The Comedians

'You go to him when he calls. You leave early to play gin-rummy.'

'That was three weeks ago. I've never done it again.'

'We spend half our time now talking about that damned crook.'

'You brought the damned crook to our house.'

'I didn't know he was going to become such a friend of the family.'

'Darling, he makes us laugh, that's all.' She couldn't have chosen an explanation which worried me more. 'There isn't much to laugh about here.'

'Here?'

'You're twisting every word. I don't mean here in bed. I mean here in Port-au-Prince.'

'Two different languages cause misunderstanding. I should have taken lessons in German. Does Jones speak German?'

'Not even Luis does. Darling, when you want me I'm a woman, but when I hurt you, I'm always a German. What a pity Monaco never had a period of power.'

'It had. But the English beat the Prince's fleet in the Channel. Like the Luftwaffe.'

'I was ten years old when you beat the Luftwaffe.'

'I did no beating. I sat in an office translating propaganda against Vichy into French.'

'Jones had a more interesting war.'

'Oh

yes?'

Was it innocence which caused her so often to introduce his name or did she feel a compulsion to have it on her tongue?

'He was in Burma,' she said, 'fighting the Japs.'

'He's told you that?'

'He's very interesting when he talks about guerrilla fighting.'

'The resistance could have done with him here. But he preferred the Government to the resistance.'

'But he's seen through the Government now.'

'Or have they seen through him? Did he tell you about the lost platoon?'

'Yes.'

'And how he has a nose for water?'

'Yes.'

'Sometimes I wonder that he didn't end up at least a brigadier.'

'Darling, what's the matter?'

'Othello charmed Desdemona with his stories of adventure. It's an old technique. I ought to tell you how I was hounded by the People. It might win your sympathy.'

'What

people?'

'Never

mind.'

'A change of subject in an embassy is always something. The first secretary is an authority on turtles. It was interesting for a while in a naturalhistory way, but it palled all the same. And the second secretary is an admirer of Cervantes, but not of Don Quixote which he says was a bid for easy popularity.'

'I suppose the Burmese war too will become stale in time.'

'At least he doesn't repeat himself yet like the others.'

'Has he told you the history of his cocktail-case?'

'Yes. Indeed he has. Darling, you underrate him. He's a very generous man. You know how our shaker leaks, so he gave Luis his - in spite of all the memories attached. It's a very good one - it came from Asprey's in London. He said it was the only thing he had with which to return our hospitality. We said we'd borrow it - and do you know what he did? He gave money to one of the servants to take it to Hamit's and have it inscribed. So there it is - we can't give it back. Such a quaint inscription. "To Luis and Martha from their grateful guest, Jones." Like that. No christian name. No initials. Like a French actor.'

'And

your first name.'

'And Luis's. Darling, it's time I left.'

'What a long time we've spent, haven't we, talking about Jones?'

'I expect we'll spend a lot more. Papa Doc won't give him a safeconduct. Not even as far as the British Embassy. The Government makes a formal protest every week. They claim he's a common criminal, but, of course, that's nonsense. He was ready to work with them, but then his eyes were opened - by young Philipot.'

'Is that what he claims?'

'He tried to sabotage a supply of arms to the Tontons Macoute.'

'An ingenious story.'

'So that really does make him a political refugee.'

'He lives on his wits, that's all.'

'Don't we all to some extent?'

'How quickly you leap to his defence.'

Suddenly I had a grotesque vision of the two of them in bed, Martha naked as she was now, and Jones still in his female finery, his face yellow with pre-shave powder, lifting his great black velvet skirt above his thighs.

'Darling, what is it now?'

'It's so stupid. To think that I brought the little crook to live with you. And now there he stays - for life perhaps. Or until someone can get near enough to Papa Doc with a silver bullet. How long has Mindszenty stayed in the American Embassy in Budapest? A dozen years? Jones sees you all day long …'

'Not in your way.'

'Oh, Jones has to have his periodic woman - I know that. I've seen him in action. And as for me I can only see you for dinner, or cocktail parties of the second order.'

'You're not at dinner now.'

'He's climbed the wall. He's in the garden itself.'

'You should have been a novelist,' she said, 'then we would all have been your characters. We couldn't say to you we are not like that at all, we couldn't answer back. Darling, don't you see you are inventing us?'

'I'm glad at least I've invented this bed.'

'We can't even talk to you, can we? You won't listen if what we say is out of character - the character you've given us.'

'What character? You're a woman I love. That's all.'

'Oh yes, I'm classified. A woman you love.'

She got out of bed and began very rapidly to dress. She swore -

' merde! ' - when a suspender failed to snap, she got her dress twisted over her head and had to start again - she was like something escaping from a fire. She couldn't find the second stocking.

I said, 'I'm going to get your guest away soon. Somehow.'

'I don't mind if you do or not. As long as he's safe.'

'Angel will miss him though.'

'Yes.'

'And

Midge.'

'Yes.'

'And

Luis.'

'He

amuses

Luis.'

'And

you?'

She thrust her feet into her shoes and didn't answer.

'We'll have peace together when he's gone. You won't be torn in two between us then.'

She looked at me a moment as though I had said something that shocked her. Then she came up to the bed and took my hand as though I were a child who didn't understand the meaning of his words but who must be warned all the same not to repeat them. She said, 'My darling, be careful. Don't you understand? To you nothing exists except in your own thoughts. Not me, not Jones. We're what you choose to make us. You're a Berkeleyan. My God, what a Berkeleyan. You've turned poor Jones into a seducer and me into a wanton mistress. You can't even believe in your mother's medal, can you? You've written her a different part. My dear, try to believe we exist when you aren't there. We're independent of you. None of us is like you fancy we are. Perhaps it wouldn't matter much if your thoughts were not so dark, always so dark.'

I tried to kiss her mood away, but she turned quickly and standing at the door said to the empty passage, 'It's a dark Brown world you live in. I'm sorry for you. As I'm sorry for my father.'

I lay in bed a long while and wondered what I could possibly have in common with a war criminal responsible for so many unidentified deaths. 2

The headlights swept up between the palms and settled like a yellow moth over my face. I could see nothing clearly when they were switched off - only something large and black approaching the veranda. I had suffered one beating-up, I didn't want another. I shouted, 'Joseph,' but of course Joseph wasn't there. I had been sleeping over my glass of rum and I had forgotten.

'Is Joseph back?' It was a relief to hear Doctor Magiot's voice. He came slowly with his inexplicable dignity, up the broken verandah steps as though they were the marble steps of the senate house and he was a senator from the outer empire granted Roman citizenship.

'I was asleep. I wasn't thinking. Can I get you something, doctor? I am my own cook now, but I can easily beat you up an omelette.'

'No, I'm not hungry. May I put my car away in your garage in case anyone comes?'

'No one ever comes here at night.'

'You never know. In case …'

When he returned I repeated my offer of food, but he would take nothing. 'I wanted company, that's all.' He chose a hard straight chair to sit in. 'I used often to come and see your mother here - in the happier days. I find it lonely now after the sun sets.'

The lightning had began and the nightly deluge would soon descend. I drew my chair a little further into the shelter of the verandah. 'Do you see nothing of your colleagues?' I asked.

'What colleagues? Oh, there are a few old men left like myself behind their locked doors. In the last ten years three quarters of the doctors who graduated have preferred to go elsewhere as soon as they could buy an exitpermit. Here one buys an exit-permit not a practice. If you want to consult a Haitian doctor, better go to Ghana.' He lapsed into silence. It was company not conversation that he needed. The rain began to fall, tingling in the swimming-pool which was empty again; the night was so dark I couldn't see Doctor Magiot's face, only the tips of his fingers laid out on the arms of his chair, like carved wood.

'The other night,' Doctor Magiot said, 'I had an absurd dream. The telephone sounded - think of that, the telephone, how many years is it since I heard a telephone? I was summoned to the general hospital for a casualty. When I arrived I saw with satisfaction how clean the ward was, the nurses too were young and spotless (of course you will find they have all left for Africa as well). My colleague advanced to meet me, a young man in whom I had great hopes; he is fulfilling them now in Brazzaville. He told me that the opposition candidate (how old-fashioned even the words sound today) had been attacked by rowdies at a political meeting. There were complications. His left eye was in danger. I began to examine the eye, but it turned out not to be the eye at all but the cheek which was cut open to the bone. My colleague returned. He said, "The Chief of Police is on the telephone. The assailants have been arrested. The President is anxious to know the result of your examination. The President's wife has sent these flowers..." ' Doctor Magiot began to laugh softly in the dark. 'Even at the best,' he said, 'even under President Estimé it was never like that. Freud's wish-fulfilment dreams are usually not so obvious.'

'Not a very Marxist dream, Doctor Magiot. With an opposition candidate.'

'Perhaps the Marxist dream of a far far future. When the world state has withered away and there are only local elections. In the parish of Haiti.'

'When I came to your house I was surprised to find Das Kapital openly on a shelf. Is that safe?'

'I told you once before. Papa Doc makes a distinction between philosophy and propaganda. He wants to keep his window open towards the east until the Americans give arms to him again.'

'They'll never do that.'

'I will make you a bet of ten to one that, in a matter of months, relations are healed and the American Ambassador returns. You forget - Papa Doc is a bulwark against Communism. There will be no Cuba and no Bay of Pigs here. Of course there are other reasons. Papa Doc's lobbyist in Washington is the lobbyist for certain American-owned mills (they grind grey flour for the people out of imported surplus wheat - it is astonishing how much money can be made out of the poorest of the poor with a little ingenuity). And then there's the great beef-racket. The poor here can eat meat no more than they can eat cake, so I suppose they don't suffer when all the beef that exists goes to the American market - it doesn't matter to the importers that there are no standards here of cattle-raising - it goes into tins for underdeveloped countries paid for by American aid, of course. It wouldn't affect the Americans if this trade ceased, but it would affect the particular Washington politician who receives one cent for every pound exported.'

'Do you despair of any future?'

'No, I don't despair, I don't believe in despair, but our problems won't be solved by the Marines. We have had experience of the Marines. I'm not sure I wouldn't fight for Papa Doc if the Marines came. At least he's Haitian. No, the job has to be done with our own hands. We are an evil slum floating a few miles from Florida, and no American will help us with arms or money or counsel. We learned a few years back what their counsel meant. There was a resistance group here who were in touch with a sympathizer in the American Embassy: they were promised all kinds of moral support, but the information went straight back to the C.I.A. and from the C.I.A. by a very direct route to Papa Doc. You can imagine what happened to the group. The State Department didn't want any disturbance in the Caribbean.'

'And the Communists?'

'We are better organized and more discreet than the others, but, if we ever tried to take over, you can be certain the Marines would land and Papa Doc would remain in power. In Washington we seem a very stable country - not suitable for tourists, but tourists are a nuisance anyway. Sometimes they see too much and write to their senators. Your Mr Smith was very disturbed by the executions in the cemetery. By the way, Hamit has disappeared.'

'What

happened?'

'I hope he's gone into hiding, but his car was found abandoned near the port.'

'He has a lot of American friends.'

'But he is not an American citizen. He is a Haitian. You can do what you like with Haitians. Trujillo murdered 20,000 of us in time of peace on the River Massacre, peasants who had come to his country for cane-cutting - men, women and children - but do you imagine there was one protest from Washington? He lived nearly twenty years afterwards fat on American aid.'

'What do you hope for, Doctor Magiot?'

'Perhaps a palace revolution. (Papa Doc never stirs outside, you can only reach him in the palace.) And then, before Fat Gracia settles in his place, a purge by the people.'

'No hope from the rebels?'

'Poor souls, they don't know how to fight. They go waving their rifles, if they've got them, at a fortified post. They may be heroes, but they have to learn to live and not to die. Do you think Philipot knows the first thing about guerrilla fighting? And your poor lame Joseph? They need someone of experience and then perhaps in a year or two … we are as brave as the Cubans, but the terrain is very cruel. We have destroyed our forests. You have to live in caves and sleep on stones. And there's the question of water …'

Like a comment on his pessimism the deluge fell. We couldn't even hear ourselves speak. The lights of the town were blotted out. I went into the bar and brought out two glasses of rum and set them between the doctor and myself. I had to guide his hand to his glass. We sat in silence till the worst of the storm was over.

'You're an odd man,' Doctor Magiot said at last.

'Why

odd?'

'You listen to me as though I were an old man speaking of a distant past. You seem so indifferent - and yet you live here.'

'I was born in Monaco,' I said. 'That is almost the same as being a citizen of nowhere.'

'If your mother had lived to see these days she would not have been so indifferent; she might well be up in the mountains now.'

'Uselessly?'

'Oh yes, uselessly, of course.'

