Client Privilege (29 page)

Although they were freely given to him, technically the jaguars did not belong to Jeff. They belonged to the government of Mexico. No pre-Columbian artifacts could legally leave the country after 1971. The United States government supported the Mexican law.

Jeff Newton didn’t care. He didn’t care what those jaguars were worth, and he didn’t care about the Mexican law. Had he wanted to sell them, he would’ve had a problem. But he didn’t intend to sell them. Jeff, I knew, loved those seven golden jaguars perhaps as much as he loved his dogs. Probably more than he loved any human being.

Dan LaBreque did care. He called Jeff a thief. Insofar as a law was being violated, I cared, too. But there wasn’t anything either of us could do about it.

Lily tugged at my arm. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘The great hunter is waiting. He heard the bell. He’ll be wondering what we’re up to.’

She led me through double glass doors on to the field-stone patio behind the house. Thomas Jefferson Newton lay on a chaise longue facing off to the east, his back to me. His thinning white hair grew close to his scalp. Pale urine-yellow streaks stained it. The back of his neck was thin. The two cords stood out in sharp relief. Even in the muggy Cape Cod summer heat, he had a blanket spread over his legs. His crutch was propped on the wrought-iron table beside him. The promised pitcher of martinis and two glasses sat on the table.

I turned to Lily and arched my brows at her.

‘Go ahead,’ she said softly. ‘I got some things to do in the kitchen.’

I shrugged and stepped out on to the terrace.

‘Jeff,’ I said.

He waved his hand without turning around. ‘Come sit down, Brady,’ he said.

I went over and perched on the edge of the chair beside his chaise. He turned his head slowly and peered at me through watery blue eyes. I was startled at his appearance. I had seen him dozens of times since he got out of the hospital six years earlier, but I still remembered him as the dark, powerful man who had gone to Africa. He was, I knew, barely fifty. He looked twenty years older. His skin glowed with the papery translucence of old age. It was patched with pink blotches as if disease was showing itself, except along the three parallel scars that began in front of his left ear and angled across his cheek, through his lips, and across his chin. The scars shone stark white.

He reached towards me. ‘Shitty weather,’ he said.

I squeezed his bony hand. ‘Summer on the Cape,’ I said. ‘It’s what you get.’

‘Traffic bad?’

‘As always. Route 3 was backed up to Marshfield.’

‘Cape’s going to hell,’ he said. ‘Just like the rest of the world. Pour us a martini. And fill the damn glass all the way up. Lily doesn’t know how to fill a glass with a martini.’

I poured from the pitcher into the glasses and handed one to Jeff. He took it and brought it to his lips. I noticed that his hand trembled, and when he sipped, some of the drink dribbled from the corner of his mouth. He swallowed, cleared his throat, and took another, longer swallow.

He cocked his head and narrowed his eyes to look at me. ‘You gaining weight?’ he said.

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I never bother weighing myself.’

‘Fatter in the jowls,’ he said.

‘Thanks.’ I lit a cigarette.

‘Those things’ll kill you.

‘Something’s got to,’ I said.

‘Stupid habit.’

I nodded and sipped my martini. ‘How are you feeling, other than mean-spirited and nasty?’ I said.

‘Piss poor. As usual. Nice of you to ask, as if you couldn’t see for yourself.’

He stared down at his legs, twin lumps under the blanket. One of them, I knew, was half the diameter of the other. Most of the thigh muscle had been torn away from the bone by the windmilling hind legs of the same leopard that had gouged his face and clomped its teeth through his shoulder and ripped at his abdomen. ‘The body’s as good as it’s going to get. I still dream about that hospital, those doctors mumbling in their deep voices, a dialect I didn’t know. They all looked like Magic Johnson.’

He smiled quickly at me, then drank again, emptying his glass. Without speaking he handed it to me. I refilled it and gave it back. He sipped, more slowly this time, and stared out towards the ocean.

‘I been thinking,’ he said. ‘When Jack Kennedy was my age, he was already dead.’

I smiled. ‘That doesn’t necessarily make you old.’

‘No. Other things make you old besides the passage of the years. You have any idea what it’s like to feel absolutely powerless? To have no control, to know what you want, to know it’s right, and to realize that there’s not a damn thing you can do except wait, even then knowing that it probably won’t happen the way you want it to?’

I shrugged.

