Siege at the Villa Lipp (6 page)

When he first told me about Placid we were sitting on the verandah of a hotel in the New Hebrides’ capital, Port Vila, having breakfast. He was in his middle thirties then, an imposingly handsome, dark-skinned man with russet hair. I had assumed that the hair colour was a product of his mixed blood, but found later that in some of the islands it was quite common. However, eyes as blue as his were not. I found them disconcerting. They have had the same effect on others I could name.

I was not too disconcerted to ask questions, though. That, after all, was what I was there for, to ask questions. So, I asked him where he came from and so received the first of many lectures.

‘As we were taught at the mission school,’ he began, ‘the great Captain James Cook gave English names to many of the places he discovered or explored in the wide Pacific Ocean. So good of him, so kind.’

It was said in a high-pitched, nasal voice, startlingly unlike his own, and further distorted by a regional English accent that he later attributed to Birmingham. He has an excellent ear. I am sure that if I had ever met the missionary whose voice he was imitating that day I would have recognized the man instantly.

The voice was discarded as abruptly as it had been assumed when Mat went on, ‘You know what I think, Mr Smythson? I think that by the time of his last voyage he was becoming bored with the problem of finding all those new names. I also think that he had a copy of Dr Johnson’s dictionary with him and was just going through it page by page. You smile? I’m serious. Fiji had its own native name, of course, even then, but north-west of it what do we find? Ocean Island, Placid Island, Pleasant Island. You see? Successive discoveries all in alphabetical order, even though they’re separated by a thousand miles. Placid and Pleasant are, anyway.’

‘And very different, I imagine.’

‘Oh, not at all different. In fact, very much the same.’ He cut a slice of papaya. ‘Neither of them was ever placid or in the least pleasant. Both, however, used to possess millions of tons of phosphate deposits. Most of these, naturally, have long been strip-mined and removed, leaving us with lunar landscapes of unlovely grey coral. We were both occupied briefly by Imperial Germany before becoming British colonies. En ‘forty-two we were both occupied by the Japanese, who used us as communication centres, and later heavily bombed by the Americans. Both of us subsequently became UN trust territories administered jointly by Britain, Australia and New Zealand, who still wanted what was left of the phosphate. I was born on Placid.’

‘I can understand your feeling bitter.’

‘Bitter?’ He grinned. ‘Why on earth should I feel bitter? We were barbarians. You will note that I say “we”. I include myself. What would we in our ignorance have done with so much old bird-crap, so much phosphate? Nothing. Our exploitation by the Powers was the best thing that ever happened to us. Even the American bombing was good. Simple people enjoy loud bangs. Unfortunately I was not there to hear them. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour, my father was considerate enough to leave me to be educated in Fiji while he took his ship off to fight for the British Empire.’

The Methodist missionaries who received him had been in for some surprising experiences.

At ten, Mat had had no education other than that provided by his parents and by his travels with them in the ship. From his father he had learned to read and write English and the mathematics of navigation; on his travels he had picked up smatterings of several island languages; from the ship’s crew he had learned about the recreational facilities available in Australasian seaports; and, of most importance to him at the time, from his mother he had learned the pagan legends of her forebears. From her too, he had learned about the power and practice of magic; above all, he had learned the secrets of death-spells and other rituals, defensive as well as offensive, through which personal safety or power over others might be achieved.

In the summer of 1942 news came that Mat’s father had gone down with his ship, and a number of refugees from Singapore, off the coast of Java. Later that year his mother died of a kidney disease. It was at the time of his becoming an orphan that Mat was baptized.

The staff at the mission school, delighted to find that they had a gifted child to teach - in mathematics he was considered a prodigy - cannot, however, have deeply regretted the death of his mother. Having fought the good fight against pagan superstition with the weapons of Christian superstition for so long, they must have been disheartened to find out their gifted child could frighten the living daylights out of his wretched classmates with an ancient death-curse. He had shown no interest in the religion he was now being taught. His sudden enthusiasm for Scouting, strange though it may have seemed at the time, was undoubtedly accepted with considerable relief.

