The Comedians

'I would have to write home to my committee. I doubt …'

'Write home, Mr Smith, and say that the Government welcomes all progressive projects and will do all it can.' He rose from behind his desk to signify that the interview was at an end, and his wide toothy smile showed that he expected it to be beneficial to all parties. He even put his arm around Mr Smith's shoulders to demonstrate that they were partners in the great work of progress.

'And the site?'

'You will have a great choice of sites, Mr Smith. Perhaps close to the cathedral? Or the college? Or the theatre? Anything which does not conflict with the amenities of Duvalierville. Such a beautiful city. You will see. I will show it to you myself. Tomorrow I am very busy. So many deputations. You know how it is in a democracy. ButThursday …'

In the car Mr Smith said, 'He seemed interested all right.'

'I would be careful about that contribution.'

'It's

returnable.'

'Only when the building's completed.'

'His story about the bricks in the coffin. Do you suppose there's something in that?'

'No.'

'After all,' Mr Smith said, 'none of us have actually seen Doctor Philipot's body. One mustn't judge hastily.'

2

For some days after my visit to the embassy I heard nothing from Martha, and I was worried. I played the scene over and over again in my mind, trying to judge whether any irrevocable words had been spoken, but I remembered none. I was relieved, but angered too, by her short untender note when it came at last: Angel was better, the pain was over, she could meet me, if I wished, by the statue. I went to the rendezvous and found nothing changed. But even in the lack of change and in her tenderness, I found cause for resentment. Oh yes, she was ready to make love now in her own good time … I said, 'We can't live in a car.'

She said, 'I've been thinking a lot about that too. We shall ruin ourselves with secrecy. I will come to the Trianon - if we can avoid your guests.'

'The Smiths will be in bed by this time.'

'We'd better take both cars in case … I can say I've brought you a message from my husband. An invitation. Something of the sort. You go first. I'll give you five minutes.' I had expected a night of argument, and then suddenly the door which I had pushed against so often before flew open. I walked through and found only disappointment. I thought: She thinks quicker than I do. She knows the ropes.

The Smiths surprised me when I reached the hotel by their audible presence. There was a clatter of spoons and the clinking of tins and a gentle punctuation of voices. They had taken over the verandah tonight for their evening Yeastrel and Barmene. I had wondered sometimes what they spoke about together when they were alone. Did they re-fight old campaigns? I parked the car and stood awhile and listened before I mounted the steps. I heard Mr Smith say, 'You've put in two spoonfuls already, dear.'

'Oh no. I'm sure I haven't.'

'Just try it first and you'll see.'

From the silence that followed I gathered he was right.

'I have often wondered,' Mr Smith said, 'what happened to that poor man who was asleep in the pool. Our first night. Do you remember, dear?'

'Of course I remember. And I wish I had gone down as I wanted to at the time,' Mrs Smith said. 'I asked Joseph next day, but I think he lied to me.'

'Not lied, dear. He didn't understand.'

I walked up the stairs and they greeted me. 'Not in bed yet?' I asked rather stupidly.

'Mr Smith had to catch up with his mail.'

I wondered how I could shift them from the verandah before Martha arrived. I said, 'You mustn't be too late. The Minister is taking us to Duvalierville tomorrow. We start early.'

'That's all right,' Mr Smith said. 'My wife will stay behind. I don't want her bumped along the roads in the sun.'

'I can stand it quite as well as you can.'

'I

have to stand it, dear. For you there's no necessity. It will give you a chance to catch up on your lessons in Hugo.'

'But you need your sleep too,'I said.

'I can do with very little, Mr Brown. You remember, dear, that second night in Nashville …'

I had noticed how Nashville came back often to their common memory: perhaps because it was the most glorious of their campaigns.

'Do you know whom I saw in town today?' Mr Smith asked.

'No.'

'Mr Jones. He was coming out of the palace with a very fat man in uniform. The guard saluted. Of course I don't suppose they were saluting Mr Jones.'

'He seems to be doing pretty well,' I said. 'From prison to palace. It's almost better than log-cabin to White House.'

'I have always felt that Mr Jones has great character. I'm very glad he's prospering.'

'If it's not at someone else's expense.'

At even that hint of criticism Mr Smith's expression slammed shut (he stirred his Yeastrel nervously to and fro) and I was seriously tempted to tell him of the telegram sent to the captain of the Medea. Wasn't it possibly a flaw in character to believe so passionately in the integrity of all the world?

I was saved by the sound of a car, and a moment later Martha came up the steps.

'Why, it's that charming Mrs Pineda,' Mr Smith exclaimed with relief. He rose and busied himself arranging a seat. Martha looked at me with despair and said, 'It's late. I can't stop. I've just brought a message from my husband …' She produced an envelope from her bag and pushed it into my hand.

'Have a whisky while you are here,' I said.

'No, no. I really must get home.'

Mrs Smith remarked, a little stiffly I thought, but perhaps it was in my imagination, 'Don't hurry away, Mrs Pineda, because of us. Mr Smith and I are just off to bed. Come along, dear.'

'I have to go in any case. My son has mumps, you see.' She was explaining too much.

'Mumps?' Mrs Smith said. 'I'm so sorry to hear it, Mrs Pineda. In that case you will certainly want to be at home.'

'I'll see you to your car,' I said and got her away. We drove to the end of the drive and stopped.

'What went wrong?' Martha asked.

'You shouldn't have given me a letter addressed to you in my handwriting.'

'I wasn't prepared. It was the only one I had in my bag. She couldn't have seen.'

'She sees an awful lot. Unlike her husband.'

'I'm sorry. What shall we do?'

'We can wait until they are in bed.'

'And then creep by and see the door open suddenly and Mrs Smith …'

'They're not on my floor.'

'Then we'll meet her for certain at the corner of the stairs. I can't.'

'Another meeting spoilt,' I said.

'Darling, that first night when you returned, by the pool … I wanted so much …'

'They still have the John Barrymore suite just overhead.'

'We can get under the trees. And the lights are out now. It's dark. Even Mrs Smith can't see in the dark.'

I felt an inexplicable reluctance. I said, 'The mosquitoes …' trying to account for it.

'Damn

the

mosquitoes.'

The last time we had been together we quarrelled because of her unwillingness. Now it was my turn. I thought angrily: If her house must not be defiled, why should my house be any less sacred? And then I wondered, sacred to what? A dead body in a bathing-pool?

We left the car and went as softly as we could towards the pool. A light was on in the Barrymore suite and the shadow of a Smith passed across the mosquito-netting. We lay down in a shallow declivity under the palms like bodies given a common burial, and I remembered another death, Marcel hanging from the chandelier. Neither of us would ever die for love. We would grieve and separate and find another. We belonged to the world of comedy and not of tragedy. The fire-flies moved among the trees and lit intermittently a world in which we had no part. We - the uncoloured - were all of us too far away from home. I lay as inert as Monsieur le Ministre.

'What's the matter, darling? Are you angry about something?'

'No.'

She said humbly, 'You don't want me.'

'Not here. Not now.'

'I angered you last time. But I wanted to make it up.'

I said, 'I never told you what happened that night. Why I sent you away with Joseph.'

'I thought you were protecting me from the Smiths.'

'Doctor Philipot was lying dead in the pool, just over there. You see that patch of moonlight …'

'Killed?'

'He had cut his own throat. To escape the Tontons Macoute.'

She moved a little away. 'I understand. Oh God, it's terrible, the things that happen. They are like nightmares.'

'Only the nightmares are real in this place. More real than Mr Smith and his vegetarian centre. More real than ourselves.'

We lay quietly side by side in our grave, and I loved her as I had never done in the Peugeot or the bedroom above Hamit's store. We approached one another by words more nearly than we had ever approached by touch. She said, 'I envy you and Luis. You believe in something. You have explanations!

'Have I? Do you think I still believe?'

She said, 'My father believed too.' (It was the first time she had ever mentioned him to me.)

'In what?' I asked.

'In the God of the Reformation,' she said. 'He was a Lutheran. A pious Lutheran.'

'He was lucky to believe in anything.'

'And people in Germany too cut their throats to escape his justice.'

'Yes. The situation isn't abnormal. It belongs to human life. Cruelty's like a searchlight. It sweeps from one spot to another. We only escape it for a time. We are trying to hide now under the palm trees.'

'Instead of doing anything?'

'Instead of doing anything.'

She said, 'I almost prefer my father.'

'No.'

'You know about him?'

'Your husband told me.'

'At least he wasn't a diplomat.'

'Or a hotel-keeper who depends on the tourist trade?'

'There's nothing wrong in that.'

'A capitalist waiting for the dollars to return.'

'You speak like a Communist.'

'Sometimes I wish I were.'

'But you are Catholics, you and Luis …'

'Yes, we were both brought up by the Jesuits,' I said. 'They taught us to reason, so at least we know the kind of part we play now.'

'Now?'

We lay there, holding each other, for a long while. Sometimes I wonder whether it was not the happiest moment we ever knew together. For the first time we had trusted each other with something more than a caress. 3

We drove out next day to Duvalierville, Mr Smith and I and the Minister with a Tonton Macoute for a driver; perhaps he was there to protect us, perhaps to observe us, perhaps just to help us pass the road-blocks, for this was the road to the north along which, as most people in the city hoped, the tanks from Santo Domingo would one day come. I wondered what good the three shabby militiamen at the road-block would be then.

Hundreds of women were flocking into the capital for market, riding side-saddle on their bourriques; they stared at the fields on either side and paid us no attention: we didn't exist in their world. Buses went by, painted in stripes of red and yellow and blue. There might be little food in the land, but there was always colour. The deep blue shadows sat permanently on the mountain slopes, the sea was peacock-green. Green was everywhere in all its varieties, the poison-bottle green of sisal slashed with black, the pale green of banana trees beginning to turn yellow at the tip to match the sand at the edge of the flat green sea. The land was stormy with colour. A big American car went by with reckless speed on the bad road and covered us with dust, and only the dust lacked colour. The Minister brought out a bright scarlet handkerchief and dabbed his eyes.

' Salauds!' he exclaimed.

Mr Smith put his mouth close to my ear and whispered, 'Did you see who those people were?'

'No.'

'I do believe one of them was Mr Jones. I may have been mistaken. They went very fast.'

'It seems unlikely,' I said.

On the flat shoddy plain between the hills and the sea a few white one-room boxes had been constructed, a cement play-ground, and an immense cockpit which among the small houses looked almost as impressive as the Coliseum. They stood together in a bowl of dust which, when we left the car, whirled around us in the wind of the approaching thunderstorm: by night it would have turned to mud again. I wondered, in the wilderness of cement, where the notional bricks had come from for Doctor Philipot's coffin.

'Is that a Greek theatre?' Mr Smith asked with interest.

'No. It's where they kill cocks.'

His mouth twitched, but he put the pain away from him: to feel pain was a kind of criticism. He said, 'I don't see many folk around here.'

The Secretary for Social Welfare said proudly, 'There were several hundred on this very spot. Living in miserable mud huts. We had to clear the ground. It was quite a major operation.'

'Where did they go?'

'I suppose some went into town. Some into the hills. To relatives.'

'Will they come back when the city's built?'

'Oh well, you know, we are planning for a better class of people here.'

Beyond the cockpit there were four houses built with tilted wings like wrecked butterflies; they resembled some of the houses of Brasilia seen through the wrong end of a telescope.

'And who will live in these?' Mr Smith asked.

'These are for tourists.'

'Tourists?' Mr Smith asked.

Even the sea had receded out of sight; there was nothing anywhere but the great cockpit, the cement field, the dust, the road, and the stony hillside. Outside one of the white boxes a negro with white hair sat on a hard chair under a sign that showed him to be a justice of the peace. He was the only human being in sight - he must have had a lot of influence to be installed so soon. There was no sign of men working, though a bulldozer stood on the cement playground with one wheel detached.

'The visitors who come to see Duvalierville.' He led us nearer to one of the houses: it was no different from the other boxes except for the useless wings which I could imagine dropping off in the hard rains. 'Now one of these - they are designed by our finest architect - might do for your centre. You wouldn't have to begin then on a bare site.'

'I had thought of something larger.'

'You could take over the whole group.'

'What would happen to your tourists then?' I asked.

'We would build some more over there,' he said, waving his hand at the dry insignificant plain.

'It seems a bit out of the world,' Mr Smith said gently.

'We are going to house five thousand people here. For a start.'

'Where will they work?'

'We shall bring industries to them. The Government believes in decentralization.'

'And the cathedral?'

'It will be over there, beyond the bulldozer.'

Around the corner of the great cockpit came seesawing one other human being. The justice of the peace was not after all the sole inhabitant of the new city. It already had its beggar too. He must have been sleeping in the sun, until he was woken by our voices. Perhaps he thought that the architect's dream had come true and there really were tourists in Duvalierville. He had very long arms and no legs and he moved imperceptibly nearer like a rocking-horse. Then he saw our driver and his dark glasses and his gun, and he stopped. Instead he set up a crooning murmur, and from under his torn cobweb of a shirt he drew a small wooden statuette which he held out towards us.

I said, 'You have your beggars then.'

'He is no beggar,' the Minister explained, 'he is an artist.'

He spoke to the Tonton Macoute who went and fetched the statuette; it was the figure of a half-naked girl indistinguishable from dozens in the Syrian stores that waited for gullible tourists who never came now.

'Let me make you a present,' the Minister said, handing the statuette to Mr Smith who took it with embarrassment. 'An example of Haitian art.'

