The Captain and the Enemy (17 page)

‘What country are you talking about?’

‘You seem an ignorant sort of fellow. Don’t you know that there’s a civil war in Nicaragua? At least lend me a hand and look at the wardrobe.’

‘Nothing there. Only a suit and some shirts.’

‘Anything in the pockets?’

‘Nothing,’ I lied, for there was indeed a letter which I had slipped into one of my own pockets without looking at the address. I was not yet an employee of Mr Quigly I told myself. A room for one night without even a meagre breakfast was not a binding obligation.

‘He’s obviously planning to return,’ Mr Quigly said, ‘but perhaps we could still intercept him before he leaves. They say he only went away half an hour ago. He won’t have got far in that old Renault of his and it won’t hold much of an arsenal. Probably a few grenades. Not that they’re much good against Somoza’s tanks, US supplied. Don’t despise financial information. It’s wonderfully intricate. That English stamp. You say that his woman’s dead, so who’s his correspondent? Never mind now. We’ve got to move quick. If we can catch him with anti-tank grenades in the plane I don’t see how Colonel Martínez could cover him up without a scandal. And a scandal would suit the Yankees well enough – as well as my paper of course. Any paper loves a scandal.’

‘But where do you want to go?’

‘To his plane of course. You know where he keeps it.’

A disturbed hot night in a small hotel with a hard pillow and a window which wouldn’t open had kept my anger against the Captain still alive, so I didn’t hesitate. I would earn my bonus.

Mr Quigly’s Mercedes for the first time impressed me. When he met me at the airport I had been too tired to take notice of it. I sat beside him and directed him a bit uncertainly – over the great bridge, past the military instalments of the Zone, the churches, the golf links, the smart villas, back into Panama, until we reached the map of the non-existent town. ‘Go slow here,’ I told him. ‘There’s a turning to take.’

He obeyed but his thoughts were elsewhere. He said, ‘If we catch him the scandal might kill the Canal Treaty. The Senate would be happy.’

‘What Canal treaty?’

He ignored my ignorance. ‘And Congress too.’ He added, ‘That letter with the English stamp. You might read it to me while we drive.’

‘I don’t think he would like me to give him an envelope I’d opened.’

‘I have a strong feeling we are too late. We may never see him again. All right. Have it your way. Keep the letter closed until we reach – what do you call it? his runway. Or should we say his runaway. If he’s not there I see no reason why you shouldn’t open it. Even if he returns he’ll never know there was a letter.’

‘It wouldn’t interest you. I know the writing on the envelope. It’s from a dead woman.’

‘A dead woman?’

‘Liza.’

‘Ah well, forget it. He knows how long letters take to reach Panama.’

‘Stop here. I’m almost sure it’s the place.’

I looked at the bushes and saw the trampled signs of the Renault’s passing. We followed bumping on its track until I saw the runway and the empty shed.

‘My goodness,’ Mr Quigly exclaimed (I was never to hear him use a stronger expletive). ‘It’s a bit rough, isn’t it? I wouldn’t like to come down here – or take off, with a load of anti-tank missiles too perhaps.’

He sat staring for a while, then he turned on his engine. ‘I must get back and send a telegram.’

‘Financial information?’

‘You wouldn’t be far wrong to call it that,’ he replied with his usual caution.

He drove me back in a glum and broody silence while I wondered if he used some kind of code in his telegrams – perhaps something as simple as the book code which as a boy I had once read about in a novel of espionage. The spy and his correspondents chose a sentence out of an agreed book, perhaps an edition of the complete works of Shakespeare, which would give a wide choice of lines to play with, and on that sentence and its order of words the code was somehow based. I tried to imagine what kind of book Mr Quigly and his Americans would have chosen. Not Updike. Updike was too short for safety. Perhaps he would have gone back to some long classic like
Gone With The Wind
.

At the Continental Mr Quigly broke his silence. ‘No point,’ he said, ‘in being uncomfortable. The room you shared is still reserved. You could even use the bed. I’ll telephone you at once when I have news of him.’

I collected the key from the porter who told me, ‘There’s a telephone message for your father,’ and I read it in the lift. ‘Please telephone the office of Colonel Martínez.’ Well, I thought, Colonel Martínez would have to wait a long while for a reply.

