The Society
It all started with a not-very-chance meeting in a European bar. At the time I was living in Belgium, just off a job running goods for mercenaries stationed in Greece who needed constant supplies during down times from a war going on in the Balkans. That job was a break from my usual activities in the Congo, where I had been attached to a series of expeditions by aid workers, scientists, the occasional missionary, and more recently, gold miners and intelligence officers mucking around in the mud or the politics of the region. Europe was a nice break, a chance to get the malaria out of my system, to enjoy some good beer, and to practice my native tongue, which I found myself almost never speaking any more. And yes, the average Belgian addressed me in English even though my French was not only excellent, but also, of the Belgian variety spoken in King Leopold’s former colony.
That is where Miranda Bolt found me, which was not an easy thing to do in those days. She had been tipped off to my location by a mutual friend with Libyan connections, where both Miranda and I had spent some time years ago being entertained by the Shah, though for very different reasons.
She was discontinuity personified when she walked into that dark and dingy tavern, this den of mean scruffy men with beards. She was very white, except her hair which was off white, and of medium height and somewhat stocky build with a very large head. She was clad in an enigmatically loud pastel pants suit, wore eye glasses that could have doubled as the marquee for a casino on the Las Vegas strip, and sported a hairdo that went all the way to the top, and money. You couldn’t literally see the money, but you could tell it was there. I would eventually learn that this elder socialite from Palm Springs had launched fleets of debutantes, held more fundraisers than the UN, and with her avocational interest in the welfare of monkeys and apes, had funded a National Science Foundation’s worth of expeditions to tropical Asia, Latin America, and more recently, Africa.
“I found you because I need you,” I remember her saying rather haughtily. “And when I need someone I’m willing to pay.” Music to my underemployed ears. Years ago, she told me, she had funded an expedition, through some sort of semisecret society that her now deceased husband was a member of. The expedition was run by the dashing and debonair primatologist Dieter Phillips, and his freshly betrothed wife Phyllis, a graduate student in zoology, to investigate certain claims that had been reported over the several decades since scientists had been looking into the Congo. Ever since the “discovery” of the horse-like forest giraffe known as Okapi, the possibility that there might be other unknown species of large animals hidden in the forest was taken seriously, though over time, less and less so. There were rumors in the central and western Congo of a dinosaur leftover, of a fourth ape that was a hybrid between gorillas and chimps, and of snakes the size of trains. But in the Eastern Congo, the region where Central African-ness fades into East African-ness, where the trade language is a form of Swahili and old tribal affiliations link Ugandans, Rwandans, and Zairois (in those days Congo was called “Zaire”), there was the most intriguing rumor of them all: This is where one could find, maybe, a living population of the animal the locally known as Sungudogo.
At the time, I must say, I didn’t think it likely that Sungudogo, which I had heard of before, could have existed without someone with a camera or at least a shotgun running into one. But two things persuaded me to consider helping her with a new expedition, a follow up on Dieter’s, in spite of my misgivings. One was the very thing that Miranda Bolt claimed had convinced Dieter Phillips and his wife to look to begin with. Most of the western ridge of the Rift Valley, which overlooked three of the “Great Lakes” of Africa, was without roads, though some had been built at the end of the Colonial era but soon abandoned. The terrain was so rugged that going from one point to another a mere five kilometers as the crow flies could take up to a week or simply be impossible in this mountainous jungle. In this environment, Miranda Bolt argued, a secretive primate like Sungudogo could exist relatively unmolested even if humans living in a traditional manner all around them hunted or otherwise bothered them now and then. Indeed, the area was remote enough that some folks from the rift wall forests, traveling far from home, were recently found by linguists to speak two previously unidentified languages, which were not only unrelated to each other but also unrelated to any other known language group (such “isolates” are more common than one might think). That was compelling but not on its own enough for me to take on the potentially dangerous job she offered, which was to organize and lead a small expedition to follow Dieter Phillips’ missing trail, in search of this thing which might have been a monkey, might have been an ape, might have been a figment of imaginations more fertile than my own. The second argument she made in favor of me taking on this job was written down, handed to me without comment. It was a check for an unspeakable sum of money.
Say no more. I started work on this project that very evening.
The first place I had to go was the European branch of the private research foundation that had promoted Dieter Phillip’s earlier work. It was called the H.L Craft Society, after the famous archaeologist and explorer. In those days donors competed to support his work and in so doing buy a piece of his fame, as at first he unearthed ancient skulls of extinct humans, then later, evidence of lost civilizations, and eventually, bits and pieces of the sunken continent Atlantis, and finally, remains of ancient alien landing sites.
Somewhere along the line, between the ancient human skulls and the ancient aliens, Craft had apparently gone off the rails. He may or may not have fooled himself about these absurd claims, but at first he managed to fool his donors, for a while. Eventually the mainstream sources of funds began to dry up as his claims became increasingly outlandish. It is said that Craft supplemented promises of new bizarre findings with the prospect of finding gold or diamonds, and it was true that most of the areas he explored were likely to bear fruit in the form of precious metal or stone. This was not enough to keep his old investors interested but it did bring into the picture a rather shady group of new patrons who cared little about reputation and were willing to fund an expedition to find Yeti if it also had a good chance of producing ownership of valuable mineral rights.
Eventually, it is said, a group of “investors” who were, by all accounts, representatives of three New York Mafia families felt double crossed when for the fifth time an expedition that should have yielded diamonds and gold instead yielded several smooth rocks that Craft claimed he could use to communicate with aliens. Craft disappeared shortly after a meeting with those investors at an eating establishment in New Jersey known then as “Maria’s Bistro.” He was never seen again, but one week later the restaurant was renamed, out of the blue, “Henry is in the Well.”
Henry was H.L. Craft’s first name.
The idea that the Dons of three New York Mafia families had killed H. L. Craft and put his lifeless body in a well, possibly the decorative well that graced the gaudy garden complete with fountains and flamingos in front of the restaurant formerly known as Maria’s, could never be verified because all three of the Dons died in untoward accidents over the next year. One died in his own house which caught on fire for no good reason and burned to the ground, one was killed in a freak accident involving lava while visiting a National Park in Hawaii, and one is said to have spontaneously combusted while walking his dog through Little Italy one warm Thursday evening.
So that is the background of the H. L. Craft society, which seemed to be of little relevance now, since decades had past since H. L. Craft disappeared. These days, the society was run by a good-old-boy network (that is correct, no girls were allowed) distributed across North America and Europe, with offices in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Brussels, Munich, and Athens. There were not many members, but they all faithfully traveled to the meetings held twice a year in one of those locations, venue rotating, and this very week, the week Miranda Bolt walked into my tavern, the H. L. Craft society was holding its meeting about four blocks away from where I first learned of its existence.
My visit there was brief and uninformative, but perfectly useful for my needs. The secretary of the society, Charles Willoughby, did not ask me for my qualifications. Rather, he told me what they were. He told me what languages I knew, where in Central Africa I had worked and lived, what my skill set was, and who some of my key contacts were. He then told me the same sorts of things about a primatologist named Pat Soffer.
