Siege at the Villa Lipp

CHAPTER NINE

For a few minutes they seemed to have stopped wondering how much truth there was in me, and to be asking themselves a question that their books had always said was irrelevant. Was there or wasn’t there honour among thieves?

Could criminal relationships be like those to be found in trade and industry? Were comparisons drawn from what was known of marriages or ménages appropriate? Or was the ‘standard’ criminal relationship one of convenience and collusion only, like a contract between politicians cancellable without warning by either party the moment it became in any way embarrassing?

No one was very hungry. Henson soon gave up on the soup. I had already done so. It is an overrated fish.

‘From what you now tell us, Mr Firman,’ she said, ‘one would almost believe that, once upon a time, you and Mr Williamson were really quite good friends.’

‘We have had a long and profitable business association. Obviously, our relationship had a friendly element to it.’

‘Friendly enough for you to compromise your own cover to protect his against the Professor’s enquiries. That was very friendly, surely?’

‘Back in May, it seemed to be in both our interests that I should cover for him. Remember, I have twenty per cent. Maybe that clouded my judgement.’

‘Yet now, you don’t seem to be very much surprised or upset by the fact that he’s betraying you, and telling you so, moreover. He is betraying you, I suppose. That tape we heard wasn’t by any chance a fake?’

Two stiff gins-and-tonic had almost restored Krom’s self esteem. ‘You’re learning, my dear. I’ve been wondering the same thing.’ He cocked an eye at me. ‘Is it a fake?’

‘I wish it were.’

Connell’s hostility towards me had returned to normal. ‘You don’t think much of our right to the truth,’ he said. ‘How do you feel about associates like Mr Williamson? I mean, after that call we heard, what’s the word now about the usefulness of truth?’

‘Carlo Lech and I always told one another the truth. To do so was part of our mutual respect. With Mat Williamson, mutual respect is based on insights of a different order. When a question is asked there, you consider, first, not what the exactly truthful answer would be, but what the questioner wishes to hear from you. No, I’m not surprised by his betraying me, nor by his telling me, in that oblique way, that he’s doing so. When you deal with Mat, there’s always a chance that he may try to deceive or betray you. What you should do is make sure that he can’t. I thought I had made sure. Upset? More annoyed, I think. Mat’s a complex creature, difficult to explain.’

He and I had been in Singapore when I had heard of Carlo’s death.

My reports on the Pacific tax-havens, existing and potential, had been written. I was waiting for Carlo’s acknowledgment of the last one, and with it, the words pronouncing my absolution and telling me that my exile was at an end.

He died of heart failure following a virus infection, according to the Vaduz lawyer who acted for our various corporate set-ups there. The man’s vagueness was understandable. There was legislation against Liechtenstein Anstalts pending in Italy as well as moves afoot to clamp down on citizens holding large amounts of their capital abroad. It would have been indiscreet of him even to have visited Carlo’s Milan office, and highly dangerous to have communicated with the family. There would have been no business reason for him to do so anyway. Carlo’s stashed-away fortune was, and still is, in trusts administered jointly by the Vaduz man, with his partners as successors, and me. Carlo’s invalid wife, his son and his daughter all benefited, in accordance with Italian inheritance laws, under the formal will he had made there. The trusts benefit only the daughter, her musician husband and, above all, Carlo’s grandson Mario. When he comes of age, that boy will be very rich.

However, according to the first letter from Vaduz, Carlo had, in addition, bequeathed me a piece of valuable real-estate.

This news had surprised me. My own holdings in our joint enterprises were already worth several million and I had discussed the whole subject with Carlo long before. We both had plenty of money, earned by our joint efforts but apportioned in accordance with an agreement made when Carlo had been convalescing after his gall-bladder trouble. Aside from the agreement, neither of us owned the other anything except good faith and a single duty. When one of us died, the other would see, as best he could, that the dead man’s family and other private obligations were taken care of in a proper fashion. For the sake of official appearances, the survivor would receive the fees and expenses normally payable to a trustee.

A second letter from Vaduz told me that the piece of valuable real-estate aforementioned was Carlo’s island.

