Chapter 5: Chimpanzeeland
Animals a la Carte
Solomon Magna stroked the bristles on his head. It was a haircut his latest mistress, Eve Catskill, had suggested would make him look a lot younger. And it did. So young did he feel, in fact, that he was planning a second fox hunt for the month.
But he had other things on his mind right now. For one, the fax from Upton, which lay in front of him. As he read it once again, he could feel the bald patch between the bristles, which bothered him. He raised his voice.
“Goodleigh!”
His harassed-looking aide came running into his office, his hunchback trailing him.
“What do you think of this?” he said, waving Upton’s communiqué in the air. He always liked to reserve judgment until Goodleigh had spoken. Even if his assistant was always sickly, didn’t get laid enough, and took too many vitamins, he had a good head on his sloped shoulders. And if Solomon Magna had one strong point, it was that he surrounded himself with people like Goodleigh.
“Excellent idea, sir,” Goodleigh exclaimed.
Solomon Magna was skeptical.
“You really think so?” he asked. “Selling chimps and dogs to those cosmetics companies is one thing – for lipstick and perfume. But animals a la carte?”
The Chairman of Magna Exchange touched his head gingerly, as if he was scared of breaking something.
“I like it, sir. There’s something immediate and quick about it, which you yourself always like. And think of it, who’s going to demonstrate outside a restaurant? You’re totally safe.”
The Chairman smiled.
“Yes. Get in quick, get out quick and make a neat profit. But whatever you do, get in there.”
Goodleigh nodded.
“So you want me to send off a reply to him, sir?”
Solomon Magna hesitated before answering.
“This won’t get in the way of the Tiger deal, will it? I don’t like that it’s happening at the same time. Shouldn’t we wait until after it’s all over?”
“I’m sure it will be fine,” Goodleigh assured him hurriedly. “He’s not being used in the transaction anyway.”
The Chairman raised his eyebrows at Goodleigh. “Well, not directly, you mean.”
“Exactly. And looking for animals will keep him occupied while the Tiger deal goes through. Besides, we can’t have our people constantly tied up with all those queries he sends.”
Solomon Magna rubbed his scalp.
“You’re right. Him and those fucking ditties.”
* * *
An Auction at the Grand Marché
Upton was met by a riot of noises, and they immediately brought back memories of the times he’d gone to see Dee the zoo cage cleaner at feeding time. Except the cages that surrounded him now in the Grand Marché were different from the kind Dee had worked in. They were small and made of wire, wood, and rattan. And they contained, as far as he could see, creatures no sanctuary would ever keep: rodents, cats, and lots of dogs barking dementedly. The bigger animals, meanwhile, he’d never come across before, either in a zoo or on the safaris he’d taken after arriving in The Capital.
The hall itself was huge, like a old hangar crossed with an Arab souk. At the far end, between the cages and above the heads of everyone, stood a man in a neatly pressed suit, a choice of outfit most unusual for the humid West African climate, even more unusual for this fleapit. All of the people in front of the suited man were gesticulating madly, all of them, that is, except for a tall woman in jeans and a tight T-shirt with a whale on it. Ella Bazaar hardly moved amidst all the frenetic activity. She looked quite calm, in fact, almost comfortable.
As Upton edged closer he saw it was an auction that was taking place, and the man in the suit was standing on a large crate that contained something he couldn’t make out from where he stood. The way the bidding carried on, though, it was clearly a very desirable item. Bids flew like bullets, and even though Upton couldn’t understand what was being said, he recognized the last voice he heard. It was Ella Bazaar’s.
“Damn! She wins again,” someone behind Upton said. He sounded annoyed.
Upton turned to see two white men dressed in khaki. He couldn’t tell whether the speaker was pleased or not about Ella Bazaar’s success.
“She comes here often?” Upton asked them hesitantly, hoping to find out something about his companion..
“Oh, yes,” replied one of the men, leaning so close that Upton found himself stepping backward. “And there’s just no beating her.”
“Been doing it since she was a child,” the second man continued. He wore very thick glasses, so his eyes were magnified to the size of two big coins. He and the other man both had heavy accents that Upton couldn’t identify, but for some reason they reminded him of the two hunters Hercules had met in the Noix, the one with a Weltenham rifle, the other with thick glasses. These two made a habit of finishing each others’ sentences.
“Damn good at the job…,” the man in glasses said.
“Yes, damn her …,” his friend added.
“She learnt from her father ….”