'With her lover?'

'He certainly would never have let her go alone.'

'Perhaps I take after my father.'

'Who

was

he?'

'I've no idea. Like my country of birth he has no face.'

The rain diminished: I could hear the separate sound of the drops now on the trees, on the bushes, on the hard cement of the bathing-pool. I said, 'I take things as they come. That's what most of the world does, surely? One has to live.'

'What do you want out of life, Brown? I know how your mother would have answered.'

'How?'

'She would have laughed at me for not knowing the answer. Fun. But

"fun" for her included almost everything. Even death.'

Doctor Magiot got up and stood at the edge of the verandah. 'I thought I heard something. Imagination. The nights make us all nervy. I really loved your mother, Brown.'

'And her lover - what did you make of him ?'

'He made her happy. What do you want, Brown?'

'I want to run this hotel - I want to see it as it used to be. Before Papa Doc came. Joseph busy behind the bar, girls in the bathing-pool, cars coming up the drive, all the stupid noises of enjoyment. Ice in glasses, laughter in the bushes, and of course, oh yes, the rustle of dollar-notes.'

'And

then?'

'Oh, I suppose a body to love. As my mother had.'

'And

after

that?'

'God knows. Isn't that enough for what's left of a lifetime? I'm nearly sixty now.'

'Your mother was a Catholic.'

'Not much of one.'

'I retain a faith, even if it's only the truth of certain economic laws, but you've lost yours.'

'Have I? Perhaps I never had one. Anyway it's a limitation to believe, isn't it?'

We sat in silence for a while with empty glasses. Then Doctor Magiot said, 'I had a message from Philipot. He's in the mountains behind Aux Cayes, but he plans to move north. He has a dozen men with him, including Joseph. I hope the others aren't cripples. Two lame men are enough. He wants to join with the guerrillas near the Dominican border - there are said to be thirty men there.'

'What an army! Forty-two men.'

'Castro had twelve.'

'But you can't tell me that Philipot is a Castro.'

'He thinks he can establish a base near the frontier for training … Papa Doc has chased the peasants away for a depth of ten kilometres, so there is a possibility of secrecy, if not of recruits … He needs Jones.'

'Why

Jones?'

'He has a great belief in Jones.'

'He would do much better to find himself a Bren.'

'Training is more important than weapons at the start. You can always take weapons from the dead, but first you have to learn how to kill.'

'How do you know all this, Doctor Magiot?'

'At times they have to trust even one of us.'

'One of you?'

'A

Communist.'

'It's a wonder you survive.'

'If there were no Communists - most of our names are on the C.I.A. list - Papa Doc would cease to be a bulwark of the free world. There may be another reason too. I'm a good doctor. The day might arrive … he's not immune …'

'If only you could convert your stethoscope into something fatal.'

'Yes, I've thought of that. But he will probably outlive me.'

'French

medicine

is

fond of suppositories and piqûres?'

'They would be tested first by someone of no importance.'

'And you really think that Jones … He's only good to make a woman laugh.'

'He had the right experience in Burma. The Japanese were cleverer than the Tontons Macoute.'

'Oh yes, he boasts about that time. I hear he holds them spellbound in the embassy. He sings for his supper.'

'He can't want to spend his whole life in the embassy.'

'He doesn't want to die on the doorstep either.'

'There are always means of evasion.'

'He'd never risk it.'

'He was risking a lot when he tried to swindle Papa Doc. Don't underrate him. Just because he boasts a lot … And you can trap a man who boasts. You can call his bluff.'

'Oh, don't mistake me, Doctor Magiot. I want him out of the embassy every bit as much as Philipot can.'

'And yet you put him there.'

'I didn't realize.'

'What?'

'Oh, that's quite a different matter. I'd do anything …'

Somebody was walking up the drive. The footsteps squealed on the wet leaves and the scraps of old coconut-shells. We both sat silent, waiting … In Port-au-Prince nobody walked at night. I wondered whether Doctor Magiot carried a gun. But it wasn't in his character. Somebody halted at the edge of the trees where the drive turned. A voice called, 'Mr Brown.'

'Yes?'

'Have you no light?'

'Who is it?'

'Petit

Pierre.'

I was suddenly aware that Doctor Magiot was no longer with me. It was extraordinary how silently the big man could move when he chose.

'I'll fetch one,' I called. 'I am alone.'

I felt my way back into the bar. I knew where I would find a torch. When I turned it on. I saw that the door into the kitchen-quarters was open. I came back with a lamp and Petit Pierre climbed the steps. It was weeks since I had seen those sharp ambiguous features. His jacket was sopping wet and he hung it on the back of a chair. I helped him to a glass of rum and awaited an explanation - it was unusual to see him after sundown.

'My car broke down,' he said, 'I waited till the worst rain was over. The lights are late tonight in coming on.'

I said mechanically - it was part of the small talk of Port-au-Prince,

'Did they search you at the block?'

'Not in this rain,' he said. 'There are no road-blocks when it rains. You can't expect a militiaman to work in a storm.'

'It's a long time since I've seen you, Petit Pierre.'

'I've been very busy.'

'Surely there's not much for your gossip-column?'

He giggled in the dark. 'There's always something. Mr Brown, today is a great day in the history of Petit Pierre.'

'Don't tell me you've got married?'

'No, no, no. Guess again.'

'You've inherited a fortune?'

'A fortune in Port-au-Prince? Oh no. Mr Brown, today I have installed a Hi-Fi-Stereo.'

'Congratulations. Does it work?'

'I haven't bought any discs yet, so I cannot tell. I have ordered discs from Hamit of Juliette Greco, Françoise Hardy, Johnny Halliday …'

'I've heard that Hamit isn't with us any more.'

'Why? What has happened?'

'He's

disappeared.'

'For once,' Petit Pierre said, 'you are ahead of me with the news. Who told you?'

'I guard my sources.'

'He went too often to the foreign embassies. It wasn't wise.'

Suddenly the lights came on, and for the first time I caught Petit Pierre off guard, brooding, disquieted, before he reacted to the light and said with his habitual gaiety, 'I shall have to wait for my discs then.'

'I have some records in the office I can lend you. I used to keep them for the guests.'

'I was at the airport tonight,' Petit Pierre said.

'Did anyone get off?'

'As a matter of fact, yes. I didn't expect to see him. People sometimes stay longer than they have planned in Miami and he has been away a long time, and what with all the trouble …'

'Who

was

it?'

'Captain

Concasseur.'

I thought I knew now why Petit Pierre had made his friendly call - it was not just to tell me about the purchase of his Hi-Fi-Stereo. He had a warning to convey.

'Has he been in trouble?'

'Anyone who touches Major Jones is in trouble,' Petit Pierre said. 'The captain is very angry. He was much insulted in Miami - they say he spent two nights in a police station. Think of it! Captain Concasseur! He wants to rehabilitate himself.'

'How?'

'By getting Major Jones somehow.'

'Jones is safe in the embassy.'

'He should stay there as long as he can. He had better not trust any safe-conduct. But who knows what attitude a new ambassador might take?'

'What new ambassador?'

'There is a rumour that the President has told Señor Pineda's government that he is no longer persona grata. Of course there may be no truth in it. May I see your discs please? The rain is over and I must be going.'

'Where have you left your car?'

'At the side of the road below the block.'

'I will drive you home,' I said. I fetched my car from the garage. When I turned on the headlights I could see Doctor Magiot sitting patiently in his car. We didn't speak.

3

After I had left Petit Pierre at the shack which he called his home I drove to the embassy. The guard at the gate stopped my car and peered inside before he let me through the gates. When I rang the bell I could hear the dog barking in the hall and Jones's voice saying with the tone of an owner,

'Quiet, Midge, quiet.'

They were alone that night, the ambassador, Martha and Jones, and I had the impression of a family party. Pineda and Jones were playing ginrummy - needless to say Jones was well ahead, while Martha sat in an armchair sewing. I had never before seen her with a needle in her fingers; it was as though Jones had brought into the house with him a kind of domesticity. Midge sat down at his feet as though he were the master, and Pineda raised his wounded unwelcoming eyes and said, 'You will excuse us if we finish this party.'

'Come and see Angel,' Martha said; we went up the stairs together, and half-way up I heard Jones say, 'I stop at two.' On the landing we turned left, into the room of our quarrel, and she kissed me freely and happily. I told her of Petit Pierre's rumour. 'Oh no,' she said, 'no. It can't be true,' and then she added, 'Luis has been worried about something the last few days.'

'But if it should be true …'

Martha said, 'The new ambassador would have to keep Jones just the same. He couldn't turn him out.'

'I wasn't thinking of Jones. I was thinking of ourselves.' Could a woman continue to call a man by his surname, I wondered, if she were sleeping with him?

She sat down on the bed and stared at the wall with a look of amazement as though the wall had suddenly come closer. 'I don't believe it's true,' she said. 'I won't believe it.'

'It was bound to happen one day.'

'I always thought … when Angel was old enough to understand …'

'How old would I be by then?'

'You've thought about it too,' she accused me.

'Yes, I've thought a lot about it. It was one of the reasons why I tried to sell the hotel in New York. I wanted money to go after you wherever you were sent. But nobody will ever buy the hotel now.'

She said, 'Darling, we'll manage somehow, but Jones - it's life or death for him.'

'I suppose if we were still young we'd think it was life or death for us too. But now - "men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love".'

Jones called out from below, 'The game's finished'; his voice came into the room like a tactless stranger. 'We'd better go,' Martha said. 'Don't say anything, not until we know.'

Pineda sat with the awful dog on his knees, stroking it; it accepted his caresses listlessly as though it wanted to be elsewhere, and it watched Jones with bleary devotion where he sat adding up the score. 'I'm 1200 up,' he said.

'I'll send to Hamit's in the morning and buy bourbon biscuits for Angel.'

'You spoil him,' Martha said. 'Buy something for yourself. To remember us by.'

'As if I could ever forget,' Jones said, and he looked at her, just as the dog on Pineda's knees looked at Jones, with an expression mournful, dewy and a bit false at the same time.

'Your information seems to be bad,' I said. 'Hamit has disappeared.'

'I hadn't heard,' Pineda said. 'Why … ?'

'Petit Pierre thinks he has too many foreign friends.'

'You must do something,' Martha said. 'Hamit helped us in so many ways.' I remembered one of them, the small room with the brass bedstead and the mauve silk coverlet and the hard eastern chairs ranged against the wall. Those afternoons belonged to our easiest days.

'What can I do?' Pineda said. 'The Secretary of the Interior will accept two of my cigars and tell me politely that Hamit is a citizen of Haiti.'

'Give me my old company back,' Jones said, 'and I'd go through the police station like a dose of salts till I found him.'

I couldn't have asked for a quicker or better response: Magiot had said, 'You can trap a man who boasts.' When Jones spoke he looked at Martha with the expression of a young man seeking approval, and I could imagine all those domestic evenings when he had amused them with his stories of Burma. It was true he wasn't young, but there was nearly ten years between us all the same.

'There are a lot of police,' I said.

'If I had fifty of my own men I could take over the country. The Japs outnumbered us, and they knew how to fight …'

Martha moved towards the door, but I stopped her. 'Please don't go.' I needed her as a witness. She stayed, and Jones went on, suspecting nothing at all. 'Of course they had us on the run at first in Malaya. We didn't know a thing about guerrilla war then, but we learnt.'

'Wingate,' I said encouragingly, for fear he wouldn't go far enough.

'He was one of the best, but there are others I could name. I was proud enough of some of my own tricks.'

'You could smell water,' I reminded him.

'That was something I hadn't got to learn,' he said. 'It was born in me. Why, as a child …'

'What a tragedy it is you are shut up here,' I interrupted him. His childhood was too distant for my purpose. 'There are men in the mountains now who only need to learn. Of course they've got Philipot.'

It was like a duet between the two of us. 'Philipot,' he exclaimed, 'he hasn't a clue, old man. Do you know he came to see me? He wanted my help in training … He offered …'

'Weren't you tempted?' I said.

'I certainly was. One misses the old Burmese days. You can understand that. But, old man, I was in the government service. I hadn't seen through them then. Perhaps I'm innocent, but a man's only got to be straight with me … I trusted them … If I'd known what I know now …'

I wondered what explanation he had given to Martha and Pineda for his flight. He had obviously elaborated a good deal on the story he had told me the night of his escape.

'It's a great pity you didn't go with Philipot,' I said.

'A pity for both of us, old man. Of course, I'm not running him down. Philipot's got courage. But I could have turned him, given the opportunity, into a first-rate commando. That attack on the police station - it was amateurish. He let most of them escape and the only arms he got …'

'If another opportunity arose …' No inexperienced mouse could have moved more recklessly towards the smell of cheese. 'Oh, I'd go like a shot now,' he said.

