Walking Dead (22 page)

The Captain grunted uninterpretably.

“OK, the deal's about something else. If you lay off the Khandhars—and by the way you also lay off the village where I've been staying—I'll tell you two things which you need to know. One which you need to know personally, and one which might make a bit of difference to the revolution.”

“You tell me, and then I'll see about making promises.”

“Um. I'll go half way. I'll tell you what it's about. Two related things. Who killed Ladyblossom, and how to stop my Company pulling out of the Islands.”

“Who killed who?”

“Ladyblossom. The woman who was killed in my lab. The caretaker's wife at the laboratories. You must remember—you were holding me as a witness.”

“Yeh? Yeh, I remember—snake-apple. Doesn't matter now, that, compared with the revolution. File closed.”

“It's quite important, and it ties in with the other thing. I suppose that matters.”

“Sure.”

“Is it a deal, then? Mind you, I can't tell you how to make certain the Company won't pull out, but they're planning to go, and I can give you some leverage which might prevent them.”

Captain Angiah sat flicking the steering-wheel with a long forefinger. Foxe wondered whether to push his luck and try and set Mr Trotter as director of a small herbalist hospital. Later, perhaps.

“If we don't go after the Khandhars, what line will they take?” said the Captain suddenly.

“I don't know. All I want is for you to try and negotiate with them. You've got quite a lot in common, I think.”

“With those crazy magicians?”

“You aren't going to be able to abolish any of that sort of thing just by making laws—it's got very deep roots. You told me you'd shot a man for letting a witch get close enough to blow on her palm at him, but that didn't stop any of the soldiers believing in magic, did it? There was only one man in the castle that night who wasn't a believer. If you want to change this country you're going to have to work along with that sort of thing. And at least the Khandhars are honest and serious.”

“Their top fellow's another Trotter.”

“Can't be helped. Well?”

“OK—provided I can swing it with the Council.”

“Good. Well, the main reason that my Company came here in the first place was for a combination of tax reasons and security, and the main reason they want to leave is that security has broken down. They think Doctor Trotter was entirely to blame; he started it, certainly, and got hold of documents which allowed him to blackmail the Company to some extent; so naturally when some of our rivals started getting hold of secrets too the Company assumed he was to blame; but in fact the chap who's been selling the secrets is the lab Director, Doctor Dreiser. He also killed Ladyblossom.”

“Crap. He was home with his mother all the time after you come in from your fishing. We have his house bugged.”

“Yes, but … hold on—do you remember if he said anything to his mother about my plans?”

“Sure. That was why we dropped on you so sudden. I was happy when Doctor O started messing you around, because I saw it was going to help the revolution. I brought you in on my own initiative, cause of that.”

“Yes. Doctor Trotter told me that I'd come to Main Island sooner than he'd intended. Mrs Trotter meant to be there to meet me. But the point I wanted to make is that Dreiser knows his house is bugged, so his easiest way of telling you I was making a run for it was to tell his mother.”

“Sure, but I keep telling you he wasn't at the laboratory to kill this woman.”

“He didn't have to be. He didn't mean to kill her. It was just a booby trap. He had three safes in his office, and he wasn't happy about their security, so he'd fixed extra gadgets to them. He showed me one which squirted purple dye over you if you tried to open it without throwing a secret switch, and my guess is he'd fixed one of the others to shoot a dart at anyone who tampered with it.”

“Where'd he get snake-apple? It's not that common?”

“It didn't come from you?”

“Course not.”

“At first I thought it must have, and you'd killed Ladyblossom to have an excuse for arresting me, and you'd used the stuff because I'd accidentally started to get a reputation as a witch. But if it didn't happen like that, it's one of the strongest points against Dreiser. I believe snake-apple plants are heavily guarded these days, but Doctor Trotter told me he'd asked the laboratory to investigate it, and Mrs Trotter said the poison lasts for ages. So there would have been some in the laboratories at some point, and Dreiser would almost certainly have hung onto it—it's exactly his sort of thing. I haven't worked out the details yet—it was the way my rat died that put me onto it. Now the next point is was Ladyblossom working for you?”

“No. Our man there is … Forget it.”

