Liz paused at the door and swung him a look compounded in equal parts of humour and severity. “Why, are there some more of my relatives you’d like to impersonate?”
De Witte chuckled deeply, sending a tremor through the frame of his bed. “No, you’ve seen my entire repertoire, I’m afraid. I’m sorry, girl. I plead total crashing boredom as mitigation.”
Liz threw a glance round the small white room. “Have you been here long?”
“Subjectively or objectively? Objectively, several weeks. Subjectively, half my bloody life.”
Liz waited a moment longer. Then, with a smile, she dropped her bag on the table, threw her hat on top of it and dropped into the chair. “Okay. Hell, I’ve nothing better to do. Till Uncle Paul wakes up I don’t know a soul in this whole country.” She looked frankly at the machines ranged at his bedhead, the tubes and leads hung round him. “What are you in for?—If it’s something embarrassing, feel free to lie.”
“It was embarrassing, all right,” De Witte said grimly. He was thinking of the ease with which he had been taken by a little black scrap who could have been one of his wife’s housegirls. “But not biologically so. I was mugged. They rushed me in here and did a lovely repair job, but if I’d have known what was coming I’d have stuck a plaster on and gone home, because once they had me at their mercy the doctors started finding all sorts of things wrong with me. I only came in with a little nick in my chest. Now I’ve got a defective heart, my insurance agent is sending me grapes and my accountant is regretting the life membership he talked me into buying at the country club.”
Liz sucked in a deep, quiet breath. She was under no illusions about what she was hearing. The man was dying and he knew it and cared very much, and still from somewhere he could dredge up the courage to joke about it with a perfect stranger. With the same instinctive generosity with which she devoted time and energy to the defeat of Joel Grant’s daemons—ingenuously, without calculation, for no better reason than a purely personal willingness to answer a perceived need—she leaned forward and laid her hand in an unmistakable gesture of comfort on the bare forearm, above the taped drip-tube, of the man whom—intellectually, philosophically—she abhorred more than any other.
She hated everything he stood for, the most fundamental precepts on which he had built his life and his work. She hated what he had done to people she cared about and to others of whom she knew nothing. She hated his long fingers creeping spiderlike across the world and their prurient rape of her precious privacy. But she found she could not hate the man: this strong man, lying like a felled lion under a maypole from a machine, all his restless ranging and seeking and striving condensed at this ignoble last into a small room like a cage.
The tragedy of his reduction, from sun king to shadow man, touched her: not with compassion exactly, inside where it finally counted he was still too strong to need or want kindly consolations, but with a sorrow that recognized the vacuum that would remain when Joachim De Witte was gone. She said quietly, “So what happens now?”
The white moustache flared briefly in a wry facial shrug. “They make tests. They take blood samples. I ask, ‘Will the tests cure me? Will taking my blood away make my heart beat stronger?’ They smile at me as if I am a child and shake their stupid fingers in my face. There are a lot of things they can do, they say, and the tests will help them decide what is best. But actually they do nothing, and as the days go by I feel my life growing thin, dilute, and seeping away through the cracks. And I think there is nothing they can do.”
A dove-grey silence settled in the room like ash. De Witte broke it after a minute with an unexpected chuckle. “Elinor—my wife, Elinor—thinks they will give me a new heart.”
Liz looked up startled. “Really?” Momentarily her senses reeled in the vortex of logic which is the South African paradox: that this land where television is a suspiciously radical innovation was the birthplace and nursery of heart transplant surgery. She fumbled to recover her grip on the conversation. “Well—perhaps they will.”
Although De Witte’s sick heart seemed far removed from the purpose which had brought her six thousand miles, for the moment any conversation she could have with him was sufficient. As long as he was talking to her, as long as she had access to him, she held the initiative. Sooner or later, in small pieces, unknowing, or all at once in angry response to a direct question, he would tell her about Grant. The urgency of her quest made her long to force the pace, to quiz him and risk the consequences, but prudence won over impatience. Finesse was the key to his knowledge. She needed to charm the snake, not bludgeon him.
