Jane (18 page)

I kissed my father’s cheek and all our troubles of late seemed borne away on the wings of a scarlet-and-yellow bird that fluttered above us and away. Then together we walked arm in arm back to camp.

*   *   *

By the time I had risen, washed, dressed, and joined my father and D’Arnot around the breakfast fire, it was clear that Ral Conrath was nowhere among us. Neither was Yabi, for he had taken off the day before to discover the best route to the Enduro Escarpment.

I took up a tin cup and sipped bitter coffee. “Where did Mr. Conrath go?” I asked.

Father shrugged.

Paul D’Arnot was staring off to the east. “There,” he said, lifting his arm and pointing through an opening in the canopy that allowed sight of a narrow sliver of the highest mountain in the range.

I could just make out on the slope two tiny figures climbing along a track toward the summit. It was Ral Conrath and a bearer carrying a narrow crate on his back.

No one spoke for a long while, for the implications were largely incomprehensible. What was clear was that D’Arnot knew something.

“Tell us, Paul,” Archie demanded.

D’Arnot sat himself down on a log, as though his legs would no longer hold him. He cradled his face in his hands and sighed deeply. Father and I took camp chairs across from him. It set the stage for a proper interrogation.

“Last year,” D’Arnot began, “Ral Conrath came to Port-Gentil, the town south of Libreville, where I had gone to live for a time. In Libreville he had drunk, whored, and gambled away most of the money he had earned on his last safari, and gotten into one too many brawls. We had met at a bistro and often drank away our sorrows together. One afternoon he sent me a message to come to the dock and meet him. There I found him with a man, a native man. I had never seen such a person in all my travels along the west coast or up the Ogowe River. This man was strong. Beautifully muscled. Fierce and intelligent. But primitive. There was no sign that he had had in all of his life contact with the world till that moment. He wore no shoes, but his feet themselves were hard as leather. His garment was a loincloth made of a textile the likes of which I had never seen. A kind of woven cotton, but not of a factory loom, hand-spun, red and yellow, with a squarish pattern that repeated over and over.

“But Ral Conrath had not brought me to meet the man to show me his clothes or the soles of his feet. Around his neck on a leather string hung an artifact
extraordinaire.
It was solid gold and very heavy. The shape was round with a round hole in the center.”

D’Arnot stopped to drink from his flask. I hoped it was water at this hour, but his lips pursed as a person’s do when he has downed a great slug of whiskey.

“Were you able to speak to this man?” Father asked.

“Only a little. We made signs with our hands, but I was careful with my gestures, for as clearly as he seemed a warrior, he was fearful of the city. He had never seen a proper building. He had never seen modern clothes. He had never seen a watch, or eyeglasses, or shoes. He had come paddling out of the Ogowe in a rough-hewn canoe and had probably not spoken to a soul on his journey from who knew where, perhaps passing other native canoes and a paddle steamer or two. He called himself Ecko of the Waziri tribe. The language he spoke was not Bantu. It seemed more—what can I say?—primitive. There were no affectations of modernity. Not even the occasional French or English word.”

“Why had he come to the coast?” I asked.

“I do not know. My skills as an interpreter were insufficient. But even as he had just arrived, he seemed eager to go home again—as though he had made a mistake coming. Conrath was, of course, most interested in the ornament around the Waziri man’s neck. I found, by the few words we had managed to learn, and by hand signals, that the gold necklaces were very common with his people. Every grown man and woman wore one. There was, he indicated with gestures, a limitless supply of them. And if he did not seem to understand the value of the metal, it was to him a
sacred
object. Something he called ‘Sumbula.’ When we repeated the word, he became instantly disturbed and signaled with his arms the shape of a mountain. He squatted down and drew on the muddy dock
four
mountains. But when I tried to ask him how his necklace and the mountains were connected, he stood and started for his canoe.

