The Comedians (37 page)

‘I'll take it up for you,' I said. ‘He'll need it.'

‘You haven't come for him?' she asked.

‘Oh yes, I have. The rain is just beginning. We'll have to give it a little while longer until the guards take shelter . . .'

‘What earthly use will he be? Out there?'

‘A great deal if all he says is true. It only needed one man in Cuba . . .'

‘How often I've heard that. It's a parrot-phrase. I'm sick of it. This is not Cuba.'

‘It will be easier for you and me when he's gone.'

‘Is that all you think about?'

‘Yes. I suppose it is.'

She had a small bruise just below the shoulder-bone. Trying to make the question sound like a joke, I said, ‘What have you been doing to yourself?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘That bruise.' I touched it with my finger.

‘Oh that? I don't know. I bruise easily.'

‘At gin-rummy?'

She put the glass down and turned her back. She said, ‘Give yourself a drink. You will need it too.'

I said, as I poured myself a whisky, ‘I'll be back on Wednesday by one if I leave Aux Cayes at dawn. Will you come up to the hotel? Angel will be at school.'

‘Perhaps. Let's wait and see.'

‘We haven't been together for several days.' I added, ‘There'll be no gin-rummy to take you home early.' She turned back to me, and I saw she was crying. ‘What's the matter?' I asked.

‘I told you. I bruise easily.'

‘What have I said?' Fear has strange effects: it releases adrenalin into the blood: it makes a man wet his trousers: in me it injected a desire to hurt. I said, ‘You seem upset at losing Jones?'

‘Why shouldn't I be?' she said. ‘You think you're lonely up there at the Trianon. Well, I'm lonely here. I'm lonely with Luis, silent in a twin bed. I'm lonely with Angel, doing his interminable sums for him when he comes back from school. Yes, I've been happy having Jones here – hearing people laugh at his bad jokes, playing gin-rummy with him. Yes, I'll miss him. I'll miss him till it hurts. How I'll miss him.'

‘More than you missed me when I went to New York?'

‘You were coming back. At least you said you were. I'm not sure now whether you ever did.'

I took the two glasses of whisky and went upstairs. On the landing I realized I didn't know which was Jones's room. I called softly, so that the servants shouldn't hear me, ‘Jones. Jones.'

‘I'm here.'

I pushed a door open and went in. He sat on his bed fully dressed: he had even put on his gumboots. ‘I heard your voice,' he said, ‘down below. Tonight's the night, old man?'

‘Yes. You'd better drink this.'

‘I can do with it.' He gave a sour grimace.

‘I've got a bottle in the car.'

He said, ‘I've done my packing. Luis has lent me a kitbag.' He ran over the items on his fingers to check them: ‘Change of shoes, change of pants. Two pairs of socks. Change of shirt. Oh, and the cocktail-shaker. That's for luck. You see it was given me . . .' He stopped abruptly. Perhaps he remembered he had told me the truth of
that
story.

‘You don't seem to anticipate a long campaign,' I said to help him out.

‘I mustn't carry more than my men. Give me time, and I'll have our supplies organized.' For the first time he sounded professional, and I wondered whether perhaps I had maligned him. ‘You can help us there, old man. When I've got a courier system working properly.'

‘Let's think of the next few hours. We have to get through them.'

‘I've a lot to thank you for.' Again his words surprised me. ‘It's a big chance for me, isn't it? Of course I'm scared to hell. There's no denying that.'

We sat in silence side by side, drinking our whiskies, listening to the thunder which shook the roof. I had been so certain Jones would resist when the moment came that I felt a little at a loss what to do next, and it was Jones who took command. ‘We'd better get cracking if we're to be out of here before the storm's over. I'll say good-bye, if you'll excuse me, to my lovely hostess.'

When he came back he had a trace of lipstick at the corner of his mouth: an awkward embrace on the mouth or an awkward embrace on the cheek – it was hard to tell which. He said, ‘The police are safe in the kitchen drinking rum. We'd better be off.'

