The Human Factor

  ‘But those little tactical atomic weapons of yours. Think of all the blacks who will die before you do and be there waiting for you.’

  ‘Terrorists,’ Muller said. ‘I don’t expect to meet them again.’

  ‘I didn’t mean the guerrillas. I mean all the families in the infected area. Children, girls, the old grannies.’

  ‘I expect they’ll have their own kind of heaven,’ Muller said.

  ‘Apartheid in heaven?’

  ‘Oh, I know you are laughing at me. But I don’t suppose they’d enjoy our sort of heaven, do you? Anyway I leave all that to the theologians. You didn’t exactly spare the children in Hamburg, did you?’

  ‘Thank God, I didn’t participate as I’m doing now.’

  ‘I think if you aren’t going to the funeral, Castle, we should get on with our business.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I agree.’ Indeed he was sorry; he was even afraid, as he had been in the offices of BOSS that morning in Pretoria. For seven years he had trodden with unremitting care through the minefields, and now with Cornelius Muller he had taken his first wrong step. Was it possible that he had fallen into a trap set by someone who understood his temperament?

  ‘Of course,’ Muller said, ‘I know that you English like arguing for the sake of arguing. Why, even your C pulled my leg about apartheid, but when it comes to Uncle Remus . . . well, you and I have to be serious.’

  ‘Yes, we’d better get back to Uncle Remus.’

  ‘I have permission to tell you – in broad lines, of course – how things went with me in Bonn.’

  ‘You had difficulties?’

  ‘Not serious ones. The Germans – unlike other ex-colonial powers – have a lot of secret sympathy for us. You could say that it goes back as far as the Kaiser’s telegram to President Kruger. They are worried about South-West Africa; they would rather see us control South-West Africa than a vacuum there. After all they ruled the South-West more brutally than we have ever done, and the West needs our uranium.’

  ‘You brought back an agreement?’

  ‘One shouldn’t talk of an agreement. We are no longer in the days of secret treaties. I only had contact with my opposite number, not with the Foreign Secretary or the Chancellor. Just the same way as your C has been talking with the CIA in Washington. What I hope is that we’ve all three reached a clearer understanding.’

  ‘A secret understanding instead of a secret treaty?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And the French?’

  ‘No trouble there. If we are Calvinist they’re Cartesian. Descartes didn’t worry about the religious persecution of his time. The French have a great influence on Senegal, the Ivory Coast, they even have a fair understanding with Mobutu in Kinshasa. Cuba won’t seriously interfere in Africa again (America has seen to that), and Angola won’t be a danger for a good many years. No one is apocalyptic today. Even a Russian wants to die in his bed, not in a bunker. At the worst, with the use of a few atomic bombs – small tactical ones, of course – we shall gain five years of peace if we are attacked.’

  ‘And afterwards?’

  ‘That’s the real point of our understanding with Germany. We need a technical revolution and the latest mining machines, although we’ve gone further than anyone realizes on our own. In five years we can more than halve the labour force in the mines: we can more than double the wages for skilled men and we can begin to produce what they have in America, a black middle class.’

  ‘And the unemployed?’

  ‘They can go back to their homelands. That is what the homelands were for. I’m an optimist, Castle.’

  ‘And apartheid stays?’

  ‘There’ll always be a certain apartheid as there is here – between the rich and the poor.’

  Cornelius Muller took off his gold-rimmed glasses and polished the gold till it gleamed. He said, ‘I hope your wife liked her shawl. You know you will always be welcome to come back now that we realize your true position. With your family too, of course. You may be sure they will be treated as honorary whites.’

  Castle wanted to reply. ‘But I am an honorary black,’ but this time he showed a little prudence. ‘Thank you.’

  Muller opened his briefcase and took out a sheet of paper. He said, ‘I have made a few notes for you on my meetings in Bonn.’ He produced a ball-point pen – gold again. ‘You might have some useful information on these points when we next meet. Would Monday suit you? The same time?’ He added, ‘Please destroy that when you’ve read it. BOSS wouldn’t like it to go on even your most secret file.’

  ‘Of course. As you wish.’

  When Muller had gone he put the paper in his pocket.