I said, 'If I could arrange for your escape … to join Philipot …'

He hardly hesitated at all, for Martha's eyes were on him. 'Just show me the way, old man,' he said. 'Just show me the way.'

Midge at that moment leapt upon his knees and licked his face, from nose to chin, as though to give the hero a long farewell; he made some obvious joke - for he was unaware then that the trap had really closed - which set Martha laughing, and I comforted myself that the days of laughter were numbered.

'You have to be ready at a moment's warning,' I told him.

'I travel light, old man,' Jones said. 'Not even a cocktail-case now.' He could risk that reference; he was so sure of me …

Doctor Magiot was sitting in my office, in the dark, although the lights had come on. I said, 'I've hooked him. Nothing could have been easier.'

'You sound very triumphant,' he said. 'But what is it after all? One man can't win a war.'

'No, I've other reasons for triumph.'

Doctor Magiot spread a map out on my desk and we went over in detail the southern road to Aux Cayes. If I was to return alone I must appear to have no passenger.

'But if they search the car?'

'We will come to that.'

I would need a police-pass for myself and a reason for my journey.

'You must get a pass for Monday, the 12th …' he told me. It would take the best part of a week for him to get a reply from Philipot, so the 12th was the earliest date possible - 'there's hardly any moon then and that's in your favour. You leave him here by the cemetery before you reach Aquin and drive on to Aux Cayes.

'If the Tontons Macoute find him before Philipot …'

'You won't get there before midnight, and no one goes into a cemetery after dark. If anyone finds him it will be a bad lookout for you,' Magiot said.

'They'll make him talk.'

'I suppose there's no other possible way …'

'I would never get a pass to leave Port-au-Prince or I would have offered …'

'Don't worry. I have a personal score to settle with Concasseur.'

'We all have that. At least there is one thing we can depend on …'

'What's

that?'

'The

weather.'

4

There was a Catholic mission and a hospital at Aux Cayes and I had thought up some story to tell of a package of theological books and a parcel of medicines which I had promised to deliver there. The story as it happened hardly mattered; the police were only concerned with the dignity of their office. A pass to Aux Cayes cost so many hours of waiting, that was all, in the smell of the zoo, under the snapshots of the dead rebels, in the steam of the stove-like day. The door of the office in which Mr Smith and I had first seen Concasseur was closed. Perhaps he was already in disgrace and my score settled for me.

Just before one o'clock struck, my name was called and I went to a policeman at the desk. He began to fill in the innumerable details, of myself and my car, from my birth in Monte Carlo to the colour of my Humber. A sergeant came and looked over his shoulder. 'You are mad,' he said.

'Why?'

'You'll never get to Aux Cayes without a jeep.'

'The Great Southern Highway,' I said.

'A hundred and eighty kilometres of mud and pot-holes. Even with a jeep it takes eight hours.'

That afternoon Martha came to see me. As we were resting side by side she said to me, 'Jones takes you seriously.'

'I meant him to.'

'You know you wouldn't get past the first road-block.'

'Are you so anxious about him?'

'You are such a fool,' she said. 'I think if I were going away for ever, you'd spoil the last moment …'

'Are you going away?'

'One day. Of course. It's certain. One always moves on.'

'Would you tell me beforehand?'

'I don't know. I mightn't have the courage.'

'I'd follow you.'

'Would you? What a baggage-train. To arrive in a new capital with a husband and Angel and a lover as well.'

'At least you would have left Jones behind.'

'Who knows? Perhaps we could smuggle him out in the diplomatic bag. Luis likes him better than he does you. He says he's more honest.'

'Honest? Jones?' I gave a good imitation of a laugh, but my throat was dry after love.

As so often before, the dusk came down while we talked of Jones; we didn't make love a second time: the subject was anaphrodisiac.

'It's strange to me,' I said, 'how easily he makes friends. Luis and you. Even Mr Smith was fond of him. Perhaps the crooked appeals to the straight or the guilty to the innocent, like blonde appeals to black.'

'Am I innocent?'

'Yes.'

'And yet you think I sleep with Jones.'

'That has nothing to do with innocence.'

'Would you really follow me if we went away?'

'Of course. If I could raise the cash. Once I had a hotel. Now I have only you. Are you leaving? Are you keeping something secret?'

'I'm not. But Luis may be.'

'Doesn't he tell you everything?'

'Perhaps he's more afraid to make me unhappy than you are. Tenderness is more - tender.'

'How often does he make love to you?'

'You think me insatiable, don't you? I need you and Luis and Jones,'

she said, but she didn't answer my question. The palms and the bougainvillaea had turned black, and the rain began, in single drops like gouts of heavy oil. Between the drops the sultry silence fell and then the lightning struck and the roar of the storm came down the mountain. The rain was hammered into the ground like a prefabricated wall. I said, 'It will be a night like this, when the moon's hidden, that I'll come for Jones.'

'How will you get him past the road-blocks?'

I repeated what Petit Pierre had said to me, 'There are no road-blocks in a storm.'

'But they'll suspect you when they find out …'

'I trust you and Luis not to let them find out. You have to close Angel's mouth, and the dog's too. Don't let him go whining round the house looking for lost Jones.'

'Are you frightened?'

'I wish I had a jeep, that's all.'

'Why are you doing it?'

'I don't like Concasseur and his Tontons Macoute. I don't like Papa Doc. I don't like them feeling my balls in the street to see if I have a gun. That body in the bathing-pool - I used to have different memories. They tortured Joseph. They ruined my hotel.'

'What difference can Jones make if he's a fake?'

'Perhaps after all he isn't. Philipot believes in him. Perhaps he did fight the Japs.'

'If he was a fake he wouldn't want to go, would he?'

'He committed himself too far in front of you.'

'I'm not that important to him.'

'Then what is? Did he ever speak to you about a golf club?'

'Yes, but you don't risk death for a golf club. He wants to go.'

'Do you believe that?'

'He asked me to lend him back his cocktail-shaker. He said it's a mascot. He always had it with him in Burma. He says he'll return it when the guerrillas enter Port-au-Prince.'

'He certainly has his dreams,' I said. 'Perhaps he's an innocent too.'

'Don't be angry,' she implored me, 'if I go home early. I promised him a party - of gin-rummy, I mean, before Angel comes back from school. He's so good with Angel. They play commandos and unarmed combat. There may not be time for many more gin-rummies. You do understand, don't you?

I want to be kind.'

I felt weariness more than anger when she left me, weariness of myself most of all. Was I incapable of trust? But when I poured myself out a whisky and heard the vast inundation of silence flooding round, venom returned; venom was an antidote to fear. I thought, why should I trust a German, the child of a hanged man?

5

A few days later I received a letter from Mr Smith - it had taken more than a week to come from Santo Domingo. They had stopped off, he wrote to me, for a few days to look around and see the tomb of Columbus, and who did I think they had met? I could answer that without even turning the page. Mr Fernandez, of course. He happened to be at the airport when they arrived. (I wondered whether his profession made him stand by on the airfield like an ambulance.) Mr Fernandez had shown them so much, so interestingly, that they had decided to stay on longer. Apparently Mr Fernandez' vocabulary had increased. In the Medea he had been suffering from a great grief, and that was the reason he had broken down at the concert; his mother had been seriously ill, but she had recovered. The cancer had proved to be no more than a fibrome, and Mrs Smith had converted her to a vegetarian diet. Mr Fernandez even thought that there were possibilities for a vegetarian centre in the Dominican Republic. 'I must admit,' he wrote, 'that conditions here are more peaceful, although there is a great deal of poverty. Mrs Smith has met a friend from Wisconsin.' He sent his cordial best wishes to Major Jones and thanked me for all my help and hospitality. He was an old man with beautiful manners, and suddenly I realized how much I missed him. In the school chapel at Monte Carlo we prayed every Sunday, ' Dona nobis pacem,'

but I doubt whether that prayer was answered for many in the life that followed. Mr Smith had no need to pray for peace. He had been born with peace in his heart instead of the splinter of ice. That afternoon Hamit's body was found in an open sewer on the edge of Port-au-Prince. I drove out to Mère Catherine's (why not if Martha was at home with Jones?), but none of the girls had ventured out that evening from their homes. The story of Hamit was probably circulating by this time all over town, and they feared that one body was not sufficient to make a feast-day for Baron Samedi. Madame Philipot and her child had joined the other refugees at the Venezuelan Embassy, and there was a feeling of uncertainty everywhere. (I noticed, driving by, that two guards were now outside Martha's embassy.) I was stopped at the road-block below the hotel and searched, although the rain had begun. I wondered whether some of the activity was due to Concasseur's return - he had to prove himself loyal. At the Trianon I found Doctor Magiot's boy waiting with a note - an invitation to dine with him. It was already past the hour of dinner and we drove accompanied by thunder to his house. This time we were not stopped - the rain was falling too heavily now and the militiaman crouched in his shelter of old sacks. The Norfolk pine dripped beside the drive like a broken umbrella, and Doctor Magiot waited for me in his Victorian sitting-room with a decanter of port.

'Have you heard about Hamit?' I asked. The two glasses stood on little bead-mats with floral designs to protect a papier mâché table.

'Yes, poor man.'

'What had they got against him?'

'He was one of Philipot's post-boxes. And he didn't talk.'

'And you are another?'

He poured out the port. I have never learned to enjoy port as an aperitif, but I took it that night without protest; I was in the mood for any drink. He didn't answer my question, so I asked him another. 'How do you know he didn't talk?'

He gave me the obvious answer, 'I am here.' The old woman called Madame Ferry who looked after the house and cooked his meals opened the door and reminded us that dinner was ready. She wore a black dress and had a white cap on her head. It might seem an odd setting for a Marxist, but I remembered hearing of the lace curtains and the china cabinets in the early Ilyushin jets. Like her they gave a sense of security. We had an excellent steak and creamed potatoes with a touch of garlic and as good a claret as could be expected so far away from Bordeaux. Doctor Magiot was not in a humour to talk, but his silence was as monumental as his conversation. When he said 'Another glass?' the phrase was like a simple name carved on a tombstone. When dinner was finished, he said, 'The American Ambassador is returning.'

'Are you sure?'

'And friendly discussions are to be opened with the Dominican Republic. We are abandoned again.'

The old lady came in with coffee and he was silent. His face was hidden from me by the glass dome which covered an arrangement of wax flowers. I felt that after dinner we should have joined other members of the Browning Society for a discussion of the Sonnets from the Portuguese. Hamit lay in his drain a very long way from here.

'I have some Curaçao or there is a little Benedictine left if you prefer it.'

'Curaçao,

please.'

'The

Curaçao,

Madame

Ferry,' and again silence settled except for the

thunder outside. I wondered why he had summoned me and at last when Madame Ferry had come and gone I heard. 'I've received a reply from Philipot.'

'A good thing it came to you and not to Hamit.'

'He says he will be at the rendezvous for three nights running next week. Beginning on Monday.'

'The

cemetery?'

'Yes. On those nights there should be hardly any moon.'

'But suppose there's no storm either?'

'Have you ever known three nights without a storm at this time of year?'

'No. But my pass is for one day only - Monday.'

'A detail. Few policemen can read. You leave Jones and drive on. If something goes wrong and you are suspected I'll try and warn you at Aux Cayes. You might possibly get away by fishing-boat.'

'I hope to God nothing does go wrong. I have no wish to be on the run. My life's here.'

'You will have to get beyond Petit Goave before the storm is over or they'll search your car there. After Petit Goave there should be no trouble before Aquin and you'll be alone again when you reach Aquin.'

'I wish to God I had a jeep.'

'So do I.'

'What about the guards at the embassy?'

'Don't bother about them. During the storm they will take rum in the kitchen.'

'We must warn Jones to be ready. I have an idea he may back out.'

Doctor Magiot said, 'I don't want you to visit the embassy between now and the night you leave. I shall go there tomorrow - to treat Jones. Mumps is a dangerous disease at his age; it may cause sterility or even impotence. The incubation period after the child's attack might seem curiously long to a doctor, but the servants won't realize that. He will have to be isolated and kept very quiet. You should be back from Aux Cayes a long time before anyone knows he's gone.'

'And you, doctor?'

'I treated him for as long as was necessary. That period is your alibi. And my car will not leave Port-au-Prince - that is mine.'

'I only hope he's worth all the trouble we are taking.'

'Oh I assure you, so do I. So do I.'