Surprise had then become confusion. In spite of my occasional white lies on the subject, Carlo had always known that the island bored me. That was why he had sent me to stew there after the Zurich fiasco. Bequeathing the place to me could have been the kind of stupid gesture that wealthy dotards have sometimes made in order to get the last word in some old and silly argument; but Carlo had not been stupid, far from it, nor had he been the kind of man who would give away a tropical island he had loved to a tropic-hater who would at once proceed to sell it.

The third letter explained all. Carlo’s island was the property of a Netherland Antilles real-estate company, the shares in which would go to Mario when he was twenty-one. Meanwhile, I was asked to hold them in trust for him. To compensate me for the time and trouble of maintaining the place, as it had been maintained during Carlo’s lifetime — and as I had known it, complete with staff — I would, until Mario was old enough to take possession, have free and unfettered use of the island and its installations at all times, for my own personal enjoyment. Our man in Vaduz suggested thoughtfully that it might be a good idea if, on my way back to Europe, I called in at the island and took stock of the current situation there.

Carlo, an innovator to the last, had found a way of getting the last word in an old argument, and of making a ribald gesture from the grave, at the expense of no one but a cornered trustee. Vaduz would have thought it foolish of me as well as petty if I had refused the task. Everyone loved islands in the Caribbean, surely. They must do. Otherwise, why did all those tourists go there?

The only person near to me then who would have enjoyed the joke was Mat. Jokes about people stepping on metaphorical banana skins always made him laugh. Luckily, I never told him that one.

It was the order in which things were happening then, not caution, that stopped me. Mat had already known of Carlo and of my connection with him — I was never able to discover how he had known — before we had met in the New Hebrides. The only consolation for me had been that he had told me about the Lech-Oberholzer operation while still believing me to be a louche character named Perrivale (Perry) Smythson whose brains he was trying to pick about certain loopholes said to exist in the Anglo-French Condominium Law. I had begun by taking him for a local boy who had made good. When the matter of our identities had been straightened out, and sufficient time had been given to mutual inspection, exploratory talks about the possibility of joint ventures had taken us a little farther. I would report our talks to Carlo and get his reactions. A further meeting place convenient for both of us was chosen — Singapore. Of course, I never heard from Carlo on the subject; the virus must already have been at work; but his unexpected going stirred everything up and made it all move faster. I mourned Carlo and needed distractions. When next I met Mat our Symposia project had become a discussable deal. There had been neither time nor inclination then for banana-skin jokes.

In those early days of our relationship Mat treated me with the deference due to an elder statesman. Some of this, of course, was part of the process of buttering me up and at the same time making me feel old, but not all. I had knowledge that he might find useful. He would listen with more than token attention to what I had to say, even if it involved criticisms of his judgement. For instance, I hadn’t approved of the pattern of business deals he’d been weaving around the Pacific, and I told him so.

He went into a long spiel about the vacuums created by the abdication of old imperialisms. There was an urgent need of entrepreneurial skills to stimulate constructive business activity at provincial levels, to bring out the money hidden in mattresses so that it could work for all and to engage the non-Chinese in major enterprises.

‘They’re either just coming down from the trees,’ he concluded, ‘or emerging from extremely ancient feudalisms. Someone’s got to get things moving for them.’

‘That’s what the invest-in-the-future type con-men usually.say when they’re finally caught.’

His ability to look mystified while deciding his next move used to impress me very much in those days. ‘What have con-men to do with me, Paul?’

‘Con-men like that are also very difficult to prosecute.’

‘Also?’

‘Those entrepreneurial skills of yours, Mat, are being used in a way that is well understood by any policeman. By the British, the offence of exploiting credit facilities on the here-today-gone-tomorrow principle is called “long-term fraud”. In Germany it’s “Stossbetrug”, in France “carambouillage”, and in America most bunco-squads call it “scam”, I believe. Authorities everywhere have difficulty in getting convictions mainly because they’re always short of the kind of auditors who know what to look for, where to look for it, and above all, can work fast enough to grab the paper-work before it disappears. You, Mat, have something extra going for you because, as well as moving from corporate set-up to corporate set-up in an ingenious way, you’re also moving backwards and forwards between national jurisdictions. You’re almost impossible to catch, except in one area.’

