The Comedians

We had already met three times in the Syrian room which contained a brass bed under a mauve silk counterpane and four hard upright chairs lined along the wall and a number of hand-tinted photographs of family groups. I think it was the guestroom, kept immaculate for some important visitor from Lebanon who never came and never would come now. The fourth time I waited for two hours and Martha did not appear at all. I went out through the store and the Syrian spoke to me discreetly. 'You have missed Madame Pineda,' he said. 'She was here with her little boy.'

'Her

little

boy?'

'They bought a miniature car and a box of bourbon biscuits.'

Later that evening she rang me up. She sounded breathless and afraid and she spoke very rapidly. 'I am at the Post Office,' she said, 'I've left Angel in the car.'

'Eating bourbon biscuits?'

'Bourbon biscuits? How did you know? Darling, I couldn't come to you. When I got to the shop I found Angel there with his nurse. I had to pretend I'd come to buy him something as a reward for being good.'

'Has he been good?'

'Not particularly. His nurse said they saw me come out last week - it was a good thing we never leave together - and he wanted to see where I'd been and that's how he discovered the biscuits he liked.'

'The bourbon biscuits.'

'Yes. Oh, he's coming into the Post Office now to find me.Tonight. Same place.' The telephone went dead.

So we met again by the Columbus statue in the Peugeot car. That time we didn't make love. We quarrelled. I told her Angel was a spoilt child, and she admitted it, but when I said that he spied on her, she was angry, and when I said he was getting as fat as his father, she tried to slap my face. I caught her wrist and she accused me of striking her. Then we laughed nervously, but the quarrel simmered on, like stock for tomorrow's soup. I said very reasonably, 'You would do better to make a break one way or the other. This kind of life can't go on indefinitely.'

'Do you want me to leave you then?'

'Of

course

not.'

'But I can't live without Angel. It's not his fault if I've spoilt him. He needs me. I can't ruin his happiness.'

'In ten years he won't need you at all. He'll be slinking off to Mиre Catherine or sleeping with one of your maids. Except that you won't be here

- you'll be in Brussels or Luxembourg, but there are brothels for him there too.'

'Ten years is a long time.'

'And you'll be middle-aged and I'll be old - too old to care. You'll live on with two fat men … And a g6od conscience, of course. You'll have salvaged that.'

'And you? Don't tell me you won't have been comforted by all sorts of women in all sorts of ways.'

Our voices rose higher and higher in the darkness under the statue. Like all such quarrels it led to nothing except a wound which easily heals. There are places for so many different wounds before we find ourselves breaking an old scab. I got out of her car and walked across to mine. I sat down at the wheel and began to back the car. I told myself it was the end - the game wasn't worth the candle - let her stay with the beastly child - there were many more attractive women to be found at Mиre Catherine's - she was a German anyway. I called, 'Good-bye, Frau Pineda' viciously out of the window as I came parallel to her car, and then I saw her bent over the wheel crying. I suppose it was necessary to say good-bye to her once before I realized that I could not do without her.

When I got back beside her, she was already in control. 'It's no good,' she said, 'tonight.'

'No.'

'Shall we see each other tomorrow?'

'Of

course.'

'Here. As usual?'

'Yes.'

She said, 'There is something I meant to tell you. A surprise for you. Something you badly want.'

For a moment I thought she was going to surrender to me and promise to leave her husband and her child. I put my arm round her to support her in the great decision and she said, 'You need a good cook, don't you?'

'Oh - yes. Yes. I suppose I do.'

'We've got a wonderful cook and he's leaving us. I engineered a row on purpose and sacked him. He's yours if you want him.' I think she was hurt again by my silence. 'Now don't you believe I love you? My husband will be furious. He said that Andrй was the only cook in Port-au-Prince who could make a proper soufflй.' I stopped myself just in time from saying, 'And Angel? He likes his food too.'

'You've made my fortune,' I said instead. And what I said was nearly true

- the Trianon soufflй au Grand Marnier was famous for a time, until the terror started and the American Mission left, and the British Ambassador was expelled, and the Nuncio never returned from Rome, and the curfew put a barrier between us worse than any quarrel, until at last I too flew out on the last Delta plane to New Orleans. Joseph had only just escaped with his life from his interrogation by the Tontons Macoute and I was scared. They were after me, I felt certain. Perhaps Fat Gracia, the head of the Tontons, wanted my hotel. Even Petit Pierre no longer looked in for a free drink. For weeks I was alone with the injured Joseph, the cook, the maid and the gardener. The hotel had need of paint and repairs, but what good was there in spending the labour without the hope of guests? Only the John Barrymore suite I kept in good order like a grave.

There was little in our love-affair now to balance the fear and the boredom. The telephone had ceased to work: it stood there on my desk like a relic of better times. With the curfew it was no longer possible for us to meet at night, while in the day there was always Angel. I thought I was escaping from love as well as politics when at last I received my exit visa at the police station after ten hours' wait, with the heavy smell of urine in the air and policemen returning with a smile of satisfaction from the cells. I remember a priest who sat all day in a white soutane and his stony attitude of long and undisturbed patience as he read his breviary. His name was never called. Pinned behind his head on the liver-coloured wall were the snapshots of Barbot, the dead defector and his broken companions who had been machine-gunned in a hut on the edge of the capital a month before. When the police sergeant gave me my visa at last, shoving it across the counter like a crust of bread to a beggar, someone told the priest that the police station was closed for the night. I suppose he came back next day. It was as good a place as any other for him to read his breviary, for none of the transients dared to speak to him, now that the Archbishop was in exile and the President excommunicated.

What a wonderful place the city had been to leave, as I looked down at it through the free and lucid air, the plane pitching in the thunderstorm which loomed as usual over Kenscoff. The port seemed tiny compared with the vast wrinkled wasteland behind, the dry uninhabited mountains, like the broken backbone of an ancient beast excavated from the clay, stretching into the haze towards Cap Haпtien and the Dominican border. I would find some gambler, I told myself, to buy my hotel, and I would then be as unencumbered as on the day I drove up to Pйtionville and found my mother stretched in her great brothelly bed. I was happy to leave. I whispered it to the black mountain wheeling round below, I showed it in my smile to the trim American stewardess bringing me a highball of bourbon and to the pilot who came to report progress. It was four weeks before I woke to misery in my air-conditioned New York room in West 44th Street after dreaming of a tangle of limbs in a Peugeot car and a statue staring at the sea. I knew then that sooner or later I would return, when my obstinacy was exhausted, my business deal written off, and half a loaf eaten in fear would seem so much better than no bread.

CHAPTER IV

1

DOCTOR MAGIOT crouched a long time above the body of the ex-Minister. In the shadow cast by my torch he looked like a sorcerer exorcizing death. I hesitated to interrupt his rites, but I was afraid the Smiths might wake in their tower-suite, so at last I spoke to break his thoughts. 'They can't pretend it to be anything but suicide,' I said.

'They can pretend it to be whatever suits them,' he replied. 'Do not deceive yourself.' He began to empty the contents of the Minister's left pocket which was exposed by the position of the body. He said, 'He was one of the better ones,' and looked with care at each scrap of paper like a bank clerk checking notes for forgery, holding them close to his eyes and his big globular spectacles which he wore for reading only. 'We took our anatomy course together in Paris. But in those days even Papa Doc was a good enough man. I remember Duvalier in the typhoid outbreak in the twenties …'

'What are you looking for?'

'Anything which could identify him with you. In this island the Catholic prayer is very apt - "The devil is like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour".'

'He

hasn't

devoured

you.'

'Give him time.' He put a notebook in his pocket. 'We haven't the leisure to go through all this now.' Then he turned the body over. It was heavy to move even for Doctor Magiot. 'I'm glad your mother died when she did. She had borne enough. One Hitler is sufficient experience for a lifetime.' We talked in whispers for fear of disturbing the Smiths. 'A rabbit's foot,' he said,

'for luck.' He put the object back. 'And here is something heavy.' He took out my brass paper-weight in the shape of a coffin marked R.I.P. 'I never knew he had a sense of humour.'

'That's mine. He must have taken it from my office.'

'Put it back in the same place.'

'Shall I send Joseph for the police?'

'No, no. We can't leave the body here.'

'They can hardly blame me for a suicide.'

'They can blame you because he chose this house to hide in.'

'Why did he? I never knew him. I met him once at a reception. That's all.'

'The embassies are closely guarded. I suppose he believed in your English phrase, "An Englishman's home is his castle". He had so little hope he sought safety in a catchword.'

'It's the hell of a thing to find on my first night home.'

'Yes, I suppose it is. Tchekov wrote, "Suicide is an undesirable phenomenon".'

Doctor Magiot stood up and looked down at the body. A coloured man has a great sense of occasion - it isn't ruined by Western education: education only changes the form of its expression. Doctor Magiot's greatgrandfather might have wailed in the slave-compound to the unanswering stars: Doctor Magiot pronounced a short carefully phrased discourse over the dead. 'However great a man's fear of life,' Doctor Magiot said, 'suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance - so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamour to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.'

'I thought that as a Catholic you would have utterly condemned …'

'I am not a practising Catholic, and in any case you are thinking of theological despair. In this despair there was nothing theological. Poor fellow, he was breaking a rule. He was eating meat on Friday. In his case the sense of survival did not put forward a commandment of God as an excuse for inaction.' He said, 'You must come down and take the legs. We have to remove him from here.' The lecture was finished, the funeral oration spoken. It was a comfort to feel myself in the large square hands of Doctor Magiot. I was like a patient who accepts without question the strict rйgime required for a cure. We lifted the Secretary for Social Welfare out of the bathing-pool and carried him towards the drive where Doctor Magiot's car stood without lights. 'When you get back,' Doctor Magiot said, 'you must turn on the water and wash away the blood.'

'I'll turn it on all right, but whether the water will come …'

We propped him on the back seat. In detective stories a corpse is always so easily made to look like a drunken man, but this dead thing was unmistakably dead - the blood had ceased to flow, but one glance into the car would note the monstrous wound. Luckily no one dared move on the roads at night; it was the hour when only zombies worked or else the Tontons Macoute. As for the Tontons they were certainly abroad; we heard the approach of their car - no other car would be out so late - before we reached the end of the drive. We switched our headlights off and waited. The car was being driven slowly uphill from the capital; we could hear the voices of the occupants arguing above the grind of the third gear. I had the impression of an old car which would never make the grade up the long slope to Pйtionville. What would we do if it gave up the ghost at the entrance of the drive? The men would certainly come to the hotel for help and some free drinks, whatever the hour. We seemed to wait a long time before the sound of the engine passed the drive and receded. I asked Doctor Magiot, 'Where do we take him?'

'We can't go far either up or down,' he said, 'without reaching a block. This is the road to the north and the militia daren't sleep for fear of inspection. That's probably what the Tontons are doing now. They'll go as far as the police-post at Kenscoff if the car doesn't break down.'

'You had to pass a road-block to get here. How did you explain … ?'

'I said there was a woman sick after a childbirth. It's too common a case for the man to report, if I am lucky.'

'And if he does report?'

'I shall say I could not find the hut.'

We drove out on to the main road. Doctor Magiot put on the headlights again. 'If anyone should be out and see us,' he said, 'he will take us for the Tontons.'

Our choice of terrain was severely limited by the barrier up the road and the barrier down. We drove two hundred yards uphill - 'That will show that he passed the Trianon: he was not on the way there' - and turned into the second lane on the left. It was an area of small houses and abandoned gardens. Here had lived in the old days the vain and the insufficiently successful; they were on the road to Pйtionville, but they had not quite arrived there: the advocate who picked up the unconsidered cases, the failed astrologer and the doctor who preferred his rum to his patients. Doctor Magiot knew exactly which of them still occupied his house and who had fled to escape the forced levies that the Tontons Macoute collected at night for the construction of the new city, Duvalierville. I had contributed a hundred gourdes myself. To me the houses and gardens seemed all equally unlived in and uncared for.

'In here,' Doctor Magiot directed. He drove the car a few yards off the road. We had to keep the headlights burning, for we had no hand free to hold a torch. They shone on a broken board which now announced only '... pont. Your Future by …'

'So he's gone,' I said.

'He

died.'

'A

natural

death?'

'Violent deaths are natural deaths here. He died of his environment.'

We got the body of Doctor Philipot out of the car and dragged it behind an overgrown bougainvillaea where it could not be seen from the road. Doctor Magiot twisted a handkerchief round his right hand and took from the dead man's pocket a small kitchen knife for cutting steaks. His eye had been sharper than mine at the pool. He laid it a few inches from the Minister's left hand. He said, 'Doctor Philipot was left-handed.'

'You seem to know everything.'

'You forget we took anatomy together. You must remember to buy another steak-knife.'

'Has he a family?'

'A wife and a boy of six. I suppose he thought that suicide was safer for them.'

We got back into the car and reversed into the road. At the entrance of my drive I got out. 'All depends now on the servants,' I said.

'They'll be afraid to talk,' Doctor Magiot said. 'A witness here can suffer just as much as the accused.'

2

Mr and Mrs Smith came down to breakfast on the verandah. It was almost the first time I had seen him without a rug over his arm. They had slept well and they ate with appetite the grapefruit, the toast and the marmalade: I was afraid they might require some strange beverage with a name chosen by a public relations firm, but they accepted coffee and even praised its quality.

'I woke up only once,' Mr Smith said, 'and I thought that I heard voices. Perhaps Mr Jones has arrived?'

'No.'

'Odd. The last thing he said to me in the customs was "We'll meet tonight at Mr Brown's".'

'He was probably shanghaied to another hotel.'

'I had hoped to take a dip before breakfast,' Mrs Smith said, 'but I found Joseph was cleaning the pool. He seems to be a man of all work.'

'Yes. He's invaluable. I'm sure the pool will be ready for you before lunch.'

'And the beggar?' Mr Smith asked.

