Moroccan Traffic: Send a Fax to the Kasbah Page 26

  ‘I might,’ said Mo Morgan.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ Johnson said. ‘So for God’s sake don’t commit yourself till I’ve done it. And hand over the tape, there’s a sport.’

  ‘Why?’ said Morgan.

  ‘Because,’ said Johnson, ‘Ellwood Pymm wanted to hear it, and I think that he should. Good and early. Before the rally sets off. When does it set off?’

  ‘Early. About nine,’ Oliver said. ‘It’s a horrendous trip, and they need daylight to do it in. Pymm could catch them up, though. If, that is, he thought Oppenheim was going as well.’

  ‘Of course he’s going,’ Johnson said. ‘We’re all bloody going. Rita and Rolly with the convoys, trundling down to Ouarzazate and forming the radio link. Oliver and myself on the Harley. Morgan by morning plane to Ouarzazate once Mr. Pymm has been motivated. Doris, would you extend your dissembling performance with Ellwood if I were to ask you nicely?’

  ‘You mean give him the tape?’ asked my mother. She liked to edit her theses.

  ‘With four sure-fire apologies that make him feel like a company favourite,’ Johnson said. ‘You meant him to have it. You muddled them up by mistake. You’ll never sleep again if he doesn’t forgive you. Then leave for the airport, nine-fifteen at the latest.’

  ‘Why?’ said my mother.

  ‘Because you and Wendy are going to London,’ Johnson said. ‘Aren’t you?’

  She didn’t even consult me. She said, ‘If you and Mo ain’t going to protect us. We thought we had an offer. We thought we’d accepted it. We want to go to Ouarzazate.’

  Johnson said, after a moment, ‘You had an offer. You nearly let it go past the expiry date, that’s all. All right. Amendment. You present yourselves at the airport as if you were going to London. You tell Ellwood Pymm you are going to London. In fact, you fly to Ouarzazate with Morgan. Mo? This is all for your crappy benefit. Will you go along with it?’

  ‘For the moment,’ said Morgan. His eyes were tiny, like currants.

  ‘Well, don’t hurt yourself. Oliver, wake me at six with a map, and we’ll do a little serious plotting. Are there enough beds for this lot?’ He wasn’t speaking French; he was just speaking very quickly indeed.

  ‘Now, there’s a problem,’ Rita said. ‘You could come with me and count them, and then we’ll see how many pillows and blankets we’ve got. I reckon you’ve got about three minutes left. Come on. Get up.’

  She was on her feet at his shoulder. So were Lenny and Oliver. ‘Boil an egg,’ Johnson said, getting up by degrees. ‘Boil a green egg. Rolly? The MTBFs are getting a teeny bit close.’

  Mean Time Between Failures. He knew a lot of jargon. It isn’t jargon. It’s the necessary vocabulary of global business relations. He was almost at the door when Roland Reed answered. ‘They always were. What the hell do you want? Job satisfaction?’

  The green face considered him, and the green hand made the smallest and rudest of gestures before our portrait painter turned and plodded out, Lenny and Oliver with him. The door shut. Lady Kingsley said, ‘What is wrong?’

  Rita Geddes turned and sat down again. She said, ‘Burns.’

  ‘No,’ said Lady Kingsley. ‘Basically wrong.’

  It was Roland Reed who answered. ‘He’s immuno-compromised. Full of chemicals that take exception to other chemicals. Hence the whisky, not morphine this evening. Otherwise he’s the same as you or me.’

  She said, ‘I was not being critical.’

  Morgan said, ‘That’s your privilege, lady. By the way, I’ve got the rest of my climbing photographs. Want to see them, anyone? I shouldn’t mind a professional contract.’

  Reed said, ‘You could probably get one. I’ll give you the name of someone to write to. Would you like a dictionary, by another way? Blackmail is when you use the truth to hurt someone. White lies are when you hide the truth to avoid ditto. I’m going to bed.’

  ‘I’ve put you in the bath,’ Rita said. ‘I’ll wake you at five.’

  ‘No. I do that,’ said my mother. ‘And at five-thirty, I make all the breakfasts. You show Lady Kingsley where to sleep. Mr. Reed, you go to your bath. Mo? You are guilty; stop trying to pin faults on everyone else. Where does this character Mo spend the night?’