  CHAPTER II

  1

  THERE were very few people at St George’s in Hanover Square when Doctor Percival arrived with Sir John Hargreaves, who had only returned from Washington the night before.

  A man with a black band around his arm stood alone by the aisle in the front row; presumably, Doctor Percival thought, he was the dentist from Droitwich. He refused to make way for anyone – it was as though he were safeguarding his right to the whole front row as the nearest living relative. Doctor Percival and C took their seats near the back of the church. Davis’s secretary, Cynthia, was two rows behind them. Colonel Daintry sat beside Watson on the other side of the aisle, and there were a number of faces only half known to Doctor Percival. He had glimpsed them once perhaps in a corridor or at a conference with MI5, perhaps there were even intruders – a funeral attracts strangers like a wedding. Two tousled men in the last row were almost certainly Davis’s fellow lodgers from the Department of the Environment. Someone began to play softly on the organ.

  Doctor Percival whispered to Hargreaves, ‘Did you have a good flight?’

  ‘Three hours late at Heathrow,’ Hargreaves said. ‘The food was uneatable.’ He sighed – perhaps he was remembering with regret his wife’s steak-and-kidney pie, or the smoked trout at his club. The organ breathed a last note and fell silent. A few people knelt and a few stood up. There was a lack of certainty about what to do next.

  The Rector, who was probably known to nobody there, not even to the dead man in the coffin, intoned ‘Take Thy plague away from me; I am even consumed by means of Thy heavy hand.’

  ‘What plague was it that killed Davis, Emmanuel?’

  ‘Don’t worry, John. The post mortem was all in order.’

  The service seemed to Doctor Percival, who had not attended a funeral for many years, full of irrelevant information. The Rector had begun reading the lesson from the First Epistle to the Corinthians: ‘All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds.’ The statement was undeniably true, Doctor Percival thought. The coffin did not contain a fish; he would have been more interested in it if it had – an enormous trout perhaps. He took a quick look round. There was a tear caged behind the girl’s lashes. Colonel Daintry had an angry or perhaps a sullen expression which might bode ill. Watson too was obviously worried about something – probably he was wondering whom to promote in Davis’s place. ‘I want to have a word with you after the service,’ Hargreaves said, and that might be tiresome too.

  ‘Behold I show you a mystery,’ the Rector read. The mystery of whether I killed the right man? Doctor Percival wondered, but that will never be solved unless the leaks continue – that would certainly suggest he had made an unfortunate mistake. C would be very upset and so would Daintry. It was a pity one couldn’t throw a man back into the river of life as one could throw a fish. The Rector’s voice, which had risen to greet a familiar passage of English literature, ‘O Death, where is thy sting?’ as a bad actor playing Hamlet picks out from its context the famous soliloquy, fell to a drone again for the dull and academic conclusion, ‘The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law.’ It sounded like a proposition of Euclid.

  ‘What did you say?’ C whispered.

  ‘QED,’ Doctor
Percival replied.

  2

  ‘What exactly did you mean by QED?’ Sir John Hargreaves asked when they managed to get outside.

  ‘It seemed a more suitable response to what the Rector was saying than Amen.’

  They walked after that in a near silence towards the Travellers Club. By a mute consent the Travellers seemed a spot more suited for lunch that day than the Reform – Davis had become an honorary traveller by this voyage of his into unexplored regions and he certainly had lost his claim to one man one vote.

  ‘I don’t remember when I last attended a funeral,’ Doctor Percival said. ‘An old great-aunt, I think, more than fifteen years ago. A rather stiff ceremony, isn’t it?’

  ‘1 used to enjoy funerals in Africa. Lots of music – even if the only instruments were pots and pans and empty sardine tins. They made one think that death after all might be a lot of fun. Who was the girl I saw crying?’

  ‘Davis’s secretary. Her name is Cynthia. Apparently he was in love with her.’

  ‘A lot of that goes on, I suppose. It’s inevitable in an outfit like ours. Daintry checked on her thoroughly, I suppose?’

  ‘Oh yes, yes. In fact – quite unconsciously – she gave us some useful information – you remember that business at the Zoo.’

  ‘The Zoo?’

  ‘When Davis . . .’

  ‘Oh yes, I remember now.’

