Читать книгу Elefant - Jamie Bulloch - Страница 8

The ravens were skulking on the railings of the restaurant terrace, watching for the slightest inattention from the waiter guarding the warm buffet. From the terrace you could hear the waves of the Indian Ocean.

Jack Harris was sitting at the second table from the back. This gave him the best view of the assortment of backpackers, businesspeople and the last expats sticking to their jour fixe at the Galle Face Hotel.

He’d been waiting around here for three weeks now, glugging too much Lion lager. Occasionally he’d get into conversation with a tourist, and once an American woman travelling on her own was so impressed by his career that she followed him up to his room. Harris was a vet, specialising in elephants.

Mostly, however, he spent the nights alone in his room. It was nicely situated; it might not directly face the sea, but it did look out on the large grassed area where the colonial masters once played golf and where countless souvenir stands and food stalls now plied their wares. Sometimes during these lonely nights he’d open one of the two windows, light a cigarette and gaze down at the lights of the lively Galle Face Green and the fluorescent surf of the ocean.

Voices and laughter mingled with scraps of music, and clouds of smoke rose from the food stalls into the light of the outside bulbs, while now and then the wind blew over the aroma of charcoal and hot coconut oil.

Harris got up and helped himself from the buffet. For the second time. He shovelled a not particularly gastronomic hodgepodge of curry, stew and gratin onto his plate and returned to his table, where the staff, unprompted, had placed a ‘Reserved’ sign in his brief absence.

He was eating too much.

Jack Harris was forty years old, from New Zealand, and looked like Crocodile Dundee gone large. Or so he thought. His wife, who’d left him eight years before – how time flew! – thought he looked more like a sheep shearer.

The divorce threw him off the rails. He’d been living with his wife, Terry, and the twins, Katie and Jerome, in a large bungalow in Fendalton, the smartest suburb of Christchurch, running a veterinary clinic with his partner and earning good money.

Sure, he’d had the odd affair, but just when he was improving on this front he caught Terry with his friend and partner. A terrible shock. He was prepared to forgive the two of them and attempt a fresh start, but although Terry wanted a fresh start too, she didn’t want a fresh start with him. After their divorce she married his partner.

Harris got himself hired as a vet on various game reserves in Asia. He’d only been back to New Zealand three times since, to see his children. They’d grown into teenagers and on their last meeting had made it plain that they didn’t think much of his rare visits. Contact with them was now restricted to modest bank transfers on their birthdays or at Christmas and the occasional awkward Skype call. Harris didn’t need to pay any maintenance and his own infidelities hadn’t been disclosed during the divorce.

A few tables further on two female tourists were feeding the ravens. He’d already noticed them on his first visit to the buffet. About thirty years of age, German-speaking, no beauties, but determined to experience more than just foreign culture and nature on their trip – this was something Harris had an eye for.

They were having great fun watching the birds land on the table and nibble their food. Harris could have impressed the women by pointing out that this was a good way of contracting cryptococcosis and psittacosis – not completely false, nor completely true either. He was just about to go up to the dessert buffet and make a remark to this effect when his mobile rang.

The display said ‘Roux’.

Harris answered, listened, said, ‘Hold on,’ took a pen from his jacket and jotted down some numbers on the back of the list of daily specials. ‘I thought it would never happen,’ he said, before finishing the conversation and dialling another number.

‘Kasun?’ he said into his phone so loudly that a number of guests turned and stared. ‘Get yourself to Ratmalana. Now!’ He made the international gesture for ‘The bill, please’ to the waiter, and when it wasn’t brought immediately Harris went up and signed the slip. On the way to his room he called his contact at the heliport.

Harris ordered a taxi and quickly put on his work clothes – khaki trousers and faded short-sleeve denim shirt. From the wardrobe he took his instrument case, which he’d already packed and checked over and over again for this long-awaited opportunity.

Barely five minutes after the phone call he was in a taxi on his way to Ratmalana Airport, fifteen kilometres to the south of Colombo.

A quarter of an hour later he was there. Kasun, the young man assigned to him by the Department of Wildlife Conservation, was waiting for him beside a Robinson R44, a light, four-seater helicopter. Its rotors had started spinning as soon as Harris’s taxi came into sight.

When Harris got to the chopper, Kasun was already strapped into the back seat, his headphones on.

The pilot increased the rotor speed, the small aircraft rose slowly and hovered over the runway for a moment. Then the pilot lowered its nose and they set off towards the south-east.