The Captain and the Enemy Read online

  ‘Señor Smith does not trust him very much I think,’ Pablo replied.

  ‘Then why did he ask Mr Quigly to meet me at the airport?’

  Pablo had no solution to that problem.

  About a week after my arrival Mr Quigly unexpectedly invited me to dinner. That night he was a changed Mr Quigly, and not only in mood. He was almost physically changed for he was now wearing a jacket with padded shoulders which made him look flatter but less narrow, and his trousers seemed less tight. He made an obscure joke which I didn’t understand, though he laughed or rather giggled at it himself. His friendship with the Captain became to me even more inexplicable.

  He told me, ‘I am taking you to a Peruvian restaurant. The Pisco Sours are excellent there.’

  ‘Is Pablo not coming with us?’

  ‘I have told him that I will be your bodyguard this evening. I have promised not to let you out of my sight.’

  ‘What about Colonel Martínez?’

  ‘I gave Pablo a little tip just for once and he agreed to forget the Colonel. A tip goes a long way in Panama, even in some very high circles.

  ‘Do you too carry a gun?’

  ‘No no. In my case there is no danger. They consider me an honorary Yankee, and no one, at this moment especially, would want any harm to come to a Yankee.’

  I had never drunk a Pisco Sour before and when we had each drunk three I felt quite clearly the effect they had. Even Mr Quigly became almost jovial.

  ‘No news from your good and errant father?’ he asked.

  The Pisco Sours had confused me. ‘Oh, the Devil never writes,’ I told him.

  ‘I wouldn’t have gone so far,’ Mr Quigly said, after what seemed a calculated consideration, ‘as to call him exactly a devil. A little mischievous sometimes perhaps.’

  I thought it best not to explain the misunderstanding. ‘Oh, devil is just a joke in the family,’ I explained.

  ‘I get on very well with him, but of course I can’t share all his ideas.’

  ‘Can one say that of anyone?’

  He evaded my question. ‘Perhaps another Pisco Sour?’

  ‘Will it be wise?’

  ‘One can’t always be wise, can one, in a world like this?’

  That night I found myself as near as I ever came to liking Mr Quigly. He seemed to grow less narrow in face and body with every Pisco Sour I took.

  ‘Do you plan a long visit?’ was the most direct question which Mr Quigly put to me and by that time we had abandoned the Pisco Sours and were deep into a bottle of Chilean wine. In the short intervals between our drinks he had spoken a little like a hired guide, recommending me to visit the Cocos Islands with their Indian inhabitants, who wore gold – gold? – earrings, and the Washington Hotel in the American Zone of Colón where he could vouch for the rum punches which were not reliable on the Pacific side of Panama. And then he told me that in the north there was a charming little resort in the mountains if I wished to take a weekend away (‘I could arrange you special terms’) and, how was it, he demanded, that he had nearly failed to mention one of the rarest attractions of Panama, the golden frogs which could be seen in a place the name of which I have forgotten quite a short ride on the other side of the American Zone. His conversation became more and more like a handbook for a tourist, a description of myself which I resented.

  ‘But I don’t regard this as a holiday,’ I said. ‘I am hoping to find a job.’

  ‘Perhaps with Mr Smith?’

  ‘Perhaps with Mr Smith,’ and I quickly corrected myself, ‘with my father.’

  ‘I’ve never quite made out what your father does, but he seems to have good relations with the National Guard. Judging by Colonel Martínez giving you your own bodyguard.’

  Mr Quigly changed the subject back to the tourist handbook and he spoke of an island called Toboso which was well worth a visit, where no cars were permitted and there was a long forgotten cemetery of Anglo-Saxons buried somewhere in the jungle. Only when we had finished the wine did he become personal again. He told me, ‘I work here for an American paper. As a financial consultant. Panama is very useful as a centre of news for the whole Central American scene – there’s a lot happening these days – in Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, a great deal of trouble everywhere. The way things are going my paper is glad to have a correspondent who is not strictly American. Luckily I have a British passport, though I left England when I was sixteen. Americans are not very popular in these parts because of the Zone. Mr Smith told me that you too have been in journalism.’

