Private Lies (30 page)

As she toppled, one leg reached out and she was able to
hook one foot in an outcrop of root that hung just over the edge of the bank.
It stopped her fall briefly, but gave her leverage to reach out to his
retreating body. Her head jerked upward and she was able to see his eyes and
note the terror in them as she tried without success once again to loosen his
hold on her forearm. It was only when he fell forward, taking her with him,
that his grip loosened.

She heard his long, frightened, whining scream as they
tumbled into the river. It wasn't a high fall, but she had no illusions about
its danger. She hadn't heard his splash, but when she surfaced, she could see
him floundering a few yards away, slapping the water with his arms, as he tried
to maneuver his body into a swimming mode.

For a moment, she bobbed on the surface, looking upward at
the three figures running along the trail above. She saw Ken grab Maggie and
wrestle her to the ground, her screams echoing over the river.

Then she was aware of other sounds, the shushing sound of
the great beasts rising and submerging in the water around her, and on the
shore at the far bank she saw the crocodiles stirring, their heads rising in
curiosity.

She did not panic, as if instinct told her that it would
cloud her judgment. Under the promontory from which they had fallen, she saw a
sliver of bank and a narrow foot trail winding upward. Reaching that place
became the goal of her survival and she headed toward it, crowding out all
other thoughts.

She continued to hear the gasps of the hippos around her
and Maggie's screams, less audible now, as she cut through the water's surface,
her heart pumping, using every energy resource in her body. I'm coming, Ken,
she cried inside as she struggled with the current, hoping it would not cause
her to overshoot her goal.

Unfortunately, she was no match for the current and she
began to drift downstream within inches of the diving hippos. Thankfully, they
paid her little attention, although she expected at any moment to be chomped or
swallowed by the crocodiles. Still, she did not panic, trying to force her body
into a pattern with the current that would bring her to the shore.

Suddenly a shot rang out. A few yards away, she saw the
thrashing of a crocodile's tail and a growing overlay of red blood on the green
surface of the water. She continued to fight the current, getting closer,
reaching out as she swam for some outcropping that might hold her against the
river's current.

Another shot rang out. She heard more thrashing beside her,
then blood spreading like molasses on the river surface around her. The events
and concerns of her life crowded out of memory, her focus on pure survival as
she struggled with the current, striking out with her arms as she reached for
any root, stone, or outcrop on the bank that might hold her.

She heard another shot. And another. Then, suddenly, her
hand gripped something. She reached out with the other hand, holding fast now,
no longer a slave to the current.

She swung her legs upward toward a flat rock and heaved
forward, finding herself completely out of the water. She lay on the rock
fighting for breath, her heart pounding in her chest. It was then that she saw
the crocodile heading toward her, emerging from the water, moving swiftly.

Leading with his massive jaws, she could see his eyes blink
in their wrinkled sockets as he slithered forward, lifting his scaly armored
body out of the water, intent on his prey. She watched, unable to move,
paralyzed by either fear or exhaustion, certain that this was the end of Carol
Stein Butterfield, the end of striving and dreams. The end of life and love.

Then the crocodile exploded in front of her, blood pluming
out of its shattered eye as it rolled over on its back, its white moist belly
shooting glints of sunlight. Only then did her energy return and she struggled
up the rocks to Ken's waiting arms.

"Thank God. Thank God," he cried, smoothing her
hair, kissing her face. Above her she could see Meade holding his rifle, her
nostrils filling with the acrid smell of gunpowder.

Ken's arms enveloped Carol as he helped her find a sitting
position against the trunk of a tree. Then he rose beside her, watched her for
a moment, then moved away. She saw him talk briefly with Meade, who looked
downward, kicking the ground with his foot and shaking his head. Then they both
disappeared out of sight along the trail beside the river.

Carol felt herself settling, her heartbeat subsiding, her
mind just beginning to respond to events beyond her survival. Only then was she
conscious of Maggie's eyes watching her. She was leaning against the side of
the tree against which Carol was sitting. Maggie's face was stark white, her
eyes seemed to be floating in their sockets.

"Eliot?" Maggie asked, her voice a whisper.

