“No.”
“Then I’ll take it over. That gives me a month’s tenancy—seems a pity to waste it—and I’ll take up the payments at the end of that time. Do you have a key?”
“Yes, of course. I let myself in by it.”
“How many keys are there?”
For answer Endean reached into his pocket and brought out a ring with four keys on it. Two were evidently for the front door of the house and two for the flat door. Shannon took them from his hand.
“Now for communications,” he said. “You can contact me by phoning here anytime. I may be in, I may not. I may be away abroad. Since I assume you will not want to give me your phone number, set up a poste restante mailing address in London somewhere convenient to either your home or office, and check twice daily for telegrams. If I need you urgently, I’ll telegraph the phone number of where I am, and a time to phone. Understood?”
“Yes. I’ll have it by tomorrow night. Anything else?”
“Only that I’ll be using the name of Keith Brown throughout the operation. Anything signed as coming from Keith is from me. When calling a hotel, ask for me as Keith Brown. If ever I reply by saying “This is Mr. Brown,” get off the line fast. It means trouble. Explain that you have the wrong number, or the wrong Brown. That’s all for the moment. You’d better get back to the office. Call me here at eight tonight, and I’ll give you the progress to date.”
A few minutes later Endean found himself on the pavements of St. John’s Wood, looking for a taxi.
Luckily Shannon had not banked the £500 he had received from Endean before the weekend for his attack project, and he still had £450 of it left.
He rang BEA and booked an economy-class round trip on the morning flight to Brussels, returning at 1600 hours, which would get him back in his flat by six. Following that, he telephoned four telegrams abroad: one to Paarl, Cape Province, South Africa; one to Ostend; one to Marseilles; and one to Munich. Each said simply, “Urgent you phone me London 507-0041 any midnight over next three days. Shannon.” Finally he summoned a taxi and had it take him back to the Lowndes Hotel. He checked out, paid his bill, and left as he had come, anonymously.
At eight Endean rang him as agreed, and Shannon told Manson’s aide what he had done so far. They agreed Endean would ring again at ten the following evening.
Shannon spent a couple of hours exploring the block he was now living on, and the surrounding area. He spotted several small restaurants, including a couple not far away in St. John’s Wood High Street, and ate a leisurely supper at one of them. He was back home by eleven.
He counted his money—there was more than £400 left—put £300 on one side for the airfare and expenses the following day, and checked over his effects. The clothes were unremarkable, all of them less than three months old, most bought in the last ten days in London. He had no gun to bother about, and for safety destroyed the typewriter ribbon he had used to type his reports, replacing it with one of his spares.
Though it was dark early in London that evening, it was still light on a warm, sunny summer evening in Cape Province as Janni Dupree gunned his car past Seapoint and on toward Cape Town. He too had a Chevrolet, older than Endean’s, but bigger and flashier, bought secondhand with some of the dollars with which he had returned from Paris four weeks earlier. After spending the day swimming and fishing from a friend’s boat at Simonstown, he was driving back to his home in Paarl. He always liked to come home to Paarl after a contract, but inevitably it bored him quickly, just as it had when he left it ten years before.
As a boy he had been raised in the Paarl Valley and had spent his preschool years scampering through the thin and poor vineyards owned by people like his parents. He had learned to stalk birds and shoot in the valley with Pieter, his klonkie, the black playmate a white boy is allowed to play with until he grows too old and learns what skin color is all about.
Pieter, with his enormous brown eyes, tangled mass of black curls, and mahogany skin, was two years older than Janni and had been supposed to look after him. In fact they had been the same size, for Janni was physically precocious and had quickly taken the leadership of the pair. On summer days like this one, twenty years ago, the two barefoot boys used to take the bus along the coast to Cape Agulhas, where the Atlantic and the Indian oceans finally meet, and fish for yellowtail, galjoen, and red steenbras off the point.