  In the end, he slept on the floor of our room, while I shared the bed with my mother. That is, I laid a hand on her lower foothills and she tucked it under her arm, and squeezed it, and let it lie there. We hadn’t shared the same room for ten years.

  I have no idea whether Mo Morgan slept. I know I did.

  Chapter 18

  Iwas wakened by the rain drumming in the dark outside the open windows. I should have heard nothing else if I hadn’t decided to hunt for a bathroom, always assuming there was one without Roland Reed sleeping inside it. My mother continued to wheeze as I slipped out of the bed, and if Morgan stirred, he didn’t say anything. I found what I wanted and coming back, stopped to listen in the dark passage.

  The house wasn’t quite silent. There were nine people restlessly asleep in the rooms round about me, maybe more. Rita had left a fire in the kitchen: I could hear it crackling. I could also hear, far off, the low ringing of a telephone and someone answering. I realised that I had heard the same sound several times through my sleep. America as well as London wanted to know who was dead in Marrakesh.

  The answering voice was a woman’s. I didn’t want to meet anyone. I had started to walk away when I was stopped by the sound of a car coming to rest outside the walls in the rain. There was a rustle of movement from the kitchen. A door opened, and I heard the squeak of naked feet hurrying down the steps in the rain. With infinite quietness, the car rolled away. I moved along the passage in the darkness and I opened, fractionally, the door that led to the living-room, letting in a crack of dim light. Then I stood back and watched.

  It was not Rita but Oliver Thornton who returned, backing into the room, his hair soaked, his daytime jacket slung over bare shoulders and trousers. The man he ushered in, without speaking, was tall. The Burberry he wore was of English make, and the cut of his thick grey hair was also somehow English. The only non-English thing about him were the dark glasses he wore. I had never seen him before.

  Then Oliver shut the door and said, ‘We have him, sir. It’s all right.’

  The man paused. With deliberation, he put down the briefcase he was carrying, threw off his Burberry and finally took off his glasses and, folding them into a pocket, sat down, without invitation, in the most comfortable divan in the room. ‘I should hope so,’ he said. ‘Or really, my Oliver, your career would have come to a halt. Tell Rita, if she will stop listening behind the door, that I should like some strong tea and some of her scones, and her presence while you both tell me precisely what has happened.’

  For a moment, I thought he had spotted me; then I realised he had been listening to some continuing sound in the kitchen. He spoke like the head of a company. You can never mistake it. And Rita, coming in with her hair flat and her face clean and a dressing-robe over what was probably nothing, replied in a subdued voice I had never heard from her before. She said, ‘Do you want him wakened?’

  ‘And earn your hatred for life? Of course not,’ said the man, getting up and smiling down at her. He put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her. ‘One from Frances, and one from Joanna. Go and get the tea, my dear. I rather need it. And you have a long report, I think, to give me, both of you.’

  She went. The man watched her and then sat, the smile fading. He said, ‘He is thought to be dead. Presumably he suffered some damage. What capacity can we rely on? A quarter? A half? Or enough to be useful?’

  They were talking of Johnson. I have heard coffee percolators being discussed with more solicitude. Oliver said, ‘Enough to be perfectly useful. You couldn’t stop him, in any case.’

  ‘Oh? Why?’ said the man. Rita had come in with a tray. ‘Chagrin over Oppenheim? I take it he’s sure about Oppenheim?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Rita. ‘I wouldn’t like to
be Oppenheim. I’d even less like to be Colonel Sullivan.’

  ‘An ex-SAS colonel amusing himself with a black PR firm? Is that in JJ’s league?’

  ‘I think he has the idea that all former mercenaries come into his league,’ Rita said. ‘I wouldn’t know why. There’s the tea. Lady Kingsley is sleeping two doors away.’

  ‘And who else?’ he said. He picked up the cup she had poured.

  She ran through the names of everyone in the house. Lenny and Reed he clearly expected. ‘And Morgan?’ he repeated after her. ‘He came here? I’m interested. But of course, he knew what he was designing?’

  ‘He knew,’ Oliver said. “JJ jumped on him this evening and gave him a shellacking. He’ll recover.’

  ‘I trust he will,’ the man said. ‘Whether he recovers or not, he’ll have to be taken out of Kingsley’s. That silly man Robert. I presume that he’s deceiving himself that he is being wooed for his charm?’

