Our Man In Havana (26 page)

‘It sounds a lonely sort of life.’

‘I can do without them,’ he said defiantly. ‘There are more important things for a man than running after …’

‘Why did you want to come to a house then?’

Again he startled Wormold with the plain truth. ‘I try to want them, but when it comes to the point …’ He hovered on the edge of confession and then plunged. ‘It doesn’t work, Wormold. I can’t do what they want.’

‘Get out of the car.’

I have to do it, Wormold thought, before he confesses any more to me. With every second the man was becoming human, a creature like oneself whom one might pity or console, not kill.
Who
knew what excuses were buried below any violent act? He drew Segura’s gun.

‘What?’

‘Get out.’

Carter stood against the whore-house door with a look of sullen complaint rather than fear. His fear was of women, not of violence. He said, ‘You are making a mistake. It was Braun who gave me the whisky. I’m not important.’

‘I don’t care about the whisky. But you killed Hasselbacher, didn’t you?’

Again he surprised Wormold with the truth. There was a kind of honesty in the man. ‘I was under orders, Wormold. I h-h-h-h –’ He had manoeuvred himself so that his elbow reached the bell, and now he leant back and in the depths of the house the bell rang and rang its summons to work.

‘There’s no enmity, Wormold. You got too dangerous, that was all. We are only private soldiers, you and I.’

‘Me dangerous? What fools you people must be. I have no agents, Carter.’

‘Oh yes, you h-have. Those constructions in the mountains. We have copies of your drawings.’

‘The parts of a vacuum cleaner.’ He wondered who had supplied them: Lopez? or Hawthorne’s own courier, or a man in the Consulate?

Carter’s hand went to his pocket and Wormold fired. Carter gave a sharp yelp. He said, ‘You nearly shot me,’ and pulled out a hand clasped round a shattered pipe. He said, ‘My Dunhill. You’ve smashed my Dunhill.’

‘Beginner’s luck,’ Wormold said. He had braced himself for a death, but it was impossible to shoot again. The door behind Carter began to open. There was an impression of plastic music. ‘They’ll look after you in there. You may need a woman now, Carter.’

‘You – you clown.’

How right Carter was. He put the gun down beside him and
slipped
into the driving seat. Suddenly he felt happy. He might have killed a man. He had proved conclusively to himself that he wasn’t one of the judges; he had no vocation for violence. Then Carter fired.

CHAPTER 6

1

HE SAID TO
Beatrice, ‘I was just leaning forward to switch on the engine. That saved me, I imagine. Of course it was his right to fire back. It was a real duel, but the third shot was mine.’

‘What happened afterwards?’

‘I had time to drive away before I was sick.’

‘Sick?’

‘I suppose if I hadn’t missed the war it would have seemed much less serious a thing killing a man. Poor Carter.’

‘Why should you feel sorry for him?’

‘He was a man. I’d learnt a lot about him. He couldn’t undo a girl’s corset. He was scared of women. He liked his pipe and when he was a boy the pleasure-steamers on the river at home seemed to him like liners. Perhaps he was a romantic. A romantic is usually afraid, isn’t he, in case reality doesn’t come up to expectations. They all expect too much.’

‘And then?’

‘I wiped my prints off the gun and brought it back. Of course Segura will find that two shots have been fired. But I don’t suppose he’ll want to claim the bullets. It would be a little difficult to explain. He was still asleep when I came in. I’m afraid to think what a head he’ll have now. My own is bad enough. But I tried to follow your instructions with the photograph.’

‘What photograph?’

‘He had a list of foreign agents he was taking to the Chief of
Police.
I photographed it and put it back in his pocket. I’m glad to feel there’s one real report that I’ve sent before I resign.’

‘You should have waited for me.’

‘How could I? He was going to wake at any moment. But this micro business is tricky.’

‘Why on earth did you make a microphotograph?’

‘Because we can’t trust any courier to Kingston. Carter’s people – whoever they are – have copies of the Oriente drawings. That means a double agent somewhere. Perhaps it’s your man who smuggles in the drugs. So I made a microphotograph as you showed me and I stuck it on the back of a stamp and I posted off an assorted batch of five hundred British colonials, the way we arranged for an emergency.’

‘We’ll have to cable them which stamp you’ve stuck it to.’