“Conrath was shouting at me, ‘Don’t let him go! Find out where these mountains are! Sumbula! There is gold there!’ But the Waziri man could not be stopped. He paddled away, and that was the last we saw of him. Well, our friend was beside himself. He hounded me, as if I should know what to do. But later that month we both returned to Libreville and I ran into Yabi and related the story. He grew very excited and told me of his and his father’s adventure to a place not so far from his village, a place with four mountains and the legend of an old tribe his people had always called ‘Wazir.’ When he told Ral Conrath he could take him to that place, the man nearly jumped out of his skin. He wished to go at that very instant.” D’Arnot laughed ruefully. “But this was not to be. His double-dealings had caught up with him. The authorities took him into custody, and before Conrath could disappear up the Ogowe, he was deported. They told him never to return to Libreville without lots of money and a passport.”

Father looked grim. “So I became his passport
and
his banker. It’s why he came to the Zoological Congress in Cambridge. He was looking for a ‘mark.’”

“Much of your money was used for bribes,” D’Arnot continued. “There were ‘associates’ to line up in Libreville, corrupt officials. There were guides and bearers to hire…” He looked ashamed. “A translator … desperate for money.”

“He’s a common treasure hunter, then,” I said.

“And I am a common drunk,” D’Arnot miserably confessed.

I knew the next question must be asked, but I dreaded it beyond words. “The Enduro Escarpment, the limestone caves … do they even exist?”

“From what I can tell, yes, they do. Conrath had questioned Yabi like a grand inquisitor. ‘Are there caves? A river?’ Yes, Yabi told him. He and his father had seen some caves. ‘Any caves will do,’ Conrath said. But the fossil he showed you, that which he told you came from the Enduro Escarpment…” D’Arnot hung his head and stared at the ground. “I believed it did until this morning. Today he bragged that he had brought it back from Java. A place he called Trinel.”

“Jane!” Father cried, his voice breaking.

“He took the thing from Eugène Dubois’s site,” I said, my voice thick with contempt. “Stole it.”

My heart pounded furiously, and an emotion I had never before associated with my father welled up and threatened to topple me: pity. This enraged me. I turned on D’Arnot like a mad thing.

“Stand up,” I ordered him. “Stand up and look at us!”

He obeyed as a slave would his master.

“There’s more that you’re not telling us.”

“What, Jane?” my father said. “What more can the man have done to us?”

“Why is Ral Conrath climbing that mountain?” I demanded of D’Arnot. “What’s in that crate he’s carrying?”

The Frenchman began to tremble—lips, shoulders, knees. But though his mouth moved, no words were forthcoming.

“I saw you and Ral Conrath in the bistro at Libreville,” I accused him, “with the Belgian engineers. You were deal-making, weren’t you?”

“What do you mean!” Father cried. “The
Belgians
? What kind of deal could you possibly make with those thugs?”

“In that crate,” D’Arnot began, his voice pathetic with confession, “is the equipment for surveying. The Belgian engineers, try as they did, could not get past French authorities into the interior. Conrath bragged to them of his surveying skills taught to him by Petrie. So for a very large amount of money, half of which has been paid, he is doing it for them—climbing to the highest point south of the Ogowe and finding a passage through unexplored Gabonese jungle for Leopold’s trade route. It is already under way.”

“So I’ve been had not once but
twice
by that lying sack of filth!” Archie roared. “Ah, we’ll see about that.” He grabbed his rifle and strode out of camp in the direction of the mountains.

I ran after him and caught him up by the arm. “Father, the man is dangerous. We know that. Don’t go up there.
Please.
”

“And let him get away with … what? Murder and butchery, conspiring with a mad king? Whatever it is that you call what he’s done to us? I’m going up there and I’m going to wring that low bastard’s neck!”

The tensed muscles of Father’s arm shuddered and suddenly became flaccid under my hand. Large and powerful as he was, he faltered, if only for the briefest moment. But I had felt it. I came around and looked him in the face. The skin was ashen. There was pain in his eyes. And the other hand was clutching the center of his chest.

