Читать книгу Piranha - Rudie van Rensburg - Страница 5

Werner Erwee swore. He had no energy for this day. He wiped a hanky across his clammy forehead. The wind blew litter into the gutters alongside the pavements and against the walls of buildings in Musina’s dusty main street. It wasn’t even ten in the morning and already it was unbearably hot. In the car on the way from Vaalwater this morning, he’d heard the weather report: thirty-three degrees Celsius in the shade. In the middle of winter.

He was on his way to the unremarkable little building squeezed between a spaza shop and Mabel’s Massage Parlour & Hair Saloon. The name above the barred window was hard to make out, because the kerning between the red letters was too narrow: International Endangered Species Agency (IESA).

Maybe he was too early. Perhaps he should wait in the car another fifteen minutes. Or was he just stalling because of the news he had to convey?

Werner shook his head. He should never have become involved. When Tim unexpectedly made him this offer, he thought it might be good for his image. He’d still had parliamentary aspirations back then. Now IESA was nothing but a millstone around his neck. He’d never been interested in the protection of endangered species. He’d been an auditor until his retirement. Numbers were his thing. His political dreams were focused on the contribution he could make to the country’s bank balance. Not its wildlife.

But Tim’s phone call from the States had flattered him. ‘You are the only unimpeachable South African I know, Werner,’ he’d said.

Truth was, of course, that Werner was the only South African Tim knew. They’d met when they shared a room in the students’ residence after Werner had won a scholarship to study in the States.

‘The position isn’t chief executive officer in the traditional sense. It’ll take up very little of your time,’ Tim had explained. ‘All you’ll be required to do is to keep an eye on the finances on behalf of IESA in South Africa. The management officer will deal with the operational side of things.’

It hadn’t worked like that in practice. IESA’s donors were wealthy and influential Americans with a great passion for the cause. They would speak to no one but the CEO. He was forever having to rush around trying to find answers to their questions. Natasha van der Merwe was his only source of information, and she was seldom in the office.

Natasha … If it hadn’t been for her, he would have opted out a long time ago. But her enthusiasm for the job was contagious.

When Tim flew in three years ago for the interviews with potential managers, they never expected their choice would land on her. The image of a former international ramp model certainly wasn’t reconcilable with what they’d had in mind.

There had been some serious heavyweights queuing for the job, men with years of experience. At twenty-five, Natasha was a rookie. The only reason they’d reluctantly granted her an interview was that she’d worked for the Conservation Action Trust for two years after she’d given up modelling.

She’d stood head and shoulders above the other candidates. It was the way she answered their questions in the interview that had convinced them. Not one of the others was able to speak about conservation with as much intelligence and knowledge. And she had a clear vision, one that had essentially redefined IESA’s role for him and Tim. They’d practically fallen over their feet to make her an offer.

Since then she’d developed IESA into an indispensable component of southern Africa’s battle against rhino and elephant poaching. In fact, the head honcho at SANParks had admitted to Werner that the crisis in the Kruger National Park, in particular, would have been much worse if it hadn’t been for IESA’s proactive analyses of poachers’ movements. His exact words had been that ‘Natasha van der Merwe has given us a competitive advantage we’ve never had in South Africa before’. Conservationists from Zimbabwe and Mozambique had recently said similar things to Werner.

And now he had to go in there and deliver the bad news.

* * *

On my very first day of school I met a boy who seemed to have a permanent smile on his face. We were the same age and sat next to each other in the class for six-year-olds. One of the other kids called him Smiley and I went along with it. Years later he forbade me from using the nickname.

Smiley’s father was one of the few white farmers in the district. Because Uganda was a British protectorate, and not a colony, most of the agricultural land actually belonged to Ugandans. Only a handful of white settlers were allowed to own land. As a result, Uganda was one of the most peaceful British areas, in sharp contrast to its neighbour Kenya.

Smiley and I soon became good friends. At break, we often ran over to my house, where my father treated us to ginger beer and little tarts baked by Mum. Then we played with my toy cars or marbles until my father sent us back to school. Those were carefree and innocent times.

When we were older, Smiley often invited me to his parents’ farm, a place that felt like paradise to me. We hunted birds with airguns, swam in the dam and played soccer with the farm workers’ children on the huge lawn in front of the house.

Joseph, who was a few years older than we were, was an exceptional soccer player who put the rest of us to shame. I soon realised that Smiley, who was a good player himself, didn’t like him. Smiley always wanted to be the best. Whenever Joseph and Smiley played on opposing teams, an argument would break out between the two of them.

Joseph was the son of a Tutsi, Rwandan refugees who’d joined the exodus from their country after the Hutu rebellion of 1959. The Baganda had always looked down on the refugees because they were foreigners and because they were mostly extremely poor.

There was always tension between the two groups. Theft was not tolerated in Uganda, especially not when the accused was a Tutsi. Suspects often paid with their lives and no one said a word about it.

One Saturday, when we were about thirteen, Smiley and I were walking in the veld when we heard a huge racket. It was coming from the other side of the hill and we ran to see what was going on. A group of Baganda were beating Joseph up, two of them hanging around with pangas in their hands. Joseph’s bloodied face was almost unrecognisable.

I turned to Smiley and shouted at him hysterically to do something to stop them. He calmly established from a bystander what was going on and, when he heard that Joseph was supposed to have stolen a screwdriver from his father’s storeroom, he threw down his airgun, grabbed a panga, commanded the men to back off and, with a mighty swing, slashed open Joseph’s temple. The Baganda laughed, whistled and applauded. I stood frozen to the spot and watched Smiley swing the panga a second, then a third time.

When Joseph stopped moving, Smiley turned towards me with blood splatters like freckles all over his face. He told the workers to bury Joseph, picked up his airgun, smiled his familiar blinding smile, and said: ‘Let’s go for a swim.’