The Green Gene Page 13

  “Scotch, mister?” said the Welshman.

  “I do not drink alcohol,” quavered Humayan, terrified of offending the demons. But their response, visible only in their stances and audible in a joint grunt, seemed to be a mixture of contempt and relief. The Welshman poured out three measures of whisky, pierced his mask with a straw and took a contented suck. The Scot muttered a fierce toast in an accent too broad for comprehension, drank, and banged his mug down on the table.

  “What’s into you, Ian?” said the Welshman.

  “Wull-brred, is she?” muttered Ian.

  “Who?”

  “Megan was saying she was wull-brred.”

  “Megan Pritchard? Man, she has a very fair breeding, clear back to Seithenyn ap Seithin Seidi, and many of them branch bank managers.”

  “Her Majesty the Queen,” snarled Ian. “Megan was saying that she was wull-brred.”

  “A figure of speech,” said the Welshman. “A touch of hyperbole.”

  Ian threw his cigarette to the floor and ground it out with his foot.

  “Gentlemen,” said Mr. Zass, “I am an ignorant foreigner but I had always taken it as an axiom that the Queen has the best pedigree in England.”

  “In England, verra like,” admitted Ian.

  “But there’s two of her own great-great-grannies she cannot put a maiden name to,” said the Welshman.

  “Och, there’s waur than that,” said Ian. “The leddy is full o’ gude Scots blude, but ne’er a green bairn she has born, nor any of her predecessors.”

  “Not forgetting the Welsh blood also,” said the Welshman.

  “Och, aye, but there is mair o’ the Scots.”

  “Tudor,” said the Welshman coldly. He had laid his pistol on the table while he drank, but now his fingers crept across the deal towards it. “It is the quality that counts,” he hissed.

  “Aye, aye,” said Ian, too lost in his argument to fret for details. “Stuart is maybe no verra gude. But there’s been green bairns born in plenty behind palace walls, Mr. Zass, only the English bishops have smuggled them awa and brocht in some bonny Saxon bairn. Generation after generation it has happened, so in what manner can her present Majesty be callit wull-brred? For a’ anybody kens her true name is Ruth Potts, and the richtful king o’ Scotland is lockit in a tower.”

  “It’s not often you meet a Maoist-Monarchist,” said the Welshman admiringly. “I’m a republican, sober; but I’ll give you this, Ian—you’d only need one generation to purify the blood.”

  “And in any case,” said Mr. Zass, “I understood it was possible for the parents to have a considerable measure of Celtic …”

  “Pickle, to you,” snarled Ian.

  “OK, OK, sure, pickle blood without necessarily producing …”

  “Pickleninnies,” said the Welshman.

  “Sure,” said Mr. Zass. “Isn’t that right?”

  “But the odds, mon, the odds,” snapped Ian, pouring out three more tots and then marking the level in the bottle with a pencil he drew from his sporran.

  “I read in the paper,” said the Welshman, “where there’s a little brown citizen been working on the odds. A breakthrough, it said he’d made …”

  The silence of startled considerations took him. His mask swung round to stare at Humayan.

  “Was that you, mister?”

  “Indeed it was,” said Humayan, gratified that his fame should have seeped as far as this remote cranny.

  “And what for should a lousy oriental be researching my genes?” shouted the Welshman. “Are there no scientists in Cardiff?”

  “Yes, yes,” babbled Humayan. “I have corresponded with Professor Evan Evans, and he has expressed himself …”

  The Welshman’s snarl cut him short.

  “Pardon me,” said Mr. Zass heavily. “I intend no criticism of your organisation, but it seems irregular that you should snatch a guy like Pete and not know who he is.”

  Both gaolers made a sudden slight movement. Humayan realised that their masks made a warning glance unreadable.

  “Can the gentleman tell us, forbye,” said Ian, “what odds it is Her Majesty should bear a green bairn?”

  “I could do that,” lied Humayan. “I would need certain data. As much as can be discovered about the racial origins of her forebears, and their physical appearance. Her ear and jaw measurements and those of her husband—these would need to be very accurate. Otherwise only the standard vital statistics.”