De Witte shook his leonine head. “No chance. Not for me. My heart’s one off.”
“On moral grounds? Or are you just boasting?”
He grinned at her. It was a pleasant change for him, being able to talk about it without the heavy undertones. “You’re pretty hard to impress, cousin Liz. No, I’m a practical man, I can claim to be unique on strictly demonstrable evidence. I got funny blood.”
“Funny blood?”
“And funny tissue to go with it. Well, call it rare—it isn’t all that much of a laughing matter when successful transplants depend on a good match between donor and recipient. The chances of somebody else with funny blood dying considerately enough as to leave his funny heart available for transplant into my funny body are about as long as the president going on the road with a black and white minstrel show.”
“I’m sorry,” said Liz. “I really am sorry.” The odd thing was that she meant it.
“Hey,” said De Witte reproachfully, catching her hand, “this has all got a bit weighty for two people that don’t know each other from holes in the wall. Anyway, what do I need a new heart for? The one I’ve got’s still ticking.” He released her to feel for his own pulse. “There, what did I tell you? Just needed a bit of intelligent company to cheer it up. Damn doctors, what do they know? There’s nothing wrong with my heart that getting out of this place and back to work won’t cure.”
He sent for some tea. It came in a silver pot, with three cups. He saw Liz counting them. “My wife will be here any time.”
She got up from the chair hurriedly, awkwardly. “Is it that time already? Listen, I’ll have to go. You don’t need me playing gooseberry—” If he had wanted her to go, she had already reasoned, he would not have sent for tea and there would not have been three cups.
De Witte waved a broad hand at her. “Sit down, have your tea. What do you think we do during visiting hours that we need privacy for? I’ve got a bad heart, remember. Anyway, I want you to meet my wife. Since I’ve been in here her social circle has narrowed to people in white coats. It’ll do her as much good to see a fresh face as it’s done me.”
If Elinor De Witte was surprised to find her husband entertaining a young woman in his room she showed no sign of it. She came forward with a smile and received De Witte’s introduction and abridged explanation with every sign of welcome. Liz, on the other hand, was left wallowing gauchely in the wake of a surprise so total and so badly disguised as to verge upon the uncouth. It was not the fact of De Witte’s being married which so startled her—she had not given the matter any thought, it seemed to have no relevance to her task—but the extraordinary beauty of the woman who was his wife.
She was as tall as Liz, thirty years older but still with the strong, slender grace of a gazelle. Her long fine hair had not so much greyed as faded from fair to an indeterminate shade like raw silk, and it was bent up behind her head in a French pleat. She had great grey eyes and skin that more than half a century of strong sun had done nothing to coarsen, had only turned faintly luminous. Liz, who was not unaware of her own physical advantages but had long ago decided they did not matter worth a damn, was mortified to experience a sudden brief pang of envy. Gone almost before she could recognize it for what it was, it nevertheless left her feeling, for the first time, that she had lost control of the situation, become only another player in her own drama. She struggled mentally to regain the initiative and wondered if her composure was as disordered as her concentration.
If it was, Elinor De Witte chose not to notice. She offered her hand, the long slender fingers cool. “How do you do?” She spoke with refinement but no affectation, with an almost classically English accent but one from thirty years ago. “I hope you’ll enjoy our country as much as my husband has obviously enjoyed your company.” It could have been a veiled cattiness but it patently was not. She was not a woman who would have chosen to express herself in that way. Any censure she had to offer would be conveyed with honesty and dignity, not by means of a barbed pleasantry. The woman was genuinely glad to see De Witte cheered by his unexpected visitor.
They had the tea. Mrs. De Witte poured. After perhaps half an hour it became apparent to Liz that De Witte was tiring rapidly and soon she would have to leave. She knew she could return tomorrow, but those twenty-four hours that would be long to her would be endless to Joel Grant, frightened, possibly hurt, in the hands of a violent and dangerous man who must himself be aware that the risk of entrapment was growing with every minute he spent on hostile foreign soil. It seemed probable that Grant could not afford her caution.
