‘I stayed till the Monday, then drove her into town. She was really most distressed and when we arrived, I brought her here, and gave her a cup of tea. There were muffins too, I remember, but she didn’t eat any.’
He looked sadly at his unsteady column.
‘Finally she left, saying she was going to go round to your town house in the hope of finding Billy there and talking things over with him. Naturally I didn’t think that was a very good idea. There was no way of knowing how Billy’s volatile mind would react to this proposed confession. I was worried about Angelica too. The dear girl hadn’t eaten anything, but she had drunk a great deal of brandy. Just like you. I don’t suppose you would fancy a muffin?’
I shook my head.
‘Just say if you change your mind,’ he said. ‘Well, I was in a bit of a panic, I must admit. As soon as she left, I rang your house. It seemed to me that if Billy was there, I had to make an effort to get him out of the way and gain time. To my relief Kim answered the phone. I’d better explain about Kim. I knew about her though she didn’t know about me. She’d been one of hundreds of ‘plants’ the North Koreans fed into the refugee camps in ‘52 and ‘53. Most got detected, but Kim, even though she was sixteen or so at the time, could pass for ten or eleven and they didn’t vet children so thoroughly. It was just sheer chance that Billy picked her up as part of his conspicuous charity drive. She really belonged to the Chinese, of course, but they had no proper control set-up in England and the KGB took her over. Soviet-Sino relations were much happier in those days, you’ll recall.’
‘Spare me the political history,’ I grated. ‘What happened?’
He shook his head.
‘All I can tell you is what I did. I identified myself to Kim. There’s a code. I used it. She knew me as a friend of the family, of course. She called me Uncle Percy, just like you. So it must have come as a shock to her but she took it in her stride. I told her quickly it was essential that Angelica didn’t have any contact with Billy that night. I was really just hoping that in the morning after a good night’s sleep with the brandy out of her system your mother might be more amenable.
‘Kim told me they were going to Paris. That gave me an idea. When Billy came on the line I told him I’d got a whisper that Special Branch were coming round to see him that evening. It was true that he was under investigation. I’d organized it myself. And the leaks to the Tory press to keep up the cries of outrage. And the leaks to the radical protest to keep up the cries of witch-hunt! It was all going rather well.’
There was a self-congratulatory tone in his voice which filled me with fury, but I held it in. Action must wait till words were finished.
‘He thanked me, said he was on his way to Paris and didn’t fancy being held up, so he’d shoot off toot-sweet. I rang off. Just to be on the safe side with my story, I then contacted the Department and arranged for an interview team to go round to the house an hour later.
‘And that was all I did, Lem. I swear it. I don’t know what happened there or who was responsible. All I can guess is that Kim contacted her own control and got instructions. Or perhaps she acted off her own bat. Or perhaps there was simply an accident. I just don’t know!
‘But when I found out what had happened, though I was personally devastated, I had to take advantage of it, you see. I arranged for Billy to be given the news in Paris and put under cover. Moscow were quite happy with they way things had fallen out. A straightforward defection would have been preferable, but this did almost as well. So they got him and they fed him with some story to keep him happy. He always had the capacity to arrange things around him for his greatest happiness, you must recall that.
‘It’s a capacity I lack, Lem. I don’t think I’ve been truly happy from that day to this. Angelica was a true, a dear friend. Perhaps no one else has ever been so close to me. And now, certainly, no one else ever will.’
He sat there with the last muffin on his fork and tears in his eyes. At least I assumed it was the last muffin. It would take the pile up to twelve and surely no one bought more than a dozen muffins at a time? Or did bakers still give their own larger dozen in the interest of consumer satisfaction?
With such banalities does the human heart avoid being overloaded.
Percy turned his damp eyes towards me and said, ‘Lem, can you find it in yourself to forgive an old man? I’ve had to make harsh decisions. I’ve had to tread a narrow path between my ideals and my affections. It hasn’t been easy. Sometimes I may have been wrong. But at least believe this: never have I deliberately chosen to hurt someone I love. Never!’
It was a fine performance.
