Murder Most Foul Read online

  One afternoon, a year later, Odendahl hitched a ride into our base camp in the Aberdares with a lorryload of regulars, having volunteered and having been assigned quite by chance to my patrol.

  “Franz Odendahl reporting for duty, sir,” he said.

  I needled him a bit. “This isn’t the bloody military, Odendahl. We’re a skeilkommando in a dirty guerrilla war.”

  “You do not have to tell me how to fight,” he said stiffly. “I was in the desert. The North African campaign.”

  “The Tobruk surrender?” I asked him sarcastically.

  But it didn’t even make him blink. At first, I considered putting one between his shoulder blades in a raid on a Mau-Mau encampment, but he had such raw physical courage that reasoned hatred of the man was hard to maintain. He was an irritating bastard, however. One broiling afternoon, we were hacking a trail through a stand of bamboo as thick as a man’s wrist, hoping to intercept one of Dedan Kimathi’s bands, when Odendahl suddenly straightened up.

  “You hate me. Canning,” he said abruptly, “but you don’t hate the farm. When these vermin are exterminated, I will need a foreman.”

  “Work for wages on my own land? Not bloody likely.”

  But barely eight years later, Kenya was independent, and Jomo Kenyatta, the man once jailed for originating Mau-Mau, was in as Prime Minister. The resultant changes made any attitude difficult to maintain. Career European civil servants were taking their lumpers and leaving; white settlers of Odendahl’s ilk were in danger of deportation. I kept hearing of labor troubles on the farm. Finally I loaded my rifles and gear and Morengaru into the Land Rover and drove north.

  It was nearly dusk when we climbed stiffly down in front of the old stone farmhouse. The wind tossed the cedars behind the house and brought woodsmoke from the labor lines down on the edge of the forest.

  Odendahl appeared on the veranda, huge and indistinct like an old tusker in your sights at dusk. He was grizzled now, pushing fifty, but as solid and immutable as he’d been fifteen years ago.

  “So, you are here.” His invitation might have been the day before.

  “When they deport you, Odendahl, I want first chance here.”

  “Just so, Ja.” Then a smile lit up his heavy countenance. “But with you here, they will not deport me, eh?” And he began to laugh…

  I soon sorted out the laborers, and within two years the farm was prospering mildly. We worked hard, had the odd drain at the club of a Saturday night, and got on together. That is, until I brought back the letter from my weekly provisions run to Nakuru. It surprised me, as he received no personal mail; he had no friends, even among the Boers.

  “A letter forwarded from South Africa.” I looked at the return address. “From someone in Belem, Brazil, named Helldorf.”

  He grunted, and I stared. Odendahl was bolt-upright beside the table, white-faced, as rigid as if in catalepsis. Finally he stretched out a careful hand like a man about to defuse a grenade.

  “Helldorf!—I know. But for him to use that name…”

  He read the letter, then crumpled it deliberately and thrust it into his pocket. His cold gray eyes met mine. “An old friend. Discussing life insurance.”

  That night at the club he got puking drunk on whiskey, but he made no further allusion to the letter.

  In the next few weeks, I halfway forgot it, and when a packet of slides came airmail from South Africa for him, I laid it aside and forgot that, too. It was the familiar yellow Kodak box for thirty-five millimeter color slides.

  I was reading the East African Standard when Odendahl, at the desk, leaped to his feet with a strangled cry.

  “Ach! Gotl im Himmel! Wie nennt man das?” His eyes were so wide that the whites showed all the way around. He began speaking in an intense voice: “What do they think? That Odendahl will lick their bellies and tell them he is sorry?”

  He hurled the packet from him and strode out of the room, colliding with the door frame like a drunk. Whoever had sent that packet had known of an exposed nerve in Odendahl, and had carefully and deliberately prodded it.

  The box held two items. The first was a heavy gold ring with the inscription JLH in flowing italics. Helldorf, Odendahl’s Brazilian correspondent? Probably. With the ring was a severed human finger. It had been crudely tanned; clinging shreds of atrophied flesh showed that it had been torn rather than cut from the hand. I tossed it into the fire; it held no terrors for me. Not so, however, for Odendahl.

