The Animal Lover – Chapter 1: The Riddle of the Carpy
A Bad Thursday
The water in Upton’s shower always came out at the same temperature, tepid. Morning, afternoon, evening, summer, winter, he knew that when he turned on the tap, the water would never change. It was just like the weather outside, humid tepid, hot tepid, rainy tepid. Underneath everything else, he could always be sure that things would be tepid.
Upton sometimes thought that’s what his life here had become, tepid. Like the shower, the weather, the city around him, there was nothing surprising about it. There was nothing he couldn’t predict. The last three days with Thursday had been a surprise, but that wasn’t the kind of surprise he was looking for. Which was why he’d come to the shower in the first place, to figure out a way of getting rid of her.
He stepped into the large, curtainless shower cubicle and turned on the faucet. Almost immediately he let out a small yelp. For the first time since he’d moved into the house, the water came out in a steady cold rivulet, colder than he could remember ever having felt in Africa. It would have been the perfect temperature if he’d been ready for it, but he wasn’t. He stepped away from the stream for a few moments, psychologically prepared himself for a cold shower instead of a tepid one, then stepped under the water again.
“It’s over, Thursday,” he said aloud, the sound of his voice drowned out by the patter of water on the concrete shower floor.
Over? he thought to himself. How could it be over when it hadn’t even started? Thursday had simply moved into Little Victoriabourg three days ago and never left. You could hardly call that the beginning of anything that could now be over. It wasn’t a relationship; it wasn’t even a friendship. Still, she had been staying under his roof for seventy-two hours, eating his food, using his tepid shower, and he now had to tell her to leave.
Hardly appreciating how good the cold water felt as it ran across his body, Upton went over the events of the past three days. He recalled how he’d met Thursday at the Shall We Go? Club on Thomas Sankara Avenue the night his favorite Senegalese acrobatic troupe was performing on the small stage up front. Shortly before they were to start, he’d been staring behind the bar at the large, black-and-white photograph of the President of State for Life. It was a photograph you saw all over The Capital – it was the law to have his likeness on a wall somewhere in your business – except in this one he looked a bit more human. He wasn’t wearing sunglasses. The more Upton contemplated the photograph, though, he noticed that the President of State for Life was pop-eyed and squint. Then he noticed something else. Another pair of eyes was trying to catch his attention in the mirror next to the photograph.
“Hello,” she said.
He turned to her.
“Upton Magna of Magna Exchange,” he replied, trying not to sound too official.
“Yaaba,” she said shyly, “but people call me Thursday.”
They watched the Senegalese acrobats throwing each other around until the performance was over. They didn’t talk much, although she seemed nice enough, and at the end of the evening he asked her if he could take her somewhere. She gave him a vague direction, so he drove them along the city’s famed boulevard of camphor trees, waiting for her to be more specific. Somehow they landed up driving all the way back to Little Victoriabourg, and he thought it would be harmless inviting her in. Besides, it wouldn’t hurt filling the house with someone other than himself, Mama Troy the housekeeper and Benjamin the gardener.
“This is Little Victoriabourg,” he announced.
He explained to her that the idea of calling the house Little Victoriabourg had been the Chairman’s, seeing it wasn’t very far from the real Victoriabourg, or rather, Victoriabourg Castle, home of the President of State for Life. (“Visibility’s the key, boy,” the Chairman liked to say. “If you do things that get noticed, then people take notice of you.”)
Not long after he’d given her a drink, she started crying. She told Upton that she had been fired from her job at the oil company that very afternoon, and that her mother had been so furious she’d kicked her out of the house. She had nowhere else to go that night.
That was the first surprise. The second surprise was that Upton told her she could stay over at Little Victoriabourg. He wasn’t sure why he did it exactly. Maybe he actually felt sorry for her. Or maybe it was because Little Victoriabourg was so big and empty anyway, and one more person under its roof wouldn’t make a difference. Thursday let out a cry of delight when he offered her a bed, and she pecked him on the cheek.
