The Assignment

3

Over southern Scandinavia the clouds seemed about to break up, and when Manuel Ortega leaned against the window he could see the contours of the land quite clearly, as if on a map. Their course was almost directly west, and to the south one could faintly discern a large town, which must be Malmö. Evening began to arrive and the sunlight that lay over the countryside was already slanting and golden red.

The plane sank lower over the water, flattened out over a level square island, and swept its broad-winged shadow across a peaceful little harbor with red customs sheds, fishing boats, and a ferry. Only a few moments later the rubber tires bit into the runway and the plane taxied up toward the airport buildings at Kastrup.

Manuel Ortega let out his breath and unhooked his seat belt. He had never been able to get used to landings, however routine they seemed, and even this time the procedure had claimed all of his attention. For a few minutes everything else had been pushed to one side.

The waiting room was the same as those in all the other airports he had seen from Dublin to Santa Cruz, and he thought that flying not only robbed the journey of its pleasure but also obliterated the individuality of the countries as well as the traveler’s identity.

He drank a glass of beer in the bar and went to the men’s room to wash his hands. Then he remembered the woman who was to meet him and went to the waiting room to look for her.

He saw no one who resembled the picture he had already created in his mind, and he soon gave up. Common sense told him that the woman could look like almost anyone. Moreover, there was no guarantee that she would be waiting there.

When he returned to the bar for another glass of beer, he was detained by a middle-aged man wearing a tweed hat and a wind-breaker. The man turned back his jacket and gave him a glimpse of a press card which was fastened to the breast pocket of his blazer with a paper clip.

"You’re Manuel Ortega, aren’t you? The new Provincial Resident?"

"Yes."

"The man with the suicidal assignment?"

"Well, there’s no reason to overdramatize it."

"It didn’t go all that well last time. Are you used to assignments of this kind?"

"No. And besides, the situation is a very special one. But is the general public here really interested in our little problems?"

"Not very. But in you personally. Anyway, it might become more interesting. Would you mind answering a few questions?"

"As well as I can."

Most of the questions were foolish and irrelevant. Such as: "What did your wife say when you left?" and "How many children do you have?"

He answered in monosyllables or by shrugging his shoulders.

"Are you yourself from this province?"

"No. I was brought up in the capital, in the north of the country."

"Is your father alive?"

"No."

"What was his profession?"

"Executive in an export business."

"What kind of an education did you have?"

"A commercial education. I studied economics and law at the university as well. I worked for a while with the Ministry of Finance."

"What are your political views?"

"None."

A photographer appeared and took a few shots.

Manuel Ortega smiled with an effort and said: "May I ask you a question? Aren’t you afraid of losing your press card?"

The man looked dumfounded. Then he turned back his wind-breaker and said:

"No, not at all. Look at this. I’ve got a safety pin which goes through the case and is fastened on the inside of the pocket. My wife fixed it for me."

He returned his notebook to his pocket and added: "One more question-a little more fundamental than the others. Are you afraid?"

"No," said Manuel Ortega.

He turned toward the bar and tapped on the glass counter with a coin to show that the conversation was at an end. Out of the corner of his eye he watched the two men walk across the floor of the hall, and he saw that the photographer said something to which the other shrugged his shoulders.

He had been unpleasantly disturbed and felt ill at ease. When he tried to analyze the sheer physical sensation he found that it could be best described as pressure on his chest.

His flight was called after half an hour’s delay. It was raining, although the sky had been quite cloudless during the flight in. The concrete apron shone with pools of water, and as he had left his raincoat on board, he put his head down and half ran to the plane. He was very conscious of his limp and thought that he must look rather foolish.

Manuel Ortega sat by the window with his black briefcase lying on his knees. Everyone seemed to be in place, but the seat beside him was still empty. He peered out into the rain and busied himself with the seat belt and did not notice her until she was standing about a yard away from him. She took off her dark-green leather coat, folded it up, and put it up on the luggage rack. Then she sat down, fastened her belt, and placed a worn canvas bag on her knee. She took a pack of cigarettes and a lighter out of the bag and put them into her jacket pocket. Then she turned her head and looked at him.

"Miss Rodríguez?"

"Yes. Danica Rodríguez."

"Manuel Ortega."

She thrust her hand into her bag again and passed him an identity card in a plastic case.

While the plane was rolling toward the takeoff runway and the engines were being revved up, he studied the identity card. It was the same type as his own, issued by the department but signed by the Foreign Minister of the previous government. Everything was there, from thumbprint and details of height, age, marital status, and color of hair, to her service codes. Surname: Rodríguez Fric. First name: Danica Antonia. Born: 1931. Place of Birth: Bematanango. Marital status: Married. Height: 5 ft. 8 in. Hair: Black. Eyes: Gray.

The first part of the code he solved with ease: stenographer, correspondent, interpreter, but after that there followed a series of numbers which he did not recognize and which for a moment at least he could not figure out.

The plane had air beneath its wings when he returned the card. She took it without looking at him and it vanished into her bag. As soon as the warning lights went off, she took a cigarette out of her jacket pocket and lit it.

"Where is Bematanango?" said Manuel Ortega.

"Down there, where we’re going. Right down in the south. It hardly exists. Twenty-five or thirty mud huts at the bottom of a valley, one street, a little Catholic chapel. There was a little hospital there once, but it’s fallen down now."

He nodded.

She let the subject drop.