I once talked to a retired colonial officer who had served in Fiji for the last three of the seven years that Mat spent there. He had known about Mat chiefly because he had been concerned as an official with the arrangements of the boy’s higher education; but that had not been the only reason. He had recalled with amusement that, even as Mat was winning a scholarship and applying, with the help of Government House, for the grants which would enable him to live as a student in London, his name was being submitted for the honour of King’s Scout.

‘I’ll bet they didn’t know
that
at the London School of Economics,’ he said, then chuckled again. ‘Do you know, there was a time when that boy was actually accused publicly by the parents of another, older boy of sorcery and weaving spells. It
wasn’t a proper court case because they were both minors and because there was no law dealing with junior witch doctors, but there had to be an investigation of the complaint and I was told off to handle it. Know what the cheeky young bugger did?’

‘Mat Williamson you mean?’

‘Yes. At the enquiry, he handed me, very respectfully, a list of the questions that he would have addressed to the other boy’s parents had he been the defendant in an adult court of law. As, under the circumstances, he was not allowed to ask them, would I please do so? Well, it sounded such a reasonable request and he looked so solemn and upset that, like a bloody fool, I agreed. Should have looked more carefully at the questions first, of course. The parents’ complaint was that, as a result of the spell, their boy had suffered agonizing stomach cramps for a week and that the spell had defeated all medical attempts to relieve the pain. That list of questions was like a medical cross-examination, only worse because it gradually became like a parody of a real one. Began all right or I wouldn’t have started on it. What had been the diagnosis of the District Nurse? Colic. Had she prescribed medicine? Yes, but it hadn’t worked, and so on. Then he really cut loose. What about bowel movements? What had the faeces looked like? Liquid or solid? Small or large? Round or sausage-shaped? Was there accompanying wind? What did it smell like? I wouldn’t have gone on but for one thing. Every other question made evidential sense. Had the boy had such attacks before? How often? Real questions. But it was the others that counted. You know, those people have rather a broad sense of humour. They began to laugh and that was that. Nothing much I could do. It wasn’t a court of law, but whenever I hear of a case being laughed out of court, I think of that list of questions. If I could have found the little monster guilty of something, I’d have done so cheerfully.’

‘But you didn’t.’

‘Of course not. I was too busy trying not to laugh myself. But afterwards I gave him a ticking-off. Not that he cared. Too clever by half, young Williamson. And I’m not saying that just because he made an ass of me and also won a scholarship. Lots of those very bright teacher’s pets are emotionally immature. He wasn’t. He had the sort of insights that a great many so-called adults never begin to acquire. He was also a bit cruel. He’d know exactly what was going through some other fellow’s mind and use the knowledge to frighten him by dressing it up in that magical hocus-pocus of his. Cruel, as I say, but funny. As for the Boy Scout stuff, that was funny, too, if you looked at it from where he stood. Tribalism, that’s what he saw, with lots of stern rituals and the chance to exercise a natural talent for leadership. A very spry lad, and a very deep one, that.’

‘As a matter of fact he still quotes Baden-Powell.’

He sniffed. ‘They say that the Devil still quotes the scriptures, I believe. I’d say that Mathew Williamson’s idea of a good deed for the day now would be lending his best friend a pound and getting an IOU from him for two.’

In fact, Mat Tuakana, as he was calling himself then, made his first million not by using his own money, but by arranging for other persons to spend theirs.