“Soffer’s been around the block a few times, is as tough as nails, though I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting this chap,” he said. “…is said to know the ways of the rainforest, knows all about monkeys, that sort of thing… done more fieldwork than god. But never in your region, so the two of you will complement each other. Soffer will know what you are looking for when you see it, you’ll find a way to the site. By the way, Soffer knew Dieter Phillips as an undergraduate, and Phillips wrote Soffer’s recommendations for graduate school and spoke well of the young scholar. The two of you will meet in the Thorn Tree Cafe at the New Stanley in Kenya in five days, at 11:00 AM local time. Have lunch on me. The fish and chips there are passable.” And he handed me a bank note for more money than I would need to run several expeditions. “Make whatever arrangements you need. I’m on the board of Barkely’s and the president of the branch office on Kenyatta Boulevard in Nairobi is my brother. Before you leave there for the Congo you’ll have cash, and how you spend it is up to you.”
And as he said these words, he stood and signaled towards the door, and as the last sentence was finished I found myself alone in the hallway outside his office. On my way to Nairobi.
I liked this plan where everyone I met gave me money. I just hoped that Soffer was someone I could work with. I’d spent too much time in the bush with people who were hard to get along with, or who were accident prone and thus dangerous, or who were in some other way annoying. This guy sounded like he might be OK to work with but one could never be sure.
New Stanley
As instructed, I arrived at the New Stanley Hotel, in downtown Nairobi, at just before 11:00 AM, to meet Pat Soffer, primatologist. Willoughby didn’t have to tell me about the fish and chips; I’d eaten here many times. The Thorn Tree Cafe was a widely known meeting place in Nairobi. A block or so from the Hilton, at the end of the main downtown street, a short walk from the central government buildings, across from a central bus station, it was a slightly pricey but reasonable hotel with an inexpensive, leisurely outdoor restaurant open early in the morning for breakfast and coffee, all day for lunch and dinner, and late into the evening for drinks.
A giant tree … a thorn tree as it happens … grew from the middle of the outdoor eating area, and around the tree was built a bulletin board. The bulletin board was mainly for travelers and tourists to hang notes for other travelers and tourists. A typical scenario might be for a couple of backpackers to cross paths in Malawi or Tanzania or Uganda, both thinking they’d be passing through Nairobi in a month or so. Then, when either would arrive in town, they would search for a note from the other and put up one of their own, and in so doing, sometimes reconnect in the Tourist Capital of East Africa. Among these numerous mostly unanswered missives, other more interesting but less overt messaging would also take place. A small but steady amount of arms, drugs, and intelligence trafficking was facilitated by notes on the Thorn Tree’s bulletin board. And, now and then, people organizing expeditions into the Congo would meet up here.
So on my arrival at the Cafe, I went right to the tree to look for a note from Pat Soffer, prepared to write my own. I realized I had no idea what my contact looked like, and the restaurant was full of westerners any one of which could be Pat Soffer, Primatologist. Seeing nothing, I took out a note pad, located a blank page and penned:
"Looking for Pat, Mutual Interest in Monkeys,” with my hotel’s name and room number.
And I was just about to pin this to the board when a woman who had been standing next to me also looking at the bulletin board took a step closer and snatched the paper from my hand. “Welcome to Nairobi,” she said, gesturing toward a table already set for tea, along the back wall. “you’re early.”
She struck me right away as someone who’d been around the block more than once and who knew how to take care of herself. Darkly tanned with a lot of split ends in her black hair, brown eyes, broad shouldered, trim and muscular, I had the vague impression that she was of Greek ancestry, though her last name did not match. For just a second I was surprised she was a girl. “Pat” is the ultimate western non-gendered name. Surprised but glad. I was tired of working with that special Intrepid Explorer Ego that usually accompanies western Y-chromosomes in the bush.
So we talked. Pat confirmed that Dieter was her advisor in undergraduate school. She had a vaguely defined plan to get a Master’s degree at Oxford, then return to Dieter’s institution to work under him towards a PhD, but by that time for some reason or another Dieter was no longer taking on female graduate students. Other than the one he had just married, that is. Yes, it was true; all the complexities of high school relationships returned but with a vengeance in graduate school, especially in Anthropology where fieldwork complicated things. Pat ended up getting her PhD elsewhere, and spent most of the time since those days working at remote field sites.
Dieter Phillips had asked her to consider joining him on an expedition to the Eastern Congo, where we were now heading, under the condition that she, Pat, would only be in the field at the same time as Dieter’s wife, at the new Mrs. Phillip’s request. Pat had no problem with that. She explained it this way to me: “Dieter Phillips was not my type. Phyllis, on the other hand, was, physically; but not emotionally or mentally. She was a child. But I would have enjoyed the window dressing and had fun playing with the social dynamic, especially if it would have given Dieter a hard time. I wasn’t really happy about being rejected from my choice of graduate school because of marital insecurity by two emotionally retarded latter day hipsters, which is how I regarded the two of them.”
“So your interest in South Dakota was not for the opportunity to work with the great Dieter Phillips?” I inquired.
“Hell no. I wanted access to their primate skeletal collection. It is the largest and best documented in the world. At the time, that’s what I wanted to do…measure bones. In the end, I’m glad it didn’t work out. I live in the field now. You know what I’m talking about.”
I certainly did. If you spend enough time in the field, not being in the field feels strange.
“Let me ask you, then, what was the point of Phillips’ expedition, the one you didn’t go on? Why didn’t you go, in the end, and what did he find? I’ve been told almost nothing about it, other than that I’m to help you.”
“Ah. I figured that. They were probably worried you would not come if you knew…”
I waited, now more intrigued than ever.
“Dieter Phillips was looking for a new species of primate, a kind of ape, called Sungudogo,” she said. “He had evidence that it really existed and intended to document its presence, collect a few to bring back as specimens, and then get funding for a much larger project.”
“OK, that much I either knew from what they told me in Brussels, or inferred. Why would you NOT go on such a search? Even if Sungudogo didn’t exist, there are probably plenty of other primate-related things in the area you could have worked on.”
“Sungudogo is a gorilla no taller than this,” she said, as she held her hand about four feet off the ground.
“While knuckle walking?” I asked, “Four feet would be about right. you’re saying Sungudogo is a bit bigger than the average gorilla?”
“No,” she said, glancing at her hand and with a grin moving it a few inches to one side. “This tall. From the top of the table. While standing full height on its hind limbs.”
“What?” I said, wishing I hadn’t been sipping my tea at just that moment. “A two and a half foot tall gorilla?”
“Well,” she said. “You should have guessed from the name; ”sungu“ from ape or chimp and ”dogo“ for small, like the word ”kidogo.“ Small Ape. Sungudogo.”
“Yeah, I had noticed that, those two terms are used in a lot of languages in the area. But I didn’t think…” I thought for a moment. “Wait, is this why you didn’t join Phillips? Because Sungudogo is no more likely to exist than Bigfoot?”
“Exactly,” she said. “I told him that I’d be the first to join his second expedition!”
Another spit-take with the tea, and I decided to put my cup down and avoid drinking during the rest of this particular conversation.
“So, they went off without you,” I asked. “How did they explain Sungudogo in the end? Was it a local totemic symbol, or some other sort of made up creature, or something lost in the translation, or what?”
“Ah…no, not exactly,” she said, that same wry grin returning to her lips.
“What then?”
“It exists,” she said, suddenly getting serious. “I’ve seen one.”
I stared. Waiting for the punchline. Happy I’d given up on drinking the tea.
“I think they killed Dieter.”
That was not the punchline I was looking for.
“Listen,” she said, leaning in close and moving my half finished cup of tea off to the side. “You are going to have to trust me on something,” now putting her hand on my forearm, as though what she was about to say might cause me to bolt.
