own, without any nosy parkers or potential snitches, leaving no loose ends, no helpers who could turn against you on the way back. A life wasn’t worth much in this part of the world. You saw plenty of stories in the papers. A single horn sold for enough money on the Vietnamese black market to ensure a dozen families a generous standard of living for several years. It didn’t do much for his spirits. The one chance I have, Tony thought, is to act fast. I shoot, I drive over, I get out the axe, I strike, and I hurry back to the hole in the fence. The night and the unlit access