The Knowledge: A Richard Jury Mystery (Richard Jury Mysteries)

by Martha Grimes

  Rupert, realizing he was a total failure at Razorbite, naturally came to hate the game and especially to hate its inventor, and he grassed on him to the headmaster. Mr. Nigby, although he found the whole idea of such a game complete nonsense, was always a fair man, and felt he had at least to call Trueblood in and hear his side of this story.

  Trueblood sat in the headmaster’s study, shaking his head sadly, looking at Rupert. He said, not unkindly, “Rupert, remember the dream you told me about? The one involving this razor-blade game?”

  “That dream? Yeah. Your game. Razorbite.” Rupert’s narrowed eyes were mere slits in his pudgy face.

  “You said,” and here Trueblood repeated the dream in detail. “So what seems to be happening here is that you’re failing to separate the real from the imaginary. You had this dream and now you think—”

  “Wait a bloody minute!” yelled Rupert.

  Mr. Nigby told the boy to watch his language.

  “I only had that dream because you’d been playing this game. You and all the others!”

  Trueblood shrugged. “No, Rupert. That didn’t happen. And remember you told me how, when you were little, you’d taken your father’s razor blades and—”

  Rupert shot out of his chair and was yelling again that Trueblood was turning everything around and using it against him. The shouts were accompanied now by tears of frustration. Trueblood sat there, reflecting on the stupidity of Rupert Thorne: how did this most unpopular of boys at St. Eg’s think he could possibly put it over on the Master of Razorbite, one of the most popular, most inventive students at St. Eglantine’s, and easily the most manipulative?

  Mr. Nigby had heard enough and led Rupert out of the room. He then called the school nurse and told her to see to the boy. After he walked Marshall Trueblood out, an arm flung about the boy’s shoulders, and with apologies that they all had to undergo this, the headmaster called Rupert’s parents and told them that their son was given to nightmares that were leading to a state of nervous collapse and that they should come to the school as soon as they could manage it.

  Trueblood suspended Razorbite for the remainder of the school year, which wasn’t a terrible sacrifice as the year had only three weeks to go. But it was just as well Rupert Thorne’s parents were going to remove him from St. Eg’s, judging by the outraged reactions of those for whom Razorbite had become nearly their lifeblood.

  Literally, in some instances.

  When Mr. Nigby was made aware of the gauze-bound wrists of two students, he did not connect this with Rupert Thorne’s ridiculous story. Instead, the parents were called into his office, where he made the sad announcement that their sons had attempted suicide and something must be done. It was. They were sent down.

  But even with all of this hectic sting of masters, mums and dads, neither boy ratted out Razorbite or its inventor. They gave very weak reasons for their wrist wounds, the same reasons all of the boys had been giving all along for nicks and cuts: accidents with broken bottles, falls on rough stone paths. The bottles were produced, the stones pointed out. Marshall Trueblood had one hard-and-fast rule for any boy who wanted to play the game: if he got hurt in the process, he would have to do something to account for his wounds. The best plan was a fistfight between any two so wounded, and a serious fistfight that would draw blood. For some time this served to explain the bloodletting, although several boys got sent down for fighting in the process.

  It was astonishing how much punishment the boys would endure for the sake of this game. All of them wanted to be Master of Razorbite. It was a cult; it was a religion; nothing could vie with it.

  Except time.

  Eventually, when he finished at St. Eglantine’s, Marshall Trueblood, who was never discovered as the inventor of Razorbite, packed two bags and went off to a Church of England high school.

  The larger bag held clothes and books; the smaller one held razor blades.

  “Good God, you’re fast,” said Leonard Zane, lighting one of his thin cigars. “We can forgo the week’s trial period. If you want the job, it’s yours.”

  This decision was no surprise to Marshall Trueblood, although he pretended a pleased befuddlement: “Why … good. Well … thank you, Mr. Zane.”

  “Call me Leo.” Leonard Zane smiled.

  Ardry End, Northamptonshire

  Nov. 4, Monday evening

  17

  In preparation for his trip, Melrose had visited the Long Piddleton library and given Miss Twinney, the librarian, the task of hunting up the best books on Kenya.

