The Ringmaster

by Morris West

  Her documents and jewellery, together with money and travellers’ cheques, were in her briefcase. I transferred them to her handbag, because the briefcase was too large to fit into the safe deposit boxes. While I was doing this I saw the diary, a handsome, old-fashioned volume with a gilt clasp and a leather binding, with the legend stamped in gold, gothic lettering: Marta Boysen’s Daybook.

  I confess I felt a strong temptation to open it and read her version of recent events. It was not virtue that stopped me, but a hoary old tag from Hamlet which popped into my head like a slice of overdone toast: ‘What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?’ What indeed? The affair was over, done, dead. All I was doing now was giving it a decent funeral. Bad enough that I was here in her bedroom, turning over her underthings and nightwear, packing makeup and toiletries like any house-broken husband.

  Finally, with handbag, briefcase and makeup case, I went downstairs, lodged her valuables in safe deposit and set off once more for Kukrit’s clinic. That, too, was a minor madness. I could have sent the stuff round by hotel messenger. However, she was expecting Miko and in her weakened state she needed some evidence of a friendly visitation. As we drove through the narrow alleys, I composed the explanation which would serve, either verbally or in writing, at least until she was strong enough to hear the truth: the delegates were arriving in force now; Miko was required to work with Tanaka and his staff; I had volunteered to come in her place. Simple, plausible, not quite a lie, not quite the truth either.

  As it turned out, it was not simple at all. Marta was still in intensive care, but awake and obviously making a good recovery. I could hardly refuse when the nurse told me I could spend a few moments with her. The prepared explanation rolled glibly off my tongue. Her documents and valuables were in safe deposit. Her clothes were unpacked. Her room was double-locked against her return. Herewith, by safe hand, night attire, dressing gown, makeup, toiletries and all her conference papers, just in case she got bored. She gave me a pale smile and thanked me, then made the flat announcement.

  ‘Miko’s not coming.’

  ‘No, she’s not.’

  ‘Did she say why?’

  ‘Yes. She’s afraid of sickness, hospitals, all that sort of thing. There are people like that. It’s another form of illness, or at least of unresolved problems. You mustn’t distress yourself over it and you shouldn’t blame her too much.’

  ‘So who went through my clothes?’

  ‘I did. That’s where old married men come in handy. They’re house trained. How are you feeling?’

  ‘Weary, washed out. Rather ashamed of myself. Apparently I’ve been nursing this ulcer for quite a while. Doctor says he’ll have to do X-rays and give me an endoscopy when I’m stronger. He says I’ll have to go on a strict diet and avoid stressful situations. He asked if I’d been having any lately. I told him there had been a few. ‘

  ‘And this isn’t going to turn into another. You’re going to settle down now. I’ll pop round some time in the morning, probably just before lunch. We’re going to be busy right up until then. As soon as you’re out of intensive care I’ll have them put in a phone for you. Would you like me to call your mother?’

  ‘Better not. She’ll only panic and keep you talking for hours. Wait until I’m out of hospital. Will you give Miko a message for me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Tell her I didn’t believe her at first. I do now. She’ll understand.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘Not quite. There’s a message for you, too, Gil. I wrote it on the plane coming here. I’d only just finished it when I got sick. Would you pass me the briefcase please?’

  I laid it open before her on the coverlet. She rummaged underneath the clothing and brought out the diary. She slipped the gilt catch and opened the volume to reveal, hidden between the papers, a large envelope, marked with the insignia of Thai Airlines. My name was written on the envelope. She handed it to me and said simply: ‘Keep it until bedtime, when you’re quiet and alone.’

  ‘Time to go, Mr Langton,’ said the little Thai nurse. ‘We mustn’t tire the patient. I’ll take care of all her things.’

  I bent and kissed Marta on the forehead. She raised her hand and brushed my cheek with her fingertips. Her skin was hot and clammy. When I turned at the door to wave to her, she was already asleep.

