The Honorary Consul

PART FIVE

1

Doctor Plarr came back from the inner room and said to Father Rivas, “He will do well enough. Your man couldn’t have aimed better if he had intended it. He hit the Achilles tendon. Of course, it will take time to mend. If you give him time. What happened?”

“He tried to escape. Aquino fired at the ground first and then at his legs.”

“It would be better if he could be taken to hospital.”

“You know that is impossible.”

“All I can do is to strap him up. His ankle ought to be put in plaster. Why don’t you give up the whole affair, Leon? I can keep him in my car for three or four hours to give you the time to disappear, and I’ll tell the police I found him by the road.”

Father Rivas did not trouble to reply. Doctor Plarr said, “It is always the same when one thing goes wrong-it is like an error in an equation… Your first error was mistaking him for the Ambassador and now this follows. Your equation will never work out.”

“You may be right, but unless we receive orders from El Tigre…”

“Get your orders then.”

“Impossible. After we announced the kidnapping all contact was broken. We are on our own here. In that way if we are captured, we cannot talk.”

“I have to go. I must get some sleep.”

“You will stay here with us,” Father Rivas said.

“That’s not possible. If I’m seen leaving in daylight…”

“If your telephone is tapped they will know you are an accomplice of ours already. If you go back they may arrest you and your friend Fortnum will be left without a doctor.”

“I have other patients to consider, Leon.”

“But they can find other doctors.”

“If you get your way… or you kill him… what happens to me?”

Father Rivas indicated the Negro called Pablo in the doorway. “You were abducted and kept here by force. It is the simple truth. We cannot allow you to leave now.”

“Suppose I just walk through that door?”

“I will tell him to shoot. Be reasonable, Eduardo. How can we trust you not to lead the police here?”

“I’m no police informer, Leon, in spite of the trick you played on me.”

“I wonder. A man’s conscience is not a simple thing. I believe in your friendship. But how do I know you would not persuade yourself you had to return for the sake of your patient? The police would follow you, and your Hippocratic oath would condemn us all to die. And then there is that sense of guilt I think you feel. They say you sleep with Fortnum’s wife. If it is true, trying to atone for that might demand all our deaths.”

“I am not a Christian any longer, Leon. I don’t think in those terms. I have no conscience. I am a simple man.”

“I have never met a simple man. Not even in the confessional, though I used to sit there for hours on end. Man was not created simple. When I was a young priest, I used to try to unravel what motives a man or woman had, what temptations and self-delusions. But I soon learned to give all that up, because there was never a straight answer. No one was simple enough for me to understand. In the end I would just say, ‘Three Our Fathers, Three Hail Mary’s. Go in peace.’ “

Doctor Plarr moved impatiently away. He looked once again at his patient. Charley Fortnum was sleeping quietly enough-a drugged contented sleep. They had collected some extra blankets from somewhere to make the coffin bed more comfortable. Doctor Plarr came back into the outer room and stretched on the floor. It seemed to him he had passed a very long day. It was difficult to believe he had taken tea only the afternoon before at the Richmond in the Calle Florida and watched his mother eat her éclairs.

The image of his mother remained with him when he fell asleep and she talked to him in her usual vein of complaint, telling him how his father would not rest like a respectable man of property in the interior of his coffin. They had constantly to shuffle him back inside, and that was no way for a caballero to enjoy his eternal peace. Father Galvao was on the way from Rio de Janeiro to see what he could do to persuade him to rest tranquil.

Doctor Plarr opened his eyes. The Indian Miguel lay asleep on the floor beside him, and Father Rivas had taken Pablo’s place in the doorway with a gun across his lap. A candle stuck in a saucer cast a shadow of his ears on the wall behind. Doctor Plarr was reminded of the dogs his father would make for him on the nursery wall. For a while he lay awake looking at his old schoolmate. Leon, Leon dog ears, Father dog ears. He remembered Leon saying, in one of those long serious conversations which they used to have at fourteen, that there existed only half a dozen careers worth a man’s while to follow: a man should be a doctor, a priest, a lawyer (always, of course, on the right side), a poet (if he wrote well enough), or a manual worker. He couldn’t remember now what the sixth career was, but it certainly wasn’t a kidnapper’s or an assassin’s.

He whispered across the floor, “Where are Aquino and the others?”

“This is a military operation,” Leon said. “We have been trained by El Tigre. We set our outposts, and we keep our watches at night.”

“And your wife?”

“She is in the town with Pablo. This hut belongs to him, and he is known there. It is safer that way. You need not whisper. An Indian falls asleep, at any moment, whenever he is not required. The only sound which can wake him is hearing his name-or a noise that may be dangerous. Look at him, lying quietly there while we talk. I envy him. That is real peace. Sleep is meant to be like that for all of us, but we have lost the animal touch.”

“Tell me about my father, Leon. I want the truth.” He had no sooner said it than he remembered how Doctor Humphries always demanded the real truth, even from the Neapolitan waiter, and got only a dusty answer.

“Your father and Aquino were in the same police station a hundred kilometres southeast of Asunción. Near Villarica. He had been there fifteen years, and Aquino only ten months. We did our best, but he was old and sick. El Tigre was against our trying to save your father, but we outvoted him. We were wrong. Perhaps your father would be alive now if we had listened to El Tigre.”

“Yes. Perhaps. In a police station. Dying slowly.”

“It was a question of seconds. A quick dash. He could have done it easily in the days when you knew him, but fifteen years in a police station-you decay there more quickly than in a prison. The General knows there is comradeship in a prison. And so he plants his victims out in separate pots with insufficient earth, and they wither with despair.”

“Did you see my father?”

“No, I was sitting in the escape car with a grenade ready in my lap. Praying.”

“Do you still believe in prayer?”

Father Rivas made no reply and Doctor Plarr fell asleep.

It was daylight when he woke and he went at once into the inner room to look at his patient. Charley Fortnum watched him come in. “So you really are one of them,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I don’t understand you, Ted. What has all this got to do with you?”

“I’ve told you often about my father. I thought these men might help him.”

“You were my friend-and Clara’s.”

“I’m not responsible for their mistake. How does your ankle feel?”

“I’ve suffered much worse from toothache. You’ve got to get me out of here, Ted. For Clara s sake.”

Doctor Plarr told Fortnum of his visit to the Ambassador. He realized, as he spoke, that it was an encouraging story. Charley Fortnum took the details slowly in. “You really got to the old man himself?”

“Yes. He’s doing his best.”

“Oh, they’ll be relieved in B. A. when I’m dead. I know that well enough. They won’t have to sack me then. An ungentlemanly act. They are all such bloody gentlemen there.”

“Colonel Perez too is doing all he can. It won’t be long before they find this place.”

“It will come to the same thing if they do. Do you suppose these fellows will ever let me get out of here alive? Have you spoken to Clara?”

“Yes. She’s all right.”

“And the baby?”

“Nothing to worry about.”

“I tried to write her a letter yesterday. I wanted her to have something she could look at afterward, though I doubt if she would be able to make much out of it.

She still finds reading pretty difficult. I thought that somebody might read it aloud to her-perhaps you, Ted. Of course that meant I couldn’t say all I felt for her, but I thought if the worst happens you would let her know.”

“Know what?”

“How I feel. I know you are a cold fish, Ted. I’ve often called you that. I sound sentimental to you, but I’ve come to think about a lot of things lying here-I’ve had the hell of a time to fill in. It seems to me that all the prime of life-well, they were pretty empty years, without any purpose, just growing that bloody weed mate to earn some cash-cash for what, for who? I wanted someone I could do something for-not just make a living for myself. There are people who fall back on cats and dogs, but I never cared much for them. Nor horses either. Horses! I could never stand the bloody brutes. All I had to fall back on was Fortnum’s Pride. I used to pretend to myself she was alive. I’d give her gas and oil and listen to her innards, but I know she was less real than one of those dolls which make wee-wee. Of course there was my wife for a while, only she was always so damned superior-there wasn’t anything I could ever do for her which she couldn’t do better for herself. I’m sorry. I’m talking too much, but you seem closer to me than anyone else because you’ve met Clara.”

“Talk all you want. There’s nothing else we can do in the situation we are in. I’m as much a prisoner here as you are.”

“They won’t let you go?”

“No.”

“Then Clara-she’s got no one?”

Doctor Plarr said with irritation, “She can look after herself for a day or two. It’s a lot easier for her than for you or me.”

“They won’t kill you.”

“No, they won’t kill me if they can help it.”

“You know there was a time before I met Clara when I thought I’d found somebody I could love. She was a girl at Mother Sanchez’ too. She was called María, but she was bad, that one.”

“Somebody knifed her.”

“Yes. Fancy you knowing. Well, it was a little while after that when I saw Clara. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed her before. I’m not a good judge of women, I suppose, and María-well, she sort of dazzled me. Clara wasn’t beautiful in that way, but she was honest. I could trust her. To make someone like Clara happy is a kind of success, isn’t it?”

“A modest sort of success.”

“Yes, you can say that, but I’m used to failing, and I can’t set my sights very high. If things had gone better, who knows… I quit drinking for nearly a week when they made me an Honorary Consul, but of course that didn’t last. I’ve still got the letter they sent me from the Embassy. I’d like you to give it to Clara if I don’t get out of here. It’s in the top left-hand drawer of my desk in the Consulate. You can pick it out easily because of the Royal Arms on the flap. She can keep it to show the child one day.” He tried to shift his position on the coffin and winced.

“Did that hurt?”

“Only a stab.” He gave a low laugh. “When I think of my wife and Clara-my God, how different two women can be. My wife told me once she’d married me out of pity. Pity for what? She was like a man in the house-knew every damn thing about electricity. She could even fix a washer on a tap. And if I ever had a little one over the right measure she had no sympathy at all. Of course it wasn’t reasonable to expect much from her. She was a Christian Scientist and even cancer didn’t exist in her eyes, though her father died of it, so you could hardly expect her to believe in a hangover. All the same she needn’t have talked so bloody loud when I had one. Her voice went through my head like a drill. Now Clara-Clara’s a real woman, she knows when to be silent, God bless her. I’d like to keep her happy till the end.”

“That ought to be easy. She doesn’t strike me as a difficult woman.”

“No. But I suppose sooner or later a test always comes. Like those bloody examinations we used to have at school. I’m not exactly insured against failing.”

They might have been talking, Doctor Plarr thought, about two different women-one was the woman whom Charley Fortnum loved-the other was a prostitute from Mother Sanchez’ house who had waited in his bed the night before. She had asked him something. And then Colonel Perez had rung the bell. It was no use trying to remember now what it was she had asked him.

Toward the end of the morning Marta came back from the city with a copy of El Litoral-the Buenos Aires papers had not yet arrived. The editor had given headlines to Doctor Saavedra’s offer-larger headlines, Doctor Plarr considered, than the story was likely to receive elsewhere. He waited to see Leon’s reaction, but he made no comment when he passed the paper without a word to Aquino. Aquino said, “Who is this Saavedra?”

“A novelist.”

“Why should he think we want a novelist in place of a Consul? What good is a novelist? Anyway he is an Argentinian. Who cares if an Argentinian dies? Not the General. Not even our own President. Nor the world either. One less of the underdeveloped to spend money on.”

At one o’clock Father Rivas turned on the radio and got a news-bulletin from Buenos Aires. Doctor Saavedra’s offer was not even mentioned. Was he listening, Doctor Plarr wondered, in that little room near the prison, listening to a silence which must seem to him more humiliating than a rejection? The kidnapping had already ceased to interest the Argentinian public. There were other more exciting events which clamoured for attention. A man had killed the lover of his wife (in a fight with knives of course)—that was a story which never lost appeal to a Latin American; the usual flying saucers had been reported from the south, there had been an army coup in Bolivia, and there was a detailed account of the activities of the Argentina Toot-ball team in Europe (someone had cut up the referee). At the close of the broadcast the announcer said: “There is still no news of the kidnapped British Consul. The time to fulfil the conditions set by the kidnappers expires on Sunday at midnight.”

Someone tapped on the outer door. The Indian who was back on guard stood flattened against the wall with his gun held out of sight. There were all six of them in the room at the moment-Father Rivas, Diego, the driver of the car, the pockmarked Negro Pablo, Marta and Aquino. Two of them should have been on duty outside, but now in the broad daylight, when everything was quiet, Leon had allowed them to come in to listen to the news on the radio, a mistake which he was probably regretting. The knock came a second time, and Aquino turned off the radio.

“Pablo,” Father Rivas said.

Unwillingly Pablo approached the door. He pulled a revolver from his pocket, but the priest told him sharply, “Put it back.”

Doctor Plarr wondered with a sense of resignation, even of relief, whether this was going to be the climax of the whole absurd affair. Would there be a burst of firing when the door opened?

Father Rivas may have had the same thought, for he moved to the centre of the room as though, if this were indeed the end, he wanted to be the first one to die. Pablo pulled the door back.

An old man stood outside. He wavered in the speckled sunlight and stared silently at them with what seemed an unnatural curiosity, until Doctor Plarr realized he was blind from cataract. The old man felt the edge of the door with a hand paper-thin, veined like an old leaf.

“José, what are you doing here?” the Negro exclaimed.

“I came to find the Father.”

“There is no Father here, José.”

“Oh yes, there is, Pablo. I was sitting by the water tap yesterday and I heard someone say, ‘The Father who lives with Pablo is a good Father.’ “

“What do you want a Father for? Anyway, he has gone.”

The old man moved his head from one side to the other as though he were listening with each ear in turn, distinguishing the different breaths that sounded in the room, heavy breaths and muted breaths, one of them hurried, another-Diego’s-with an asthmatic whistle.

“My wife has died,” he told them. “When I woke this morning and put my hand out to wake her she was cold as a wet stone. She was all right last night. She made my soup, and it was very good soup. She never told me she was going to die.”

“You must get the priest of the barrio, José”

“He is not a good priest,” the old man said. “He is the Archbishop’s priest. You know that very well, Pablo.”

“The Father who came here was only a visitor. A relation of my cousin in Rosario. He has gone away again.”

“Who are all the people in the room, Pablo?”

“My friends. What do you suppose? We were listening to the radio when you came.”

“My goodness, have you a radio, Pablo? How rich you have become all of a sudden.”

“It is not mine. It belongs to a friend.”

“What a rich friend you have. I need a coffin for my wife, Pablo, and I have no money.”

“You know that will all be arranged, José”. We in the barrio will see to that.”

“Juan says you bought a coffin from him. You have no wife, Pablo. Let me have your coffin.”

“I need the coffin for myself, José. The doctor has told me I am a very sick man. Juan will make you a coffin and all of us in the barrio will pay him.”

“But there is the Mass. I want the Father to say the Mass. I do not want the Archbishop’s priest.” The old man took a step into the room, feeling toward them with his hands, palms up.

“There is no Father here. I told you. He has gone back to Rosario.”

Pablo stood between the old man and Father Rivas as though he feared that even in his blindness he could pick a priest out.

“How did you find your way here, José”?” Diego asked. “Your wife was the only eyes you had.”

“Is that Diego? I can see well enough with my hands.” He held them out, fingers pointed first at Diego, then at where the doctor stood, and afterward he turned them toward Father Rivas. They were like eyes on stalks, of some strange insect. He didn’t even look at Pablo. Pablo he took for granted. It was the others, the strangers, whom his hands and ears sought. He gave the impression that he was numbering them like a prison warder, while they stood in silence for his inspection. “There are four strangers here, Pablo.” He took a step toward Aquino and Aquino shuffled back.

“They are all friends of mine, José.”

“I never knew what a lot of friends you have, Pablo. They are not of this barrio.”

“No.”

“They will be welcome all the same to come and see my wife.”

“They will come later, but I must lead you home now, Jose.”

“Let me hear the radio speak, Pablo. I have never heard a radio speak.”

“Ted!” the voice of Charley Fortnum called from the next room, “Ted!”

“Who is that calling, Pablo?”

“A sick man.”

“Ted! Where are you, Ted?”

“A gringo!” The old man added with awe, “I have never known a gringo in the barrio before. And a radio. You have become a big man, Pablo.”

Aquino turned the sound of the radio full on to drown the voice of Charley Fortnum and a woman’s voice spoke loudly of the outstanding merits of Kellogg’s Rice Krispies. “Popping with life and vigour,” the voice said. “Golden and Honey Sweet.”

Doctor Plarr went quickly into the back room. He whispered, “What do you want, Charley?”

“I dreamed someone was in the room. He was going to cut my throat. I was damn scared. I wanted to be sure you were still here.”

“Don’t speak again. There’s a stranger here. If you speak you will put all our lives in danger. I’ll come back to you when he’s gone.”

In the other room, as he returned, a woman’s tinned voice-was saying, “She will love the scented smoothness of your cheek.”

The old man said, “It is like a miracle. To think a box is able to say beautiful things like that.”

Then someone began to sing a romantic ballad of love and death.

“Here, José, touch the radio. Hold it in your hands.” They all felt easier when the old man’s hands were occupied-not turning to look at them. He held the radio close to his ears as though he were afraid to miss a single one of the beautiful words it spoke.

Father Rivas took Pablo aside. He whispered, “I will go with him if you think it will do any good.”

“No,” Pablo said, “all the barrio will be gathered at his hut to see the body of his wife. They will know he has gone to fetch a priest. If the Archbishop’s priest comes, he will want to know who you are. He will want to see your papers. He might send for the police.”

Aquino said, “An accident should happen to the old one before he gets back.”

“No,” Pablo said, “I will not agree to that. I have known him since I was a child.”

“Anyway,” the driver Diego gave his opinion in a sullen voice, “to stop his mouth would be too late now. How did the woman at the water tap know a priest was here?”

Pablo said, “I have told no one.”

“There are never any secrets for long in a barrio,” Father Rivas said.

“He knows of the radio and the gringo,” Diego said. “That is the worst of all. We ought to move from here quickly.”

“You would have to carry Fortnum on a stretcher,” Doctor Plarr said.

The old man shook the radio. He complained, “It does not rattle.”

“Why should it rattle?” Pablo asked.

“There is a voice in it.”

“Come, José,” Pablo said, “it is time for you to go back to your poor wife.”

