He appeared most grateful for the afternoon’s tour. Having seen only towns, England, his own tropics and the desiccated coasts of Egypt and North Africa, the abrupt savagery of those green mountains plunging to the Atlantic was strange to him. Half modest, half uneasy, he said that there must still be so many currents of European life which he did not understand.
He told me with one of his deep chuckles that Olura considered me a member of the Establishment, but still with a soul to be saved. He was too practical a man not to be amused by her over-enthusiasm. Yet, like Vigny, he thought her a person of importance, a mover of public opinion. I couldn’t believe he was right. In these days there is no salon influence corresponding to that of the great Victorian and Edwardian hostesses. Olura’s entertainment of the citizens, prominent or promising, of new countries was well conceived and undoubtedly useful. But it was not an exercise of power. It remained a generous and ambitious eccentricity.
Mgwana left the lounge a little before midnight, saying that he had a couple of hours’ work before him. I read the local paper and then went up myself. Looking along the line of balconies, I noticed that Olura’s light was still on. I remember thinking that she was not the type to draw curtains automatically and that, since there was nothing but the Biscay swell between Brittany and her bedroom for three hundred miles, she would certainly prefer casements opening on the foam.
I was in a first half-sleep, obsessed with pots of cactus and miniature orange trees—association with the sort of balcony Olura would have in London and the difficult choice of a seat which would face Keats’ nightingale—when I heard my name being whispered. I sat up, and there was Olura standing just inside my own magic casement.
‘Don’t turn the light on!’ she said.
The situation looked very hopeful. This approach fitted her self-imposed sincerity, and she was very scantily dressed so far as I could judge in the liquid, dark-blue shine from the sea behind her. I slid out of bed and asked her to come in.
‘No. Philip, I need you in my room immediately. Along the balconies. I’ve just done it. The bedroom windows are all shut.’
Her voice was steady, but there was something wrong with her breathing.
‘Are you ill, Olura?’ I asked.
‘No, no! come at once and don’t let anyone see you!’
Obviously this was not an occasion for dressing-gown and pyjamas. What was up I couldn’t begin to guess; but whether it was a large moth or burglars or a violently overflowing lavatory cisten, action had to be taken. So I grabbed beach shirt, trousers and sandals. After reconnoitring all visible balconies in case some romantic was leaning out to have a look at nothing, I slipped across to her room. One of the wrought-iron barriers on the way was impassable except by way of some nasty spikes on the outer edge. She certainly had not climbed that just from alarm at insects or plumbing.
The heavy curtains of her room were now tightly drawn, but the window behind them was open. My first mental snap was of Leopold Mgwana standing in the middle of the room with his hands behind his back and an air of Savonarola about to be burnt at the stake. I hoped to God that I had not been called in to rebuke him for unwelcome approaches.
His presence in Olura’s room seemed, however, to be explained by common interests in work. Her portable typewriter was on a chair. Two others chairs were drawn up at a table covered with papers. More papers had overflowed on to the bed—a fairly convincing sign of innocence. Olura must have been playing the private secretary though hardly dressed for the part.
With the clear-sightedness brought on by mild rivalry I suspected that she ignored convention—of course with her usual high-mindedness—and then accused the opposite sex of coarseness because it couldn’t adjust itself immediately to the pure atmosphere of a nudist camp. All splendid! All setting an example of modernity free from inhibitions! But she would not have been so determinedly progressive if she had not been well aware that she was very beautiful.
‘Philip,’ she said, ‘we want to know what to do. I am not going to drag you into this. But I must know what to do.’
This time her voice was on the edge of hysteria. Mr Mgwana, still immobile on his pile of faggots, said:
‘I too, should be grateful for your advice, Ardower. I give you my word of honour that I will never mention your presence here.’
I liked his use of my surname, unconsciously implying that whatever the difference of power and ancestry our education and traditions were the same—or at any rate similar enough to treat some impossible emergency with an imperial pretence of coolness.
I asked with a show of heartiness but in a low voice what the trouble was. The strained atmosphere suggested that some gorgeous, idealistic folly of Olura’s had put him on the spot. But why climb along balconies?
‘Go into the bathroom, Philip.’
The bathroom door, wide open, was in the far, left-hand corner of the room—from my position by the window, that is. The bed more or less faced it. I passed Mgwana and looked in. What I saw instantly reminded me of a Punch and Judy show, of the recurring tableaux in which the upper half of a puppet, Judy or the Hangman, droops over the edge of the stage after being whacked on the head by Punch.
The bathrooms of the Hostal de las Olas were the latest word in luxury, but Spanish capitalists and their builders like to economise. Each bathroom had a frosted window, about two feet high and eighteen inches wide, opening into a malodorous shaft. The sill of the window was some five feet above the floor, and in Olura’s room—though not in mine—it was to the right of the bath, opposite to the door into the bedroom. From this window drooped the upper half of a man with a camera hanging down beyond his head, its strap caught under his coat collar. The bar and thumbscrew at the top of the window, which normally prevented it from opening more than ten or twelve inches, seemed to have broken.
Olura’s grey eyes, distended by shock, were fixed on me in a sort of desperate question—not so much panic-stricken at what had happened as apprehensive of what I, as the first arrival, might think had happened.
