by Wilbur Smith
She went on quietly, covering every detail of her arrangements, and he could find no omissions. She was interrupted by a soft hail from out of the darkness and Hapiti throttled the diesels back to idle. They drifted down closer to the loom of the island. A canoe bumped against the side, and Magda turned quickly in his arms, reaching up for his mouth with hers.
‘Please be careful, Peter,’ was all that she said, and then she broke away and stepped down into the canoe as Hapiti handed down her single valise. The canoe pushed away immediately, and was lost in the dark. There was nothing to wave at, and Peter liked it better that way, but still he stared back over the stern into the night as the Chris-craft groped blindly for the channel again.
There was a hollow feeling under his ribs, as though part of himself was missing; he tried to fill it with a memory of Magda that had amused him because it epitomized for him her quick and pragmatic mind.
‘– When the news of your death hits the market, the bottom is going to drop out of Altmann stock.’ He had realized this halfway through their final discussion that morning. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ He was troubled by the complication.
‘I had,’ she smiled serenely. ‘I estimate it will lose a hundred francs a share within the first week after the news breaks.’
‘Doesn’t that worry you?’
‘Not really.’ She gave that sudden wicked grin. ‘I telexed a buying order to Zurich this morning. I expect to show a profit of not less than a hundred million francs when the stock bounces back.’ Again the mischievous flash of green eyes. ‘I do have to be recompensed for all this inconvenience, tu ne penses pas?’
And although he still smiled at the memory, the hollow place remained there inside him.
Pierre flew the Tahitian police out to Les Neuf Poissons in the Tri-Islander, and there followed two days of questions and statements. Nearly every member of the community wished to make a statement to the police, there had seldom been such entertainment and excitement available on the islands.
Nearly all of the statements were glowing eulogies to ‘La Baronne’ delivered to the accompaniment of lamentation and weeping. Only Hapiti had first-hand information and he made the most of this position of importance, embroidering and gilding the tale. He was even able to give a positive identification of the shark as a ‘Dead White’ – The English name startled Peter until he remembered that the movie Jaws was in the island’s cassette video library and was undoubtedly the source of the big boatman’s inspiration. Hapiti went on to describe its fangs as long and sharp as cane knives, and to give a gruesome imitation of the sound they made as they closed on ‘La Baronne’ – Peter would willingly have gagged him to prevent those flights of imagination, which were not supported by Peter’s own statement, but the police sergeant was greatly impressed and encouraged Hapiti to further acts of creation with cries of astonishment.
On the last evening there was a funeral feast on the beach for Magda. It was a moving ritual, and Peter found himself curiously affected when the women of the island, swaying and wailing at the water’s edge, cast wreaths of frangipani blooms onto the tide to be carried out beyond the reef.
Peter flew back to Tahiti-Faaa with the police the following morning, and they stayed with him, flanking him discreetly, on the drive to the headquarters of gendarmerie in the town. However, his interview with the Chief of Police was brief and courteous – clearly Magda had been there before him – and if there was no actual exchange of winks and nudges, the commissioner’s handshake of farewell was firm and friendly.
‘Any friend of La Baronne is a friend here.’ And he used the present tense, then sent Peter back to the airport in an official car.
The UTA flight landed in California through that sulphurous eye-stinging layer of yellow air trapped between sea and mountains. Peter did not leave the airport, but after he had shaved and changed his shirt in the men’s room he found a copy of the Wall Street Journal in the first-class Pan-Am Clipper lounge. It was dated the previous day, and the report of Magda Altmann’s death was on Page Three. It was a full column, and Peter was surprised by the depth of the Altmann Industries involvement in the American financial scene. The complex of holdings was listed, followed by a résumé of Baron Aaron Altmann’s career and that of his widow. The cause of death as given by the Tahitian police was ‘Shark Attack’ while scuba diving in the company of a friend—General Peter Stride – Peter was grimly satisfied that his name was mentioned. Caliph would read it, wherever he was, and draw the appropriate conclusion. Peter could expect something to happen now; he was not quite sure what, but he knew that he was being drawn closer to the centre like a fragment of iron to the magnet.
