Isvik (14 page)

Rodriguez was getting to his feet again, the uneasy look back on his face. He seemed to find something disturbing in what Ward had said.

‘Sit down, man. There's a little matter we haven't touched on yet.' Ward pointed to the chair. ‘Sit down, for God's sake.' He leaned back. ‘Here in Mexico the Spaniards topped every Aztec temple to Huitzilopochtli, every pyramid, either with a church or a statue of the Virgin Mary. Ye're a Roman Catholic, Ah take it?'

Rodriguez nodded slowly.

‘A very pragmatic church. A lot of glitz.' He seemed to be talking to himself. ‘Ah wonder what Christ makes of all the horrors done in his name. And now we have fanatical variations of the Muslim faith breathin' hate and venom all over the Near East.'

I didn't follow the relevance of his religious digression. Nor I think did Rodriguez, who had subsided into his seat again, a sad, dazed look on his face.

‘
¡Salud!
' Ward raised his glass.

‘
¡Salud!
'

‘Tell me –' His tone was mild, almost conversational – ‘how much did he pay you?'

The man's eyes slid sideways to the street door. ‘
No comprendo
.' The door was open and he started to rise.

‘You understand perfectly well.' Ward was very much the old Etonian now, his manner still mild, but with something in the voice that held Rodriguez riveted, both hands on the table and his bottom half out of his seat. ‘You went to Peru.'

‘No.'

‘You went to Peru,' he repeated, ‘and you saw Gómez. He still uses his service rank, does he?'

‘Yes, he is
Capitán
now.'

‘So you saw him.'

The other didn't answer.

‘How much?' Ward's voice had hardened.

‘I don't go to Peru. I come here to Mexico City where it is not too far by airplane to visit my publishers in San Francisco.'

‘You went to Peru.' Ward said it very quietly this time, but with an emphasis that made it sound like a threat.

‘You cannot prove anything.'

‘No?' Ward left his enquiry hanging there, smiling quietly. Then he said, ‘What I need from you is not so much what he paid you, but why. You went to Peru –' He pulled a diary out of his breast pocket and checked some notes at the end – ‘on March 5 this year. That is just two months before your book came out. What were you going to write into the book if he didn't pay you?'

‘Nothing. Nothing, I tell you. He pay me nothing.'

Ward glanced at his diary again. ‘According to my information your book has sold some eight thousand copies in the English language and the print figure in the Spanish edition was twenty-five thousand. You have two wives to keep, the one you are living with here, who is really your mistress, and I believe rather expensive, particularly as she already has a daughter, and your wife proper who will not divorce you and is living in the Argentine with your two children, a boy and a girl. You also run a big Chrysler and have two addresses, one here in Mexico City, the other in Cuernavaca. In other words, you live an expensive life, more expensive than you could possibly afford on the basis of the royalties from your two books and the articles you periodically write for newspapers and magazines in the States. So – what is it you haven't told me about this man?'

Rodriguez didn't answer. He subsided back into his seat, staring down at his drink, while Ward watched him, waiting. Their eyes met. Then Rodriguez glanced at the door again as though seeking escape, but it was shut now. His eyes flickered round the restaurant. There were still several people watching us, conversation muted.

‘Well?'

He shook his head, suddenly reaching for his drink and swallowing it in one quick gulp. He stared at the empty glass for a moment. I think he would have liked another, but instead he pulled himself slowly to his feet.

Ward had also risen, the two of them facing each other. ‘You mention in your book that some time after the capitulation at Port Stanley, Gómez was given the job of testing an aircraft for its long-range capabilities, flying it out of that Argentine base at the bottom of Tierra del Fuego. You suggest he was secretly testing it for work on the Antarctic land mass, flying it south over the pack ice. How far south? Do you know where?'

‘
No
.'

‘As far as the Ice Shelf?'

‘
No sé
.'

‘It couldn't have been entirely secret since you say it was reported in the papers. You even have a picture of him taken on his return. It was a German plane, a Fokker I believe?'

‘
Si
.'