“But the Father,” Jose said, “I want the Father to anoint her.”

“I tell you, José”, there is no Father here. The Archbishop’s priest will do that.”

“He never comes when we send for him. He is always busy at a meeting. It will be many hours before he comes, and where will the soul of my poor wife be wandering all that while?”

Father Rivas said, “She will come to no harm, old man. God does not wait for the Archbishop’s priest.”

The man’s hands turned quickly toward him. He said, “You-you there who spoke-you have a priest’s voice.”

“No, no, I am not a priest. If you had your sight you would see my wife is here beside me. Speak to him, Marta.”

She said in a low voice, “Yes. This is my husband, old one.”

Pablo said, “Come. I will take you home.”

The old man clung obstinately to the radio. The music was loud, but not loud enough for him. He pressed it against his ear.

“He told us he came here alone,” Diego whispered. “How could he? Suppose someone led him here on purpose and left him at the door…”

“He has been here twice before with his wife. The blind remember a path well. Anyway if I take him home I can tell if someone is waiting for him or watching.”

“If you do not return in two hours,” Aquino said, “if they stop you… then we shall kill the Consul. You can tell them that.” He added, “If only I had aimed at his back yesterday, we would be far away by now.”

“I have heard a radio,” the old man said with astonishment. He laid it down gently like a fragile thing. “If only I could tell my wife…”

“She knows,” Marta said, “she knows everything.”

“Come, José.” The Negro took the old man’s right hand and pulled him toward the door, but he was stubborn. He twisted round, and with his free hand he seemed to be counting them over again. He said, “What a big party you have here, Pablo. Give me something to drink. Give me some cańa.”

“We have nothing to drink here, José.” He pulled the blind man out and the Indian closed the door quickly behind them. For a moment they felt relief like a breath of wind cooling the thunder-heavy day.

“What do you think, Leon?” Doctor Plarr asked. “Was he a spy?”

“How can I tell?”

“I think you should have gone with the poor man, Father,” Marta said. “His wife is dead and there is no priest to help him.”

“If I had gone I would have endangered all of us.”

“You heard what he said. The Archbishop’s priest cares nothing for the poor.”

“And do you think I care nothing for them? I am risking my life for them, Marta.”

“I know that, Father. I was not accusing you. You are a good man.”

“She has been dead for hours. What difference can a little oil make now? Ask the doctor.”

“Oh, I deal only with the living,” Doctor Plarr said.

The woman touched her husband’s hand. “I did not want to offend you, Father. I am your woman.”

“You are not my woman. You are my wife,” Father Rivas said with angry impatience.

“If you say so.”

“I have explained to you how it is over and over again.”

“I am a stupid woman, Father. I do not always understand. Does it matter so much? A woman, a wife…”

“It does matter. Human dignity matters, Marta. A man who feels lust takes a woman for the period of his desire, but I have taken you for life. That is marriage.”

“If you say so, Father.”

Father Rivas said in a voice which sounded tired with having eternally to teach the same thing, “Not if I say so, Marta. It is the truth.”

“Yes, Father. I would feel better if sometimes I could hear you pray…”

“Perhaps I pray more often than you know.”

“Please do not be angry, Father. I am very proud that you chose me.”

She turned on the others who were in the room. “He could have slept with any woman he liked in our barrio in Asuncion. He is a good man. If he did not go back with the old one, he must have had a good reason. Only, please, Father…”

“I wish you would not call me Father all the time. I am your husband, Marta. Your husband.”

“Yes, but I would be so proud if just once I could see you as you used to be… all dressed at the altar… turning to bless us, Father.”

The word slipped out again; she put her hand to her mouth too late to stop it.

“You know I cannot do that.”

“If I could see you like I saw you in Asuncion… in white for Easter…”

“You will never see me again like that.”

Leon Rivas turned away. “Aquino,” he said, “Diego, go back to your posts. We will relieve you in two hours. You, Marta, go back to the town and see if the newspapers have come yet from Buenos Aires.”

“You had better buy more whisky for Fortnum,” Doctor Plarr said. “His sort of measure soon empties a bottle.”

“This time,” Father Rivas said, “no one is to share it.”

“What are you hinting at?” Aquino asked.

“I am not hinting at anything. Do you think I could not smell your breath yesterday?”

At four it was Aquino who turned on the radio, but this time there was not a single reference to the kidnapping. It was as though they had been wiped off the world’s memory. “They do not even mention your disappearance,” Aquino said to Doctor Plarr.

“They may not know of it yet,” Doctor Plarr said. “I am losing count of the days. Is it Thursday? I remember I gave my secretary a long weekend off. She will be busy somewhere gathering indulgences. For the souls in purgatory. I hope we shall not have the benefit of them.”

An hour later Pablo returned. No one had shown any suspicion, but he had stayed away longer than he intended because he was bound to join the queue which was waiting to pay the last respects to the dead woman. When he left, the Archbishop’s priest had still not arrived. The only anxiety he had felt was when José chatted to everyone about the radio. The old man was immensely proud because he was the only one there who had ever listened to a radio and he had actually held one in his hands. For the time being he seemed to have forgotten about the gringo.

“He will remember soon enough,” Diego said. “We ought to get away from here.”

Pablo said, “How can we go? With a wounded man.”

“El Tigre would say ‘Kill him now.’ ” Aquino argued.

“You had your chance,” Diego said.

“Where is Father Rivas?” Pablo asked.

“On guard.”

“There should be two of you out there.”

“A man must have a drink. My mate was finished. It was Marta’s job to bring more, but Father Rivas sent her into the town to buy whisky for the gringo. He must never be left thirsty.”

“Aquino, you go.”

“I take no orders from you, Pablo.”

If this inaction goes on much longer, Doctor Plarr thought, they will be fighting each other.

It was evening by the time Marta returned. The papers from Buenos Aires had arrived and in the Nación a few lines were devoted to Doctor Saavedra, though the reporter found it necessary to remind his readers who Saavedra was. “The novelist,” he wrote, “who is best known by his first book, The Silent Heart,” getting the title wrong.

The evening seemed interminably drawn out. It was as though, sitting there for hours in silence, they formed part of a universal silence all around them, the silence of the radio, the silence of the authorities, even the silence of nature. No dogs barked. The birds had ceased to sing, and when rain began to fall it was in heavy spaced drops, as infrequent as their words-the silence seemed all the deeper between the drops. Somewhere far off there was a storm, but the storm was happening across the river in another country.

Whenever any of them spoke, the danger of a quarrel arose even over the most innocent remark. The Indian alone was unaffected. He sat and smiled with gentle content as he oiled his gun. He cleaned the crevices of the bolt with tenderness and with sensuous pleasure like a woman attending to her first baby. When Marta gave them soup, Aquino complained of a lack of salt, and Doctor Plarr thought for a moment she was going to throw a plate full of the despised soup in his face. He left them and went into the inner room.

Charley Fortnum said, “If only I had something to read…”

Doctor Plarr said, “There’s not enough light to see by.” Only one candle lit the room.

“Surely they could give me a few more candles.”

“They don’t want any light to show outside. Most people in this barrio sleep as soon as it’s dark… or make love.”

“Thank God there’s still plenty of whisky. Have a glass. It’s an odd relationship, isn’t it? They shoot me down like a dog and then they give me whisky. This time I didn’t even pay for it. Is there any news? When they put the radio on they turn it so damn low I can’t hear a thing.”

“There’s no news at all. How are you feeling?”

“Pretty awful. Do you think I’ll live to see the end of this bottle?”

“Of course.”

“Then be an optimist and give yourself a bigger dose.”

They drank together in the silence which they had only momentarily broken. Doctor Plarr wondered where Clara was. At the camp? at the Consulate? At last he said, “What made you marry Clara, Charley?”

“I told you-I wanted to help her.”

“You needn’t have married her to do that.”

“If I hadn’t she’d have lost a lot in taxes when I died. Besides I wanted a child. I love her, Ted. I want her to feel secure. I wish you knew her a bit better. A doctor sees only the outside-oh, and the inside too, I suppose, but you know what I mean. To me she’s like… like…” He couldn’t find the word he wanted and Doctor Plarr was tempted to supply it. She’s like a looking glass, he thought, a looking glass which has been manufactured by Mother Sanchez to reflect any man who looks at her-to reflect Charley’s fumbling tenderness with her own imitation of it and my… my… but the right word failed him too. It certainly wasn’t “passion.” What was the question she had asked him just before he left her? She reflected even one’s suspicion of her. He was angry with her as though in some obscure way she had done him an injury. One could use her to shave In, he thought, remembering Gruber’s sunglasses.

“You’ll laugh at me,” Charley Fortnum rambled on, “but she reminds me a bit of Mary Pickford in those old silent movies… I don’t mean her face, of course, but, well, a sort of… I suppose you might call it innocence.”

“Then I hope the child turns out to be a girl. A boy like Mary Pickford would hardly make his way in the world.”

“I don’t mind which it is, but Clara seems to want a boy.” He added with self-mockery, “Perhaps she wants him to take after me.”

Doctor Plarr had a savage desire to tell him the whole truth. It was only the wounded body which stopped him, stretched helplessly out on the coffin lid. To disturb a patient would be unprofessional. Charley Fortnum raised his glass of whisky and added, “Not as I am now, of course. Cheers.”

Doctor Plarr heard the voices rise higher in the next room.

“What’s happening out there?” Charley Fortnum asked.

“They are quarrelling among themselves.”

“What about?”

“Probably about you.”

2

Just after nine o’clock on Friday morning a helicopter came flying low down over the barrio. It went back and forth in regular lines, like a pencil along a ruler, up and down every muddy track, just above the trees, tireless and probing. Doctor Plarr was reminded of the way his own fingers had to make tracks sometimes along a patient’s body, seeking the exact spot of pain.

Father Rivas told Pablo to join Diego and Marta who were on guard outside. “The whole barrio will be watching,” he said. “They will notice if in this one hut people show indifference.” He told Aquino to keep watch on Fortnum in the inner room. Though there was no possible way for Fortnum to signal his presence there, Father Rivas was taking no chances.

Doctor Plarr and the priest sat in silence and watched the roof of the room as though the machine at any moment might come crashing through on top of them. After the helicopter had passed, they could hear the rustle of the leaves falling like rain. When that sound ceased they stayed dumb, waiting for the chopper to return.

Pablo and Diego came in. Pablo reported, “They were taking photographs.”

“Of this hut?”

“Of the whole barrio.”

“Then they have seen your car,” Doctor Plarr said. “They will wonder what a car is doing here.”

“We have it well hidden,” Father Rivas said. “We can only hope…”

“They were making a very careful search,” Pablo told them.

“It would be better to shoot Fortnum now,” Diego said.

“Our ultimatum does not expire till Sunday midnight.”

“They have rejected it already. The helicopter shows that.”

Doctor Plarr said, “Extend your ultimatum a few days. You have to give time for my publicity to work. You are in no immediate danger. The police dare not attack you.”

“El Tigre set the time limit,” Father Rivas said. “You must have some way of communicating with him, whatever you say.”

“We have none.”

“You sent news of the Fortnum capture.”

“That line was cut immediately.”

“Then act yourself. Have someone telephone El Litoral. Give them another week.”

“Another week for the police to find us,” Diego said. “Perez dare not search too closely. He does not want to find a dead man.”

The chopper became audible again. They heard it from a long way off, hardly louder than a man humming. The first time it had travelled from east to west. Now it tracked above the trees going from north to south and back again. Pablo and Diego returned into the yard, and their long wait was resumed to the sound of the dropping leaves. At last silence came back.

The two men returned. “They must have taken a picture of every path and hut in the barrio.”

“More than the city council ever did,” the Negro said. “Perhaps after this they will realize we need more water taps.”

Father Rivas called Marta in from the yard and whispered instructions to her. Doctor Plarr tried to hear what he was saying, but he could hear nothing until the voices rose.

“No,” Marta said, “no, I will not leave you, Father.”

“Those are my orders.”

“Did you tell me I was your wife or your woman?”

“Of course you are my wife.”

“Oh yes, you say that, it’s easy to say that, yet you treat me like your woman. You say ‘Go away’ because you have finished with me. I know very well now I am only your woman. No priest would marry us. They all refused you. Even your friend, Father Antonio.”

“I have explained a dozen times to you a priest is not necessary for a marriage. A priest is only a witness. People marry each other. Our vow is all that counts. Our intention.”

“How can I tell what your intention was? Perhaps you just wanted a woman to sleep with. Perhaps I am your whore. You treat me like a whore when you tell me to go away and leave you.”

Father Rivas raised his hand as though he wanted to strike her and then he turned away.

“If I am not your sin, Father, why is it you will not say Mass for us? We are all in danger of death, Father. We need a Mass. And that poor woman in the barrio who died… Even the gringo in there… He needs your prayers too.”

The old schoolboy desire to mock at Leon came back to Doctor Plarr. “It’s a pity you ever left the Church,” he said. “You see-they are losing confidence in you.”

Father Rivas looked up at him with the inflamed eyes of a dog who defends a bone. “I never told you I had left the Church. How can I leave the Church? The Church is the world. The Church is this barrio, this room. There is only one way any of us can leave the Church and that is to die.” He made the gesture of a man who is tired of useless discussion. “Not even then, if what we sometimes believe is true.”

“She only asked you to pray. Have you forgotten how to pray? I certainly have. I can never get further than Hail Mary, and then I mix the words up with an English nursery rhyme, ‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary.’ “

Father Rivas said, “I never knew how to pray.”

“What are you saying, Father? He does not know what he is saying,” Marta told them, as though she were defending a child who had used some foul expression, picked up in the street.

“A prayer for the sick. A prayer for rain. Do you want those? Oh, I know all those by heart, but those are not prayers. Call them petitions if you want to give that mumbo-jumbo a name. You might just as well write them down in a letter and get your neighbours to sign it too and stick it in a post box addressed to the Lord Almighty. Nobody will ever deliver your letter. Nobody will ever read it. Oh, of course, now and then there may be a coincidence. For once a doctor will give the right medicine and a child recovers. Or a storm comes when you want it. Or the wind changes.”

“All the same,” Aquino told them from the doorway of the other room, “I used to pray in the police station. I prayed I would have a girl in bed with me again. You are not going to tell me that was not a real prayer. And it worked too. The first day I was out I had a girl. It was in a field while you were off buying food in a village. My prayer was answered, Father. Even if it was in a field and not in a bed.”

Like me, Doctor Plarr thought, he is a picador. He pricks the bull’s hide to make the beast more active before he dies. The repetitions of the word “Father” were like darts inserted to pierce the skin. Why do we so want to destroy him-or are we hoping to destroy ourselves?—it’s a cruel sport.

“What are you doing out here, Aquino? I told you to stay and watch the prisoner.”

“The helicopter has gone. What can he do? He is only writing a letter to his woman.”

“You gave him a pen? I took away his pen myself when he was brought in.”

“What harm can a letter do?”

“They were my orders. If you all start disobeying orders there is no safety for any of us. Diego, Pablo, get outside again. If El Tigre were here…”

“But he is not here, Father,” Aquino said. “He is somewhere in safety eating well and drinking well. He was not at the police station either when you rescued me. Is he never going to risk his own life like he risks ours?”

Father Rivas pushed him to one side and went on into the inner room. Doctor Plarr found it hard to recognize the boy who had explained the Trinity to him. In the innumerable lines of premature age which crisscrossed the face he thought he could detect a tangle of agonies, like a tangle of fighting snakes.

Charley Fortnum was propped on his left elbow. His bandaged leg stuck out over the side of the coffin, and he wrote slowly, painfully; he didn’t look up. Father Rivas said, “Whom are you writing to?”

“My wife.”

“It must be difficult to write like that.”

“It’s taken me a quarter of an hour to do two sentences. I asked your man Aquino to write for me. But he refused. He’s been angry with me ever since he shot me. He won’t talk to me any more. Why? You would think I’d done him an injury.”

“Perhaps you have.”

“What injury?”

“Perhaps he feels betrayed. He did not believe you had the courage to trick him.”

“Courage? Me? I haven’t the courage of a mouse, Father. I wanted to see my wife again, that’s all.”

“Who is going to give her this letter?”

“Doctor Plarr, perhaps. If you let him go after I am dead. He can read it aloud to her. She doesn’t read very well and my handwriting is bad at the best of times.”

“If you like I will write the letter for you.”

“Thank you a lot. I’d be grateful if you would. I’d rather it was you than anyone else. A letter like this is a sort of secret. Like a confession. And after all you are a priest.”

Father Rivas took the letter and sat down on the floor beside the coffin.

“I’ve forgotten what I wrote last.”

Father Rivas read, ” ‘Do not worry, my darling, about being alone with a child. It is better for him to be alone with a mother than with a father. I know that well. I was left alone with my father and it was never any fun. Always horses, horses…’ That is all. You have written nothing after ‘horses.’ “

“In the situation I’m in,” Charley Fortnum said, “I suppose you think I ought to find some way to forgive. Even my father. Perhaps he wasn’t such a bad chap after all. Children hate too easily. Better leave out that stuff about the horses, Father.”

Father Rivas drew a line through the words.

“Put instead-but what? I’m damned unused to writing anything personal, that’s the trouble. Give me a drop of whisky, Father. It may help the brain to tick, what there is left of it-my brain, I mean.”

Father Rivas poured him out a drink.

“I prefer Long John,” Charley Fortnum said, “but this stuff you’ve brought me is not all that bad. If I stay here long enough I’ll get quite a taste for Argentinian whisky, but it’s more tricky than real Scotch to know the right measure. You wouldn’t understand what I mean, Father, but every drink has its right measure-not water, of course. Water’s not meant for drinking. It rusts the inside or gives you typhoid. It’s not good for man or beast except those bloody horses. Is it any good asking you to have a small one with me?”

“No. I am, as you would say, on duty. Do you want to go on with your letter?”

“Yes, of course. I was just waiting a while to let the whisky work. You’ve cut out that bit about the horses, haven’t you? What ought I to say next? You see I want to talk to her quite simply, as if we were alone together, on the verandah, at the camp, but words never come easily to me-not on paper, I mean. I expect you understand. After all you are married too in a way, Father.”