'Oh, he went away before morning.'

'Not with an empty stomach, I hope?' He gave me a smile as much as to say: 'I'm only joking, I know you are a man of goodwill.'

'Joseph would certainly have seen to that.'

Mr Smith took another piece of toast. He said, 'I thought that this morning Mrs Smith and I would write our names in the embassy book.'

'It would be wise.'

'I thought it would be courteous. Afterwards perhaps I could present my letter of introduction to the Secretary for Social Welfare.'

'If I were you I would ask at the embassy whether there has been any change. That is, if the letter is addressed to someone personally.'

'A Doctor Philipot, I think.'

'I would certainly ask then. Changes happen very quickly here.'

'But his successor, I suppose, would receive me? What I have come here to propose would be of great interest to any minister concerned with health.'

'I don't think you ever told me what you were planning …'

'I come here as a representative,' Mr Smith said.

'Of the vegetarians of America,' Mrs Smith added. 'The true vegetarians.'

'Are there false vegetarians?'

'Of course. There are even some who eat fertilized eggs.'

'Heretics and schismatics have splintered every great movement,' Mr Smith said sadly, 'in human history.'

'And what do the vegetarians propose to do here?'

'Apart from the distribution of free literature - translated, of course, into French - we plan to open a centre of vegetarian cooking in the heart of the capital.'

'The heart of the capital is a shanty-town.'

'In a suitable site then. We want the President and some of his ministers to attend the gala opening and take the first vegetarian meal. As an example to the people.'

'But he's afraid to leave the palace.'

Mr Smith laughed politely at what he considered my picturesque exaggeration. Mrs Smith said, 'You can hardly expect much encouragement from Mr Brown. He is not one of us.'

'Now, now, my dear, Mr Brown was only having a little joke with us. Perhaps after breakfast I could ring up my embassy.'

'The telephone doesn't work. But I could send Joseph with a note.'

'No, in that case we'll take a taxi. If you'll get us a taxi.'

'I'll send Joseph to find one.'

'He surely is a man of all work,' Mrs Smith said to me harshly, as though I were a southern plantation-owner. I saw Petit Pierre walking up the drive and I left them.

'Ah, Mr Brown,' Petit Pierre cried, 'a very very good moming.' He waved a copy of the local paper and said, 'You'll see what I have written about you. How are your guests? They have slept well, I hope.' He mounted the steps, bowed to the Smiths at their table and breathed in the sweet flowery smell of Port-au-Prince as though he were a stranger to the place. 'What a view,' he said, 'the trees, the flowers, the bay, the palace.' He giggled. 'Distance lends enchantment to the view. Mr William Wordsworth.'

Petit Pierre had not come for the view, I was certain, and at this hour he would hardly have come for a free glass of rum. Presumably he wanted to receive information, unless perhaps he wished to impart it. His gay manner did not necessarily mean good news for Petit Pierre was always gay. It was as though he had tossed a coin to decide between the only two possible attitudes in Port-au-Prince, the rational and the irrational, misery or gaiety; Papa Doc's head had fallen earthwards and he had plumped for the gaiety of despair.

'Let me see what you've written,' I said.

I opened the paper at his gossip-column - which always appeared on page four - and read how, among the many distinguished visitors who had arrived yesterday in the Medea, was the Honourable Mr Smith who had been narrowly defeated in the American Presidential elections of 1948 by Mr Truman. He was accompanied by his elegant and amiable wife who, under happier circumstances, would have been America's First Lady, an adornment to the White House. Among the many other passengers was the well-loved patron of that intellectual centre, the Hotel Trianon, who was returning from a business visit to New York … I looked afterwards at the principal news page. The Secretary for Education was announcing a six-year plan to eliminate illiteracy in the north - why the north in particular? No details were given. Perhaps he was depending on a satisfactory hurricane. Hurricane Hazel in '54 had eliminated a great deal of illiteracy in the interior - the extent of the death-roll had never been disclosed. There was a small paragraph about a party of rebels who had crossed the Dominican frontier: they had been driven back, and two prisoners had been taken carrying American arms. If the President had not quarrelled with the American Mission, the arms would probably have been described as Czech or Cuban. I said. 'There are rumours about a new Secretary for Social Welfare.'

'You can never trust rumours,' Petit Pierre said.

'Mr Smith has brought an introduction to Doctor Philipot. I don't want him to make a mistake.'

'Perhaps he ought to wait a few days. I hear that Doctor Philipot is in Cap Haпtien - or somewhere in the north.'

'Where the fighting is?'

'I do not believe there is really much fighting.'

'What kind of a man is Doctor Philipot?' I felt an itch of curiosity to know more of someone who had become a kind of distant relative by dying in my pool.

'A man,' Petit Pierre said, 'who suffers very much from his nerves.'

I closed the paper and handed it back to him. 'I see you don't mention the arrival of our friend Jones.'

'Ah yes, Jones. Who exactly is Major Jones?' I was sure then that he had come with the purpose of receiving rather than giving information.

'A

fellow-passenger.

That's all I know.'

'He claims to be a friend of Mr Smith's.'

'In that case, I suppose he must be.'

Petit Pierre imperceptibly moved me away down the verandah until we turned the corner out of sight of the Smiths. His white cuffs fell a long way out of his sleeves on to his black hands. 'If you would be frank with me,' he said, 'I might perhaps be of a little help.'

'Frank about what?'

'About Major Jones.'

'I wish you wouldn't call him Major. Somehow it doesn't suit him.'

'You think perhaps he is not … ?'

'I know nothing about him. Nothing at all.'

'He was going to stay at your hotel.'

'He seems to have found a lodging elsewhere.'

'Yes. At the police station.'

'Why on earth … ?'

'I think they found something incriminating in his baggage. I don't know what.'

'Does the British Embassy know?

'No. But I do not think they can help very much. These things have to take their course. They are not ill-treating him as yet.'

'What would you advise, Petit Pierre?'

'It is probably a misunderstanding - but then there is always the question of amour propre. The chief of Police suffers a great deal from amour propre. Perhaps if Mr Smith spoke to Doctor Philipot, Doctor Philipot might speak to the Secretary for the Interior. Major Jones could then be fined for a merely technical offence.'

'But what is his offence?'

'That question is in itself a technicality,' he said.

'But you have just told me Doctor Philipot is in the north.'

'True. Perhaps Mr Smith ought rather to see the Secretary for Foreign Affairs.' He waved the papers proudly. 'He will know how important Mr Smith is, for he will undoubtedly have read my article.'

'I shall go at once and see our chargй.'

'It is the wrong method,' Petit Pierre said. 'It is far easier to satisfy the amour propre of the chief of police than to satisfy national pride. The Haitian Government does not accept protests from foreigners.'

It was much the same advice as the chargй gave me later that morning. He was a hollow-chested man with sensitive features which reminded me the first time I met him of Robert Louis Stevenson. He spoke with many hesitations and an amused air of defeat - it was the conditions of life in the capital that had defeated him, not the inroads of tuberculosis. He had the courage and the humour of the defeated. For example he carried a pair of black glasses in his pocket which he always put on when he saw a member of the Tontons Macoute, who wore them as a uniform, to terrify. He collected books on Caribbean flora, but he had sent all but the most common of them home, just as he had sent his children, for there was always the risk of sudden fire aided by a tin of petrol.

He listened to me without interruption or impatience while I told him of Jones's predicament and Petit Pierre's advice. I felt sure he would have shown no more surprise if I had told him of the Secretary for Social Welfare dead in my bathing-pool and the way in which I had disposed of the body, but think he would have been secretly grateful to me that I had not called him in. When I finished my story, he said, 'I had a cable from London about Jones.'

'So did the captain of the Medea. His cable came from the owners in Philadelphia. It wasn't very specific.'

'Mine you might say was cautionary. I was not to be unduly helpful. I suspect some consulate somewhere has been taken for a ride.'

'All the same a British subject in prison … ?'

'Oh, I agree that is a little too steep. Only we have to remember, don't we, that even these bastards may have acted with good reason. Officially I shall proceed with caution - as the cable suggests. A formal inquiry to begin with.'

He made a movement with his hand across the desk and laughed. 'I shall never lose the habit of picking up a telephone.'

He was the perfect spectator - the spectator of whom every actor must sometimes dream, intelligent, watchful, amused and critical in just the right way, a lesson he had learnt from having seen so many performances good and bad in different plays. For some reason I thought of my mother's words to me, when I saw her for the last time, 'What part are you playing now?' I suppose I was playing a part - the part of an Englishman concerned over the fate of a fellow-countryman, of a responsible business man who saw his duty clearly and who came to consult the representative of his Sovereign. I temporarily forgot the tangle of legs in the Peugeot. I am quite sure that the chargй would have disapproved of my cuckolding a member of the diplomatic corps. The act belonged too closely to the theatre of farce. He said, 'I doubt if my inquiries will do much good. I shall be told by the Secretary for the Interior that the affair is in the hands of the police. He will probably give me a lecture on the separation of the judicial and executive functions. Did I ever tell you about my cook? It happened while you were away. I was giving a dinner for my colleagues and my cook simply disappeared. No marketing had been done. He had been picked up in the street on the way to market. My wife had to open the tins we keep for an emergency. Your Seсor Pineda did not appreciate a soufflй of tinned salmon.' Why did he say my Seсor Pineda? 'Later I heard that he was in a police cell. They released him the next day when it was too late. He had been questioned about what guests I entertained. I protested, of course, to the Secretary for the Interior. I said I should have been told, and I would have arranged for him to go to the police station at a convenient hour. The Minister simply said that he was a Haitian and he could do what he liked with a Haitian.'

'But Jones is English.'

'I assume so, but I doubt all the same whether our Government in these days will send a frigate. Of course, I'm anxious to help to the best of my ability, but I think Petit Pierre's advice is quite sound. Try other means first. If you get nowhere, of course I'll protest - tomorrow morning. I have a feeling that this is not the first police cell Major Jones has known. We mustn't exaggerate the situation.' I felt a little like the player king rebuked by Hamlet for exaggerating his part.

When I got back to the hotel the swimming-pool was full, the gardener was pretending to occupy himself by raking a few leaves off the surface of the water, I heard the voice of the cook in the kitchen, everything was near to normal again. I even had guests, for there in the pool, avoiding the gardener's rake, swam Mr Smith, wearing a pair of dark grey nylon bathingpants which billowed out behind him in the water, giving him the huge hindquarters of some prehistoric beast. He swam slowly up and down using the breaststroke and grunting rhythmically. When he saw me he stood up in the water like a myth. His breasts were covered with long strands of white hair.

I sat down by the pool and called out to Joseph to bring a rum punch and a Coca-Cola. I was uneasy when Mr Smith trundled to the deep end before he emerged - he was passing so close to the spot where the Secretary for Social Welfare had died. I thought of Holyrood and the indelible mark of Rizzio's blood. Mr Smith shook himself and sat down beside me. Mrs Smith appeared on the balcony of the John Barrymore suite and called down to him, 'Dry yourself, dear, or you might catch cold.'

'The sun will dry me quickly enough, dear,' Mr Smith called back.

'Put the towel round your shoulders or you'll burn.'

Mr Smith obeyed her. I said, 'Mr Jones has been arrested by the police.'

'My goodness. You don't say. What has he done?'

'He hasn't necessarily done anything.'

'Has he seen a lawyer?'

'That's not possible here. The police wouldn't allow it.'

Mr Smith gave me an obstinate look. 'The police are the same everywhere. It happens often enough at home,' he said, 'in the south. Coloured men shut up in jail, refused a lawyer. But two wrongs don't make a right.'

'I've been to the embassy. They don't think they can do much.'

'Now

that

is scandalous,' Mr Smith said. He was referring to the attitude of the embassy rather than to the conditions of Jones's arrest.

'Petit Pierre thinks that the best thing at the moment would be for you to intervene, to see the Secretary of State perhaps.'

'I'll do anything I can for Mr Jones. There's obviously been a mistake. But why does he suppose I would have any influence?'

'You were a presidential candidate,' I said, as Joseph brought the glasses.

'I'll do anything I can,' Mr Smith repeated, brooding into his Coca-Cola. 'I very much took to Mr Jones. (I don't know why it is I can't get round to calling him Major - after all there are some good men in all armies.) He seemed to me the best type of Britisher. There must have been a foolish mistake somewhere.'

'I don't want to get you into any trouble with the authorities.'

'I'm not afraid of trouble,' Mr Smith said, 'with any authorities.'

3

The office of the Secretary of State was in one of the exhibition buildings near the port and the Columbus statue. We passed the musical fountain that never played now, the public park with its Bourbon pronouncement: 'Je suis le drapeau Haпtien, Uni et Indivisible, Franзois Duvalier' , and came at last to the long modern building of cement and glass, the wide staircase, the great lounge with many comfortable armchairs lined with the murals of Haitian artists. It bore as little relation to the beggars of the Post Office square and the shanty-town as Christophe's palace of Sans Souci, but it would make a much less picturesque ruin.

The lounge contained more than a dozen middle-class people, fat and prosperous. The women in their best dresses of electric blues and acid greens chattered happily to each other as though they were taking their morning coffee, looking sharply up at every newcomer. Even a suppliant in this lounge bore himself with importance in an air filled with the slow tap of typewriters. Ten minutes after we arrived Seсor Pineda walked heavily through with the certitude of diplomatic privilege. He smoked a cigar and looked at no one and without asking a by-your-leave passed through one of the doors which opened on to an inner balcony.

'The Secretary's private office,' I explained. 'The South American ambassadors are still persona grata. Especially Pineda. He hasn't any political refugees in his embassy. Not yet.'

We waited for three-quarters of an hour, but Mr Smith showed no impatience. 'It seems very well organized,' he said once, when the suppliants were reduced by two after a brief conference with a clerk. 'A minister has to be protected.'

