"Bertie and I will go. First I need to get in touch with your grandmother, ask her to set up an appointment through the U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican. It was going to be a tough sell even with you along, but we'll make our pitch and trust they won't think we're raving mad."
"I'm sorry—" Tears again.
"Betts is your priority," he said kindly. "We'll somehow convince Leoncaro to keep a low profile for a few weeks. Then we'll join you in California."
"You will? Oh, God, Tom, you don't know how grateful—"
"We're a team, Eden. We back each other up. That's how it will always be."
She flew out of the chair and pressed her wet face against his chest, aware of his heart, the closeness of his bones, but still miles from the moment she had opened the bedroom door to him, thinking in her drowse that he had come to make love to her. A girlish thing, a lonely infatuation.
"God bless," she whispered.
"Be strong."
She felt the hard point of his chin against the crown of her head.
B
ertie was almost always a sound sleeper, but even in those depths she heard the big turbine of the Augusta helicopter winding up for flight. She popped up out of a dream like a glistening fish from deep water. Left her room by way of the interior courtyard that separated the new octagonal wing with its conical copper roof from the original house. Flanked by two silent dogs like dark escorts she walked through the house out onto the moon-blazoned veranda.
She saw Eden, fifty yards from the house, slip beneath the moving blades on the concrete pad and climb into the helicopter while Tom raised the RPMs and turned on the fuselage running lights. Eden had gear with her, a mid-size duffel slung across her back.
Almost as soon as the door closed behind her Tom lifted off, turning first toward the lake and then southeast, a heading that would take them to Nairobi. For what purpose Bertie didn't know.
She heard a cabinet clock inside chime twice.
When the roar of the helicopter became too faint to hear against the cold wind blowing down the Rift Valley, Bertie returned to her bedroom and lay down, but with her knees up and her hands behind her head, looking up through the mosquito netting at the moonlight on motionless fan blades. Seeing the two of them in the helicopter with some rendezvous in mind, and her normally contented expression turned glum. After a while she got up again with no more thought of sleep, put on a jogging suit and sandals, and crossed the wide lawn to Eden's bungalow. In the sitting room there was still faint warmth from the redeye fire. Also a glass of watered whiskey that Tom (she thought) might have left there.
She went into the bedroom but couldn't tell anything except that the bed had been slept in and then Eden had packed in a hurry, leaving cabinet doors open and drawers pulled out.
Bertie felt bad for herself, with no real evidence to explain the feeling. It was just something that had been coming on for a month or so.
Tom and Eden, Eden and Tom.
When Bertie went outside again she heard faint but frenzied human cries that seemed to be coming from the campsite of the climatologists and earth scientists down at the lake.
T
he animal that had snatched Jean-Baptiste Chabot from his cot in the floored tent he shared with another member of the climatology team was described by the frightened survivor as a huge hyena. Which he had only glimpsed by moonlight through large rents in the tent's back wall. A striped hyena, he said. That was a dry-country variety usually seen in northern Kenya and Ethiopia; the smaller spotted hyenas were common within a few kilometers of Shungwaya. But mysteriously silent this night. Jean-Baptiste, his head locked in the jaws of the hyena, had not uttered a sound; his tentmate had been alerted by the jangle of an alarm clock prematurely activated when it fell from an overturned table as the hyena exited with its nearly naked prey.
Joseph Nkambe and the Somali house staff boss named Hassan, also an experienced hunter, looked at the long rips in the tough tent fabric. Hassan devoted half a minute to turning his head in all directions and sniffing deeply.
"Hyena? I do not think so," the tall Somalian said. "
Felid
."
With the aid of a million-candlepower torch, a beam with a throw of half a mile at night, Joseph found on the dusty floor of the tent faint pug marks that measured more than eight inches across.
"Nor was it a lion" Joseph said. "Scarred in some way that gave the impression of stripes."
They looked at each other, perplexed. They carried double-barreled rifles, a number two Jeffery's Express and Joseph's old Evans Double Express with a bead of non-yellowing warthog ivory for a night sight. Their bush jackets were weighted with five-hundred-grain cartridges the size of small cigars.
Outside there was scant blood spoor, but the body of Jean-Baptiste had left a drag track they easily could have followed by the light of the red-tinged full moon.
October. Known as the "month of madness" in many parts of Africa, or the Month of the Blood Moon when winds hot or cold raised the red dust from pan to plain in drought years, carried it howling for a thousand miles.
The track crossed a hippo path to open water and continued upland in moderately heavy cover two hundred yards from the campsite. From the stride of the unknown
felid
Joseph judged it to be a dozen feet in length.
That was extraordinary, if not impossible.
They paused before entering the wood, listening.
African night is never quiet, and in spite of the wind coursing through the trees Joseph identified sounds from grunts and guttural coughs to cooing and sharp barks. His knees hurt him already. So did an arthritic elbow from carrying a heavy rifle at high port arms.
Hassan, whom Joseph knew to be a brave man, seemed to be trembling in light clothing. Of course it was a chilly hour of the night.
"There is so little blood," Hassan said in a low voice. "And where is This One going? If not to feed, what did it want with the young man who was the friend of the
memsaab
Eve? I am afraid of this
felid
."
"It is sensible to be afraid. But we must see for ourselves what it is."
"An enchanted thing," Hassan declared. "Part
fisi
, part
felid
. The lover of a witch, for whom the young man is intended as an offering. The stripes described to us may well be the markings of the witch that raised it and gave it power."
"That will be enough mbojo talk," Joseph said, not immune himself to the mention of witches and their enchantments so deep in the night and with a blood moon low across the lake. "I'm surprised at you, Hassan."
"Let us wait now for Bwana Tom. Or the Bwana Game from Hell's Gate. Do you know where Bwana Tom has gone in his helicopter?"
