Black As He’s Painted

‘They’re as worried as hell but say that what the President lays down is it: the general idea being that they might as well speak to the wind. He’s got this notion in his head – it derives from his schooldays and his practising as a barrister in London – that because Great Britain, relatively, has had a non-history of political assassination there won’t be any in the present or future. In its maddening way it’s rather touching.’

‘He can’t stop the SB doing its stuff, though. Not outside the Embassy.’

‘He can make it hellish awkward for them.’

‘What’s the procedure, then? Do you wait till he comes, Mr Alleyn, and plead with him at the airport?’

‘I do not. I fly to his blasted republic at the crack of dawn tomorrow and you carry on with the Dagenham job on your own.’

‘Thanks very much. What a treat,’ said Fox. ‘So I’d better go and pack.’

‘Don’t forget the old school tie.’

‘I do not deign,’ said Alleyn, ‘to reply to that silly crack.’

He got as far as the door and stopped.

‘I meant to ask you,’ he said. ‘Did you ever come across a man called Samuel Whipplestone? At the FO?’

‘I don’t move in those circles. Why?’

‘He was a bit of a specialist on Ng’ombwana. I see he’s lately retired. Nice chap. When I get back I might ask him to dinner.’

‘Are you wondering if he’d have any influence?’

‘We can hardly expect him to crash down on his knees and plead with the old Boomer to use his loaf if he wants to keep it. But I did vaguely wonder. ‘Bye, Br’er Fox.’

Forty-eight hours later Alleyn, in a tropical suit, got out of a Presidential Rolls that had met him at the main Ng’ombwana airport. He passed in a sweltering heat up a grandiose flight of steps through a Ruritanian guard turned black, and into the air-conditioned reception hall of the Presidential Palace.

Communication at the top level had taken place and he got the full, instant VIP treatment.

‘Mr Alleyn?’ said a young Ng’ombwanan wearing an ADC’s gold knot and tassel. ‘The President is so happy at your visit. He will see you at once. You had a pleasant flight?’

Alleyn followed the sky-blue tunic down a splendid corridor that gave on an exotic garden.

‘Tell me,’ he asked on the way, ‘what form of address is the correct one for the President?’

‘His Excellency, the President,’ the ADC rolled out, ‘prefers that form of address.’

‘Thank you,’ said Alleyn, and followed his guide into an anteroom of impressive proportions. An extremely personable and widely smiling secretary said something in Ng’ombwanan. The ADC translated: ‘We are to go straight in, if you please.’ Two dashingly uniformed guards opened double-doors and Alleyn was ushered into an enormous room at the far end of which, behind a vast desk, sat his old school chum: Bartholomew Opala.

‘Superintendent Alleyn, your Excellency, Mr President, sir,’ said the ADC redundantly and withdrew.

The enormous presence was already on its feet and coming, light-footed as a prizefighter, at Alleyn. The huge voice was bellowing: ‘Rory Alleyn, but all that’s glorious!’ Alleyn’s hand was engulfed and his shoulder-blade rhythmically beaten. It was impossible to stand to attention and bow from the neck in what he had supposed to be the required form.

‘Mr President –’ he began.

‘What? Oh, nonsense, nonsense, nonsense! Balls, my dear man (as we used to say in Davidson’s).’ Davidson’s had been their house at the illustrious school they both attended. The Boomer was being too establishment for words. Alleyn noticed that he wore the old school tie and that behind him on the wall hung a framed photograph of Davidson’s with The Boomer and himself standing together in the back row. He found this oddly, even painfully, touching.

‘Come and sit down,’ The Boomer fussed. ‘Where, now? Over here! Sit! Sit! I couldn’t be more delighted.’

The steel-wool mat of hair was grey now and stood up high on his head like a toque. The huge frame was richly endowed with flesh and the eyes were very slightly bloodshot but, as if in double-exposure, Alleyn saw beyond this figure that of an ebony youth eating anchovy toast by a coal fire and saying: ‘You are my friend: I have had none, here, until now.’