At last Pineda passed out through the lounge, still smoking a cigar - it was a fresh one. The band was on it: he never removed his bands because they were stamped with his monogram. This time he gave me a bow of recognition - for a moment I thought he was going to pause and speak to me; his bow must have attracted the attention of the young man who accompanied him to the head of the stairs, for he returned and asked us with courtesy what we wanted.

'The Secretary of State,' I said.

'He is very busy with the foreign ambassadors. There is a great deal to discuss. You see tomorrow he is leaving for the United Nations.'

'Then I think he should see Mr Smith at once.'

'Mr

Smith?'

'You haven't read today's paper?'

'We have been very busy.'

'Mr Smith arrived yesterday. He is the Presidential Candidate.'

'The Presidential Candidate?' the young man said with incredulity. 'In Haiti?'

'He has business in Haiti - but that is a matter for your President. Now he would like to see the Minister before he leaves for New York.'

'Please wait here a moment.' He passed into one of the offices on the inner court and came out, hurriedly, a minute later carrying a newspaper. He knocked on the Minister's door and went in.

'You know, Mr Brown, that I'm no longer a presidential candidate. We made our gesture once and for all.'

'There's no need to explain that here, Mr Smith. After all you belong to history.' I could see in those pale-blue honest eyes that perhaps I had gone a little too far. I added, 'A gesture like yours is there for everyone to read' - I could not specify where. 'It belongs to this year as much as to the past.'

The young man stood beside us - he had left the newspaper behind. 'If you would come with me …'

The Secretary of State flashed his teeth at us with great amiability. I saw the newspaper lying at the corner of his desk. The palm he held out to us was large, square, pink and humid. He told us in excellent English how interested he had been to read of Mr Smith's arrival and how he had hardly hoped to have the honour, since he was leaving for New York tomorrow … There had been no word from the American Embassy, or else of course he would have arranged a time …

Since the President of the United States, I said, had seen fit to recall his ambassador, Mr Smith thought it better to make his visit unofficially. The Secretary said he saw my point. He added to Mr Smith, 'I understand you are seeing the President …'

'Mr Smith has not yet asked for an audience. He was anxious to see you first - before you land in New York.'

'I have to make my protest before the United Nations,' the Minister explained with pride. 'Will you have a cigar, Mr Smith?' He offered his leather case and Mr Smith took one. I noticed that the band bore the monogram of Seсor Pineda.

'Protest?' Mr Smith asked.

'The raids from the Dominican Republic. The rebels are being supplied with American arms. We have evidence.'

'What

evidence?'

'Two men were captured carrying revolvers manufactured in the United States.'

'I'm afraid you can buy such things anywhere in the world.'

'I have been promised the support of Ghana. And I hope other Afro-Asian countries …'

'Mr Smith has come about quite a different matter,' I interrupted them. 'A great friend of his who was travelling with him was arrested yesterday by the police.'

'An

American?'

'An Englishman called Jones.'

'Has the British Embassy made inquiries? This is really a matter concerning the Secretary for the Interior.'

'But a word from you, Your Excellency …'

'I cannot interfere with another department. I'm sorry. Mr Smith will understand.'

Mr Smith pushed his way into our dialogue with a roughness I had not known him to possess. 'You can find out what the charge is, can't you?'

'Charge?'

'Charge.'

'Oh - charge.'

'Exactly,' Mr Smith said. 'Charge.'

'There will not necessarily be a charge. You are anticipating the worst.'

'Then why keep him in prison?'

'I know nothing about the case. I suppose there is something to be investigated.'

'Then he ought to be brought before a magistrate and put on bail. I will stand bail for any reasonable amount.'

'Bail?' the Minister said, 'Bail?' He turned to me with a gesture of appeal from his cigar. 'What is bail?'

'A kind of gift to the state if a prisoner should not return for trial. It can be quite a substantial amount,' I added.

'You've heard of Habeas Corpus, I suppose,' Mr Smith said.

'Yes. Yes., Of course. But I have forgotten so much of my Latin. Virgil. Homer. I regret that I no longer have time to study.'

I said to Mr Smith, 'The basis of the law here is supposed to be the Code Napolйon.'

'The

Code Napolйon?'

'There are certain differences from the Anglo-Saxon law. Habeas Corpus is one of them.'

'A man has to be charged surely.'

'Yes. Eventually.' I spoke rapidly to the Minister in French. Mr Smith understood little French, even though Mrs Smith had reached the fourth lesson in Hugo's. I said, 'I think a political mistake has been made. The Presidential Candidate is a personal friend of this man Jones. You ought not to alienate him just before your visit to New York. You know the importance in democratic countries of being friendly with the opposition. Unless the affair is of really great importance, I think you should let Mr Smith see his friend. Otherwise he will undoubtedly believe that he has been

- perhaps - ill-treated.'

'Does Mr Smith speak French?'

'No.'

'You see, there is always the possibility that the police may have exceeded their instructions. I wouldn't want Mr Smith to get a bad impression of our police procedure.'

'Couldn't you send in a reliable doctor first - to tidy up?'

'Of course there would be nothing really to conceal. It is only that sometimes a prisoner misbehaves. I am sure even in your own country …'

'Then we can rely on you to have a word with your colleague? What I would suggest is that Mr Smith should leave with you a little compensation - in dollars, of course, not gourdes - for any damage Mr Jones may have inflicted on a policeman.'

'I will do what I can. So long as the President is not involved. In that case there is nothing that any of us can do.'

'No.'

Above his head hung the portrait of Papa Doc - the portrait of Baron Samedi. Clothed in the heavy black tail-suit of graveyards he peered out at us through the thick lenses of his spectacles with myopic and expressionless eyes. He was rumoured sometimes to watch personally the slow death of a Tonton victim. The eyes would not change. Presumably his interest in the death was medical.

'Give me two hundred dollars,' I said to Mr Smith. He picked out two hundred-dollar notes from his case. In the other pocket I saw that he had a photograph of his wife wrapped in her rug. I laid the notes on the Minister's desk; I thought he looked at them with an air of disparagement, but I couldn't believe that Mr Jones was worth much more than that. At the door I turned, 'And Doctor Philipot,' I asked, 'is he here at the moment? There was something about the hotel I wanted to discuss with him - a drainage plan.'

'I believe that he is in the south at Aux Cayes about a new hospital project.' Haiti was a great country for projects. Projects always mean money to the projectors so long as they are not begun.

'We'll hear from you then?'

'Of course. Of course. But I promise nothing.' He was now a little brusque. I have often noticed that a bribe (though, of course, this was not, strictly speaking, a bribe) has that effect - it changes a relation. The man who offers a bribe gives away a little of his own importance; the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has paid for a woman. Perhaps I had made a mistake. Perhaps I should have left Mr Smith as an undefined menace. The blackmailer retains his superiority. 4

All the same the Minister proved himself to be a man of his word; we were allowed in due course to see the prisoner.

At the police station the next afternoon the sergeant was the most important figure, far more important than the Minister's secretary who accompanied us there. He tried in vain to catch the eye of the great man, but he had to wait his turn at the counter with all the other suppliants. Mr Smith and I sat under the snapshots of the dead rebel which were still wilting on the wall after all these months. Mr Smith looked at them and hastily looked away. In a little room opposite us sat a tall negro in a natty civilian suit; he had his feet up on his desk and he stared at us continually through dark glasses. Perhaps it was only my nerves that lent him an expression of repulsive cruelty.

'He'll remember us again,' Mr Smith said with a smile. The man knew that we had spoken of him. He rang a bell on his desk and a policeman came. Without moving his feet or turning his gaze away from us he asked a question, and the policeman glanced at us and replied and the long stare went on. I turned my head, but inevitably after a little while I looked back into the two black circular lenses. They were like binoculars through which he was observing the habits of two insignificant animals.

'An ugly customer,' I said uneasily. Then I noticed that Mr Smith was returning the stare. One couldn't see how often the man blinked because of the dark glasses; he might easily have closed his eyes and rested them and we would not have known, yet it was Mr Smith's blue relentless gaze which won the day. The man got up and closed the door of his office. 'Bravo,' I said.

'I shall remember him too,' Mr Smith said.

'He probably suffers from acidity.'

'It's highly possible, Mr Brown.'

We must have been there more than half an hour before the Foreign Minister's secretary got any attention. In a dictatorship ministers come and go; in Port-au-Prince only the chief of police, the head of the Tontons Macoute and the commander of the palace guard had any permanence - they alone could offer security to their employees. The Minister's secretary was dismissed by the sergeant like a small boy who has run an errand and a corporal led us down the long corridor of cells that smelt like a zoo. Jones sat on an upturned bucket beside a straw mattress. His face was criss-crossed with pieces of plaster and his right arm was bandaged to his side. He had been tidied up as well as could be, but his left eye could have done with a raw steak. His double-breasted waistcoat looked more conspicuous than ever with a small rusty stain of blood. 'Well, well,' he greeted us with a happy smile, 'look who's here.'

'You seem to have been resisting arrest,' I said.

'That's their story,' he said brightly. 'Got a cigarette?'

I gave him one.

'You haven't a filter tip?

'No.'

'Ah well, mustn't look a gift-horse … I felt this morning things had taken a turn for the better. They gave me some beans at midday, and a doctor chap came and worked on me.'

'What are you charged with?' Mr Smith asked.

'Charged?' He seemed as puzzled at the word as the Foreign Secretary had been.

'What do they say you've done, Mr Jones?'

'I haven't had much of an opportunity to do anything. I didn't even get through the customs.'

'There must be some reason? A mistaken identity perhaps?'

'They haven't explained things very clearly to me yet.' He touched his eye with caution. 'I look a bit the worse for wear, I expect.'

'Is that all you have for a bed?' Mr Smith asked with indignation.

'I've slept in worse places.'

'Where? It's hard to imagine …'

He said vaguely and unconvincingly, 'Oh, in the war, you know.' He added, 'I think the trouble is I had the wrong introduction. I know you warned me, but I thought you were exaggerating - like the purser.'

'Where did you get your introduction?' I asked.

'Someone I met in Leopoldville.'

'What were you doing in Leopoldville?'

'It was more than a year ago. I do a lot of travelling.' I had the impression that to him the cell was unremarkable, like one of the innumerable airports on a long route.

'We've got to get you out of here,' Mr Smith said. 'Mr Brown has told your chargй. We've both seen the Secretary of State. We've stood bail.'

'Bail?' He had a better sense of reality than Mr Smith. He said, 'I tell you what you can do for me, if you wouldn't mind. Of course I'll pay you back later. Give twenty dollars to the sergeants as you go out.'

'Of course,' Mr Smith said, 'if you think it will do any good.'

'Oh, it will do good all right. There's another thing - I have to get that business of the introduction straight. Have you a bit of paper and a pen?'

Mr Smith provided them and Jones began to write. 'You haven't an envelope?'

'I'm

afraid

not.'

'Then I'd better phrase it a bit differently.' He hesitated a moment and then he asked me, 'What's the French for factory?'

' Usine?'

'I was never very good at languages, but I've picked up a bit of French.'

'In

Leopoldville?'

'Give that to the sergeant and ask him to pass it on.'

'Can he read?'

'I think so.' He stood up as he returned the pen and said in the polite tone of dismissal, 'It was good of you chaps to call.'

'You've got another appointment?' I asked him ironically.

'To tell you the truth those beans are beginning to work. I've an appointment with the bucket. If either of you can spare a little more paper …'

We collected between us three old envelopes, a receipted bill, a page or two from Mr Smith's engagement book, and a letter to me, which I thought I had destroyed, from a New York real-estate agent regretting that at the moment he had no clients interested in the purchase of hotel properties in Port-au-Prince.

'The spirit of the man.' Mr Smith exclaimed in the passage outside. 'It's what brought you people safely through the blitz. I'll get him out of there if I have to go to the President himself.'

I looked at the fold of paper in my hand. I recognized the name written there. It was that of an officer in the Tontons Macoute. I said, 'I wonder if we ought to involve ourselves any further.'

'We

are involved,' Mr Smith said with pride, and I knew that he was thinking in the big terms I could not recognize, like Mankind, Justice, the Pursuit of Happiness. It was not for nothing that he had been a presidential candidate.

CHAPTER V

1

NEXT day a number of things distracted me from the fate of Jones, but I do not believe that Mr Smith for one moment forgot him. I saw him in the bathing-pool at seven in the morning, lumbering up and down, but that slow motion - from the deep to the shallow end and back - probably aided him to think. After breakfast he wrote a number of notes which Mrs Smith typed for him on a portable Corona, using two fingers, and he dispatched them through Joseph by taxi - one note was to his embassy, another to the new Secretary for Social Welfare whose appointment had been announced that morning in Petit Pierre's paper. He had enormous energy for a man of his age, and I am sure he was never for a moment distracted from the thought of Jones sitting on the bucket in his prison cell while he remembered the vegetarian centre, which one day would remove acidity and passion from the Haitian character. Simultaneously he was planning an article on his travels which he had promised to write for his home-town journal - a journal needless to say Democratic and anti-segregationist and sympathetic towards vegetarianism. He had asked me the day before to look his manuscript over for errors of fact. 'The opinions of course are my own,' he added with the wry smile of a pioneer.

My first distraction came early, before I had got up, when Joseph knocked on my door to tell me that against all probability the body of Doctor Philipot had already been discovered; as a consequence several people had left their homes and taken refuge in the Venezuelan Embassy, includinig a local police-chief, an assistant-postmaster and a schoolteacher (no one knew what their connections had been with the ex-Minister). It was said that Doctor Philipot had killed himself, but of course no one knew how the authorities would describe his death - as a political assassination, perhaps, engineered from the Dominican Republic? It was believed the President was in a state of fury. He had badly wanted to get his hands on Doctor Philipot who one night recently under the influence of rum was said to have laughed at Papa Doc's medical qualifications. I sent Joseph to the market to gather all the information he could.