CHAPTER III

1

NEXT day I received a note from Martha that Jones had been taken ill and that Doctor Magiot feared complications. She was nursing him herself and couldn't at the moment leave the embassy. It was a note written for other people to read, a note to leave about, and yet it chilled me. Surely between the lines it would have been possible for her to have indicated some unobtrusive sign of love. The danger was not all Jones's, it was mine as well, but all the comfort of her presence these last days was to belong to him. I pictured her sitting on his bed, while he made her laugh as he had made Tin Tin laugh in the stable at Mère Catherine's. Saturday came and passed, then Sunday began its long course. I was impatient to be finished. On Sunday afternoon, as I was reading on the verandah, Captain Concasseur drove up in a jeep - I envied him the jeep. The driver who had been assigned to Jones, with the big belly and the gold teeth, sat beside him wearing a fixed grin like an ape being delivered at a zoo. Concasseur didn't get out; they both stared at me through their black glasses, and I stared at them in return, but they had the advantage - I couldn't see them blink. After a long time Concasseur said, 'I hear you're going to Aux Cayes.'

'Yes.'

'Which

day?'

'Tomorrow - I hope.'

'Your pass is for a short trip only.'

'I know that.'

'A day to go and a day to return and one night at Aux Cayes.'

'I

know.'

'Your business must be very important to take you on such an uncomfortable journey.'

'I told my business at the police station.'

'Philipot is in the mountains near Aux Cayes and your man Joseph too.'

'You know more than I do. But it's your job.'

'You are alone here now?'

'Yes.'

'No presidential candidate. No Madame Smith. Even your chargé is on leave. You are very isolated here. Are you frightened sometimes at night?'

'I'm getting used to it by now.'

'We'll be watching for you along the road, noting your arrival at each post. You will have to account to us for your time.' He said something to his chauffeur and the man laughed. 'I said to him that he or I will ask you questions if you linger on the road.'

'Just as you questioned Joseph?'

'Yes. Exactly in the same way. How is Major Jones?'

'Not well at all. He has caught mumps from the ambassador's son.'

'They say there will be a new ambassador soon. The right of asylum ought not to be abused. Major Jones would be well advised to move to the British Embassy.'

'Shall I tell him that you'll give him a safe-conduct?'

'Yes.'

'I'll tell him when he's better. I'm not sure that I've had mumps and I don't want to take any risks.'

'We can still be friends, Monsieur Brown. I feel certain you do not like Major Jones any more than I do.'

'You may be right. Anyway I'll give him the message.'

Concasseur backed the jeep into the bougainvillaea, breaking branches with the same pleasure he felt in breaking limbs, turned and drove away. His visit was the only thing that interrupted the monotony of the long Sunday. For once the lights were turned out exactly on time, and the storm poured down the flanks of Kenscoff as though started by a stop-watch; I tried to read in a paperback volume of his short stories Henry James's Great Good Place which someone long ago had left behind; I wanted to forget that tomorrow was Monday, but I failed. 'The wild waters of our horrible times,'

James had written and I wondered what temporary break in the long enviable Victorian peace had so disturbed him. Had his butler given notice?

I had built my life around this hotel - it represented stability more profoundly than the God whom the fathers of the Visitation had hoped I would serve; once it had represented success better than my travelling artgallery with the phoney paintings; it was in a sense a family tomb. I put The Great Good Place down and went upstairs with a lamp. I thought it possible

- if things went wrong - that this might be the last night I would spend in the Hotel Trianon.

On the stairs most of the paintings had been sold or returned to their owners. My mother had the wisdom in her early days in Haiti to buy an Hyppolite, and I had kept it against all American offers, through the good and the bad years, as an insurance-policy. There remained too a Benoit, that represented the great Hurricane Hazel of 1954, a grey river in flood carrying down all kinds of strangely chosen objects, a dead pig floating on its back, a chair, the head of a horse, and a bedstead with floral decorations, while a soldier and a priest prayed on the bank and the gale beat the trees all one way. On the first landing there was a picture by Philippe Auguste of a carnival procession, men, women and children wearing bright masks. Of a morning, when the sunlight shone through the first-floor windows, the harsh colours gave an impression of gaiety, the drummers and the trumpeters seemed about to play a lively air. Only when you came closer you saw how ugly the masks were and how the masquers surrounded a cadaver in graveclothes; then the primitive colours went flat as though the clouds had come down from Kenscoff and the thunder would soon follow. Wherever that picture hung, I thought, I would feel Haiti close to me. Baron Samedi would be walking in the nearest graveyard, even though the nearest graveyard was in Tooting Bec.

I went up first to the John Barrymore suite. When I looked out of the window I could see nothing; the city was in darkness, except for a cluster of lights in the palace and a line of lamps which marked the port. I noticed Mr Smith had left a vegetarian hadbook by the bed. I wondered how many he carried with him for distribution. I opened it and found on the flyleaf a message written in his clear slanting American hand. 'Dear Unknown Reader, do not close this Book, but read a little before you sleep. There is Wisdom here. Your Unknown Friend.' I envied him his assurance, yes, and the purity of his intention too. The capital initials gave the same impression as a Gideon Bible.

On the floor below was my mother's room (I slept there now), and among the closed guest rooms, which had known no visitors for a long time, was Marcel's room and the one in which I had lain that first night in Port-auPrince. I remembered the clanging bell and the great black figure in the scarlet pyjamas and the monogram on the pocket and how he had said to me sadly and apologetically, 'She wants me.'

I went into the two rooms in turn: they contained nothing of that remote past. I had changed the furniture, I had painted the walls, I had even altered their shapes, so that bathrooms could be added. Dust lay thick on the porcelain of the bidets and the hot-water taps ran no longer. I went into my room and sat down on the big bed which had been my mother's. I almost expected, even after all the intervening years, to find a thread on the pillows of that impossibly Titian hair. But nothing survived of her except what I had deliberately chosen to keep. On a table by the bed was a papier mâché box in which my mother had stored some improbable jewellery. The jewellery I had sold to Hamit for next to nothing, and the box now contained only that mysterious medal of the Resistance and the picture-postcard of the ruined citadel which carried the only writing I had of hers addressed to me - 'Nice to see you if you come this way' and the signature that I had taken for Manon and the name she had never had the time to explain to me, 'Comtesse de Lascot-Villiers'. There was also another message in the box written in her hand but not to me. I had found it in Marcel's pocket when I cut him down. I don't know why I preserved it, or why two or three times I had re-read it, for it only deepened my sense of being without parentage. 'Marcel, I know I'm an old woman and as you say a bit of an actress. But please go on pretending. As long as we pretend we escape. Pretend that I love you like a mistress. Pretend that you love me like a lover. Pretend that I would die for you and that you would die for me.' I read the message again now; I thought it movingly phrased … And he had died for her, so perhaps he was no comédien after all. Death is a proof of sincerity. 2

Martha greeted me with a glass of whisky in her hand. She was wearing a gold linen dress and her shoulders were bare. She said, 'Luis is out. I was taking a drink to Jones.'

'I'll take it up for you, 'I said. 'He'll need it.'

'You haven't come for him?' she asked.

'Oh yes, I have. The rain is just beginning. We'll have to give it a little while longer until the guards take shelter,

'What earthly use will he be? Out there?'

'A great deal if all he says is true. It only needed one man in Cuba …'

'How often I've heard that. It's a parrot-phrase. I'm sick of it. This is not Cuba.'

'It will be easier for you and me when he's gone.'

'Is that all you think about?'

'Yes. I suppose it is.'

She had a small bruise just below the shoulder-bone. Trying to make the question sound like a joke, I said, 'What have you been doing to yourself?'

'What do you mean?'

'That bruise.' I touched it with my finger.

'Oh that? I don't know. I bruise easily.'

'At

gin-rummy?'

She put the glass down and turned her back. She said, 'Give yourself a drink. You will need it too.'

I said, as I poured myself a whisky, 'I'll be back on Wednesday by one if I leave Aux Cayes at dawn. Will you come up to the hotel? Angel will be at school.'

'Perhaps. Let's wait and see.'

'We haven't been together for several days.' I added, 'There'll be no gin-rummy to take you home early.' She turned back to me, and I saw she was crying. 'What's the matter?' I asked.

'I told you. I bruise easily.'

'What have I said?' Fear has strange effects: it releases adrenalin into the blood: it makes a man wet his trousers: in me it injected a desire to hurt. I said, 'You seem upset at losing Jones?'

'Why shouldn't I be?' she said. 'You think you're lonely up there at the Trianon. Well, I'm lonely here. I'm lonely with Luis, silent in a twin bed. I'm lonely with Angel, doing his interminable sums for him when he comes back from school. Yes, I've been happy having Jones here - hearing people laugh at his bad jokes, playing gin-rummy with him. Yes, I'll miss him. I'll miss him till it hurts. How I'll miss him.'

'More than you missed me when I went to New York?'

'You were coming back. At least you said you were. I'm not sure now whether you ever did.'

I took the two glasses of whisky and went upstairs. On the landing I realized I didn't know which was Jones's room. I called softly, so that the servants shouldn't hear me, 'Jones. Jones.'

'I'm

here.'

I pushed a door open and went in. He sat on his bed fully dressed: he had even put on his gumboots. 'I heard your voice,' he said, 'down below. Tonight's the night, old man?'

'Yes. You'd better drink this.'

'I can do with it.' He gave a sour grimace.

'I've got a bottle in the car.'

He said, 'I've done my packing. Luis has lent me a kitbag.' He ran over the items on his fingers to check them: 'Change of shoes, change of pants. Two pairs of socks. Change of shirt. Oh, and the cocktail-shaker. That's for luck. You see it was given me …' He stopped abruptly. Perhaps he remembered he had told me the truth of that story.

'You don't seem to anticipate a long campaign,' I said to help him out.

'I mustn't carry more than my men. Give me time, and I'll have our supplies organized.' For the first time he sounded professional, and I wondered whether perhaps I had maligned him. 'You can help us there, old man. When I've got a courier system working properly.'

'Let's think of the next few hours. We have to get through them.'

'I've a lot to thank you for.' Again his words surprised me. 'It's a big chance for me, isn't it? Of course I'm scared to hell. There's no denying that.'

We sat in silence side by side, drinking our whiskies, listening to the thunder which shook the roof. I had been so certain Jones would resist when the moment came that I felt a little at a loss what to do next, and it was Jones who took command. 'We'd better get cracking if we're to be out of here before the storm's over. I'll say good-bye, if you'll excuse me, to my lovely hostess.'

When he came back he had a trace of lipstick at the corner of his mouth: an awkward embrace on the mouth or an awkward embrace on the cheek - it was hard to tell which. He said, 'The police are safe in the kitchen drinking rum. We'd better be off.'

Martha unbolted the front door for us. 'You go first,' I said to Jones, trying to re-establish command. 'Stoop down below the windscreen if you can.'

We were both wet through the moment after we emerged. I turned to say good-bye to Martha, but even then I couldn't resist the question, 'Are you still crying?'

'No,' she said, 'it's the rain,' and I could see she spoke the truth. The rain ran down her face as it ran down the wall behind her. 'What are you waiting for?'

'Don't I rate a kiss as much as Jones?' I said, and she put her mouth against my cheek: I could feel the listless indifference of the embrace. I said accusingly, 'I'm running a bit of danger too.'

'But I don't like your motive,' she said.

It was as though somebody I hated spoke from my mouth before I could silence him. 'Have you slept with Jones?' I regretted the question even before the last word was said. If the heavy peal of thunder which followed had drowned it I would have been content, I would never have repeated it. She stood flat against the door as though she were facing a firing squad, and I thought for some reason of her father before his execution. Had he flung a defiance at his judges from the scaffold? Had he worn an expression of anger and disdain?

'You've been asking me that for weeks,' she said, 'every time I've seen you. All right then. The answer's yes, yes. That's what you want me to say, isn't it? Yes. I've slept with Jones.' The worst thing was I only half believed her.

3

There were no lights in Mère Catherine's as we passed the turning to her brothel and took the Southern Highway, or else we couldn't see them through the rain. I drove at about twenty miles an hour; I felt like a man blindfolded, and this was the easy part of the road. It had been constructed with the help of American engineers in the much advertised five-year plan, but the Americans had gone home and the metalled road ceased about seven miles out of Port-au-Prince. This was where I expected a road-block, but I was startled when my headlamps picked up an empty jeep outside a militiaman's hut, which meant the Tontons Macoute were there as well. I had little time to accelerate, but no one came from the hut - if the Tontons were inside, they were keeping dry too. I listened for the sound of pursuit, but all I could hear was the drumming of the rain. The great highway had become no more than a country track: our speed went down to eight miles an hour as we bumped from rock to rock and splashed through standing pools. For more than an hour we drove in silence, too shaken about to speak. A rock crashed under the car and I thought for a moment an axle was broken. Jones said, 'Can I find your whisky?'

