The Human Factor (22 page)

‘I'm sorry,' Muller said, ‘I would have changed our date if I'd known.'

‘It's not your fault. The fact is – I have an official diary and a private diary. Here I have you marked, you see, for 10 Thursday. The private diary I keep at home, and I must have written the funeral down in that one. I'm always forgetting to compare the two.'

‘All the same . . . forgetting the funeral . . . isn't that a bit odd?'

‘Yes, Freud would say I wanted to forget.'

‘Just fix another date for me and I'll be off. Tomorrow or the next day?'

‘No, no. Which is more important anyway? Uncle Remus or listening to prayers being said over poor Davis? Where was Carson buried by the way?'

‘At his home. A small town near Kimberley. I suppose you'll be surprised when I tell you that I was there?'

‘No, I imagine you had to watch and observe who the mourners were.'

‘Someone – you're right – someone had to watch. But I chose to go.'

‘Not Captain Van Donck?'

‘No. He would have been easily recognized.'

‘I can't think what they are doing with those files.'

‘This man Davis – perhaps he didn't mean very much to you?' Muller asked.

‘Well, not as much as Carson. Whom your people killed. But my son was fond of him.'

‘Carson died of pneumonia.'

‘Yes. Of course. So you told me. I had forgotten that too.'

When the files at last came Castle went through them, seeking to answer Muller's questions, but with only half of his mind. ‘We have no reliable information about that yet,' he found himself saying for the third time. Of course it was a deliberate lie – he was protecting a source from Muller – for they were approaching dangerous ground, working together up to that point of non-cooperation which was still undetermined by either of them.

He asked Muller, ‘Is Uncle Remus really practicable? I can't believe the Americans will ever get involved again – I mean with troops in a strange continent. They are just as ignorant of Africa as they were of Asia – except, of course, through novelists like Hemingway. He would go off on a month's safari arranged by a travel agency and write about white hunters and shooting lions – the poor half-starved brutes reserved for tourists.'

‘The ideal that Uncle Remus has in mind,' Muller said, ‘is to make the use of troops almost unnecessary. At any rate in great numbers. A few technicians, of course, but they're already with us. America maintains a guided missile tracking station and a space tracking station in the Republic, and they have over-flying rights to support those stations – you certainly know all that. No one has protested, no one has marched. There have been no student riots in Berkeley, no questions in Congress. Our internal security so far has proved excellent. You see, our race laws have in a way been justified; they prove an excellent cover. We don't have to charge anyone with espionage – that would only draw attention. Your friend Carson was dangerous – but he'd have been more dangerous still if we had had to try him for espionage. A lot is going on now at the tracking stations – that's why we want a close co-operation with your people. You can pinpoint any danger and we can deal with it quietly. In some ways you're much better placed than we are to penetrate the liberal elements, or even the black nationalists. Take an example. I'm grateful for what you've given me on Mark Ngambo – of course we knew it already. But now we can be satisfied that we've missed nothing important. There's no danger from that particular angle – for the time anyway. The next five years, you see, are of vital importance – I mean for our survival.'

‘But I wonder, Muller – can you survive? You've got a long open frontier – too long for minefields.'

‘Of the old-fashioned kind, yes,' Muller said. ‘It's as well for us that the hydrogen bomb made the atom bomb just a tactical weapon. Tactical is a reassuring word. No one will start a nuclear war because a tactical weapon has been used in almost desert country very far away.'

‘How about the radiation?'

‘We are lucky in our prevailing winds and our deserts. Besides, the tactical bomb is reasonably clean. Cleaner than the bomb at Hiroshima and we know how limited the effect of that was. In the areas which may for a few years be radioactive there are few white Africans. We plan to canalize any invasions there are.'

‘I begin to see the picture,' Castle said. He remembered Sam, as he remembered him when he looked at the newspaper photograph of the drought – the spread-eagled body and the vulture, but the vulture would be dead too of radiation.

