Black As He's Painted

by Ngaio Marsh

  ‘Mr President –’ he began.

  ‘What? Oh, nonsense, nonsense, nonsense! Balls, my dear man (as we used to say in Davidson’s).’ Davidson’s had been their house at the illustrious school they both attended. The Boomer was being too establishment for words. Alleyn noticed that he wore the old school tie and that behind him on the wall hung a framed photograph of Davidson’s with The Boomer and himself standing together in the back row. He found this oddly, even painfully, touching.

  ‘Come and sit down,’ The Boomer fussed. ‘Where, now? Over here! Sit! Sit! I couldn’t be more delighted.’

  The steel-wool mat of hair was grey now and stood up high on his head like a toque. The huge frame was richly endowed with flesh and the eyes were very slightly bloodshot but, as if in double-exposure, Alleyn saw beyond this figure that of an ebony youth eating anchovy toast by a coal fire and saying: ‘You are my friend: I have had none, here, until now.’

  ‘How well you look,’ the President was saying. ‘And how little you have changed! You smoke? No? A cigar? A pipe? Yes? Presently, then. You are lunching with us of course. They have told you?’

  ‘This is overwhelming,’ Alleyn said when he could get a word in. ‘In a minute I shall be forgetting my protocol.’

  ‘Now! Forget it now. We are alone. There is no need.’

  ‘My dear –’

  ‘“Boomer.” Say it. How many years since I heard it!’

  ‘I’m afraid I very nearly said it when I came in. My dear Boomer.’

  The sudden brilliance of a prodigal smile made its old impression. ‘That’s nice,’ said the President quietly and after rather a long silence: ‘I suppose I must ask you if this is a visit with an object. They were very non-committal at your end, you know. Just a message that you were arriving and would like to see me. Of course I was overjoyed.’

  Alleyn thought: this is going to be tricky. One word in the wrong place and I not only boob my mission but very likely destroy a friendship and even set up a politically damaging mistrust. He said –

  ‘I’ve come to ask you for something and I wish I hadn’t got to bother you with it. I won’t pretend that my chief didn’t know of our past friendship – to me a most valued one. I won’t pretend that he didn’t imagine this friendship might have some influence. Of course he did. But it’s because I think his request is reasonable and because I am very greatly concerned for your safety, that I didn’t jib at coming.’

  He had to wait a long time for the reaction. It was as if a blind had been pulled down. For the first time, seeing the slackened jaw and now the hooded, lacklustre eyes he thought, specifically: ‘I am speaking to a Negro.’

  ‘Ah!’ said the President at last, ‘I had forgotten. You are a policeman.’

  ‘They say, don’t they, if you want to keep a friend, never lend him money. I don’t believe a word of it, but if you change the last four words into “never use your friendship to further your business” I wouldn’t quarrel with it. But I’m not doing exactly that. This is more complicated. My end object, believe it or not, sir, is the preservation of your most valuable life.’

  Another hazardous wait. Alleyn thought: ‘Yes, and that’s exactly how you used to look when you thought somebody had been rude to you. Glazed.’

  But the glaze melted and The Boomer’s nicest look – one of quiet amusement – supervened.

  ‘Now, I understand,’ he said. ‘It is your watch-dogs, your Special Branch. “Please make him see reason, this black man. Please ask him to let us disguise ourselves as waiters and pressmen and men-in-the-street and unimportant guests and be indistinguishable all over the shop.” I am right? That is the big request?’

  ‘I’m afraid, you know, they’ll do their thing in that respect, as well as they can, however difficult it’s made for them.’

  ‘Then why all this fuss-pottery? How stupid!’

  ‘They would all be much happier if you didn’t do what you did, for instance, in Martinique.’

  ‘And what did I do in Martinique?’

  ‘With the deepest respect: insisted on an extensive reduction of the safety precautions and escaped assassination by the skin of your teeth.’

  ‘I am a fatalist,’ The Boomer suddenly announced, and when Alleyn didn’t answer: ‘My dear Rory, I see I must make myself understood. Myself. What I am. My philosophy. My code. You will listen?’

  ‘Here we go,’ Alleyn thought. ‘He’s changed less than one would have thought possible.’ And with profound misgivings he said: ‘But of course, sir. With all my ears.’

