A Wreath of Stars

Chapter Six

Snook’s telephone began to ring and, at the same instant, somebody knocked loudly on the front door of his bungalow.

He went to the living-room window, parted two slats of the blind and peered out. Three black soldiers were standing on the verandah—a lieutenant, a corporal and a private—all wearing the black-and-tan spotted berets of the Leopard Regiment. The corporal and the private had the inevitable submachine guns slung on their shoulders, and they also wore expressions that Snook had seen many times before in other parts of the world. They were examining his house with the appraising, faintly proprietory looks of men who had been authorised to use any degree of force necessary to accomplish their mission. As he watched, the lieutenant pounded the door again and took one step backwards, waiting for it to be opened.

“Hold on a minute,” Snook shouted as he went to the telephone, picked it up and gave his name.

“This is Doctor Boyce Ambrose,” the caller said. “I’ve just arrived in Barandi from the States. Has my secretary been in touch with you to explain why I’m here?”

“No. International communications don’t operate too well in these parts.”

“Oh, well—I expect you can guess what brought me to Barandi, Mister Snook. May I come out to the mine to see you? I’m very much…” Ambrose’s words were lost in an even louder hammering on the front door. It sounded as though a gun butt was being used, and Snook guessed that the next step would be to burst the door open.

“Are you in Kisumu?” he snapped into the phone.

“Yes.”

“At the Commodore?”

“Yes.”

“Hang on there and I’ll try to contact you—right now I’ve got some visitors at the door.”

Snook heard the beginnings of a protest as he set the phone down, but his principal concern was with the impatient group on his doorstep. He had been expecting some kind of reaction to his publicity campaign from Colonel Freeborn and it remained to be seen how violent the storm was going to be. He hurried to the door and flung it open, blinking in the mid-morning sun.

“You are Gilbert Snook?” The lieutenant was a haughty young man with an angry stare.

“I am.”

“It took you a long time to come to the door.”

“Well—you were knocking at it for a long time,” Snook said with the tricky obtuseness he had been practising for years and which he knew to infuriate officials, especially those whose native tongue was not English.

“That’s not the…” The lieutenant paused, recognising the danger of involving himself in verbal exchanges. “Come with us.”

“Where to?”

“I am not required to give that information.”

Snook smiled like a teacher disappointed by a child’s lack of comprehension. “Son, I have just required it of you.”

The lieutenant glanced at his two men, and his face showed he was reaching a difficult decision. “My orders are to bring you to Kisumu to see President Ogilvie,” he said finally. “We must leave at once.”

“You should have said so at the beginning,” Snook chided. He took a lightweight jacket from a hook, stepped out and closed the door behind him. They went to a canvas-topped jeep, Snook was given a rear seat beside the corporal and the vehicle surged away immediately. Almost at once, Snook saw two Land-Rovers emblazoned with the sign “Pan-African News Services’. As they passed the minehead enclosure he was interested to see that the four armoured cars which had been sitting at the fence the night before were now absent. A number of men were moving through the mine buildings, but the vacuum tubes which snaked away to the south were translucent—instead of opaque with speeding dust—which showed that no excavation was taking place below ground.

Snook knew the mine had never before ceased production for as much as a single day, and he guessed that economic pressures were building up somewhere. The conflict was between the new Africans and the old; between modern ambitions and ancient fears. President Paul Ogilvie and Colonel Freeborn were men of the same breed, adventurers whose nerve and lack of scruples had enabled them to hack a prime cut from the carcase of Africa. Ogilvie, in particular, promoted the notion that Barandi had a wide-based economy—with its exports of pyrethrum flowers and extract, coffee, soda ash and some electronic products—but the diamond mines were what had brought the country into being and were what kept it in existence. Snook could imagine the President’s growing rage at the closure of National Mine No. 3.

The interesting thing, however, was that Ogilvie and Freebom still had no true idea of what they were up against, of the strength of the miners’ determination not to go underground again. It was one thing to dismiss the ghosts as a product of mass hysteria, without having seen them; but it was something else to stand in a dark tunnel, kilometres below the surface, and watch the procession of silent, glowing figures with their slow-turning heads and mouths which warped in response to unknown emotions. With the bright morning air flowing around him, and the ambience of a motor vehicle with its sounds and smells and chipped paintwork—the essence of human normalcy, even Snook found it difficult to believe in the ghosts.