“Yes, I am married too,” Father Rivas said.

“But where I’m going there’s no marriage, or so you priests always tell us. It seems a bit of a waste when I’ve found the right girl so bloody late in the day. There ought to be visiting days in heaven, so as to give us something to look forward to from time to time. Like they have in prison. If there’s nothing to look forward to, it can’t be much of a heaven. You see I even get theological with the right measure of whisky. Where had I got to? Oh, the horses. You are quite sure we left out the old bastard’s horses?”

Doctor Plarr came in from the outer room; his feet made no sound on the earth floor, and neither man looked up. They were busy over the letter. He stood watching them in silence by the door. They looked to him like old friends.

” ‘Let the child go to the local school,’” Charley Fortnum dictated. ” ‘But if he’s a boy don’t send him on to that grand English school in B. A. where I went. I was never happy there. Let him be a real Argentinian like you are-not a half and half like me.’ Have you got that down, Father?”

“Yes. Had you not better say something to her about the change in the writing? She may wonder…”

“I doubt if she’d notice a thing like that. And Plarr can always explain to her how it was. My God, writing a letter is a bit like getting Fortnum’s Pride started on a rainy morning. One jerk after another. You begin to think the engine’s beginning to run and then it cuts again. Oh well, Father, write-‘Lying here, I think of you most of the time, and the baby too. At home you are always on my right side, and I can put my right hand on your stomach and feel the little bastard kick, but there’s no right side here. The bed’s too narrow. Quite comfortable, of course. I’ve nothing really to complain about. I’m luckier than most men.’” He paused, ” ‘Luckier…’” and took the bit between his teeth. ” ‘Before I knew you, my darling, I was a finished man. A man has to have some sort of ambition to live by. Even a millionaire wants to make another million. But before you lived with me there was nothing I could look forward to, except the right measure, of course. My mate was never exactly an exhibition crop. Then I found you and I had something I really wanted to do. I wanted to make you content and safe, and suddenly there was this child of ours. We were in business together. I didn’t expect to live long. All I wanted was to make sure that those first years were all right-the first years are important to the child, they sort of set a pattern. You mustn’t think though I’ve given up hope-I will find a way out of here yet in spite of them.’” He paused. “Of course that’s only a joke, Father. How can I escape? But I don’t want her to think I’m depressed. My God, Fortnum’s Pride did begin to work for a while, we nearly got out of that ditch, but I can’t manage any more now. Just write, ‘My darling girl, all my love.’ “

“Are you sure you have finished?”

“Yes. I think so. It’s damned hard work writing letters. To think sometimes on a library shelf you see ‘Collected Letters’ of somebody or other. Poor bugger. Two volumes of them perhaps. There is something I forgot. Just put it at the end. With a P. S. You see, Father, this is the first child she’s had. She hasn’t any experience. People say a woman knows by instinct. I doubt it though. Write this-‘Please don’t give the child sweets. They are bad for the teeth, they pretty well ruined mine, and if you are in doubt about anything at all ask Doctor Plarr. He’s a good doctor and a good friend.’ That’s all I can think of, Father.” He closed his eyes. “Perhaps I will manage something more later on. I’d like to add a word or two just before you kill me, the famous last words, but I’m too damned tired to think of any more now.”

“You must not give up hope, Seńor Fortnum.”

“What hope? Since I married Clara, I’ve always been afraid of dying. There’s only one happy way to die and that’s together, and even if you hadn’t interfered, I’d have been too old for it to happen that way. I can hardly bear it when I think she will be alone and frightened when her turn comes to die. I want to be there holding her hand and telling her it’s all right, Clara, I’m dying too, don’t be scared-it’s not all that bad dying. I’m crying now, you can see for yourself that I’m not a brave man. All the same it’s not self-pity, Father. I just don’t want her to be alone when she dies.”

Father Rivas made a gesture-it might have been an attempt to sketch a blessing in the air which he had forgotten how to give. “God will be there,” he said without conviction.

“Oh, you can have your God. Sorry, Father, but I don’t see any sign of Him around, do you?”

Doctor Plarr had walked back into the outer room in a state of unreasoning rage. It seemed to him that every word of the letter he had heard Fortnum dictate was a reproach aimed unjustly at himself. He was so absorbed in his anger that he strode straight toward the outer door until he felt the Indian’s gun pressing into his stomach and stopped. The child, always the child, he thought, a good friend, don’t give the child sweets, feel him kicking. He stood there with the gun stuck against his stomach and spat his bile upon the ground.

“What is the matter, Eduardo?” Aquino asked.

“I’m tired to death of being cooped up here. Why the hell can’t you trust me and let me go?”

“We need a doctor for Fortnum. If you went away from here you could not come back.”

“There’s no more I can do for Fortnum, and I’m in a bloody prison here.”

“You would not feel that way if you had been in a real prison. This is liberty to me.”

“A hundred square meters of dirt floor.”

“I was used to nine. So the world has grown a lot larger for me.”

“I suppose you can write your poems in any bloody hole, but I have nothing, nothing, to do. I’m a doctor. One patient is not enough.”

“I never write poems now. They were just part of the prison life. I wrote verses because they were easy to memorize. It was a way of communicating, that was all. Now I have all the paper I want and a pen and I cannot write a line. Who cares? I live instead.”

“You call this life? You can’t even walk as far as the town.”

“I never cared very much for walking. I have always been a lazy man.”

Father Rivas came in. “Where are Pablo and Diego?” he asked.

“On guard,” Aquino said. “You sent them out yourself.”

“Marta, take one of them with you and go into the town. It may be the last chance we shall have. Buy as many provisions as you can. Enough for three days. Easily portable.”

“What is worrying you?” Aquino asked. “You look as if you had heard bad news.”

“I am worried about the helicopter-about the blind man too. The ultimatum ends on Sunday night, and the police may be here long before then.”

“And afterward?” asked Doctor Plarr.

“We kill him and we make a run for it. We must have food to take with us. We shall have to keep away from towns.”

“Do you play chess, Eduardo?” Aquino asked.

“Yes. Why?”

“I have a pocket set.”

“Then for God’s sake let’s have a game.”

They sat on the dirt floor with the tiny board between them. Setting out the pieces Doctor Plarr said, “I used to play nearly every week at the Bolivar with an old man called Humphries. I was playing with him there the night you caught the wrong fish.”

“A good player?”

“He was better than me that night.”

Aquino was a slapdash player, moving too rapidly, and when Doctor Plarr hesitated over a move, he began to hum. “Do be quiet,” Doctor Plarr appealed.

“Ha, ha. I have got you, have I?”

“On the contrary. Check.”

“I can soon cure that.”

“Check again. And mate.”

He won two games in succession.

“You are too good for me,” Aquino said. “I ought to take on Seńor Fortnum.”

“I have never seen him play.”

“You are a great friend of his?”

“In a way.”

“And of his wife?”

“Yes.”

Aquino lowered his voice. “That baby he is always talking about-is it yours?”

Doctor Plarr said, “I am sick to death of hearing about that baby. Do you want another game?”

As they were putting out their pieces they heard the sound of a rifle shot, very far off. Aquino seized his gun, but there was no repetition. Doctor Plarr sat on the floor with a black rook in his hand. It grew damp with sweat. Nobody spoke. At last Father Rivas said, “Only someone shooting at a wild duck. We begin to think everything has to do with our affair.”

“Yes,” Aquino said, “even the helicopter might have belonged to the city council if you can forget the military markings.”

“How long is it before the next radio news?”

“Another two hours. There might be a special announcement though.”

“We cannot leave the radio on all the time. It is the only radio in the barrio. Too many people know about it already.”

“Then Aquino and I might as well have our game,” Doctor Plarr said. “I will give you a rook.”

“I do not want your rook. I will beat you in a straight match. I am out of practice, that is all.”

Over Aquino’s shoulder Doctor Plarr could see Father Rivas. A small and dusty object, he looked rather like a shrunken mummy dug out of the ground, together with a few treasured possessions which had been buried with him-a revolver, a tattered paper volume. Was it a missal? Doctor Plarr wondered. A book of prayers? With a sense of extreme boredom he repeated his old refrain, “Check and mate.”

“You play too well for me,” Aquino said.

“What are you reading, Leon?” Doctor Plarr asked. “Do you still read your breviary?”

“I gave that up years ago.”

“What have you got there?”

“Only a detective story. An English detective story.”

“A good one?”

“I am no judge of that. The translation is not very good, and with this sort of book I can always guess the end.”

“Then where is the interest?”

“Oh, there is a sort of comfort in reading a story where one knows what the end will be. The story of a dream world where justice is always done. There were no detective stories in the age of faith-an interesting point when you think of it. God used to be the only detective when people believed in Him. He was law. He was order. He was good. Like your Sherlock Holmes. It was He who pursued the wicked man for punishment and discovered all. But now people like the General make law and order. Electric shocks on the genitals. Aquino’s fingers. Keep the poor ill fed, and they do not have the energy to revolt. I prefer the detective. I prefer God.”

“Do you still believe in Him?”

“In a way. Sometimes. It is not so easy as all that to answer yes or no. Certainly he is not the same God as the one they taught us at school or in the seminary.”

“Your personal God,” Doctor Plarr said, teasing again. “I thought that was a Protestant heresy.”

“Why not? Is it any worse for that? Is it any less likely to be true? We no longer kill heretics-only political prisoners.”

“Charley Fortnum is your political prisoner.”

“Yes.”

“So you are a bit like the General yourself, Leon.”

“I do not torture him.”

“Are you sure of that?”

Marta returned from the town alone. She asked, “Is Diego here?”

“No,” Father Rivas said, “surely he went with you-or did you take Pablo?”

“He stayed behind in the town. He said he would catch me up. He had to collect petrol. The car is nearly dry, he said, and there is no reserve.”

Aquino said, “That is not true.”

Marta said, “He was very frightened by the helicopter. By the old man too.”

“Do you think he has gone to the police?” Doctor Plarr asked.

“No,” Father Rivas said, “I will never believe that.”

“Then where is he?” Aquino demanded.

“He may have been arrested on suspicion. He may have gone with a woman. Who knows? Anyway there is nothing for us to do. We can only wait. How long now before the news comes on?”

“Twenty-two minutes,” Aquino said.

“Tell Pablo to come in. If they have spotted us, there is no point in leaving him outside to be picked off alone. Better to keep together at the end.”

Father Rivas took up his detective story again. He said, “The only thing we can do is hope.” He added, “What a wonderful peaceful world this one is. Everything is so well ordered. There are no problems. There is an answer to every question.”

“What are you talking about?” Doctor Plarr asked.

“The world in this detective story. Can you tell me what Bradshaw means?”

“Bradshaw?”

It seemed to Doctor Plarr that this was the first time he had seen Leon so relaxed since the long arguments they used to have when they were schoolboys together. Had he, as the situation grew darker, lost the sense of responsibility, like a roulette player who abandons his chart and no longer bothers even to watch the ball? He should never have tried to be a man of action: as a priest at a bedside he would have been most at his ease waiting passively for the end. “It’s an English family name,” Doctor Plarr said. “My father had a friend Bradshaw who used to write to him from a town called Chester.”

“This one seems to be a man who knows all the trams in England by heart. The trains never take more than a few hours to go anywhere. And they always arrive on time. The detective only has to consult Bradshaw to know exactly when… What a strange world your father came from. Here we are little more than eight hundred kilometres from Buenos Aires and the train is supposed to take a day and a half to make the journey, but it is often two or three days late. This English detective is a very impatient man. He is pacing the platform of the station in London, waiting for the train from Edinburgh-that is nearly as far as Buenos Aires surely? - and the train is half an hour late, according to this man Bradshaw, and yet the detective thinks something must be wrong. Half an hour late!” Father Rivas exclaimed. “It is like when I was a child and I would be late in coming home from school and my mother would worry and my father used to say, ‘But what could happen to the child between here and the school house?’”

Aquino said with impatience, “And Diego? Diego is late too, and I tell you I worry.”

Pablo came into the hut. Aquino told him at once, “Diego has gone.”

“Where to?”

“To the police perhaps.”

Marta said, “All the way into town he talked about the helicopter. And when we came to the river-oh, he did not say anything, but it was the way he looked. At the ferry landing he said to me. That is strange. There are no police controlling the passengers.’ I said to him, ‘And the other side-can you see all the way across there? And can you tell a policeman when he is out of uniform?’”

Pablo said, “What do you think, Father? I introduced him to you. I feel ashamed. I told you he was a good man to drive the car. And a brave man.”

Father Rivas said, “There is no reason to start worrying yet.”

“I have to worry. He was my countryman. All you others come from across the border. You can trust each other. I feel as though I were Diego’s brother and my brother had betrayed you. You should not have come to me for help.”

“What could we have done without you, Pablo? There is nowhere in Paraguay where we could have hidden the Ambassador. Even taking him across the river would have been too dangerous. Perhaps it was a mistake to include any of your countrymen in our group, but El Tigre never thought of us as foreigners here in Argentina. He does not think in terms of Paraguayans, Peruvians, Bolivians, Argentinians. I think he would like to call us all Americans, if it were not for that place up there in the north.”

Pablo said, “Diego asked me once why there were only Paraguayans on your list of prisoners to be released. I told him-these are the most urgent cases. Men who have been in prison more than ten years. The next time we strike together perhaps it will be for our own people, like the time in Salta. There were Paraguayans who helped us then. I do not believe he will go to the police, Father.”

“Nor do I, Pablo.”

“We have only a little time to wait,” Aquino said. “They must surrender-or we leave a dead Consul in the river.”

“How long before the news?”

“Ten minutes,” Doctor Plarr said.

Father Rivas picked up his detective story, but to Doctor Plarr, watching him closely, he seemed to be reading with unnatural slowness. He had fastened his eyes on one passage and he kept them there a long time before he turned the leaf. His lips moved a little. He might have been praying-in secrecy perhaps, because prayers by a priest at a deathbed are the last resort and the patient must not be allowed to hear them. All of us are his patients, Doctor Plarr thought, we are all about to die.

The doctor had no belief that things would turn out well. From a false equation you get only a chain of errors. His own death might be one of the errors, for afterward people would say he had followed in his father’s steps, but they would be wrong-that had not been his intention.

He wondered with an unpleasant itch of anxiety and curiosity about his child. The child too was the result of an error, a carelessness on his part, but he had never before felt any responsibility. He had considered the child to be a useless part of Clara like her appendix, perhaps a diseased appendix which ought to be removed. He had suggested an abortion, but the idea had frightened her-perhaps there had been too many unprofessional abortions in the house of Mother Sanchez. Now, waiting for the news bulletin on the radio, he said to himself: the poor little bastard, if only I could have made some sort of arrangement for it. What sort of a mother was Clara likely to prove? Would she go back to Mother Sanchez and have the child brought up as the spoiled brat of a brothel? That would probably be better than life with his mother in B. A. stuffed with dulce de leche in the Calle Florida among the international voices of the well-to-do. He thought of the tangle of its ancestry, and for the first time in the complexity of that tangle the child became real to him-it was no longer just one more wet piece of flesh like any other torn out of the body with a cord which had to be cut. This cord could never be cut. It joined the child to two very different grandfathers-a cane-cutter in Tucuman and an old English liberal who had been shot dead in the yard of a police station in Paraguay. The cord joined it to a father who was a provincial doctor, to a mother from a brothel, to an uncle who had walked away one day from the cane fields to disappear into the waste of a continent, to two grandmothers… There was no end to the tangle which must constrict the tiny form like the swaddling bandages with which in old days they used to bind the limbs of a newborn child. A cold fish, Charley Fortnum had called him. What effect did it have on a child to have a cold fish for a father? It might have been better if they could have exchanged fathers. A cold fish would have been his own proper parentage rather than a father who had cared enough to die. He would have liked the little bastard to believe in something, but he was not the kind of father who could transmit belief in a good or a cause. He called across the dirt floor, “Do you really believe in God the Father Almighty, Leon?”

“What? I am sorry. I did not hear. This detective is a very cunning man, so there must be a good reason why the train from Edinburgh is half an hour late.”

“I asked if you believed sometimes in God the Father?”

“You have asked me that before. You do not really want to know. You are only mocking me, Eduardo. All the same I will give you my answer when there is no more hope. You will not be ready to laugh then. Excuse me a moment-the story has become more interesting-the Edinburgh express is steaming into a station called King’s Cross. King’s Cross. Would that be symbolic?”

“No. Just the name of a station in London.”

“Be quiet, both of you.” Aquino turned the radio up and they listened to the international news which was beamed at that hour from Buenos Aires. The announcer described the visit by the Secretary General of the United Nations to West Africa; fifty hippies had been expelled with violence from Majorca; there was yet another rise in taxes on cars imported to Argentina; a retired general had died in Cordoba at the age of eighty; a few bombs had exploded in Bogota, and of course the Argentine football team was continuing its violent progress through Europe.

“They have forgotten us,” Aquino said.

“If only we could believe that,” Father Rivas said. “To stay here… forgotten… forever. It would not be so bad a fate, would it?”

3

On Saturday at midday the news came for which they had been waiting so long, but they had to listen patiently until the end of the bulletin. It was the policy of all the governments concerned to play down the importance of the Fortnum affair. Buenos Aires quoted moderate expressions of British opinion. The Times of London, for instance, had stated that an Argentinian novelist (whose name was not given) had offered himself in exchange for the Consul, and a BBC broadcast put the affair, as the Argentinian commentator remarked, in proper perspective. A Junior Minister had referred to the matter briefly when questioned in a television discussion on political violence occasioned by the tragic death of more than a hundred and sixty BOAC passengers. “I know no more about this affair in Argentina than any of our listeners. I do not have time to read many novels, but before I came out this evening I did ask my wife’s bookseller about Mr. Savindra, and I’m afraid he was no better informed than me.” The Minister added, “Much as I sympathize with Mr. Fortnum, I want to emphasize that we cannot treat a kidnapping like this as an attack on the British diplomatic service with all that would imply. Mr. Fortnum has never at any time been a member of the diplomatic service. He was born in Argentina, and so far as I know he has not even visited this country. When the unfortunate affair occurred we were about to terminate his engagement as Honorary Consul since he had passed the normal age for retirement and there was really no occasion to replace him as the number of British residents in that particular province has been very much reduced in the last ten years. I am sure you are aware that this Government is making every effort to economize in the Foreign Service.”

