Olura (31 page)

Left alone in the villa, I understood that there had been a covert declaration of war. Any more mention of bandaged heads, and Olura Manoli stands trial! It was highly improbable that Vigny and
Sauche knew who was Gonzalez’s informant. Ardower, if he were after all alive? French agents? Myself? Even Mgwana? But whoever it was would appreciate the threat and perhaps offer a
profitable bargain.

I do not suggest for a moment that Sauche alone could influence the Spanish Ministry of Justice. What I think may have happened was that after Gonzalez’s questioning he called on any
friends he had in high places, pretending alarm and renewed plots against his life. That was the last straw for authorities already in the mood to damn all foreigners and their obscure intrigues.
No doubt the excuses which had been good enough to keep the Italian Embassy quiet went nowhere near satisfying the Consul-General of South Africa. So the police were instructed to hold Olura until
the truth came out for the crime to which she had confessed.

I now return to the night of Ardower’s arrival. When I had left him to sleep, I cleared up the puddles on the floor and wondered for how long I could conceal his presence if I decided to
do so at all.

Our domestic arrangements were simple. A respectable old body named Concha came in every morning to clean the villa and prepare our breakfast and a light lunch. She then returned home to her own
responsibilities. I could think of nothing better than to stage an exhibition of elderly distrust and obstinacy and refuse to allow her to clean Olura’s room on the grounds that it contained
an unknown quantity of valuable dresses and jewellery.

This worked more effectively than I had foreseen. She screamed at me that she had always been a woman of honour and that she would rather steal from the Church than the poor señorita. She
left the house with dignity, bursting into tears as soon as she was in the garden. Poor woman! I would have trusted her with a bookmaker’s bag of unidentifiable pound notes.

Meanwhile Ardower had stayed quiet in the locked room. When Concha had gone we had breakfast. I found him less emotional—indeed clear-sighted and self-disciplined. I was prepared
unhesitatingly to sacrifice him if there were any benefit to be gained for Olura. Though my thoughts had remained unspoken, I was taken aback to find that he agreed with them. He declared that he
could never marry Olura, that the vast discrepancy of income could only lead to never-ending strain on their mutual affection, however much each considered the susceptibilities of the other, and
that though one could love eternally one could not be an eternal lover. He personally would prefer long absence studying the languages of Mgwana’s forests to a long sentence in a Spanish
gaol, but one or the other was probably the right solution for Olura.

I let this pass. He had constructed for himself out of lonely introspection too simple a world. He also underrated the character of the Manolis. He would have to put up with Olura renting a
beehive hut in the nearest village or a flat right opposite the gaol, unless I could get rid of him out of her life.

He faced me across the breakfast table, thin, worn and with very watchful eyes drained of all emotion. He was an unnecessary complication, for I saw no difficulty in freeing Olura as soon as
Mgwana knew she was in goal; nor was I seriously afraid of adverse publicity now that I had time to weigh up the risk and to recover from Olura’s extremely unjust attack. Everything could be
arranged except the killing of Duyker.

One resents disturbance in the early morning at my age. One is accustomed to swear at humanity in general. One is also well aware from experience that such thoughts are never translated into
speech or action, and that a certain sour amusement may be extracted from analysing the silent outburst of resentment. It occurred to me that an excellent reason—among others more
ephemeral—for blasting Ardower to hell was that he had the effrontery to love Olura as much as I did.

A forgivable sin. Serener contemplation of it led me to put him at least into the class of a diamond bracelet which Olura wanted—if, that is, she had been a woman to set her heart on
anything of the sort. In that record which she wrote for me there had been a passage which I found moving. She said that she knew little of my youth and begged me to remember.

While Ardower drank his coffee, I did the remembering. In a long memory there are so many selves. The young Henry, his love and his misery are no longer vivid. I remember far more clearly what
the man in his middle forties thought about him, and how the pompous fellow was impatient of such a waste of time in loneliness and suffering. And so one arrives at the present self, the pantaloon,
who has forgotten so much that forty-year-old Henry remembered, but disapproves of him all the same and is very sorry indeed for young Henry and his romantic obsession. I said to Ardower, breaking
a long silence, that Olura had not mentioned to me—or only very vaguely—his Breton captain.

