Our Man In Havana (10 page)

The economic report proved to be a tedious chore, for Wormold had never learnt to type with more than two fingers or to use the tabulator on his machine. It was necessary to alter the official statistics in case someone in the head office thought to compare the two reports, and sometimes Wormold forgot he had altered a figure. Addition and subtraction were never his strong points. A decimal point got shifted and had to be chased up and
down
a dozen columns. It was rather like steering a miniature car in a slot machine.

After a week he began to worry about the absence of replies. Had Hawthorne smelt a rat? But he was temporarily encouraged by a summons to the Consulate, where the sour clerk handed him a sealed envelope addressed for no reason he could understand to ‘Mr Luke Penny’. Inside the outer envelope was another envelope marked ‘Henry Leadbetter. Civilian Research Services’; a third envelope was inscribed 59200/5 and contained three months’ wages and expenses in Cuban notes. He took them to the bank in Obispo.

‘Office account, Mr Wormold?’

‘No. Personal.’ But he had a sense of guilt as the teller counted; he felt as though he had embezzled the company’s money.

CHAPTER 2

1

TEN DAYS PASSED
and no word reached him. He couldn’t even send his economic report until the notional agent who supplied it had been traced and approved. The time arrived for his annual visit to retailers outside Havana, at Matanzas, Cienfuegos, Santa Clara and Santiago. Those towns he was in the habit of visiting by road in his ancient Hillman. Before leaving he sent a cable to Hawthorne. ‘On pretext of visiting sub-agents for vacuums propose to investigate possibilities for recruitment port of Matanzas, industrial centre Santa Clara, naval headquarters Cienfuegos and dissident centre Santiago calculate expenses of journey fifty dollars a day.’ He kissed Milly, made her promise to take no lifts in his absence from Captain Segura, and rattled off for a stirrup-cup in the Wonder Bar with Dr Hasselbacher.

2

Once a year, and always on his tour, Wormold wrote to his younger sister who lived in Northampton. (Perhaps writing to Mary momentarily healed the loneliness he felt at being away from Milly.) Invariably too he included the latest Cuban postage stamps for his nephew. The boy had begun to collect at the age of six and somehow, with the quick jog-trot of time, it slipped Wormold’s
memory
that his nephew was now long past seventeen and had probably given up his collection years ago. In any case he must have been too old for the kind of note Wormold folded around the stamps; it was too juvenile even for Milly, and his nephew was her senior by several years.

‘Dear Mark,’ Wormold wrote, ‘here are some stamps for your collection. It must be quite a big collection by now. I’m afraid these ones are not very interesting. I wish we had birds or beasts or butterflies in Cuba like the nice ones you showed me from Guatemala. Your affectionate uncle. P.S. I am sitting looking at the sea and it is very hot.’

To his sister he wrote more explicitly, ‘I am sitting by the bay in Cienfuegos and the temperature is over ninety, though the sun has been down for an hour. They are showing Marilyn Monroe at the cinema, and there is one boat in the harbour called, oddly enough, the
Juan Belmonte
. (Do you remember that winter in Madrid when we went to the bullfight?) The Chief – I think he’s the Chief – is sitting at the next table drinking Spanish brandy. There’s nothing else for him to do except go to the cinema. This must be one of the quietest ports in the world. Just the pink and yellow street and a few cantinas and the big chimney of a sugar refinery and at the end of a weed-grown path the
Juan Belmonte
. Somehow I wish I could be sailing in it with Milly, but I don’t know. Vacuum cleaners are not selling well – electric current is too uncertain in these troubled days. Last night at Matanzas the lights all went out three times – the first time I was in my bath. These are silly things to write all the way to Northampton.

‘Don’t think I am unhappy. There is a lot to be said for where we are. Sometimes I fear going home to Boots and Woolworths and cafeterias, and I’d be a stranger now even in the White Horse. The Chief has got a girl with him – I expect he has a girl in Matanzas too: he’s pouring brandy down her throat as you give a cat medicine. The light here is wonderful just before the sun goes down: a long trickle of gold and the seabirds are dark patches on the pewter swell. The big white statue in the Paseo which looks in
daylight
like Queen Victoria is a lump of ectoplasm now. The bootblacks have all packed up their boxes under the arm-chairs in the pink colonnade: you sit high above the pavement as though on library-steps and rest your feet on the back of two little sea-horses in bronze that might have been brought here by a Phoenician. Why am I so nostalgic? I suppose because I have a little money tucked away and soon I must decide to go away for ever. I wonder if Milly will be able to settle down in a secretarial-training college in a grey street in north London.