‘How well you look,’ the President was saying. ‘And how little you have changed! You smoke? No? A cigar? A pipe? Yes? Presently, then. You are lunching with us of course. They have told you?’

‘This is overwhelming,’ Alleyn said when he could get a word in. ‘In a minute I shall be forgetting my protocol.’

‘Now! Forget it now. We are alone. There is no need.’

‘My dear –’

‘“Boomer.” Say it. How many years since I heard it!’

‘I’m afraid I very nearly said it when I came in. My dear Boomer.’

The sudden brilliance of a prodigal smile made its old impression. ‘That’s nice,’ said the President quietly and after rather a long silence: ‘I suppose I must ask you if this is a visit with an object. They were very non-committal at your end, you know. Just a message that you were arriving and would like to see me. Of course I was overjoyed.’

Alleyn thought: this is going to be tricky. One word in the wrong place and I not only boob my mission but very likely destroy a friendship and even set up a politically damaging mistrust. He said –

‘I’ve come to ask you for something and I wish I hadn’t got to bother you with it. I won’t pretend that my chief didn’t know of our past friendship – to me a most valued one. I won’t pretend that he didn’t imagine this friendship might have some influence. Of course he did. But it’s because I think his request is reasonable and because I am very greatly concerned for your safety, that I didn’t jib at coming.’

He had to wait a long time for the reaction. It was as if a blind had been pulled down. For the first time, seeing the slackened jaw and now the hooded, lacklustre eyes he thought, specifically: ‘I am speaking to a Negro.’

‘Ah!’ said the President at last, ‘I had forgotten. You are a policeman.’

‘They say, don’t they, if you want to keep a friend, never lend him money. I don’t believe a word of it, but if you change the last four words into “never use your friendship to further your business” I wouldn’t quarrel with it. But I’m not doing exactly that. This is more complicated. My end object, believe it or not, sir, is the preservation of your most valuable life.’

Another hazardous wait. Alleyn thought: ‘Yes, and that’s exactly how you used to look when you thought somebody had been rude to you. Glazed.’

But the glaze melted and The Boomer’s nicest look – one of quiet amusement – supervened.

‘Now, I understand,’ he said. ‘It is your watch-dogs, your Special Branch. “Please make him see reason, this black man. Please ask him to let us disguise ourselves as waiters and pressmen and men-in-the-street and unimportant guests and be indistinguishable all over the shop.” I am right? That is the big request?’

‘I’m afraid, you know, they’ll do their thing in that respect, as well as they can, however difficult it’s made for them.’

‘Then why all this fuss-pottery? How stupid!’

‘They would all be much happier if you didn’t do what you did, for instance, in Martinique.’

‘And what did I do in Martinique?’

‘With the deepest respect: insisted on an extensive reduction of the safety precautions and escaped assassination by the skin of your teeth.’

‘I am a fatalist,’ The Boomer suddenly announced, and when Alleyn didn’t answer: ‘My dear Rory, I see I must make myself understood. Myself. What I am. My philosophy. My code. You will listen?’

‘Here we go,’ Alleyn thought. ‘He’s changed less than one would have thought possible.’ And with profound misgivings he said: ‘But of course, sir. With all my ears.’

As the exposition got under way it turned out to be an extension of The Boomer’s schoolboy bloody-mindedness seasoned with, and in part justified by, his undoubted genius for winning the trust and understanding of his own people. He enlarged, with intermittent gusts of Homeric laughter, upon the machinations of the Ng’ombwanan extreme right and left who had upon several occasions made determined efforts to secure his death and were, through some mysterious process of reason, thwarted by The Boomer’s practice of exposing himself as an easy target. ‘They see,’ he explained, ‘that I am not (as we used to say at Davidson’s) standing for their tedious codswallop.’