  This she did, loading him with travel guides (Lonely Planet, Fodor, Eyewitness), collections of photographs (National Geographic, Heritage), essays (Peter Matthiessen, Paul Theroux) and history that leaned heavily on the rape of the Congo.

  “And one or two on Botswana, Tanzania and South Africa,” said Miss Twinney. “For good measure. In case you take a side trip.” Miss Twinney smiled broadly.

  Side trip. Melrose loved that.

  He liked the photographs, hated the guides, had mixed feelings about the essays, was appalled by the history. What a battleground! What a bloodbath! Africans and British, Africans and Germans, British and Germans. German guerrilla fighting, dragging the Second World War through the length and breadth of East Africa. What a disgusting takeover was British colonialism.

  Melrose had always had a lingering sense of guilt over jettisoning his titles. His father, the seventh earl of Caverness, had been a decent man who had worn his aristocratic heritage well. But now, having read this bloody chapter of British history, Melrose was happy to be joined no longer to the British peerage. Although that was a shallow estimate of individual responsibility, wasn’t it?

  That evening, after his second glass of Talisker, he had just about decided to reverse his decision (no matter that this would bring Trueblood in for even greater stardom) and instruct Ruthven to cancel the car to Heathrow. But then he realized he’d been reading the wrong stuff, went to his bookshelves and pulled down Hemingway.

  With his fresh whisky, he started in on “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” Finished that with annoyance (what a pack of lies!) and opened up Green Hills of Africa. Better, but still Hemingway swaggering all over the veldt and Melrose wondering how someone who could write like that could, at the same time, posture like that.

  Once again, he thought of calling Jury and begging off. Africa and he had nothing in common.

  But then the image of Marshall Trueblood, who had just been to London that morning, floated before his eyes: Trueblood shooting his cuffs, flicking down cards; Trueblood in his tux and crisp white shirt, calling out, “Bets, please” in that smug tone; Trueblood in that luxury casino.

  He went to the bookshelves again and pulled down Joseph Conrad.

  Another hour and yet another whisky later, and with Martha delaying dinner yet again, Melrose thought he had it. For this whole question of individual responsibility was what lay between Marlow and Kurtz, wasn’t it?

  He was thinking about this when the phone rang. He did not wait for Ruthven to answer, as the extension was at his elbow. He picked it up.

  It was Richard Jury. “You packed?”

  Instead of answering that idle question, Melrose launched into his attempt to assess responsibility for the corruption of Africa by Europeans. He put it to Jury in this hypothetical way: If a fraction of Group A mistreats Group B—read: slave trade, government, British colonialism, the East India Company, et cetera et cetera—then does each individual in Group A bear responsibility? Even though not directly connected to it? Even after all of this time?

  “So what this boils down to,” said Jury, “is: do you have any personal responsibility for, say, Kenya?”

  “Exactly.”

  Jury paused, then said, “You packed?”

  Melrose snapped shut Heart of Darkness, sure he was the man for the job. Although he hardly considered himself a Marlow (well, actually, that’s pretty much who he did consider himself), he would do what little he could (actuall
y thinking he could do a lot) to wipe out the bloody footprint Britain had planted if not all over Africa, at least over a little part of Kenya, thereby restoring some of Britain’s good name.

  He wondered if perhaps he wasn’t exaggerating this notion of personal responsibility. He would get another opinion and decided to call the person who was least likely to question personal responsibility: Diane Demorney. Diane was never a font of knowledge, but she always knew one arcane fact about virtually any subject, such as the least strenuous path to Lourdes, so that the one bit of knowledge was the subject’s black hole, with a gravitational pull that sucked all of the other bits into it.

  Everyone outside the Jack and Hammer’s circle thought Diane was devastatingly smart—that is, everyone who hadn’t twigged that Diane knew only this single fact, but nothing else, about her subject.

  She was home. So was her cocktail shaker. Melrose briefly summarized what he’d been reading about British colonialism and asked, “Have you ever heard of anything more degenerate?”