“One of the greatest ringmasters in the world …”
“… killed on the job and …”
“She saw it all …”
“You know, the munching, the crunching …”
“Wasn’t it an elephant?”
“Or a bear?”
“But she was …”
“… toughened by it, they say, and it …”
“… gave her the education she needed to deal with …”
“… a very tough business and …”
“… one of the very toughest people in the business.”
They both paused and then, after looking at each other and then at Upton, said in unison, “You know who we’re talking about, of course. The very toughest person in the business?”
Upton shook his head. The one with the glasses, his eyes gone from the size of saucers to dinner plates, whispered a name.
“Berry Fineman.”
They fell silent, as if they had just said the name of someone who should be both feared, respected, knelt before. At that point a third man, also dressed in khaki, appeared from behind a nearby cage. He looked at the other two accusingly.
“Don’t you two think you have said enough already?” he barked.
They nodded sheepishly, tipped their khaki hats at Upton, and then walked, one behind the other, in the direction of the giraffe-skin exit.
* * *
Genus Pan troglodytes
“Well done,” Upton called out as he approached Ella Bazaar, trying to show as much admiration as he could muster under the circumstances. He certainly admired her business savvy – and maybe he could learn something from her – but he was still having trouble getting around the fact that she bought animals not to love them but to sauté them.
Ella Bazaar didn’t hear Upton because she was pushing her way through the men she’d recently outbid. She took a deep breath of the foul-smelling air.
“I love this place,” she said.
Upton sighed. At least she loved something, even if it wasn’t an animal.
“It’s certainly very … different,” he added.
She put two poles through the upper part of the cage and then moved to the front of it, placing her shoulders under the supports and steadying herself to lift it. She did this all so easily, Upton reflected, you’d think she attended chaotic auctions of animals every day of the week – or at least on those days that she wasn’t stealing them from people like Mister Sulahman.
When Ella Bazaar motioned Upton to lift the poles in the rear, he obeyed her, although not without difficulty. As they began moving through the crowd, people once again shifting aside quickly, Upton could feel something in his back crack.
“What is this?” he huffed, out of breath. “A small elephant?”
“Pan troglodytes,” she said. “A chimp. A rare West African strain. Hardly any left in the world. We will call him Maurice.”
Two thoughts came to Upton right then, immediately causing him to forget the pain in his back. The first thought was, of course, about the chimp in the diary, who was also called Maurice. The second thought was about the chimp in the Tarzan movies he’d seen as a child, an animal, as he recalled, with big doleful eyes, a whooping cry, and lots of dark fur.
“People eat that?” he asked, feeling sick at the very idea.
“Oh, yes,” she said, walking too fast for him. “It’s excellent with a raspberry sauce and a chilled chardonnay.”
* * *
The Iguana Deal: The Delay
Jocelyn Magna climbed the small stairway onto the charter plane in Bangkok, and after she’d settled into her seat she impatiently grabbed the glass of champagne from the stewardess.
Jocelyn was deep in thought about the Iguana Matchstick Company. What should her strategy be? Negotiations had reached such a crucial point. This delay because of her employees in Manila was the last thing she needed. Success now would all be a matter of time and her own brilliance.
“Can’t leave them for a week and they fuck up,” she muttered into the champagne bubbles. “What would they do without me?”
She was preparing herself for battle, for it was imperative that she take over Iguana. If there was a company just crying to be taken over, then this was it. Iguana looked insignificant enough, but when you started studying the books you saw how diverse it was. Pieces of land, forests, lakes, all used in the company’s own insignificant way, but not the way Jocelyn would use them. No, sirree.
Once Iguana was hers, she would start exploiting the mineral rights on a particularly large parcel of virgin territory in Indonesia that the company seemed to have overlooked. And then there was that tract of rare indigenous trees owned by a subsidiary, Hyrax Holdings. After the wood had been auctioned to the highest bidder, she would sell the property off in lots to coffee farmers who would strip-and-burn them. She could already picture the hazy sky created by the trails of smoke. And haze to Jocelyn was the ultimate sign of success, because she knew that everything underneath it belonged to, or had been exploited by, a Magna.
“I’ll get Iguana even if I have to sleep with the whole matchstick factory,” she told herself, a possibility that didn’t entirely displease her.