I looked at her, and saw something in her eyes that caught my attention. Worry. Fear, maybe. Something else. Her gaze was really starting to get my attention when a flash of light from the sun shining off the window of a bus pulling out of the station across the street brought me back into focus.
"There are a couple of things that have to be cleared up, very soon, before we can go forward with this expedition,” she continued. “I have been sworn to absolute secrecy and I can’t even tell you certain things.”
“That won’t do at all,” I replied, maybe a little too tersely. For that I earned a tighter grip on my forearm.
“I know,” she said. “This is where you have to trust me. We’re both going to Goma, Zaire. You know that place, right?”
“Only in as much as I live there when I’m in country and not on a job, sure.”
“Do you have a place there?”
“No,” I replied. “Not at the moment, I gave that up. I stay in a hotel. But yes, I know the place. I understand We’re going to points north of Goma, so that is where I assume we’ll start out. Arrange a vehicle, get supplies, maybe poke around for information, get our land legs.”
“Here’s what we need to do, Mallows. We’ll meet in Goma in a few days. I’ll supply the vehicle, I have access to a Land Rover. I need to make a stop and verify something and then, if all that works out, I can tell you more. I promised to not tell anybody, you included, everything that I know until we are in country. We’ll talk in Goma in about a week.”
I don’t know exactly what made me trust her, but really, the cost was not high. If things didn’t work out, Goma was where I should be anyway. This is where the action was in mining and mercenary work. Once I got to Goma, even if Pat never showed up, I’d be fine. I gave a nod.
“Besides,” she said, seeing my nod and relaxing a little. “Goma’s where you would normally go this time of year anyway, since your job in Brussels is done.” Echoing my thoughts, knowing more about me than I thought she did, like everyone else I’d spoken to so far. She let go of my arm, reached out her hand for me to shake it, and as I did so, she stood. “See you in Goma in a week. I’ll send a telegraph to the Pierre Hotel when I know my exact schedule. That’s the one you usually stay in, right?”
And without waiting for an answer, she turned and walked out of the Thorn Tree Cafe, took a right towards the Hilton and Government Center, and disappeared.
Betsy
A week later I was in Goma, hanging out in a restaurant and nursing a 750 ml Primus lager and a plate of chips. Pat had left a telegram at the Pierre Hotel for me, as agreed, and told me that she’d try to make it to this spot on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday. It was Thursday, so if we were all talking about the same week, we were right on time. Goma time, that is.
Halfway done with the chips, just as they were starting to get cold, I picked up the plate and passed it over the low wall edging the restaurant’s outdoor eating area. Two child’s hands rose up out of nowhere and took the plate, lowering it carefully out of sight. A moment later the plate reappeared on the top of the wall, empty, and I casually returned it to the table. By this time, the young waiter had sauntered over, and he picked up the plate formerly endowed with chips.
“Those kids love you, Mr. Archer Mallows,” he said, pointing with his eyes and lips over the edge of the railing, where by now the French fries would have been consumed by four or five hungry mouths, having been transferred from my plate into a small enamelware basin the children usually used to carry peanuts they’d sell to tourists and passersby.
“Everybody’s got to eat,” I said.
This was all very routine. For a few hours a day, for the last few days, I would come to this restaurant and order a series of food and drink items, properly paired. Coffee and French toast in the morning. I drank the coffee, the French toast went over the rail. For lunch, a glass of water and a sandwich. I’d eat half the sandwich, the other half went over the rail. Mid afternoon, a beer and a plate of chips. I never touched the chips. And so on.
“I think it’s about time for dessert,” I said to the widely grinning waiter. I knew the kids loved him too. “Maybe a piece of that cake and a spot of tea. Extra sugar on the side, please.”
The extra sugar, for which I’d be charged, would go over the edge as well. If it seemed like I’d been doing this with these kids for years, it was because I had been. Goma was my home base here in the Congo, and this restaurant was a regular haunt, and I’d been sharing food with this group of kids long enough that their composition had changed, with older ones moving on and younger ones joining. Zapierre, the waiter, had been one of the street kids only six or seven years ago. It was a good deal. In return for giving them a few dollars worth of much needed food every day that I happened to be in town, they would leave me alone when I walked or drove down the street, and they’d see to it that the other street urchins did the same. I was the most ignored white man in Goma, which probably made me stand out, or at least, the envy of some.
And just as I was contemplating how much this city had become my home, I registered in the back of my mind a familiar sound, but then realized it was just another Land Rover driving down the street. But when I glanced up, I was startled at first, then utterly astonished. From the direction of the main intersection out of town to the East came my old Land Rover, a vehicle I had purchased used and maintained with loving care and many spare parts until the transmission failed and I traded it along with a pile of cash for a newish Toyota Land Cruiser. Well, a ten year old Toyota. I knew the truck had been handed off to a new owner in neighboring Rwanda, so it was not a total shock…yet at the same time it was bone chillingly odd…to see that my new colleague Pat was behind the wheel. She pulled the truck over to the side across the street, and as the dust swirled to a stop moments later on the dirt road, the Urchins left their hiding place by my rail and headed right for it. Just as they arrived, Pat had stepped out of the vehicle and closed the door, unlocked with the window open. She leaned down to whisper in the ear of the Urchin In Charge (easily discerned) and within moments all five of them were sitting on the roof and hood of Ol’ Betsy (that was the Land Rover’s name), guarding her from all possible hazards. Pat had already spotted me and was now heading briskly, with that grin of hers in place, over to my table.
"What the fu … ” I started to say.
“Your old truck!” she interrupted me, pointing with her thumb over her shoulder, eyes wide, smiling, like it was her job to show up with a vehicle I had put out to pasture years ago. “Surprised?”
"Well, yes, I’m surprised she still runs, and I’m even more surprised to see you driving … “
“She? Does she have a name?”
I told her that the truck’s name was Betsy, and I told her the story behind that, which is amusing. But Pat was the one that needed to do the explaining.
Pat sat across from me at the table, and indicated that she was famished. I suggested the grilled cheese sandwich with chips.
“Sounds great, but I’ll skip the chips.”
So, I got Zapierre’s attention and ordered a grilled cheese sandwich, a couple more beers, and a plate of chips.
“I won’t eat those chips,” Pat said, looking slightly confused.
“I know. Me neither,” I waved off her concern. “But we are going to sip these beers as long as it takes for you to fill me in on what’s going on. Like you promised.”
Pat relaxed in her chair and noticing that we were in the shade, took off her sunglasses and folded them into the pocket of her unbuttoned denim shirt. I could see that she was wearing a World Wildlife Consortium T-shirt underneath. When she looked at me, I had the sense that she wanted me to see her eyes, so I would know she was being straight with me. Or, perhaps, so I would think she was being straight with me when she wasn’t. I hadn’t spent enough time with her to even come close to really knowing her, but she felt like a kindred spirit in a way. Old hands at field work, grown through experience past the nervousness of being in a foreign land, and grown past the ego trip of being special (not everybody gets to do this kind of work…just us and Indiana Jones). I liked her, and I wanted to like her more, but there were things she knew that I didn’t know yet, and that made me more than a little uncomfortable.
“The Craft Foundation,” she began, “is backing this whole trip. I’m told that there is a connection between Craft, both the foundation and the old man who started this gig like 50 years ago, H.L. Craft, and what Dieter and Phyllis were doing here 20 years ago. I honestly don’t know what that connection is.”