  As the exposition got under way it turned out to be an extension of The Boomer’s schoolboy bloody-mindedness seasoned with, and in part justified by, his undoubted genius for winning the trust and understanding of his own people. He enlarged, with intermittent gusts of Homeric laughter, upon the machinations of the Ng’ombwanan extreme right and left who had upon several occasions made determined efforts to secure his death and were, through some mysterious process of reason, thwarted by The Boomer’s practice of exposing himself as an easy target. ‘They see,’ he explained, ‘that I am not (as we used to say at Davidson’s) standing for their tedious codswallop.’

  ‘Did we say that at Davidson’s?’

  ‘Of course. You must remember. Constantly.’

  ‘So be it.’

  ‘It was a favourite expression of your own. Yes,’ shouted The Boomer as Alleyn seemed inclined to demur, ‘always. We all picked it up from you.’

  ‘To return, if we may, to the matter in hand.’

  ‘All of us,’ The Boomer continued nostalgically. ‘You set the tone (at Davidson’s),’ and noticing perhaps a fleeting expression of horror on Alleyn’s face, he leant forward and patted his knees. ‘But I digress,’ he said accurately, ‘Shall we return to our muttons?’

  ‘Yes,’ Alleyn agreed with heartfelt relief. ‘Yes. Let’s.’

  ‘Your turn,’ The Boomer generously conceded. ‘You were saying?’

  ‘Have you thought – but of course you have – what would follow if you were knocked off?’

  ‘As you say: of course I have. To quote your favourite dramatist (you see, I remember), “the filthy clouds of heady murder, spoil and villainy” would follow,’ said The Boomer with relish. ‘To say the least of it,’ he added.

  ‘Yes. Well now: the threat doesn’t lie, as the Martinique show must have told you, solely within the boundaries of Ng’ombwana. In the Special Branch they know, and I mean they really do know, that there are lunatic fringes in London ready to go to all lengths. Some of them are composed of hangovers from certain disreputable backwaters of colonialism, others have a devouring hatred of your colour. Occasionally they are people with a real and bitter grievance that has grown monstrous in stagnation. You name it. But they’re there, in considerable numbers, organized and ready to go.’

  ‘I am not alarmed,’ said The Boomer with maddening complacency. ‘No, but I mean it. In all truth I do not experience the least sensation of physical fear.’

  ‘I don’t share your sense of immunity,’ Alleyn said. ‘In your boots I’d be in a muck sweat.’ It occurred to him that he had indeed abandoned the slightest nod in the direction of protocol. ‘But, all right. Accepting your fearlessness, may we return to the disastrous effect your death would have upon your country? “The filthy clouds of heady murder” bit. Doesn’t that thought at all predispose you to precaution?’

  ‘But, my dear fellow, you don’t understand. I shall not be killed. I know it. Within myself, I know it. Assassination is not my destiny: it is as simple as that.’

  Alleyn opened his mouth and shut it again.

  ‘As simple as that,’ The Boomer repeated. He opened his arms. ‘You see!’ he cried triumphantly.

  ‘Do you mean,’ Alleyn said very carefully, ‘that the bullet in Martinique and the spear in a remote village in Ng’ombwana and the one or two other pot-shots that have been loosed off at you from time to time were all predestined to miss?’

  ‘Not only
do I believe it but my people – my people – know it in their souls. It is one of the reasons why I am reelected unanimously to lead my country.’

  Alleyn did not ask if it was also one of his reasons why nobody, so far, had had the temerity to oppose him.

  The Boomer reached out his great shapely hand and laid it on Alleyn’s knee. ‘You were and you are my good friend,’ he said. ‘We were close at Davidson’s. We remained close while I read my law and ate my dinners at the Temple. And we are close still. But this thing we discuss now belongs to my colour and my race. My blackness. Please, do not try to understand: try only, my dear Rory, to accept.’

  To this large demand Alleyn could only reply: ‘It’s not as simple as that.’

  ‘No? But why?’