The broad smile. ‘I know nothing of sharp practices, Paul. Please enlighten me.’

‘Two policemen of different nationalities could one day get together, maybe through reading an Interpol bulletin, and regret that there is nothing they can do jointly to bust you. But one or other of them, or both, depending on the countries concerned, might decide to clobber you with a breach of some exchange control regulation. It would still be slow going for them, and they might never get a conviction on the fraud charge, but there’s one thing a lot of these law maniacs can always get done quickly. They can have bank accounts frozen pending enquiries. For the victim, I’m told, it can be a nasty, lingering disease that prevents his enjoying life to the full.’

He tapped my arm gently. ‘You’re absolutely right, Paul. That’s been my own view for a long time and I’m delighted to hear that you share it.’ He made it sound as if he’d been testing me; and, for all I knew, he had been. ‘In fact,’ he went on, ‘I took my name out of it months ago, and not just because I didn’t like what some of those rascals I’d trusted were getting up to. It was the local Chinese who decided me in the end. That’s one of the clubs that won’t be licked and can’t be joined. They’re natural business leaders, the overseas Chinese. Some people compare them with the Jews — diaspora, ghetto life, preservation of cultural identity despite assimilation, that sort of stuff. I say that’s superficial. I say that they’re the one multinational corporation that’ll never be busted under any anti-trust law anywhere. Why? Complete local autonomy for every single unit of accounting is there for all to see, that’s why. So where’s the corporation? It’s programmed into their genes. Tell you something else about the Chinese. . ‘

He paused. He’d been talking more or less freely to a listener he’d considered as safe. Now, though, there was something that he considered important to be said; so he was reviewing it again before letting me hear it.

‘Paul, the Chinese can’t be frightened in the same way as the rest.’

By the ‘rest’, I later found, he meant the rest of mankind.

The nature of his peculiar ideas, about intimidation and the techniques of frightening people into absolute obedience emerged from what he then told me about something that had happened to him in Java. He had, of course, been making his first million at the time, so his recollection of the incident was pleasantly light-hearted.

‘Just getting about the place was terribly difficult,’ he said. ‘There were bandits calling themselves religious patriots raiding the villages, and bits of the civil war still going on everywhere outside the large towns. It wasn’t safe to travel by road, even from Djakarta to Bandung, without a military escort, and not all that safe with one. So, all the sizeable towns were jammed with people. A top priority got you a bed, but not much else. A room to yourself? Rare, very rare. The Russians were among the greatest friends of the revolution, but the Soviet Embassy had to function for months from a bungalow in the western areas, though in East Java, and especially in places like Surabaja, Jogjakarta and Semarang, it stayed difficult. That was because the hard-cores on both sides were still using the interior as a battle-field. God, how I hate hard-cores! Give me the pragmatists every time.’

‘I hadn’t realized, Mat, that you’d ever found it necessary to give that choice any thought.’

‘You’ve never worked for a revolutionary government, that’s for sure. Well, I had a top priority then, and let me tell you, whenever I had to take trips East I used that priority as if I were Genghis Khan. I’d found that the best way of getting through your business is comfort in those parts was to commandeer a foreign consulate. There were several available. No foreign consuls in them just then, of course, on account of the troubles, but the compounds and houses were still there, and in most cases the old native servants had stayed on. In theory they were there protecting property belonging to friendly foreign governments entitled to diplomatic status and immunities.’

‘How did you get around that?’

He gave me a boyish smile. ‘Servants protecting foreign property on behalf of the central government were responsible to the central government. When one of that government’s officials decided to inspect the property to see if the protectors were doing their duty, they’d better co-operate. Otherwise, they’d find themselves out on their ears or, more likely, in jail.’

‘So they co-operated.’

‘Yes. But they also resented and hated and wondered how to handle the interloper, this man who was suddenly giving them orders, making them work instead of resting up, sitting at the consul’s dinner table, sleeping in their consul’s bedroom. What would you have done in their place, Paul?’

‘Pretended you were the consul and tried to kill you with kindness, I expect.’

