The Book of Secrets Read Online Free

a small moustache, and the cold green eyes revoked any trace of warmth betrayed by the faint toothy smile at his lips. Nevertheless, he was liked and much respected for what he was, the more so for the predicament in which he had (unfairly, it was said) been put.
    Frank Maynard was a captain in the King’s African Rifles who would pursue a recalcitrant animal or tribesman with like ferocity and ruthlessness. Currently he was on suspension pending an inquiry regarding his conduct on a punitive expedition against a tribe and was biding his time on the coast.
    On several occasions Corbin’s eyes had met and acknowledged that searching look from the trophy wall. Then one day, after he had been deposited at the Club door by a tram after a sightseeing tour, as he sat in the bar wiping sweat from his brow and contemplating his second bath, despairing over yet another change of clothes, Alfred Corbin’s eyes fell briefly on the soldier. That momentary look seemed to spark a resolve, for Maynard got up, and with slow deliberate steps came straight towards his table.
    “Frank Maynard,” he said, shaking hands and sitting down.
    “Corbin, Alfred Corbin.”
    “So I’ve heard, old chap.”
    Corbin tried not to feel like a mouse under that overbearingsmile, that brilliant predatory gaze, not to become too conscious of the heads turned to stare at them from the bar. He was waiting for his first posting in Africa, and this was a man who had trampled the land from corner to corner, slept in the forests and killed its wildlife and natives.
    “I knew your brother in India. Robert. Good man.”
    “In the Punjab?”
    Maynard nodded. The same amused look.
    “And I met Kenneth in Voi. Didn’t get to know him well, though, he was on his way out — home leave, it was, and Nyasaland after that, I believe.”
    They had a drink together. The lion on the wall, Maynard told him, catching his gaze, had measured nine-foot-eleven, tip to tip, nose to tail; it took eight men to carry it.
    The following evening Corbin was invited for supper.
    Maynard kept rooms on the second storey of an Arab house on the Kilindini Road, not far from the Club. He greeted Corbin at the door in a yellow kanzu and a tasselled red fez. The reception room was furnished simply in the Arab style and they sat on pillows. Maynard produced a hookah and Corbin a cheroot. By this time the younger man was more composed, the other relaxed and less intimidating. A woman suddenly entered the room with a sharp rustle of clothing which made Corbin start. She was strikingly beautiful, a half-caste of partly Arab or Indian blood, partly African. The short length of buibui, worn around her shoulders over a colourful dress, was what had rustled; she hovered around them for a while before finally taking a stool some distance away.
    “Stop gaping, man!”
    Corbin raised an eyebrow. Maynard chuckled.
    “A few years ago practically every man in Nairobi kept a native girl — or two or three. Now they are more civilized and busy with each other’s wives.”
    The night was cool, a light breeze blew in through the openwindow; there was a mosque not far off, from which the muezzin’s “Allahu Akber” presently came through clearly. Below, from the courtyard of the building came the sounds of boys playing, men chatting on stone benches by the little garden, probably over their coffee. Over whiskies Corbin and Maynard talked of their schools, their families. Maynard’s was a banking family; his refusal to join his father caused him much guilt and brooding. He was now estranged from his family.
    The woman got up and left the room again with the distinct rustle of her buibui. She returned with a pitcher of water for washing hands. Then she brought their food: meat curry, and rice and bread. They drank more whisky and had plum pudding from home for dessert.
    “I don’t always eat this much, but in company I tend to indulge. Africa teaches you how little food you really need, and how much we