When there is no reason for acting, one can never tell what one’s own face shows or how. Without a word passing between us, her tension relaxed. I did not know much about her character; it was possible that her surface manner concealed an explosive temper. But I could not conceive that it would ever express itself in violence. She thought twice before squashing a mosquito. It was unbelievable that she would squash an impertinent photographer.
Mgwana’s character, however, was unpredictable. I could not tell how far away he really was, in all the confusion at the bottom of his two cultures, from using an assagai on any deserving object. Yet surely self-control must be second nature to so balanced and patient a politician.
‘He didn’t!’ Olura exclaimed. ‘I swear he didn’t!’
I never saw anything look so dead—the puppet, I mean, not Mgwana. But in case he had just fainted, humanity compelled me to feel his heart.
I explored further. The base of the skull and back of the neck felt anatomically odd. One doesn’t have any certain knowledge of these things without medical training. For purposes of comparison I ran my hand over the back of my own neck. It seemed more solid, however much I relaxed the muscles. The question had to be settled one way or the other, so I stuck my fingers and thumb well into the puppet’s flesh and found a lot of hard things loose. I then had to pull myself together by severe personal exhortations and a splash of cold water from the tap.
‘When did you find him?’ I asked Olura.
‘Just now, when I went into the bathroom.’
‘The door wasn’t open?’
‘No. But who is to tell it wasn’t!’
I had not altogether realised the set-up till then. What I myself believed might be a relief to Olura; but what was the world going to believe when the story broke? It was probable that Olura and Mgwana could prove their innocence—medical or other evidence must surely be in their favour whenever police investigated the incident—but by that t
ime, after columns and columns of front-page fiesta, they would be degraded for ever.
The objective of the photographer needed no explanation. He hoped for some saleable demonstration of affection between Olura and Mgwana. But why had his confederate, whose existence must be assumed, killed him? A deliberate attempt to get Mgwana convicted of manslaughter, ensuring even more scandalous publicity? I gave it up.
Mr Mgwana entered the bathroom, at last breaking his tortured silence.
‘We must accept what is coming to us,’ he said, ‘and you, Ardower, must go at once. We have no right to drag you in.’
This stoicism in face of the unknown wouldn’t do at all; after all, he was a man experienced in action and I was not. I reminded him that he had had a stormy journey to power and that he must some time have been faced—in the jungle, say—with an awkward corpse.
‘In Government House too,’ he answered frankly. ‘But I control the police. Obviously I could keep a … an incident like this quiet if the interests of the country demanded it.’
‘Wouldn’t you be laying yourself open to blackmail?’
His admission disturbed me. Since I had invited and expected it, that was absurd. Possibly I foresaw even then that a man accustomed to disdain the conventional processes of law was unlikely to keep a plain citizen’s sober balance between alarm and over-confidence.
‘In a young country a politician is always open to blackmail,’ he said. ‘But there are means of dealing with an individual. And one can shut down a …’
He left his sentence unfinished. In the presence of Olura, with her ardently liberal convictions about the Freedom of the Press, it would not have been tactful to mention the shutting down of newspapers.
I made them both sit down. Whoever was waiting for the shriek, the excitement, the summoning of the manager, could damned well wait.
‘Tell me about press photographers, Olura. Are they really a nuisance?’
‘Not when they come from reputable papers. It’s the French and Italian free-lance photographers.’
‘But would one of them go as far as climbing in by a bathroom window to get a … well, if he had reason to think …’
I found it difficult to express what I wanted to say. Olura, however, had no inhibitions.
‘If he believed that the relationship between Leopold and myself was sexual? Yes, he might,’ she answered without embarrassment. ‘I don’t think any paper would dare to publish more than a kiss. If there was anything worse I should be invited to pay to get back the negative.’
‘Then this is all in the day’s work from the point of view, say, of a sub-editor paid to bring in the dirt?’
‘Yes. I remember that when I took a dancer to Rome because I felt he ought to be imaginatively directed in a film I was pestered by photographers. He was a Negro from Mali, and so he was News. I could have smashed their slimy faces and their cameras.’
I advised her not to tell anyone else that, and asked Mgwana if he had any suspicions.
‘In my own country I could guess who was behind this,’ he replied. ‘But not here.’
‘Was it widely known beforehand that you were coming?’
‘No. That good man, Prebendary Flanders, recommended the hotel as a place where I should find peace and privacy. So Oluro booked a room for me and made sure I would be welcome. There was nothing official.’
‘But your political sympathisers in London knew you would both be here at this time?’
‘Probably. Why?’
‘Because unless this is some appalling accident, it must have been planned well beforehand.’
‘It was not planned in this form’ said Mgwana, at last getting the politico-gangster half of his brain to work. ‘Whoever arranged that bathroom had to kill a man to do it. Nobody would take such a risk. It is not worth murder just to compromise Olura and me. There is only one explanation. The photographer may have been brought here to create a scandal; but he was killed for some reason that does not concern us. And then his body was used in this way.’
That seemed to fit the facts, while begging a great many questions. I said that I wondered what would happen if we simply shoved him back through the window.