  ‘I had a job on a very local paper,’ I said, ‘and I walked out without notice.’

  ‘So they won’t take you back, I suppose? A bit of a gamble, wasn’t it, joining your father?’

  The wine was making me confidential. Perhaps, I thought, I have been a bit unfair to Mr Quigly. ‘Judging from his letters there’s a lot of money to be made here. Of course he has always been a bit of an optimist.’ I added carelessly, ‘So long as I’ve known him.’

  ‘Since you were a baby in fact?’ Mr Quigly commented with the first hint of humour he had ever shown.

  I decided after all to be truthful – perhaps that was the way the wine worked too. ‘He isn’t my real father,’ I admitted, ‘he’s a kind of adopted one.’

  ‘That is most interesting,’ Mr Quigly replied, though I could not see what interest my bit of family history could possibly have for him. Perhaps he read a question in my eyes, for he added, ‘At least with an adopted father like that you won’t have to worry about the very unjust statement in what I like to call the Unholy Bible – “The sins of the fathers are visited on the children.”’ He giggled at the last drop which remained in his glass of Chilean wine. It was as though he had at last found an opportunity to use a joke which he had been keeping a long time in store, and I think he was disappointed by my failure to laugh. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘we could use another bottle of this Chilean brew.’

  ‘Not for me. I’ve had all I can take.’

  ‘Ah, a wise man. I think perhaps you are right, though all the same …’

  This seemed a moment when I too could take advantage of the wine to extract a little information. ‘I’ve wondered,’ I said, ‘why my father – let’s call him that – asked you to meet me.’

  His answer was what I had expected when I talked to Pablo. ‘He thought your Spanish might not be good enough to cope with the bodyguard. You see with my journalistic contacts I’ve been able to help him now and then. He’s had his difficulties too, though not linguistic ones.’

  I remembered how the Captain had warned Liza against taking the easier and less expensive route to Panama via New York.

  ‘With the Americans?’

  ‘Oh, and others too. As I told you, I don’t know exactly what business he is in.’

  ‘He has an expensive room at any rate.’

  ‘You can’t judge by that. There are activities here where it pays well to look expensive in the short term. I do sincerely hope you will find he can find a place of work for you which you will find suitable. And rewarding. To be rewarding after all is the greatest thing.’

  Mr Quigly looked at his watch and said with his usual precision: ‘Ten seventeen.’ Then he called for the waiter and asked for the bill, which he signed after a careful study of the figures. He even questioned the number of Pisco Sours. ‘On expenses,’ he told me and giggled again. ‘Before we say goodnight,’ he added, ‘I would like to say how much I’ve enjoyed your company. A fellow Englishman. One does feel sometimes in these parts a little lonely. It’s good to hear one’s own tongue spoken.’

  ‘Surely you have plenty of Americans close by in the Zone.’

  ‘Yes, yes, but it’s not quite the same, is it? I do want to tell you – it’s not only the Chilean wine that speaks – if you have any difficulty in finding a job I might be able to help a little. Or if you need a bit of supplementary work. With me a story sometimes breaks suddenly, and I can’t always be on the spot. I could do wit
h an assistant. What I believe in the newspaper world you come from they call a stringer. Half time, half time at most. Of course I don’t want to interfere with any arrangements Mr Smith may have made for you.’

  At the door of the hotel he told me, ‘You have my telephone number. Just get in touch with me at any time,’ and something in the tone of his voice made me feel that he was disclosing at last the whole object of our evening together. But he need not have expended so many Pisco Sours in the course of it. I was only too well aware that I might need help when the Captain learnt that Liza was dead.

  (2)

  Two evenings later, when I was tired of walking the streets of Panama with Pablo and passing a dozen or more banks out of the hundred and twenty-three (I had no desire to return to the slums of Hollywood where we had been pursued by an addict wishing to sell us drugs for dollars), my bodyguard left me in my room, but he returned a moment later with the news that Mr Smith had arrived, that he would be at the hotel in half an hour, and that his guardianship was over. ‘Señor Smith can look after you now. Colonel Martínez has withdrawn me.’

