“It’s already started. There have been three brutal, motiveless, barbarous killings of white people in the last six weeks.”
Simon stared, frowning.
“But your colored people aren’t naked savages like the Kikuyu. They’re as civilized as the negroes in the United States.”
“You’d have said that about Guiana — and it wasn’t so long ago, if you remember, that I’ve had to send a warship there to nip a Communist coup in the bud. No, actually there’s a lot of difference. In some ways, our colored people are a lot better off than they are in America. There’s no segregation, some of them are in big business and make a lot of money, their children go to our best schools, and they can go into any club or restaurant on the island. They not only have the vote, they hold the political power, and they’re very active with it. Unfortunately, some of their leaders are pretty radical. And even more unfortunately, in spite of a lot of good Government intentions, there are still an enormous number who are desperately poor, totally illiterate, completely ignorant — and therefore the perfect chumps for the Communists to stir up. And that Maroon settlement makes a rather ideal focal point for it.”
“I’m beginning to see a few ways that it could be used,” Simon admitted slowly. “Do you know anything more about the brains of the act? — I’d hate to succumb to the obvious cliché of ‘the nigger in the woodpile.’ ”
“A little,” Farnham said. “It may have started several years ago, when an English writer who’s since become a rather notorious apologist for the Reds came over here and paid the Maroons a visit. Then, after a while, there were a couple of so-called artists with foreign accents who moved in with the Maroons, allegedly to paint a lot of pictures of their life and customs. I never saw the pictures, but I heard rumors that they were talking a lot of party-line poppycock to anyone who’d listen to them. But presently they went away. And then a few months ago, it seems, we got a chap we could really worry about. One of their own people.”
“You mean a Russian?”
“No. A Maroon.”
The Saint’s brows drew lower over his quietly intent eyes.
“I see. And of course you’re not supposed to touch him. But he’d naturally have more influence than any outsider. And if he’s an upper-echelon hammer-and-sickle boy—”
“I believe he is. Our Secret Service knows a bit about him — we aren’t quite such hopeless fuddy-duddies as some people think. There’s no doubt that he’s a real Maroon, but he’s spent most of his life away from here. He’s had a good education — and a thoroughly bad one, too. But he’s got plenty of brains, and, I’m told, a terrific personality. He may be quite a problem.”
Farnham got up and walked across to gaze out briefly at the stars, his old briar firmly gripped between his teeth and puffing stolidly, hands deep in his pockets, seemingly unaware of any enormity of understatement.
He said, “I don’t expect you to be too concerned with our wretched colonial headaches, but a Communist base in the Caribbean would be rather nasty for all of us. Frankly, I don’t quite know how I’m going to handle this blighter, and I thought if you came along you might have an idea or two.”
“I’ll be along, for whatever it’s worth,” said the Saint. Something more personal was troubling him: it was absurd, impossible within the established limits of chronology and space, but... “Do you know the name of this black commissar?” he asked.
“Oh, yes,” Farnham said. “His background is a bit different from your Johnny’s. You probably know his name. It’s Mark Cuffee.”
3
Mr Mark Cuffee’s career, in many respects, could have been cited as a shining example of the achievement possible to the emancipated negro, and Mr Cuffee himself had scathing epithets with which to describe those who did not regard it with unqualified admiration. His father had left the Maroon country to work in a rum distillery soon after Mark was born, and in due course worked himself up to the rank of foreman. With visions of still higher employment in mind for his son, he sent the boy to school in Kingston, where he proved to be such a brilliant student that at seventeen he won a scholarship to Oxford. With a benevolent Sugar Industries Association supplying the necessary extra funds, he went to England, where he not only won his degree in Law with first-class honors, but also had time to represent his University both as an oarsman and a cricketer, and to give a performance in the title role of an OUDS production of Othello which earned such critical acclaim that he continued it professionally for a six-weeks run in London.
After this brief triumph, knowing full well the narrow limit to the number of starring parts available to a colored actor, no matter how talented, Mr Cuffee with apparent good philosophy turned his histrionic talents back to the Bar. He was a clever lawyer and a born virtuoso in court, and since for a while he continued to play cricket for an exclusive amateur club, he had a social entrée which in England opens all doors to distinguished adepts of the national game, provided they do not play it for money.
Thus far, his record was entirely praiseworthy, and all the auspices pointed to a successful and illustrious future.
It is not known at exactly what moment Mr Cuffee decided to turn his back on his good omens and seek other goals. One obvious milestone is the occasion when he became a Socialist candidate for Parliament in the first post-war election, and was soundly defeated in spite of the general Conservative debacle. Others would date it from the time when a notoriously unconventional peeress, with whom the gossips had frequently linked his name, quite gracefully declined to marry him. At any rate, within a short space of both these events, he resigned from his cricket club, dropped most of his society friends, and soon afterwards went on a visit to Moscow, where he stayed for more than a year.
When he returned he wrote some articles in praise of the Soviet system for one of the pinker weeklies, and became a vitriolic public speaker against anything he could call reactionary, bourgeois, capitalist, warmongering, or, as a convenient synonym for all sins, American. Few of his former legal clients came back to him, but he was regularly retained for the defense of Communist spies and agitators, and in many other cases which could be disguised as humanitarian and used as sounding-boards for diatribes against anything that contravened the current interests of the Politburo. Although he by no means starved, he did the dirty work of his new masters and endured the inevitable public obloquy for several years, with the strange uncomplaining patience of a dedicated party member, until at last the infinitely elaborate card files in the Kremlin brought forth his name as the perfect instrument for a certain task, and he found himself back in the wild hills of Jamaica where he had spent his boyhood.
He stood near the gate of the village of Accompong, watching a jeep bumping up the winding rocky road which the Government has built from the nearest market town to the Maroon territory, a town with the magnificent name of Maggotty. He had been watching it ever since it came in sight, having been warned of its approach by signals relayed between a chain of outposts stationed down to where the farthest sentry commanded the turn-off from the main road.
Drawn up in loose formation around him were two dozen of his senior followers, whom he had been able to pick a few hours after his arrival from information supplied by previous emissaries. By now he was even more sure of them, for they were linked by what was literally a bond of blood. Most of them were clad in faded rags of incredible age, and all of these carried machetes, the all-purpose knives of the Jamaican laborer, which are as long and heavy as a cutlass and just as handy a weapon.