'I must pay the man,' Mr Smith said.

'No need. The Government looks after him.' The Minister began to lead the way back to the car, his hand on Mr Smith's elbow to guide him over the broken ground. The beggar rocked to and fro, making sounds of melancholy and desperation. No words were distinguishable; I think he had no roof to his mouth.

'What is he saying?' Mr Smith asked.

The Minister ignored the question, 'Later,' he said, 'we will have a proper art centre here where the artists can live and relax and get their inspiration from nature. Haitian art is famous. Our pictures are collected by many Americans, and there are examples in the Museum of Modern Art in New York

Mr Smith said, 'I don't care what you say. I'm going to pay that man.'

He shook off the protecting hand of the Secretary for Social Welfare and ran back towards the cripple. He pulled out a bunch of dollar bills and held them out. The cripple looked at him with incredulity and fear. Our driver made a motion to interfere, but I blocked his way. Mr Smith bent down and pressed the money into the cripple's hand. The cripple with an enormous effort began to rock back towards the cockpit. Perhaps he had a hole there in which he could hide the money … There was an expression of rage and disgust on the driver's face as though he had been robbed. I think he contemplated drawing his gun (his fingers went to his belt) and putting an end to at least one artist, but Mr Smith was coming back along his line of fire. 'He's made a sale all right,' Mr Smith said with a satisfied smile. The justice of the peace had risen to watch the transaction outside his box beyond the playground - standing he was an enormous man. He put his hand over his eyes to see better in the hard sunlight. We took our places in the car, and there was a momentary silence. Then the Secretary said, 'Where would you like to go now?'

'Home,' said Mr Smith laconically.

'I could show you the site we have chosen for the college.

'I've seen enough,' Mr Smith said. 'I'd rather go home if you don't mind.'

I looked back. The justice of the peace was running fast on long loping legs across the cement playground, and the cripple was rocking back with desperation towards the cockpit; he reminded me of a sand-crab scuttling to its hole. He had only another twenty yards to go, but he hadn't a chance. When I looked round a minute later Duvalierville was hidden by the dust-cloud of our car. I said nothing to Mr Smith, for he was smiling happily at a good action accomplished; I think he was already rehearsing the story he would tell to Mrs Smith, a story which would enable her to share his sense of happiness.

After we had gone a few miles the Minister said, 'Of course the tourist site is partly the responsibility of the Secretary for Public Works, and the Secretary for Tourism would also have to be consulted, but he is a personal friend of mine. If you cared to make the necessary arrangements with me, I would see that the others were satisfied.'

'Satisfied?' Mr Smith asked. He was not wholly guileless; though he had been unshaken by the beggars in the Post Office, I believe the city of Duvalierville had opened his eyes.

'I mean,' the Minister said - he produced a box of cigars from the back of the car, 'you will not want to be involved in endless discussions. I will represent your views to my colleagues. Take a couple of cigars, Professor.'

'No, thank you. I don't smoke.' The driver did. He saw what was going on in his mirror, and leaning back he abstracted two cigars. One he lit and one he put in his shirt-pocket.

'My views?' Mr Smith said. 'If you want them, you shall have them. I don't see your Duvalierville being exactly a centre of progress. It's too remote.'

'You would prefer a site in the capital?'

'I'm beginning to reconsider the whole project,' Mr Smith said in a voice so final that even the Minister relapsed into uneasy silence. 4

And yet Mr Smith lingered on. Perhaps when he went over the events of the day with Mrs Smith, the aid he had given the cripple re-established his sense of hope, hope that he could do something for the human race. Perhaps she strengthened his faith and fought his doubts (she was more a fighter than he). Already by the time we arrived at the Hotel Trianon, after more than an hour of gloomy silence, he had begun to revise his severest criticisms. The thought that he might possibly have been unfair haunted him. He had said good-bye with distant courtesy to the Secretary for Social Welfare and thanked him 'for a very interesting excursion', but suddenly on the steps of the verandah he halted and turned to me. He said, 'That word "satisfied" - I guess I took him up too hard. It made me sore, but then English isn't his native tongue. Maybe he didn't intend …'

'He intended it all right, but he hadn't meant to say it so openly to you.'

'I wasn't very favourably impressed by that project, I'll allow, but you know even Brasilia … and they have all the technicians they need … it's something to want a thing even if you fail.'

'I don't think they are quite ripe here for vegetarianism.'

'I was thinking the same, but perhaps …'

'Perhaps you must have enough cash to be carnivorous first. He gave me a quick look of reproach and said, 'I'll talk it all over with Mrs Smith.' Then he left me alone - at least I thought I was alone until I entered my office and found the British chargé there. Joseph had furnished him, I saw, with his special rum punch. 'A lovely colour,' the chargé said, holding it up to the light when I entered.

'It's the grenadine.'

'I'm going on leave,' he said, 'next week. And so I'm saying my adieux.'

'You won't be sorry to be out of here.'

'Oh, it's interesting,' he said, 'interesting. There are worse places.'

'The Congo perhaps? But people die quicker there.'

'At least I'm glad,' the chargé said, 'that I'm not leaving a fellowcountryman in jail. Mr Smith's intervention proved successful.'

'I wonder if it was Mr Smith. I got the impression Jones would have got out anyway, on his own steam.'

'I wish I knew what makes the steam. I won't pretend to you I haven't had inquiries …'

'Like Mr Smith he carried a letter of introduction, but like Mr Smith I suspect it was to the wrong man. That was why they arrested him, I imagine, when they took it off him at the port. I have a suspicion his letter was to one of the army officers.'

'He came to see me the night before last,' the chargé said. 'I wasn't expecting him. He was very late. I was just going to bed.'

'I haven't seen him since the night he was released. I think his friend Captain Concasseur doesn't regard me as sufficiently reliable. I was there, you see, when Concasseur broke up Philipot's funeral.'

'Jones gave me the impression he was engaged on some sort of project for the Government.'

'Where's he staying?'

'They've put him up at the Villa Créole. You know the Government took the place over? They lodged the Polish mission there after the Americans left. The only guests they've had up till now. And the Poles departed very quickly. Jones has a car and a driver. Of course the driver may be his gaoler too. He's a Tonton Macoute. You haven't any idea what the project could be?'

'Not a clue. He ought to be careful. To sup with the Baron you need a very long spoon.'

'That's more or less what I told him. But I think he knows well enough

- he's not a stupid man. Were you aware that he had been in Leopoldville?'

'I think he did say once …'

'It came out quite accidentally. He was there at the time of Lumumba. I checked up with London. Apparently he was helped out of Leopoldville by our consul. That doesn't mean much - a lot of people have been helped out of the Congo. The consul gave him his ticket to London, but he got off in Brussels. That's nothing against him either, of course … I think what he really wanted with me was to check up whether the British Embassy had the right of asylum. In case of difficulties. I had to tell him no. No legal right.'

'Is he in trouble already?'

'No. But he's sort of surveying his ground. Like Robinson Crusoe climbing the highest tree. But I didn't much fancy his Man Friday.'

'Who do you mean?'

'His driver. A man as fat as Gracia with a lot of gold teeth. I think he must collect gold teeth. He probably has good opportunities. I wish your friend Magiot would take that big gold molar out and put it in his safe. A gold tooth always attracts greed.' He drank the last of his rum. This was a noonday for visitors. I had got into my bathing-trunks and dived into the pool only a little before the next comer arrived. I found I had to conquer some repugnance at bathing there, and the repugnance returned when I saw young Philipot looking down at me from the margin of the pool, standing just above the spot at the deep end where his uncle had bled to death. I had been swimming underwater, and I had not heard his approach. I was startled when his voice came through the skin of water. 'Monsieur Brown.'

'Why, Philipot, I didn't know you were here.'

'I did what you advised, Monsieur Brown. I went and saw Jones. I had quite forgotten our conversation. 'Why?'

'Surely you remember - the Bren?'

Perhaps I had not taken him seriously enough. I had thought of the Bren as a new poetic symbol of his, like the pylons in the poems of my youth: after all those poets never joined the Electricity Board.

'He's staying up at the Villa Créole with Captain Concasseur. I waited last night until I saw Concasseur go out, but there was still Jones's driver sitting at the foot of the stairs. The one with the gold teeth. The man who ruined Joseph.'

'He did that? How do you know?'

'Some of us keep a record. We have a lot of names on it now. My uncle, I am ashamed to say, was on the same list. Because of the pump in the Rue Desaix.'

'I don't think it was altogether his fault.'

'Nor do I. Now I have persuaded them his name belongs to the other list. The list of victims.'

'I hope you keep your files in a very safe place.'

'At least they have copies of them across the border!

'How did you get to see Jones?'

'I climbed into the kitchen through a window and then I went up the service stairs. I knocked on his door. I pretended to have a message from Concasseur. He was in bed.'

'He must have been a bit startled.'

'Monsieur Brown, do you know what those two are up to?'

'No. Do you?'

'I am not sure. I think so, but I am not sure.'

'What did you say to him?'

'I asked him to help us. I told him the raiders across the border could do nothing to shift the Doctor. They kill a few Tontons Macoute and then they get killed themselves. They have no training. They have no Brens. I told him how seven men once captured the army barracks because they had tommyguns. "Why are you telling this to me?" he asked. "You are not an agent provocateur, are you?" I said no; I said if we hadn't been prudent so long, Papa Doc wouldn't be there in the palace. Then Jones said, "I've seen the President." '

'Jones has seen Papa Doc?' I asked incredulously.

'He told me so, and I believe him. He's up to something, he and Captain Concasseur. He told me Papa Doc was as interested in weapons and training as I was. "The army's gone," Jones said, "not that it was any good to anyone, and what the Tontons Macoute have left of the American arms is all rusting away for want of proper care. So you see it's no good coming to me - unless you have a better proposition than the President's named already."'

'But he didn't say what proposition?'

'I tried to see the papers on his desk - they looked like the plans of a building, but he said to me, "Leave those alone. They mean a lot to me." Then he offered me a drink to show he had nothing personally against me. He said to me, "One has to earn a living the best way one can. What do you do?" I

said, "I used to write verses. Now I want a Bren gun. And training. Training too." He asked me, "Are there many of you?" and I told him that numbers were not so important. If the seven men had had seven Brens …'

I said, 'The Brens are not magical, Philipot. Sometimes they stick. Just as a silver bullet can miss. You are going back to Voodoo, Philipot.'

'And why not? Perhaps the gods from Dahomey are what we need now.'

'You are a Catholic. You believe in reason.'

'The Voodooists are Catholics too, and we don't live in a world of reason. Perhaps only Ogoun Ferraille can teach us to fight.'

'Was that all Jones said to you?'

'No. He said, "Come on. Have a Scotch, old man," but I wouldn't take the drink. I went down the front stairs, so that the driver could see me. I wanted him to see me.'

'Not very safe for you if they question Jones.'

'Without a Bren, the only weapon I have is distrust. I thought that if they began to distrust Jones something might happen …' There were tears in his voice; a poet's tears for a lost world or a child's tears for the Bren that no one would give him? I swam away to the shallow end that I mightn't see him weep. My lost world was the naked girl in the pool, and what was his? I remembered the evening when he read his derivative verses to me and to Petit Pierre and to the young beat-novelist who wanted to be the Kerouac of Haiti; there was an ageing painter too who drove a camion during the day and worked at night with his calloused fingers at the American art centre, where they gave him paints and canvases. Propped against the verandah was his latest picture - cows in a field, but not the kind of cows they sold south of Piccadilly, and a pig with his head stuck through a hoop, among green banana leaves darkened by the perpetual storm coming down the mountain. It had something which my art student failed to find. I rejoined him by the end of the pool when I had given him time enough to check the tears. 'Do you remember,' I asked him, 'that young man who wrote a novel called La Route du Sud?'

'He is in San Francisco where he always wanted to be. He escaped after the massacre in Jacmel.'

'I was thinking of the evening when you read to us …'

'I don't regret those days. They were not real. The tourists and the dancing and the man dressed up as Baron Samedi. Baron Samedi is not an entertainment for visitors.'

'They brought money to the island.'

'Who saw the money? At least Papa Doc has taught us to live without money.'

'Come to dinner on Saturday, Philipot, and meet the only tourists here.'

'No, I have something to do that night.'

'Be careful at any rate. I wish you'd start writing poems again.'

He flashed white teeth at me in a malicious smile. 'The poem about Haiti has already been written once and for all. You know it, Monsieur Brown,' and he began to recite to me,

'Quelle est cette île triste et no Ire ? - C'est Cythére,

Nous dit-on, un pays fameux dans les chansons,

Eldorado banal de tous les vieux garçons.

Regardez,

après

tout,

c'est une pauvre terre.'

A door opened overhead and one of les vieux garçons stepped out on to the balcony of the John Barrymore suite. Mr Smith picked his bathingpants off the rail and looked down into the garden.' Mr Brown,' he called.

'Yes?'

'I've been talking to Mrs Smith. She thinks perhaps I was a bit hasty in my judgement. She thinks we ought to give the Minister the benefit of the doubt.'

'Yes?'

'So we shall stay on a while and try again.'

5

I had asked Doctor Magiot to dine that Saturday in order to meet the Smiths. I wanted the Smiths to know that all Haitians were not either politicians or torturers. Besides I had not seen the doctor since the night when we disposed of the body and I did not wish him to feel I had kept away from cowardice. He arrived just after the electricity had been cut, and Joseph was on the point of lighting the oil lamps. He turned the wick of one too high and the flames shooting up the chimney made the shadow of Doctor Magiot unroll down the verandah like a black carpet. He and the Smiths greeted each other with old-fashioned courtesy, and it seemed for a moment that we were back in the nineteenth century, when oil lamps shone softer than electric globes, and our passions - or so one believed - were gentler too.