He tried to sleep with her that night, but he couldn’t. All he could think of was her mouth. They were the same words that came to him every time he was in bed with a woman in Africa. The mouth, Upton, the mouth. He thought Thursday would be disappointed, but when they were lying in bed, him limp, she actually seemed relieved that he wasn’t going to do anything.
The next night she moved into a spare room which contained an old wooden African bed that someone had been laid to rest on and which he’d bought as a possible export. He couldn’t imagine how Thursday would manage to sleep on it, but she seemed to do just fine. That had been three days ago, the longest anyone had ever stayed with him at Little Victoriabourg.
By the time Upton was drying off from the shower – at any other time he would have stayed under the cold water until it got tepid again – he had decided what to do. He would go away for the weekend to his favorite hotel in Prang. Before leaving, he would tell Thursday that he had guests coming and that she would have to move out before he returned. He was sorry, and he had really enjoyed her company, but now things had to get back to normal. There could be no more surprises.
Yes, that’s what he’d tell her.
***
An Interrogation at Prang
“I need something new,” Upton began.
Mister Sulahman poured him some more tea. Upton loved the Ugandan tea and had once held high hopes for it as a possible export, but London had turned it down. Every time he sipped it after that, the words he’d composed to accompany the proposal came back to him: Green it grows on the hills/And as for the brew, how it thrills.
“Something new?” the hotel manager asked.
Mister Sulahman always posed a question after anything Upton said, no matter what it was. In the beginning he used to think Mister Sulahman suffered from bad hearing or was egging him on to say more, but lately he’d come to the conclusion that he was only being polite.
“Yes,” Upton said. “It’s almost a year that I’ve been here now.”
“Do you mean a new business perhaps?”
Upton didn’t answer because he couldn’t tell Mister Sulahman what he meant.
“Or do you mean a new location?” Mister Sulahman realized what he’d said. “On no, Mister Upton, does that mean you will be leaving us? Going to Tokyo? Paris maybe?”
Paris, Upton thought wistfully. How many times hadn’t he told Mister Sulahman about his desire to be appointed Magna Exchange’s man on the Champs Elysée rather than here on the humid, oppressive Gulf of Guinea. Even though he knew that a Parisian posting was most unlikely – Magna Exchange didn’t have a single branch office in the First World, and wasn’t likely to soon – he didn’t reject Mister Sulahman’s suggestion. He simply reveled in the thought.
“You are so lucky, Mister Upton,” the hotel manager continued, then sighed. “You being in big business, traveling, seeing many countries. Yes?”
Upton never corrected Mister Sulahman for thinking his role in Magna Exchange to be a lot more important than it really was. Nor did he mention that Jocelyn and Felix got paid many times more than he did – Southeast Asia and Latin America being a lot more important than West Africa, at least in the Chairman’s eyes.
“Yes, the Chairman’s always on the lookout for something new,” Upton said, still being as vague as possible. “That’s the nature of our work.”
“New markets perhaps?” Mister Sulahman tried again. At the same time, he wiped away the blotch of a squashed mosquito from the plastic tablecloth. Then he opened a copy of The Guinea Times and placed it where his most regular guest – his only guest, as far as Upton could tell – might peruse it at his convenience.
Upton suddenly felt content. Coming to Prang always made him feel that way. While it was only a short drive from The Capital – although the potholes and roadblocks usually added an extra few hours to any route he took – the hotel’s location in the hills leant it a cool quiet that he never found in the city. And the hotel manager was a constant source of inspiration to him.
Mister Sulahman, without actually knowing it, had provided Upton with countless ideas for exports. Not that London had liked any of them, but Upton had remained hopeful. Until now, that is. For several weeks he had been coming to the conclusion that he would have to start looking elsewhere for something new. London, it was clear, just didn’t like Mister Sulahman’s taste. He was especially surprised they had turned down the exotic, locally made sandals. Not even his ditty had swayed them: Shoes in lacquer/Your feet could flatter.
Mister Sulahman cleared his throat.
“A new, er, product?” he prompted his guest.
Upton shifted uncomfortably in his picnic chair on the porch. He didn’t want to explain to Mister Sulahman that he’d been offering products from Prang to head office without even telling him.
