Olura

by Geoffrey Household

  I let this pass. He had constructed for himself out of lonely introspection too simple a world. He also underrated the character of the Manolis. He would have to put up with Olura renting a beehive hut in the nearest village or a flat right opposite the gaol, unless I could get rid of him out of her life.

  He faced me across the breakfast table, thin, worn and with very watchful eyes drained of all emotion. He was an unnecessary complication, for I saw no difficulty in freeing Olura as soon as Mgwana knew she was in goal; nor was I seriously afraid of adverse publicity now that I had time to weigh up the risk and to recover from Olura’s extremely unjust attack. Everything could be arranged except the killing of Duyker.

  One resents disturbance in the early morning at my age. One is accustomed to swear at humanity in general. One is also well aware from experience that such thoughts are never translated into speech or action, and that a certain sour amusement may be extracted from analysing the silent outburst of resentment. It occurred to me that an excellent reason—among others more ephemeral—for blasting Ardower to hell was that he had the effrontery to love Olura as much as I did.

  A forgivable sin. Serener contemplation of it led me to put him at least into the class of a diamond bracelet which Olura wanted—if, that is, she had been a woman to set her heart on anything of the sort. In that record which she wrote for me there had been a passage which I found moving. She said that she knew little of my youth and begged me to remember.

  While Ardower drank his coffee, I did the remembering. In a long memory there are so many selves. The young Henry, his love and his misery are no longer vivid. I remember far more clearly what the man in his middle forties thought about him, and how the pompous fellow was impatient of such a waste of time in loneliness and suffering. And so one arrives at the present self, the pantaloon, who has forgotten so much that forty-year-old Henry remembered, but disapproves of him all the same and is very sorry indeed for young Henry and his romantic obsession. I said to Ardower, breaking a long silence, that Olura had not mentioned to me—or only very vaguely—his Breton captain.

  ‘I don’t suppose she did,’ he replied. ‘I doubt if she got hold of it at all. Her emotions were naturally a little overwhelmed by Zarauz and Duyker.’

  I questioned him about Bozec and Bernardino. Applying myself to his answers, I was mortified to find that I had decided to intervene, and that I was meditating just the sort of skulduggery which Olura and her woolly friends expect of International Finance when in fact it is the most unlikely section of society to indulge in it. But what use is power unless employed for those we love?

  I confess, too, that as the general shape of a counter attack began to form I felt a sense of enjoyment: comparable, let us say, to that of regulating a market and sending off the speculators to lick their wounds. Perhaps I recovered something of youth; or it may have been that I welcomed a reversion to the ethics of my early ancestors who were trained in statecraft at the courts of Cordoba and Constantinople and accepted revenge as a moral duty. Those two military nuisances, Vigny and Sauche, deserved no mercy; and none would be given them right to the end.

  ‘Can you endure more loneliness?’ I asked.

  Ardower replied that he was near the limit, but that he would have to. Meanwhile might he rest for a day?

  ‘I want you to remain here in the house, in such comfort as we can arrange, for about four days,’ I said.

  My own ruthless handling of poor Concha had suggested an idea. The old fool of an admiral from whom I rented the villa at a price which must have doubled his yearly pension had been bothered about his valueless valuables. He had them all locked up in an airless cubby-hole under the eaves, which was then sealed by the local notary public.

  I proposed to pack Olura’s things and call in police and the same notary to lock and seal her bedroom with its adjoining private lavatory and to register the fact that the room contained eight unexamined suit-cases of ostrich skin. Having observed the antics of this public functionary during the almost religious ceremony, I thought it safe for Ardower to remain hidden under the bed.

  He considered it an intolerable risk, but I overruled his protests and explained that the plan depended on the most trustworthy constant in our world: professional character. Notaries do not look under beds unless engaged in matrimonial cases.

  Cheering up a little, he said that a cheese, some fruit, half a metre of Pamplona sausage, bread, butter and anything there might be in the cellar, not forgetting a corkscrew, would keep him comfortable for a week if my estimate of four days turned out to be optimistic. To these requirements I added Olura’s typewriter and a quantity of paper, requesting him to spend his enforced leisure in drawing up for me, and me alone, a very frank and detailed statement of his relations with Olura and Mgwana, of his movements and his interrogations.

  That is the origin of the document which forms the bulk of this file and is divided for the sake of clarity, as I have already explained, into two parts by Olura’s narrative. I assumed there would be revealing discrepancies between the written account and his verbal report. There were few. I also assumed it would be short. I did not then know that he was a practised writer who had even succeeded in the nearly impossible task of popularising his obscure linguistic research.

  I sent at once for the notary public. As I expected, his ridiculous self-importance facilitated our business. He was registering the presence of eight unexamined suit-cases, the property of the arrested spinster, Olura Manoli, and nothing else concerned him. He displayed no emotion or curiosity, nor did the policeman in the passage, except when they found it necessary to calm my simulated distrust and indignation. It seemed to me astonishing that the notary public did not smell the sausage which was under the bed with Ardower. It is possible that even at his age he was more occupied by the delicate and lingering perfume of Olura.