Asked whether the Government’s attitude would have been the same if the victim had been a member of the diplomatic service the Minister said, “Certainly it would have been the same. We don’t intend to give in to this kind of blackmail anywhere, under any circumstances. In this particular case we have every confidence that Mr. Fortnum will be released when these desperate men realize the complete futility of their action. It is for the President of Argentina in that case to decide whether he will treat these criminals with clemency. Now, if the chairman will allow me, I would like to return to the real subject of tonight’s broadcast. I can assure you that there were no security men on the plane and so no question of an armed struggle…” Pablo turned off the radio. “What did all that mean?” Father Rivas asked. Doctor Plarr said, “They have left Fortnum’s case in your hands.”

“If they have rejected the ultimatum,” Aquino said, “the sooner we kill him the better.”

“Our ultimatum was not made to the British Government,” Father Rivas said.

“Of course,” Doctor Plarr hastily corrected himself, “they have to say all that in public. We can’t tell what pressures they may be exerting in Buenos Aires and Asunción privately.” Even to himself his words lacked confidence.

They all, taking turns with those on guard, spent the afternoon drinking mate, with the exception of Doctor Plarr who had inherited from his father a taste for tea. He played another game with Aquino and, by pretending a slip which lost him his queen, he allowed Aquino a victory, but there was a sullen lack of belief in the way Aquino pronounced “Checkmate.”

Doctor Plarr visited his patient twice and found him sleeping on both occasions. He regarded with resentment the peaceful expression on the condemned man’s face. He was even smiling a little-perhaps he was dreaming of Clara or the child, or perhaps only of the “proper measure.” Doctor Plarr wondered what the years ahead might be like-in the unlikely event of there being any years ahead. He was not worried about Clara: that affair-if you could call it an affair-would have been finished soon in any case. It was the child’s unage, as he grew up under Charley Fortnum’s care, which worried him. For no rational reason he pictured the child as a boy, a boy who resembled two early photographs of himself, one taken at four years and one at eight. His mother preserved them still in the overcrowded apartment, the silver frames tarnished from lack of care, among the china cockatoos and the junk of antique shops.

Charley, he was certain, would have the child brought up as a Catholic-he would be all the more strict about that because he had once broken the laws of the Church himself-and he could imagine Charley listening with sentimental pleasure beside the boy’s bunk while the child stumbled through an Our Father. Afterward he would join Clara beside the dumbwaiter on the verandah. Charley would be a very kind father. He would never make his son ride a horse. It was even possible that he would give up drink or at least severely reduce the proper measure. Charley would call the boy “old fellow” and pat his cheek and turn over the pages of London Panorama before tucking him up firmly in bed. Doctor Plarr suddenly saw the boy sitting up in his bunk, as he had done, listening to the distant locking of doors, to the low voices downstairs, the stealthy footsteps. There was one night he remembered when he had crept for reassurance to his father’s room, and he was looking down now at the bearded face of his father stretched on the coffin-four days’ stubble had begun to resemble a beard.

Doctor Plarr returned abruptly to the company of Charley Fortnum’s future murderers.

Guard duty had been resumed. Aquino was outside, while Pablo took the place of the Indian at the door. The Guaraní slept quietly on the floor, and Marta was clattering dishes noisily in the yard behind. Father Rivas sat with his back to the wall. He played with some dried beans which he tossed from hand to hand, like the beads of a broken rosary.

“Did you finish your book?” Doctor Plarr asked.

“Oh yes,” Father Rivas said. “The end was exactly what I thought. You can always tell. The murderer went and committed suicide on the Edinburgh express. That was why it was half an hour late and why the man Bradshaw was wrong. How is the consul?”

“Sleeping.”

“And his wound?”

“Doing all right. But will he live long enough to see it heal?”

“I thought you believed in those secret pressures?”

“I thought you believed in something too, Leon. Things like mercy and charity. Once a priest always a priest-that’s the theory, isn’t it? Don’t start telling me about Father Torres or the bishops who went to war in the Middle Ages. This isn’t the Middle Ages and this isn’t war. This is the murder of a man who has done you no harm at all-a man old enough to be my father-or yours. Where is your father, Leon?”

“Under a marble monument in Asunción almost as big as this hut.”

“We all of us seem to live with dead fathers, don’t we? Fortnum hated his. I think I may have loved mine. Perhaps. How can I possibly tell? That word love has such a slick sound. We take credit for loving as though we had passed an examination with more than the average marks. What was your father like? I can’t remember even seeing him.”

“He was what you would expect, one of the richest of the bourgeoisie in Paraguay. You must remember our house in Asunción with the great portico and the white columns and the marble bathrooms and all the orange and lemon trees in the garden? And the lapachos covering the paths with their rose petals. Probably you never saw inside the house, but I am sure you came once to a birthday party in the garden. Friends of mine were never allowed inside the house-there were so many things they might break or soil. We had six servants. I liked them much better than my parents. And there was a gardener called Pedro-he was always busy sweeping up the petals-they were so untidy my mother said. I was very fond of Pedro, but my father threw him out because he stole a few pesos which had been left on a garden seat. My father paid a lot of money every year to the Colorado Party, so there was no trouble for him when the General came to power after the civil war. He was a good abogado, but he never worked for a poor client. He served the rich faithfully until he died, and everyone said he was a good father because he left plenty of cash behind him. Oh well, I suppose he was, in that way. It is one of the duties of a father to provide.”

“And God the Father, Leon? He doesn’t seem to provide much. I asked last night if you still believed in Hun. To me He has always seemed a bit of a swine. I would rather believe in Apollo. At least he was beautiful.”

“The trouble is we have lost the power to believe in Apollo,” Father Rivas said. “We have Jehovah in our blood. We can’t help it. After all these centuries Jehovah lives in our darkness like a worm in the intestines.”

“You should never have been a priest, Leon.”

“Perhaps you are right, but it’s too late to change now. What time is it? How tired to death I am of this radio, but we have to listen to the news-it is still possible they may give in.”

“My watch has stopped. I forgot to wind it.”

“Then we had better keep the radio on, however dangerous, as long as there is a chance…” He turned the sound as low as he could, but all the same they ceased to be alone. Someone was playing a harp almost inaudibly, someone sang in a whisper. They might have been sitting in a vast hall where they couldn’t even see or hear the performers.

There was nothing to do but talk, talk about anything under the sun except about Sunday midnight.

“I’ve often noticed,” Doctor Plarr said, “when a man leaves a woman he begins to hate her. Or is it that he hates his own failure? Perhaps we want to destroy the only witness who knows exactly what we are like when we drop the comedy. I suppose I shall hate Clara when I leave her.”

“Clara?”

“Fortnum’s wife.”

“It is true what they say?”

“There’s not much point in lying about anything, Leon, in the position we are in now. Dying is a wonderfully effective truth drug, better than pentothal. You priests have always known that. When the priest arrives I always leave a dying man so that he’s free to talk. They most of them want to talk, if they have the strength.”

“Are you planning to desert this woman?”

“I’m planning nothing. But it will happen. If I live. I am certain of that. Nothing is for keeps in this world, Leon. When you entered the Church, weren’t you sure in your heart that one day even your priesthood would come to an end?”

“No. I never believed that. Not for a moment. I thought the Church and I wanted the same thing. You see I had been very happy in my seminary. You might say that was the period of my honeymoon. Only there were occasions… I suppose it happens the same way in all honeymoons… there was a hint that something might be wrong… I remember one old priest… he was the professor in the moral theology course. I’ve never known a man so cut and dried and sure of the truth. Of course moral theology is the bugbear in every seminary. You learn the rules and find they don’t apply to any human case… Oh well, I used to think, a little difference of opinion, what does it matter? In the end a man and wife grow together. The Church will grow nearer to me as I grow nearer to her.”

“But when you left the Church you began to hate it, didn’t you?”

“I have told you-I never left the Church. Mine is only a separation, Eduardo, a separation by mutual consent, not a divorce. I shall never belong wholly to anyone else. Not even to Marta.”

“Even a separation brings hate often enough,” Doctor Plarr said. “I have seen it happen many times among my patients in this damned country where no one is allowed a divorce.”

“It will never happen in my case. Even if I cannot love, I see no reason to hate. I can never forget that long honeymoon in the seminary when I was so happy. Now, if I feel any emotion for the Church, it is regret, not hate. I think she could have used me easily for a good purpose if she had understood a little better. I mean about the world as it is.”

The radio murmured on, and they listened with ears alert for the time signal. In the room of mud, which might well have been some primitive aboveground tomb prepared for a whole family, Doctor Plarr no longer felt the least desire to torment Leon Rivas. If there was anyone he wanted to torment, it was himself. He thought: whatever we may pretend to each other, we have both given up hope. That is why we can talk like the friends we used to be. I have reached a premature old age when I can no longer mock a man for his beliefs, however absurd. I can only envy them.

Curiosity after a while drove him to speak. He remembered how at his first Communion in Asunción, dressed like a diminutive monk with a rope round his waist, he had believed-something, though now he could not remember what.

“It’s a long time,” he told Leon, “since I listened to a priest. I thought you taught that the Church was infallible like Christ.”

“Christ was a man,” Father Rivas said, “even if some of us believe that he was God as well. It was not the God the Romans killed, but a man. A carpenter from Nazareth. Some of the rules He laid down were only the rules of a good man. A man who lived in his own province, in his own particular day. He had no idea of the kind of world we would be living in now. Render unto Caesar, but when our Caesar uses napalm and fragmentation bombs… The Church lives in time too. Only sometimes, for a short while, for some people-I am not one of them-I am not a man of vision-I think perhaps-but how can I explain to you when I believe so little myself?—I think sometimes the memory of that man, that carpenter, can lift a few people out of the temporary Church of these terrible years, when the Archbishop sits down to dinner with the General, into the great Church beyond our time and place, and then… those lucky ones… they have no words to describe the beauty of that Church.”

“I don’t understand a word you say, Leon. You used to explain things more clearly. Even the Trinity.”

“Forgive me. It is such a very long time since I read the right sort of books.”

“You haven’t the right audience either. I feel no more interested in the Church now than I feel in Marxism. The Bible is as unreadable to me as Das Kapital. Only sometimes, like a bad habit, I find myself using that crude word God. Last night…”

“Any word one uses from habit means nothing at all.”

“All the same, when you shoot Fortnum in the back of the head, are you sure you won’t have a moment’s fear of old Jehovah and His anger? ‘Thou shalt not commit murder.’ “

“If I kill him it will be God’s fault as much as mine.”

“God’s fault?”

“He made me what I am now. He will have loaded the gun and steadied my hand.”

“I thought the Church teaches that He’s love?”

“Was it love which sent six million Jews to the gas ovens? You are a doctor, you must often have seen intolerable pain-a child dying of meningitis. Is that love? It was not love which cut off Aquino’s fingers. The police stations where such things happen… He created them.”

“I have never heard a priest blame God for things like that before.”

“I don’t blame Him. I pity Him,” Father Rivas said, and the time signal struck faintly in the dark.

“Pity God?”

The priest put his fingers on the dial. For a moment he hesitated to turn it. Yes, Doctor Plarr thought, there is always something to be said for remaining ignorant of the worst. I have never told a cancer patient yet that’ there is no hope any longer.

A voice said as indifferently as if it were reading out a list of prices on the stock exchange, “The following communiqué has been issued from police headquarters. ‘At seventeen hours yesterday a man who refused to give his name was arrested while attempting to board the ferry to the Chaco shore. He attempted to escape by plunging into the river, but he was shot by police officers. His body was recovered. It proved to be that of a lorry driver employed at the Bergman orange-canning factory. He had been absent from work since last Monday, the day before the kidnapping of the British Consul. His name was Diego Corredo and his age was thirty-five. Unmarried. His identification is believed to be an important step toward tracing the other members of the gang. It is thought that the kidnappers have not left the province, and an intensive search is now in progress. The commander of the 9th Infantry Brigade has put a parachute company at the disposal of the police.’”

Doctor Plarr said, “Lucky for you he was not interrogated. I doubt if Perez would have many scruples at this stage.”

It was Pablo who answered. “They will discover soon enough who his friends were. I was employed at the same factory until a year ago. Everyone knew we were good friends.” The man on the radio was talking again about the Argentinian football team. There had been a riot with twenty injured when they played in Barcelona.

Father Rivas woke Miguel and sent him out to relieve Aquino, and when Aquino returned, the old arguments, broke out anew. Marta had cooked the anonymous stew which she had served for two days now. Doctor Plarr wondered whether Father Rivas had endured the same meal every day of his married life, but probably it was no worse than he had been accustomed to eat in the poor barrio of Asunción.

Aquino waved his spoon and demanded the instant death ol Charley Fortnum. “They have killed Diego.”

To get away from them awhile Doctor Plarr carried a plate of stew into the other room. Charley Fortnum looked at it with distaste. “I could do with a nice grilled chop, he said, “but I suppose they are afraid I would use a knife to escape.”

“We are all eating the same thing,” Doctor Plarr said. “I only wish Humphries was here. It might give him an even greater appetite for the goulash at the Italian Club.”

” ‘Whatever the crime, the same meal’s served to all.’”

“A quotation?”

“One of that fellow Aquino’s poems. Is there any news?”

“The man called Diego tried to escape to the Chaco, but the police shot him.”

“Ten little nigger boys and then there were nine. Will I be the next to go?”

“I don’t think so. You are the only card they have left to gambit with. Even if the police discover this hideout they’ll be afraid to attack it while you are alive.”

“I doubt if they would bother much about me.”

“Colonel Perez will bother about his career.”

“Are you as scared as I am, Ted?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps I have a bit more hope. Or perhaps I have less to lose.”

“Yes. That’s true. You’re lucky. You haven’t Clara and the baby to worry about.”

“No.”

“You know about these things, Ted. Will there be much pain?”

“They say when the wound’s serious people feel very little.”

“And my wound will be the most serious of all.”

“Yes.”

“Clara will feel the pain longer than me. I wish it could be the other way round.”

They were still arguing in the outer room when Doctor Plarr returned. Aquino was saying, “But what does he know of the situation? He is safe in Cordoba or…” He checked himself and looked up at Doctor Plarr.

“Don’t worry,” Doctor Plarr said, “I am not likely to survive you. Unless you give up this insane idea. You still have time to escape.”

“And I admit failure,” Aquino said, “to all the world.”

“You used to be a poet. Were you afraid to admit it when a poem failed?”

“My poems were never published,” Aquino said. “No one knew when I failed. My poems were never read out on the radio. There were 110 questions asked about them in the British Parliament.”

“It’s your damn machismo again, isn’t it? Who invented machismo? A gang of ruffians like Pizarro and Cortes. Can’t any of you for a moment escape your bloody history? You haven’t learned a thing, have you, from Cervantes? He had his fill of machismo at Lepanto.”

Father Rivas said, “Aquino is right. We cannot afford to fail. Once before our people released a man rather than kill him-he was a Paraguayan Consul, the General cared no more about his life than Fortnum’s, and when it came to the point we were not prepared to kill. If we are weak again like that, no threat of death will be of any use on this continent. Until more ruthless men than we are begin to kill a great many more. I do not want to be responsible for the deaths which will follow our failure.”

“You have a complicated conscience,” Doctor Plarr said. “Will you pity God for those murders too?”

“You have no idea, have you, what I meant?”

“No. I was never taught anything about pitying God by the Jesuits in Asuncion. Not that I remember.”

“Perhaps you would have more faith now if you had remembered a little more.”

“Mine’s a busy life, Leon, trying to cure the sick. I can’t leave that to God.”

“Oh, you may be right. I have always had far too much time. Two Masses on a Sunday. A few feast days. Confessions twice a week. It was mostly the old women who came-and of course the children. The children were forced to come. They were beaten if they did not come, and anyway I gave them sweets. Not as a reward. The bad child received just as many sweets as the good one. I only wanted to make them feel happy while they knelt in that stuffy box. And when.1 gave them a penance I tried to make it a game we played together, a reward not a punishment. And they sucked their sweets while they said a Hail Mary. I could be happy too, for as long as I was with them. I was never happy with then-fathers-or their mothers. I don’t know why. Perhaps if I had had a child myself…”

“It’s a long journey you’ve made, Leon, since you left Asunción.”

“It was not. such an innocent life there as you think. Once a child of eight told me he had drowned his baby sister in the Paraná. People thought she had slipped off the cliff. He told me she used to eat too much and there was less for him. Less mandioca!”

“Did you give him a sweet?”

“Yes. And three Hail Mary’s for a penance.”

Pablo went out on guard in his turn, taking Miguel’s place. Marta served the Guaraní with stew and cleaned the other plates. She said, “Father, tomorrow is Sunday. Surely you could say a Mass for us on that day?”

“It is more than three years since I last said a Mass. I doubt if I can even remember the words.”

“I have a missal, Father.”

“Read the Mass to yourself then, Marta. It will serve just as well.”

“You heard what they said on the radio. The soldiers are searching for us now. It may be the last Mass we shall ever hear. And there is Diego-you must say a Mass for him.”

“I have no right to say a Mass. When I married you, Marta, I excommunicated myself.”

“No one knows you married me.”

“I know.”

“Father Pedro used to sleep with women. Everyone in Asunción knew that. And he said Mass every Sunday.”

“He did not marry, Marta. He could go to confession and sin again and go to confession. I am not responsible for his conscience.”

“You seem to suffer from an odd lot of scruples, Leon,” Doctor Plarr said, “for a man who plans to murder.”

“Yes. Perhaps they are not scruples-only superstitions. You see if I took the Host I would still half believe I was taking His body. Anyway it’s a useless argument. There is no wine.”

“Oh but there is, Father,” Marta said. “I found an empty medicine bottle in the rubbish dump and when I was in the town I filled it at a cantina.”

“You think of everything,” Father Rivas said sadly.