He managed to sleep for an hour, in one of the big armchairs, before the hostess roused him for the Pan-Am Polar flight to London’s Heathrow.
He called Pat Stride, his sister-in-law, from Heathrow Airport. She was unaffectedly delighted to hear his voice.
‘– Steven is in Spain, but I am expecting him home tomorrow before lunch, that is if his meetings go the way he wants them. They want to build a thirty-six-hole golf course at San Istaban—’ Steven’s companies owned a complex of tourist hotels on the Spanish coast‘– and Steven had to go through the motions with the Spanish authorities. But, why don’t you come down to Abbots Yew tonight? Alex and Priscilla are here, and there will be an amusing house party for the weekend—’ He could hear the sudden calculating tone in Pat’s voice as she began instinctively to run through the shortlist of potential mates for Peter.
After he had accepted and hung up, he dialled the Cambridge number and was relieved that Cynthia’s husband, George Barrow, answered.
Give me a Bolshevik intellectual over a neurotic ex-wife any day, he thought as he greeted Melissa-Jane’s stepfather warmly. Cynthia was at a meeting of the Faculty Wives Association, and Melissa-Jane was auditioning for a part in a production of Gilbert and Sullivan by the local drama society.
‘How is she?’ Peter wanted to know.
‘I think she is well over it now, Peter. The hand is completely healed. She seems to have settled down—’ They spoke for a few minutes more, then ran out of conversation The two women were all they had in common.
‘Give Melissa-Jane my very best love,’ Peter told him, and picked up a copy of The Financial Times from a news-stand on his way to the Avis desk. He hired a compact and while waiting for it to be delivered he searched swiftly through the newspaper for mention of Magda Altmann. It was on an inside page, clearly a follow-up article to a previous report of her death. There had been a severe reaction on the London and European stock exchanges – the hundred-franc drop in Altmann stock that Magda had anticipated had already been exceeded on the Bourse – and again there was a brief mention of his own name in a repetition of the circumstances of her death. He was satisfied with the publicity, and with Magda’s judgement in buying back her own stock. Indeed it all seemed to be going a little too smoothly. He became aware of the fateful prickle of apprehension down his spine, his own personal barometer of impending danger.
As always Abbots Yew was like coming home, and Pat met him on the gravel of the front drive, kissed him with sisterly affection and linked her arm through his to lead him into the gracious old house.
‘Steven will be delighted,’ she promised him. ‘I expect he will telephone this evening. He always does when he is away.’
There was a buff cable envelope propped on the bedside table of the guest room overlooking the stables that was always reserved for Peter. The message originated at Ben-Gurion Airport, Tel Aviv, and was a single word – the code he had arranged with Magda to let him know that she arrived safely and without complication. The message gave him a sharp pang of wanting, and he lay in a deep hot bath and thought about her, remembering small details of conversation and shared experience that suddenly were of inflated value.
While he towelled himself he regarded his image in the steamed mirror with a critical eye. He was lean and hard and burned dark as a de
sert Arab by the Pacific sun. He watched the play of muscle under the tanned skin as he moved, and he knew that he was as fit and as mentally prepared for action as he had ever been, glad that Magda was safely beyond the reach of Caliph’s talons so that he could concentrate all his energies on what his instincts told him must be the final stage of the hunt.
He went through to his bedroom with the towel around his waist and stretched out on the bed to wait for the cocktail hour in Pat Stride’s rigidly run household.
He wondered what made him so certain that this was the lead which would carry him to Caliph, it seemed so slim a chance and yet the certainty was like a steel thread, and the steel was in his heart.
That made him pause. Once again he went carefully over the changes which had taken place within him since his first exposure to Caliph’s malignant influence; the fatal miasma of corruption that seemed to spread around Caliph like the poisonous mists from some evil swamp seemed to have engulfed Peter entirely.
