The Three Sentinels (15 page)

‘I am looking for Lorenzo.’

‘And why do you think he would be here, Chepe?’

‘Because I cannot think where else he could be.’

The answer was quite true and need not be expanded. He did not mention explosives. That was his own secret. shared only with his father and Don Mateo.

‘Your father thinks so too?’ Gateson asked sharply.

Chepe disliked his voice and answered with the irresistible dignity of a child that his father was much too busy to bother.

‘He has certainly got his hands full!’ Thorpe replied. ‘Well, you might find Lorenzo, Chepe. Who knows? But take care of yourself and always look up at the rigs when you pass
underneath. This place reminds me of a war ruin.’

‘Did you kill anyone in the war?’

‘I did, Chepe.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he would have killed me if I didn’t.’

‘So that is right?’

‘It depends what use we are to the world.’

Chepe considered this statement. Since he greatly respected Sr. Thorpe, it had to be true though it did not fit his experience. His mother had obviously been of use to the world but she was
killed. He himself was no use at all as yet, but very much alive.

‘I must ask Don Mateo,’ he said, though not really meaning to say it aloud.

‘Are you ever alone with Don Mateo?’ the Field Manager enquired.

‘I have been, señor.’

‘And what do you do?’

‘We talk.’

‘Does he put his arm around you?’

Sr. Thorpe exclaimed indignantly in English, but Sr. Gateson only smiled.

The question was none of his business and was not answered; one did not discuss with anyone at all episodes of tears and being comforted. Chepe excused himself politely. There seemed to be a
quarrel beginning, but not like those of the men he knew. Sr. Thorpe was very angry, but Sr. Gateson still had his thin smile as if he had been at school much longer than Sr. Thorpe.

In the evening his father was uncommunicative. Chepe recounted his adventures but was given no guidance on whether he had been useful or not; he hoped to be told that it was pointless to spend a
second day as a detective. Since papacito was unwilling to be pestered about Lorenzo, he fell back on the superintendent’s laughing remark that he might find him. Tucked under his blanket, he
decided that he should not give up so easily. The grown-up world was always insistent that one should finish what one had started instead of darting off like a humming bird. Little, blue humming
bird, his mother had said.

So again next day he toiled up to the old field, wandered aimlessly about and called Lorenzo’s name without any excited expectation that he might be answered. This duty finished, it was
time to consider other duties. Absence from school had been in the back of his mind but had not entered any of his dialogues with himself. Now with no flower left to sip, alone and frustrated, the
inevitable consequence of not going to school occurred to him. He had another duty. For a man of honour there could be no question. It could be performed at once, for the headquarters office was
not far below him.

He stood before the porter, his large eyes shining just over the level of the desk, and asked to see Don Mateo. The porter laughed at him, which seemed to Chepe very absurd. Evidently the porter
was not familiar with Don Mateo’s character. Chepe pointed to the telephone—for in his experience he was seldom refused a reasonable request—and said:

‘I am José-María Garay. Please have the goodness to call him on the thing.’

The porter did so for the sake of a good story to tell. Chepe could hear a female voice reply. There was a short silence. Then the porter said Don Mateo would see him and led him to the
elevator.

‘It goes up,’ the porter explained, seeing the boy’s reluctance to be caged.

‘And it will go down?’

‘You walk down.’

There was a very long corridor and at the end of it a door where he was handed over to Pilar Alvarez whom he knew by sight. He also knew of her distinguished family and did his best to give a
little bow as he had been taught. He did not bow to the General Manager. He rubbed his hand on his trousers and held it out, for they were friends.

‘I have come to give you back the water pistol, Don Mateo, because for two days I have not been to school.’

‘How was that, Chepe?’

‘I was looking for Lorenzo in the old field.’

‘But why there?’

‘He used to go up at night to find … to find what I had. You know.’

‘And do you think he found it?’

‘Not when my father and I saw him there.’

Mat did not immediately press his questions. There was no hurry, and he must not alarm the boy or send him away with an uneasy sense that he had been disloyal. Cabo Desierto was infected by
quite enough disloyalty without spreading it to the innocent.