The beers came and were poured into warm glasses that were so old that they looked dirty even though they were not. Probably. Pat downed half of her glass in one drag, and topped it off from the bottle. This being my second, I sipped mine. I watched her wipe the bits of foam away from her lips.
“They have provided me with absolutely strict instructions on what I am to tell you and when. There are three parts to what I know. I told you the first part in Nairobi, and I actually let slip one thing I should not have said.”
“That you’ve seen a Sungudogo?”
“Yeah, that. Just forget I said that. It is not exactly true anyway.”
“How can seeing a two foot tall ape not known to science be something that might or might not be true?”
“Trust me, Mallows, you’ll get that later.” She took another sip and glanced around.
“Nervous that we are being watched?”
“No,” she replied. “Hungry.” And just then Zapierre came out onto the patio carrying three plates. One held Pat’s grilled cheese, the second a huge pile of chips, and the third held two shish kabob sticks with some sort of meat on them.
He put the meat between us and said, “The Chef is trying something new. He’d like your opinion.” Zapierre turned and left promptly, sensing that we were in the middle of something.
I pulled one of the meat chunks off the stick and popped it in my mouth. “Hmmm…pretty tender for colubus monkey!” I exclaimed.
“Nope, that’s a cow,” said Pat, without skipping a beat. “I took a whole seminar in shish kebob monkeys in grad school. That is not one.”
Remembering that we were in fact being watched, I took the plate of chips and held them over the edge of the rail. Pat watched, amused, as the two hands rose out of nowhere, took the plate and keeping careful balance so no chips would slide off, lowered it away. A moment later the plate clattered to the top of the rail and a young boy darted out of the bushes carrying the enamelware basin, to join his compatriots who were still sitting on top of Ol’ Betsy.
“Cute,” Pat said, halfway grinning. “Your family.”
“Might as well be,” I replied, and took a sip of my beer. “You were saying?”
“OK. The Craft Foundation has a collection of notes from the old man. I’ve seen some of them, and they are crazy. Most of the notes are written in either a code that has not been translated, or in gibberish. And there are these rocks…smooth river cobbles…that are carefully curated and numbered. The Craft Foundation funded Dieter’s expedition because they got wind of the fact that he was going to search for Sungudogo. They wanted in on that, and to control what he did, because he would be going into the last place H.L. Craft had visited before his untimely disappearance.”
“And then, Dieter didn’t manage to make it back so they needed some other plan.”
Pat took a moment to munch on her sandwich, but gave me a nod as she did so.
“More or less,” she spoke through the grilled cheese in her mouth. A swallow. A sip of beer. “They mostly stood off and waited, and tried to collect additional information, which was mostly a fruitless venture. But then one day someone spotted your Land Rover.”
“Ol’ Betsy?”
"Right. They were watching and listening for items of interest from the region, when they spotted a photograph of some tourists standing in front of your truck, or actually, the Rwandan Adventure Safari Inc’s truck.
“Why would that be of the slightest interest to the H.L. Craft foundation?”
“Because of the right rear door,” Pat replied, munching. “That door was obviously a replacement part, right?”
She was right. The right rear door of my land rover had been badly damaged when Ol’ Betsy was rammed by an enraged hippopotamus up in the Semliki Valley. Hippos hate headlights. They also hate the sound of truck engines. When they are out of the water at night grazing, one has to be careful to avoid them. Most hippos will run away from a moving vehicle, and a few will just ignore it, but the larger, more ornery males will go after it. The hippo had knocked my truck clear off the narrow dirt road I was driving on. Most of the gear tied to the roof rack came flying off, everybody in the truck got knocked around a bit, and two giant tusk holes penetrated the right rear door, which was nearly knocked off its hinges. The poor animal wandered off after the attack and died a few days later, down in the river, where its body was slowly consumed by hyenas and giant catfish.
“The door … It was taken from an old World Wildlife Consortium truck,” I said, mostly to myself, as I glanced across the street where I could see Ol Betsy’s right flank. I could see the left half of a logo easily recognized as the tail end of the excessively cute World Wildlife Consortium otter. Also visible were the letters “SD” which I now understood must be “SDRU” (South Dakota Regional University), Dieter’s academic base of operations. Beneath this one could barely make out some letters, a word starting with a G…
“South Dakota Regional University,” Pat said my thoughts out loud, seeing that my eyes were reading my former truck. “Gorillas R Us”
Only barely visible, I had ignored the words hand painted by a local artist in the style of so much lettering and signing in the region. I had assumed someone had borrowed the WWC otter and used it in their own design. At the time that I purchased the door from an old junk shop in Goma I was curious enough about its origins that I asked about it, and that was a mistake: Studied indifference would have allowed me to get a better price. In the end, I paid the equivalent of 10 US dollars, and found out that this door and the Land Rover to which it had been attached were last seen leaving this very place 18 years before I was to rediscover it, and two years before finding myself across the table from Pat the Primatologist, who was looking more and more interesting to me every minute.
“So, H.L. Craft Society’s spies spotted Ol’ Betsy on a pamphlet, recognized the barely readable logo of Dieter Philipps expedition, and … what?”
“Yeah, I know, quite a chance finding, right? Anyway, someone was sent in to investigate, and they got as far as figuring out that Ol’ Betsy was formerly owned by you, and that you had probably recently found Dieter’s old door by chance. This led to three ideas."
“First,” she continued, “This is how they found out about you, and decided to consider you as a possible resource if they were to go back in to Dieter’s site.”
“And, thus, here we two are.”
“Correct. Second, not in any particular order,” she drained the last of her beer, “they realized that if the door had materialized somehow, that there must be more evidence of what had happened to Dieter.”
“That does not make a lot of sense,” I interrupted. “He went to his research site and never came out. Why would there not be physical evidence somewhere, even if not located yet, of where he went and possibly of what he did? Why would a door showing up 18 years after the fact mean anything?”
“I know,” she agreed. “But that’s what they said. I have the sense that the door simply reminded them that Dieter had existed, that he had gone into the bush and never come out on their behalf. Anyway, the third thing is the door itself. They have suggested that the door might spark a memory. Someone might see the door, if we, well, drove around with it, and remember something, or make some kind of connection.”
“So,” rubbing my chin as I replied, “we travel around advertising that we are associated with the guy who someone may have made disappear for unknown reasons, and see if they try it with us.”
“Where’s that waiter, I want another beer,” was her reply. I sent a signal to Zapierre. “Either way, driving up with Ol’ Betsy here was worth it, just to see the expression on your face.”
I just stared at her, trying not to enjoy her grin as much as I was enjoying it.
“I just hope you and Betsy parted on good terms. No bad feelings or anything.”
I laughed. “Betsy was my first Land Rover. She’ll always be special to me. Don’t worry about that. I just hope she’ll run.”
“She’s a Land Rover. She’ll need constant repair but will never die,” Pat chimed in, knowingly. “Plus, that’s a newish engine and transmission, totally new injectors, and a rebuilt suspension. Everything else is fixed up as best as the shop in Rwanda could manage. It’s got brakes. Steering wheel. What else do you need?”
“Another beer would be good…” and when Zapierre came over, we ordered another round.
And just then, seeing her grinning at me and realizing that this was all really happening, a sense of thrill came over me. And dread. This was normal for the start of a new adventure.
I took a draft of the newly poured beer and grinned back. Expedition on.
The rest of the story is here.
