Читать книгу Slaves to Fortune - Tom Lanoye - Страница 16

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Mpumalanga

Tony Hanssen couldn’t bring himself to press the trigger. He didn’t know what was holding him back the most: his fear of failure, his fear of being caught, or his realization that he—yes, he!—was about to kill another living being.

Three times, already, he’d had the rhinoceros’ right eye in the exact centre of his cross hairs while the creature was barely moving. It stood there chewing lazily, staring into space with the slow, short-sighted gaze common to all herbivores. ‘The rhino is an armoured bovine’ a blogger had written on one of the sites Tony had consulted—a site that, ironically, warned against the scourge of poaching—“an armoured bovine with two unfortunate weak spots: its eyes.”

It was these virtually blind, unprotected peepers, deeply embedded in a vortex of skin folds, that unsettled Tony and caused his finger to freeze around the trigger. He saw innocence in that gaze, and a heart-rending plea for mercy. Horses looked like that when they had just been wounded or beaten, as Tony had once been forced to witness in Provence, not far from his former holiday home. Two men were flogging a worn-out draught horse that stoically put up with the rain of blows. All of a sudden, they’d had enough, and raced off, arguing.

Tony had been so aghast that he hadn’t tried to stop the brutes, something he would feel guilty about for years. At crucial moments, he was clearly less decisive than he would have expected himself to be. He’d walked guiltily up to the horse, which had remained rooted to the spot, only its flanks quivering. He spoke soothingly to the animal without touching it, so as not to frighten it even more.

The horse neither started nor moved. It gave Tony a sad, human look. He felt doubly conscience-stricken. Would anyone—would he?—be capable of braving such torment without collapsing in pain, or going crazy with anger? This broken, tortured nag embodied something so noble, it was almost offensive. A sober heroism that Tony doubted he would ever be capable of.

Now, in Krokodilspruit, placing his finger back on the trigger, he tried to convince himself that such considerations were just mere projections, based on a deep longing for kinship. Show a man a stray cat, a cumulus cloud, or a weeping willow, and he will find something of himself in each of them. And each time it will be baloney.

And a rhinoceros was especially far from being human. A sea lion’s brain was a hundred times more sophisticated than the grey matter of this stinking colossus, which should have become extinct thousands of years ago, along with the dinosaurs and the mammoth. It was an oversight of nature that it was still wandering around, serving the tourist industry. In the Middle Ages, knights had scoured the Old World looking for unicorns—elegant white stallions that could charm virgins with the twisted horn on their foreheads. In the modern Middle Ages, the era of globalization, Joe Sixpack could lay his eyes on the unicorn’s cumbersome grey kinsman in any zoo in the world. Few people, virgins or otherwise, fainted at the sight of its squat double horns. If the rhinoceros possessed any charms, they were hidden beneath its robust hideousness, its surprising girth, its threatening, primordial strength. A primitive tank on four legs; it was hard to believe it would let itself be taken out by a single person with the right gun and a steely set of nerves.

Before the arrival of men with guns, rhinos hadn’t even had any natural enemies. Wherever they weren’t hunted, they thrived and flourished. They were the only species of tropical animal not to suffer from the Arctic winters and eternal nights of the menageries in the Far North, as long as they had creature comforts and a decent roof above their heads.

In that respect, they were only too human. All the rest was sentimental fantasy.

Tony had no time for sentiment. There was a knife at his throat. He had to bring off this appalling job or go under, himself, dragging everything he loved down with him. He wanted his family back, his reputation, and his old life. That creature, there, was the key. Backing out was no longer possible anyway. He was already guilty of fencing, breaking and entering, and attempted poaching, plus illegal arms possession and forgery. And that was just the South African stuff.

It wasn’t fair, though. This animal was simply unlucky enough to be the first rhinoceros to turn up at the watering hole. ‘But hey, that’s life! Things are tough for everyone!’ The head of the trading floor had shouted that at the first furious clients who had telephoned to complain about Tony, and the inexplicably falling prices of the stocks recommended to them on the basis of his prognoses.

‘When the prices inexplicably rise, you lot never call. Drop dead, you bunch of losers!’ For a whole week, he’d had to maintain his defensive line of scorn and threat.

Then he’d begun to telephone Tony himself to complain about his own shrinking portfolio. He, too, called Tony a conman and a leech. Another week later, something happened that no investment fund, ministry, or rating agency had wanted to consider. The bank went bankrupt and pulled all its foreign affiliates down into the black hole with it. A fortune larger than the budget of some European industrial powers disappeared into the void, leaving behind as much of a footprint as a fart in outer space.

