Mosaic (13 page)

“And I'd be particularly interested if any of the planes you're watching should take off unexpectedly this morning for any of the northern airports, with or without a cargo. Not the Britannia, though; he'll want us to keep watching that.”

“This Vanderbilt: do you know him?” Corner's shrewd eyes were on him. “You sound as if you know him.”

“Oh yes,” said Shola softly, “I know him. Not personally, you understand; not even by repute, although I've heard the name. But I know him. He's me: a man fighting for the future of his country as he wants it to be. He's tough and he's clever and he's brave, and he knows that when you're far from home and surrounded by enemies, sometimes all the toughness and cleverness and courage in the world aren't enough to stand between you and twenty years behind high walls, when the only freedom you'll enjoy will be going bald. And he'll risk that three or four times every year, until he's caught or killed or his nerve goes.”

“You sound as if you admire him.”

“I hate the bastard.”

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.”