When he had found it he took a swill and handed the bottle to me. The car because of my momentary inattention skidded sideways and the rearwheels stuck in wet laterite. It took us twenty minutes' hard labour before we moved again.

'Shall we make your rendezvous on time?' Jones asked.

'I doubt it. You may have to keep under cover till tomorrow night. I brought you some sandwiches in case.'

He chuckled. 'It's the life,' he said. 'I've often dreamt of something like this.'

'I thought it was the life you'd always led.'

He fell silent again as though aware of an indiscretion. Suddenly for no reason at all the road improved. The rain was easing rapidly; I hoped it wouldn't stop altogether before we passed the next policepost. Afterwards there was no problem before the cemetery this side of Aquin. I said, 'And Martha? How did you get on with Martha?'

'She's a wonderful girl,' he said with caution.

'I got the impressions she was fond of you.'

It was a bad sign of the weather clearing that sometimes I could detect a streak of sea between the palms like the flash of a match. Jones said, 'We got on like a house on fire.'

'I sometimes envied you, but perhaps she's not your type.' It was like stripping a bandage from a wound: the more slowly I pulled the longer the pain would last, but I lacked the courage to rip the bandage right away, and all the time I had to watch the difficult road.

'Old man,' Jones said, 'every girl's my type, but she was something special.'

'You know she's German?'

'The fräuleins understand a thing or two.'

'As well as Tin Tin?' I tried to ask in a casual clinical way.

'Tin Tin was not in the same class, old man.' We might have been two medical students boasting of rudimentary experiences. I didn't speak again for a long time.

We were approaching Petit Goave - I knew the place from better days. The police station, I remembered, was off the highway, and I would be supposed to drive there to report. I hoped the rain was still heavy enough to keep the police in their quarters - they were unlikely to have militia posted here. Dank huts wobbled in the headlights beside the road, the mud and thatch broken and bedraggled in the rain: no lamps burned, there was no human being to be seen, not even a cripple. In the small yards the family tombs looked more solid than the family huts. The dead were allotted mansions of a better class than the living - houses of two storeys with window-embrasures where food and lights could be placed on the night of All Souls. I couldn't let my attention wander until we had passed Petit Goave. In a long yard beside the road there were rows of little crosses with what looked like tresses of blonde hair looped between, as though they had been ripped from the skulls of women buried below.

'Good God,' Jones said, 'what was that?'

'Only sisal drying.'

'Drying? In this rain?'

'Who knows what's happened to the owner? Perhaps he's shot. In prison. Fled to the mountains.'

'It was a bit eery, old man. Sort of Edgar Allan Poe. It looked more like death than the cemeteries do.'

Nobody was about in the main street of Petit Goave. We passed something called the Yo-Yo Club and a big sign for Mère Merlan's Brasseries and a boulangerie belonging to someone called Brutus and a garage owned by Cato - so the stubborn memories of this black people preserved the memories of a better republic - and then to my relief we were in the country again, tossing from rock to rock. 'We've made it,' I said.

'Nearly

there?'

'We're nearly half-way.'

'I think I'll take another drop of whisky, old man.'

'Drink what you like. You'll have to make it last a long time, though.'

'I'd better finish it before I join the boys. It wouldn't go far with

them.'

I took another pull myself to give me courage, and yet I postponed the final unambiguous question.

'How did you get on with the husband?' I asked him cautiously.

'Fine. I wasn't stealing any greens of his.'

'Weren't

you?'

'She doesn't sleep with him any more.'

'How do you know?'

'I have my reasons,' he said, taking the bottle and sucking at it loudly. The road again required all my attention. Our speed was practically reduced to walking-pace now: I had to thread between the rocks like a pony at a gymkhana.

'We ought to have had a jeep,' Jones said.

'Where would you find a jeep in Port-au-Prince? Borrowed it from the Tontons?'

The road branched, and we left the sea behind us and turned inland, climbing into the hills. The track for a while became plain laterite and there was only the mud to clog our passage. It was a change of exercise. We had been going for three hours - it was close to one in the morning.

'Little danger of militia now,' I said.

'But the rain's stopped.'

'They're afraid of the hills.'

'From which cometh our help,' Jones quipped. The whisky was loosening him up. I could wait no longer and I pushed the question home.

'Was she a good lay?'

'Re-markable,' Jones said, and I clung to the wheel to keep my hands off him. It was a long while before I spoke again, but he noticed nothing. He fell asleep with his mouth open, leaning back against the door where Martha had often leant; he slept as peacefully as a child, innocently. Perhaps he really was as innocent as Mr Smith, and that was the reason they had liked each other. Anger soon left me: the child had broken a dish, that was all - yes, a dish, I thought, is just how he would have described her. Once he woke for a moment and offered to drive, but I felt enough danger in our situation without that.

And then the car gave out altogether; perhaps my attention had wandered, perhaps it was just waiting for one extra heavy lurch to shake its innards out. The wheel whirled in my hands as I tried to recover the road after bouncing off a rock: we struck hard against another boulder and came to rest, the front axle cracked in two and one headlamp smashed. There was nothing whatever to be done - I couldn't get to Aux Cayes, and I couldn't go back to Port-au-Prince. I was tied for that night anyway to Jones. Jones opened his eyes and said, 'I dreamt … why have we stopped?

Are we there?'

'The front axle's bust.'

'How far are we, do you suppose, from - there?'

I looked at the mileage and said, 'A couple of kilometres I'd say, perhaps three.'

'Shanks's pony,' Jones said. He began to haul his kitbag out of the car. I put the car-keys in my pocket, I didn't know why - I doubted whether there was a garage in Haiti capable of mending the car, and anyway who would trouble to come down this road to fetch it? The roads round Port-au-Prince were littered with abandoned cars and overturned buses; once I had seen a breakdown van with its crane lying sideways in a ditch - it was like a lifeboat broken on the rocks, a contradiction of nature. We began to walk. I had brought a torch, but it was very rough going and Jones's gumboots slithered on the wet laterite. It was after two, and the rain had stopped. 'If they are following us,' Jones said, 'they won't have much difficulty now. We're a bloody advertisement for human existence.'

'There's no reason why they should be following us.'

'I was thinking of that jeep we passed,' he said.

'There

was

nobody in it.'

'We don't know who was in the hut watching us go by.'

'Anyway, we have no choice. We couldn't walk two yards without a light. On this road we'd hear a car coming a couple of miles away.'

When I flashed the torch towards either side of the road there was only rock and earth and low wet scrub. I said, 'We mustn't miss the cemetery and walk bang into Aquin. There's a military post in Aquin.' I could hear Jones breathing heavily, and I offered to take his kitbag for a spell, but he would have none of it. 'I'm a bit out of condition,' he said, 'that's all,' and a little further on he said, 'I talked a lot of nonsense in the car. I'm not always exactly trustworthy.'

It seemed to me an understatement, but I wondered why he made it. At last my torch picked out what I was looking for: a cemetery on my right, stretching uphill into the dark. It was like a city built by dwarfs, street after street of tiny houses, some nearly big enough to hold ourselves, some too small for a new-born child, all of the same grey stone, from which the plaster had long flaked. I turned my torch to the other side where I had been told there would be a ruined hut, but mistakes are always made in the plan of a rendezvous. The hut should have been opposite the first corner of the cemetery we came to, standing alone, but there was nothing except a slope of earth.

'The

wrong

cemetery?' Jones asked.

'It can't be. We must be near Aquin now.' We went on down the track and opposite the further corner we did find a hut, but it didn't seem ruined so far as I could tell in the torch-light. There was nothing we could do but try it. If anyone lived there, he would be at least as scared as we were.

'I wish I had a gun,' Jones said.

'I'm glad you haven't, but what about your unarmed combat?' He muttered something that sounded like 'rusty'.

But there was nobody inside when the door opened to my push. A patch of paling night-sky showed through a hole in the roof. 'We are two hours late,' I said. 'He's probably come and gone.'

Jones sat on his kitbag and panted. 'We should have started earlier.'

'How could we? We were timed by the storm.'

'What do we do now?'

'When it's light I'll go back to the car. There's nothing compromising in a wrecked car on this road. Some time during the day I know there's a local bus between Petit Goave and Aquin, and perhaps I can hitch a ride on from there, or there may be another bus as far as Aux Cayes.'

'It sounds simple,' Jones said with envy. 'But what do I do?'

'Hold out until tomorrow night.' I added viciously, 'You're in your familiar jungle now.' I looked out of the doorway: there was nothing to be seen or heard, not even a barking dog. I said, 'I don't like staying here. Suppose we fell asleep - someone might come. The soldiers must sometimes patrol these roads - or a peasant going to work. He'd inform on us. Why shouldn't he? We are white.'

Jones said, 'We can keep watch in turn.'

'There's a better way. We'll sleep in the cemetery. No one will come there except Baron Samedi.'

We crossed the so-called road and clambered over a low stone-wall and found ourselves in the street of the miniature town, where the houses were only shoulder-high. We climbed the hillside slowly because of Jones's kitbag. I felt safer in the very middle of the cemetery, and there we found a house higher than ourselves. We put the bottle of whisky in one of the window embrasures and sat down with our backs to a wall. 'Oh well,' Jones said mechanically, 'I've been in worse places.' I wondered how bad a place would have to be before he forgot his signature tune.

'If you see a top-hat among the tombs,' I said, 'it will be the Baron.'

'Do you believe in zombies?' Jones asked.

'I don't know. Do you believe in ghosts?'

'Let's not talk about ghosts, old man, let's have another whisky.'

I thought I heard a movement and switched on the torch. It shone the whole length of a street of graves into a cat's eyes which reflected like Franco studs. It leapt upon a roof and was gone.

'Ought we to show a light, old man?'

'If there was anyone about to see it, he would be too scared to come. You couldn't do better than to dig in here tomorrow' - it was not a happily chosen phrase to use in a cemetery. 'I doubt if anyone comes here except to bury the dead.' Jones sucked in more whisky, and I warned him, 'There's only a quarter of a bottle left. You've got all tomorrow before you.'

'Martha filled the shaker for me,' he said. 'I've never known a girl so thoughtful.'

'Or such a good lay?' I asked.

There was a spell of silence - I thought perhaps he was remembering with pleasure the occasions. Then Jones said, 'Old man, the game's turned serious now.'

'What

game?'

'Playing at soldiers. I can understand why people want to confess. Death's a bloody serious affair. A man doesn't feel quite worthy of it. Like a decoration.'

'Have you such a lot to confess?'

'We all have. I don't mean to a priest or God.'

'To

whom?'

'To anyone at all. If I had a dog here tonight instead of you, I'd confess to the dog.'

I didn't want his confessions, I didn't want to hear how many times he had slept with Martha. I said, 'Did you confess to Midge?'

'There wasn't any occasion. The game hadn't turned serious then.'

'A dog at least has to keep your secrets.'

'I don't care a damn who tells what, but I don't fancy a lot of lies after I'm dead. I've lied enough before.'

I heard the cat come scrambling back over the roofs, and again I turned on my torch and lit the eyes. This time it flattened itself upon a stone and began to scrape its nails. Jones opened his kitbag and pulled out a sandwich. He broke it in half and tossed one half towards the cat which fled, as though the bread were a stone.

'You'd better be careful,' I said. 'You're on short rations now.'

'The poor devil's hungry.' He put the half-sandwich back, and we and the cat were silent a long while. It was Jones who broke the silence with his obstinate obsession. 'I'm an awful liar, old man.'

'I've always assumed that,' I said.

'What I said about Martha - there wasn't a word of truth in it. She's only one of fifty women I haven't had the courage to touch.'

I wondered if he was telling the truth now or graduating to a more honourable sort of lie. Perhaps he had detected something in my manner which told him all. Perhaps he pitied me. One could hardly sink lower, I thought, than that - to be pitied by Jones. He said, 'I've always lied about women.' He gave an uneasy laugh. 'The moment I had Tin Tin, she became a leading member of the Haitian aristocracy. If there had been anyone around to tell about it. Do you know, old man, I haven't had a single woman in my life I haven't paid - or at least promised to pay. Sometimes I've had to welsh when things were bad.'

'Martha told me she's slept with you.'

'She can't have told you that. I don't believe you.'

'Oh yes. It was almost the last words she said to me.'

'I never realized,' he said gloomily.

'Realized

what?'

'That she was your girl. Another of my lies has found me out. You mustn't believe her. She was angry because you were going away with me.'

'Or angry because I was taking you away.'

There was a scrabble in the dark where the cat had found the bit of sandwich. I said, 'There's quite a jungle atmosphere here. You'll feel at home.'

