“Only that they are leaving.”
He showed no surprise. “When?”
“She doesn’t know.”
“How?”
“By sea, she thinks.”
“From where?”
“There’s a village, or small town, midway down the island on the south side. It’s called Babino Polje. This country’s hell on names, isn’t it?”
He smiled. “Not for me. There are affinities, don’t forget. Why does she fancy this?”
“Because Madame V. is talking about making an overnight trip there.”
He considered this, and then nodded. “Maybe I should send Frau Spiegel down there right away.”
“Tell her to take her transistor set with her.”
The bluff old lawyer’s face crinkled with the ghost of a smile. Then, stiff-backed, one of the old kind that you don’t meet often these days, he went out. I hadn’t the faintest idea whether I’d sold him a pup or not. But it was worth a try.
The water and the electricity were on so I shaved and took a shower, then dressed and went down on to the terrace, to catch the last of the sun before it dropped behind the tall hills, and to have a drink with Vérité.
“Pleasant afternoon?”
“People keep asking me that,” I said. “Average.”
“Is there anything for me to report to Herr Stebelson?”
“Stebelson?”
“All my reports to Herr Malacod go through him, naturally.”
“Naturally.” But it was interesting. “No,” I said. “Nothing yet.”
I finished reading Stigmata before I went to sleep that night. It was a pretty simple overall argument, but it was put with great force and backed up with fat wads of historical evidence.
Simply, it was that conventional conceptions of national character – neuroses, as Professor Vadarci preferred to call them – were completely valid. But the validity rested not in what a nation thought of itself, but what was commonly accepted by other nations as the true national myth or neurosis. For instance, the English, broadly, were a race of stubborn hypocrites, hopeless at rational planning of their national life or national defence, but masters of improvisation in their recurring moments of crisis. Overall, they were stigmatized as being excitable, illogical, and much more concerned with saving face than the Japanese, for instance. (It was this last bit of deduction which had spurred some Times leader writer on 16 February, 1947, into pompous indignation – linked, of course, with the fact that Herr Malacod had appointed Professor Vadarci as director of the research foundation he was establishing for the study of national neuroses, with particular reference to their impact on international political affairs.) (Actually, a fortnight later, Professor Vadarci – for health reasons, it was said – had declined the post.)
Other nations got equally bad write-ups, so that by and large they sounded like a world community of delinquents with the odd psychopath here and there among them. Vadarci, too, was hard on communications. He argued that mass communications, like the radio, television and Press services, were inherently evil since by contracting the world and bringing it into people’s front parlours they diminished its importance for people and made people indifferent to people. A breakfast paper every morning of every year full of war, disaster, murder, robbery, pillage, rape, arson, sex offences, moral looseness in persons and parties ... all these, fed ad nauseam to the world, tended to decrease the natural sensibility of the individual towards the individual. Civilization was linked to communications and throughout history the highest points of civilization had always produced the most revolting examples of man’s inhumanity to man. Civilized, communicable man was ruthless, vicious and contemptuous of the sanctity of human life. Behind the parties, the politics, the fancy uniforms, the urge for social reforms, and emerging nationalistic aspirations, was nothing but man the beast.
It was hard hitting stuff and guaranteed to put up blood pressures. And he finished by denouncing all forms of international co-operation – the League of Nations, the United Nations, European unity, Pan-Americanism, the World State – as useless, impractical diversions while the real business of kill and hold tight to what you had went on. In Professor Vadarci’s opinion there was only one realistic solution, only one way to create a tolerable human society which would allow men to become what, spiritually, all men longed to be – real human beings – and that was by the emergence of one overriding world force. No community of nations. But one nation, overlords, ruthless at first, subjecting the other nations, and finally leading them into the promised land. In the West he put up two nominees – Italy or Germany, with a bias to Germany. And in the East he had a straight candidate in China. And he had a bundle of arguments for his choice, and I had no doubt that a lot of people would have agreed with him though they might have had their eye on different candidates.
It was good bedtime reading, and I wondered what the hell it had to do with Katerina and Madame Vadarci. Maybe Madame Vadarci saw herself as a world ruler. Well, she had the whip already to her hand. I went to sleep thinking of that whip. At the back of my mind I had an idea that I already knew something about it.
I was wakened at daybreak by a knock on my door. I called out for whoever it was to come in. But no one entered. I rolled over in bed and saw