  ‘If I talk about my personal anxiety for you I’ll be saying in effect that I don’t understand and can’t accept, which is precisely what you do not want me to say. So I must fall back on my argument as an unwilling policeman with a difficult job. I’m not a member of the Special Branch but my colleagues in that Department have asked me to do what I can, which looks a bit like damn-all. I do put it to you that their job, a highly specialized and immensely difficult one, is going to be a hundred per cent more tricky if you decline to co-operate. If, for instance, on an impulse you change your route to some reception or walk out of your embassy without telling anybody and take a constitutional in Kensington Gardens all by yourself. To put it badly and brutally, if you are killed somebody in the Special Branch is going to be axed, the Department’s going to fall into general disrepute at the highest and lowest levels, and a centuries-old reputation of immunity from political assassination in England is gone for good. You see, I’m speaking not only for the police.’

  ‘The police, as servants of the people,’ The Boomer began and then, Alleyn thought, very probably blushed.

  ‘Were you going to say we ought to be kept in our place?’ he mildly asked.

  The Boomer began to walk about the room. Alleyn stood up.

  ‘You have a talent,’ The Boomer suddenly complained, ‘for putting one in the wrong. I remember it of old at Davidson’s.’

  ‘What an insufferable boy I must have been,’ Alleyn remarked. He was getting very bored with Davidson’s and really there seemed to be nothing more to say. ‘I have taken up too much of your Excellency’s time,’ he said. ‘Forgive me,’ and waited to be dismissed.

  The Boomer looked mournfully upon him. ‘But you are lunching,’ he said. ‘We have agreed. It is arranged that you shall lunch.’

  ‘That’s very kind, your Excellency, but it’s only eleven o’clock. Should I make myself scarce in the meantime?’

  To his intense dismay he saw that the bloodshot eyes had filled with tears. The Boomer said, with immense dignity: ‘You have distressed me.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I was overjoyed at your coming. And now it is all spoilt and you call me Excellency.’

  Alleyn felt the corners of his mouth twitch and at the same time was moved by a contradictory sense of compassion. This emotion, he realized, was entirely inappropriate. He reminded himself that the President of Ng’ombwana was far from being a sort of inspired innocent. He was an astute, devoted and at times ruthless dictator with, it had to be added, a warm capacity for friendship. He was also extremely observant. ‘And funny,’ Alleyn thought, controlling himself. ‘It’s quite maddening of him to be funny as well.’

  ‘Ah!’ the President suddenly roared out, ‘you are laughing! My dear Rory, you are laughing,’ and himself broke into that Homeric gale of mirth. ‘No, it is too much! Admit! It is too ridiculous! What is it all about? Nothing! Listen, I will be a good boy. I will behave. Tell your solemn friends in your Special Branch that I will not run away when they hide themselves behind inadequate floral decorations and dress themselves up as nonentities with enormous boots. There now! You are pleased? Yes?’

  ‘I’m enchanted,’ Alleyn said, ‘if you really mean it.’

  ‘But I do. I do. You shall see. I will be decorum itself. Within,’ he added, ‘the field of their naive responsibilities. Within the UK in fact. OK? Yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And no more Excellencies. No? Not,’ The Boomer added without turning a hair, ‘when we are tête-à-tête. As at present.’

  ‘As at present,’ Alleyn agreed and was instantly re-involved in an exuberance of hand-shaking.

  It was arranged that he would be driven round the city for an hour before joining the President for luncheon. The elegant ADC reappeared. When they walked back along the corridor, Alleyn looked through its french windows into the acid-green garden. It was daubed superbly with flamboyants and veiled by a concourse of fountains. Through the iridescent rise and fall of water there could be perceived, at intervals, motionless figures in uniform.

  Alleyn paused. ‘What a lovely garden,’ he said.

  ‘Oh yes?’ said the ADC, smiling. Reflected colour and reflected lights from the garden glanced across his polished charcoal jaw and cheekbones. ‘You like it? The President likes it very much.’

  He made as if to move. ‘Shall we?’ he suggested.

  A file of soldiers, armed, and splendidly uniformed, crossed the garden left, right, left, right, on the far side of the fountains. Distorted by prismatic cascades, they could dimly be seen to perform a correct routine with the men they had come to replace.

  ‘The changing of the guard,’ Alleyn said lightly.