The night before, Tony had gone into hiding. Disappeared off the radar, along with his laptop and his twelve memory sticks. They contained encoded company secrets from throughout the years. Activities that had been kept off the balance sheets. Toxic investment products, cut with clean ones and then oversold as reliable derivatives. A list of demanding clients and their exotic bank-account numbers. A demanding client—and this could be a person, a fund, a country, or another bank—didn’t like to share where the money came from or where it was going next, but demanded the highest interest rates and, if they didn’t get them, put their eggs in the competition’s basket.

The memory sticks were supposed to be a private database, nothing more—a way of keeping track in the growing rat’s nest of data. Tony only consulted them when his laptop was offline, that was how worried he was about hackers and extortionists. He had installed all the firewalls possible, but didn’t trust any of them completely. He had never wanted to use the sticks for criminal purposes. The thought hadn’t even occurred to him. His loyalty and sense of duty were too great for that. Now, in retrospect, he could no longer imagine it, but as long as he’d worked for the bank, gratitude for his job had won out over doubts about his role. He had shown respect because he thought he was respected. Extremely proud was how he had felt about his career, his salary, and his domestic happiness, even though he seldom got home before eleven at night and usually left again by seven in the morning. His weekends were one day long—unless there was a crisis, then they lasted an afternoon. His holidays in Provence were never longer than seven days, one of which was spent travelling there and another getting back. For ten years, he’d begged his wife to be patient. Just before she turned forty, he’d granted her a pregnancy. After the birth of their daughter, he’d had himself sterilized.

The more blood he shed on the altar of his profession, the more fanatically he took up its defence. He even protected his employer from slander on internet forums, albeit under a false name. He didn’t want be known as a toady. Toadies didn’t survive in investment banks. Indispensability depended on hard figures, not on soft-soaping.

On the Net, he had used ten pseudonyms in rotation to attack each new critic. He had the nine other usernames give his first alias the thumbs up, accompanied with little commentaries that attacked the details in the post but backed up the general gist. Sometimes the discussions between his aliases were longer than their collective brawls with the slanderers. This was how he conducted his chorus of swelling counter-voices to a climax: the detractors would grow tired of the unexpectedly large blowback and go and mouth off elsewhere, about some other financial mastodon.

Their departure filled him with more disappointment than triumph. He didn’t have any other hobbies.

Now he, too, had departed. He was in exile. He took his incriminating memory sticks and his laptop with him in a sports bag bearing the bank’s logo. He wasn’t intending to do any harm with them. He wasn’t a rancorous person; he found revenge barbaric. But he didn’t feel like paying for what was on his sticks. They would be his life insurance, nothing more.

His real life insurance would be shut down a few days after his disappearance, he was certain of that. Not everyone found revenge repulsive. He had many superiors, and the urge to retaliate increased the further up the food chain you went. His good name would be dragged through the mud, his bank accounts and his credit cards blocked, his shares, warrants, and options would be confiscated or forfeited. Whatever value they still had.

He stamped his BlackBerry to smithereens in the main station in Brussels, right after he’d used the phone one last time to say goodbye to Martine, his shocked wife. He hadn’t had Klara, their six-year-old daughter, on the line. She was still with the mother from the babysitting co-op, Martine sobbed. Tony didn’t know whether to believe his wife or whether she wanted to spare Klara the trauma of two tearful parents. Klara was a hypersensitive child.

But Tony was the person who would have been able to calm her down. He and Klara often talked on the phone. They mainly talked on the phone. But there wasn’t time to convince Martine. He wouldn’t be surprised if his BlackBerry were already being tapped. I’m sorry, darling! Keep thinking of me, and tell Klara that Daddy will be back as soon as he can! He left the broken pieces and the battery in a corridor where there were no security cameras. He might be acting overly cautiously, but prevention was better than being arrested. A little fear of being followed wasn’t unhealthy for a man in hiding with a controversial record.

Next, he took the metro to the terminus of line 5, Herrmann-Debroux station. It was a twenty-minute walk from there to his hideout on the Tervurenlaan, which bisected one of the prettiest neighbourhoods in the European capital. He hadn’t dared take a taxi. He might just stumble on the one ex-Yugoslavian driver who had inherited a photographic memory from his partisan family. Or what if the Belgian security services, or who knows, even the CIA, kept lists of anyone arriving by taxi at what was supposed to be his safe haven?