  There was a brief pause as she (Melrose pictured this) plugged her long cigarette holder with a cigarette. “Scorpion vodka?” she said.

  He didn’t think he wanted to know what the hell that was and said good-bye.

  He sat staring into the fire’s embers, picturing the Congo and reassessing his position. Oh, go ahead: let Marshall Trueblood shoot his cuffs and fan his cards and look like he’d schooled every croupier from here to Monte Carlo. What was far more important was for some Briton to reestablish a sense of decency, some kind of British refinement. Into this landscape of self-satisfaction, self-delusion and self-promotion (formerly peopled only by Hemingway), Ruthven came to ask him if he was ready for dinner yet, and Melrose said not quite.

  Ruthven cleared his throat. “The pheasant is drying up, m’lord.”

  Melrose squinched his eyes shut. His imagination had him plowing down the Congo, accompanied by a native entourage, a school of lungfish and extreme moral rectitude, when the truth was that his real life was the pheasant drying up. “Just give me another fifteen minutes, Ruthven, to ponder the British Empire, will you?”

  “That should be ample time, m’lord.” Ruthven left.

  Melrose winced. He lived in a world of dried-up pheasant and one-liners. “You packed?” “Scorpion vodka?” “Ample time.”

  In the dark polish of a dining room that made Melrose think of the dark continent, Ruthven poured a dry chardonnay and served a chilled cucumber soup.

  Melrose asked him if he’d finished the packing.

  “Certainly, sir. But not much, as I imagine you’ll want only the essentials.”

  Melrose was not sure what the essentials were. “Do I have any khaki stuff? Isn’t that what everyone wears?”

  “You do, and I have packed it. You wouldn’t want to be burdened with too many bags and trunks on such a long journey.”

  Soup tureen in hand, Ruthven was heading toward the swinging door into the kitchen, when he added, “A long journey, my lord, but I’m sure a worthwhile one, and one which you will enjoy enormously. Well, let’s say, except for …” Here, the door that had swung open at the start of this assessment now swung shut and cut off the end of it.

  Except for …?

  Too late, Melrose called out, “Except for what?”

  HEART OF DIMNESS

  Nairobi, Kenya

  Nov. 5, Tuesday night

  18

  Except for the Attaboys.

  This was the family that Melrose was herded together with the following evening in the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport by the driver for Mbosi Luxury Tented Camp. The Attaboy family consisted of Mitchell (father), Mildred (mother), Mona (fourteen-year-old daughter), Little Mitchell (eight-year-old son) and eighty-one-year-old Etta. Melrose thought that if “Attaboy” wasn’t a name for the ages, “Etta Attaboy” should do it.

  As they made their way through the airport, Melrose had to listen to Mildred Attaboy listing the virtues and accomplishments of Little Mitchell, the “little” always appended to the name, perhaps to distinguish him from the father.

  Little Mitchell was doing nothing but making the lives of those he passed miserable: he wrestled a frozen yogurt cone away from a four-year-old, whereupon Mildred called out, “Little Mitchell! Now behave!” in such a singsong voice that no child would have considered behaving. Then, as he passed the Nairobi version of a newsagent, he swept several candy bars and peanut packets off the shelf. “Little Mitchell! Come away from there!” Which he did, Mars bars and Smarties sprouting from his pockets.

  Melrose had to hand it to Etta, the only one who appeared to think the ruin left in the wake of her grandson’s passing should be rebuilt. Immediately, Etta went to the little girl and gave her money for another cone; she did the same thing to the newsagent’s cashier, who was wearing a look of fixed horror.

  Etta Attaboy seemed to have a few behavior markers the other Attaboys absolutely lacked. Except for Etta, the Attaboys, who were from Hampshire, struck Melrose as models for the notion of the corrupt European, minus the erudition and cunning of, say, Gilbert Osmond. Little Mitchell was the embryonic corrupt European. Attaboyism in embryo. Melrose did not want to sic the Nairobi police on Little Mitchell; he did not want to sic the first hungry cheetah flinging itself across their path on Little Mitchell; no, the one he wanted to sic on Little Mitchell was Henry James. Henry James would make mincemeat of Little Mitchell quicker than a lion could bring down an exhausted impala.

