Olura (7 page)

‘But then you and he come downstairs at two in the morning,’ he went on, ‘so he wasn’t there at all. Good! Now you are all three in the lady’s room, and a little
later she comes out with your key to get something from your room. So you are still there, and at breakfast time I am still on duty in the pantry. And again you two come down from upstairs.
It’s like a farce in the theatre!’

I said that we had moved very quietly so as not to wake up other guests, and he admitted very readily that he might have been dozing. I am sure that movement along the balconies never occurred
to him; there was no conceivable reason for it.

I promised that in future the Prime Minister would make the job of his amateur security guard as easy as possible, and then I asked him if he knew anyone in the hotel called Araña.

‘Yes, the outside man,’ he replied. ‘He does the odd jobs and the garden. An Andalusian with all their gipsy tricks. He cuts little bunches of flowers and presents them to the
old ladies. You should see him mimic them afterwards. He’s always good for a laugh and free with the drinks.’

Well, there was the man who had almost certainly provided Livetti with a ladder. No wonder he had been recommended as a rich source for any newshawk trying to fill in the details of a juicy
scandal.

All this had taken the best part of an hour. I joined Mgwana on his balcony and told him what I had discovered.

‘I asked our people to let the Spanish Embassy know where I was going and when I should arrive,’ he said. ‘But they are too busy learning how to use fish-knives and leave the
proper cards. I can’t blame them. Conventions aren’t as useless as they seem. Just a year ago the Ambassador was a schoolteacher and the First Secretary a bank clerk.’

God, how the man must have needed that week of rest which Olura had arranged for him!

She came up from lunch and asked why I had not been there. I explained that I had been busy pumping a female Livetti.

‘Yes, I saw her in the restaurant and spoke to her,’ she said. ‘She’s Mary Deighton-Flagg and was at school with me. She wasn’t a bad feature writer, but if she
goes back to London she faces an action for slander. It isn’t her fault that the Law is four hundred years out of date.’

I replied emphatically that the conversation of Miss Deighton-Flagg made me thank heaven for Her Majesty’s judges.

‘So far as I can see,’ I added, ‘your Mary thinks that any woman of character and originality has to be a nymphomaniac.’

‘Meaning me? But I don’t care what she thinks, Philip, and I’m sorry for her.’

‘I hope you weren’t sorry enough to give her a story,’ I said, and refrained from pointing out that I admired her charity more than her taste.

Only twenty-four hours earlier I had been looking forward to a promising holiday from erudition, islanded in luxury with the lovely eccentricities of Olura and the exotic intelligence of her
black man. But now, hard behind that curled-up puppet in the boot, came so much more humanity with alien purposes: the Deighton-Flagg woman, a specialist in poking round the bend of lavatories on
the pretence of cleaning them; the puzzled Arizmendi; the unknown Araña; and now at last the security guard who might have been some use the night before but could be only an embarrassment
in our present emergency.

That was my first meeting with Lieutenant Pedro Gonzalez. He had come from Zarauz where he had been keeping his police eyes on the children of some German prince whose matrimonial adventures
with one millionairess and two fashionably deformed movie stars had left some doubt in the eyes of the Law whose bloody baby was whose and why. He spoke perfect French, which wasn’t much good
to Mgwana who had only English, so I was called in to translate.

I liked Gonzalez at once. He was thin, wiry, and had a mobile face which he kept under control—sometimes with an effort. He wore a bow tie and a black summer suit, and could have passed as
any bachelor enjoying a respectable holiday. Except for a twinkle in his eye and a bulge on his hip—so discreet that it would have been unnoticeable if not for the exactitude of Spanish
tailoring—he might have been a clerk at a Consulate or the serious, young under-manager of a first-class hotel.

He wanted very little from Mgwana: merely that he should keep in sight when not in his room, and should allow himself to be accompanied when travelling by car. He had no reason to suppose that
His Excellency’s holiday would be disturbed, but we must understand that Spain was a welcoming nation and could not avoid receiving people who might abuse such hospitality. He
believed—with a bow to Olura and me—that we, too, with our great tradition of offering political asylum, found it had occasional disadvantages. I got the impression that
Gonzalez’s chiefs had given him more precise information than he was giving to us, but all policemen like to surround themselves with an aura of mysterious importance.