My second distraction was the news that the child Angel was ill with mumps - in great pain, Martha wrote to me (and I couldn't help wishing him another turn of the screw). She was afraid to leave the embassy in case he asked for her, so it was impossible for her to meet me that night as we had arranged by the Columbus statue. But there was no reason, she wrote, why, after my long absence, I should not call in at the embassy - it would seem natural enough. A lot of people made a point of dropping in now that the curfew had been raised, if they could avoid the eye of the policeman at the gate, and he usually took a ration of rum in the kitchen at nine. She supposed they were preparing the ground in case a time came when they wanted to claim political asylum in a hurry. She added at the end of her note: 'Luis will be pleased. He thinks a lot of you' - a phrase which could be interpreted two ways.

Joseph came to my office after breakfast, when I was reading Mr Smith's article, to tell me the whole story of the discovery of Doctor Philipot's body as it was now known to the stall-holders in the market, if not yet to the police. It was one chance in a thousand which had led the police to the corpse that Doctor Magiot and I had expected to lie concealed for weeks in the ex-astrologer's garden: a bizarre chance, and the story made it hard for me to pay much attention to Mr Smith's manuscript. One of the militiamen on the road-block below the hotel had taken a fancy to a peasant woman who was on her way up to the big market at Kenscoff early that morning. He wouldn't let her pass, for he claimed she was carrying something concealed underneath her layers of petticoat. She offered to show him what she had there and they went off together down the side-road and into the astrologer's deserted garden. She was in a hurry to complete the long road to Kenscoff, so she went quickly down upon her knees, flung up her petticoats, rested her head on the ground, and found herself staring into the wide glazed eyes of the ex-Minister for Social Welfare. She recognized him, for in the days before he came to political office he had attended her daughter in a difficult accouchement.

The gardener was outside the window, so I tried not to show undue interest in Josephs narrative. Instead I turned a page of Mr Smiths article.

'Mrs Smith and I,' he had written, 'left Philadelphia with much regret after we had been entertained by the Henry S. Ochs's whom many readers will remember for their hospitable New Year parties at the time they occupied 2041 DeLancey Place, but the sorrow of leaving our good friends was soon lost in the pleasure of making new ones on the S.S. Medea …'

'Why did they go to the police?' I asked. The natural thing for the couple to have done after the discovery was to slip away and say nothing.

'She scream so loud the other militiaman he come,'

I skipped a page or two of Mrs Smith's typewriting and came to the arrival of the Medea at Port-au-Prince. 'A black republic - and a black republic with a history, an art and a literature. It was as if I were watching the future of all the new African republics, with their teething troubles over.'

(He had no intention, I am sure, of appearing pessimistic.) 'Of course a great deal remains to be done even here. Haiti has experienced monarchy, democracy and dictatorship, but we must not judge a coloured dictatorship as we judge a white one. History in Haiti is a matter of a few centuries, and if we still make mistakes, after two thousand years, how much more right have these people to make similar mistakes and to learn from them perhaps better than we have done? There is poverty here, there are beggars in the streets, there is some evidence of police authoritarianism' (he had not forgotten Mr Jones in his cell), 'but I wonder whether a coloured man landing for the first time in New York would have received the courtesy and friendly help which Mrs Smith and I enjoyed at the immigration office of Port-au-Prince.' I seemed to be reading about a different country. I said to Joseph, 'What are they doing with the body?'

The police wanted to keep it, he said, but the ice-plant at the mortuary was not working.

'Does Madame Philipot know?'

'Oh yes, she has him in Monsieur Hercule Dupont's funeral parlour. I think they bury him, double-quick.'

I couldn't help a feeling of responsibility for Doctor Philipot's last rites - he had died in my hotel. 'Let me know what the arrangements are,' I said to Joseph and turned back to Mr Smith's travelogue.

'For an unknown stranger like myself to be given an interview by the Secretary of State on my first day in Port-au-Prince was another example of the astonishing courtesy which I have met everywhere here. The Secretary of State was about to leave for New York to attend the conference of the United Nations; nonetheless he gave me half an hour of his precious time and enabled me, through his personal intervention with the Secretary for the Interior, to visit an Englishman in prison, a fellow-passenger on the Medea who had unfortunately - through some bureaucratic mistake liable to happen in much older countries than Haiti - fallen foul of the authorities. I am following the case up, but I have small fear of the result. Two qualities which I have always found strongly implanted in my coloured friends - whether living in the relative freedom of New York or the undisguised tyranny of Mississippi - are a regard for justice and a sense of human dignity.' In reading Churchill's prose works one is aware of an orator addressing an historic chamber, and in reading Mr Smith I was conscious of a lecturer in the hall of a provincial town. I felt surrounded by well-meaning middle-aged women in hats who had paid five dollars to a good cause.

'I look forward,' Mr Smith continued, 'to meeting the new Secretary for Social Welfare and discussing with him the subject which readers of this paper will have long regarded as my King Charles's head - the establishment of a vegetarian centre. Unfortunately Doctor Philipot, the former Minister to whom I carried a personal introduction from a Haitian diplomat attached to the United Nations, is not at the moment in Port-au-Prince, but I can assure my readers that my enthusiasm will carry me through all obstacles, if necessary to the President himself. From him I can expect a sympathetic hearing, for before he went into politics he won golden opinions as a doctor during the great typhoid epidemic some years ago. Like Mr Kenyatta, the Prime Minister of Kenya, he has also made his mark as an anthropologist'

('mark' was an understatement - I thought of Joseph's crippled legs). Later that morning Mr Smith came shyly in to hear what I thought of his article. 'It would please the authorities,' I said.

'They'll never read it. The paper has no circulation outside Wisconsin.'

'I wouldn't bank on their not reading it. Not many letters leave here nowadays. It's easy enough to censor them if they want to.'

'You mean they'd open it?' he asked with incredulity, but he added quickly, 'Oh well, it's been known to happen even in the U.S.A.'

'If I were you - just in case - I'd leave out all reference to Doctor Philipot.'

'But I've said nothing wrong.'

'They may be sensitive about him at the moment. You see, he's killed himself.'

'Oh the poor man, the poor man,' Mr Smith exclaimed. 'What on earth could have driven him to that?'

'Fear.'

'Had he done something wrong?'

'Who hasn't? He had spoken ill of the President.'

The old blue eyes turned away. He was determined to show no doubt to a stranger - a fellow white man, one of the slaver's race. He said, 'I would like to see his widow - there might be something I could do. At least Mrs Smith and I ought to send flowers.' However much he loved the blacks, it was in a white world he lived; he knew no other.

'I wouldn't if I were you.'

'Why

not?'

I despaired of explaining, and at that moment, as bad luck would have it, Joseph entered. The body had already left Monsieur Dupont's funeral parlour; they were taking the coffin up to Pйtionville for burial and were halted now at the road block below the hotel.

'They seem in a hurry.'

'They very worried,' Joseph explained.

'There's nothing to fear now surely,' Mr Smith said.

'Except the heat,' I added.

'I shall join the cortиge,' Mr Smith said.

'Don't you dream of it.'

Suddenly I was aware of the anger those blue eyes were capable of showing. 'Mr Brown, you are not my keeper. I am going to call Mrs Smith and we shall both …'

'At least leave her behind. Don't you really understand the danger … ?'

And it was on that dangerous word 'danger' that Mrs Smith entered.

'What danger?' she demanded.

'My dear, that poor Doctor Philipot to whom we had an introduction has killed himself.'

'Why?'

'The reasons seem obscure. They are taking him for burial to Pйtionville. I think we should join the cortиge. Joseph please, s'il vous plaоt, taxi …'

'What danger were you talking about?' Mrs Smith demanded.

'Do neither of you realize the kind of country this is? Anything can happen.'

'Mr Brown, dear, was saying he thought I ought to go alone.'

'I don't think either of you should go,' I said. 'It would be madness.'

'But - Mr Smith told you - we had a letter of introduction to Doctor Philipot. He is a friend of a friend.'

'It will be taken as a political gesture.'

'Mr Smith and I have never been afraid of political gestures. Dear, I have a dark dress … Give me two minutes.'

'He can't give you even one,' I said. 'Listen.' Even from my office we could hear the sound of voices on the hill, but it didn't sound to me like a normal funeral. There was not the wild music of peasant pompes funиbres, nor the sobriety of a bourgeois interment. Voices didn't wail: they argued, they shouted. A woman's cry rose above the din. Before I could attempt to stop them Mr and Mrs Smith were running down the drive. The Presidential Candidate had a slight lead. Perhaps he maintained it more by protocol than effort, for Mrs Smith certainly had the better gait. I followed them more slowly, and with reluctance.

The Hotel Trianon had sheltered Doctor Philipot both alive and dead, and we were still not rid of him: at the very entrance of the drive I saw the hearse. It had apparently backed in so as to turn away from Pйtionville, in retreat towards the city. One of the hungry unowned cats which haunted that end of the drive had leapt, in fear of the intrusion, on to the top of the hearse and it stood there arched and shivering like something struck by lightning. No one attempted to drive it away - the Haitians may well have believed it to contain the soul of the ex-Minister himself.

Madame Philipot, whom I had met once at some embassy reception, stood in front of the hearse and defied the driver to turn. She was a beautiful woman - not yet forty - with an olive skin, and she stood with her arms out like a bad patriotic monument to a forgotten war. Mr Smith repeated over and over again, 'What's the matter?' The driver of the hearse, which was black and expensive and encrusted with the emblems of death, sounded his horn - I had not realized before that hearses possessed horns. Two men in black suits argued with him one on either side; they had got out of a tumbledown taxi which was also parked in my drive, and in the road stood another taxi pointing up the hill to Pйtionville. It contained a small boy whose face was pressed to the window. That was all the cortиge amounted to.

'What's going on here?' Mr Smith cried again in his distress and the cat spat at him from the glass roof.

Madame Philipot shouted 'Salaud' at the driver and ' Cochon,' then she flung her eyes like dark flowers at Mr Smith. She had understood English.

' Vous кtes amйricain? '

Mr Smith, expanding his knowledge of French nearly to its outer limit, said, ' Oui. '

'This

cochon, this salaud,' Madame Philipot said, still barring the way to the hearse, 'wants to drive back into the city.'

'But

why?'

'The militia at the barrier up the road will not let us pass.'

'But why, why?' Mr Smith repeated with bewilderment and the two men, leaving their taxi in the drive, began to walk down the hill towards the city with an air of purpose. They had put on top-hats.

'They murdered him,' Madame Philipot said, 'and now they will not even allow him to be buried in our own plot of ground.'

'There must be some mistake,' Mr Smith said, 'surely.'

'I told that salaud to drive on through the barrier. Let them shoot. Let them kill his wife and child.' She added with illogical contempt, 'They probably have no bullets in any case for their rifles.'

' Maman, maman, ' the child cried from the taxi.

' Chйri? '

' Tu m'as promis une glace а la vanille. '

' Attends un petit peu, chйri. '

I said, 'Then you got through the first road-block without being questioned?'

'Yes, yes. You understand - with a little payment.'

'They wouldn't accept payment up the road?'

She said, 'Oh, he had orders. He was afraid.'

'There must be a mistake,' I said, repeating Mr Smith, but unlike him I was thinking of the bribe which had been refused.

'You live here. Do you really believe that?' She turned on the driver and said, 'Drive on. Up the road. Salaud,' and the cat, as though it took the insult to itself, leapt at the nearest tree: its claws scrabbled in the bark and held. It spat once more over its shoulder, at all of us, with hungry hatred and dropped into the bougainvillaea.

The two men in black returned slowly up the hill. They had an intimidated air. I had time to look at the coffin - it was a luxurious one, worthy of the hearse, but it bore only a single wreath of flowers and a single card; the ex-Minister was doomed to have an interment almost as lonely as his death. The two men who had now rejoined us were almost indistinguishable one from the other, except that one was a centimetre or so the taller - or perhaps it was his hat. The taller one explained, 'We have been to the lower road-block, Madame Philipot. They say we cannot return with the coffin. Not without the authorization of the authorities.'

'What authorities?' I asked.

'The Secretary for Social Welfare.'

We all with one accord looked at the handsome coffin with its gleaming brass handles.

' There is the Secretary for Social Welfare,' I said.

'Not since this morning.'

'Are you Monsieur Hercule Dupont?'

'I am Monsieur Clйment Dupont. This is Monsieur Hercule.' Monsieur Hercule removed his top-hat and bowed from the hips.

'What's happening?' Mr Smith asked. I told him.

'But that's absurd,' Mrs Smith interrupted me. 'Does the coffin have to wait here till some fool mistake has been cleared up ?'

'I'm beginning to fear it was no mistake.'

'What else could it be?'

'Revenge. They failed to catch him alive.' I said to Madame Philipot,

'They will arrive soon. That's certain. Better go to the hotel with the child.'

'And leave my husband stranded by the road? No.'

'At least tell your child to go and Joseph will give him a vanilla ice.'

The sun was almost vertically above us now: splinters of light darted here and there from the glass of the hearse and the bright brass-work of the coffin. The driver turned off his engine and we could hear the sudden silence extending a long long way to where a dog whined on the fringes of the capital.

Madame Philipot opened the taxi door and lifted the little boy out. He was blacker than she was and the whites of his eyes were enormous like eggs. She told him to find Joseph and his ice, but he didn't want to go. He clung to her dress.

'Mrs Smith,' I said, 'take him to the hotel.'

She hesitated. She said, 'If there's going to be trouble, I think I ought to stay here with Madame Phili - Phili - you take him, dear.'

'And leave you, dear?' MrSmith said. 'No.'

I hadn't noticed the taxi-drivers where they sat motionless in the shadow of the trees. Now, as though they had been exchanging signals with each other while we talked, they started simultaneously to life. One swung his taxi out of the drive, the other reversed and turned. With a grinding of gears they skidded together like decrepit racing-motorists down the hill towards Port-au-Prince. We heard the taxis halt at the road-block and then start off again and fade into the silence.