‘And school, Chepe?’

‘I can add numbers.’

‘How much is that and that and that?’ Mat asked, dealing out three piles of small coins on his desk.

‘Two and six … and four. Twelve, Don Mateo.’

‘Well done! Take them!’

‘My father would not like it.’

‘He is very right. I am sorry. But it pleases me to give and I have no one to give to.’

‘You must get married and have a son, Don Mateo. Or are you too old?’

‘That could be, Chepe.’

‘I saw Sr. Thorpe. He stopped to talk to me.’

‘For Sr. Thorpe we are all one family.’

‘He said it was all right to kill people who were no use.’

Mat considered this. It was clear that Thorpe had been respectfully led into conversation, but he couldn’t possibly have said anything of the sort.

‘We are all of use, Chepe.’

‘Am I?’ he asked—there was a note of puzzlement or anxiety.

‘Of course. You will be a fine, brave person like your father and mother.’

‘Were Sr. Thorpe and that Sr. Gateson looking for Lorenzo too?’

Careful now! Rafael might have put him up to that question. But Mat knew what in fact the pair had been doing: merely deciding where the new power plant should be when the refinery had covered
the site of the present one.

‘They had not a thought of Lorenzo, Chepe. Any way your father has the explosives now.’

‘I don’t think he has, Don Mateo. I could not show him the place.’

‘So you saw somebody hide it?’

‘Yes. Under boards.’

A hole and a cover of some sort. Mat remembered Pilar’s conjecture—inferred from something said or not said by the women—that Birenfield visited the old field alone at night.
There were boards all over the place and the man could presumably use a hammer and nails.

‘I see. But what took Lorenzo there?’

‘We think he was supposed to know where it was, but he didn’t.’

Another gap in the guesswork filled up. Birenfield was secretive, over-secretive, and rightly determined that the Company and its top executives should not be involved. But somebody in Cabo
Desierto had to know where the explosives were hidden, and what better man than the silent, devoted Lorenzo?

This at last explained why Mrs. Gateson on that first night asked what he thought of Lorenzo. She expected that he had been told in London—by Dave Gunner?—that Lorenzo was a key man;
her question was a hint, simply to give herself importance, that she was in the secret. Very possibly she had learned at one of those morning sessions in Mrs. Birenfield’s bedroom how the
General Manager proposed to break the boycott, and a good half of what Gateson knew might well have come to him through his wife rather than his boss.

‘Thank you, Chepe. Tell Don Rafael that I am always ready to talk to him.’

‘I will. If we were not enemies, he would ask you to honour our house.’

‘We may not be enemies for ever. Who knows?’

Pilar Alvarez gently took the boy as far as the head of the stairs. She returned in a mood that was far from gentle and wiped the genial smile off Mat’s face.

‘You send me crazy!’

‘I’ve been told that before, Pilar.’

‘By every secretary you ever had I should think.’

‘What’s the matter now?’

‘You build bridges everywhere except where you should.’

‘This isn’t a bridge. It’s a hobby.’

‘I know! But let it be thought you are using the son to spy on the father.’

‘That’s just what I am trying to avoid, Pilar. I don’t want to upset either of them.’

‘But there is gossip!’

‘To hell with it!’

‘You don’t understand. You should see yourself when you talk to the boy. Have you ever looked at a woman as you look at him?’

‘Damn it, Pilar, a woman is not a child!’

‘For you, no! Never!’

He was quite unable to guess what had annoyed her. She was not a woman to mind Chepe being invited to the General Manager’s office or escorting him to the stairs past popped-out, curious
faces. It must be that she resented the preposterous touch of scandal. You could bet your life that Mrs. Gateson or some other idle, oil-fired female was at the bottom of it. Ignorant as well as
idle surely? Or was there really some truth in the vicar-choir boy relationship which Sunday papers were so fond of? It was difficult to see where the fun came in.

