The Honorary Consul Page 3

  Now, as he stood in the dark hall, watching intently the luminous dial of his watch, he realized he had never for a moment believed they would reach the point of action. Even when he had given them the precise information they required of the American Ambassador's movements (he had learned the details from Charley Fortnum over a Long John) and supplied them with the drug they needed, he still didn't believe that anything would really happen. Only when he woke that morning and heard Léon's voice, "The show goes on," did it occur to him that perhaps these amateurs might after all be dangerous. Was it Léon Rivas who was dying now? Or Aquino?

  It was two twenty-two when he went outside for the third time. A car swerved round the block and stopped, the engine running. A hand waved to him.

  As far as he could tell in the light of the dashboard, he didn't know the man at the wheel, but his companion he was able to guess at in the dark by the line of the thin beard which outlined the jaw. It was in a police station cell that Aquino had grown his beard and had begun to write his poetry, and it was in the cell too that he had developed a hungry passion for 'chipá', those doughy rolls made out of mandioca, that can only be properly appreciated after semistarvation. "What went wrong, Aquino?"

  "The car would not start. Dust in the carburetor. That was it, Diego? And then there was a police patrol."

  "I meant who is dying?"

  "Nobody, we hope."

  "Léon?"

  "He is all right."

  "Why did you telephone? You promised not to involve me. Léon promised."

  He would never have consented to help them if it had not been for Léon whom he had missed almost as much as his father when he and his mother left on the river boat. Léon was someone whose word he believed that he could always trust, even though his word seemed later to have been broken when Plarr heard that Léon had become a priest instead of the fearless 'abogado' who would defend the poor and the innocent, like Perry Mason. In his school days Léon had possessed an enormous collection of Perry Masons stiffly translated into classical Spanish prose. He lent them carefully, one at a time, to selected friends. Perry Mason's secretary Delia was the first woman to arouse Plarr's sexual appetite.

  "Father Rivas told us to fetch you," the man called Diego said.

  He continued to call Léon Father, Doctor Plarr noticed, though he had broken a second vow when he left the Church and married, but that particular broken promise was not one which worried Plarr, who never went to Mass except when he accompanied his mother on one of his rare visits to the capital. Léon, it seemed to him, was struggling back from a succession of failures toward the primal promise to the poor he had never intended to break. He would end as an 'abogado' yet.

  They turned into Tucumán and then into San Martin, but Doctor Plarr after that tried to avoid looking out. It was as well not to know where they were going. If the worst happened he wanted to betray as little as possible under interrogation.

  They were driving fast enough to attract attention. He asked, "You are not afraid of the police patrols?"

  "Léon has them all mapped out. He has studied them for a month."

  "But tonight—surely it's a little bit special."

  "The Ambassador's car will have been found in the upper Paraná. They will be searching every house on the border, and they will have warned them in Encar-naci6n across the river. There will be road blocks on the road to Rosario. The patrols here must have been cut. They need the men elsewhere. And this is the last place they will look for him with the Governor waiting at his house to take him to the airport."

  "I hope you are right."

  For a moment, without meaning to, Doctor Plarr raised his eyes as the car lurched round a turning, and he saw on the pavement a deck chair containing a stout elderly woman whom he knew, as he knew the small open doorway behind her—her name was Señora Sanchez and she never slept before her last customer had gone home. She was the richest woman in town or so it was believed.

  Doctor Plarr said, "What happened about the Governor's dinner? How long did they wait?" He could imagine the confusion. One couldn't telephone to a lot of ruins.

  "I do not know."

  "Surely you had somebody on the watch?"

  "We had enough on our hands." He was back with the amateurs; it seemed to Doctor Plarr that the plot would have been better written by Saavedra. Ingenuity, if not 'machismo', was distinctly lacking.

  "I heard a plane. Was it the Ambassador's?"

  "If it was, it must have gone back empty."