Apropos of nothing she snapped her fingers. “That’s where I’ve heard your name before! Do forgive me,” she added, immediately contrite, “but it’s been bothering me ever since I found out you weren’t my Uncle Paul.”
“My name?” said De Witte, unconcerned. “You mustn’t believe everything you read in the papers, especially when they aren’t censored.”
“There were two men on the plane. They spent the whole damn journey talking—I think they must know everyone in the land. When they said De Witte I listened in for a minute—I didn’t know then how large a tribe it is.”
“There are fewer flies on a water buffalo,” De Witte admitted. “What were they saying?”
Liz shrugged. “I don’t know, really. I lost interest when I realized it wasn’t Uncle Paul they were talking about. Oh—they mentioned a friend of yours; at least, I presumed it was a friend. Joel Grant?”
Liz held her breath. De Witte thought for a moment. Then he said, “Never heard of him.”
“And someone called Mpani,” Liz prompted desperately, hoping her desperation was not showing.
Understanding dawned visibly in De Witte’s steel-coloured eyes. “Yes—now I know. That Grant. My God, some people have long memories. I’ve been made a fool of dozens of times since then.”
A few minutes later the nurse came, and Liz left the De Wittes alone to say good night. Her mind was bubbling with activity. Her foray into the world of the spies had been rewarded with two most interesting discoveries. The first was that, clearly, De Witte had no knowledge of Vanderbilt’s operation in England. The second was that the mention of Joel Grant’s name, which had failed to ring the faintest of bells with De Witte who interrogated him, had sent Mrs. De Witte starting out of her clear, pale skin.
Chief Inspector Corner had been encountering obscure difficulties all day. The ratio of inquiries per useful result had risen steadily and now stood at a personal best if not a track record. It was not as if any of the London experts he was calling had actually refused to co-operate: nothing so definite, so easy to deal with. It was more that they suddenly found themselves embroiled in incredibly long conversations on other lines, summoned to lengthy and repeated conferences, out to improbably timed meals. If one actually took a call, from compassion or by mistake, he promised to come back with the required information and somehow forgot.
George Corner bore the frustration with equanimity at first—there were days like that, God knew he had had enough of them in the past; later with suspicion, finally with the absolute certainty that his investigation was being booby-trapped by some upper-echelon dirty tricks brigade. He made three extremely forthright calls to three extremely senior worthies—known, because of the honours it had pleased Her Majesty to bestow on them, as Call me God, Kindly Call me God and God Calls me God—and two hours later, returning to his office after an abbreviated tea in the cafe opposite with a wife who opened her campaign by asking the waitress to point him out, he found it occupied by a young man in a poplin raincoat. Corner, who tended to look more like a marquee than a mannequin, nevertheless appreciated style in others. He knew that raincoat was not of local origin. London, Paris, Rome, New York possibly; not Manchester. The last idea in the head of the man who tailored it was that it would be useful to keep the wearer from getting wet.
Corner looked pointedly at the name on the door. “Yes, this is mine.”
The young man smiled. It was a self-assured, satirical smile as sophisticated as the raincoat. “I took the liberty of waiting for you in here.”
“Yes,” agreed Corner, “you did.”
“It occurred to me you might prefer to conduct our business in private. However, it doesn’t matter to me if you leave the door open, switch through the intercom and tune in all the radio cars as well.”
Corner shut the door, with restraint. “Who are you?”
The young man flashed the smile again, as if it was something he was famous for. “My name is James.”
Chief Inspector Corner was not obtuse, but he did occasionally choose to misunderstand. “All right, Jimmy, suppose you tell me who sent you and what the message is and then we can both get back to doing something useful.”
The urbane Mr. James did not much like being addressed as Jimmy. It showed in the tiny frown that gathered between brows so perfectly shaped, so elegantly arched, they might have been plucked. But he did not make an issue of it. He had probably, decided Corner, been called a great deal worse in his time.
“London,” James said judiciously, “is a little surprised at the amount of time and effort you feel able to devote to this one case.”