He thought again of his execution of the blonde girl at Johannesburg what seemed like a thousand years before, but with mild surprise realized was months not years ago.
He thought of how he had been prepared to kill both Kingston Parker and Magda Altmann – and realized that contact with violence was brutalizing, capable of eroding the principles and convictions which he had believed inviolate after almost forty years of having lived with them.
If this was so, then after Caliph – if he succeeded in destroying him – what was there after Caliph? Would he ever be the same man again? Had he advanced too far beyond the frontiers of social behaviour and conscience? Would he ever go back? he wondered. Then he thought about Magda Altmann and realized she was his hope for the future, after Caliph there would be Magda.
These doubts were weakening, he told himself. There must be no distractions now, for once again he was in the arena with the adversary. No distraction, no doubts – only total concentration on the conflict ahead.
He stood up from the bed and began to dress.
Steven was delighted to have Peter at Abbots Yew again, as Pat had predicted.
He also was tanned from the short stay in Spain, but he had again put on weight, only a few pounds, but it would soon be a serious problem, good food and drink were two of the occupational hazards of success: the most evident but not the most dangerous temptations that face a man who has money enough to buy whatever idly engages his fancy.
Peter watched him covertly during the lunch, studying the handsome head which was so very much like his own, the same broad brow and straight aristocratic nose, and yet was so different in small but significant details, and it was not only Steven’s thick dark moustache.
All right, it’s easy to be wise afterwards, Peter told himself, as he watched his twin brother. Seeing again the little marks, which only now seemed to have meaning. The narrower set of eyes, slightly too close together, so that even when he laughed that deep bluff guffaw of his they seemed still to retain a cold cruel light, the mouth that even in laughter was still too hard, too determined, the mouth of a man who would brook no check to his ambitions, no thwarting of his desires. Or am I imagining it now? Peter wondered. It was so easy to see what you looked for expectantly.
The conversation at lunch dwelt almost exclusively on the prospects for the flat-racing season which had opened at Doncaster the previous weekend, and Peter joined it knowledgeably; but as he chatted he was casting back along the years, to the incidents that might have troubled him more if he had not immediately submerged them under an instinctive and unquestioning loyalty to his twin brother.
There was Sandhurst when Steven had been sent down, and Peter had known unquestioningly that it was unjust. No Stride was capable of what Steven had been accused of, and he had not even had to discuss it with his brother. He had affirmed his loyalty with a handshake and a few embarrassed muttered words.
‘Thank you, Peter. I’ll never forget that,’ Steven had told him fervently, meeting Peter’s gaze with steady clear eye.
Since then Steven’s rise had been meteoric through the post-war years in which it seemed almost impossible for even the most able man to amass a great fortune, a man had to have special talents and take terrible risks to achieve what Steven had.
Now sitting at his brother’s board, eating roast saddle of lamb and the first crisp white asparagus shoots of the season flown in from the Continent, Peter was at last covering forbidden ground, examining loyalties which until then had been unquestioned. Yet they were straws scattered by the winds of time, possibly without significance. Peter transferred his thoughts to the present.
‘Stride,’ Magda’s control at Mossad in Tel-Aviv had said. Just the two names: ‘Cactus Flower’ and ‘Stride’. That was fact and not conjecture.
Down the length of the luncheon table Sir Steven Stride caught his brother’s eye.
‘Wine with you, my dear fellow.’ Steven lifted the glass of claret in the old salute..
‘Enchanted, I’m sure.’ Peter gave the correct reply, a little ritual between them, a hangover from Sandhurst days, and Peter was surprised at the depth of his regret. Perhaps Caliph has not yet succeeded in corrupting me entirely, Peter thought, as he drank the toast.
After lunch there was another of their brotherly rituals. Steven signalled it with a jerk of the head and Peter nodded agreement. Peter’s old army duffle coat was in the cupboard below the back staircase with his Wellingtons, and he and Steven changed into rough clothing sitting side by side on the monk’s bench in the rear entrance hall as they had so often before.