  I locked up the house, and the same afternoon flew up again to Paris. Confident that I had not come empty-handed, I insisted on a second conference with officials of the Deuxième Bureau. I was received, though with pointed impatience.

  When I related what I knew of Captain Bozec of Le Croisic, my distinguished friends became more excited, and I was asked to repeat my story at the highest level. It was already known that Sauche and Vigny had escaped by sea, and that correspondence was shuttling back and forth. Bozec was one of half a dozen very vague suspects.

  I went on to the question of Bozec’s rendezvous with the Isaura, explaining that her owner was a plain fisherman who would not be capable of complicated navigation. Therefore the position of the rendezvous must be simple—two Vizcayan peaks in line or something of that nature—and would be well known to the crew of the Phare de Kerdonis as well as the master. If they were quietly arrested, what was the chance that one of them would talk?

  Inevitable, I was told. Bozec and his crew were all in it for money, not from political conviction. An offer of ten thousand francs would produce the rendezvous and the method of communication, especially if the alternative was a five years’ sentence for treason.

  So at last I was free to come to the point. If I could frighten the former General Sauche, I said, into arranging his urgent retirement from Spain, would it not be easy to sequester the Phare de Kerdonis, put a trustworthy crew from Naval Intelligence aboard her and pick him up at the rendezvous without anyone being the wiser—except possibly the skipper of the Isaura who would never dare to talk?

  Yes, they liked it. There were a lot of ‘ifs’, but in principle they liked it. They were kind enough to say that the Services always benefited from the fresh thinking of the financial world. But what was to be done with Sauche and Vigny? They could be kept secretly on the ice for a week or so; but never, in such doubtful circumstances, could they be brought to trial or caused to disappear.

  Leading them step by step towards the solution I had in mind, I suggested Algeria. Could they not turn up accidentally in Algeria where the Government would know what to do with them and could be trusted
to keep it quiet?

  No, but no, but no! Even if it could be shown that they had visited Algeria voluntarily, no one would ever believe it. Sauche and his plastiqueurs had been and still were a real danger to the Head of State. He and Vigny deserved to be squashed like the bed-bugs they were. But there was no way of hiding the mess.

  I then revealed that there was, pointing out that all they required for the ultimate disposal of the pair was a government which would not be suspected, which had no kindly feelings for them, which was in absolute and efficient control of its police and security services.

  ‘These two gentlemen,’ I declared, ‘have insulted and offended M. Leopold Mgwana beyond bearing.’

  They needed confirmation. I told them that if they could get me a clear line to Mgwana and scramble the conversation at their end—I knew that Mgwana could deal with it at his—anyone who for reasons of state wished to listen in might do so. I added that the cost of the operation which I envisaged—above the line, that is—need not be more than one obsolescent, long-range, propellor aircraft.

  When that evening I had Leopold Mgwana on the other end of the line, I told him that Olura was in prison and Ardower on the run. At first he misinterpreted my circumlocutions and was firmly convinced that I had bad news about the financing of his prestige airline; then, when he understood, he was continually interrupting me with exclamations of grief and anger. Yes, I assured him, I knew of his statement to the Ministry of Justice; but it simply had not been believed. The police could not make up their minds whether he had merely hit a press photographer too hard, or whether he was trying to protect Olura from the consequences of a plot to assassinate him in which she had been involved.

  Then I let him know who were responsible and somewhat exaggerated the danger to Olura if the pair remained at liberty. I explained why the French Government was unable to help me and added that favours would be reciprocated all round.

  Mgwana understood our problem by instinct, though it was certainly the first time that he had been asked to bury an international embarrassment in the mysteries of his Africa. He asked if anyone in authority were listening to our conversation. When I replied that on my invitation there was, Mgwana assured him in his sonorous, somewhat biblical English—which the unknown, though no accomplished linguist, understood without difficulty—that he, Mgwana would be personally responsible for all security measures. His only conditions were that the aircraft carrying Sauche and Vigny must be cleared from a foreign airport and that the pilot, as sole survivor of an accident, must be able to answer the questions of press and diplomatists with every appearance of sincerity and emotion.

  A preliminary planning outline and a routine of communication were agreed. For me, too, communication was made direct and easy—an obvious necessity, since I had no wish that the Paris partners should have any clear idea of what my business with the Deuxième Bureau had been. One of the French agents employed to report the movements of Sauche was ordered to accept and transmit my messages—a gratifying gesture of trust, considering that only a week before I had been threatened with his interference.

  That done, I could afford to indulge my anxiety for Olura, and boarded the first plane for Madrid. I knew that reverence for the Manoli balance sheet would ensure that she was treated with respect, and it was not the imprisoned part of her which worried me; it was the free Olura, which no cell could confine, wandering out into the Ermita in ignorance and despair.

  Her eyes had nothing in them but a question. I told her guardedly that a friend had arrived by sea and was occupying her bedroom in excellent health. She splendidly controlled any expression of emotion which might have given away the secret, leaving it to the touch of arms and cheek to say what she thought of me. Guiltily remembering my hesitation, I may have been outwardly the more moved of the two. At the end of our conversation she reminded me to call on Miss Mary Deighton-Flagg.