No, no taxis for him. In Brussels, Tony figured, you’d stand out least as a pedestrian with a sports bag in a sweater. A sweater whose hood you could pull right over your head. He’d purchased the item especially for this purpose from a grubby little shop near the Fontainasplein. A low-key disguise. And even then, after leaving the Herrmann-Debroux, he’d be better off taking the quiet minor roads that would take him past Castle Hertoginnedal’s gardens. Pleasant footpaths, pastoral greenery on either side, almost deserted at dusk. The fewer people who noticed him, the better.

He would miss Klara and Martine like crazy. He felt no remorse about the rest. They should have checked his work more thoroughly. But they weren’t even capable of it. That was the essence of the collapse. It was also the reason that all of his peers had long been fired and he hadn’t. Nobody in the world, except for himself and a handful of confrères, understood the details, let alone the scope, of the newest generation of econometric computer models.

If Tony were honest, he had to admit that he had found it hard to keep a handle on them, himself. They had outgrown the human brain, so to speak. It wouldn’t be long before they became independently operating cancerous growths, autonomous digital organisms, spurred on algorithmically to ever-greater speeds, until they achieved perpetual motion with unprecedented purchasing power and no inhibitory mechanism at all. In virtual reality, where there were no days or nights and the free markets stayed open forever, the most diverse products could be purchased fully automatically and then immediately resold, even if they had long ceased to exist in the tangible world. Sometimes they had never existed in the first place. The market for financial derivatives was already ten times larger than the real-life global economy. The end of the tumescence was still not yet in sight.

The concept that a product must exist in order to be traded has long been outmoded. Just as old-fashioned is the idea that money should exist before you can spend it. In a career barely spanning two decades, Tony, as key witness in the front row, had been able to observe this natural progress on his ever-thinner, ever-higher-resolution computer screens. Trading had definitively freed itself from its two fetters, merchandise and money. The earth’s produce and the bargaining chips to obtain it with? They had quite simply become superfluous. Just as art for art’s sake had come into existence, now there was trading for the sake of trading. After the poet and the conceptual sculptor, now the banker and the stockbroker had entered the era of pure lyricism, in which you didn’t have to take anyone else into account, least of all the public. Lucre became hermetic poetry. Even property could be a soap bubble.

At some point a real bill would be presented, for real money. Material money, old-fashioned money. They all knew that only too well. Fearful of being the first to be cast out of the pecuniary pecking order, they had all just carried on speculating and cashing in. This schizophrenia didn’t even prove to be that unpleasant. When repression takes hold of a closed group of insiders, an enjoyable collective intoxication ensues. Especially if the concrete salaries and bonuses continued to rise in tandem with the phantom rates.

Intoxication becomes addiction, and addiction is the new Order of the Garter’s badge of honour—honi soit qui mal y pense. In no time, a newfangled nobility had risen up, a coterie of untouchables, dancing on the lid of a cesspool that gained the allure of a blocked volcano as more and more yeast and toxic gasses escaped from the underground river of global crap. Its eruption had been a surprise, nevertheless, and was felt across the globe.

On Tony’s memory sticks there were constructions and trajectories that undeniably fingered him as the architect and route planner. But why should he put on the hair shirt? He had been an errand boy, nothing more. He had followed his masters’ marching orders without insubordination. If they’d been hoping he’d be the get-out clause that would ensure their collective impunity, they had the wrong man. For the first time in his life, he was going to categorically follow their beloved principle: ‘Help yourself, no one else will.’

They had tried to hammer in the unwritten rule—‘the Law’—from his first workday onwards. Each employee, they had warned him, would be judged on his quarterly results, not on the vague feelings of satisfaction of some client or other. This was neither cheating nor negligence, they thought. In the long term, it was the client in particular, each client, who was better off with a stronger bank. That was how it worked, the Invisible Hand, the tentacle that governed the free market better and more rationally than God his Creation. Help yourself, and the whole world would be better for it.

Tony hadn’t openly protested, even though the Law clashed with his ethics as a programmer, his principles as a dyed-in-the-wool democrat, and his sense of duty as a spouse, and later, a father. And, above all, he didn’t like to be forced to do anything he didn’t believe in one hundred percent.

This internal conflict was the only thing that irritated him about his job. Ostensibly, he had submitted meekly to the banking uniform—a tie and designer labels. Internally, and that was what counted, he had continued to see himself as some kind of rebel. A latent anarchist. However fiercely he defended his corporatist pride to the outside world, it didn’t prevent him feeling on the inside that he was a missing link. An autonomous pivot between the normal tribe he came from and the master race of high finance to which he would never be admitted.

And which he’d never wanted to belong to, in the first place. He was neither one nor the other. He was himself. And that secret feeling of honour was something no one could take away from him.