‘I don’t suppose she did,’ he replied. ‘I doubt if she got hold of it at all. Her emotions were naturally a little overwhelmed by Zarauz and Duyker.’

I questioned him about Bozec and Bernardino. Applying myself to his answers, I was mortified to find that I had decided to intervene, and that I was meditating just the sort of skulduggery which
Olura and her woolly friends expect of International Finance when in fact it is the most unlikely section of society to indulge in it. But what use is power unless employed for those we love?

I confess, too, that as the general shape of a counter attack began to form I felt a sense of enjoyment: comparable, let us say, to that of regulating a market and sending off the speculators to
lick their wounds. Perhaps I recovered something of youth; or it may have been that I welcomed a reversion to the ethics of my early ancestors who were trained in statecraft at the courts of
Cordoba and Constantinople and accepted revenge as a moral duty. Those two military nuisances, Vigny and Sauche, deserved no mercy; and none would be given them right to the end.

‘Can you endure more loneliness?’ I asked.

Ardower replied that he was near the limit, but that he would have to. Meanwhile might he rest for a day?

‘I want you to remain here in the house, in such comfort as we can arrange, for about four days,’ I said.

My own ruthless handling of poor Concha had suggested an idea. The old fool of an admiral from whom I rented the villa at a price which must have doubled his yearly pension had been bothered
about his valueless valuables. He had them all locked up in an airless cubby-hole under the eaves, which was then sealed by the local notary public.

I proposed to pack Olura’s things and call in police and the same notary to lock and seal her bedroom with its adjoining private lavatory and to register the fact that the room contained
eight unexamined suit-cases of ostrich skin. Having observed the antics of this public functionary during the almost religious ceremony, I thought it safe for Ardower to remain hidden under the
bed.

He considered it an intolerable risk, but I overruled his protests and explained that the plan depended on the most trustworthy constant in our world: professional character. Notaries do not
look under beds unless engaged in matrimonial cases.

Cheering up a little, he said that a cheese, some fruit, half a metre of Pamplona sausage, bread, butter and anything there might be in the cellar, not forgetting a corkscrew, would keep him
comfortable for a week if my estimate of four days turned out to be optimistic. To these requirements I added Olura’s typewriter and a quantity of paper, requesting him to spend his enforced
leisure in drawing up for me, and me alone, a very frank and detailed statement of his relations with Olura and Mgwana, of his movements and his interrogations.

That is the origin of the document which forms the bulk of this file and is divided for the sake of clarity, as I have already explained, into two parts by Olura’s narrative. I assumed
there would be revealing discrepancies between the written account and his verbal report. There were few. I also assumed it would be short. I did not then know that he was a practised writer who
had even succeeded in the nearly impossible task of popularising his obscure linguistic research.

I sent at once for the notary public. As I expected, his ridiculous self-importance facilitated our business. He was registering the presence of eight unexamined suit-cases, the property of the
arrested spinster, Olura Manoli, and nothing else concerned him. He displayed no emotion or curiosity, nor did the policeman in the passage, except when they found it necessary to calm my simulated
distrust and indignation. It seemed to me astonishing that the notary public did not smell the sausage which was under the bed with Ardower. It is possible that even at his age he was more occupied
by the delicate and lingering perfume of Olura.

I locked up the house, and the same afternoon flew up again to Paris. Confident that I had not come empty-handed, I insisted on a second conference with officials of the Deuxième Bureau.
I was received, though with pointed impatience.

When I related what I knew of Captain Bozec of Le Croisic, my distinguished friends became more excited, and I was asked to repeat my story at the highest level. It was already known that Sauche
and Vigny had escaped by sea, and that correspondence was shuttling back and forth. Bozec was one of half a dozen very vague suspects.

