Chapter 5

The far-off murmur of great crowds woke me next morning; I thought at first that I was back in Brighton and that the sea was turning the shingle. My aunt was already up and had prepared breakfast with grapefruit picked in the garden. From the town came snatches of music.

“What’s happening?”

“It’s the National Day. Wordsworth warned me, but I had forgotten. If you go into town carry something red.”

“Why?”

“It’s the colour of the governing party. The Liberal Party is blue, but it’s unhealthy to carry blue. No one does.”

“I haven’t got anything red.”

“I’ve got a red scarf.”

“I can hardly wear a woman’s scarf.”

“Stuff it in your breast pocket. It will look like a handkerchief.”

“Won’t you come into town with me, Aunt Augusta?”

“No. I must wait for Mr. Visconti. He will come today for sure. Or at least he’ll send a message.”

I needn’t have been shy of wearing the scarf. Most men in the street wore red scarves round their necks, and many scarves were printed with a picture of the General. Only the bourgeois confined themselves to a handkerchief, and some to a handkerchief barely on display at all but pressed in the hand and showing only through the knuckles – perhaps they would rather have carried blue. There were red flags everywhere: you would have thought the town had been taken over by the Communists, but red here was the colour of conservatism. I was held up continually at street crossings by processions of women in red scarves carrying portraits of the General and slogans about the great Colorado Party. Groups of gauchos came riding into town with scarlet reins. A drunk man fell out of a tavern door and lay face down in the road with the general’s genial face spread over his back as the horses picked their way across him. Decorated cars carrying pretty girls with scarlet camellia blossoms in their hair went by. Even the sun looked red through the morning mist.

The movement of the crowd edged me towards the Avenue of Mariscal Lopez, where the processions were passing. Across the road were stands reserved for the government and the diplomats. I could recognize the General taking the salute, and the stand next door must have been that of the American Embassy, for in the back row I could see my friend O’Toole pressed into a corner by a stout military attaché. I waved to him and I think he must have seen me because he gave a shy smile and spoke to the fat man at his side. Then a procession passed and I lost sight of him.

It was a procession of elderly men in shabby suits – a few were on crutches and some had lost an arm. They carried banners representing their old units. They had fought in the Chaco war, and once a year, I suppose, they had this moment of pride. They looked more human than the colonels who followed them, standing upright in their cars, in dress uniforms with gold tassels and epaulettes, all with black moustaches and all quite indistinguishable; the colonels looked like painted skittles waiting for a ball to bowl them over.

After an hour I had had enough of watching and walked into the centre of town, to the new skyscraper hotel, to buy an English-language newspaper, but there was only a five-day-old New York Times. A man spoke to me in a confidential voice before I went into the hotel; he had a distinguished intellectual air; he might have been a diplomat or a university professor.

“I beg your pardon,” I said.

“Any U.S. dollars?” he asked me rapidly, and when I shook my head (for I had no desire to break any local currency laws) he walked away. Unfortunately when I emerged again from the hotel with my newspaper he was back on the opposite pavement and failed to recognize me. “Any U.S. dollars?” he whispered. I said no again and he glared at me with an air of disgust and disdain, as though I had been playing a childish practical joke.

I walked back towards the edge of town and my aunt’s house, interrupted at street corners by the tag end of processions. A palatial house covered in banners bore a number of scarlet placards; it was probably the headquarters of the Colorado Party. Stout men in city suits who sweated in the morning sun climbed up and down the wide steps wearing red scarves. One of them stopped and demanded, or so I supposed, what I wanted.

“Colorado?” I asked.

“Yes. Are you American?”

I was glad to find someone who spoke English. He had the face of an amiable bulldog, but he needed a shave.

“No,” I said, “I’m English.”

He gave a short bark which did not sound amiable at all, and at that moment, perhaps because of the heat, the sun and the scent of flowers, I was overcome by a fit of sneezing. Without thinking, I drew my aunt’s red scarf from my breast pocket and blew my nose. It was most unfortunate. I found myself sitting on the pavement without knowing how I got there, and my nose streamed with blood. Fat men surrounded me, all of them in dark suits and all with the faces of bulldogs. Others like them appeared on the balcony of the Colorado house and looked down at me with curiosity and disapproval. I heard the word “inglés” repeated often, and then a policeman yanked me on to my feet. Afterwards I was to think how lucky I had been; if I had blown my nose near a group of gauchos I might well have received a knife in the ribs.