After Paarl Boys’ High, Janni had been a problem—too big, aggressive, restless, getting into fights with those big scything fists and ending up twice in front of the magistrates. He could have taken over his parents’ farm and tended with his father the stubby little vines that produced such thin wine. The prospect appalled him—of becoming old and bent trying to make a living from the smallholding, with only four black boys working with him. At eighteen he volunteered for the army, did his basic training at Potchefstroom, and transferred to the paratroops at Bloemfontein. It was here he had found the thing he wanted to do most in life, here and in the counterinsurgency training in the harsh bushveld around Pietersburg. The army had agreed with him about his suitability, except on one point: his propensity for going to war while pointing in the wrong direction. In one fistfight too many, Corporal Dupree had beaten a sergeant senseless, and the commanding officer had busted him to private.
Bitter, he went AWOL, was taken in a bar in East London, battered two MPs before they held him down, and did six months in the stockade. On release he saw an advertisement in an evening newspaper, reported to a small office in Durban, and two days later was flown out of South Africa to Kamina base in Katanga. He had become a mercenary at twenty-two, and that was six years ago.
As he drove along the winding road through Franshoek toward the Paarl Valley, he wondered if there would be a letter from Shannon or one of the boys, with news of a contract. But when he got there, nothing was waiting at the post office. Clouds were blowing up from the sea, and there was a hint of thunder in the air.
It would rain that evening, a nice cooling shower, and he glanced up toward the Paarl Rock, the phenomenon that had given the valley and the town its name long ago when his ancestors first came into the valley. As a boy he had stared in wonderment at the rock, which was a dull gray when dry but after rain glistened like an enormous pearl in the moonlight. Then it became a great glistening, gleaming thing, dominating the tiny town beneath it. Although the town of his boyhood could never
offer him the kind of life he wanted, it was still home; and when he saw the Paarl Rock glistening in the light, he always knew he was back home again. That evening, he wished he were somewhere else, heading toward another war.
Tiny Marc Vlaminck leaned on the bar counter and downed another foaming schooner of Flemish ale. Outside the front windows of the place his girlfriend managed, the streets of Ostend’s red-light district were almost empty. A chill wind was blowing off the sea, and the summer tourists had not started to arrive yet. He was bored already.
For the first month since his return from the tropics, it had been good to be back, good to take hot baths again, to chat with his friends who had dropped in to see him. Even the local press had taken an interest, but he had told them to get lost. The last thing he needed was trouble from the authorities, and he knew they would leave him alone if he did or said nothing to embarrass them with the African embassies in Brussels.
But after weeks the inactivity had palled. A few nights back it had been enlivened when he thumped a seaman who had tried to fondle Anna’s bottom, an area he regarded as entirely his own preserve. The memory started a thought running through his mind. He could hear a low thump-thump from upstairs, where Anna was doing the housework in the small flat that they shared above the bar. He heaved himself off his barstool, drained the tankard, and called, “If anyone comes in, serve ’em yourself.”
Then he lumbered up the back stairs. As he did so, the door opened and a telegram came in.
It was a clear spring evening with just a touch of chill in the air, and the water of the Old Port of Marseilles was like glass. Across its center, a few months ago a mirror for the surrounding bars and cafés, a single homecoming trawler cut a swathe of ripples that wandered across the harbor and died chuckling under the hulls of the fishing boats already moored. The cars were locked solid along the Canebière, smells of cooking fish emanated from a thousand windows, the old men sipped their anisette, and the heroin sellers scuttled through the alleys on their lucrative missions. It was an ordinary evening.
In the multinational, multilingual caldron of seething humanity that called itself Le Panier, where only a policeman is illegal, Jean-Baptiste Langarotti sat at a corner table in a small bar and sipped a long, cool Ricard.
He was not as bored as Janni Dupree or Marc Vlaminck. Years in prison had taught him the ability to keep himself interested in even the smallest things, and he could survive long periods of inactivity better than most.
Moreover, he had been able to get himself a job and earn a living so that his savings were still intact. He saved steadily, the results of his economies mounting up in a bank in Switzerland that no one knew about. One day they would buy him the little bar in Calvi that he wanted.