Fletch, Too

Later that afternoon they watched this same cheetah on uncertain legs hunt, bring down and kill an eland, to feed on and to feed her young. Immediately, hyenas came and took her kill from her. They dragged it a few meters away and devoured it.

The cheetah sat, blinking in the sunlight, watching them, clearly too tired to protest, to go on, just yet, or to go back, foodless, to her young.

From the ground, even more than the beasts, the dik-diks, the zebras, Thompson’s and Grant’s gazelles, topis, tree and rock hyraxes, impalas, leopards, lions, waterbucks, elephants, giraffes, or, down by the Mara River, the vervet monkeys, patas monkeys, olive baboons, were the birds, big and small, fascinating, the marabou storks and sacred ibises, secretary birds, Egyptian vultures, black kites, peregrines, francolins, spur fowl, bustards, plovers, turacos, the white-bellied go-away birds. Omoke had a bird book which he passed around. He knew his birds, but it was fun for Barbara and Fletch to look from this amazing bird in the bush to the book to confirm that such a creature existed and had a name and that one could believe one’s eyes.

Besides these specific observations, the general observation of African arithmetic is impressive. The social unit of many, if not most, species of birds and beasts is dominated by a single male. He has two wives, five wives, ten wives, fifty wives, seventy wives. Besides bearing the children, the wives do the work of hunting and feeding. All these wives and children belong to the single male, at least as long as he can fight off whatever young male would like to take his place. The only way this stupefying arithmetic can work out is if a shocking number of young males die trying. Or so Barbara and Fletch worked out in the back of the guari.

Giraffes stretch their long necks to graze off the top of trees, their four slim legs, bodies, long, graceful necks making something architectural out of whatever tree they graze/grace.

On the way back to the lodge that second night, they stopped to watch elephants graze through a stand of long, coarse grass. An elephant uses its tusk like a spoon, its trunk like a fork. With its tusk, an elephant digs down into the earth, loosens and lifts whatever it is eating. His trunk grabs it and swings it into his mouth, grass, root, soil, all together, all the while making this wonderful, rhythmical swaying movement, as if inviting someone to dance, or to box.

“The women are giving up,” Barbara said. At the bar, the two French hotel executives had put down their empty glasses. “They are going to bed. Seeing we need an askari to escort us, I might as well leave with them.”

“Okay. I’ll have a nightcap with Carr.”

After she stood up, Barbara said, “You might not find your father on this trip. But it looks to me as if you may have found your father figure.”

“Barbara says every woman around is eating you up with her eyes,” Fletch said.

Carr had brought two fresh beers to the table. “Occupational hazard. Women can think bush pilots attractive, but, for the most part, they’d never think of marrying one,” He touched his glass to Fletch’s. “Home tomorrow to the camp, and Sheila.”

They drank.

Fletch said, “Barbara and I are very grateful to you, Mr. Peter Carr. Seeing the Masai Mara has been a most memorable treat.”

“Then perhaps you’ll permit me a personal question?”

“Of course.”

Carr took another swallow of his beer before speaking. “You’ve got me a bit confused, young Fletcher. I’m speaking of the murder you saw, or half saw, at the airport.”

“Yes.”

“I understand your not running out of the men’s room yelling bloody murder, or I guess I do. Jet-lagged, deeply shocked, sick, newly arrived in a country foreign to you, knowing no one here, unsure of your father, his invitation, all that.”

“Did he ever indicate to you he might meet us at the airport?”

“But in the days since then, why haven’t you come forward? Granted, the authorities here would want you to testify, might hold you over, and, sooner rather than later you want to get back to your own lives in the States … but something could be worked out, don’t you think?”

Fletch cleared his throat. “My ace in the hole.”

“You’re playing poker?”

“There are those who say life is poker.”

“What’s in the pot?”

“My father.”

“Oh, I see. I think I see.”

“I’m talking about a trade-off, Carr.”

Carr’s eyes narrowed. “The senior Fletcher for a murderer.”

“Carr, I’ve been listening to you all. That’s what a reporter does: he listens. I’m in a country, however you love it, where a tourist is jailed, fined, and expelled for tearing a hundred-shillingi note in half; where a government driver is jailed for eighteen months for parking a government car outside a bar; where an Indian lawyer is sentenced to seven years in prison for having thirteen U.S. dollars in his pocket. My father got into a drunken bar brawl and may or may not have slugged a cop. What’s that worth in Kenyan prison time?”

“I see. You’re looking forward to doing a deal.”

“If it comes to it, I know a deal is possible. No police in the world would fail to forgive what is essentially a misdemeanor for an eyewitness account of a murder.”

“You’re not just playing Hamlet.”

“I see my father’s ghost, and that’s about all.”

Quietly, Carr said, “You don’t even know the chap.”

“He’s my father.”

“And that means something to you?”

“I don’t know what it means to me.”

“He ran off on you and your mother. He seems to have ignored you all your life. A few days ago, in prison, he refused to see you.”

“Am I crazy?”

“I don’t know.”

“He also arranged for Barbara and me to come out here to meet him, spend some time with him, get to know him. There must be some feeling there. At least ‘mild curiosity.’”

“There’s a moral question here somewhere.”

“Is there? How do I know what morals there are within a family, between a father and a son? No one ever taught me.”

“I see.”

“I know I don’t want to see anyone who is my father spend months, years in an African prison for getting pissed and blindly swinging out at someone.”

“Not quite what I mean. You can identify a murderer, someone who has murdered and is still at large.”

“You mean you think he may murder again?”

“Exactly. Don’t you have the responsibility to get the chap off the streets?”

Fletch shook his head. “No. That was a murder of impulse, of rage. I was there.”

“The police aren’t so sure,” Carr said. “I made a phone call while we were in Nairobi.”

“Dan Dawes?”

“The same.”

Fletch chuckled. “The police informant.”

“Right. The police inform him of everything. Bringing hard currency into Kenya isn’t illegal; in fact, it’s rather appreciated. Failing to declare the money upon arrival is illegal. In getting as far as the men’s room without declaring this extraordinary number of deutsche marks, Louis Ramon, who, by the way,