I said, ‘Never? Not even when you arranged for Quintero to con me into thinking I had cancer?’
‘The hurt wasn’t permanent,’ he argued. ‘Besides, it wasn’t my idea or my doing.’
‘You mean you didn’t make the arrangement yourself when you were so fortuitously “passing through” Margarita in the summer?’
‘Why should I have done?’ he cried indignantly. ‘If you won’t believe my fondness for you, believe facts. Billy didn’t do his disappearing trick till nearly two months later. What reason could I have had when I visited you for initiating that grisly charade?’
‘The best reason in the world,’ I said quietly. ‘You wanted me dead.’
He suddenly looked alarmed, but his voice was steady as he answered. ‘Dead? Why should I want you dead?’
‘Why should the symptoms have started so long before Pa disappeared?’ I countered. ‘That’s been puzzling me ever since I got the dates sorted out in my mind. But eventually I got the answer. You’d heard from Krylov that Pa claimed he’d smuggled a transcript of Kim’s confession to the West to be delivered on his death. But delivered to whom? You knew Pa well enough to work that one out, didn’t you? It had to be me. Who else would he trust to react properly to what it was he had to tell? So I bet you had your bloodhounds sniffing at every law firm and bank that Pa or I had ever had any dealings with. When that failed, you suddenly found yourself impelled by love and affection to drop in on your errant godson and take an avuncular interest in his well-being. I bet you went through every scrap of paper you could find in the house! Nothing—so it had to be the final solution.’
‘But why should I want you dead, Lem?’ he asked plaintively. ‘It was all a charade, the cancer. You were in no real danger!’
‘You didn’t want to risk an embarrassing investigation by poisoning me straight off,’ I said. ‘In any case, even a crook like Quintero would probably have balked at murder. No, the idea was simply to flush me out of cover so that your Communist friends in the FALN could finish me off, no questions asked. How long had they known about poor old Dario? It must have amused you, thinking of my surprise when they told me. First the good news, Mr Swift, you haven’t got cancer. Now the bad, we really are going to kill you!’
‘But why, Lem? Why should I want this?’ he protested once more.
‘Because if I died immediately after Pa’s death, which seemed imminent, any mysterious package would pass into my estate, and you are my executor. A not unfitting term, Uncle Percy. More than that, Angelica is my sole heir and during her minority, you would have been her appointed guardian and trustee. You’d have had every chance in the world of getting your hands on that package, wouldn’t you?
‘But before I did my disappearing act, Pa performed his and the case was altered. With him loose, it was pointless killing me. In fact your clever little mind saw there might be an advantage in letting me loose in Rome where you believed Pa was hiding. If I flushed him out, you’d get two birds with one stone. If Krylov and the Brigadier got him first, then I was readily disposable and you were back to plan one. And even if by some miscalculation, the package was delivered directly to Angelica, well, a sixteen-year-old girl wouldn’t put up much resistance, would she?’
‘Lem, this is utterly outrageous!’ he protested, all red and hurt. ‘How can you imagine I would ever let the slightest ha
rm come to Angie?’
‘Why not?’ I enquired. ‘After all, you murdered her grandmother, didn’t you?’
I said it quietly. If I’d had any doubts about the truth of the accusation, they disappeared in that briefest of moments when guilt started up on his face before vanishing beneath the cosmetic of shock and indignation.
‘What? This is too much. Lem, you cannot believe such a thing! I had no idea … I was prostrate with grief when I heard the news. Prostrate. If this mysterious package should ever turn up, I’m certain not even the fevered imagination of that Korean whore could devise such a foul slander!’
‘Bravo,’ I applauded mildly. ‘And you’re quite right. She doesn’t. Oh yes, Uncle Percy, the package has turned up. It was with my sister, Teresa, all the time. It must have been within a few yards of Krylov when he was working on her fingernails, but he never asked. All that Kim told my father on her deathbed was that she never saw Mama that night. But she let two men in at the back door and they were carrying what looked like a roll of carpeting. They told her what to say and she left for the airport. But my father knew what it meant, Percy, just as I know. He might still have believed you just gave the orders, but not me. I know now what you’re capable of. I’ve no doubt at all that you killed Mama yourself, right here in this snug, warm, little apartment. Perhaps she was lying here awaiting collection when I phoned that night. Right here in front of the fire, to delay rigor mortis!’
