“Mr. St. Ives?” the guard on my side of the car said, his left arm still leaning casually on the Ford’s window ledge, his right hand resting not so casually on the butt of a holstered revolver.
“Yes.”
“May I see some identification, please?”
I got out my wallet and handed him the New York driver’s license. He read it without moving his lips and then handed it back. “The other gentleman?” From the way he said it I could tell that Mbwato was a mile or two from being a gentleman in his estimation.
“He wants some identification,” I said.
“To be sure,” Mbwato said, reached into the inside breast pocket of his splendid deep blue, raw-silk jacket, and handed over what looked to be a passport. The guard opened it, read all about Mbwato, looked at the picture, compared it with the real thing, and then said, “How do you pronounce it?”
“Conception Mbwato,” the good colonel said in his best Old Boy English.
“Just a minute,” the guard said, and went back into the hut and picked up a telephone. The other guard continued to lean on the door on the right-hand side and stare at Mbwato. “You’re a big ’un, for sure,” he said conversationally, and Mbwato smiled at him again. The guard in the hut replaced the phone and came out. “Follow the road straight ahead,” he said, as if by rote. “Do not turn off. Do not drive over twenty miles per hour. Do not stop. One mile from here you’ll be met by a blue jeep. Follow the jeep to the main house.”
“Thanks,” I said.
He nodded and went back into a hut where I assumed that he pressed a button because the two iron gates parted. I drove through and followed another winding asphalt road through grassland and forest for a mile. I drove exactly twenty miles per hour. There were no buildings in sight.
“Mr. Spencer seems to put a high premium on security,” Mbwato said.
“His art collection is worth God knows how many million dollars,” I said. “I guess he doesn’t want it trucked away in the middle of the night.”
“How large is his farm?”
“Plantation,” I said.
“Sorry.”
“Four thousand acres, I think. That’s about eleven square miles.”
“My word.”
The blue jeep was waiting for us with a sign on its back that read FOLLOW ME, just like the ones that some airports have. Its driver was another of Spencer’s lean, rangy home guards and he kept the jeep at exactly twenty miles per hour as we wound through the meadows and the pines and the oaks and the birches. Three miles from where we picked up the jeep we topped a rise and caught our first glimpse of what one can do to make oneself comfortable if one is worth a billion dollars or so.
It was built on the side of a hill that ran down to an artificial lake that was large enough to land the pontoon-equipped six-passenger Beechcraft that was tied up alongside a concrete dock. The house or mansion or villa or chateau or whatever it was carefully tumbled down the side of the hill for a hundred yards or so. It was built primarily of gray fieldstone that had been cut into massive blocks at least ten feet long and two feet high. Thick chimneys stuck up from the black slate roof here and there and the windows were recessed a foot into the stone under wide eaves that thrust the roof line out in a pleasantly aggressive manner. It was a one-story structure built on at least a dozen levels that wandered down to the lake. A brilliant green lawn was saved from looking as if you could putt on it by what seemed to be casual plantings of shrubs and flowers which probably crowned the life’s work of some landscape genius.
Separated from the house by some fifty yards was a large, windowless one-story structure of what looked to be gray marble. It was built on a ledge that had been cut into the hill and I assumed that it contained Spencer’s art collection.
The jeep with the FOLLOW ME sign took us up a crushed-stone drive that circled in front of two massive green copper doors that were recessed into the gray stone. The jeep stopped and I pulled up behind it. The guard came back to the Ford and bent down to look at us. “No packages, briefcases, or luggage are allowed inside,” he recited. “If you will step out of the car, please.”
I stepped out and he said, “Hold your arms straight out from your body, please.” I did and he ran expert hands over me. “Thank you,” he said, then turned to Mbwato and gave him the same instructions and the same treatment. Mbwato left his large, black attaché case on the front seat.
The guard went up three steps to the door, pressed a button, and spoke into an intercommunication device. “Cleared at primary checkpoint,” he said. “Henderson now returning to mile-point-one.” The communications device squawked something and the green doors were opened by a wide-shouldered, narrow-hipped man, about thirty, with short-cropped brown hair and a face that would have been almost pretty but for a nose that someone had broken. “Mr. St. Ives,” he said, looking at me, “and Mr. Mbwato, I believe.” I nodded. “I’m Mr. Spencer’s secretary. Will you follow me, please.”
Mbwato and I followed him down a wide carpeted hall to a closed door. He knocked on the door and then opened it, stood to one side, and motioned us through. I went first; Mbwato followed. It was a good-sized room, well furnished and richly carpeted. Opposite the door was a glass wall that afforded a view of the lake. A massive carved desk was at the far right. Behind the desk was Spencer and behind Spencer, resting on the floor and leaning against the wall, as if nobody could think of a place to hang it, was the shield of Komporeen.
Mbwato gave a long sigh as we moved toward the desk. Spencer stood up, glanced at the shield, and then looked at me. “You haven’t seen it before, have you, St. Ives?”
“No.”
“But Mr. Mbwato — or rather, Colonel Mbwato, I should say — has.”
“Often,” Mbwato said.
“You said that you were bringing no one who was of the police, St. Ives,” Spencer said, and toyed with a letter opener on his desk. It was the only thing on it. “You lied to me.”
“I did?”
“Yes, you did. Colonel Conception Mbwato is very much of the police. The Komporeenean police.”
“I thought you were in the army,” I said to Mbwato.
The big man smiled gloriously and shrugged. “In a small country such as mine, Mr. St. Ives, it is sometimes difficult to separate the duties of the constabulary from those of the armed forces.”
“They have a name for Colonel Mbwato in his country,” Spencer said. “They call him ‘The Rope.’”
“Do they?” I said to Mbwato.
“Only the enemies of my country, I assure you, Mr. St. Ives.”
“And there have been at least two thousand of them in recent months,” Spencer said. “They have dangled from the end of ropes.”
“History demonstrates that each revolution produces a fair crop of both traitors and patriots,” Mbwato said. “It was at one time my duty to deal with the traitors.”
I moved over to the shield, squatted down, and looked at it. I was surprised that it was a dull, dark green. But most brass that is nine hundred or so years old probably is. In the center of the shield was a sunburst and from it emanated in widening concentric circles carefully cast figures who seemed busy running, harvesting, planting, making love, and killing each other with sharp-looking knives and spears. I thought they were extremely well done as were some animals who were also getting killed. It may have told a story, but there didn’t seem to be much plot.