Jigsaw (28 page)

‘When you're in a position to help those less fortunate …' Barron remarked, and airily waved a hand. ‘I'm interested in a number of charitable causes, not just in South Africa, of course.'

Van den Kamp turned his acid-blue eyes on Barron. You could read in those eyes a number of things – fear, anxiety, the need for self-preservation. The Afrikaner smiled, a frugal little movement of lips. ‘You occupy an unusual position. You come and go as you please in the townships because you're the white man who brings good cheer. You don't have a political axe to grind. You can go places in South Africa where any other white would be shot on sight.' Van den Kamp turned his glass round in his big hands. ‘I sometimes wonder … if you ever hear anything.'

‘Hear anything?' Barron asked. ‘Such as?'

‘This, that. Titbits. Information that might be useful to my people.'

Barron smiled. ‘What are you fishing for, Rolfe? Perhaps if you came to the point …' He leaned forward in his chair.

Van den Kamp gazed into his drink in a brooding manner. When he spoke next he talked of the need to protect his family. Barron understood that he was referring to something more extensive than his immediate blood relations: he was talking about a way of life, about survival and supremacy. The process of democracy was a mockery as far as he was concerned. Ballot-boxes meant nothing. He had a private war to fight.

The Afrikaner sipped his Wild Turkey. ‘The militants have AK–47s. They have Uzis. We don't know where they're coming from, but they're getting them somewhere. We'd like to know their source.'

‘And you think I might have access to that kind of knowledge?'

‘I think you might.'

Barron said, ‘The world is filled with arms merchants, Rolfe. We both know that. In any event, do you imagine the militants take me into their confidence? All I ever meet are mayors and tribal chiefs and pols. I don't think I'd recognize a militant if I saw one.' He permitted himself a small laugh, as if the very idea that he might be associated with radicals were ridiculous.

Van den Kamp rose from his chair. He was a massive, well-muscled man. ‘Scratch a black and you find a terrorist, Tobias.'

Barron shrugged. Van den Kamp, wandering the room, dwarfing the furniture, picked out the first few bars of ‘Pack Up Your Troubles' on the spinet in a cack-handed way. When he stepped back from the keyboard he said, ‘We need to balance the situation in our favour.'

‘What have you got in mind?' Barron asked. He wondered about the Afrikaner's logic: how could a situation be
balanced
in somebody's favour? It was a perverse use of language. Van den Kamp's perception of balance meant that he wanted the scales tipped decisively to his benefit.

‘My people have certain urgent requirements.'

‘Such as?'

Van den Kamp didn't answer the question directly. ‘I got the impression in Durban you might be of assistance. Correct me if I'm wrong.'

‘I'm not sure what impression I gave you, Rolfe.'

‘You seemed to have, ah, a wide range of connections.'

‘I know a great many people, if that's what you mean. I have associates in a number of fields. Medicine. Agriculture. Education. All kinds of useful friends and allies. I have projects of different kinds all over the place. Crop rotation in Cuba. Medical aid in Ethiopia. Irrigation schemes in Angola. It's a long list.'

Van den Kamp shook his head. ‘I think you know I'm driving at something else, Tobias.'

Barron said nothing. He had a sense of the delicacy of the situation. He might have helped Van den Kamp along, might have urged him to speak his mind, but he enjoyed the waiting game. He walked to the mantelpiece, where the photographs of his famous friends provided a striking backdrop. It was, he knew, a piece of theatre intended to impress upon the Afrikaner that he was fortunate to have been granted an audience.

‘I'll put it another way,' Van den Kamp said. ‘I had the feeling in Durban that you were sympathetic to our plight in the present climate of violence.'

‘Did I give that impression?'

‘Course, I may have misunderstood you …'

‘I try to stay detached, Rolfe. If I said anything to mislead you, I'm sorry.'

Van den Kamp looked down at the keyboard of the spinet. His expression was one of disappointment. ‘I hope I haven't come all this way for nothing.'

‘Perhaps if you said what's on your mind,' Barron suggested.

Van den Kamp, who was not by nature a circumspect man, enjoyed frank exchanges. In his world men spoke brute facts over ice-cold lagers. ‘OK. In Durban I got the feeling that among your associates there were those who might be in a position to help us.'