  It was a good many years since I had last seen the Captain, and I felt as though I were waiting for a stranger or indeed a character existing only on the pages of that youthful manuscript of mine, on which I am still working. He existed there better on paper than in memory. For example if I tried to remember the occasions when he had taken me to a cinema it was only King Kong which came to my mind because I had recorded that memory in writing. When I thought of his previous arrivals after a long absence – only too frequent during our life together – it was the unexpected one with a bearded face which I saw in my mind’s eye, because I had described it in words, or the stranger talking to the headmaster, the one who had afterwards fed me with smoked salmon. It was again because I had tried to recreate this character in my sorry attempt to become a ‘real writer’.

  So now, when the door of the room opened, I felt myself back in the Swan Inn and I was watching for a much younger man who would ask for his suitcase containing two bricks to be sent up to his room. I would not have been in the least surprised to learn that the suitcase which he planted heavily down on his bed contained similar bricks: what surprised me was the age of the Captain – the worn pleated old man’s face. He wore neither a beard nor a moustache, and their absence seemed to give more room for the deep criss-cross lines in the skin, and the hair on his head was grey where it wasn’t white.

  ‘Why, Jim,’ he said holding out an obviously shy hand, ‘it’s good to see you again after all this time, but I wish you weren’t here alone.’ He almost echoed my own thoughts when he said, ‘What a lot older you look.’ He added, ‘It’s odd, isn’t it, that Liza’s not here to make us a cup of tea, but then I suppose the time has come now when you’ll be wanting something stronger. Whisky? Gin?’

  ‘Your friend Mr Quigly has been teaching me to drink Pisco Sours, but I would prefer whisky.’ (Remembering the long ago past I nearly said ‘gin and tonic’.)

  The Captain went to the bar. ‘Quigly is an acquaintance,’ he told me, ‘he’s hardly what I’d call a friend,’ and as he prepared the two whiskies, he asked with his back turned to me, perhaps in order that I should not see the anxiety in his eyes, ‘How’s Liza?’

  I don’t think anyone can really blame me for not replying then with the simple truth, ‘She’s dead’, and it was perhaps at that precise moment I dangerously decided to delay telling him of her death as long as I could.

  After all I owed him nothing. Hadn’t his only interest in me lain in his desire to give Liza what she couldn’t otherwise have – a child? But I realized very well what difficulties remained for me to face. I had no idea of how often she was in the habit of writing to him and how could I explain her complete silence? I knew that inevitably, sooner or later, the truth was bound to come out, but somehow I had to establish myself first safely in this strange world before he knew that I had lied to him.

  I said, ‘Not too well.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She had a small accident. Knocked down. On the way to the baker’s. She had to go to hospital.’

  ‘What sort of accident?’

  I gave him a modified version of the truth without the sequel.

  ‘And you’ve come here, leaving her alone in hospital …?’

  I nearly told him, ‘She’s used to being alone,’ but I stopped in time when he added, ‘You are the only companion she has.’ I remembered that she had never written to tell him of my desertion, for fear of worrying him, nor would she have wanted to bring any pressure on him to return. So I continued to lie carefully. ‘She urged me to come. She gave me the money for the fare because she couldn’t come herself. She plans to follow me. As soon as the doctors give the OK.’ The lies and the evasions began to multiply and I found it impossible to check them.

  ‘But I wasn’t expecting her to come. I wrote to her not to come yet. To wait a little longer. Because of difficulties.’

  ‘She thought I might be of help to you.’

  ‘I hate the thought of her staying there in hospital – ill and alone.’

  ‘She’s probably back home by this time.’

  ‘Yes. Home as you call it. In that dreary basement.’

  ‘She was happy there. In her own way. Waiting for you to return.’

  ‘Thank God she had you, but now … If only I could take the next plane back to Europe, but I can’t. I’ve promised … In a month perhaps I’ll be free, I’m almost sure of that, but a month is a hell of a long time for someone who is sick and alone.’

