Flames Coming out of the Top (21 page)

By the time evening came the river changed from liquid, sliding amber to a dull, unburnished red. Upstream only a few yards away by fast motor boat lay Sandar, but already it had drifted out of his mind. Even Sandar, was too much of a town to be the stepping-off place for such an odyssey: houses and a railway station did not belong anywhere in this landscape.
When the sun dropped, cut off suddenly by the knife edge of the Cordilleras, it was as though at a single stroke they had been transported a thousand miles into space. They were not even natural forests that lay along the river bank, but a kind of creeping, continuous life that only this moat of water could withstand. Its dim outlines showed faintly menacing on either hand. They lacked the clarity of things seen, and remained there formless but forbidding like a thought kept at the back of the mind. The moon, when it rose, restored a certain melancholy security to the scene. The hostile dimnesses on either side became banks with trees once more and the vague ghostlike element on which they had been steadily sliding south eastwards was a river again.

Next morning they continued through the journey of the previous day; and on the day after they began again. Nothing changed as they proceeded: it was always the same water, the same spreading mudbanks and the same massed barricade of trees. The only relief occurred when a macaw suddenly decided to change its quarters in the natural zoo it lived in; it was the first macaw that Dunnett had ever seen. It came into existence right overhead. At one moment there was nothing there and, at the next, something blue and yellow and as vivid as a football jersey was moving there, trailing a tail like a piece of animated bunting. Dunnett asked Captain Leach if he had seen it. The man opened one eye and nodded. “Rank,” he said. “Rank and bitter. Parrots are rank as cat's flesh.” A moment later he was drowsing again.

Another something happened that divided this section of the river from all others and printed the memory of it on his brain. They were passing a native village where squalor had reached one of its minor pinnacles of South American achievement. The piles of fly-infested human rubbish, the hovels that had long since collapsed but were still inhabited, the small black pigs that rooted about even inside the dwellings, all indicated that life was being lived without even self-respect to support it. And in the middle of the village a lonely figure was standing waving at them. The Captain of the
Santa Veronica
responded,
as one would to a child. “He always waves,” he explained. “He waves every time he sees a boat.” The man on the shore shaded his eyes for a moment. He was dressed like an Indian, with a two-penny wisp of rag about his loins. But it was obvious that he was, or rather had been, a white man—it was merely that the nationality had become rather obscured with time. It would have been difficult to say just what it was that most distinguished him. It was at once something in the way he stood and something in the way he raised his hand to wave—a weary, hopeless sort of gesture as though he had been waving at boats for years and none had ever stopped.

Captain Leach regarded him with interest. “They've got him there,” he said. “And they won't let him go.”

“Who won't?”

“The Indians.”

“But how can they stop him?”

“He burned his boats,” Captain Leach replied. “He married one of 'em.”

“But he could still get away, couldn't he?”

“Not him. He couldn't walk so far,” Captain Leach answered. “He used to be quite a trader in his way, before it happened. But he'll never get away again now. They're too proud of him. They've made him into a sort of bleeding little brass god.”

The outcast on the bank still waving, slowly receded into the distance and was gone. The last that Dunnet saw of him was a tiny figure vaguely semaphoring, a minor agitation in the remote shoreline. Captain Leach said something about Indian women being dirtier than monkeys and less moral and the episode was closed.

On the afternoon of the fifth day they reached Canagua. The town was not a large one; it was merely a focal point for what life there was in that hundred miles square of forest. But at that moment the place was buzzing with the kind of activity which only an army can produce. Soldiers were everywhere—thrown full length in the shade, sitting alongside the landing stage, absentmindedly polluting the river, and
swaying about in the main street drunk on spirits. Leach regarded them with disfavour and advised Dunnett to keep close to him. Then without warning he lurched down the gangway with the impetuousness of an unsteady man, and they set off to find an hotel.