“London is.” Corner nodded thoughtfully. “What did you do, conduct a Gallup poll?”
James smiled, thinly but not without humour. “Whitehall, if you prefer.”
“The Foreign Office? Or something a little more obscure than that?”
“It’s not as if,” James went on smoothly, “any of those involved, except on the fringes, are British subjects.”
“So the Foreign Office—or whatever—thinks I should only concern myself with crimes committed by or upon voters?”
“It’s the backwash of somebody else’s war. It may be reprehensible of them to continue it on our soil, but they’ve kept the action by and large between themselves. An English newspaper office was broken into, an English house was entered and an English girl got a bump on the head. That’s all that need concern you; and that’s pretty small stuff by police standards, surely.”
“A man has been kidnapped. There’s every reason to believe that he will be taken out of this country by force if”—he paused fractionally—“London doesn’t pull its finger out and start sending me answers instead of singing telegrams.”
“The missing man is a South African. The man who’s got him is a South African. They’re going back to South Africa, which is where their differences should have been settled in the first place. We have enough home-grown problems: you spend your time on those, Mr. Corner.”
George Corner thought for a moment. He hung up his coat and sat down behind his desk. Then he favoured James with a friendly smile. “Tell you what, son. You tell the Grand High Poohbar, or whatever it is your chief calls himself these days, to tell the Foreign Secretary what it is he requires. The Foreign Secretary can make a formal request to the Home Secretary, and the Home Secretary can have a quiet word with the Chief Constable. The Chief Constable will tell my Superintendent and my Superintendent will tell me.
“By which time, almost certainly, either I will have found this big Boer who treats other people’s countries like an adventure playground, or the poor bastard who thought he was safe in England will have been dragged beyond the reach of any help I can give him. That will save me having to tell the Superintendent, for the consumption of the Chief Constable, the Home Secretary, the Foreign Secretary and the Grand High Poohbar, that the time to wonder whether Joel Grant was worth protecting was before he was given sanctuary in this country, not when the thug employee of a Fascist government thumbs his nose at our laws and international convention in order to take him back.”
Patrick James said quietly, “I understand your anger.” The slick urbanity had stripped from him like a veneer as Corner failed to succumb to it. “And yes, you’re absolutely right: if we do this through channels it’ll take forever. In fact, it won’t get done at all, because most of the people in that chain of communication won’t put their names to a formal request of that kind. So no, we probably can’t stop you doing your job. But we have a good reason for asking you to hold off.”
“I find that difficult to believe,” Corner said evenly.
“I dare say. But then criminal law—with all its complexities—is like a child’s first reader compared with the world of international relations. You know about choosing the lesser of two evils, but what about backing evil men in preference to good ones because in the long run what they can achieve will be of more lasting value than any amount of well-meaning idealism? We have to do that. The bigger the picture, the blacker parts of it are, but we have to work in those areas precisely because that’s where the dirt is. It’s muck and brass: the dirt is where the power is, and to keep the lid from flying off and the contents hitting the fan we have to find ways of tapping into that power. Yes, we’re working with substandard material—Christ, we are substandard material! But the alternative is a pristine anarchy.
“Chief Inspector, I’m with you. Joel Grant had a right to expect better of us. He fought against tyranny in his own country for as long as his strength held out, and when he was mentally and physically exhausted he was lucky enough to get out, and to be accepted into a country where tradition, government and law all guarantee equal rights for all citizens. He must have thought he’d died and gone to heaven. He was entitled to suppose he was safe. And then he wakes up one morning to find himself back in the hands of the people he damn nearly died to escape from. We’ve let the bastard in, we’ve let him find him, we’ve let him take him—knowing he’ll end up back in Pretoria with his head wired to a trip-hammer—and now some creep from Whitehall is explaining to the only man standing between him and the abyss why we should let him fall.
“And the reason is this. If you catch the Boer, if you kill him in a showdown, if Grant goes free or if any members of the British public become involved, we have a diplomatic incident on our hands. We have to accuse South Africa, they have to deny it, it’ll mean formal protests and recalled ambassadors, it’ll probably end in frozen relations and trade sanctions and God knows what else. And that just could be enough to project South Africa into bloody revolution.
