‘If an uncivilised son of a whore walks down the main street of Barcelona with only a comic hat and a pair of bum bags on,’ replied Gonzalez with furious dignity, ‘we naturally arrest him whether he is a Trade Union official or not. You would do the same to any Spaniard in Piccadilly Circus.’
‘Of course we would. And if he was a socialist, Miss Manoli would probably pay his fine. But publicity is publicity!’
He was silent, and I began to feel that I might soon be let loose as an incorrigible and harmless rogue. His companion in the front seat, however, took out a notebook and began to scribble away in shorthand as a firm hint that we should get to the point. He had a general air of dead-pan distrust. I don’t suppose that the regular criminal investigation branch much cared for the intrusion of a secret agent into what was, on the face of it, a straight case of murder.
‘What do you know about the señorita Flagg?’ Gonzalez asked.
‘Nothing—except that a colleague of yours in Madrid sticks her up against the office back door from time to time. So you can’t pull her finger nails out. They are too short anyway. She paints them a dirty silver and then bites them.’
‘You know very well that we do not pull finger nails out!’
‘It’s true I haven’t had the experience. But nothing would stop the Flagg saying that she had.’
‘What has she got to do with Livetti?’
‘How should I know? I protest against all this just because a passport was found on the road which I among a hundred other drivers have used and because you fish a damned photographer out of the sea on the same bit of coast where I happen to be a little ruthless in pursuit of Miss Manoli. If you find a corpse in San Sebastian tomorrow, am I guilty because I dined there last night? I have never set eyes on Livetti. …’
‘But Miss Manoli was acquainted with him.’
He must have seen the utter astonishment on my face. By this time I had penetrated Gonzalez’s character fairly well, both as an agent of government and a naturally friendly fellow. So I was sure he was not bluffing. He was stating a fact. And the whole foundation of our lies, always suspicious but difficult to break down, had collapsed.
I asked him how he knew. He replied drily that there was a telephone line to Rome.
‘It does not surprise me in the least that you are deeply attached to this lady,’ he went on in a tone of utmost courtesy. ‘What a glory of a girl! I say it, believe me, with respect. But couldn’t it be that she has deceived you? I do not mean in affairs of the heart, but, let’s say, in that curious aversion from facts so common among women.’
I agreed that it certainly could be, and probably was—but that it was preposterous to suppose Olura capable of violence.
‘If you don’t believe that I know her,’ I added, ‘ask your superiors to get a report on her from Scotland Yard.’
‘They have already.’
‘Well, what did it say?’
‘That—with your permission—she is unreliable.’
The bloody fools! But their answer was inevitable. Anyone who protested against the normal necessities of government was for Olura a hero and martyr. I can with an effort—needful since I mix with and endeavour to tutor the young—understand the solemnity of their faith that it is morally right to sit in the road and stick pins into police horses for the sake of certain political principles and morally wrong for the sake of other principles, though both sets of opinion are equally dubious and held with equal sincerity.
Some pattern, illogical but significant, might possibly be discovered by a statistician. Hard-worked administrators, however, can only be expected to see hysteria. A police report on Olura would insist that she was of good character, but that anything became credible as soon as her conscience involved itself in politics.
‘What did they say about me?’ I asked.
‘Nothing known.’
A little unfair, perhaps. Still, the enquiry concerned criminal propensities, not academic distinction.
‘You could hardly expect them to say anything else.’
Somehow I had to play for time and head him off Olura. But my sheer impudence in implying that I had indeed been secretly attached to Mgwana appals me. So far as Gonzalez was concerned, it did some good; for he was compelled to interrogate me more or less as a colleague before deciding of exactly what I was guilty.
Meanwhile his impatient companion had to be allowed to get down to brass tacks.
‘What about the wheelbarrow?’ he asked.
‘What wheelbarrow?’