‘That's what I came here to show you – the general picture – we needn't go into all the details – so that you can properly evaluate any information you obtain. The tracking stations are at this moment the sensitive point.'

‘Like the race laws they can cover a multitude of sins?'

‘Exactly. You and I needn't go on playing with each other. I know you've been instructed to keep certain things from me, and I quite understand. I've received just the same orders as you have. The only important thing is – we should both look at identically the same picture; we shall be fighting on the same side, so we've got to see the same picture.'

‘In fact we're in the same box?' Castle said, making his private joke against them all, against BOSS, against his own service, even against Boris.

‘Box? Yes, I suppose you could put it that way.' He looked at his watch. ‘Didn't you say the funeral was at eleven? It's ten to eleven now. You'd better be off.'

‘The funeral can go on without me. If there's an after-life Davis will understand, and if there isn't . . .'

‘I'm quite sure there
is
an after-life,' Cornelius Muller said.

‘You are? Doesn't the idea frighten you a bit?'

‘Why should it? I've always tried to do my duty.'

‘But those little tactical atomic weapons of yours. Think of all the blacks who will die before you do and be there waiting for you.'

‘Terrorists,' Muller said. ‘I don't expect to meet them again.'

‘I didn't mean the guerrillas. I mean all the families in the infected area. Children, girls, the old grannies.'

‘I expect they'll have their own kind of heaven,' Muller said.

‘Apartheid in heaven?'

‘Oh, I know you are laughing at me. But I don't suppose they'd enjoy our sort of heaven, do you? Anyway I leave all that to the theologians. You didn't exactly spare the children in Hamburg, did you?'

‘Thank God, I didn't participate as I'm doing now.'

‘I think if you aren't going to the funeral, Castle, we should get on with our business.'

‘I'm sorry. I agree.' Indeed he was sorry; he was even afraid, as he had been in the offices of BOSS that morning in Pretoria. For seven years he had trodden with unremitting care through the minefields, and now with Cornelius Muller he had taken his first wrong step. Was it possible that he had fallen into a trap set by someone who understood his temperament?

‘Of course,' Muller said, ‘I know that you English like arguing for the sake of arguing. Why, even your C pulled my leg about apartheid, but when it comes to Uncle Remus . . . well, you and I have to be serious.'

‘Yes, we'd better get back to Uncle Remus.'

‘I have permission to tell you – in broad lines, of course – how things went with me in Bonn.'

‘You had difficulties?'

‘Not serious ones. The Germans – unlike other ex-colonial powers – have a lot of secret sympathy for us. You could say that it goes back as far as the Kaiser's telegram to President Kruger. They are worried about South-West Africa; they would rather see us control South-West Africa than a vacuum there. After all they ruled the South-West more brutally than we have ever done, and the West needs our uranium.'

‘You brought back an agreement?'

‘One shouldn't talk of an agreement. We are no longer in the days of secret treaties. I only had contact with my opposite number, not with the Foreign Secretary or the Chancellor. Just the same way as your C has been talking with the CIA in Washington. What I hope is that we've all three reached a clearer understanding.'

‘A secret understanding instead of a secret treaty?'

‘Exactly.'

‘And the French?'

‘No trouble there. If we are Calvinist they're Cartesian. Descartes didn't worry about the religious persecution of his time. The French have a great influence on Senegal, the Ivory Coast, they even have a fair understanding with Mobutu in Kinshasa. Cuba won't seriously interfere in Africa again (America has seen to that), and Angola won't be a danger for a good many years. No one is apocalyptic today. Even a Russian wants to die in his bed, not in a bunker. At the worst, with the use of a few atomic bombs – small tactical ones, of course – we shall gain five years of peace if we are attacked.'

‘And afterwards?'

‘That's the real point of our understanding with Germany. We need a technical revolution and the latest mining machines, although we've gone further than anyone realizes on our own. In five years we can more than halve the labour force in the mines: we can more than double the wages for skilled men and we can begin to produce what they have in America, a black middle class.'