His latent resistance had turned into overt revolt shortly after his department head had called him a leech and a conman down the phone. The heads of other departments had come to threaten him, too, all the way to his office, which they had never set foot in before. One of them, a red-faced brute in a double-breasted suit, foaming at the mouth, had unexpectedly taken a swing at him with a balled fist covered in rings. The fellow was probably still coked up, too. Once one party drug wears off, you need another.

Tony had been able to turn his face away in a bewildered reflex. The punch had grazed his jaw without doing any visible damage, but his cheek was still sore a week later. A humiliating phantom pain that only let up when Tony made up his mind what to do. You couldn’t even call it rebellion. It was more about finding an antidote for the poison.

From now on, he swore—as he emptied his drawers and collected his memory sticks, packed his laptop in the sports bag, not forgetting his framed photo of Martine and Klara—from now on he would live life the way he’d been brought up. Help yourself? You could say that again. He didn’t just know the programmes for embellishing bank balances and pimping up long-term government budgets.

He also knew the paths a person of flesh and blood could take to go up in smoke.

And even here, Tony thought—sweating on this hilltop in Mpumalaga at the foot of God’s Porch—even here, the Law worked. Even here, I and I alone am the master of my own destiny. He wiped his sweaty palms on his cotton safari trousers and shouldered his gun again. He hadn’t been a bad marksman during his military service. According to his training officer, he possessed all the qualities you needed to become a sniper in urban combat. Accuracy plus patience, patience, patience.

It wasn’t the kind of thing you could forget. It was a gift. The only thing you had to do was pull the trigger at the right moment. What could go wrong? There was hardly any wind; there wasn’t a single reason to believe that the bullet would miss its target. Its head had been notched with a cross so as to burst behind the eye socket on impact. The animal would die instantly with a minimum of suffering. It sounded cruel but it was humane.

For minutes on end, Tony stood there, trying to gird his loins, but again he didn’t manage to pull the bloody trigger. He was forced to watch helplessly through his scope as the rhino cow turned her head away again. She revealed the contours of her magical, majestic double horn, the price of which, per kilo, exceeded that of gold. She sniffed around suspiciously, her head back, her nose in the air. Then she bent down toward her baby. He was standing next to her, panting away after frolicking in the mud of the watering hole. The place where his own horn would grow was marked only by a small bump. How old was this calf? A few weeks? Months?

Tony let his gun drop. He couldn’t do this. His right leg was shaking, sweat was running into his eye again. His armpits stank. Thank God the light breeze was blowing in his direction, away from the watering hole; otherwise his presence would have been betrayed long before. He rested his back against the pickup and rolled his shoulders around to relax them, breathing deeply in and out. A zebra stallion brayed in the distance, a family of warthogs trotted toward the waterline at a respectable distance from the rhinos, the wading birds were still pecking away like crazy, and the colossal red sun sank ever deeper into the horizon. How much time was left until darkness fell? Which escape route should he choose?

And what would happen if he missed the eye, and the animal was only wounded? That wasn’t an option. He had to hit his target with the first shot.

He pulled himself together and aimed again.

His heart winced. The endearingly clumsy rhino calf was searching between its mother’s back legs for a nipple. It wasn’t easy, with all those skin folds and layers of fat. The calf just kept on feeling around, searching.

The rhino cow didn’t interfere. She stood there with her legs wide apart, somewhat peevishly—or was that more silly anthropomorphism? A little bird with a red beak was sitting on the cow’s hunched back, pecking away at parasites. The cow just let it all happen.

Again, Tony had her right eye in his sights; again, his finger failed him. Now he was paralyzed by the thought of the suckling calf. What would happen to a calf like that in the African night? He shuddered to think. Next to a corpse that would attract scavengers from kilometres and kilometres away? God, he wasn’t about to sentence one living being to death, but two. He could picture it already. The baby would be snatched and dragged off by a crocodile because it had dared to venture too close to the water’s edge. Or it would be attacked in the middle of the night by hyenas with slimy, already-bloodied maws. Or by a pack of Cape hunting dogs. In ten minutes they could tear an impala to bits. They might need slightly longer for such a thick-skinned baby.

He wiped the sweat off his top lip with his wrist. Should he shoot twice, then, so as to grant the baby a merciful death, too? That would be even harder for him. He was no brute. Two shots would result in lost time and a racket, with all the attendant risks. The fight against poaching had been drastically stepped up in recent years. You could read all about that online, too. The government and the game managers were co-operating more closely. As well as night vision goggles and reconnaissance planes, they now possessed the most modern forms of communication, and had even gone so far as to acquire munitions, recently—the poaching gangs were becoming so foolhardy. In the Umfolozi game reserve, the former hunting ground of King Shaka Zulu, there had been a bloody clash between a poaching gang and a surveillance patrol, with deaths on both sides and a fuss in the international press.