He sat without speaking for the whole of the jolting ride into Kisumu and beyond it to the new complex of governmental offices which sprawled over eighty hectares of parkland. The cubist architecture was softened and modified by islands of jacarandas, palms and Cape chestnuts. Positioned near the centre of the complex was the presidential residence. It was surrounded by a small lake which was sufficiently ornamental to disguise the fact that it served the same function as a moat. The jeep passed across a bridge, stopped at the main entrance to the residence, and a minute later Snook was ushered into a room of high windows, oiled woods and Murano glass. President Ogilvie was standing at a desk near one of the windows. He was a man of about fifty, with a thin-lipped, narrow-nosed cast of features which, to Snook’s eyes, made him look like a Caucasian in dark stage make-up. His clothing was exactly as in all the pictures Snook had seen of him—blue business suit, white stiff-collared shirt, narrow tie of blue silk. Snook, normally not susceptible to such things, abruptly became aware of the sloppiness of his own clothes.

“Sit down, Mister Snook,” Ogilvie said in a dry unaccented voice. “I believe you have already met Colonel Freeborn.”

Snook turned and saw Freeborn standing in a shaded corner with his arms folded. “Yes, I’ve met the Colonel,” Snook said, lowering himself on to a chair.

Freeborn uncrossed his arms, long-muscled beneath the half-sleeves of his drill shirt, and the gold head of his cane shone like a miniature sun. “When you speak to the President use the correct form of address.”

Ogilvie raised a slim hand. “Forget it, Tommy, we’re here to talk business. Now, Mister Snook—Gilbert, isn’t it?—you realise we have a problem here. A very expensive problem.”

Snook nodded. “I can see that.”

“There’s a school of thought which holds you responsible.”

“I’m not.” Snook glanced briefly at Freeborn. “In fact, when I was talking to the school of thought in his office a couple of days ago, I gave him good advice on how to avoid the problem. He wasn’t interested.”

“What was your advice?”

“The ghosts can be seen only through magniluct glasses. Take the miners’ glasses away, install full lighting—no ghosts. It’s too late now, of course.”

“You still insist that these ghosts really exist?”

“Mister President, I’ve seen them, and I’ve photographed them.” Snook, who had been leaning forward in his earnestness, sat back and wished he had avoided any reference to the pictures.

“That brings me to another point,” Ogilvie said, taking a thin cigar from a box and sitting on one corner of his desk to reach for a lighter. “Colonel Freeborn tells me you took the film from the camera in his presence, and at that time it was blank. How do you explain that?”

“I can’t,” Snook said simply. “The only thing I can suggest is that the radiation by which we see the ghosts takes a long time to register on a negative.”

“That’s crap,” Ogilvie stated unemotionally, examining Snook through smoke-narrowed eyes. Snook received a distinct impression that the preliminaries had ended and that the serious business of the interview was about to begin.

“I don’t know much about these things,” he said, “but now that scientific researchers have begun to arrive in Kisumu from the States maybe we’ll get a better understanding of what’s going on.”

“Have you spoken to any of these people?”

“Yes—I’m meeting a Doctor Ambrose later today. Snook resisted the temptation to add that it would cause comment if he failed to keep the appointment. He knew that he and Ogilvie were communicating on two levels, one of which required no words.

“Doctor Ambrose.” Ogilvie moved behind his desk, sat down and made a note on a writing pad. “As you know, it is my policy to encourage tourists to visit Barandi—but it would be very wrong to entice them to come here with exaggerated ideas of what the country has to offer. Tell me, Gilbert, did you fake those photographs?”

Snook looked shocked. “I wouldn’t know how, Mister President. But even if I did know how—why should I?”

“That’s another thing I can’t understand.” Ogilvie smiled his regret. “If I could attribute a motive…”

“How did the photographs get into the hands of the Press?” Freeborn put in from his place in the corner.

“Well, that was my fault,” Snook replied. “I came into town that night for a drink and ran into Gene Helig, the Press Association man. We got to talking about the ghosts. Then I remembered I had shoved the film spools into my pocket and I took them out. You can imagine the surprise I got when Gene noticed the images on one film.”

Ogilvie gave a humourless laugh. “I can imagine.”

Snook decided to get back on to firmer ground. “The central issue, Mister President, is that these so-called ghosts do exist and the miners won’t go anywhere near them.”

“That’s what they think,” Freeborn said.