He was twenty-two when he graduated from the LSE. One of his student friends there was a native of what had formerly been the Dutch East Indies and was then emerging as the Republic of Indonesia. The friend’s father had long been a Sukarno man, was close to the new President and had valuable patronage at his disposal. American aid to the new state was being given generously. In Djakarta educated men of ability who were neither Dutch nor Chinese were in short supply. When Mat and his friend arrived they had no trouble at all in making themselves useful. In a country where the average life expectancy was then no more than thirty years and the number of university graduates as a percentage of the population was approximately zero, their youth was no handicap. Within weeks they were in positions of authority and responsibility that in most other countries could only have been reached after years of determined in-fighting and conspicuous dedication. In Indonesia, too, positions of authority and responsibility were also, then, positions of considerable personal profit for those who held them. Mat’s job in the Ministry of Trade and Industry was to act as a purchasing agent. The money he used was allocated from the millions of dollars of US aid which arrived in the form of American bank credits, and what he bought was what American advisers to the new regime appeared to believe the Indonesian people most needed: useful things like refrigerators, room air-conditioners, radio sets, modern plumbing and cars that would make the place more like home.

Of the millions of dollars that Mat spent on buying such things, some, naturally, stuck to his own fingers. He got two commissions on each deal, one from the agent selling the merchandise for its US manufacturer and another from the merchant to whom he allocated the stuff when it arrived. He made his million in a little under two years and then, sensing that change was in the air and knowing that, while it is always a mistake to be greedy, in Djakarta at the time it was often a fatal mistake, he got out.

He had many American contacts now, so it was to America that he went. He was also given much advice on how best to multiply his million. This he ignored. The advice he took concerned his education. From Americans whose judgement he had come to respect he had learned that the great American law schools are not simply places where men and women are taught to practise law, but places where excellence in other kinds of social and political management is nurtured and developed. Believing his education to be in many such respects incomplete, he had applied to Stanford and, on the basis of his excellent showing at LSE, had been accepted. With the million sensibly invested, I am sure that he had no trouble at all in enjoying his spare time there.

Whether or nor he enjoyed the rest of it I have never discovered. The only time I ever asked him he evaded the question. It may have been that those who assessed him there ultimately saw through him a little too clearly, and allowed him to know that they had done so.

The Kensington hotel was made up of two large, Victorian, terraced houses joined together and given a revolving-door entrance. The night porter was obviously a tippler, but still more or less sober when I arrived. Mat’s name sobered him still further and, after telephoning up to announce me, he managed to operate a curious old lift. The hotel may have been sleazy, but Mat had made the best of it. Since I had last been there he had taken over most of the second floor with, according to the porter, four rooms en suite.

The largest had been made into a sitting-room and Max was waiting for me there. So was Frank Yamatoku his boyfriend.

Frank is a Japanese-American whizz-kid from California who made a killing in the porn trade there before Mat found him. Frank’s innovation had been in movie theatres. He had started in Los Angeles with the one house, a couples-only place in which there were water-beds instead of seats and triple-X films showing around the clock. When he had had six of these places going, he had sold out to a syndicate, thoughtfully giving the Vice Squad a list of the syndicate’s members as soon as he had cleared their cheque and was in the overseas departure complex of the airport. Frank has a lot of imagination and is an absolutely brilliant accountant, but until Mat found him he often took risks and lived dangerously.

Mat had cured him of those tendencies, I thought, but I would still have found it difficult ever to like Frank. He knew it, too, and the feeling was mutual. Even though I knew that he was working on the fine print of the Placid Island settlement with the Anglo-Anzac accountant, I was not pleased to see him there with Mat.

‘You made good time, Paul,’ Mat said. ‘No further problems?’

‘No further problems, no. But the one I’m here about is quite enough, I assure you.’ I looked at Frank and then back at Mat and waited.

After a moment Mat gave me his lazy smile. ‘All right. Would you excuse us, Frank?’

Frank stood up. ‘Surely. Good to see you, Paul.’

With a nod he left. I was quite sure that he would listen to what Mat and I had to say to one another, but even so it was better without him there.

‘A drink, Paul?’ Mat motioned towards the sideboard.

‘A little later perhaps, Mat. We have that man Krom, the criminology professor, on our backs.’

He became very still. He knew who Krom was. All the stuff about the man and his views that had been passed by the researchers to me had been passed by me to Mat. He was now mentally reviewing it. After he had done so, he relaxed again.