Several fat men accompanied me to the police station, including the one who had struck me. He carried my aunt’s scarf, the evidence of a crime. “It’s all a mistake,” I assured him.

“Mistake?” His English was very limited.

At the police station – a very imposing building, built to withstand a siege – everyone began to speak at once with noise and fury. I felt at a loss how to behave. I kept on repeating “inglés” without effect. Once I tried “ambassador,” but it wasn’t in their vocabulary. The police officer was young and worried – I imagine his superior officers were all at the parade. When I said “inglés” for the third time and “ambassador” for the second he hit me but without conviction – a blow which hardly hurt me at all. I was discovering something new. Physical violence, like the dentist’s drill, is seldom as bad as one fears.

I tried “mistake” again, but no one could translate that word. The scarf was handed from one to another, and a patch of snot was pointed out to the officer. He picked up what looked like an identity card and waved it at me. I suppose he was demanding my passport. I said, “I left it at home,” and three or four people began to argue. Perhaps they were disagreeing on the meaning of what I said.

Oddly enough, it was the man who had struck me who proved most sympathetic. My nose was still bleeding and he gave me his handkerchief. It was not very clean and I feared blood poisoning, but I didn’t want to reject his help, so I dabbed rather tentatively at my nose and then offered him his handkerchief back again. He waved it away with a gesture of generosity. Then he wrote something on a piece of paper and showed it me. I read the name of a street and a number. He pointed at the floor and then pointed at me and held out the pencil. Everyone pressed nearer with great curiosity. I shook my head. I knew how to walk to my aunt’s house, but I had no idea of the name of the street. My friend – I was beginning to think of him as that – wrote down the name of three hotels. I shook my head.

Then I spoilt everything. For some unknown reason, standing beside the officer’s desk in the hot and crowded room, with an armed sentry at the door, my mind went suddenly back to the morning of my stepmother’s funeral, the chapel full of distant relatives, and the voice of my aunt breaking the reverent whispers: “I was present once at a premature cremation.” I had looked forward to the funeral as a break in the orderly routine of my retirement and what a break it had proved. I had been worried, I remembered, about the rain falling on my lawn-mower. I began to laugh, and when I laughed all the enmity returned. I was again the insolent foreigner who had blown his nose on the flag of the Colorado Party. My first assailant snatched away his handkerchief, and the officer, pushing aside those who stood in his way, strode to my side and gave me a severe cuff on my right ear which began to bleed in its turn. Desperately trying to find the name of anyone they might know, I let out Mr. Visconti’s alias. “Señor Izquierdo,” I said with no effect at all, and then, “Señor O’Toole.” The officer paused with his hand raised to strike again and I tried, “Embassy – Americano.”

Something about those words worked, though I was not sure whether the working was in my favour. Two policemen were summoned and I was pushed down a corridor and locked into a cell. I could hear the officer telephoning and I could only hope that Tooley’s father really knew the ropes. There was nothing to sit on in the cell – only a piece of sacking under a barred window too high for me to see anything but a patch of monotonous sky. Somebody had written on the wall in Spanish – perhaps a prayer, perhaps an obscenity, I couldn’t tell. I sat down on the sacking and prepared for a long wait. The wall opposite me reminded me of what my aunt had said: I trained myself to be thankful that the wall seemed to keep its distance.