'I am an admirer,' Doctor Magiot said, 'of Mr Truman for some of his internal policies, but you will forgive me if I cannot pretend to be his supporter over the Korean war. I am honoured in any case to meet his opponent.'

'Not a very important opponent,' Mr Smith said. 'It was not specifically on the Korean war we differed - though it goes without saying I'm against all wars, whatever excuses politicians may find for them. It was for the sake of vegetarianism I ran against him.'

'I had not realized,' Doctor Magiot said, 'that vegetarianism was an issue in the election.'

'I'm afraid it wasn't, except in one state.'

'We polled ten thousand votes,' Mrs Smith said. 'My husband's name was printed on the ballot.'

She opened her bag and after a little search among the Kleenex pulled out a ballot-paper. Like most Europeans I knew little of the American electoral system: I had a vague idea that there were two or three candidates, at the most, and that all voters everywhere voted for their presidential choice. I hadn't realized that on the ballot-papers of most states the name of the presidential candidate was not even shown, only the names of the presidential electors for whom the votes were actually cast. In the State of Wisconsin, however, the name of Mr Smith was clearly printed under a big black square containing an emblem, which, I think, must have represented a cabbage. I was surprised at the number of parties: even the socialists were split in two, and there were Liberal and Conservative candidates for minor offices. I could see from Doctor Magiot's expression that he was as lost as myself. If an English election is less complex than an American, a Haitian is simpler than either. In Haiti, if one put any value on one's skin, one stayed at home, even during the relatively peaceful days of Doctor Duvalier's predecessor.

We handed the ballot-paper from one to the other under the eyes of Mrs Smith who watched it as closely as a hundred-dollar note.

'Vegetarianism is an interesting idea,' Doctor Magiot said. 'I am not sure it is suited to all mammals. I doubt for example whether a lion would flourish on green things.'

'Mrs Smith once had a vegetarian bulldog,' Mr Smith said with pride.

'Of course it took some training.'

'It took authority,' Mrs Smith said and her eyes challenged Doctor Magiot to deny it.

I told him of the vegetarian centre and of our journey to Duvalierville.

'I had a patient from Duvalierville once,' Doctor Magiot said. 'He had been working on the site - I think it was on the cockpit, and he was sacked because one of the Tontons Macoute there wanted the job for a member of his family. My patient made a very foolish mistake. He appealed to the Tonton on the grounds of his poverty, and the Tonton shot him once through the stomach and once through the thigh. I saved his life, but he is a paralysed beggar by the Post Office now. I wouldn't settle in Duvalierville if I were you. It is not the right ambiance for vegetarianism.'

'Is there no law in this country?' Mrs Smith demanded.

'The Tontons Macoute are the only law. The words, you know, mean bogey-men.'

'Is there no religion?' Mr Smith asked in his turn,

'Oh yes, we are a very religious people. The State religion is the Catholic Church - the Archbishop's in exile, the Papal Nuncio is in Rome and the President is excommunicated. The popular religion is Voodoo which has been taxed almost out of existence. The President was a strong Voodooist once, but since he has been excommunicated he can take no part - you have to be a Catholic communicant to take part in Voodoo.'

'But it's heathenism,' Mrs Smith said.

'Who am I to say? I believe no more in the Christian God than I do in the gods of Dahomey. The Voodooists believe in both.'

'Then what do you believe in, doctor?'

'I believe in certain economic laws.'

'Religion is the opium of the people?' I quoted flippantly at him.

'I don't know where Marx wrote that,' Doctor Magiot said with disapproval, 'if he ever did, but since you were born a Catholic, as I was, you should be pleased to read in Das Kapital what Marx has to say of the Reformation. He approved of the monasteries in that state of society. Religion can be an excellent means of therapy for many states of mind - melancholy, despair, cowardice. Opium, remember, is used in medicine. I'm not against opium. Certainly I am not against Voodoo. How lonely my people would be with Papa Doc as the only power in the land!

'But it's paganism,' Mrs Smith persisted.

'The right therapy for Haitians. The American Marines tried to destroy Voodoo. The Jesuits tried. But the celebrations go on yet when a man can be found rich enough to pay the priest and the tax. I wouldn't advise you to go.'

'She's not easily frightened,' Mr Smith replied. 'You should have seen her in Nashville.'

'I don't question her courage, but there are features that for a vegetarian …'

Mrs Smith asked sternly, 'Are you a Communist, Doctor Magiot?'

It was a question I had wanted to ask many times and I wondered how he would answer.

'I believe, madame, in the future of Communism.'

'I asked if you were a Communist.'

'My dear,' Mr Smith said, 'we have no right …' He tried to distract her.

'Let me give you a little more Yeastrel.'

'To be a Communist here, madame, is illegal. But since American aid stopped we have been allowed to study Communism. Communist propaganda is forbidden, but the works of Marx and Lenin are not - a fine distinction. So I may say I believe in the future of Communism; that is a philosophical outlook.'

I had drunk too much. I said, 'As young Philipot believes in the future of the Bren gun.'

Doctor Magiot said, 'You cannot stop martyrs. You can only try to reduce their number. If I had known a Christian in the days of Nero I would have tried to save him from the lions. I would have said, "Go on living with your belief, don't die with it."

'Surely very timid advice, doctor,' Mrs Smith said.

'I cannot agree, Mrs Smith. In the western hemisphere, in Haiti and elsewhere, we live under the shadow of your great and prosperous country. Much courage and patience is needed to keep one's head. I admire the Cubans, but I wish I could believe in their heads - and in their final victory.'

CHAPTER II

1

I HAD not told them at dinner that a rich man had been found and a Voodoo ceremony was to take place that night somewhere on the mountains above Kenscoff. It was Joseph's secret and he had only confided in me because he needed a lift in my car. If I had refused I am sure he would have tried to drag his damaged limb the whole way. The hour was past midnight; we drove some twelve kilometres and when we left the car on the road behind Kenscoff we could hear the drums beating very gently like a labouring pulse. It was as though the hot night lay there out of breath. Ahead was a thatched hut open to the winds, a flicker of candles, a splash of white. This was the first and the last ceremony I was to see. During the two years of prosperity, I had watched, as a matter of duty, the Voodoo dances performed for tourists. To me who had been born a Catholic they seemed as distasteful as the ceremony of the Eucharist would have seemed performed as a ballet on Broadway. I only went now because I owed it to Joseph, and it is not the Voodoo ceremony I remember with most vividness but the face of Philipot, on the opposite side of the tonnelle, paler and younger than the negro faces around him; with his eyes closed, he listened to the drums which were beaten softly, clandestinely, insistently, by a choir of girls in white. Between us stood the pole of the temple, stuck up, like an aerial, to catch the passage of the gods. A whip hung there in memory of yesterday's slavery, and, a new legal requirement, a cabinet-photograph of Papa Doc, a reminder of today's. I remembered how young Philipot had said to me in reply to my accusation, 'The gods of Dahomey may be what we need.' Governments had failed him, I had failed him, Jones had failed him - he had no Bren gun; he was here, listening to the drums, waiting, for strength, for courage, for a decision. On the earth-floor, around a small brazier, a design had been drawn in ashes, the summons to a god. Was it a summons to Legba, the gay seducer of women, to sweet Erzulie, the virgin of purity and love, to Ogoun Ferraille, the patron of warriors, or to Baron Samedi in his black clothes and his black Tonton glasses, hungry for the dead? The priest knew, and perhaps the man who paid for the ceremony, and I suppose the initiates could read the hieroglyphics of ash.

The ceremony went on for hours before the climax; it was the face of Philipot that kept me awake through the chanting and the drum-beats. Among the prayers were little oases of familiarity, 'Libera nos a malo' ,

'Agnus dei' , holy banners swayed past inscribed to the saints, 'Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie' . Once I looked at the dial of my watch and saw in pale phosphorescence the hands approaching three. The priest came in from his inner room swinging a censer, but the censer which he swung in our faces was a trussed cock - the small stupid eyes peered into my eyes and the banner of St Lucy swayed after it. When he had completed the circle of the tonnelle the houngan put the head of the cock in his mouth and crunched it cleanly off; the wings continued to flap while the head lay on the dirt-floor like part of a broken toy. Then he bent down and squeezed the neck like a tube of tooth-paste and added the rusty colour of blood to the ash-grey patterns on the floor. When I looked to see how the delicate Philipot was accepting the religion of his people, I saw he was no longer there. I would have gone too, but I was tied to Joseph and Joseph was tied to the ceremony in the hut.

The drummers became more reckless as the night advanced. They no longer tried to muffle the beats. Something was happening in the inner room where the banners were stacked around an altar, and where a cross stood below a poker-work prayer, and presently a procession emerged. They were carrying what I thought at first was a corpse wrapped in a white sheet for burial - the head was covered and a black arm dangled free. The priest knelt beside the fire and blew the embers up into flames. They laid the corpse beside him, and he took the free arm and held it in the flames. As the body flinched I realized it was alive. Perhaps the neophyte screamed - I couldn't hear because of the drums and the chanting women, but I could smell the burning of the skin. The body was carried out and another took its place, and then another. The heat of the flames beat on my face as the night wind blew through the hut. The last body was surely a child's - it was less than three feet long, and on this occasion the houngan held the hand a few inches above the flame - he was not a cruel man. When I looked again across the tonnelle Philipot was back in his place, and I remembered that one arm which had been held in the flames appeared as light as a mulatto's. I told myself it could not possibly have been Philipot's. Philipot's poems had been published in an elegant limited edition, bound in vellum. He had been educated like myself by the Jesuits; he had attended the Sorbonne; I remembered how he had quoted the lines of Baudelaire to me at the swihmmming-pool. If Philipot was one of the initiates what a triumph that would represent for Papa Doc as he dragged his country down. The flames lit the photograph nailed on the pillar, the heavy spectacles, the eyes staring at the ground as though at a body ready for dissection. Once he had been a country doctor struggling successfully against typhoid; he had been a founder of the Ethnological Society. With my Jesuit training I could quote Latin as well as the houngan who was now praying for gods of Dahomey to arrive. 'Corruptio optimi. . .'

It wasn't sweet Erzulie who came to us that night, although for a moment her spirit seemed to enter the hut and touch a woman who sat near Philipot, for she rose and put her hands over her face and swayed gently this way, gently that. The priest went to her and tore away her hands. She had an expression of great sweetness in the candlelight, but the houngan would have none of her. Erzulie was not wanted. We had not assembled tonight to meet the goddess of love. He put his hands on her shoulders and thrust her back on her bench. He had scarcely time to turn before Joseph was in the ring.

Joseph moved in a circle, the pupils of his eyes turned up so high that I saw only the whites, his hands held out as though he were begging. He lurched upon his wounded hip and seemed on the point of falling. The people around me leant forward with grave attention as though they were watching for some sign to prove that the god was really there. The drums were silent: the singing stopped: only the houngan spoke in some language older than Creole, perhaps older than Latin, and Joseph paused and listened, staring up the wooden pillar, past the whip and Papa Doc's face, into the thatch where a rat moved, crackling the straw.

Then

the

houngan went to Joseph. He carried a red scarf, and he flung it across Joseph's shoulders. Ogoun Ferraille had been recognized. Someone came forward with a machete and clamped it in Joseph's wooden hand as though he were a statue waiting completion.

The statue began to move. It slowly raised an arm, then swung the machete in a wide arc so that everyone ducked for fear it would fly across the tonnelle. Joseph began to run, the machete flashing and cutting; those in the front row scrambled back, so that for a moment there was panic. Joseph was no longer Joseph. His face ran with sweat, his eyes looked blind or drunk as he stabbed and swung, and where was his injury now? He ran without a stumble. Once he paused and seized a bottle which had been abandoned on the dirt-floor when the people fled. He drank a long draught and then ran on.

I saw Philipot isolated on his bench: all those around him had fallen back. He leant forward watching Joseph, and Joseph ran across the floor towards him, swinging the machete. He took Philipot's hair in his hand, and I thought he was going to strike him down with the machete. Then he forced Philipot's head back and poured the spirit down his throat. Philipot's mouth belched liquid like a drain-pipe. The bottle fell between them, Joseph revolved twice on the floor and fell. The drums beat, the girls chanted, Ogoun Ferraille had come and gone.

Philipot was one of the three men who helped carry Joseph into the room behind the tonnelle, but as for me I'd had enough. I went out into the hot night and drew a long breath of air, which smelt of wood-fire and rain. I told myself that I hadn't left the Jesuits to be the victim of an African god. The holy banners moved in the tonnelle, the interminable repetitions went on, I returned to my car, where I sat waiting for Joseph to come back. If he could move so agilely in the hut, he could find his way without my help. After a while the rain came. I closed the windows and sat in stifling heat, while the rain fell like an extinguisher over the tonnelle. The noise of the rain silenced the drums, and I felt as lonely as a man in a strange hotel after a friend's funeral. I kept a flask of whisky in the car against emergencies and I took a pull from it, and presently I saw the mourners going by, grey shapes in the black rain.