There was only one problem that stood in the way of her realizing her fantasy, and that was her brother Felix. Jocelyn still felt bitter about his last triumph, where he’d outdone her with a particularly Magnaficent deal in Mexico. He had sold a piece of beachside property south of Cancun to a German leisure company, which discovered only after buying it that a band of militants were claiming the very same beach, and that they were ready to fight to the death over it. By that time, however, Felix was nowhere to be found.
But Jocelyn was confident that Iguana was so close that Felix would never be able to come up with anything as good or as fast. Whatever her sibling had up his sleeve this time, she could beat him. She wasn’t Solomon Magna’s only daughter for nothing.
“Hey, you!” Jocelyn barked at the stewardess, whom she already hated for her long legs and tight ass. “I’ve never flown with you before, but I expect snappy service.”
The stewardess smiled but said nothing, which made Jocelyn uncomfortable.
“Which charter company is this anyway?”
When the stewardess answered, Jocelyn raised her eyebrows.
“Never heard of it, but I like it. Guerrilla Air,” then she laughed to herself. “Very mercenary.”
The stewardess didn’t bother to correct her. To most ears, it sounded the same as the correct name – Gorilla Air.
* * *
A Photograph from Long Ago
For once in his life, Upton was prepared for Solomon Magna’s reply.
‘My boy,’ the fax read, ‘I knew you could do it. I always knew you were a Magna deep down under all that shit of your mother’s. Live animals would be an asset to the company. We do skins already and ivory when we can get it, but live creatures for the pot is pure genius. The rarer, the better. Go to any lengths to find out more. Take all the time you need. Remember, Magnaficent, Magnafrican. Regards, etc.’
It wasn’t often that Solomon Magna praised Upton. In fact, Upton couldn’t remember ever having been praised by the Chairman. Now that he had been, he would’ve preferred it to be for the discovery of lacquer sandals or coconut lampshades and not for sending animals to be braised or pan-fried.
While Upton waited in The Palms bar at the Hotel Noix for Ella Bazaar to arrive for their journey to get Mister Sulahman’s pet, he paged through the diary. For the umpteenth time he looked at the photographs in the middle of the book. There was one of Hercules, who was tall and dark like Upton imagined a Latin movie star in the 1940s might have looked, and another of him together with a black man who was sinewy, square-jawed, and not quite as tall. That must be Mohammed.
Several of the people Upton didn’t recognize from what he’d read so far, characters he knew he’d probably meet further on in the diary’s pages. He stared for a long time at a photograph of a woman – a woman who even fifty years later would have turned people’s heads. There was something about her eyes that reminded him of someone he was sure he knew.
“Sylvie,” he thought, dwelling for a moment on what he’d last read about her. How she had come to the rescue of the badly wounded woman in the native village and had almost found out Hercules’s secret by reading his palm.
Wondering what the connection was between Sylvie, the diary, and Ella Bazaar, Upton began reading where he’d left off.
* * *
The Invalid
Janet contemplated what Ethel Goodleigh had just told her about the most recent developments at Magna Exchange. She herself had just gotten off the phone, having spent half the night talking to contacts in Zurich, Tegucigalpa, two African capitals, and a small landing strip in Oman. She wished she could have avoided Upton’s near-drowning at the Motel du Soleil, but Ella Bazaar had acted quickly. She was grateful for that. Then, feeling a draft come through the open window, she pulled the blanket up over her legs.
* * *
On the Road
Pink Jeep was piled high with baggage covered in canvas and rope, all of which made it resemble a vehicular bouffant. Upton couldn’t see the pan what’s-its-name they’d bought at the Grand Marché, but he was sure the animal was underneath it all. He hoped the poor creature didn’t suffocate before they reached their destination.
When Ella Bazaar had first told Upton where it was they were headed in order to deliver the chimp and to retrieve Mister Sulahman’s pet – the town of Belleville – he was not unhappy. He liked the idea of going to the place where the story of Hercules had occurred. The real purpose of traveling with Ella Bazaar might be to learn all about the business of buying and exporting exotic animals, but it was the thought of reaching Belleville that really excited him. And the more he read of the diary as he sat in The Palms bar, the more excited he got. As soon as he heard Pink Jeep pull up outside the hotel, he closed the diary and tucked it deep into his jacket pocket where Ella Bazaar couldn’t see it.
“There has been a slight change of plans,” she told him.
“What do you mean?” Upton asked.
“We have to make a detour.”
“Where to?”
He thought she said the Red Sea, even though they were on the other side of the continent from Egypt.