“I don’t believe in supernatural phenomena,” Snook continued. “I think there’s bound to be a plain explanation for the things that have been seen, and I think the only efficient way to clear up the whole mess is to find out what the explanation is. The whole world’s watching Barandi at this time and…”

“Don’t belabour the point.” Ogilvie had begun to sound bored. “You’ve stuck your nose into a lot of things without any authority—are you prepared to act as official liaison man if I give permission for a full scientific investigation to be carried out at the mine?”

“I’d be glad to.” Snook fought to conceal his surprise.

“All right. Go and see your Doctor Ambrose, and tie in with Cartier, the mine manager. And keep Colonel Freeborn fully informed. That’s all.” Ogilvie turned his swivel chair and sent a cloud of cigar smoke rolling in the direction of the nearest window.

“Thank you, Mister President.” Snook got to his feet and, without looking in the direction of Colonel Freeborn, hurried from the room. The interview with the President had gone better than he could have hoped for, and yet he had an uneasy feeling that he had been out-manoeuvred.

Freeborn waited a few seconds, ensuring that Snook had gone, before he moved forward into the light. “Things are bad, Paul,” he said. “Things are bad when a grease monkey like that can swagger in and out of here, laying down the law.”

“You think he should be shot?”

“Why waste a bullet? A plastic bag over the head is more satisfactory—it gives them lots of time to repent.”

“Yes, but unfortunately our grease monkey—by accident or design—has done all the right things to keep himself alive.” President Ogilvie stood up and paced the length of the room, marking his path with blue smoke clouds, and looking like a corporation executive discussing a sales plan. “What do you know of his history?”

“Only that I should have ended it three years ago when I had the chance.” Freeborn, in a reflex action, raised his cane and slid its gold head into the dent in his skull.

“There’s more to him than you think, Tommy. For instance, the suggestion he gave you about collecting all the miners’ low-light glasses had a lot of merit.”

“It would have involved a complete new lighting system for the mine. Have you any idea how much that would cost these days? It isn’t as if your nuclear power station had begun to work when it was supposed to.”

“New lighting would have been a trifle compared to the cost of a major shut-down—in any case, there’s more than money involved.” Ogilvie wheeled and pointed at the bigger man with his cigar. “Money means very little to me, Tommy. I’ve got more of it than I’ll ever be able to spend. The only thing I really want now is for this country, Barandi, the country that I made, to be given its rightful membership of the United Nations. I want to walk into that building in New York and see my flag up there among all the others. That’s why the diamond mines have to keep going. Because without them Barandi wouldn’t last a year.”

Freeborn’s eyes shuttled briefly as he sought the right words to use. He had been exposed to the President’s megalomania in the past and had no sympathy with it. The idea of his country’s leader dreaming of hoisting a scrap of cloth in a foreign city beyond the ocean—while there were hostile forces on the borders only a matter of kilometres distant—filled him with impatience and dismay, but he was accustomed to concealing his thoughts and biding his time. He had even learned to endure seeing the President take white and Asian whores to his bed, but a day was approaching when he would be in a position to give Barandi the firm military leadership it cried out for. In the meantime, he had to maintain and consolidate his own power.

“I share your dreams,” he said slowly, flooding his voice with sincerity, “but that’s all the more reason for us to take decisive steps right now, before the situation deteriorates any further.”

Ogilvie sighed. “I haven’t gone soft, Tommy. I have no objection to you turning your Leopards loose on the rabble at Number Three—but it can’t be done when there are outside observers present. The logical first step is to get them out of the country.”

“But you’ve just given permission for them to go right into the mine.”

“What else could I do? Snook was right when he said the whole world is watching us.” Ogilvie suddenly relaxed and smiled. He took his cigar box from the desk and offered it to Freeborn. “But the world soon grows tired of watching one part of Africa after another—you should know that as well as I do.”

Freeborn accepted a cigar. “And in the meantime?”

“In the meantime I want you—unofficially, of course—to make life difficult for our little scientific community from abroad. Don’t do anything obtrusive or newsworthy, just make life difficult for them.”

“I see.” Freeborn felt a resurgence of confidence in the President. “How about the Press Association man, Helig? Is he to be put out of business?”

“Not now—it’s too late to correct that particular mistake. Just watch him in future.”

“I’ll look after things.”

“Do that. And there’s something else—we’ll have to refuse entry to any further foreign visitors. Find some valid reason to cancel all entry permits.”

Freeborn frowned in thought. “Smallpox outbreak?”