Martha unbolted the front door for us. ‘You go first,' I said to Jones, trying to re-establish command. ‘Stoop down below the windscreen if you can.'

We were both wet through the moment after we emerged. I turned to say good-bye to Martha, but even then I couldn't resist the question, ‘Are you still crying?'

‘No,' she said, ‘it's the rain,' and I could see she spoke the truth. The rain ran down her face as it ran down the wall behind her. ‘What are you waiting for?'

‘Don't I rate a kiss as much as Jones?' I said, and she put her mouth against my cheek: I could feel the listless indifference of the embrace. I said accusingly, ‘I'm running a bit of danger too.'

‘But I don't like your motive,' she said.

It was as though somebody I hated spoke from my mouth before I could silence him. ‘Have you slept with Jones?' I regretted the question even before the last word was said. If the heavy peal of thunder which followed had drowned it I would have been content, I would never have repeated it. She stood flat against the door as though she were facing a firing squad, and I thought for some reason of her father before his execution. Had he flung a defiance at his judges from the scaffold? Had he worn an expression of anger and disdain?

‘You've been asking me that for weeks,' she said, ‘every time I've seen you. All right then. The answer's yes, yes. That's what you want me to say, isn't it? Yes. I've slept with Jones.' The worst thing was I only half believed her.

III

There were no lights in Mère Catherine's as we passed the turning to her brothel and took the Southern Highway, or else we couldn't see them through the rain. I drove at about twenty miles an hour; I felt like a man blindfolded, and this was the easy part of the road. It had been constructed with the help of American engineers in the much advertised five-year plan, but the Americans had gone home and the metalled road ceased about seven miles out of Port-au-Prince. This was where I expected a road-block, but I was startled when my headlamps picked up an empty jeep outside a militiaman's hut, which meant the Tontons Macoute were there as well. I had little time to accelerate, but no one came from the hut – if the Tontons were inside, they were keeping dry too. I listened for the sound of pursuit, but all I could hear was the drumming of the rain. The great highway had become no more than a country track: our speed went down to eight miles an hour as we bumped from rock to rock and splashed through standing pools. For more than an hour we drove in silence, too shaken about to speak.

A rock crashed under the car and I thought for a moment an axle was broken. Jones said, ‘Can I find your whisky?'

When he had found it he took a swill and handed the bottle to me. The car because of my momentary inattention skidded sideways and the rear-wheels stuck in wet laterite. It took us twenty minutes' hard labour before we moved again.

‘Shall we make your rendezvous on time?' Jones asked.

‘I doubt it. You may have to keep under cover till tomorrow night. I brought you some sandwiches in case.'

He chuckled. ‘It's the life,' he said. ‘I've often dreamt of something like this.'

‘I thought it was the life you'd always led.'

He fell silent again as though aware of an indiscretion.

Suddenly for no reason at all the road improved. The rain was easing rapidly; I hoped it wouldn't stop altogether before we passed the next police-post. Afterwards there was no problem before the cemetery this side of Aquin. I said, ‘And Martha? How did you get on with Martha?'

‘She's a wonderful girl,' he said with caution.

‘I got the impressions she was fond of you.'

It was a bad sign of the weather clearing that sometimes I could detect a streak of sea between the palms like the flash of a match. Jones said, ‘We got on like a house on fire.'

‘I sometimes envied you, but perhaps she's not your type.' It was like stripping a bandage from a wound: the more slowly I pulled the longer the pain would last, but I lacked the courage to rip the bandage right away, and all the time I had to watch the difficult road.

‘Old man,' Jones said, ‘every girl's my type, but she was something special.'

‘You know she's German?'

‘The fräuleins understand a thing or two.'

‘As well as Tin Tin?' I tried to ask in a casual clinical way.

‘Tin Tin was not in the same class, old man.' We might have been two medical students boasting of rudimentary experiences. I didn't speak again for a long time.

