He signed the letter, ‘The Captain, the Colonel, the Major, the Sergeant, Señor Smith’ with an exclamation mark after each name. I wondered why he hadn’t added his real name, but I suppose he wanted to preserve one at least of his names out of use. After all he and I had never been much closer than strangers since that gin and tonic of his and the lunch of smoked salmon. All his interest had lain in Liza, and there ironically was her letter which had arrived too late for him to read and which might have broken the news of her death more gently than I had done. I was sorry for that, and yet I found his letter hard to digest.
I opened the letter which he would never now read. Liza was not given to writing long letters and this was very short. She wrote, ‘Dear Captain, I know what the doctor and the nurse are trying not to tell me, that I shall soon be dead. So now I’m writing what I’ve always been too shy to say. I’ve loved you ever since the day you came to see me with the Devil in hospital. You had lost a button off your shirt and your shoes could have done with a good clean. You were the kindest man I’ve ever known. Liza.’
The letter astonished me. So there had been, after all, some kind of love between them. Whatever that phrase meant it seemed more durable than the casual sexual interludes which I had in my way enjoyed. As I lay on the sofa in the Captain’s room awaiting sleep which was long in coming, I felt a stab of jealous pain. To have remembered that missing button through all the years of unexplained absences, this was something beyond my imagination, and I was seized with a furious sense of inferiority. I was shut out, an Amalekite again. All the same I kept the letter. It might please him and soften his anger if he came back, but as I dozed into sleep I was angry with both of them and all the inexplicable world which they represented. I had an odd dream of walking down a long rough road towards a deep and dark wood which retreated as I advanced. I had for some reason to penetrate that wood, but I became more and more exhausted until I was woken by the crying of the telephone beside the Captain’s bed. I was reluctant to pick up the receiver. I feared that I would hear the Captain’s voice, but it was Mr Quigly’s.
‘Is that Jim?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve been ringing a long time. Four and a half minutes.’ Always that precision in the way of figures. Perhaps it was the quality of the financial profession.
‘I was asleep.’
‘I’ve been rung up by Colonel Martínez. He’s never rung me before. It must be important. He wants to see you. He had sent to that place I put you in, but you weren’t there. Are you listening?’
‘Yes. How did he know where I slept?’
‘Ask him. It’s his job to know. Pablo is on the way to fetch you. Don’t tell him anything.’
‘Pablo?’
‘No, no. Colonel Martínez, of course.’
There was a knock on the door and I put down the receiver. I’d had enough of Mr Quigly. I opened the door and Pablo was there.
(11)
There seemed to be a sentry everywhere to whom Pablo had to show his pass – at the gates of the National Guard headquarters, at the doorway of the building we entered, outside the waiting-room to which we were ushered. Pablo said not a word and sat beside me in silence. His revolver pressed uncomfortably against my hip and I became impatient. ‘Colonel Martínez,’ I said, ‘seems to be a busy man,’ but Pablo made no reply.
When my turn came at last Pablo left me at the door, and I looked across the room at the Colonel with curiosity. No policeman would ever have described him as a man with a military bearing. He had a kindly, pale and anxious face and when he stood up to greet me I could see that he was short and a little tubby.
‘I am sorry to have kept you waiting, Mr Smith,’ he said, speaking English slowly and with care, and yet with that Yankee twang which living a lifetime close alongside the American Zone had perhaps produced.
‘Baxter,’ I corrected him and he looked down and shuffled some papers on his desk and corrected himself, ‘Mr Baxter’. Then there was a long pause. Had he forgotten the purpose of my being there just as he had forgotten my true name? Anyway I knew that I liked him a good deal better than Mr Quigly. There was an innocence about him which I wouldn’t have associated with a military uniform – or a policeman’s.
He said, ‘Do sit down, Mr Baxter. We are a little worried about Mr Smith – his unexpected absence. He was to have done a small job for us, but he seems to have disappeared into the blue.’ He was troubled by a little cough which conveniently covered my silence. ‘Of course we know you are a friend of Mr Quigly’ – the word ‘we’ as he used it seemed to cover the whole of the National Guard, and for a moment I was surprised at the trouble they had taken to notice an insignificant stranger, until I remembered Pablo. Of course he would have reported. I said, ‘Not really a friend.’
The Colonel said, ‘Mr Quigly is an excellent journalist and working as he does for a gringo paper he has sources of information closed to us. We wondered if perhaps he had said a word to you which might indicate … We are anxious to have news of Mr Smith.’
I thought of the letter, but I obeyed Mr Quigly’s instruction. ‘I have none,’ I said.
‘Both of you were seen calling at the Continental Hotel yesterday morning and we supposed that you were trying to see your father. We thought perhaps he might have told you something …’
I ignored the small flaw in their information about my relations with the Captain and I said, ‘Not a word. He wasn’t there. He’d gone.’