* * *
The Rusted Old Boat
An hour after leaving the city, Ella Bazaar turned Pink Jeep onto a dirt road that ended at a vast lagoon. Instead of a bridge there was a pontoon waiting for them, its sole oarsman so young that Upton didn’t believe the boy would get them away from the lagoon shoreline, let alone pole them to wherever they were going. Pink Jeep got stuck driving onto the pontoon, so Ella Bazaar and Upton had to get out and push. Upton sunk so deep into the mud that it swallowed up the kob-skin shoes he’d bought on one of his safaris.
Once they had finally left shore, Ella Bazaar made Upton sit at the top of the canvas pile in order to balance the raft. From his precarious position, he watched the opaque water lapping around them soothingly, the young oarsman poling the lagoon bed with a rhythmic motion, whereupon he immediately started to feel more relaxed. The banks were lined with palms, the silence broken only occasionally by the cry of a lone palm vulture.
As they rounded a bend in the shore, Upton noticed an old, rusty cargo boat upended in the shallows. It looked surreal lying there, and he assumed it must have been left by some crazy mariner who had for some inexplicable reason come down the nearest river, the Bandama, before getting stuck in the lagoon.
There were initials on the boat’s funnel, but the vessel was so badly corroded after years in the humidity, decades even, that Upton couldn’t make them out. The inscription on the bow was more legible, but it was half-submerged. All he could read were the letters SYLV.
Trying to make out more of the word, Upton leaned forward, but at the same time something under him shifted and then poked his buttocks. Upton slipped on the canvas, throwing the flimsy craft off course. When they finally regained their balance, the half-sunken vessel was behind them, and then finally out of view.
Upton peered over Pink Jeep at Ella Bazaar, to see if she had noticed it was him who had thrown them off course. But she was looking behind them too – in the direction of the sunken boat.
* * *
A Bad Day for Geoffrey Badland
“Ruthlessness, boy,” Solomon Magna remarked to Upton when the boy had just turned eighteen. “That’s the key. Never let sentiment stand in your way.”
What led to this remark was the Chairman’s recent acquisition of a notable publishing company in London, which he’d bought for a quarter of what it was actually worth. How he’d achieved this was simple and simply ruthless.
First, he spread nasty rumors about Geoffrey Badland – the owner who had built the company up from nothing – saying that Badland had an addiction to young boys. Next, Solomon Magna promised potential investors that if they helped him take over the company, he would use the printing presses to bring out tabloid newspapers and not, as he put it, “the literary crap” that Badland favored. Before long Badland found it impossible to obtain any more loans to publish the manuscripts he liked, and the night the sale to Magna Exchange went through he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
When the funeral was over, Solomon Magna had only this to say about Badland: “The man had no balls.”
* * *
The Fantastic, Wondrous Great Bazaar
Ella Bazaar studied Upton’s face as he slept in the passenger seat of Pink Jeep. The trip on the lagoon, plus the exertion carrying the chimp’s cage through the Grand Marché, as well as several sleepless nights at the Hotel le Noix, had ensured that he was exhausted.
For the first time now she could see how much he resembled his mother, or at least the woman that she had seen in old newspaper cuttings – the famously beautiful and headstrong wife of Solomon Magna out on the town with her new husband.
Pulling over to the side of the road, Ella Bazaar got out and walked around to the back of the vehicle. Having lifted the canvas off the cage containing the pan troglodytes so that it could get some air, she leaned against Pink Jeep and lit up a cheroot. The aroma never failed to remind her of her father, The Great Bazaar, who had always liked to smoke a cheroot after a good night in the circus ring.
As a child Ella Bazaar had enthusiastically watched every performance of The Great Bazaar’s, as well as the cheroot-smoking ritual afterward. Her mother, a retired acrobat, usually encouraged her to do so, although only when Ella Bazaar was six did she realize that this had nothing to do with The Great Bazaar. It had more to do with André the Strongman or one of the tent riggers, who would be lurking in the shadows near their caravan door with a bottle of cheap wine in hand. As soon as the young girl was gone, they would enter. Eager to stay away from the rocking caravan and to be with her father, Ella Bazaar followed him everywhere.
“Animals are our livelihood,” The Great Bazaar would tell his daughter, scooping her onto the camel’s back while he put a harness of bells around its neck. “I might hold the whip and jab sticks in their ribs, my little hamster, but you must remember that I don’t mean to hurt them. And even though they are in cages, I make sure that their lives are good ones. They might not be in the jungle, but at least it’s better than a zoo.” Then he would draw on his cheroot and add, a little conceitedly, “Besides, I have a gift.”
