‘I suppose so.’
‘No time, nothing! You throw a scare into the head man right then and there. You don’t accept the bananas. Instead, you ask him what you ordered. You ask him slowly, and as you speak you rap the table in time with the words. He will be a little afraid and say that, although you ordered papaya, the fruit available were not good. Then you address him in the manner of a death spell — a spirit-of-eating-alive type intonation maybe — and tell him that it was mango you ordered, not papaya. Now he’s in bad trouble. He doesn’t know what to think except that the spirits are not on his side. And that’s just the beginning. After that, you see that nothing he does is right. You order meat for dinner and he tries bringing you fish. You give him hell, but tell him you distinctly ordered vegetables. What’s he trying to do, poison you? You order meat again. Worried, he tries to back off by bringing you meat. You give him hell again, and this time you threaten to put the lot of them in jail for stealing meat when the country is starving. Now they’re really on the skids, I mean panic-scared and shaking. The spirits in the entrails have turned against them. Only one thing left for them to do, isn’t there?’
‘Dig up the entrails and get rid of them, I suppose.’
‘Oh, yes, they’ll have to put back the clock, but appeasing the spirits won’t be so easy. They’ll have to work at it. Work hard. Do as they’re told without trying to outsmart you. Be good citizens. Do what comes naturally.’
‘What’s that?’
‘For them? Being obedient.’
I smiled.
He remembered at once that the good Scout is at all times chivalrous, a parfit knight who never kicks a defeated enemy when the slob’s down. ‘Of course,’ he added, ‘as soon as they’d decided to behave themselves I was as nice as pie. That’s the way spells work, like a storm. One moment it’s all thunder and lightning and cleansing fear. Then, when the gods and the sorcerer are appeased, out comes the sun again.’
That was only one of his analogies on the subject of spells and sorcery. Many of them I came to know quite well. For me, though, the thing he was describing — often quite poetically — was merely a primitive, and only slightly more deadly version of what western man nowadays calls gamesmanship. A death-spell can kill in two ways; by frightening the victim to death or, since few men are totally susceptible to fear, by frightening him into doing something foolish — like taking too many sleeping pills or stepping in front of a bus.
It was Mat’s belief that Lord Baden-Powell was a natural sorcerer of great potency, and that, but for the accident of his having been born an Englishman, his world leadership would have extended far beyond the confines of the Boy Scout movement. He would have had the will to use his superb skills and cunning politically.
Mat had made a close study of the Chief Scout’s defence of Mafeking during the Boer War. The famous siege, which began in October 1899 and lasted for over eight months, was, according to B-P who commanded the town’s defenders, a ‘minor operation’ and his successful defence against overwhelming odds, ‘largely a piece of bluff.
Mat says that he put a spell on the enemy. An official historian said that he made imaginative tactical use of the modest resources at his disposal. Either or both could be right. By constantly moving his one acetylene searchlight around, B-P made the enemy believe that no night attack could possibly succeed. He disturbed their sleep by using a megaphone to give orders to imaginary trench-raiding parties. He harassed them with snipers who only fired during the late afternoon when the sun was behind them and in the enemy’s eyes. His men lobbed bombs at the enemy with fishing rods as if they were casting from a beach for flounders. When he had pushed his line of forts and his trench system far enough out from the town, he even began sniping with field-guns. And all the time he kept up a cheerful correspondence with the enemy who was trying to starve him out or wear him down — the Scout smiles and whistles under all difficulties. In a presumptuous attempt to cast spells — or wage psychological warfare? — in the B-P manner, the Boer Commandant at one point proposed a cricket match between the two sides. B-P’s reply could not have been bettered, in Mat’s opinion. ‘You must bowl us out first before your side can come in.’
With Mat, I have never really been sure where cleverness stops and low cunning begins. Inside that second-rate mind, there could be a third-rate one struggling to get out.
Among things said by Mat that I repeated to Krom and the witnesses was this:
‘A man once called me a shark. You know what imbeciles some so-called businessmen are. He loses money, so he calls me a shark. He thought he was being offensive. I took it as a compliment. Know something? In the islands, my mother’s people worship sharks. That’s because sharks are the greatest of all the spirits of the dead. Super-saints, you might say, god-like beings. So, when he called me a shark I only laughed. What’s wrong with being told you’re a god? As a matter of fact, I rather enjoyed it.’
‘That was very nice,’ said Dr Henson.
She and Connell were in her room. After an interval the bed creaked again.
I was alone with the bugging gear in the loft over the garage. Yves had been sent, at his own request, on a tour of the perimeter fences. Melanie was on watch at the attic windows. Krom was in his room studying File № 2, and licking his wounds no doubt. He would also be casting about feverishly for some ways of retrieving his position. He couldn’t wholly succeed now, but he still had a negotiating position of sorts; and, in spite of the wounds I had inflicted on him, he would make the most of it. More hard bargaining lay ahead.
That is, it lay ahead as long as the two parties at present under attack remained in reasonably good condition.
Connell and Henson had begun to talk again.
‘It’s the old man’s fault,’ he was saying; ‘if he’d levelled with us in Amsterdam and we’d talked it through with him, even a little, we’d at least have had some chance. We wouldn’t have had to stand there like dummies while Firman threw curve balls that the old man couldn’t even see.’
‘One sympathizes though.’
‘Oh, sure. That Oberholzer identification was his big breakthrough, so everything that came after had to flow from it, whether it should really have done so or not. He was wearing blinkers and we weren’t allowed to comment or even notice.’
‘Hindsight, friend.’
‘Admitted. Even so … ‘
‘Even so, what could we have changed? We might have had private doubts, but can you see either of us trying to tell the old man that he’d got the wrong end of the stick? Another thing, Firman’s right. If we’d been doing the research, we’d have taken months to track down Symposia’s tie-up with this Australasian witch-doctor Boy Scout. You know we would. By the way, I think my right leg’s going to sleep. Do you mind easing over just a fraction of a …?’
‘Sorry.’
‘No, that’s fine. Don’t go away. Were you ever a Scout?’
‘Never. Nobody ever asked me to join. Don’t tell me you were a Girl Guide.’