It could actually be considered a miracle, Tony realized, that he hadn’t already been caught red-handed. The risks he was running were outrageous. That was why he’d cooked up the plan on his own, without any nosy parkers or potential snitches, leaving no loose ends, no helpers who could turn against you on the way back. A life wasn’t worth much in this part of the world. You saw plenty of stories in the papers. A single horn sold for enough money on the Vietnamese black market to ensure a dozen families a generous standard of living for several years. It didn’t do much for his spirits. The one chance I have, Tony thought, is to act fast. I shoot, I drive over, I get out the axe, I strike, and I hurry back to the hole in the fence. The night and the unlit access roads will hide my retreat. That’s the way it has to happen. Forget that calf!

He beat off a few mosquitoes and took aim.

To his dismay, he saw the zebra stallion he’d just heard braying many times appear some way behind the hunched back of the rhinoceros cow. The stallion was the first to descend a low ridge; the herd followed in his footsteps, in dribs and drabs, in a messy line. A family of giraffes ran along with them at a slow gallop, thirsty, majestic. Tony had been so focussed on his prey, he hadn’t seen them coming. He suppressed an expletive. What else was about to turn up? A herd of gnus? A watering hole like this could be incredibly busy at this time of day, and that made all of the animals nervous. They were venturing into treacherous terrain. Lions often lay in wait here. Tony needed to strike before the rhino cow cleared off. Rhinos liked their privacy; it wasn’t in their nature to share a lair or a watering hole. There you go! The cow was getting restless. Her large pointed ears turned in all directions; she sniffed for hostile odours again. Stepping backward, she began to rock her massive head to and fro.

Tony cursed and followed her with his gun. He couldn’t get the eye cleanly in the cross hairs anymore. I should have pulled the trigger just now, he muttered. At the same time, he was overwhelmed by the hefty grace of his prey. Her nervous stamping carried all the way over to him; he saw quivers run across her dusty flanks. In her neck, under her legs, and in her groins there were folds like an old leather armchair, her armoured skin stretched between them, pockmarked like magnified, concrete-coloured orange peel. He saw the shaking of her heavy, hanging belly, the curling of her short but powerful tail. What an awe-inspiring, beautiful creature she was! Millions of years of precarious evolution and an irrepressible survival instinct.

Tony’s own Klara flashed through his mind; he’d only spoken to her a couple of times in the past year. Surreptitiously and briefly, via Skype and all kinds of false accounts and digital back doors. His wife and his daughter were the bait he would have chosen, himself. Not only the government would be looking for him. The bank had a different name by now—its relaunch had been generously subsidized by the government—and it had hired not only most of the old bank directors but most of the researchers, too. Those Judases were good at their jobs. They had given Tony hushed-up information about clients often enough, or insider knowledge that bordered on the illegal. He couldn’t be too careful.

But it was also high time he took the step toward his potential deliverance, towards rehabilitation, however bloody and difficult that step had to be. His odyssey had lasted long enough. His life’s course couldn’t just end here. He’d already given up too much, invested too much for that. He had the right to a second chance. A future, just like everyone else.

He determinedly took aim again, gritting his teeth with determination. And at last a crisp shot rang out at the foot of God’s Porch.

Tony was surprised. He wasn’t the one who had fired it. He let his gun drop and looked at the rhino in disbelief. One of her temples had been blown away, eye and all. Blood gushed out. An expert shot.

For the moment, the cow remained on her feet, shuddering. She bellowed briefly but dolefully, stamping her back legs truculently as the wading birds rose up above her, the zebras and giraffes fled around her in disarray, and the echo of the shot rumbled behind her, ever deeper and higher into the ravine.

Then she fell with a dull thud. In the distance, a songbird made its presence known again.

◆ ◆ ◆

It wasn’t a large gang that had stolen a march on him, as Tony feared for a split second—his heart skipping a few beats at the thought that he had accidentally found himself face to face with half a dozen poachers. Imagine if he had been the first to shoot, and they’d fired at him after that! With their superior numbers and undoubtedly automatic weapons! He could have been dead by now. Helplessly riddled with bullets, left behind to disappear without a trace, twelve thousand kilometres from home, eaten by vultures and worms, a carcass of uncertain origin.

