Siege at the Villa Lipp (32 page)

‘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 No 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.’