‘I don’t suppose it is, Mat. Frank’s advice, as you’ll know, was non-resistance. Yours appears to be a little different and slightly more reassuring — no walks in the jungle. Have I got that right?’
No plain answer, of course. I hadn’t really expected one.
It was time for that final, all-important move to the third stage of the ritual. The preliminary declaration that a moral authority was properly vested in him, along with its appropriate powers, had formally been made. In other, cruder words, the softening-up process was over. Now, it was time for the decisive incantation. I know of no simple way of describing that process accurately. The carnivorous plant treating inspect prey with enzymes before eating them is a clumsy comparison. Mat doesn’t want to eat his victims; he only wants them to oblige him.
He spoke slowly, and was probably tapping a table or desk in time with the words as he said them.
‘Paul, there’s something I’m going to remind you of now that I’m quite sure you haven’t forgotten. You won’t have forgotten this because it was something you once told me. You told me, too, in a moment of personal loss and sadness when you were trying to recall worse things you’d gone through. It was about when you were in the army in Italy, before you got to know Carlo up in the north. You recalled seeing another soldier, one of the men under your own personal command, go to obey an order you’d given. And then, a split second later, he’d stepped on a land mine — an S-mine, you called it — and been cut clean in two.’
A three-tap pause.
‘How far away was he from you? Only a few yards, wasn’t it? Close enough for you to be deaf for a few days, I know, and close enough for you to see what his guts looked like while his own eyes were still wondering what had happened. Less than a minute to die, though, with all those arteries severed. But the awful thing for you, aside from your having told the man to do something that killed him, came afterwards, didn’t it? I mean after the first physical shock, when you realized that, although you were still alive, there was death all around you. When you stood there with all that singing in your ears and knew that you’d strayed into a minefield, and that if you moved so much as a fraction of an inch in any direction, or maybe even leaned over a little and changed the weight distribution under one of your feet, your guts could be slopping about on the ground there too. So, you did what others have sometimes done when they’ve found they were in a minefield and seen what a mine can do to the soft human body. No disgrace, not when you’re in shock and looking at the results of making the wrong move. Some men would have turned and run blindly. Not you. You froze. And you stayed frozen until, eventually, someone from an engineer patrol came. Remember? He was a sergeant. He took you by the arm and persuaded you, and finally made you walk. It was a step at a time, much slower than a funeral march you said, left-and-right and left-and-right, until you both reached a piece of ground where tanks had been. The mark of their tracks were new, so from there you had places to put your feet where there couldn’t be unexploded S-mines. You walked back in the tank tracks. You listening, Paul?’
‘Yes.’
‘You asked for my advice. You don’t need it. You already know what to do. You’re in a minefield. Freeze. Right where you are. And stay frozen until I can get things straightened out and made safe; safe for you to walk away. Will you do that for me, Paul?’
‘Yes, Mat.’
It would have called for a serious effort on my part to have said anything else.
Besides, it would have been foolish to have said anything else. Better if he believed that the spell was cast; or, to use the jargon he probably now prefers, that I was correctly programmed.
‘I’ll be there to take your arm,’ he said.
The line went dead.
Green, orange and red lights glowed and flickered in the sky.
From my bedroom there was a good view of the bay, and I had brought Yves’s binoculars down with me from the attic floor. I took a closer look at the motor cruiser.
Most of the deck lights had been switched off now, as if to make the fireworks show up better; but there were several Roman candles burning at once and some of the orange balls from them stayed alight longer than the others on the way down to the water. I could see quite a lot of her.
The stern gave her name as Chanteuse, and her home port as Monrovia. She had Liberian registration. By the autumn she would be among the dozens of other boats just like her tied up along the yachting moles of Cannes and available for charter next year. It must have been expensive, I thought, to get hold of her at such short notice. Although there were always a few charterers who had their coronaries in June or early July, and so were obliged to forfeit their deposits, you had to be right in there with bundles of dollars or D-marks in both hands to buy your way on to the yacht-broker’s sucker lists of last-minute clients.
Mat must have hated that; but Frank wouldn’t have minded.
That Frank was on board the boat, I now had no doubt at all. I knew where he was, too. The people with the drinks on the after deck were merely set-dressing. There were lights on below. The only place in complete darkness was the bridge. It was a big all-glass affair like a greenhouse, with sloping sides that reflected the glare of the fireworks. He’d be there in the darkness with a walkie-talkie, where he could see and control but not be seen.
The man in charge of the fireworks was using a flashlight to set up a Catherine wheel on a plank lashed to the bow rails. As he stood back and felt for his matches again, the beam shone straight down on the rest of the entertainment, the fun-things still to come.
There was nothing more to see. I checked both phones. Then, I rewound the tape and took the recorder downstairs so that the others could hear what had been said.
Krom tried to stop me. He had been listening on the extension and was very agitated.
‘We must call the police,’ he said.
‘We can’t. And time’s running out. Keep still and listen.’
They listened. Krom seemed not to hear, though. A tic had started under his left eye, I watched the others. Yves especially. He kept catching my eyes on him and then looking past me over my shoulder. The cassette switched off.
Henson had a question. ‘Did the minefield thing really happen to you as he describes it?’
‘Not quite as he describes it. That’s a Camp Fire Yarn version for Scouts. Mat’s a prude, you see, and he has blind spots. He thinks that people are unalterable, for instance. It would never occur to him that the mere fact of my being able to tell him about that paralysing experience meant that the memory of it had become tolerable. After over thirty years, it can’t paralyse me any more, only make me curl my toes.’ I stood up. ‘It’s cooler outside and we can watch the fireworks.’
‘We must call the police,’ Krom said.
Connell had questions. ‘What’s Williamson think he’s doing? Sniping with field-guns?’
‘And disturbing the enemies’ sleep, too, I imagine. The accent he was using, by the way, came from Birmingham in England a long time ago. It came via Fiji and used to belong to an inoffensive missionary.’
‘We must …’ Krom began, and then paused. He put out his hands and gripped his knees tightly. ‘They’re there and he can’t stop them,’ he went on. ‘He won’t get here in time.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘he won’t, I’m afraid.’
There was no considerate way of explaining the position, either to him or to the others.
The Catherine wheel on the boat suddenly went haywire and flew off into the sea.
‘Mat’s telling me to freeze because his sorcerer’s calculations tell him that, after the softening up I’ve had and Frank Yamatoku’s warning, I’m going to behave irrationally. By talking about tiger-traps and minefields, he thinks he’s compelling me to run, head for the hills with most of you following. Herd instinct. He wants us to run the way we came, in two parties.’