The two unread letters in my pocket weighed on my mind, and as soon as I was alone I opened first the one which was addressed legitimately to me. A cheque and a ticket came out first and then the letter. It amazed me by its length, and as I read by its contents. Something after all the years of discretion had made him speak at last, and that something of course was the death of Liza.

Jim, you have been lying to me every day since you arrived and God alone knows why you didn’t continue. I suppose you were waiting till I found you a job and set you up to live on me as you have lived on me all these years. I kept you for Liza’s sake, but Liza is dead. I don’t want to see your face again – it bears too many memories of Liza. Here’s your ticket home to London and a cheque which will keep you for a few weeks if you cash it here before you go, time for you to get a job at home. You’ve no place here. But my last advice to you and my last responsibility to you is to warn you to keep clear of that man Quigly. I’m sorry I ever asked his help to meet you, but he was around and he’s always ready to do small things for me. It’s his way of keeping in touch with me, and he’s paid for that by his employers and God damn them all. They never got a penny’s worth of value out of me.

You’ve no reason at all to trust me. I know that well. I’ve been a liar too, but I’ve never lied to you or,
whatever
the old Devil may have told you, to Liza – only to the coppers. It’s a fuliginous story, I know that. When I began I didn’t steal to make myself rich. I stole without an object. It was a game, a risky game like roulette. In war one begins to enjoy a little danger. In that German camp I was bored to death by safety and when I got over the frontier I was bored by the peace of the Spanish monastery. Back in England learning to fly was only too easy like getting a car licence. Then peace came almost as soon I got into the air. No danger. No glabrous excitement. So I stole. That was amusement enough until I met the Devil and saw poor Liza in the hospital and the child she wanted so much was killed inside her by order of the Devil. I don’t know that she ever really cared much for me. She was an honest girl and I don’t think she would ever have liked to use the word love untruly. Since then I’ve played the danger game only for her sake so that one day she might be safe when I was gone. When you told me she was dead, I knew that I wasn’t needed by her any more. I never took risks, serious risks, after I met Liza, but now all my responsibility is over. Thank God, if he should exist, for granting me that at least. I’m not unhappy, nothing bad can happen to Liza any longer, she’s free and I’m free at last, and free of you too. I’ve escaped from the prison camp again. There’s one useful thing I can do for my friends now that Liza’s gone, and I can take any risk I like. For you I’ve done enough. I don’t want you to write to me. I won’t read anything you write. You’ve betrayed Liza. Don’t wait for me when you get this letter. Go away and never come back.

He signed the letter, ‘The Captain, the Colonel, the Major, the Sergeant, Señor Smith’ with an exclamation mark after each name. I wondered why he hadn’t added his real name, but I suppose he wanted to preserve one at least of his names out of use. After all he and I had never been much closer than strangers since that gin and tonic of his and the lunch of smoked salmon. All his interest had lain in Liza, and there ironically was her letter which had arrived too late for him to read and which might have broken the news of her death more gently than I had done. I was sorry for that, and yet I found his letter hard to digest.

I opened the letter which he would never now read. Liza was not given to writing long letters and this was very short. She wrote, ‘Dear Captain, I know what the doctor and the nurse are trying not to tell me, that I shall soon be dead. So now I’m writing what I’ve always been too shy to say. I’ve loved you ever since the day you came to see me with the Devil in hospital. You had lost a button off your shirt and your shoes could have done with a good clean. You were the kindest man I’ve ever known. Liza.’

The letter astonished me. So there had been, after all, some kind of love between them. Whatever that phrase meant it seemed more durable than the casual sexual interludes which I had in my way enjoyed. As I lay on the sofa in the Captain’s room awaiting sleep which was long in coming, I felt a stab of jealous pain. To have remembered that missing button through all the years of unexplained absences, this was something beyond my imagination, and I was seized with a furious sense of inferiority. I was shut out, an Amalekite again. All the
same
I kept the letter. It might please him and soften his anger if he came back, but as I dozed into sleep I was angry with both of them and all the inexplicable world which they represented. I had an odd dream of walking down a long rough road towards a deep and dark wood which retreated as I advanced. I had for some reason to penetrate that wood, but I became more and more exhausted until I was woken by the crying of the telephone beside the Captain’s bed. I was reluctant to pick up the receiver. I feared that I would hear the Captain’s voice, but it was Mr Quigly’s.