“It doesn't matter. She was working for somebody. She had a son in the army called Sonny who she was very fond of, and she hinted she'd been telling him things about my work. And the Khandhars knew about me, and what Professor Galdi was working on from a guard called Sonny. It must have been the same man. Hang on—they said something once about a man at the laboratories who kept all the secrets … Anyway, Ladyblossom had been through my papers thoroughly enough to find out which rats were performing specially well. But then I'm afraid I persuaded her that I was a powerful witch, and because of that I think she decided to stop spying on me and started on Dreiser. She found the safes behind the big picture and tried to open one and got shot with the snake-apple dart. She was a very intense believer in magic, and I once told her that Quentin had what she called ‘the power,' because it seemed to be the only way to stop her tampering with the performance of my rats. I think after she felt the dart she was still conscious enough to go up to my lab and get him out of his cage, because she thought that he was the only hope. And that's how she died there.”

“Could be,” said Captain Angiah irritably. “No way you can prove it and what's it going to do for the revolution?”

“Knowing who killed her, not much. But what's in that safe, do you think? The other safe—the one Dreiser showed me for top security documents—that was only guarded with a harmless dye. What would he keep in one which was guarded with a poison dart? Money, I think, and documents which proved it was he who'd been selling the Company secrets. One of the things he arranged on that fishing trip was to make certain that copies of my report got through to Doctor Trotter. I had to arrive at the airport in time for that. You know, I don't think he's been doing this simply for the cash—I think he felt he wasn't going to be able to leave here until the Company decided to pull out, because until then he'd never be able to persuade his mother to go. So for the past three years he's been systematically trying to incriminate Doctor Trotter in the Company's eyes, and he'd succeeded so well that the Company's been getting ready to go by having completely useless work done here. Now, if I'm right, and if you can get to that safe before Dreiser does, you're going to be able to go to the Company and persuade them that the security-leak has been an internal Company matter. As I say, this won't necessarily make them stay, but it will remove their main reason for pulling out, and there are quite good reasons why they should want to keep a foothold in the Islands. You can offer them whatever advantages are worth your while. My guess is you can get them to hang on long enough to see how the revolution's going to work out. That's all.”

The Captain continued to flick obsessively at the wheel. Foxe sat beside him and listened to the sound, and the whispers of the canefield, and smelt the stink of the ditch. The world had indeed changed since he had left the forest; there it had been dreamlike and magical, only living in the middle of the dream and the magic he had accepted them as ordinary. Now that he was confronted with the real ordinariness of the shabby, negotiating, compromising world he could recognise the strangeness of the dream. He had been on a voyage and was now returning to the place where he belonged, but returning changed. There was no question of retaining any longer the slightest wisp or scent of Lou's goodness and in any case that had no leverage here. Here one had to negotiate and compromise, and accept that the best one could do was only best in the sense that it was less bad than other possibilities.

“I left something out,” he said. “If I'm right you'll look after Dreiser's mother, won't you?”

“Too late.”

“Rubbish. What better way is there of proving that your revolution is run by civilised and reliable people than by being as considerate as you can to someone in her position?”

“You think so?”

“Yes. And don't forget I've got a lot of emphasis to play with when I tell my story.”

The Captain grunted, started the engine and drove forward between the
slashing canes to the bridge. They bounced over timber slats to the road.

“Hang on a moment will you?” said Foxe.

The Captain hesitated, but braked about twenty yards further on and halted alongside the stinking ditch. Foxe climbed out and picked up a stone about the size of his fist, then leaned into the back of the jeep to look for a bit of rag. There was nothing.

“Mind if I nick this?” he said, plucking at the turquoise chiffon scarf that enwrapped Mrs Trotter's thick neck.

“It's yours,” said the Captain, puzzled but affable.

Foxe eased the scarf free and spread it out. There was a little drying blood in one corner. He laid Quentin's body in the middle with the stone beside it, then knotted the scarf by its corners into a tight bundle round the two objects. Without ceremony he tossed the bundle into the ditch and only watched it long enough to make sure it would sink in the black slime.