Olura treated him distantly, seeing in him a member of Franco’s secret police with a habit of torturing honest working men on his day off. But he was nothing more than a citizen of
excellent education who conceived it his pleasure and duty to keep the peace. He would have served Monarchy or Republic as loyally as the government of the Caudillo.

The evening passed without incident, one of us continually keeping an eye on the car. I was determined to dispose of Livetti alone. I could easily have been persuaded to take Mgwana along, but
that was now impossible. As for Olura, I knew that her sensibilities would be outraged. However much I needed her company and such physical help as she could give, I felt that she would never want
to see me again afterwards.

Yet she insisted, and nothing could shake her. She must have balanced her duty to the living individual against her guilt at desecrating the dead, and decided in my favour.

At half past seven I went to her room. It was pouring with rain again, and I wanted to start early in case we were held up by mud or flooding when we left the main roads. She was ready, and
wearing the Red Riding Hood cloak. I exclaimed impulsively that it wouldn’t do.

She smiled and asked why not. I wondered myself why I had blurted out anything so silly, and then saw the answer. Because it was the essence of our first meeting. Because it should not be
associated with this cold-blooded crime which, the night before, had seemed merely a desperate solution and now grew with every moment to be more disgusting, more immoral and more inevitable.

‘No, I’m wrong,’ I said. ‘The cloak will be quite black at night and hides you. But please promise to stay in the car when we come to the point.’

‘I won’t promise anything, Philip. Last night I came to you only for advice. But you didn’t give it and go back to bed.’

‘It didn’t seem an occasion for only advice.’

‘That’s what I feel now.’

We hesitated over the irrevocable step of leaving the room and going down to the car, not talking very much but at ease with each other.

‘He has a home,’ she said.

‘I suppose so. But anyway he is never going to return to it.’

‘I hate this!’

‘So do I. But don’t you believe Mgwana is worth it?’

She looked at me gratefully. Keeping Olura happy sometimes reminded me of arguing with a professor of ethics about the ultimate good.

She had just lifted the hood over that dark gold hair when Mgwana came in. His expression made us both sure that Livetti had been discovered.

‘You mustn’t go,’ he said. ‘Not yet! Will you watch the car from the window while I tell you what has happened?’

It was not, after all, the worst; nor was it wholly alarm which had given his face a patina of purple-grey. That dull darkness was a cloud of anger and humiliation.

He had just received a telephone call, he told us, in his native language. A white man had been speaking—not at all fluently except for his command of insult in vocabulary and
inflection.

The voice, sure that it could not be monitored and understood, had challenged him with what he was concealing and where it was. Mgwana naturally assumed that our movements had been observed. In
fact, as I now know, they had not. The accusation was an intelligent guess. After all, we could not possibly have hidden Livetti in the hotel to be discovered at any moment by the host of eager
chambermaids.

‘You will leave the hotel, boy,’ the voice ordered, ‘taking the body with you and driven by your …’

Mgwana, translating for us, was hoarse with suppressed fury. The unknown speaker must have referred to Olura by some barbarously disgusting term for a whore, even coarser than ours.

‘… driven by Miss Manoli,’ Mgwana went on. ‘You will leave the hotel at 9 p.m. precisely, and we shall assist you both to dispose of the body. If you do not obey, the
police will be informed and advised to open the boot.’

‘But how did the caller know you still had it?’ I asked.

‘I think now that he didn’t know,’ Mgwana replied, ‘and that he was fishing to find out. But I was so surprised and outraged that I gave it away.’

‘Then there was no mention of me and last night?’

‘No. I’m sure they do not realise that you come into it at all,’ he said.

Olura tried to be masculine and calm. She pointed out that the man behind the voice was a murderer and trying to force us to help him. He was in serious danger, whereas we had only questions to
answer and scandal to face.

Mgwana considered that in a long silence and shook his head.