Barron stared at the Afrikaner. ‘It depends on the kind of help you're looking for, Rolfe. Clearly, you're not talking about irrigation technicians or AIDS experts, are you?'

‘I think you know what I'm talking about. Do I need to spell it out for you?'

‘I don't like fumbling in the dark any more than you do,' Barron said.

‘OK. For purely defensive purposes, we're in the market for armoured Range Rovers. Kevlar body armour. Stun grenades. We're under threat, Tobias. And it's no way to live. Believe me.'

Barron listened. He knew Van den Kamp was the kind of man who would first of all mention his defensive needs. He didn't want to be perceived as the aggressor. That role could be attributed to the blacks.

‘To defend yourself,' Barron said, ‘you also need to be able to attack.'

‘Of course.'

‘And?'

‘We're looking for Webley gas-grenade launchers. HK93s. MP5Ks. Remington 870s 12 bore. Glock 9mm automatics. Tejas .50 calibre rifles. All the necessary ammo. It's a long list.'

Barron pressed his fingertips to his lips, remembering Nofometo coming to his hotel in Durban. Van den Kamp and Nofometo, a study in contrasts, in attitudes; and yet when you reached the bottom line, both men had similar desires – the right of possession, a stake in the future, the leadership of a country.

‘I can always pass along a message, Rolfe. But the final decision, you must understand, would have absolutely nothing to do with me.' Barron experienced a feeling of distance from the conversation. It was a way of protecting himself, a shell of sorts. ‘Assuming I happen to know some people who
might
be helpful – and I'm not saying I do – you're talking about a considerable amount of money, Rolfe.'

‘Money's the least of our problems.'

Barron studied the Afrikaner, on whom he'd compiled a dossier. Rolfe Van den Kamp, whose personal fortune was estimated to be in the region of five million pounds sterling, was the leader of a right-wing movement already involved in military conflict with the blacks. It had been small-time activity up to now, a few killings here, a few there, a matter of flying the flag of white supremacy. But this was changing; Van den Kamp and his people were becoming more ambitious, needed more strike power, greater displays of force.

Barron said, ‘Let's get one thing straight from the beginning. I'm not in a position to promise you anything. All I can do is put certain people in touch with you. And if they want to do business, that's their affair. It's nothing to do with me. Frankly, I shouldn't even be listening to any of this.'

‘I understand.' Van den Kamp finished his drink, put the empty glass down on the polished wood of the spinet.

Barron picked up the glass before it could leave a ring in the wood. ‘I find the whole subject of guns distasteful.'

‘But you'll see the message gets to its destination?'

Barron nodded. He changed the subject abruptly. ‘Are you doing a little sightseeing while you're in Venice?'

‘I don't have the time.'

‘A pity. The city in winter has certain charms.' Barron looked at his watch. ‘You must excuse me. I'm expecting company.'

‘Sure.'

He walked Rolfe Van den Kamp to the door and shook his hand briefly. When the Afrikaner had gone, Schialli entered the drawing-room to announce that the dinner guests had arrived.

‘All,' Schialli added, ‘save the old one.'

Barron twisted a length of fettuccine around his fork and raised it to his mouth. It tasted of anchovy and parmesan. He picked up his wineglass and sipped the Sardinian Vermentino, then held the glass up to the light as if seeking impurities in the liquid. Satisfied, he set the wine down and looked across the table at his companions, his eye passing over the place set for the missing guest.

On his right sat Henry Saxon in his hideously thick spectacles; despite what manners he might have learned in prep schools and at Harvard, Henry was never entirely at ease at dinner tables, as if he were constantly afraid of a
faux pas
in the area of etiquette. Henry tended to sweat; the palms of his hands were moist.

Next to Henry was Leo Kinsella, dressed in an expensive three-piece charcoal-grey suit. He wore decorative leather boots made to his own specifications by a craftsman in Taos, New Mexico. His expression was flinty, austere. He spoke in an accent designed to remind others of his impoverished childhood in the dirt-hills of Oklahoma. Leo was proud of his origins and how he'd transcended them: the embodiment, Barron supposed, of the American Dream, every immigrant's fantasy – streets of gold, arid deserts out of which oil gushed.