Gonzalez raised his white, clerkly hand, suggesting that it was too soon to go into the subject of barrows, and shot a far more deadly question at me:
‘You frequently wear rope-soled alpargatas, Don Felipe?’
‘On the beach, yes.’
‘Were you wearing them on the night of July 22nd?’
‘You know I wasn’t.’
‘The señorita Flagg states that you entered the hotel next morning wearing rope-soled alpargatas.’
‘The señorita Flagg was so drunk she couldn’t tell rope from rubber.’
‘You are known to wear them, Don Felipe. Why isn’t there a pair in your cupboard?’
‘That’s simple. I always throw them away after I have mended the strings twice. They ought to be made stronger.’
Their evidence smelt to high heaven, but was far from complete. I thanked the Lord that Mgwana had had the sense to pack our shoes, and that Olura’s foot was small for her height and could be that of any local woman. The rope soles were more awkward, for nobody except a few middle-aged labourers—at any rate in Vizcaya—wears them any longer.
How much they had been able to deduce from the tracks of the barrow I could not guess. Evidently the groove of the wheel was still there in the dried mud along the edge of the old workings. A man in rope-soled shoes had pushed a wheelbarrow for three journeys; for two of them a woman had been hopping about behind or alongside. Farther afield, however, the tracks would be lost on bare rock, in the running puddles and through stiff, short heather and grass. No doubt one of Mgwana’s less sophisticated countrymen with his eyes to the ground could have revealed all our movements, but I reckoned that the task would be too much for civilised police.
Gonzalez’s next question was highly intelligent, for I had never revealed the state of my palms in his presence.
‘May I see your hands?’
I opened and spread them out.
‘How did you get those blisters?’
‘Rowing.’
‘When?’
I’d got him there. Olura and I had taken a boat up river a week before, and I could quote the date, the time and the name of the owner. In fact it was Olura who did the rowing, since I could not bear to touch an oar. But who was to tell that?
The lieutenant gave up the straight detective stuff, probably realising that a police magistrate would do it much better, and returned to direct attack.
‘If you didn’t kill Livetti, who did?’ he asked.
I said that I might be able to help him if I knew who was the other man in that black Seat.
Piet Buyker. A South African.’
‘What’s known about him?’
‘Respectable and well-to-do. Frequent visits to Spain. Active in the affairs of the Protestant Church. Piety apparently sincere. Politically harmless. Believed to be treasurer and secretary of the Alliance des Blancs.’
I refrained from showing absolute ignorance. Whatever kind of Commonwealth cloak-and-dagger operative I was supposed to be, I ought to know what the Alliance des Blancs was. Gonzalez’s tone did not suggest that it was particularly sinister; on the other hand, if it was responsible for shoving Livetti through Olura’s bathroom window, it could hardly be a charitable organisation.
I ventured to ask why it was allowed to operate in Spain. ‘Everyone is welcome in Spain so long as he does not break the law.’
A patriotic myth! But Madrid certainly sheltered some odd characters with outdated sympathies�
�due partly to the old-boy network among ultra conservatives, partly to that tradition of political asylum which is even more a point of public honour in Latin America.
‘Yours is the only government which doesn’t mind annoying de Gaulle,’ I said.
‘That is not what we are discussing, Don Felipe.’
I could see that I had touched a nerve there. Gonzalez’s overworked department probably cursed the right-wing activities of French exiles and former Nazis as heartily as Scotland Yard disliked those of Olura’s woolly friends. I seemed to be on the right lines, so I tried again:
‘Has des Aunes been long in Spain?’
‘You know how long.’
‘Time passes so quickly.’
‘Yes, it doesn’t seem two years since his trial,’ Gonzalez replied.
I tore into the dead news of forgotten front pages which still must be filed somewhere in the circuits of my brain, trying to extract and distinguish the sad careers of the more excitable military men in France. Sauche? Who had been Sauche? Now I could even recall the photographs of that embittered and disappointed leader of the O.A.S., condemned in absence to twenty years for plotting against de Gaulle and pretty lucky that he did not get the death penalty. Of course des Aunes was General Sauche. So much for the motor horns sounding Algérie Française!