‘They could do that and they often did. But sometimes the effort seemed to cost them too much and then they’d try to redress the balance in their favour. That happened once when I was staying in a French consulate. I’d been to dinner with the official in charge of the port installations because I’d had business to do with him. He lived in a compound two minutes away, so, after an early dinner and a brief chat, I walked back to the consul’s house. You know how those places are arranged? Square lot of half a hectare maybe, high wall all around with barbed-wire on top as optional extra, house in the centre, separate servants’ quarters in back of compound, gap in the wall for gate, driveway from gate to house?’

‘I know.’

‘Well, when I got to the gate I found it unlocked. In that place and at that time, that alone would have given me pause. I also heard and saw movements inside. There was a moon, so I waited by the gate till my eyes had adjusted to the light and I could see what was going on. Have you met many French consuls, Paul?’

‘Not many, no.’

‘Those I’ve met haven’t, on the whole, been great hobbyists. There was one who was a bit of an ornithologist and made a hobby of his bird-photography, but I haven’t come across any who cultivated their gardens much, except career-wise and metaphorically. I think this particular consul may have had an English wife.’

‘You’ll have to tell me what you’re talking about, Mat. I won’t try to guess.’

‘That place had a rose garden in front of the house!’

‘Not a flower I care for much.’

‘But an English rose garden in Java, Paul. It was crazy. They were a crummy lot as you’d expect. Still, there they were, planted right after the Japs had pulled out in ‘forty-five, no doubt, and tended with care by Madame Consul until the new war came and the servants had had to take over. Now what I saw, as I stood in the darkness by the gate, was a couple of those servants, the two men, digging up the rose garden and burying something in it. Paul, what would you have thought they were burying at dead of night, eh?’

‘With you, a self-proclaimed government snooper, on the property? Small-arms I would say, or possibly the last of the old consular hoard of vacuum-packed Gauloises Bleues.’

‘Or ammunition, or stolen car-pans? Sure. As I stood there just outside the gate, watching and waiting for them to finish the job, I went through all those possibilities and more. I also realized that this had to be a one-off, amateur-night deal or they’d have had a boy out on watch in case I came back early. When at last they did finish and the rose bushes were all replanted, I had to move away a bit because then they remembered that they’d left the gate open and came over to lock up. I heard them giggling over something, but couldn’t hear what. Then they went off to their own quarters. As soon as they were out of the way, I let myself in and went to the house.’

‘Not stopping to look at the roses by moonlight?’

‘I wasn’t interested in the bloody roses, and neither would you have been. The trouble was that they’d taken the shovels they’d been using away with them. There was no electricity on at that time of night, so, with just my flashlight, all I could find in the house to use as a digging tool was a silver card-tray kept by the front door. In darkest Java with tray and flashlight! Are you with me?’

‘Out there in the rose garden digging up the consul’s cash-float box? Could be. I hope the silver tray stood up to it.’

‘That tray wasn’t solid silver,’ he said quickly; ‘it was plate.’ I hadn’t known it then, but Mat’s scout training instilled in him a respect for the property of others, apart from their money I mean, that has never left him. ‘Besides,’ he went on, ‘the soil was all loose where they’d been digging. I washed the tray carefully afterwards. There wasn’t a scratch on it.’

‘How about the consul’s cash box?’

He took a deep breath in order to regain lost calm before he answered.

‘What they’d buried there, Paul,’ he said solemnly, ‘was the entrails of a pig.’

Now I may not have known much, at that early stage, about his concern for the preservation of borrowed objects, or about any other by-products of his unusual education, but I had already learned that, if you let him adopt his preternaturally solemn tone with you without instantly taking counter-measures, he could become insufferably condescending. He had expected to surprise me, so I was very careful to look unsurprised.

‘How did you know they were a pig’s entrails?’ I demanded suspiciously. ‘They could have been a sheep’s or a cow’s.’

‘In Java?’

‘All right, an ox’s entrails maybe.’

‘They were a pig’s entrails. I know about such things, Paul. Take my word for it.’

‘Okay, I take your word. So what? Dried blood and bone meal are supposed to be good fertilizers. Why not pigs’ entrails? You said that the roses looked crummy. The poor men were simply anticipating your criticisms by feeding the things while they thought you were safely out of the way.’