‘There was some proof that I did not kill Livetti so long as his body remained in the window,’ he said. ‘There is no proof at all now. The motive is just as weak or as strong
as it was before, but the evidence of guilt has become overwhelming. I think I must obey.’

Looking back in cold blood, I believe that Mgwana ought to have confided in Gonzalez, and immediately opened up a line direct to the Minister of Justice and the Head of State. In that way it
might have been possible to keep the whole affair secret during investigation. But he was new to the ways of the west. How far would his word be trusted? Wasn’t it likely that colour could
count against him? Even if it didn’t, would they remember his early tribal youth, and forget Balliol, the London School of Economics and his influence at the United Nations? He was not yet
sure enough that the diplomatic old-boy network applied to him.

Olura was too lost in all this naked brutality to remind Mgwana that civilisation continued to exist outside it. I myself, who should have known better, accepted the situation as it was, and put
my faith in a trained mind accustomed to distinguish clearly between conflicting hypotheses. In fact I considered all this criminal impertinence as a challenge.

‘I suggest that you and Olura obey the instructions,’ I said. ‘But they will find when they follow the car that there are two unexpected men in it—myself and Gonzalez.
That will save us from any annoyance.’

What I meant by annoyance—and it was not lost on Mgwana—was any attempt to assassinate more than his reputation. Who was involved besides the highly probable Vigny I could not know;
but it was abundantly clear that they did not like Mgwana and did not stick at murder. If they were so obliging as to dig a secret grave for Livetti, they could easily make it large enough for
two.

Olura again protested that I ought not to get involved with two people who might be arrested at any moment. And what was the use of us all taking an evening run in the car and returning with
Livetti?

I explained my plan to them. It was unlikely that our followers would dare to stop us; but they might very well carry out their threat of tipping off the police. If they did, our Lieutenant
Gonzalez would show his pass and deal with any wretched cop who wanted to search His Excellency’s car. When we reached Amorebieta we would all stop and order dinner. There was a café,
I said—just to give them confidence in the objectivity of all this—where the wine was excellent, but I could not answer for the food.

Gonzalez, Mgwana and Olura were to remain at our table and take a taxi back to the hotel. Meanwhile I would try to get clear away with the car. I assured them that I knew the roads, the
language, the people and a taxi-driver and that if we all kept our heads and grabbed any opportunity which Amorebieta offered, it could be done. Gonzalez, whose sole duty was to guard Mgwana, had
no interest in my movements.

Olura’s expression was untranslatable. She looked as if she opposed my scheme, but had nothing better to offer. Mgwana retired into that impressive air of martyrdom, which really meant, as
I now realised, that he was waiting motionless in the jungle with ears spread until he saw which way to charge. At least he had given me a quick smile at the mention of Gonzalez, which showed that
he appreciated the main point.

At nine we collected our tame secret policeman and played the capricious foreigners on holiday who couldn’t stand any more of the hotel in the rain and were going out for a drive. I sat
alongside Olura. Gonzalez and Mgwana were in the back. It had been a muggy day, and it seemed to my guilty conscience that the boot was not quite airtight.

No car followed us. It was unnecessary. For the first few miles there was only one road we could take. Then after we had passed the first cross-roads and were swinging up the hairpin bends of
the coastal hills I looked down on the headlights of a car keeping half a mile behind us. While we were on the flat in the wide valley which seemed so empty at night and so full of scattered
red-roofed farms during the day, the car accelerated and passed us. For a second it forced us to slow down and almost instantaneously increased its distance. Undoubtedly the intention had been to
stop us and give us our orders; but the sight of three men with Olura instead of one imposed caution. The car was a big black Seat with a Spanish number. Two people whose faces I could not see were
in it.

In Amorebieta we parked openly outside the café. Here we had the choice of three roads—to San Sebastian, Vitoria, or Bilbao—so that anyone who proposed to follow us had to
stay pretty close. I deliberately ordered a meal which would take time to prepare and then left the other three at the table on the excuse of going out to see if the local
estanco
had any
good Havanas. I found the black Seat almost at once.