“Possibly,” he mumbled. “It’s up to the Chairman.”
At the mention of the Chairman’s name, a flock of parrots in a nearby tree suddenly squawked, distracting Upton and making him furrow his brow. The sound of the birds triggered a memory from a night shortly after his mother died … Upton being woken by Solomon Magna, drunk from a party he’d attended … the towering man leading the young boy from his bed … Upton nervously clutching his teddy bear to his chest … them going down to the basement … the Chairman proudly showing off his latest acquisition, twenty crates of parrots from Sierra Leone … one of the birds getting loose somehow, fluttering around the room madly … Solomon Magna killing it with a baseball bat…
Mister Sulahman refilled Upton’s teacup and reminded him of what Upton had been saying: “The Chairman will decide …”
“Oh, yes,” Upton continued, happy to forget the parrot ordeal, but careful not to say the Chairman’s name too loudly again. “The Chairman knows about business. That’s why I’m here, you see. He said that the world will want Africa in the twenty-first century. He needed someone special to be here.”
“Special?” Mister Sulahman echoed him.
“Well, yes.”
The hotel manager didn’t understand.
“Someone who might discover things, interesting things.”
“Oh,” the hotel manager answered, a light in his eyes. “That’s what you mean by something new.”
Upton laughed nervously.
“Well, yes. But it can’t be just any old something new. It has to be something new that will make him rich.”
“Rich?” the hotel manager asked.
Upton corrected himself. “Well … richer.”
“Ah, richer,” echoed Mister Sulahman. “That I understand.”
***
The Other History of Vaclav Svaboda
“Ugandan tea!” Solomon Magna huffed. “Christ, what’ll he send me next?”
Solomon Magna’s assistant, a bespectacled man named Goodleigh, whose back was alarmingly hunched even though he hadn’t yet turned thirty, listened but said nothing.
“How much of that tea would I have to sell to make a decent profit?”
Goodleigh ran his fingers across his head. “A decent profit, sir?”
Solomon Magna wasn’t paying attention.
“You know what that country needs? A civil war. Then we could make some real money.” He paused. “Isn’t there something we can stir up? Unrest maybe? A strike? Some guerrilla movement in the wings?”
“Not that I know of, sir.”
Solomon Magna inspected one of his nails, which had been manicured that morning, and then he fell into a leather armchair. Above him loomed the large painting of a man he steadfastly claimed to be his grandfather but which was, in fact, a hastily done portrait of a Czech immigrant whom the Chairman of Magna Exchange had bumped into forty years ago coming out of a brothel in Soho. Solomon Magna always prided himself on the fact that an instant history had cost him only eight pounds, a sum that had also included a rented tuxedo for Vaclav Svaboda to wear during the sitting.
“Christ!” he shouted. “Instead of something valuable, I get tea and wood carvings.”
Goodleigh waited for his employer to carry on.
“Where’s the real mahogany? They’ve got rain forests down there, don’t they? And how about the occasional animal on the verge of extinction? Is that too much to ask for? Look at what Jocelyn and Felix bring in.”
He motioned for Goodleigh to pour him a whiskey, and once it was in his hand he fingered the ice with his right digit. The glistening cubes brought to mind yet another of his favorite products – the product, in fact, the one he could never get enough of – and a tone of almost religious respect suddenly came into his voice.
“And what about a diamond or two?”
He suddenly burst out laughing at the thought.
“Not that I’d ever expect a gem from him! But one single shipment of rare wood? A few dodos?”
Goodleigh cleared his throat. “Actually, they’re already extinct, sir.”
“You see. Someone always gets there before us.”
Once Goodleigh had topped up the glass tumbler, Solomon Magna moaned.
“That boy is going to be my downfall.”
Goodleigh was sure that the Chairman was right.
***
The Stranger
The bottom of The Guinea Times front page was always reserved for a particularly gruesome story – and today was no exception. Upton stared at the look of terror staring back at him from the newspaper: two eyes, their whites huge, and both lodged in a decapitated head.