  As usual at the week-end, the club was almost empty. They would have begun lunch – it was an almost automatic reflex – with smoked trout, but it was not available. Doctor Percival reluctantly accepted as a substitute smoked salmon. He said, ‘I wish I had known Davis better. I think I might have come to like him quite a lot.’

  ‘And yet you still believe he was the leak?’

  ‘He played the role of a rather simple man very cleverly. I admire cleverness – and courage too. He must have needed a lot of courage.’

  ‘In a wrong cause.’

  ‘John, John! You and I are not really in a position to talk about causes. We aren’t Crusaders – we are in the wrong century. Saladin was long ago driven out of Jerusalem. Not that Jerusalem has gained much by that.’

  ‘All the same, Emmanuel . . . I can’t admire treachery.’

  ‘Thirty years ago when I was a student I rather fancied myself as a kind of Communist. Now . . .? Who is the traitor – me or Davis? I really believed in internationalism, and now I’m fighting an underground war for nationalism.’

  ‘You’ve grown up, Emmanuel, that’s all. What do you want to drink – claret or burgundy?’

  ‘Claret, if it’s all the same to you.’

  Sir John Hargreaves crouched in his chair and buried himself deep in the wine list. He looked unhappy – perhaps only because he couldn’t make up his mind between St Émilion and Médoc. At last he made his decision and his order. ‘I sometimes wonder why you are with us, Emmanuel.’

  ‘You’ve just said it, I grew up. I don’t think Communism will work – in the long run – any better than Christianity has done, and I’m not the Crusader type. Capitalism or Communism? Perhaps God is a Capitalist. I want to be on the side most likely to win during my lifetime. Don’t look shocked, John. You think I’m a cynic, but I just don’t want to waste a lot of time. The side that wins will be able to build the better hospitals, and give more to cancer research – when all this atomic nonsense is abandoned. In the meanwhile I enjoy the game we’re all playing. Enjoy. Only enjoy. I don’t pretend to be an enthusiast for God or Marx. Beware of people who believe. They aren’t reliable players. All the same one grows to like a good player on the other side of the board – it increases the fun.’

  ‘Even if he’s a traitor?’

  ‘Oh, traitor – that’s an old-fashioned word, John. The player is as important as the game. I wouldn’t enjoy the game with a bad player across the table.’

  ‘And yet . . . you did kill Davis? Or didn’t you?’

  ‘He died of his liver, John. Read the post mortem.’

  ‘A happy coincidence?’

  ‘The marked card – you suggested it – turned up, you see – the oldest trick of all. Only he and I knew of my little fantasy about Porton.’

  ‘You should have waited till I came home. Did you discuss it with Daintry?’

  ‘You had left me in charge, John. When you feel the fish on the line you don’t stand waiting on the bank for someone else to advise you what to do.’

  ‘This Château Talbot – does it seem to you quite up to the mark?’

  ‘It’s excellent.’

  ‘I think they must have ruined my palate in Washington. All those dry martinis.’ He tried his wine again. ‘Or else it’s your fault. Does nothing ever worry you, Emmanuel?’

  ‘Well, yes, I am a little worried about the funeral service – you noticed they even had an organ – and then there’s the interment. All that must cost a lot, and I don’t suppose Davis left many pennies behind. Do you suppose that poor devil of a dentist has paid for it all – or did our friends from the East? That doesn’t seem quite proper to me.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that, Emmanuel. The office will pay. We don’t have to account for secret funds.’ Hargreaves pushed his glass on one side. He said, ‘This Talbot doesn’t taste to me like ’71.’

  ‘I was taken aback myself, John, by Davis’s quick reaction. I’d calculated his weight exactly and I gave him what I thought would be less than lethal. You see, aflatoxin had never been tested before on a human being, and I wanted to be sure in case of a sudden emergency that we gave the right dose. Perhaps his liver was in a bad way already.’

  ‘How did you give it to him?’

  ‘I dropped in for a drink and he gave me some hideous whisky which he called a White Walker. The flavour was quite enough to drown the aflatoxin.’

  ‘I can only pray you got the right fish,’ Sir John Hargreaves said.

  3

  Daintry turned gloomily into St James’s Street, and as he passed White’s on the way to his flat a voice hailed him from the steps. He looked up from the gutter in which his thoughts had lain. He recognized the face, but he couldn’t for the moment put a name to it, nor even remember in what circumstances he had seen it before. Boffin occurred to him. Buffer?