‘And giggling while they did so?’

‘A cultural curiosity. Golden Bough stuff. The peasants of Java consider entrails highly amusing.’

I had been baiting him of course. He had now realized that, and didn’t like it. He gave me a long, bleak look before he spoke again.

‘They were there,’ he said slowly, ‘to cast a spell, to render me helpless in their filthy hands.’

‘Oh.’

Once he had started on spells, there was no point in trying to comment, or interrupt. He knew what he was talking about and he liked playing teacher. If he sounded on those occasions as if he were explaining the facts of life for the last time to a strangely backward adolescent, that was probably another hangover from his Fijian scouting days.

‘Those servants knew that the rose garden was of the greatest importance to the owner. That I wasn’t the real owner made no difference. As the person in command of the place, even temporarily, I had taken on the attributes of the owner, his strengths and, above all, his weaknesses.

I was dangerous to them because I could put in spiteful reports about the number of illegals they kept hidden in that compound paying squeeze for a patch of roof and a place of refuge from authority. I was a nuisance to them because I made work for them to which they had become unaccustomed. I messed things up, I wanted food, my bed made, my clothes dhobied. They wanted me out of there but couldn’t tell me to go. So what was there for them to do? Only one thing. Reduce my capacity for mischief to a minimum. How? Let the spirits of the dead render me impotent. By what means? Let them emasculate me through my rose garden. Let the embodiment of the most aggrieved and jealous spirits be placed in that earth where I was vulnerable. Got it?’

‘Mm.’

‘So what do you do when hostile spirits have been put in to subvert and suborn you? You turn them around, make double agents of them, that’s what you do. Hah! Those offal buriers didn’t know the man they’d challenged. They soon learned. Next morning at breakfast, just to start with. The head man can’t wait to run tests, of course, to see if the spell had started to work. So, he changes what they serve me for breakfast. I’d ordered papaya. He brings me bananas. Moment of truth! If I don’t notice because I don’t remember what I ordered, or if, having noticed and complained, I still accept the substitution, then the spell’s beginning to work. I’m spooked and they’re getting the upper hand. If, though, I do notice and do complain and tell him to take the goddam bananas away and bring me papaya, then maybe they’ll have to wait. Until the next meal, that is, to test again with my food or to see what happens when they starch a shirt so hard that I can’t do up the buttons. Maybe the day is adverse. Maybe these entrails need to get a bit riper before the spirits feel comfortable in them. Got to give it time, eh?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘No time, nothing! You throw a scare into the head man right then and there. You don’t accept the bananas. Instead, you ask him what you ordered. You ask him slowly, and as you speak you rap the table in time with the words. He will be a little afraid and say that, although you ordered papaya, the fruit available were not good. Then you address him in the manner of a death spell — a spirit-of-eating-alive type intonation maybe — and tell him that it was mango you ordered, not papaya. Now he’s in bad trouble. He doesn’t know what to think except that the spirits are not on his side. And that’s just the beginning. After that, you see that nothing he does is right. You order meat for dinner and he tries bringing you fish. You give him hell, but tell him you distinctly ordered vegetables. What’s he trying to do, poison you? You order meat again. Worried, he tries to back off by bringing you meat. You give him hell again, and this time you threaten to put the lot of them in jail for stealing meat when the country is starving. Now they’re really on the skids, I mean panic-scared and shaking. The spirits in the entrails have turned against them. Only one thing left for them to do, isn’t there?’

‘Dig up the entrails and get rid of them, I suppose.’

‘Oh, yes, they’ll have to put back the clock, but appeasing the spirits won’t be so easy. They’ll have to work at it. Work hard. Do as they’re told without trying to outsmart you. Be good citizens. Do what comes naturally.’

‘What’s that?’

‘For them? Being obedient.’

I smiled.

He remembered at once that the good Scout is at all times chivalrous, a parfit knight who never kicks a defeated enemy when the slob’s down. ‘Of course,’ he added, ‘as soon as they’d decided to behave themselves I was as nice as pie. That’s the way spells work, like a storm. One moment it’s all thunder and lightning and cleansing fear. Then, when the gods and the sorcerer are appeased, out comes the sun again.’