Well, I could understand that Sauche would not approve of independence for Algerians; but it looked as if he hadn’t stopped at that. Frustrated extremists are always inclined to exaggerate their importance by inventing some vast public conspiracy to account for their private defeat. The opinions which Vigny had expressed to me plus the activities of this South African of Boer descent—the sort of man to be a member of the secret Bruderbond—suggested that Sauche extended his resentment to all the emergent states of Africa. In one form or other this Alliance des Blancs probably held the dear old creed: that the Almighty had created Europeans to rule and that we shouldn’t disappoint divinity by pandering to Africans. What’s a European? What were Hitler’s Aryans? What’s an Arab when he has one leg and is black? Daddy, are Caucasians communists? Why not hold the Sabbath on Tuesday and be saved? Bah!
‘And Vigny? How long has he been here?’ I asked.
‘He presented his request for asylum on the 11th July. We do not know how he crossed the frontier. Sauche expected him, and rented a villa at Zarauz for the pair.’
‘Then what were they doing at the Hostal de las Olas?’
‘Waiting for the villa to be ready for them. You are aware that they left the hotel before Mr Mgwana arrived; and you may as well know that their alibi after that is unbreakable. On the night of July 21st they were holding a small party at the villa.’
I apologised for asking questions when I ought to be answering them and thanked him for his courtesy. He replied coolly that questions could be quite as revealing as answers. However, I saw no harm in asking another:
‘What had Vigny and Duyker to say for themselves?’
‘They happened to be on the same road. They had no idea whom they passed. They stopped for a drink in Amorebieta. They well remembered that a taxi-driver parked in front of them and had trouble with his hand-brake, but what about it?’
‘You believe that?’
‘Until such time as you tell the truth. Why did you wish to avoid them?’
He would have none of my story that I was trying to ditch a jealous Vigny, and held me wriggling on the end of the hook. Finally I put the blame on Mgwana and said that it was he who had been worried. So I had left him under the lieutenant’s professional care and removed Olura.
‘Why did Miss Manoli bring Mr Mgwana here so secretly?’
‘Because she is the sort of person who doesn’t want to understand protocol.’
‘Yet the Alliance knew he was coming.’
Obviously it did. I couldn’t see where he was heading—in the direction, I hoped, of whom Livetti had offended and why.
‘When did you notice that Miss Manoli had provided an opportunity for an attack on Mgwana?’
I gasped at the monstrosity of this inference. At the same time I could not help seeing that it was a possible reconstruction of the few solid facts, except for the vital misreading of Olura’s character.
‘But, teniente, it is utterly inconceivable that Olura Manoli would connive at the assassination of Leopold Mgwana or anyone else! She is always campaigning for freedom, democracy, independence and keeping everybody out of prison except policemen!’
‘We know she is,’ he said. ‘And so we find it hard to believe that her friendship with a caudillo like Mr Mgwana was sincere.’
‘Mgwana is an obvious exception.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he is black.’
‘What has colour to do with it? Don’t come to me with baby talk!’
‘But it’s true!’
‘Nonsense, Don Felipe! You might as well say she would approve the cruelties of Batista in Cuba because he was a sambo. Mr Mgwana is a born leader, whom you or I would be proud to serve, but Miss Manoli, never! Now, tell me—who is Prebendary Flanders?’
‘All I can tell you is that he organises protests, and that, like Peter the Hermit, he has a considerable following among emotional youth, March, boys, march, and perhaps you’ll reach Jerusalem ! But without reference to the Chaplain of my College or some similar authority I cannot say with any confidence exactly what a Prebendary is.’
‘This dignitary recommended the Hostal de las Olas to Miss Manoli?’
‘Yes. I think he did.’
‘And he is the head of a left-wing and politically excitable movement?’