Nobody stopped at the car: they divided and flowed past on either side. Once I thought I heard an engine start - Philipot must have brought his car, but the rain hid it. I should never have gone to this funeral, I should never have come to this country, I was a stranger. My mother had taken a black lover, she had been involved, but somewhere years ago I had forgotten how to be involved in anything. Somehow somewhere I had lost completely the capacity to be concerned. Once I looked out and thought I saw Philipot beckoning to me through the glass. It was an illusion. Presently when Joseph had not appeared I started the car and drove home alone. It was nearly four o'clock in the morning and too late to sleep, so that I was wide-awake at six when the Tontons Macoute drove up to the verandah steps and shouted to me to come down.

2

Captain Concasseur was the leader of the party and he held me at gun-point on the verandah while his men searched the kitchen and the servants'

quarters. I could hear the bang of cupboards and doors and the screech of smashed glass. 'What are you looking for?' I asked.

He lay on a wicker chaise longue with the gun in his lap pointing at me and at the hard upright chair on which I sat. The sun had not yet risen, but he wore his dark glasses all the same. I wondered whether he could see clearly enough to shoot, but I preferred to take no risks. He made no reply to my question. Why should he? The sky reddened over his shoulder and the palm trees turned black and distinct. I was sitting on a straight dining-room chair and the mosquitoes bit my ankles.

'Or is it someone you're looking for? We have no refugee's here. Your men are making enough noise to wake the dead. And I have guests,' I added with reasonable pride.

Captain Concasseur changed the position of his gun as he changed the position of his legs - perhaps he suffered from rheumatism. The gun had been pointing at my stomach; now it pointed at my chest. He yawned, his head went back, and I thought he had fallen asleep, but I couldn't see his eyes through his dark glasses. I made a slight movement to rise and he spoke immediately, 'Asseyez-yous.'

'I'm stiff. I want to stretch.' The gun was now pointing at my head. I said, 'What are you and Jones up to?' It was a rhetorical question, and I was surprised when he answered.

'What do you know about Colonel Jones?'

'Very little,' I said. I noticed that Jones had risen in rank. Then came an extra loud crash from the kitchen, and I wondered whether they were dismantling the range. Captain Concasseur said, 'Philipot was here.' I kept silent, not knowing whether he meant the dead uncle or the live nephew. He said, 'Before coming here he went to see Colonel Jones. What did he want with Colonel Jones?'

'I know nothing. Haven't you asked Jones? He's a friend of yours.'

'We use white men when we have to. We don't trust them. Where is Joseph?'

'I don't know.'

'Why isn't he here?'

'I don't know.'

'You drove out with him last night.'

'Yes.'

'You returned alone.'

'Yes.'

'You had a rendezvous with the rebels.'

'You're talking nonsense. Nonsense.'

'I could shoot you very easily. It would be a pleasure for me. You would have been resisting arrest.'

'I don't doubt it. You must have had plenty of practice.'

I was frightened, but I was even more frightened of showing my fear - that would unleash him. Like a savage dog he was safer while he barked.

'Why would you have arrested me?' I asked. 'The embassy would want to know that.'

'At four o'clock this, morning a police station was attacked. One man was killed.'

'A

policeman?'

'Yes.'

'Good.'

He said, 'Do not pretend that you have courage. You're very frightened. Look at your hand.' (I had wiped it once or twice against my pyjama trousers to get rid of the moisture.)

I gave a bad imitation of a laugh. 'The night's hot. My conscience is quite clear. I was in bed by four o'clock. What happened to the other policemen? I suppose they ran away.'

'Yes. We shall deal with them in due course. They left their arms behind, when they ran away. That was a bad mistake.'

The Tontons Macoute came streaming out of the kitchen-quarters. It was odd to be surrounded by men in sun-glasses in the murk of the early dawn. Captain Concasseur made a sign to one of them and he hit me on the mouth cutting my lip. 'Resisting arrest,' Captain Concasseur said. 'There has to be a struggle. Then, if we are polite, we will show your body to the chargé. What is his name? I forget names easily.'

I could feel my nerve going. Courage even in the brave sleeps before breakfast and I was never brave. I found it needed an effort to stay upright in my chair, for I had a horrible desire to fling myself at Captain Concasseur's feet. I knew the move would be fatal. One didn't think twice about shooting trash.

'I will tell you what happened,' Captain Concasseur said. 'The policeman on duty was strangled. He was probably asleep. A man with a limp took his gun, a métis took his revolver, they kicked open the door where the others were sleeping …'

'And they let them get away?'

'They would have shot my men. Sometimes they spare the police.'

'There must be a lot of men with limps in Port-au-Prince.'

'Then where is Joseph? He should be sleeping here. Someone recognized Philipot, and he is not at his home. When did you last see him?

Where?'

He signalled to the same man. This time the man kicked me hard on the shin, while another snatched the chair from under me, so that I found myself where I didn't wish to be, at Captain Concasseur's feet. His shoes were a horrible red-brown. I knew

that I had to get upright again or I would be finished, but my leg hurt me and I wasn't sure I could stand. I was in an absurd position sitting there on the floor as though at an informal

party. Everyone was waiting for me to do my turn. Perhaps when I stood up they would kick me down again. That might be their idea of a party joke. I remembered Joseph's broken

hip. It was safer to stay where I was. But I stood up. My right leg gave a shoot of pain. I leant back for support against the balustrade of the verandah. Captain Concasseur changed the position of his gun to cover me, but without any haste. He had an attitude of great comfort in the chaise longue. Indeed he

looked as though he owned the place. Perhaps that was his intention. I said, 'What were you saying? Oh yes … I went last night with Joseph to a Voodoo ceremony. Philipot was there. But we didn't speak. I left before it was over.'

'Why?'

'I

was

disgusted.'

'You were disgusted by the religion of the Haitian people?'

'Every man to his taste.'

The men in sun-glasses came a little nearer. The glasses were turned towards Captain Concasseur. If only I could have seen one pair of eyes and the expression … I was daunted by the anonymity. Captain Concasseur said,

'You are so frightened of me that you have pissed in your pantalon.' I realized that what he said was true. I could feel the wet and the warmth. I was dripping humiliatingly on the boards. He had got what he wanted, and I would have done better to have stayed on the floor at his feet.

'Hit him again,' Captain Concasseur told the man.

'Dégoûtant,' a voice said, 'tout à falt dégoûtant.'

I was as astonished as they were. The American accent with which the words were spoken had to me all the glow and vigour of Mrs Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of the Republic. The grapes of wrath were trampled out in them and there was a flash of the terrible swift sword. They stopped my opponent with his fist raised to strike.

Mrs Smith had appeared at the opposite end of the verandah behind Captain Concasseur, and he had to lose his attitude of lazy detachment in order to see who it was who spoke, so that the gun no longer covered me and I moved out of reach of the fist. Mrs Smith was dressed in a kind of old colonial nightgown and her hair was done up in metal rollers which gave her an oddly cubist air. She stood there firmly in the dawn light and let them have it in sharp fragmented phrases torn out of Hugo's Self-Taught. She told them of the bruit horrible which had roused her and her husband from their sleep; she accused them of lâcheté in striking an unarmed man; she demanded their warrant to be here at all - warrant and again warrant: but here Hugo's vocabulary failed her - 'montrez-moi votre warrant'; 'votre warrant où est-il?' The mysterious word menaced them more than the words they understood.

Captain Concasseur began to speak, 'Madame,' and she turned on him the focus of her fierce short-sighted eyes. 'You,' she said, 'oh, yes. I've seen you before. You are the woman-striker.' Hugo's had no word for that - only English could serve her indignation now. She advanced on him, all her hardwon vocabulary forgotten. 'How dare you come here flourishing a revolver?

Give it to me,' and she held out her hand for it as though he were a child with a catapult. Captain Concasseur may not have understood her English, but he understood very well the gesture. As though he were guarding a precious object from an angry mother, he buttoned the gun back inside the holster. 'Get out of that chair, you black scum. Stand up when you speak to me.' She added, in defence of all her past, as though this echo of Nashville racialism had burnt her tongue, 'You are a disgrace to your colour.'

'Who is this woman?' Captain Concasseur asked me weakly.

'The wife of the Presidential Candidate. You have met her before.' I think for the first time he remembered the scene at Philipot's funeral. He had lost his grip: his men stared at him through their dark glasses waiting for orders which didn't come.

Mrs Smith had recovered her grasp on Hugo's vocabulary. How she must have worked all that long morning when Mr Smith and I visited Duvalierville. She said in her atrocious accent, 'You have searched. You have not found. You can go.' Except for the absence of certain nouns the sentences would have been suitable ones for the second lesson. Captain Concasseur hesitated. Too ambitiously she attempted both the subjunctive and the future tense and got them wrong, but he recognized very well what she intended to say, 'If you don't go, I will fetch my husband.' He capitulated. He led his men out and soon they were going down the drive more noisily than they had come, laughing hollowly in an attempt to heal their wounded pride.

'Who

was

that?'

'One of Jones's new friends,' I said.

'I shall speak to Mr Jones about it at the first opportunity. You can't touch pitch without … Your mouth is bleeding. You had better come upstairs and I will wash it in Listerine. Mr Smith and I never travel anywhere without a bottle of Listerine.'

3

'Does it hurt?' Martha asked me.

'Not much,' I said, 'now.' I could not remember a time when we had been so alone and so at peace. The long hours of the afternoon faded behind the mosquito-netting over the bedroom window. When I look back on that afternoon it seems to me we had been granted the distant sight of a promised land - we had come to the edge of a desert: the milk and honey awaited us: our spies went by carrying their burden of grapes. To what false gods did we turn then? What else could we have done other than we did?

Never before had Martha come of her own will, unpressed, to the Trianon. We had never slept before in my bed. It was

for half an hour only, but the sleep was deeper than any I have known since. I woke flinching from her mouth with my wounded gum. I said, 'I received a letter of apology from Jones. He told Concasseur that he took it as a personal insult that a

friend of his should be treated like that. He threatened to break off relations.'

'What

relations?'

'God knows. He asked me to have a drink with him tonight. At ten. I shan't go.'

We could hardly see each other now in the dusk. Every time she spoke I thought it was to say that she could stay no longer. Luis was back in South America reporting to his Foreign Office, but there was always Angel. I knew that she had invited some friends of his for tea, but tea doesn't last very long. The Smiths were out - another meeting with the Secretary for Social Welfare. This time he had asked them to come alone, and Mrs Smith had taken the Hugo Self-Taught with her in case interpretations were required. Now I thought I heard a door slam, and I said to Martha, 'I think the Smiths are back.'

'I don't care about the Smiths,' she said. She put her hand on my chest and said, 'Oh, I'm tired.'

'A good tired or a bad tired?'

'A bad tired.'

'What's wrong?' It was a stupid question in our position, but I wanted to hear the words I often spoke, on her own tongue.

'I'm tired of not being alone. I'm tired of people. I'm tired of Angel.'

I said in amazement, 'Angel?'

'Today I gave him a whole box of new puzzles. Enough to occupy him for a week. I wish I could have that week with you.'

'A

week?'

'I know. It's not long enough, is it? This isn't an adventure any more.'

'It stopped being that when I was in New York.'

'Yes.'

Somewhere from far away in the town came the sound of shots.

'Somebody's being killed,' I said.

'Haven't you heard?' she asked.

Two more shots came.

'I mean about the executions?'

'No. Petit Pierre hasn't been up for days. Joseph has disappeared. I'm cut off from news.'

'As a reprisal for the attack on the police station, they've taken two men from the prison to shoot them in the cemetery.'

'In the dark?'

'It's more impressive. They've rigged up arc-lights with a television camera. All the schoolchildren have to attend. Orders from Papa Doc.'

'Then you'd better wait for the audience to disperse,' I said.

'Yes. That's all it means to us. We aren't concerned.'

'No. We wouldn't make very good rebels, you and I.'

'I don't imagine Joseph will either. With that damaged hip.'

'Or Philipot without his Bren. I wonder if he's got Baudelaire in his breast-pocket to stop the bullets.'

"Don't be too hard on them,' she said, 'because I'm German and the Germans did nothing.' She moved her hand as she spoke and my desire came back, so that I didn't bother to ask her what she meant. Not with Luis safely away in South America and Angel occupied with his puzzles and the Smiths out of sight and hearing. I could imagine the taste of milk on her breasts and the taste of honey between her thighs and I could imagine for a moment that I was entering the promised land, but the spasm of hope was soon over, and she spoke as though her thoughts had not for a moment left their furrow. She said, 'Haven't the French a word for going into the street?'

'My, mother must have gone into the streets I suppose, unless it was her lover who gave her the Resistance medal.'

'My father went into the streets too in 1930, but he became a warcriminal. Action is dangerous, isn't it?'

'Yes, we've learnt from their example.'

It was time to dress and go downstairs. Every stair down was a stair nearer Port-au-Prince. The Smiths' door stood open and Mrs Smith looked up as we went by. Mr Smith sat with his hat in his hands, and she had laid her hand on the back of his neck. After all, they were lovers too.

'Well,' I said as we walked to the car, 'they've seen us. Afraid?'

'No. Relieved,' Martha said.

I went back into the hotel and Mrs Smith called to me from the first floor. I wondered whether, like one of the old inhabitants of Salem, I was to be denounced for adultery. Would Martha have to wear a scarlet letter? I have no idea why, but I had assumed them to be puritan because they were vegetarian. Yet it was not the passion of love which was caused by acidity, and they were both enemies of hate. I went reluctantly upstairs and found them in the same attitude. Mrs Smith said with an odd note of defiance as though she had read my thoughts and resented them, 'I would have liked to have said good evening to Mrs Pineda.'

I put it as blackly as I knew how, 'She had to hurry home to her child,'

and Mrs Smith did not so much as wince. She said, 'She is a woman I would have liked to know better.' Why had I assumed it was only for the coloured races that she felt charity? Was it my guilt which had deciphered disapproval on her face the other night? Or was she the kind of woman who, when she had once tended a man, forgave him everything? I had been shriven perhaps by the Listerine. She took her hand from her husband's neck to lay it on his hair.

I said, 'It's not too late. She'll come back another day.'

'We go home tomoffow,' she said. 'Mr Smith despairs.'

'Of a vegetarian centre?'

'Of everything here.'

He looked up and there were tears in the old pale eyes. What an absurd fancy it had been for him to pose as a politician. He said, 'You heard the shots?'

'Yes.'

'We passed the children on the way from school.' He said, 'I had never conceived … when we were freedom-riders, Mrs Smith and I …'

'One can't condemn a colour, dear,' she said.

'I know. I know.'

'What happened with the Minister?'

'The meeting was a short one. He wanted to attend tho ceremony.'

'Ceremony?'

'At

the

cemetery.'

'Does he know you are leaving?'

'Oh yes, I had made my decision before - that ceremony. The Minister had been thinking the affair over and he had come to the conclusion that I was not after all a sucker. The

alternative was that I was as crooked as himself. I had come here to get money, not to spend it, so he showed me a method - it only meant splitting three ways, instead of two, with someone in charge of public works. As I understood it I would have to pay for some materials but not for many materials, and they would really be bought out of our share of the pickings.'

'And how were they going to get the pickings?'

'The Government would guarantee wages. We would hire the labour at a much lower wage, and at the end of a month the labourers would be dismissed. Then we'd keep the project idle for two months and afterwards engage a fresh lot of workers. Of course the guaranteed wages during the idle months would go into our own pockets - apart from what we paid out for materials and the commission on these would keep the head of the Public Works Ministry - I think it was the Public Works Ministry - happy. He was very proud of the scheme. He pointed out that in the end there might even possibly be a vegetarian centre.'

'The scheme sounds full of holes to me.'

'I didn't let him go into the details. I think he would have patched up all the holes as they occurred - patched them up out of the pickings.'

Mrs Smith said with sorrowful tenderness, 'Mr Smith came here with such high hopes.'

'You too, dear.'

'One lives and learns,' Mrs Smith said. 'It is not the end.'

'Learning comes easier to the young. Forgive me, Mr Brown, if I sound kind of dejected, but we didn't want you to misunderstand our leaving your hotel. You have made us very welcome. We have been very happy here under your roof.'

'I've been glad to have you. Are you catching the Medea? She's due back tomorrow.'

'No. We won't wait for her. I've written out our address for you at home. We are going to fly to Santo Domingo tomorrow and we'll stay there a few days at least - Mrs Smith wants to see Columbus's tomb. I'm expecting some vegetarian literature to arrive here on the next boat. If you will be kind enough to redirect it …'

'I'm sorry about the centre. But, you know, Mr Smith, it would never have done.'

'I realize that now. Perhaps we seem rather comic figures to you, Mr Brown.'

'Not comic,' I said with sincerity, 'heroic.'

'Oh, we're not made at all in that mould. I'll say good night to you, Mr Brown, now, if you'll excuse me. I'm feeling kind of exhausted this evening.'

'It was very hot and damp in the city,' Mrs Smith explained, and she touched his hair again as though she were touching some tissue of great value.

CHAPTER III

1

NEXT day I saw the Smiths off at the airport. There was no sign of Petit Pierre, and yet surely the departure of a Presidential Candidate rated one paragraph in his column, even though he would have had to omit the final macabre scene which took place outside the Post Office. Mr Smith asked me to stop the car in the centre of the square, and I thought he intended to take a photograph. Instead he got out, carrying his wife's handbag, and the beggars approached from all directions - there was a low babble of half-articulated phrases, and I saw a policeman run down the steps of the Post Office. Mr Smith opened the handbag and began to scatter notes - gourdes and dollars indiscriminately. 'For God's sake,' I said. One or two of the beggars gave high unnerving screams: I saw Hamit standing amazed at the door of his shop. The red light of evening turned the pools and mud the colour of laterite. The last money was scattered, and the police began to close in on their prey. Men with two legs kicked down men with one, men with two arms grasped those who were armless by their torsos and threw them to the ground. As I hustled Mr Smith back into my car, I saw Jones. He sat in a car behind his Tonton driver and he looked bewildered, worried, for once in his life lost. Mr Smith said, 'Well, my dear, I guess they won't squander that any worse than I would have done.'

I saw the Smiths on to their plane, dined alone, and then drove to the Villa Créole - I was curious to see Jones.

The chauffeur was slumped at the bottom of the stairs. He watched me with suspicion, but he let me pass. A voice from the landing above cried angrily, 'La volonté du diable,' and a negro, who flashed a gold ring under the light, went by me.

Jones greeted me as though I were an old school friend whom he had not seen for years, and with a hint of patronage because our relative positions had changed since those days. 'Come in, old man. I'm glad to see you. I expected you the other night. Forgive the confusion. Try that chair - you'll find it pretty snug.' The chair was certainly warm: it still held the heat of the last angry occupant. Three packs of cards were scattered over the table: the air was blue with cigar-smoke, and an ash-tray had toppled over, leaving some butts on the floor.

'Who's your friend?' I asked.

'Someone in the Treasury Department. A bad loser.'

'Gin-rummy?'

'He shouldn't have raised the stakes half-way through, when he was well ahead. But you don't argue with someone in the Treasury, do you? In any case at the end the old ace of spades turned up and it was over in a flash. I'm two thousand to the good. But he paid me in gourdes, not dollars. What's your poison?'

'Have you a whisky?'

'I have next to everything, old man. You wouldn't fancy a dry Martini?'

I would have preferred a whisky, but he seemed anxious to show off the riches of his store, so, 'If it's very dry,' I said.

'Ten to one, old man.'

He unlocked the cupboard and drew out a leather travelling-case - a half-bottle of gin, a half-bottle of vermouth, four metal beakers, a shaker. It was an elegant expensive set, and he laid it reverently on the tumbled table as though he were an auctioneer showing a prized antique. I couldn't help commenting on it. 'Asprey's?' I asked.

'As good as,' he replied quickly and began to mix the cocktails.

'It must feel a little odd finding itself here,' I said, 'so far from W.I.'

'It's used to much stranger places,' he said. 'I had it with me in Burma during the war.'

'It's come out remarkably unscathed.'

'I had it furbished up again.'

He turned away from me to find a lime, and I took a closer look at the case. Asprey's trade mark was visible inside the lid. He came back with the lime and saw me looking.

'I'm caught, old man. It is from Asprey's. I didn't want to seem pretentious, that's all. As a matter of fact there's quite a history around that case.'

'Tell

me.'

'Try the drink first and see if it's to your taste.'

'It's

fine.'

'I got that case as a result of a bet with some other chaps in the outfit. The brigadier had one like it, and I couldn't help envying him. I used to dream of a case like that on patrol - the shaker clinking with the ice. I had two young chaps out with me from London - never been much further than Bond Street before. Well-lined, both of them. They teased me about the brigadier's cocktail-set. Once when we got pretty near to the end of our water they challenged me to find a stream before night. If I did I could have a cocktail-case like that next time anyone went home. I don't know whether I've told you that I can smell water …'

'Was that the time you lost the whole platoon?' I asked. He looked up at me over his glass and I'm sure he read my thoughts. 'That was another occasion,' he said and changed the subject abruptly.

'How are Smith and Mrs Smith?'

'You saw what happened by the Post Office.'

'Yes.'

'It was the last instalment of American aid. They left this evening on the plane. They sent their regards to you.'

'I wish I'd seen more of them,' Jones said. 'There's something about him …' He added surprisingly, 'He reminded me of my father. Not physically, I mean, but … well, a sort of goodness.'

'Yes, I know what you mean. I don't remember my father.'

'To tell you the truth my memory's a bit dim too.'

'Let's say the father we would have liked to have.'

'That's it, old man, exactly. Don't let your Martini get warm. I always felt that Mr Smith and I had a bit in common. Horses out of the same stable.'

I listened with astonishment. What could a saint possibly have in common with a rogue? Jones gently closed the cocktail-case, and then, taking a cloth from the table, he began to stroke the leather, as tenderly as Mrs Smith had smoothed her husband's hair, and I thought: innocence perhaps.

'I'm sorry,' Jones said, 'about that affair with Concasseur. I told him if he touched a friend of mine again I was finished with the lot of them.'

'Be careful what you say. They're dangerous.'

'I have no fear of them. They need me too much, old man. Did you know young Philipot came to see me?'

'Yes.'

'Just

imagme

what

I could have done for him. They realize that.'

'Have you a Bren for sale.'

'I've got myself, old man. That's better than a Bren. All the rebels need is a man who knows the way around. Think of it - on a clear day, you can see Port-au-Prince from the Dominican border.'

'The Dominicans will never march.'

'They are not needed. Give me fifty Haitians with a month's training and Papa Doc would be on a plane to Kingston. I wasn't in Burma for nothing. I've thought a lot about it. I've studied the map. Those raids near Cap Haïtien were a folly the way they were done. I know exactly where I'd put in my feint and where I'd strike!

'Why didn't you go with Philipot?'

'I was tempted, oh I was tempted all right, but I've got a deal on here which only happens once in a man's life. It means a fortune if I can get away with it.'

'Where

to?'

'Where

to?'

'Get away where to?'

He laughed happily. 'Anywhere in the world, old man. Once before I nearly brought it off in Stanleyville, but I was dealing with a lot of savages and they got suspicious.'

'And they aren't suspicious here?'

'They are educated. You can always get round the educated.'

While he poured out two more Martinis I was wondering what form his swindle took. One thing at least was certain - he was living better than he had done in his prison cell. He had even put on a little weight. I asked him directly, 'What are you up to, Jones?'

'Laying the foundations of a fortune, old man. Why not come in with me? It's not a long-term project. Any moment now I'll have the bird by the tail, but I could do with a partner. That's what I wanted to talk to you about, but you never came. There's a quarter of a million dollars in it. Perhaps more if we keep our nerve.'

'And the partner's job?'

'To complete the deal I have to do a spot of travelling, and I want a man I can rely on to watch things here while I'm away.'

'You don't trust Concasseur?'

'I don't trust one of them. It's not a question of colour, but think of it, old man, a quarter of a million pure profit. I can't take any chances. I'd have to deduct a little of it for expenses - ten thousand dollars would probably cover that, and then we'd divide the rest. The hotel's not doing too well, is it?

And think what you could do with your share. There are islands in the Caribbean just waiting for development - a beach, an hotel, an air-strip. You'd end a millionaire, old man.'

I suppose it was my Jesuit education which reminded me of that moment when, from a high mountain above the desert, the devil displayed all the kingdoms of the world. I wondered whether the devil really had them to offer or whether it was all a gigantic bluff. I looked around the room in the Villa Créole for evidence of the thrones and powers. There was a recordplayer which Jones must have bought at Hamit's - he would hardly have carried it all the way from America in the Medea, for it was a cheap enough machine. Beside it rather suitably lay a disc of Edith Piaf, ' Je ne regrette rien,' and there was little other sign of personal possession, little sign that he had been enabled to draw much of his wealth in advance for the goods which he had to deliver - what goods?

'Well,

old

man?'

'You haven't given me a very clear idea of what you want me to do.'

'I can't let you into it very well, can I, until I know you are with me?'

'How can I tell whether I'm with you if I know nothing?'

He looked at me across the scattered cards; the lucky ace of spades lay face upwards. 'It comes down to a matter of trust, doesn't it?'

'It certainly does.'

'If only we'd been in the same outfit during the war, old man. Under those conditions you learn to trust …'

I said, 'What division were you with?' and he replied without the slightest hesitation '4 Corps'. He even elaborated a little, '77 Brigade'. He had the answers right. I checked them that night at the Trianon in a history which some client had left behind of the Burma campaign, but even then it occurred to my suspicious mind that it was possible he possessed the same book and had drawn his data from it. But I was unjust to him. He really had been in Imphal.

'What hope have you got for your hotel?'

'Very

little.'

'You couldn't find a purchaser if you tried. Any day now you'll be dispossessed. They'll say you are not making proper use of your property and take it over.'

'It

might

happen.'

'What is it, old man? Woman trouble?'

I suppose my eyes gave me away.

'You're too old for fidelity, old man. Think of what you can get for

$150,000.' (I noticed that the reward had increased.) 'You can go further than the Caribbean. Do you know Bora-Bora? There's nothing there but an airstrip and a rest-house, but with a little capital … and the girls, you've never seen such girls, the mothers had them off the Americans twenty years ago. Mère Catherine can't show you better.'

'What

will

you do with your money?'

I would never have thought that Jones's flat brown eyes like copper coins had the capacity to dream, yet they moistened now with some kind of emotion. 'Old man, I've one particular spot in mind not far from here: a coral-reef and white sand, real white sand that you could build castles with, and behind are green slopes as smooth as real turf and God-made natural hazards - a perfect spot for a golf-course. I'll build a club-house, bungalowsuites with showers, it will be more exclusive than any other golf-club in the Caribbean. Do you know what I mean to call it? … Sahib House.'