‘And the unemployed?'

‘They can go back to their homelands. That is what the homelands were for. I'm an optimist, Castle.'

‘And apartheid stays?'

‘There'll always be a certain apartheid as there is here – between the rich and the poor.'

Cornelius Muller took off his gold-rimmed glasses and polished the gold till it gleamed. He said, ‘I hope your wife liked her shawl. You know you will always be welcome to come back now that we realize your true position. With your family too, of course. You may be sure they will be treated as honorary whites.'

Castle wanted to reply. ‘But I am an honorary black,' but this time he showed a little prudence. ‘Thank you.'

Muller opened his briefcase and took out a sheet of paper. He said, ‘I have made a few notes for you on my meetings in Bonn.' He produced a ball-point pen – gold again. ‘You might have some useful information on these points when we next meet. Would Monday suit you? The same time?' He added, ‘Please destroy that when you've read it. BOSS wouldn't like it to go on even your most secret file.'

‘Of course. As you wish.'

When Muller had gone he put the paper in his pocket.

CHAPTER II

1

T
HERE
were very few people at St George's in Hanover Square when Doctor Percival arrived with Sir John Hargreaves, who had only returned from Washington the night before.

A man with a black band around his arm stood alone by the aisle in the front row; presumably, Doctor Percival thought, he was the dentist from Droitwich. He refused to make way for anyone – it was as though he were safeguarding his right to the whole front row as the nearest living relative. Doctor Percival and C took their seats near the back of the church. Davis's secretary, Cynthia, was two rows behind them. Colonel Daintry sat beside Watson on the other side of the aisle, and there were a number of faces only half known to Doctor Percival. He had glimpsed them once perhaps in a corridor or at a conference with MI5, perhaps there were even intruders – a funeral attracts strangers like a wedding. Two tousled men in the last row were almost certainly Davis's fellow lodgers from the Department of the Environment. Someone began to play softly on the organ.

Doctor Percival whispered to Hargreaves, ‘Did you have a good flight?'

‘Three hours late at Heathrow,' Hargreaves said. ‘The food was uneatable.' He sighed – perhaps he was remembering with regret his wife's steak-and-kidney pie, or the smoked trout at his club. The organ breathed a last note and fell silent. A few people knelt and a few stood up. There was a lack of certainty about what to do next.

The Rector, who was probably known to nobody there, not even to the dead man in the coffin, intoned ‘Take Thy plague away from me; I am even consumed by means of Thy heavy hand.'

‘What plague was it that killed Davis, Emmanuel?'

‘Don't worry, John. The post mortem was all in order.'

The service seemed to Doctor Percival, who had not attended a funeral for many years, full of irrelevant information. The Rector had begun reading the lesson from the First Epistle to the Corinthians: ‘All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds.' The statement was undeniably true, Doctor Percival thought. The coffin did not contain a fish; he would have been more interested in it if it had – an enormous trout perhaps. He took a quick look round. There was a tear caged behind the girl's lashes. Colonel Daintry had an angry or perhaps a sullen expression which might bode ill. Watson too was obviously worried about something – probably he was wondering whom to promote in Davis's place. ‘I want to have a word with you after the service,' Hargreaves said, and that might be tiresome too.

‘Behold I show you a mystery,' the Rector read. The mystery of whether I killed the right man? Doctor Percival wondered, but that will never be solved unless the leaks continue – that would certainly suggest he had made an unfortunate mistake. C would be very upset and so would Daintry. It was a pity one couldn't throw a man back into the river of life as one could throw a fish. The Rector's voice, which had risen to greet a familiar passage of English literature, ‘O Death, where is thy sting?' as a bad actor playing Hamlet picks out from its context the famous soliloquy, fell to a drone again for the dull and academic conclusion, ‘The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law.' It sounded like a proposition of Euclid.