  Back at the hotel, I stopped at the desk to pick up messages. As I turned away, I found myself facing Boris Vannikov and a tall, straight-backed fellow with an agreeable smile and cool, appraising eyes. Boris introduced him in Russian.

  ‘Gil Langton, meet Lieutenant-General Vadim Popov, commander of the Kiev military district on secondment to our conference. He’s our expert on transport. He did three tours in Afghanistan and supervised our pull-out from there.’

  ‘My pleasure, general.’

  ‘Mine also, Mr Langton. Friend Boris here speaks very highly of you.’

  ‘Have you introduced the general to Sir Pavel Laszlo? He’s heading our committee on transport.’

  ‘I’ve read his dossier. Very impressive. Boris telephoned his room to invite him for a drink. He was not there.’

  ‘Then let me be the host. May I suggest my suite?’

  As we rode upstairs on the elevator I told Boris about Marta’s sudden illness. He made sympathetic noises and a very practical request.

  ‘Will you act as liaison for our people with the medical services here? Everybody’s been duly warned about food, water and sexual hygiene, but we’re bound to get a few casualties.’

  ‘Let’s establish a simple routine. I’ll tell Tanya whom to call. I’ll introduce her to the rostered medical officers and to Kukrit. Your people report to her. She calls me if there’s a problem with language or anything else.’

  ‘How long have you been visiting Bangkok, Mr Langton?’

  ‘More than twenty years, General. I have a small publishing business here.’

  ‘You speak the language?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When I was at military school, we did a series of studies on warfare in delta country, both in tropical climates and cold ones like ours. I remember thinking then that the Siamese – I think we used to call them Siamese in those days – were very clever people. They used the monsoons for an ally as we used the great freeze in winter and the spring thaw.’

  ‘They also divided their friendships, General, never making too large concessions to powerful nations. The building which you will see from my bedroom is the headquarters of the East Asiatic Company. It’s one of the world’s largest conglomerates, but it was founded and is still owned by the Danes. The Thai reversed the classic motto. Theirs was to divide the potential conquerors with courtesies and limited concessions.’

  ‘You are something of a strategist yourself, Mr Langton?’

  ‘On the contrary, General. I’m a communicator. I try to make strategic alignments unnecessary.’

  ‘I wish it were possible, Mr Langton.’

  Settled with drinks in our hands, looking down at the bustle of the river traffic and the misty stretch of delta lands beyond Thonburi, with yellow lights pricking out of the gathering dark, we were soon at ease with each other. As the man who had organised the massive Soviet pull-out from Afghanistan, Popov had turned what could have been a bloody retreat into an orderly withdrawal. He had imagination and curiosity and I thought he and Laszlo would make a formidable team, not merely at the conference, but afterwards.

  ‘Afterwards is our problem.’ Boris Vannikov was weary and inclined to be sombre. ‘I have told Vadim I believe we can hammer out a good agreement here, but when we start to make it work at home, we have little practice in the mechanics of free enterprise and decades of bureaucratic inertia.’

  ‘I have an idea,’ said the General. ‘It is too early to sell it yet to the General Staff or to the President, because they still see the armed forces as a weapon only, an instrument of combat, an enforcer of public order. I see it differently – a training ground, a sch
ool of change. Look what the Israelis did, broke down the barriers of sex and reactionary religion and built a great fighting force at the same time. The fact that they Ve gone crazy now against the Arabs doesn’t change the principle. At the upper end of the scale you Ve got the Swiss. You know the joke they have in Zurich: that the banks are run by the army. It’s true. Every senior bank official has done his service time and has probably reached at least field rank with his contemporaries. Boris here thinks I’m dreaming.’

  ‘Not so.’ Vannikov was emphatic. ‘You’ve got time on your side. You’re only forty-six. You’ve got a shining record: Hero of the Soviet Union. You brought the boys home from the war. The whole country’s on your side.’