  “Aye,” said Ian in a tone of doubt.

  “And then what?” hissed the Welshman. “We send in the burglars to the royal dentists. We waylay the Duke and measure his buttocks. This joker gets out his slide-rule and says that Her Majesty’s next will be as brave a green as ever bracken was, so we set about increasing the royal libido. You’ll have plans for that, no doubt.”

  “Haud your thrapple,” said Ian. “It is the historical fraud that maun be brocht tae licht, and if the brown gentleman can dae it …”

  “Goodbye to your FRS, Pete,” said Mr. Zass.

  The Welshman appeared to lose patience with the argument. He picked up the mugs and bottle and hid them back on the top compartment, nodded to Mr. Zass and left without another word. Mr. Zass settled down to playing cribbage with Ian. Humayan, exhausted with fresh fears, went and lay on his bed and brooded unconstructively on the bitterness of being kidnapped by green demons who didn’t even know who he was.

  VII

  CORK, THURSDAY. For the second day running the World Conference of Celts broke up in disorder, with no business conducted, having again been unable to reach any compromise on the controversial Cornish resolution concerning the shape of the earth. By a procedural device the minor nations, Cornwall, Brittany and Andorra, have managed to block all moves to by-pass this resolution and proceed to more urgent matters. For some time this morning it appeared that the Conference might accept a Scottish motion stating that the so-called roundness of the earth is a falsehood foisted upon the Celts by the Saxon Newton and the Jew Einstein, but postponing for further consideration any declaration of what shape the earth in fact is. This move was blocked by the Cornishmen, who genuinely appear to believe that the earth is flat, and the Bretons, acting on orders from Paris, according to well-informed quarters. A move to appease the hard-liners by expelling the New Zealand delegation, who have all along maintained that the earth is round and that they live on the far side of it, had no result except a walk-out by the New Zealanders, thus removing from the Conference its most level-headed element. After break-up it was being rumoured that this was the result for which the Irish had been working, in order to exclude the New Zealanders from later debates in which their moderate counsels might have prevailed. Some indeed now think it likely that the Cornish motion will be passed with no further difficulty tomorrow morning.

  Time ached away. Meals came. They ate, slept, excreted, talked, lay in dark silence.

  There was a rough roster of three gaolers, Ian, an excitable little Welshman called Ossian Jones, and a white student. The first Welshman, whose name was Dave, appeared to be head gaoler, coming for a while at the changes of duty, drinking a couple of tots when it was Ian’s turn, and then going away. Mr. Zass tried steadily to make friends with all of these and had some success with them, apart from the student. He would play cards and argue with Ian and Ossian, deliberately losing by the end of each session. Indeed at one point he allowed Ossian to win so large a sum of notional dollars that the Welshman fell off his chair in a sort of fit, and the prisoners were in the predicament of having an unconscious gaoler and a perfectly usable gun.

  “I guess not,” said Mr. Zass, gazing regretfully down at the weapon. “We’d not get ourselves free before Dave comes back, even if we rub Ossy out … Oh, forget it. Hell!”

  With a sigh of relief Humayan knelt by the twitching body and bathed the temples in cold water. When
Ossian came round he made no reference at all to his fit, and Mr. Zass sensibly told him that they’d added an erroneous nought to the original bet, which made it an acceptably smaller sum.

  The student refused to talk or play cards, because he was reading for a Ph.D. He also insisted on the prisoners sitting as far as possible away from him and talking in whispers. They learnt from Ian that he was at ideological odds with the rest of the group, being a supporter of the Universal Celtic Language, which combined elements of Gaelic, Welsh and Irish and was favoured by the more rigorous revolutionaries despite the disadvantage of being at least two-thirds incomprehensible to almost all Greens. This dispute in the movement was the only one they were told of directly, but in Ossian’s remarks, especially, there were frequent implications of schisms and fissions all through the hierarchy. Mr. Zass was too canny to press for details.