Then Steven went through into the gunroom, took down a Purdey Royal shotgun from the rack, and thrust a handful of cartridges in his coat pocket.
‘Damned vixen has a litter of cubs somewhere in the bottoms, playing merry hell with the pheasant chicks—’ he explained as Peter asked a silent question. ‘It goes against the grain a bit to shoot a fox but I must put a stop to her – haven’ t had a chance at her yet—’ and he led the way out of the back door through the orchard towards the stream.
It was almost a formal beating of the bounds, the leisurely circuit of the estate boundaries that the two brothers always made on Peter’s first day at Abbots Yew, another old comfortable tradition which allowed them time to have each other’s news and reaffirm the bond between them
They sauntered along the riverbank, side by side, moving into single file with Steven leading when the path narrowed and turned away from the stream and went up through the woods.
Steven was elated by the success of his visit to Spain, and he boasted of his achievements in obtaining another parcel of prime seafront property on which to build the new golf course and to extend the hotel by another five hundred rooms.
‘Now’s the time to buy. Mark my words, Peter – we are on the verge of another explosion.’
The cut-back in oil price is going to help, I’d expect,’ Peter agreed.
‘That’s not the half of it, old boy.’ Steven turned to glance back over his shoulder and he winked knowingly at Peter. ‘You can expect another five per cent cut in six months, take my word on it. The Arabs and the Shah have come to their senses.’ Steven went on swiftly, picking out those types of industry which would benefit most dramatically from the reduction in crude prices, then selecting the leading companies in those sectors. ‘– If you have a few pounds lying idle, that’s where to put it.’ Steven’s whole personality seemed to change when he spoke like this of power and great wealth. Then he came out from behind the façade of the English country squire which he was usually at such pains to cultivate; the glitter in his eyes was now undisguised and his bushy moustache bristled like the whiskers of some big dangerous predator.
He was still talking quickly and persuasively as they left the woods and began to cross the open fields towards the ruins of the Roman camp on the crest of the low hills.
‘– These people have still to be told what to do, you know. Those damned shop stewards up in Westminster may have thrown t
he Empire away, but we still have our responsibilities.’ Steven changed the Purdey shotgun from one arm to the other, carrying it in the crook of the arm, the gun broken open and the shining brass caps of the Eley Kynoch cartridges showing in the breeches. ‘– Government only by those fit to govern.’ Steven enlarged on that for a few minutes.
Then suddenly Steven fell silent, almost as though he had suddenly decided that he had spoken too much, even to somebody as trusted as his own younger twin. Peter was silent also, trudging up the curve of the hill with his boots squelching in the soft damp earth. There was something completely unreal about the moment, walking over well-remembered ground in the beautiful mellow sunlight of an English spring afternoon with a man he had known from the day of his birth – and yet perhaps had never known at all.
It was not the first time he had heard Steven talk like this, and yet perhaps it was the first time he had ever listened. He shivered and Steven glanced at him.
‘Cold?’
‘Goose walked over my grave,’ Peter explained, and Steven nodded as they clambered up the shallow earth bank that marked the perimeter of the Roman camp.
They stood on the lip under the branches of a lovely copper beech, resplendent in its new spring growth of russet.
Steven was breathing hard from the pull up the hill, that extra weight was already beginning to tell. There was a spot of high unhealthy colour in each cheek, and little blisters of sweat speckled his chin.
He closed the breech of the shotgun with a metallic clash, and leaned the weapon against the trunk of the copper beech as he struggled to regain his breath.
Peter moved across casually and propped his shoulder against the copper beech, but his thumbs were hooked into the lapels of the duffle coat, not thrust into pockets, and he was still in balance, weight slightly forward on the balls of his feet. Although he seemed to be entirely relaxed and at rest he was in fact coiled like a spring, poised on the brink of violent action – and the shotgun was within easy reach of his right hand.