The threat to Olura was real. Unpleasant rather than dangerous, but there was no knowing. Spaniards take their politics seriously; what we dismiss as mere foam on the surface, to them is evidence of a wave. Prebendary Flanders, Olura, their committees and their civil disobedience were neither more nor less significant than the Alliance des Blancs, both appearing equally futile to the outsider and equally portentous to themselves.
It was this self-valuation which mattered to Gonzalez and his experienced department. No good Englishman would have been at all impressed if he had taken a beer with the early Hitler in Munich or a dismal tea with Karl Marx in London; but a Spaniard, well accustomed to quixotismo getting out of hand, would have made a note in his little black book and opened a file.
I told Gonzalez firmly that the first principle of Olura and her political friends was non-violence.
‘For many anarchists, too.’
‘But there is all the difference in the world!’
‘Why? Why should you English be different?’ he insisted. ‘Spaniards, Italians, Russians, Indians—their leaders often preached non-violence at first, and then—waking up, let’s say, upon a morning of sun with indigestion due to nuts and goat’s milk—decided that the only effective route to non-violence was by violence.’
‘But Miss Manoli’s friends are not anarchists!’ I shouted, my loud resentment at the accusation showing me that I was a little uncertain myself.
‘Anarchists march with them, Don Felipe. At least they understand that anyone who sets out to make government impossible is an anarchist whatever he calls himself.’
The damned fellow must have been well educated by logical Jesuits. Given enough time and a decanter of port I could have tied him into knots; but one is not at one’s best as a suspect, however unruly, under interrogation.
‘If I follow you,’ he said, enjoying himself at my expense and, I think, deliberately shocking his stolid companion in the front seat, ‘neither Miss Manoli nor her chief, Prebendary Flanders, would attempt to assassinate our Generalissimo?’
‘You can’t call him her chief, and they most decidedly would not!’
‘But if we caught, tried and shot an unsuccessful assassin, they would organise a march of protest and have questions asked in your parliament.’
‘They might. But it would be a protest against what they considered injustice, not a condo
nation of the attempt.’
‘It is injustice which excites them?’
‘Yes! And why the devil not?’
‘But now we have arrived, my dear Don Felipe! If Spanish justice offends them, what must they think of African? I do not, I fear, think it at all impossible that Miss Manoli used the Alliance des Blancs.’
‘And I tell you, much appreciated teniente, that it’s nonsense! After all, the one thing we know is that Vigny and this Duyker followed her.’
‘Yes, because the plot had failed.’
‘You might as well accuse Leopold Mgwana!’
‘A Prime Minister? Of a friendly state? We are not Albanians, Don Felipe! But he has of course been asked unofficially through diplomatic channels to make any statement he pleases.’
‘Good God! And did he?’
‘Naturally I have not seen the text of his reply. But my superiors have given me to understand that he says he killed Livetti in self-defence on the night of July 21st, that he claims diplomatic immunity and that he has requested our Minister of Justice to close the case discreetly. He has also stated that neither you nor Miss Manoli had any part in it.’
I stared at him, not daring to open my mouth. So Mgwana’s talk of chivalry had not been merely allusive. His word of honour that he would not involve me had also been nobly kept. But this superbly mediaeval attempt to squash all publicity was deadly. Since Olura had some mysterious connection with Livetti, she was in trouble whatever Mgwana said.
No doubt the Spanish Foreign Office had replied to Mgwana thanking him very much, regretting that he should have been molested on Spanish soil and assuring him that the case was closed. But no government could let it go at that. Attempts at assassination are too serious. The question of who employed Livetti became more serious than who killed him. Mgwana quite unintentionally had removed himself from the case, leaving us two hopelessly stuck in it.
‘Why don’t you accept his statement?’ I asked.
The cop in the front seat looked round like a dog asking to be let off the leash. My question had, I suppose, implied that I did not accept Mgwana’s statement either.
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