The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest (17 page)

IX

I
'm sorry. Where was I? Oh, yes—in the same way I think he had no conception of Paul's relation with his work. He would have considered it perfectly natural for him to return to New Guinea and use his talent decorating the doors of a few huts.”

“Didn't he talk to you about any of this, Mrs. Caine?” said Pibble.

She abandoned her tortured nail, like an old lady laying her crochet work down in her lap to cope with the importunities of a great-nephew.

“Aaron?” she said, with a curious squeaky giggle that he hadn't heard before; it seemed strangely out of context. “He was always talking about going back to New Guinea, but I never thought it was more than a daydream.”

“He didn't talk about it any differently last night?”

“Not that I noticed, but honestly I'd slightly given up listening. I enjoyed having him here, but I'd heard it all before, about the pig hunts and the hut building and the dances and feasts and drums—”

“Drums!” said Eve sharply.

“Yes, and having the whole valley full of jungle round them and it all being theirs for miles and miles and miles. He used to talk about the children growing up with that as the world they knew, instead of all these bricks.”

“But he didn't say anything new last night?” said Pibble.

“I didn't
hear
anything. It was like having a record player on playing Beethoven, but you don't pay any attention to it because you're doing a crossword or worrying about money or something. It's not right, and you know it, just treating all that marvelous stuff as a cozy noise, but you do it because you feel like it.”

She laughed her proper pigeon laugh this time.

“Are you sure that he talked about drums as if they were something he liked?” said Eve.

“Yes, I think so. No. Wait a bit—it's all my fault for not listening properly—he might have said that somebody else had them and he didn't like them. Was there another tribe anywhere near? Anyway, I don't think he talked about them at all last night.”

“Never mind,” said Eve. “I expect you've muddled up different things. Until you are used to them, it can be very difficult to judge whether they approve or disapprove of anything—to judge from their tone, that is. Some Europeans find them embarrassingly explicit verbalizers, especially the women. He must have felt very relaxed and at home with you to talk about the drums at all.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Caine. “I didn't realize.”

The conversation puttered about for a bit, without ever regaining the ease and confidence it had possessed earlier on. They were all three bored, Pibble realized, and both the women looked drawn and tired. He thanked Mrs. Caine for his tea and left to interview the old men.

It took two hours and turned out to be almost entirely wasted time. They all said exactly the same things; they outlasted his nerve-racking silences with contemptuous ease; they remained aloof from his treacherous friendliness and impervious to his factitious aggression; every question was considered, then answered with the stately formality of minor characters in a tragedy by Racine.

Joshua was the most interesting; he was the cook whom Pibble had nicknamed The Poacher, and his style of conversation was different from the others. Perhaps his vocabulary was smaller, but he relied less on words than on an elaborate and expressive code of gestures. He sat on the bed of the pretty little room which Pibble had collared for his inquisition, a blob of black flesh, perched like Tenniel's Humpty Dumpty with tiny legs dangling, while his large, delicate hands fluttered and deprecated, modifying the midnight syllables he spoke. But all the time his glistening black eyes stared unmoving at Pibble. If the cook had been a white man, Pibble realized, it would have been certain that he was frightened and lying, some old fence who'd had the bad luck to become involved with tearaways who'd taken him deeper in than even his cupidity cared for, and was now trying to wheedle his way out of trouble with sighs and grimaces and a straight, dishonest stare. But how could you tell what moved behind this alien phiz?

No, he'd slept all night. No, he could think of no reason for anyone wanting to slay the chief. No, he knew of no way out of the hut save through the door which Elijah kept. Yes, he made the
kava
, and had put no more than the usual number of sleeping tablets in it. Yes, he would have been able to taste had someone else added more tablets—was he not the cook? What kind of a cook would he be if he could not taste a simple thing like that?

A flick of his fingers suggested an abysmal level of efficiency. Pibble shifted his ground.

“Do you think Aaron would have wished to stop the drumming?” he said.

“Of course.” No gesture.

“Did he speak to you about this?”