“No, that could interfere with trade. It would be better if there was a military emergency. Say, an attack by one of our long-established neighbours. We’ll discuss the details over lunch.”

Freeborn lit his cigar, inhaled deeply, then smiled with something approaching genuine pleasure. “The Gleiwitz technique? I have a few awkward prisoners in reserve.”

President Ogilvie, the image of a corporation executive in his conservative blue suit, nodded his assent. “Gleiwitz.”

Freeborn’s smile developed into a chuckle. He had never been a student of European history, but the name of Gleiwitz, a speck on the map close to Germany’s border with Poland, was familiar to him because it had been the scene of a Nazi operation which both Ogilvie and he had emulated more than once in their own careers. There, in the August of 1939, the SS Gestapo had staged a fake Polish attack on the German radio station and—as visible evidence of the crime by their neighbours—had strewn the area with the bodies of men whom they had dressed in Polish army uniforms and then shot. The incident had been used in propaganda as justification for the invasion of Poland.

Colonel Freeborn regarded it as an exemplary piece of military tactics.

Snook’s mind was still seething with suspicion about President Ogilvie’s reactions when he got out of the taxi at the Hotel Commodore. It was almost noon, and the sun was hanging directly overhead like an unshaded lamp. He plunged into the prism of shadow beneath the hotel canopy, went through the split-level foyer—ignoring a signal from the desk clerk—and straight into the bar. Ralph, the senior barman, saw him coming and without speaking took a quarter-litre glass, half filled it with Tanqueray’s gin and topped it up with ice water.

“Thanks, Ralph.” Snook sat on a stool, cushioned his elbows on the puffy leather facing of the bar and took a long therapeutic drink from his glass. He felt its coolness travel all the way to his stomach.

“Rough morning, Mister Snook?” Ralph put on the look of rueful sympathy he always used with hangover sufferers.

“Grim.”

“You’ll feel better after that.”

“I know.” Snook took another drink. He had enacted the same little tableau, with exactly the same dialogue, many times before and he drew comfort from the fact that Ralph had sufficient empathy never to vary the routine. It was about the only kind of communication Snook enjoyed.

Ralph leaned across the bar and lowered his voice. Two people over there waiting to see you.”

Snook turned in the indicated direction and saw a man and a woman regarding him with dubious expectancy, and the phrase ‘the beautiful people’ sprang into his mind. They were a well-matched couple—both young, immaculate and with finely chiselled, fair-skinned good looks—but it was the woman who held Snook’s attention. She was slim, with intelligent grey eyes, full-lipped, cool and sensuous at the same time; and to Snook came a sudden fear that his entire way of life had been a mistake, that this was the sort of prize he might have won had he opted for life in the glittering cities of the Occident. He lifted his glass and went towards their table, disturbed at the pang of jealousy he felt towards the man who rose to meet him.

“Mister Snook? I’m Boyce Ambrose,” the man said as they shook hands. “We spoke on the telephone.”

Snook nodded. “Call me Gil.”

“I’d like you to meet Prudence Devonald. Miss Devonald is with UNESCO. Actually, I think she wants to talk business with you, too.”

“This must be my lucky day.” Snook spoke the words automatically as he sat down, his mind busy with the realisation that the couple were not marriedj as he had somehow assumed. He saw that the girl was giving him a look of frank appraisal and, for the second time that day, became conscious of the fact that his clothing was barely passable and even then only because the material was indestructible.

“It isn’t your lucky day,” Prudence said. “In fact, it could be quite the reverse. One of the things I have to do in Barandi is check up on your teaching qualifications.”

“What qualifications?”

“That’s what my office would like to know.” She spoke with a direct unfriendliness which saddened Snook and also goaded him into his standard pattern of reaction.

“You work for an inquisitive office?” He met her gaze squarely. “Do you report to the desk or the filing cabinet?”

“In English,” she said, with insulting sweetness, “the word “office” can also mean the staff who work there.”

Snook shrugged. “It can also mean a lavatory.”

“I was just about to get us a couple more Homosexual Harolds,” Ambrose said quickly to Snook. “You know…Camp Harrys. Would you like another drink?”

“Thanks. Ralph knows my tipple.” While Ambrose went to the bar Snook leaned back comfortably, looked at Prudence and decided she was one of the most beautiful women he had ever met. If there was anything short of perfection in her face it was that her upper teeth had a very slight inwards slope, but for some reason this served to enhance the aristocratic impression she created in his mind. / want you, he thought. You’re a bitch, but I want you.