We were approaching Petit Goave – I knew the place from better days. The police station, I remembered, was off the highway, and I would be supposed to drive there to report. I hoped the rain was still heavy enough to keep the police in their quarters – they were unlikely to have militia posted here. Dank huts wobbled in the headlights beside the road, the mud and thatch broken and bedraggled in the rain: no lamps burned, there was no human being to be seen, not even a cripple. In the small yards the family tombs looked more solid than the family huts. The dead were allotted mansions of a better class than the living – houses of two storeys with window-embrasures where food and lights could be placed on the night of All Souls. I couldn't let my attention wander until we had passed Petit Goave. In a long yard beside the road there were rows of little crosses with what looked like tresses of blonde hair looped between, as though they had been ripped from the skulls of women buried below.

‘Good God,' Jones said, ‘what was that?'

‘Only sisal drying.'

‘Drying? In this rain?'

‘Who knows what's happened to the owner? Perhaps he's shot. In prison. Fled to the mountains.'

‘It was a bit eery, old man. Sort of Edgar Allan Poe. It looked more like death than the cemeteries do.'

Nobody was about in the main street of Petit Goave. We passed something called the Yo-Yo Club and a big sign for Mère Merlan's Brasseries and a
boulangerie
belonging to someone called Brutus and a garage owned by Cato – so the stubborn memories of this black people preserved the memories of a better republic – and then to my relief we were in the country again, tossing from rock to rock. ‘We've made it,' I said.

‘Nearly there?'

‘We're nearly half-way.'

‘I think I'll take another drop of whisky, old man.'

‘Drink what you like. You'll have to make it last a long time, though.'

‘I'd better finish it before I join the boys. It wouldn't go far with them.'

I took another pull myself to give me courage, and yet I postponed the final unambiguous question.

‘How did you get on with the husband?' I asked him cautiously.

‘Fine. I wasn't stealing any greens of his.'

‘Weren't you?'

‘She doesn't sleep with him any more.'

‘How do you know?'

‘I have my reasons,' he said, taking the bottle and sucking at it loudly. The road again required all my attention. Our speed was practically reduced to walking-pace now: I had to thread between the rocks like a pony at a gymkhana.

‘We ought to have had a jeep,' Jones said.

‘Where would you find a jeep in Port-au-Prince? Borrowed it from the Tontons?'

The road branched, and we left the sea behind us and turned inland, climbing into the hills. The track for a while became plain laterite and there was only the mud to clog our passage. It was a change of exercise. We had been going for three hours – it was close to one in the morning.

‘Little danger of militia now,' I said.

‘But the rain's stopped.'

‘They're afraid of the hills.'

‘From which cometh our help,' Jones quipped. The whisky was loosening him up. I could wait no longer and I pushed the question home. ‘Was she a good lay?'

‘Re-markable,' Jones said, and I clung to the wheel to keep my hands off him. It was a long while before I spoke again, but he noticed nothing. He fell asleep with his mouth open, leaning back against the door where Martha had often leant; he slept as peacefully as a child, innocently. Perhaps he really was an innocent as Mr Smith, and that was the reason they had liked each other. Anger soon left me: the child had broken a dish, that was all – yes, a dish, I thought, is just how he would have described her. Once he woke for a moment and offered to drive, but I felt enough danger in our situation without that.

And then the car gave out altogether; perhaps my attention had wandered, perhaps it was just waiting for one extra heavy lurch to shake its innards out. The wheel whirled in my hands as I tried to recover the road after bouncing off a rock: we struck hard against another boulder and came to rest, the front axle cracked in two and one headlamp smashed. There was nothing whatever to be done – I couldn't get to Aux Cayes, and I couldn't go back to Port-au-Prince. I was tied for that night anyway to Jones.

Jones opened his eyes and said, ‘I dreamt . . . why have we stopped? Are we there?'

‘The front axle's bust.'

‘How far are we, do you suppose, from – there?'

I looked at the mileage and said, ‘A couple of kilometres I'd say, perhaps three.'