“Father, you know I have wanted all these years to hear you say Mass again and to see the people praying with you. Of course it will not be the same without the beautiful vestments. If only you had kept them with you.”

“They did not belong to me, Marta. Anyway vestments are not the Mass. Do you think the Apostles wore vestments? How I hated wearing them when the people in front of me were all in rags. I was glad to turn my back on them and forget them and see only the altar and the candles-but the money for the candles would have fed half the people there.”

“You are wrong, Father. We were all glad to see you in those vestments. They were so beautiful, all the scarlet and the gold embroidery.”

“Yes. I suppose they helped you escape from everything for a little while, but to me they were the clothes of a convict.”

“But, Father, you won’t listen to the Archbishop’s rules? You will say a Mass for us tomorrow?”

“Suppose what they say is true and I am damning myself?”

“The good God would never damn a man like you, Father. But poor Diego, Jose’s wife… all of us… we need you to speak to God for us.”

Father Rivas said, “All right. I will say Mass. For your sake, Marta. I have done very little for you in these years. You have given me love and all I have given you has been a great deal of danger and a dirt floor to lie on. I will say Mass as soon as it is light if the soldiers give us enough time. Have we any bread left?”

“Yes, Father.”

A sense of some obscure grievance moved Doctor Plarr. He said, “You don’t believe yourself in all this mumbo-jumbo, Leon. You are fooling them like you fooled that child who killed his sister. You want to hand them sweets at Communion to comfort them before you murder Charley Fortnum. I’ve seen with my own eyes things just as bad as any you’ve listened to in the confessional, but I can’t be pacified with sweets. I have seen a child born without hands and feet. I would have killed it if I had been left alone with it, but the parents watched me too closely-they wanted to keep that bloody broken torso alive. The Jesuits used to tell us it was our duty to love God. A duty to love a God who produces that abortion? It’s like the duty of a German to love Hitler. Isn’t it better not to believe in that horror up there sitting in the clouds of heaven than pretend to love him?”

“It may be better not to breathe, but all the same I cannot help breathing. Some men, I think, are condemned to belief by a judge just as they are condemned to prison. They have no choice. No escape. They have been put behind the bars for life.”

“I see my father only through the bars,” Aquino quoted with a sort of glum self-satisfaction.

“So here I sit on the floor of my prison cell,” Father Rivas said, “and I try to make some sense of things. I am no theologian, I was bottom in most of my classes, but I have always wanted to understand what you call the horror and why I cannot stop loving it. Just like the parents who loved that poor bloody torso. Oh, He seems ugly enough I grant you, but then I am ugly too and yet Marta loves me. In my first prison-I mean in the seminary-there were lots of books in which I could read all about the love of God, but they were of no help to me. Not one of the Fathers was of any use to me. Because they never touched on the horror-you are quite right to call it that. They saw no problem. They just sat comfortably down in the presence of the horror like the old Archbishop at the General’s table and they talked about man’s responsibility and Free Will. Free Will was the excuse for everything. It was God’s alibi. They had never read Freud. Evil was made by man or Satan. It was simple that way. But I could never believe in Satan. It was much easier to believe that God was evil.”

Marta exclaimed, “Father, you do not know what you are saying.”

“I am not talking as a priest now, Marta. A man has the right to think aloud to his wife. Even a madman, and perhaps I am a little mad. Perhaps those years in Asuncion in the barrio have turned my brain, so here I am waiting to kill an innocent man…”

“You are not mad, Leon,” Aquino said. “You have come to your senses. We will make a good Marxist of you yet. Of course God is evil, God is capitalism. Lay up treasures in heaven-they will bring you a hundred percent interest for eternity.”

“I believe in the evil of God,” Father Rivas said, “but I believe in His goodness too. He made us in His image-that is the old legend. Eduardo, you know well how many truths in medicine lay in old legends. It was not a modern laboratory which first discovered the use of a snake’s venom. And old women used the mould on overripe oranges long before penicillin. So I too believe in an old legend which is almost forgotten. He made us in His image-and so our evil is His evil too. How could I love God if He were not like me? Divided like me. Tempted like me. If I love a dog it is only because I can see something human in a dog. I can feel his fear and his gratitude and even his treachery. He dreams in his sleep like I do. I doubt if I could ever love a toad-though sometimes, when I have touched a toad’s skin, I am reminded of the skin of an old man who has spent a rough poor life in the fields, and I wonder…”

“I find my disbelief a lot easier to understand than your kind of belief. If your God is evil…”

“I have had more than two years in hiding,” Father Rivas said, “and we have to travel light. There is no room in our packs for books of theology. Only Marta has kept a missal. I have lost mine. Sometimes I have been able to find a paperback novel-like the one I have been reading. A detective story. That sort of life leaves a lot of time to think and perhaps Marta may be right and my thoughts are turning wild. But I can see no other way to believe in God. The God I believe in must be responsible for all the evil as well as for all the saints. He has to be a God made in our image with a night side as well as a day side. When you speak of the horror, Eduardo, you are speaking of the night side of God. I believe the time will come when the night side will wither away, like your communist state, Aquino, and we shall see only the simple daylight of the good God. You believe in evolution, Eduardo, even though sometimes whole generations of men slip backward to the beasts. It is a long struggle and a long suffering, evolution, and I believe God is suffering the same evolution that we are, but perhaps with more pain.”

“I am not so sure of evolution,” Doctor Plarr said, “not since we managed to produce Hitler and Stalin in one generation. Suppose the night side of God swallows up the day side altogether? Suppose it is the good side which withers away. If I believed what you believe, I would sometimes think that had happened already.”

“But I believe in Christ,” Father Rivas said, “I believe in the Cross and the Redemption. The Redemption of God as well as of Man. I believe that the day side of God, in one moment of happy creation, produced perfect goodness, as a man might paint one perfect picture. God’s intention for once was completely fulfilled so that the night side can never win more than a little victory here and there. With our help. Because the evolution of God depends on our evolution. Every evil act of ours strengthens His night side, and every good one helps His day side. We belong to Him and He belongs to us. But now at least we can be sure where evolution will end one day-it will end in a goodness like Christ’s. It is a terrible process all the same and the God I believe in suffers as we suffer while He struggles against Himself-against His evil side.”

“Is killing Charley Fortnum going to help his evolution?”

“No. I pray all the time I shall not have to kill him.”

“And yet you will kill him if they don’t give in?”

“Yes. Just as you lie with another man’s wife. There are ten men dying slowly in prison, and I tell myself I am fighting for them and that I love them. But my sort of love I know is a poor excuse. A saint would only have to pray, but I have to carry a revolver. I slow evolution down.”

“Then why…?”

“Saint Paul answered that question, ‘What I do is not that which I wish to do, but something which I hate.’ He knew all about the night side of God. He had been one of those who stoned Stephen.”

“Do you still call yourself a Catholic, believing all that?”

“Yes. I call myself a Catholic whatever the bishops may say. Or the Pope.”

Marta said, “Father, you frighten me. All that is not in the catechism, is it?”

“No, not in the catechism, but the catechism is not the faith, Marta. It is a sort of times two table. There is nothing I have said which your catechism denies. You learned when you were a child about Abraham and Isaac, and how Jacob cheated his brother, and Sodom was destroyed like that village last year in the Andes. God when He is evil demands evil things; He can create monsters like Hitler; He destroys children and cities. But one day with our help He will be able to tear His evil mask off forever. How often the saints have worn an evil mask for a time, even Paul. God is joined to us in a sort of blood transfusion. His good is in our veins, and our tainted blood runs through His. Oh, I know I may be sick or mad. But it is the only way I can believe in the goodness of God.”

“It’s much easier not to believe in a God at all.”

“Are you sure?”

“Well, perhaps the Jesuits left one germ of the disease in me, but I have isolated it. I keep it under control.”

“I have never spoken aloud like this before-I don’t know why I do now.”

“Perhaps because you think there is no more hope?”

“Ted,” the voice which Doctor Plarr was beginning to hate called from the inner room, “Ted.”

Doctor Plarr made no motion to rise.

“Your patient,” Father Rivas reminded him.

“I’ve done all I can for him. What’s the good of mending his ankle if you are going to put a bullet through his head?”

“Ted,” the voice came again.

“He probably wants to ask me what vitamins Clara ought to give his baby. Or when he ought to be weaned. His baby! The dark side of God must be having a hearty laugh about that. I never wanted a child. I would have got rid of it if she had let me.”

“Speak lower,” Father Rivas said, “even if you are jealous of the poor man.”

“Jealous of Charley Fortnum? Why should I be jealous?” He couldn’t control his voice. “Jealous because of the child? - but the child’s mine. Jealous because of his wife? She’s mine as well. For as long as I want her.”

“Jealous because he loves.”

He was aware of the way Marta looked at him. Even Aquino’s silence seemed a criticism.

“Oh love! That’s not a word in my vocabulary.”

Marta said, “Give me your shirt, Father. I want to wash it ready for the Mass.”

“A little dirt will not matter.”

“You have slept in it for three weeks, Father. It is not good to go up to the altar smelling like a dog.”

“There is no altar.”

“Give it to me, Father.”

Obediently he stripped off his shirt; the blue was faded by the sun and stained with the marks of food and the whitewash of many walls. “Do what you want,” the priest said. “All the same it is a pity to waste our water. We may need all we have of it before the end.”

It was too dark to see and the Negro lit three candles. He carried one into the inner room, but brought it back and nipped out the flame. He said, “He is asleep.” Father Rivas turned on the radio and the sad notes of Guaraní music came over the air-the music of a people who are doomed to die. There was a lot of static; it crackled like the machine guns of extinction. Up in the mountains beyond the river the summer was beginning to break up and the lightning quivered on the walls.

“Put out all the pans and pails you have,” Father Rivas told Pablo.

The wind came in a sudden blast, the leaves of the avocados swept across the tin roof, and then again the wind dropped. “I shall have to wear a wet shirt at Mass,” Father Rivas said, “unless I can persuade Marta that God does not mind a man’s naked skin.”

Suddenly, as though someone were standing close at their elbow within the hut, a voice spoke to them, “We have been asked by police headquarters to read the following statement.” There was a pause while the man found the right place. They could even hear the rustle of the papers he was carrying.

“It is now known where the gang of kidnappers are holding the British Consul captive. They have been located in a certain quarter in the barrio popular which…” The rain came sweeping down from Paraguay, beating on the roof, and drowned the announcer’s words. Marta ran in, holding out a piece of damp cloth, the shirt of Father Rivas. She cried, “Father, what can I do? The rain…”

“Hush,” the priest said, and he turned the’ radio louder. The rain passed over them toward the city, and the lightning lit the room almost continuously. Across the Paraná in the Chaco the thunder became audible, like a barrage which has lifted and moved on before an attack.

“You have no longer any hope of escape,” the voice continued slowly and ponderously, in an interval of static, speaking with extreme clarity like a teacher explaining a problem of mathematics to a class of children; Doctor Plarr recognized the voice of Colonel Perez. “We know exactly where you are. You are surrounded by men from the 9th Brigade. Before eight tomorrow morning you must send the British Consul out of the hut. He must come alone and walk unmolested into the cover of the trees. Five minutes afterward you must come out yourselves, one by one with arms raised over the head. The Governor guarantees that your lives will be spared and you will not be returned to Paraguay. Do not attempt to escape. If any man leaves the hut before the Consul has been delivered unharmed he will be shot down. No white flag will be respected. You are completely surrounded. I warn you that if any harm…” After that the static whined and shrieked through his words, making them unintelligible.

“Bluff!” Aquino said, “only bluff! If they were out there Miguel would have warned us. That man can see an ant in the dark. Kill Fortnum and afterward we will draw lots to see who leaves first. How can they tell on a night like this who it is that leaves the hut-the Consul or another?” He threw the door open and called out to the Indian “Miguel!” Like an answer to his question a semicircle of floodlights flashed on-they flared from between the trees in an arc nearly a hundred yards across. Through the open door Doctor Plarr could see moths crowding away from him towards the lights to beat and shrivel against the reflectors. The Indian lay flattened on the ground, and the doctor’s own shadow shot back into the hut and lay stretched there like a dead man on the floor. The doctor moved aside. He wondered whether Perez had seen him and identified him.

“They do not dare shoot into the hut,” Aquino said, “for fear of killing Fortnum.”

The lights went out again. In the silence between the thunderclaps they heard a rustle no louder than the movements of a rat. Aquino stood a. the edge of the doorway and turned his gun toward the darkness. “No,” Father Rivas said, “it’s Miguel.” Another wave of water swept the roof and in the yard a pail was overturned and sent rattling away before the wind.

The darkness did not last. Perhaps the lightning had blown a fuse which was now repaired. The men watching from inside the hut saw the Indian rise to his feet to run, but the lights blinded him. He began to turn in a circle with a hand over his eyes. A single shot was fired and he fell to his knees. It was as though the men of the 9th Brigade had no intention of wasting ammunition on someone of so little importance. The Guaraní knelt with his head bent, like a pious man at the elevation of the Host. He swayed from side to side-he might have been enacting part of a primitive rite. Then with immense effort he began to raise his gun in the wrong direction until it pointed at the open door of the hut. It seemed to Doctor Plarr, who watched flattened against the wall, that the parachutists were waiting with a cruel and patient curiosity to see what happened next. They were not going to waste another bullet. The Indian was no danger to them, for how could he possibly see to shoot in the glare of the lights? Whether he were dying or not was immaterial to them. He could lie there till morning came. Then the gun sailed a few feet through the air toward the hut. It fell out of reach and Miguel was still on the ground.

Aquino said, “We must pull him in.”

“He is dead,” Doctor Plarr assured him.

“How can you tell?”

The lights went out again. It was as though the men hidden in the trees were playing a cruel game with them.

“This is your chance, doctor,” Aquino said.

“What can I do?”

“You are right,” Father Rivas said. “They are trying to tempt one of us to go out.”

“Your friend Perez might not shoot if you went out.”

Doctor Plarr said, “My patient is here.”

Aquino edged the door further open. The automatic rifle lay just out of reach. He put a hand out toward it. The lights flashed on, and a bullet struck the edge of the door as he banged it shut. The man in charge of the lights must have heard the squeak of the hinge.

“Close the shutters, Pablo.”

“Yes, Father.”

With the glare of the lights shut out, they felt a sense of protection.

“What shall we do now, Father?” the Negro asked.

“Kill Fortnum at once,” Aquino said, “and if the lights go out again we can make a run for it.”

Pablo said, “Two of us are dead already. It might be better, Father, if we surrendered. And there is Marta here.”

“But the Mass, Father?”

“It seems to me I shall have to make it a Mass for the dead,” Father Rivas said.

“Say any sort of Mass you like,” Aquino said, “but kill the Consul first.”

“How could I say the Mass after I had killed him?”

“Why not if you can say a Mass when you intend to kill him?” Doctor Plarr said.

“Ah, Eduardo, you are still enough of a Catholic to know how to turn the knife in the wound. You will be my confessor yet.”

“May I prepare the table, Father? I have the wine. I have the bread.”

“I will say it at the first light. I have to prepare myself, Marta, and that takes longer than laying a table.”

“Let me kill him while you say your prayers,” Aquino said. “Do your work and leave me to do mine.”

“I thought your work was writing poems,” Doctor Plarr said.

“My poems have all been about death, so I am well qualified.”

“It is madness to go on,” Pablo said. “Forgive me, Father, but Diego was right to try to escape. It is madness to kill one man and make sure that five of us die. Father…”

“Take a vote,” Aquino interrupted with impatience. “Let the vote decide.”

“Are you turning into a Parliamentarian, Aquino?” Doctor Plarr said.

“Keep to a subject you know, doctor. Trotsky believed in a free vote inside the Party.”

“I vote for surrender,” Pablo said. He put his hands over his face. The movements of his shoulders showed he was weeping. For himself? For the dead? For shame?

Doctor Plarr thought: the desperadoes! That is what the papers would call them. A failed poet, an excommunicated priest, a pious woman, a man who weeps.

For heaven’s sake let this comedy end in comedy. None of us are suited to tragedy.

Pablo said, “I love this house. I had nothing else but the house left when my wife and child died.”

Yet another father, Doctor Plarr told himself, are we never going to finish with fathers?

“I vote for killing Fortnum now,” Aquino said.

“You told us they were bluffing,” Father Rivas said. “Perhaps you are right. Suppose eight o’clock comes and we have done nothing-they still cannot attack us. So long as he is alive.”

“Then what do you vote for?” Aquino asked.

“For delay. We gave them till midnight tomorrow.”

“And you, Marta?”

“I vote with my husband,” she said with pride.

A loudspeaker-so close that it must have been set up among the trees outside-spoke to them, again in the voice of Perez. “The United States Government and the British Government have refused to intervene. If you have been listening to your radio you will know I am telling you the truth. Your blackmail has failed. You have nothing to gain by holding the Consul any longer. Send him out of the hut before 08.00 hours if you wish to save your own lives.”

“They insist too much,” Father Rivas said.

Somebody was whispering beside the microphone. It was unintelligible-a sound which grated like pebbles drawn back under a wave. Then Perez continued. “There is a dying man outside your door. Send the Consul out to us now, and we will try to save your friend. Are you going to leave one of your own people to die slowly?”

No Hippocratic oath demands suicide, Doctor Plarr told himself. In his childhood his father had read him stories of heroism, of wounded men rescued under fire, of Captain Gates walking out into the snow. “Shoot if you must this old grey head” was one of his favourite poems in those days.

He went abruptly into the inner room. He could see nothing in the darkness there. He whispered, “Are you awake?”

“Yes.”

“How does your ankle feel?”

“It’s all right.”

“I will bring a light and change the bandages.”

“No.”

Doctor Plarr said, “The soldiers have us surrounded.

You mustn’t give up hope.”

“Hope of what?”

“There’s only one man who really wants your death.”

“Yes?” the indifferent voice replied. “Aquino.”

“And you,” Charley Fortnum said, “you! You want it.”

“Why should I?”