It was not easy. There, a thousand miles into the jungle, rooms were at a premium; they were in the middle of an acute housing shortage. Dunnett felt like laughing at the craziness of it. But the desire to laugh passed when Captain Leach reported that they would have to sleep on the quayside. The only alternative was a windowless room ten foot square with a corpse in it; the mourners, he said, were prepared to sink their own feelings in the matter and let the room for the night, but decency forbade that they should disturb the late occupant. Dunnett declined, and the two of them sat down outside a
mercado
to drink beer at three shillings a bottle and discuss the position. Their luggage—a single suitcase: Captain Leach had brought nothing but himself—stood on the steps beside them.

It was as a last moment's stroke of resourcefulness that Captain Leach suggested that they should approach the military authorities. He told Dunnett to remain where he was, and went off to find the commanding officer. Dunnett bought himself another bottle of the odd unexhilarating beer and waited. At the end of half-an-hour Captain Leach had not returned and the shopkeeper tried to sell Dunnett another bottle. For ten minutes Dunnett resisted him and then he gave way. Even sitting drinking such beer as that was preferable to just sitting. Leaning back against the ant-eaten arm of the seat he wondered what mischief Captain Leach had got into. He found out almost immediately. And when he found out, things began to happen very rapidly.

An officer, accompanied by two privates, who walked behind him like a bodyguard, came down the street, peering anxiously to right and left. When he saw Dunnett his whole face brightened. He halted the soldiers and addressed him.

“You have a friend, Captain Leach?” he asked.

Dunnett admitted it.

“Would you please come with us?” he asked.

“Is anything wrong?” Dunnett asked.

The officer was dignified and impersonal. “I know nothing,” he said. “It is the General who wishes to see you.”

Dunnett got up and joined him. Now that he was on his feet he found that the beer had not been so insignificant as he had imagined. It gave him a feeling of strange lightheadedness, as though he were walking on springs. He noticed with a kind of contemptuous amusement that one of the soldiers was now marching ahead of them while the other was following up behind. The officer had taken an outside position, and the little cortège moved off with a dignity all its own. The rear soldier carried the suitcase.

They passed through the barracks gate with an exchange of salutes, and the officer halted his men outside a long wooden hut with a bulbous corrugated iron roof. He politely requested Dunnett to remain, and went inside; as the door opened Dunnett could hear the voice of Captain Leach raised in displeasure about something.

A moment later the officer returned and said that the General was ready to receive him. They entered the room and the soldiers tramped in dutifully after them. It was not a cheerful group which they confronted. Backed by two other officers, the General himself, a small, round man with a gleaming naked head, was sitting at his desk, his fists clenched, regarding Captain Leach. He appeared to dislike the man. And quite a lot had happened to Captain Leach since Dunnett had last seen him. One eye was now closed and the flesh round it was broken. Also his shirt was torn : he had evidently been in some sort of rough-and-tumble since Dunnett had last seen him.

“Do you know this man?” the General asked.

“I do,” Dunnett replied.

“He is charged,” said the General, “with assaulting two officers in pursuit of their duties, damaging a chair, the property of the Bolivian Government “—he indicated a plain
deal chair with the back broken: it had evidently been thrown at someone—“and using obscene lauguage when arrested.”

“Lice,” Captain Leach observed tersely. “Just a lot of crawling, military lice.”

The General ignored the interruption. “Who is this man?” he asked.

“He's Captain Leach,” Dunnett replied. “He's come to Canagua to be my guide.”

“Why should you come to Canagua at all?” the General demanded.

“I had business here.”

“What sort of business?”

“I wished to see the Bolivian agent of the firm I worked for.”

“What firm is that?”

Dunnett told him, and the General made a note on the charge sheet before him.

“What manner of business is it?” he asked.

“Import business,” Dunnett replied non-committally.

“Who is your agent?”

Dunnett paused. Thanks to Captain Leach, the carefully concealed details of their plan were now to be discovered; he could see Señor Muras getting wind of the visit and removing himself in time. At that moment he shared the General's view of Captain Leach: Captain Leach, however, was oblivious of his discontent.