“Father!”

“It’s all right. It’s nothing. A twinge. That’s all.”

“D’Arnot!” I shouted. “Come here quickly!”

The two of us helped Father back to the fire and sat him on the camp stool. His color had already begun returning. He was smiling, relieved.

“I told you, sweetheart. A tiny twinge. A hiatal hernia.”

“One doesn’t go grey in the face with a hiatal hernia. You need to rest.”

The bearers were about to break down my father’s tent. I turned to D’Arnot. “Tell them to stop. Leave the tent up.” My jaw clenched in bitter fury. “It’s not as if we’re going anywhere.” Then I said to my father, “Can you stand?”

“Of course I can stand.”

“Then come. You’re going to your tent to lie down. Don’t argue with me. If anything happens to you, Mother will skin me alive. That was the bargain. We were going to take care of each other.”

“All right.”

Father allowed us to see him to the tent. D’Arnot went in after him to get him out of his clothes.

When the tent flap closed behind them, I grabbed my rifle and followed Ral Conrath up the mountain.

In all my life I had never felt such hatred for another human being. I climbed relentlessly up the steep path, barely awed by the trees in their unimaginable proportions, or the trail strangely wide and even for one so rarely trod upon. All curiosity, all delight in my surroundings had been shattered by this fiend’s appalling deceit and betrayal. My father’s dreams dashed, perhaps forever. He was unwell, seriously so, despite his protestations. The “bum ticker” was real, waiting only for a terrible blow such as this to irreparably wound it. He could die out here. We could all die if Ral Conrath was not stopped.

I would stop him. I must.

The Mountain

Fury propelled me. As I reached the rim of the flattened cone, the size of the trees normalized, and where before no foliage had grown in the dark clearings beneath the thick, umbrellalike canopy, now smaller trees and bushes and ferns grew in profusion.
Good,
I thought. The easier to hide my approach to Conrath, who was certainly on the eastern slope, gazing out toward the Chaillu Massif, and beyond.

Just as I had envisioned, I found a narrow machete-hacked path through the undergrowth leading out to the east. I cocked my rifle, then very carefully and very quietly moved along the track. There in a newly cut clearing with his surveyor’s transit, level, and solar compass was Ral Conrath kneeling and making notations upon a large map. I could see beyond him, through the hacked limbs and twigs, the sky, the jungle spread out like a great green ocean all around the mountain, and far in the distance the peaks of Chaillu Massif.

There was no sign of the bearer.

I waited, still and barely breathing. Watched as Ral carefully folded the map and stowed it inside his bush jacket. When finally he stood, he turned and found himself staring, at close range, down the barrel of my rifle.

“I suppose the Belgians know the way as far as the eastern slopes of the Chaillu range,” I said. It pleased me to see I had startled him, though he quickly regained his composure.

“There’s only so much they know,” he said. “Every time they send an expedition into this damn hellhole of a country, they run into a pack of cannibals and never make it out alive. My employer wants to know if there’s a southern route around those mountains out there … and the best route from there to the coast.”

Ral flashed me such a carefree and rakish grin that I wondered with a thrill of terror if even now the bearer, hidden in the bush, had his weapon aimed at my head. I must hold steady. Show no fear.

“Well, isn’t it a shame Leopold won’t ever receive his coordinates.”

“Won’t he?”

“Not if you’re rotting in an English prison. Or maybe we’ll just turn you over to the French in Libreville. I understand their jail is extremely unpleasant. Hot as hades.”

His expression changed not a whit, but I was close enough to see a small muscle beneath his eye begin to twitch.

“I haven’t broken any law,” he said. “You and your father wanted to go on a dig, and I took you on one. By now Yabi’s found the caves his father and he saw all those years ago. I would have delivered you there and you would have dug to your heart’s content.”