‘You should have kept that old beard of yours,’ I said, ‘then you wouldn’t need to shave now.’
‘That was years and years ago and anyway Liza didn’t like the beard. When I came back, she told me I looked a different man, a man she didn’t know.’
‘I don’t think it was the beard she minded.’
‘I think you are right. But I’m surprised you noticed at that age.’
‘She was afraid the police would catch you without it. If you shaved.’
‘Right again. But things are very different now. I’m not dealing with the English coppers. They are used to simple things like a murder or a jewel theft. The people here can’t be deceived by a beard – or a haircut. I have to be a great deal more careful than that. Everything here is politics.’
The Captain turned away from the mirror and said, ‘Thank God, I’m not in danger of prison here. I’m only in danger of death.’
‘Good heavens, why?’
‘What on earth is there to worry about in death? Death is unavoidable anyway, so why should I care? And if all goes well, when I go at last, I’ll leave Liza a rich woman.’
‘She never wanted to be rich.’
‘Oh, cut out that word rich. I want her to be secure, that’s all – if something happens to me.’
My heart sank whenever he spoke of Liza, for he would have to learn some day that she was dead. Once again I regretted not telling him of her death at the start.
‘I’m playing for higher stakes here,’ he continued between strokes of the razor, ‘than the odd thousand pounds of jewels, so of course the penalties are a lot higher. At least for those who think that death’s a higher penalty than prison. But I know what a prison is like. I had enough of one in the war. Damn it, I’ve cut myself again. Give me my hemo stick. Why, I’d never have got out of that German prison camp if I had thought a prison better than death.’
‘So that story’s true?’ I asked.
‘Of course it’s true. Why?’
‘My father thought a lot of your stories were lies.’
‘Oh it was the Devil who liked to lie, not me. And I did win you at backgammon not chess.’
‘And all that story of escaping across the Pyrenees and the Spanish monks?’
‘How else could I have taught you the bit of Spanish you know, and how would I have got on here without it?’
‘And all those mules?’
‘Today,’ he said, and he turned solemnly away from the mirror, lifting his razor much as a priest lifts the Host, ‘I’m going to show you one of the mules in its own stable. You and I will be the only ones who know where the stable is – except of course a few of my real friends who will never, I hope, betray me.’ He wiped the razor clean and faced me again. ‘It’s a big secret,’ he said. ‘You are one of my real friends, aren’t you?’
Could I be blamed for giving him the answer, ‘Yes, of course,’ for if he was not my friend, who, literally on earth, was my friend now that Liza was dead?
(8)
We took the Captain’s car – a not very expensive Renault – and drove away from the city, out beyond the banks and the slums – unchecked into the American Zone, past all the golfers and the barracks and the churches – the Captain named a few of the churches as we went by them – the Coco Solo Community Church, the Cross Roads Bible Church, the Nazarene, the Latter Day Saints, the Four Square Gospel – ‘more than sixty of them,’ he told me confirming Pablo’s mathematics, ‘though not so many as the banks.’
‘Coco Solo,’ I protested, thinking of Coca-Cola, ‘you must have invented that.’
‘Not invented, but perhaps I pointed to the wrong building. It may have been the Jehovah Witnesses or the First Isthian. A very religious people, the Yankees. I forgot to show you the Argosy Book Stall. That is really unique. The only bookshop in the Zone. Of course with so much religion, not to speak of military duties, they have very little time to read.’
We drove left out of the Zone just as unchecked as we had gone in and then turned – I was going to write north, but points of the compass in Panama can be confusing even to a geographer. Who for example would guess that the Canal runs from the Atlantic to the Pacific more or less west to east? All I can remember now of our drive was a great hoarding by the road we took which exhibited the plan of a town to be built apparently one day by the Bank of Boston and not yet begun. There were only a number of light standards along cemented roads which led nowhere except to a huddle of huts on the edge of the Pacific.
