Philip Kerr - Esau

Swift thought the Scotsman was more interested in money than in anything so creditable as a professional name. To her, he appeared a stereotypical Scot: crudely tattooed, chain-smoking, hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, argumentative, and generally deficient in manners, patience, and anything that might pass for pleasant conversation. Jack greatly admired him however, having climbed both Everest and the Kangchenjunga North Ridge with the diminutive, brick-faced Scot, and he told Swift that he hoped she and the rest of the team might never find themselves in the kind of tight spot where MacDougall could be relied upon to perform at his very best.

Miles Jameson owed his place on the team to Byron Cody, although as director of the Chitwan National Park in southern Nepal’s lowland Tarai region and as a qualified doctor of veterinary medicine, he would have always been a natural choice. Jameson had been senior DVM at the Los Angeles Zoo when he first met Cody in connection with Cody’s best-selling book about gorillas. Before that, the thirty-eight-year-old white Zimbabwean had worked with Richard Leakey in the Kenyan Wildlife Service. Like Leakey, Jameson also came from a distinguished East African family. His father. Max, was the director of parks and wildlife in Zimbabwe, while his sister Sally had made a name for herself protecting the elephants at Zimbabwe’s Whange National Park. Big cats were Jameson’s special area of expertise, and more especially, L.A.’s collection of koalas and white tigers. Tigers were also Chitwan’s most important attraction for the Park’s fifteen thousand visitors a year, and it was said that Prince Gyanendra of Nepal had been so impressed with what Jameson had achieved in L.A. that immediately upon meeting the young Zimbabwean, he invited him to take over the administration of Chitwan, not to mention the command of a force of fourteen hundred soldiers that existed to protect the Park’s tigers and rhinos against poachers. Chitwan had seen very few visitors since the beginning of hostilities between India and Pakistan, and when he heard about the real purpose of the expedition, Jameson had pressed to join it. Tall, fair-skinned, with dark hair and blue eyes, Jameson had the impeccable manners of a diplomat, which made it all the more surprising to everyone that he and MacDougall should get on so famously. They laughed at each other’s jokes, discussed trout fishing with endless enthusiasm, and bunked together in the Hotel Paradise Garden Lodge, where their loud laughter and incessant smoking could disturb nobody but themselves.

Byron Cody preceded the last person to arrive at ABC — who was also the most academically distinguished — by almost sixty minutes. Lincoln Warner was professor of molecular anthropology at the University of Georgetown in Washington and adjunct research scientist at the Smithsonian. He looked exhausted, having carried his own pack all the way from Chomrong, unlike Cody.

‘What the hell did you want to do that for?’ said Jack. ‘You should have gotten a porter to carry your gear. Professor. That’s what they’re for.’

‘That’s what I told him,’ shrugged Cody.

The tall black man shook his head and dumped his rucksack on the snow outside the clamshell.

‘No way,’ he said. ‘A porter is just a slave by another name.’

‘Slaves don’t get paid ten dollars a day,’ remarked Cody.

Lincoln Warner glared at the older man, and it was obvious that the two had already argued about porterage.

‘I think that a man ought to carry his own load in life,’ said Warner. ‘Know what I’m saying?’

‘Oh, and I suppose that computer of yours just walked up here all by itself,’ said Jack. ‘Everyone else is using an extra-lightweight laptop. But you have a desktop PC.’

‘I can’t do my job without that UVP. If there were a laptop powerful enough for my requirements, I’d have brought it. There isn’t. But the point I’m making is that I don’t see why I shouldn’t carry some kind of load — anything at all — when all these other men are carrying something.’

‘Well, Professor, I guess that’s your choice,’ said Jack. ‘But the point I’m making is that you did a man out of a job. People around here need the money badly, and carrying heavy loads on their backs, which they’re very used to doing and which they do damned well, is about the only way that they can earn it. So there’s no need to feel guilty about letting them. Lots of Westerners coming here make that mistake. Fact is, the Nepalese don’t understand a man who can afford to pay and yet carries a load himself. They don’t think you’re a good guy or a good democrat or whatever. They just think you’re being mean. Isn’t that so, Hurké?’

The sirdar nodded solemnly.

‘It is just so. Jack sahib. Carrying loads mean plenty big money for porters. Special with not much tourists right now. For man with family this maybe biggest money all year round, sahib. Ten bucks a day make sixty from Chomrong.’

‘I don’t remember saying that I had a problem with mental arithmetic,’ growled Warner. ‘Look, you made your point. And I’m too tired to argue. Too tired and too cold.’ He grinned at Jack.

Jack clapped him on the shoulder.

‘I thought you were from Chicago,’ he said. ‘It gets pretty cold in the Windy City, doesn’t it, Professor?’

‘Lincoln, just call me Lincoln. Or Link. Professor makes me sound about as old as I feel right now. Actually I was born up the coast from Chicago. Place called Kenosha, Wisconsin. There were three good things that came out of Kenosha, Wisconsin. The first was the road south to Chicago. The second was Orson Welles. And the third was me, Lincoln Orson Warner. Like most folks in Kenosha, my momma, well, she always had a thing for that old fat man.’

The forty-year-old scientist was not dissimilar to the larger-than-life Welles. Tall, slightly overweight, and with a thin moustache, Warner looked like Welles when the actor had played Othello. Physically he made an impact, like someone who could hardly be contained. And, in common with cinema’s wünderkind, there had been nothing in Warner’s background that suggested the precocious scientific talent that, before he was thirty, made the molecular anthropologist was one of the outstanding minds of his generation. Warner had published a number of important books on the genetic implications of the human fossil record and on the biological nature of the human race. Currently he was embarked on constructing a theory to account for why some people were black and some were white. But it was his work with the DNA sequences of Australian Aborigines and orangutans that persuaded Swift that Lincoln Warner would be an invaluable person to have along, in the event they were lucky enough to capture a living specimen: Warner had argued that the mitochondrial DNA suggested aboriginals and orangutans had split at a different time than African man and African apes. From this, he posited that human-like creatures had evolved separately in several different parts of the world and had merged only subsequently. It was as radical a theory as had been constructed in the world of paleoanthropology during the whole of the previous decade.

The arrival of Cody and Warner took the team up to ten, not including the sirdar and his assistant who oversaw the cook boys, mail runners to carry film, and the ten or fifteen porters who came and went between ABC, Chomrong, and Pokhara.

In Pokhara itself — a small village that was the gateway to Nepal’s more popular trails — the expedition and its supplies were administered by Lieutenant Surjabahandur Tuhte who, like Hurké Gurung, was formerly of the Gurkha Rifles. Over a hundred and fifty kilometres away, in Khatmandu, Helen o’connor, a Reuters news reporter, ran the expedition office from her elegant home overlooking Dunbar Square. Fluent in Nepali and Hindustani, Helen maintained good contacts with the government and, as Jack had discovered on several previous occasions, her knowledge of local bureaucracy and, more especially, Nepalese Customs and Excise, was second to none. It was Helen’s good offices they would have to rely on if the Nepalese authorities got wind of the real purpose of the expedition and its forbidden location.