  ‘Got any Maltesers, old man?’

  Then the scene of their encounter came back to him with a sense of embarrassment.

  ‘What about a spot of lunch, Colonel?’

  Buffy was the absurd name. Of course, the fellow must certainly possess another, but Daintry had never learnt it. He said, ‘I’m sorry. I’ve got lunch waiting for me at home.’ This was not exactly a lie. He had put out a tin of sardines before he went to Hanover Square, and there remained some bread and cheese from yesterday’s lunch.

  ‘Come and have a drink then. Meals at home can always wait,’ Buffy said, and Daintry could think of no excuse not to join him.

  As it was still early only two people were in the bar. They seemed to know Buffy a thought too well, for they greeted him without enthusiasm. Buffy didn’t seem to mind. He waved his hand in a wide gesture that included the barman. ‘This is the Colonel.’ Both of them grunted at Daintry with weary politeness. ‘Never caught your name,’ Buffy said, ‘at that shoot.’

  ‘I never caught yours.’

  ‘We met,’ Buffy explained, ‘at Hargreaves’ place. The Colonel is one of the hush-hush boys. James Bond and all that.’

  One of the two said, ‘I never could read those books by Ian.’

  ‘Too sexy for me,’ the other one said. ‘Exaggerated. I like a good screw as much as the next man, but it’s not all that important, is it? Not the way you do it, I mean.’

  ‘What’ll you have?’ Buffy asked.

  ‘A dry martini,’ Colonel Daintry said, and, remembering his meeting with Doctor Percival, he added, ‘very dry.’

  ‘One large very dry, Joe, and one large pink. Really large, old chap. Don’t be stingy.’

  A deep silence fell over the little bar as thoug
h each one was thinking of something different – of a novel by Ian Fleming, of a shooting party, or a funeral. Buffy said, ‘The Colonel and I have a taste in common – Maltesers.’

  One of the men emerged from his private thoughts and said, ‘Maltesers? I prefer Smarties.’

  ‘What the hell are Smarties, Dicky?’

  ‘Little chocolate things all different colours. They taste much the same, but, I don’t know why, I prefer the red and yellow ones. I don’t like the mauve.’

  Buffy said, ‘I saw you coming down the street, Colonel. You seemed to be having quite a talk with yourself, if you don’t mind my saying so. State secrets? Where were you off to?’

  ‘Only home,’ Daintry said. ‘I live near here.’

  ‘You looked properly browned off. I said to myself, the country must be in serious trouble. The hush-hush boys know more than we do.’

  ‘I’ve come from a funeral.’

  ‘No one close, I hope?’

  ‘No. Someone from the office.’

  ‘Oh well, a funeral’s always better to my mind than a wedding. I can’t bear weddings. A funeral’s final. A wedding – well, it’s only an unfortunate stage to something else. I’d rather celebrate a divorce – but then that’s often a stage too, to just another wedding. People get into the habit.’

  ‘Come off it, Buffy,’ said Dicky, the man who liked Smarties, ‘you thought of it once yourself. We know all about that marriage bureau of yours. You were damned lucky to escape. Joe, give the Colonel another martini.’

  Daintry, with a feeling of being lost among strangers, drank the first down. He said, like a man picking a sentence from a phrase book in a language he doesn’t know, ‘I was at a wedding too. Not long ago.’

  ‘Hush-hush again? I mean, one of your lot?’

  ‘No. It was my daughter. She got married.’

  ‘Good God,’ Buffy said, ‘I never thought you were one of those – I mean one of those married fellows.’

  ‘It doesn’t necessarily follow,’ Dicky said.

  The third man, who had hardly spoken up till then, said, ‘You needn’t be so damned superior, Buffy. I was one of those too once, though it seems the hell of a long time ago. As a matter of fact it was my wife who introduced Dicky to Smarties. You remember that afternoon, Dicky? We’d had a pretty gloomy lunch, because we sort of knew we were breaking up the old home. Then she said, “Smarties”, just like that, “Smarties” . . . I don’t know why. I suppose she thought we had to talk about something. She was a great one for appearances.’