The Captain and the Enemy

  (3)

  It was a chance, or so I thought it to be at the time, that I fell in with Mr Quigly the very next morning. When I woke the Captain’s bed was empty, and on the chair beside it lay the letter to Liza still unsealed and unstamped, perhaps because he meant to continue it after his work – what work? – the next evening or not send it at all. I was only momentarily tempted to read it – I had read so many of his letters recently that I could almost guess the contents of this one. It would surely contain the same unconvincing sentimentalities. All the same I felt a little proud of myself for refraining. It seemed to reduce a little my sense of guilt for my great lie.

  I had hardly left the hotel, with no other purpose than to pass the time, when Mr Quigly appeared walking towards me. As the four banks were within a hundred yards the coincidence was easily explicable – in fact it was explained in just that way by Mr Quigly. ‘Been drawing some expenses in red ink,’ he said, ‘and I’ve included you among them.’

  ‘Me? I don’t understand.’

  ‘I would like to pay you a very small advance.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘You can be of help with a news story I’m writing for my paper.’

  ‘I don’t see how.’

  ‘As one journalist to another.’

  ‘Has this something to do with’ (I hesitated at the name) ‘Mr Smith?’

  ‘Not directly.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I told him, ‘I can’t help you,’ and I walked away in a thoroughly bad mood without taking his money.

  (4)

  As I write this account I begin to realize that there is one great gap in my story. Surely I should have felt some grief for Liza’s death. She had played her role as substitute mother very correctly over all the years after my unexpected arrival with the Captain – with what had seemed a natural affection and even a natural irritation on occasion – and with far more skill than my aunt had ever shown. I could make no complaints of the life I had led with her. The Captain believed she had needed a child to complete her happiness and to ease the loneliness he assumed she must feel during his many absences. Perhaps he had done wrong – perhaps he had only added a responsibility. How can one ever be sure of what another feels? Certainly she had never been possessive and even as a child I may have appreciated that, if only half consciously. It was this attitude of hers which enabled me to cut loose without scruples when my time for independence came, though I continued to play the comedy of a dutiful son by visiting her once a week – if nothing more attractive presented itself. Now I have to face the truth of that gap in my story. When they told me at the hospital that she was dead I felt no more emotion than when I had left her behind after a weekly visit to go to my bed-sitting-room in Soho. If there was any emotion it was the emotion of relief, a duty finished.

  One object she did abandon in the hospital – it was a letter addressed only with the name of the Captain, for she had probably forgotten the Apt number which neither of us understood. I nearly opened it, but a cold sort of reason prevented me. I was going to the Captain: I couldn’t present him with an open letter and I thought that handing the letter to him might be a way of breaking the news of her death and even excusing my use of his cheque to join him. But it was too late now and I had torn it up unread and put the scraps into a dustbin outside the hospital.

  (5)

  It was rash of me to have dismissed Mr Quigly so abruptly, for I was bored with my long solitary days in this city to which I was a stranger. I would even have welcomed the return of Pablo and, if the Captain was supposed by the mysterious Colonel Martínez to have taken the office of my guardian, why was he now absent so soon after his return? Anyway what on earth was the purpose of a bodyguard? I could feel no danger among the international banks when I changed a little of my money at one of them – or rather the remains of Liza’s. Bodyguards and banks didn’t seem to belong to the same world as mine or the Captain’s. Perhaps only Mr Quigly would be at home among them both.

  As it happened I wasn’t to be left alone for very long. The Captain even apologized for his absence when he walked into our room. ‘There were a few problems to be solved,’ he told me. ‘Now we can enjoy ourselves with a free mind and I will show you some of the beauties of Panama.’

  ‘Please not the banks. Not the slums. I’ve seen too much of both. Are there any beauties?’

  ‘The beauty of ruins,’ he told me. ‘They do teach us a lesson.’

  ‘What lesson?’

