Hartog slammed his empty glass down on the desk. “Very well, then.” Mockingly he extended his arms across the top of the desk towards Shaw. “Slip the bracelets on, Inspector, I’m coming quietly.”
“I think you’d better tell me anything you haven’t told me already, and skip the funny stuff.”
“Oh, all right.” Hartog shrugged and sat back again. “The arm wasn’t due to a skid — though for the record I did have one.” He held the arm up. “There’s been a bullet in there.”
“Which you got when my train was attacked?”
“Exactly — but don’t bother to reach for that gun under your shoulder, because it isn’t what you think.” Hartog jabbed a finger towards Shaw. “It’s a long story. But I got that bullet when I followed the natives who were mounting the attack. It was a stray shot, one that had gone over and wide, and I was just unlucky. It wasn’t so bad that I couldn’t get back to the car and drive it home, but it was bad enough. If you check up you’ll find that I didn’t go to a doctor, either here at the station or in Manalati. I got my wife to fix it.”
“Why was that — if you were only eavesdropping—”
“I couldn’t prove that, could I, and everybody would have known about the train hold-up and they’d have jumped to wrong conclusions. Anyway, there’s another and more important reason. It’s this.” Hartog leaned across the desk, bloodshot eyes fixing Shaw intently. “Steve Geisler doesn’t like me. He loathes my guts, in fact. He’d love an excuse for getting rid of me.” Gently, he tapped his arm. “This could give him that excuse, if he cared to stir up trouble and come to the wrong answer — like you’re doing now. Besides which, he’s already warned me that if I go on with this business he’ll shop me to London or Washington. That’d mean I’d be relieved double-quick, and I’m not ready for that yet. I don’t want everything mucked up now.”
“What do you mean by that? And what do you mean when you say ‘this business’?”
Hartog’s mouth twisted. “Look, Shaw, I’m not a fool. You’ve formed your own conclusions already, and you think I’m up to something pretty nasty. I believe that was the general drift of your remarks to Steve about some one signalling the missile down, or causing an accident. You meant me when you said that — didn’t you? Right, now let me do a little explaining. In the first place, you must have checked up on all of us by now. Did you find anything against me?”
“No. If there had been, you wouldn’t have been employed here anyway. But sometimes people’s loyalties change after they’ve been screened, you know, and no screening’s a hundred per cent, anyway.”
Hartog said, “I wouldn’t know about that. But my loyalties haven’t changed. Other things have, but not my loyalties.” “Can you elaborate on that?”
Hartog said slowly, almost wearily, “Yes, I can, but to understand it you’ve got to have lived in this bloody country really. You’ve got to have watched this thing building up, Shaw, you’ve got to have felt its effect, and seen the whole place degenerate into fear, terror of what’s going to happen.” He wiped beads of sweat from his face. “You’ve got to have watched a whole country gradually dying just because some bastard has got hold of the blacks’ imagination and worked on it through their own voodoo. You’ve got to have lived where you can’t trust anybody with a bit of colour in them — or rather, not many of them. Even those you do trust, you don’t feel absolutely sure of. The change that’s come to me… it stems from all of that.”
Hartog got up and went over to refill his glass, long legs moving in that loping stride. Coming back, he said, “There’s people here, Steve Geisler’s one of them, my wife’s another, who’ll tell you I am just an alcoholic — or going that way at least. Very sad, they say, to see a brilliant brain going to the devil like that. What the hell do they know about it, Shaw?” He ran a hand through his black hair. “There’s some who probably think I’m crazy. Well — in a way I am. Both. Drunk and crazy. Only that’s not all. Look, after the current troubles are over, they can send me home any time they like — and they will too, if Geisler can fix it that way. I shan’t care— then. But not yet, d’you see — not yet! I’ve got things to— finish.”
“What things?”
Hartog didn’t answer that directly. He said moodily, “I told you I was at the hold-up last night. As a matter of sober fact… I was part of it, I wasn’t eavesdropping at all—”
“You—”
“Wait!” The man’s closed fist smashed down on the desk and his lips went thin, hard. “Let me finish. I didn’t try to stop it because I couldn’t on my own, and even supposing I hadn’t been killed out of hand as a result, I’d have lost months of patient work. Months of getting myself accepted on my own merits and therefore—trusted.” He paused. “You see, Shaw, I’m a member of the Cult of Edo.”
Shaw’s face was white. “Do you really mean that, Hartog?”
“Yes, of course I do. What’s more, Geisler knows it.”
“He does?”
Hartog nodded. “I told him a couple of days ago. I got in a mad temper and it just came out. That was when he warned me officially to stop it all. Said that as a serving officer in an executive command he couldn’t let the station get mixed up in what was essentially a political matter. He said it’d be the boot for him if anything came out, which I dare say is true enough, but for God’s sake!” He looked almost appealingly at Shaw. “There’s more in the pot now than one man’s career. Anyway I didn’t take a blind bit of notice of him. You see, in a way, I’m doing your job for you. Finding out what’s going on — or trying my best to.”
Shaw said slowly, “Hartog, it’s a damned tall story. Have you in fact found anything out?”
“No. Only what I told you before — that the blacks think Edo’s turned up somewhere.”
“Nothing else at all?”
“Nothing else at all. They’re a close lot, you know. They accept me all right, but the impression I get is that they don’t know themselves what’s going to happen, and they won’t know till Edo tells them. Out here, they’re only the small fry, the labourers of the racket, as you might say, who’re waiting for the big bugs to join them — but there’s millions of them and they’re the Africa that counts. This thing’s going to be big if it’s allowed to come off.”
Shaw asked, “What do you think is going to happen?”
Hartog shrugged, fingers drumming on the desk nervously. “That’s anybody’s guess. It may be a wholesale uprising if Tshemambi doesn’t back down — and I’m damn sure he won’t. It may be some attack on the base here, it could even be…well, I just don’t know. Theorizing doesn’t help much.” He paused, then asked, “Well? D’you believe me?”
Shaw bit his lip, frowned. He said, “You’ve put me in a spot. What you’ve said does begin to make a curious kind of sense, I suppose. Look, what are your own real feelings about the Africans? I know Geisler said you didn’t like them, but—”
“I detest their stinking hides.”
Shaw was startled by the sheer venom in the man’s tone; the feeling, he was convinced, was absolutely genuine. He asked, “In that case, isn’t it a little odd that they accept you — a member of the station staff, too — as a sympathizer of the Cult?”
Hartog said, “Well, it wasn’t quite that way, not in the first place.” He paused. “They blackmailed me into it at the start, Shaw, and that I’ve not told Steve, by the way, because he wouldn’t understand. But I’ll tell you why, if you’re interested. I dare say you’ll ferret it out for yourself now, anyway.”
“I’m more than interested.”
“Right. It’s like this: When I was in the Russian zone after being liberated from that German P.O.W. camp, I was… forced to do some work in the guided missiles field for the Reds. God knows, it wasn’t anything they couldn’t have worked out for themselves in time — and it never came out in the screening process after I escaped back to the West. I didn’t say anything, neither did the Reds.” He paused, rubbed at his eyes. “Then a long time later, a couple of men came to see me in London and they told me I was only at liberty through the good offices of the Reds and that if they just let some information trickle through I’d be for the high jump. They said, however, that they never would let on… but there was a suggestion in the air that one day they might ask foi; payment for keeping quiet. D’you follow?”