  "You seem to know very little," Doctor Plarr said.

  "Who is hurt?"

  The car drew suddenly and roughly up on the margin of a dirt track. "We get out here," Aquino said. After Doctor Plarr had left the car he heard it being backed a few yards. He stood still, letting his eyes grow accustomed to the dark, until he was able to see by starlight the kind of place they had brought him to. It was part of the 'bidonville' which lay between the city and the bend of the river. The track was almost as wide as a city street, and he could just see a shack made out of dried mud and old petrol cans hidden among the avocados. As his sight cleared he began to make out other huts standing concealed among the trees, like men in ambush. Aquino led him on. The doctor's feet sank more than ankle deep in mud. Even a jeep would have to pass slowly here. There would be plenty of warning if the police made a raid. Perhaps after all they were amateurs of some intelligence.

  "Is 'he' here?" he asked Aquino.

  "Who?"

  "Oh, for God's sake, there are no microphones in the trees. The Ambassador, of course."

  "Yes, he is here all right. But he has not come round after the injection."

  They moved as quickly as they could along the mud track, passing several dark huts. The silence seemed unnatural—not even a child crying. Doctor Plarr paused to recover breath. "These people," he whispered, "they must have heard your car."

  "They will not talk. They think we are smugglers. Anyway you can imagine—they are no friends to the police."

  Diego led the way down a side turning where the mud was even deeper. It had not rained for two days, but in this 'barrio' of the poor the mud lay permanently until the dry season was well advanced. There was nowhere for the water to drain, and yet, as Doctor Plarr knew well, the inhabitants had to walk as much as a mile in order to find a tap which gave water fit for drinking. The children—he had treated many of them—were big-bellied from protein deficiency. Perhaps he had been many times down this very track—it was indistinguishable from all the others; he had always needed a guide when he visited a patient here. For some reason 'The Taciturn Heart' came back to his mind. To fight for one's honor with knives over a woman, that belonged to another, an absurdly outdated world, which had ceased to exist except in the romantic imagination of writers like Saavedra. Honor meant nothing to the starving. To them belonged the more serious fight for survival.

  "Is that you, Eduardo?" a voice asked.

  "Yes, is that you, Léon?"

  Somebody held a candle up long enough for him to reach the threshold. Then the door was closed quickly behind him.

  In the light of the candle he saw the man whom they still called Father Rivas; Léon looked as thin and immature in his T-shirt and jeans as the boy he had known in the country across the border. His brown eyes were too big for his face, the large ears set almost at right angles to his skull made bun resemble one of the small mongrel dogs which haunted the 'barrio' of the poor. There was the same soft fidelity in the eyes and a vulnerability in the protruding ears. He could have been taken in spite of his age for a shy seminarist.

  "You have been a long time, Eduardo," he complained softly.

  "Ask your driver Diego about that."

  "The Ambassador is still in a coma. We had to give him a second injection. He was thrashing around too much."

  "I told you a second shot would be dangerous."

  "Everything is dangerous," Father Rivas said gently, as though he were in the confessional warning someone against th
e temptation of proximity.

  While Doctor Plarr unpacked his briefcase Father Rivas went on, "He is breathing very heavily."

  "What will you do if he stops breathing altogether?"

  "We shall have to change our tactics."

  "How?"

  "We shall have to announce he was executed. Revolutionary justice," he added with an unhappy grin. "Please, I beg you, do all you can."

  "Of course."

  "We do not want him to die," Father Rivas said. "Our job is to save lives."

  They went into the only other room, in which a bed had been improvised out of a long wooden box—he couldn't see clearly what kind of a box—with a few blankets spread over it. Doctor Plarr heard the deep uneven breathing of the drugged man, like someone struggling awake from a nightmare. He said, "Bring the light closer." He bent down and looked closely at the flushed face. For a long moment he couldn't believe his eyes. Then he laughed from the shock of what he had seen. "Oh Léon," he said, "you have taken up the wrong profession."

