Our Man in Havana

Chapter 4

Captain Segura said, ‘I’m glad to find you alone. Are you alone?’

‘Quite alone.’

‘I’m sure you don’t mind. I have put two men at the door to see that we aren’t disturbed.’

‘Am I under arrest?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Milly and Beatrice are out at a cinema. They’ll be surprised if they are not allowed in.’

‘I will not take up much of your time. There are two things I have come to see you about. One is important. The other is only routine. May I begin with what is important?’

‘Please.’

‘I wish, Mr Wormold, to ask for the hand of your daughter.’

‘Does that require two policemen at the door?’

‘It’s convenient not to be disturbed.’

‘Have you spoken to Milly?’

‘I would not dream of it before speaking to you.’

‘I suppose even here you would need my consent by law.’

‘It is not a matter of law but of common courtesy. May I smoke?’

‘Why not? Is that case really made from human skin?’ Captain Segura laughed. ‘Ah, Milly, Milly. What a tease she is!’ He added ambiguously, ‘Do you really believe that story, Mr Wormold?’ Perhaps he had an objection to a direct lie; he might be a good Catholic. ‘She’s much too young to marry, Captain Segura.’

‘Not in this country.’

‘I’m sure she has no wish to marry yet.’

‘But you could influence her, Mr Wormold.’

‘They call you the Red Vulture, don’t they?’

‘That, in Cuba, is a kind of compliment.’

‘Aren’t you rather an uncertain life? You seem to have a lot of

enemies.’

‘I have saved enough to take care of my widow. In that way, Mr Wormold, I am a more reliable support than you are. The establishment it can’t bring you in much money and at the moment it is liable to be closed.’ ‘Closed?’

‘I am sure you do not intend to cause trouble, but a lot of trouble has been happening around you. If you had to leave the country, would you not feel happier if your daughter were well established here?’ ‘What kind of trouble, Captain Segura?’

‘There was a car which crashed never mind why. There was an attack on poor Engineer Cifuentes -a friend of the Minister of the Interior. Professor Sanchez complained that you broke into his house and threatened him. There is even a story that you poisoned a dog.’

That I poisoned a dog?’

‘It sounds absurd, of course. But the headwaiter at the Hotel Nacional said you gave his dog poisoned whisky. Why should you give a dog whisky at all? I don’t understand. Nor does he. He thinks perhaps because it was a German dog.

You don’t say anything, Mr Wormold.’

‘I am at a loss for words.’

‘He was in a terrible state, poor man. Otherwise I would have thrown him out of the office for talking nonsense. He said you came into the kitchen to gloat over what you had done. It sounded very unlike you, Mr Wormold. I have always though of you as a humane man. Just assure me there is no truth in this story.’

‘The dog was poisoned. The whisky came from my glass. But it was intended for me, not the dog.’

‘Why should anyone try to poison you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Two strange stories -they cancel out. Probably there was no poison and the dog just died. I gather it was an old dog. But you must admit, Mr Wormold, that a lot of trouble seems to go on around you. Perhaps you are like one of those innocent children I have read about in your country who set poltergeists to work.’

‘Perhaps I am. Do you know the names of the poltergeists?’ ‘Most of them. I think the time has come to exorcise them. I am drawing up a report for the President.’

‘Am I on it?’

‘You needn’t be. I ought to tell you, Mr Wormold, that I have saved money, enough money to leave Milly in comfort if anything were ever to happen to me. And of course enough for us to settle in Miami if there were a revolution.’ ‘There’s no need for you to tell me all this. I’m not questioning your financial capacity.’

‘It is customary, Mr Wormold. Now for my health that is good. I can show you the certificates. Nor will there be any difficulty about children. That has been amply proved.’

‘I see.’

‘There is nothing in that which need worry your daughter. The children are provided for. My present encumbrance is not an important one. I know that Protestants are rather particular about these things.’

‘I’m not exactly a Protestant.’

‘And luckily your daughter is a Catholic. It would really be a most suitable marriage, Mr Wormold.’

‘Milly is only seventeen.’

‘It is the best and easiest age to bear a child, Mr Wormold. Have I your permission to speak to her?’

‘Do you need it?’

‘It is more correct.’

‘And if I said no…’

‘I would of course try to persuade you.’