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1FeADvF
The Society
It all started with a not-very-chance meeting in a European bar. At the time I was living in Belgium, just off a job running goods for mercenaries stationed in Greece who needed constant supplies during down times from a war going on in the Balkans. That job was a break from my usual activities in the Congo, where I had been attached to a series of expeditions by aid workers, scientists, the occasional missionary, and more recently, gold miners and intelligence officers mucking around in the mud or the politics of the region. Europe was a nice break, a chance to get the malaria out of my system, to enjoy some good beer, and to practice my native tongue, which I found myself almost never speaking any more. And yes, the average Belgian addressed me in English even though my French was not only excellent, but also, of the Belgian variety spoken in King Leopold’s former colony.
That is where Miranda Bolt found me, which was not an easy thing to do in those days. She had been tipped off to my location by a mutual friend with Libyan connections, where both Miranda and I had spent some time years ago being entertained by the Shah, though for very different reasons.
She was discontinuity personified when she walked into that dark and dingy tavern, this den of mean scruffy men with beards. She was very white, except her hair which was off white, and of medium height and somewhat stocky build with a very large head. She was clad in an enigmatically loud pastel pants suit, wore eye glasses that could have doubled as the marquee for a casino on the Las Vegas strip, and sported a hairdo that went all the way to the top, and money. You couldn’t literally see the money, but you could tell it was there. I would eventually learn that this elder socialite from Palm Springs had launched fleets of debutantes, held more fundraisers than the UN, and with her avocational interest in the welfare of monkeys and apes, had funded a National Science Foundation’s worth of expeditions to tropical Asia, Latin America, and more recently, Africa.
“I found you because I need you,” I remember her saying rather haughtily. “And when I need someone I’m willing to pay.” Music to my underemployed ears. Years ago, she told me, she had funded an expedition, through some sort of semisecret society that her now deceased husband was a member of. The expedition was run by the dashing and debonair primatologist Dieter Phillips, and his freshly betrothed wife Phyllis, a graduate student in zoology, to investigate certain claims that had been reported over the several decades since scientists had been looking into the Congo. Ever since the “discovery” of the horse-like forest giraffe known as Okapi, the possibility that there might be other unknown species of large animals hidden in the forest was taken seriously, though over time, less and less so. There were rumors in the central and western Congo of a dinosaur leftover, of a fourth ape that was a hybrid between gorillas and chimps, and of snakes the size of trains. But in the Eastern Congo, the region where Central African-ness fades into East African-ness, where the trade language is a form of Swahili and old tribal affiliations link Ugandans, Rwandans, and Zairois (in those days Congo was called “Zaire”), there was the most intriguing rumor of them all: This is where one could find, maybe, a living population of the animal the locally known as Sungudogo.
At the time, I must say, I didn’t think it likely that Sungudogo, which I had heard of before, could have existed without someone with a camera or at least a shotgun running into one. But two things persuaded me to consider helping her with a new expedition, a follow up on Dieter’s, in spite of my misgivings. One was the very thing that Miranda Bolt claimed had convinced Dieter Phillips and his wife to look to begin with. Most of the western ridge of the Rift Valley, which overlooked three of the “Great Lakes” of Africa, was without roads, though some had been built at the end of the Colonial era but soon abandoned. The terrain was so rugged that going from one point to another a mere five kilometers as the crow flies could take up to a week or simply be impossible in this mountainous jungle. In this environment, Miranda Bolt argued, a secretive primate like Sungudogo could exist relatively unmolested even if humans living in a traditional manner all around them hunted or otherwise bothered them now and then. Indeed, the area was remote enough that some folks from the rift wall forests, traveling far from home, were recently found by linguists to speak two previously unidentified languages, which were not only unrelated to each other but also unrelated to any other known language group (such “isolates” are more common than one might think). That was compelling but not on its own enough for me to take on the potentially dangerous job she offered, which was to organize and lead a small expedition to follow Dieter Phillips’ missing trail, in search of this thing which might have been a monkey, might have been an ape, might have been a figment of imaginations more fertile than my own. The second argument she made in favor of me taking on this job was written down, handed to me without comment. It was a check for an unspeakable sum of money.
Say no more. I started work on this project that very evening.
The first place I had to go was the European branch of the private research foundation that had promoted Dieter Phillip’s earlier work. It was called the H.L Craft Society, after the famous archaeologist and explorer. In those days donors competed to support his work and in so doing buy a piece of his fame, as at first he unearthed ancient skulls of extinct humans, then later, evidence of lost civilizations, and eventually, bits and pieces of the sunken continent Atlantis, and finally, remains of ancient alien landing sites.
Somewhere along the line, between the ancient human skulls and the ancient aliens, Craft had apparently gone off the rails. He may or may not have fooled himself about these absurd claims, but at first he managed to fool his donors, for a while. Eventually the mainstream sources of funds began to dry up as his claims became increasingly outlandish. It is said that Craft supplemented promises of new bizarre findings with the prospect of finding gold or diamonds, and it was true that most of the areas he explored were likely to bear fruit in the form of precious metal or stone. This was not enough to keep his old investors interested but it did bring into the picture a rather shady group of new patrons who cared little about reputation and were willing to fund an expedition to find Yeti if it also had a good chance of producing ownership of valuable mineral rights.
Eventually, it is said, a group of “investors” who were, by all accounts, representatives of three New York Mafia families felt double crossed when for the fifth time an expedition that should have yielded diamonds and gold instead yielded several smooth rocks that Craft claimed he could use to communicate with aliens. Craft disappeared shortly after a meeting with those investors at an eating establishment in New Jersey known then as “Maria’s Bistro.” He was never seen again, but one week later the restaurant was renamed, out of the blue, “Henry is in the Well.”
Henry was H.L. Craft’s first name.
The idea that the Dons of three New York Mafia families had killed H. L. Craft and put his lifeless body in a well, possibly the decorative well that graced the gaudy garden complete with fountains and flamingos in front of the restaurant formerly known as Maria’s, could never be verified because all three of the Dons died in untoward accidents over the next year. One died in his own house which caught on fire for no good reason and burned to the ground, one was killed in a freak accident involving lava while visiting a National Park in Hawaii, and one is said to have spontaneously combusted while walking his dog through Little Italy one warm Thursday evening.
So that is the background of the H. L. Craft society, which seemed to be of little relevance now, since decades had past since H. L. Craft disappeared. These days, the society was run by a good-old-boy network (that is correct, no girls were allowed) distributed across North America and Europe, with offices in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Brussels, Munich, and Athens. There were not many members, but they all faithfully traveled to the meetings held twice a year in one of those locations, venue rotating, and this very week, the week Miranda Bolt walked into my tavern, the H. L. Craft society was holding its meeting about four blocks away from where I first learned of its existence.
My visit there was brief and uninformative, but perfectly useful for my needs. The secretary of the society, Charles Willoughby, did not ask me for my qualifications. Rather, he told me what they were. He told me what languages I knew, where in Central Africa I had worked and lived, what my skill set was, and who some of my key contacts were. He then told me the same sorts of things about a primatologist named Pat Soffer.
