The Comedians (35 page)

‘You've thought about it too,' she accused me.

‘Yes, I've thought a lot about it. It was one of the reasons why I tried to sell the hotel in New York. I wanted money to go after you wherever you were sent. But nobody will ever buy the hotel now.'

She said, ‘Darling, we'll manage somehow, but Jones – it's life or death for him.'

‘I suppose if we were still young we'd think it was life or death for us too. But now – “men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love”.'

Jones called out from below, ‘The game's finished'; his voice came into the room like a tactless stranger. ‘We'd better go,' Martha said. ‘Don't say anything, not until we know.'

Pineda sat with the awful dog on his knees, stroking it; it accepted his caresses listlessly as though it wanted to be elsewhere, and it watched Jones with bleary devotion where he sat adding up the score. ‘I'm 1200 up,' he said. ‘I'll send to Hamit's in the morning and buy bourbon biscuits for Angel.'

‘You spoil him,' Martha said. ‘Buy something for yourself. To remember us by.'

‘As if I could ever forget,' Jones said, and he looked at her, just as the dog on Pineda's knees looked at Jones, with an expression mournful, dewy and a bit false at the same time.

‘Your information seems to be bad,' I said. ‘Hamit has disappeared.'

‘I hadn't heard,' Pineda said. ‘Why . . . ?'

‘Petit Pierre thinks he has too many foreign friends.'

‘You must do something,' Martha said. ‘Hamit helped us in so many ways.' I remembered one of them, the small room with the brass bedstead and the mauve silk coverlet and the hard eastern chairs ranged against the wall. Those afternoons belonged to our easiest days.

‘What can I do?' Pineda said. ‘The Secretary of the Interior will accept two of my cigars and tell me politely that Hamit is a citizen of Haiti.'

‘Give me my old company back,' Jones said, ‘and I'd go through the police station like a dose of salts till I found him.'

I couldn't have asked for a quicker or better response: Magiot had said, ‘You can trap a man who boasts.' When Jones spoke he looked at Martha with the expression of a young man seeking approval, and I could imagine all those domestic evenings when he had amused them with his stories of Burma. It was true he wasn't young, but there was nearly ten years between us all the same.

‘There are a lot of police,' I said.

‘If I had fifty of my own men I could take over the country. The Japs outnumbered us, and they knew how to fight . . .'

Martha moved towards the door, but I stopped her. ‘Please don't go.' I needed her as a witness. She stayed, and Jones went on, suspecting nothing at all. ‘Of course they had us on the run at first in Malaya. We didn't know a thing about guerrilla war then, but we learnt.'

‘Wingate,' I said encouragingly, for fear he wouldn't go far enough.

‘He was one of the best, but there are others I could name. I was proud enough of some of my own tricks.'

‘You could smell water,' I reminded him.

‘That was something I hadn't got to learn,' he said. ‘It was born in me. Why, as a child . . .'

‘What a tragedy it is you are shut up here,' I interrupted him. His childhood was too distant for my purpose. ‘There are men in the mountains now who only need to learn. Of course they've got Philipot.'

It was like a duet between the two of us. ‘Philipot,' he exclaimed, ‘he hasn't a clue, old man. Do you know he came to see me? He wanted my help in training . . . He offered . . .'

‘Weren't you tempted?' I said.

‘I certainly was. One misses the old Burmese days. You can understand that. But, old man, I was in the government service. I hadn't seen through them then. Perhaps I'm innocent, but a man's only got to be straight with me . . . I trusted them . . . If I'd known what I know now . . .'

I wondered what explanation he had given to Martha and Pineda for his flight. He had obviously elaborated a good deal on the story he had told me the night of his escape.

‘It's a great pity you didn't go with Philipot,' I said.

‘A pity for both of us, old man. Of course, I'm not running him down. Philipot's got courage. But I could have turned him, given the opportunity, into a first-rate commando. That attack on the police station – it was amateurish. He let most of them escape and the only arms he got . . .'

‘If another opportunity arose . . .' No inexperienced mouse could have moved more recklessly towards the smell of cheese. ‘Oh, I'd go like a shot now,' he said.

I said, ‘If I could arrange for your escape . . . to join Philipot . . .'