Ella Bazaar never knew exactly what her father meant by that – his “gift” – until the night Bombay the tiger escaped from his cage. It all happened shortly before the evening’s performance was to start, with the audience already gathered outside the main tent. None of the public knew that a tiger was on the loose, but all the cage hands scattered when they found out, rushing to their caravans or climbing up nearby ropes. But not The Great Bazaar. Oh, no. With only his trusty whip in hand, he approached Bombay. The tiger roared and ripped his claws through the air, but The Great Bazaar did not flinch once. He coaxed the huge cat away from a corner in the tent, across the arena, and back into his cage.
Ella Bazaar’s mother, who normally tried to get rid of her, was calling out her name, begging her to come back to the caravan. But the little girl hid in the folds of the tent so that she could watch her father. She stayed as close as possible to him the whole time, noticing the gentle but stern flick he gave his whip and listening to him mumble things to Bombay – not words so much as humming noises, foreign sounds, clicks and rumbles. She was mesmerized, convinced that she was witnessing him use the gift he had told her about. And from that night on, she wanted to be just like The Great Bazaar.
But then, one at a time, things began to go wrong. Ella Bazaar’s mother ran off with a Romanian clown, and animal rights groups started picketing performances and calling The Great Bazaar “sadist” and “murderer.” The protests went on day and night, causing so much noise that not even the animals could get any sleep. Everyone, both human and animal, was not only on edge but also exhausted.
One afternoon when The Great Bazaar was in the ring working with the bears, the huge female was supposed to act as if she was actually sitting on her trainer. She was so tired, however, that once she had seated herself she never got up again. The Great Bazaar, whose lungs had been overused for years by consumption of his favorite cheroots, couldn’t breathe. He suffocated to death.
In memory of him, Ella Bazaar never inhaled the smoke from the cheroots, but rather rolled the smoke around in her mouth, savoring the taste, and then blowing it out softly, almost unnoticeably. She did that now, watching it disappear into the African air, before tipping some ash onto the roadside next to Pink Jeep. Looking over her shoulder at the rare chimpanzee in the cage behind her, she wondered if The Great Bazaar would have approved of the kind of work she was doing now.
* * *
A Mongoose in Vinaigrette
Beware the Bikini Tuaregs, the postcard read.
The scrawled handwriting as well as the picture on the reverse side – an animal described as a Mellivora capensis, or honey badger – told Upton exactly who the postcard belonged to. It had been on the windscreen until now, but had somehow fallen onto his lap while he was sleeping.
“What does that mean?” he asked Ella Bazaar, who had put out her cheroot more than two hours ago, and then waited for him to wake up. “Who are the Bikini Tuaregs?”
“It’s nothing you should concern yourself with,” she replied, hastily taking the postcard from him. “I keep it as a reminder. Just remember that we are heading into territory that could be unsafe.”
Upton didn’t like the sound of that. He noticed then that the cage had been taken off the back of Pink Jeep and was lying in the shade of a nearby teak tree.
“Not all Tuaregs are bad,” Ella Bazaar added as she folded the piece of canvas that had been covering the back of the vehicle. “Normally they are our friends. They’ve helped me get some of my best animals.” She paused. “The Senegalese desert mongoose was superb.”
Upton tried not to think of the fate of the aforementioned mongoose – lying on some table in Brussels or Lyon, smothered in garlic butter or a fancy vinaigrette.
“But the Bikini sect,” he said, “they are not your friends?”
“No. They’re dangerous and are even said to have links to Berry …”
She stopped herself. Even though he was sure he’d heard the name Berry before, Upton couldn’t think where or when it had been. He scratched his head, which felt burnt from too much sun. He noticed then that the vegetation had changed while he’d been sleeping. They had left the lagoons and were now in terrain covered by smaller palms. It was drier, but it wasn’t desert.
“I thought Tuaregs lived in the desert,” he pointed out to her. “This isn’t desert.”
“The Bikini Tuaregs follow their own rules,” Ella Bazaar answered. “They even wander down as far as the Gulf of Guinea. Thus the bikini name. And they drink lots of beer.”
* * *
The Bikini Tuaregs
The three men in blue robes, their faces covered in swathes of white material, sat in the clump of small coconut palms and swatted flies with their sabers. The first one was drinking beer from a can.