‘You said once that I was not of the torturable class.’

Captain Segura laid his hand affectionately on Wormold’s shoulders. ‘You have Milly’s sense of humour. But seriously, there is always your residence-permit to consider.’

‘You seem very determined. All right. You may as well speak to her. You have plenty of opportunity on her way from school. But Milly’s got sense. I don’t think you stand a chance.’

‘In that case I may ask you later to use a father’s influence.’

‘How Victorian you are, Captain Segura. A father today has no influence.

You said there was something important…’

Captain Segura said reproachfully, ‘This was the important subject. The other is a matter of routine only. Would you come with me to the Wonder Bar?’ ‘Why?’

‘A police matter. Nothing for you to worry about. I am asking you a favour, that is all, Mr Wormold.’

They went in Captain Segura’s scarlet sport scar with a motor-cycle policeman before and behind. All the bootblacks from the Paseo seemed to be gathered in Virdudes. There were policemen on either side of the swing-doors of the Wonder Bar and the sun lay heavy overhead.

The motor-cycle policemen leapt off their machines and began to shoo the bootblacks away. Policemen ran out from the bar and formed an escort for Captain Segura. Wormold followed him. As always at that time of day, the jalousies above the colonnade were creaking in the small wind from the sea. The barman stood on the wrong side of the bar, the customers’ side. He looked sick and afraid. Several broken bottles behind him were still dripping single drops, but they had spilt their main contents a long while ago. Someone on the floor was hidden by the bodies of the policemen, but the boots showed the thick over-repaired boots of a not-rich old man. ‘It’s just a formal identification,’ Captain Segura said. Wormold hardly needed to see the face, but they cleared a way before him so that he could look down at Dr Hasselbacher.

‘It’s Dr Hasselbacher,’ he said. ‘You know him as well as I do.’ ‘There is a form to be observed in these matters,’ Segura said. ‘An independent identification.’

‘Who did it?’

Segura said, ‘Who knows? You had better have a glass of whisky. Barman!’ ‘No. Give me a daiquiri. It was always a daiquiri I used to drink with him.’

‘Someone came in here with a gun. Two shots missed. Of course we shall say it was the rebels from Oriente. It will be useful in influencing foreign opinion. Perhaps it was the rebels.’

The face stared up from the floor without expression. You couldn’t describe that impassivity in terms of peace or anguish. It was as though nothing at all had ever happened to it: an unborn face.

‘When you bury him put his helmet on the coffin.’

‘Helmet?’

‘You’ll find an old uniform in his flat. He was a sentimental man.’ It was odd that Dr Hasselbacher had survived two world wars and had died at the end of it in so-called peace much the same death as he might have died upon the Somme.

‘You know very well it had nothing to do with the rebels,’ Wormold said.

‘It is convenient to say so.’

‘The poltergeists again.’

‘You blame yourself too much.’

‘He warned me not to go to the lunch, Carter heard him, everybody heard him, so they killed him.’

‘Who are They?’

‘You have the list.’

‘The name Carter wasn’t on it.’

‘Ask the waiter with the dog, then. You can torture him surely. I won’t complain.’

‘He is German and he has high political friends. Why should he want to poison you?’

‘Because they think I’m dangerous. Me! They little know. Give me another daiquiri. I always had two before I went back to the shop. Will you show me your list, Segura?’

‘I might to a father-in-law, because I could trust him.’

They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like the pain of an amputated leg no longer there. It was time, Wormold thought, to pack up and go and leave the ruins of Havana. ‘You know,’ Captain Segura said, ‘this only emphasizes what I meant. It might have been you. Milly should be safe from accidents like this.’ ‘Yes,’ Wormold said. ‘I shall have to see to that.’

The policemen were gone from the shop when he returned. Lopez was out, he had no idea where. He could hear Rudy fidgeting with his tubes and an occasional snatch of atmospherics beat around the apartment. He sat down on the bed. Three deaths: an unknown man called Raul, a black dachshund called Max and an old doctor called Hasselbacher; he was the cause and Carter. Carter had not planned the death of Raul nor the dog, but Dr Hasselbacher had been given no chance. It had been a reprisal: one death for one life, a reversal of the Mosaic Code. He could hear Milly and Beatrice talking in the next room. Although the door was ajar he only half took in what they were saying. He stood on the frontier of violence, a strange land he had never visited before; he had his passport in his hand. ‘Profession: Spy.’