“Perhaps we should start over again,” he said. “We seem to have got off on the wrong something or other.”

Prudence almost smiled. “It’s probably my fault -1 should have guessed you’d be embarrassed to answer my questions with a third party present.”

“I’m not embarrassed.” Snook allowed himself to sound mildly surprised at the notion. “And, just for the record, I won’t be answering any of your questions.”

Her grey eyes triangulated on him angrily, but at that moment Ambrose arrived back at the table with the Camparis and gin. He set them down and examined the accompanying sales slip with a puzzled expression.

“There seems to be a mistake here,” he said. “This round cost three times as much as the last one.”

“That’s my fault.” Snook raised his drink in salute. “I order my gin by the beer glass to save trotting backwards and forwards to the bar.” He glanced at Prudence. “I get embarrassed.”

Her lips tightened. “I’d be interested to hear how you can drink like that and hold down a job as a teacher.”

“I’d be even more interested,” Ambrose put in heartily, “to hear your first-hand account of…”

Snook silenced him with an upraised hand. “Hold on a moment, Boyd.”

“Boyce.”

“Sorry—Boyce. I’d be most interested of the lot to hear why this lady keeps quizzing me about my private business.”

“I’m with UNESCO.” Prudence took a silver badge from her purse. “Which means that your salary comes…”

“My salary,” Snook interrupted, “consists largely of one crate of gin and one sack of coffee every two weeks. Any hard cash I get I earn by repairing automobile engines around the mine. In between times I teach English to miners on the nights when they’ve no money left for pleasures of the flesh. These clothes I’m wearing are the same ones they gave me when I came here three years ago. I often eat my dinner straight out of the can, and I brush my teeth with salt. I get drunk a lot, but otherwise I’m a model prisoner. Now, is there anything else you want to know about me?”

Prudence looked concerned, but gave no ground. “You claim you’re a prisoner here?”

“What else?”

“How about political refugee? I understand there’s the question of a fighter plane which disappeared from Malaq.”

Snook shook his head emphatically. “The pilot of that plane is a political refugee here. I was a passenger who thought it was going in the opposite direction, and I’m a prisoner here because I refused to service it for the Barandian Army.” Snook was alarmed to discover that he had discarded all his defences for a woman he had met only a few minutes earlier.

“I’ll include this in my report.” Prudence held her silver badge closer to her mouth, revealing that it was also a recorder, and her lips developed an amused quirk. “Do you spell your name just the way it sounds?”

“It is a funny name, isn’t it?” Snook said, slipping back into character. “How clever of you to decide to be born into a family called Devonald.”

The colour rose in Prudence’s cheeks. “I didn’t mean…”

Snook turned away from her. “Boyce, what’s going on here? Are you a UNESCO man, too? I came here because I thought you were interested in what we saw at the mine.”

“I’m a private researcher and I’m intensely interested in what you saw.” Ambrose gave Prudence a reproachful glance.

“It was pure coincidence that I met Miss Devonald—perhaps if we arranged separate appointments…”

“There’s no need—I’m going to shut up for a while,” Prudence said, and suddenly Snook saw in her the schoolgirl she had been not many years earlier. He began to feel like a veteran legionary who had chosen to sharpen his sword on a raw recruit.

“Gil, have you any idea of what you actually did see at the mine?” Ambrose tapped Snook’s knee to regain his attention. “Do you know what you discovered?”

“I saw some things which looked like ghosts.” Snook had just made the more immediate discovery that, in moody relaxation. Prudence Devonald’s profile inspired in him an obscure anguish which had to do with the transience of beauty, of life itself. It was his first conscious experience of the kind, and it was not entirely welcome.

“What you saw,” Ambrose said, “were the inhabitants of another universe.”

It took a few seconds for the words to come to a sharp focus in Snook’s mind, then he began to ask questions. Twenty minutes later he leaned back in his chair, took a deep breath, and realised he had forgotten about his drink. He sipped from the glass again, trying to accustom himself to the idea that he was sitting at the crossroads of two worlds. Once more, within the space of a single hour, he was being forced to think in new categories, to make room in his life for new concepts.

“The way you put it,” he said to Ambrose, “I have to believe you—but what happens next?”

Ambrose’s voice developed a firmness which had not been there earlier. “I should have thought the next step was quite obvious. We have to make contact with these beings—find a way of talking to them.”