“Soffer’s been around the block a few times, is as tough as nails, though I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting this chap,” he said. “…is said to know the ways of the rainforest, knows all about monkeys, that sort of thing… done more fieldwork than god. But never in your region, so the two of you will complement each other. Soffer will know what you are looking for when you see it, you’ll find a way to the site. By the way, Soffer knew Dieter Phillips as an undergraduate, and Phillips wrote Soffer’s recommendations for graduate school and spoke well of the young scholar. The two of you will meet in the Thorn Tree Cafe at the New Stanley in Kenya in five days, at 11:00 AM local time. Have lunch on me. The fish and chips there are passable.” And he handed me a bank note for more money than I would need to run several expeditions. “Make whatever arrangements you need. I’m on the board of Barkely’s and the president of the branch office on Kenyatta Boulevard in Nairobi is my brother. Before you leave there for the Congo you’ll have cash, and how you spend it is up to you.”
And as he said these words, he stood and signaled towards the door, and as the last sentence was finished I found myself alone in the hallway outside his office. On my way to Nairobi.
I liked this plan where everyone I met gave me money. I just hoped that Soffer was someone I could work with. I’d spent too much time in the bush with people who were hard to get along with, or who were accident prone and thus dangerous, or who were in some other way annoying. This guy sounded like he might be OK to work with but one could never be sure.
New Stanley
As instructed, I arrived at the New Stanley Hotel, in downtown Nairobi, at just before 11:00 AM, to meet Pat Soffer, primatologist. Willoughby didn’t have to tell me about the fish and chips; I’d eaten here many times. The Thorn Tree Cafe was a widely known meeting place in Nairobi. A block or so from the Hilton, at the end of the main downtown street, a short walk from the central government buildings, across from a central bus station, it was a slightly pricey but reasonable hotel with an inexpensive, leisurely outdoor restaurant open early in the morning for breakfast and coffee, all day for lunch and dinner, and late into the evening for drinks.
A giant tree … a thorn tree as it happens … grew from the middle of the outdoor eating area, and around the tree was built a bulletin board. The bulletin board was mainly for travelers and tourists to hang notes for other travelers and tourists. A typical scenario might be for a couple of backpackers to cross paths in Malawi or Tanzania or Uganda, both thinking they’d be passing through Nairobi in a month or so. Then, when either would arrive in town, they would search for a note from the other and put up one of their own, and in so doing, sometimes reconnect in the Tourist Capital of East Africa. Among these numerous mostly unanswered missives, other more interesting but less overt messaging would also take place. A small but steady amount of arms, drugs, and intelligence trafficking was facilitated by notes on the Thorn Tree’s bulletin board. And, now and then, people organizing expeditions into the Congo would meet up here.
So on my arrival at the Cafe, I went right to the tree to look for a note from Pat Soffer, prepared to write my own. I realized I had no idea what my contact looked like, and the restaurant was full of westerners any one of which could be Pat Soffer, Primatologist. Seeing nothing, I took out a note pad, located a blank page and penned:
"Looking for Pat, Mutual Interest in Monkeys,” with my hotel’s name and room number.
And I was just about to pin this to the board when a woman who had been standing next to me also looking at the bulletin board took a step closer and snatched the paper from my hand. “Welcome to Nairobi,” she said, gesturing toward a table already set for tea, along the back wall. “you’re early.”
She struck me right away as someone who’d been around the block more than once and who knew how to take care of herself. Darkly tanned with a lot of split ends in her black hair, brown eyes, broad shouldered, trim and muscular, I had the vague impression that she was of Greek ancestry, though her last name did not match. For just a second I was surprised she was a girl. “Pat” is the ultimate western non-gendered name. Surprised but glad. I was tired of working with that special Intrepid Explorer Ego that usually accompanies western Y-chromosomes in the bush.
So we talked. Pat confirmed that Dieter was her advisor in undergraduate school. She had a vaguely defined plan to get a Master’s degree at Oxford, then return to Dieter’s institution to work under him towards a PhD, but by that time for some reason or another Dieter was no longer taking on female graduate students. Other than the one he had just married, that is. Yes, it was true; all the complexities of high school relationships returned but with a vengeance in graduate school, especially in Anthropology where fieldwork complicated things. Pat ended up getting her PhD elsewhere, and spent most of the time since those days working at remote field sites.
Dieter Phillips had asked her to consider joining him on an expedition to the Eastern Congo, where we were now heading, under the condition that she, Pat, would only be in the field at the same time as Dieter’s wife, at the new Mrs. Phillip’s request. Pat had no problem with that. She explained it this way to me: “Dieter Phillips was not my type. Phyllis, on the other hand, was, physically; but not emotionally or mentally. She was a child. But I would have enjoyed the window dressing and had fun playing with the social dynamic, especially if it would have given Dieter a hard time. I wasn’t really happy about being rejected from my choice of graduate school because of marital insecurity by two emotionally retarded latter day hipsters, which is how I regarded the two of them.”
“So your interest in South Dakota was not for the opportunity to work with the great Dieter Phillips?” I inquired.
“Hell no. I wanted access to their primate skeletal collection. It is the largest and best documented in the world. At the time, that’s what I wanted to do…measure bones. In the end, I’m glad it didn’t work out. I live in the field now. You know what I’m talking about.”
I certainly did. If you spend enough time in the field, not being in the field feels strange.
“Let me ask you, then, what was the point of Phillips’ expedition, the one you didn’t go on? Why didn’t you go, in the end, and what did he find? I’ve been told almost nothing about it, other than that I’m to help you.”
“Ah. I figured that. They were probably worried you would not come if you knew…”
I waited, now more intrigued than ever.
“Dieter Phillips was looking for a new species of primate, a kind of ape, called Sungudogo,” she said. “He had evidence that it really existed and intended to document its presence, collect a few to bring back as specimens, and then get funding for a much larger project.”
“OK, that much I either knew from what they told me in Brussels, or inferred. Why would you NOT go on such a search? Even if Sungudogo didn’t exist, there are probably plenty of other primate-related things in the area you could have worked on.”
“Sungudogo is a gorilla no taller than this,” she said, as she held her hand about four feet off the ground.
“While knuckle walking?” I asked, “Four feet would be about right. you’re saying Sungudogo is a bit bigger than the average gorilla?”
“No,” she said, glancing at her hand and with a grin moving it a few inches to one side. “This tall. From the top of the table. While standing full height on its hind limbs.”
“What?” I said, wishing I hadn’t been sipping my tea at just that moment. “A two and a half foot tall gorilla?”
“Well,” she said. “You should have guessed from the name; ”sungu“ from ape or chimp and ”dogo“ for small, like the word ”kidogo.“ Small Ape. Sungudogo.”
“Yeah, I had noticed that, those two terms are used in a lot of languages in the area. But I didn’t think…” I thought for a moment. “Wait, is this why you didn’t join Phillips? Because Sungudogo is no more likely to exist than Bigfoot?”
“Exactly,” she said. “I told him that I’d be the first to join his second expedition!”
Another spit-take with the tea, and I decided to put my cup down and avoid drinking during the rest of this particular conversation.
“So, they went off without you,” I asked. “How did they explain Sungudogo in the end? Was it a local totemic symbol, or some other sort of made up creature, or something lost in the translation, or what?”
“Ah…no, not exactly,” she said, that same wry grin returning to her lips.
“What then?”
“It exists,” she said, suddenly getting serious. “I’ve seen one.”
I stared. Waiting for the punchline. Happy I’d given up on drinking the tea.
“I think they killed Dieter.”
That was not the punchline I was looking for.
“Listen,” she said, leaning in close and moving my half finished cup of tea off to the side. “You are going to have to trust me on something,” now putting her hand on my forearm, as though what she was about to say might cause me to bolt.
