Flames Coming out of the Top (14 page)

He had not gone a hundred yards from the gates when a figure detached itself from the shadow of the wall and began to come towards him. It was more like a flopping scarecrow than a man. His clothes, several sizes too large, had been turned up and belted, until they no longer resembled clothes. His trousers in particular were disgraceful. They did not even conceal what they were intended to make secret. When he spoke he looked up sideways from under the bent shiny peak of his cap.

“Are you English?” he asked,

“Yes, I'm English,” Dunnett answered.

“Do you want a good time?”

Dunnett shook his head.

“Nice clean girls,” the man continued. “Make you forget everything.” He spoke without enthusiasm. He had a dull, flat voice as though all the life in it had been trampled out. The voice, however, had retained its authentic flavour of Cockney. It was as much a piece of London as Ludgate Circus.

“Who the hell are you?” Dunnett asked.

“I'm down on my luck,” the man replied. “I'm a sailor without a ship.”

“Well, why don't you get one?” Dunnett asked. “There are plenty of ships along this coast.”

“Not for me, there aren't; not now.” He held up his right hand from which all save the little finger and the thumb was missing. It had been a plump hand once, full and robust and powerful, but now it was more like a fin. “They don't have sailors with hands like this.”

“Well, I can't help you,” Dunnett answered. “I haven't got any ship I can put you on.”

“You could give me the price of a meal,” he said. “I haven't been doing so well lately.”

Dunnett felt in his pocket and took out five bolivianos. “Do what you can with that,” he said.

The man came forward gratefully. He took the coins with his damaged right hand, his thumb and little finger making
a parody of claws as he reached. Then he transferred the money adroitly to his pocket.

“I shan't forget,” he said proudly. “I may be able to help you yet.” He touched his drooping peak-cap and began to move off.

Dunnett stood where he was, watching him go. The man, of course, had not always been like that. It was the accident to his hand that had settled him; something arbitrary and outside his control. But could it have been only that? Wasn't there perhaps some other side to the man's private history, something shameful and disreputable of which those missing fingers were only the token? Dunnett gave it up. The ex-sailor remained one of those unpleasant mysteries of travel —the reverse side of any tourist agency poster. By some stroke of calamitous providence he had come down to the common level of the red-light district where he was now lodged: that was all there was to it. He now was tasting life as the natives knew it; and he had known something better, perhaps a great deal better, in his time. Dunnett tried to forget him and walked on.

When he reached the Avenida the daughter of the house was ready to welcome him. She had placed a chair outside the front door—it was on the shady side of the street—and was sitting there on the pavement reading. She raised her face as Dunnett approached and smiled as though they were old friends. As she smiled, he noticed how beautiful she was.

“I have something for you,” she said. “Letters.”

She got up and followed him indoors. Her walk had that faintly swinging ease peculiar to Latins. It was at once graceful and unhurried. Dunnett envied her. She looked cool and placid.

“One, two, three,” she said, counting out the letters. “From England.”

Dunnett took the letters without a word. It was what he had been waiting for and he did not want to show it. He just thrust the three crinkled and miscellaneous envelopes straight into his pocket and went up to his room. It was not until he
was on the stairs that he looked at them again. His eye caught Kay's immediately. Her small, round handwriting leapt up at him. He felt desperately lonely as he opened the envelope.

It was the first letter she had ever written him, and it seemed idiotically precious as he held it. “
I'm missing you all the time”
he read, “
and looking forward day and night to the time when we are together again.”
But as he read on he was disappointed. It was all so strangely reserved, almost as though some third person might have been looking over her shoulder as she wrote. “
You don't mind long engagements, do you?
” it ran, “
because mother is terribly against doing things in a hurry. She says that if we do something rash now we may regret it, always, and that I'm quite young enough to wait for two years or even three. Of course, I'd much rather get married straight away, but I'm sure you will understand. I don't want to do anything to upset mother. She hasn't been a bit well lately. Take care of yourself, and come back to me. With love, Kay.”