He snorted a mirthless laugh through his nose. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I didn’t figure you’d understand. The only thing worse is to look back and see your mistake and know you blew it, and know what you should’ve done, and know you can’t ever go back and try it again, do it right, make it right, and you’ve just got to live with it, and you don’t know how you can, but you do, day to day, hour to hour, churning it around and around in your head.’

I looked out towards the ocean and said nothing.

‘So,’ he continued in his weak, moist, old man’s voice, ‘I screwed up the past and I can’t do a goddam thing about the future. So here sits Jeff Newton, professional hunter, twisted and broken inside and out. A poor excuse for a human being.’

‘Stop feeling sorry for yourself,’ I said. ‘You’re alive.’

‘More’s the pity.’

‘Jeff, for Christ sake,’ I said, ‘it’s been six years.’

‘The man died,’ he said softly. ‘His name was Walter McIntyre and he was a chemical engineer from Teaneck, New Jersey. It was his first trip to Africa. He was my client and
Nyalubwe
got him. I killed him.’

J
EFF REACHED OVER AND
put his hand on my leg. ‘I don’t usually talk about it,’ he said quietly. ‘But I think about it all the time. That instant in my life. It changed everything.’

‘Jeff, you don’t have to…’

He shook his head. ‘I remember that leopard’s breath. It was hot and rotten on my face. And the red. I saw red. Blood in my eyes. And the pain and the rush of adrenaline. The pain was only for an instant, and it seemed to be everywhere. But all that was the same instant of memory as the business I had to do, getting the muzzle of my gun against that cat’s belly and blowing him away. I wasn’t thinking of dying. Not then. I was thinking of killing. And I wasn’t thinking of Walter McIntyre, the poor silly son of a bitch. If he’d stayed in the hide he would’ve been fine. And so would I. I would’ve found that cat and killed him. He followed me into the tall grass after I told him not to.’ Jeff arched his eyebrows. ‘I keep telling myself it was his fault. And it was. But I was responsible for him.’

‘Can’t you just let it go?’ I said.

He gazed out towards the ocean. ‘No,’ he said after a long pause. ‘No, I guess I can’t. See, there was something else that happened. Another series of thoughts on a different, deeper, more abstract level. I was thinking that finally, this was it, what I had been waiting for. This was the moment I had wanted. Hand to hand with a leopard. Equal terms. His teeth and claws, my shotgun, strength against strength on the terrain that we both knew. This was why I had come to Africa. To kill or be killed. Before I went unconscious, when I still didn’t know which of us was the winner, I experienced this odd, wonderful sense of fulfilment, a kind of peace, as if it had all, finally, come together for me. At that instant I think I believed I was dead. And right then it was OK.’

He turned his head and stared at me. ‘See,’ he said, ‘it isn’t really guilt over Walter McIntyre. That would be simple. And it wasn’t death. I didn’t fear death itself. But it was death in that tall grass. When I was in the hospital I dreamed about it. I still do. Weird, terrifying dreams. In the hospital I think I would’ve welcomed a peaceful death, numbed by drugs and fever and pain. I hallucinated on images of all the animals I’d ever killed coming after me, goring me and trampling me and ripping at me with their teeth and tusks and claws. It was them that I feared, not death itself. So I knew. I couldn’t go back. A lot of hunters get hurt. They go back. I knew I couldn’t. That’s what’s so hard to live with.’

Jeff closed his eyes.

‘Is that why you wanted me to come?’ I said. ‘To share this with me?’

He turned his head slowly and opened one eye. He gave me a quick, ironic smile, then closed his eye. ‘Ignore me,’ he mumbled.

Jeff’s body healed as much as it was going to after he killed his last African leopard. The razor claws of that gutshot leopard had permanently reduced the big muscles of his left thigh to strings, but with the support of a crutch he was able to dodder around the bungalow. He had lost one testicle. His shoulder and his face healed. His soul never did.

He lived on the royalties from the books he had written about Africa and the films he had made. It was a living for him. Barely. But then, Jeff Newton himself was barely living.

On my rare trips to Orleans to visit him, I tried to persuade him to go out on to the pond with me in his canoe, or take a stroll through the wooded gardens inside the fence, or climb into my car for a drive to the ocean.

‘Another time, maybe,’ was his standard reply.

Once I suggested he write another book.

‘Can’t even begin to think of it,’ he said.

He read a little, watched some television. According to Lily, he mostly lay around with his eyes closed listening to Mozart tapes, and on especially nice days he let her persuade him to sit out on the patio to look at the flowers she was cultivating in the terraced rock gardens and watch the hummingbirds and sniff the salty breezes. He received company infrequently and unenthusiastically.