To pass the time I took out my pen and began to doodle on the whitewash. I put down my initials and was irritated, as often before, because they represented a famous sauce; then I wrote the date of my birth, 1913, with a dash against it where someone else could fill in the date of my death. It occurred to me to record a family history – it would help to pass the time if I were to have a long stay, so I wrote down my father’s death in 1923 and my stepmother’s less than a year ago. I knew nothing of my grandparents, so the only relative left me was my aunt. She had been born somewhere around 1895, and I put a question mark after the year. It occurred to me to try to work out my aunt’s history on the wall, which had already begun to take on a more friendly family air. I didn’t entirely believe all her stories and perhaps I might discover a chronological flaw. She had seen me at my baptism and never again, so she must have left my father’s house somewhere around 1913, when she was eighteen – it could not have been long after the snapshot had been taken. There had been the period with Curran in Brighton – that must surely have been after the First World War, so I put Dogs’ Church 1919 with another question mark. Curran had left her, she had gone to Paris, and there in the establishment in the Rue de Provence she had met Mr. Visconti – perhaps about the same time as my father died in Boulogne. She would have been in her twenties then. I began to work on the Italian period, her travels between Milan and Venice, Uncle Jo’s death, her life with Mr. Visconti, which had been interrupted by the failure of his Saudi Arabia scheme. I put tentatively the date 1937 against Paris and Monsieur Dambreuse, for she had returned to Italy and been reunited with Mr. Visconti at the house behind the Messaggero before the outbreak of the Second War. Of the last twenty years of her life I knew nothing before the arrival of Wordsworth. I had to admit that I had found nothing intrinsically false in the chronology. There was ample time for all she had told me to happen and a great deal more besides. I began to speculate on the nature of the quarrel with my so-called mother. It must have occurred round about the time of the pretended pregnancy – if that story were true… The door of the cell was thrown open and a policeman brought in a chair. It seemed a kindly action, and I got up from the sacking to take advantage of it, but the policeman pushed me roughly away. O’Toole came in. He looked embarrassed. “You seem to be in trouble, Henry,” he said.

“It’s all a mistake. I sneezed and then I happened to blow my nose…”

“On the Colorado colours outside the Colorado HQ.”

“Yes. But I thought it was my handkerchief.”

“You are in an awful spot.”

“I suppose I am.”

“You could easily have a ten-year sentence. Do you mind if I sit down? I’ve been standing for hours at that damn parade.”

“Of course. Please.”

“I could ask for another chair.”

“Don’t bother. I’m getting used to this sack.”

“I guess what makes it worse,” O’Toole said, “is that you did it on their National Day. It seems kind of provocative. Otherwise they might have been content to expel you. What made you ask for me?”

“You said you knew the ropes and they didn’t seem to understand ‘English Embassy.’”

“Your people don’t count for very much here, I’m afraid. We provide their arms – and then there’s the new hydroelectric station we are helping them to build… not far from the Iguazú Falls. It will serve Brazil too – but Brazil will have to pay them royalties. Great thing for the country.”

“Very interesting,” I said with some bitterness.

“Of course I’d like to help you,” O’Toole said. “You are a friend of Lucinda’s. I’ve had a postcard from her, by the way. She’s not in Katmandu. She’s in Vientiane. I don’t know why.”

“Look, O’Toole,” I said, “if you can’t do anything else, you might at least ring up the British Embassy. If I’m to have ten years in prison I’d like a bed and a chair.”

“Sure,” O’Toole said, “I can arrange all that. I guess I could arrange your release too – the Chief of Police is a good friend of mine…”

“I think my aunt knows him too,” I said.

“Don’t bank on that. You see, we’ve had some fresh information about your relative. The police don’t want to act – I guess some money has passed – but we’re bringing pressure on them. You seem to be mixed up with some pretty shady characters, Henry.”

“My aunt’s an old lady of seventy-five.” I glanced at the notes I had made on the wall: Rue de Provence, Milan, Messaggero. I would have certainly called her career shady myself nine months ago, and yet now there seemed nothing so very wrong in her curriculum vitae, nothing so wrong as thirty years in a bank. “I don’t see what you can have against her,” I said.

“Your friend, that black fellow, came to see us.”

“I’m certain he told you nothing against my aunt.”

“That’s right, he didn’t, but he had plenty to say about Mr. Izquierdo. So I persuaded the police to keep him out of circulation awhile.”

“Is that part of your social research?” I asked. “Perhaps he suffered from malnutrition.”

“I guess I sort of lied to you, Henry,” he said, looking ashamed again.

“Are you in the CIA, like Tooley told me?”

“Well… kind of… not exactly,” he said, clinging to his torn rag of deception like a blown-out umbrella in a high wind.

“What did Wordsworth tell you?”

“He was in a pretty bitter mood. If your aunt hadn’t been so old I’d have said it was love. He seemed jealous of this guy Izquierdo.”

“Where’s Wordsworth now?”

“He’s sticking around. He wants to see your aunt again when things blow over.”

“Are they likely to blow over?”

“Well, Henry, they could. Everyone were reasonable.”

“Even my sneeze?”