  ‘That’s when it gets dangerous,’ said Popov ruefully. ‘Somebody starts a whisper about Bonaparte and I’m shunted sideways to a desk job in Sakhalin, in case I get delusions of grandeur.’

  I was just about to ask him how he saw the effects of a German/ Japanese economic enterprise, when the telephone rang. Tanaka was on the line. His first inquiry was about Marta, but his first concern was that I was back in the hotel and functioning. I asked him if he wanted a meeting. He told me, no. He was closeted with Sir Pavel Laszlo. I told him whom I was entertaining and suggested an early breakfast to discuss the routine of the first general meeting. We settled for seven-thirty on the river terrace. I begged time from my guests to make a brief call to Carl Leibig. He was relieved to hear the news about Marta and undertook to send flowers in the morning. Boris Vannikov laughed.

  ‘They’ve got you running, Gil.’

  ‘What do you expect? It’s all new. It’s a big day tomorrow. They’re still trying to figure out which hand to wipe their noses with. Things will settle down tomorrow. You and I should brief the press immediately after the opening session.’

  ‘How much are we telling the press?’ General Popov was instantly alert.

  ‘As much or as little as we choose. Do you have any special problems?’

  ‘Some, yes. Laszlo and I are going to be discussing the initial use of army vehicles and aircraft for the transport of civilian material. No question, we’ll have to do it; but I don’t want pre-emptive discussion in Moscow before we’ve sorted out a policy here. Besides, Laszlo’s a Hungarian and a Jew. That makes another set of problems’

  ‘Correction, general. Laszlo is an Australian citizen who runs one of the best intercontinental transport systems in the world. The fact that he’s a Jew is irrelevant.’

  ‘For you, yes, Mr Langton. To some of my people it’s a handicap, which has to be recognised.’

  ‘Or a stigma which you, a general officer and a Hero of the Soviet Union, ought to protest in the strongest terms.’

  ‘Are you teaching me my job, Mr Langton?’

  ‘No. I’m doing mine. Clearing away the rubbish before you trip on it and break your neck!’

  ‘I did warn you, Vadim,’ Boris Vannikov put in his own rouble’s worth. ‘You shouldn’t screw around with this man.’

  ‘I like to test a weapon before I go into battle with it.’ He held out his hand. ‘You test well, Mr Langton. We’ll get along together. Boris is taking me across the river for dinner with that young woman of his. Would you like to join us?’

  ‘Thank you, no. I’m going to do some paper work, have a light meal and turn in. But you’ll enjoy the Sala Rim Nam. You can see it from here. The food’s excellent. The entertainment is interesting, first time around at least. Have a pleasant evening.’

  ‘One question before we go.’ Boris Vannikov paused at the door. ‘What’s happened with our two friends Hoshino and Cubeddu?’

  ‘They’ve agreed, should the occasion demand it, to merge their funds in a trust managed by German and Japanese bankers. That’s as much as I know. It means that they’re prepared to subordinate their interests within the general pattern.’

  ‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ said Vannikov without enthusiasm.

  ‘So will I; but I’ve got the feeling we’re all in for some surprises before the week is over.’

  ‘One surprise I’m dreading’ said General Vadim Popov. ‘The first air attack in the first desert battle against Iraq. Time’s running out and reason is almost lost in the dust-storms. Take me to dinner, Boris. I need food and a pretty woman to share it.’

  I was in bed early that night. I sat, propped up on the pillows, sipping mineral water and reading the letter Marta Boysen had written to me between Tokyo and Bangkok. It was written in that emphatic, cursive hand of hers, in a German whose colorations and emotional overtones were very much of the south.

  My dearest Gil,

  We met so joyfully, we fitted so well, like fingers in a glove. I cannot believe we have fallen so quickly into this pit of despair yet I know it was I who caused the fall. It was I who, years before, had prepared the slide on which we came to grief. Please don’t misunderstand me. It was not malice. It was not conspiracy. It was simply the nature of things, the nature of me.

