“A bit much,” said the Major placatorily.
“A bit? It’s a damned sight too much if you ask me. Not that anyone does round here. Sponging swine,” and he disappeared into a bush leaving the Major rather hurt by the ambiguity of the remark.
“Seems he’s a fan of the Master,” said the Major addressing himself to a large blossom.
“Hm,” snorted the Colonel who had transferred his attentions to a rhododendron, “I’ve heard that tale before. Says that to get his foot in the door and before you know what’s happened the whole damned club is full of ’em.”
Major Bloxham said there was something to be said for that point of view but that the Kommandant sounded quite genuine. The Colonel disagreed.
“Used to wave a white flag and shoot our officers down,” he shouted. “Can’t trust a Boer further than you can see him.”
“But…” said the Major trying to keep track of the Colonel’s physical whereabouts while staying with his train of thought.
“But me no buts,” shouted the Colonel from a hydrangea. “The man’s a scoundrel. Got coloured blood too. All Afrikaners have a touch of the tar. A known fact. Not having a nigger in my house.” His voice distant in the shrubbery rumbled on to the insistent click of the secateurs and Major Bloxham turned back towards the house. Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon, her migraine quite recovered, was drinking a sundowner on the stoep.
“Intransigent, my dear,” said the Major treading warily past the chihuahua that lay at her feet. “Utterly intransigent.” Proud of his use of such a diplomatically polysyllabic communique the Major poured himself a double whisky. It was going to be a long hard evening.
“Cub hunting season,” said the Colonel over avocado pears at dinner. “Look forward to that.”
“Fox in good form?” asked the Major.
“Harbinger’s been keeping him in trim,” said the Colonel, “been taking him for a ten-mile trot every morning. Good man, Harbinger, knows his job.”
“Damn fine whipper-in,” said the Major, “Harbinger.”
At the far end of the polished mahogany table Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon gouged her avocado resentfully.
“Harbinger’s a convict,” she said presently. “You got him from the prison at Weezen.”
“Poacher turned gamekeeper,” said the Colonel, who disliked his wife’s new habit of intruding a sense of reality into his world of reassuring artifice. “Make the best sort, you know. Good with dogs too.”
“Hounds,” said Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon reprovingly. “Hounds, dear, never dogs.”
Opposite her the Colonel turned a deeper shade of puce.
“After all,” continued Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon before the Colonel could think of a suitable reply, “if we are going to pretend we’re county and that we’ve ridden to hounds for countless generations, we might as well do it properly.”
Colonel Heathcote-Kilkoon regarded his wife venomously. “You forget yourself, my dear,” he said at last.
“How right you are,” Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon answered, “I have forgotten myself. I think we all have.” She rose from the table and left the room.
“Extraordinary behaviour,” said the Colonel. “Can’t think what’s come over the woman. Used to be perfectly normal.”
“Perhaps it’s the heat,” suggested the Major.
“Heat?” said the Colonel.
“The weather,” Major Bloxham explained hurriedly. “Hot weather makes people irritable, don’t you know.”
“Hot as hell in Nairobi. Never bothered her there. Can’t see why it should give her the habdabs here.”
They finished their meal in silence and the Colonel took his coffee through to his study where he listened to the stock-market report on the radio. Gold shares were up, he noted thankfully. He would ring his broker in the morning and tell him to sell West Driefontein. Then switching the radio off he went to the bookshelf and took down a copy of Berry & Co. and settled down to read it for the eighty-third time. Presently, unable to concentrate, he laid the book aside and went out on to the stoep where Major Bloxham was sitting in the darkness with a glass of whisky looking out at the lights of the city far below.
“What are you doing, Boy?” asked the Colonel with something akin to affection in his voice.
“Trying to remember what winkles taste like,” said the Major. “Such a long time since I had them.”
“Prefer oysters meself,” said the Colonel. They sat together in silence for some time. In the distance some Zulus were singing.
“Bad business,” the Colonel said, breaking the silence. “Can’t have Daphne upset. Can’t have this damned fellow either. Don’t know what to do.”
“Don’t suppose we can,” agreed the Major. “Pity we can’t put him off somehow.”
“Put him off?”
