The Land God Made in Anger. John Davis Gordon

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СКАЧАТЬ his full name. No, it was typed because the sender wished to be anonymous. But who, apart from Helga, would worry what McQuade thought about the Holocaust? People he had seen at the Schmidt ranch? But for what reason? To explain? To tell him to keep his mouth shut?

      He walked pensively through to his office, carrying Roger’s books. He stood a moment, thinking; then he reached for the answering machine.

      It clicked; there followed the soft hiss of the tape, and then a deep male voice said softly, ‘Mind your own business, McQuade.’

      Then another click as the machine cut off.

      McQuade stared across the room. Then he rewound and played it again.

      He could not recognize the voice. Even the accent was hard to identify. It sounded as if the speaker had disguised it. It might have been Afrikaner, but it could also have been a German accent, or even an English-speaking South African. But what was unmistakable was the menace.

      McQuade frowned. What he felt was anger that some person was trying to frighten him. And, yes, he felt a twinge of fear. The bastard had succeeded! His first reaction was to snatch up the telephone and tell the Stormtrooper to tell her bloody friends to leave him alone before he reported them to the police. Just then the telephone rang.

      He jerked. It shrilled in the empty house. There was a click as the answering machine took the call. McQuade stabbed the audio button. There was a moment’s pause, then a softly sneering voice said: ‘Did you get my message, McQuade?’

      McQuade’s hand reached out for the telephone, and the voice said softly: ‘I know you’re there, McQuade, because your lights are on and your Landrover’s outside.’

      McQuade snatched up the telephone. ‘Who is this?’

      There was a smirk. ‘Just to confirm you got the message.’

      McQuade barked: ‘What are you talking about, you big oaf?’

      There was a chuckle, then the voice said, ‘Just forget about everything, and stay healthy.’ The telephone went dead. McQuade slammed it down.

      He was furious. And shaky.

      He snatched up the telephone again. Then hesitated.

      And tell the police what?

      He slowly sat down.

      Tell them how much? ‘Mind your own business,’ the voice had said. ‘Forget about everything.’ What business? Forget about what? What you saw on the Schmidt ranch? A bunch of Germans getting sentimental about the old days? Or the submarine-business?

      He stared at the wall.

      But how could the voice know he had been looking into the submarine story? It was hardly possible for anyone to know he’d been sitting on the Skeleton Coast with his sextant. Somebody saw him talking to Skellum outside Kukki’s Pub and put two and two together? Certainly nobody followed him to Jakob’s kraal. So? So the only possibility was Skellum or Jakob had opened their mouths about the strange things McQuade had been up to. But that seemed hardly likely, in the short time since he left them.

      McQuade sat. Trying to think it through.

      If the voice had been referring to the submarine, it could only mean that he was trying to scare McQuade off, or was trying to hush up the story. That could only mean that there was a political connection. Somebody did not want it known that forty years ago a German came struggling ashore from a sunken submarine. And if that was the case, it most likely meant that that German was still alive …

      McQuade sat there, thoughts cramming his head. Then he slowly returned the telephone to its cradle.

      But surely it was unlikely that the voice was referring to the submarine. And the voice had doubtless delivered The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. So it was highly likely that the call was from somebody who was at the Schmidt ranch. Highly likely. But he wasn’t going to take the chance of reporting to the police since he certainly did not want them to know what he had been doing since then.

      McQuade rubbed his chin. He considered telephoning the Stormtrooper, telling her to call off her bloody bully-boys. ‘Stay healthy.’ Christ, how juvenile. No. He got up. He felt silly doing it, but he went to the front door and made sure it was locked. He switched off the living-room light, then pulled back the curtains. All he saw was the silent, empty sand-street and the railway yards.

      He went to the kitchen, got a beer, then walked through to the bathroom. He turned on the taps.

      He went back to his office and got the topmost book off the pile. German Rule in Africa, by Evans Lewin. He took it back to the bathroom.

      He hesitated; and then locked the bathroom door. He had never done that before in this house.

      Here again coincidence came into play. If he hadn’t received that threatening telephone call he wouldn’t have read Roger Wentland’s books all night; and, had he not done so, it is doubtful whether he would have persevered in the long chance of trying to trace the man who landed on this coast forty years ago from a sunken German submarine. In the books he learnt about political battles of not so long ago, history of which he was sure most educated people of his generation had little idea; recent history with a relevance to the present to make his blood run cold.

      That night was unreal. A fog came rolling in off the Atlantic, so dense that a man would have been invisible five paces away, and the town was completely silent: it would have been a perfect night for villainy. McQuade sat in a yellow-grey pool of light, the mist rolling in his open window, jerking every time he imagined a sound, growing hourly more appalled by Germany’s colonial history. He read speeches by parliamentarians in the Reichstag denouncing their own government for maintaining German rule by the terror of the whip, calling their African territories ‘The Colonies of the Twenty-five’, referring to the twenty-five vicious lashes that were meted out for the most trivial offences – for failing to salute a white man, for failing to raise a hat, for collapsing when carrying heavy loads, for not being punctual with the master’s dinner. ‘The insensibility to the feelings of others, the disregard of native rights and the elementary principles of justice, the brutal callousness … and the total inability to conceive any system of administration that is not upheld by cruelty and by designed intimidation … stamps German administrators as on a par with the most brutal of the old Arab slave hunters’. He read a report about District Judge Rotberg in Togoland, who ‘was making a journey when one of the porters, overcome by his burden, fell to the ground. The representative of German justice knelt upon him, pummelled him in the face, and then had him flogged. The poor fellow fell again. He was again thrashed – this time with fatal effects.’ He read the verbatim report of a German judge, protesting in the Reichstag in 1906 in these words:

      The native, after being completely stripped, is strapped across a block of wood or barrel, so that he cannot move, and then … the strongest amongst the black soldiers has to wield a plaited rope, or a correspondingly thick stick, with both hands and with all his strength, and with such violence that each blow must whistle in the air. It has happened that if the blow does not whistle it has to be repeated, and, moreover, if it does not do so the soldier gets it himself.

      And he read about forced labour as a substitute for taxes, about blacks being caught ‘like so much game’ and being driven by soldiers in chained gangs to work on the road-making and railway-building and on the colonists’ farms, about women being taken as hostages if the men ran away when the soldiers came to seize them. He read:

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