“You talk too loud, Plarr. I don’t suppose you ever talked so loud at the camp, even when I was out farming a mile away. You were always so damned discreet, weren’t you, in case the servants heard. But the time always comes when even a husband has his ears open.” There was a sound of scrabbling in the darkness as though he were trying to pull himself upright. “I always thought” there was some code of honour for doctors, Plarr, but of course that’s an English notion, and you’re only half English, and as for the other half…”

“I don’t know what you heard,” Doctor Plarr said. “You must have dreamt it or misunderstood.”

“I suppose you thought to yourself what the hell does it matter, she’s only a little tart from Mother Sanchez’ house. How much did she cost you? What did you offer her, Plarr?”

“If you want to know,” Doctor Plarr said in a spurt of rage, “I gave her a pair of sunglasses from Gruber’s.”

“Those glasses? She was fond of those glasses. She thought they were smart, and now they’ve been smashed to bits by your friends. What a swine you are, Plarr. It was like raping a child.”

“It came more easily.”

Doctor Plarr had not realized how close he was to the coffin bed. A fist struck at him through the dark. It caught him on the neck and made him choke. He stepped back and heard the coffin creak.

“Oh God,” Charley Fortnum said, “I’ve knocked the bottle over.” He added, “There was still a measure left. I’d kept it for…” A hand groped across the floor, touched Doctor Plarr’s shoes and recoiled.

“I’ll bring a light.”

“Oh no, you won’t. I don’t want to see your fucking face ever again, Plarr.”

“You are taking it too hard. These things happen, Fortnum.”

“You don’t even pretend to love her, do you?”

“No.”

“I suppose you’d had her at the brothel, and so you thought…”

“I’ve told you before-I saw her there, but I never had her.”

“I’d saved her from that place and you’ve begun to push her back.”

“I never intended this, Fortnum.”

“You never intended to be found out. It was cheaper for you, wasn’t it, not having to pay for your fucks.”

“What good do scenes like this do? I thought it would be all over quickly and you’d never know. It’s not as if she or I really cared for each other. Caring is the only dangerous thing, Fortnum.”

“I cared.”

“You’d have had her back. You would never have known.”

“When did it begin, Plarr?”

“The second time I saw her. At Gruber’s. When I gave her the sunglasses.”

“Where did you take her? Back to Mother Sanchez?” The persistent questions reminded Doctor Plarr of fingers pressing the pus out of a boil.

“I took her to my flat. I asked her in to have coffee, but she knew very well what I meant by coffee, Fortnum. If it hadn’t been me, it would have been someone else sooner or later. She even knew the porter at my flat.”

“Thank God,” Fortnum said. “What do you mean?”

“I’ve found the bottle. It’s not spilt.” He could hear the sound of Fortnum drinking. He said, “You’d better save a little for later in case…”’ “I know you think I’m a coward, Plarr, but I’m not much afraid of dying now. It’s a lot easier than going back and waiting at the camp for a child to be born with your face, Plarr.”

“It’s not how I intended things,” Doctor Plarr repeated. He had no anger left with which to defend himself. “Nothing is ever what we intend. They didn’t mean to kidnap you. I didn’t mean to start the child. You would almost think there was a great joker somewhere who likes to give a twist to things. Perhaps the dark side of God has a sense of humour.”

“What dark side?”

“Some crazy notion of Leon’s. You should have heard that-not the things you did hear.”

“I wasn’t trying to hear-I was trying to get off this damn box and join you. I was lonely, and your drugs don’t work any more. I’d nearly got to the door when I heard the priest say you were jealous. Jealous, I thought, jealous of what? And then I heard and I got back on to the box.”

In a distant village Doctor Plarr had once been forced to perform an emergency operation for which he was not qualified. He had the choice of risking the operation or letting the woman die. Afterward he felt the same fatigue as he felt now, and the woman had died just the same. He had sat down on the floor in his exhaustion. He thought: I’ve said all I can. What more can I say? The woman was a long time dying or it seemed so to him then.

Fortnum said, “To think I wrote to Clara telling her you would look after her and the baby.”

“I know.”

“How the hell do you know?”

“You aren’t the only one who overhears things. The joker again. I overheard you dictating to Leon. It made me angry.”

“You angry? Why?”

“I suppose Leon was right-I am jealous.”

“Jealous of what?”

“That would be another comic twist, wouldn’t it?”

He could hear the sound of Charley Fortnum drinking again. Doctor Plarr said, “Even one of your measures won’t last forever.”

“I haven’t got forever. Why can’t I hate you, Plarr? Is it the whisky? I’m not drunk yet.”

“Perhaps you are. A little.”

“It’s an awful thing, Plarr, but there’s no one else I can leave them with. I can’t trust Humphries…”

“I’ll give you a jab of morphine if you want to sleep.”

“I’d rather stay awake. I’ve the hell of a lot of things to think about and not much time. I want to be left alone, Plarr. Alone. I have to get used to that, haven’t I?”

4

It seemed to Doctor Plarr that they had all been left completely alone. Their enemies had abandoned them: the loudspeaker had fallen silent, the rain had stopped, and in spite of his thoughts Doctor Plarr slept, though fitfully. The first time he opened his eyes it was the voice of Father Rivas that woke him. The priest was kneeling by the door with his lips pressed to a crack in the wood. He seemed to be speaking to the dead or dying man outside. Words of comfort, a prayer, the formula of conditional absolution? Doctor Plarr turned on his other side and slept again. When he woke a second time, Charley Fortnum was snoring in the other room-a dry-throated grating whisky snore. Perhaps he was dreaming of security in the big bed at home after he had finished the bottle on the dumbwaiter. Was Clara patient with him when he snored like that? When she was forced to lie awake beside him what had her thoughts been? Had she regretted her cell at Mother Sanchez’? There, with the dawn, she could sleep peacefully alone. Did she regret the simplicity of her life there? He had no idea. He could no more imagine her thoughts than he could imagine the thoughts of a strange animal.

The light from the projectors shining under the door lost brilliance. The last day had begun. He remembered an occasion years ago when he sat with his mother at a son-et-lumiere performance outside Buenos Aires. The searchlights came and went like a professor’s white chalk, picking out a tree, under which someone-San Martin was it?—had sat-an old stable where another figure of history had tethered his horse, the windows of a room where a treaty or a constitution-he couldn’t remember what-had been signed. A voice explained the story in a prose touched with the dignity of the un-recallable past. He was tired from his medical studies and he fell asleep. When he woke for the third time it was to see Marta busy at the table laying a cloth, while daylight seeped through the interstices of window and door. There were two unlit candles on the table stuck in saucers. “They are all we have left, Father,” Marta said.

Father Rivas was still asleep, curled up like an embryo.

Marta repeated, “Father.”

One by one, as she spoke, the others began to wake to the new day, Leon, Pablo, Aquino.

“What time is it?”

“What?”

“What did you say?”

“There are not enough candles, Father.”

“The candles do not matter, Marta. You fuss too much.”

“Your shirt is still wet. You will catch your death from cold.”

“I doubt that,” Father Rivas said.

She grumbled her disappointments as she laid out on the table in turn a medicine bottle full of wine, a mate gourd which had to serve as a chalice, a torn dishcloth for a napkin. “It is not how I wanted it to be,” she complained. “It is not how I dreamed of it.” She put a pocket missal which had lost half its binding open on the table. “What Sunday is it, Father?” she asked, as she fumbled with the leaves. “Is it the twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost or the twenty-sixth? Or can it be Advent, Father?”

“I have no idea,” Father Rivas said.

“Then how can I find you the right Gospel and the right Epistle?”

“I will take what comes. Pot luck,” he said.

Pablo said, “It would be a good thing to release Fortnum now. It must be nearly six, and in two hours…”

“No,” Aquino said, “we have voted to wait.”

“He hasn’t voted,” Pablo said, indicating Doctor Plarr.

“He has no vote. He is not one of us.”

“He will die with us.”

Father Rivas took his wet shirt from Marta. He said, “We have no time to argue now. I am going to say Mass. Help Seńor Fortnum in if he wants to hear it. I shall be saying Mass for Diego, for Miguel, for all of us who may be going to die today.”

“Not for me,” Aquino said.

“You cannot dictate to me whom I pray for. I know well enough you believe in nothing. All right. Believe in nothing. Stay In the corner there and believe in nothing. Who cares whether you believe or not? Even Marx cannot guarantee what is true or false any more than I can.”

“I hate to see time wasted. We have not so much of it left.”

“What would you prefer to do with your time?”

Aquino laughed. “Oh, of course, I would waste it like you. ‘When death is on the tongue, the live man speaks.’ If I still had a wish to write I would make that verse a little clearer-I almost begin to understand it myself.”

“Will you hear my confession, Father?” the Negro asked.

“Of course. In a moment. If you come into the yard. And you, Marta?”

“How can I confess, Father?”

“Why not? You are near enough to death to promise anything. Even to leave me.”

“I will never…”

“The parachutists will see to that.”

“But you, Father?”

“Oh, I will have to take my chance. There are not many people lucky enough to die with a priest handy. I am glad to be one of the majority. I have been one of the privileged too long.”

Doctor Plarr left them and went in to the inner room. He said, “Leon’s going to say Mass. Do you want to be there?”

“What time is it?”

“I don’t know. Some time after six, I think. The sun has risen.”

“What will they do now?”

“Perez has given them till eight to release you.”

“They are not going to?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then they’ll kill me and Perez will kill them. You’ve got the best chance, haven’t you?”

“Perhaps. It’s not a big chance.”

“My letter to Clara… you’d better keep it for me all the same.”

“If you want me to.”

Charley Fortnum took a wad of papers from his pocket. “Most of these are bills. Unpaid. The tradesmen all cheat except Gruber. Where in hell did I put it?” At last he found the letter in another pocket. “No,” he said, “there’s not much point in sending it to her now. Why should she care to hear a lot of loving words from me if she has you?” He tore the letter into small pieces. “Anyway I wouldn’t want the police to read it. There’s a photo too,” he said, searching in his wallet. “The only one I’ve got of Fortnum’s Pride, but she’s in it as well.” He took a quick look and then he tore it also into minute pieces.

“Promise you won’t tell her that I knew about you. I wouldn’t want her to feel any guilt. If she’s capable of it.”

“I promise,” Doctor Plarr said.

“These bills-you’d better look after them,” Charley Fortnum said. He handed them to Doctor Plarr. “There may be enough in my current account to meet them. If not-the buggers have swindled me enough. I’m clearing the decks,” he added, “but I don’t want the crew to suffer.”

“Father Rivas will be starting Mass by now. If you want to hear it, I’ll give you an arm in there.”

“No, I’ve never been what you’d call a religious man. I think I’ll stay out here with the whisky.” He carefully measured what was left in the bottle. “Perhaps one small one now-that leaves a real measure at the last. Bigger than a shipmaster’s.”

A low voice was speaking in the other room. Charley Fortnum said, “I know people are supposed to get a bit of comfort at the end-by believing in all that. Do you believe in anything at all?”

“No.”

Now that the personal truth was out between them Doctor Plarr felt a curious need to speak with complete accuracy. He added, “I don’t think so.”

“Nor do I-except… It’s a damn silly thing to feel, but when I’m with that fellow out there, I mean the priest… the one who’s going to murder me… I feel… Do you know there was even a moment when I thought he was going to confess to me. To me, Charley Fortnum? Can you beat that? And by God I’d have given him absolution. When are they going to kill me, Plarr?”

“I don’t know what the time is. I have no watch. Some time around eight I suppose. Perez will send in the Para’s then. What happens afterward, God knows.”

“God again! You can’t get away from the bloody word, can you? Perhaps I’ll go and listen awhile after all. It won’t do any harm. It’ll please him. I mean the priest. And there’s nothing else to do. If you’ll help me.”

He put his arm around Doctor Plarr’s shoulder. He weighed surprisingly light for his bulk-like a body filled only with air. He’s an old man, Doctor Plarr thought, he wouldn’t have had long to live anyway, and he remembered the night he had met him first, when he and Humphries lugged him protesting across the road to the Bolivar. He had weighed a lot heavier then. They made only two steps toward the door and then Charley Fortnum stopped dead in his tracks. “I can’t make it,” he said. “Why should I anyway? I wouldn’t want to curry favor at the last moment. Take me back to the whisky. That’s my sacrament.”

Doctor Plarr returned to the other room. He took up his stand near Aquino who sat on the ground, watching the motions of the priest with a look of suspicion. It was as though he feared that Father Rivas was laying some trap, planning a betrayal, as he moved to and fro by the table and made the secret signals with his hands. All Aquino’s poems were of death, Doctor Plarr remembered. He wasn’t going to be robbed of it now.

Father Rivas was reading the Gospel. He read it in Latin not in Spanish, and Doctor Plarr had long forgotten the little Latin he had once known. He kept his eye on Aquino while the voice ran rapidly on in the dead tongue. Perhaps they thought he was praying with his eyes lowered and a kind of prayer did enter his mind-or at least a wish, heavy with self-distrust, that if the moment came he would have the skill and determination to act quickly. If I had been with them over the border, he wondered, what would I have done when my father called for help in the police-station yard? Would I have gone back to him or escaped as they did?

Father Rivas reached the Canon of the Mass and the consecration of the bread. Marta was watching her man with an expression of pride. The priest lifted up the mate gourd and spoke the only phrases of the Mass which Doctor Plarr had for some reason never forgotten. “As often as you do these things you shall do them in memory of Me.” How many acts in a lifetime had he done in memory of something forgotten or almost forgotten?

The priest lowered the gourd. He knelt and rose quickly. He seemed to be whipping the Mass to its conclusion with impatience. He was like a herdsman driving his cattle toward the byre before a storm burst, but he had started home too late. The loudspeaker blared its message in the voice of Colonel Perez. “You have exactly one hour left to send the Consul out to us and save your lives.” Doctor Plarr saw Aquino’s left hand tighten on his gun. The voice went on, “I repeat you have one hour left. Send the Consul out and save your lives.”

“… who takes away the sins of the world, grant them eternal rest.”

Father Rivas began “Domine, non sum dignus.” Marta’s was the only voice which joined his. Doctor Plarr looked around seeking Pablo. The Negro knelt with bowed head by the back wall. Would it be possible, he wondered, before the Mass ended, while they were distracted by the ceremony, to seize Aquino’s gun and hold them up for long enough to enable Charley Fortnum to escape? I’d be saving all their lives, he thought, not only Charley’s. He looked back toward Aquino, and as though Aquino knew what was in his mind he shook his head.

Father Rivas took the kitchen cloth and began to clean the gourd, as punctiliously as though he were back in the parish church at Asunción.

“Ite missa est.”

The voice on the loudspeaker answered like a liturgical response, “You have fifty minutes left.”

“Father,” Pablo said. “The Mass is over. Better surrender now. Or let us vote again.”

“My vote is the same,” Aquino said.

“You are a priest, Father, you cannot kill,” Marta said.

Father Rivas held out the dishcloth. “Go into the yard and burn this. It will not be needed again.”

“It would be a mortal sin for you to kill him now, Father. After the Mass.”

“It is a mortal sin for anyone at any time. The best I can do is to ask for God’s mercy like anyone else.”

“Was that what you were doing up at the altar?” Doctor Plarr asked. He felt wearied out by all the arguments, by the slowness with which the short time left them dragged by.

“I was praying I would not have to kill him.”

“Posting a letter,” Doctor Plarr said. “I thought you didn’t believe in any reply to letters like that.”

“Perhaps I was hoping for a coincidence.”

The loudspeaker announced: “You have forty five minutes left.”

“If they would leave us alone…” Pablo complained.

“They want to break our nerve,” Aquino said.

Father Rivas left them abruptly. He carried his revolver with him.

Charley Fortnum lay on the coffin. His eyes were open and he stared up at the mud roof. “Have you come to liquidate me, Father?” he asked.

Father Rivas had a look of shyness or perhaps shame. He moved a few steps into the room. He said, “No. No. Not that. Not yet. I thought there might be something you needed.”

“I still have some whisky left.”

“You heard their loudspeaker. They will be coming for you soon.”

“And then you will kill me?”

“Those are my orders, Seńor Fortnum.”

“I thought a priest took his orders from the Church, Father. Oh, I forgot. You don’t belong any more, do you? All the same you were saying a Mass. I’m not much of a Catholic, but I didn’t feel inclined to attend it. It’s not exactly a holiday of obligation. Not for me.”

“I remembered you at the altar, Seńor Fortnum,” Father Rivas said with awkward formality, as though he were addressing a bourgeois parishioner. The phrase came from a language which had grown rusty during the last years.

“I’d rather you forgot me, Father.”

“I shall never be allowed to do that,” Father Rivas said.

Charley Fortnum noticed with surprise that the man was close to tears. He said, “What’s the matter, Father?”

“I never believed it would come to this. You see-if it had been the American Ambassador-they would have given way. And I would have saved ten men’s lives. I never believed I would have to take a life.”

“Why did they ever choose you as a leader?”

“El Tigre thought he could trust me.”

“Well, he can, can’t he?”

“I don’t know now. I don’t know.”

Does a condemned man always have to comfort his executioner? Charley Fortnum wondered. He said, “Is there anything I can do for you, Father?”

The man looked at him with an expression of hope, like a dog who thinks he has heard the word “walk.” He shuffled a step nearer. Charley Fortnum remembered the boy at school with protuberant ears whom Mason used to bully. He said, “I am sorry…” Sorry for what? For failing to be the American Ambassador?

The man said, “I know how hard it must be for you. Lying there. Waiting. Perhaps if you could prepare yourself a little… that might take your mind off…”

“You mean confess?”

“Yes.” He explained, “In an emergency… even I…”

“But I’m no good as a penitent, Father. I haven’t confessed in thirty years. Not since my first marriage anyway-which wasn’t a marriage. You’d better look to the others.”

“I have done all I can for them.”

“After such a long time… it’s impossible… I haven’t enough belief. I would be ashamed to speak all those pious words, Father, even if I remembered them.”

“You would feel no shame now if you had no belief. And you need not say them to me aloud, Seńor Fortnum. Only make an act of contrition. In silence. To yourself. That is enough. We have so little time. Just an act of contrition,” he pleaded as though he were asking for the price of a meal.

“But I’ve told you, I’ve forgotten the words.”