‘Characteristic Features: Friendlessness.’

‘Purpose of Visit: Murder:’ No visa was required. His papers were in order.

And on this side of the border he heard the voices talking in the language he knew.

Beatrice said, ‘No, I wouldn’t advise deep carnation. Not at your age.’

Milly said, ‘They ought to give lessons in make-up during the last term.

I can just hear Sister Agnes saying, “A drop of Nuit d’Arnour behind the ears.” ‘Try this light carnation. No, don’t smear the edge of your mouth. Let me show you.’

Wormold thought, I have no arsenic or cyanide. Besides I will have no opportunity to drink with him. I should have forced that whisky down his throat. Easier said than done off the Elizabethan stage, and even there he would have needed in addition a poisoned rapier.

‘There. You see what I mean.’

‘What about rouge?’

‘You don’t need rouge.’

‘What smell do you use, Beatrice?’

‘Sous Le Vent.’

They have shot Hasselbacher, but I have no gun, Wormold thought. Surely a gun should have been part of the office equipment, like the safe and the celluloid sheets and the microscope and the electric kettle. He had never in his life so much as handled a gun, but that was no insuperable objection. He had only to be as close to Carter as the door through which the voices came. ‘We’ll go shopping together. I think you’d like Indiscret. That’s Lelong.’

‘It doesn’t sound very passionate,’ Milly said.

‘You are young. You don’t have to put passion on behind the ears.’

‘You must give a man encouragement,’ Milly said.

‘Just look at him.’

‘Like this?’ Wormold heard Beatrice laugh. He looked at the door with astonishment. He had gone in thought so far across the border that he had forgotten he was still here on this side with them.

‘You needn’t give them all that encouragement,’ Beatrice said.

‘Did I languish?’

‘I’d call it smoulder.’

‘Do you miss being married?’ Milly asked.

‘If you mean do I miss Peter, I don’t.’

‘If he died would you marry again?’

‘I don’t think I’d wait for that. He’s only forty.’

‘Oh yes. I suppose you could marry again, if you call it marriage.’

‘I do.’

‘But it’s terrible, isn’t it. I have to marry for keeps.’

‘Most of us think we are going to do that when we do it.’

‘I’d be much better off as a mistress.’

‘I don’t believe your father would like that very much.’

‘I don’t see why not. If he married again it wouldn’t be any different. She’d really be his mistress, wouldn’t she? He wanted to stay with Mother always. I know. He told me so. It was a real marriage. Even a good pagan can’t get round that.’

‘I thought the same about Peter. Milly, Milly, don’t let them make you hard.’

‘They?’

‘The nuns.’

‘Oh. They don’t talk to me that way. Not that way at all.’

There was always, of course, the possibility of a knife. But for a knife you had to be closer to Carter than he could ever hope to get. Milly said, ‘Do you love my father?’

He thought: One day I can come back and settle these questions. But now there are more important problems; I have to discover how to kill a man. Surely they produced handbooks to tell you that? There must be treatises on unarmed combat. He looked at his hands, but he didn’t trust them. Beatrice said, ‘Why do you ask that?’

‘A way you looked at him.’

‘When?’

‘When he came back from that lunch. Perhaps you were just pleased because he’d made a speech?’

‘Yes.’

‘It wouldn’t do,’ Milly said. ‘I mean, you loving him.’

Wormold said to himself, At least if I could kill him, I would kill for a clean reason. I would kill to show that you can’t kill without being killed in your turn. I wouldn’t kill for my country. I wouldn’t kill for capitalism or Communism or social democracy or the welfare state whose welfare? I would kill Carter because he killed Hasselbacher. A family-feud had been a better reason for murder than patriotism or the preference for one economic system over another. If I love or if I hate, let me love or hate as an individual. I will not be 59200/5 in anyone’s global war.

‘If I loved him, why shouldn’t I?’

‘He’s married.’

‘Milly, dear Milly. Beware of formulas. If there’s a God, he’s not a God of formulas.’

‘Do you love him?’

‘I never said so.’

A gun is the only way; where can I get a gun?

Somebody came through the door; he didn’t even look up. Rudy’s tubes gave a high shriek in the next room. Milly’s voice said, ‘We didn’t hear you come in.’