He went and stood over by the window. Something was missing from that letter. There was no use attempting to disguise the fact. It was the sort of letter that a schoolgirl might have written if she had been set the task in a composition class. He remembered his own letters to her. Perhaps
they
had been wrong. Perhaps people didn't write that kind of letter in Walham Green. Or receive them either. He wondered if she would understand that, when he wrote them, he had only been saying what every bit of him had been crying out to say. There had seemed no sense in being in love if you didn't admit it to the other person.

From where he was standing he could see a courtship of another kind proceeding. Down below in the street, a coal-black negress in a brightly flowered dress was being greedily and publicly devoured by an enthusiastic compatriot. They had just met and the man kept thrusting his head down on to her shoulder to nuzzle her. The girl appeared to like it. She was very pliant and willing under his hands, and when they finally moved away she was still putting up her lips to his. Dunnett looked after them enviously.

He turned away and opened the letter from the firm. It contained the statement of the final stock figures for the Compañia Muras. It gave him, as he read, a feeling of something like pride to see his own name typed on such a letter. It was, in its way, a proof of the fact that he was now a person of some importance. And he derived another sensation from it, an odd feeling of security from the simple fact that he was a member of the staff of Govern and Fryze. There they were, a crowded office of them, over by the entrance to the East India Docks in London and here he was in an unstarred hotel in a disesteemed town of a remote South American republic; yet somehow he and they were one. As he sat looking at the heading of the notepaper with its list of cable codes, and branches everywhere—Calcutta, Madras, Cape Town, Durban, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Hamilton, Hong Kong, Buenos Aires, Valparaiso, Amricante, Singapore, Penang— he had the feeling which a soldier knows when he sees the rest of his column following after him. A feeling that with all that behind him it could not be intended that he should fail.

There was one letter left, which he had not opened. It was in an indigo blue envelope, lavishly deckled and touched with little flecks of silver. The writing in its impetuousness sprawled right across the front. Whoever had written it must have arranged for it to be delivered by hand, for there were no stamps on it and no room for them.

“Dear Mr. Dunnett,”
he read. “
We did so enjoy having you out here the other evening. Papa was awfully sick the fireworks all went wrong the way they did. He sacked our general handyman next day just because of it. You must come out again soon, it's really quite nice here at the altitude we are. If you ride, we can take a couple of horses up into the hills and get right away from everything. People ride enormous distances in these parts and don't think anything of it. There's shooting, too: but I don't expect you'd enjoy that—the surroundings are so different, not a bit like the sort of shooting you get in England. I know you're terribly busy—Papa says he's never seen anybody go for work the way you do—but if you have got a spare
half-day do remember that we should like to see you. I don't seem to see anybody nowadays. Ever sincerely yours, Carmel Muras.”

He put the letter down beside Kay's: the bright indigo of the paper made Kay's looked faded and demure. It was a new sensation being sought after like that. And Carmel Muras's letter was pretty direct. There was evidently something in the stories which he had heard about these South American girls; that bit about taking a couple of horses up into the hills and riding right away from everything could scarcely have said more. It was the impingement of American civilisation that had destroyed the natural balance of things; life for these girls was now centred on new dance records and the photogravure film weeklies instead of on a husband and a couple of brunette babies. And Carmel was typical of the new order of things. No doubt when she married she would settle down all right. She would make a very gallant and exciting wife for some adventurously minded man. … But
he
had work to do. He put all thoughts of Carmel from his mind and got out his typewriter with a pleasant consciousness of virtue. Then, in the high bedroom with the cathedral-like four-poster in it and the carved, discoloured ceiling, he clicked out his report to the head office.

