On the wall of the ministry office reception area was a faded poster advertising Environment Day from five years ago. A dusty kudu skull was mounted above it—a nice rack with two and a half twists. But it had been a long while since it was tended to. Moths had taken up residence in the horns, their long gray tubes hanging from the twists, making a tired beard.
A bloated young woman, barely contained by her ministry uniform, put down her sticky deep-fried pastry as if my sudden presence was an inconvenience to her busy schedule. She shifted her weight in irritation, licked her pudgy fingers, and tried to suppress a deep cough as she asked in Afrikaans if she could be of assistance. “Kan ek jou help?” Her voice was harsh and raspy—a smoker, no doubt.
“Yes, hello, I’m Catherine Sohon. I have an appointment with Mr. Baggs.”
“Oh.” The woman rolled her eyes and pointed to a crooked chair.
I sat down facing the entryway so that I wouldn’t have to look at her. I sensed that we’d both appreciate that gesture. I opened up a faded tourist magazine with more advertisements for safaris than content. My eye was drawn to picture of an attractive couple sitting on the deck of a pontoon houseboat having a drink at sunset: Zambezi River Tours…Be Adventurous.
Gidean had brought my repaired car to me early so I could get to the office first thing in the morning. They hadn’t found anything of interest at the crime scene, but the police dusted for prints before towing the vehicle and transferring the bodies to the morgue. They saved me some of the ivory chips so that WIA could do the genetic analysis. Once he got approval, Gidean would give them to me. Meanwhile, they were off to track the wounded buffalo.
A tall, wiry man with sandy hair marched stiffly into the office. At first glance he looked like a haggard old man, wearing the same ministry uniform as the woman, only untucked and disheveled. But my second glance caught me off guard, as I fought back the urge to stare at this old man trapped in a younger man’s handsome body. He couldn’t have been more than early forties, tops.
“Morning, Draadie!” he announced theatrically. “Get me 63131.” His accent said English South African, and the tension between the Afrikaner and the Englishman was clear.
“Lines are down,” Draadie happily reported, picking up her sticky breakfast that I now realized was a koeksuster and taking another bite. The thought of eating this Afrikaans breakfast favorite—an extremely sweet and greasy doughnut—at this hour made my stomach hurt.
“Oh, Jesus!” The man’s shoulders fell. “Not again.” He groaned and collapsed against the door to the private office next to the reception area where I was still sitting, waiting to be presented.
Draadie pointed her Afrikaans doughnut toward me. “This woman says she has an appointment with you.”
I stood up.
The man winced at the woman, waiting for a further explanation.
Draadie shrugged, dropping her pastry and licking her fingers again.
The apparent Mr. Baggs turned to me and attempted to skewer me with his dark eyes. But it didn’t quite work, and I got the sense that he knew it. What I saw in front of me was a disturbingly good-looking man beneath the curmudgeonly act—his large vulnerable eyes lost in a sea of anguish.
I fumbled an introduction. “Hello, I’m Catherine Sohon.” I held out my hand.
Baggs jumped slightly, as if my hand were some kind of trap that would ensnare him.
I immediately regretted wearing shorts as he diverted his eyes to my bare knees. Feeling naked, I held my backpack awkwardly against my thighs, sliding it down farther to cover my kneecaps with the hope of breaking his stare.
When he looked back up at my face, I realized that it might have been safer to have him looking at my knees. What I had mistaken for a lewd expression, which I was used to and could fend off, was more an expression of genuine surprise.
He stiffened back up and reached for my hand, holding it limply away from his body, forcing a vast chasm between us. “Jon Baggs,” he said officiously.
“I’m the pilot from WIA, sent up to help with the elephant census.”
He looked at me dubiously and nodded for me to proceed into his office. He signaled for me to sit in any of an assortment of half-broken chairs in front of his institutional-sized wooden desk.
As Baggs sat down, time seemed to stand still for both of us. I saw one hand gripping the other, as if he were struggling to hide behind the persona he was trying to conjure in order to intimidate me. He glared at me, while I tried to placate his irritation with calm, which seemed to make things worse.