“No. He did not speak often.” A movement of wrists and elbows, like that of a Thai dancer rejecting a suitor, implied the aloofness of the chief.

“Why would he wish to stop the drumming?”

“For the sake of the Reverend Mackenzie.” The palms were laid together in the attitude of devotion.

“And you didn't feel the same about the Reverend Mackenzie?”

“He bewitched us for a season.” A shrug and a spreading of the hands told that witchcraft was the kind of misfortune that might befall anybody. “If he had not come—” A wholly different shrug, saying that anything might have happened.

“But Robert Caine would still have arrived at your village, whether Mr. Mackenzie had been there or not,” said Pibble.

Joshua whisked his hands apart and clapped them together, saying, as clear as words, He would have been nothing to us.

“What would you have done?” asked Pibble, curiosity getting the upper hand of duty. “Would you have eaten him?”

“More tales are told than are true,” said Joshua, mocking the white man's superstition with a flip of the wrist.

“He'd have been tough,” suggested Pibble.

“All adult beasts need care,” said Joshua, the glistening stare at last mitigating into professional interest. “A few of the joints might have roast. The hams and the shoulders. With much basting, of course. He was well fleshed, and younger then. Even so, one would need strong herbs to mask that part of the taste which might be rancid. The lesser joints would broil easily enough. The lights—I do not know. I think I would not have used them unless meat were scarce. We had a big lizard in our valley, quick but stupid—hard to catch but easy to trap. Parts of the flesh were succulent, the flavor of a good capon with the texture of crabmeat, but other parts were poisonous. So it might be with a man.” The left hand, thrust forward a little, palm up, fingers curled in, commented that all the foregoing was merest supposition and not based on any firsthand knowledge. The eyes regained their intense indifference. Pibble sighed.

“What steps could Aaron have taken to stop the drumming?” he said.

Joshua pouted and put his head on one side. Not a very serious question.

“Well,” said Pibble, “what would have happened if he had managed to persuade Dr. Ku that the whole tribe ought to move back to New Guinea?”

Joshua locked his fingers together and folded his thumbs across them, like a prep-school headmaster who finds that he will have to talk to one of the boys about sex a term ahead of schedule. An absorbing but embarrassing point had been raised.

“What would have happened?” he said. “Who can tell?”

Pibble allowed the silence to tick by. The old man stared at him, frightened and motionless, as an exhausted hare crouches in an agony of stillness, ears laid back, corneas bulging—sometimes the beagles miss her, but not often. Pibble, alas, knew his own toothlessness: not for him, now, to raise his head from the grasses, his jowls the color of blackberry jam with the blood of the hare.

“Would you have wanted to go?” he said at last.

Joshua sighed; his shoulders drooped and his hands pattered onto his thighs.

“We are old,” he said, “old.”

His hands spread out again, in a wide tremulous movement, measuring the distance to New Guinea, and the length the journey had been in years to achieve this new balance of life, and at the same time the shortness of the span left them to discover another conceivable posture.

“But surely,” said Pibble, “life in New Guinea would not be so very different from life here. Isn't that the point of all these rituals you keep up? Haven't you begun to return—in spirit, so to speak—by starting this drumming business again?”

“These are not the same drums. The priest does not call the same spirits. We are not the same men. On the television they told us that when you send back a tame lion to the jungle he can no longer catch meat.” His hands made a baffled movement, the spring of a beast that misses.

“You think, then,” said Pibble, “that Dr. Ku has served no purpose in keeping all your customs, as far as possible, intact?”

“You are all the same,” said Joshua, with an irritable flick of the fingers, “all you people who come in from outside. You all think he has done everything for us, as if we were babies who could do nothing for ourselves. He is nothing—a
parahili
.” An effeminate wriggle of arm and shoulder translated the word into the universal language of men. “But he is clever, certainly. He will know that we have changed, even as much as Paul's way of painting has changed.”