‘Here,’ the Captain said, ‘we turn right – and I would like you to forget where we are,’ he added quickly as he bumped the car over a ditch and into a mass of grass and bushes shoulder high. We came out from them into a short runway which even to my amateur eye looked the worse for long wear.
‘There she is,’ the Captain proclaimed with an unmistakable note of pride as he stopped the car and pointed at a small plane parked on the rough ground.
‘She looks a bit old,’ I remarked.
‘Thirteen years, but she’s safe enough. If only they let her alone.’ He was silent for quite a while and I thought that perhaps he was brooding on ‘they’, whoever ‘they’ were, but I was wrong. He broke the silence. ‘You mustn’t mention her when you write to her.’
I felt entangled by all the ‘theys’ and ‘hers’. I asked, ‘Mention who?’
‘The plane of course. She’d be worried.’
Can a plane worry? I thought.
He sat a while silent at the wheel and I was afraid to break the silence, and silence in my situation was safer than words.
At last he spoke. ‘She’ll be all right.’
‘The doctor said …’ I began, but then I realized that this time it was the plane he meant, not Liza. Luckily it seemed that he hadn’t caught my words, those dangerous words which might have opened the door and let the truth in. He said, ‘I check her after every flight. It’s not that I’m afraid of anything wrong, but I can’t afford to let the others down.’
‘The others?’
He didn’t hear me, for his mind had already switched in another direction. ‘You’ve written to her and told her you’re here – safe?’
‘Oh yes, I’ve written,’ I said, for obviously this time he wasn’t talking about the plane.
‘When did you learn to fly?’ I asked him.
‘It was when I got back to England. I was fed up with the bloody infantry, but then the war came to an end just as I was passing my tests. I did no real flying. I never thought it would be of use until I came here. But in these parts I found I wanted a plane.’
‘What for?’
‘To be of real use to my friends. They needed a plane. To carry things which they badly want where you can’t go by road. Would you like a spin?’
Looking at the thirteen-year-old second-hand plane I would have dearly liked to say ‘No’, but I hadn’t the courage and I nodded instead.
As we approached the plane it seemed, at every step I took, to become older and more fragile. There could have been at most room for three apart from the pilot, but as we came close to it the Captain paused and took a step back. He was gazing at the plane with reverence as though it were some sacred object which might grant his prayers, or as a man might look at a woman who has aged by his side but still holds his admiration by the way she has skilfully dealt with time. He said, ‘Do you know what I would have liked to do for her?’
‘No. What?’
‘I would have liked to paint her wings just like they paint the buses here. You’ve seen them go by in the street with their coloured landscapes, even with madonnas you could pray to. Not that I’m a believer, but think how pretty she would look.’
‘Why don’t you paint her then?’
‘Oh, it would never do. She’d be too identifiable. Perhaps one day I might when I retire from all this and don’t use her for work any more. I can just see Liza sitting up there in the pilot’s seat looking out at the painted trees on the wings or standing beside us do
wn here, saying a prayer for us to the Madonna. There would be a landscape on one wing and a madonna on the other.’
‘You say retire – retire from what?’ But to that question he gave me no answer.
‘We might have one spin together just for the fun of it,’ he said. ‘There’s no one around to see us take off,’ and in spite of my fears we did take off after many bumps.
I shall remember our flight very clearly – far more clearly than the events I have recorded earlier, which are often flawed by their touches of imagination. Over the forest of Darién we went in silence, with the deep green carpet unbroken below, without so much as a small tear in the surface. Once he nodded his head – east? west? south? impossible to say in the confused geography of Panama – and he remarked, ‘Over there you can see Colombia. Where all this began,’ but I had no idea of what he intended by ‘all this’.
We reached the Atlantic and then we turned and dropped low over a small village by the sea. ‘Nombre de Dios,’ the Captain told me. I could see one old cannon lying in the grass and a scurry of retreating villagers who must have been unused to planes, for only a helicopter could have landed there.