The woman they belonged to, Upton read, had been killed by her husband because she’d cheated on him, although she’d only done so after she found out he was cheating on her. The bloody, violent episode made Upton shiver, but he couldn’t help taking a last quick look at the severed head before he turned his attention to another, more sobering story – about the possibility of a new dam being built on the Volta River. He yawned.
The topic of dams and construction bored him, even though he knew he should be riveted. A dam meant potential business for Magna Exchange: shovels and bulldozers and cement that could be imported and sold. As Solomon Magna had exhorted Upton for as long as he could remember: “Opportunity, that’s the key. Whether it’s a tractor or an AK47, people need to buy and we need to sell.” Then he’d get a look that managed to scare his youngest son as much as if it had been coming from a decapitated head . “Trading is in the Magna blood.”
Upton’s concentration was broken by the sound of someone grunting. Mister Sulahman had left the porch, and a woman he’d never seen before was moving through the tall grass in front of Prang Hotel, dragging a large brown object.
“C … can I help you?” Upton offered hesitantly, not sure of himself, even less sure that she’d heard him. He got up and walked quickly down the length of the porch to the stairs and pathway, breathing fast by the time he got to her.
Without standing up, but still earnestly pulling the heavy weight, she looked up at him. Her skin was pale for the tropics, etched with dark eyebrows and hair that was pulled back into a ponytail. Her breasts were pressed together so tightly that he couldn’t read the slogan on her T-shirt.
“Thank you,” she said quickly.
Upton took one side of the load, a canvas bag that was large and misshapen. He couldn’t see what it contained, although at one point he was sure he felt something inside it move. It also stank terribly. When he tried to inspect it more closely, though, she said something that distracted him. They finally reached her vehicle, a jeep that was parked between the trees and was so heavily covered in mud, you couldn’t see its original color.
“My name’s Upton,” Upton said after they’d hoisted the bag into the vehicle and he began rubbing his back. The stranger was already making for the driver’s seat.
“You come here often?” he asked, walking after her. “I’ve never seen you here before.”
“Thank you very much again,” she replied evasively. “I have to go.”
Without turning on the ignition, she let the jeep coast down a slight incline, slowly at first, before the engine kicked into action and the back wheels kicked up gravel and a cloud of dust. All the while the canvas bag moved around in the rear as if it were alive. Before Upton knew it the jeep, the stranger, the bag were swallowed by the trees, and the last thing he remembered seeing was the sticker plastered to the bumper. It said SAVE THE RHINO.
“How odd,” he thought, his heart pounding, his body sore.
***
The Iguana Deal: The Set-Up
As she lay next to the hotel swimming pool in Phuket, Thailand, Jocelyn Magna was contemplating how much money she could make off the Iguana deal. The Thai teenager who handed out towels squeezed some suntan oil onto her back, then slowly began to rub it in.
“Lower,” she said, eyeing his crotch. “Much lower.”
***
Mister Sulahman Goes Ballistic
The mystery of the canvas bag didn’t last for long. The jeep had hardly pulled off when Mister Sulahman came running out of the hotel. He was waving his hands madly. He came to a sudden stop, looked around for something or someone, and then let out a cry.
“Ahh-weeeeeee-ooooh!”
It sounded unreal, like the cry a bad actor might make.
“Mister Sulahman, what is it?”
The hotel manager stood as still as a statue. He looked – now that Upton came to think of it – exactly like a model wearing all the products that had been offered to, and rejected by, Magna Exchange: a necklace of small pink shells from Cape Conakry, a Benin bronze medallion, a pair of outrageously colorful boubou pants, a kneelength shirt worn with a Mao collar (a style preferred by the President of State for Life), and, of course, lacquer sandals.
“Mister Sulahman! Are you all right?”
At last the hotel manager managed to speak, although his words left Upton no more enlightened.
“She took my treasure.”
“What treasure?” Upton asked.
“It’s too terrible!” Mister Sulahman wailed.
“I don’t understand,” Upton said.
Mister Sulahman motioned for his most regular guest to follow him, and then he led the way down a corridor that ran through the center of the hotel, past a kitchen that never seemed to get used except to make Upton his tea, and into a courtyard which was dusty and almost vacant. Mister Sulahman stopped in front of an empty cage that stood about five feet high and stank terribly. He pointed to it.
