The Golden Elephant. Alex Archer

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      I N HER HOTEL ROOM , a modest three-star establishment not far from the Tuileries with only moderately ruinous rates, Annja sat back and ran her hands across her face and back through her heavy chestnut hair, which hung over the shoulders of her black Chasing History’s Monsters crew T-shirt. Her notebook computer lay open before her crossed legs, propped on a pillow so the cooling-fan exhaust wouldn’t scorch her bare thighs.

      She had been doing research not on the Golden Elephant—a quick check of her e-mail accounts showed no helpful responses to a number of guarded queries she’d fired off to contacts across the world—but on the Elephant Calf. Princess Easy herself.

      She was a concert pianist, world-class gymnast, martial artist, model, scholar. Pot hunter. There was a quote from an interview with the German magazine Spiegel that jumped out at Annja: “To be sure I’m rich and multitalented. But that has nothing to do with me. Those are circumstances. I prefer to focus on my achievements.”

      She rocked back on the bed, frowning. She badly wanted to toss that off as spoiled-little-rich-girl arrogance. Arrogant it was. But at base it made sense.

      And Elephant Calf Ngwenya had achievements.

      She had even been a celebrity as a little girl. National Geographic had done a spread on the official celebration of the birth of a royal first child of one of Africa’s most powerful tribes, and again on the party her father had thrown for her fifth birthday. At the latter Easy foreshadowed things to come, wowing the crowd playing Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” on a concert grand piano, then ruining her pink party dress and shoes in a fistfight with the eight-year-old son of the ambassador from Mali. She won.

      Her father was technically the chief of a tribe of South Africa’s Zulu nation and an outspoken critic of the ANC-dominated government. He accused them of repression and corruption, of leading the populous, resource-rich country down the same nightmare path to ruin as neighboring Zimbabwe. Repeated attempts had been made on his life. In one the then-fifteen-year-old Princess Elephant Calf had killed two would-be assassins with two shots from a colossal colonial-era double-barreled elephant gun. What got widely overlooked in the subsequent furor in the world media was the fact that the recoil from the first shot of the monstrous gun had broken Easy’s shooting hand. Yet she had coolly lined up a second shot and blown a hole through the midriff of an adult male wielding a Kalashnikov.