  "What do you mean?"

  "You would do better to go back to the Church. You are not made to be a kidnapper."

  "I do not understand. Is he dying?"

  Doctor Plarr said, "You needn't worry, Léon, he's not going to die, but this isn't the American Ambassador."

  "Not..."

  "This is Charley Fortnum."

  "Who is Charley Fortnum?"

  "Our Honorary Consul," Doctor Plarr said in the same tone of mockery which Doctor Humphries had employed.

  "But that is impossible," Father Rivas exclaimed.

  "Charley Fortnum's veins run with alcohol, not blood. The morphine I gave you would have acted more gently on the Ambassador. The Ambassador is afraid of alcohol. They had to provide Coca-Cola for the dinner tonight. So Charley told me. He will be all right in a little while. Leave him to sleep it off," but before he had time to leave the room the man on the wooden box opened his eyes. He stared at Doctor Plarr and Doctor Plarr stared back at him. It was as well to know for certain whether he were recognized.

  "Take me home," Fortnum said, "home," and then his body lurched sideways into a deeper sleep.

  "Did he recognize you?" Father Rivas asked.

  "How would I know?"

  "If he recognized you it would complicate matters."

  Somebody lit a second candle in the outer room, but no one spoke; it was as though they all waited to catch a suggestion in another man's eyes as to what should be done now. At last Aquino said, "This will not please El Tigre."

  "It's really rather comic," Doctor Plarr said, "when you think of it. That must have been the Ambassador's plane I heard, and he was in it. On the way back to Buenos Aires. I wonder how the Governor's dinner went without an interpreter." He looked from one face to another, but no one smiled in return.

  There were two men in the room who were unknown to him, and for the first time he noticed a woman who lay asleep on the floor in a dark corner—he had mistaken her for a poncho which someone had dropped. One of them was a Negro with a pockmarked face, the other an Indian who spoke up now. He couldn't understand the words—they were not Spanish. "What is he saying, Léon?"

  "Miguel thinks we ought to put him into the river to drown."

  "And what did you say?"

  "I said the police would be interested in a body found three hundred kilometers away from the car."

  "The idea's absurd," Doctor Plarr said. "You can't murder Charley Fortnum."

  "I try not to think in those terms, Eduardo."

  "Is killing a matter of semantics to you now, Léon? I remember you were always good at semantics. You used to explain the Trinity to me in the old days, but your explanation was more complicated than the catechism."

  "We do not want to kill him," Father Rivas said, "but what can we do? He saw you."

  "He won't remember when he wakes. He always forgets things completely when he's drunk." Doctor Plarr added, "How on earth did you make such a mistake?"

  "That I must find out," Father Rivas replied, and he began to talk again in Guaraní.

  Doctor Plarr took one of the candles and went back to the doorway of the other room. Charley Fortnum looked quite peacefully asleep on the box, just as though he were in his own great brass bedstead at home, where he lay always on the right side near the window. A sense of fastidiousness made the doctor choose the left side, near the door, when he slept in it himself with Clara.

  Charley Fortnum's face as long as he had known him had always been a little flushed. His blood pressure was high and he was too fond of whisky. He had passed sixty, but his thin hair retained a soft and mouselike tint like a boy's, and his coloring to the unprofessional eye gave a false impression of health. He looked like an out-of-doors man, a farmer. Indeed he had a camp about fifty kilometers from the city, where he grew a little grain and mate. He liked trundling from field to field in an old Land Rover which he called Fortnum's Pride. "Off for a gallop," he would say, grinding at the gears, "hi-yup."

  Now he suddenly raised his hand and waved it. His eyes were closed. He was dreaming. Perhaps he thought he was waving to his wife and the doctor, as he left them on the verandah to deal with dull medical business. "Women's insides," Charley Fortnum had said once. "Never understood them. One day you must draw me a diagram."