He said, ‘I want you to do something for me, Milly.’

‘Were you listening?’

He heard Beatrice say, ‘What’s wrong? What’s happened?’

‘There’s been an accident, a kind of accident.’

‘Who?’

‘Dr Hasselbacher.’

‘Serious?’

‘Yes.’

‘You are breaking the news, aren’t you?’ Milly said.

‘Yes.’

‘Poor Dr Hasselbacher.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll get the chaplain to say a Mass for every year we knew him.’ There hadn’t, he realized, been any need to break a death gently, so far as Milly was concerned. All deaths to her were happy deaths. Vengeance was unnecessary when you believed in a heaven. But he had no such belief. Mercy and forgiveness were scarcely virtues in a Christian; they came too easily.

He said, ‘Captain Segura was here. He wants you to marry him.’

‘That old man. I’ll never ride in his car again.’

‘I’d like you to once more, tomorrow. Tell him I want to see him.’

‘Why?’

‘A game of draughts. At ten o’clock. You and Beatrice must be out of the way.’

‘Will he pester me?’

‘No. Just tell him to come and talk to me. Tell him to bring his list.

He’ll understand.’

‘And afterwards?’

‘We are going home. To England.’

When he was alone with Beatrice, he said, ‘That’s that. The end of the office.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Perhaps we’ll go down gloriously with one good report the list of secret agents operating here.’

‘Including us?’

‘Oh no. We’ve never operated.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I’ve got no agents, Beatrice. Not one. Hasselbacher was killed for no

reason. There are no constructions in the Oriente mountains.’ It was typical of her that she showed no incredulity. This was a piece of information like any other information to be filed for reference. Any assessment of its value would be made, he thought, by the head-office. He said, ‘Of course it’s your duty to report this immediately to London, but I’d be grateful if you’d wait till after tomorrow. We may be able to add something genuine then.’

‘If you are alive, you mean.’

‘Of course I’ll be alive.’

‘You are planning something.’

‘Segura has the list of agents.’

‘That’s not what you are planning. But if you are dead,’ she said with what sounded like anger, ‘de mortuis I suppose.’

‘If something did happen to me I wouldn’t want you to learn for the first time from these bogus files what a fraud I’ve been.’ ‘But Raul… there must have been a Raul.’

‘Poor man. He must have wondered what was happening to him. Taking a joy-ride in his usual way. Perhaps he was drunk in his usual way too. I hope so.’

‘But he existed.’

‘One has to get a name from somewhere. I must have picked his up without remembering it.’

‘Those diagrams?’

‘I drew them myself from the Atomic Pile Cleaner. The joke’s over now. Would you like to write out a confession for me to sign? I’m glad they didn’t do anything serious to Teresa.’

She began to laugh. She put her head in her hands and laughed. She said, ‘Oh, how I love you.’

‘It must seem pretty silly to you.’

‘London seems pretty silly. And Henry Hawthorne. Do you think I would ever have left Peter if once -just once -he’d made a fool of UNESCO? But UNESCO was sacred. Cultural conferences were sacred. He never laughed…. Lend me your handkerchief.’

‘You’re crying.’

‘I’m laughing. Those drawings…’

‘One was a nozzle-spray and another was a double-action coupling. I never thought they would pass the experts.’

‘They weren’t seen by experts. You forget this is a Secret Service. We have to protect our sources. We can’t allow documents like that to reach anyone who really knows. Darling…’

‘You said darling.’

‘It’s a way of speaking. Do you remember the Tropicana and that man singing? I didn’t know you were my boss and I was your secretary, you were just a nice man with a lovely daughter and I knew you wanted to do something crazy with a champagne bottle and I was so deadly bored with sense.. ‘But I’m not the crazy type.’

“They say the earth is round My madness offends.”’

‘I wouldn’t be a seller of vacuum cleaners if I were the crazy type.’

“I say that night is day And I’ve no axe to grind.”’

‘Haven’t you any more loyalty than I have?’

‘You are loyal.’

‘Who to?’

‘To Milly. I don’t care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations…. I don’t think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren’t there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?’

He said, ‘I suppose they could take away my passport.’

‘Let them try.’

‘All the same,’ he said, ‘it’s the end of a job for both of us.’