  As soon as Dave was out of the room the student used to tug his mask off his head in order to be able to read his textbooks without strain. This revealed a pale, elongated face and a straggle of ginger beard which looked as though it did not really belong there but was part of the fleece of some large russet sheep which had snagged on the student’s chin as the animal passed. His voice had an upper-class bleat, which Humayan had last heard from the lips of a very old British Council lecturer in Bombay.

  Mr. Zass, the first time this visage appeared, nodded towards it and whispered, “I didn’t care for it, till I found what small fry he was.”

  “Oh,” whispered Humayan, “why not?”

  “I reckoned they wore masks because they intended to let me go. If they’d been planning to rub me out, they wouldn’t have bothered. They can’t wear them all the time.”

  “Why should they, er, rub you out?”

  “You can never tell with pickles. Course, I know if they do rub me out it’ll be a quick shot in the back of the head. But I keep seeing it as a firing squad. They line up in the middle of the court, see, and I’m against this wall, and I say ‘no, no blindfold,’ and the officer asks if I have a last request and I just mumble, so he comes closer to hear what I’m saying, and then I kick him in the crotch. I used to be a pretty fair kick when I was at college. What do you think of that, Pete?”

  Humayan smiled politely at this display of hypothetical guts. He found Mr. Zass tiring company. It was not exactly that the big Jew was arrogant or boastful, but very few conversations proceeded without casual references to his wealth and power. The reason, for instance, why he had a reputation for understanding the Greens was that his chauffeur, his manservant and all his gardeners were green. He had travelled far but narrowly, visiting only cities that contained a first-class American hotel and there seeing only those sights that were rated five stars in the guidebook. Any restaurant he had eaten in was the best, any man he mentioned was a great guy and any woman a very lovely lady. Humayan was bored with these achievements when he believed them to be the delusions of a maniac, and when he found that they were probably true he became both bored and jealous.

  This revelation came on what might have been Humayan’s fifth day in the prison, when Megan brought in to breakfast some black clothes glittering with threads of gold and laid them on Mr. Zass’s bed with a dismissive sniff.

  “Thanks, honey,” said Mr. Zass. “That’s great. You see, Pete, when they sandbagged me I had just run out of this tailor’s shop in my court dress, only they hadn’t finished the fittings so it was all white thread and chalk marks, so Megan’s been finishing it off for me. You couldn’t have done a better job, honey. As good as Savile Row. My tailor used to make your Duke of Windsor’s jackets, Pete, but the Duke had his pants made over in New York. There isn’t a tailor in Europe knows how to make a pair of pants.”

  Humayan, wondering in what manner the Duke of Windsor could have been said to be his, watched Mr. Zass struggle into his finery and strut like a flabby rook around the cellar. The absurd cocked hat looked equally irrelevant whether born on the head or tucked under the arm-pit. It was indeed galling to think that this was the Ambassador of the United States of America, whose acquaintanceship might have been most useful to a rising statistician, given other circumstances.

  So after that Humayan spent a lot of time on his bed. In any case there were the long hours when the green demons pulled the main switch and left their prisoners unguarded in the dark. Humayan had never needed much sleep, so now there was nothing to do but lie awake and dream, or think, or meditate. Sometimes he worried dully at the enigma of how he had come to be kidnapped by revolutionaries who did not know who he was; sometimes he thought about Selina, or Kate, or Mr. Palati’s curries, but mostly he considered the programming of the big machine in the basement of the RRB. If any help came, he decided, it would start from there. That was the only creature in all Britain (apart from Mr. Palati) with whom he had been able to build a comfortable relationship; he could talk with it in a way he never would be able to with Mr. Zass. So he lay in the dark, remembering that friendship, reconstructing it by systematically listing in his mind all the coding instructions and references he had seen, and then trying to work out their relationships. The task was impossible, even for a genius. Humayan’s memory for figures was complete and effortless, but it was linear. He could not carry a mass of figures at the front of his mind for mutual comparison, but had to summon small batches from his memory store, juggle with those and see what he found. Even so he made progress. After several of the dark, trancelike sessions he became aware that given more data and a calculating machine—pencil and paper would do—he could have unravelled the whole maze.