‘Which stamp?’

‘You don’t expect them to look through five hundred stamps, do you, looking for one black dot.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that. How very awkward.’

‘You must know which stamp …’

‘I didn’t think of looking at the front. I think it was a George V, and it was red – or green.’

‘That’s helpful. Do you remember any of the names on the list?’

‘No. There wasn’t time to read it properly. I know I’m a fool at this game, Beatrice.’

‘No. They are the fools.’

‘I wonder whom we’ll hear from next. Dr Braun … Segura …’

But it was neither of them.

2

The supercilious clerk from the Consulate appeared in the shop at five o’clock the next afternoon. He stood stiffly among the vacuum cleaners like a disapproving tourist in a museum of phallic objects.
He
told Wormold that the Ambassador wanted to see him. ‘Will tomorrow morning do?’ He was working on his last report, Carter’s death and his resignation.

‘No, it won’t. He telephoned from his home. You are to go there straight away.’

‘I’m not an employee,’ Wormold said.

‘Aren’t you?’

Wormold drove back to Vedado, to the little white houses and the bougainvilleas of the rich. It seemed a long while since his visit to Professor Sanchez. He passed the house. What quarrels were still in progress behind those doll’s house walls?

He had a sense that everyone in the Ambassador’s home was on the look-out for him and that the hall and the stairs had been carefully cleared of spectators. On the first floor a woman turned her back and shut herself in a room; he thought it was the Ambassadress. Two children peered quickly through the banisters on the second floor and ran off with a click of little heels on the tiled floor. The butler showed him into the drawing-room, which was empty, and closed the door on him stealthily. Through the tall windows he could see a long green lawn and tall sub-tropical trees. Even there somebody was moving rapidly away.

The room was like many Embassy drawing-rooms, a mixture of big inherited pieces and small personal objects acquired in previous stations. Wormold thought he could detect a past in Teheran (an odd-shaped pipe, a tile), Athens (an icon or two), but he was momentarily puzzled by an African mask – perhaps Monrovia?

The Ambassador came in, a tall cold man in a Guards tie, with something about him of what Hawthorne would have liked to be. He said, ‘Sit down, Wormold. Have a cigarette?’

‘No thank you, sir.’

‘You’ll find that chair more comfortable. Now it’s no use beating about the bush, Wormold. You are in trouble.’

‘Yes.’

‘Of course I know nothing – nothing at all – of what you are doing here.’

‘I sell vacuum cleaners, sir.’

The Ambassador looked at him with undisguised distaste. ‘Vacuum cleaners? I wasn’t referring to them.’ He looked away from Wormold at the Persian pipe, the Greek icon, the Liberian mask. They were like the autobiography in which a man has written for reassurance only of his better days. He said, ‘Yesterday morning Captain Segura came to see me. Mind you, I don’t know how the police got this information, it’s none of my business, but he told me you had been sending a lot of reports home of a misleading character. I don’t know whom you sent them to: that’s none of my business either. He said in fact that you had been drawing money and pretending to have sources of information which simply don’t exist. I thought it my duty to inform the Foreign Office at once. I gather you will be receiving orders to go home and report – who to I have no idea, that sort of thing has nothing to do with me.’ Wormold saw two small heads looking out from behind one of the tall trees. He looked at them and they looked at him, he thought sympathetically. He said, ‘Yes, sir?’

‘I got the impression that Captain Segura considered you were causing a lot of trouble here. I think if you refused to go home you might find yourself in serious trouble with the authorities, and under the circumstances of course I could do nothing to help you. Nothing at all. Captain Segura even suspects you of having forged some kind of document which he says you claim to have found in his possession. The whole subject is distasteful to me, Wormold. I can’t tell you how distasteful it is. The correct sources for information abroad are the embassies. We have our attachés for that purpose. This so-called secret information is a trouble to every ambassador.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I don’t know whether you’ve heard – it’s been kept out of the papers – but an Englishman was shot the night before last. Captain Segura hinted that he was not unconnected with you.’

‘I met him once at lunch, sir.’

‘You had better go home, Wormold, on the first plane you can
manage
– the sooner the better for me – and discuss it with your people – whoever they are.’

‘Yes sir.’