  First, there was the me you remember, the little girl trotting happily beside you through the woods. Then there was the other me, the adolescent whom you never met but who was so powerfully drawn to your memory that you haunted her life ever after. You were the dream lover who comforted her lonely nights. You were the rival of every man who ever possessed her. You were the legendary lover gypsy, always beckoning, always waving goodbye.

  It was the memory of you and your father which drove me, like a slave-master, to scholarship. The two of you seemed so free and yet so secure. You were citizens of a country which had no frontiers, yet whose passport was the most potent document in the world. My family, as you know, were theatre people, but all their insecurities were acted out in public, every day. That was the other side of me: the make-believe girl, whose mother was queen of a make-believe world, courted, indulged, manipulated, too, by producers and directors and young men who needed her patronage and old ones who wanted to lend her theirs. It was a world of endless intrigues and I was endlessly curious about them all, ready always for any invitation into a new ritual of mysteries. I felt few guilts and found much pleasure and I know that I was very lucky not to have come to harm, because sometimes I was very frightened by the dark labyrinths I saw opening in front of me.

  And yet I did come to harm, because it was in a period of reaction and revulsion from a year of study and a short, silly season of dissipation in Vienna, that I married. The silly season had started with a flirtation with a woman which turned quickly ugly. I wasn’t prepared for that. I was looking for mischief, but not melodrama. I fled, straight into the arms of my gutsherr from Carinthia.

  I told you the miseries of that marriage. I did not tell you that half of them were of my own making. We had no theatre in the country. Good! I would create some! High drama, cruel comedy, low farce to make the yokels blush! Our quarrels were like set-piece duets. Our silences were orchestrated with sinister drum beats and heavy undertones on strings and basses. Even in our most passionate matings – and we had those, too – there were elements of terror, of a vendetta enacted in the name of love.

  It is the same old play, in a different setting. I am committing the greatest of theatrical follies: directing myself in the lead role. The only difference is that I am beginning to see and to fear the consequences of the folly.

  Everything in my life has been touched by it. Even my scholarship, which is acknowledged to be sound, is vitiated by a certain raffishness which belongs more to a novelist or to a playwright than to a serious researcher. I see it, sometimes, as a corruption of that wonderful gift which your father possessed, of wearing his scholarship lightly, with humour and grace.

  Even as I write, I can see you reading this, shaking your head, not understanding a word of it. Let me show you what I mean. My thesis on Haushofer’s geopolitics was acclaimed as a solid piece of work. It won me my Doctorate and much respect. But what really set me doing it, what really interested me and, indeed, piqued my most morbid curiosities, was Haushofer
himself.

  Think back. He’s a soldier of the old regime, academy trained, distinguished enough to be seconded as instructor to the Japanese army. He’s intelligent and open. He immerses himself in Oriental languages and cultures. He’s a fighting General in the First World War. He’s already thinking in geopolitical terms – a world view. I understand his confusions and resentments after Versailles. I can even, with difficulty, understand his fascination with Hitler and often wished I could have found an eyewitness account of their first meeting in Landsberg prison, their first discussion about living room for the German people. But what fascinated me even more was the slow mystery of his seduction into the service of a vulgar, brutal, mindless movement led to power by thugs and murderers and deviates, and decent men who stayed silent while the indecencies were committed.

  What was the music he danced to? Money? He was richly rewarded. Power? He became a kind of Delphic oracle, quoted all around the world; an interpreter of secrets, a prognosticator of events. Fear? That, too, I am sure, because he accepted a humiliating gift that at once denied his wife her personal identity and guaranteed her physical safety. But through it all was excitement, illusion, which endured right up to the final twilight of the gods.

  How do I know this? I understood his temptations; I had succumbed to them myself, and for the same excitements and illusions. I made the same shabby bargain with Max Wylie. I didn’t need the money he paid. I didn’t believe a single word of all the shopworn incantations he intoned. I was there for the thrill of it. I was mocking myself and mocking the world by an act of transvestism, just as I did in my emotional and sexual life.