That was only one of his analogies on the subject of spells and sorcery. Many of them I came to know quite well. For me, though, the thing he was describing — often quite poetically — was merely a primitive, and only slightly more deadly version of what western man nowadays calls gamesmanship. A death-spell can kill in two ways; by frightening the victim to death or, since few men are totally susceptible to fear, by frightening him into doing something foolish — like taking too many sleeping pills or stepping in front of a bus.

It was Mat’s belief that Lord Baden-Powell was a natural sorcerer of great potency, and that, but for the accident of his having been born an Englishman, his world leadership would have extended far beyond the confines of the Boy Scout movement. He would have had the will to use his superb skills and cunning politically.

Mat had made a close study of the Chief Scout’s defence of Mafeking during the Boer War. The famous siege, which began in October 1899 and lasted for over eight months, was, according to B-P who commanded the town’s defenders, a ‘minor operation’ and his successful defence against overwhelming odds, ‘largely a piece of bluff.

Mat says that he put a spell on the enemy. An official historian said that he made imaginative tactical use of the modest resources at his disposal. Either or both could be right. By constantly moving his one acetylene searchlight around, B-P made the enemy believe that no night attack could possibly succeed. He disturbed their sleep by using a megaphone to give orders to imaginary trench-raiding parties. He harassed them with snipers who only fired during the late afternoon when the sun was behind them and in the enemy’s eyes. His men lobbed bombs at the enemy with fishing rods as if they were casting from a beach for flounders. When he had pushed his line of forts and his trench system far enough out from the town, he even began sniping with field-guns. And all the time he kept up a cheerful correspondence with the enemy who was trying to starve him out or wear him down — the Scout smiles and whistles under all difficulties. In a presumptuous attempt to cast spells — or wage psychological warfare? — in the B-P manner, the Boer Commandant at one point proposed a cricket match between the two sides. B-P’s reply could not have been bettered, in Mat’s opinion. ‘You must bowl us out first before your side can come in.’

With Mat, I have never really been sure where cleverness stops and low cunning begins. Inside that second-rate mind, there could be a third-rate one struggling to get out.

Among things said by Mat that I repeated to Krom and the witnesses was this:

‘A man once called me a shark. You know what imbeciles some so-called businessmen are. He loses money, so he calls me a shark. He thought he was being offensive. I took it as a compliment. Know something? In the islands, my mother’s people worship sharks. That’s because sharks are the greatest of all the spirits of the dead. Super-saints, you might say, god-like beings. So, when he called me a shark I only laughed. What’s wrong with being told you’re a god? As a matter of fact, I rather enjoyed it.’

‘That was very nice,’ said Dr Henson.

She and Connell were in her room. After an interval the bed creaked again.

I was alone with the bugging gear in the loft over the garage. Yves had been sent, at his own request, on a tour of the perimeter fences. Melanie was on watch at the attic windows. Krom was in his room studying File № 2, and licking his wounds no doubt. He would also be casting about feverishly for some ways of retrieving his position. He couldn’t wholly succeed now, but he still had a negotiating position of sorts; and, in spite of the wounds I had inflicted on him, he would make the most of it. More hard bargaining lay ahead.

That is, it lay ahead as long as the two parties at present under attack remained in reasonably good condition.

Connell and Henson had begun to talk again.

‘It’s the old man’s fault,’ he was saying; ‘if he’d levelled with us in Amsterdam and we’d talked it through with him, even a little, we’d at least have had some chance. We wouldn’t have had to stand there like dummies while Firman threw curve balls that the old man couldn’t even see.’

‘One sympathizes though.’

‘Oh, sure. That Oberholzer identification was his big breakthrough, so everything that came after had to flow from it, whether it should really have done so or not. He was wearing blinkers and we weren’t allowed to comment or even notice.’

‘Hindsight, friend.’

‘Admitted. Even so … ‘

‘Even so, what could we have changed? We might have had private doubts, but can you see either of us trying to tell the old man that he’d got the wrong end of the stick? Another thing, Firman’s right. If we’d been doing the research, we’d have taken months to track down Symposia’s tie-up with this Australasian witch-doctor Boy Scout. You know we would. By the way, I think my right leg’s going to sleep. Do you mind easing over just a fraction of a …?’