  He appeared in the doorway with his huge chest rising and falling rapidly as if he had been running. What that box contained must have been to him more deadly than a mamba in his bed, but his blunt, untremulous fingers took it from my hand without the slightest visible hesitation. He removed the cover, then raised his massive head to glare at me.

  “The other thing?”

  “In the fire. And the damned ring is too big for me, too.”

  His great tensed body relaxed; he almost smiled. “You are a good fellow, Peter.”

  That Saturday morning, he stopped me on my way to Nakuru for the week's supplies. “Are you driving later to Kakamega for the tourney?”

  “I’d thought of it.”

  “Mind if I ride along?”

  I drove down to Nakuru in a thoughtful mood. Kakamega is an Abaluhya village that is also the Administration Centre for Kenya’s Western Region. The yearly golf tourney provides a time for drunken reminiscences about the rapidly disappearing colonial past. Odendahl had been singularly uninterested other years, so I knew that whatever had caught up from his past was closing in fast.

  had lunch at the Stag’s Head, a fine old colonial relic where one can watch bush Africans parade by—mostly Kalenjins—and even see an occasional pretty European lass. Over my beer, I had a discussion with a dark, intense lad who said he was American Peace Corps. His solution for all the world’s ills seemed to be “brotherhood,” “equality,” and “self-determination.”

  “Being Kenya-born, you understand the local people pretty well; but what about this Odendahl character?” He ran slim fingers through his hair. His eyes had a disconcerting brightness. “I think he’d have a rotten time without you to handle his help for him. Say—would your boss mind if we visited his farm this afternoon?”

  “Not today,” I stood up abruptly. “We’re off to the golf tourney at Kakamega.”

  In the Land Rover, I had to smile to myself: the words “your boss” and “his farm” from a stranger, particularly a bloody American, had rankled. At that lad’s age, l had tried to shoot Odendahl to keep my land. To youth, all problems seem open to swift, violent solutions. Then comes maturity, and reality keeps getting in the way.

  That evening, the Kakamega Club had a film laid on. While they were changing reels, I blundered out the back door to make water. By custom, one used the first tee. Odendahl was before me, a bulky shadow against the spidery silhouettes of the gum trees along the Kisumu Road.

  I unzippered, with the old colonialist ritual I’m too old to change: “To Africa.”

  Odendahl responded, “To Afr—” and the snipers opened up from the gum trees. Slugs plowed grass on either side and sang into the golf course beyond. I buried my nose in the short, wet grass, tensed for that peculiar slap of lead against living flesh, but there was just one ragged burst.

  I sat up. To my surprise, I was sweating. The years take it out of you.

  Beside me, Odendahl was musing coolly. “Three rifles, maybe? Ja. I think maybe three-oh-eights. Winchester semi-automatics—that would be it.”

  I tried to match his tone. “Either they misjudged the angle, shooting uphill in the dark, or they didn’t want to hit anything.”

  We said nothing about it at the club, but I knew I wanted nothing further to do with it. It was Odendahl’s shauri.

  Back at the farm, however, I found that the old Emergency atmosphere soon returned. A cow had its throat slit in an almost ceremonial manner; a grain storage bin was fired, and there were so many strange noises along the labo
r lines at night that talk was revived of the Kipsigi Bear, a semi-legendary animal which old-timers swear inhabits the Mau Forest.

  Resolutely ignoring it all, I planned a sortie with Morengaru after a herd of buff which was crossing the ditch from the forest at night, breaking through the fence and feeding on the wheat. We went out at dawn, scouting for fresh tracks by the Land Rover headlamps.

  Morengaru suddenly stiffened and pointed. “Iko mbogo!”

  “Wapi?” I stopped the Land Rover and saw the huge spoor, sunk deep into the soft earth an hour before.

  Morengaru thrust his big toe into a mound of tumbled, strawy dung. “Porini. Iko ndume Kabisa.”

  The tracks already had told me it was a very large bull. I unslung my .577 and he got his shotgun from the Land Rover. Within a dozen steps, we were drenched; wait-a-bit thorn clung to my bush jacket, drew beads of blood from my bare arms with its tiny black scimitars. A trophy hunter might go into the bush after buffalo once in a lifetime, and think himself lucky to come back out. It is like jump-shooting game birds, except what you put up might weigh two tons or so and carry a fifty-inch boss of horn.

