Passenger to Frankfurt - Agatha Christie [50]
‘But how can–?’ He stopped.
‘I can’t tell you because I don’t know. It’s an enormous ramification. She’s behind it in one sense, supports rather curious charities, earnest philanthropists and idealists, raises innumerable grants for students and artists and writers.’
‘And yet you say it’s not–’
‘No, it’s not yet complete. It’s a great upheaval that’s being planned. It’s believed in, it’s the new heaven and the new earth. That’s what’s been promised by leaders for thousands of years. Promised by religions, promised by those who support Messiahs, promised by those who come back to teach the law, like the Buddha. Promised by politicians. The crude heaven of an easy attainment such as the Assassins believed in, and the Old Man of the Assassins promised his followers and, from their point of view, gave to them.’
‘Is she behind drugs as well?’
‘Yes. Without conviction, of course. Only a means of having people bent to her will. It’s one way, too, of destroying people. The weak ones. The ones she thinks are no good, although they had once shown promise. She’d never take drugs herself–she’s strong. But drugs destroy weak people more easily and naturally than anything else.’
‘And force? What about force? You can’t do everything by propaganda.’
‘No, of course not. Propaganda is the first stage and behind it there are vast armaments piling up. Arms that go to deprived countries and then on elsewhere. Tanks and guns and nuclear weapons that go to Africa and the South Seas and South America. In South America there’s a lot building up. Forces of young men and women drilling and training. Enormous arms dumps–means of chemical warfare–’
‘It’s a nightmare! How do you know all this, Renata?’
‘Partly because I’ve been told it; from information received, partly because I have been instrumental in proving some of it.’
‘But you. You and she?’
‘There’s always something idiotic behind all great and vast projects.’ She laughed suddenly. ‘Once, you see, she was in love with my grandfather. A foolish story. He lived in this part of the world. He had a castle a mile or two from here.’
‘Was he a man of genius?’
‘Not at all. He was just a very good sportsman. Handsome, dissolute and attractive to women. And so, because of that, she is in a sense my protectress. And I am one of her converts or slaves! I work for her. I find people for her. I carry out her commands in different parts of the world.’
‘Do you?’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘I wondered,’ said Sir Stafford Nye.
He did wonder. He looked at Renata and he thought again of the airport. He was working for Renata, he was working with Renata. She had brought him to this Schloss. Who had told her to bring him here? Big, gross Charlotte in the middle of her spider’s web? He had had a reputation, a reputation of being unsound in certain diplomatic quarters. He could be useful to these people perhaps, but useful in a small and rather humiliating way. And he thought suddenly, in a kind of fog of question marks: Renata??? I took a risk with her at Frankfurt airport. But I was right. It came off. Nothing happened to me. But all the same, he thought, who is she? What is she? I don’t know. I can’t be sure. One can’t in the world today be sure of anyone. Anyone at all. She was told perhaps to get me. To get me into the hollow of her hand, so that business at Frankfurt might have been cleverly thought out. It fitted in with my sense of risk, and it would make me sure of her. It would make me trust her.
‘Let’s canter again,’ she said. ‘We’ve walked the horses too long.’
‘I haven’t asked you what you are in all this?’
‘I take orders.’
‘From whom?’
‘There’s an opposition. There’s always an opposition. There are people who have a suspicion of what’s going on, of how the world is going to be made to change, of how with money, wealth, armaments, idealism, great trumpeting words of power that’s going to happen. There are people who say it shall not happen.