“Tell him we’ve got foot-and-mouth or something,” said the Major whose career was littered with dubious excuses. Colonel Heathcote-Kilkoon considered the idea and rejected it.
“Wouldn’t wash,” he said finally.
“Never do. Boers,” said the Major.
“Foot-and-mouth.”
“Oh.”
There was a long pause while they stared into the night.
“Bad business,” said the Colonel in the end and went off to bed. Major Bloxham sat on thinking about shellfish.
In her room Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon lay under one sheet unable to sleep and listened to the Zulus’ singing and the occasional murmur of voices from the stoep with increasing bitterness. “They’ll humiliate him if he comes,” she thought, recalling the miseries of her youth when napkins had been serviettes and lunch dinner. It was the thought of the humiliation she would suffer by proxy as the Kommandant fumbled for the fish fork for the meat course that finally decided Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon. She switched on the light and sat at her writing table and wrote a note on mauve deckle-edged paper to the Kommandant.
“You’re going to town, Boy?” she asked the Major next morning at breakfast. “Pop this into the police station will you?” She slid the envelope across the table to him.
“Right you are,” said Major Bloxham. He hadn’t intended going to Piemburg but his position in the household demanded just this sort of sacrifice. “Putting him off?”
“Certainly not,” Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon said looking coldly at her husband. “Compromising. It’s the English art or so I’ve been led to believe. I’ve said we’re full up and…”
“Damned good show, my dear,” interrupted the Colonel.
“And I’ve asked him if he would mind putting up at the hotel instead. He can have lunch and dinner with us and I trust you’ll have the decency to treat him properly if he accepts.”
“Seems a fair arrangement to me,” said the Colonel.
“Very fair,” the Major agreed.
“It’s the least I can do,” said Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon, “in the circumstances. I’ve told him you’ll foot the bill.”
She got up and went into the kitchen to vent her irritation on the black servants.
At Piemburg Police Station Kommandant van Heerden was busy making arrangements for his holiday. He had bought a map of the Weezen district, a trout rod and flies, a pair of stout walking boots, a deerstalker hat, a twelve-bore shotgun, some waders, and a pocket book called Etiquette for Everyman. Thus accoutred he felt confident that his stay with the Heathcote-Kilkoons would give him valuable experience in the art of behaving like an English gentleman.
He had even gone to the trouble of buying two pairs of pyjamas and some new socks because his old ones had mended holes in them. Having acquired the outward vestiges of Englishness, the Kommandant had practised saying “Frightfully” and “Absolutely” in what he hoped was an authentic accent. When it was dark he went into his garden with the trout rod and practised casting flies into a bucket of water on the lawn without ever managing to land a fly in the bucket but decapitating several dozen dahlias in the attempt.
“Practising what?” Luitenant Verkramp asked incredulously when his men reported this new activity to him.
“Fishing from a bucket,” the Security men told him.
“He’s off his rocker,” Verkramp said.
“Keeps muttering to himself too. Repeats ‘Fascinating’ and ‘Pleased to make your acquaintance, sir’ over and over again.”
“I know that,” said Verkramp who had listened in to the Kommandant’s monologue on his radio.
“Here’s a list of all the things he’s bought,” said another Security man. Verkramp looked down the list of waders and deerstalkers and boots, completely mystified.
“What’s all this about him meeting some woman at the Golf Club?” he asked. He had never given up his original idea that the Kommandant was engaged in some sort of illicit love affair.
“Chats her up every day,” the Security men told him. “Plump little thing with dyed hair aged about fifty-five. Drives an old Rolls.”
Verkramp gave orders to his men to find out all they could about Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon and went back to his study of Fact & Fiction in Psychology. He had no sooner started than his phone rang with a message that the Kommandant wanted to see him. Verkramp put the book away and went along the passage to the Kommandant’s office.
“Ah, Verkramp,” said the Kommandant, “I’m taking a fortnight’s leave as from Friday and I’m leaving you in charge here.” Luitenant Verkramp was delighted.
“Sorry to hear that, sir,” he said diplomatically. “We’ll miss you.” The Kommandant looked up unpleasantly. He didn’t for one moment believe that Verkramp would miss him, particularly when he had been left in command.
“How are you getting on in the search for those Communists?” he asked.
“Communists?” said Verkramp, puzzled for a moment. “Oh well it’s a long business sir. Results take a long time.”