‘Where Drake’s buried,’ I said.
‘No. His body’s off Portobello further up.’
‘But there was a poem I learnt at school. “Slung atween the round shot in Nombre de Dios Bay.”’
‘Poets never get things right. Drake’s buried deep down in the water off Portobello, near where the Spaniards stored their gold.’
We headed back then towards the Pacific and for a long while not a single word was said. I wondered where his thoughts might be wandering, but as we began our descent I learnt at least something of the route they had taken, and it was to me a very dangerous one.
We were in sight of the ruins when he spoke first. ‘I’m anxious about Liza. There should have been another letter.’
‘The post to Panama is very slow.’
‘Not that slow. Sometimes two weeks perhaps. If anything went wrong do they have my address?’
I hesitated. ‘Who do you mean by they?’
‘The doctors of course, the nurses.’
We were passing over the great Bridge of the Americas and a huddle of ships were waiting to enter the Canal. ‘Yes,’ I told him. ‘They have it.’ Apt something or other I thought, for I could no longer remember the number.
I felt I was drawing perilously near the end of the road of lies which I had been so recklessly treading. I said, ‘I’ll telegraph a friend to inquire if you like.’
‘Yes, do that.’
The trouble was that I had no friend who knew enough to aid me in my deceit. It even occurred to me that I might ask aid of Mr Quigly. It was for more time that I was fighting, time to free myself somehow from my dependence on the Captain.
The plane was bumping over the rough turf of its hideout before he spoke again. ‘Do it quickly. Do it as soon as you get to the hotel.’
‘I’ll go straight to the post office.’
‘No need for that. There are always queues there. Send it from the hotel.’
My fury mounted – fury at my own cowardice. Anger muttered in my stomach all the way to the hotel in the way a kettle on a gas ring mutters as it approaches the boiling point. I felt I wasn’t trusted and that infuriated me all the more because I knew very well that I wasn’t trustworthy. Why should I be? I defended myself. Did a man who had been wanted so often by the police at home for his misdeeds and was now engaged in God knows what criminal enterprise in this strange little country of banks and poverty deserve any trust himself?
At the hotel he led me to the counter and commanded a telegraph form and then stood over me as I attempted to compose. I felt I could trust the English post office not to return an undelivered telegram all the way to Panama, but what name to put on it? All the Captain’s aliases came first to my mind and blocked the imagination: Victor, Carver, Cardigan, Smith …
The Captain was impatient. ‘Surely you know someone? Have you no friends in London?’
‘Browne,’ I wrote, as I remembered his own original name, and Browne with an e seemed to make the name more plausible. I added the number and street where I had my studio rooms. The message asked ‘Browne’ to call at the hospital and send news of Liza’s health to me at the hotel. The Captain was still looking over my shoulder and I asked with undisguised iritation, ‘Won’t that do?’
‘Yes, I suppose so. It could be a bit more glabrous.’ That word bore for him a large variety of meanings which were unknown to me.
We went upstairs to the inevitable evening ceremony when the miniature whisky bottles were drawn from the hotel refrigerator.
‘I have to finish my letter to Liza,’ he told me, and with the taste of whisky my prudence left me for a moment.
‘I hope that she will be able to read it,’ I replied, thinking how to explain the lack of letters.
His hand shook so that he upset his glass. ‘What on earth do you mean? You said it was a small accident.’
‘Yes, yes, it seemed small.’
‘What do you mean seemed?’ I tried to right myself. ‘Well, you know the shock. At a certain age …’
‘She’s not old,’ he said with a note of ferocity, and of course I realized that to him, at his years, old age did not start till well after his own, and besides all the years of separation probably had no existence for him.
‘No, no, that was not what I meant.’
But the anger rose in me. After all I was not only protecting myself, I was protecting him from the truth, but if he wanted the truth …
He said, ‘You shouldn’t have left Liza there alone if she’s worse than you told me.’