I went on to the question of Bozec’s rendezvous with the
Isaura
, explaining that her owner was a plain fisherman who would not be capable of complicated navigation. Therefore the
position of the rendezvous must be simple—two Vizcayan peaks in line or something of that nature—and would be well known to the crew of the
Phare de Kerdonis
as well as the
master. If they were quietly arrested, what was the chance that one of them would talk?

Inevitable, I was told. Bozec and his crew were all in it for money, not from political conviction. An offer of ten thousand francs would produce the rendezvous and the method of communication,
especially if the alternative was a five years’ sentence for treason.

So at last I was free to come to the point. If I could frighten the former General Sauche, I said, into arranging his urgent retirement from Spain, would it not be easy to sequester the
Phare de Kerdonis
, put a trustworthy crew from Naval Intelligence aboard her and pick him up at the rendezvous without anyone being the wiser—except possibly the skipper of the
Isaura
who would never dare to talk?

Yes, they liked it. There were a lot of ‘ifs’, but in principle they liked it. They were kind enough to say that the Services always benefited from the fresh thinking of the
financial world. But what was to be done with Sauche and Vigny? They could be kept secretly on the ice for a week or so; but never, in such doubtful circumstances, could they be brought to trial or
caused to disappear.

Leading them step by step towards the solution I had in mind, I suggested Algeria. Could they not turn up accidentally in Algeria where the Government would know what to do with them and could
be trusted to keep it quiet?

No, but no, but no! Even if it could be shown that they had visited Algeria voluntarily, no one would ever believe it. Sauche and his
plastiqueurs
had been and still were a real danger
to the Head of State. He and Vigny deserved to be squashed like the bed-bugs they were. But there was no way of hiding the mess.

I then revealed that there was, pointing out that all they required for the ultimate disposal of the pair was a government which would not be suspected, which had no kindly feelings for them,
which was in absolute and efficient control of its police and security services.

‘These two gentlemen,’ I declared, ‘have insulted and offended M. Leopold Mgwana beyond bearing.’

They needed confirmation. I told them that if they could get me a clear line to Mgwana and scramble the conversation at their end—I knew that Mgwana could deal with it at his—anyone
who for reasons of state wished to listen in might do so. I added that the cost of the operation which I envisaged—above the line, that is—need not be more than one obsolescent,
long-range, propellor aircraft.

When that evening I had Leopold Mgwana on the other end of the line, I told him that Olura was in prison and Ardower on the run. At first he misinterpreted my circumlocutions and was firmly
convinced that I had bad news about the financing of his prestige airline; then, when he understood, he was continually interrupting me with exclamations of grief and anger. Yes, I assured him, I
knew of his statement to the Ministry of Justice; but it simply had not been believed. The police could not make up their minds whether he had merely hit a press photographer too hard, or whether
he was trying to protect Olura from the consequences of a plot to assassinate him in which she had been involved.

Then I let him know who were responsible and somewhat exaggerated the danger to Olura if the pair remained at liberty. I explained why the French Government was unable to help me and added that
favours would be reciprocated all round.

Mgwana understood our problem by instinct, though it was certainly the first time that he had been asked to bury an international embarrassment in the mysteries of his Africa. He asked if anyone
in authority were listening to our conversation. When I replied that on my invitation there was, Mgwana assured him in his sonorous, somewhat biblical English—which the unknown, though no
accomplished linguist, understood without difficulty—that he, Mgwana would be personally responsible for all security measures. His only conditions were that the aircraft carrying Sauche and
Vigny must be cleared from a foreign airport and that the pilot, as sole survivor of an accident, must be able to answer the questions of press and diplomatists with every appearance of sincerity
and emotion.

A preliminary planning outline and a routine of communication were agreed. For me, too, communication was made direct and easy—an obvious necessity, since I had no wish that the Paris
partners should have any clear idea of what my business with the Deuxième Bureau had been. One of the French agents employed to report the movements of Sauche was ordered to accept and
transmit my messages—a gratifying gesture of trust, considering that only a week before I had been threatened with his interference.