Beside Leo was Montgomery Rhodes, a taciturn figure in dark shades. Rhodes was dressed in the kind of sharp black suit that suggested the garb of an upscale funeral-parlour director. He'd once been attached to a clandestine branch of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and so far as Barron knew might still be employed by that nebulous outfit. There was a quality of brutality about Monty Rhodes, a manic intensity in his silences and the way he scribbled in his little notebook. Barron wasn't fond of Rhodes because the man suggested a human black hole. He drained light out of any room in which he sat. He dragged menace around with him like a dead animal.

Barron raised his wineglass. ‘Welcome to Venice, gentlemen.'

Leo Kinsella, who didn't like eye-tie food or wine, and whose tastes ran no further than charbroiled steaks of Texan dimensions, pushed his plate aside. ‘Let's get down to the business, Tobias. I don't have time to wait for our absent guest.'

Barron looked at Saxon and said, ‘Henry?'

Saxon produced a set of folders. He began to flick through the messages. ‘A few of these are requests for money and
matériel,'
he said in his intoning way.

‘Summarize for the sake of brevity,' said Kinsella. ‘I know how you can go on at times, Henry. Goddam lawyers too fond of their own voices.'

Henry Saxon cleared his throat and glanced at Barron, who smiled in cheerful indulgence of Kinsella's manner. ‘The sum of one million US dollars is requested by Lotus.'

‘I thought we'd taken care of all the money business. I was of the opinion, Tobias, that we'd laid out all the bread we were ever going to. I'm not sure we can approve that request.' Kinsella glanced at Rhodes, who took out a notebook, jotted something down with his maroon Waterman fountain-pen, the nib of which scratched the surface of paper.

Kinsella continued. ‘Lotus is a goddam bottomless pit. If we give him the go-ahead, and that's a mighty big if, it's going to take time. We have to find new routes for money now. You can't move that kind of cash without somebody asking questions. We don't want anybody sticking their nose in. And most of all we don't want people who have a habit of developing sudden
qualms
, do we? We don't want anybody likely to be stricken by an abrupt attack of conscience. If you know what I mean.'

Barron asked, ‘Who can predict a man's conscience, Leo?'

‘Yeah,' Rhodes said. ‘Who indeed? Myself, I happen to think conscience a luxury item. A goddam expensive one too, as some people find out too late.'

There was a short silence before Saxon continued. ‘Orchid needs one point three million in Warsaw.'

‘I bet he does,' said Kinsella. He stared at Tobias Barron. ‘You wonder about these guys sometimes. My people Stateside ask a lot of questions, Tobias. They see a whole lot going out and nothing much coming in so far. They think they've contributed enough.'

‘I'm sure the money is well spent,' Barron answered.

Kinsella raised his dense grey eyebrows. ‘Jesus Christ, how much can it cost to buy votes in Poland anyway? What's he paying people per head to mark their ballots for Communists?'

‘I gather it's an expensive business,' Barron remarked.

Montgomery Rhodes said in his quiet, nasal way, ‘There's going to be an accounting at the end of all this, Tobias. And it better be goddam accurate.'

‘Indeed,' said Barron. He stared a second at Rhodes. The darkness of the man's shades was decidedly sinister. You could never tell if Rhodes was looking at you or not. And if he was, you couldn't read his expression. Barron sighed. He thought money a grubby topic. What truly interested him about these meetings was his sense of being the epicentre of things. Even if Barron was finally apolitical, even if he found politics an unsightly game played by scoundrels, the idea that he was the adhesive holding everything together narcotized him, jangled his system like speed. He brought together diverse people in unlikely partnerships. He found the resources. He sat at the heart of a great web he'd created himself.

Kinsella, Rhodes, the others throughout Europe and the United States – they would never have come together had it not been for the influence and connections of Tobias Barron. Whether he approved of their individual aims was of no ultimate concern to him. His mind drifted away from this room a moment, it floated up and beyond Venice, beyond the confines of Europe, it became a kind of satellite high above the planet, monitoring events, digesting information, analysing and assessing, scouring the world for opportunities. He was suddenly seized by a sharp sense of self, as if he were outlined by a supernatural current of electricity. If you turned out the lights in the room, he might be phosphorescent.