Siege at the Villa Lipp (34 page)

‘I thought there were only three passengers,’ I said, ‘the one man and the two women who swim from the outer beach.’

‘The one in the pullover must be a guest or the other husband.’ He gave a strangled sort of laugh. ‘They all look drunk to me.’

And indeed they did, in a way; the falling-about, arm-waving way of film extras pretending to be drunk in the orgy sequence of a biblical silent. Sounds of the revelry came faintly across the water. Much louder was the sound of diesels suddenly going astern and the squawk of the chain as an anchor was let go.

To celebrate their arrival, the man in the sweater rose unsteadily to his feet from the cushion on which he had been sitting cross-legged and flung a hand in the air as if to call for three cheers. The next moment he had swooped on a long cardboard box lying on the deck by the table and was staggering forward with it to the bows. The crewman there securing the anchor took no notice at all when the man with the box dumped it beside him and began tearing at gummed-paper fastenings on the lid.

‘What the hell’s he got there?’ Connell demanded. ‘Bunting? Fairy lights?’

The guests were standing now too. After Yves’s outburst, I suppose, any diversion had been welcome. I saw the crewman walk quickly away. Henson’s eyes were the sharpest. Her exclamation was one of outrage.

‘Oh no!’

Then, I saw. For a swaying-about, fumbling drunk, the man in the bows was suddenly displaying remarkable dexterity. In the space of a few seconds he had lighted from a single match no less than three strings of Chinese jumping crackers and had them bursting simultaneously all over the deck around him. What’s more, he wasn’t even bothering to watch them. He was already rummaging in the box for fresh delights.

I could sympathize with Henson’s cry of protest. I remember thinking to myself as he lighted the first string that the motor cruiser had to be a chartered one with a bad crew easily bribed. No one who owned or had any other normal concern for such a boat would have allowed a good deck to be scarred in that way. Decks are sacred, and expensive surfaces. The Italian banker had kept sets of overshoes for guests ignorant or oafish enough to come on board wearing leather soles, and smokers on deck had always been required to carry ash-trays.

‘Paul!’ It was Melanie.

‘Telephone,’ she said. ‘An old friend. And I think it’s long distance.’

‘On which line?’

‘The listed number.’

To Krom I said: ‘If you want to hear this conversation with Mat Williamson, there’s an extension in the entrance hall. Melanie will show you where.’

I didn’t wait to see if he accepted the offer. As I turned away, though, a sudden glow from the sea made me look back.

The vandal on the boat had lighted a Roman candle. As he held it aloft, balls of red fire were spurting up and falling to the deck all around him. His friends began to applaud.

I went up the stairs slowly. Mat would wait and I didn’t want to seem even a little breathless when I
took his call. After starting the recorder, I waited an extra moment or two before picking up the phone, and then began to speak immediately as if I had just snatched it up.

‘Mat? What a pleasant surprise!’

I tried to make my surprise, if not my pleasure, sound genuine, but of course he wasn’t fooled.

‘Sorry to take you away from the fireworks, Paul, but this is by way of being an emergency. Besides, I’m returning your call to me this morning.’

I had to think very quickly then. He was using the high pitched, nasal voice of one of the English missionaries who had taught at the school in Fiji. I had heard it first when he had told me about Placid Island. It was his anti-imperialist voice, and also the one he sometimes used to make the saying of a highly unpleasant thing seem as if it were funny. He was probably using it now, partly anyway, as a disguise, but it startled me and I
knew that I would have to watch myself. I ought not have been startled by an English Birmingham accent. With the recorder going, though, it couldn’t be allowed to pass without comment.

‘What a strange voice you have, Grandma!’

It was a mistake. He came back promptly, sketching in, for the record, a portrait of the faithful henchman driven at last by mockery into a small loss of temper. ‘I said I was sorry to spoil your fireworks, Paul, and I’m sorry to disturb you when you have so much on your plate already, but this isn’t a bedtime story.’

‘That’s twice you’ve mentioned fireworks, Mat. Where are you? Along the road somewhere? Watching the fireworks too?’