‘Is that Jim?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve been ringing a long time. Four and a half minutes.’ Always that precision in the way of figures. Perhaps it was the quality of the financial profession.

‘I was asleep.’

‘I’ve been rung up by Colonel Martínez. He’s never rung me before. It must be important. He wants to see you. He had sent to that place I put you in, but you weren’t there. Are you listening?’

‘Yes. How did he know where I slept?’

‘Ask him. It’s his job to know. Pablo is on the way to fetch you. Don’t tell him anything.’

‘Pablo?’

‘No, no. Colonel Martínez, of course.’

There was a knock on the door and I put down the receiver. I’d had enough of Mr Quigly. I opened the door and Pablo was there.

(11)

There seemed to be a sentry everywhere to whom Pablo had to show his pass – at the gates of the National Guard headquarters, at the doorway of the building we entered, outside the waiting-room to which we were ushered. Pablo said not a word and sat beside me in silence. His revolver pressed uncomfortably against my hip and I became impatient. ‘Colonel Martínez,’ I said, ‘seems to be a busy man,’ but Pablo made no reply.

When my turn came at last Pablo left me at the door, and I looked across the room at the Colonel with curiosity. No policeman would ever have described him as a man with a military bearing. He had a kindly, pale and anxious face and when he stood up to greet me I could see that he was short and a little tubby.

‘I am sorry to have kept you waiting, Mr Smith,’ he said, speaking English slowly and with care, and yet with that Yankee twang which living a lifetime close alongside the American Zone had perhaps produced.

‘Baxter,’ I corrected him and he looked down and shuffled some papers on his desk and corrected himself, ‘Mr Baxter’. Then there was a long pause. Had he forgotten the purpose of my being there just as he had forgotten my true name? Anyway I knew that I liked him a good deal better than Mr Quigly. There was an innocence about him which I wouldn’t have associated with a military uniform – or a policeman’s.

He said, ‘Do sit down, Mr Baxter. We are a little worried about Mr Smith – his unexpected absence. He was to have done a small job for us, but he seems to have disappeared into the blue.’ He was troubled by a little
cough
which conveniently covered my silence. ‘Of course we know you are a friend of Mr Quigly’ – the word ‘we’ as he used it seemed to cover the whole of the National Guard, and for a moment I was surprised at the trouble they had taken to notice an insignificant stranger, until I remembered Pablo. Of course he would have reported. I said, ‘Not really a friend.’

The Colonel said, ‘Mr Quigly is an excellent journalist and working as he does for a gringo paper he has sources of information closed to us. We wondered if perhaps he had said a word to you which might indicate … We are anxious to have news of Mr Smith.’

I thought of the letter, but I obeyed Mr Quigly’s instruction. ‘I have none,’ I said.

‘Both of you were seen calling at the Continental Hotel yesterday morning and we supposed that you were trying to see your father. We thought perhaps he might have told you something …’

I ignored the small flaw in their information about my relations with the Captain and I said, ‘Not a word. He wasn’t there. He’d gone.’

‘Yes, yes, gone, we know, and his plane too. But I thought that earlier than that he might have given you some indication … I assure you that we are worried – worried for his safety, Mr Baxter.’ With his eyes bent over his papers he said in a low voice as though he were ashamed at having to give away a valuable piece of information: ‘He was seen flying off, but he took the wrong direction.’

‘The wrong direction?’

‘Not the direction which he had been ordered to take.’ There was a long pause as Colonel Martínez stared down
at
his papers. I thought: has he too taken a wrong direction?

The doubts in my mind harassed me and I tried to resolve them, with what seemed even to my own ears in this hushed room a question vulgarly direct. ‘Who gave him the order? You or Mr Quigly?’

Colonel Martínez looked up at me and gave a little sigh like someone who has been relieved from a burden of discretion. ‘Ah yes, Mr Quigly! What exactly do you know of Mr Quigly?’

‘I know that he has offered me a job.’

‘Are you going to take it?’