The Sunbird [Wilbur Smith] (fb2) читать постранично, страница - 3

The envelope was on my desk marked ‘Private and Confidential’ with a note pinned to one corner, ‘This came for you at lunchtime. Looks exciting! Sal.’

With a quick stab of jealousy I inspected the seal of the envelope. It was unbroken. Sally hadn’t been into it but I knew it must have taken all her self-control for she has an almost neurotic curiosity. She calls it a fine inquiring scientific mind.

I guessed she would arrive within the next five minutes so I found the packet of Three X peppermints in my top drawer and slipped one into my mouth to smother the whisky fumes before I opened the envelope and drew out the glossy twelve-by-twelve enlargement, switched on the desk light and adjusted it and the magnifying table lens over the print. Then I looked around at the hosts of the past that crowd my office. All four walls are lined with shelves, and from floor to shoulder height - my shoulder height - these are filled with books: the tools of my trade, all bound in brown and green calf-skin, and titled in gold leaf. It is a big room, and there are many thousands of volumes. The shelves above the books carry the plaster busts of all the creatures that preceded man. Head and shoulders only. Australopithecus, Proconsul, Robusta, Rhodesian Man, Peking - all of them up to Neanderthal and finally Cro-Magnon himself - homo sapiens sapiens in all his glory and infamy. The shelves to the right of my desk are laden with busts of all the typical ethnic types found in Africa, Hamites, Arabs, pygmies, the negroids, Boskops, bushmen, Griqua, Hottentot and all the others. They watched me attentively, with their bulging glass eyes as I addressed them.

‘Gentlemen,’ I said, ‘I think we are on to something good.’ I only speak aloud to them when I am excited or drunk, and now I was more than a little of each.

‘Who are you talking to?’ asked Sally from the doorway, making me leap in my seat. It was a rhetorical question, she knew damn well who I was talking to. She lounged against the jamb, her hands thrust deeply into the pockets of her grubby white dust-coat. Dark hair drawn back with a ribbon from the deep bulging forehead, large green eyes well spaced beside the pert nose. High cheekbones, wide sensual smiling mouth. A big girl with long well-muscled legs in the tight-fitting blue jeans. Why do I always like them big?

‘Good lunch?’ she asked, starting the slow sidling approach across the carpet towards my desk that would put her in position to check what was going on. She can read documents upside-down, as I have proved to my cost.

‘Great,’ I answered, deliberately covering the photograph with the envelope. ‘Cold turkey, lobster salad, smoked trout, and a very good duck and truffles in aspic.’

‘You bastard,’ she whispered softly. She loves good food, and she had noticed my play with the envelope. I don’t allow her to talk to me like that, but then I can’t stop her either.

Five feet from me she sniffed, ‘And peppermint-flavoured malt whisky! Yummy!’

I blushed, I can’t help it. It’s like my stutter - and she burst out laughing and came to perch on the edge of my desk.

‘Come on, Ben.’ She eyed the envelope frankly. ‘I’ve been bursting since it arrived. I would have steamed it open - but the electric kettle is broken.’

Dr Sally Senator has been my assistant for two years, which is coincidently the exact period of time that I have been in love with her.

I moved aside making room for her behind the desk and uncovered the photograph. ‘All right,’ I agreed, ‘let’s see what you make of it.’

She squeezed in beside me, her upper arm touching my shoulder - a contact that shivered electrically through my whole body. In two years she had become like the children, she didn’t seem to notice the hump. She was easy and natural, and I had a timetable worked out - in another two years our relationship would have ripened. I had to go slowly, very slowly, so as not to alarm her, but in that time I would have accustomed her to the thought of me as a lover and husband. If the last two years had been long - I hated to think about the next two.

She leaned over the desk peering into the magnifying lens, and she was still and silent for a long time. Reflected light was thrown up into her face, and when she at last looked up her expression was rapt, the green eyes sparkled.

‘Ben,’ she said. ‘Oh Ben - I’m so glad for you!’ Somehow her easy acceptance and presumption annoyed me.

‘You are jumping the gun,’ I snapped. ‘There could be a dozen natural explanations.’

‘No.’ She shook her head, smiling still. ‘Don’t try and knock it. It’s true, Ben, at last. You’ve worked so long and believed so long, don’t be afraid now. Accept it.’

She slipped out from behind the desk and crossed quickly to the shelf of books under the label ‘K’. There are twelve volumes there that bear the author’s name ‘Benjamin Kazin’. She selected one, and opened it at the fly-leaf.

‘Ophir,’ she read, ‘by Dr Benjamin Kazin. A personal investigation of the prehistoric gold-working civilization of Central Africa, with special reference to the city of Zimbabwe and to the legend of the ancients and the lost city of the Kalahari.’

She came to me smiling. ‘Have you read it?’ she asked. ‘It’s quite entertaining.’

‘There’s a chance, Sal. I agree. Just a chance, but—’

‘Where does it lie?’ she cut in. ‘In the mineralized series, as you predicted?’

I nodded. ‘Yes, it’s in the gold belt. But it could, it just could, produce so much more than Langebeh and Ruwane.’

She grinned triumphantly, and bent over the lens again. With her finger she touched the indian ink arrow in the corner of the photo that gave the northerly bearing.

‘The whole city—’

‘If it is a city,’ I cut in.

‘The whole city,’ she repeated with emphasis, ‘faces north. Into the sun. With the acropolis behind it - sun and moon, the two gods. The phallic towers - there are four, five - six. Perhaps seven of them.’

‘Sal, those aren’t towers, they are just dark patches on a photograph taken from 36,000 feet.’

‘Thirty-six thousand!’ Sal’s head jerked up. ‘Then it’s huge! You could fit Zimbabwe into the main enclosure half a dozen times.’

‘Easy, girl. For God’s sake.’

‘And the lower city outside the walls. It stretches for miles. It’s enormous, Ben - but I wonder why it’s crescent-shaped like that?’ She straightened up, and for the first time - the very first wonderful time - she spontaneously threw her arms around my neck and hugged me. ‘Oh, I’m so excited, I could die. When do we leave?’

I didn’t answer, I hardly heard the question, I just stood there and revelled in the feel of her big warm breasts pressing against me.

‘When?’ she asked again, pulling back to look into my face.

‘What?’ I asked. ‘What did you say?’ I was both blushing and stuttering - and she laughed.

‘When do we leave, Ben? When are we going to find your lost city?’

‘Well,’ I considered how to phrase it delicately, ‘Louren Sturvesant and I will go in first. We leave on Tuesday. Louren didn’t mention an assistant - so I don’t think you will be coming along on the recce.’

Sally stepped back and placed her clenched fists on her hips, she looked at me unkindly and asked with deceptive gentleness: ‘Do you want to bet on that?’

I like reasonable odds when I do bet, so I told Sally to pack. A week was too long for the job, for she is a professional and travels light. Her personal effects filled a single small valise and a shoulder-strapped carry-all. Her sketchbooks, and paints, were more bulky, but we pooled our books to avoid duplication. My photographic equipment was another big item, and then the sample bags and boxes together with my one canvas case made a formidable pile in the corner of my office. We were ready in twenty-four hours, and for the next six days we killed time by arguing, agonizing, squabbling and poring over the photograph which was starting to lose a little of its gloss. When our tensions built up