‘You know where I am, Paul. There are always fireworks along the coast there on the Fourteenth of July. If I’m a bit upset, that’s because I’ve been speaking to Frank, so bear with me. I’ve also listened to your conversation with him earlier, and . . . Paul? Are you still there?’

‘I’m here.’

‘Paul, what Frank said to you this morning was one long lie.’

‘You mean one continuous lie or a lot of separate lies strung together?’

‘I am
not
joking, Paul. From understandable motives, possibly, but with absolutely no authority from me, Frank has made a dangerous bloody fool of himself. In trying to be helpful by running interference for you, he’s done a number of things he ought not have done. He’s tried to be clever and only succeeded in being horribly stupid. As he’s my responsibility, the first thing I want to do is apologize.’

‘Apology accepted,’ I tried to throw him. So far, every word he’d uttered had been that of a loyal lieutenant addressing a capricious martinet. I tried to throw him by suddenly becoming a martinet, and by speaking to him in a way that he hadn’t been spoken to. I was sure, for a long time, if ever. ‘But,’ I snarled, ‘you said that apologizing was the
first
thing you wanted to do. How about the
second
and
third?
Or have you been sitting around on your black butt waiting for somebody else to do your thinking for you?’

He seemed not to have heard what I’d said. All he did was move calmly into his second-stage position. ‘Paul, do you remember that time some years ago when we - you, that is - were thinking of buying into that Malay-Chinese rubber syndicate? We went to stay with those people up near Kedah.’

‘No, I don’t remember that at all and I’ve never been to Kedah.’

‘Near
Kedah, I said. You’ll remember when I tell you. It was just after that American went for a wall; in the jungle and disappeared. The American who’d built up that silk business in Thailand and was taking a vacation in Malaysia? Staying as a house-guest with friends? Remember now, Paul?’

‘How about getting to the point?’

‘But that
is
the point, that he disappeared and was certainly killed. The local theory was that after he told his friends that he was going for a wall; he was accidentally killed, not because he wasn’t used to the jungles - in fact he was very much at home in them - but because he fell into a tiger trap the village people had dug there on the path he took. It wasn’t the villagers’ fault, of course, but they were scared because
he
was an American and it was
they
who’d dug the trap and planted the bamboo spikes. So they buried the body and didn’t report it. That’s why
our
friends didn’t want us to go for any walks outside the compound while we were their guests. Our disappearance would have meant police enquiries, trouble. Besides, I think they liked us. I think they wanted our money, but I don’t think they wanted us killing ourselves on their doorsteps.’

‘Any more than you want me impaling myself on the bamboo stakes that Frank’s been so busily sharpening? That’s nice, Mat. I’m glad to know. Where’s Frank staying down here?’

‘It’s not nice for anyone, Paul. And I’m including your guests. I don’t know why. If anything should accidentally go wrong in spite of all you’ve done to protect them, they have to be the guilty parties. I hear through the grapevine, by the way, that two of them at least have intelligence links. I’ve asked friends about the Brit and they confirm. There’s nothing nice about any of it. Oh, I agree with you, that doesn’t excuse Frank. He’s made a prize idiot of himself. These people he used your private files to learn about and contact, these old acquaintances of yours, were never the simple-minded hayseeds he wanted them to be. He knows that now and he’s not staying in any one place. He’s buzzing about like crazy, because he also knows now that trying to win medals by relieving you of an unwanted presence was never a good idea anyway. Not without consultation. I’ve told him. He’ll be lucky if he doesn’t get the chop. But let’s be realistic, Paul. The fact that he knows all this, and that he’s doing his damnedest to put things right, doesn’t help with the immediate problem. Calling off the kind of people he’s had out digging traps for you isn’t as easy as setting them on.’

‘I don’t suppose it is, Mat. Frank’s advice, as you’ll know, was non-resistance. Yours appears to be a little different and slightly more reassuring - no walks in the jungle. Have I got that right?’

No plain answer, of course. I
hadn’t really expected one.

