“It’s a nice fit,” I said.
Mbwato smiled. “They served their purpose. Rather than have us clutter up their reception rooms, your State Department officials no longer kept us waiting. Some of them were quite decent chaps, in fact. But it really made no difference. Their policy is set, their minds are closed, or at least made up. We even showed a motion-picture film to one of them, an assistant under-secretary of State for African Affairs.”
“Littman Cox?” I said.
“Yes. Littman Cox. Do you know him?”
“No. I’ve just heard of him.”
“I see. We had films flown in from Komporeen and in truth, Mr. St. Ives, they almost made me physically ill. They were films of our children as they literally starved to death before one’s eyes. One child, a seven-year-old boy, died while the camera recorded it. He died of starvation while we watched. He starved because of the Jandolaean blockade. I thought that surely this would have some impact.”
“Did it?”
Mbwato shook his head slowly from side to side and his eyes seemed to grow infinitely sad. “Your Mr. Cox said that it was terrible, but that there was nothing he could do. Then he thanked us for what he described as a ‘most instructive morning’ and excused himself to keep an important luncheon date. I must say that I found him rather ineffectual.”
“I’ve heard him called worse,” I said, remembering Myron Greene’s comment. “But you didn’t stop with an assistant under-secretary of State, did you? He has about as much influence as I do.”
“No,” Mbwato said. “We didn’t stop with Mr. Cox. We ended with him. He was at the tail of what has proved to be a rather long line. In the two months that Mr. Ulado and I have been in the States — planning the theft of the shield, if all else failed — we have seen scores of your senators and congressmen, the secretaries of your Departments of State and Agriculture and Defense. We have even spent an hour with your Vice-President, and all have been personally sympathetic, but none has been encouraging. Our one port remains blockaded. The British have provided the Jandolaeans with radar-guided antiaircraft weaponry so that it is impossible to fly in supplies except at great risk which only a few pilots are willing to take.”
Ulado had turned in the front seat and was following the conversation closely, nodding his head in sharp little jerks when he felt that Mbwato had made a telling point. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish there was something I could do. But there isn’t.”
Mbwato took a deep breath and let it out slowly. It was more than a sigh: it seemed to be the cautious physical response of a man who has something important to say, but who also knows that his anger and rage might make it come out all wrong. “There is something you can do, Mr. St. Ives. There is indeed. You can return the shield of Komporeen to us once it is in your possession. I have been authorized to raise your fee to seventy-five thousand dollars.” There was no smile this time.
I shook my head. “I can’t do that; you know I can’t.”
The four weeks of the Washington run-around seemed to bubble and then boil over. Mbwato fought it. I could see the muscles in his large face working as he tried to recover his poise, but it was no use. When he spoke it came out as a deep roar. I thought it was the pained outcry of a man to whose desperate need too many persons had already said no.
“Can’t! Can’t, you say. Goddamn it, man, that shield can save a country, a nation, a people, and you sit there and say ‘I can’t do that.’ Let me tell you about starvation, St. Ives. Let me tell you what it’s already done to more than 800,000 children in my country. During the first few days they have stomach cramps, horrible, intense pain. Then the stomach bloats while it shrinks in size. They cry for the first few days. They cry and they eat anything that will stop the horrible pain. They eat mud and grass and straw and chalk. Anything. And then they grow weaker, so weak that they can no longer cry, only whimper, and their breath begins to stink and smell like acetone because they’re burning up their fat and they have no carbohydrates to replace it. Then, after this, they sink into lethargy and at least they can sleep. That’s all they have left. Sleep and death. The proteins are gone now and their stomachs are distended and the degeneration of the kidneys and the liver sets in. If they’re lucky, they’ll catch a disease which they can’t fight and which will finish them off quickly. Even a slight infection from a cut or a scratch will do it. If they don’t contract a disease or develop an infection, they just die — slowly and painfully. How much — how much do you want, St. Ives, to keep my nation’s children alive? A hundred thousand? Is that your price? All right. I’ll increase it to one hundred thousand. It’s cheap really. With the shield we can hold out until recognition comes from France and Germany, and with the recognition will come food, and perhaps only another hundred thousand or so children will starve instead of another five hundred or seven hundred thousand. It’s only a piece of brass to you, St. Ives. To my country, it’s life itself.”
Mbwato slumped back against the seat. He looked spent and utterly weary. I turned my head and stared out the window of the car at the well-fed pedestrians. Somehow they all seemed fat, almost blubbery. I didn’t look at Mbwato when I spoke and I could feel the flush rising in my face.
“What you ask is impossible,” I said, but it didn’t seem to be me who was talking. It was some totally rational stranger. I didn’t much care for him. “You’re asking me to take a quarter of a million dollars of other people’s money,” the Rational Stranger said, “and turn it over to a gang of thieves. Then I’m to hand the shield over to you while you slip me a hundred thousand or seventy-five thousand under the table. That turns me into a thief, of course, and that’s why I’m not going to do it. Because I’d get caught and go to jail and I don’t want to go to jail. Not for you. Not for Komporeen. Not even for the kids that are starving to death. It’s just not in me — do you understand? I just can’t do it.” The Rational Stranger hurried on. “All I can suggest is that you get the shield back from whoever stole it. Get it back anyway you can. Buy it back or steal it back. I don’t care which. But I won’t help you do that either.”
I looked at Mbwato then and found that he was staring at me. There was dislike in his gaze; not hatred, just dislike. And there was also bitter contempt, enough to make the flush in my face start up again. But he was calm now and when he spoke his voice was as cold and as hard as frosted chrome. “Is it that you fear your reputation as a go-between will suffer, Mr. St. Ives? Let me assure you that you won’t suffer nearly the agony that one child in Komporeen suffers as he starves to death.”
The Cadillac had drawn up in front of my hotel, but I made no move to get out. Ulado was still turned in the front seat and his head jerked in agreement with Mbwato’s last statement.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just can’t do it. I told you why and you’ll simply have to accept it. I’m sorry.” I reached for the handle of the door, but turned and looked at Mbwato again. He was staring at me and there was a half-smile on his face. Suddenly it became a full smile, that dazzling white-on-black smile that threatened to light up the world. He reached over and slapped me on the knee. “Don’t be sorry, Mr. St. Ives. Don’t ever be sorry about anything that you lack the courage to attempt, otherwise you will go through life with a burden of guilt that eventually will crush you.”
“All right,” I said, and again reached for the handle of the door.
“We’ll be seeing more of each other,” Mbwato said.
“I don’t think so.”
“Then you are mistaken.”
“All right,” I said again.