"I have a few things with me for you to deal with. Do you want to look at them now?"

"It can wait. We’ve plenty of time."

Manuel Ortega lets the back of his seat down and closes his eyes. A formula has once again begun to grind away in his brain: The sentence will be carried out within two weeks at the most. Then he shrugs his shoulders and thinks, without knowing it, in exactly the same words as his predecessor: Barking dogs don’t bite. Then he remembers the news item about Orestes de Larrinaga, his name misspelled. He thinks about the journalist with the neat safety pin and the abrupt question: Are you afraid? It is easier to spell Ortega, he thinks. A few seconds later he is asleep.

An hour later they are over another part of Europe. The plane is a Convair Coronado 990 jet of Swissair. It is flying at twenty-six thousand feet and the air in the cabin is dry and smells of cloth and leather. The man by the window has awakened. His mouth tastes of lead and he is sitting forward with his black briefcase on his knees and he has put his right arm across it so that no one can see the chain between his wrist and the handle.

He turns his head to the right and looks at the woman in the seat beside him for the first time. Her hair is short and black and she is wearing a red dress with blue revers. She is sitting slightly crouched with her right elbow on the foam-rubber armrest and her head resting against her hand. On her knees there is an open notebook and a page of stenciled tables. She is smoking as she reads. When she picks a flake of tobacco from her lip with her little finger, he sees that her nails are cut short and the cuticle is bitten down. She is wearing no makeup and has a thin downy shadow on her upper lip, and he thinks that most young women would have this removed. There is nothing conspicuous about her. She would vanish into anonymity on any European or American street, and if she had been sitting a few yards farther away he would quite likely never have noticed her. Presumably she had been in the waiting room at Kastrup all the time while he had been looking for her.

He thinks: Be careful, Manuel. They mean it.

Then she turns her head and looks at him with her strange dark-gray eyes. She says nothing, but smiles slightly and calmly.

He looks at the clock and turns away, leaning his forehead against the windowpane and staring into the darkness.

He notices that she rises and goes to the washroom and when she comes back down the aisle he follows her with his eyes. She walks like an animal, softly and rhythmically, with gliding steps.

It was ten past nine when they touched down in Zürich. During the long wait there Manuel Ortega drank coffee and brandy in the waiting room. She sat opposite him and read an American paperback.

At one point he said: "You have an unusual name."

"My mother was a Croat."

"Not your father?"

"No."

Another time he asked: "Have you a clear picture of the job we’ve got ahead of us?"

"Only in principle."

"I must admit I’ve not really had time to look into the matter. I didn’t get my instructions until eight o’clock this morning."

"Mine came even later."

"As soon as possible we must get the negotiations going again from where they … were broken off."

"I don’t think there was time for much negotiating before Larrinaga was shot."

When she said this she looked straight into his eyes.

"Your knowledge of the province will be extremely useful."

"I wasn’t there for very long."

At that point the conversation ceased.

As the plane bounced in the air pockets over the Alps, Manuel Ortega sat with his legs crossed and wrote. He had put his notebook with its black oilcloth cover on top of his briefcase and he was trying to write down his thoughts. This was a habit he had acquired long ago; he had often found it useful.

The woman had fallen asleep, and when he looked at her he realized how tense and nervous her face had been when she was awake. Now it was open and relaxed, and he noticed that her features were finely-drawn and pure like those of a little girl. She was breathing through her nose and her breath played in the soft hair on her upper lip.

He wrote: Am I afraid? Yes, but not rationally. I have never concerned myself with politics in their active and more extreme forms, but on the other band I have come across many other and similar situations, for example in the commercial world, and have handled difficult negotiations between obviously incompatible parties. In these cases it has always been possible to come to some agreement in a rational way. A small group of people working on the same problem sooner or later always come around to what is possible and what is absolutely out of the question. Politics prove this: in situations in which it is a question of saving everyone’s skin, compromise solutions always appear to be quite honorable. One assumption is that the parties are represented by people who are neither mentally ill nor entirely without talent. The work that lies ahead in this unhappy province should then, on my part, be accomplished with reasonable expectations of progress. The first step must be to create a state of peace and guarantees of public safety. Then it should be possible to find practical solutions which would to some extent satisfy and benefit the backward masses without the occupying (and, one supposes, the more able) class suffering any real damage. There should, of course, be found within this "upper" class technically and administratively trained people who must not be pushed out, but who must be won over to a sensible project of cooperation. I cannot believe that either side would gain anything by doing violence to me personally. They must realize this themselves. The murder of Larrinaga was surely a tragic mistake, committed by some lone fanatic. (What has, for that matter, become of the assassin? No one has said anything about that. Presumably he was caught. In which case his trial should prove productive.) Moreover, it was a provocation to give the post of Resident to an army man, even if he was retired and a national hero. A stupidity on the part of a Liberal government. What I am now embarked on is a matter of the well-being of three hundred thousand people. It is a great task. No, I am not afraid. But I shall naturally take all reasonable precautions. The best thing would be to rely entirely on the Federal Police. Without physical security one cannot work efficiently.

Manuel had filled several pages of his notebook. He closed it and put it into the outside pocket of his briefcase. Then he leaned back and was lulled to sleep in the air pockets.

At midnight they touched down at Lisbon. They still had the cold, raw chill of northern Europe in their bones, and they were taken by surprise by the night air which billowed up to meet them, heavy, hot, and suffocating.

Like a small taste of the day to come.