Elephant Song - Smith Wilbur - Страница 42

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Malawi customs regulations allowed them to import a new car and sell it locally at the end of their term.

Chetti Singh paid them twice the US value of the Cadillac in Malawi kwacha on arrival.  They could live in princely style on for the full three years of their tour i this amount n Mwi while still retaining use of the car and saving their official salaries.

When they left, Chetti Singh took over the vehicle, ran it for a year, until the next arrangement matured at which time he placed the Cadillac on the showroom floor of his Toyota agency with a price tag of three times its original US value.  It was usually sold within the week.  No profit was too small to despise; no loss was too small to abhor.  it was not by accident that over the years Chetti Singh had amassed a fortune the full extent of which not even his, wife could guess at.

At the warehouse gates Chawe swung open the boom to allow him to drive the Cadillac through.

Yes?  Chetti Singh asked the big Angoni.  He came, Chawe replied.  As you said he would.  He drove by on this road at ten minutes past four.

He was in the truck with the man's arm painted on the door.  He drove slowly and he was staring through the fence all the time.  Chetti Singh frowned with annoyance.  This chap is becoming an absolute pest.  Never mind, he said aloud, and Chawe looked bemused.  His English was rudimentary.  Come with me, Chetti Singh ordered, and Chawe climbed into the back seat of the Cadillac.  He would never be so presumptuous as to sit beside his master.

Chetti Singh drove slowly along the front of the warehouse complex.

All the call doors were already closed and locked for the night. There were no burglar alarms guarding the area; at night even the perimeter fence was unlit by floodlights.

There had been a period two or three years back during which he had suffered from repeated burglaries and break-ins.

Alarms and floodlights had done little to prevent these depredations.

In desperation he had consulted the most famous Sangorna in all the territory.  This old witch-doctor lived in dread isolation up on the top of the misty Mlanje plateau attended only by his acolytes.

For a fee commensurate with his reputation, the witch-doctor descended from the mountain with his entourage and, with great fanfare and ceremony, he placed the warehouse under the protection of the most powerful and malevolent of the spirits and demons that he controlled.

Chetti Singh invited all the idlers and loafers of the town to witness the ceremony.  They watched with interest and trepidation as the witch-doctor decapitated a black cockerel at each of the five doors of the warehouse and sprinkled its blood on the portals.  After this, to suitable incantations, he placed the skull of a baboon on each corner-post of the perimeter fence.  The spectators had been much impressed and the word spread swiftly through the townships and the beerballs that Chetti Singh was under magic protection.

For six months thereafter there were no further break-ins.

Then one of the township gangs worked up the courage to test the efficacy of the spell, and they got away with a dozen television sets and nearly forty transistor radios.

Chetti Singh sent for the witch-doctor and reminded him that his services carried a guarantee.  They haggled until finally Chetti Singh agreed to buy from him at a bargain price the ultimate deterrent.  Her name was Nandi.

Since Nandi's arrival there had been only a single break-in.

The burglar had died in Lilongwe hospital the following day with his scalp ripped off his skull and his bowels bulging out of the rents in his belly.  Nandi had solved the problem, permanently.

Chetti Singh drove the Cadillac around the peripheral pathway inside the fence.  The fence was in good order, even the baboon skulls still grinned down from the tops of the cornerposts, but the infra-red alarms were gone.  Chetti Singh had sold them at a good price to a Zambian customer.  After Nandi's arrival they had become redundant.

Completing the circuit of the fence, Chetti Singh parked the Cadillac at the rear of the warehouse, beside a neat shed of the same corrugated sheeting as the main building.  This was obviously a later addition, tacked on as an afterthought to the rear wall of the warehouse.

As Chetti Singh stepped out of the Cadillac, his nostrils flared to the faint but rank odour that wafted from the single small window in the shed.  This was set high up and was heavily barred.

He glanced at Chawe.  Is she safe?  She is in the small cage, as you ordered, Mambo.

Despite the assurance, Chetti Singh peered through the peephole in the door before he opened it and stepped into the shed.

The only light came from the high window and the room was in semi-darkness, made more intense by the contrast of the late sunshine outside.

The smell was stronger now, a pungent wild scent, and suddenly from the gloom there was a spitting snarl so vicious that Chetti Singh stepped back involuntarily.  My goodness.  he chuckled to hide his nerves.  We are in absolutely foul mettle today.  An animal moved behind the bars of the cage, a dark shape on silent pads and there was a gleam of yellow eyes.  Nandi.  Chetti Singh smiled.  "'The sweet one".  Nandi had been the name of King Chaka's mother.

Chetti Singh reached out to the switch beside the door and the fluorescent tube in the ceiling spluttered and then lit the shed with a cold blue light.

In the cage a female leopard shrank away against the far wall, crouching there, staring at the man with murderous eyes, her upper lip lifting in a creased and silent snarl to reveal her fangs.

She was a huge cat, over seven feet from nose to tail, one of the animals from Mlanje mountain forest, who would turn the scale at 120 pounds.  A wild creature captured by the old witchdoctor in her maturity, she had once been a notorious goat and dog-killer, terrorising the villages on the slopes of the mountain.  Shortly before her capture she had savagely mauled a young herdboy who had tried to defend his flock against her.

The forest cats were darker than those of the open savanna, the jet-b lack rosettes that dappled her skin were close-set, so that she was close in coloration to the melanistic panther.  Her tail curled and flicked like a metronome, the gauge of her temper.

She watched the man unblinkingly.  The force of her hatred was as thick as the wild animal stench in the small hot room.  Are you angry?

Chetti Singh asked, and her lip lifted higher to the sound of his voice. She knew him well.  Not angry enough, Chetti Singh decided, and reached for the cattle prod on the rack beside the light switch.

The cat reacted immediately.  She knew the sting of the electric prod.

Her next snarl was a crackling rattle and she ran back and forth trying to escape from the torment she had come to expect.  At the end nearest the main wall of the warehouse the steel mesh cage narrowed into a bottleneck just wide enough to admit the leopard's body, a low tunnel that ended against a steel sliding door in the warehouse wall.

The prod was bolted on to a long aluminium pole.  Chetti Singh slipped it between the cage bars and reached out to touch the leopard.

Her movements became frantic as she tried to avoid the device, and Chetti Singh laughed at her antics as he pursued her around the cage.

He was trying to drive her into the bottle-necked tunnel.

At last she flung herself against the bars of the cage, ripping at the steel with her claws as she tried to reach him, coughing and grunting with fury, but the length of the pole kept Chetti Singh out of range.

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