The man came two steps nearer, as if he were gathering a bit of courage or hope. Perhaps he hoped to be offered enough cash for a piece of bread.

“Just say you are sorry and try to mean it.”

“Oh, I’m sorry for a lot of things, Father. Not the whisky though.” He picked the bottle up, scrutinized what was left and put it down again. “It’s a difficult life. A man has to have one sort of drug or another.”

“Forget the whisky. There must be other things. I only ask you to say-I am sorry for breaking a rule.”

“I don’t even remember what rules I’ve broken. There are so many damned rules.”

“I have broken the rules too, Seńor Fortnum. But I am not sorry I took Marta. I am not sorry I am here with these men. This revolver-one cannot always swing a censer up and down or sprinkle holy water. But if there was another priest here I would say to hurt, yes I am sorry. I am sorry I did not live in an age when the rules of the Church seemed more easy to keep-or in some future when perhaps they will be changed or not seem so hard. There is one thing I can easily say. Perhaps you could say it too. I am sorry not to have had more patience. Failures like ours are often just failures of hope. Please-cannot you say you are sorry you did not have more hope?”

The man obviously needed comfort and Charley Fortnum gave him all he could. “Yes, I suppose I could go about as far as that, Father.”

Father, Father, Father. The word repeated itself in his mind. He had a vision of his father sitting bewildered, not understanding, not recognizing him, by the dumbwaiter, while he lay on the ground and the horse stood over him. Poor bugger, he thought.

Father Rivas finished the words of absolution. He said, “Perhaps I will have a drink with you now-a small one.”

“Thank you, Father,” Charley Fortnum said. “I’m a lot luckier than you are. There’s no one to give you absolution.”

“I only saw your father for a few minutes once a day,” Aquino said, “when we walked around the yard. Sometimes…” He broke off to listen to the loudspeaker from the trees outside. The voice said, “You have only fifteen minutes left.”

“The last quarter of an hour has gone a bit too quickly for my taste,” Doctor Plarr commented.

“Will they begin to count out the minutes now? I wish they would let us die quietly.”

“Tell me a little more about my father.”

“He was a fine old man.”

“During the few minutes you had with him,” Doctor Plarr asked, “what did you talk about?”

“We never had time to talk of anything much. A guard was always there. He walked beside us. He would greet me-very formally and affectionately like a father greeting his son-and I-well, I had a great respect for him, you understand. There would always be a spell of silence-you know how it is with a caballero like that. I would wait for him to speak first. Then the guard would shout at us and push us apart.”

“Did they torture him?”

“No. Not in the way they did to me. The CIA men would not have approved. He was an Anglo-Saxon. All the same fifteen years in a police station is a long torture. It is easier to lose a few fingers.”

“What did he look like?”

“An old man. What else can I say? You must know what he looked like better than I do.”

“He wasn’t an old man the last time I saw him. I wish I had even a police snap of him lying dead. You know the kind of thing they take for the records.”

“It would not be a pleasant sight.”

“It would fill a gap. Perhaps we wouldn’t have recognized each other if he had escaped. If he had been here with you now.”

“He had very white hair.”

“Not when I knew him.”

“And he stooped badly. He suffered very much from rheumatism in his right leg. You might say it was the rheumatism which killed him.”

“I remember someone quite different. Someone tall and thin and straight. Walking fast away from the quay at Asunción. Turning once to wave.”

“Strange. To me he seemed a small fat man who limped.”

“I’m glad they didn’t torture him-in your way.”

“With the guards always around I never had a proper chance to warn him about our plan. When the moment came-he did not even know the guard had been bribed-I shouted to him ‘Run’ and he looked bewildered. He hesitated. That hesitation and the rheumatism…”

“You did your best, Aquino. It was no one’s fault.” Aquino said, “Once I recited a poem to him, but I do not think he cared much for poetry. It was a good poem all the same. About death of course. It began, ‘Death has the taste of salt.’ Do you know what he said to me once? It was as if he were angry-I do not know who with-he said, ‘I am not unhappy here, I am bored. Bored. If God would only give me a little pain.’ It was an odd thing to say.”

“I think I understand,” Doctor Plarr said. “In the end, he must have got his pain.”

“Yes. He was lucky at the end.”

“As for me I have never known boredom,” Aquino said. “Pain yes. Fear. I am frightened now. But not boredom.”

Doctor Plarr said, “Perhaps you have not come to the end of yourself. It’s a good thing when that happens only when you are old, like my father was.” He thought of his mother among the porcelain parrots in Buenos Aires or eating éclairs in the Calle Florida, of Margarita fallen asleep in the carefully shaded room while he lay wide awake watching her unloved face, of Clara, and the child, and the long impossible future beside the Paraná. It seemed to him he was already his father’s age, that he had spent as long in prison as his father had, and that it was his father who had escaped.

“You have ten minutes left,” the loudspeaker said. “Send the Consul out immediately and afterward one at a time with your hands raised…”

It was still giving careful instructions, when Father Rivas came back into the room. Aquino said, “The time is almost up. Better let me kill him now. It is not the job for a priest.”

“They may still be bluffing.”

“By the time we know for sure it may be too late. These Para’s are well trained by the Yankees in Panama. They move quick.”

Doctor Plarr said, “I am going out to talk to Perez.”

“No, no, Eduardo. That would be suicide. You heard what Perez said. He will not even respect a white flag. You agree, Aquino?”

Pablo said, “We are beaten. Let the Consul go.”

“If that man passes through the room,” Aquino said, “I shall shoot him-and anyone who helps him-even you, Pablo.”

“Then they will kill us all,” Marta said. “If he dies we shall all die.”

“At any rate it will be a memorable occasion.”

“Machismo,” Doctor Plarr said, “your damned stupid machismo. Leon, I’ve got to do something for the poor devil in there. If I talk to Perez…”

“What can you offer him?”

“If he agrees to extend his time limit, will you extend yours?”

“What would be the good?”

“He is the British Consul. The British Government…”

“Only an Honorary Consul, Eduardo. You have explained more than once what that means.”

“Will you agree if Perez…”

“Yes, I will agree, but I doubt if Perez… He may not even give you time to talk.”

“I think he will. We have been good friends.”

A memory came back to Doctor Plarr of the back reach of the river, of the great horizontal forest, of Perez moving without hesitation from dipping log to dipping log toward the little group where the murderer awaited him. “They are all my people,” Perez had said.

“Perez is not a bad man as policemen go.”

“I am afraid for you, Eduardo.”

“The doctor is suffering from machismo too,” Aquino said. “Go on… get out there and talk… but take a gun with you…”

“It’s not machismo I’m suffering from. You told me the truth, Leon. I am jealous. Jealous of Charley Fortnum.”

“If a man is jealous,” Aquino said, “he kills the other man-or gets killed. It’s a simple thing, jealousy.”

“Mine is not that kind of jealousy.”

“What other sort of jealousy is there? You sleep with a man’s wife… And when he does the same…”

“He loves her… that’s the trouble.”

“You have five minutes left,” the loudspeaker announced.

“I’m jealous because he loves her. That stupid banal word love. It’s never meant anything to me. Like the word God. I know how to fuck-I don’t know how to love. Poor drunken Charley Fortnum wins the game.”

“One doesn’t surrender a mistress so easily,” Aquino said. “They cost a lot of trouble to win.”

“Clara?” Doctor Plarr laughed. “I paid her with a pair of sunglasses.” Memories continued to return. They were like tiresome obstacles which he had to work around, a blindfold game with bottles, before he reached the door. He said, “There was something she asked me before I left home… I didn’t bother to listen.”

“Stay here, Eduardo. You cannot trust Perez…”

For a moment after he opened the door Doctor Plarr was dazzled by the sunlight, and then the world came back into sharp focus. Twenty yards of mud stretched before him. The Indian Miguel lay like a bundle of old clothes thrown to one side sodden with the night’s ram. Beyond the body the trees and the deep shade began.

There was no sign of anyone alive. The police had probably cleared the people from the neighbouring huts. About thirty yards away something gleamed among the trees. It might have been a drawn bayonet which had caught the sun, but as he walked a little nearer and looked more closely, he saw it was only a piece of petrol tin that formed part of a hut hidden among the trees. A dog barked a long distance away.

Doctor Plarr walked slowly and hesitatingly on. No one moved, no one spoke, not a shot was fired. He raised his hands a short distance above his waist, like a conjuror who wants to show that they are empty. He called, “Perez! Colonel Perez!” He felt absurd. After all there was no danger. They had exaggerated the whole situation. He had felt more insecure on the occasion when he followed Perez from raft to raft.

He didn’t hear the shot which struck him from behind in the back of the right leg. He fell forward full length, as though he had been tackled in a rugby game, with his face only a few yards from the shadow of the trees. He was unaware of any pain, and though for a while he lost consciousness, it was as peaceful as falling asleep over a book on a hot day.

When he opened his eyes again the shadow of the trees had hardly moved. He felt very sleepy. He wanted to crawl on into the shade and sleep again. The morning sun here was too violent. He was vaguely aware that there was something he had to discuss with someone, but it could wait until his siesta was over. Thank God, he thought, I am alone. He was too tired to make love, and the day was too hot. He had forgotten to draw the curtains.

He heard the sound of breathing; it came from behind him, and he didn’t understand how that could be. A voice whispered, “Eduardo.” He did not at first recognize it, but when he heard his name repeated, he exclaimed, “Leon?” He couldn’t understand what Leon could be doing there. He tried to turn round, but a stiffness in his leg prevented him.

The voice said, “I think they have shot me in the stomach.”

Doctor Plarr woke sharply up. The trees in front of him were the trees of the barrio. The sun was shining on his head because he had not had time to reach the trees. He knew that he would not be safe until he reached the trees.

The voice which he now knew must be Leon’s said, “I heard the shot. I had to come.”

Doctor Plarr again tried to turn, but it was no use-he gave up the attempt.

The voice behind him said, “Are you badly hurt?”

“I don’t think so. What about you?”

“Oh, I am safe now,” the voice said.

“Safe?”

“Quite safe. I could not kill a mouse.”

Doctor Plarr said, “We must get you to a hospital.”

“You were right, Eduardo,” the voice said. “I was never made to be a killer.”

“I don’t understand what’s happened… I have to talk to Perez… You have no business to be here, Leon. You should have waited with the others.”

“I thought you might need me.”

“Why? What for?”

There was a long silence until Doctor Plarr asked rather absurdly, “Are you still there?”

A whisper came from behind him.

Doctor Plarr said, “I can’t hear you.”

The voice said a word which sounded like “Father.” Nothing in their, situation seemed to make any sense whatever.

“Lie still,” Doctor Plarr said. “If they see either of us move they may shoot again. Don’t even speak.”

“I am sorry… I beg pardon…”

“Ego te absolve,” Doctor Plarr whispered in a flash of memory. He intended to laugh, to show Leon he was only joking-they had often joked when they were boys at the unmeaning formulas the priests taught them to use-but he was too tired and the laugh shrivelled in his throat.

Three Para’s came out of the shade. In their camouflage they were like trees walking. They carried their automatic rifles at the ready. Two of them moved toward the hut. The third approached Doctor Plarr, who lay doggo, holding what little breath he had.

5

In the cemetery were a great number of people whom Charley Fortnum did not know from Adam. One woman in a long old-fashioned dress of black he assumed to be Seńora Plarr. She held tightly to the arm of a thin priest whose dark brown eyes turned here and there, to left and right as though he were afraid of missing an important member of the congregation. Charley Fortnum heard her introduce him several times-“This is my friend Father Galvao from Rio.” Two other ladies wiped their eyes prominently near the graveside. They might have been hired for the occasion like the undertakers. Neither of them spoke to Seńora Plarr, or even to one another, but of course that might have been a matter of professional etiquette. After the Mass in the cathedral they had come separately up to Charley Fortnum and introduced themselves.

“You are Seńor Fortnum, the Consul? I was such a great friend of poor Eduardo. This is my husband, Seńor Escobar.”

“My name is Seńora Vallejo. My husband was unable to come, but I could not bear to fail Eduardo, so I brought with me my friend Seńor Duran. Miguel, this is Seńor Fortnum, the British Consul whom those scoundrels…”

The name Miguel called up immediately in Charley Fortnum’s mind the image of the Guaraní as he squatted in the doorway of the hut, tending his gun with a smile, and then he thought of the bundle of rain-soaked clothes past which the parachutists carried him on a stretcher. One of his hands in passing had dangled down and touched a piece of wet material. He began to say, “May I introduce my wife…?” but Seńora Vallejo and her friend were already moving on. She held her handkerchief under her eyes-so that it looked rather like a yashmak-until her next social encounter. At least, Charley Fortnum thought, Clara does not pretend grief. It’s a kind of honesty.

The funeral, he thought, very much resembled two diplomatic cocktail parties he had attended in Buenos Aires. They were part of a series given for the departing British Ambassador. It was soon after his own appointment as Honorary Consul when he was still regarded with interest because he had picnicked with royalty among the ruins. People wanted to hear what the royals had talked about. This time the second party, with the same guests whom he had seen in the church, was held in the open air of the cemetery.

“My name is Doctor Saavedra,” a voice said. “You may remember we met once with Doctor Plarr-“

Charley Fortnum wanted to reply, Surely it was at the house of Mother Sanchez. I remember you well with a girl. I was with María, the one whom somebody stabbed.

“This is my wife,” he said, and Doctor Saavedra bowed with courtesy over her hand; her face must have been familiar to him, if only because of the birthmark on her forehead. He wondered how many of these people knew that Clara had been Plarr’s mistress.

“I must go now,” Doctor Saavedra said. “I have been asked to say a few words in honour of our poor friend.”

He moved toward the coffin, pausing on the way to shake hands and exchange a few words with Colonel Perez. Colonel Perez was in uniform and carried his cap in the crook of his arm. He had the air of being the most serious person present. Perhaps he was wondering how the doctor’s death would affect his career. A lot depended, of course, on the attitude of the British Embassy. A young man, Crichton, who was a new face to Charley Fortnum, had flown up from B. A. to represent the Ambassador (the First Secretary being in bed with flu). He stood beside Perez close to the coffin. You could estimate the social importance of a mourner by his closeness to the coffin, for the coffin represented the guest of honour. The Escobar’s were worming their way toward it, and Seńora Vallejo was almost near enough to put out a hand. Charley Fortnum with a crutch under his right arm stayed on the periphery of the smart company. He felt it was absurd to be there at all. He was an imposter. He only owed his position there because he had been mistaken for the American Ambassador.

Also on the periphery, but far removed from Charley Fortnum, stood Doctor Humphries. He too had the air of being out of place and knowing it. His proper habitat was the Italian Club, his proper neighbour the waiter from Naples, who feared he had the evil eye. When he first noticed Humphries Charley Fortnum had taken a step in his direction, but Humphries had backed hastily away. Charley Fortnum remembered telling Doctor Plarr, in some long distant past, that Humphries had cut him. “Lucky you,” Plarr had exclaimed. Those had been happy days, and yet all the while Plarr had been sleeping with Clara and Plarr’s child was growing in her body. He had loved Clara and Clara had been gentle and tender to him. All that was over. He had owed his happiness to Doctor Plarr. He took a furtive look at Clara. She was watching Saavedra who had begun to speak. She looked bored as though the subject of the eulogy was a stranger who did not interest her at all. Poor Plarr, he thought, he was deceived by her too.

“You were more than a doctor who healed our bodies,” Doctor Saavedra said, addressing his words directly to the coffin which was wrapped in a Union Jack that had been lent on request by Charley Fortnum. “You were a friend to each of your patients-even to the poorest among them. All of us know how unsparingly you worked in the barrio of the poor without recompense-from a sense of love and justice. What a tragic fate then it was that you, who had toiled so hard for the destitute, died at the hands of their so-called defenders.”

Good God, Charley Fortnum thought, can that be the story Colonel Perez is putting out?

“Your mother was born in Paraguay, once our heroic enemy, and it was with a machismo worthy of your maternal ancestors who gave their hearts’ blood for Lopez-not seeking whether his cause were good or ill-that you walked out to your death from the hut, where these false champions of the poor were gathered, in a last attempt to save their lives as well as your friend’s. You were shot down without mercy by a fanatic priest, but you won the day-your friend survived.”

Charley Fortnum looked across the open grave at Colonel Perez. His uncovered head was bowed; his hands were pressed to his sides; his feet were at the correct military angle of attention. He looked like a nineteenth century monument of soldierly grief while Doctor Saavedra continued to establish by his eulogy-was it about that they had spoken together? - the official version of Plarr’s death. Who would think to question it now? The speech would be printed verbatim in El Litoral and a resume would surely appear even in the Nación.

“Except for your murderers and their prisoner I was the last, Eduardo, to see you alive. Your enthusiasms were so much wider than your professional interests, and it was your love of literature which enriched our friendship. The last time we were together you had called me to your side-a strange reversal of the usual role of doctor and patient-to discuss the formation in this city of an Anglo-Argentinian cultural club, and with your usual modesty you invited me to be the first president. My friend, you spoke that night of how best to deepen the ties between the English and the South American communities. How little either of us knew that in a matter of days you would give your own life in that cause. You surrendered everything-your medical career, your appreciation of art, your capacity for friendship, the love you had grown to have for your adopted land, in the attempt to save those misguided men and your fellow countryman. I promise you with my hand on your coffin that the Anglo-Argentinian Club will live, baptized with the blood of a brave man.” Seńora Plarr was weeping, and so, more decoratively, were Seńora Vallejo and Seńora Escobar. “I am tired,” Charley Fortnum said, “it’s time to go home.”

“Yes, Charley,” Clara said. They began a slow walk toward their hired car. Somebody touched Fortnum’s arm. It was Herr Gruber.

Herr Gruber said, “Seńor Fortnum… I am so glad you are here… safe and…”

“Nearly sound,” Charley Fortnum said. He wondered how much Gruber knew. He wanted to get back to the shelter of the car. He said, “How is the shop? Doing well?”