'You don't suggest I'm to be your partner there.'

'One can't have partners in a dream, old man. Conflicts would arise. I've got the place planned as I want it to the last detail' (I wondered whether those were the blueprints Philipot had seen). 'I've gone an awfully long way to get there, but it's in sight now - I can even see exactly where to put the 18th hole.'

'You're keen on golf?'

'I don't play myself. I've somehow never had the time. It's the idea that appeals to me. I'm going to get a first-class social hostess. Someone goodlooking with background. I did think at the beginning of having bunny-girls, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized they would be out of place in a golf-club of class.'

'Were you planning all this in Stanleyville?'

'I've been planning it for twenty years, old man, and now the moment's nearly here. Have another Martini?'

'No, I must be going.'

'I'm going to have a long bar made of coral called the Desert Island Bar. With a barman trained at the Ritz. I'm going to have chairs made out of driftwood - of course we'll make them comfortable with cushions. Parakeets on the curtains, and a big brass telescope in the window focused on the 18th hole.'

'We'll talk about it again.'

'I've never talked about it to anyone before - anyone who could understand what I have in mind, that is. I used to talk to my boy in Stanleyville when I was thinking out the details, but the poor little bugger hadn't got a clue.'

'Thanks for the Martinis.'

'I'm glad you liked the case.' When I looked back he had taken off the cloth and was polishing it again. He called after me, 'We'll have another talk soon. If only you'd agree in principle …'

2

I had no wish to return to the Trianon which was empty now of guests, and I had received no word from Martha all day, so I was drawn back to the casino as the nearest equivalent of a home, but it was a casino much changed since the night when I had met Martha. There were no tourists, and few residents of Port-au-Prince cared to venture out after dark. Only one roulette table was functioning and only one player was seated there - an Italian engineer whom I knew slightly called Luigi; he worked with the erratic electricity-plant. No private company could have kept a casino running under these conditions, and the Government had taken it over; now every night they made a loss, but it was a loss in gourdes and the Government could always print more.

The croupier sat with a scowl on his face - perhaps he wondered where his pay would come from. Even with two zeros the chances in favour of the bank were too fine. With so few players one or two losses en plein and the bank would be down for the night.

'Winning?' I asked Luigi.

'I'm a hundred and fifty gourdes up,' he said. 'I haven't the heart to leave the poor devil,' but on the next run he made another fifteen.

'Do you remember this place in the old days?'

'No. I wasn't here then.'

They had tried to economize on the lighting, so we played in a cavernous obscurity. I played without interest, placing my tokens on the first column, and won also. The face of the croupier grew darker. 'I've got a good mind,' Luigi said, 'to put all my winnings on red and give him a chance to recuperate.'

'But you might win,' I said.

'There's always the bar. They must make a good cut out of the drinks.'

We bought whiskies - it seemed too cruel to order rum, though whisky was hardly wise for me on top of the dry Martinis. Already I began to feel …

'Why, if it isn't Mr Jones,' a voice called from the end of the salle, and I turned to see the purser of the Medea advancing on me with a damp and welcoming hand.

'You've got the name wrong,' I said, 'I'm Brown, not Jones.'

'Breaking the bank?' he asked jovially.

'It doesn't need much breaking. I thought you never ventured into town as far as this.'

'I don't follow my own advice,' he said and winked. 'I went first to Mère Catherine's, but the girl has got family trouble - she won't be there till tomorrow.'

'Nobody else you fancied?'

'I always like to eat off the same plate. How are Mr and Mrs Smith?'

'They flew out today. Disappointed.'

'Ah, he should have come with us. Any trouble with the exit-visa?'

'We got it through in three hours. I've never seen the immigration department and the police work faster. They must have wanted to be rid of him.'

'Political

trouble?'

'I think the Ministry for Social Welfare found his ideas upsetting.'

We had a few more drinks and watched Luigi lose a few gourdes for conscience sake.

'How's the captain?'

'He longs to be off. He cannot endure this place. His temper will not be right until we are at sea again.'

'And the man with the tin hat? Did you leave him safely in Santo Domingo?'

I felt an odd nostalgia when I talked of my fellow passengers, perhaps because it was the last time that I had experienced a sense of security - the last time too I had possessed any real hope; I had been returning to Martha and I had believed then everything might be changed.

'The tin hat?'

'Don't you remember? He recited at our concert.'

'Oh yes, poor fellow. We left him safely behind all right in the cemetery. He had a heart-attack before we landed.'

We gave Baxter the tribute of two seconds' silence, while the ball bounced and chinked for Luigi alone. He won a few more gourdes and rose with a gesture of despair.

'And Fernandez?' I asked. 'The black man who wept.'

'He proved invaluable,' the purser said. 'He knew all the ropes. He took charge of everything. You see, it turned out that he was an undertaker. The only thing which worried him was Mr Baxter's faith. In the end he put him in the Protestant cemetery because he found in his pocket a calendar about the future. Old something …'

'Old Moore's Almanack?'

'That was it.'

'I wonder what the entry was for Baxter.'

'I looked to see. It was not very personal. A hurricane was going to cause great damage. There would be a severe sickness in the Royal Family, and the price of steel shares would rise several points.'

'Let's go,' I said. 'An empty casino is worse than an empty tomb.' Luigi was already cashing in his chips, and I did the same. The night outside was heavy with the usual storm.

'Have you got a taxi?' I asked the purser.

'No. He wanted to be paid off.'

'They don't like to stay around at night. I'll drive you to the ship.'

The lights across the playground flashed on and off and on. ' Je suis le drapeau Haïtien, Uni et Indivisible. François Duvalier.' (The 'f' had fused, so it read ' rançois Duvalier'.) We passed Columbus's statue and came to the port and the Medea. A light shone down along the gangplank upon a policeman standing at the foot. There was a light shining too on to the bridge from the captain's cabin. I looked up at the deck where I had sat watching the passengers reel by me on their morning rounds. In port (she was the only ship there) the Medea seemed oddly dwarfed. It was the empty sea which gave the little boat her pride and magnitude. Our footsteps ground upon coal-dust and the taste of grit lodged between our teeth.

'Come on board for a last drink.'

'No. If I did I might want to stay. What would you do then?'

'The captain would ask to see your exit-visa.'

'That fellow would ask first,' I said, looking at the policeman who stood at the foot of the gangplank.

'Oh, he is a good friend of mine.'

The purser mimicked the action of a man drinking and pointed towards me. The policeman grinned back. 'You see he has no objection!

'All the same,' I said, 'I won't come up. I've mixed too many drinks tonight.' But yet I lingered at the plank.

'And Mr Jones,' the purser asked, 'what has become of Mr Jones?'

'He's doing well.'

'I liked him,' the purser said. For a man of such ambiguity, whom we all trusted so little, Jones had a knack of winning friendship.

'He told me he was Libra - a birthday in October, so I looked him up.'

'In Old Moore? What did you find?'

'An artistic temperament. Ambitious. Successful in literary enterprises. But as for the future - I could find only an important Press conference by General de Gaulle and electrical storms in South Wales.'

'He tells me he's about to make a fortune of a quarter of a million dollars.'

'A

literary

enterprise?'

'Hardly that. He invited me to be his partner.'

'So you will be rich too?'

'No. I refused. I used to have my dreams of making a fortune. Perhaps I'll be able to tell you one day about the travelling art-gallery, it was the most successful dream I ever had, but I had to get out quick, and so I came here and found my hotel. Do you think I'd give up that security?'

'You think the hotel security?'

'It's the nearest I've ever come to it.'

'When Mr Jones is a rich man you will be sorry you did not give up that kind of security.'

'Perhaps he'll lend me enough to carry on with my hotel until the tourists return.'

'Yes. I think he is a generous man in his way. He gave me a very large tip, but it was in Congo currency and the bank

wouldn't change it. We shall be here till tomorrow night at least. Bring Mr Jones to see us.'

The lightning began to play over the slopes of Pétionville: sometimes a blade quivered in the ground long enough to carve out of the dark the shape of a palm or the corner of a roof. The air was full of coming rain, and the low sound reminded me of voices chanting the responses at school. We said good night.

PART III

CHAPTER I

1

I FOUND it hard to sleep. The lightning flashed on and off as regular as Papa Doc's publicity in the park, and only when the rain ceased for a while did some air filter through the mosquito-screens. I thought quite a lot about Jones's promised fortune. If I could really share it, would Martha leave her husband? But it was not money which held her, it was Angel. He would be happy enough, I imagined myself persuading her, if I pensioned him off with a weekly issue of puzzles and bourbon biscuits. I fell asleep and dreamt I was a boy kneeling at the communion-rail in the college chapel in Monte Carlo. The priest came down the row and placed in each mouth a bourbon biscuit, but when he came to me he passed me by. The communicants on either side came and went away, but I knelt obstinately on. Again the priest distributed the biscuits and left me out. I stood up then and walked sullenly away down the aisle which had become an immense aviary where parrots stood in ranks chained to their crosses. Someone called out sharply behind me, 'Brown, Brown,' but I was not certain whether that was my name or not, for I didn't turn. 'Brown.' This time I awoke and a voice came up to me from the veranda below my room.

I got out of bed and went to the window, but I could see nothing through the mosquito-screen. Footsteps shuffled below and a voice further off called urgently, 'Brown,' under another window. I could hardly hear it through the holy mutter of the rain. I found my torch and went downstairs. In my office I picked up the only weapon handy, the brass coffin marked R.I.P. Then I unlocked the side-door and shone my torch to show that I was there. The light fell on the path leading to the bathing-pool. Presently round the corner of the house and into the circle of the light came Jones. He was drenched with rain and his face was smeared with dirt. He carried a parcel under his coat to guard it from the rain. He said, 'Turn out the light. Let me in quick.' He followed me into the office and took the parcel from under his wet jacket. It was the travelling cocktail-case. He laid it gently on my desk like a pet animal and stroked it down. He said,

'Everything has gone. Finished. Capot in three columns.'

I put out a hand to turn on the light. 'Don't do that,' he said, 'they might see the light from the road.'

'They can't,' I said and pressed the switch.

'Old man, I'd rather if you don't mind … I feel better in the dark.' He turned out the light again. 'What's that in your hand, old man?'

'A

coffin.'

He was breathing heavily - I could smell the gin. He said, 'I've got to get out quick. Somehow.'

'What

happened?'

'They've begun investigating. At midnight I had a call from Concasseur - I didn't even know the bloody telephone worked. It gave me a shock ringing like that suddenly by my ear. It had never rung before.'

'I suppose they fixed up the telephone when they put the Poles in. You're living in a government rest-house for V.I.P.s.'

'Very important pooves we called them in Imphal,' Jones said with the ghost of a laugh.

'I could give you a drink if you let me put on the light.'

'There isn't time, old man. I've got to get out. Concasseur was speaking from Miami. They've sent him to check up. He wasn't suspicious yet, only puzzled. But in the morning when they find I've skipped …'

'Skipped

where?'

'Yes, that's the question, old man, that's the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.'

'The

Medea's in port.'

'The very place …'

'I'll have to put on some clothes.'

He followed me like a dog, leaving wet patches in his wake. I missed Mrs Smith's help and advice, for she had a high opinion of Jones. While I dressed - he had to allow me a little light for that - he ambled nervously from wall to wall, well away from the window.

'I don't know what your game was,' I said, 'but surely with a quarter of a million dollars at stake you could be certain that one day they'd investigate.'

'Oh, I'd thought that one out. I'd have gone over to Miami with the investigator.'

'But they'd have kept you here.'

'Not if I'd left a partner behind. I hadn't realized time was so short - I thought I had a week or more at least - or I'd have tried to persuade you earlier.'

I stopped with one leg in my trousers and asked him with astonishment, 'You're telling me just like that, that I was to be the fall guy?'

'No, no, old man, you exaggerate. You can be dead sure I'd have tipped you off in time for you to get into the British Embassy. If it was ever necessary. But it wouldn't have been. The investigator would have cabled O.K. and taken his cut, and you would have joined us afterwards.'

'How big a cut had you planned for him? I know it's only of academic interest now.'

'I'd allowed for all that. What I offered you, old man, was net not gross. All yours.'

'If I survived.'

'One always survives, old man.' As he dried, his confidence returned.

'I've had my setbacks before. I was just as neax the grand coup - and the end

- in Stanleyville.'

'If your plan had anything to do with arms,' I said, 'you've made a bad mistake. They've been stung before …'

'How do you mean, stung?'

'There was a man here last year who arranged half a million dollars'

worth of arms for them, fully paid up in Miami. But the American authorities were tipped off, the arms were seized. The dollars, of course, stayed in the agent's pocket. Nobody knew how many real arms there had ever been. They wouldn't be taken for the same ride twice. You should have done more homework before you came here.'

'My scheme was not exactly that. In fact there were no arms at all. I don't look like a man with that much capital, do I?'

'Where did that introduction of yours come from?'

'From a typewriter. Like most introductions. But you are right about the homework. I put the wrong name on the letter. I talked myself out of that one though.'

'I'm ready to go.' I looked at him where he fidgeted in a corner with a light flex: the brown eyes, the not quite trim officer's moustache: the grey indifferent skin. 'I don't know why I'm running this risk for you. A fall guy again …'

I took the car out on the road with the lights off, and we cruised slowly down towards the city. Jones crouched low and whistled to keep his courage up. I think the tune dated from 1940 - 'The Wednesday after the war'. Just before the roadblock I switched the lights on. There was a chance the militiaman was asleep, but he wasn't.