‘Sorry.’

‘No, that’s fine. Don’t go away. Were you ever a Scout?’

‘Never. Nobody ever asked me to join. Don’t tell me you were a Girl Guide.’

‘I was wondering about the total ethos of a movement that could accommodate Mr Williamson and his peculiarities with such ease. My brother joined the Scouts when he was a boy, but he’s eight years older than me so we didn’t discuss the experience while it was happening. All I heard was grown-ups discussing it. He dropped out. I’m not sure why. I do remember one thing he quoted from the Baden-Powell book on scouting. It was the twelfth edition my brother had, an enlarged and revised one. I know that because when he quoted from it, my father pricked up his ears. Thought it might be the Edwardian first edition and therefore valuable.’

‘Because the thing quoted was an Edwardian value judgement?’

‘Not exactly. The book said that a tenderfoot was sometimes timid about handling dead or injured men or seeing blood.’

‘Here’s one tenderfoot who still is.’

‘Well, Baden-Powell said that if you were to visit a slaughter house you’d soon get used to it. It didn’t say how often you had to go. Until you were used to it, I suppose.’

‘Used to seeing dead men in a slaughter-house?’

‘Used to the sight of blood. That’s a problem Mr Williamson’s never experienced, I imagine. Did you like the shark worship thing? We have an anthropologist who did her doctoral thesis on one of those island groups. I’ve never completely trusted her or her Pacific-island colleagues. I mean the khaki-shorts-and-beard brigade. You know? Out there, with all those animistic tribes for them to batten on, they can’t go wrong. You fancy a sub-culture that’s taken to keeping the souls of the departed in used Coca-Cola bottle-caps? All you have to do is seek, find, and then get lots of sixteen-millimetre colour footage before anyone else can. Your reputation’s made. If shark-worship hadn’t existed Mr Williamson would have had no trouble at all in inventing it.’

‘The way I heard it, Williamson has no trouble at all doing anything, ever. That bit about his enjoying being told he’s a god had a certain ring. And there were other bits I thought un-Firmanlike too. Our host may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he wouldn’t get his kicks out of brain-washing domestic help who couldn’t talk back, and I doubt if he’d be, capable of dreaming up the entrails story. Hell, I’m beginning to buy his Number-Two pitch.’

‘I bought that after hearing Yamatoku. Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first call up with advance warning of the holocaust.’

‘It isn’t only the gods who like to do things in that order.’

‘Sorry, my fault. I wasn’t thinking just about sour marriages though.’

There was a pause. I waited patiently while they made themselves more comfortable. Then she went on.

‘Mafeking was what made me think. Or, rather, the mirror image of it that was held up so thoughtfully to demonstrate the nature of our predicament. It’s got everything, nearly everything anyway, that we’ve got here, hasn’t it?’

‘Almost nearly everything, yes.’

‘A garrison besieged, but somewhat short of field-guns to snipe with? That sort of almost-nearly do you mean?’

‘I was thinking more along the lines that, in this mirror version of the siege, the good old Chief Scout’s on the outside doing his whistling and weaving of spells, instead of standing firm on the inside, and either socking it to the enemy with bombs on fishing lines or writing sardonic notes about cricket.’

‘There’s that, I agree.’ But she sounded doubtful. She was nearly there. ‘What bothers me isn’t in the mirror.’

‘Nothing to do with Mafeking?’

‘Oh, very much to do with Mafeking. The reason why the siege of Mafeking is remembered and why it added to the language a new word for crowd euphoria, you’ll recall, isn’t that it made Baden-Powell a popular hero, but that its long-awaited relief caused such wild rejoicing. The relief of Mafeking, that’s what’s remembered, not the siege. So, what bothers me is not that Baden-Powell is shown on the wrong side, but that there’s no relief column on the way.’

‘I see what you mean. No distant trumpeter, no cut-away of the cavalry galloping through murderous enemy fire to the rescue.’

‘The police here have motor bikes. But yes, that’s part of what I mean.’

