The Lioness(35)

“I don’t. They could have just disarmed them. They had all the surprise,” said Muema. He gazed up at a trio of bee-eater birds against the blue sky. “And look at Juma. He was unarmed and had his hands up when he got out of the Land Rover. I saw it. I saw it with my own eyes.”

“Juma was like an older brother to my father.”

Muema nodded. “You saw his instincts. Protect the guests. He tried to get as many to safety as he could.”

It seemed that Muema was about to say more, and Benjamin waited. But then he saw why Muema had grown silent. One of the men who had overtaken the camp and shot the rangers was approaching the front of the lorry, twirling the keys in his hand. An idea came to Benjamin and he told himself it was just a possibility: it wasn’t a certainty. It wasn’t an absolute. But he thought of what Muema had said, and he understood now what the guide was suggesting and why he viewed their plight as so dire: all of these men in the truck knew the faces of the criminals who had murdered the guide and the rangers and, possibly, the porter and the cook he couldn’t account for. They could identify these men for the police or the army or in a trial.

And that alone might be a reason why they wouldn’t be allowed to live—why they couldn’t be allowed to live. Perhaps they really were all going to be driven somewhere to be executed where their bodies would never be found.



* * *



.?.?.

Kenya hadn’t the gold of Congo or Tanganyika, but there was a mine near Lake Victoria that was owned by Europeans, as well as a tremendous refinery to process the mineral. Near that mine were the ditches and ravines and sewage pits where men and children—lots of children—would dig by hand, hoping to find a few nuggets or a little gold dust. Benjamin’s grandfather had done that as a teen before getting a job at the European mine. The working conditions there weren’t much better, but he made a little more money. He was deeply religious and (at least according to Benjamin’s father) steered clear of the prostitutes who worked the streets and the bridges over the river so filled with sewage and poisons from the mining operation that some days dead fish floated on the surface like water lilies. He ate as little as he could, and thus saved enough cash to return to Nairobi to marry Benjamin’s grandmother. Most of the time that he spent mining he was sick or hungry, and his back never recovered. Before he died, Benjamin’s grandfather told him of the line of hovels on the far side of the river where you sold the gold dust and flakes you hacked from the ground or panned in the fetid water. The buyers were Africans, but they, too, had European masters. Many, like Benjamin’s family, were even Kikuyu.

The lesson that his grandfather took away from his adolescence and his year at the gold mine—other than the rather obvious one that he wanted his children and grandchildren to have nothing to do with gold—was that survival depended on white people. As a boy, Benjamin watched his father and his grandfather argue about this, but the debates never grew heated. Neither man had a temper. Still, Benjamin could see the generational difference, how his father saw the English for the slave masters they were and the potential in African independence, while his grandfather had the fatalism and acceptance that came from growing up beneath British boots. He had seen the severed heads: the skulls of the workers who’d died in mining accidents decorating the street side of a wealthy Brit’s flower garden. There they were, human trophies posted on pikes beside the buffalo and rhino heads that sat on the ground amid rose moss and weeping ferns. The Belgians across the border were even more likely to decorate with dead Africans, because they were using the corpses of rebels: it was, for them, a reminder of who was in charge.

Nevertheless, Benjamin never lost sight of the reality that his father worked for a white man: Charlie Patton.

And, for better or worse, so did he.



* * *



.?.?.

There was a difference between pursuit predation and ambush predation. Examples of the former, Benjamin’s father had taught him, were most (but not all) of the big cats and the birds of prey. The hunters. The stalkers. The latter were such creatures as the crocodile, that would lie in wait in the water. The lion could be both. One might trail its prey a long time; another might be lazy, absolutely content to wait in the brush for the solitary gazelle to wander off. It might hinge upon how hungry the cubs were.

And humans? They were both, too, though the biggest factor was what they were after and why. They might sit for hours in a blind awaiting a buffalo, but they might track a particular bull elephant for days if they thought his tusks might near (or top) a hundred pounds each. But, as with the lion, it also depended upon whether the human was hunting for sport or survival. His father only saw the hunters so wealthy they didn’t need the animals that they killed. They slaughtered animals solely for trophies.

And, thank God, his father had never seen men such as the group that had taken the Americans and now was driving off with Charlie Patton’s crew. Two men were in the back with them, both armed with rifles—one that Kalashnikov—while a third was driving. Benjamin watched the men from the corner of his eyes, knowing he didn’t dare stare at them. He felt his internal clock racing in much the same way it did when he was doing work as pedestrian as assembling a camp before the guests arrived or as exciting as rumbling across the savanna because someone had spotted a rhinoceros. In this case, the countdown was until this lorry stopped. He and Muema and the others dramatically outnumbered the men who had taken them. But the Black men were bound, and the white men had guns.