Wasps paraded in and out of waterlogged, torn ceiling boards. A large faded map of the region fell away from the far wall. Piles of evidence collected dust in the corner—rotting leopard skins, a crocodile skull, a tattered Florsheim dress shoe, a handmade rifle leaning next to three small elephant tusks.
Unnerved by the silent treatment, I proceeded. “Did you not get the package?”
I was met with a blank stare.
“The one that WIA sent up? My clearance and, I believe, some new elephant mortality forms that need to be submitted to the IUCN.”
Baggs pulled at his shorts in frustration. He turned his head, trying not to look at me directly, and began pounding a pencil tip on his desk, annoyed. “With no cellphone reception and the landlines down, oh and the mail train derailed, communications are a bit slow in the Caprivi.”
“I have an extra copy of the forms.” I dug into my backpack, dodging the ivory trade report, and pulled out a folder of forms.
As I placed the folder on the desk, Baggs slammed a hand down on it, making me jump. “You’re bloody joking, right?”
I realized my mistake. “I’m sorry. Of course you must have tons of these blank forms lying around.”
“As blank as the stares I get from my staff when I ask whether they’ve filled them in.”
“It was like that in Kruger, too. But these are the revised standardized forms that were just issued internationally. Easier to fill out.”
Baggs scowled. “Exactly what is the purpose of your stay, did you say?”
“I’ll be helping with the upcoming elephant census.”
“Helping how, exactly?”
“I’ll be flying the plane.” I looked at his blank face. “You really haven’t heard from WIA yet, have you?”
“Sir Craig Phipps from the Joburg office?” Baggs spat.
“Yes. He placed me here on a month contract. Aside from the census, I could help out in other ways. Fly the area. Look for carcasses. Assess mortalities. I’m a biologist by training.”
“You’ll need ministry clearance before you can have access to any information from this office.”
“Of course. Craig has already requested it.”
Baggs eyed me suspiciously. “You do realize, Ms. Sohon, that we have a very different problem than East Africa. All well and good for them to keep burning tons of ivory in an attempt to convince the world to stop selling, but they don’t have any bloody elephants left. In southern Africa we are overrun with the buggers. And in many cases, if elephants aren’t seen as a benefit financially, we’d have bloody cornfields in the place of elephant habitat. The money made from legal ivory sales is vital to our conservation efforts. We have gone to great lengths to monitor the legal trade.”
“If we can’t stop the poaching and smuggling, what good is monitoring the legal trade?”
“We have a very good handle on the smuggling.”
“I’d like to ask you some questions about that.” I assumed he had been told about what I had seen on my way to Susuwe, as he seemed to get even more defensive.
“Questions? I need to see your clearance before I can answer any of your questions.” He shrugged. “Ministry rules.”
“Of course. I’ll make sure you get that as soon as possible.”
A slight breeze carried a pungent smell from the pile of rotting animal parts in the corner. I tried not to cough. “The WIA Hong Kong office had the DNA tested from the ivory confiscated in that last big shipment found in Singapore en route to Guangzhou. Some of the ivory was definitely from Zimbabwe, Angola, and Zambia. And Craig has reason to believe it is being run through the Caprivi. If we can stop traffic through this corridor, it would make a big difference, regardless of whether you are for or against the legal sale of ivory.”
“We’re talking a couple of tusks in the kind of busts we do around here. The bigger stuff is happening in East Africa, not here.”
“A lot of ivory can fit in the trunk of a car, you know.” I couldn’t resist the jab.
Baggs got up and paced the room aggressively. “Exactly what do you mean by that, Ms. Sohon? You said you were a pilot, not a bloody detective.” He pointed a finger at me. “Let’s get one thing straight. This is not a playground for American pilot-cum-reporters trying to win the Pulitzer. I don’t know what WIA thinks they’re up to in sending you here, but I know your type.” He hesitated and then growled, “You didn’t take any pictures, did you?”
“Pictures?”