Carol struggled up from the ground, felt a brief faintness,
then rested for a moment against the tree until it subsided. She was no more
than a foot from Maggie and their eyes locked for a long moment.

"Eliot?" Maggie asked again. Then Maggie fell
into Carol's arms, her body shuddering with hysterical sobs. There was no point
in explanations, Carol decided. We were all lousy detectives, missed the clues
and the murderer got away. Besides, loving was the only truth here and who
could possibly explain that.

For some reason Carol's eyes drifted upward. A wide winged
bird glided against the clear sky. It flew closer and she recognized its white
ugly head. A vulture, she thought, surprised at the graceful way it swooped and
dived.

KEN SAT IN a corner of the Norfolk lounge nursing a golden
brandy in a snifter. The mostly white pub crowd at the far end of the veranda
had dwindled while the dinner groups in the main restaurant lingered over
dessert and coffee.

He looked at his watch. By ten in the evening at the
latest, Meade had said, estimating that it would take him seven or eight hard
hours to bring back the van loaded with their luggage over two hundred miles of
bad roads from the Masai Mara. A light plane chartered out of Nairobi had
picked up the three of them at a landing strip in the Mara and flown them back
to the city in less than an hour. Thankfully, the noise of the plane's motor
had made communication between them impossible.

Ken expected Meade's estimate to be accurate. Time was the
only certainty in this place. It was the measure of everything, the one true
thing.

He had been searching for something to anchor the endlessly
spinning reel of images that had assailed him since yesterday morning. Only
time could be that anchor. Everything else seemed subject to inaccuracies: observations,
speculations, thoughts, intuition, words, especially words. Only time was
precise.
Rashomon
, he remembered suddenly. Everyone sees everything from
their own perspective. Truth shifts like a grasshopper, from mind to mind.

Hopefully tomorrow, if they could maneuver themselves
through the various official authorities, a jet plane would lift them back to
New York, backward in time, but forward in chronology, another irony. Like
memory. The images of what had occurred in those few moments of compressed time
had changed him forever.

He would always hear Carol's scream, the piercing terror of
it. Slowed down in his mind, he would see Eliot and Carol struggling at the
edge of the cliff. An odd pas de deux, it had seemed at the time, totally out
of context. A danse macabre at death's door. Why was it happening? he
remembered wondering. Who had initiated it? Had one lost his balance, then the
other? Had one tried to save the other from falling? Nagging questions, he
supposed, would plague him forever.

He had seen in their eyes glimpses of intense
concentration, like two arm-wrestlers probing each other, locked at the point
of maximum resistance. A duel of hatred, he remembered thinking. But it had all
happened so fast. Later he had distrusted the observation.

But, despite the mystery of how it had begun, he did
remember the pure physicality of the event. He had seen Carol's foot wrapped
around an exposed knuckle of root and Eliot leaning over her, losing balance.
Finally, their weight could not defy the laws of physics and they had slipped
over the edge, like falling trees. As they fell, they continued to hold
together, separating only as they reached the river's surface.

Behind him, Maggie had screamed. It was a cry of pain from
deep inside her, a clear clarion.

"Eliot!"

It echoed and reechoed, slammed hard against his eardrum,
as Maggie moved forward beyond him to the very edge of the high bank. If he had
not reached out, he was certain she would have gone over. He had had to put her
in a hammerlock to stop her. Then she had collapsed like a puppet whose strings
had been cut and they peered down into the green water at the hippos emerging
and submerging and, along the opposite shore, saw the crocodiles begin to move.

He had seen both Carol and Eliot at that moment,
floundering in the current, tiny shapes among the giant hippos.

"Eliot. Eliot. Oh, my God," he had heard Maggie
shout. But by then the truth had hatched full-grown in his mind, the shell of
secrecy soundly cracked by the birth of revelation. It confronted him suddenly
with the limitations of his own insight. His imagination, too, he realized, was
a faulty piece of work.

He did not cry out Carol's name. Perhaps he was too
paralyzed by fear and too stunned to act, except to save Maggie from flinging
herself into the river. The slithering movement of those creatures at the
opposite bank and those dark swimming monsters in the river carried the message
of inevitability. Death was arriving for those two in the river. The choice was
to join them or not. Death or life.