3

The
K.L.M.
plane was due to take off at three-thirty in the morning for Amsterdam by way of Montreal. Wormold had no desire to travel to Kingston, where Hawthorne might have instructions to meet him. The office had been closed with a final cable and Rudy and his suitcase were routed to Jamaica. The code-books were burnt with the help of the celluloid sheets. Beatrice was to go with Rudy. Lopez was left in charge of the vacuum cleaners. All the personal possessions he valued Wormold got into one crate, which he arranged to send by sea. The horse was sold – to Captain Segura.

Beatrice helped him pack. The last object in the crate was the statue of St Seraphina.

‘Milly must be very unhappy,’ Beatrice said.

‘She’s wonderfully resigned. She says like Sir Humphrey Gilbert that God is just as close to her in England as in Cuba.’

‘It wasn’t quite what Gilbert said.’

There was a pile of unsecret rubbish left to be burnt.

Beatrice said, ‘What a lot of photographs you had tucked away – of
her
.’

‘I used to feel it was like killing someone to tear up a photograph. Of course I know now that it’s quite different.’

‘What’s this red box?’

‘She gave me some cuff-links once. They were stolen, but I kept the box. I don’t know why. In a way I’m glad to see all this stuff go.’

‘The end of a life.’

‘Of two lives.’

‘What’s this?’

‘An old programme.’

‘Not so old. The Tropicana. May I keep it?’

‘You are too young to keep things,’ Wormold said. ‘They accumulate too much. Soon you find you have nowhere left to live among the junk-boxes.’

‘I’ll risk it. That was a wonderful evening.’

Milly and Wormold saw her off at the airport. Rudy disappeared unobtrusively following the man with the enormous suitcase. It was a hot afternoon and people stood around drinking daiquiries. Even since Captain Segura’s proposal of marriage Milly’s duenna had disappeared, but after her disappearance the child, whom he had hoped to see again, who had set fire to Thomas Earl Parkman, junior, had not returned. It was as though Milly had outgrown both characters simultaneously. She said with grown-up tact, ‘I want to find some magazines for Beatrice,’ and busied herself at a bookstall with her back turned.

‘I’m sorry,’ Wormold said. ‘I’ll tell them when I get back that you know nothing. I wonder where you’ll be sent next.’

‘The Persian Gulf perhaps. Basra.’

‘Why the Persian Gulf?’

‘It’s their idea of purgatory. Regeneration through sweat and tears. Do Phastkleaners have an agency at Basra?’

‘I’m afraid Phastkleaners won’t keep me on.’

‘What will you do?’

‘I’ve got enough, thanks to poor Raul, for Milly’s year in Switzerland. After that I don’t know.’

‘You could open one of those practical joke shops – you know, the bloodstained thumb and the spilt ink and the fly on the lump of sugar. How ghastly goings-away are. Please don’t wait any longer.’

‘Shall I see you again?’

‘I’ll try not to go to Basra. I’ll try to stay in the typists’ pool with Angelica and Ethel and Miss Jenkinson. When I’m lucky I shall be off at six and we could meet at the Corner House for a cheap snack and go to the movies. It’s one of those ghastly lives, isn’t it, like
UNESCO
and modern writers in conference? It’s been fun here with you.’

‘Yes.’

‘Now go away.’

He went to the magazine stall and found Milly. ‘We’re off,’ he said.

‘But, Beatrice – she hasn’t got her magazines.’

‘She doesn’t want them.’

‘I didn’t say good-bye.’

‘Too late. She’s passed the emigration now. You’ll see her in London. Perhaps.’

4

It was as if they spent all their remaining time in airports. Now it was the
K.L.M.
flight and it was three in the morning and the sky was pink with the reflection of neon-lighted stands and landing-flares, and it was Captain Segura who was doing the ‘seeing off’. He tried to make the official occasion seem as private as possible, but it was still a little like a deportation. Segura said reproachfully, ‘You drove me to this.’

‘Your methods are gentler than Carter’s or Dr Braun’s. What are you doing about Dr Braun?’

‘He finds it necessary to return to Switzerland on a matter to do with his precision-instruments.’

‘With a passage booked on to Moscow?’

‘Not necessarily. Perhaps Bonn. Or Washington. Or even Bucharest. I don’t know. Whoever they are they are pleased, I believe, with your drawings.’