‘How is Aunt Alice and the famous wax in her ears? And how is Uncle Edward? or is he dead? I’ve reached the time of life when relatives die unnoticed.’

He paid his bill and asked for the name of the Chief Engineer – it had struck him that he must have a few names checked when he got home, to justify his expenses.

3

In Santa Clara his old Hillman lay down beneath him like a tired mule. Something was seriously wrong with its innards; only Milly would have known what. The man at the garage said that the repairs would take several days, and Wormold decided to go on to Santiago by coach. Perhaps in any case it was quicker and safer that way, for in the Oriente Province, where the usual rebels held the mountains and Government troops the roads and cities, blocks were frequent and buses were less liable to delay than private cars.

He arrived at Santiago in the evening, the empty dangerous hours of the unofficial curfew. All the shops in the piazza built against the Cathedral façade were closed. A single couple hurried across in front of the hotel; the night was hot and humid, and the greenery hung dark and heavy in the pallid light of half-strength lamps. In the reception office they greeted him with suspicion as though they assumed him to be a spy of one kind or another. He
felt
like an impostor, for this was a hotel of real spies, real police-informers and real rebel agents. A drunk man talked endlessly in the drab bar, as though he were saying in the style of Gertrude Stein ‘Cuba is Cuba is Cuba’.

Wormold had for his dinner a dry flat omelette, stained and dog-eared like an old manuscript, and drank some sour wine. While he ate he wrote on a picture-postcard a few lines to Dr Hasselbacher. Whenever he left Havana he dispatched to Milly and Dr Hasselbacher and sometimes even to Lopez bad pictures of bad hotels with a cross against one window like the cross in a detective story which indicates where the crime has been committed. ‘Car broken down. Everything very quiet. Hope to be back Thursday.’ A picture-postcard is a symptom of loneliness.

At nine o’clock Wormold set out to find his retailer. He had forgotten how abandoned the streets of Santiago were after dark. Shutters were closed behind the iron grills, and as in an occupied city the houses turned their backs on the passer-by. A cinema cast a little light, but no customer went in; by law it had to remain open, but no one except a soldier or a policeman was likely to visit it after dark. Down a side-street Wormold saw a military patrol go by.

Wormold sat with the retailer in a small hot room. An open door gave on to a patio, a palm tree and a well-head of wrought iron, but the air outside was as hot as the air within. They sat opposite each other in rocking-chairs, rocking towards each other and rocking away, making little currents of air.

Trade was bad – rock rock – nobody was buying electrical goods in Santiago – rock rock – what was the good? rock rock. As though to illustrate the point the electric light went out and they rocked in darkness. Losing the rhythm their heads came into gentle collision.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘My fault.’

Rock rock rock.

Somebody scraped a chair in the patio.

‘Your wife?’ asked Wormold.

‘No. Nobody at all. We are quite alone.’

Wormold rocked forward, rocked back, rocked forward again, listening to the furtive movements in the patio.

‘Of course.’ This was Santiago. Any house might contain a man on the run. It was best to hear nothing, and to see nothing was no problem, even when the light came half-heartedly back with a tiny yellow glow on the filament.

On his way to the hotel he was stopped by two policemen. They wanted to know what he was doing out so late.

‘It’s only ten o’clock,’ he said.

‘What are you doing in this street at ten o’clock?’

‘There’s no curfew, is there?’

Suddenly, without warning, one of the policemen slapped his face. He felt shock rather than anger. He belonged to the law-abiding class; the police were his natural protectors. He put his hand to his cheek and said, ‘What in God’s name do you think …?’ The other policeman with a blow in the back sent him stumbling along the pavement. His hat fell off into the filth of the gutter. He said, ‘Give me my hat,’ and felt himself pushed again. He began to say something about the British Consul and they swung him sideways across the road and sent him reeling. This time he landed inside a doorway in front of a desk where a man slept with his head on his arms. He woke up and shouted at Wormold – his mildest expression was ‘pig’.