Maggie, he was still convinced, would have, at that moment,
chosen death. He would never be certain of his own choice, except that he had
not acted. From now to forever, he would always have the excuse of saving
Maggie, leaving open the question of which was the more powerful drive, love or
death.

Again Hemingway's story "The Short Happy Life of
Francis Macomber" surfaced in his mind, reminding him of those ambiguous
wells of hidden choices, invoking, too, the power of the writer's art to embed
an idea in one's mind, like finding one's truth in Africa. Death and love. He
hadn't fully realized how closely they were related.

Of course, he had not debated the question during those
confused moments. He could see the crocs advancing on the two swimmers. Behind
him he could hear the uncommon but unmistakable metallic click of a rifle, then
the ear-shattering blast. The croc nearest Carol flumed out of the water, his
white belly gleaming in the sun, his tail flailing the green water now overlaid
with a glaze of blood.

There had been another blast, a numbing explosion near him,
and another croc leaped in agony, his narrow brow blown open, brains spilling
into the water, just short of Eliot. Another click, a pause. He had turned to
see the sweating Meade loading, aiming, the barrel hesitating. The crocs were
moving against their prey. The new shot stopped the croc inches from Carol;
another hit one running parallel to her, his white belly, as it turned, stained
red by his companion's blood.

Another pause, loading, more shots.

"No. No," Maggie was screaming, twisting to catch
a better view of the embattled swimmer as he passed around the river's bend.
But Ken was watching Carol, struggling to make the shore. Obviously, they were
each watching the one who meant most to them.

Another shot rang out. Then another. Meade was
concentrating his fire now on the crocs heading for Carol, stopping them
abruptly with what must have been deadly accuracy. The water surrounding Carol
had turned blood-red.

Then she had reached the other side. Another shot caught a
croc through one eye, out of which spurted a fountain of blood. By then, Maggie
had collapsed in Ken's arms and he had put her gently on the ground and
scrambled down the rocks to reach Carol. He reached her just as she touched dry
ground, then literally dragged her up to the footpath. Embracing her with
gratitude, and without shame, he settled her against a tree a few paces from
Maggie and ran off with Meade to search for Eliot along the river trail.

They found no trace of him. Even the signs of the early
carnage had disappeared. The hippos, oblivious, still gamboled in the now green
water, and the remaining crocodiles, also oblivious to recent events, slept
still and lifeless on the opposite shore. Africa, Ken realized, takes care of
its own refuse collection.

The truth was out there now, fully revealed, the skin of
private lies peeled clean. Their incredible blind stupidity as well. Fools, he
berated them all. Himself included. Only it was too late for Eliot.

Finally Meade had turned toward him, his face drawn and
pale, his shirt sweat-stained and foul-smelling.

"Not a clue," he said, shaking his head.

The aftermath would always be jumbled in his head.
Authorities had appeared, including a doctor, who gave Maggie a mild sedative,
which Carol had refused, and stayed with them at the camp while he and Meade
and various officials searched the river's banks for any sign of Eliot.

"We'll never find anything," Meade had said with
an air of finality. It had become a chorus of agreement.

"A tragic accident," Ken remembered telling them
at some point, stealing a quick glance at Meade's now impassive face.

A black policeman had interrogated all of them, writing
down their various statements. "Yes, I saw them fall," Ken had said.
"They were walking behind us and one of them, I can't tell which, lost his
balance."

"Who tried to save who?" the policeman asked
Carol.

"My husband lost his balance," Carol told him.
"He grabbed me as a reflex. I tried to keep my footing, but it was
impossible."

Ken remembered having looked at Maggie, who had been
listening. The vague look in her eyes had disappeared for a moment and she had
been suddenly alert glancing toward Ken. Then, quickly, she had turned away. He
would never mistake the message of this glance. The wrong man was dead.

There was an awkwardness in the Norfolk when they had
arrived, having said nothing to each other on the short flight.

"Three rooms," he had told the clerk, who had
looked at him incredulously as he filled out the registration for all of them.
Sometime during the night he had tried Carol's door. It was locked. He had then
tried Maggie's. It, too, was locked.