  ‘To tell you the truth – I’m not quite sure what.’ The phrase ‘to tell you the truth’ was a key phrase with the Captain. How often Liza and I had exchanged ironic looks at the sound of it, for truth and the Captain were not easily paired. All the same, perhaps in this case he was looking for a true answer, since he stood a long while in respectful silence among the seaside ruins of the old city which Sir Henry Morgan had destroyed more than three hundred years before.

  ‘You call these beautiful,’ I said to break the silence. ‘What are they but a lot of broken stones?’ I had never before known him to be as silent as this.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘You think these ruins beautiful? Of course I suppose they are a lot better than all those skyscraper banks, but beautiful?’

  ‘Think,’ the Captain said, ‘of all the work in those days which went into making these buildings into ruins. What a waste of time it was. Now I could have broken up this church in a matter of seconds – if it is a church.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘From the air with a couple of bombs.’

  ‘If you had a plane. Sir Henry Morgan hadn’t.’

  ‘As a matter of fact’ (it was not ‘to tell you the truth’ this time) ‘I do have a little plane. Second-hand of course.’ Was the word ‘fact’ the same to the Captain as the word ‘truth’ and just as little reliable, I wondered, and I said nothing in reply.

  ‘I prefer Drake to Morgan,’ the Captain continued, gazing, as it seemed to me, with a certain gloom at the ruins. ‘Drake got the gold and killed a few Spaniards, but he didn’t destroy a city. Why, I can show you the Spanish treasure house in Portobello exactly the same as it was in his day.’

  ‘But what about your plane?’

  ‘Oh, forget it. I didn’t mean to tell you about the plane. It just slipped out. No importance. A silly hobby of mine. A man has to have a hobby.’

  A plane to me seemed a very expensive hobby and I was left wondering how he had paid for it. Had he again signed a bit of paper?

  What he had called a slip proved that evening to be rather more important than I expected, when our conversation turned in a very dangerous direction. All had gone well at the start. The past was an area of safety, and we seemed to be harmlessly engaged in discovering each other in a friendly way after the years of absence.

  I even probed just a little way into those dubious years and the unexplained visits of the police which I so well remembered. ‘Do you remember that time when you were away for months and then you came back with a beard?’

  He laughed. ‘Yes, I had them foxed all right that time.’

  ‘And then there was a report in the Telegraph …’

  ‘What a memory you have.’

  ‘Well, you see, some years ago I wanted to be a writer and I wrote a lot of what had happened down. After Liza’s accident I found the manuscript and read it. About that robbery and the man the police were looking for.’

  ‘“A man with a military bearing”. Yes, I read that report too. It tickled me no end. They wouldn’t say the same of me now would they, and yet in my way I’m a fighting man again. Those were good days even when they were a bit difficult. I worked with three others then. They weren’t reliable, and they cheated when they could, but I had no choice of partners. I had to take what I could. I wanted to get Liza out of that dreary basement and give her a proper home, and it hurts me to think she will have to go back there from the hospital.’

  I tried to interrupt the risky train of his thoughts. ‘So
you were that man in the Telegraph?’

  ‘Of course I was.’

  ‘And they wanted you for theft?’

  ‘When you are talking of nearly three thousand pounds’ worth of jewels it’s not theft, it’s robbery.’

  ‘You were a robber then?’

  ‘Like Drake before me. Drake not Morgan. I didn’t destroy cities. I never did anybody any real harm.’

  ‘What about the jeweller?’

  ‘Why, he came to no harm at all. We were very careful when we tied him up. He was doing badly and he must have been glad of the insurance money. Those fellows are always very well insured. Anyway it was something I had to do.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I had my responsibilities. Liza and you.’

  ‘Did Liza know?’

  ‘She’s a clever girl and I think perhaps she guessed a lot. I didn’t have many secrets from her. Only small ones to stop her worrying. All I ever want is for her to be happy and one day I swear she will be.’

  ‘Why did you keep on changing your name?’

  ‘It used to be more of a joke than serious in those days. Even when I was a small boy I always wanted to make fun of coppers. I don’t like coppers.’