‘The old man’s already rejected the police once. Okay, the situation seems to have changed. But what do we, or they, complain of to the local commissaire. The burns in Mr Boularis’s shoe? Mr Yamatoku’s used-car-lot courtliness?’

‘Don’t you think, friend, that we may still be missing the point? That phone call was a threat, but only if one knew enough to understand why. When we began to see that our leader had made a number of quite bad mistakes, you asked Firman a question. What kind of danger were we in and what was the extent of it?’

‘A question he didn’t answer.’

‘A question that he didn’t answer immediately. Supposing he’d told us, there and then, that his boss and partner, Williamson, had decided to terminate that uninsurable risk we all represented by killing us. What would your reaction have been? The same as mine, I expect. We’d have tittered merrily then moved on to the next question. “What must we do to be saved?” ‘

‘Still tittering merrily?’

‘Merrily enough, I think, to make it certain that any answer we received would be either facetious or evasive. Boularis is no longer even nominally polite to us. Firman’s still doing his best, but our academic conceits must bore him stiff.’

‘I’m afraid you may be right.’

‘So, I think that Firman has answered your question.’

‘With all this stuff about spell-casting and Mafeking studies?’ He was having doubts again.

‘Authentic anecdote, I call it. What other currency has the wretched man left? What currency, I mean, that we’d accept from him without saying that it was unquestionably forged?’

‘All right. We have our answer. “Yes, you’re all for the chopping-block. Sorry.” Now, how do we tackle the matter of survival? I think we’d both be grateful if his answer to that was a little less Delphian and didn’t have to be interpreted. Always assuming, naturally, that there is an answer and that he has it.’

‘Perhaps we should try asking him about that first. I have another suggestion.’

‘Shoot.’

‘That we don’t ask Firman anything more in front of Professor Krom.’

A pause, then he sighed. ‘Difficult.’

‘Why? Krom, if he ever gets back to civilization, will undoubtedly write all this up as if everything turned out exactly as he had planned it. It’ll be back to the dream world for him. We decline to comment on anything except the authenticity of those papers we’ve seen. End of obligation. What’s difficult about that? Do you mind passing me my cigarettes?’

Two reliable allies would be sufficient for what I had in mind. I switched off and went downstairs to the garage.

When I’d found the things I’d been looking for I hid them under the stairs.

Back in the loft, I went through the carton with the tapes in it. The boxes containing the ones Yves had used were numbered. I removed the tapes, adding the one I had just recorded to the pile, but left the numbered boxes in the carton.

In my bedroom I put the tapes away in a safe place before going up to the attic.

Melanie had Yves’s binoculars on her lap with her hands folded over them. She looked up as I came in but had obviously been dozing.

I told her to go to her room and have a nap and that I would keep watch for a while.

When she had gone, I used the binoculars to see where Yves had got to on his tour of the perimeter. I spotted him down near the coast-road gate, well away from the house.

I returned to the garage. The job I had to do there should have taken no more than half an hour, but it took me much longer than that. I have never been much of a handyman.

Persons like Yves who can work so quickly and surely with their hands have always made me envious.

But at least I did the job properly; did it without being disturbed or attracting attention and got back upstairs without being seen on the way.

This time, when I searched with the binoculars, I couldn’t locate Yves. An hour earlier, that would have worried me.

Now, it didn’t. I went down to my bedroom, cleaned myself up and then, after pushing a note under Melanie’s door, descended to the drawing-room. The note told her not to bother returning to the attic as I had revised our security arrangements.

Now, there was no point in having a sentry up there.

Now, all I had to do was continue to think clearly and to give Connell and Henson, already heading towards me from the terrace, the prescription for our collective survival.

Oh yes, and I had to decide, too, how to reply to Mat.

He would call, I knew; not just to make sure that his spell was working — he would have few doubts on that score — but to make sure that I remained faithful unto death, and that, if the process of my dying should happen to take longer than planned, I wouldn’t spend the extra time drawing unpleasant conclusions and making wild statements to ambulance attendants.

That was the one chore he wouldn’t leave to Frank Yamatoku.

Moulding the minds and hearts of men was work for gods.