Wise of them, he decided. Words would have been forced and
meaningless. He had things to work out as well. What troubled him most was the
realization that four reasonably intelligent people had been victimized by such
blunted and stigmatized perceptions.

Where, he wondered, was the vaunted writer's insight, that
sustained vision that would allow him to enter the world of true sentences,
Hemingway's magic kingdom? No wonder he had failed. How was it possible that he
could be so sideswiped by his own psychic wish list? Had blind love shattered
his five senses of observation and corrupted his insight as well?

Looking back over the last few months, he was amazed at the
clues that lay strewn across the landscape like an Easter egg hunt, so
completely obvious, so patently transparent.

He tossed all night, leaving his hotel room at first light.
Passing Carol's room, he paused, then inexplicably pressed his ear to her door.
He heard nothing, of course. Nor did he attempt to turn the doorknob. What was
the point? Besides, he reasoned, she would need all her strength and composure
for their scheduled meeting with the authorities.

He also stopped briefly in front of the door to Maggie's
room. For a long moment, he looked at the door blankly, imagining Maggie, her
pillow wet with tears, shoulders shaking with sobs of frustration and grief. A
flash of anger passed through him and he turned away. Could she be forgiven? he
wondered. Of all the people on this earth, was it possible that Maggie, the
open, honest, caring Maggie, could have played this role so flawlessly, fooled
them so completely?

He had a light breakfast in the restaurant, attempted to
read the papers, and tried valiantly to rid himself of his gloom and the
certain knowledge of his failed insight.

A United States Embassy official picked them up in front of
the Norfolk at mid-morning. Both Carol and Maggie were composed. Neither had
put on any makeup, although he could tell from Maggie's mottled skin and puffy
eyes that his earlier assessment of how she had spent the night was correct.

Carol wore black slacks and a black short-sleeved blouse
over which she wore a single strand of costume pearls. With her black hair
parted in the middle and a carefully composed expression of stoicism, she
looked severe, more bitter than grief-stricken. It struck Ken as the perfect
pose.

Occasionally, their eyes drifted toward each other and they
exchanged glances of understanding. He did not try to look at Maggie and it was
obvious that Maggie deliberately kept her face hidden from his.

"I know it must be awful for you," the man from
the embassy said as he drove. He was a bright-eyed youngish man who wore a
light gray suit and snappy polka-dot bow tie and a suitably sympathetic
expression. "The Kenyans would like to get this over with as quickly as
possible. Bad for business, you see. They're paranoid about any accidents in
the bush that might keep the tourists away. They have your statements given to
the game-park authorities and the police in the Masai Mara. Poor Mr.
Butterfield." He had already given Carol appropriately elaborate
condolences, noting that the embassy was busy getting their plane bookings
arranged for the early-morning flight to Europe and home.

"These freak accidents are the worst," the man
from the embassy said. "And I'm so sorry about their not finding..."
He checked himself and grew silent.

Meade had instructed them on how they must handle
themselves with the authorities. Apparently he had been through it all before.

"Above all," he had cautioned them, "stick
to the letter of what we've already told them. And please, you must not mention
the rifle. It's illegal and could get my license revoked, but that's not the
issue here. If they hear that guns were involved they'll hold you in Kenya.
There'll be hearings and red tape. Believe me, you wouldn't want that. Besides,
we all saw what happened. It was an accident. At least we were lucky enough to
save Mrs. Butterfield."

They had, of course, agreed. Even Maggie, who had
acknowledged it through her genuine grief.

By then, all evidence had disappeared. The crocodile
carcasses had drifted downstream.

"All flesh disappears in the African bush," Meade
had explained to him privately. "Including poor old Butterfield."

They met in a small room of a government office with the
man from the embassy present. As both Ken and Meade had predicted, the
representative of the government, a pleasant smiling black man with a clipped
British accent, made quick work of the conference. Carol was appropriately
somber. Maggie, Ken noted, was viewed merely as a grieving friend, and he was
hardly noticed.

"I am so terribly sorry for this situation, Mrs.
Butterfield," the Kenyan said. "It is very rare for us. But there is
danger out there in the park."

He went on to explain that Kenya was an emerging country
that needed its tourist industry. He provided broad hints that any publicity on
this matter would be harmful and Carol nodded agreement.