  Doctor Plarr went quickly back into the outer room. "He's all right, Léon. You can dump him safely by the road somewhere for the police to find."

  "We cannot do that. He may have recognized you."

  "He's fast asleep. Anyway he would say nothing to hurt me. We are old friends."

  "I think I know what must have happened," Father Rivas said. "The information you gave us—it was quite correct up to a point. The Ambassador came from Buenos Aires by car, he spent three nights on the road because he wanted to see the country, and the Embassy sent a plane from Buenos Aires to bring him back after his dinner with the Governor. All those details were correct enough, but you never told us your Consul was going with him to the ruins."

  "I didn't know. He told me about the dinner—that was all."

  "He did not even go in the Ambassador's car. At least we would have grabbed both of them then. He must have taken his own car and then have left while the Ambassador was still lingering around. Our men were only expecting one car to pass. Our outpost flashed the signal when it went by. He had seen the flag."

  "The Union Jack, not the Stars and Stripes. He hadn't even the right to fly that."

  "In the dark you cannot see clearly and he had been told about the diplomatic number plate."

  "It was CC not CD."

  "The letters look much the same in the dark on a moving car. You cannot blame him. Alone in the dark—frightened probably. It could have happened to me or you. A fatality."

  "The police may not know what has happened to Fortnum yet. If you release him quickly..."

  Doctor Plarr, in face of their attentive silence, felt as though he were pleading before a tribunal. He said, "Charley Fortnum's no good to you as a hostage."

  "He is a member of the diplomatic corps," Aquino said.

  "No, he isn't. An Honorary Consul is not a proper Consul."

  "The British Ambassador would have to intervene."

  "Of course. He would report the affair home. Just as he would for anyone British. If you kidnapped me or old Humphries it would be much the same."

  "The British will ask the Americans to bring pressure on the General in Asunción."

  "You can be sure the Americans will do nothing of the kind. Why should they? They don't want to anger their friend the General for the sake of Charley Fortnum."

  "But he is a British Consul."

  Doctor Plarr began to despair of ever convincing them of how unimportant Charley Fortnum was. He said, "He had not even the right to put CC on his car. He was in trouble for that."

  "You knew him well, I think?" Father Rivas said.

  "Yes."

  "And you liked him?"

  "Yes. In a way." It
wasn't a good sign that Léon already spoke of Fortnum in the past tense.

  "I am sorry. I can understand how you feel. It is always much easier to deal with strangers. Like in the confessional box. I used to hate it if I recognized a voice. One can be harsh so much more easily to a stranger."

  "What can you gain by holding him, Léon?"

  "We came over the border to do a job. There are a lot of our people who would be discouraged if nothing happened. In our situation something must always happen. Even the kidnapping of a Consul is something."

  "An Honorary Consul," Doctor Plarr corrected.

  "It will be a warning to people who are more important. Perhaps they will take our next threat seriously. That is a small tactical point gamed in a long war."

  Doctor Plarr said, "So I suppose you'll be prepared to hear the stranger's confession and give him absolution before you kill him? Charley Fortnum's a Catholic, you know. He'll appreciate having a priest at his deathbed."

  Father Rivas said to the Negro, "Give me a cigarette, Pablo."

  "He will be even glad of a married priest like you, Léon," Doctor Plarr said.

  "You were willing enough to help us, Eduardo."

  "In the case of the Ambassador, yes. His life wouldn't have been in any danger. They would have given way. In any case an American... he's a combatant. The Americans have killed plenty of men in South America."

  "Your father is among those we are trying to help—if he is still alive."

  "I don't know whether he would have liked your method."

  "We have not chosen our method. 'They' have reduced us to this."

  "What on earth can you ask in return for Charley Fortnum? Perhaps a case of real Scotch?"

  "For the American Ambassador we would have demanded the release of twenty prisoners. For a British Consul I think we shall have to halve the bill. That is up to El Tigre."