I heard him take a pull at the whisky and then he said, 'Old man, I've never been in a jungle in my life - unless you count the Calcutta Zoo.'

'Were you never in Burma?'

'Oh yes, I was. Or nearly. Anyway I was only fifty miles from the border. I was at Imphal, in charge of entertaining the troops. Well, not exactly in charge. We had Noel Coward once,' he added with pride and a sense of relief - it was something true that he could boast about.

'How did the two of you get on?'

'I didn't actually speak to him,' Jones said.

'But you were in the army?'

'No. I was rejected. Flat feet. They found I'd managed a cinema in Shillong, so they gave me this job. I had a uniform of a kind but without badges of rank. I was in liaison,' he added with that note of odd pride, 'with E.N.S.A.'

I flashed my torch around the acre of grey tombs. I said, 'Why the hell are we here then?'

'I boasted a bit too much, didn't I?'

'You've let yourself into a nasty situation. Aren't you frightened?'

'I'm like a fireman at his first fire,' he said.

'Your flat feet won't enjoy these mountain tracks!

'I can manage with supports,' Jones said. 'You won't tell them, old man? It was a confession.'

'They'll soon find out without my telling them. So you can't even use a Bren?'

'They haven't got a Bren.'

'You've spoken too late. I can't smuggle you back.'

'I don't want to go back. Old man, you don't know what it was like in Imphal. I used to make friends sometimes - I could introduce them to girls, and then they'd go away and never come back. Or they'd come back once or twice for a yarn. There was a man called Charters who could smell water …'

He broke off abruptly, remembering. 'Another lie,' I said, as though I myself were a man of scrupulous rectitude.

'Not exactly a lie,' he said. 'You see, when he told me that, it was like someone calling me by my real name.'

'Which

wasn't

Jones?'

'Jones was on my birth certificate,' he said. 'I've seen it there myself,'

and brushed the question aside. 'When he told me that, I knew I could do the same with a bit of practice. I knew I had it in me. I made my clerk hide glasses of water in the office and then I'd wait till I had a big thirst and sniff. It didn't work very often, but then tap-water is not the same.' He added, 'I think I'll ease my feet a bit,' and I could tell from his movements that he was pulling off his gumboots.

'How did you come to be in Shillong?' I asked.

'I was born in Assam. My father planted tea - or so my mother said.'

'You had to take it on trust?'

'Well, he went home before I was born.'

'Your mother was Indian?'

'Half-Indian, old man,' he said as though he attributed importance to fractions. It was like meeting an unknown brother - Jones and Brown, the names were almost interchangeable, and so was our status. For all we knew we were both bastards, although of course there might have been a ceremony

- my mother had always given me that impression. We had both been thrown into the water to sink or swim, and swim we had - we had swum from very far apart to come together in a cemetery in Haiti. 'I like you, Jones,' I said. 'If you don't want that half a sandwich, I could do with it.'

'Of course, old man.' He fingered in his kitbag and felt for my hand in the dark.

'Tell me more, Jones,' I said.

'I came to Europe,' he said, 'after the war. I got into a lot of scrapes. Somehow I couldn't find what I was intended to do. You know, there had been times in Imphal when I almost wished the Japs would reach us. The authorities would have armed even the camp-followers then, like me and the clerks in N.A.A.F.I. and the cooks. After all I had a uniform. A lot of unprofessionals do well in war, don't they? I've learnt a lot, listening, studying maps, watching … You can feel a vocation, can't you, even if you can't practise it? And there I was, checking transport and travel-vouchers for third-class entertainers - Mr Coward was one of the exceptions, and I had to keep an eye on the girls. I called them girls. Old troupers more like. My office smelt like a stage dressing-room.'

'The grease-paint drowned the smell of water?' I said.

'You are right. It wasn't a fair test. I only wanted my chance,' he added, and I wondered whether perhaps in all his devious life he had been engaged on a secret and hopeless love-affair with virtue, watching virtue from a distance, hoping to be noticed, perhaps, like a child doing wrong in order to attract the attention of virtue.

'And now you have the chance,' I said.

'Thanks to you, old man.'

'I thought that what you wanted most was a golf-club …'

'That's true. It was my second dream. You have to have two, don't you? In case the first goes wrong.'

'Yes. I suppose so.' Making money had been my dream also. Had there been another? I had no wish to search so far back.

'You'd better try to sleep a while,' I said. 'It won't be safe to sleep in daylight.'

And sleep he did, almost at once, curled up like an embryo below the tomb. That was one quality he shared with Napoleon, and I wondered whether perhaps there might be others. Once he opened his eyes and remarked that this was 'a good place' and then slept again. I could see nothing good in it, but in the end I slept as well.

After a couple of hours something woke me. I imagined for a moment it was the noise of a car, but I thought it unlikely that a car would be out on the road so early, and the wreck of a dream stayed with me and accounted for the noise - I had been driving my car across a river on a bed of boulders. I lay still and listened with my eyes watching the grey early sky. I could see the shapes of the tombs standing around. Soon the sun would be up. It was time to get back to the car. When I was sure of the silence I nudged Jones awake.

'You'd better not sleep again now,' I said.

'I'll walk a little way with you.'

'Oh no, you won't. For my sake. You must keep away from the road until it's dark. The peasants will be going to market soon. They'll report any white man they see.'

'Then they'll report you.'

'I have my alibi. A smashed car on the road to Aux Cayes. You'll have to keep company with the cat till dark. Then go to the hut and wait for Philipot.'

Jones insisted on shaking hands. In the reasonable light of day the affection which I had felt for him was leaking rapidly away. I thought again of Martha, and as though he were half aware of my thoughts, he said, 'Give my love to Martha when you see her. Luis and Angel too, of course.'

'And

Midge?'

'It was good,' he said, 'it was like being in a family.'

I walked down a long street of graves towards the road. I was not born for the maquis - I took no precautions. I thought: Martha had no reason to lie, or had she? Opposite the wall of the cemetery stood a jeep, but the sight of it for a moment didn't change the current of my thoughts. Then I stopped and stood waiting. It was too dark yet to see who was at the wheel, but I knew very well what was going to happen next.

The voice of Concasseur whispered, 'Stay just there. Quite still. Don't move.' He got out of the jeep, followed by the fat chauffeur with the gold teeth. Even in the half light he wore the black spectacles which were his only uniform. A tommy-gun of ancient make was pointed at my chest. 'Where is Major Jones?' Concasseur whispered.

'Jones?' I said as loudly as I dared. 'How would I know? My car broke down. I have a pass to Aux Cayes. As you know.'

'Speak quietly. I am taking you and Major Jones back to Port-auPrince. Alive, I hope. The President would prefer that. I have to make my peace with the President.'

'You're being absurd. You must have seen my car by the road. I was on the way …'

'Oh yes, I saw it. I was expecting to see it.' The tommy-gun twisted in his hands and pointed away somewhere to my left. There was no advantage to me in that - the chauffeur had his gun covering me too. 'Come forward,'

Concasseur said. I made a step forward, and he said, 'Not you. Major Jones.'

I turned and saw Jones was standing there behind me. He held what was left of the whisky in his hand.

I said, 'You bloody fool. Why didn't you stay put?'

'I'm sorry. I thought perhaps you might need the whisky waiting.'

'Get into the jeep,' Concasseur said to me. I obeyed. He went up to Jones and struck him in the face. 'You cheat,' he said.

'There was enough in it for both of us,' Jones said, and Concasseur hit him again. The chauffeur stood and watched. There was enough light to see the wink of his gold teeth as he grinned.

'Get in beside your friend,' Concasseur said. While the chauffeur held us covered, he turned and began to walk towards the jeep. A noise, if it is loud and close enough, almost escapes the hearing: I felt a vibration in my ear-drums rather than heard the explosion. I saw Concasseur knocked backwards as though struck by an invisible fist: the chauffeur pitched upon his face: a scrap of the cemetery-wall leapt in the air and dropped, a long time afterwards, with a small ping in the road. Philipot came out of the hut and Joseph limped after him. They carried tommy-guns of the same ancient make. Concasseur's black glasses lay in the road. Philipot ground them to pieces under his heel and the body showed no resentment. Philipot said, 'I left the driver for Joseph.'

Joseph was bending down over the driver and working on his teeth.

'We've got to move quickly,' Philipot said. 'They'll have heard the shots in Aquin. Where is Major Jones?'

Joseph said, 'He went into the cernetery.'

'He must be fetching his kitbag,' I said.

'Tell him to hurry.'

I walked up between the little grey houses to the spot where we had passed the night. Jones was there, kneeling beside the tomb in the attitude of prayer, but the face he turned to me was olive-green with sickness. He had vomited on the ground. He said, 'I'm sorry, old man. One of those things. Please don't tell them, but I've never seen a man die before.'

CHAPTER IV

1

I DROVE along many kilometres of wire-fencing to find a gate. Mr Fernandez had procured for me in Santo Domingo a small sports-car at a cut-rate, perhaps a too flippant car for my errand, and I had a personal introduction from Mr Smith. I had left Santo Domingo in the afternoon and now it was sunset; there were no road-blocks in those days in the Dominican Republic and all was peace - there was no military junta - the American Marines had not yet landed. For half the distance I followed a wide highway where cars went by me at a hundred miles an hour. The sense of peace was very real after the violence of Haiti which seemed more than a few hundred kilometres away. Nobody stopped me to examine my papers. I came to a gate in the fence, which was locked. A negro in a steel helmet and blue dungarees asked my business from the other side of the wire. I told him I had come to see Mr Schuyler Wilson.

'Let me see your pass,' he demanded, and I felt as though I were back where I had come from.

'He expects me.'

The negro went to a hut and I saw him telephoning (I had almost forgotten that telephones worked). Then he opened the gate and gave me a badge which he said I was to wear so long as I was on the mining estate. I could drive as far as the next barrier. I drove a good many miles beside the flat blue Caribbean sea. I passed a small landing-ground with a windstocking blowing towards Haiti and then a harbour empty of boats. The red bauxite dust lay everywhere. I came to another barrier closing the road and another negro in a tin hat. He examined my badge and took my name again and my business and telephoned. Then he told me to wait where I was. Someone would come for me. I waited ten minutes.

'Is this the Pentagon,' I asked him, 'or the headquarters of the C.I.A.?'

He wouldn't speak to me. He probably had orders not to speak. I was glad he didn't carry a gun. Then a motor-cycle arrived driven by a white man in a tin helmet. He spoke practically no English and I knew no Spanish; he indicated I was to follow his motor-cycle. We drove on for a few kilometres more of red earth and blue sea before we reached the first administrative buildings, rectangular blocks of cement and glass with no one in sight. Further on was a luxurious trailer-park where children played with space-uniforms and space-guns. Women looked out of windows over kitchen-stoves, and there was a smell of cooking. At last before a great glass building we came to a halt. There was a flight of steps wide enough for a parliament and a terrace with lounging-chairs. A large fat man with an anonymous face shaved as smooth as marble stood at the top. He might have been a city mayor waiting to deliver a freedom.

'Mr

Brown?'

'Mr Schuyler Wilson?'

He looked at me in a surly way. Perhaps I had pronounced his first name wrong. Perhaps he disliked my sports-car. He said grudgingly, 'Have a coke,' and gestured towards one of the lounging-chairs.

'If you could spare a whisky?'

He said without enthusiasm, 'I'll see what we can do,' and walked into the great glass building leaving me alone. I felt I had chalked up a black mark. Perhaps only visiting directors or leading politicians got whisky. I was only a potential catering manager, seeking a job. However he brought the whisky, carrying a coke in his other hand like a reproach.

'Mr Smith wrote to you about me,' I said. I just stopped myself from saying the Presidential Candidate.

'Yes. Where did you two meet?'

'He stayed at my hotel in Port-au-Prince.'

'That's right.' It was as though he were double-checking the facts to see if one of us had lied. 'You're not a vegetarian?'

'No.'

'Because the boys here like their steak and French fries.' I drank a little of the whisky which was drowned in soda. Mr Schuyler Wilson watched me closely as though he begrudged me every drop. I felt more and more that the job would not come my way.

'What's your experience in catering?'

'Well, I owned this hotel in Haiti until a month ago. I've worked too at the Trocadero in London -' and I added the ancient lie, 'Fouquet's in Paris.'

'Got any testimonials?'

'I could hardly write my own, could I? I've been my own employer a good many years now.'

'Your Mr Smith's a bit of a crank, isn't he?'

'I like him.'

'Did his wife tell you he ran for president once? On the vegetarian ticket.' Mr Schuyler Wilson laughed. It was an angry laugh without amusement, like the menace of a hidden beast.

'I suppose it was a form of propaganda.'