‘She wanted me to come. She asked me to come.’
‘She was thinking of me. She never thinks of herself. You shouldn’t have come.’
‘If you don’t want me here …’ I had no idea of how to finish the sentence, but he finished it for me.
‘You must go back. At once. Tomorrow I’ll get you your ticket. There’s a plane the day after.’
‘And if I don’t want to go?’
‘I’m not going to give you a penny if you stay. Your place is with Liza.’
‘I don’t need your money. I’ve been offered a job.’
‘A job!’ he exclaimed with incredulity as though I had said, ‘a fortune’. ‘Who by?’
‘A friend of yours.’
‘You don’t know any friends of mine.’
‘By Mr Quigly.’
‘Quigly! Don’t you dare …’
He took a step towards me and I thought he was preparing to strike me. I backed towards the door and threw the truth at him like a glass of vitriol. ‘There’s no one to go back to. Liza’s dead.’
(9)
I didn’t wait to see his stricken face. I had no wish to pity the man, and so I made quickly for the stairs, not even waiting for the lift in case he followed me. I was afraid of him, but I felt no guilt at all as I scrambled down four flights and I was happy to find a lift door open on the eighth floor. All that he had done for me, save for that one far-off day at school, he had done only for the sake of Liza. I had no obligation to him. I had lied in order to win my independence, but how many lies had he told to win his, if indeed he was independent now?
In the hall I seized the telephone and for the first time I called the number which Mr Quigly had given me, but it was a strange voice that answered me with a genuine Yankee twang.
‘Is Mr Quigly there?’
‘Who’s speakin’?’
‘Smith – Jim Smith.’
There was a pause and then the same voice came back, an unfriendly voice I thought it; it was as though I had interrupted an intimate conversation. ‘He says he’ll ring you in the morning.’
I implored, ‘If he’s there, can’t I speak to him, please? Tell him it’s urgent.’
There was another long pause and then it was Mr Quigly who replied. ‘What is it, Mr Smith?’
‘
It’s not Mr Smith. It’s Jim.’
‘Jim?’
‘His son.’ The complexity of our relations increased at every moment.
‘Oh, it’s you.’
‘Yes, it’s me.’
‘What’s so urgent?’
‘I can’t tell you over the telephone. Can I come and see you? But I haven’t your address.’
‘It’s difficult for me to see you here. Look. Wait a moment while I think. Come to that restaurant in a quarter of an hour. The one with the Pisco Sours. We can talk alone there.’
I put down the telephone and went out into the night, uncertain of my route and of my future. The banks stood around me like immense tombstones, lit only on the lowest floors by the light from the little houses of the rich which lay among them. I took several wrong turnings, afraid always of finding myself suddenly in that other Panama, of dirt and penury and drugs, or that by crossing a street I might enter a different country altogether, the United States of America. Nor did I remember the name of the restaurant. There were few taxis about and no ranks, and it was only by repeating the words ‘restaurant’ and ‘Peru’ to several passers-by that I came on the rendezvous at last.
Mr Quigly had not yet arrived. I bought myself a Pisco Sour out of what remained of the money Liza had given me and waited with impatience and apprehension. The restaurant was nearly empty and there were very few people in the streets where Pablo had warned me that muggings were frequent at night. Although I sipped it slowly my Sour was finished long before a taxi drew up and Mr Quigly appeared in the doorway. The Sour had not mixed well with the whisky in my stomach, and Mr Quigly in my eyes looked more narrow than he had ever done before.
‘I’m sorry I was a little delayed,’ he apologized. ‘In my line of business the unexpected is always liable to happen.’ He seemed to choose his words with the slow care of a leader writer for a paper of quality. ‘I see you have had a Pisco Sour. Can I offer you another?’
‘It was a mistake,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t go with whisky.’
‘Another whisky then. And perhaps I’ll take one myself. For me it has been a long dry evening.’