  ‘More or less,’ Oliver said. ‘You’d need to get JJ’s extremely biased opinion.’

  ‘I want yours,’ said the man. ‘In a moment. And who else have we to consider? The girl, of course, and her mother. A pity they had to become mixed up in it. I take it they go home tomorrow, with Charity Kingsley. Now tell me the lot.’

  Standing outside the door, I listened to the events of the last days being related by Oliver Thornton who was more, I had already realised, than a crewman of Dolly. I knew by now, too, that the man who had arrived must be Johnson’s controller, and that he had come, fast and privately, when the first reports of Johnson’s death had reached London. I don’t remember now at what stage of the report I realised that Mo Morgan was standing in the passage behind me.

  I nearly made a sound; then he put his hand on my shoulder and stopped me. His eyes, like mine, were on the slit of light and the little we could see of the room and the three people in it. He had kept his shirt and shorts on, and his hair was half loose and half plaited. In the event, we stood together and listened as the narrative came to a close.

  By the end, the man had finished his tea and was lying back, eyes lightly closed, hands together. Without opening his eyes he said, ‘You’ve put it very clearly. And Jay is right, of course. Flush out Pymm, flush out Oppenheim and let Morgan see what is going on. He’ll want to get out of Kingsley’s, and Sir Robert will have to be nobbled and made to unbundle him quietly. If that doesn’t work, we go public, admit what Morgan is doing and rely on small-print procedures to bail him out of Kingsley’s, set him up in some sanitised unit, and give him reins of a kind that won’t throttle him.’

  Roland Reed seemed to consider it. He said, ‘Perhaps that would be the best thing that could happen.’

  The man opened his eyes. He said, ‘If I’d thought it the best thing, I shouldn’t have sent Jay in the first place. Morgan’s work is wholly sensitive. It can affect issues he couldn’t even imagine. I do not want it made public. I do want to discover the names of the two organisations employing Pymm and Oppenheim. If we’re right, the moment Morgan publicly walks, they’ll lose interest in Kingsley’s and, from what you tell me, Kingsley’s will go down the drain. I want to know who they are before that.’

  ‘And MCG?’ Rita said.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ the man said. ‘I think I ought to have been told about MCG and Kingsley’s, don’t you? A little something I have to take up with our verdant and mutual friend. Oliver?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Open that door, will you?’ said the man.

  There was no time to get away. The door before us crashed back and light exposed us where we stood, Morgan in his shirt and me in the Wardrobe’s idea of a robe. I don’t know how he knew we were there. Rita said, ‘It’s Wendy and Mo. You should talk to them.’

  She had come over to stand beside us. She looked the way she had at the hotel in Asni, after the boar. She stood in the middle, holding each of us close by the arm. The man had risen. He said, ‘I suppose I should. At any rate, I’m not going to eat them. Come in. I can’t blame you for listening. Saves time. Miss Helmann? Mr. Morgan?’

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ Morgan said.

  It was Oliver, collecting himself, who shut the door and coming forward, got us seats. He said to Morgan, ‘This is—’

  ‘Bernard Emerson,’ said the man. ‘A friend of Johnson’s. We’re both rather keen, as you will have gathered, to keep you inside the family, but I’ve no idea how to persuade you. In fact, I don’t think I shall. You can play, or observe, or go home with certain restrictions, like Lady Kingsley. Miss Helmann the same.’

  Morgan said, ‘Johnson does what you tell him? What are you going to tell him?’

  The man spoke perfectly calmly. ‘He proposed a course of action.

  It seems sensible. If you wish to proceed, I shan’t stop you. Presumably you’ve weighed up the dangers.’

  Morgan said, ‘You would let him do it?’

  ‘Reed says I couldn’t stop him,’ Emerson said.

  ‘Because of Sullivan?’ Morgan said. He was looking at Rita. Rita’s face, looking back, was impassive.

  Emerson said, ‘There are scores to settle, I gather. But surely that isn’t all. Do you really think Sullivan works for Sir Robert? Or even Oppenheim?’

  Roland Reed’s wits worked faster than Rita’s or mine. He said,

  ‘You mean he works for Oppenheim’s principal? That is why JJ wants him?’