Percy gave a little birdlike twitter of fear, or perhaps simply distaste. With trembling fingers he removed the twelfth muffin from the toasting-fork and placed it on the perilous pile. His shaking hand went into the paper bag. A baker’s dozen after all.
‘Nothing to say, Uncle Percy?’ I mocked. ‘Oh, you knew why Pa did his escape act, didn’t you? You knew his mind wasn’t concerned with trials and press conferences. He wanted one thing only, that tireless servant of reason and worshipper of truth. He wanted to perform the most rational and truth-advancing act of his life, which was to get his fingers round your throat and squeeze the last gasp of treacherous, pusillanimous, prevaricating breath out of you. Well, he couldn’t make it. He got diverted en route. But at the end, for the first time in his life, he delegated me to do a job that was beyond him. He was drowning and his hands had been chopped off by a propeller, but he raised those bloody stumps towards me and told me his dying wish. “Kill Percy,” he said. “Kill Percy!”’
‘Lem,’ the old man cried brokenly. ‘Dear boy … how can you … I loved …’
He choked on his words. His left hand flapped ineffectively at his tear-stained cheeks. And his right hand came out of the paper bag.
But I was already launched out of my deep leather armchair and my fingers closed like a manacle round his skinny twiglike wrist. I hadn’t really believed that in this materialistic society bakers gave their inflated dozens any more.
‘Mustn’t be greedy, Uncle,’ I said. ‘Too many muffins will give you indigestion.’
Roughly I prised his fingers loose from the butt of the Smith and Wesson 61 Escort which at about twelve centimetres is just the right size for hiding in a bag of muffins. He looked up at me with his round philanthropist’s face still reluctant to contort its lineaments into the terrified acceptance of malicious intent.
Now at last he believed and with a squeal of fear he swung the toasting-fork at me, but he had only the cunning, not the speed, of the serpent whose form it took and I had no difficulty in intercepting the blow and wresting the fork from his weak grasp with my free hand.
I pressed the gun against his brow. He retreated in his chair till the leather upholstery had absorbed as much of his frame as it could. The only sounds were the gas fire and his shallow rapid breathing.
The doorbell rang.
He screamed as if the gun had made the sound and in truth I too was so startled by it that I almost pulled the trigger.
‘The US Cavalry,’ I said. ‘Or the Indians. Either way, they’ve got here too late this time.’
‘Lem, for God’s sake, you don’t know what you’re doing!’ he pleaded. ‘You mustn’t do it, for your own sake.’
‘For God’s sake? For my own sake?’ I cried, feeling my rage bubble up to boiling point. ‘Why not include for my mother’s sake? For my father’s sake?’
‘I do include them, Lem. Believe me, I do,’ he gabbled. ‘Lem, I knew your mother first. I knew her very well. Remember, I didn’t deny that we’d once been lovers. How could I harm her, Lem? How could I? Lem, listen, she was pregnant when she married your father. She didn’t realize it till too late, but she was, she was! Check their wedding date against your date of birth, you can see she was!’
I recoiled from him. I’d thought I was past shock but this was the worst yet.
‘What are you saying old man?’ I shouted.
Behind me, the door burst open. Startled, I looked round.
It was Reilly. She must have borrowed or stolen her clothes for she was wearing a man’s dress shirt, tight running shorts and floppy basketball boots. In other circumstances I’d have fallen about laughing. But Charlie Chaplin couldn’t have made me laugh just now.
‘Lem!’ she screamed.
I felt a crashing blow on the side of my head and, as I fell, a gushing of liquid over my face. I cried out in pain as it hit my eyes, then had time to feel relief as it reached my lips.
It was cognac. Percy had hit me with the crystal decanter.
Instinctively my hands went to my face, letting the gun and fork fall from my questing fingers.