But soon his panic ebbed away. It was replaced by a cautious sense of relief. His opponent turned out to be a lone man, just like himself. And, judging by his bold act, he hadn’t even noticed Tony.

Even before the shot had died away, a safari jeep raced to the watering hole with a shadow at the wheel. The canvas protecting the back seats featured the same logo as the bonnet: a graphic representation of a springbok, with the words Nasionale Krugerwildtuin underneath it.

For a moment, Tony thought that his opponent was simply better prepared than he was. This fellow hadn’t bought a stolen four-by-four in Jo’burg; he’d carjacked one in the vicinity. An entirely appropriate vehicle, which no one would frown at if it were spotted, parked on the forbidden byroads of a neighbouring safari park. Brilliantly planned.

But when the man got out, surrounded by the cloud of dust his abruptly braking jeep had thrown up, Tony’s mild admiration turned into enmity. This wasn’t fair. It was Tony’s right to be standing there, he thought, down there in that dust cloud, down there by that water. His right—after all the trouble he’d gone to to get this far, a foreigner in a remote, unpredictable country, and a numbers person at that, which meant he rarely came into contact with animals, and certainly not in order to kill them. His opponent, on the other hand, was a professional park guide. That was much easier.

Tony watched the man through his telescopic sights with increasing dismay. A black giant of around 50 with a gammy leg and bloodshot eyes, creamy white teeth, grey stubble, and a grimace that looked as gloomy as it was grim, he was wearing the uniform that came with the job: sturdy shoes, knee-high green socks, a dark pair of shorts with pockets on the thighs, and a khaki-coloured shirt with breast pockets and green epaulettes on which the reserve’s emblem was repeated in miniature.

Tony remembered that uniform only too well. He had admired it, not two years ago, during his stay in Africa’s largest wildlife park with Martine and Klara. They may even have met this man in his capacity as guard.

That possibility made Tony’s blood boil.

For ten days, they had exchanged their converted barn in Belgium for a country as big as Western Europe. They hadn’t nearly enough time—they’d realized that right away. They hadn’t seen much more than the Kruger Wildlife Park, two vineyards in Franschhoek, and the view of Table Mountain from Cape Town.

But what a staggering panorama that had been! The bright-blue bay with its V&A Waterfront, the lattice of the busy streets in the City Bowl, wedged between Devil’s Peak and Lion’s Head, the elongated Parade with its palm trees, the smoggy patches on the northern horizon… After the immense, ever-changing landscape that he and Martine had admired from the hire car for hours on end, this lavish vista made them feel even more regretful. They resolved to return as soon as possible and do this magnificent country justice.

Nothing ever came of their resolution. They just didn’t have time. The ten-day trip was one of the very few real trips Tony had ever allowed himself. Martine had pressed for it for so long, and the bank, back then, seemed to be heading toward double-digit profit growth. They could, briefly, do without him. For once, he even accepted the risk that, while he was gone, the newly recruited whiz-kids would steal his niche. These days they were snatched from university even before their finals and given a five-year contract straight off, in exchange for that period in their lives when they didn’t yet have a time-consuming family, but did have the endurance of an athlete. Those pups could work for two nights in a row without losing any of their enthusiasm. Well, just let them try it, the suckers. Let them muddle along without him for once. Just to play it safe, he’d stowed away a few files behind double passwords. There were others he’d failed to mention during the briefing. They’d just have to get on with it. He’d had to do that, too, when he joined the bank.

Klara had just turned four back then, during their jaunt, but two years later she still remembered the herd of elephants and the one lion they’d seen close up, not to mention the family of amusing meerkats, and the warthog with eight piglets. And the hippos! Once Klara got going about them? Their wide-open mouths with birds in, pecking between their teeth? And her very own pink Hello Kitty binoculars, used to spot everything? After that, Tony could just sit back and listen for a few minutes. Klara would rattle on endlessly to oblige Daddy.

At least it had once been that way. At home and on the phone. And recently, again, though much more briefly, on Skype. There was hardly time to talk about anything else; Tony didn’t dare to speak to her or his wife for longer than ten or twelve minutes at a time.

Maybe it was better that way—Klara talking about the trip again. He wouldn’t have known what to say if she had pestered him with questions like she usually did. He was already feeling sick about the fact that, in the space of three minutes and with her prettiest pout, she’d twice asked him when he was coming home, at last.