  ‘No,’ Emerson said. ‘That is why I don’t want him to die before he has answered some questions. Do you understand me?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Reed.

  ‘Oliver?’

  ‘You want me to say this to JJ?’ Oliver said.

  ‘Save your breath. He knows,’ Emerson said. He was sitting forward again and, elbows on knees, had laced his hands in front of his chin. He said, ‘I have two things to say. Morgan, you owe nothing to me, but it matters a lot to Sir Robert that you forget any plans to leave Kingsley’s. Will you let him think, for a bit, that you’re staying?’

  ‘I might,’ Morgan said. ‘It might be true. A sanitised unit isn’t the hell of a lure.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Emerson said. ‘The best you can say is that you wouldn’t be killing your friends. The second matter is this. You told Johnson you thought the Kingsley books had been laundered?’

  ‘We discussed that. Yes,’ Morgan said.

  The man looked from Morgan to me. He said, ‘If you’re staying, and I gather you very gallantly are, it would be a great help to have some idea of real figures. If there are raiders about, it would deter them.’

  He was right. It wouldn’t be letting Kingsley’s down, only Sir Robert. I said, ‘Mr. Morgan and I know roughly what they should be.’ The papers were here, in my case.

  Bernard Emerson said, ‘I have to go. How quickly could you work them over and write them down? Could you give them to Lenny for me? Would you trust me with them?’

  It was Morgan who agreed, and I let him. I supposed, climbing mountains, he was used to weighing up briefings from experts. It didn’t stop me from feeling frightened. Soon after, Emerson rose, and Reed rang someone and had a car brought round with a driver. I didn’t know where he was going.

  I went back to bed an hour later, and found my mother awake. She said, ‘What is it? Is it bad news?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Our plans are sort of the same, but official.’

  ‘Official?’ repeated my mother.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Mo from the floor. ‘She means we all get buried a K.’

  The following morning, everyone who knew Johnson and was capable of reading a newspaper was aware that he was missing believed killed while on a painting commission in Marrakesh. Anyone who knew Jimmy Auld might have found, among the small print, a reference to a minor shooting accident involving his son-in-law Daniel Oppenheim. I didn’t see the papers: I was asleep.

  I slept so late, I missed Lady Kingsley going away, and Lenny leaving with my revised papers, and the first of the convoys of film people de
parting with Rita and Rolly for Ouarzazate.

  Because his door and mine were wide open, I didn’t fail to hear Oliver waking Johnson, after the injection they weren’t supposed to have given him. Johnson’s voice couldn’t have been quieter, but I heard every bitten-off syllable.

  Oliver said, ‘Will you give me a chance? I was told to do it. Sir Bernard was here.’

  This time, he had punched the mute button. ‘Was?’ said Johnson eventually.

  ‘For an hour. He wouldn’t disturb you. Wanted to know the agenda, and agreed it. Your folks will know you’re OK: he’s having them moved out of circulation for a day or two. He says keep the lid on it all if you can, remember you’re dead, and he’ll see you after the Resurrection which means Easter, so get a move on.’

  ‘He’ll see me where?’

  ‘I didn’t ask him.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Johnson. It was what he had said when Kingsley’s office blew up. I dragged on the last of my borrowed garments and opened the door.

  They were standing just inside Johnson’s bedroom. Johnson had got hold of bifocals from somewhere but not yet a razor, and had slept in his borrowed shirt, which was now blotched with dye. I was getting used to his skin being green. Then he saw me, and turned a fraction to exclude me. He said, ‘All right, that’s enough of all that. Who’s still here?’

  ‘Wendy and her mother and Morgan. Look, there are the maps, and I’ve got all the gen on the rally. The vintages have to get over the mountains, and end up by nightfall in Taroudant. There are two passes over the High Atlas, the Test and the Tichka. It isn’t a race: they only have to get their cars over, but the Tichka pays maximum points, so they’re all trying that. Seven thousand four hundred feet, vertical ravines, hairpin bends, and snow at the top. The idea is that they cross the mountains this morning, rest and lunch at Ouarzazate, and then do the second leg under better conditions to the Sous, where they spend the night at the Gazelle d’Or outside Taroudant. Sir Robert goes with them, so his meeting could be in Ouarzazate or Taroudant. Taroudant seems more likely.’