  About the time when he realised that he would make no further progress and so was sitting whispering small-talk to Mr. Zass—their relationship remained uncomfortable because there was no area in which he could give this intensely competitive man the satisfaction of competition—Ossian Jones came to relieve the student in a very frenetic condition, brandishing his gun and a newspaper in wild arcs.

  “They’ve done it! They’ve done it!” he shrilled.

  “Hold it,” said Mr. Zass. “You got that safety-catch on?”

  Ossy must have heard, despite his frenzy, for he checked by pulling the trigger. The bullet whined and flicked round the vaults while the slam of the explosion dazed their ears. The noise calmed him enough to make him drop the newspaper and prod dazedly at the safety-catch. The student picked up his books and left.

  “Wales won some kind of football match?” said Mr. Zass, unfolding the paper. His face changed and hardened as he read. Ossy was beginning to moan, “They’ve done it! They’ve done it!” again before Mr. Zass finally passed the paper across to Humayan.

  It was the paper Frank Leary worked for, and the relevant story was written by somebody called Jack Courage, who was described as the Celtic Affairs Correspondent.

  U.S. APPOINTS GREEN ENVOY TO LONDON

  “QUEEN WILL RECEIVE HIM”: Foreign Sec.

  The text added little. For politeness Humayan read hurriedly through paragraphs about this new nonentity, who appeared to have spent his life making himself rich and then being the statutory green man on a number of state and federal boards and commissions.

  “What does it mean?” he said.

  “It means I’m an ex-ambassador now,” said Mr. Zass. “Our friends here aren’t going to like that, any more than Mrs. Zass is. I wonder what you’ll make of this Mahoney guy, Ossy. He’s a real bastard, and the Mafia owns fifty per cent of him, too.”

  “They can appoint a sheep, provided he’s green,” said Ossian exultantly.

  “They will let you go now,” said Humayan.

  “You reckon so?”

  “They have no use for you if you are no longer ambassador.”

  “Yeah. But they’ve been outmanoeuvred. They won’t like that. They’ve lost face.”

  “But they have gained face by having a green ambassador presented to the Queen.”

  “Except
it’s Mahoney. You know, Mrs. Zass used to worry herself sick what I was going to say to Her Majesty. At least Mahoney can talk race-tracks with her. Hey, Ossy, what’s that?”

  They had all three heard it, a signal from the door, only ten minutes since the last guard-change.

  “Stay here,” hissed Ossy, sliding his safety-catch over and moving cautiously away. He went with theatrical stealth, like a child playing grandmother’s footsteps. They heard the clatter of the door-fastenings and a short bout of talk, made somehow menacing by the rising note of Ossy’s excitement. Then the fastenings clattered again and there was silence. After a couple of minutes Mr. Zass walked round to the entrance and returned, shaking his head.

  “Gone,” he said. “I don’t like it.”

  “At least they’ve left us the lights,” said Humayan.

  They sat for a while, listening to silence. The change of routine was very disturbing. Humayan kept imagining that he could hear the far noise of gunfire. Mr. Zass picked up the paper and read as though his eyes had starved for newsprint, missing nothing, and occasionally making muttered comments such as “Kaiser Al are down,” or “Edible brassières, huh?” It might have been an hour later when he folded the paper carefully, passed it across the table to Humayan and tapped with his forefinger a little item low down on an inside page.

  The Race Relations Board have informed the Indian High Commission that an Indian subject, said to have been working in the RRB statistical department, can definitely be regarded as among the victims of last month’s explosion in Horseman’s Yard, Kensington.

  A successor has been appointed to Doctor Gideon Glister, editor of Prism, who was another of the victims. The new editor will be Mr. Tarquin ffoster, a Civil Servant with a strong interest in Celtic Affairs.