“I guess so. As for Mr. Izquierdo’s smuggling racket – no one cares a devalued dime about that if only he’d be reasonable. Now you know Mr. I.”

“I’ve never met him.”

“Maybe you know him under another name?”

“No,” I said.

O’Toole sighed. “Henry,” he said, “I want to help you. Any friend of Lucinda can count on me. We can have this whole thing tied up in a few hours. Visconti’s not important, not like Mengele or Bormann.”

“I thought we were talking about Izquierdo.”

“You and I and your friend Wordsworth know it’s the same man. So do the police, but they protect these guys – anyway till they run out of cash. Visconti nearly ran out of cash, but then Miss Bertram arrived and paid up.”

“I don’t know a thing,” I said. “I’m simply here on a visit.”

“I guess there was a good reason why Wordsworth met you in Formosa, Henry. Anyway, I’d like to have a word with your aunt and a word from you might make it easier for me. If I persuaded the police to let you go, you and I could see her together…”

“What exactly are you after?”

“She must be anxious about Visconti by this time. I can reassure her. They’ll only hold him in jail a few days till I give the word.”

“Are you offering her some kind of bargain? I warn you, she won’t do anything to hurt Mr. Visconti.”

“I just want to talk to her, Henry. With you there. She mightn’t trust me alone.”

I was feeling very cramped on the sacking, and I saw no reason not to agree.

He said, “It may take an hour or two to get you released. Everything is disorganized today.” He stood up.

“How are the statistics, O’Toole?”

“This parade’s put everything out. I was afraid to drink any coffee for breakfast. All these hours of standing without taking a leak. I ought to cancel today altogether. It’s not what you’d call a normal day.”

It took him more than an hour or two to persuade them to let me go, but they forgot to take the chair from the cell after he’d gone and they brought me some thin gruel, and these I took for favourable signs. To my own surprise, I wasn’t bored, though there was nothing I could usefully add to the history on the wall, except two problematical dates for Tunis and Havana. I began in my head to compose a letter to Miss Keene describing my present circumstances: “I have insulted the ruling party of Paraguay and I’m mixed up with a war criminal wanted by Interpol. For the first offence the maximum penalty is ten years. I am in a small cell, ten feet by six, and I have nothing to sleep on but a piece of sacking. I have no idea what is going to happen next, but I confess I am not altogether unhappy, I am too deeply interested.” I would never really write the letter, for she would be quite unable to reconcile the writer with the man she had known.

It was quite dark outside when at last they came to release me. I was led back down the corridor and through the office, and there they solemnly returned me my aunt’s red scarf, and the young officer slapped my back in a friendly way, urging me through into the street where O’Toole waited for me in an ancient Cadillac. He said, “I’m sorry. It took longer than I thought. I’m afraid Miss Bertram will be nervous about you too.”

“I don’t think I count much beside Mr. Visconti.”

“Blood’s thicker than water, Henry”.

“Water’s not the term to use for Mr. Visconti.”

There were only two lights on in the house. As we came through the trees at the bottom of the garden someone flashed a light on our faces, but the light went out before I could see who held the torch. I looked back from the lawn and could see nothing.

“Are you having the place watched?” I asked.

“Not me, Henry.”

I could tell that he was uneasy. He put his hand inside his jacket.

“Are you armed?” I said.

“One has to take precautions.”

“Against an old lady? My aunt’s the only one here.”

“You can never be sure.”

We went forward across the lawn and climbed the steps. The globe in the dining-room shone down on two empty glasses and an empty bottle of champagne. It was still cold to the touch when I picked it up. When I put it down I knocked over one of the glasses and the sound rang through the house. My aunt must have been in the kitchen, for she came at once to the door.

“Where on earth have you been, Henry?”

“In prison. Mr. O’Toole helped me to get out.”

“I never expected to see Mr. O’Toole in my house. Not after what he did to Mr. Izquierdo in Argentina. So you are Mr. O’Toole.”

“Yes, Miss Bertram. I thought it would be a good thing if we could have a friendly talk. I know how anxious you must be about Mr. Visconti.”

“I’m not in the least anxious about Mr. Visconti.”

“I thought perhaps… that not knowing where he was… all this long delay…”

“I know perfectly well where he is,” my aunt said. “He’s in the lavatory.” The flush of water could not have come more exactly on cue.