One consequence of Klara’s extended safari story was that Martine barely had the chance to break into the conversation. As a mother, she clearly considered it more important that their sensitive daughter got to talk to her father than that she unburdened her sorrows as a wife. When Tony had cautiously sounded her out on the progress of the investigation, Martine had reacted strangely. She had gone white as a sheet, stuttered, stumbled over her words, and been completely incomprehensible. Was this his Martine? Where was her self-control, the sangfroid he’d always admired? From the dismal sob in her voice and the sidelong, fearful glances she’d cast at her daughter, only visible to him, Tony concluded that she and Klara were still under surveillance, and that they were trying to track him down through his family. They were being tapped, watched, downright spied upon.

He not only cut the connection immediately, he logged off completely and left the internet café without paying, disappearing into the ambling crowds in Istanbul’s Old City. Two hours later, he had checked in at Atatürk airport, completing his stopover of almost a full day. Two hours later, and he was taking off in a Turkish Airlines Airbus A330 to O.R. Tambo airport, Johannesburg.

The uniformed black giant had hardly looked around as he got out, maddeningly calm, as though any cause for concern were unimaginable. He threw back the canvas of his jeep, tossed his safari hat onto the back seat, and still with the same air of appalling unflappability, got out a chainsaw. The rhino cow lay convulsing on her side next to the jeep. Blubber welled out of the hole in her head while her fat legs continued to move, slowly struggling as though making their way sideways through a sea of clotting mucus. The bottom of the sun touched the horizon. A sickly smell reached Tony’s nostrils, carried on the evening breeze. Birds hovered high in the sky; Tony wasn’t sure if they’d already been circling before, or not.

The birds flapped away when the man set off his chainsaw with a tug of the starter cord. The hysterical roar of the machine not only cleaved the newly regained Arcadian silence with just a few bird and insect sounds, it also cut Tony’s heart in two. He no longer knew what he felt, watching motionlessly from his hiding place. Outrage? Jealousy?

Or was he simply angry?

Even as a student, he’d had a predilection for black people. Their history was deeply tragic; it seemed to cry out for vengeance. The nice thing was—and this country was a wonderful example of that—that the black masses, despite all the injustice done to them over the centuries, were able to forgive. At least as long as they had a leader like Nelson Mandela.

Unfortunately, they had also proved, in other African countries, that they knew what genocide was. They thought nothing of large-scale acts of revenge. Nor did they shrink from other major atrocities. But if you had the stomach to look at things from a historical perspective, the Europeans could hardly boast. They hadn’t managed much better, even in just the twentieth century, even amongst themselves. And you didn’t need to have studied economics to be shocked by the lasting havoc Europe had caused beyond its borders, primarily in its former fiefdoms.

Improving the local schools and infrastructure did little to lessen the responsibility, no, the liability, of the Old World. It was going to take generations for the West to even slightly redeem itself. That couldn’t be said often enough, flying in the face of all that Eurocentric cynicism. What’s more, Tony, like Martine, considered the black man to be more handsome and noble by nature than, well, representatives of all the other races. Race was a word they didn’t like to use, but there was no other way to describe it. If you disregarded the unfortunate high number of dictators—their existence frequently playing a part in Europe’s continuing interference—blacks were simply more photogenic and more likeable than the other inhabitants of the planet. This was something he and Martine had been able to experience during their admittedly brief stay.

The wealthy tourist received a warm welcome in every holiday paradise in the world, but the genuine, good-humoured geniality to which Tony and his family were treated for ten whole days? Even on the street? And by all the South Africans—not just the blacks, but also the coloureds, and even the whites? Their love of life was almost unsettling. Certainly when you returned to the self-proclaimed navel of the world, that country of your birth, where you were re-confronted with all those snarling voices and sour faces, for whom a friendly word seemed equal to an insult, which could only be answered with a real insult. Even Klara—who, with her blond curls and her freckles, had been the centre of attention for ten days, treated to cries of admiration and tickling games by adoring strangers—seemed to sense it. “When are we going back to all the smiley black people again?” she’d pouted one evening at bedtime. And to friends and family, to anyone who had wanted to listen, Martine and Tony had been full of praise for the overwhelming country of their dreams, where, sure, inequality hadn’t quite been eliminated, sadly enough, which they’d travelled to with a sense of apprehension, yes, that, too—but where, from the first day onward, they’d been treated like royalty and friends, and where the motorways, hear this, were better than those in Belgium.

And it wasn’t as dangerous as you thought. But now Tony was being forced to watch a black man take advantage of a uniform aimed at tourists to commit a crime against the resources and the progress of his own country. He knew that he was ill-placed to lecture others, but it made him seethe. Everything that went wrong in Africa, everything that made its future look so hopeless, came together in this spectacle, this tragedy in a nutshell.