Monsieur Hercule Dupont cleared his throat. He said, 'You are quite right. I and Monsieur Clйment will take the child …' Each seized a hand, but the little boy dragged to get away.

'Go

chйri,' his mother said, 'and find a vanilla ice.'

' Avec de la crйme au chocolat? '

' Oui, oui, bien sыr, avec de la crйme au chocolat. '

They made an odd procession, the three of them going up the drive under the palms, between the bougainvillaeas, two top-hatted middle-aged twins with the child between. The Hotel Trianon was not an embassy, but I suppose that the brothers Dupont considered it was perhaps the next best thing - a foreigner's property. The driver of the hearse too - we had forgotten him - abruptly climbed down and ran to catch them up. Madame Philipot, the Smiths and I were alone with the hearse and the coffin, and we listened in silence to the other silence on the road.

'What happens next?' Mr Smith asked after a while.

'It's not in our hands. We wait. That's all.'

'For

what?'

'For

them.'

Our situation reminded me of that nightmare of childhood when something in a cupboard prepares to come out. None of us was anxious to look at another and see his private nightmare reflected, so we looked instead through the glass wall of the hearse at the new shining coffin with the brass handles which was the cause of a the trouble. Far away, in the land where the barking dog belonged, a car was taking the first gradients of the long hill.

'They're coming,' I said. Madame Philipot leant her forehead against the glass of the hearse, and the car climbed slowly up towards us.

'I wish you'd go in,' I said to her. 'It would be better for all of us if we all went in.'

'I don't understand,' Mr Smith said. He put out his hand and gripped his wife's wrist.

The car had halted at the barrier down the road - we could hear the engine running; then it came slowly on in bottom gear, and now it was in view, a big Cadillac dating from the days of American aid for the poor of Haiti. It drew alongside us and four men got out. They wore soft hats and very dark sun-glasses; they carried guns on their hips, but only one of them bothered to draw, and he didn't draw his gun against us. He went to the side of the hearse and began to smash the glass with it, methodically. Madame Philipot didn't move or speak, and there was nothing I could do. One cannot argue with four guns. We were witnesses, but there was no court which would ever hear our testimony. The glass side of the hearse was smashed now, but the leader continued to chip the jagged edges with his gun. There was no hurry and he didn't want any one to scratch his hands.

Mrs Smith suddenly darted forward and seized the Tonton Macoute's shoulder. He turned his head and I recognized him. It was the man whom Mr Smith had out-stared in the police station. He shook himself free from her grip and putting his gloved hand firmly and deliberately against her face he sent her reeling back into the bushes of bougainvillaea. I had to put my arms round Mr Smith and hold him.

'They can't do that to my wife,' he shouted over my shoulder.

'Oh yes, they can.'

'Let me go,' he shouted, struggling to be free. I've never seen a man so suddenly transformed. 'Swine,' he yelled. It was the worst expression he could find, but the Tonton Macoute spoke no English. Mr Smith twisted and nearly got free from me. He was a strong old man.

'It won't do any good to anyone if you get shot,' I said. Mrs Smith sat among the bushes; for once in her life she looked bewildered. They lifted the coffin out of the hearse and carried it to the car. They wedged it into the boot, but it stuck several feet out, so they tied it securely with a piece of rope, taking their time. There was no need to hurry; they were secure; they were the law. Madame Philipot with a humility which shamed us - but there was no choice between humility and violence and only Mrs Smith had essayed violence - went over to the Cadillac and pleaded with them to take her too. Her gestures told me that; her voice was too low for me to hear what she said. Perhaps she was offering them money for her dead: in a dictatorship one owns nothing, not even a dead husband. They slammed the door in her face and drove up the road, the coffin poking out of the boot, like a box of fruit on the way to market. Then they found a place to turn and came back. Mrs Smith was on her feet now; we stood in a little group and we looked guilty. An innocent victim nearly always looks guilty, like the scapegoat in the desert. They stopped the car and the officer - I assumed he was an officer, for the black glasses and the soft hats and the revolvers were all the uniform they wore - swung the car door open and beckoned to me. I am no hero. I obeyed and crossed the road to him.

'You own this hotel, don't you?'

'Yes.'

'You were in the police station yesterday?'

'Yes.'

'Next time you see me don't stare at me. I don't like to be stared at. Who is the old man?'

'The

Presidential

Candidate,' I said.

'What do you mean? Presidential candidate for where?'

'For the United States of America.'

'Don't joke with me.'

'I'm not joking. You can't have read the papers.'

'Why has he come here?'

'How would I know? He saw the Secretary of State yesterday. Perhaps he told him the reason. He expects to see the President.'

'There's no election now in the United States. I know that much.'

'They don't have a President for life like you do here. They have elections every four years.'

'What was he doing with this - box of offal?'

'He was attending the funeral of his friend, Doctor Philipot.'

'I'm acting under orders,' he said with a hint of weakness. I could understand why it was these men wore dark glasses - they were human, but they mustn't show fear: it might be the end of terror in others. The Tontons Macoute in the car stared back at me as expressionless as golliwogs. I said, 'In Europe we hanged a lot of men who acted under orders. At Nuremberg.'

'I don't like the way you speak to me,' he said. 'You are not open. You have a mean way of talking. You've got a servant called Joseph, haven't you?'

'Yes.'

'I remember him well. I interviewed him once.' He let that fact sink in.

'This is your hotel. You make a living here.'

'No

longer.'

'That old man will be leaving soon, but you will stay on.'

'It was a mistake you made to hit his wife,' I said. 'It's the kind of thing he's likely to remember.' He slammed the door shut again and they drove the Cadillac back down the hill; we could see the end of the coffin pointing out at us until they turned the corner. Again there was a pause and we heard them at the barrier; then the car put on speed, racing down towards Port-auPrince. To where in Port-au-Prince? What use to anyone was the body of an ex-Minister? A corpse couldn't even suffer. But unreason can be more terrifying than reason.

'Outrageous. It's outrageous,' Mr Smith said at last. 'I'll telephone to the President. I'll get that man …'

'The telephone doesn't work.'

'He struck my wife.'

'It's not the first time, dear,' she said, 'and he only pushed me. Remember at Nashville. It was worse at Nashville.'

'It was different at Nashville,' he replied and there were tears in his voice. He had loved people for their colour and he had been betrayed more deeply than are those who hate. He added, 'I'm sorry, dear, if I used expressions …'

He took her arm and Madame Philipot and I followed them up the drive. The Duponts were sitting on the verandah with the little boy, and all three were eating vanilla ices with chocolate sauce. Their top-hats stood beside them like expensive ash-trays.

I told them, 'The hearse is safe. They only broke the glass.'

'Vandals,'

Monsieur

Hercule said, and Monsieur Clйment touched him

with a soothing undertaker's hand. Madame Philipot was quite calm now and without tears. She sat down by her child and aided him with the ice-cream. The past was past, and here beside her was the future. I had the feeling that when the time came, in however many years, he would not be allowed to forget. She spoke only once before she left in the taxi which Joseph fetched for her. 'One day someone will find a silver bullet.'

The Duponts, for want of a taxi, left in their own hearse, and I was alone with Joseph. Mr Smith had taken Mrs Smith to the John Barrymore suite to lie down. He fussed over her and she let him have his way. I said to Joseph,

'What good to them is a dead man in a coffin? Were they afraid that people might have laid flowers on his grave? It seemed unlikely. He wasn't a bad man, but he wasn't all that good either. The waterpumps for the shanty-town were never finished - I suppose some of the money went into his pocket.'

'The people they very frightened,' Joseph said, 'when they know. They frightened the President take their bodies too when they die.'

'Why care? There's nothing left as it is but skin and bone, and why would the President need dead bodies anyway?'

'The people very ignorant,' Joseph said. 'They think the President keep Doctor Philipot in the cellar in the palace and make him work all night. The President is big Voodoo man.'

'Baron

Samedi?'

'Ignorant people say yes.'

'So nobody will attack him at night with all the zombies there to protect him? They are better than guards, better than the Tontons Macoute.'

'Tontons Macoute zombies too. So ignorant people say.'

'But what do you believe, Joseph?'

'I be ignorant man, sir,' Joseph said.

I went upstairs to the John Barrymore suite, and I wondered while I climbed where they would dump the body - there were plenty of unfinished diggings and no one would notice one smell the more in Port-au-Prince. I knocked on the door, and Mrs Smith said, 'Come in.'

Mr Smith had lit a small portable paraffin-stove on the chest-of-drawers and was boiling some water. Beside it was a cup and saucer and a cardboard carton marked Yeastrel. He said, 'I have persuaded Mrs Smith for once not to take her Barmene. Yeastrel is more soothing.' There was a large photograph of John Barrymore on the wall looking down his nose with more than his usual phoney aristocratic disdain. Mrs Smith lay on the bed.

'How are you, Mrs Smith?'

'Perfectly all right,' she said with decision.

'Her face is quite unmarked,' Mr Smith told me with relief.

'I keep on telling you he only pushed me.'

'One doesn't push a woman.'

'I don't think he even realized I was a woman. I was, well - sort of assaulting him, I must admit.'

'You are a brave woman, Mrs Smith,' I said.

'Nonsense. I can see through a pair of cheap sun-glasses.'

'She has the heart of a tigress when roused,' Mr Smith said, stirring the Yeastrel.

'How are you going to deal with the incident in your article?' I asked him.

'I have been considering very carefully,' Mr Smith said. He took a spoonful of Yeastrel to see whether it was the right temperature. 'I think one more minute, dear. It's a little too hot still. Oh yes, the article. It would be dishonest, I think, to omit the incident altogether, and yet we can hardly expect readers to see the affair in proper perspective. Mrs Smith is much loved and respected in Wisconsin, but even there you will find people who are prepared to use a story like this to inflame passions over the colour question.'

'They would never mention the white police officer in Nashville,' Mrs Smith said. ' He gave me a black eye.'

'So taking all things into consideration,' Mr Smith said, 'I decided to tear the article up. People at home will just have to wait for news of us - that's all. Perhaps later, in a lecture, I might mention the incident when Mrs Smith is safely by my side to prove that it wasn't very serious.' He took another spoonful of Yeastrel. 'It's cool enough now, dear, I think.'

2

I went reluctantly to the embassy that evening. l would have much preferred to know nothing of Martha's normal surroundings. Then, when she was not with me, she would have disappeared into a void where I could forget her. Now I knew exactly where she went when her car left the Columbus statue. I knew the hall which she passed through with the chained book where visitors wrote their names, the drawing-room that she entered next with the deep chairs and sofas and the glitter of chandeliers and the big photograph of General so-and-so, their relatively benevolent president, who seemed to make every caller an official caller, even myself. I was glad at least that I had not seen her bedroom.

When I arrived at half past nine the ambassador was alone - I had never seen him alone before: he seemed a different man. He sat on the sofa and thumbed through Paris-Match like a man in a dentist's waiting-room. I thought of sitting down silently myself and taking Jours de France, but he anticipated me with his greeting. He pressed me at once to take a drink, a cigar … Perhaps he was a lonely man. What did he do when there was no official party and his wife was out meeting me? Martha had said that he liked me - the idea helped me to see him as a human being. He seemed tired and out of spirits. He carried his weight of flesh slowly, like a heavy load, between the drink-table and the sofa. He said, 'My wife's upstairs reading to my boy. She'll be down presently. She told me you might call.'

'I hesitated to come - you must be glad of an evening sometimes to yourselves.'

'I'm always glad to see my friends,' he said and lapsed into silence. I wondered whether he suspected our relationship or whether indeed he knew.

'I was sorry to hear that your boy had caught mumps.'

'Yes. It is still at the painful stage. It's terrible, isn't it, to watch a child suffering?'

'I suppose so. I've never had a child.'

I looked at the portrait of the general. I felt that at least I should have been here on a cultural mission. He wore a row of medals and he had his hand on his sword-hilt.

'How did you find New York?' the ambassador asked.

'Much as usual.'

'I would like to see New York. I know only the airport.'

'Perhaps one day you'll be posted to Washington.' It was an ill-considered compliment; there was little chance of such a posting if at his age - which I judged to be near fifty - he had stuck so long in Port-au-Prince.

'Oh, no,' he said seriously, 'I can never go there. You see my wife is German.'

'I know that - but surely now …'

He said, as though it were a natural occurrence in our kind of world, 'Her father was hanged in the American zone. During the occupation.'

'I

see.'

'Her mother brought her to South America. They had relations. She was only a child, of course.'

'But she knows?'

'Oh yes, she knows. There's no secret about it. She remembers him with tenderness, but the authorities had good reason …'

I wondered whether the world would ever again sail with such serenity through space as it seemed to do a hundred years ago. Then the Victorians kept skeletons in cupboards - but who cares about a mere skeleton now?

Haiti was not an exception in a sane world: it was a small slice of everyday taken at random. Baron Samedi walked in all our graveyards. I remembered the hanged man in the Tarot pack. It must feel a little odd, I thought, to have a son called Angel whose grandfather had been hanged, and then I wondered how I might feel … We were never very careful about taking precautions, it could easily happen that my child … A grandchild too of a Tarot card.

'After all, the children are innocent,' he said. 'Martin Bormann's son is a priest now in the Congo.'

But why, I wondered, tell me this fact about Martha? Sooner or later one always feels the need of a weapon against a mistress: he had slipped a knife up my sleeve to use against his wife when the moment of anger came. The man-servant opened the door and ushered in another visitor. I didn't catch the name, but as he padded across the carpet I recognized the Syrian from whom a year ago we had rented a room. He gave me a smile of complicity and said, 'Of course I know Mr Brown well. I did not know you had returned. And how did you find New York?'