  Full daylight brought the knowledge that we would shoot no buffalo that day, but I waited another three miles. Not to see if Morengaru had missed it—I knew better than that—but to see if he thought I had. Finally I cursed him and slopped.

  “Ngapi?” I demanded abruptly.

  He gave me a wide, sly grin. “Mbiti.”

  “Africans?”

  “Hapana. Wazunga.”

  Which was bloody interesting. Two white men trailing us on our own land had to be another blunder by the inaccurate snipers from Kakamega—a blunder, because one should never try to beat a man at his own game, and the bush was my game.

  We waited beside a clearing, following their advance by the birds they disturbed. The shadows had shortened. Sunlight in the clearing would make their bush jackets shine like beacons.

  The first one was a surprise. He was my Peace Corpsman from the Stag’s Head, moving cautiously, all his energies bent on tracking. The one behind was shorter and pudgier, blond, but cut from the same pattern. I worked my breech bolt from experience, I know how hard it is to locate that particular sound, not repeated, in the bush. They froze, eyes darting frantically, arm muscles ridged with gripping their Winchester semi-automatics.

  After thirty seconds, as the sweat began to sting their eyes, that sly old devil Morengaru slid his shotgun out of the brush and pressed the muzzle firmly against the second man’s temple. He shrieked and dropped his rifle, and I stood up to let my Peace Corpsman look up the nose of my .577 cannon.

  “Drop it. I get nervous when people track me—especially people who are as damned bad at it as you are. Where’s your third man?”

  “There is no one else. We were hunting and got confused and—”

  “When I get nervous, I get unpredictable.”

  The ease of the ambush had shaken his confidence. He was a good-looking lad, with fine features and olive skin. “At the cattle dip, watching the boche.” He did his American accent extremely well.

  “We did not try to kill you at the golf course!” The other one stank badly of fear.

  “Psychological,” explained my Peace Corpsman, “like Helldorf’s finger in the mail. With a night scope, we could have killed Odendahl then, but we want him to know who and why before—”

  “You should have.”

  “What?” He was shocked. Those who value human life lightly often are disconcerted to meet an equal indifference.

  “Did you think you would scare him with prep-school pranks—butchered cows and severed fingers? Now we have you…”

  “You are turning us in? We are finished?”

  He was incredible. Everyone was to play by the rules except his crowd. I was considering shooting them. But I merely said, “Can you suggest a reason why you shouldn’t be?”

  “There are several.” He sat on a fallen tree. “If we remove Odendahl, who has no relatives, you may get your farm back.”

  “You seem to know a lot about him.”

  “And about you. We considered enlisting your aid before we decided it would be easier to merely hold you until we had finished with Odendahl.” He gave his sudden engaging smile. “We fouled it up.”

  “Quite so. Why did you consider that I might help you?”

  He seemed eager to talk now; his eyes shone. “We’re not American Peace Corps, of course. We are Maccabees; we take our name from Judas Maccabeus, a Jewish leader who would not be trampled by the Syrians, the master race of his day. The Maccabees captured Eichmann and killed Bohrmann; we train in the Israeli desert and are the new Hammers of God. I am Avrohom. This is Ayzik. The other is Yankev. Odendahl would know these are the Yiddish equivalents of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—the Jewish patriarchs.”

  “So Odendahl is not a Boer.” I was remembering the many small things which should have seemed odd: the fact that he cared nothing about Tobruk when other Boers came to blows over the surrender of the South African garrison by its commander, General Klopper; the fact that he made no friends among the other Boers…

  “His real name is Franz Kalt.” Avrohom tapped faster with his twig, as if Odendahl’s past made the adrenalin spurt. “He was an officer in the extermination camp at Buchenwald. In August of nineteen forty-four, he and Captain Johann Helldorf deserted and got to Switzerland. Helldorf went to Brazil, Kalt to South Africa. In nineteen forty-eight, he emigrated to Kenya as Franz Odendahl, South African national, and bought your mother’s farm.”