  I asked with real interest this time, ‘What name did you have when you were born?’

  ‘My name was Brown.’

  I said with amusement, ‘And now it’s Smith. You are getting closer to the truth, the simple truth.’

  ‘Well, this time it’s my friends who have chosen the name for me. They wanted something they could remember. They found Carver difficult, but Smith is a bit difficult too – to pronounce. Latins don’t like the th.’

  He got up to pour two more whiskies. ‘I’m talking much more than I should. It’s because I’ve been so bloody alone for too long.’

  ‘Who are those friends of yours?’

  ‘Good fellows. I try to help them, but we try not to see too much of each other. We are on to something of real importance now and each one of us works most of the time alone. Except for those who do the real fighting …’

  ‘To get those mule trains?’

  ‘That’s right – the mule trains.’

  ‘And is Mr Quigly concerned?’

  ‘Leave Quigly out of it. I wouldn’t trust him far.’

  ‘I get the impression that neither of you trusts the other. Why are you friends?’

  ‘I told you – not friends. It’s a game. A serious game – like chess or backgammon. We swap pieces – unimportant pieces – though of course everything in a sense can lead to something important. For his friends or mine. Come along. Finish your whisky. It’s time for bed – I mean the sofa. I’ll just add a line or two to Liza. It’s a habit I never want to lose.’

  I lay down, but I didn’t sleep for a long while. I lay and watched the Captain writing a line and then stopping, writing another line and stopping, more like a child doing a difficult exercise than a man corresponding with a woman he loved, a woman who was dead.

  (6)

  It was his mention of the plane which had intrigued me most and I thought that talking about the plane might help to delay the moment when some chance would reveal to him that Liza was dead. It might be that even Mr Quigly could be of assistance there. When I woke the Captain had gone again with only a small note left behind to tell me to charge my meals, or if possible anything I might want to buy, to the hotel. ‘I shall be back before dark. Just a short fuliginous flight.’ He included a hundred dollars in the envelope, and I was reminded of the mysterious remittances which in my childhood would come to Liza after the coded signal had sounded at the door. I felt no gratitude – I was even infuriated, for I had no wish to spend his money. I would much rather earn it myself in some way, even from Mr Quigly. I had no address, for the card had given only his telephone number. Even the Captain’s misuse of that absurd word fuliginous irritated me.

  In my anger I ordered the biggest breakfast I could think of on the telephone and left half of it uneaten. Then I went down into the hall of the hotel and saw Mr Quigly rising from a seat beside the door. ‘Why, what a happy coincidence,’ he said, ‘I just dropped in here to take a little rest. In this heat … Is your father at home?’

  ‘A hotel is not a home,’ I said. I was still in a black mood. I added, ‘He’s on what he calls a short flight.’

  ‘Ah, those flights of his. It’s quite difficult sometimes to get hold of him.’

  ‘Do you want to get hold of him?’

  ‘Oh, I always like to have a chat with him. He has ideas of his own which interest me. Even when we disagree.’

  I showed him the Captain’s note. ‘What on earth does fuliginous mean?’ Mr Quigly asked.

  ‘I knew once, but I’ve forgotten. I don’t carry a dictionary around. Anyway a dictionary wouldn’t help. I think he cares only for the sound. He gets the meanings wrong.’

  I told Mr Quigly the story which the Devil had told me of the prison camp and the half-destroyed dictionary. ‘He doesn’t often use words like that when he speaks, but they seem to get control when he writes.’

  ‘Like a poet?’

  ‘Not much of a poet.’ But then suddenly I thought, can it be from the Captain I have somehow inherited this irritating desire to be a writer? It certainly wasn’t from the Devil or from my mother, and I began to feel a certain shame that I might be betraying to Mr Quigly one who had perhaps in a sense fathered me. Didn’t I a bit resemble, in my desire to find words, the Captain in his perpetual search for the mules which carried gold?