I looked at her, and saw something in her eyes that caught my attention. Worry. Fear, maybe. Something else. Her gaze was really starting to get my attention when a flash of light from the sun shining off the window of a bus pulling out of the station across the street brought me back into focus.
"There are a couple of things that have to be cleared up, very soon, before we can go forward with this expedition,” she continued. “I have been sworn to absolute secrecy and I can’t even tell you certain things.”
“That won’t do at all,” I replied, maybe a little too tersely. For that I earned a tighter grip on my forearm.
“I know,” she said. “This is where you have to trust me. We’re both going to Goma, Zaire. You know that place, right?”
“Only in as much as I live there when I’m in country and not on a job, sure.”
“Do you have a place there?”
“No,” I replied. “Not at the moment, I gave that up. I stay in a hotel. But yes, I know the place. I understand We’re going to points north of Goma, so that is where I assume we’ll start out. Arrange a vehicle, get supplies, maybe poke around for information, get our land legs.”
“Here’s what we need to do, Mallows. We’ll meet in Goma in a few days. I’ll supply the vehicle, I have access to a Land Rover. I need to make a stop and verify something and then, if all that works out, I can tell you more. I promised to not tell anybody, you included, everything that I know until we are in country. We’ll talk in Goma in about a week.”
I don’t know exactly what made me trust her, but really, the cost was not high. If things didn’t work out, Goma was where I should be anyway. This is where the action was in mining and mercenary work. Once I got to Goma, even if Pat never showed up, I’d be fine. I gave a nod.
“Besides,” she said, seeing my nod and relaxing a little. “Goma’s where you would normally go this time of year anyway, since your job in Brussels is done.” Echoing my thoughts, knowing more about me than I thought she did, like everyone else I’d spoken to so far. She let go of my arm, reached out her hand for me to shake it, and as I did so, she stood. “See you in Goma in a week. I’ll send a telegraph to the Pierre Hotel when I know my exact schedule. That’s the one you usually stay in, right?”
And without waiting for an answer, she turned and walked out of the Thorn Tree Cafe, took a right towards the Hilton and Government Center, and disappeared.
Betsy
A week later I was in Goma, hanging out in a restaurant and nursing a 750 ml Primus lager and a plate of chips. Pat had left a telegram at the Pierre Hotel for me, as agreed, and told me that she’d try to make it to this spot on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday. It was Thursday, so if we were all talking about the same week, we were right on time. Goma time, that is.
Halfway done with the chips, just as they were starting to get cold, I picked up the plate and passed it over the low wall edging the restaurant’s outdoor eating area. Two child’s hands rose up out of nowhere and took the plate, lowering it carefully out of sight. A moment later the plate reappeared on the top of the wall, empty, and I casually returned it to the table. By this time, the young waiter had sauntered over, and he picked up the plate formerly endowed with chips.
“Those kids love you, Mr. Archer Mallows,” he said, pointing with his eyes and lips over the edge of the railing, where by now the French fries would have been consumed by four or five hungry mouths, having been transferred from my plate into a small enamelware basin the children usually used to carry peanuts they’d sell to tourists and passersby.
“Everybody’s got to eat,” I said.
This was all very routine. For a few hours a day, for the last few days, I would come to this restaurant and order a series of food and drink items, properly paired. Coffee and French toast in the morning. I drank the coffee, the French toast went over the rail. For lunch, a glass of water and a sandwich. I’d eat half the sandwich, the other half went over the rail. Mid afternoon, a beer and a plate of chips. I never touched the chips. And so on.
“I think it’s about time for dessert,” I said to the widely grinning waiter. I knew the kids loved him too. “Maybe a piece of that cake and a spot of tea. Extra sugar on the side, please.”
The extra sugar, for which I’d be charged, would go over the edge as well. If it seemed like I’d been doing this with these kids for years, it was because I had been. Goma was my home base here in the Congo, and this restaurant was a regular haunt, and I’d been sharing food with this group of kids long enough that their composition had changed, with older ones moving on and younger ones joining. Zapierre, the waiter, had been one of the street kids only six or seven years ago. It was a good deal. In return for giving them a few dollars worth of much needed food every day that I happened to be in town, they would leave me alone when I walked or drove down the street, and they’d see to it that the other street urchins did the same. I was the most ignored white man in Goma, which probably made me stand out, or at least, the envy of some.
And just as I was contemplating how much this city had become my home, I registered in the back of my mind a familiar sound, but then realized it was just another Land Rover driving down the street. But when I glanced up, I was startled at first, then utterly astonished. From the direction of the main intersection out of town to the East came my old Land Rover, a vehicle I had purchased used and maintained with loving care and many spare parts until the transmission failed and I traded it along with a pile of cash for a newish Toyota Land Cruiser. Well, a ten year old Toyota. I knew the truck had been handed off to a new owner in neighboring Rwanda, so it was not a total shock…yet at the same time it was bone chillingly odd…to see that my new colleague Pat was behind the wheel. She pulled the truck over to the side across the street, and as the dust swirled to a stop moments later on the dirt road, the Urchins left their hiding place by my rail and headed right for it. Just as they arrived, Pat had stepped out of the vehicle and closed the door, unlocked with the window open. She leaned down to whisper in the ear of the Urchin In Charge (easily discerned) and within moments all five of them were sitting on the roof and hood of Ol’ Betsy (that was the Land Rover’s name), guarding her from all possible hazards. Pat had already spotted me and was now heading briskly, with that grin of hers in place, over to my table.
"What the fu … ” I started to say.
“Your old truck!” she interrupted me, pointing with her thumb over her shoulder, eyes wide, smiling, like it was her job to show up with a vehicle I had put out to pasture years ago. “Surprised?”
"Well, yes, I’m surprised she still runs, and I’m even more surprised to see you driving … “
“She? Does she have a name?”
I told her that the truck’s name was Betsy, and I told her the story behind that, which is amusing. But Pat was the one that needed to do the explaining.
Pat sat across from me at the table, and indicated that she was famished. I suggested the grilled cheese sandwich with chips.
“Sounds great, but I’ll skip the chips.”
So, I got Zapierre’s attention and ordered a grilled cheese sandwich, a couple more beers, and a plate of chips.
“I won’t eat those chips,” Pat said, looking slightly confused.
“I know. Me neither,” I waved off her concern. “But we are going to sip these beers as long as it takes for you to fill me in on what’s going on. Like you promised.”
Pat relaxed in her chair and noticing that we were in the shade, took off her sunglasses and folded them into the pocket of her unbuttoned denim shirt. I could see that she was wearing a World Wildlife Consortium T-shirt underneath. When she looked at me, I had the sense that she wanted me to see her eyes, so I would know she was being straight with me. Or, perhaps, so I would think she was being straight with me when she wasn’t. I hadn’t spent enough time with her to even come close to really knowing her, but she felt like a kindred spirit in a way. Old hands at field work, grown through experience past the nervousness of being in a foreign land, and grown past the ego trip of being special (not everybody gets to do this kind of work…just us and Indiana Jones). I liked her, and I wanted to like her more, but there were things she knew that I didn’t know yet, and that made me more than a little uncomfortable.
“The Craft Foundation,” she began, “is backing this whole trip. I’m told that there is a connection between Craft, both the foundation and the old man who started this gig like 50 years ago, H.L. Craft, and what Dieter and Phyllis were doing here 20 years ago. I honestly don’t know what that connection is.”