“We are almost the last people they respect still having anything like normal contacts with South Africa. There are plenty of decent people who say that’s not to our credit. But if we scrape them off our shoes they won’t mend their ways: they’ll revert to the old Boer fundamentalism of Kruger and Vorster. The liberals won’t stand a chance before that bulldozer, but the blacks will turn it on its side. They’re not going back; it’s only that tiny trend towards liberalization that has kept them from open rebellion so long. If the whites try to turn back the clock it’ll happen, overnight. It has to. If the blacks ever plan on being free of Afrikaner oppression it has to be now. The country’s a powder-keg: it won’t explode, it’ll erupt, and half Africa will be sucked into the firestorm. The casualties could run into millions. I’m talking about the human equivalent of a nuclear event.”
Chief Inspector Corner sat at his desk, regarding the young man speculatively for rather longer than might have seemed necessary. Finally he said, “Sonny, I’m going to do you the courtesy of supposing that you believe all that and further, of supposing that you care. To me it sounds pretty far-fetched that the likes of Joel Grant could be the catalyst for an African Armageddon; but again, I’ll accept your word for it.
“But I have to tell you, it doesn’t alter one scrap the job I have to do. Juggling the fate of nations may be part of your brief but there’s nothing whatever about it in the police manual. My job is to uphold the law, here and now, and to protect those who wish to live within it from those who choose to act outside it. It is my duty to help Grant to the limit of my ability. Do you understand that? I have no option; it is my duty.”
“You won’t get the help you need to succeed.” The hard edge of frustration on Patrick James’s voice was burred with regret.
“I’d guessed that already.”
Liz loitered downstairs, in the hospital’s reception area, waiting for Mrs. De Witte to emerge from the lift. Her mind was operating, like a sophisticated rotary wing, on two distinct and contra-active levels. On the lower level her thoughts were in turmoil, spinning invisibly without drag or lift, dramatic and useless as a feathered blade. It was crazy enough that De Witte should know nothing—and he clearly knew nothing, Liz had been watching very closely and no one dissembled that well—about the matter she had travelled so far to take up with him, risking her safety every time she opened her mouth; for she had no illusions about the degree of protection her British passport would afford if her prying came to the attention of the authorities. It just meant she would be snatched covertly, after dark, instead of in broad daylight on the public street. If they were prepared to send a man to England in pursuit of Joel Grant, they would not waste a moment’s worry on the prospect of pointed questions should Liz Fallon disappear in Pretoria. Indeed, the very fact that she had been allowed to leave De Witte’s room and reach unimpeded the public parts of the hospital confirmed that she had been asking the wrong questions, or the wrong person.
But what had really set her mind whirling was the extraordinary way Elinor De Witte had responded to the casual use of Joel’s name. If it was clear that De Witte knew nothing of Grant’s predicament, it was equally obvious that his wife was aware of Vanderbilt’s activities. Liz could conceive of no possible reason for such a paradox; at the same time, the afternoon had been a success in that she now knew where to pursue her inquiries, and Mrs. De Witte might—though only might—be an easier nut to crack than the colonel.
All that was on the lower, roiling level. Immediately above it Liz had battened down a hatch of half-inch pragmatism. She had things to do which she could not allow her confusion to infect. It would be time enough to sort out the implications when she had more facts: right now the important thing was to avoid being sucked into that mental vortex, to where reason would drown, her grip would slacken, her calm detachment vanish utterly, leaving her naked before her enemies. She had still to control the monster, even though it was changing shape visibly in front of her.
When Elinor De Witte emerged from the lift, alone, Liz fell into step beside her. The older woman did not seem surprised. She said nothing, hardly glanced Liz’s way; but her profile was strained, drawn in lines of quiet despair. She looked as if she had not slept for a month.
Liz said quietly, “I believe we need to talk”; and after only a moment’s hesitation Mrs. De Witte nodded and led the way outside to her car. It was already dark.