“They must do,” said the Kommandant feeling that he had punctured Verkramp’s irritating complacency a bit. “Well, while I’m away I expect you to concentrate on routine crime and the maintenance of law and order. I don’t want to find that rapes, burglaries and murders have gone up in my absence. Understand?”
“Yes sir,” said Verkramp. The Kommandant dismissed him and Verkramp went back to his office in high spirits. The opportunity he had been waiting for had arrived at long last. He sat down at his desk and considered the manifold possibilities offered by his new authority.
“A fortnight,” he thought. “A fortnight in which to show what I can really do.” It wasn’t long but Luitenant Verkramp had no intention of wasting time. There were two things he had particularly in mind. With the Kommandant out of the way he would put into effect Plan Red Rout. Crossing to his safe he took out the folder in which all the details of the operation were kept. Months before he had drawn up the plan in secret. It was time to put it into practice. By the time Kommandant van Heerden returned from his holiday, Luitenant Verkramp was certain that he would have uncovered the network of saboteurs he was convinced was operating in Piemburg.
During the course of the morning Verkramp made a number of phone calls and in various firms throughout the city employees who didn’t normally receive phone calls during working hours were called to the phone. In each case the procedure was the same.
“The mamba is striking,” said Verkramp.
“The cobra has struck,” said the secret agent. Designed as an infallible method of communicating the order to his agents to meet him at their prearranged rendezvous, it had its disadvantages.
“What was all that about?” the girl in agent 745396’s office asked when he put down the phone after what could hardly be called a prolonged conversation.
“Nothing,” agent 745396 replied hastily.
“You said ‘The cobra has struck,’” said the girl, “I distinctly heard you. What cobra’s struck? That’s what I want to know.”
All over Piemburg Verkramp’s system of code words aroused interest and speculation in the offices where his secret agents worked.
That afternoon Luitenant Verkramp, disguised as a motor mechanic and driving a breakdown truck, left town for the first of his appointments, and half an hour later ten miles out on the Vlockfontein road was bending over the engine of 745396’s car pretending to mend a broken distributor to lend verisimilitude to his disguise while giving 745396 his instructions.
“Get yourself fired,” Verkramp told the agent.
“Done that already,” said 745396 who had taken the afternoon off without permission.
“Good,” said Verkramp wondering how the hell he was going to get the distributor together again. “I want you to work full-time from now on.”
“Doing what?”
“Infiltrating the revolutionary movement in Zululand.”
“Where do I start?” 745396 asked.
“Start hanging about Florian’s café and the Colonial Bar. Plenty of students and Commies go there. The University canteen is another place where subversives gather,” Verkramp explained.
“I know all that,” said 745396. “Last time I went there I got chucked out on my ear.”
“The last time you went there you hadn’t blown anything up,” said Verkramp. “This time you won’t just say you’re a saboteur, you’ll be able to prove it.”
“How?”
Verkramp led the way round to the cab of his breakdown truck and handed the agent a packet. “Gelignite and fuses,” he explained. “On Saturday night blow the transformer on the Durban road. Put it there at eleven and get back into town before it goes up. It’s got a fifteen-minute fuse.”
745396 looked at him in astonishment. “Jesus wept,” he said, “you really mean it?”
“Of course I do,” snapped Verkramp, “I’ve given the matter a lot of thought and it’s obviously the only way to infiltrate the sabotage movement. No one’s going to doubt the dedication to the Communist party of a man who’s blown up a transformer.”
“I don’t suppose they are,” 745396 agreed nervously. “What happens if I get arrested?”
“You won’t be,” Verkramp said.
“That’s what you told me when I had to pass those messages in the men’s lavatory in the Market Square,” said 745396, “and I got nabbed for soliciting.”
“That was different. Uniformed branch got you that time.”
“Uniformed branch could get me this time,” said 745396. “You never know.”
“I’m in charge of the uniformed branch from now on. I’m Kommandant from Friday,” Verkramp explained. “And anyway who paid your fine?”
“You did,” 745396 admitted, “but I got the publicity. You want to try working in an office where everyone thinks you make a habit of soliciting old men in public lavatories. It took me months to live that down and I had to move my lodgings five times.”