“Do you like Paul's paintings?” said Pibble. Joshua was the fifth of the old men he had talked to. Ishmael and the two younger ones, Jacob and Daniel, were to come, but he knew that he would get nothing police-like out of any of them. Instead he pursued academic byways—something, after all, might emerge there.

“They are not true paintings,” said Joshua. “Not like the ones we have done on our door and in our hut. They are difficult, but they are clever. When I understand them, they make me laugh.”

“But the drumming has changed in a way you do understand?”

Joshua nodded solemnly, an affirmative more potent than words.

“And the drumming is important to you?”

Another nod.

“Why?”

“We are dying, policeman. For many hours, for many days, we are dead. But when the drums move in our blood we are alive again for a little. It is like this: an old man has a wife, they were wedded many years past, and even after a feast now he can give her no joy, and his heart says I am old, I am old, soon I will see no more, taste no more, smell no more, and my cousins will bury me. But then his wife gives him leave to take another wife, a young girl with hard muscles, and the old man's strength comes back to him and he has pleasure with her and pleasure with his old wife, too, if he is a good man. So it is with us and the drums. If you could hear them, you might understand.” The whole of Joshua's small parable had been accompanied by sensual, obscene, explicit finger play.

“I hope to come tonight,” said Pibble.

“The priest will slay the slayer of our chief,” said Joshua.

Pibble was jolted back into the path of duty.

“I believe,” he said, “that Aaron did intend to move the whole tribe back to New Guinea. If he and Dr. Ku and the women had been agreed on this, could the men's hut have withstood him?”

Joshua's fists bonked together in the head-on collision of opposing stupidities. He gazed mournfully at the smarting knuckles.

“I do not know,” he said. “The women have no voice, but the wise man hears them all the time.”

Pibble looked at him gloomily. By their own crazy standards, the old men had a motive for killing the chief, and they could have done it, all acting together—drawing lots, presumably, for the actual man who was to wait in ambush. Pibble had been puzzled all along by the question of smell; everyone agreed that Aaron would have been aware of an outsider (Caine, for preference) lurking on the stairs, but in a house that smelled of Kus an extra-strong whiff of Ku might pass unnoticed. Collusion was in the air; all the old men shared the frightened gaze of the hare. But it didn't feel right—Pibble found he trusted the movements of Joshua's hands more than the tongue in anyone's head. Perhaps they were just frightened of authority, dreading the unknown element as a child dreads the jelly it finds in the cavities of cold meat.

Or perhaps one of them—Robin, most likely—had stirred himself to the momentariness of action; he might even have a key, or the knack of moving so softly that the keeper of the door would not be aware of him—after all, they seemed none of them to have heard him stealing out onto the roof through his sliding panel—and now they knew in their hearts that he had done it, but not in their minds. That would account both for the fright and for the apparent truthfulness of all their answers.

In any case, how was Pibble going to prove it? Unless the younger men were more vulnerable, he couldn't see anyone except possibly Robin breaking down, and that not till after months of brainwashing—and pretty
that
would be made to look once the defense learned about it! Fourteen, was he?

Pibble dismissed Joshua, who bowed himself fussily out but immediately beetled back as if he at last had something useful to communicate.

“I believe the best cut,” he whispered, “would be slices of the shoulder muscles cut across the grain and beaten very thin. I would fry them with garlic and fennel.”

The young men were no more vulnerable, no less frightened—if fright it was. Jacob was voluble, Daniel taciturn, but neither said anything in the least bit useful, beyond confirming that they had heard the old men making bets on how much Pibble would discover in the hut. They were both just as firmly in favor of the drumming as the old men had been, both certain that nothing that had happened in the hut was anyone else's business, least of all Eve's. Pibble had decided to be tough with Jacob, snarling and sneering, but a chance answer betrayed him; the black man hated and distrusted Caine to an irrational extent, he discovered, and after that the interrogation became almost cozy. He found himself wondering whether he would have liked Aaron, aloof and puritan, as much as he liked the lesser members of the tribe. When the last useless silence was over, he walked down the stairs and found his associates Fernham and Strong waiting in the porch.