There was a moment's silence, the two of them standing there and the restaurant quite still now. ‘We'll be stopping off in Lima,' Ward said. ‘If Gómez is not at the address you have given me I shall presume it is because you've been in touch with him, so don't phone him. Okay?' And he added, ‘I will not, of course, mention our meeting here in Mexico City.'

The other nodded and turned towards the door. But then he paused, a look almost of malice. ‘If you go to Cajamarca you should know
el Niño
is running.'

‘So?'

‘
El Niño
is the counter-equatorial current.'

‘I know that.'

‘Every six or seven years it overruns the Humboldt.'

‘And then?'

‘And then … per'aps you will see.' He smiled, adding, ‘When
el Niño
run the fishermen don't earn nothing because fish like the cold of the north-flowing Humboldt, not the warmth of the Equatorial, and with no fish, the birds die.'

‘How do you know what's happening down there in Peru? Have you been there again?'

‘No. It is in the papers. The birds are dying.'

‘And how's that concern us?'

‘I am never on the Pacific coast in
el Niño
year,' Rodriguez said, still smiling, ‘but if the rains of the Amazon slip across the Cordilleras you will maybe have a bad flight to Cajamarca.
¡Buen viaje!
' he added, not bothering now to hid his malice as he turned quickly to the door and made his escape.

Ward knocked back the rest of his tequila and called for the
cuenta
. ‘Time we got some sleep. The next few days could be a wee bit hectic.'

All the way back to the hotel he sat hunched and silent in the rear of the taxi, his eyes closed. He only spoke once, and then he was merely voicing his thoughts aloud. ‘That aircraft was fitted with long-range tanks. He could have got to the South Pole and back. Or he could have flown it around in the wastes of ice where Shackleton lost the
Endurance
. Nobody would see him there.' And he added, ‘Ah wonder how much Iris knows?'

I failed to follow his train of thought, my mind still on the meeting with Rodriguez. ‘You really think he was blackmailing the man?'

He looked at me then, a quick flick of the eyes. ‘Of course. And not just Gómez. A book like that, it's a great temptation fur a journalist who knows so much he's scared to go on livin' in his own country.'

I said something about the political climate in the Argentine having changed since the Falklands War. I thought I knew that much about the country. I suppose I had read it somewhere. But he laughed and shook his head.

‘That's a very naïve assessment. Nothin' has changed. Not really. The Argentines are still ethnically the same, the population still predominantly Italian, most of them havin' their roots in the south of Italy and in Sicily. The Camorra and the Mafia are part of their heritage, violence in their blood.'

I started to argue with him, but all he said was, ‘Leopards don't change their spots just because the fashion in political leadership alters. And remember, the Junta that decided on the invasion of the Malvinas, at least tae of them, were of Italian extraction. They're finished, of course, now, but there will be others – others that are lyin' low fur the moment. Rodriguez knows that. Probably knows who they are. That's why he's scared to remain in Buenos Aires.'

He relapsed into silence then, and because my mind was still trying to grapple with the politics of a country I knew very little about, I failed to ask him whether Gómez had made that flight on his own or if he had had a crew with him.

It was only later, when I was lying in my bed, with the neon lights of a bar across the road flickering on the curtains and music blaring, that I remembered Ward standing in the saloon of the
Cutty Sark
and asking Iris Sunderby who she had in mind as navigator, who the man was who had convinced her he had also seen a ship locked in the ice of the Weddell Sea. I had thought at the time she had been referring to an officer on some survey vessel, the British Antarctic Survey's supply ship perhaps, or else a pelagic fisherman or whaler, even an Antarctic explorer. But now it came back to me. She had said,
A man I'm convinced has actually seen what my husband saw
. Those had been her words, and if she was being exact, they would mean that he had seen the icebound vessel from the air, exactly as Sunderby had seen it.

I lay there for a long time thinking about that, the loud insistence of the Mexican music from across the way drumming in my ears and gradually merging into the crashing ice of layering floes as my mind drifted into a fantasy of trekking with Iris Sunderby towards the dim outline of an icicle-festooned ghost of a ship, the man at the helm towering like a giant question mark over my jet-lagged brain. Had Charles Sunderby imagined it, or had he really seen the figure of a man standing frozen at the wheel?