“Who is your agent?” the General repeated.

“Señor Muras,” Dunnett told him.

The name appeared to cause some excitement. The General withdrew to the other end of the room and conferred with his fellow officers. Dunnett could hear them whispering; at intervals one or other of them would turn round and inspect their two visitors. Then the General returned and took his place at his desk, his
aides
beside him.

“You are under arrest, Señor Dunnett,” he said.

“But I haven't done anything,” Dunnett protested

“We shall find that out in the morning,” the General answered.

“Do you realise that I'm a British subject?” Dunnett demanded; he produced his passport and threw it down on the desk in front of him. The General examined it and then locked it away in a drawer. “It is safer there,” he said briefly.

“May I ask by what authority you are keeping me here?” Dunnett asked.

“By article thirty-seven of our Criminal Code. You are a suspected person in a Military Zone.”

“Suspected of what?”

“Suspected of being a Paraguayan spy,” the General replied with astonishing vehemence. “That's what you are,” he said. “Paraguayan spies both of you.”

The outburst appeared to rouse Captain Leach. “Call me a Paraguayan again,” he said, “and I'll knock the chops off your face.”

The pocket General ignored him. He turned to the officer who had escorted Dunnett to the barracks. “Take him away,” he said, coldly.

One of the
aides
assisted Captain Leach to the door. Once there, however, he stuck. He put his knees against the jamb and refused to move. From where he was standing he could survey the whole length of the room. The General looked up to see the cause of the delay.

“Pigsface,” Captain Leach shouted at him, “you stink worse than a skunk.”

One of the soldiers brought his rifle butt down hard in the pit of Captain Leach's stomach, and Captain Leach ceased to be dignified. He fell to the ground moaning. Dunnett stood there regarding him. Only the feel of something hard thrust suddenly into his own back reminded him that he, too, was meant to be moving.

The hut to which the guard conducted them was on the far side of the barracks, beside the latrines. It was the solidest looking building in Canagua. The walls and roof were of
quebracho nearly a foot thick. There was no window, only a narrow diamond cut in each side; the officer opened the door, which was of half man height, and stood back for the soldiers to deposit Captain Leach. They were carrying him between them like some hunting trophy. His body sagged in a limp arc. Occasionally, he would groan and make some reference to his high standing in the eyes of the British Government. But his captors ignored him. They halted in front of the open door and steadied themselves. Then they one-two-three'd and shot him head first into the timber cell. The officer beckoned to Dunnett to follow. He did so with a calm that surprised him. But there did not seem to be much sense in arguing with a hostile officer and four native soldiers. He just ducked his head and stepped within like someone entering a children's summer house.

It was not like a summer house inside, however. The atmosphere had the peculiar thickness of air that has been cooped up and slowly grilled. For a moment he stood quite still. The horror of the place—that it would be a perpetual midnight inside even though there might be a full Bolivian sun without—had only just struck him. He sweated suddenly at the thought. And then he found that he was wrong. It was not black inside but chocolate, with light shafts of yellow where the diamonds were cut. One of these shafts fell on Captain Leach and lit him up where he lay.

For some minutes neither of them spoke. There didn't in the circumstances seem to be very much that could be said. It was Dunnett who broke the silence. “How the devil did this happen?” he asked.

“I was set on,” Captain Leach told him. “Set on and beaten up.”

“Where?”

“Ina house I went into.”

“What sort of a house?”

“A bad one,” Captain Leach replied sadly. “A very bad sort of house. I didn't know just how bad it was.”

“Why did they beat you up?”

“Because it was reserved for officers. They didn't want me with them and I didn't want to go. I dared them to throw me out.”

“And did they?”

Captain Leach nodded. “But I got back again,” he said. “Got back and raised hell. There was an automatic piano playing and I wanted to hear the end of the roll. When it finished, I broke loose.”