'Did you pass here tonight?' I asked.

'No. I made a detour through a couple of gardens.'

'Well, there's no avoiding him now.'

But he was too sleepy to be troublesome: he limped across the road and raised the barrier. His big toe was bound up in a dirty bandage and his backside showed through a hole in his grey-flannel trousers. He didn't bother to search us for arms. We drove on down, past the turning to Martha's, past the British Embassy. I slowed down there: all seemed quiet enough - the Tontons Macoute would surely have put guards at the gate if they had known of Jones's escape. I said, 'What about going in there? You'll be safe enough.'

'I'd rather not, old man. I've been a bother to them before, and they won't exactly welcome me.'

'You'd have a worse welcome from Papa Doc. This is your great chance.'

'There are reasons, old man …' He paused, and I thought he was going at last to confide in me, but, 'Oh God,' he said, I've forgotten my cocktailcase. I left it in your office. On the desk.'

'Is it so important?'

'I love that case, old man. It's been with me everywhere. It's my luck.'

'I'll bring it to you tomorrow if it's so important to you. You want to try the Medea then?'

'If there's a snag we can always come back here as a last resort.' He tried out another tune - I think it was 'A nightingale sang' - but stuck. 'To think after all we've been through together that I'd leave it …'

'Is it the only bet you ever won?'

'Bet? What do you mean, bet?'

'You told me you won it in a bet.'

'Did I?' He brooded awhile. 'Old man, you're running a big risk for me, and I'll be straight with you. That wasn't exactly the truth. I pinched it.'

'And Burma - was that not the truth either.'

'Oh, I was in Burma all right. I promise that.'

'You pinched it from Asprey's?'

'Not with my hands, of course.'

'With your wits again?'

'I was working at the time. Something in the city. I used one of the company's cheques, but I signed my own name. I wasn't going to be sent down for forgery. It was just a temporary loan. You know it was love at first sight when I saw that case and I remembered the brigadier's.'

'It wasn't with you in Burma then?'

'I was romancing a bit there. But I did have it with me in the Congo.'

I left the car by the Columbus statue - the police must have been accustomed to seeing my car there at night, though not alone, and I went ahead of Jones to reconnoitre. It was easier than I thought. For some reason the policeman was no longer by the gangplank, which had been kept down for latecomers from Mère Catherine's: perhaps he had a beat, perhaps he'd gone behind the wall to urinate. One of the crew was on guard at the top, but seeing our white faces he let us go by.

We went up to the top deck and Jones's spirits rose - he had hardly uttered a sound since his confession. As he passed the saloon door he said,

'Remember the concert? That was a night, wasn't it? Remember Baxter and his whistle? "St Paul's will stand, London will stand." He was too good to be true, old man.'

'He isn't true any more. He's dead.'

'Poor bugger. That makes him sort of respectable, doesn't it?' he added with a kind of yearning.

We climbed the ladder to the captain's cabin. I did not relish the interview, for I remembered his attitude to Jones after he had received the wireless inquiry from Philadelphia. Everything had gone easily up till now, but I had small hope that our luck would last. I rapped on the door and with hardly an interval the captain's voice came, hoarse and authoritative, bidding me enter.

At least I had not woken him from sleep. He was propped up in his berth wearing a white cotton nightshirt, and he had put on very thick reading-glasses which made his eyes look like broken chips of quartz. He held a book tilted below the reading-lamp, and I saw it was one of Simenon's novels, and this encouraged me a little - it seemed to be a sign that he had human interests.

'Mr Brown,' he exclaimed in surprise, like an old lady disturbed in her hotel room, and like an old lady his left hand went instinctively to the neckline of his nightshirt.

'And Major Jones,' Jones added jauntily and moved out from behind me into view.

'Oh, Mr Jones,' the captain said in a tone of distinct displeasure.

'I hope you've room for a passenger?' Jones asked with his unconvincing hilarity. 'Not short of schnapps, I hope?'

'Not for a passenger. But are you a passenger? At this hour of the night, I would imagine you lack a ticket …'

'I have the money to pay for one, captain.'

'And an exit-visa?'

'A formality for a foreigner like myself.'

'A formality which is complied with by all except the criminal classes. I think you're in trouble, Mr Jones.'

'Yes. You might say I'm a political refugee.'

'Then why have you not gone to the British Embassy?'

'I felt I'd be more at home in the dear old Medea' - the phrase had a good music-hall ring and perhaps that was why he repeated it. 'Dear old Medea.'

'You were never a welcome guest, Mr Jones. I had too many inquiries about you.'

Jones looked at me, but I could give him little help. 'Captain,' I said,

'you know how they treat prisoners here. Surely you can stretch a rule …'

His white nightshirt, embroidered around the neck and cuffs, perhaps by that formidable wife of his, had a horribly judicial air; he looked down at us from the height of his bunk as from a bench. 'Mr Brown,' he said, 'I have my career to consider. I must return here every month. Do you think that at my age the company would give me another command, on another route?

After an indiscretion such as you propose?'

Jones said, 'I'm sorry. I never thought of that,' with a gentleness which surprised, I think, the captain just as much as it surprised me, for when the captain spoke again it was almost as though he were offering an excuse.

'I do not know whether you have a family, Mr Jones. But I certainly have.'

'No, I have no one,' Jones admitted. 'No one at all. Unless you count a bit of tail here and there. You're right, captain, I'm expendable. I'll have to sort this out some other way.' He brooded a little, while we watched him, then suddenly suggested, 'I could stow away if you'd turn a blind eye.'

'In that case I would have to hand you over to the police in Philadelphia. Does that suit you, Mr Jones? I have an idea there are people in Philadelphia who want to ask you questions.'

'It's nothing serious. I owe a little money, that's all.'

'Of your own?'

'On second thoughts perhaps it wouldn't suit me all that well.'

I admired Jones's calm: he might have been a judge himself, sitting in chambers with two experts in a tricky Chancery case.

'The choice of action seems to be strictly limited,' he summed the problem up.

'Then I would suggest again the British Embassy,' the captain said in the chill voice of one who always knows the correct answer and expects no disagreement.

'You're probably right. I didn't get on with the consul in Leopoldville very well, that's the truth. And they all come out of the same stable - Career out of Diplomatic Bag. I'm afraid they'll have a report on me here too. It's a problem, isn't it? You really would be bound to hand me over to the coppers in Philadelphia?'

'I'd be bound to.'

'It's just as short as it's long, isn't it?' He turned to me. 'What about some other embassy where there'd be no report …?'

'These things are governed by diplomatic rules,' I said. 'They couldn't claim a foreigner had the right of asylum. They'd be stuck with you for keeps, as long as this government lasted.'

Steps came rattling up the companionway. A hand knocked on the door. I saw Jones catch his breath. He wasn't nearly so calm as he tried to show.

'Come

in.'

The second officer entered. He looked at us without surprise as though he expected to find strangers. He spoke to the captain in Dutch, and the captain asked him a question. He replied with his eye on Jones. The captain turned to us. As though he had at last abandoned the hope of Maigret for the night he put his book down. He said, 'There's a police officer at the gangway with three men. They want to come on board.'

Jones gave a deep unhappy sigh. Perhaps he was watching Sahib House and the 18th hole and the Desert Island Bar disappearing for ever. The captain gave an order in Dutch to the second officer who left the cabin. He said, 'I must get dressed.' He balanced shyly on the edge of the bunk like a hausfrau, then heavily descended.

'You're letting them come on board?' Jones exclaimed. 'Where's your pride? This is Dutch territory, isn't it?'

'Mr Jones, if you will please go into the toilet and keep quiet, it will be easier for all of us.'

I opened a door at the end of the bunk and pushed Jones through. He went reluctantly. 'I'm trapped here,' he said, 'like a rat,' then altered the phrase quickly to 'a rabbit, I mean,' and gave me a frightened smile. I sat him firmly down like a child on the lavatory seat.

The captain was pulling his trousers on and tucking in his nightshirt. He took a uniform jacket off a peg and put it on - the nightshirt was concealed by the collar.

'You're not going to let them search?' I protested. He had no time to reply or to put on his shoes and socks before the knock came on the door. I knew the police officer who entered. He was a real bastard, as bad as any of the Tontons Macoute; a man as big as Doctor Magiot and one who wielded a terrific punch; many broken jaws in Port-au-Prince testified to his strength. His mouth was full of gold teeth, probably not his own: he carried them as an Indian brave used to carry scalps. He looked at us both with insolence, while the second officer, a pimply youth, hovered nervously behind. He said to me, the words like an insult, 'I know you.'

The little captain looked very vulnerable in his bare feet, but he replied with spirit, 'I don't know you.'

'What are you doing on board at this hour?' the policeman said to me. The captain said in French to the second officer so that his meaning was clear to everyone, 'I thought I told you he was to leave his gun behind?'

'He refused, Sir. He pushed me on one side.'

'Refused? Pushed?' The captain drew himself up and almost reached the negro's shoulder. 'I invited you on board but only on conditions. I am the only man allowed to carry arms on this ship. You are not in Haiti now.'

That phrase spoken with conviction really disconcerted the Officer. It was like a magic spell - he felt unsafe. He looked around at all of us, he looked around the cabin. ' Pas à Haïti? ' he exclaimed, and I suppose he saw only the unfamiliar, a framed certificate on the wall for saving life at sea, a photograph of a grim white woman with iron-grey waves in her hair, a stone bottle of something called Bols, a photograph of the Amsterdam canals icebound in winter. He repeated distractedly, ' Pas à Haïti? '.

' Vous êtes en Hollande,' the captain said with a masterly laugh as he held out his hand. 'Give me your revolver.'

'I am under orders,' the bully said miserably, 'I am.doing my duty …'

'My officer will return it to you when you leave the ship.'

'But I am looking for a criminal.'

'Not in my ship.'

'He came here in your ship.'

'I am not responsible for that. Now give me your revolver.'

'I

must

search.'

'You can search all you like on shore but not here. Here I am responsible for law and order. Unless you give me your revolver I shall call the crew to disarm you and afterwards I will have you pitched into the harbour.'

The man was beaten. His eye was drawn to the disapproving face of the captain's wife as he unbuttoned his holster and handed over his gun. The captain put it in her charge. 'Now,' he said, 'I am prepared to answer any reasonable questions. What is it you want to know?'

'We want to know if you have a criminal on board. You know him - a man called Jones.'

'Here is a passenger-list. If you can read.'

'His name will not be on it.'

'I have been captain on this line for ten years. I stick to the letter of the law. I will never carry a passenger who is not on that list. Nor a passenger without an exit-visa. Has he an exit-visa?'

'No.'

'Then I can promise you, lieutenant, that he will never be a passenger in this ship.'

The sound of his rank seemed to mollify the police officer a little. 'He may be hidden,' he said, 'without your knowledge.'

'In the morning before sailing I will have the ship searched, and if he is found, I shall put him ashore.'

The man hesitated. 'If he is not here,' he said, 'he must have gone to the British Embassy.'

'It would be a more natural place,' the captain said, 'than the Royal Netherlands Steamship Company.' He handed the revolver to the second officer. 'You will give it him,' he said, 'at the foot of the gangway.' He turned his back and left the officer's black hand floating in mid-air like a catfish in an aquarium.

We waited in silence until the second officer returned and told the captain that the lieutenant had driven away with his men; then I let Jones out of the lavatory. He was effusively grateful. 'You were superb, captain,' he said.

The captain regarded him with dislike and contempt. He said, 'I told him only the truth. If I had discovered you stowing away I would have put you on shore. I am glad I did not have to lie. I would have found it hard to forgive myself or you. Please leave my ship as soon as it is safe.' He removed his jacket, he pulled his white nightshirt out of his trousers so that he could remove them with modesty, we went away.

Outside I leant over the rail and looked at the policeman who had returned to the foot of the gangway. He was last night's policeman, and there was no sign of the lieutenant or his men. I said, 'It's too late now for the British Embassy. It will be well guarded by this time.'

'What do we do then?'

'God knows, but we've got to leave the boat. If we are still here in the morning the captain will be as good as his word.'

The purser, who woke quite cheerfully from his sleep (he was lying flat on his back when we entered with a lubricious smile on his face), saved the situation. He said, 'There is no difficulty about Mr Brown leaving, the policeman knows him already. But there is only one solution for Mr Jones. He must leave as a woman.'

'But the clothes?' I asked.

'There is an acting box here for the ship's parties. We have the dress of a Spanish señorita and a peasant-costume from Vollendam.'

Jones said piteously, 'But my moustache.'

'You must shave it off.'

Neither the Spanish costume, which was designed for a flamencodancer, nor the elaborate headgear of the Dutch peasant was inconspicuous. We tried our best to make an unobtrusive mixture of the two, jettisoning the Vollendam headgear and the wooden sabots of the one and the mantilla of the other, as well as a great many underskirts in both cases. Meanwhile Jones gloomily and painfully shaved - there was no hot water. Oddly enough he looked more reliable without his moustache; it was as though before he had been wearing an incorrect uniform. Now I could almost believe in his military career. Odder still, when once the great sacrifice had been made, he entered with a kind of expert enthusiasm into the spirit of the charade.

'You have no rouge or lipstick?' he asked the purser, but the purser had none and Jones had to make do for cosmetics with a stick of Remington pre-shave powder. It gave him, above the black Vollendam skirt and the spangled Spanish blouse, a look of lurid pallor. 'At the foot of the gangway,'

he told the purser, 'you must kiss me. It will help to hide my face.'