I woke in a daze, the music replaced by the roar of traffic and the sunrise showing like a great red orange through a gap in the buildings opposite. There was no wind, the air crystal clear. I was too excited at being in such a strange city on the other side of the world for there to be any question of going back to sleep again. I got up, dressed and went for a walk, my limbs lethargic with the altitude, my brain sluggish after the disturbed night. The shops were opening and I browsed for a while in one that sold books as well as newspapers and magazines, but I failed to find the American edition of Rodriguez's book. Instead, I came away with an old copy of Prescott's
Conquest of Peru
. It was dusty and the spine was broken, but at least it was in English. Even so, it cost me rather more of my American dollars than I expected.

By then the sun was risen above the tops of the buildings and it was hot. I walked slowly back to the hotel. No sign of Ward, so I had breakfast, then rang his room. First time I tried his phone was engaged. When I finally got through to him he said very brusquely, ‘Don't phone again. Order a taxi fur ten-forty-five and hold it till Ah come down. Ah'm waitin' fur a call.'

‘It's getting late,' I said.

‘Ah know, but this call is important. Anyway, they'll not take off on time.'

It was almost eleven before he appeared, looking as though he hadn't slept at all. ‘Taxi there? Good. Make sure it doesn't go off.' He dumped his overnight bag with mine and I went out to tell the driver we were just coming. When I got back he was at the cashier's desk settling the bill. It was in US dollars, not Mexican pesetas. ‘And there is also', the clerk said, ‘two hundred and seventy-nine dollars owing for your calls,
señor
.'

Ward paid with American traveller's cheques and we hurried out to the taxi. ‘
Aeropuerto
.' He flopped into his seat.

‘That was quite a telephone bill,' I said as we moved off.

‘International calls are expensive.' He closed his eyes.

‘London? Or were you phoning Lima?'

I don't know whether he was asleep or not, but he didn't answer. He was equally uncommunicative when we reached the airport. His guess that the flight would be delayed proved correct. Security, they said. Apparently there had been a bomb scare recently. The transit baggage had not been loaded and customs officials and police were insisting on all cases being opened and everything laid out on the floor. It all took time and it was past midday before we finally got away.

Ward ordered vodka, drank it straight and went to sleep with
¿Muerto O Vivo?
open on his lap. The meal came. He waved it away and went back to sleep. We had just passed over a gaggle of eighteen-thousand-foot volcanoes, great slag heaps of ash with gaping vents pointed at the clear blue bowl of the heavens, when he finally shifted in his seat and leaned across me to look out of the window, blinking his eyes. ‘Know where Ah'd like to be goin'? The Galapagos.' He nodded his head towards a white line of distant cloud far out over the starb'd wing tip. ‘Out there. Can't be more than a thousand miles. Mebbe Ah'll dae that when Ah've extricated mesel' from the Southern Ocean an' all that ice.'

He picked up his book again, opened it at the marker and settled himself in his seat. He was back, playing the Glasgow boy and wearing his tourist hat like a hired costume. The stewardess came down the aisle, a big-breasted young woman exuding a strong odour of perspiration. He ordered another vodka and turned to me. ‘What about ye? Horse's Neck?'

I nodded.

He gave the order and we returned to our books. I had become totally absorbed in William Prescott's account of the Inca civilisation, which had been destroyed by the greed of Pizarro's
Conquistadores
. It was a fascinating glimpse of a people who in the sixteenth century had never seen a wheel or a sea-going ship, had never faced an armoured knight on horseback or the fire power of crossbows and guns, but whose roads and lines of communication through the incredible terrain of the Andes, whose methods of agriculture by irrigation and whose whole political set-up, so close to what we know as Communism, was in some ways more advanced than that of their conquerors.

The drinks came and Ward sat back, watching me out of the corner of his eye. ‘When ye've finished absorbin' Prescott Ah guess ye'll know as much about Peru as most Peruvians. Probably more.' And he added, ‘This will be the first time Ah've visited the country, but havin' read Prescott myself Ah don't think Ah'm goin' to like the Spaniards and what they and the mestizos have done to it.' And then he said suddenly, ‘That phone call Ah was waitin' fur – it was from the hotel Iris had given me as her address in Lima. They say she pulled out three days ago.'