'Any news in town, Hamit?' the ambassador asked.

'The Venezuelan Embassy has another refugee.'

'They will all be coming to me one day, I suppose,' the ambassador said,

'but misery likes company.'

'A terrible thing happened this morning, Excellency. They stopped Doctor Philipot's funeral and stole the coffin.'

'I heard rumours. I didn't believe them.'

'They are true enough,' I said. 'I was there. I saw the whole …'

'Monsieur Henri Philipot,' the man-servant announced, and a young man advanced towards us through the silence with a slight polio limp. I recognized him. He was the nephew of the ex-Minister, and I had met him once before in happier days, one of a little group of writers and artists who used to gather at the Trianon. I remembered him reading aloud some poems of his own - well-phrased, melodious, a little decadent and vieux jeu, with echoes of Baudelaire. How far away those times seemed now. All that was left to recall them were the rum punches of Joseph.

'Your first refugee, Excellency,' Hamit said. 'I was half expecting you, Monsieur Philipot.'

'Oh no,' the young man said, 'not that. Not yet. I understand when you claim asylum you have to make a promise not to indulge in political action.'

'What political action are you proposing to take?' I asked.

'I am melting down some old family silver.'

'I don't understand,' the ambassador said. 'Have one of my cigars, Henri. They are real Havana.'

'My dear and beautiful aunt talks about a silver bullet. But one bullet might go astray. I think we need quite a number of them. Besides we have to deal with three devils not one. Papa Doc, the head of the Tontons Macoute and the colonel of the palace guard.'

'It's a good thing,' the ambassador said, 'that they bought arms and not microphones with American aid.'

'Where were you this moming?' I asked.

'I arrived from Cap Haпtien too late for the funeral. Perhaps it was a lucky thing. I was stopped at every barrier on the road. I think they thought my land-rover was the first tank of an invading army.'

'How is everything up there?'

'Only too quiet. The place swarms with the Tontons Macoute. Judging by the sun-glasses you might be in Beverly Hills.'

Martha came in while he spoke and I was angry when she looked first at him, though I knew it was prudent to ignore me. She greeted him a shade too warmly, it seemed to me. 'Henri,' she said, 'I'm so glad you're here. I was afraid for you. Stay with us for a few days.'

'I must stay with my aunt, Martha.'

'Bring her too. And the child.'

'The time hasn't come for that.'

'Don't leave it too late.' She turned to me with a pretty meaningless smile which she kept in store for second secretaries and said, 'We are a third-rate embassy, aren't we, until we have a few refugees of our own?'

'How is your boy?' I asked. I meant the question to be as meaningless as her smile.

'The pain is better now. He wants very much to see you.'

'Why should he want that?'

'He always likes to see our friends. Otherwise he feels left out.'

Henri Philipot said, 'If only we had white mercenaries as Tshombe had. We Haitians haven't fought for forty years except with knives and broken bottles. We need a few men of guerrilla experience. We have mountains just as high as those in Cuba.'

'But not the forests,' I said, 'to hide in. Your peasants have destroyed those.'

'We held out a long time against the American Marines all the same.' He added bitterly, 'I say "we", but I belong to a later generation. In my generation we have learnt to paint - you know they buy Benoit's pictures now for the Museum of Modem Art (of course they cost far less than a European primitive). Our novelists are published in Paris - and now they live there too.'

'And

your

poems?'

'They were quite melodious, weren't they, but they sang the Doctor into power. All our negatives made that one great black positive. I even voted for him. Do you know that I haven't an idea how to use a Bren? Do you know how to use a Bren?'

'It's an easy weapon. You could learn in five minutes.'

'Then teach me.'

'First we would need a Bren.'

'Teach me with diagrams and empty match-boxes, and perhaps one day I'll find the Bren.'

'I know someone better equipped than I am as a teacher, but he's in prison at the moment.' I told him about 'Major' Jones.

'So they beat him up?' he asked with satisfaction.

'Yes.'

'That's good. White men react badly to a beating-up.'

'He seemed to take it very easily. I almost had the impression he was used to it.'

'You think he has some real experience?'

'He told me he had fought in Burma, but I've only got his word for that.'

'And you don't believe it?'

'There's something about him I don't believe, not altogether. I was reminded, when I talked to him, of a time when I was young and I persuaded a London restaurant to take me on because I could talk French - I said I'd been a waiter at Fouquet's. I was expecting all the time that someone would call my bluff, but no one did. I made a quick sale of myself, like a reject with the price-label stuck over the flaw. And again, not so long ago, I sold myself just as successfully as an art expert - no one called my bluff then either. I wonder sometimes whether Jones isn't playing the same game. I remember looking at him one night on the boat from America - it was after the ship's concert - and wondering, are you and I both comedians?'

'They can say that of most of us. Wasn't I a comedian with my verses smelling of Les Fleurs du Mal, published on handmade paper at my own expense? I posted them to the leading French reviews. That was a mistake. My bluff was called. I never read a single criticism - except by Petit Pierre. The same money would have bought me a Bren perhaps.' (It was a magic word to him now - Bren.)

The ambassador said, 'Come on, cheer up, let us all be comedians together. Take one of my cigars. Help yourself at the bar. My Scotch is good. Perhaps even Papa Doc is a comedian.'

'Oh no,' Philipot said, 'he is real. Horror is always real.'

The ambassador said, 'We mustn't complain too much of being comedians - it's an honourable profession. If only we could be good ones the world might gain at least a sense of style. We have failed - that's all. We are bad comedians, we aren't bad men.'

'For Christ's sake,' Martha said in English, as though she were addressing me directly, 'I'm no comedian.' We had forgotten her. She beat with her hands on the back of the sofa and cried to them in French, 'You talk so much. Such rubbish. My child vomited just now. You can smell it still on my hands. He was crying with pain. You talk about acting parts. I'm not acting any part. I do something. I fetch a basin. I fetch aspirin. I wipe his mouth. I take him into my bed.'

She began to weep standing behind the sofa. 'My dear,' the ambassador said with embarrassment. I couldn't even go to her or look at her too closely: Hamit watched me, ironic and comprehending. I remembered the stains we had left on his sheets, and I wondered whether he had changed them himself. He knew as many intimate things as a prostitute's dog.

'You put us all to shame,' Phflipot said.

She turned and left us, but her heel came off on the edge of the carpet and she stumbled and nearly fell in the doorway. I followed her and put my hand under her elbow. I knew that Hamit was watching me, but the ambassador, if he noticed anything, covered up well. 'Tell Angel I'll be up in half an hour to say good-night.' I closed the door behind me. She had taken off her shoes and was struggling to fasten the heel. I took it from her.

'There's nothing we can do,' I said. 'Haven't you another pair?'

'I've twenty other pairs. Does he know, do you think?'

'Perhaps. I don't know.'

'Will that make it any easier?'

'I don't know.'

'Perhaps we won't have to be comedians any more.'

'You said you were no comedian.'

'I exaggerated, didn't I? But all that talk irritated me. It made every one of us seem cheap and useless and self-pitying. Perhaps we are, but we needn't revel in it. At least I do things, don't I, even if they are bad things? I didn't pretend not to want you. I didn't pretend I loved you that first evenings.'

'Do you love me?'

'I love Angel,' she said defensively, walking up the wide Victorian staircase in her stockinged feet. We came to a long passage lined with numbered rooms.

'You've got plenty of rooms for refugees.'

'Yes.'

'Find a room for us now.'

'It's too risky.'

'It's as safe as the car. And what does it matter, if he knows … ?'

' "In my own house" he would say, just as you would say "in our Peugeot". Men always measure betrayal in degrees. You wouldn't mind so much, would you, if it were someone else's Cadillac?'

'We're wasting time. He gave us half an hour.'

'You said you'd see Angel.'

'Then afterwards … ?'

'Perhaps - I don't know. Let me think.'

She opened the third door down, and I found myself where I never wanted to be, in the bedroom she shared with her husband. The two beds were both double beds: their rose coloured sheets seemed to fill the room like a carpet. There was a tall pier-glass in which he could watch her prepare for bed. Now I had begun to feel a liking for the man I saw no reason why Martha should not like him too. He was fat, but there are women who love fat men, as they love hunchbacks or the one-legged. He was possessive, but there are women who enjoy slavery.

Angel sat upright against two pink pillows; the mumps had not noticeably increased the fatness of his face. I said, 'Hi!' I don't know how to talk to children. He had brown expressionless Latin eyes like his father - not the blue Saxon eyes of the hanged men. Martha had those.

'I am ill,' he said in a tone of moral superiority.

'So I see.'

'I sleep here with my mother. My father sleeps in the dressing-room. Until the fever has gone. I have a temperature of …'

I said, 'What's that you're playing with?'

'A puzzle.' He said to Martha, 'Is there no one else downstairs?'

'Monsieur Hamit is there and Henri.'

'I would like them to come and see me too.'

'Perhaps they have never had mumps. They might be afraid of catching it.'

'Has Monsieur Brown had mumps?'

Martha hesitated, and he took note of her hesitation like a crossexamining counsel. I said, 'Yes.'

'Does Monsieur Brown play cards?' he asked with apparent irrelevance.

'No. That is - I don't know,' she said as though she feared a trap.

'I don't like cards,' I said.

'My mother used to. She went out nearly every night playing cards - before you went away.'

'We have to go now,' Martha said. 'Papa will be up in half an hour to say good-night.'

He held out the puzzle to me and said, 'Do this.' It was one of those little rectangular boxes with glass sides that contain a picture of a clown and two sockets where his eyes should be and two little beads of steel which have to be shaken into the holes. I turned it this way and that way; I would get one bead in place and then in trying to fix the other I would dislodge the first. The child watched me with scorn and dislike.

'I'm sorry. I'm no good at this sort of thing. I can't do it.'

'You aren't properly trying,' he said. 'Go on.' I could feel the time I had left to be alone with Martha disappearing like sand in an egg-timer, and I could almost believe that he could see it too. The devilish beads chased each other round the edge of the box and ran across the eye-sockets without falling in; they took dives into corners. I would get them moving slowly downhill towards the sockets on a low gradient and then with the slightest tilt to guide them they plunged to the bottom of the box. All had to be begun again - I hardly moved the box at all now except by a quiver of my nerves.

'I've got one in.'

'That's not enough,' he said implacably.

I flung the box back at him. 'All right. You show me.'

He gave me a treacherous, unfriendly grin. He picked the box up and holding it over his left hand he hardly seemed to move it at all. One bead even mounted against the slope, tarried on the edge of a socket and fell in.

'One,' he said.

The other bead moved straight for the other eye, shaved the socket, turned and dropped into the hole. 'Two,' he said.

'What's in your left hand?'

'Nothing.'

'Then show me nothing.'

He opened his fist and showed a small magnet concealed there. 'Promise you won't tell,' he said.

'And what if I won't?'

We might have been adults quarrelling over a trick at cards. He said, 'I can keep secrets if you can.' His brown eyes gave nothing away.

'I promise,' I said.

Martha kissed him and smoothed his pillows and laid him flat and turned on a small night-lamp beside the bed. 'Will you come to bed soon?' he asked.

'When my guests have gone.'

'When will that be?'

'How can I tell?'

'You can always say that I am ill. I may vomit again. The aspirin isn't working. I'm in pain.'

'Just lie still. Close your eyes. Papa will be up soon. Then I expect they will all go away and I will come to bed.'

'You haven't said good-night,' he accused me.

'Good-night.' I put a false friendly hand on his head and ruflled his tough dry hair. My hand smelt afterwards like a mouse.

In the corridor I said to Martha, 'Even he seems to know.'

'How can he possibly?'

'What did he mean then by keeping secrets?'

'It's a game all children play.' But how difficult it was to consider him a child.

She said, 'He has suffered a great deal of pain. Don't you think he's behaving very well?'

'Yes. Of course. Very well.'

'Quite like a grown-up?'

'Oh yes. I thought that myself.'

I took her wrist and drew her down the corridor. 'Who sleeps in this room?'

'No

one.'

I opened the door and pulled her in. Martha said, 'No. Can't you see it's impossible?'

'I've been away three months and we've made love only once since then.'

'I didn't make you go away to New York. Can't you feel I'm not in the mood, not tonight?'

'You asked me to come tonight.'

'I wanted to see you. That's all. Not to make love.'

'You don't love me, do you?'

'You shouldn't ask questions like that.'

'Why?'

'Because I might ask you the same.'

I recognized the justness of her retort and it angered me, and the anger drove away the desire.

'How

many

"adventures"

have you had in your life?'

'Four,' she said with no hesitation at all.

'And I'm the fourth?'

'Yes. If you want to call yourself an adventure.'

Many months later when the affair was over, I realized and appreciated her directness. She played no part. She answered exactly what I asked. She never claimed to like a thing that she disliked or to love something to which she was indifferent. If I had failed to understand her, it was because I failed to ask her the right questions, that was all. It was true that she was no comedian. She had kept the virtue of innocence, and I know now why I loved her. In the end the only quality but beauty which attracts me in a woman is that vague thing, 'goodness'. The woman in Monte Carlo had betrayed her husband with a schoolboy, but her motive had been generous. Martha too had betrayed her husband, but it was not Martha's love for me which held me, if she did love, it was her blind unselfish attachment to her child. With goodness one can feel secure; why wasn't I satisfied with goodness, why did I always ask her the wrong questions?

'Why not one adventure to last ?' I asked as I released her.

'How can I tell?'