What had got into the man’s head? In a region and a time of towering unemployment, you finally get offered a decent job, expenses and housing included, clothes on your body and a car beneath your ass, in one of the most beautiful parts of the world, and in a sector where the visitors’ tips alone equalled the basic income of three quarters of your less-fortunate compatriots—and what do you do? You take them for a ride. You start poaching, too, thus increasing the damage perpetrated by those international gangs. You saw off the branch you are sitting on. How stupid could you be? And this, too, was Africa, with its epidemic skulduggery, its short-sightedness, its corruption at every level that just couldn’t be stamped out. The ease with which you could buy a stolen pickup here, a rifle, even ordnance. Just like that! On the street, no questions asked. Tony kept a roll of South African rands in the glovebox of his pickup, brand-new notes in the highest denomination, now featuring a picture of Nelson Mandela, if you please. Notes he’d use to bribe customs so that his luggage, horn and all, would be set on the conveyor belt unchecked. Prior contact wasn’t necessary; guts and canniness about human nature at the crucial moment were enough. This was something else he’d found out during his ten-day stay. Traffic fines? Half the money as a backhander to Mr. Friendly Policeman, and he’d tear up your ticket. No authorities ever needed to know. A wink and a mutual nod sufficed. The rituals of corruption were pathetically simple and catastrophically efficient. And then they were shocked that their rainbow nation remained a sunless mess.

But Tony’s anger cut deeper than that. It had to do with the man himself. The man was acting in total cold blood. It was surely not the first time he’d got up to something like this. Everything about him was arrogant, focussed, and offensively authentic. Tony’s safari outfit was a parody; the guard’s was the real thing. He was a professional; Tony was a hobbyist, a miserable impostor, even in deceit. Without realizing it, the man was holding up a shaming mirror to Tony. He saw that clearly, now, and it shocked him. This was what he had wanted to do. This was how far he’d sunk.

But, in spite of this, he still felt a primitive envy of this part-time poacher, and it made his blood boil.

The uniformed brute didn’t wait until the rhino’s legs had stopped thrashing. He hobbled over to the dying animal, stood with his legs wide apart, and placed the roaring chainsaw against the root of the largest horn. Tony had to stop himself from screaming. The bastard! At least put the creature out of its misery first!

The man braced himself. The chainsaw’s roar changed into a bellow, softer and yet warlike, triumphant. It sliced through Tony like a knife. The chutzpah of it—the man daring to use a chainsaw rather than an axe! You could hear the racket for miles. And he sawed deeper than necessary, too, not wanting to miss a scrap of horn. Drops of blood and bits of bone flew into the air. Tony loathed the man from the bottom of his heart. A faint smell of burning hair and hot bone reached him. He felt his teeth grate; he gagged in disgust. The man got ready to remove the second, smaller horn.

And then it happened. Still clearly visible despite the looming darkness—half of the sun had disappeared now—the rhino calf charged.

Tony had lost sight of the animal. It had probably run off with the zebras and only just returned. In any case, it charged desperately, with its still-virgin nose low to the ground. This was how it reached the giant, sideways from behind, not head-on. But it was still enough to send the man with the bad leg pitching forward.

Deafened by the roar of his saw, the giant hadn’t heard the calf approaching. In order not to fall, he had to make a clownish jump, chainsaw in his hands, over the mutilated head of the rhino cow. His swearing was audible above the singing of the saw.

He regained his balance and turned around angrily to face the calf, who began a second charge from close by. Then the giant did something he shouldn’t have. He raised the chainsaw, ready to mow down the calf. And Tony shot him.

In a fraction of a second, he had aimed and pulled the trigger, all signs of paralysis gone, and just as accurate a shot as ever. It was a gift, and Tony possessed it, even though he was a programmer and number cruncher by trade. He could see the result through the gun’s sights. His shot had hit the giant below the neck, not far above his heart. Interrupted in his counter-attack, the man let out a gurgling scream, head back, mouth and eyes wide open in pain and astonishment. The chainsaw slipped out of his hands and fell across his knee, separating his thigh from his lower leg. Blood spurted out, mixing with that of the rhino cow. The man himself toppled theatrically, away from his amputated limb. For the second time that evening, the crack of a shot echoed deeper and deeper through the rocky crevice.

The howling of the chainsaw had stopped. It stood upright in the loose sand, like a knife in a tabletop.

The remorse would come later, along with the shame and the permanent dent in his self-image. (‘Am I really capable of something that monstrous?’)

For the time being, Tony felt none of that—aside, perhaps, from the adrenaline coursing through his veins. The only thing he did think was: I should have done this much sooner.