ld seem he does,” said the agency chief. “My man could not follow him into the building, but he noticed the commissionaire touched his cap to the subject and held the door open for him. He did not do that for a stream of secretaries and evidently junior executives who were emerging for lunch.”
“He’s brighter than he looks,” conceded Shannon. The youth had done a good job. Shannon gave several further instructions and that afternoon mailed £50 by registered mail to the detective agency. He also opened a bank account and put down a £10 deposit in it. The following morning he banked a further £500 and that evening flew to Paris.
Dr. Gordon Chalmers was not a drinking man. He seldom touched anything stronger than beer, and when he did he became talkative, as his employer, Sir James Manson, had found out for himself over their luncheon at Wilton’s. The evening that Cat Shannon was changing planes at Le Bourget to catch the Air Afrique DC-8 to West Africa, Dr. Chalmers was having dinner with an old college friend, now also a scientist and working in industrial research.
There was nothing special about their meal. He had run into his former classmate in one of those coincidental meetings on the street a few days earlier, and they had agreed to have dinner together.
Fifteen years earlier they had been young undergraduates, single and working hard on their respective degrees, earnest and concerned as so many young scientists feel obliged to be. In the mid-1950s the concern had been the bomb and colonialism, and they had joined thousands of others marching for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the various movements that sought an instant end to empire, and world freedom now. Both had been indignant, serious, committed, and both had changed nothing. But in their indignation over the state of the world they had dabbled with the Young Communist movement. Chalmers had grown out of it, married, started his family, secured a mortgage for his house, and slowly merged into the salaried middle class.
The combination of worries that had come his way over the previous two weeks caused him to take more than his usual single glass of wine with dinner, considerably more. His friend, a kindly man with soft brown eyes, noticed his worry and asked if he could help.
It was over the brandy that Dr. Chalmers felt he had to confide his worries to someone, someone who, unlike his wife, was a fellow scientist and would understand the problem. Of course it was highly confidential, and his friend was solicitous and sympathetic.
When he heard about the crippled daughter and the need for the money to pay for her expensive equipment, the man’s eyes clouded over with sympathy, and he reached across the table to grip Dr. Chalmers’ forearm.
“Don’t worry about it, Gordon. It’s completely understandable. Anyone else would have done the same thing,” he told him. Chalmers felt better when they left the restaurant and made their separate ways home. He was easier in his mind, his problem somehow shared.
Though he had asked his old friend how he had fared in the intervening years since their undergraduate days together, the man had been slightly evasive. Chalmers, bowed under his own worries and his observation blunted by wine, had not pressed for detail. Even had he done so, it was unlikely the friend would have told him that, far from merging into the bourgeoisie, he had remained a fully committed member of the Communist party.
1For a more detailed explanation of this procedure, which was used by a would-be assassin of General de Gaulle, see The Day of the Jackal (New York: The Viking Press, 1971; Bantam Books, Inc., 1972; New American Library, 2012).
seven
The Convair 440 that ran the connecting air service into Clarence banked steeply over the bay and began its descent toward the airfield. Being intentionally on the left side of the plane, Shannon could look down toward the town as the aircraft overflew it. From a thousand feet he could see the capital of Zangaro occupying the end of the peninsula, surrounded on three sides by the palm-fringed waters of the gulf, and on the fourth side by the land, where the stubby peninsula, just eight miles long, ran back to join the main coastline.
The spit of land was three miles wide at its base, set in the mangrove swamps on the coastline, and a mile wide at the tip, where the town was situated. The flanks along each side were also composed of mangrove, and only at the end did the mangroves give way to some shingly beaches.
The town spanned the end of the peninsula from side to side and stretched about a mile back down the length of it. Beyond the fringes of the town at this end, a single road ran between cultivated patches the remaining seven miles to the main coast.
Evidently all the best buildings were set toward the seaward tip of the land, where the breezes would blow, for the aerial view showed the buildings to be set in their own plots of land, one to an acre. The landward side of the town was evidently the poorer section, where thousands of tin-roofed shanties intersected with narrow muddy alleys. He concentrated on the richer section of Clarence, where the colonial masters had once lived, for here would be the important buildings, and he would only have a few seconds to see them from this angle.