  Mr Quigly interrupted my thoughts. ‘You know I was half planning to look you up,’ he said. ‘I was in touch with my paper yesterday and they have agreed in principle’ (he emphasized the word principle) ‘that I take you on as a stringer – for six hundred dollars a month payable on the first of the month – the arrangement to be terminated by either of us at any time without notice.’

  ‘I don’t understand. For doing what?’

  ‘Oh, little stories will probably come your way which can fit into the end of a column. Sometimes I have to go off for a few days and then I would ask you to keep an eye on things. In a place like this a story can suddenly break. Panama is a curious place. A little capitalist state with a socialist general, split in two by the Americans. You and I as Englishmen can understand the difficulties which might arise here. It’s as though England were split between the north and the south with the Americans in between. Somehow the Americans can’t understand the resentment, because they bring in a lot of money. Panama would be poor without them, they expect to be loved, but they have enemies instead. Money makes enemies as well as friends.’

  I noticed not for the first time that he spoke certain words (‘American’ was one) with something of a Yankee ring. ‘You are English?’ I asked.

  ‘You can see my passport,’ he said. ‘Born in Brighton. You can’t be more English than that.’

  ‘It’s only,’ I apologized, for after all wasn’t he trying to help me? ‘that sometimes your accent …’

  ‘An Atlantic accent,’ he admitted. ‘You see I spent years in the States learning my trade.’

  ‘Trade?’

  ‘Being a financial correspondent, so now here I am in a country with a hundred and twenty-three banks, and a socialist general in charge. It could turn a financial correspondent into a political correspondent – why, even a war correspondent – at the drop of a hat. It would be very useful then for my paper to have two neutrals reporting from here.’

  ‘Why don’t you recruit the Captain? He’s had a lot of experience around the world.’

  ‘What captain?’

  ‘It’s a name we always gave him – I mean my father.’

  ‘Oh, he’s busy enough – with his business – whatever it is. And his plane. Do you know by the way where he keeps his plane?’

  ‘At the airport I suppose.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. It was a silly question. I just never happened to see it around. Of course there are two airports. Th
e national and the international, and I generally find myself using the international.’

  ‘So you want me to ask him?’

  ‘No, no, forget it. It was just idle curiosity. Well, to be truthful, not altogether idle. In my trade it can always happen that I need a small plane. I can pay well – I mean of course my paper can pay well, and there are so few private planes to be found around here.’

  ‘Have you asked him?’

  ‘One day I shall if I really feel the need, and I’m pretty sure he would always be ready to help me. After all he’s a fellow Englishman, and in these parts I would rather trust an Englishman than a Yankee.’

  ‘Why? If you are working for them.’

  ‘Oh I don’t mean the fellows on my paper, but journalism isn’t a simple business in these parts. A good story can sometimes be a bit dangerous. There are people who mightn’t want it published so that in a way it’s comforting to have another Englishman …’

  Our conversation ‘in a way’ seemed to be moving in circles and I found that, for some reason, I didn’t believe a word that he was saying. I think Mr Quigly spotted my mistrust. He said, ‘Here I am talking a lot of nonsense to you instead of going about my proper business. I have a lot to do today.’

  ‘And what today is your business?’

  ‘A story of course, it’s always a story. If you don’t have a new story for them nearly every week they feel you are not worth paying. Sometimes I must admit that it’s as well to invent one.’

  I could well understand his reasoning, for wasn’t it the way I had obtained my first job? Perhaps this was the first time I felt the possibility of a certain companionship with Mr Quigly. I would have liked, if he had been more specific, to help him. I took a step towards the desk to leave my key and I heard his voice behind me, ‘Well, I’ll be off. See you again soon,’ but when I turned he was already gone, vanished, though not into thin air, for the air of Panama was damp and broody with the daily rain to come.

  (7)

  ‘I’ve something to show you,’ the Captain told me. He had cut himself shaving and he leant close to the mirror in order to examine the wound. I was reminded of that occasion years ago when he had slit himself open in removing a beard.