'I don't like propaganda. We've had leaflets here pushed under the wire. Trying to get at the men. We pay them well. We feed them well. What made you leave Haiti?'

'Trouble with the authorities. I helped an Englishman to escape from Port-au-Prince. The Tontons Macoute were after him.'

'What's the Tontons Macoute?'

We were less than three hundred kilometres from Port-au-Prince; it seemed strange he could ask me that, but I suppose there hadn't been a story for a long time in any newspaper he read.

'The secret police,' I said.

'How

did

you get out?'

'His friends helped me across the border.' It was a brief enough statement to cover two weeks of fatigue and frustration.

'Who do you mean - his friends?'

'The

insurgents.'

'You mean the Communists?' He was cross-examining me as though I had applied for a job as agent in the C.I.A. and not as catering manager for a mining-company. I lost my temper a little. I said, 'Insurgents are not always Communists until you make them so.'

My irritation amused Mr Schuyler Wilson. He smiled for the first time; it was a smile of self-satisfaction as though he had uncovered by adroit questioning something I had wanted to keep secret.

'You're quite an expert,' he said.

'An

expert?'

'I mean owning your own hotel, working at that place you mentioned in Paris. I guess you wouldn't be very happy here. Just plain American cooking is all we need.' He got up to show me that the interview was over. I finished my whisky while he watched me with impatience, and then, 'Glad to have met you,' he said without shaking hands, 'give up your badge at the second gate.'

I drove away past the private landing-ground and the private port. I handed over my badge: I was reminded of the entry-permit you leave with immigration at Idlewild.

2

I drove to the Ambassador Hotel on the outskirts of Santo Domingo where Mr Smith was staying. It wasn't the right setting for him, or so it seemed to me. I had become accustomed to the stooping figure, the mild and modest face and the wild white hair, in surroundings of poverty. In this wide glittering hall men sat wearing purses on their belts instead of revolverholsters, and when they wore dark glasses it was only to save their eyes from the bright light. There was a continuous rattle from the one-armed bandits and you could hear the calls from the croupier in the casino. Everyone had money here, even Mr Smith. Poverty was out of sight, down in the city. A girl in a bikini wearing a gay bathrobe came in from the swimming-pool. She asked at the desk whether a Mr Hochstrudel, Junior, had arrived yet. 'I mean Mr Wilbur K. Hochstrudel.' The clerk said, 'No, but Mr Hochstrudel is expected.'

I sent a message to Mr Smith that I was below and found myself a seat. At the table nearest me the men were drinking rum punches and I thought of Joseph's. He made better ones than they served here, and I missed him.

I had stayed only twenty-four hours with Philipot. He was polite enough to me in a restrained way, but he was a changed man from the one I used to know. I had been a good audience in the past for his Baudelairian verses, but I was too old for war. It was Jones he needed now and Jones's company which he sought. He had nine men with him in his hide-out and to hear him talking to Jones you would have imagined he commanded at least a battalion. Jones very wisely listened and didn't speak much, but once I woke, during the night I spent with them, and heard Jones say, 'You have to establish yourself. Near enough to the frontier for newspapermen to come over. Then you can demand recognition.' Were they really, in this hole among the rocks (and they changed their hole, I learnt, each day) already thinking in terms of a provisional government? They had with them three old tommy-guns from the police station - which had probably seen service first in the days of Al Capone, a couple of first-war rifles, a shotgun, two revolvers, and one man had nothing better than his machete. Jones added like an old hand, 'This kind of war is a bit like a confidence-trick. There was one way we deceived the Japs …' He hadn't found his golf-course, but I really believe he was happy. The men clustered close; they couldn't understand a word he said, but it was as though a leader had come into the camp.

Next day I was sent off with Joseph, as my guide to try to cross the Dominican frontier. My car and the bodies had been long discovered by now, and there was no safety for me anywhere in Haiti. They could spare Joseph easily because of his damaged hip, and he could fulfil at the same time a second function. Philipot planned that I was to slip over the international road, which divided the two republics for about fifty kilometres north of Banica. It was true that, every few kilometres on either side of the road, there were Haitian and Dominican guard-posts, but it was said, with what truth he wanted to find out, that the posts on the Haitian side were deserted at night for fear of a guerrilla attack. All peasants had been expelled from the border, but there was said to be still that party of about thirty men operating in the mountains with which Philipot wanted to make contact. Joseph's information would be of value if he got back, and he was more expendable than the others. I suppose, too, his lame walk was considered slow enough to enable a man of my age to keep up with him. The last words Jones said to me in private were, 'I'm going to keep it up, old man.'

'And the golf-club?'

'The golf-club's for old age. After we've taken Port-an-Prince.'

The journey was slow, rough and tiring and took us eleven days, nine days of lying up, of sudden dashes from one point to another, of doubling on our tracks, and finally two last days of imprudence because of hunger. I was glad enough when we came in sight at dusk, from our grey eroded mountain where nothing grew, of the deep Dominican forest. You could see all the twists of the frontier by the contrast between our bare rocks and their vegetation. It was the same mountain range, but the trees never crossed into the poor dry land of Haiti. Half-way down the slope was a Haitian guardpost - a collection of decrepit huts - and across the track a hundred yards from it was a castellated fort, like something from the Spanish Sahara. A little before dusk we saw the Haitian guards straggle out, leaving not one sentinel behind. We watched them go to God knows what hide-out (there were no roads or villages where they could escape the pitiless rock), then I said good-bye to Joseph, making some silly joke about rum punch, and scrambled down the track of a meagre stream on to the international road - a grand name for a track little better than the Great Southern Highway to Aux Cayes. Next morning the Dominicans put me on an army truck which came daily to the fort with supplies, and I landed in Santo Domingo in torn and dusty clothes, with a hundred unchangeable gourdes in my pocket and fifty American dollars comprised in a single note which I had sewn for safety into the lining of my pants. With the help of that note I took a room and a bath and cleaned myself up and slept for twelve hours before I went to beg for money at the British Consulate and for expatriation - to where?

It was Mr Smith who saved me from that humiliation. He happened to be driving by in Mr Fernandez's car and he saw me on the street as I tried to ask my way to the Consulate from a negro who only spoke Spanish. I wanted Mr Smith to drop me at the Consulate, but he would have none of it; all such matters, he said, could wait till after lunch, and when lunch was over he told me it was quite out of the question to borrow money from an unsympathetic consul since he, Mr Smith, was there with plenty of American Express dollars. 'Think what I owe you,' he said, but I could think of nothing that he owed me. He had paid his bill at the Hotel Trianon. He had even supplied his own Yeastrel. He appealed against me to Mr Fernandez and Mr Fernandez said, 'Yes,' and Mrs Smith remarked angrily that, if I thought her husband was the kind of man to let a friend down, then I should have been with them that day in Nashville … Waiting for him now, I thought what a continent of difference divided him from Mr Schuyler Wilson.

He was alone when he joined me in the lounge of the Ambassador. He apologized for the absence of Mrs Smith who was taking her third lesson in Spanish from Mr Fernandez. 'You should hear the two of them talking away together,' he said. 'Mrs Smith has a remarkable talent for languages.'

I told him how I had been received by Mr Schuyler Wilson. 'He assumed I was a Communist,' I said.

'Why?,

'Because the Tontons were after me. Papa Doc, you remember, is a bulwark against Communism. And insurgent, of course, is a dirty word. I wonder how President Johnson would deal now with something like the French Resistance. That too was infiltrated (another dirty word) by the Communists. My mother was an insurgent - lucky I didn't tell Mr Schuyler Wilson that.'

'I don't see what harm a Communist could do as a catering manager.'

Mr Smith looked at me with an expression of sadness. He said, 'It's not at all pleasant to feel ashamed of a fellow-countryman.'

'You must have experienced it often enough in Nashville.'

'That was different. There it was a disease, a fever. I could be sorry for them. In my state we still have a tradition of hospitality. When a man knocks on the door we don't ask him about his politics.'

'I'd hoped to be able to pay you back your loan.'

'I'm not a poor man, Mr Brown. There's plenty more where that came from. I suggest you take another thousand dollars now.'

'How can I? I have no security to offer you.'

'If that's what's worrying you, we'll draw up a paper - quite fair and legal, and I'll take a mortgage on your hotel. After all it's a fine property.'

'It's not worth a nickel now, Mr Smith. The Government has probably taken it over.'

'Things will change one day.'

'I've heard of another job in the north. Near Monte Cristi. As canteen manager for a fruit company.'

'You don't have to fall as low as that, Mr Brown.'

'I've fallen a lot lower than that in my time and less respectably. If you don't mind my using your name again … This is an American company too.'

'Mr Fernandez was telling me that he needs an Anglo-Saxon partner. It's a fine prosperous little business he has here.'

'I've never thought of becoming an undertaker.'

'It's a valuable social service, Mr Brown. And there's security too. No business recessions.'

'I'll try the canteen first. I've more experience there. If that fails, who knows … ?'

'Did you know Mrs Pineda was in town?'

'Mrs

Pineda?'

'That charming lady who came up to the hotel. Surely you remember her?'

For a moment I really hadn't known whom he meant. 'What's she doing in Santo Domingo?'

'Her husband has been transferred to Lima. She's staying a few days here at her embassy with her little boy. I forget his name.'

'Angel.'

'That's right. A fine boy. Mrs Smith and I are very fond of children. Perhaps because we never had any of our own. Mrs Pineda was glad to hear you'd come out of Haiti in one piece, but she was naturally anxious about Major Jones. I thought we might all have a little dinner together tomorrow night and you could tell her the story.'

'I'm planning to go north tomorrow early,' I said. 'Jobs can't wait. I've been hanging around here long enough. Tell her I'll write to her all I know about Jones.'

3

I had a jeep to withstand the road on this occasion, arranged for me again at a cut-price by Mr Fernandez. Nevertheless I was not to reach Monte Cristi and the banana plantations, and I shall never know whether I would have proved acceptable as a canteen manager. I set off at six in the morning and reached San Juan by breakfast-time. There was a good road as far as Elias Pinas, but then along the frontier, perhaps because there was no traffic except the daily bus and a few military camions, the international road was more suitable for mules and cows. I had reached the military post of Pedro Santana when I was stopped - I didn't understand why. The lieutenant, whom I knew by sight because I had met him a month ago when I came over the frontier, was busy talking to a fat man in city-clothes; he was being shown a lot of glittering junk-jewellery, necklaces, bracelets, watches, rings - the frontier was a happy hunting-ground for smugglers. Money changed hands and the lieutenant came to my jeep.

'What's wrong?' I asked.

'Wrong? Nothing is wrong.' He spoke French as well as I did.

'Your men won't let me go on.'

'It's for your own safety. There's a lot of firing on the other side of the international road. Wild firing. I've seen you before, haven't I?'

'I came across the road a month ago.'

'Yes. I remember now. I daresay we shall be seeing some more people like you presently.'

'Do you often get refugees here?'

'We had about twenty guerrillas over just after you came. They are in a camp now in Santo Domingo. I thought there were none left.'

He must have meant the band which Philipot had wanted to contact. I remembered Jones and Philipot talking in the night, while the men listened, of the great plans for an established strongpoint, for a provisional government, for visiting journalists.

'I want to get up to Monte Cristi before dark.'

'You would do better to go back to Elias Pinas.'

'No, I'll wait around if you don't mind.'

'You

are

welcome.'

I had a bottle of whisky in my car and I made myself more welcome. The man selling jewellery tried to interest me in some ear-rings which he said were sapphire and diamond. Presently he drove away in the direction of Elias Pinas. He had sold the lieutenant a watch and the sergeant two necklaces.

'For the same woman?' I asked the sergeant.

'For my wife,' he said and closed one eye.

It was high noon. I sat on the steps of the guardroom in the shade and considered what I should do if the fruit company turned me down. There was always Mr Fernandez' offer: I wondered whether I would have to wear a black suit.

Perhaps there is an advantage in being born in a city like Monte Carlo, without roots, for one accepts more easily what comes. The rootless have experienced, like all the others, the temptation of sharing the security of a religious creed or a political faith, and for some reason we have turned the temptation down. We are the faithless; we admire the dedicated, the Doctor Magiots and the Mr Smiths for their courage and their integrity, for their fidelity to a cause, but through timidity, or through lack of sufficient zest, we find ourselves the only ones truly committed - committed to the whole world of evil and of good, to the wise and to the foolish, to the indifferent and to the mistaken. We have chosen nothing except to go on living, 'rolled round on Earth's diurnal pourse, With rocks and stones and trees.'