At the very end was a small port, formed where, for no geological reason, two long curving spits of shingle ran out into the sea like the antlers of a stag beetle or the pincers of an earwig. The port was set along the landward side of this bay. Outside the arms of the bay, Shannon could see the water ruffled by the breeze, while inside the three-quarter-circle enclosed within the arms, the water was a flat calm. No doubt it was this anchorage, tacked onto the end of the peninsula in one of nature’s afterthoughts, which had attracted the first mariners.
The center of the port, directly opposite the opening to the high seas, was dominated by a single concrete quay without any ship tied up to it, and a warehouse of sorts. To the left of the concrete quay was evidently the natives’ fishing area, a shingly beach littered with long canoes and nets laid out to dry, and to the right of the quay was the old port, a series of decrepit wooden jetties pointing toward the water.
Behind the warehouse there were perhaps two hundred yards of rough grass, ending with a road along the shore, and behind the road the buildings started. Shannon caught a glimpse of a white colonial-style church and what could have been the governor’s palace in bygone days, surrounded by a wall. Inside the wall, apart from the main buildings, was a large courtyard surrounded by lean-to hutments of evidently recent addition.
At this point the Convair straightened up, the town disappeared from view, and they were on final approach.
Shannon had already had his first experience of Zangaro the previous day when he had applied for his visa for a tourist visit. The consul in the neighboring capital had received him with some surprise, being unused to such applications. He had had to fill out a five-page form giving his parents’ first names (as he had no idea of Keith Brown’s parents’ names, he invented them) and every other conceivable piece of information.
His passport, when he handed it over, had a handsome banknote idly lying between the first and second pages. This went into the consul’s pocket. The man then examined the passport from every angle, read every page, held it up to the light, turned it over, checked the currency allowances at the back. After five minutes of this, Shannon began to wonder if there was something wrong. Had the British Foreign Office made an error in this particular passport?
Then the consul looked at him and said, “You are an American.”
With a sense of relief Shannon realized the man was illiterate. He had his visa in five minutes more. But at Clarence airport the fun stopped.
He had no luggage in the aircraft hold, just a hand grip. Inside the main (and only) passenger building the heat was overpowering, and the place buzzed with flies. About a dozen soldiers lounged about, and ten policemen. They were evidently of different tribes. The policemen were self-effacing, hardly speaking even to each other, leaning against the walls. It was the soldiers who attracted Shannon’s attention. He kept half an eye on them as he filled in another immensely long form (the same one he had filled the previous day at the consulate) and penetrated Health and Pass
port Control, both manned by officials whom he took to be Caja, like the policemen.
It was when he got to customs that the trouble started. A civilian was waiting for him and instructed him with a curt gesture to go into a side room. As he did so, taking his bag with him, four soldiers swaggered in after him. Then he realized what it was about them that rang a bell in his memory.
Long ago in the Congo he had seen the same attitude, the blank-eyed sense of menace conveyed by an African of almost primeval cultural level, armed with a weapon, in a state of power—wholly unpredictable, with reactions to a situation that were utterly illogical, ticking away like a moving time bomb. Just before the worst of the massacres he had seen launched by Congolese on Katangese, Simbas on missionaries, and Congolese army on Simbas, he had noticed this same menacing mindlessness, the sense of power without reason, that can suddenly and for no recollected explanation turn to frenetic violence. The Vindu soldiers of President Kimba had it.
The civilian customs officer ordered Shannon to put his bag on the rickety table and then began to go through it. The search looked thorough, as if for concealed weapons, until he spotted the electric shaver, took it from its case, examined it, tried the “on” switch. Being a Remington Lektronic and fully charged, it buzzed furiously. Without a trace of expression, the customs man put it in his pocket.
Finishing with the bag, he gestured to Shannon to empty his pockets onto the table. Out came the keys, handkerchief, coins, wallet, and passport. The customs man went for the wallet, extracted the travelers’ checks, looked at them, grunted, and handed them back. The coins he swept into his hand and pocketed them. Of the banknotes, there were two 5000-French-African-franc notes and several 100s. The soldiers had crowded nearer, still making no sound but for their breathing in the roasting atmosphere, gripping guns like clubs, but overcome with curiosity. The civilian behind the table pocketed the two 5000-franc notes, and one of the soldiers picked up the smaller denominations.