“You know what I’m talking about. Last thing we need is an image of the crime scene on the front cover of The New York Times: ‘Zambian Witch Doctor Runs Amok in the Caprivi, Slaughtering Elephants and Stealing the Brains of Its Citizens.’ ”
“No, I didn’t take any pictures.” My cellphone was broken, and I had been too flustered to think about taking photos anyway. If a lion and the rangers hadn’t shown up, I assumed I would have recovered my composure enough to have done so—for Craig’s eyes only—but I broke my phone before that could happen.
“Bloody well not have.” Jon smoldered. “Listen, I’ve seen enough of you bloody Americans coming over to Africa to try to save us. You people and your big foreign aid budgets just make things worse.”
Baggs suddenly looked bored and sat down. He wiped his hands down his brow. “Bloody darkness,” he mumbled as he looked past me with faraway eyes. “Africa teeters on a precarious edge. She’s breathtaking and revolting—deadly and mysterious with an uncertain end—an end that will find us all in hell riddled with Ebola, I promise you.”
There was no reasoning with this man. I didn’t know what could have happened in his four decades of life to make him this cynical. I felt like a springbok lamb in the mouth of a sated jackal too stuffed to eat any more.
The mist vanished from his eyes as he stood up again, pulling a floppy cap down over his ears, making him look like a naïve boy, were it not for the carved lines of a complicated man’s face. He sighed. “Hopeless.” He looked at his watch and tugged down his uniform shirt jacket. “Pleasure chatting with you, but I must go now. I’m afraid I have a meeting with the governor.” He pointed to the three tusks next to his desk. “The game guards found the induna’s son burying these in his backyard last night.”
I looked at the tusks. “Shouldn’t they come in pairs?”
“Usually.” Baggs squinted. “Perhaps UNITA soldiers got there first.”
“UNITA? Didn’t they disband after Savimbi’s death?”
“Apparently no one told them that.”
“Where did he find them?”
“On their owners, I suspect.”
“Their owners?”
“You know, those charismatic megafauna wandering out there, remembering things.”
“Oh, you mean you think he’s a poacher?”
“What kind of degree did you say you had?”
“I have a Ph.D. in wildlife management. I specialized in population viability of large game in Yellowstone.”
“Yes, well, perhaps it would have been more useful to have had a degree from the school of hard knocks.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m sure the induna will turn the ivory over to Chief Bwabwata, who will no doubt have some claim that the property should remain part of the Bwabwata throne.”
I struggled to get out of my broken chair, trying to follow what he meant.
I could see that he sensed my confusion and was enjoying himself. “Yes, a chief’s privileges do tend to get in the way of law and order around here. Pleasure meeting you.” Baggs waved me out of his office.
I said good-bye to Draadie, knowing that Baggs was behind me. “Do you happen to know where I can find a working phone?”
“Post office.” Draadie spat a piece of pastry toward me as she spoke. “But they’re closed for month’s end.”
“Yes, they’re out delivering coffins.” Baggs giggled behind me.
I ignored him. “Anywhere else?”
Draadie shook her head.
Baggs followed silently behind me as I walked quickly out to the parking lot.
As I approached my car, I heard him snicker. “Nice choice!”
I slowed down, desperate for a change in the dynamic between us. “An old friend.”
Baggs walked over with a big grin on his face. “Your elephants will use this as a soccer ball! Von Scheffel would approve. But watch out for Biggles. He’s likely to take offense at anything made in Germany.” He looked at his watch again. “Hippo Lodge has a nice lady’s rump on their lunch special. Assume that’s where you’re staying?”
“No, Susuwe, actually.”
“Susuwe! Heart of darkness out there. I’ll give the manager at Hippo a ring. Far more suitable to sup at the swollen teat of the Zambezi. Lush lawns, guinea fowl at your feet, beautiful. All the foreign aid folks stay there.”
“No, really, thank you, but Susuwe will be fine. Closer to the elephants.”
Baggs squinted. “I’ll speak to the guys at WIA. See what we can do. And remember. Don’t get your hopes up….God’s country is full of broken dreams.” He got into his diesel 4x4 truck and drove off in a dusty plume.