The argument interested me; I daresay it eased the never quiet conscience which had been injected into me without my consent, when I was too young to know, by the fathers of the Visitation. Then the sun came round on to the steps and drove me into the guardhouse with its bunks like stretchers, its pinups and relics of many homes, its heavy airless smell. There the lieutenant came to find me. He said, 'You'll be able to go on soon now. They are coming in.'

Some Dominican soldiers were plodding up the road to the post, walking in single file so as to keep in the shade of the trees. They bore their rifles slung and carried in their hands the weapons of the men who had emerged from the Haitian hills and who walked a few paces behind them, limp with fatigue, wearing an abashed look on their faces like the expression of children who have broken something of value. I didn't recognize any of the negroes, but nearly at the tail of the little column I saw Philipot. He was naked to the waist and he had used his shirt to tie his right arm to his side. When he saw me he said defiantly, 'We had no ammunition left,' but I don't think he recognized me then - he saw only what he thought was an accusing white face. At the very end of the small column two men carried a stretcher. On it lay Joseph. His eyes were open, but he couldn't see the foreign country into which they were carrying him.

One of the men asked, 'Do you know him?'

'Yes,' I said. 'He used to make good rum punches.'

The two men looked at me with disapproval; I realized it was not the kind of speech one should make over the dead. Mr. Fernandez would have done better, and I followed after the stretcher in silence like a mourner. Somebody had given Philipot a chair inside the guardhouse and a cigarette. The lieutenant was explaining to him that they had no transport until next day and that they had no doctor in the post.

'It's only a broken arm,' Philipot said. 'I fell coming down the ravine. It's nothing at all. I can wait.'

The lieutenant said with kindness. 'We have made a comfortable camp for your people near Santo Domingo. In an old lunatic asylum …'

Philipot began to laugh, 'A lunatic asylum! You are right,' and then to cry. He put his hands over his eyes to hide them.

I said, 'I have a car here. If the lieutenant permits, you needn't wait.'

'Emil is wounded in the foot.'

'We can take him with us.'

'I don't want to be separated from them now. Who are you? Oh, of course, I know you. My mind's confused.'

'The two of you need a doctor. There's no point in waiting here till tomorrow. Are you expecting anyone else to come across?' I was thinking of Jones.

'No, there's no one else.'

I tried to remember how many had come up the road. 'All the rest are dead?' I asked.

'All

dead.'

I made the two men as comfortable as I could in the jeep, and the fugitives stood and watched with pieces of bread in their hands. There were six of them, and Joseph lying dead on a stretcher in the shade. They had the dazed look of men who have narrowly escaped from a forest fire. We drove away, two men waved, the others munched their bread.

I said to Philipot, 'And Jones - is he dead?'

'By this time.'

'Was he wounded?'

'No, but his feet gave out.'

I had to drag the information out of him. I thought at first that he wanted to forget, but he was just preoccupied. I said, 'Was he all that you hoped for?'

'He was a wonderful man. With him we began to learn, but he didn't have enough time. The men loved him. He made them laugh.'

'But he spoke no Creole.'

'He did not need words. How many men are there in this lunatic asylum?'

'About twenty. All those you were looking for.'

'When we can get arms again, we will go back.'

I said to comfort him. 'Of course.'

'I would like to find his body. I would like him to have a proper grave. I'm going to put up a stone where we crossed the frontier, and one day when Papa Doc is dead, we shall put a similar stone at the spot where he died. It will be a place of pilgrimage. I shall get the British Ambassador, perhaps a member of the Royal Family …'

'I hope Papa Doc doesn't outlive us all.' We turned out of Elias Pinas on to the good road for San Juan. I said, 'So after all he proved that he could do it.'

'Do

what?'

'Lead a commando.'

'He had proved that against the Japanese.'

'Yes. I had forgotten.'

'He was a cunning man. You know how he deceived Papa Doc?'

'Yes.'

'Do you know that he could smell water a long way off?'

'He

really

could?'

'Of course, but as it happened, water was not a thing we ever lacked.'

'Was he a good shot?'

'Our weapons were so old, so out of date. I had to teach him. He was not a good shot, he went through Burma with a walking stick, he told me, but he knew how to lead.'

'On his flat feet. How did the end come?'

'We came up to the border to find the others, and we were ambushed. It was not his fault. Two men were killed. Joseph was badly hurt. There was nothing to do but escape. We could not go fast because of Joseph. He died coming down the last ravine.'

'And

Jones?'

'He could hardly move because of his feet. He found what he called a good place. He said he'd keep the soldiers off till we had time to reach the road - not one of them was anxious to risk himself very close. He said he would follow slowly, but I knew he would never come.'

'Why?'

'He told me once that there was no room for him outside of Haiti.'

'I wonder what he meant.'

'He meant his heart was there.'

I thought of the captain's cable from the office in Philadelphia and the message that the chargé had received. There was more in his past than a cocktail-shaker stolen from Asprey's, that was certain. Philipot said, 'I had grown to love him. I would like to write about him to the Queen of England …'

4

They held a Mass for Joseph and the other dead men (a three were Catholics), and Jones whose beliefs were not known, was included out of courtesy. I went to the small Franciscan church in a side street with Mr and Mrs Smith. It was a tiny congregation. One felt surrounded by the indifference of the world outside Haiti. Philipot led in the small company from the lunatic asylum, and at the last moment Martha entered with Angel at her side. A Haitian refugee-priest said the Mass, and of course Mr Fernandez was there - he looked professional and accustomed to such occasions.

Angel behaved well, and he seemed to be thinner than I remembered him. I wondered why in the past I had found him so detestable, and I wondered, too, looking at Martha two paces in front, why our semi-attached life had been so important. It seemed to belong now exclusively to Port-auPrince, to the darkness and the terror of the curfew, to the telephones that didn't work, to the Tontons Macoute in their dark glasses, to violence, injustice and torture. Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel.

The priest was a young man of Philipot's age with the light skin of a métis. He preached a very short sermon on some words of St Thomas the Apostle: 'Let us go up to Jerusalem and die with him.' He said, 'The Church is in the world, it is part of the suffering in the world, and though Christ condemned the disciple who struck off the ear of the high priest's servant, our hearts go out in sympathy to all who are moved to violence by the suffering of others. The Church condemns violence, but it condemns indifference more harshly. Violence can be the expression of love, indifference never. One is an imperfection of charity, the other the perfection of egoism. In the days of fear, doubt and confusion, the simplicity and loyalty of one apostle advocated a political solution. He was wrong, but I would rather be wrong with St Thomas than right with the cold and the craven. Let us go up to Jerusalem and die with him.'

Mr Smith shook his head sorrowfully; it was not a sermon which appealed to him. There was in it too much of the acidity of human passion. I watched Philipot go up to the altar-rail to receive communion, followed by most of his little band. I wondered whether they had confessed their sins of violence to the priest; I doubted whether he had required of them a firm purpose of amendment. After Mass I found myself standing beside Martha and the child. I noticed that Angel had been crying. 'He loved Jones,' Martha said. She took me by the hand and led me into a side-chapel: we were alone with a hideous statue of St Clare. She said, 'I have bad news for you.'

'I know already. Luis has been transferred to Lima.'

'Is that really such bad news? We had reached an end, hadn't we, you and I?'

'Had we? Jones is dead.'

'He mattered more to Angel than to me. You made me angry that last night. If it hadn't been Jones you worried about it would have been someone else. You were looking for a way to finish. I never slept with Jones. You've got to believe that. I loved him - but in quite a different way.'

'Yes. I can believe you now.'

'But you wouldn't have believed me then.'

The fact that after all she had been faithful to me was ironic, but it seemed singularly unimportant now. I almost wished that Jones had had his

'fun'. 'What is your bad news?'

'Doctor Magiot is dead.'

I never knew the day when my father died, if he had died, so that I experienced for the first time the sense of sudden separation from someone on whom as a last resort I could depend. 'How did it happen?'

'The official version is he was killed resisting arrest. They accused him of being an agent of Castro's, a Communist.'

'He was a Communist certainly, but I'm pretty sure he was no one's agent.'

'The true story is that they sent a peasant to his door asking him to come and help a sick child. He came out on to the path and the Tontons Macoute shot him down from a car. There were witnesses. They killed the peasant too, but that was probably not intended.'

'It had to happen. Papa Doc is a bulwark against Communism.'

'Where are you staying?'

I told her the name of the small hotel in the city. 'Shall I come to see you?' she asked. 'I can this afternoon. Angel has friends.'

'If you really want to.'

'I leave for Lima tomorrow.'

'If I were you,' I told her, 'I know that I wouldn't come.'

'Will you write and tell me how things go with you?'

'Of

course.'

I sat in the hotel through the whole afternoon in case she came, but I was glad she stayed away. I remembered how twice before our love-making had been disturbed by the dead - first Marcel and then the ancien ministre. Now it was Doctor Magiot who had joined the dignified and disciplined ranks; they rebuked our levity.

In the evening I had dinner with the Smiths and Mr Fernandez - Mrs Smith acted as my interpreter, she had learnt enough Spanish for that, but Mr Fernandez too was able to talk a little. It was agreed I should become a junior partner in the Fernandez business. I was to deal with the French and the Anglo-Saxon bereaved, and we were both promised an interest in Mr Smith's vegetarian centre when it was established. Mr Smith thought it only fair, since our business might be adversely affected by the success of vegetarianism. Perhaps the centre would really have been established if violence had not come in turn a few months later to Santo Domingo - violence which brought a measure of prosperity to Mr Fernandez and myself, though as usual in such cases the dead mainly belonged to Mr Fernandez' side of the business. Coloured people get killed more easily than Anglo-Saxons.

That night when I went back to my hotel room I found a letter on my pillow - a letter from the dead. I never learned who had brought it. The clerk could tell me nothing. The letter was not signed, but the writing was unmistakably Doctor Magiot's.

'Dear friend,' I read, 'I write to you because I loved your mother and in these last hours I want to communicate with her son. My hours are limited: I expect any moment that knock upon the door. They can hardly ring the bell, for the electricity as usual is off. The American Ambassador is about to come back and Baron Samedi will surely pay a little tribute in return. It happens like that all over the world. A few Communists can always be found, like Jews and Catholics. Chiang Kai-shek, the heroic defender of Formosa, fed us, you remember, into the boilers of railway-engines. God knows for what medical research Papa Doc may find me useful. I only ask you to remember ce si gros neg. Do you remember that evening when Mrs Smith accused me of being a Marxist? Accused is too strong a word. She is a kind woman who hates injustice. Yet I have grown to dislike the word

"Marxist". It is used so often to describe only a particular economic plan. I believe of course in that economic plan - in certain cases and in certain times, here in Haiti, in Cuba, in Vietnam, in India. But Communism, my friend, is more than Marxism, just as Catholicism - remember I was born a Catholic too - is more than the Roman Curia. There is a mystique as well as a politique. We are humanists, you and I. You won't admit it perhaps, but you are the son of your mother and you once took the dangerous journey which we all have to take before the end. Catholics and Communists have committed great crimes, but at least they have not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate. I know you and love you well, and I am writing this letter with some care because it may be the last chance I have of communicating with you. It may never reach you, but I am sending it by what I believe to be a safe hand - though there is no guarantee of that in the wild world we live in now (I do not mean my poor insignificant little Haiti). I implore you - a knock on the door may not allow me to finish this sentence, so take it as the last request of a dying man - if you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?'

I remembered Martha saying, 'You are a prêtre manqué.' How strangely one must appear to other people. I had left involvement behind me, I was certain, in the College of the Visitation: I had dropped it like the roulette-token in the offertory. I had felt myself not merely incapable of love

- many are incapable of that, but even of guilt. There were no heights and no abysses in my world - I saw myself on a great plain, walking and walking on the interminable flats. Once I might have taken a different direction, but it was too late now. When I was a boy the fathers of the Visitation had told me that one test of a belief was this: that a man was ready to die for it. So Doctor Magiot thought too, but for what belief did Jones die?

Perhaps, under the circumstances, it was only natural that I should dream of Jones. He lay among the dry rocks on the flat plain beside me and he said, 'Don't ask me to find water. I can't. I'm tired, Brown, tired. After the seven hundredth performance I sometimes dry up on my lines - and I've only two.'

I said to him, 'Why are you dying, Jones?'

'It's in my part, old man, it's in my part. But I've got this comic line - you should hear the whole theatre laugh when I say it. The ladies in particular.'

'What is it?'

'That's the trouble. I've forgotten it.'

'Jones, you must remember.'

'I've got it now. I have to say - just look at these bloody rocks - "This is a good place," and everyone laughs till the tears come. Then you say, "To hold the bastards up?" and I reply, "I didn't mean that." '

The ringing of the telephone woke me - I had overslept. The call came, so far as I could make out, from Mr Fernandez who was summoning me to my first assignment.