'Why not kiss Mr Brown?' the purser asked.

'He's taking me home. It wouldn't be natural. You have to imagine that we've passed quite an evening together, all three of us.'

'What kind of an evening?'

'An evening of riotous abandonment,' Jones said.

'Can you manage your skirt?' I asked.

'Of course, old man.' He added mysteriously. 'This is not the first time. Under very different circumstances, of course.'

He went down the gangway on my arm. The skirts were so long that he had to gather them in one hand like a Victorian lady picking her way across a muddy street. The ship's sentry stared at us agape: he hadn't known there was a woman aboard, and such a woman, too. Jones, as he passed the sentry, gave him an appraising and provocative glance from his brown eyes. I noticed how fine and bold they looked now below his shawl; they had been killed by the moustache. At the foot of the gangway he embraced the purser and left him smudged on both cheeks with pre-shave powder. The policeman watched us with dulled curiosity - it was obvious that Jones was not the first woman to leave the boat in the early hours, and he could hardly have appealed to any man acquainted with the girls at Mère Catherine's. We walked slowly arm in arm to the place where I had left my car.

'You're holding your skirt too high,' I warned him.

'I was never a modest woman, old man.'

'I

mean

the

flic can see your shoes.'

'Not in the dark.'

I would never have believed our escape could prove so easy. No footsteps followed us, the car was there, unwatched, peace and Columbus reigned over the night. I sat and thought while Jones arranged his skirts. He said, 'I played Boadicea once. In a skit. To amuse the fellows. I had royalty in the audience.'

'Royalty?'

'Lord Mountbatten. Those were the days. Would you mind lifting your left leg? My skirt's caught.'

'Where do we go from here?' I said.

'Search me. The man I wrote the introduction to, he's dossing down in the Venezuelan Embassy.'

'It's the most heavily guarded of the lot. They have half the general staff there.'

'I'd be quite satisfied with something more modest.'

'Perhaps you wouldn't be taken in. You aren't exactly a political refugee, are you?'

'Doesn't deceiving Papa Doc count as resistance?'

'Perhaps you wouldn't be welcome as a permanent guest. Have you thought of that?'

'They'd hardly push me out, would they, if I were once safely in?'

'I think one or two of them might even do that.'

I started the engine, and we began to drive slowly back into the town. I didn't wish to give the impression of flight. I watched before every turn for the light of another car, but Port-au-Prince was as empty as a cemetery.

'Where are you taking me?'

'To the only place I can think of. The ambassador's away.'

I felt relief as we mounted the hill. There would be no road-block on this side of the familiar turning. At the gates a policeman looked briefly into the car. He knew my face and Jones passed easily enough for a woman when the dashboard-light was out. Obviously there had not yet been a general alarm - Jones was only a criminal; he was not a patriot. They had probably warned the road-blocks and put some Tontons Macoute around the British Embassy. With the Medea covered and probably my hotel, too, they must think they had him cornered.

I told Jones to stay in the car and I rang the bell. Somebody was awake, for I could see a light burning in a window on the ground floor. Yet I had to ring twice, and I waited with impatience as heavy steps came from a long way back inside, ponderous and unhurried. A dog yapped and whined - I was puzzled by the noise, for I had never seen a dog in the house. Then a voice - I supposed that it was the night-porter's - asked who was there. I said, 'I want Señora Pineda. Tell her it is Monsieur Brown. Something urgent.'

The door was unlocked, unbolted and then unchained, but the man who threw it open was not the porter. The ambassador himself stood there, peering myopically. He was in his shirtsleeves, and he wore no tie: I had never before seen him less than immaculate. Beside him, on guard, was a horrible miniature dog, all long grey hair, the shape of a centipede. 'You want my wife?' he said. 'She is asleep.' Seeing his tired and wounded eyes, I thought: He knows, he knows everything.

'Do you want me to wake her?' he asked. 'Is it so urgent? She is with my son. They are both asleep.'

I said lamely and ambiguously, 'I didn't know that you had returned.'

'I came in on tonight's plane.' He put up his hand to where his tie should have been. 'There's a lot of work waiting for me to do. Papers to be read … you know how it is.' It was as though he were apologizing to me and proffering me humbly his passport - Nationality: human being. Special peculiarities: cuckold.

I said with a sense of shame, 'No, please don't wake her. It was really you I wanted to see.'

'Me?' I thought for a moment he would give way to a panic impulse, that he would retreat inside and close the door. Perhaps he believed I was about to tell him what he was afraid to hear. 'Won't it wait until morning?' he implored me. 'So late. So much to do.' He felt for a cigar-case which wasn't there. I think he half intended to press a bundle of cigars into my hands as another might have pressed money - to persuade me to go. But there weren't any cigars. He said in miserable surrender, 'Come in then if you must.'

I said, 'The dog doesn't like me.'

'Don Juan?' He rapped out an order to the miserable creature, which began to lick his shoe.

I said, 'I have a companion,' and signalled to Jones. The ambassador watchedwith despairing incredulity the appearance of Jones. He must still have thought that I intended to confess all and perhaps demand the break-up of his marriage, and what part, he probably demanded, could 'she' play in the affair; was she a witness, a nurse to look after Angel, a substitute wife? In a nightmare anything, however cruel or grotesque, is possible and this to him was certainly a nightmare. First out of the car came the heavy rubber-soled shoes, a pair of socks striped in scarlet and black like a school-tie worn in the wrong place, then fold after fold of blue-black skirt, and last the head and shoulders wrapped in a scarf, the Remington-white face and the provocative brown eyes. Jones shook himself like a sparrow after a dust-bath and advanced rapidly to join us.

'This is Mr Jones,' I said.

'Major Jones,' he corrected me. 'I'm glad to meet you, Your Excellency.'

'He wants asylum here. The Tontons Macoute are after him. There's not a hope of getting him into the British Embassy. It's too well guarded. I thought perhaps … although he is not a South American … He is in extreme danger.'

A look of enormous relief spread over the ambassador's face while I spoke. This was politics. This he could deal with. This was everyday. 'Come in, Major Jones, come in. You are very welcome. My house is at your disposition. I will wake my wife at once. One of my rooms shall be prepared.' In his relief he threw his possessive articles around like confetti. Then he closed, locked, bolted and chained the door, and absent-mindedly offered his arm to Jones to escort him into the house. Jones took it and moved magnificently across the hall like a Victorian matron. The horrible grey dog swept the ground beside him with his matted hair, smelling at the fringe of Jones's skirt.

'Luis!' Martha stood on the landing and looked down at us with sleepy amazement.

'My dear,' the ambassador said, 'let me introduce you - this is Mr Jones. Our first refugee.'

'Mr

Jones!'

'Major Jones,' Jones corrected them both, lifting the scarf from his head as though it were a hat.

Martha leant over the banisters and laughed; she laughed till her eyes filled with tears. I could see her breasts through her nightdress and even the shadow of her hair, and so, I thought, could Jones. He smiled up at her and said, 'In the women's army, of course,' and I remembered the girl called Tin Tin at Mère Catherine's who, when I asked her why she liked him, had said to me, 'He made me laugh.'

2

There was not much of the night left for me in which to sleep. As I returned to the Trianon the same police officer who had boarded the Medea stopped me at the entrance to the drive and demanded where I had been. 'You know that as well as I do,' I said, and he searched my car very thoroughly in revenge - a stupid man.

I rummaged in the bar for a drink; but the ice-containers had been left dry, and there was only a bottle of Seven-Up remaining on the shelves. I laced it heavily with rum and sat out on the verandah to wait for the sun to rise - the mosquitoes had long ceased to trouble me, I was stale and tainted meat. The hotel behind me seemed emptier than it had ever done before; I missed the limping Joseph as I might have missed a familiar wound, for perhaps unconsciously I had ached a little with him in his halting progress from the bar to the verandah and up and down the stairs. His footstep was at least one I could easily recognize, and I wondered in what waste of mountain it was sounding now, or whether he was dead already among the stony knobs of Haiti's spine. It seemed to me the only sound to which I had ever had the time to become accustomed. I was filled with self-pity, sweet like the bourbon biscuits of Angel. Could I yet separate even the sound of Martha's footsteps, I asked myself, from another woman's? I doubted it, and certainly I had never learnt to know my mother's before she left me behind with the fathers of the Visitation. And my real father? He had deposited not so much as one childish memory. Presumably he was dead, but I wasn't sure

- this was a century in which old men lived beyond their time. But I felt no genuine curiosity about him; nor had I any wish to seek him out or find his tombstone, which was possibly, but not certainly, marked with the name Brown.

Yet my lack of curiosity was a hollow where a hollow should not have been. I had not plugged the hollow with a substitute, as a dentist puts in a temporary filling. No priest had come to represent a father to me, and no region of the earth had taken the place of home. I was a citizen of Monaco, that was all.

The palms had begun to detach themselves from the anonymous darkness; they reminded me of the palms outside the casino on that blue artificial coast where even the sand was an importation. A faint breeze stirred the long leaves, which were serrated like the keyboard of a piano; the keys were depressed two or three at a time as though by an invisible player. Why was I here? I was here because of a picture-postcard from my mother which could easily have gone astray - no odds at any casino could have been higher than that. There are those who belong by their birth inextricably to a country, who even when they leave it feel the tie. And there are those who belong to a province, a county, a village, but I could feel no link at all with the hundred or so square kilometres around the gardens and boulevards of Monte Carlo, a city of transients. I felt a greater tie here, in the shabby land of terror, chosen for me by chance.

The first colours touched the garden, deep green and then deep red - transience was my pigmentation; my roots would never go deep enough anywhere to make me a home or make me secure with love.

CHAPTER II

1

THERE were no longer any guests in the hotel; when the Smiths departed, the cook who had made my kitchen famous with his soufflés gave up all hope and moved to the Venezuelan Embassy, where at least there were a few refugees to feed. For my meals I would boil myself an egg or open a tin, or share the Haitian food with my last remaining maid and the gardener, or sometimes I would have a meal with the Pinedas, not often, though, for the presence of Jones irritated me. Angel now went to a school organized by the Spanish Ambassador's wife, and in the afternoons Martha would drive quite openly up the Trianon drive and leave her car in my garage. The fear of discovery had left her, or perhaps a complaisant husband now gave us a limited freedom. In my bedroom we would pass the hours making love or talking and only too often quarrelling. We even quarrelled about the ambassador's dog. 'It gives me the creeps,' I said. 'Like a rat wearing a woolshawl, or a long centipede. What induced him to buy it?'

'I suppose he wanted company,' she said.

'He has you.'

'You know how little he has of me.'

'Have I got to feel sorry for him too.'

'It wouldn't do any of us harm,' she said, 'to feel sorry for someone.'

She was more astute than I at seeing the distant cloud of a quarrel when it was still no bigger than a man's hand, and she would usually take the right avoiding action, for when an embrace was over the quarrel was usually over too - for that occasion at least. Once she spoke of my mother and their friendship. 'Strange wasn't it? My father was a war-criminal and she was a heroine of the Resistance.'

'You really think she was?'

'Yes.'

'I found a medal in a piggy-bank, but I thought it might be the memento of a love-affair. There was a holy medal in the pig too, but that meant nothing - she was certainly not a pious woman. When she left me with the Jesuits it was for convenience only. They could afford an unpaid bill.'

'You were with the Jesuits?'

'Yes.'

'I remember now. I used to think you were - nothing.'

'I

am

nothing.'

'Yes, but a Protestant nothing, not a Catholic nothing. I am a Protestant nothing.'

I had a sense of coloured balls flying in the air, a different colour for every faith - or even every lack of faith. There was an existentialist ball, a logical-positivist ball. 'I even thought you might be a Communist nothing.' It was gay, it was fun so long as with great agility one patted the balls around: it was only when a ball fell to the ground one had the sense of an impersonal wound, like a dog dead on an arterial road.

'Doctor Magiot's a Communist,' she said.

'I suppose so. I envy him. He's lucky to believe. I left all such absolutes behind me in the chapel of the Visitation. Do you know they even thought once that I had a vocation?'

'Perhaps you are a prêtre manqué.'

'Me? You are laughing at me. Put your hand here. This has no theology.' I mocked myself while I made love. I flung myself into pleasure like a suicide on to a pavement.

What made us, after that short furious encounter, talk of Jones again?

I am confusing together in memory many afternoons, many love-makings, many discussions, many quarrels, all of them a curtain-raiser for the final quarrel of all. For example there was the afternoon when she left early and to my inquiry why she was going - Angel would not be back from school for a long time yet - she replied, 'I promised Jones that he could teach me ginrummy.' It was only ten days after I had deposited Jones under her roof, and when she told me that, I felt the premonition of jealousy like the first shiver which announces a fever.

'It must be an exciting game. You prefer it to making love?'

'Darling, we've made love all we can. I don't want to disappoint him. He's a good guest. Angel likes him. He plays a lot with Angel.'

And an afternoon much later the quarrel began in another way. She asked me suddenly - it was the first sentence she spoke after our bodies separated - what the word 'midge' meant.

'A kind of small mosquito. Why?'

'Jones always calls the dog Midge, and he answers to the name. His real name is Don Juan, but he's never learnt that.'

'I suppose you are going to tell me the dog likes Jones too.'

'Oh, but he does - better than he likes Luis. Luis always feeds him, he won't even allow Angel to do that, and yet Jones has only to call "Midge" …'

'What does Jones call you?'

'How do you mean?'