He hardly hesitated at all, for Martha's eyes were on him. ‘Just show me the way, old man,' he said. ‘Just show me the way.'

Midge at that moment leapt upon his knees and licked his face, from nose to chin, as though to give the hero a long farewell; he made some obvious joke – for he was unaware then that the trap had really closed – which set Martha laughing, and I comforted myself that the days of laughter were numbered.

‘You have to be ready at a moment's warning,' I told him.

‘I travel light, old man,' Jones said. ‘Not even a cocktail-case now.' He could risk that reference; he was so sure of me . . .

Doctor Magiot was sitting in my office, in the dark, although the lights had come on. I said, ‘I've hooked him. Nothing could have been easier.'

‘You sound very triumphant,' he said. ‘But what is it after all? One man can't win a war.'

‘No, I've other reasons for triumph.'

Doctor Magiot spread a map out on my desk and we went over in detail the southern road to Aux Cayes. If I was to return alone I must appear to have no passenger.

‘But if they search the car?'

‘We will come to that.'

I would need a police-pass for myself and a reason for my journey. ‘You must get a pass for Monday, the 12th . . .' he told me. It would take the best part of a week for him to get a reply from Philipot, so the 12th was the earliest date possible – ‘there's hardly any moon then and that's in your favour. You leave him here by the cemetery before you reach Aquin and drive on to Aux Cayes.'

‘If the Tontons Macoute find him before Philipot . . .'

‘You won't get there before midnight, and no one goes into a cemetery after dark. If anyone finds him it will be a bad lookout for you,' Magiot said. ‘They'll make him talk.'

‘I suppose there's no other possible way . . .'

‘I would never get a pass to leave Port-au-Prince or I would have offered . . .'

‘Don't worry. I have a personal score to settle with Concasseur.'

‘We all have that. At least there is one thing we can depend on . . .'

‘What's that?'

‘The weather.'

IV

There was a Catholic mission and a hospital at Aux Cayes and I had thought up some story to tell of a package of theological books and a parcel of medicines which I had promised to deliver there. The story as it happened hardly mattered; the police were only concerned with the dignity of their office. A pass to Aux Cayes cost so many hours of waiting, that was all, in the smell of the zoo, under the snapshots of the dead rebels, in the steam of the stove-like day. The door of the office in which Mr Smith and I had first seen Concasseur was closed. Perhaps he was already in disgrace and my score settled for me.

Just before one o'clock struck, my name was called and I went to a policeman at the desk. He began to fill in the innumerable details, of myself and my car, from my birth in Monte Carlo to the colour of my Humber. A sergeant came and looked over his shoulder. ‘You are mad,' he said.

‘Why?'

‘You'll never get to Aux Cayes without a jeep.'

‘The Great Southern Highway,' I said.

‘A hundred and eighty kilometres of mud and pot-holes. Even with a jeep it takes eight hours.'

That afternoon Martha came to see me. As we were resting side by side she said to me, ‘Jones takes you seriously.'

‘I meant him to.'

‘You know you wouldn't get past the first road-block.'

‘Are you so anxious about him?'

‘You are such a fool,' she said. ‘I think if I were going away for ever, you'd spoil the last moment . . .'

‘Are you going away?'

‘One day. Of course. It's certain. One always moves on.'

‘Would you tell me beforehand?'

‘I don't know. I mightn't have the courage.'

‘I'd follow you.'

‘Would you? What a baggage-train. To arrive in a new capital with a husband and Angel and a lover as well.'

‘At least you would have left Jones behind.'

‘Who knows? Perhaps we could smuggle him out in the diplomatic bag. Luis likes him better than he does you. He says he's more honest.'

‘Honest? Jones?' I gave a good imitation of a laugh, but my throat was dry after love.

As so often before, the dusk came down while we talked of Jones; we didn't make love a second time: the subject was anaphrodisiac.

‘It's strange to me,' I said, ‘how easily he makes friends. Luis and you. Even Mr Smith was fond of him. Perhaps the crooked appeals to the straight or the guilty to the innocent, like blonde appeals to black.'

‘Am I innocent?'

‘Yes.'

‘And yet you think I sleep with Jones.'

‘That has nothing to do with innocence.'

