Venom

by Alan Scholefield

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “Have you a family out there?”

  “I’m not married.”

  “Oh.”

  Supposed to have been, he thought. Should have been.

  The District Commissioner’s wife had always said, “Dick’ll make someone a marvellous husband.” And each time she said it she had eyed him with a speculative look and he knew he could have had her any time he liked, when the DC was away on tour. Harry Marshall had had her. He’d said it was like going to bed with a python. But going to bed with your DC’s wife was a cliche in the Colonial Service–it was where most divorces stemmed from and Howard had steered clear of that. He’d been ambitious then, although he liked to think he wasn’t, and he had not wanted anything to blight his career. Half an hour between the sheets with the DC’s wife one hot afternoon was just the sort of thing that might do it.

  He would have made a good husband; Jane had missed something there; she’d never know how much she’d missed; he’d have given her everything. Now, remembering the amused voice of the man on the telephone he felt again a twinge of anger and jealousy. In all this time he had never said to himself that he was lucky, rather the reverse; if he’d stayed on in London it would never have happened; he had left her; she was lonely; he had finally come round to the conclusion that it had been his fault. After Jane most women he’d met seemed like flat soda water. He’d taken them to bed as he needed to but there had never been any very strong feelings. There had been a time when he had been in with the BO AC lot, different air hostesses arriving in batches twice and sometimes three times a week–and he still had the flat in Nairobi. He’d taken them out to the game-park on the edge of town and then to drinks or dinner and then back to the flat. It had been almost too easy. Some said it was the altitude; that it went to their heads. Whatever it was these blue-skirted, white-bloused, coolly attractive girls suddenly seemed to become nymphos once they landed. It had been good for a while but then for financial reasons he’d had to give up the flat and driving all the way into Nairobi for a date and then sneaking up the hotel stairs to the girl’s room hadn’t been quite the same. He’d had an affair with a widow on a nearby farm; neither had wanted marriage and that had been soothing; no tensions. They’d talked about books mainly and then gone to bed without much passion, but with a need for therapeutic contact. Most of the time he stayed on the farm by himself. He was lonely and thought about marriage often; the only trouble was that no one he met looked like Jane. Then when he had sold the farm and gone into the safari business he’d been glad there was no wife to leave behind. There had been stories that white hunters always took along a double sleeping-cot so that their clients” wives could bag the hunter while their husbands bagged a rhino. It was rubbish. Firstly, you slept on a canvas cot in the bush and two people humping up and down on it would have flattened it in a minute, secondly, you were too bloody tired at the end of a day for that sort of caper, and thirdly and most important of all a white hunter was only as good as his reputation and that spread out to cover a multitude of things; apart from anything else you didn’t want an irate husband armed with an elephant gun poking his head round your tent flap while you were at it'. It wasn’t on, no matter what the novelists said.

  “My husband was a South African,” the voice next to him said. “That’s why I knew the accent.” She’d said it before and it sounded silly said again, but what else could she say? He seemed to disappear within himself. Somehow she had to bring him out and keep him out.

  He did not react. “What did you do in Africa?” she said remorselessly.

  “Quite a lot of things. Colonial service. A bit of hunting. Farming. Looked after a safari park.”

  She was aware that Jacmel had half turned and was listening, but she ignored him. “Tell me about it.”

  “What?”

  “You.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. Why not?”

  “What sort of thing?”

  “I don’t know. About your life.”

  “It’d take all night.”

  We’ve got all night.”

  “Yes, I suppose we have. But you don’t want to know about me.”

  “For God’s sake,” she said. “Talk to me. Don’t close your eyes. Don’t drift away. Talk. Tell me.”

  He pulled himself upright and swung round to look at her, seeing the face as a soft pale blob in the dim light, the dark eye sockets. “Give me your hand,” he said. She put out her hand and took his and brought it back on to her warm lap under the coat. “You’ll be all right,” he said. “Don’t worry.” “M be all right.”

  “ We'll be all right. Where d’you want me to start?”

  “You said you were in the Colonial Service. Start there.”

  So he told her about the Service and the DC’s wife, and going on tour of his district, and to Salisbury on leave, and sometimes home to Kenya. But he didn’t tell her about Harry Marshall or Jane Lasser. He spoke in brief jerky sentences and as he went on the sentences grew longer, the detail more varied and after a while what had started as a kind of curriculum vitae was fleshed out into autobiography. He, too, became aware that Jacmel was listening but, like Marion, he did not care. He told her about being in London when the cable had come about his parents” death and he realized that she had only barely heard of the Mau Mau terrorism in Kenya which had marked the early fifties with bloodshed, when white farmers by the tens and black people by the hundreds were slaughtered by Kikuyu tribesmen who had taken blood oaths. He told her of the farm and how, after Kenya had gained independence from Britain, he’d had to sell it at a quarter of the true value; how, after his debts were paid off, he had only enough money to equip himself for the hunting business–the only other business he knew. He told her about going down to Mozambique with Michel Blanchet and how he had started the safari park hotel.

  And when he had finished she said, “Why did you leave?” “Kenya or the hotel?”

  “Both.”

  Here it was. She had asked the question innocently enough but in fact this was where everything had been leading. It was unavoidable. Again, as in a dream, he felt the lion on top of him and involuntarily his hands went to his stomach where the lacerations burned at the memory.

  “I had an accident,” he said.

  “What sort of an accident?”

  “With one of the lions. One gets too confident and then they turn on you.”

  “What happened?” This time it was Jacmel’s voice from the window.

  “Someone was taking a photograph of it and it charged,” Howard said.

  “At you?”

  “At me.”

  “Why did you not shoot it?” Jacmel said. “You had a gun, no?”

  “Yes,” Howard said wearily, “I had a gun.”

  They waited but he did not explain and finally Jacmel shrugged and said, “English. You love animals even when they kill you.” Howard’s silence seemed to get to him for he came away from the window and stood near the sofa and said, “You let them take this place away from you.”

  For a moment Howard was confused and then he realized what Jacmel meant.

  “The British Government decided to give independence to Kenya,” he said. “Nothing we could do about it.”

  “You could have fought against the Mau Mau and against the British Government. In Algeria we fought for our country. Do you know what is a pied noirV

  “The settlers. The ones who fought against France.”

  “Yes, but not France, only against those Frenchmen who wished to give Algeria independence. We, the pieds noirs, were patriots. Algerie frangaise. That was our banner. We fought against the French army and we fought against the Moslems. And we fought against de Gaulle. He did what you call a sell-out, no? Do you know what is the O.A.S. and the F.L.N.? Do you know of the Delta Commando? Of the plastiquage? The barbouzesl Do you remember the Week of the Barricades? Salan? Gardes? Maurice Challe? What do you know of a colonial war? You gave up the country to the
black people. You gave up your farm. I too had a farm. I did not give it away. But you–you did not even fire a gun.”

  Jacmel looked down at the sofa and saw two frightened people. What could they know of his life? How could they understand the war in Algiers and Oran? You could not take a cup of coffee at a sidewalk cafe for fear of bullets from a passing car; you could not go to a cinema for fear of plastic explosive in a brief-case. Death was all around you in those days. Friends, brothers, fathers–one day you would be all together, the next, half would be arrested or dead.

  No, he had more in common with the big policeman who waited in the cold. He would have been a good man to have on one’s side in Algeria.

  He saw again in his mind’s eye the shattered glass that so often crunched underfoot in the streets of Algiers, the blood, the twisted wrecks of bombed cars; he saw again the vineyard near Miliana bursting into flames, erupting in smoke as he set it alight. Then he saw Louise and himself, hand in hand, running towards the car. Driving away. Never looking back. At that moment he had thought that his life was over. He didn’t care. Let the F.L.N. take him. But the O.A.S. looked after their own.

  He and Louise were smuggled aboard a freighter bound for Barcelona and a new life for them began in Spain. Franco had from the beginning adopted a lenient attitude to members of the O.A.S. and Spain became a haven for those on the run from the French police. Jacmel and Louise drifted along the coast to Malaga where the establishment of semi-permanent foreign colonies allowed them to submerge from view. They rented a small villa at Monte Mar and he tried to put what savings remained into land deals. But he was five years too late. Development on the coast was so fast and on so massive a scale that there was no longer room for the small entrepreneur. Instead he turned his attention to the Coin valley some miles inland expecting this to be the new centre of the building boom. He bought a run-down orange farm and waited for the hotel companies and the apartment-house builders to come out to him. But no one wanted to live that far from the sea, especially holiday-makers, and the holidaymaker was God.

  It was while they were living on the decaying finca near Coin that he and Louise broke up. Their affair had been born in a hothouse of tension and excitement and now it foundered on the rocks of routine domesticity. Unlike Jacmel, Louise had been on no one’s wanted list and she was free to move in and out of France at will, so two years after they arrived in Spain she went to live in Paris.

  Jacmel sold the farm at a loss and took a small flat in the Calle San Miguel in Torremolinos, which was just beginning to be torn apart and changed from a beautiful fishing-village into a concrete disaster. He met an American woman, heiress to a soft drink fortune, who had a villa on the outskirts of the town. She was ten years older than he and drank herself into a coma by seven each evening. She made very few demands on him–she was hung-over in the daytime and too drunk at night–and that suited him. In six months he went to bed with her three times. After her there had been a German countess who had fled from Prussia before the advancing Russians at the end of the war. This time there was less money and more sex. With his American lady he had been fed steaks specially brought in from Madrid; with his German countess he ate a great deal of crumbly goat’s milk cheese and large green olives. But that didn’t bother him and he became quite fond of her two flaxen-haired young daughters. After the German countess there was a young blonde Swede who had come to southern Spain because Sweden and Swedish men bored her. She had less money than the American, more than the German, but a better body than either, and one day she had left him for a young Italian who played the guitar. The last he saw of her she was heading along the coast road with her new friend in the direction of Marbella.

  He might have gone on like this, drifting from one woman, one house, one bed to the next–his capacity for self-disgust was buried in the ruins of Algeria–but he met two other former members of the O.A.S.

  He knew there were ex-officers living farther up the coast around Nerja and Motril but he had never sought them out. One January morning after he had bought his oleo for the paraffin stove that kept his small apartment warm he had gone up to the square, to the Bar Central, for a cup of coffee and there they were, two men he had last seen on a bank raid in Bône. There had been a reunion. Champagne, couscous at a French-Moroccan restaurant on the Malaga road, brandy, then back to his apartment late in the afternoon for red wine. By evening it was apparent that the two had not met him by chance but had come to look for him, and by midnight he knew what they wanted. The following month they relieved the Banque de Roussillon in Perpignan of just over a million francs, and re-entered Spain by the smugglers’ paths through Andorra in a snow-storm.

  After that life became better; there was money, and he could pick his women instead of the reverse. In 1970 they held up the Credit Golfe in Montpellier, this time taking nearly two million francs, re-entering Spain by fishing-boat which put them ashore near Cadaques.

  Jacmel had grown tired of the south coast, of the continual noise of concrete mixers, and after the second bank robbery he went north to Madrid, bought an apartment not far from the university and kept his money in a safe-deposit box in the Banco de Viscaya near the Plaza del Sol. Through former O.A.S. members he heard occasional news of Louise.

  Things had not gone well with her in Paris. The French police were on constant alert for O.A.S. action, especially after the de Gaulle assassination attempts. Many of the old groups had split up and dispersed. Louise had gone to Cannes as the mistress of a former O.A.S. officer turned yacht broker. Cannes, with its old and new harbours stuffed with expensive craft, was a yacht broker’s paradise and it was possible that they might have made a success of the new life had they had sufficient capital to last until they had built up contacts. But they did not and to rectify that they had robbed half-a-dozen holiday villas closed for the winter between Cannes and St. Raphael before they were caught. Louise had spent two years in gaol in Nice and when she came out she was alone once more. This time she teamed up with a Marseillais, first smuggling American cigarettes into Italy and then, as the late sixties turned into drug heaven, smuggling hash from Morocco to France. When the American Government exerted pressure on France in the early seventies to clamp down on the drug trade, she had been picked up in Toulon and put away for three years. This time she served her sentence in Marseilles and when she came out she knew a great deal about the French underworld.

  While she was spending her three years in prison, Jacmel’s life had also undergone a change in Madrid. He had met Isabel. She was half-Spanish, half-Venezuelan. Thirty-one years old, the widow of a textile manufacturer in Caracas who had left her enough money to make her comfortable for life if she was careful. She was not.

  She had an apartment off the Alcala, drove a Lancia coupé, spent her weekends at the sherry bodegas in Jerez, or on someone’s yacht at Barcelona, and generally lived life at an expensive and rapid pace. She was deeply tanned and while no conventional beauty–her Venezuelan ancestry had given her the high cheekbones and flat planes of an Indian–she was attractive in a vital way. She was small and big-breasted, a combination that fascinated Jacmel. He met her at the Banco de Viscaya where she, too, kept her loot in a safe-deposit box.

  To have her it was necessary to keep up with her: this he realized from the start. And while he still had a good deal of capital tucked away he knew it would not last long at the pace he was living. He tried to reach his former associates but they had left their old addresses and when he got in touch with a former O.A.S. colonel in Nerja he received the disquieting news that they had been deported from Spain for illicit currency dealing.

  His capital diminished rapidly. There were dinners at Botin’s and lunches down on the river at Aranjuez. Five days at the feria in Seville had cost him nearly a hundred and fifty thousand pesetas. There were weekends at the Granada

  Palace and the Reina Christina in Algeciras and trips from there to Tangiers, and skiing at Puerto de Navecerrada. And presents. But there was no th
ought of giving Isabel up. He had become too infatuated, not only with her, but with her life-style, for that. The problem must therefore be solved by the other route. If he needed money then he would get more money. It was at this point, when he was at his most receptive, that he had received a letter from Louise bearing a London postmark. It had gone first to his old address in Coin where they had lived together, then to his flat in Torremolinos, then to Madrid. It had taken nearly a month to reach him but when he saw its contents he knew it might be the answer to his problem.

  He had read the letter several times before coming to a decision and even now he could recall whole paragraphs. It had been cleverly written. She had not used either his name or hers yet there was enough private knowledge to make it obvious that the letter had come from Louise. The first part had given him news of her. Things had not been good since she had left prison after the second conviction. She had been ill with hepatitis and been in bed for nearly two months. Almost a year had gone by before she felt well enough to face the world again. She had moved back to Paris but all her friends were either dead or in hiding, so she had taken a position as a maid in a moderately well-off household. She had moved after a year, getting a good reference. She took another job. This time the reference meant she could aim higher and she began work for the Due de Cherbourg. Again she stayed a year, again she was given a good reference. Now she was able to put into operation the first step of a plan which had been forming in her mind: a position of trust in a rich household where there were children. She had to wait nearly half a year before her opportunity came. M Michel Blanchet, the hotel millionaire, wanted a personal maid for his new wife in London, someone who could also look after a small boy. References had to be of the highest and a knowledge of English was required. Louise filled both prerequisites admirably.

  Gradually Jacmel began to see where the letter was leading. He had been involved in political kidnappings as a member of the Delta Commando but had never liked them much. They were often messy. By their nature they were complex and had a way of going wrong.