I rolled over, rubbing at my eyes. I heard Percy’s voice cry, ‘Hold still,’ which was, probably, literally, the last thing I was going to do. I kept rolling but as vision returned to my left eye, I saw that he wasn’t talking to me but to Reilly. She was coming at him in a headlong rush but her overlarge boots and the clutter of furniture weren’t helping.
Percy had retrieved the Smith and Wesson. He raised it and fired. Reilly cried out and went down. The revolver swung round towards me. Now I reversed my roll, trying to keep just ahead of the smoking muzzle’s arc, but by the time I reached my starting point, it had caught up with me.
I felt something hard and metallic under my forearm. I grasped it in my left hand. And pushing myself off the floor with my right hand, hurled the serpentine toasting fork at Percy.
The twin prongs of snake’s tongue took him in the throat. He crashed back against the fire, whose hisses and pops were minimized by the awful bubbling noises coming from his mouth. The gun dropped to the carpet as he tried to grip the fork with both hands.
Then he sank down to the floor, still twisting, still turning, but with progressively less force. I lay there and watched, paralysed by emotions I did not yet dare contemplate.
Finally he was still. And from the top of the fire tumbled the tower of muffins, scattering themselves across his belly and chest.
I stood up, crying, ‘Reilly!’
To my momentary relief she pulled herself to her knees by the side of an armchair. There was blood all over the dress shirt. She looked down at Uncle Percy with the brass snake at his throat.
‘Well, little Tonto,’ she said, ‘white man speak with forked tongue.’
And slid back out of sight.
28
… the Spanish for nine …
It was early evening, my favourite time on Isla de Margarita.
I lay in my chinchorro on the verandah with a long whisky in my hand. Distantly I glimpsed my new foreman doing his dusk check of the inner perimeter fence. Inside the house I could hear Numero Ocho singing a tuneless Amerindian song as she prepared my meal. Soon the scarlet ibis would glide by towards the long lagoon. It was a blessed time, a time of peace, a time when the past had least power to pain.
I had got Reilly to hospital and stayed just long enough to have my own diagnosis confirmed, which was that the bullet had shattered her shoulder and the wound was serious but not dangerous. When interest began to be shown in me, I clasped my split h
ead and swayed on my feet. They put me in one of those treatment cubicles where the first rule in a NHS hospital is that the patient must be completely ignored for at least fifteen minutes.
When they came back, I was gone.
I returned to the hospital next day, vaguely disguised in dark glasses and a hat—not an Italian straw hat this time but a trilby. I knew that telephoning or enquiring at reception was likely to get me nowhere but an SIS cellar. All I wanted was a glimpse of Reilly to check that she was all right. All I got was a glimpse of Commander Hunnicut deep in conversation with a small grey-suited man who looked too authoritatively ordinary to be anything but Security.
Honey glimpsed me too, over the Security yo-yo’s shoulder. His eyes registered my identity. Then he yawned as if he’d had a long night and knuckled his eyeballs.
I got the message. In Honey’s book, I deserved one flicker of sympathy for what I’d been put through.
But it would only be one.
Alexander Evans was on the next flight to Dublin and thence by various routes to a joyous homecoming in Venezuela.
Well, perhaps not exactly joyous, but I stage-managed things so that an anonymous telephone call led the police to a rat-infested Caracas cellar where they discovered and rescued their currently most famous terrorist kidnap victim. There was no doubt the authorities guessed or had been tipped off that something odd was going on, but when you’ve got a grateful guest assuring the world’s press that Venezuelan police, government, and society generally are the greatest in the universe, you don’t knock it.
In Porlamar, the Chief of Police led what was a sort of civic reception, assuring me that if there was any more shooting on his island he’d make damn sure I was on the receiving end of it, then he graciously allowed me to split a couple of bottles of champagne with him.
Dr Quintero, I gathered, had during the last twenty-four hours experienced an irresistible humanitarian urge to practise his craft among the poor deprived Indians of the Gran Sabana. I had just missed him. Numero Siete had likewise disappeared, taking with her as many of my household possessions as she could pack into the set of leather suitcases she stole.
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