  Prejudice, such as Ardower’s, against the Press is absurd. It is not the object of journalists to instruct the public, but to entertain it. I have always found them excellent and helpful people whose gratitude can easily be earned by giving them information which, for forty-eight hours, will be near enough to the truth. Miss Deighton-Flagg was not of course in this responsible class, but obliging in every way and very ready to sympathise with the limited demands of a much older man though initially she misunderstood their nature. As a freelance society correspondent I could see no abnormality in her to criticise.

  Intimacy, in the conventional sense, developed with most satisfactory frankness. It had been Livetti himself who telephoned her. He had two motives: to get a background story for his photographs and to have a lady of the Press on the spot who would and could scream in print for the Liberty of the Photographer if there were a row.

  What she said confirmed Vigny’s account of the murder. Livetti, when he spoke to her on the telephone from Zarauz, was only aware that Mgwana had taken some London deb down to the Hostal de las Olas. She herself had not known till she arrived at the hotel that Mgwana’s companion was not a juvenile with a taste for publicity, but Olura. What, she asked me, had happened to Livetti? Had he called the whole thing off and returned to Rome? When Gonzalez and his service desired to interrogate without giving anything away, their technique must have been masterly.

  I found that the young woman, in spite of a very creditable pose of bright courage, was in fact appalled at the prospect of indefinite exile. She saw no hope of remaking her life except by devoting herself to a novel. As I had no doubt that it would be of modish and profitable obscenity, I offered to serve the cause of literature by financing two years of comparative comfort while she wrote it. All that I wished in return, as her disinterested patron, was that she should swear in any court of law whenever required that the telephone conversation which brought her up to the Hostal had been in French.

  ‘Of course it was,’ she said at once. ‘How stupid of me to have forgotten!’

  In the morning I flew to Bilbao to see Gonzalez. The complexities of the case were now beginning to have their own intrinsic interest, so that I was no more tired than if I had been engaged on any series of delicate financial negotiations.

  I gave him Olura’s compliments, and asked whether it would be possible for me to have rather obvious police protection if I were to call in person at the Zarauz villa. He agreed at once, and was glad that I wished it to be obvious. It would be extremely embarrassing to the authorities, he said, if there were any discourtesy to me.

  I stayed the night at a most comfortable hotel where, in the bar, I met a French tourist and his pretty, schoolteacherish wife who were collecting Basque folk-songs on a tape recorder. The ingenuity of these devoted servants of state both delights and disturbs me. I had previously thought it utterly absurd that Ardower, a transparent don, could be suspected by Gonzalez of being a security officer. The two naive folklorists, equally transparent, gave me the news that Bozec and his crew had been arrested, that the rendezvous with the Isaura was known and that the Phare de Kerdonis was ready to sail whenever I gave the word.

  On the morning of September 4th I drove over to the villa at Zarauz. The chauffeur of the hired car was accompanied, as chauffeurs often are, by a friend. His stern and closed solidity made it plain to any observer that he was not the normal type of friend. There was also a uniformed policeman lounging at the villa gate.

  Sauche received me very cordially. Both officers in their manner and tact were an advertisement for the French Army. One regretted that there was no war to occupy them. My name meant nothing to Vigny. Sauche had heard of me and was searching his memory. I assisted him by mentioning several common acquaintances. Before his defiance of de Gaulle, the general was noted for his excellent political contacts.

  As soon as I explained that Olura Manoli was my goddaughter and ward, they assumed that I had called to do business. That, at least, was what I judged from the faintest possible air of mercantile rather than military insolence. I admit that I prefer the French ge
nerals of my youth who looked immensely stupid and distinguished and in fact were neither. Sauche reminded me of a shop assistant who had taken a correspondence course in management. I simply do not believe that Ardower recognised him straightaway as a professional soldier.

  ‘You are naturally aware, gentlemen,’ I asked, ‘that you are under surveillance by agents of the French Government?’

  ‘They are even very well known to us,’ Vigny replied.

  ‘Yet it is not likely that out of three murders they would not have noticed even one.’

  ‘Only three?’ Sauche retorted. ‘In France I am never accused of less than a dozen.’

  ‘The police are often excitable, my general. But here we know of only three: Livetti, Duyker and Ardower.’

  I suppose that as a corps commander Sauche could deal effectively with a surprise attack in the field. In conversation he could not. His face and his hesitation invigorated me.

  ‘Livetti, of course, was no great loss,’ I admitted casually.

  He strolled across to the window. To his practised eye there could be no doubt that the police had taken precautions for my safety. It seemed to me that I might usefully refer to them.

  ‘The authorities have been good enough to inform me that Ardower visited this house on the evening of August 25th. He has never been seen since. Two witnesses state, however, that a man with his head bandaged was driven out, accompanied by the late Piet Duyker and a third person: presumably yourself, Major Vigny. I suggest that on the orders of General Sauche Duyker executed Ardower. You then buried the body and killed Duyker to ensure his silence.’

  ‘This is a monstrous figment of the imagination!’ Sauche exclaimed. ‘The police will never find any such burial!’