‘Yes, yes, gone, we know, and his plane too. But I thought that earlier than that he might have given you some indication … I assure you that we are worried – worried for his safety, Mr Baxter.’ With his eyes bent over his papers he said in a low voice as though he were ashamed at having to give away a valuable piece of information: ‘He was seen flying off, but he took the wrong direction.’
‘The wrong direction?’
‘Not the direction which he had been ordered to take.’ There was a long pause as Colonel Martínez stared down at his papers. I thought: has he too taken a wrong direction?
The doubts in my mind harassed me and I tried to resolve them, with what seemed even to my own ears in this hushed room a question vulgarly direct. ‘Who gave him the order? You or Mr Quigly?’
Colonel Martínez looked up at me and gave a little sigh like someone who has been relieved from a burden of discretion. ‘Ah yes, Mr Quigly! What exactly do you know of Mr Quigly?’
‘I know that he has offered me a job.’
‘Are you going to take it?’
‘Mr Smith has left me a letter with a cheque. He wants me to go home immediately.’
‘And you are going?’
‘I want to tell him first what I plan.’
Colonel Martínez said, ‘I can only hope for all our sakes that will prove possible.’
I was completely at a loss. I told him, ‘I don’t know what you mean. Has he done something wrong? Is he in prison?’
‘Certainly not. He is our friend. We put a great value on all the work he has done for us. We have need of him.’ That damned word ‘need’ again.
‘And how does Mr Quigly come into all this?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t describe Mr Quigly as his friend.’
‘But’ – the name always made me hesitate – ‘Mr Smith sent Mr Quigly to meet me when I arrived.’
‘Oh, we were very content that Mr Smith should have a certain contact with Mr Quigly. We say nothing against Mr Quigly. If you decide to work for Mr Quigly it’s your decision, but perhaps if that happens we could give you a little advice. The advice I would give you now is just to wait. Don’t make up your mind until – as we hope will happen – you have spoken again to your father.’
He patted the papers on his desk and rose with a friendly smile to show that the interview – interrogation? – was at an end. He said, ‘Of course we shall let you know as soon as we have news of your father.’
(12)
But it was not Colonel Martínez who gave me the
first news. It was Mr Quigly two hours later, or, as he would certainly have put it himself, two hours twelve minutes later. I had returned to the Captain’s room in the hotel, for I had nowhere else to go. I lay on the sofa, but I couldn’t sleep. All that was left for me to pass the time was thought – and how I thought, how I turned things over in my worried and twisted mind. It was as though I had been holding out my fist – as a child I had often done this for Liza – for a ball of knitting wool to be wound around it, and then I had carelessly moved and got the wool tangled.
Why were they anxious about the Captain’s absence – an absence of only a few hours? Hadn’t his life been full of absences since that first absence of his from the German prison camp was discovered by his guards if the story he told me was true? Did Mr Quigly and the Colonel fear a betrayal, but wasn’t his life full of betrayals? He had pretended to love Liza and yet he had left her continually for reasons which he never explained. Who was this Somoza of whom Colonel Martínez spoke and who were the Sandinistas? I was abysmally ignorant, I realized well enough, of all that might be happening in these unknown regions. My work as a journalist had been confined to a very small area of England. Once I had travelled on a story as far as Ipswich, on the track of an odd and rather comic tale about a thief. The Captain too was a thief. My mind shifted again back and forth and the wool became even more tangled. And Quigly? Who was Quigly? What was Quigly?
It was when I was asking myself these questions which were the most difficult of all to answer that the telephone rang. I knew at once what the voice at the other end would say (it would be the code word ‘Fred’) so I let it ring on and on. In a way the sound was a relief: the questions had stopped and the wool fell off my wrists.
At last the ringing ceased and after a short interval what I expected came: a knock on the door. I felt I had to open it and there, of course, was Mr Quigly.
‘I was ringing from below. They told me you were up here. Why didn’t you answer?’
‘I was busy thinking, Mr Quigly. Or should I call you Fred?’
‘This is no joke, Jim. I’ve had news, bad news. Your father, I’m sorry, I mean Mr Smith, he’s dead.’ It flashed through my mind that at least Mr Quigly hadn’t played for time as I had done when the Captain spoke to me of Liza. I was grateful to him for that. It seemed in a strange way to clear the air. I had no need to pretend a sorrow which I didn’t feel.
‘Are you sure? Colonel Martínez said he would let me know about him.’
‘Ah, but he probably hasn’t heard himself yet. You see Mr Smith took the wrong direction.’ Those were the same words which Colonel Martínez had used to me.
‘You mean if he had taken the right one …’
‘Colonel Martínez would have known where he was and he would be alive.’
‘What was the wrong direction?’
‘A nearly suicidal one. He must have known it was unlikely he would come back. I expect he never wanted to come back. He only wanted to help his friends and die.’
‘How would that help his friends?’
‘Because he would have killed Somoza too.’
‘Somoza?’
Would I ever cease to be a stranger in this region of the world where I was at a loss to remember all the names?