“My treasure is gone.”
“I see,” Upton said, then assumed that Mister Sulahman must be talking about an animal. Trying to be helpful, he said, “Was it a dog? A cat?”
“No! No!” Mister Sulahman insisted, then said a word that Upton knew couldn’t be right. It sounded like either ‘car pee’ or ‘carpy.’ He was about to ask Mister Sulahman to repeat himself when a terrible thought struck him. The stink of the cage was much the same as the stink of the canvas bag he’d helped load into the stranger’s jeep. Did that mean the car pee or carpy was inside the bag, and was now being stolen? If so, Upton had been an accomplice to the robbery, a fact Mister Sulahman didn’t seem to know. And he wasn’t about to tell him.
***
The Toucan Deal: The Set-Up
At the very same moment, it was early morning in Mexico City, and a large man dressed in an expensive suit sat outside Felix Magna’s office. Clutching his briefcase very tightly, he tried not to look nervous.
“Senor Magna will see you shortly,” the secretary said. “He’s very busy.”
“I know, I know,” the businessman replied, nodding quickly. “He is famous. I will wait as long as he needs me to.”
Behind the door, Felix Magna lit up the joint he’d just rolled from a batch of marijuana that had come in the previous night from Costa Rica. Inhaling deeply, he considered the word on the front page of the dossier in front of him. That word was Toucan.
***
Upton Starts to Read
Upton offered to reimburse Mister Sulahman for the room that the mystery woman had not paid for nor, it was clear upon inspection, stayed in.
“I wish I could help you get your treasure back,” he added, more out of sympathy than because he thought he could actually be of any actual assistance. He also used the word ‘treasure’ because he still didn’t know what kind of animal it was that had been taken. “I wish I could help.”
Mister Sulahman misunderstood him.
“Is this true? You can help me get my treasure back?”
Not wanting to disappoint his friend, Upton shrugged uncertainly. Mister Sulahman immediately grabbed his hand and led him to his office. There he pulled out the Prang Hotel reception book and opened it to the most recently used page. Right below Upton’s signature was only one other entry for the past month. When Upton made out the name, his eyes widened.
“Ella Bazaar?” he muttered. “What a curious name.”
“That’s the thief,” Mister Sulahman announced angrily.
“You sure?” Upton asked, trying to act as if he knew nothing about the thief and what she’d done. The hotel manager nodded, so Upton continued reading.
“And she gave her address as … La Cité?”
Mister Sulahman nodded again, and then looked at Upton as if he was the only person on earth who could help him. Upton knew he couldn’t say no. He felt he owed his friend something for all the potential exports he’d introduced him to – even though not one of them had worked out.
“Okay, I’ll see what I can do,” Upton said, even though he was more convinced than ever, now that he’d seen the woman came from a city far from Prang and The Capital, that he wouldn’t be able to achieve anything at all. He didn’t even know what a carpy looked like.
Mister Sulahman hugged Upton gratefully.
“And seeing you paid for her room,” he said, reaching behind the counter, “you should have her things.”
He held out a book with a vellum cover, deckle-edged, its tops done in gilt. It looked like it belonged in an antiques store, not in Prang Hotel.
“It is hers,” he explained. “She left it behind.”
Upton was curious.
“You mean … it’s Ella Bazaar’s?”
It felt strange using her name as if he knew her more intimately than as a two-minute accomplice.
Mister Sulahman handed the book to him, and Upton couldn’t help wonder if it would help him find out more about the mystery woman.
Outside Upton’s window late that night, there was an unusual amount of noise. The truck from the Prang Aqua Provision Company had arrived to transfer the hotel’s supply of water for the week, and the two drunk drivers were talking loud enough to wake the only guest in Prang Hotel. But Upton wasn’t sleeping anyway. Lying in bed, he held the book in his hands for a long time, rubbing the vellum with his fingertips as if the covers contained something very special, a clue to Ella Bazaar’s identity and her whereabouts maybe, and then he turned to the first page.