I remembered the only real letter which I had ever received from her, apart from notes for rendezvous made ambiguous in case they fell into the wrong hands. It was while I was waiting in New York, and I must have written to her grudgingly, suspiciously, jealously. (I had found a call-girl on East 56th Street, and so I assumed, of course, that she had found an equivalent resource to fill the empty months.) She wrote back to me with tenderness, without rancour. Perhaps having one's father hanged for monstrous crimes puts all our petty grievances into proportion. She wrote of Angel and his cleverness in mathematics, she wrote a great deal about Angel and the nightmares he was having - 'I stay in with him nearly every night now,' and at once I began to wonder what she did when she did not stay in, with whom she passed the evening hours. It was useless to tell myself that she was with her husband, or at the casino where I had first met her. And suddenly, as though she knew how my thoughts would turn, she wrote - or words to that effect: 'Perhaps the sexual life is the great test. If we can survive it with charity to those we love and with affection to those we have betrayed, we needn't worry so much about the good and the bad in us. But jealousy, distrust, cruelty, revenge, recrimination … then we fail. The wrong is in that failure even if we are the victims and not the executioners. Virtue is no excuse.'

At that moment I found in what she wrote a pretentiousness, a lack of sincerity. I was angry with myself, and so I was angry with her. I tore the letter up in spite of its tenderness, in spite of the fact that it was the only one I had. I thought she was preaching at me because I had spent two hours that afternoon in the apartment on East 56th Street, though how could she possibly have known? That is the reason why of all my jackdaw-relics - the paper-weight from Miami, an entrance-ticket from Monte Carlo - I have no scrap of her writing with me now. And yet I can remember her writing very clearly, rounded and childish, though I can't remember the tones of her voice.

'Well,' I said, 'we may as well go downstairs.' The room we stood in was cold and unoccupied; the pictures on the wall were probably chosen by an office of works.

'You go. I don't want to see those people.'

'The Colombus statue when he's better?'

'The

Columbus

statue.'

Just as I was expecting nothing she put her arms round me. She said,

'Poor darling. What a homecoming.'

'It's not your fault.'

She said, 'Let's do it. Let's do it quickly.' She lay on the edge of the bed and pulled me towards her, and I heard the voice of Angel down the passage calling, 'Papa. Papa.'

'Don't listen,' she said. She had drawn up her knees and I was reminded of Doctor Philipot's body under the diving-board: birth, love and death in their positions closely resemble each other. I found I could do nothing, nothing at all, no white bird flew in to save my pride. Instead there were the footsteps of the ambassador mounting the stairs.

'Don't worry,' she said. 'He won't come here,' but it wasn't the ambassador who had chilled me. I stood up and she said, 'It doesn't matter. It was a bad idea of mine, that's all.'

'The

Columbus

statue?'

'No. I'll find something better, I swear I will.'

She went out of the room in front of me and called, 'Luis.'

'Yes, dear?' He came to the door of their room carrying Angel's puzzle.

'I'm just showing Mr Brown the rooms up here. He says we could do with a few refugees.' There was not a false note in her voice; she was perfectly at ease, and I thought of her anger when we talked of comedians, although now she proved to be the best comedian of us all. I played my part less well; there was a dryness in my voice which betrayed anxiety and I said, 'I must go.'

'Why? It's still quite early,' Martha said. 'We haven't seen you for a long time, have we, Luis?'

'There's a rendezvous I have to keep,' I told her without knowing that I spoke the truth.

3

The long long day was not yet over: midnight was an hour or an age away. I took my car and drove along the edge of the sea, the road pitted with holes. There were very few people about; perhaps they had not realized the curfew was raised or they feared a trap. On my right hand were a line of wooden huts in little fenced saucers of earth where a few palm trees grew and slithers of water gleamed between, like scrap-iron on a dump. An occasional candle burned over a little group bowed above their rum like mourners over a coffin. Sometimes there were furtive sounds of music. An old man danced in the middle of the road - I had to brake my car to a standstill. He came and giggled at me through the glass - at least there was one man in Port-auPrince that night who was not afraid. I couldn't make out the meaning of his patois and I drove on. It was two years or more since I had been to Mиre Catherine's, but tonight I needed her services. My impotence lay in my body like a curse which it needed a witch to raise. I thought of the girl on East 56th Street, and when reluctantly I thought of Martha I whipped up my anger. If she had made love to me when I had wanted her, this would not be happening.

Just before Mиre Catherine's the road branched - the tarmac, if you could call it tarmac, came to an abrupt end (money had run out or someone hadn't received his cut). To the left was the main southern highway, almost impassable except by jeep. I was surprised to find a road-block there, for no one expected invasion from the south. I stood, while they searched me more carefully than usual, under a great placard which announced 'U.S.A.-Haitian Joint Five-Year Plan. Great Southern Highway', but the Americans had left and nothing remained of all the five-year plan but the notice-board, over the stagnant pools, the channels in the road, the rocks and the carcass of a dredger which nobody had bothered to rescue from the mud. After they let me go I took the right fork and arrived at Mиre Catherine's compound. All was so quiet. I wondered whether it was worth my while to leave the car. A long low hut like a stable divided into stalls was the quarters here for love. I could see a light burning in the main building where Mиre Catherine received her guests and served them drinks, but there was no sound of music and dancing. For a moment fidelity became a temptation and I wanted to drive away. But I had carried my malady too far along the rough road to be put off now, and I moved cautiously across the dark compound towards the light, hating myself all the way. I had foolishly turned the car against the wall of the hut, so that I was in darkness, and almost at once I stumbled against a jeep, standing lightless; a man slept at the wheel. Again I nearly turned and went, for there were few jeeps in Port-au-Prince which were not owned by the Tontons Macoute, and if the Tontons Macoute were making a night of it with Mиre Catherine's girls, there would be no room for outside custom.

But I was obstinate in my self-hatred, and I went on. Mиre Catherine heard me stumbling and came to meet me on the threshold, holding up an oil-lamp. She had the face of a kind nanny in a film of the deep south, and a tiny delicate body which must once have been beautiful. Her face didn't belie her nature, for she was the kindest woman I knew in Port-au-Prince. She pretended that her girls came from good families, that she was only helping them to earn a little pin-money, and you could almost believe her, for she had taught them perfect manners in public. Till they reached the stalls her customers too had to behave with decorum, and to watch the couples dance you would almost have believed it to be an end-of-term celebration at a convent-school. On one occasion three years before I had seen her go in to rescue a girl from some brutality. I was drinking a glass of rum and I heard a scream from what we called the stable, but before I could decide what to do Mиre Catherine had taken a hatchet from the kitchen and sailed out like the little Revenge prepared to take on a fleet. Her opponent was armed with a knife, he was twice her size, and he was drunk with rum. (He must have had a flask in his hip-pocket, for Mиre Catherine would never have allowed him to go outside with a girl in that condition.) He turned and fled at her approach, anct later when I left, I saw her through the windows of the kitchen, with the girl upon her knees, crooning to her as though she were a child, in a patois which I couldn't understand, and the girl slept against the little bony shoulder. Mиre Catherine whispered a warning to me, 'The Tontons are here.'

'All the girls taken?'

'No, but the girl you like is busy.'

I hadn't been here for two years, but she remembered, and what was even more remarkable the girl was with her still - she would be close on eighteen by now. I hadn't expected to find her, and yet I was disappointed. In age one prefers old friends, even in a bordel.

'Are they in a dangerous mood?' I asked her.

'I don't think so. They are looking after someone important. He's out with Tin Tin now.'

I nearly went away, but my grudge against Martha worked like an infection.

'I'll come in,' I said. 'I'm thirsty. Give me a rum and coke.'

'There's no more coke.' I had forgotten that American aid was over.

'Rum and soda then.'

'I have a few bottles of Seven-Up left.'

'All right. Seven-Up.'

At the door of the salle a Tonton Macoute was asleep on a chair; his sunglasses had fallen into his lap and he looked quite harmless. The flies of his grey flannel trousers gaped from a lost button. Inside there was complete silence. Through the open door I saw a group of four girls dressed in white muslin with balloon-skirts. They were sucking orangeade through straws, not speaking. One of them took her empty glass and moved away, walking beautifully, the muslin swaying, like a little bronze by Degas.

'No customers at all?'

'They all left when the Tontons Macoute came.'

I went in, and there at a table by the wall with his eyes fixed on me as though I had never once escaped from them was the Tonton Macoute I had seen in the police station, who had smashed the windows of the hearse to get out the coffin of the ancien ministre. His soft hat lay on a chair, and he wore a striped bow-tie. I bowed to him and started towards another table. I was scared of him, and I wondered whom it could be - more important than this arrogant officer - that Tin Tin was consoling now. I hoped for her sake he was not a worse man as well.

The officer said, 'I seem to see you everywhere.'

'I try to be inconspicuous.'

'What do you want here tonight?'

'A rum and Seven-Up.'

He said to Mиre Catherine, who was bringing in my drink upon a tray,

'You said you had no Seven-Up left.' I noticed that there was an empty sodawater bottle on the tray beside my glass. The Tonton Macoute took my drink and tasted it. 'Seven-Up it is. You can bring this man a rum and soda. We need all the Seven-Up you have left for my friend when he returns.'

'It's so dark in the bar. The bottles must have got mixed.'

'You must learn to distinguish between your important customers and,' he hesitated and decided to be reasonably polite, 'the less important. You can sit down,' he said to me.

I turned away.

'You can sit down here. Sit down.'

I obeyed. He said, 'You were stopped at the cross-roads and searched?'

'Yes.'

'And at the door here? You were stopped at the door?'

'By

Mиre Catherine, yes.'

'By one of my men?'

'He

was

asleep.'

'Asleep?'

'Yes.'

I had no hesitation in telling tales. Let the Tontons Macoute destroy themselves. I was surprised when he said nothing and made no move towards the door. He only stared blankly through me with his black opaque lenses. He had decided something, but he would not let me know his decision. Mиre Catherine brought me in my drink. I tasted it. The rum was still mixed with Seven-Up. She was a brave woman.

I said, 'You seem to be taking a lot of precautions tonight.'

'I am in charge of a very important foreigner. I have to take precautions for his security. He asked to come here.'

'Is he safe with little Tin Tin? Or do you keep a guard in the bedroom, captain? Or is it commandant?'

'My name is Captain Concasseur. You have a sense of humour. I appreciate humour. I am in favour of jokes. They have political value. Jokes are a release for the cowardly and the impotent.'

'You said an important foreigner, captain? This morning I had the impression that you didn't like foreigners.'

'My personal view of every white man is very low. I admit I am offended by the colour, which reminds me of tuid. But we accept some of you - if you are useful to the State.'

'You mean to the Doctor?'

With a very small inflexion of irony he quoted, 'Je suis le drapeau Haпtien, Uni et Indivisible.' He took a drink of rum. 'Of course some white men are more tolerable than others. At least the French have a common culture with us. I admire the General. The President has written to him offering to join la Communautй Europйenne.'

'Has he received a reply?'

'These things take time. There are conditions which we have to discuss. We understand diplomacy. We don't blunder like the Americans - and the British.'

I was haunted by the name Concasseur. Somewhere I had heard it before. The first syllable suited him well, and perhaps the whole name, with its suggestion of destructive power, had been adopted like that of Stalin and Hitler.

'Haiti belongs by right to any Third Force,' Captain Concasseur said. 'We are the true bastion against the Communists. No Castro can succeed here. We have a loyal peasantry.'

'Or a terrified one.' I took a long drink of rum; drink helped to make his pretensions more supportable. 'Your important visitor is taking his time.'

'He told me he had been away from women for a long time.' He barked at Mиre Catherine, 'I want service. Service,' and stamped the floor. 'Why is no one dancing?'

'A bastion of the free world,' I said.

The four girls rose from their table, and one put on the gramophone. They began to dance together in a graceful slow old-fashioned style. Their balloon-skirts swung like silver censers and showed their slender legs the colour of young deer; they smiled gently at each other and held one another a little apart. They were beautiful and undifferentiated like birds of the same plumage. It was almost impossible to believe they were for sale. Like everyone else.

'Of course the free world pays better,' I said, 'and in dollars.'

Captain Concasseur saw where I was looking; he missed nothing through those black glasses. He said, 'I will treat you to a woman. That small girl there, with a flower in her hair, Louise. She doesn't look at us. She is shy because she thinks I might be jealous. Jealous of a putain! What absurdity!

She will serve you very well if I give her the word.'

'I don't want a woman.' I could see through his apparent generosity. One flings a putain to a white man as one flings a bone to a dog.

'Then why are you here?'

He had a right to ask the question. I could only say, 'I've changed my mind,' as I watched the girls revolve, worthy of a better setting than the wooden shed, the rum-bar and the old advertisements for Coca-Cola. I said, 'Are you never afraid of Communists?'

'Oh, there's no danger from them. The Americans would land marines if they ever became a danger. Of course we have a few Communists in Portau-Prince. Their names are known. They are not dangerous. They meet in little study-groups and read Marx. Are you a Communist?'

'How could I be? I own the Hotel Trianon. I depend on American tourists. I am a capitalist.'

'Then you count as one of us,' he said with the nearest he ever came to courtesy, 'except for your colour, of course.'

'Don't insult me too far.'

'Oh, you cannot help your colour,' he said.

'I meant, don't say I'm one of you. When a capitalist state gets too repulsive, it is in danger of losing the loyalty even of the capitalists.'

'A capitalist will always be loyal if he is allowed a cut of twenty-five per cent.'

'A little humanity is necessary too.'

'You speak like a Catholic.'

'Yes. Perhaps. A Catholic who has lost his faith. But isn't there a danger that your capitalists may lose their faith too?'

'They lose their lives but never their faith. Their money is their faith. They guard it to the end and leave it to their children.'

'And this important man of yours - is he a loyal capitalist or a right-wing politician?' While he chinked the ice in his glass I thought I remembered where I had heard the name Captain Concasseur before. It was Petit Pierre who had spoken of him, with some degree of awe. He had withdrawn all the dredges and pumps belonging to an American water company, after the employees had been evacuated and the Americans had withdrawn their ambassador, and he had sent them to work on a wild project of his own, at the mountain village of Kenscoff. He hadn't got very far, for the labourers had left him at the end of a month because they were unpaid; it was said too that he hadn't cleared himself satisfactorily with the chief of the Tontons Macoute who would have expected his proper cut. So Concasseur's folly stood on the slopes of Kenscoff - four cement columns and a cement floor already cracking in the heat and the rains. Perhaps the important man now playing with Tin Tin in the stables was a financier who was going to help him out? But what financier in his senses would think of lending money in this country, from which all the tourists had fled, in order to build an ice-skating rink on the slopes of Kenscoff?

'We need technicians, even white technicians,' Concasseur said.

'The Emperor Christophe did without them.'

'We're more modern than Christophe.'

'An ice-skating rink instead of a castle?'

'I think I have borne with you nearly enough,' Captain Concasseur said, and I knew I had gone too far. I had touched his raw wound and I was a little scared. If I had made love to Martha what a different night this would have been; I would have been sleeping deeply in my own bed at the hotel, unconcerned with politics and the corruption of power. The captain took the revolver out of his holster and laid it on the table, beside his empty glass. His chin dropped against his shirt of white and blue stripes. He sat in a lugubrious silence as though he were weighing carefully the advantages and the disadvantages of a quick shot between the eyes. I could see no disadvantages so far as he was concerned.

Mиre Catherine came and stood behind me and deposited two glasses of rum. She said, 'Your friend has been more than half an hour with Tin Tin. It is time...'

'He must be allowed,' the captain said, 'whatever time he wants. He is an important man. A very important man.' Small bubbles of spittle gathered at the corners of his lips like venom. He touched the revolver with the tips of his fingers. He said, 'An ice-rink is very modern.' His fingers played between the rum and the revolver. I was glad when he picked up the glass. He said,

'An ice-rink is chic. It is snob.'

Mиre Catherine said, 'Your payment was for half an hour.'

'My watch keeps a different time,' the captain said. 'You lose nothing. There are no other customers.'

'There is Monsieur Brown.'

'Not tonight,' I said. 'I wouldn't know how to follow such an important guest.'

'Then why are you staying here?' the captain asked.

'I'm thirsty. And curious. It's not often in Haiti we have important visitors. Is he financing your ice-rink?' The captain looked at his revolver, but the moment of spontaneity, which was the moment of real danger, had passed. Only signs of it remained like traces of old sickness: the streak of blood across the yellow eye-balls, the striped tie which had somehow gone vertically askew. I said, 'You wouldn't like your important foreign guest to come in and find a white corpse. It would be bad for business.'

'That can always be arranged later. . .' he said with sombre truth, and then an extraordinary smile opened his face like a crack in the cement of his own ice-rink, a smile of civility, even of humility. He stood up and, hearing the door of the salle close behind me, I turned and saw Tin Tin all in white, smiling too, modestly, like a bride at a church door. But Concasseur and she were not smiling at each other, both their smiles were directed at the guest of great importance on whose arm she had entered. It was Mr Jones. 4

'Jones,' I exclaimed. There were still the relics of battle on his face, but they were neatly covered now with pieces of sticking-plaster.

'Why, if it isn't Brown,' he said. He came and shook my hand with great warmth. 'It's good to see one of the old lot,' he said as though we were veterans at some regimental reunion who had not met since the last war but one.

'You saw me yesterday.' I said, and I detected a slight embarrassment - when an unpleasantness was over Jones forgot it as quickly as possible. He explained to Captain Concasseur, 'Mr Brown and I were shipmates on the Medea. And how is Mr Smith?'

'Much as he was yesterday when he visited you. He has been anxious about you.'

'About me? But why?' He said, 'Forgive me. I haven't introduced my young friend here.'

'Tin Tin and I know each other well.'

'That's fine, fine. Sit down, dear, and we'll all have a snifter.' He pulled out a chair for her and then took my arm and led me a little aside. He said in a low voice, 'You know all that business is past history now.'

'I'm glad to see you safely out.'

He explained vaguely, 'My note did it. I thought it would. I was never really worried. Mistakes on both sides. I wouldn't want the girls to know about it though.'

'You would find them very sympathetic. But doesn't he know?'

'Oh yes, but he's bound to secrecy. I would have told you tomorrow how things had gone, but tonight I badly needed a roll in the hay. So you know Tin Tin?'

'Yes.'

'She's a sweet girl. I'm glad I chose her. The captain wanted me to take that girl with the flower.'

'I don't suppose you'd have noticed the difference. Mиre Catherine caters for a sweet tooth. What are you doing with him?'

'We're in a bit of business together.'

'Not an ice-rink?'

'No. Why an ice-rink?'

'Be careful, Jones. He's dangerous.'

'Don't worry about me,' Jones said, 'I know the world.' Mиre Catherine passed: her tray was loaded with rum and what was probably the last of the Seven-Ups and Jones grabbed a glass. 'Tomorrow they are finding me transport. I'll come and see you when I've got my car.' He waved to Tin Tin; to the captain he called ' Salut.' 'I like it here,' he said. 'I've landed on my feet.'

I left the salle, my mouth cloyed with too much Seven-Up, and shook the sentry by the shoulder as I passed - I might as well do someone a good turn. I felt my way past the jeep to my own car, and heard footsteps behind me and dodged sideways. It might be the captain come to preserve the honour of his ice-rink, but it was only Tin Tin.

She said, 'I told them I go faire pipi.'

'How are you, Tin Tin?'

'Very well and you...'

' Зa marche.'

'Why not stay a little while in your car? They will go soon. The Englishman is tout а fait йpuisй.'

'I don't doubt it, but I'm tired. I've got to go. Tin Tin, did he behave all right to you?'

'Oh yes. I liked him. I liked him a lot.'

'What did you like so much?'

'He made me laugh,' she said. It was a sentence which was to be repeated to me disquietingly in other circumstances. I had learnt in a disorganized life many tricks, but not the trick of laughter.

PART II

CHAPTER I

1

JONES fell from view for a while as completely as the body of the Secretary for Social Welfare. No one ever learnt what was done with his corpse, though the Presidential Candidate made more than one attempt to discover. He penetrated to the bureau of the new Secretary where he was received with celerity and politeness. Petit Pierre had done his best to spread his fame as 'Truman's opponent', and the minister had heard of Truman. He was a small fat man who wore, for some reason, a fraternity pin, and his teeth were very big and white and separate, like tombstones designed for a much larger cemetery. A curious smell crossed his desk as though one grave had stayed open. I accompanied Mr Smith in case a translator were needed, but the new Minister spoke good English with a slight twang which went some way to support the fraternity pin (I learnt later that he had served for a while as 'the small boy' at the American Embassy. It might have been a rare example of merit rising if he had not served an interim period in the Tontons Macoute where he had been a special assistant to Colonel Gracia - known as Fat Gracia).

Mr Smith excused the fact that his letter of introduction was addressed to Doctor Philipot.

'Poor Philipot,' the Minister said, and I wondered whether at last we were to receive the official version of his end.

'What happend to him?' Mr Smith asked with admirable directness.

'We will probably never know. He was a strange moody man, and I must confess to you, Professor, his accounts were not in good order. There was the matter of a water-pump in Desaix Street.'

'Are you suggesting he killed himself?' I had underrated Mr Smith. In a good cause he could show cunning and now he played his cards close to his chest.

'Perhaps, or perhaps he has been the victim of the people's vengeance. We Haitians have a tradition of removing a tyrant in our own way, Professor.'

'Was Doctor Philipot a tyrant?'

'The people in Desaix Street were sadly deceived about their water.'

'So the pump will be set working now?' I asked.

'It will be one of my first projects.' He waved his hand at the files on the shelves behind him. 'But as you see I have many cares.' I noticed that the steel grips on many of his 'cares' had been rusted by a long succession of rainy seasons: a 'care' was not quickly disposed of.

Mr Smith came smartly back at him. 'So Doctor Philipot is still missing?'

'As your war-communiqués used to put it, "missing believed killed".'

'But I attended his funeral,' Mr Smith said.

'His

what?'

'His

funeral.'

I watched the Minister. He showed no embarrassment. He gave a short bark, which was meant to be a laugh (I was reminded of a French bulldog) and said, 'There was no funeral.'

'It was interrupted.'

'You cannot imagine, Professor, the unscrupulous propaganda put about by our opponents.'

'I am not a professor and I saw the coffin with my own eyes.'

'That coffin was filled with stones, Professor - I am sorry, Mr Smith.'

'Stones?'

'Bricks to be exact, brought from Duvalierville where we are constructing our beautiful new city. Stolen bricks. I would like to show you Duvalierville one morning when you are free. It is our answer to Brasilia!

'But his wife was there.'

'Poor woman, she was used, I hope innocently, by unscrupulous men. The morticians have been arrested.'

I gave him full marks for readiness and imagination. Mr Smith was temporarily silenced.

'When are they to be tried?' I asked.

'The inquiries will take some time. The plot has many ramifications.'

'Then it's not true what the people think - that the body of Doctor Philipot is in the palace working as a zombie?'

'All that is Voodoo stuff, Mr Brown. Luckily our President has rid the country of Voodoo.'

'Then he has done more than the Jesuits could do.'

Mr Smith broke in with impatience. He had done his best in the cause of Doctor Philipot and now it was his mission which demanded full attention. He was anxious not to antagonize the Minister with such irrelevancies as zombies and Voodoo. The Minister listened to him with great courtesy, doodling at the same time with a pencil. Perhaps it was not a sign of inattention, for I noticed the doodle took the form of innumerable percentage-marks and crosses - so far as I could see there were no minussigns. Mr Smith spoke of a building which would contain a restaurant, kitchen, a library and a lecture hall. If possible there should be enough room for extensions. Even a theatre and cinema might be possible, one day; already his organization could supply documentary films, and he hoped that soon - given the opportunities for production - there might arise a school of vegetarian dramatists. 'In the meanwhile,' he said, we can always fall back on Bernard Shaw.'

'It is a great project,' the Minister said.

Mr Smith had been in the republic a week now. He had seen the kidnapping of Doctor Philipot's body; I had driven him through the worst of the shanty-town. That morning he had insisted against my advice in going to the Post Office himself to buy stamps. I had lost him momentarily in the crowd, and when I found him again he had not been able to approach a foot towards the guichet. Two one-armed men and three one-legged men hemmed him round. Two were trying to sell him dirty old envelopes containing out of date Haitian postage stamps: the others were more frankly begging. A man without legs at all had installed himself between his knees and removed his shoe-laces preparatory to cleaning his shoes. Others seeing a crowd collected were fighting to join in. A young fellow, with a hole where his nose should have been, lowered his head and tried to ram his way through towards the attraction at the centre. A man with no hands raised his pink polished stumps over the heads of the crowd to exhibit his infirmity to the foreigner. It was a typical scene in the Post Office except that foreigners were rare nowadays. I had to fight my way to reach him, and once my hand encountered a stiff inhuman stump, like a piece of hard rubber. I forced it on one side, and I felt revolted by myself, as though I were rejecting misery. The thought even came to me, What would the fathers of the Visitation have said to me? So deeply embedded are the disciplines and myths of childhood. It took me five minutes to get Mr Smith clear, and he had lost his shoe-laces. We had to replace them at Hamit's before we called on the Secretary for Social Welfare.

Mr Smith said to the Minister, 'The centre, of course, would not be run at a profit, but I calculate we ought to give employment to a librarian, secretary, accountant, cook, waiters - and eventually of course the cinemausherettes … At least twenty people. The film-shows would be educational and free of charge. As for the theatre - well, we mustn't look too far ahead. All vegetarian products would be supplied at cost price, and the literature for the library would be gratis.'

I listened to him with astonishment. The dream was intact. Reality could not touch him. Even the scene in the Post Office had not sullied his vision. The Haitians freed from acidity, poverty and passion would soon be bent happily over their nut cutlets.

'This new city of yours, Duvaliervifle,' Mr Smith said, 'might provide an admirable situation. I'm not an opponent of modern architecture - not at all. New ideas need new shapes, and what I want to bring to your republic is a new idea.'

'It might be arranged,' the Minister said, 'there are sites available.' He was making a whole row of little crosses on his sheet, all plus-signs. 'You have plenty of funds, I am sure.'

'I thought a mutual project with the Government …'

'Of course you realize, Mr Smith, we are not a socialist state. We believe in free enterprise. The building would have to be put up to tender.'

'Fair

enough.'

'Of course the Government would make the final decision between the tenders. It is not a mere matter of the lowest bid. There are the amenities of Duvalierville to be considered. And of course questions of sanitation are of first importance. For that reason I think the project might well come in the first place under the Ministry for Social Welfare.'

'Fine,' Mr Smith said. 'Then I would be dealing with you.'

'Later of course we would have to have discussions with the Treasury. And the Customs. Imports, of course, are the responsibility of the Customs!

'Surely there are no duties here on food?'

'Films

…'

'Educational

films?'

'Oh well, let us talk about all that later. There is first the question of the site. And its cost.'

'Don't you think the Government might be inclined to contribute the site? In view of our investment in labour. I guess land here doesn't fetch a high price anyway.'

'The land belongs to the people, not the Government, Mr Smith,' the Minister said with gentle reproof. 'All the same you will find nothing is impossible in modern Haiti. I would myself suggest, if my opinion is asked, a contribution for the site equivalent to the cost of construction …'

'But that's absurd,' Mr Smith said, 'the two costs bear no relation!

'Returnable, of course, on completion of the work.'

'So you mean the site would be free?'

'Quite

free.'

'Then I don't see the point of the contribution.'

'To protect the workers, Mr Smith. Many foreign projects have come suddenly to an end, and the worker on pay day has found nothing in his envelope. A tragic thing for a poor family. We still have many poor families in Haiti.'

'Perhaps a bank guarantee …'

'Cash is a better notion, Mr Smith. The gourde has remained stable for a generation, but there are pressures on the dollar.'