Wilbur Smith - Shout At The Devil
PART ONE
Flynn Patrick O'Flynn was an ivory poacher by profession, and modestly he admitted that he was the best on the east coast of Africa.
Rachid El Keb was an exporter of precious stones, of women for the harems and great houses of Arabia and India, and of illicit ivory. This he admitted only to his trusted clients; to the rest he was a rich and respectable owner of coastal shipping.
In an afternoon during the monsoon of 1912, drawn together by their mutual interest in pachyderms, Flynn and Rachid sat in the back room of El Keb's shop in the Arab quarter of Zanzibar, and drank tea from tiny brass thimbles.
The hot tea made Flynn O'Flynn perspire even more than usual. It was so humid hot in the room that the flies sat in languid stupor upon the low ceiling.
'Listen, Kebby, you lend me just one of those stinking little ships of yours and I'll fill her so high with tusks, she'll damn nigh sink.'
'Ah!' replied El Keb carefully, and went on waving the palm-leaf fan in his own face a face that resembled that of a suspicious parrot with a straggly, goatee beard.
'Have I ever let you down yet?' Flynn demanded aggressively, and a drop of sweat fell from the tip of his nose onto his already damp shirt.
'Ah!' El Keb repeated.
This scheme has a flair. It has the touch of greatness to it. This scheme...' Flynn paused to find a suitable adjective, '... this scheme is Napoleonic. It is Caesarian!'
'Ah!' El Keb said again, and refilled his tea cup. Lifting it delicately between thumb and forefinger, he sipped before speaking. 'It is necessary only that I should risk the total destruction of a sixty-foot dhow worth...' prudently he inflated the figure.'.. two thousand English pounds?'
'Against an almost certain recovery of twenty thousand, Flynn cut in quickly, and El Keb smiled a little, almost dreamily.
'You'd put the profits so high? 'he asked.
'That's the lowest figure. Good God, Kebby! There hasn't been a shot fired in the Rufiji basin for twenty years. You know damn well it's the Kaiser's private hunting reserve.
The Jumbo are so thick in there I could round them up and drive them in like sheep.' Involuntarily Flynn's right forefinger crooked and twitched as though it were already curled a round a trigger.
'Madness hispered El Keb, with the gold gloat softening the shape of his lips. 'You'd sail into the Rufiji river from the sea, hoist the Union Jack on one of the islands in the delta and fill the dhow with German ivory. Madness.'
'The Germans have formally annexed none of those islands. I'd be in and out again before Berlin had sent their first cable to London. With ten of my gun-boys hunting, we'd fill the dhow in two weeks.'
'The Germans would have a gunboat there in a week.
They've got the Blacher lying at Dares Salaam under steam, heavy cruiser with nine-inch guns.'
'We'd be under protection of the British flag. They couldn't dare touch us not on the high seas not with things the way they are now between England and Germany.'
'Mr. O'Flynn, I was led to believe you were a citizen of the United States of America.'
'You damn right I am.' Flynn sat up a little straighter, a little more proudly.
'You'd need a British captain for the dhow,' El Keb mused, and stroked his beard thoughtfully.
'Jesus, Kebby, you didn't think I was fool enough to sail that dhow in myself? 'Flynn looked pained. 'I'll find someone else to do that, and to sail her out again through the Imperial German navy. Me, I'm going to walk in from my base camp in Portuguese Mozambique and go out the same way.'
'Forgive me.' El Keb smiled again. 'I underestimated you.'
He stood up quickly. The splendour of the great jewelled dagger at his waist was somewhat spoiled by the unwashed white of his ankle-length robe. 'Mr. O'Flynn, I think I have just the man to captain your dhow for you. But first it is necessary to alter his financial circumstances so that he might be willing to accept employment.'
The leather purse of gold sovereigns had been the pivot on which the gentle confusion of Sebastian Oldsmith's life turned. It had been presented to him by his father when Sebastian had announced to the family his intention of sailing to Australia to make his fortune in the wool trade. It had comforted him during the voyage from Liverpool to the Cape of Good Hope where the captain had unceremoniously deposited him after Sebastiah's misalliance with the daughter of the gentleman who was proceeding to Sydney to take up his appointment as Governor of New South Wales.