In it he disclosed everything; he led them to expect nothing good from their Bolivian house. The report closed with the ominous words:
“I am continuing my investigations as I am very far from satisfied with the state of affairs in general. I cannot help feeling that Señor Muras is keeping back a good deal more than he tells me. As soon as I have anything more definite to go on I shall report again.”
He decided to send the letter registered, and achieved his purpose in a tense atmosphere of fuss and sealing-wax. He had a more than passing suspicion that an ordinary letter might somehow get mislaid or even fall eventually into the hands of Señor Muras himself.

On his way to the Post Office be began to debate in his own mind the question of the mysterious stock rooms; he kept asking himself what the redoubtable Mr. Verking would have done if he had been sent out to inspect something and had
found the door locked, so to speak, in his face. The answer, he was pretty sure, was “break in.” But how? If he were really going to do a little investigation work on his own he didn't want half the regular staff standing by and looking on; and those German clerks in the outer office had the look of men who might easily still be at their desks long after the Compañia Muras was closed to the world. Altogether, it was one of those things that called for patience and a decent show of circumspection.

On the way back to the hotel he stopped to buy a paper. It was a glaring, hysterical broadsheet. The name,
Pacific Eagle and Sea Board Clarion
, ran across the front in two-inch letters. But it was not at the title but at the headlines that he was looking. Apparently it was a great day for Bolivia; he had, without knowing it, stepped straight into the middle of a bit of history. According to the writer nothing less than the greatest military rout and victory of modern times had just occurred; in his version the entire Paraguayan nation was at last on the move, harried by the irresistible might of a justly aroused Bolivia. The writer was both something of a stylist and a student of manoeuvres. “Our unhappy continent,” his message ran, “so often seethed in the blood of those that truly love it, has now justified itself in the eyes of all right thinking people. The iron stranglehold of Paraguay has been loosened and her feet of clay revealed. Despite the abominable weapons of our opponents and their use of poison gas, they have been defeated, nay demolished. Three enemy companies, armed with every refinement of modern warfare, have been annihilated by withering machine gun fire and aerial attack. Our gallant bombers, swooping from the clouds like condors, have blasted into destruction the lairs and hide-outs where the attackers have been lurking ready to pounce on a peaceful and unarmed land. Our infantry following up the assault, has cleared an area which, until this moment, had been regarded by the experts on both sides, as impregnably Paraguayan. The fighting was of the fiercest and, in the green
hell of the Chaco, the knife supplanted the rifle. Soon the entire enemy front line was in disorder, and in retreat. Cold steel and inspired courage have once more defeated chemical atrocity and mere tactical cunning. …” Dunnett looked at the man who had sold the paper. He was leaning up against the wall with one foot upon the surface behind him for support. From the corner of his mouth hung a match stick as a negligent smoker might carry a cigarette. He was very dirty and seemingly perfectly contented. As soon as he had achieved the miracle of a sale he closed his eyes again. At his feet, pigeons were feeding. Two doors away a young woman with a flat, expressionless face was feeding a baby from her enormous sack-like breast. It seemed hard, looking at that scene, to realise that, even after discounting a proportion of what the
Eagle and Clarion's
eloquent reporter had to say, a few hundred miles away men were at one another's throats in the jungle.

He was just about to return to the Avenida when he heard himself hailed. It was Señor Muras. He was leaning out of the window of his cream-coloured limousine waving at Dunnett with the evening paper. On account of Señor Muras's size the effect was not simply that of a man waving to a friend from a motor car: it was rather that of a captive bear in a travelling circus cage pawing wildly through the bars. Dunnett sauntered slowly back to the waiting car. “You were looking for me?” he asked.

“Who else?” Señor Muras replied politely. “They told me that you had gone out with a few letters in your hands and so I decided that I must wait. I did not know of course that you were proposing to register one of the letters.”

“So you had me followed?” Dunnett asked.

Señor Muras smiled, revealing the bright gold stoppings in his teeth. “My chauffeur ‘phoned the Post Office and they told him,” he replied. “It is none of my business what you were registering, of course. They merely told me at what counter you were standing. There was surely nothing untoward in that?”