Calvin’s home was modestly sized, and in daylight she would find it a surprisingly sweet brick cottage creepered with bougainvillaea, when she pictured the lair of a famous doomsayer more like the flaming red caves of Apocalypse Now. In fact, most of the conservation Jeremiahs with which this neighbourhood was poxed lived in pristine, lush, spacious estates that made you wonder where they got their ideas from. Inside, too, Eleanor was struck by how normal his rooms looked, though he did not go in for the carvings and buffalo bronzes that commonly littered the white African household. Instead she found the room towered with journals and mountainous tatters of clippings. The bookshelves were lined in science fiction, with a smattering of wider interests: Chaos, Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Executioner’s Song and a biography of Napoleon. All the records and CDs were classical save a recording of Sweeney Todd. There was a touch of the morbid in his Francis Bacon prints, their faces of hung meat, and in the one outsized bone on his coffee table that could only have come from an elephant, but the femur had blanched in the sun until porous like driftwood. It was not deathly, merely sculptural, suggesting that anything killed long enough ago retires from tragedy to knick-knack.
She inspected two framed photos on the wall. The first was of a black diver in a wet suit, her hood down and short hair beaded. The face itself was small, the chin sharp and narrow; but the eyes were enormous and at this angle showing an alarming amount of white. The girl had great buck teeth which were somehow, in their startling, unapologetic dominance of the thin lower lip, attractive. The smile was carnivorous, and she was clutching a diving knife—“what little good it did her”, Calvin would remark later. Though the young woman was beautiful in some inexplicable way, the face was haunting and a little fearsome, all eyeball and grin, and the contours of cheek or chin, the tiny body they guarded, would always seep away in Eleanor’s memory however many times she’d study the photo when Calvin wasn’t in. It was a face you wouldn’t want to come upon in the dark, though that is exactly when it would float before her, gloating with all that underworldly power that Eleanor herself felt cheated of.
The second photo was of Calvin, posed in a cocky stetson and muddy safari gear, one hand akimbo and the other on a blunderbuss, with a rumpled grey mountain range behind him. Calvin, too, was grinning here. He did not have the girl’s enormous teeth, but both sinister smiles and sidelong glances alluded to the same unsaid. They seemed to be looking at each other. Eleanor felt excluded.
In the safari photo Calvin could not have been more than twenty-five, and the image challenged her original assessment from across the conference hall that he had not changed. Oh, he’d lost some hair, which lengthened his forehead and made him look more intelligent; and the weather had leathered him, for here he was seamless and by the time she met him he had already slipped into that indeterminate somewhere between thirty-five and sixty that certain men seem able to maintain until they’re ninety-two and of which women, who have no such timeless equivalent, are understandably jealous. Yet none of this transformation was interesting. In the picture his stare was searing; now Calvin’s eyes had gone cold. They no longer glinted like sapphire but glared like marble.
She did a double take. The mountain range was a stack of dead elephants.
“In the early sixties I culled for the Ugandan game authorities,” Calvin explained. “They were the first on the continent to realize they had a population problem. Despite a two-year gestation, elephants multiply like fury. And they devastate the land—tear trees up by the roots, trample the undergrowth. By the time we arrived the vegetation was stripped, and other species were dying out. Left to their own devices, elephants eliminate their own food supply. In earlier times, they’d migrate to wreck some other hapless bush, and slowly the fauna they plundered would grow back. Now, of course, there’s nowhere for them to go. Once they’ve ruined their habitat, they starve, by the tens of thousands. In short order the species is in danger of extinction. So we were brought in to crop. We took out seven elephants a day for two years.”
“That sounds horrendous.”
“Those were the best years of my life. And the work was a great cure for sentimentality. In culling, you have to shoot whole families. Orphans get peckish.”
“No wonder you have no feeling for infant mortality.”
“That’s right,” he agreed affably. “And it was a professional operation, with full utilization: we’d cut out the tusks, carve up the carcasses and fly the meat back to Kampala. Not bad, elephant meat. A little tough.”
“I’m confused—I thought the problem with elephants was poaching.” She fingered one of the stacks of clippings: deforestation, ozone holes, global warming—fifteen solid inches of disaster, teetering from constant additions on the edge of his end table, like the world itself on the brink.
“It is now,” he carried on. “But as soon as you clean up the poaching, over-population sets in again. Why, in Tsavo—Starvo, as it is better known—the Game Department insisted for years their elephants were dying off because of poaching, but that yarn was a front for their own mismanagement. You got game wardens carving out the tusks of emaciated carcasses to make it look as if the animals had been poached; but the real story was the monsters had over-reproduced and torn the place apart until there wasn’t a leaf in the park. It was grotesque. I begged David Sheldrick to let me in there to cull, but no-no.” It was hard to imagine Calvin Piper imploring anyone. “He hated me.”
“Lots of people seem to hate you.”
“Flattering, isn’t it? As usual in issues of any importance, the conflict degenerated to petty vendetta. I said the problem was population; Sheldrick said it was poaching; and the lousy animals got lost in the shuffle. All that mattered to Sheldrick was being right.”
“What mattered to you?”
“Being right, what do you think?”
“Over-population—I thought elephants were endangered.”
“Oh, they are,” he said lightly. “Then, so are we.”
“What’s happening in Starvo now?”
“A few sad little herds left. Now the problem’s poaching, all right. While the elephant community spends its time firing furious, bitchy articles at each other, I’ve retired from the fight. The absurdity of the poaching-population controversy is that they are both problems. If you successfully control poaching but restrict migration, the ungainly pachyderms maraud through the park and then they starve. If you fail to control poaching, they’re simply slaughtered. The larger problem is that humans and elephants cannot coexist. The Africans despise them, and if you’d ever let one of those adorable babies loose in your vegetable patch you’d see why. The only answer, as much as there is one, is stiff patrolling and a regular cull—what they do in South Africa.”
“They would.”
Calvin smiled. “South Africans aren’t squeamish. But here culling has become unpopular. The bunny-huggers have decided that it traumatizes the poor dears; that we create whole parks full of holocaust survivors. And you would like this, Eleanor: they’re now trying to develop elephant contraceptives.”
“Do they work?”
He laughed. “Do they work with people? You should know.”
“I suppose the acceptance rate is rather low.”
“It’s technologically impractical. All that money towards dead-end research just because young girls who take snaps have weak stomachs. But in East African parks, it won’t come to over-population. As human numbers here go over the top, the desperation level rises as steadily as the water table goes down. You know that Kenya has imported the SAS? They use the same shoot-to-kill on poachers as they do on the IRA. Still, as long as a pair of tusks will fetch sterling pound for pound, the poachers will keep trying. And I don’t blame the wretches. If I were some scarecrow villager, I’d probably shoot elephants wholesale. The dinosaurs are doomed anyway, so someone should cash in.”
Calvin’s green monkey had screamed and run away when