  ‘Exactly. They are purely ceremonial troops.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘As at your Buckingham Palace,’ explained the ADC.

  ‘Quite,’ said Alleyn.

  They passed through the grandiloquent hall and the picturesque guard at the entrance.

  ‘Again,’ Alleyn ventured, ‘purely ceremonial?’

  ‘Of course,’ said the ADC.

  They were armed, Alleyn noticed, if not to the teeth, at least to the hips, with a useful-looking issue of sophisticated weapons. ‘Very smartly turned out,’ he said politely.

  ‘The President will be pleased to know you think so,’ said the ADC and they walked into a standing bath of heat and dazzlement.

  The Presidential Rolls heavily garnished with the Ng’ombwanan arms and flying, incorrectly since he was not using it, the Presidential standard, waited at the foot of the steps. Alleyn was ushered into the back seat while the ADC sat in front. The car was air-conditioned and the windows shut and, thought Alleyn, ‘If ever I rode in a bullet-proof job – and today wouldn’t be the first time – this is it.’ He wondered if, somewhere in Ng’ombwana security circles there was an influence a great deal more potent than that engendered by the industrious evocation of Davidson’s.

  They drove under the escort of two ultra-smart, lavishly accoutred motor-cyclists. ‘Skinheads, bikies, traffic cops, armed escorts,’ he speculated, ‘wherever they belch and rev and bound, what gives the species its peculiar air of menacing vulgarity?’

  The car swept through crowded, mercilessly glaring streets. Alleyn found something to say about huge white monstrosities – a Palace of Culture, a Palace of Justice, a Hall of Civic Authority, a Free Library. The ADC received his civilities with perfect complacency.

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘They are very fine. All new. All since The Presidency. It is very remarkable.’

  The traffic was heavy but it was noticeable that it opened before their escort as the Red Sea before Moses. They were stared at, but from a distance. Once, as they made a right hand turn and were momentarily checked by an oncoming car, their chauffeur, without turning his head, said something to the driver that made him wince.

  When Alleyn, who was married to a painter, looked at the current scene, wherever it might be, he did so with double vision. As a stringently trained policeman he watched, automatically, for idiosyncrasies. As a man very sensitively tuned to his wife’s way of seeing, he searched for consonancies. Now, when confronted by a concourse of round, black heads that bobbed, shifted, clustered and dispe
rsed against that inexorable glare, he saw this scene as his wife might like to paint it. He noticed that, in common with many of the older buildings, one in particular was in process of being newly painted. The ghost of a former legend showed faintly through the mask – SANS RIT IMPO T NG TR DI G CO. He saw a shifting, colourful group on the steps of this building and thought how, with simplification, re-arrangement and selection Troy would endow them with rhythmic significance. She would find, he thought, a focal point, some figure to which the others were subservient, a figure of the first importance.

  And then, even as this notion visited him, the arrangement occurred. The figures reformed like fragments in a kaleidoscope and there was the focal point, a solitary man, inescapable because quite still, a grotesquely fat man, with long blond hair, wearing white clothes. A white man.

  The white man stared into the car. He was at least fifty yards away but for Alleyn it might have been so many feet. They looked into each other’s faces and the policeman said to himself: ‘That chap’s worth watching. That chap’s a villain.’

  Click, went the kaleidoscope. The fragments slid apart and together. A stream of figures erupted from the interior, poured down the steps and dispersed. When the gap was uncovered the white man had gone.

  IV

  ‘It’s like this, sir,’ Chubb had said rapidly. ‘Seeing that No. 1 isn’t a full-time place being there’s two of us, we been in the habit of helping out on a part-time basis elsewhere in the vicinity. Like, Mrs Chubb does an hour every other day for Mr Sheridan in the basement and I go to the Colonel’s – that’s Colonel and Mrs Cockburn-Montfort in the Place – for two hours of a Friday afternoon, and every other Sunday evening we baby-sit at 17 The Walk. And –’

  ‘Yes. I see,’ said Mr Whipplestone, stemming the tide.

  ‘You won’t find anything scamped or overlooked, sir,’ Mrs Chubb intervened. ‘We give satisfaction, sir, in all quarters, really we do. It’s just An Arrangement, like.’