‘Would you really follow me if we went away?'

‘Of course. If I could raise the cash. Once I had a hotel. Now I have only you. Are you leaving? Are you keeping something secret?'

‘I'm not. But Luis may be.'

‘Doesn't he tell you everything?'

‘Perhaps he's more afraid to make me unhappy than you are. Tenderness is more – tender.'

‘How often does he make love to you?'

‘You think me insatiable, don't you? I need you and Luis and Jones,' she said, but she didn't answer my question. The palms and the bougainvillaea had turned black, and the rain began, in single drops like gouts of heavy oil. Between the drops the sultry silence fell and then the lightning struck and the roar of the storm came down the mountain. The rain was hammered into the ground like a prefabricated wall.

I said, ‘It will be a night like this, when the moon's hidden, that I'll come for Jones.'

‘How will you get him past the road-blocks?'

I repeated what Petit Pierre had said to me, ‘There are no road-blocks in a storm.'

‘But they'll suspect you when they find out . . .'

‘I trust you and Luis not to let them find out. You have to close Angel's mouth, and the dog's too. Don't let him go whining round the house looking for lost Jones.'

‘Are you frightened?'

‘I wish I had a jeep, that's all.'

‘Why are you doing it?'

‘I don't like Concasseur and his Tontons Macoute. I don't like Papa Doc. I don't like them feeling my balls in the street to see if I have a gun. That body in the bathing-pool – I used to have different memories. They tortured Joseph. They ruined my hotel.'

‘What difference can Jones make if he's a fake?'

‘Perhaps after all he isn't. Philipot believes in him. Perhaps he did fight the Japs.'

‘If he was a fake he wouldn't want to go, would he?'

‘He committed himself too far in front of you.'

‘I'm not that important to him.'

‘Then what is? Did he ever speak to you about a golf club?'

‘Yes, but you don't risk death for a golf club. He wants to go.'

‘Do you believe that?'

‘He asked me to lend him back his cocktail-shaker. He said it's a mascot. He always had it with him in Burma. He says he'll return it when the guerrillas enter Port-au-Prince.'

‘He certainly has his dreams,' I said. ‘Perhaps he's an innocent too.'

‘Don't be angry,' she implored me, ‘if I go home early. I promised him a party – of gin-rummy, I mean, before Angel comes back from school. He's so good with Angel. They play commandos and unarmed combat. There may not be time for many more gin-rummies. You do understand, don't you? I want to be kind.'

I felt weariness more than anger when she left me, weariness of myself most of all. Was I incapable of trust? But when I poured myself out a whisky and heard the vast inundation of silence flooding round, venom returned; venom was an antidote to fear. I thought, why should I trust a German, the child of a hanged man?

V

A few days later I received a letter from Mr Smith – it had taken more than a week to come from Santo Domingo. They had stopped off, he wrote to me, for a few days to look around and see the tomb of Columbus, and who did I think they had met? I could answer that without even turning the page. Mr Fernandez, of course. He happened to be at the airport when they arrived. (I wondered whether his profession made him stand by on the airfield like an ambulance.) Mr Fernandez had shown them so much, so interestingly, that they had decided to stay on longer. Apparently Mr Fernandez' vocabulary had increased. In the
Medea
he had been suffering from a great grief, and that was the reason he had broken down at the concert; his mother had been seriously ill, but she had recovered. The cancer had proved to be no more than a
fibrome
, and Mrs Smith had converted her to a vegetarian diet. Mr Fernandez even thought that there were possibilities for a vegetarian centre in the Dominican Republic. ‘I must admit,' he wrote, ‘that conditions here are more peaceful, although there is a great deal of poverty. Mrs Smith has met a friend from Wisconsin.' He sent his cordial best wishes to Major Jones and thanked me for all my help and hospitality. He was an old man with beautiful manners, and suddenly I realized how much I missed him. In the school chapel at Monte Carlo we prayed every Sunday, ‘
Dona nobis pacem
,' but I doubt whether that prayer was answered for many in the life that followed. Mr Smith had no need to pray for peace. He had been born with peace in his heart instead of the splinter of ice. That afternoon Hamit's body was found in an open sewer on the edge of Port-au-Prince.