He still slept away more than half of each day. He continued to require medication for the residual infections and chronic pain. A local doctor visited him weekly.

At first, Lily had cooked elaborate meals for him. But Jeff showed no enthusiasm for her efforts and only picked at them, so after a while she gave it up. She fed him canned soup and sandwiches. He grew thinner and softer and more wrinkled.

Life, it seemed, was a condition to be endured until something better came along.

Now we were sipping martinis at the end of this Friday in July.

After a while, I said, ‘Did you want to talk business?’

He opened his eyes. ‘Why the hell else would I ask you to come down here?’

I smiled.

‘I want to rethink my will.’

‘Not much to think about, Jeff. You haven’t got a helluva lot to leave behind.’

‘I got this place. I got the movies and books. I got the jaguars.’

I shrugged. The place was mortgaged, the movies and books weren’t worth much, and I had long ago persuaded him to will the jaguars to the Museum of Fine Arts, knowing that they’d return them to the Mexican government.

‘I want to take care of things,’ he said. ‘Set things right.’

‘How?’ Jeff had a simple will. Jeff’s wife divorced him when he took off for Africa. Everything except the jaguars was going to his kids fifty-fifty.

He closed his eyes again. ‘We’ll discuss it later.’

A few minutes later Lily came out on to the patio. She carried a glass, which she filled from the martini pitcher. She pulled a chair close to mine. Jeff opened his eyes, glanced at her, and closed them again.

She had brushed back her hair and tied it into a ponytail with a yellow ribbon. She had done something to her eyes. She wore a white sleeveless blouse, knotted at her stomach, over her bikini top.

‘How’s fresh lobster salad sound?’ she said.

‘Terrific,’ I said.

Jeff mumbled, ‘Mmm.’

Lily stuck out her tongue at him. ‘You can have a peanut butter sandwich, you old shit.’

‘Good.’

‘It’s Friday, don’t forget. Dr Sauerman’ll be here after supper. Think you can stay awake that long?’

‘Mmm.’

She looked at me. ‘Brilliant conversationalist.’ She took a big gulp of her drink. ‘Come on, Brady. See what I’ve done with the gardens.’

She took my hand and led me down the path that zigzagged among the terraces on the hillside behind the house. She had planted them with exotic Japanese irises and gladioli. The irises had finished blooming, but the glads spread great washes of colour against all the greenery, oranges and pinks, reds and whites, and Lily told me the names of all of them. Over the years, she had set out azaleas and rhododendrons and lilacs, ground covers of myrtle and pachysandra, wildflowers and herbs, and here and there, where a column of sunshine angled between the trees, a cluster of annuals made a brilliant splash. There were three or four acres in all, amidst a forest of gnarled pine and pin oak and Volkswagen-sized boulders, all enclosed by the ten-foot chain link fence where the patrols of Tondo and Ngwenya had worn paths.

At the foot of the hill a little rock-paved pool caught a trickle from a hidden spring. It tinkled and gurgled over a miniature waterfall. A jumble of boulders made natural seats beside it, and Lily and I sat down. A screen of giant rhododendrons and tall pines shaded the place. It smelled cool and moist.

‘The whole place was supposed to be a sort of benign jungle,’ said Lily. ‘A place for the professional hunter to come, acclimate himself, watch the little animals and birds. When he was still hunting, it was a place to meditate, and he used to wander around a lot. After he came back for good, I thought it would be a place where he could heal.’ She placed her hands beside her to brace herself on the rock where she sat. She arched her back. ‘It hasn’t worked,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t come down here anymore. Says the hill is too much for him. Which is total bullshit. He can get around fine. Oh, he likes to hobble on his crutch and piss and moan, but I’ve seen him when he thinks I’m not looking. He’s got a limp is all. Sometimes he plays with the dogs, and he forgets himself, I guess, and he bounds around like a kid.’

I lit a cigarette. ‘What about you?’

She smiled. ‘Me? What about me?’

‘What’s in it for you?’

She shifted on the rock so that she was sitting cross-legged facing me. She propped her elbows on her knees, rested her chin on her folded hands, and frowned. ‘Once upon a time there was this young woman whose man dumped her. He told her it wasn’t working. That was his only explanation. It wasn’t satisfactory. She’—Lily peered up at me—‘I, that is—I didn’t understand. I was unprepared.’