In gradually dwindling quantity the sovereigns had remained with him through the series of misfortunes that ended in Zanzibar, when he awoke from heat drugged sleep in a shoddy room to find that the leather purse and its contents were gone, and with them were gone the letters of introduction from his father to certain prominent wool brokers of Sydney.
It occurred to Sebastian as he sat on the edge of his bed that the letters had little real value in Zanzibar, and with increasing bewilderment, he reviewed the events that had blown him so far off his intended COUrse. Slowly his forehead creased in the effort of thought. It was the high, intelligent forehead of a philosopher crowned by a splendid mass of shiny black curls; his eyes were dark brown, his nose long and straight, his jaw firm, and his mouth sensitive. In his twenty-second year, Sebastian had the face of a young Oxford don; which proves, perhaps, how misleading looks can be. Those who knew him well would have been surprised that Sebastian, in setting out for Australia, had come as close to it as Zanzibar.
Abandoning the mental exercise that was already giving him a slight headache, Sebastian stood up from the bed and, with the skirt of his nightshirt flapping around his calves, began his third minute search of the hotel room.
Although the purse had been under his mattress when he went to sleep the preceding evening, this time Sebastian emptied the water jug and peered into it hopefully. He unpacked his valise and shook out each shirt. He crawled under the bed, lifted the coconut matting and probed every hole in the rotten flooring before giving way to despair.
Shaved, the bed-bug bites on his person anointed with saliva, and dressed in the grey three-piece suit which was showing signs of travel fatigue, he brushed his derby hat and placed it carefully over his curls, picked up his cane in one hand, and lugging his valise in the other, he went down the stairs into the hot noisy lobby of the Hotel Royal.
'I say,' he greeted the little Arab at the desk with the most cheerful smile he could muster. (I say, I seem to have lost my money.'
A silence fell upon the room. The waiters carrying trays out to the hotel veranda slowed and stopped, heads turned towards Sebastian with the same hostile curiosity as if he had announced that he was suffering from a mild attack of leprosy.
'Stolen, I should imagine,' Sebastian went on, grinning.
'Nasty bit of luck, really.'
The silence exploded as the bead curtains from the office were thrown open and the Hindu proprietor erupted into the room with a loud cry of, 'Mr. Oldsmith, what about your bill?'
'Oh, the bill. Yes, well, let's not get excited. I mean, it won't help, now, will it?'
And the proprietor proceeded to become very excited indeed. His cries of anguish and indignation carried to the veranda where a dozen persons were already beginning the daily fight against heat and thirst. They crowded into the lobby to watch with interest.
Ten days you owe. Nearly one hundred rupees.'
'Yes, it's jolly unfortunate, I know.' Sebastian was grinning desperately, when a new voice added itself to the uproar.
'Now just hold on a shake.' Together Sebastian and the Hindu turned to the big red-faced, middle-aged man with the pleasantly mixed American and Irish accent. 'Did I hear you called Mr. Oldsmith?'
'That is correct, sir. Sebastian knew instinctively that here was an ally.
'An unusual name. You wouldn't be related to Mister Francis Oldsmith, wool merchant of Liverpool, England?'
Flynn O'Flynn enquired politely. He had perused Sebastian's letters of introduction passed on to him by Rachid El Keb.
'Good Lord!' Sebastian cried with joy. 'Do you know my Pater?'
'Do I know Francis Oldsmith?' Flynn laughed easily, and then checked himself His acquaintance was limited to the letterheads. 'Well, I don't exactly know him person to person, you understand, but I think I can say I know of him.
Used to be in the wool business myself once. 'Flynn turned genially to the hotel proprietor and breathed on him a mixture of gin fumes and good-fellowship. 'One hundred rupees was the sum you mentioned.'
'That's the sum, Mr. O'Flynn.' The proprietor was easily soothed.
'Mr. Oldsmith and I will be having a drink on the veranda. You can bring the receipt to us there.' Flynn placed two sovereigns on the counter; sovereigns that had so recently reposed beneath Sebastian's mattress.
With his boots propped on the low veranda wall, Sebastian regarded the harbour over the rim of his glass. Sebastian was not a drinking man but in view of Flynn O'Flynn's guardianship he could not be churlish