It was time for that final, all-important move to the third stage of the ritual. The preliminary declaration that a moral authority was properly vested in him, along with its appropriate powers, had formally been made. In other, cruder words, the softening-up process was over. Now, it was time for the decisive incantation. I know of no simple way of describing that process accurately. The carnivorous plant treating inspect prey with enzymes before eating them is a clumsy comparison. Mat doesn’t want to eat his victims; he only wants them to oblige him.

He spoke slowly, and was probably tapping a table or desk in time with the words as he said them.

‘Paul, there’s something I’m going to remind you of now that I’m quite sure you haven’t forgotten. You won’t have forgotten this because it was something you once told me. You told me, too, in a moment of personal loss and sadness when you were trying to recall worse things you’d gone through. It was about when you were in the army in Italy, before you got to know Carlo up in the north. You recalled seeing another soldier, one of the men under your own personal command, go to obey an order you’d given. And then, a split second later, he’d stepped on a land mine - an S-mine, you called it - and been cut clean in two.’

A three-tap pause.

‘How far away was he from you? Only a few yards, wasn’t it? Close enough for you to be deaf for a few days, I know, and close enough for you to see what his guts looked like while his own eyes were still wondering what had happened. Less than a minute to die, though, with all those arteries severed. But the awful thing for you, aside from your having told the man to do something that killed him, came afterwards, didn’t it? I mean after the first physical shock, when you realized that, although
you
were still alive, there was death all around you. When you stood there with all that singing in your ears and knew that you’d strayed into a minefield, and that if you moved so much as a fraction of an inch in any direction, or maybe even leaned over a little and changed the weight distribution under one of your feet,
your
guts could be slopping about on the ground there too. So, you did what others have sometimes done when they’ve found they were in a minefield and seen what a mine can do to the soft human body. No disgrace, not when you’re in shock and looking at the results of making the wrong move. Some men would have turned and run blindly. Not you. You froze. And you
stayed
frozen until, eventually, someone from an engineer patrol came. Remember? He was a sergeant. He took you by the arm and persuaded you, and finally
made
you walk. It was a step at a time, much slower than a funeral march you said, left-and-right and left-and-right, until you both reached a piece of ground where tanks had been. The mark of their tracks were new, so from there you had places to put your feet where there couldn’t be unexploded S-mines. You walked back in the tank tracks. You listening, Paul?’

‘Yes.’

‘You asked for my advice. You don’t need it. You already know what to do. You’re in a minefield. Freeze. Right where you are. And stay frozen until I can get things straightened out and made safe; safe for you to walk away. Will you do that for me, Paul?’

‘Yes, Mat.’

It would have called for a serious effort on my part to have said anything else.

Besides, it would have been foolish to have said anything else. Better if he believed that the spell was cast; or, to use the jargon he probably now prefers, that I was correctly programmed.

‘I’ll be there to take your arm,’ he said.

The line went dead.

Green, orange and red lights glowed and flickered in the sky.

From my bedroom there was a good view of the bay, and I had brought Yves’s binoculars down with me from the attic floor. I took a closer look at the motor cruiser.

Most of the deck lights had been switched off now, as if to make the fireworks show up better; but there were several Roman candles burning at once and some of the orange balls from them stayed alight longer than the others on the way down to the water. I could see quite a lot of her.

The stern gave her name as
Chanteuse,
and her home port as Monrovia. She had Liberian registration. By the autumn she would be among the dozens of other boats just like her tied up along the yachting moles of Cannes and available for charter next year. It must have been expensive, I thought, to get hold of her at such short notice. Although there were always a few charterers who had their coronaries in June or early July, and so were obliged to forfeit their deposits, you had to be right in there with bundles of dollars or D-marks in both hands to buy your way on to the yacht-broker’s sucker lists of last-minute clients.

Mat must have hated that; but Frank wouldn’t have minded.

That Frank was on board the boat, I now had no doubt at all. I knew where he was, too. The people with the drinks on the after deck were merely set-dressing. There were lights on below. The only place in complete darkness was the bridge. It was a big all-glass affair like a greenhouse, with sloping sides that reflected the glare of the fireworks. He’d be there in the darkness with a walkie-talkie, where he could see and control but not be seen.