  “How can you be so sure of his identity?”

  “Helldorf told us enough so we could pick up the trail in South Africa. He was relieved when the time came to die.” He said it as if discussing the gelding of a bull. “We mailed our gift and followed it here. We are not murderers, merely executioners. You fought against his sort in the war.”

  I consciously thrust away the thought that the farm could be mine again. “All this wants some thinking about. Do nothing until Saturday. Then we'll meet in the Stag’s Head and—”

  “No! What if you betray the Cause?”

  “You’re in no position to bargain.” I gestured at the rifles.

  “Okay.” He nodded stiffly. “He lives until Saturday, then.”

  Morengaru watched them out of sight, down the back trail, then shook his head. “Mbaya. bwana. Walu mbaya Sana. Very bad men.”

  “What the bloody hell do you know about it?” I snarled. The hell of it was that I had fought Odendahl’s sort in the war.

  In some obscure way, handling the stock always pleased Odendahl. He came in that evening smelling of dip, his voice almost cheery. I realized how bloody little one ever knows about another person.

  “So… Did you get your buffalo?”

  “We got something more interesting.” I jerked my head at the two Winchester rifles on the table. Odendahl looked at them and stiffened, then sat slowly down by the west window.

  “I’d hoped… How did you get these?”

  My own conflicting emotions surprised me: telling him, I kept hoping he’d deny it. But when was finished, he just sat unmoving, while the houseboy lit the paraffin lamps and, seeing the rifles, racked them in the gun cabinet. Then Odendahl stood up and walked heavily from the room without speaking or looking back.

  I poured myself a whiskey, drank it, and carried the bottle and two glasses down the hallway to the bedrooms. I leaned against the door frame watching him pack, and then handed him a whiskey.

  “Looks like you’ll be moving fast and light,” I said.

  “Danke shon.” His eyes met mine defiantly. “Chin-chin.”

  “Chin-chin,” I responded. We drank.

  He went back to stuffing clothes into his pack. I’d seldom been in his bedroom; we had lived our years under the same roof in an unspoken truce, like rivals under the threat of a common enemy’s batteries.

  “So you’re letting them run you out,” I said finally.

  The conte
mpt in my voice brought his head up. “Nein. I am choosing my ground: the desert. The Northern Frontier District.”

  “They’re trained to operate in the desert, Odendahl.”

  “So am I, my friend.” He sat down abruptly on the bed. Words he had swallowed for twenty years spilled out. “I was at the Qatlara Depression, a lieutenant then. If they had given Rommel men and equipment…” He shrugged and slapped his thigh. “At Fuka, I was wounded. Sent to a hospital in Italy, then home to the Fatherland.”

  “And there you were assigned to Buchenwald?”

  He grunted savagely over his drink. “The best doctors were at the camps; they worked on my leg between their amusements. I followed orders, of course. A German soldier always follows orders.”

  I couldn’t tell if this was self-directed sarcasm or a sort of explanation.

  “And Helldorf?”

  “A captain of S.D. Hitler Jugend, University of Berlin in the thirties to study Rassenkunde—racial science. Oh, he believed in the Third Reich, all of it.” He stood up. “Your glass is empty.”

  He brought back the bottle and set it on the bright sisal rug; I was sitting on the floor with my back against the dresser. He sat down on the bed and went on.

  “In February, nineteen forty-four, I was in Paris on leave, and obtained the identity papers of two French resistance workers who had died during interrogations. Helldorf’s beliefs did not include dying for the Reich, and I had long before determined to save my neck. From Switzerland, he went to Brazil, and I went to South Africa. I never liked him personally, but I suppose he was a friend; he warned me they had caught up.”

  “And then told them where to look for you,” I said.

  “So?” He looked up from the glass his blunt, calloused fingers were turning. “It is easy to break a man.” He nodded absently to himself. “I am an expert in the mechanics of breaking men. You see, I have always known they would come for me. If not these now, others later. So I will wait for them in the desert.” He raised his eyes from the tips of his heavy veldskoen. We were both feeling the whiskey. “They will have their chance to take me—if they are men enough.” Then he gave an odd, coarse laugh, as if at a private joke.