Leopard Hunts in Darkness - Smith Wilbur - Страница 33

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"You promised ten o'clock," she said, and despite his protestations, scrupulously divided the bill in half and paid her share.

When he parked outside the apartment, she looked at him seriously for a moment before she asked, "Coffee?"

"With the greatest of pleasure." He started to open the door, but she stopped him.

"Right from the start, let's get it straight," she said. "The coffee is instant Nescaf6 and that's all. No gymnastics nothing else, okay?"

"Okay," he agreed.

"Let's go." Her apartment was furnished with a portable tape recorder, canvas covered cushions and a single camp-bed on which her sleeping-bag was neatly rolled. Apart from the cushions, the floor was bare but polished, and the walls were papered with her photographs. He wandered around studying them while she made the coffee in the kitchenette.

"If you want the bathroom, it's through there," she called. "Just be careful." It was more darkroom than ablution, with a light-proof black nylon zip-up tent over the shower cabinet and jars of chemicals and packets of photographic paper where in any other feminine bathroom there would have been scents and soaps.

They lolled on the cushions, drank the coffee, played Beethoven's Fifth on the tape, and talked of Africa. Once or twice she made passing reference to his book, showing that she had read it with attention.

"I've got an early start tomorrow-" at last she reached across and took the empty mug out of his hand. "Good night, Craig."

"When can I see you again?"

"I'm not sure, I'm flying up into the highlands early tomorrow. I don't know how long." Then she saw his expression and relented. "I'll call you at the Mono when I get back, if you like?"

"I

like."

"Craig, I'm beginning to like you as a friend, perhaps, but I'm not looking for romance. I'm still hurting just as long as we understand that," she told him as they shook hands at the door of the apartment.

Despite her denial, Craig felt absurdly pleased with himself as he drove back to the Monomatapa. At this stage he did not care to analyse too deeply his feelings for her, nor to define his intentions towards her. It was merely a pleasant change not to have another celebrity boffer trying to add his name to her personal scoreboard.

Her powerful physical attraction for him was made more poignant by her reluctance, and he respected her talents and accomplishments and was in total sympathy with her love of Africa and her compassion for its peoples.

"That's enough for now," he told himself as he parked the Volkswagen.

The assistant manager met him in the hotel lobby, wrin ing his hands with anguish, and led him through to his office.

"Mr. Mellow, I have had a visit from the police special branch while you were out. I had to open your deposit box for them, and let them into your room."

"God damn it, are they allowed to do that?" Craig was outraged.

"You don't understand, here they can do whatever they like," the assistant manager hurried on. "They removed nothing from the box, Mr. Mellow I can assure you of that."

"Nevertheless, I'd like to check it," Craig demanded grimly.

He thumbed through his travellers" cheques and they tallied. His return air-ticket was intact, as was his passport but they had been through the "survival kit" that Henry Pickering had provided. The gilt field assessor's identification badge was loose in its leather cover.

Ino could order a search like this?" he asked the assistant manager as they relocked the box.

"Only someone pretty high up."

"Tungata Zebiwe," he thought bitterly. "You vicious, nosy bastard how you must have changed." raig took his report of his visit to Tuti Rehabilitation Centre for Henry Pickering up to the embassy, and Morgan Oxford accepted it and offered him coffee.

J might be here a longer time than I thought," Craig told him, 'and I just can't work in an hotel room."

"Apartments are hell to find," Morgan shrugged. "I'll see what I can do." He phoned him the next day. "Craig, one of our girls is going home on a month's vacation. She is a fan of yours, and she will sub-let her flat for six hundred dollars. She leaves tomorrow." The apartment was a bed-sitter, but it was comfortable and airy. There was a broad table that would do as a writing, desk Craig set a pile of blank Typer bond paper in the centre of it with a brick as a paper-weight, his Concise Oxford Dictionary beside that and said aloud: "Back in business." He had almost forgotten how quickly the hours could pass in never-never land, and in the deep pure joy of watching the finished sheets of paper pile up at the far end of the table.

Morgan Oxford phoned him twice during the next few days, each time to invite him to diplomatic parties, and each time Craig refused, and finally unplugged the telephone. When he relented on the fourth day and plugged the extension in again6, the telephone rang almost immediately.

"Mr. Mellow." Itwas an African voice. "We have had great difficulty finding you. Hold on, please, for General Fungabera." "Craig, it's Peter." The familiar heavy accent and charm.

"Can we meet this afternoon? Three o'clock? I will send a driver." Peter Fungabera's private residence was fifteen miles out of town on the hills overlooking Lake Macillwane. The house had originally been built in the 1920s by a rich remittance man, black sheep younger son of an English aircraft manufacturer. It was surrounded firstly by wide verandas and white fretwork eaves and then by five acres of lawns and flowering trees.

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