"
Sejui
. He may not return tonight. This stalk will be our business alone, Hassan."
Joseph led Hassan into the wood, the brilliant torch restoring mistily to life daytime colors of the fringelike mimosa, creeper orchid, and tall green acacias. But moonlight was enough and Hassan preferred it; artificial light distorted senses that were finely tuned to the nuances of the night. Farther into the wood the odors were musty and stale from lack of rain. Hassan sniffed nervously left and right with the nostrils of a horse as they walked. For one mile, and the better part of two, as the terrain changed and the trees thinned, becoming mostly scrub oak growing on the banks of ravines choked with tangled brush.
The track they had been following vanished.
Hassan looked around with his finger on a trigger of the Jeffery's. A hyena clan was in an uproar somewhere, their repertoire of wails and chilling moans borne on the wind. They had been hearing them for a while. Joseph felt something windblown-viscous and stringy-stick to his bare forearm. He turned on the light and saw a dabber of blood. He brushed it off and swept the torch beam through the boughs of the trees around them: high in the tossing canopy a slim body swayed head down, wedged by the waist in the forked wands of a stout limb. The head was soggy and unrecognizable after almost an hour in the jaws of the creature that had carried Jean-Baptiste this far, then climbed nearly straight up the trunk of the tree for twenty feet to secure its prey. A leopard might also cache food in this manner.
Hassan stared up at the body, then smacked his lips loudly, an expression of opprobrium.
"You see? This One did not intend to eat." All Somalis have a keen instinct for impending disaster. "Nay, it lured us here and now it has gone."
Joseph already had grasped that they had been deliberately drawn away from the house, where now, except for the Englishman Culver, there were only servants, women, and dogs. Etan Culver was not familiar with guns.
"Listen," Hassan said. "Do you hear the
farasi
? They have got wind of This One.
Mbeya Sana
."
They were less than a mile directly overland from the house and grounds of Shungwaya, and the
boma
constructed of dense blackthorn where the horses were safely stabled away from predators. Only elephants were impervious to thorns like needle-tipped steel spikes that exceeded four inches in length.
Without another word Hassan began to run, striding through brush that was only a minor obstacle for his seven-foot frame, his heavy rifle at arm's length above his head.
Joseph was too old to run. Instead he took a walkie-talkie from a pocket of his bush jacket.
"Y
es," Alberta Nkambe said, in a voice so low her father barely understood her. "I see it. I see
them
. Hyena. A large clan, at least thirty. They're following it. The horses have gone crazy."
Not to mention the dogs surrounding her on the veranda. Two servant boys came running from their quarters to the house, yipping from fear. Bertie motioned them inside. She was looking west to a
lugga
behind farm buildings and the corral where the hyenas had appeared, rambling along with their strange crippled-looking gaits (although they could outrun horses over short distances) behind the powerful
felid
, its head in the moonlight three times larger than theirs, but with the same black snout, crooked jaw line, and bad dental armature. An
uber
hyena, godlike, with the heavy but lissome body of a tiger.
Bertie didn't mention the nude, spectral woman she saw astride the tiger, like a limerick she vaguely remembered, because she felt certain that she was the only one seeing this blank-eyed, evil apparition, long black hair silkily afloat in the argentine light. No need to compound the madness, or the fear Bertie heard in her father's voice. Although by now the goony screams of the approaching hyenas made it hard for her to hear him.
Another Somali servant, wearing only a breechclout, whipped past her into the relative safety of the stone house. The dogs were leaping and snarling, rolling their eyes at Bertie, waiting for a command to attack. Six of them, brawny mixed breeds with emphasis on durability and courage. They all would have been dead in twenty seconds if Bertie let them loose on the hyena clan.
"Go in the house at once," Joseph Nkambe said, unnecessarily. "Arm yourself."
"Yes. But don't you come here. I can take care of it?" Maybe. She was beginning to swallow her heart. Bertie wondered where Hassan was. Probably returning at a dead run, one rifle, sure death for Hassan as well.
She ordered the dogs into the house. They retreated reluctantly. Bertie followed, glancing at the scared faces inside.
"What in God's name?" Etan Culver said. He was in his pajamas but had a camera with him. Pegeen was holding on to him with both hands, mouth moving soundlessly, appearing to be in a fearful state of near-collapse.
"The thing we saw in your picture show? It's real. And it's here. Brought a pack of hyena along as well."
"I told you, I
hate
this place!" Pegeen said, slamming a fist into her husband's rib cage. "Get me out of here
now
, Etan!"
"Go back to your room and bar the door," Bertie said. "Push an armoire against the windows. And don't come out until I call you." The kitchen pavilion seemed to be the best place for the house staff; she sent them there with similar instructions for sealing off possible points of entry. Although Bertie had no intention of letting any marauder close to the house. She tried to close her mind to the din they were making outside. Hyena had a wide range of vocalizations. For now they were tittering and guffawing like elderly ladies telling each other dirty jokes at their bridge club luncheon. Hyena didn't bother her; she'd been listening to them all of her life. It was unlikely they could break in; they were by nature sneaks. Their strength was in their jaws, which could crush the bones of elephants.
She knew nothing, yet, about the strength of the were-beast and its ghostly accomplice, her pale face resonant in Bertie's subconscious mind.
Bertie went quickly into the parlor and opened the twin gun cabinets, looking over the weapons available to her. Everything from a five-shot, seven-millimeter. Rigby to a double-barreled elephant rifle that had a recoil massive enough to dislocate her shoulder. No point in trying to kill the were-beast and its mistress, she guessed. But she wanted to give their hyena entourage something to remember, if they should be tempted to return en masse to Shungwaya another day.