The Condition of Muzak (12 page)

Tom McCarthy’s patrol was supposed to round up a group of Rhodesian African guerillas. Instead, he claims, it wiped out a village. There were about sixty victims—the entire population of a tiny village near the Mozambique border. McCarthy, a 22-year-old Londoner, who served in the Rhodesian Light Infantry, told the full story of the atrocity for the first time yesterday. McCarthy himself confessed that he shot a young terrorist as he lay wounded. He was ordered by an officer to shoot the boy. The death-mission began when the Rhodesian Special Branch was given a tip-off that the guerillas would be slipping into the village to collect £1000 towards their “funds”. McCarthy and his patrol, including black scouts and members of the Rhodesian Special Air Service, were ordered from their base at Mount Darwin in the troubled border area north of Salisbury. They arrived at the village below the Mavuradonha mountain range, about 30 miles away, in darkness. Through their “night-sights” they saw 17 guerillas arrive. But the Rhodesian soldiers did not move into the village to arrest them. Instead they illuminated the village with flares. Then they bombarded the huts with automatic fire and rockets. McCarthy maintained he could hear the screams of the villagers 300 yards away. Then he was called in to help with the “mopping-up operations”. Thirteen of the terrorists died with the villagers. Four escaped but three were picked up later. McCarthy went into graphic detail of the alleged murder rampage by the Rhodesian troops. He said: “We were told that the only prisoners we wanted were the terrorists. We were also told we were after the money. There was this boy of about seventeen. There was no doubt he was one of the guerillas because I recognised him from the night-sight. He had been shot but he wasn’t too bad and the medic was working on him. Someone must have decided that he knew nothing because the medic was told to move away.” McCarthy was sending a radio message when an officer called him over and ordered him to shoot the youth. “I was frightened and asked if he wouldn’t be any good. I was told: ‘Certainly not.’ I was shaking quite a bit and the officer said: ‘Are you worried?’ I knew that if I disobeyed a lawful command in an operational area I faced four years in the stockade. I remember putting the safety catch to ‘rapid fire’ and put my rifle to my shoulder. But I turned my face away before I fired. I missed by a foot—that will tell you how bad I was. He just lay there and put his arms up against his chest. I don’t know why but he didn’t say a word. He just looked at me and I’ll always remember that as if it were just this morning.” The officer then came behind McCarthy, grasped his head in both his hands and said: “You useless——bastard.” McCarthy continued: “He forced my head down to look at the man on the ground and said: ‘Now shoot the bastard.’ This time I hit him between the nose and the mouth and his face just seemed to cave in.”

—Ellis Plaice,
Daily Mirror
, 27 February, 1976

William Randolph Hearst’s monumental pile had first been displayed to the public on 2 June, 1958, and since then had become one of California’s greatest attractions, on a par with Hollywood and Disneyland, under the supervision of the California Department of Parks and Recreation, in accordance with Hearst’s legacy after he had died, aged 88, on 13 August, 1951; a mock Hispano-Moorish haven, crammed with the greatest collection of second-rate art ever assembled in one private building, it lay on top of a hill once known as Camp Hill, now rechristened the Enchanted Hill and a visit to it was, according to the official guide book, “an experience unsurpassed by the other great dwellings built in a fabulous era when American tycoons were erecting imposing structures and importing art treasures found throughout the world. A walk through its grounds with terraced gardens, paths lined with camellia hedges, great banks of azaleas and rhododendron, more than 50 varieties of roses and the soft tinkling of water dripping from marble fountains, is a stroll through the epitome of beauty and grandeur. A great dream, never quite completed.” The building began in 1919, nearly twenty years before the Derry & Toms Roof Garden, an echo, an exquisite miniature, had been opened in London. “There are”, the guide book tells us, “100 rooms in the main building, including 38 bedrooms, 31 baths, 14 sitting rooms, 2 libraries, a theatre and an area that was meant to contain a complete bowing alley.” Work on this building continued to 1947, when it was abandoned. There is no real evidence for the legend that in a year sometimes given as 1955, sometimes as 1985 and sometimes, obviously erroneously, as 1918, an important and secret meeting was held there of a number of men and women, representatives of most schools of thought and of many nations in the world. This has been variously described as the “Veterans’s Meeting” or the “Reunion Party” and, of course, a number of books have been written in an effort to ‘explain’ the legend. So far a satisfactory book has yet to appear, though all accounts are agreed on the authenticity of one piece of evidence, a guest list, giving the names of the guests in order of arrival, “with one notable absence, impossible to remedy at this stage” (as a pencilled note on the card points out). Accounts by local people concerning a huge concourse of ghosts on a day and a night in midsummer 1951, when shadowy figures were seen laughing and talking in the grounds, swimming in the Neptune pool, playing music of bizarre and unrecognisable origin, chiming the thirty-six carillon bells, housed in the twin Hispano-Moresque towers of the Casa Grande; feasting in the huge refectory, with its silk banners representing the seventeen wards of Sienna, its Gothic tapestries and its fifteenth-century Spanish choir stalls, whilst seated at long tables of rich, old wood, burning oddly coloured lights, to ride off in a great flurry of hoofs shortly before dawn, heading for the sea, have been independently confirmed and described, according to the taste of the teller, as a meeting of vampires, witches, devils or the Wild Hunt itself. Reports also agree that there was nothing sinister about the haunting, that, indeed, a great sense of peace and tranquillity pervaded the surrounding countryside on that Midsummer Night, a peace which those ancient Californian hills had not experienced for many a century, and the ghosts were generally thought to be “lucky” rather than “evil” (Butler,
Haunted California
, 1975). “Men and women from all sides of the conflict would meet on common ground and exchange information in the timeless halls and passages of the four castles, in the peaceful groves of the noble Tanelorn” (Butler, ibid.). “Their voices were hushed and relaxed and there wasn’t one who showed any animosity he or she might feel…” (Hall,
The San Simeon Mystery Explained
, 1971). “The time of the final conflict was not yet. Their garments, their manners, their languages, their gestures represented the best that the twentieth century had been able to offer, the inheritance of Golden Age on Golden Age. Every enthusiasm was represented; every beast was in its prime. And, for a day and a night, there could be no question of invasion, even from within” (Morgan,
Law v. Chaos: The Last Great Meeting
, 1975). “Time travellers? Visitors from space? Ghosts? Or just a bunch of hoaxers—a gang of kids having fun? Then how to explain music that was years ahead of its time, fashions that were not seen until twenty years later, snatches of conversation referring to events occurring towards the end of this century?” (Fromental,
San Simeon, the Flying Saucers and Patty: Who is getting at who?
, 1976).

The note of guests attending the “coven” or “sabbat”, as others have called it, was found under the billiard table in the Game Room, written in longhand, not evidently American and probably English, headed “Manifestations” and, under that, “Arrivals in order of appearance”. The names included the following: