The Whip Hand

by Victor Canning

  He smiled, full of understanding for youth, and then because he thought he was using me, I decided to use him and get a second opinion and maybe a few crumbs of information. I said, “I don’t trust this girl Katerina Saxmann. She knows I’m following Madame Vadarci, but she plays along with it, without telling the old girl. I can’t figure her angle – and she gives nothing away. I thought I was good at mind reading but she has me baffled.”

  He nodded, pursed his lips, frowned, and thought for a while, taking his time over all of them. Then he said weightily, “I give her much thought. She is a dedicated girl. Dedicated to herself. With a face, a figure, and an intelligence like hers what else could she be? Anything else would be a waste. She accepts that she has been chosen. But that is not all. Now she looks to see, and waits to see, what most she can make of it. She keeps you coming because you may ... sometime, somewhere ... be useful in her plans. But, of course, a girl like that does not work alone. Somewhere behind her is a man. This is psychology. A woman, no matter how beautiful, how intelligent, how determined, must always have a man. It is a law of nature.”

  “Could be.” He was a shrewd old number, worth his place on the pay-roll more than ever Howard Johnson would be. Old school, too, no emotions, no heroics, just a job to do and nothing he liked better than a quiet evening with a book and then to bed. I said, “You and I know little, just keep our noses to the scent and jog along. I think she knows a great deal. Everything, maybe.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Any idea who the man is?”

  He smiled and it was full of friendly cunning and understanding. “I think you know that as well as I do. You do not go into some things with your eyes shut. Not these things.”

  “I shouldn’t have thought he was her type.” I was thinking of Herr Stebelson and hoped he was. Stebelson was the only candidate in my book.

  “What is type? There are only men and women, and the combinations are infinite. You will not have seen his dossier since you are, let us say, a franc-tireur. Me, I have seen some of it, the pages below the red line, and even that is formidable.” He stood up and I guessed he would have liked to have gone on, talking shop, easing a load of past experience and weariness off on to a youngster like myself, fresh to the game and not so completely involved as he. I could almost like him. There’s always a lot to be learned, too, in sitting at the feet of a master for an hour or so while he rambles on. But he was well aware of the dangers of reminiscing. He said from the door, “So she tells you nothing?”

  “Only that they are leaving.”

  He showed no surprise. “When?”

  “She doesn’t know.”

  “How?”

  “By sea, she thinks.”

  “From where?”

  “There’s a village, or small town, midway down the island on the south side. It’s called Babino Polje. This country’s hell on names, isn’t it?”

  He smiled. “Not for me. There are affinities, don’t forget. Why does she fancy this?”

  “Because Madame V. is talking about making an overnight trip there.”

  He considered this, and then nodded. “Maybe I should send Frau Spiegel down there right away.”

  “Tell her to take her transistor set with her.”

  The bluff old lawyer’s face crinkled with the ghost of a smile. Then, stiff-backed, one of the old kind that you don’t meet often these days, he went out. I hadn’t the faintest idea whether I’d sold him a pup or not. But it was worth a try.

  The water and the electricity were on so I shaved and took a shower, then dressed and went down on to the terrace, to catch the last of the sun before it dropped behind the tall hills, and to have a drink with Vérité.

  “Pleasant afternoon?”

  “People keep asking me that,” I said. “Average.”

  “Is there anything for me to report to Herr Stebelson?”

  “Stebelson?”

  “All my reports to Herr Malacod go through him, naturally.”

  “Naturally.” But it was interesting. “No,” I said. “Nothing yet.”

  I finished reading Stigmata before I went to sleep that night. It was a pretty simple overall argument, but it was put with great force and backed up with fat wads of historical evidence.

  Simply, it was that conventional conceptions of national character – neuroses, as Professor Vadarci preferred to call them – were completely valid. But the validity rested not in what a nation thought of itself, but what was commonly accepted by other nations as the true national myth or neurosis. For instance, the English, broadly, were a race of stubborn hypocrites, hopeless at rational planning of their national life or national defence, but masters of improvisation in their recurring moments of crisis. Overall, they were stigmatized as being excitable, illogical, and much more concerned with saving face than the Japanese, for instance. (It was this last bit of deduction which had spurred some Times leader writer on 16 February, 1947, into pompous indignation – linked, of course, with the fact that Herr Malacod had appointed Professor Vadarci as director of the research foundation he was establishing for the study of national neuroses, with particular reference to their impact on international political affairs.) (Actually, a fortnight later, Professor Vadarci – for health reasons, it was said – had declined the post.)

  Other nations got equally bad write-ups, so that by and large they sounded like a world community of delinquents with the odd psychopath here and there among them. Vadarci, too, was hard on communications. He argued that mass communications, like the radio, television and Press services, were inherently evil since by contracting the world and bringing it into people’s front parlours they diminished its importance for people and made people indifferent to people. A breakfast paper every morning of every year full of war, disaster, murder, robbery, pillage, rape, arson, sex offences, moral looseness in persons and parties ... all these, fed ad nauseam to the world, tended to decrease the natural sensibility of the individual towards the individual. Civilization was linked to communications and throughout history the highest points of civilization had always produced the most revolting examples of man’s inhumanity to man. Civilized, communicable man was ruthless, vicious and contemptuous of the sanctity of human life. Behind the parties, the politics, the fancy uniforms, the urge for social reforms, and emerging nationalistic aspirations, was nothing but man the beast.

  It was hard hitting stuff and guaranteed to put up blood pressures. And he finished by denouncing all forms of international co-operation – the League of Nations, the United Nations, European unity, Pan-Americanism, the World State – as useless, impractical diversions while the real business of kill and hold tight to what you had went on. In Professor Vadarci’s opinion there was only one realistic solution, only one way to create a tolerable human society which would allow men to become what, spiritually, all men longed to be – real human beings – and that was by the emergence of one overriding world force. No community of nations. But one nation, overlords, ruthless at first, subjecting the other nations, and finally leading them into the promised land. In the West he put up two nominees – Italy or Germany, with a bias to Germany. And in the East he had a straight candidate in China. And he had a bundle of arguments for his choice, and I had no doubt that a lot of people would have agreed with him though they might have had their eye on different candidates.

  It was good bedtime reading, and I wondered what the hell it had to do with Katerina and Madame Vadarci. Maybe Madame Vadarci saw herself as a world ruler. Well, she had the whip already to her hand. I went to sleep thinking of that whip. At the back of my mind I had an idea that I already knew something about it.

  I was wakened at daybreak by a knock on my door. I called out for whoever it was to come in. But no one entered. I rolled over in bed and saw that a note had been pushed under the door.

  I shuffled over and picked it up, read it, and then went out into the vaulted corridor and looked out of the tall window. Katerina, in her yellow bikini, was poised on the
edge of the quay. She dived, neat and clean, came up and started away in a strong crawl. She could have given me fifty yards’ start in a hundred and beaten me easily.

  I went back to bed and lit a cigarette.

  Her note read:

  Walking Pomina late afternoon. Taking toothbrush, nightdress. Love.

  I shaved and dressed and went next door to Vérité’s room. She was sitting up in bed having breakfast.

  I said, “I think Mrs V. and Katerina are leaving today. My guess is that some boat is picking them up here.” I squatted on the end of the bed and showed her Pomina on the map.

  “What are you going to do?”

  I took a sugar lump from her bowl and sucked it, thoughtfully. She looked nice sitting up in bed, her dark hair tied back at the nape of her neck with a ribbon, a little bed jacket demurely buttoned close up to her neck.

  “Well, I’m not swimming after them. The only thing I can do is to be out there, catch the name of the yacht – if it is a yacht – and then it can be traced. But we’ll have to get back to Dubrovnik to set that going. That means a time gap. One that Katerina might not be able to bridge for me. Anyway, I think you’d better make arrangements for us to leave for Dubrovnik tonight.”

  “Do you want me to come with you to Pomina?”

  “No. I’ll take off after lunch on my own. We don’t want anything conspicuous about this.”

  “Because of Herr Walter Spiegel?” She gave me a shrewd look and a half smile.

  I nodded. She was no fool. How could she be, being Malacod’s secretary? I said, “He’s got an interest. He tried to sell me part of it. Not that he threw any light on the overall project. But I’ve managed to sell him the idea that Mrs V. will be leaving from Babino Polje, which is some way down the coast in the wrong direction. He’s sending the good Frau down there. Probably on the back of a mule – there don’t seem to be any roads, but she’ll have her transistor to keep her company. I’d just like to know that he was taking a siesta this afternoon. Okay?”

  She nodded and pushed my hand away from the sugar bowl. “That stuff is bad for the teeth.”

  I bared mine briefly. “They’re big and strong. I’ve got an urge to bite something with them.”

  She giggled and it was like a string of soap bubbles going up into the sunlight, bursting with little iridescent pops.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” I said. “I want to bite in anger. I’m fed up with being a follower. I’m fed up with being out in the dark. My curiosity is killing me.”

  She laughed and said, “I had a brother who was something like you....”

  I stood up and backed gently for the door. “That’s a damning thing to say to a man. Puts him on the wrong side of the romantic tracks. I don’t want to be a brother to anyone but my sister.”

  She said, “Oughtn’t you – under the terms of your employment – to give me something specific to report about Herr Spiegel?”

  “Why not? He’s working for the Russians. Is one. An old and very tried agent. And he’s paying me five hundred dollars a month for double-crossing Herr Malacod. The money’s useful. And he’s getting nothing from me. Not even a receipt. Okay?”

  It was a pleasant walk, though maybe a bit soon after lunch. I went across the short strip of water to the near lakeside in the hotel rowing boat with a party of English schoolmistresses, who were going for a long hike collecting flower specimens. They were a jolly lot, most of them pushing forty-five, and with that hearty, semi-flirtatious manner which gets over schoolmistresses once the Channel steamer hits the Calais quay. I told them I was going wild-mongoose-watching and needed to be on my own. They padded away in their tennis shoes up the lake road, leaving a wake of sharp, bright echoes of chatter in the steel-blue, bright afternoon air. As I took a track straight up the hillside away from the road I had a moment’s nostalgia for Wilkins and underground station signs, and Brighton pier seemed a long way away. Which it was, of course, but then obvious thoughts are always comforting, and I had a queer feeling in my stomach that cried out for comfort, the butterfly tickle which had nothing to do with the dalmatinski prsut which I had gone for in a big way at lunch. (Smoked ham: Fodor.)

  I went up over the shoulder of the hill, along a very rough track and dropped down to the lake road on the far side, out of sight of the hotel. I went westwards towards the far end of the lake, and after about half an hour was on a small bridge that crossed the little water channel that connected the big Veliko Jezero with the smaller Malo Jezero. Here, I left the road and went along the north shore of the small lake for a while, and then up the hillside, through small oak and large pine, to cross the hump of land that would bring me down to Pomina.

  Pomina was nothing. Just a rough road that died out among boulders and a stony beach. There were a few bamboo-thatched sheds full of lobster-pots and fishing gear, and about four fishermen’s houses, stone built, and with that incomplete look of broken walls, unglazed windows, and raw wood that made you wonder whether they were just being built or slowly falling down. There was a small motor-boat moored off a wooden jetty that was only a foot above water, a yellow dog asleep at the end, and a bantam cock with six hens foraging around the water-line. A woman beat a carpet strip over a low wall and stopped to stare at me. Remembering my Fodor, I gave her a smiling, “Dobor dan”. She hurried indoors as though I were mad.

  I went back up the hill, into the trees and scrub and worked my way along the slope until I found a little open space, nicely screened from the sea. I sat down and pulled my field-glasses out of the nylon string bag I had borrowed from Vérité. In it, besides the field-glasses, I had my cigarettes, a flask of whisky, and a pullover in case the day should cloud over and make it too cold just for shirt-sleeves and light drill trousers. Inside the pullover I had wrapped the ·22 Le Chasseur.

  I snapped off a few branches of the bush ahead of me, and had a good view of the little bay. Pomina was more or less below me and I could see my woman friend, back in her yard, hanging up strings of tomatoes against the house wall to dry. I kept the glasses on her for a moment and she jerked her head over her shoulder and looked up the hill, as though some instinct told her that the madman was still about. She had a fine, very thin line of black hair above her upper lip. I shifted the glasses away. On my left hand a longish promontory ran out protecting the south side of the bay. Away to the right, on the north of the bay, were a couple of islands, white limestone boulders thrusting up through the green shrubs on their summits. Anchored in the bay, a couple of hundred yards off Pomina, was a yacht. It was lined up dead ahead of me, so that I got the nice smooth white run of its rather bulbous stern square on in the glasses. In black letters her name and home port were painted just below the rail: KOMIRA, BRINDISI.

  There was no sign of life on deck. An Italian flag flapped a few loose folds now and then over the stern, and water was being pumped out of some sluice port just above the water-line. She was a nice boat, long, low, single funnelled, radar basket above the bridge, and I didn’t bother to work out how many months’ work I would have had to do for Herr Spiegel to save up enough to buy her. A companion ladder ran down the starboard side and there was a small white launch moored at its foot.

  I lit a cigarette and kept my eye on the rough road down to Pomina. For an hour the sun and I idled the time away.

  Then there was a movement on the yacht. Two men appeared on deck and came down the companion-way to the launch. The launch moved away from the Komira and headed towards Pomina. It tied up at the jetty and the two men stepped ashore. I held them through the glasses. One of them was an elderly deckhand type, singlet, canvas trousers and a black thatch of hair with a bald patch dead in its centre. He was carrying, somewhat surprisingly, a couple of golf clubs and a bulging white linen bag. The other was a tall, much younger man, wearing a black silk shirt, wide open to show a façade of muscles that would have made Tarzan feel like something that had crawled out of a crack behind the bath, black trousers and black sandals. His hair was blond, close-
cropped, and his face was square, regularly featured, good looking in the way that the dummies in the windows of Austin Reed’s and Simpson’s are, very masculine, guaranteed to crack if the smile became half an inch wider. His reflexes were perfect. As he stepped ashore the sleeping yellow dog uncoiled, resenting the intrusion, and went for his leg. He caught it with his right toe in the groin, hefted it into the water to cool off, and strode ashore without giving any impression that he had been aware of the incident.

  Both of them came along the shore and then headed up the hillside towards me. I stubbed out my cigarette.

  They came out on to a small grassy plateau about fifteen yards below me and halted there. Flat on my paunch, I stuck my head through a bush to get a good look at them. They were talking in German so nothing they said made any sense to me, except the occasional ja, ja, nein, nein, which didn’t help.

  The deckhand tipped up the linen bag on the grass and about three dozen golf balls tumbled out. The blond Siegfried took one of the golf clubs – it looked like a seven iron, or something in the mashie niblick range – and helped himself to a few practice swings. It whistled through the air at the lowest point of his swing with a swish like a rocket going off. Then he nodded at the deckhand, who began to set the balls up for him.

  He swung at a ball and my heart bled for the polyurethane painted cover and the labyrinth of rubber guts inside it. It went off, straight and true, howling with pain and fell thirty yards short of the Komira, dead in line with the stern. He smacked another dozen after it and you could have covered the fall of them all with a large table cloth. I lay with my eyes popping out and wished Arnold Palmer could have been there. It would have made him take up smoking again.

  Having loosened himself up with the iron, he passed to the wood, a spoon, and began to bombard the yacht and make pretty patterns of water spouts around and beyond it. One fifty yards to port. The next fifty yards to starboard. A nice bit of draw, and another curling in and beyond the bows from the right, and then a fade to match it coming in around the bows from the left. I worked it out, thirty-six new balls at five bob each. Nine quid. Well, a man has got to have his exercise and the way he did it certainly went with the yacht.