‘Oh, President Somoza survived all right – to please my friends.’
So, I thought, now it is all over, our quarrel and his life.
Mr Quigly went on, ‘He was in no danger from us. We wanted to keep him alive. If only to discover where exactly he was dumping his arms.’
‘What do you all mean – the wrong direction? How did he die?’
‘His plane crashed near the bunker in Managua where Somoza stays at night these days. The plane must have been as full as he could make it of explosives, but all he did was kill himself and break a few windows in the Intercontinental Hotel across the way. No one else was hurt – only himself.’
‘Oh, he wasn’t hurt,’ I said. ‘He’s free of me and Liza and all the others.’
‘The others?’
‘All who needed him.’
‘His death is a waste. He was even a little useful to us in his way. What will you do – Jim?’ He hesitated over the Christian name.
‘He’s left me enough money to go home.’
‘Will you go?’
‘I haven’t got a home.’ It was not in self-pity that I used the phrase, it was a cold statement of fact. I was like a man without a passport, only a card of residence.
Mr Quigly said, ‘I’m pretty sure that I can fix things for you if you will only stay. You know you have quite a bit of value, Jim.’ He didn’t hesitate this time over the name. ‘After all he was your father, and perhaps through you we might be able to contact and speak to some of his old friends.’
‘But he wasn’t my father.’
‘Oh, yes, I forgot, but we mustn’t be too literal, Jim.’
‘And Colonel Martínez?’
‘I’m sure he’ll be your friend too if you give him the chance. You don’t need to take sides between us. That’s something we shall have to talk about together. You can be of help to both of us. I’m sure that if you stay everything can be arranged satisfactorily.’
I felt lost in all his ambiguities. They were like a twisting country road with many signposts which had been long abandoned by heavy traffic. I found myself for a moment regretting the great auto routes and the thunder of heavy lorries. I said, ‘Go away, Mr Quigly. I want to be alone.’
Mr Quigly hesitated. ‘But we are friends, Jim. I came here as a friend.’
‘Yes, yes,’ I agreed without conviction in order to get rid of him and he went. But before he left he dropped an envelope on the bed. ‘Just in case you are running short,’ he said and was gone again into the city of a hundred and twenty-three banks. I thought, as I opened his envelope, ‘So here one obviously pays cash even for friendship.’ I put the money in my pocket – five two hundred dollar bills, and heard the telephone ring again. This time it was Pablo. He said, ‘Colonel Martínez wants to see you again. He has news for you.’
It amused me to tell him, ‘He needn’t trouble to see me. I have the news already. From Mr Quigly.’
There was a long silence on the line. I imagined Pablo in the Colonel’s office passing on this piece of news and waiting for his reply. It came at last. ‘Colonel Martínez says that it is important all the same that you should see him. At once. He is sending me with a car for you.’
(13)
While I wait for Pablo I am spending the time bringing this narrative to a close. With the Captain dead what is the point of continuing it? I realize more than ever that I am no writer. A real writer’s ambition doesn’t die with his main character.
What now? I have a return ticket to London (but I can turn that in) and the dollars left me by the Captain and Mr Quigly. Shall I take Mr Quigly’s advice and enter a world of secrecy and danger which will lead me I don’t know where. I don’t blame myself. It is the Captain who is responsible. He knew where he was going when he stole the jewels, when he crashed his plane. Sometimes if I think of the Captain I imagine that in some strange way he will prove one day to have been my real father if only for this legacy of illegality which he has injected into my bloodstream. I remember again the dream I had last night before Mr Quigly woke me, with an added detail, which I had forgotten. All that remained in my mind when I woke was the dark path which I was following into some deep wood, but now the reason for my walk came back to me. I had been following two mules which stopped again and again to crop the grass. There was nothing on their backs and I had no idea why I was pursuing them. The Captain of course would have known. How often he had spoken to me of those mules, but in his version they always carried sacks of gold.
One can hate one’s father and even though I may choose to follow in his footsteps, it will still be hate that I shall feel. Compared with Liza I was nothing to him. He looked after her till her death, but me – he has left me this unfeeling legacy of a ti
cket of return to a place I have left for ever and if I stay here one thing I know for sure. I shall write no more. The bell of my room is ringing. It’s almost certainly Pablo, coming to take me to see Colonel Martínez, and afterwards what do I do? Shall I tell Mr Quigly what passed between me and the Colonel? Do I take Mr Quigly’s money? Will the Colonel offer me money – or only advice? The Captain would have advised me from his own experience, but he’s safe and dead, and anyway would I have trusted him? It was only for Liza that he cared if he ever cared for her. We have both been a burden to him. And then King Kong came back into my mind and the words he had used to me then when I watched the King with his burden – a burden which kicked him so hard that I wondered why he didn’t drop her into the street below: ‘He loves her, boy, can’t you understand that?’ Perhaps I have never understood the nature of love. Perhaps … I wish I had seen him once more or that I hadn’t lied to him at the beginning.