‘You can’t!’ Olura cried, appalled by the brutality of my suggestion. ‘You can’t!’
‘It is most unlikely that a fall of one story could produce such a wound,’ Mgwana pointed out. ‘Even if the post-mortem wasn’t very thorough and took the fall for granted, I think the police would soon receive an anonymous letter.’
‘But who is to know he fell from here?’
We pulled him in and looked cautiously through the window. Any detective would spot at once where he fell from. The ladder up which he had climbed alive or been hoisted dead was still in position. Two of the bathroom lights were still on, showing that guests were awake or careless, but none of them could look out into the shaft. The base of the sliding bar of Olura’s window had been unscrewed from the sash. That could easily be done from the outside, but not from the inside.
We stretched him out on the bathroom floor. He was a little fellow with a muddy, dark complexion which suggested—unless it was a result of the blow—that his profession seldom took him into the open air. Mgwana, now away from the stake and into his memories of sedition, recommended that we should put on gloves. We hadn’t any, so did our clumsy best with two pairs of Olura’s stockings. She was utterly overcome, and had gone back into the bedroom.
He had half a dozen press cards on him—some from highly respectable papers, to which, I am sure, he was not accredited. His passport gave his name as Alberto Livetti, born at Naples in 1935. Profession: Press Photographer. Mgwana, who knew his way around the scattered and unintelligible stamps of passports, said that he had entered Spain by Irun six days earlier. He took a few quick notes of Livetti’s other movements.
Even without the camera slung from his neck there could be no doubt of Livetti’s objective. Nobody in the hotel was News except Mgwana and Olura. A screwdriver and the screws he had removed from the window bar were in his pocket, together with a plain iron key which was probably that of the door at the bottom of the shaft.
‘If you could be proved innocent in a week or two,’ I asked, ‘would the temporary scandal still damage you?’
‘In my own country, not seriously. In London, I suppose it would be disastrous for us both.’
I said that locally we might be able to avoid publicity, that although I had no friends in high places I had a lot among the useful middle class. It was true. I could call on a fund of exaggerated good will in Vizcaya, for even my name was absurdly in my favour. With a slight change of stress, it means ‘wine’ in Euzkadi and naturally encourages the ripening of friendship when casual acquaintances try to find out whether I possess the Basque’s capacity for Rioja as well as his language. I felt sure that I could count on help in trouble and a blind eye—at police sergeant level—to any reasonable illegalities.
‘You will find that steps have already been taken to prevent us keeping it quiet,’ said Mgwana gloomily.
It was my thinking of village, mountain and sea, and of the sturdy, classless inhabitants who had accepted me as one of themselves which led me towards my lunatic proposal. I asked Mgwana if he thought it likely that anyone was watching what we did.
‘From a distance, perhaps. But not here, close to. Think of the risk! Anyone on the spot, anyone acting suspiciously is going to be questioned. When the hunter has set a trap, he goes away and leaves it. He doesn’t stand by it.’
‘Could we move this across the balconies to my room?’
Mgwana picked up the puppet by its shoulders. I had the impression that he could have dangled it from one hand. He was a little shorter than I, but he had longer and far stronger arms.
‘Easily,’ he said.
It would not be fair to imply that, writhing in the hunter’s trap, he had forgotten his determination not to allow me to be involved. Defeat, I think, was such a challenge to this able and highl
y educated son of unprincipled chieftains that it was not in his nature to reject an ally. I am also sure that anxiety for Olura counted.
So away we went, with Mgwana’s boom-like arms passing Livetti carefully and silently round the spikes of the balconies until we had him safely in my room. For the moment I put him in the wardrobe, locked it and pocketed the key.
‘I wish the bar was still open,’ I said, as I drew the curtains and switched on the lights.
‘I have a bottle of the best palm toddy in my room,’ he suggested, ‘forced upon me when leaving for London by one of my constituents.’
It seemed a welcome plan in more senses than one. His room was a floor up. It could be approached by the wide and imposing main staircase, or by a service staircase which started outside my room. If any confederate or hotel servant had been posted in the passage to keep an eye on Olura’s door and ensure that she did not escape the vilification which was coming to her, he would not see us slipping up the back stairs.
As we returned with the bottle of African rot-gut, down the main staircase and along the passage, we passed the open door of a pantry and a floor waiter sleepily packing together the debris of somebody’s late supper. It seemed to me that he should have finished that job long ago. We said good-night to him—thus creating a worth-while complication, though hardly an alibi—and knocked at Olura’s door. Since she was expecting us to come back through the window, she was alarmed. Her response of who’s there? sounded as high-pitched as that of a child in an empty house. I hoped that it would pass, if heard by the waiter or anyone else, as the reaction of maidenly modesty.
If that palm toddy was the best Africa produces, I am appalled to think what the suffering masses consume; but taken like medicine in a tumbler of water it relieved my dazed sensation of dashing to and fro like an experimental rat in an emergency. Mgwana, too, it must have helped, for he sighed and then showed his gladiator’s teeth in a grin. I cannot remember how much we actually talked about what must be done. Little, I think. The next move was so obvious.
Olura Page 3