  He took a long drink at his whisky. ‘You always used to get the bread for her. Where were you when the accident happened?’

  ‘I was working.’

  ‘Oh yes, of course. You got that job on a paper. She wrote to me how glad she was that you weren’t hanging around all day. It was something she enjoyed, looking forward to the evening when you came home.’

  I had never thought before of quite how far he had been deceived by both of us. Together we had dug a hole which would hide the truth deeper than any grave. But there was one truth which sooner or later had to be unearthed – the truth of her death. She couldn’t remain credibly silent to his letters for ever. I drank, but the whisky didn’t help me to unravel that riddle.

  The Captain poured himself a second glass of whisky. ‘I don’t drink tea any more,’ he said, ‘not that I ever really liked it. Tea for me belongs to only one place in the world, her place.’ He was, I think, trying to ease the tension between us which he probably attributed to our different anxieties, perhaps even a change in our relationship. We were no longer a man and a boy – he was a much older man and I had altogether ceased to be a boy. He asked, ‘What did you think of the man Quigly?’

  ‘I couldn’t make him out. I wondered why you sent him to meet me.’

  ‘Pablo knows very little English, and I thought your Spanish – well, we never got very far with that, did we? At least Quigly would be able to explain things a bit to you.’

  ‘He explained nothing.’

  ‘I just meant about the hotel, this room, how you should put things on account, and what’s best to eat in this benighted city. I wasn’t able to meet you. I was on an important job. I was badly needed.’

  ‘Not by the police?’ I asked, meaning only to make light of that ambiguous past which Liza and I had shared with him.

  ‘Oh no, it’s not the police I have difficulties with now.’

  ‘But there are still difficulties?’

  ‘There always are. I don’t mind difficulties. Life wouldn’t be worth living without them. I’m afraid you’ve only got that sofa there for a bed now that I’m back.’

  ‘I got used to a sofa in Camden Town. And it wasn’t as comfortable as the one here.’

  ‘I suppose this time you’ve got a pair of pyjamas?’

  I was glad that his thoughts too were going back to that far past about which I had written. In the past there were no trap
s to be avoided, and each could talk freely to the other. ‘They are not orange ones, thank God,’ I said.

  ‘But you put up with the orange ones the first night.’

  ‘As soon as the house was quiet I took them off and went to sleep naked.’

  ‘And rumpled them up I suppose so that Liza wouldn’t notice?’

  ‘I managed to tear them badly. In case I would have to wear them again after a wash.’

  ‘Yes, I remember Liza was furious because I had to pay for another pair. I wasn’t the only one with a double life, and you began yours even younger than I did.’

  ‘But you’ve continued to live one,’ I said. ‘What is your job?’

  ‘I’m not sure it’s quite safe for you to know as yet.’

  ‘Safe for whom?’

  ‘For both of us.’

  ‘Does Mr Quigly know?’

  I was reluctant to leave out the title Mister when I spoke of Quigly. It seemed to distance me from the man. It was almost like an adjective of contempt.

  ‘Oh, he’d like to know, but you can never trust a journalist if that’s what he is.’

  ‘I was a journalist a week ago.’

  ‘Not a journalist of Quigly’s kind, I hope.’

  ‘What is Mr Quigly’s kind?’

  ‘He calls himself a financial correspondent, but he’s hungry for all kinds of copy. I’m not sure that he always uses it for his paper. He’s a man you have to watch.’

  ‘Do you want me to watch him? Is that the job you have in mind for me?’

  ‘Perhaps. It might be. Who knows? Anyway it’s too late to talk now and we’re tired. Let’s have one more whisky and then go to sleep. At least you can sleep. I want to write first to Liza and tell her you’ve arrived safely.’

  For a moment I could have believed that he was testing me, to see how long I would continue with my lie that she was alive, but of course it was not the case. He added, ‘I always try to write to her before I sleep, even if I don’t always send the letter. When the day is finished I can forget the difficulties and think only of her,’ and it was to the sound of his pen on paper that I eventually fell asleep.