  They had all been plucked from the Nairobi airport by a gangly young Kenyan in a khaki outfit and a red cap emblazoned with the name of their luxury tented accommodation. He was the driver of the vehicle that was to transport Melrose and the Attaboys to the Mbosi Camp on the outskirts of Nairobi.

  As they’d strolled through the airport or squeezed together in the car, Melrose had addressed the mother and father as Attaboy. After he’d pronounced it this way three times, Mildred Attaboy corrected him, “At-ta-bois, as if spelled ‘b-o-i-s’—you know, French—and pronounced ‘Atta-bwa.’” She repeated this twice more in case he hadn’t got it.

  Melrose got it, but he wasn’t keeping it. (He especially liked the plural, Attaboys.) He decided if Mildred was going to go the “Attabois” route, he would go the Lord Ardry one. They were terribly impressed.

  “We go to national park,” said the driver, who introduced himself as Badru. “About twenty-five kilometers.”

  “Are there animals?” said Mildred Attaboy.

  “It is national park, madam,” said Badru. “Of course. Except for elephant, you can see the Big Five.”

  “No elephants? Why aren’t there elephants?” demanded Little Mitchell, in a tone that said seeing an elephant was his God-given right.

  “Transplanted,” said Badru cryptically.

  “You mean,” said Mildred, again in a worrisome way, “there will be big animals right around us?”

  Melrose noticed a little smile that suggested Badru would have liked to tell her the Big Four would surround the vehicle and pose a problem to them getting out that night.

  But he merely told them that Nairobi was the only capital city in the world that had a national park as one of its borders. They could see, if they looked behind them, the tall buildings of the city.

  Melrose did not know what he had expected in a luxury safari camp, but he had not expected a Trust House Forte. Mbosi Lodge, the main building, appeared to have been built to this busy motorway-stop’s specifications. It was much that size and shape and had masses of lit-up windows the weary traveler could spot from the M1 to the M40.

  Except that the car park at Mbosi Lodge was considerably smaller than those cresting the motorway rises, nor did Forte Welcome Break caterers have zebras gnawing their grass. A family of zebras were uprooting what they could at the edge of the little car park.

  The new guests were greeted the moment they walked through the door by the Van der Moots, whose name didn’t sound English but whose accent did. These were T
rish and Ernest, she a bit overdressed in gray silk and sequined jacket; he in khakis and a leopard-printed neckerchief. Polished mahogany-bright boots, of course. Melrose pegged Ernest as one who wanted to live up to his given name.

  The room on the left of the front door was comfortably furnished with wicker and wood and easy chairs and another dozen guests. There was a large drinks table supporting a small forest of bottles, and the guests who sat and stood around in uncertain configurations were making the most of it.

  The room on the right was the dining room, and Melrose saw, with dread, one long table in the middle of it, a table that looked as if it stretched all the way to Nairobi’s center.

  Trish Van der Moot told them that dinner had been delayed to await their arrival, and as it was now eight thirty they would have just enough time to have a drink or go to their tents and freshen up.

  Melrose noted the slight emphasis on the “or.”

  “I expect I’ll do both,” said Etta, to be contrary.

  Melrose applauded this attitude, for weren’t they all paying an arm and a leg for the right to be contrary?

  Trish, not wanting to comply, but having to, said, “Well, of course you may do that.”

  Standing near the dining-room table and by another long table on which were a suite of serving dishes and tureens were several attendants—waiters?—dressed like Maasai warriors, or what Melrose remembered of the Maasai from the National Geographic photos he’d seen. Large red scarves were passed over their shoulders and under the opposite arms and tied off. They wore white balloon-sleeved shirts and small red hats that resembled fezzes. They were tall and arrow-straight, their expressions noncommittal.

  Another one of these warriors stood by Melrose’s group, prepared to quickstep the Attaboys (or at least Etta) to their tent.