2

T
he press conference went very easily. The questions asked were not those which might have forced Foxe to choose between lying and breaking the alliance, but if they had come up he would have told the lie. Yes, he had effectively been kidnapped by the deposed regime. Yes, he had certainly heard hard evidence that the regime had systematically tortured its political opponents. Yes, almost indiscriminate torture. And the break-out? Well, he'd done his best to help, but it wasn't the sort of activity he'd been trained in, and it was difficult to remember much about it because he'd been scared out of his wits. No, no plans to write a book about his experiences. Voodoo? You're thinking of Haiti, but of course there are some vaguely similar beliefs in the Islands—for instance the death-spirit it is called the Sunday Dwarf, which must have some connection with Baron Samedi … No, he'd never seen anything you could call an orgy—look, he wasn't an anthropologist, and he'd only been on the Islands a few months. All he could say was that he'd met people who believed strongly enough in that sort of thing to behave as if it worked, even when they themselves were the victims … Yes, the Khandhars had been very considerate—in fact it was only when he returned to civilisation that he discovered he was supposed to have been their hostage. No, he had seen and heard nothing to suggest they were Communists; to the best of his knowledge they were primarily a religious sect who were the victims of a personal vendetta by the late Prime Minister, and were not tools of the Kremlin or Dr Castro or even the CIA …
(laughter).
And so on and so on.

Water off a duck's back. Foxe felt wholly in control of the occasion. He kept his voice level and subdued, but clear, and felt the tension steadily dropping. Not much of a story here, no real hardship or adventures, no titillatingly unspeakable tortures, except of Islanders. Dull. Dull. Dull. File a few pars, just to tidy the story up, then on to the Chilean death-camps, perhaps, or cannibalism on a stranded weather-station, or a rediscovered species of parrot in a Papuan valley, or bribery in …

“You ran that very neatly,” said the young man at Foxe's elbow as the meeting broke up. He wore a pale grey business suit and a quiet tie, and had come to Foxe's room that morning, finding his way as if by magic through the security ring. His official status in the Company was a string of vague general nouns, but his job was troubleshooting. His name was Hans.

“Anything to avoid a fuss,” said Foxe.

“Exactly. Care for a drink? There's a quiet little bar along here …”

The Arab tent and the stuffed camel had gone to join the igloo and the polar bear. Now Mount Fuji covered the far wall and the big black girl behind the bar wore a kimono. Hans ordered pineapple-juice and Foxe Island beer.

“Well, cheers,” said Hans. “Pity about Dreiser.”

“What happened?”

“Killed himself. Rigged up a most curious apparatus to do it with.”

“I hadn't heard.”

“Why should you? The Revolutionary Council are happy to keep it quiet and so is the Company. He had been selling Company secrets for months.”

“Only months?”

“Nearer two years, actually.”

Foxe nodded. Just after the kidnapping of his mother, of course. He hadn't wanted the money. He hadn't intended to kill Ladyblossom. The whole thing had been a Dreiserism, an intricate method of escape, a monstrous mechanism, all flailing levers and jets of loose steam, to force his mother to go by forcing the Company to go …

“Is the Company still planning to pull out?” Foxe asked.

“Too early to say. My guess is they'll give these new people a whirl—they seem very co-operative. You looking for a job here? I'd have thought …”

“No—I was just curious. Um … Do you happen to know—at one point Doctor Trotter got the Company to ship out some stuff called SG 19, which he wanted me to do some tests on …”

Hans's all-boys-together laugh cut the sentence short.

“That was in my briefing,” he said. “I don't know whether you realised it, but by that stage we weren't giving the Doctor a blind thing if we could help it. I'm afraid we wasted your time there. That was just salt, dressed up.”

Foxe nodded again. All salt, Lou had said. He had eaten salt.

“You don't happen to know if the Danish papers have been taking any interest in my adventure?” he said.

“No idea. It's not one of the languages I speak. Denmark, I should think so—fairly pinkish kind of press there.”

Foxe sucked at the sour-clean beer and thought. He didn't know the address, but the opera-house should find her. Telegram? Arriving Flight something stop. Please leave message airport stop. Would like to talk to you stop. Seriously stop?

No, a letter would be fairer, simply saying what had happened, asking for nothing, expecting nothing. But hoping.