“I’ve tasted better,” he said. The Chairman had recently acquired a publishing company in London for a quarter of what it was actually worth.
“Don’t have more than one,” the second instructed him. “We have to be sober.”
The third, who’d been peering through the trees, paused before he spoke.
“I’m glad he’s not driving this time.”
* * *
A Few Words About Ella Bazaar’s Conscience
“Doesn’t it bother you?” Upton said.
“What?” Ella Bazaar answered.
Lying on the ground, her breasts pressed suggestively against the crossed-out word FUR on her T-shirt. Her head was propped up against the cage, the pan troglodytes inside it reaching through the bars to play with her hair. Upton thought that she looked quite beautiful, much more beautiful than Dee.
“What you do,” he carried on. “I mean, killing these animals.”
He pointed to the creature she called Maurice. “He really seems to like you. Besides, how much meat can you get off those bones?”
“We don’t kill them,” Ella Bazaar said pointedly. “Someone else does.”
It was the kind of thing Jocelyn Magna would have said, which made Upton uncomfortable. He didn’t want Ella Bazaar to be like his half-sister.
“You don’t pull the trigger, but you might as well.”
Ella Bazaar stiffened, sat up quickly, and brushed her hand through her hair.
“Details, details. I don’t have time for that. All I can think of is getting Maurice to Belleville and getting your okapi. Then you shall pay me and our deal will be finished.”
The words of The Chairman echoed in Upton’s head: “Ruthlessness, that’s the key.” Sadly, he realized once again, she was more Solomon Magna’s kind of woman than his kind.
“I do what I have to do,” she said, suddenly looking him straight in the eye, almost challenging him. “How else do you succeed in business? Surely you, a Magna, should know that. Isn’t that how Magna Exchange has become so successful?”
Her words reminded Upton of why exactly he was traveling with Ella Bazaar – not for himself but for Magna Exchange.
“Of course,” he said, “business is about perseverance, authority, ruthlessness.” He was mouthing not his own thoughts but Solomon Magna’s. “The Chairman taught me that.”
“The Chairman?” she asked.
“My father.”
Ella Bazaar said nothing at the mention of his father, but Upton noticed the look on her face, which was suddenly sad and distant, almost exactly like Dee’s when he’d first met her at the A.P.E. coffee bar, where she was recovering from the incident with the out-of-control elephant penis.
In the long silence that followed, a strange sensation started building up in Upton. He wasn’t sure whether it was because of the sadness in her eyes, or because of the way she looked in her tight T-shirt, or because she was almost a real animal woman – he forgot, for the moment, what she did with the animals – but he had this incredible urge to kiss her. Without losing a moment, he slid over to her while she wasn’t looking and opened his mouth for her.
As fast as an athlete, Ella Bazaar fell sideways, which caused Upton to knock the cage behind her with a heavy thump. Its door immediately flew open, and before they could do anything to stop him, the chimp had escaped and was scampering down the dirt road.
“The pan troglodytes!” Ella Bazaar yelled, hurriedly jumping into Pink Jeep and speeding off in pursuit. Upton began running after her.
“Slow down!” he yelled, but before he knew it she’d taken a curve in the road and was lost from sight.
He ran as fast as he could, and after several hundred yards he rounded the bend, only to see that Pink Jeep had plowed into some trees and Ella Bazaar was gone. When he got closer, he saw her behind the trees, although she wasn’t alone now. There were three other people, and she seemed to be struggling with them.
“Upton!” she cried out when she saw him. It was a very different plea for help from the one he’d heard at Prang Hotel. Upton thought his stomach would burst, he was running so fast.
“I’m coming, Ella Bazaar! I’m here for you.”
As soon as he got close to the attackers, he saw that each one of them was dressed in white robes. One of them, a large man, but by no means the largest of the trio, had already got Ella Bazaar in a tight grip. She was struggling in his arms like a ferocious animal. Another of the men grabbed Upton, who smelt beer on his breath.
“I know who you are,” he shouted. “You’re the Bikini Tuaregs!”
Ella Bazaar was being forced into the back of Pink Jeep, while one of the Bikini Tuaregs climbed into the driver’s seat. She called out to Upton.
“Find the chimp! Do that for me! Take him to the Red Sea!”
Right then the third and largest of the attackers, who had been holding Upton from behind, stepped in front of him. He pulled his saber from his belt and then smiled menacingly. Upton tried to struggle, but he didn’t have a chance. The man blindfolded him and then led him off the road and into the palm trees.
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