Wormold said, ‘I am a British subject, my name is Wormold, my address Havana – Lamparilla 37. My age forty-five, divorced, and I want to ring up the Consul.’

The man who had called him a pig and who carried on his arm the chevron of a sergeant told him to show his passport.

‘I can’t. It’s in my brief-case at the hotel.’

One of his captors said with satisfaction, ‘Found on the street without papers.’

‘Empty his pockets,’ the sergeant said. They took out his wallet and the picture-postcard to Dr Hasselbacher, which he had forgotten to post, and a miniature whisky bottle, Old Granddad,
that
he had bought in the hotel-bar. The sergeant studied the bottle and the postcard.

He said, ‘Why do you carry this bottle? What does it contain?’

‘What do you suppose?’

‘The rebels make grenades out of bottles.’

‘Surely not such small bottles.’ The sergeant drew the cork, sniffed and poured a little on the palm of his hand. ‘It appears to be whisky,’ he said and turned to the postcard. He said, ‘Why have you made a cross on this picture?’

‘It’s the window of my room.’

‘Why show the window of your room?’

‘Why shouldn’t I? It’s just – well, it’s one of the things one does when travelling.’

‘Were you expecting a visitor by the window?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Who is Dr Hasselbacher?’

‘An old friend.’

‘Is he coming to Santiago?’

‘No.’

‘Then why do you want to show him where your room is?’

He began to realize what the criminal class knows so well, the impossibility of explaining anything to a man with power.

He said flippantly, ‘Dr Hasselbacher is a woman.’

‘A woman doctor!’ The sergeant exclaimed with disapproval.

‘A doctor of philosophy. A very beautiful woman.’ He made two curves in the air.

‘And she is joining you in Santiago?’

‘No, no. But you know how it is with a woman, Sergeant? They like to know where their man is sleeping.’

‘You are her lover?’ The atmosphere had changed for the better. ‘That still does not explain your wandering about the streets at night.’

‘There’s no law …’

‘No law, but prudent people stay at home. Only mischief-makers go out.’

‘I couldn’t sleep for thinking of Emma.’

‘Who is Emma?’

‘Dr Hasselbacher.’

The sergeant said slowly, ‘There is something wrong here. I can smell it. You are not telling me the truth. If you are in love with Emma, why are you in Santiago?’

‘Her husband suspects.’

‘She has a husband?
No es muy agradable
. Are you a Catholic?’

‘No.’

The sergeant picked up the postcard and studied it again. ‘The cross at a bedroom window – that is not very nice, either. How will she explain that to her husband?’

Wormold thought rapidly. ‘Her husband is blind.’

‘And that too is not nice. Not nice at all.’

‘Shall I hit him again?’ one of the policemen asked.

‘There is no hurry. I must interrogate him first. How long have you known this woman, Emma Hasselbacher?’

‘A week.’

‘A week? Nothing that you say is nice. You are a Protestant and an adulterer. When did you meet this woman?’

‘I was introduced by Captain Segura.’

The sergeant held the postcard suspended in mid-air. Wormold heard one of the policemen behind him swallow. Nobody said anything for a long while.

‘Captain Segura?’

‘Yes.’

‘You know Captain Segura?’

‘He is a friend of my daughter.’

‘So you have a daughter. You are married.’ He began to say again,’ That is not n …’ when one of the policemen interrupted him, ‘He knows Captain Segura.’

‘How can I tell that you are speaking the truth?’

‘You could telephone to him and find out.’

‘It would take several hours to reach Havana on the telephone.’

‘I can’t leave Santiago at night. I will wait for you at the hotel.’

‘Or in a cell at the station here.’

‘I don’t think Captain Segura would be pleased.’

The sergeant considered the matter for a long time, going through the contents of the wallet while he thought. Then he told one of the men to accompany Wormold back to the hotel and there to examine his passport (in this way the sergeant obviously thought that he was saving face). The two walked back in an embarrassed silence, and it was only when Wormold had lain down that he remembered the postcard to Dr Hasselbacher was still on the sergeant’s desk. It seemed to him to have no importance; he could always send another in the morning. How long it takes to realize in one’s life the intricate patterns of which everything – even a picture-postcard – can form a part, and the rashness of dismissing anything as unimportant. Three days later Wormold took the bus back to Santa Clara; his Hillman was ready; the road to Havana offered him no problems.