“I shall have a lot of photographs to develop. Of the hut where they held you. Everyone is going out there to see it. I don’t think they always photograph the right hut. Seńora Fortnum, you must have had an anxious time.” He explained to Charley Fortnum, “Seńora Fortnum has always bought her sunglasses at my shop. I have some new designs in from Buenos Aires if she would care…”

“Yes. Yes. Next time we are in town. You must forgive us, Herr Gruber. The sun is very hot and I have stood too long.”

His ankle itched almost unbearably in its plaster case. They had told him at the hospital that Doctor Plarr had done a good job. In a matter of weeks he would be driving Fortnum’s Pride again. He had found the Land Rover standing in its old place under the avocados, a little battered, with one headlight gone and the radiator bent. Clara explained it had been borrowed by one of the police officers. “I shall complain to Perez,” he had said, supporting himself against the car while he pressed his hands tenderly upon a wounded plate.

“No, you must not do that, Charley. The poor man would be in trouble. I told him he could take it.” It wasn’t worth an argument on his first day home.

They had driven him straight back from the hospital through a landscape which seemed like the memory of a country he had left forever-the byroad which went to the Bergman orange-canning factory, the disused rail track of an abandoned camp which had once belonged to a Czech with an unpronounceable name. He counted the ponds as he passed-there ought to be four of them-he wondered how he ought to greet Clara.

There was no real greeting apart from a kiss on the cheek. He refused to go and lie down on the excuse that he had been on his back too long. He couldn’t bear the thought of the large double bed which Clara must so often have shared with Plarr when he was out farming (because of the servants they would have been afraid to disarrange the bed in a guest room). He had sat with his foot propped up on the verandah beside the dumbwaiter. He had been away less than a week, but it seemed a long slow year of separation, long enough for two characters to grow apart-he poured himself out a shipmaster’s measure of Long John. Looking up at Clara over the right measure, he said, “Of course they have told you?”

“Told me what, Charley?”

“Doctor Plarr is dead.”

“Yes. Colonel Perez came here. He told me.”

“The doctor was a good friend to you.”

“Yes, Charley. Are you comfortable like that? May I fetch you a pillow?” He thought that after all their love-making and deception it was hard Plarr had not earned a single tear. The Long John had an unfamiliar taste, he had become so accustomed to Argentinian whisky. He began to explain to Clara that it would be best if for the next few weeks he slept alone. In one of the guest rooms. The plaster round his ankle made him restless, he said, and she must sleep well-because of the child. She said yes, of course, she understood. It would be arranged.

Now as he shunted on his crutch away from the cemetery toward the hired car, a voice said to him, “Excuse me, Mr. Fortnum…” It was the young fellow Crichton from the Embassy. He said, “I wondered if I could come out to your camp this afternoon. The Ambassador has asked me… there are certain things he wants me to talk over with you…”

“You can have lunch with us,” Charley Fortnum said. “You will be very welcome,” he added, thinking that anyone, even a man from the Embassy, would help to preserve him from the solitude he would otherwise have to share with Clara.

“I am afraid… I would very much like to… but I have promised Seńora Plarr… and Father Galvao. If I could come about four o’clock. I am catching the evening plane to B A”

When he got back to the camp Charley Fortnum told Clara that he was too tired to eat. He would sleep a bit before Crichton came. Clara made him comfortable-she had been trained to make men comfortable as much as any hospital nurse. He tried not to show that the touch of her hand irritated him when she arranged the pillows. He felt his skin tighten when she kissed his cheek and he wanted to tell her not to trouble. A kiss was worth nothing from someone who was incapable of loving even her lover. And yet, he asked himself, what fault was it of hers? You don’t learn about love from a customer in a brothel. And because it was not her fault he must be careful never to show her what he felt. It would have been a lot simpler, he thought, if she had really loved Plarr. He could so easily picture how it would have been if he had found her heartbroken, the gentle way in which he would have comforted her. Phrases from romantic novels came to his head like “Dear, there is nothing to forgive.” But as he played with the fancy he remembered she had sold herself for a gaudy pair of sunglasses from Gruber’s.

The sun through the jalousies striped the floor of the guest room. One of his father’s hunting prints hung on the wall. A huntsman held a fox above the ravening hounds. He looked at the picture with disgust and turned his face away-he had never killed anything in his life, not even a rat.

The bed was comfortable enough, but after all the coffin with the blankets had not really been very hard-better than the bed in his nursery when he was a child. There was a deep quiet here, broken only by an occasional footstep from the kitchen region or the creak of a chair out on the verandah. There was no radio to announce the latest news, no quarrelling voices from an inner room. To be free, he discovered, was a very lonely thing. He could almost have wished the door to open, to have seen the priest come shyly in, carrying a bottle of Argentine whisky. He had felt an odd kinship with that priest.

There had been no ceremony at the priest’s funeral. He had been shovelled quickly away in unconsecrated ground, and Charley Fortnum resented that. If he had known about it in time he would have stood by the grave and said a few words like Doctor Saavedra, though he could not remember ever having made a speech in his life: all the same he could have found the courage in the heat of his indignation. He would have told them all, “The Father was a good man. I know he didn’t kill Plarr.” But his only audience, he supposed, would have been a couple of gravediggers and the driver of the police truck. He thought: at least I’ll find out where they stowed him and I’ll lay a few flowers there. Then he fell into a deep sleep of exhaustion.

Clara woke him because Crichton had arrived. She found his crutch and helped him on with his dressing gown, and he went out on to the verandah. He lowered himself down beside the dumbwaiter and said, “Have a Scotch.”

“It’s a bit early, isn’t it?” Crichton asked.

“It’s never too early for a drink.”

“Well, a very small one then. I was saying to Mrs. Fortnum what a terribly anxious time she must have had.” He put the glass down on a small table without taking any.

“Cheers,” Charley Fortnum said.

“Cheers.” Crichton took his glass up again with reluctance. Perhaps he had hoped to leave it untouched on the table until the canonical hour. “There are things the Ambassador wanted me to talk over with you, Mr. Fortnum. Of course I needn’t tell you how very, very worried we have all been.”

“I was a bit worried myself,” Charley Fortnum said.

“The Ambassador wants you to know we did everything in our power…”

“Yes. Yes. Of course.”

“Thank God things turned out all right.”

“Not everything. Doctor Plarr’s dead.”

“Yes. I didn’t mean…”

“And the priest too.”

“Well, he deserved what he got. He murdered Plarr.”

“Oh no, he didn’t.”

“You haven’t seen Colonel Perez’s report?”

“Colonel Perez is a bloody liar. It was the Para’s who shot Plarr.”

“There was a post mortem, Mr. Fortnum. They checked the bullets. One in the leg. Two in the head. They were not army bullets.”

“You mean the surgeon of the 9th Brigade checked them. You can tell the Ambassador this, Crichton, from me. I was in the next room when Plarr went out. I heard all that happened. Plarr went out to try to talk to Perez-he thought he might save all our lives. Father Rivas came to me. He said he had agreed to postpone the ultimatum. Then we heard a shot. He said, ‘They have shot Eduardo.’ He ran out.”

“And gave him the coup de grace,” Crichton said.

“Oh no, he didn’t. He left his gun where I was.”

“With his prisoner?”

“It was out of my reach. He had an argument with Aquino in the other room-and with his wife. I heard Aquino say, ‘Kill him first.’ And I heard his reply…”

“Yes?”

“He laughed. I heard him laugh. It surprised me because he wasn’t a man who laughed. A shy sort of giggle sometimes. Not what you’d call a laugh. He said, ‘Aquino, for a priest there are always priorities.’ I don’t know why, but I started to say an ‘Our Father,’ and I’m not a man who prays. I only got as far as ‘thy Kingdom’ when there was another shot. No. He didn’t kill Plarr. He hadn’t even reached him. They carried me past the bodies. They were ten feet apart. I suppose if Perez had been there he would have thought of rearranging them. To make the distance right for a coup de grace. Please tell the Ambassador that”

“Of course I’ll tell him what your theory is.”

“It’s not a theory. The Para’s scored all three deaths-Plarr, the priest and Aquino. It’s what they call good shooting.”

“They saved your life.”

“Oh yes. Or Aquino’s bad aim. You see he had only his left hand. He came nearly up to the coffin I was on before he fired. He said, ‘They’ve shot Leon.’ He was too excited to keep the gun steady, but I don’t suppose he would have missed a second time. Even with his left hand.”

“Why didn’t Perez get your story?”

“He didn’t ask me for it. Plarr said once that Perez always has to think about his career.”

“I’m glad they got Aquino anyway. He was a murderer-or wanted to be.”

“He’d seen his friend shot. You have to remember that. They’d been through a lot together. And he was angry with me. I made friends with him and then I tried to escape. You know he fancied himself as a poet. He used to recite me bits of his poems and I pretended to like them, though they didn’t make much sense to me. Anyway, I’m glad the Para’s were satisfied with three deaths. Those other two-Pablo and Marta-they were only poor people who got caught up in things.”.

“They had more luck than they deserved. They needn’t have been caught up in things.”

“Perhaps it was love of a kind. People do get caught up by love, Crichton. Sooner or later.”

“It’s not a very good excuse.”

“No, I suppose not. Not in the Foreign Service anyway.”

Crichton looked at his watch. Perhaps he was satisfied now that the proper hour had been reached. He raised his glass. He said, “I suppose you’ll be out of action for quite a while.”

“I haven’t much to do here anyway,” Charley Fortnum said.

“Exactly.” Crichton took another drink.

“Don’t tell me the Ambassador wants another report on the mate?”

“No, no. We just want you to get well in your own good time. As a matter of fact the Ambassador is writing to you officially at the end of the week, but he wanted me to have a word with you first. After all you’ve been through, official letters always seem-well, so official. You know how it is. They are written to go on the files. Top copy to London. You have to be so-cautious. Someone at home might possibly look at the files one day.”

“What’s the Ambassador got to be cautious about?”

“Well, for more than a year, London has been pressing us for economies. Do you know they are cutting us down ten percent on official entertainment and we have to show chits now for the least expenditure? And yet these damn MPs keep on coming out and expect to be invited to lunch at least. Some of them even think they rate a cocktail party. Now you, you know, you’ve had a pretty long inning. If you were in the Service you would have passed the retiring age quite a while ago. In a way the office forgot about you-until this kidnapping came along. You’ll be much safer-out of the front line.”

“I see. That’s it. It’s a bit of a blow, Crichton.”

“It’s not as if you ever got more than your expenses,”

“I could import a car every two years.”

“That’s another thing-as an Honorary Consul you hadn’t really the right.”

“The Customs here don’t distinguish. And everyone does it. The Paraguayan, the Bolivian, the Uruguayan-“

“Not everyone, Fortnum. We try to keep our hands clean at the British Embassy.”

“Perhaps that’s why you’ll never understand South America.”

“I don’t want to bear only bad news,” Crichton said. “There was something the Ambassador asked me to tell you-hi strictest confidence. Have I your promise?”

“Of course. Who would I tell?” There isn’t even Plarr, he thought.

“The Ambassador proposes to recommend you for an honour in the List next New Year.”

“An honour,” Charley Fortnum repeated incredulously.

“An O. B. E.”

“Why, that’s really kind of him, Crichton,” Charley Fortnum said. “I never thought he liked me…”

“You won’t tell anyone, will you? In theory you know all these things have to be approved by the Queen.”

“The Queen? Yes. I understand. I hope it won’t make me too proud,” Charley Fortnum said. “You know I guided some members of the Royal family once-round the ruins. They were a very nice couple. We had a picnic like I had with the American Ambassador, but they didn’t expect me to drink Coca-Cola. I like that family. They do a wonderful job.”

“And you’ll tell no one-except your wife, of course. You can trust her.”

“I don’t think she’d understand anyway,” Charley Fortnum said. During the night he dreamt he was walking up a very long straight road with Doctor Plarr. On either side the lagunas lay like pewter plates which grew more grey every moment in the evening light. Fortnum’s Pride had broken down and they had to reach the camp before it was dark. He was anxious. He wanted to run, but he had hurt his leg. He said, “I don’t want to keep the Queen waiting.” “What’s the Queen doing at the camp?” Doctor Plarr asked. “She’s going to give me the O. B. E.” Doctor Plarr laughed. “Order of the Bad Egg,” he said. Charley Fortnum woke with a sense of desolation, and the images wound themselves quickly up like a strip of Scotch tape, so that all he could remember was the long road and Plarr laughing. He lay on his back in the narrow guest-room bed, and he felt his age weigh heavily on his body like a blanket. He wondered how many more years he would have to lie alone like that-it seemed a waste of time. A lamp passed the window. He knew it was carried by the capataz going to work; in that case it must be nearly dawn. The lamplight moved along the wall and lit his crutch which looked like a big carved initial letter against the wall, and then dimmed and passed away. He knew exactly what the lamp would be lighting now-first the avocados, then the sheds and afterward the irrigation ditches; from here and there the men would be gathering for work in the gunmetal light. He swung his good leg out of the bed and reached for the crutch. After Crichton had gone he had told Clara the bad news of his retirement. He could see it meant nothing to her. In the eyes of a girl from Mother Sanchez’ house he would seem always to be a rich man. He had said nothing about the O. B. E. As he had told Crichton, she wouldn’t understand, and he feared that her indifference might make it seem less important even to himself. And yet he wished he could have told her. He wanted to break the wall of silence which was growing up between them. “The Queen is going to give me an honour,” he could hear himself saying to her, for the words “the Queen” would surely mean something even to her. He had often told her about his picnic with royalty among the rums. He moved on his crutch diagonally like a crab down the passage between the sporting prints, then put his hand out in the dark to open the door of the bedroom, but the door wasn’t there and he moved forward into what he felt certain was an empty room. There wasn’t even the faintest sound of breathing to break the silence. He might have been walking alone through another ruin. To make sure he passed his hand back and forth over the pillow, and he felt the coldness and cleanness of a bed which had not been slept in. He sat down on the edge of the bed and thought: she’s gone away. Right away. Who with? The capataz perhaps?—or one of the workmen? why not? They were more her own kind than he was. She could talk to them as she couldn’t talk to him. He had been alone a great many years before he found her and there was no reason to be afraid of the few years likely to be left. He had managed then, he assured himself, and he could manage again. Perhaps Humphries would no longer cut him in the street after his name had appeared among the New Year Honours. They would eat goulash again at the Italian Club and he would invite Humphries to the camp; they would sit together by the dumbwaiter, but Humphries was not a drinking man. He felt a pang of pain because Plarr was dead. By her absence she seemed to be betraying Plarr as well as himself. He felt a little angry with her for Plarr’s sake. Surely she could have been faithful for a short while to a dead man-it would have been like wearing something black for a week or two. He didn’t hear her come in, and he was startled when she spoke. She said, “Charley, what are you doing here?” He said, “It’s my room, isn’t it? Where have you been?” “I was afraid of being alone. I went to sleep with María.” (María was the maid.) “What were you afraid of? Ghosts?” “I was afraid for the child. I dreamed I was strangling the child.” So she cares for something, he thought. It was like a glimmer of light at the end of his darkness. If she is capable of that… If she isn’t all deception. She said, “I had a friend at Seńora Sanchez’ house who strangled her baby.” “Sit here, Clara.” He took her hand and pulled her gently down beside him. “I thought you did not want me to be near you.” She said the sad truth like a fact of no importance, as another woman might say, “I thought you preferred me in red.” “I have no one else, Clara.” “Shall I put on the light?” “No. It will be daylight soon. Just now I saw the capataz going by to work. How is the baby, Clara?” He knew he had hardly mentioned the baby since he came home. He felt as though he were relearning a language he hadn’t spoken since a childhood in another country. “I think he is all right. But sometimes he is so quiet I feel afraid.” “We shall have to find you a good doctor,” he said, speaking mechanically without thought. She made a sound like a dog does when you tread on its paw, an exclamation of shock-or was it pain? “I am sorry… I didn’t mean…” It was still too dark to see her. He raised his hand and found her face. She was crying. “Clara.” “I am sorry, Charley. I am tired.” “Did you love him, Clara?” “No… no… I love you, Charley.” “There’s nothing wrong in love, Clara. It happens. It doesn’t much matter who with. We get caught up,” he told her, and remembering what he had said to young Crichton, he added, “we get kidnapped,” attempting a feeble joke to reassure her, “by mistake.” “He never loved me,” she said. “To him I was only a girl from Seńora Sanchez’.” “You are wrong.” It was like pleading a cause; he might have been attempting to bring two young people to a closer understanding. “He wanted me to kill the baby.” “You mean in your dream?” “No. No. He wanted it killed. He really wanted it. I knew then he could never love me.” “Perhaps he’d begun, Clara. Some of us… we are a bit slow… it’s not so easy to love… we make a lot of mistakes.” He went on for the sake of saying something, “I hated my father… I did not much like my wife… But they were not really bad people… that was only one of my mistakes. Some of us learn to read quicker than others… Ted and I were both bad at the alphabet. I am not so good at it even now. When I think of all the mistakes there must be on those files in London,” he rambled on, making a little human noise in the darkness in the hope that it might reassure her. “I had a brother I loved, Charley. One day he wasn’t there any more. He got up to go cane-cutting, but no one in the fields saw him. He went away just like that. Sometimes at Seńora Sanchez’ house I used to think, Perhaps he will come here looking for a girl and then he will find me and we will go away together.” There seemed at last to be a sort of communication between them and he tried hard to keep the thin thread intact. “What shall we call the child, Clara?” “If he is a boy-would you like Charley?” “One Charley’s enough in the family. I think we will call him Eduardo. You see I loved Eduardo in a way. He was young enough to be my son.” He put his hand tentatively on her shoulder and he felt her body shaken with tears. He wanted to comfort her, but he had no idea how to do it. He said, “He really loved you in his way, Clara. I don’t mean anything wrong.” “It is not true, Charley.” “Once I heard him say he was jealous of me.” “I never loved him, Charley.” Her lie meant nothing to him now at all. It was contradicted too plainly by her tears. In an affair of this kind it was the right thing to lie. He felt a sense of immense relief. It was as though, after what seemed an interminable time of anxious waiting in the anteroom of death, someone came to him with the good news that he had never expected to hear. Someone he loved would survive. He realized that never before had she been so close to him as she was now.