The beers came and were poured into warm glasses that were so old that they looked dirty even though they were not. Probably. Pat downed half of her glass in one drag, and topped it off from the bottle. This being my second, I sipped mine. I watched her wipe the bits of foam away from her lips.
“They have provided me with absolutely strict instructions on what I am to tell you and when. There are three parts to what I know. I told you the first part in Nairobi, and I actually let slip one thing I should not have said.”
“That you’ve seen a Sungudogo?”
“Yeah, that. Just forget I said that. It is not exactly true anyway.”
“How can seeing a two foot tall ape not known to science be something that might or might not be true?”
“Trust me, Mallows, you’ll get that later.” She took another sip and glanced around.
“Nervous that we are being watched?”
“No,” she replied. “Hungry.” And just then Zapierre came out onto the patio carrying three plates. One held Pat’s grilled cheese, the second a huge pile of chips, and the third held two shish kabob sticks with some sort of meat on them.
He put the meat between us and said, “The Chef is trying something new. He’d like your opinion.” Zapierre turned and left promptly, sensing that we were in the middle of something.
I pulled one of the meat chunks off the stick and popped it in my mouth. “Hmmm…pretty tender for colubus monkey!” I exclaimed.
“Nope, that’s a cow,” said Pat, without skipping a beat. “I took a whole seminar in shish kebob monkeys in grad school. That is not one.”
Remembering that we were in fact being watched, I took the plate of chips and held them over the edge of the rail. Pat watched, amused, as the two hands rose out of nowhere, took the plate and keeping careful balance so no chips would slide off, lowered it away. A moment later the plate clattered to the top of the rail and a young boy darted out of the bushes carrying the enamelware basin, to join his compatriots who were still sitting on top of Ol’ Betsy.
“Cute,” Pat said, halfway grinning. “Your family.”
“Might as well be,” I replied, and took a sip of my beer. “You were saying?”
“OK. The Craft Foundation has a collection of notes from the old man. I’ve seen some of them, and they are crazy. Most of the notes are written in either a code that has not been translated, or in gibberish. And there are these rocks…smooth river cobbles…that are carefully curated and numbered. The Craft Foundation funded Dieter’s expedition because they got wind of the fact that he was going to search for Sungudogo. They wanted in on that, and to control what he did, because he would be going into the last place H.L. Craft had visited before his untimely disappearance.”
“And then, Dieter didn’t manage to make it back so they needed some other plan.”
Pat took a moment to munch on her sandwich, but gave me a nod as she did so.
“More or less,” she spoke through the grilled cheese in her mouth. A swallow. A sip of beer. “They mostly stood off and waited, and tried to collect additional information, which was mostly a fruitless venture. But then one day someone spotted your Land Rover.”
“Ol’ Betsy?”
"Right. They were watching and listening for items of interest from the region, when they spotted a photograph of some tourists standing in front of your truck, or actually, the Rwandan Adventure Safari Inc’s truck.
“Why would that be of the slightest interest to the H.L. Craft foundation?”
“Because of the right rear door,” Pat replied, munching. “That door was obviously a replacement part, right?”
She was right. The right rear door of my land rover had been badly damaged when Ol’ Betsy was rammed by an enraged hippopotamus up in the Semliki Valley. Hippos hate headlights. They also hate the sound of truck engines. When they are out of the water at night grazing, one has to be careful to avoid them. Most hippos will run away from a moving vehicle, and a few will just ignore it, but the larger, more ornery males will go after it. The hippo had knocked my truck clear off the narrow dirt road I was driving on. Most of the gear tied to the roof rack came flying off, everybody in the truck got knocked around a bit, and two giant tusk holes penetrated the right rear door, which was nearly knocked off its hinges. The poor animal wandered off after the attack and died a few days later, down in the river, where its body was slowly consumed by hyenas and giant catfish.
“The door … It was taken from an old World Wildlife Consortium truck,” I said, mostly to myself, as I glanced across the street where I could see Ol Betsy’s right flank. I could see the left half of a logo easily recognized as the tail end of the excessively cute World Wildlife Consortium otter. Also visible were the letters “SD” which I now understood must be “SDRU” (South Dakota Regional University), Dieter’s academic base of operations. Beneath this one could barely make out some letters, a word starting with a G…
“South Dakota Regional University,” Pat said my thoughts out loud, seeing that my eyes were reading my former truck. “Gorillas R Us”
Only barely visible, I had ignored the words hand painted by a local artist in the style of so much lettering and signing in the region. I had assumed someone had borrowed the WWC otter and used it in their own design. At the time that I purchased the door from an old junk shop in Goma I was curious enough about its origins that I asked about it, and that was a mistake: Studied indifference would have allowed me to get a better price. In the end, I paid the equivalent of 10 US dollars, and found out that this door and the Land Rover to which it had been attached were last seen leaving this very place 18 years before I was to rediscover it, and two years before finding myself across the table from Pat the Primatologist, who was looking more and more interesting to me every minute.
“So, H.L. Craft Society’s spies spotted Ol’ Betsy on a pamphlet, recognized the barely readable logo of Dieter Philipps expedition, and … what?”
“Yeah, I know, quite a chance finding, right? Anyway, someone was sent in to investigate, and they got as far as figuring out that Ol’ Betsy was formerly owned by you, and that you had probably recently found Dieter’s old door by chance. This led to three ideas."
“First,” she continued, “This is how they found out about you, and decided to consider you as a possible resource if they were to go back in to Dieter’s site.”
“And, thus, here we two are.”
“Correct. Second, not in any particular order,” she drained the last of her beer, “they realized that if the door had materialized somehow, that there must be more evidence of what had happened to Dieter.”
“That does not make a lot of sense,” I interrupted. “He went to his research site and never came out. Why would there not be physical evidence somewhere, even if not located yet, of where he went and possibly of what he did? Why would a door showing up 18 years after the fact mean anything?”
“I know,” she agreed. “But that’s what they said. I have the sense that the door simply reminded them that Dieter had existed, that he had gone into the bush and never come out on their behalf. Anyway, the third thing is the door itself. They have suggested that the door might spark a memory. Someone might see the door, if we, well, drove around with it, and remember something, or make some kind of connection.”
“So,” rubbing my chin as I replied, “we travel around advertising that we are associated with the guy who someone may have made disappear for unknown reasons, and see if they try it with us.”
“Where’s that waiter, I want another beer,” was her reply. I sent a signal to Zapierre. “Either way, driving up with Ol’ Betsy here was worth it, just to see the expression on your face.”
I just stared at her, trying not to enjoy her grin as much as I was enjoying it.
“I just hope you and Betsy parted on good terms. No bad feelings or anything.”
I laughed. “Betsy was my first Land Rover. She’ll always be special to me. Don’t worry about that. I just hope she’ll run.”
“She’s a Land Rover. She’ll need constant repair but will never die,” Pat chimed in, knowingly. “Plus, that’s a newish engine and transmission, totally new injectors, and a rebuilt suspension. Everything else is fixed up as best as the shop in Rwanda could manage. It’s got brakes. Steering wheel. What else do you need?”
“Another beer would be good…” and when Zapierre came over, we ordered another round.
And just then, seeing her grinning at me and realizing that this was all really happening, a sense of thrill came over me. And dread. This was normal for the start of a new adventure.
I took a draft of the newly poured beer and grinned back. Expedition on.
The rest of the story is here.
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1FeADvF