Prejudice, more of class than colour, was responsible. If Chepe had been one of those neat, emptily noisy children who played on the lawns of the executive ghetto and were educated by two
imported governesses from nine to one, his choice of any one of them would have added to his popularity. Dear, kind Uncle Mat! Such a pity he never married! A lot of jealousy, of course, would have
been stirred up because he had unaccountably preferred to toss a cricket ball at one rather than another, and accompanied by chatter that the mother of this paragon had played her cards very well.
But no one would have found anything in the relationship which demanded explanation.

The bond between himself and Chepe was admittedly hard for them to understand. Indeed it couldn’t be explained at all unless he gave away what had happened on that first night of his
arrival. Without the key to it, this intimacy between the General Manager and the seven-year-old son of an obstinate, black carpenter was perhaps bound to be a little suspect up on the hill. Down
below it wasn’t. Rafael Garay himself, passionately proud of his son, seemed to consider the friendship partly comical, partly flattering, without any influence on the boycott one way or the
other. Probably that view was shared by his comrades. They all knew Chepe when he took wings.

According to Pilar, his admiration for the boy was too transparent. And why not? He remembered that interview with Henry and Dave Gunner when he got the job, and how his triumph had been soured
a little by the thought that there was no one dependent on him to share it or profit by it. Well, there never would be and meanwhile he would do what he pleased. When the chokes of the Three
Sentinels were opened again and few lives lost in the process or, likely enough, none at all, Gateson and his party would hesitate to invent any more Sunday paper conjectures even at the most
private table of their Country Club.

Cabo Desierto, like a frontier village, observed the manning of positions on both sides of the line, each party ready for defence, neither willing to attack. Rafael
Garay’s mass meeting had the discipline of supreme self-confidence but did not overflow the plaza. Gil Delgado and the committee needed no meeting; their influence over the field spread by
word of mouth. The minority in favour of no surrender was isolated though still admired.

As the field waited for a clash which did not come, anxiety was chiefly among the neutrals: the municipal council, the shopkeepers, the market, the clerks. In the taverns under the colonnade
confident prophecies dried up. Their futility was too apparent. Action was for the General Manager alone. London had agreed to his proposals and only he could transmute paper into fact.

Except for the militants, men remained curiously aloof, disassociating themselves from both parties unless the issue was presented to them with all its oratory, threats and excitement. Work on
the lands was more energetic than ever. For some it was a sullen refuge from the necessity to make up their minds; for others the burst of industry was a farewell, largely subconscious, to this
gallant effort at living in the way of their ancestors. At dawn they picked up their tools cursing, but in the evening put them away with satisfaction. A man could see the result of what he had
done. The older workers were very much aware of this. They remembered that when a well came in even the unskilled had known some sort of fulfilment.

As the company plane swooped in from the sea, banked over the town and disappeared behind the refinery, Mat was sitting on the terrace of the little town hall, enjoying a municipal drink with
the doctor and the mayor and looking down on the length of the main street. All the faces between the plaza and the port turned upwards as if ranks of white, orange and brown flowers had suddenly
opened in the sun. That was not normal. The company plane was hardly worth a glance, and the only likely comment on its arrival was abuse of the blasted noise which disturbed a peaceful
evening.

It was vivid proof of the tense mood of expectation. But expectation of what? Nothing much could be expected of the return of Captain González, and it was most unlikely that the
Government, holding its collective breath like Cabo Desierto, was about to take any action whatever. Expectation was presumably for some impossible link—bomb or letter or a winged President
of the Republic—between the unlimited sky and Rafael Garay stubbornly on the ground.

The Mayor, like most of his fellow citizens, at once turned for distraction to a minor problem.

‘Legally we should be holding the elections,’ he complained. ‘But what am I to do till this is over?’

‘It’s of no importance. You will be returned unopposed.’

‘But my council, Don Mateo!’

‘I will get González to certify a state of emergency. Elections can’t be held.’

‘Is that constitutional?’

Little that any of them were doing was strictly constitutional. But the Mayor’s question was not, Mat decided, as absurd as it seemed. When a man had authority without power, he was
sensitive on the point of where it came from. That was about all one could say for democracy, and it was quite a lot.