Tango (37 page)

‘I’m thinking.’

William was aware of Manuel’s movement but not of any threat. He seemed to fold his arms and change position as if to see William without having to turn his head so much. William’s
last sight was of the small dark ‘O’ of the gun barrel. It was so brief a glimpse that he had no time even to be alarmed. There was an explosion in his ears and chest and a pain beyond
anything. It lasted an instant yet seemed for ever expanding. Next there was a feeling of being free, of floating, that again seemed both instantaneous and timeless. Then a sudden decline, an
abrupt and bottomless fall.

‘The Cross of Honour, second class. It should be first, but I’ll compromise.’

‘No.’

‘I can’t go lower than that. Third class is for diplomats and I don’t want you lumped in with them.’

‘I don’t want a medal. I wasn’t being brave.’

‘Of course you were. Anyway, it’s useful that you should be recognised for what you did. It lends dignity to the lynching, at least in international eyes.’

Carlos’s own eyes were drawn again to the window, through which he could see nurses sunbathing on the military hospital lawn. William’s private room was sunny and filled with
flowers. They had brought him the remains of his stamp collection that morning. He could walk and talk and eat now, and though there was a dull pain all the time it was excruciating only when he
sneezed or coughed. His chest was still discoloured and swollen; the doctors said there was nothing to be done with fractured sternum and ribs except to let them heal. On his bedside table was the
silver revolver in its holster, the leather torn and the chamber flattened on one side where Manuel’s bullet had hit it. The shock had actually stopped his heart, they told him. He had seven
stitches in his head where he had cut it when thrown back against the tomb. The concussion was wearing off now and the headaches came only if he moved suddenly.

Manuel had been caught fleeing the cemetery. He had been surrounded by a mob, tied to a trader’s stall and dragged to the covered market where, after castration, he had been hanged from
the clock tower. His testicles were rumoured to have been thrown in with other offal and cooked. The incident had threatened to cause public relations problems for the new government but with
American help United Nations criticisms had been headed off. There were to be no executions.

Carlos was wearing another new uniform with many medals. He had been inaugurated as president for life the day before. The reconstituted parliament had voted unanimously and an estimated million
people had thronged the streets. His uncle, the prime minister, would actually run the government. There had been dancing all night and that evening Maria’s was to be officially reopened by
Carlos. El Lizard would continue to run it but it was to be given the status of a government hostel and run by a board of trustees, chaired by Carlos’s cousin. This was to ensure that it
remained, as El Lizard desired, an orderly house.

William had refused the chairmanship, but had agreed to sit on the board. He was to have special responsibility for the welfare of staff.

‘That nurse who was in here when I came?’ Carlos asked.

‘Camilla. She’s on in the mornings.’

‘I thought she was reasonably beautiful. She reminded me of Theresa. I shall send for her.’

‘I’m seeing Theresa this afternoon.’

‘How is she? Have they moved her now?’

‘The same but yes, thank you, she’s on the floor below.’

Carlos stood. ‘I shall have tea with my wife and children and then, I think, a short sleep before going to Maria’s tonight.’ He straightened his uniform. ‘You know,
idleness is so agreeable to me. I’ve never liked doing things. I only get bored when I’m busy.’

‘You look very well on it.’

‘I feel well on it. Are we agreed – second class?’

‘I’ll think about it.’

‘It should really be first, but it is conditional on your accepting my other offer.’

‘The British Foreign Office won’t like that.’

‘We all have to accept things we don’t like sometimes. At least, some people do.’ Carlos smiled. ‘If they want a representative here and they want cobalt, they’ll
agree. Otherwise neither. Anyway, Special Information Services plc owes it to you to use their influence.
Chau
, William.’

William waited a while after Carlos had gone, then got carefully out of bed and put on his dressing-gown. It tired him to be up for very long so he built his days around visits to Theresa. Now
that, through Carlos, he had got her moved out of the appalling and hopeless mental wing into a room below his, visits were much easier.

The worst period had been the two days of fluctuating consciousness and persistent pain when, propped up in bed, he had seen the mental patients walking behind the wire on the grass outside
their wing. He had thought at first that his sightings of her were cruel tricks of his poor eyesight, then that he was suffering hallucinations. That was why he had said nothing as she wandered,
withdrawn and apparently unseeing, amidst the sad aimless people. They looked as if they were all either under heavy sedation or beyond it. She wore the same dull green overalls as the others and
her hair had been ruthlessly cut. William had become obsessed. It was the way she held herself and the way she moved. Even her smallest gesture suggested something beyond itself. By the end of the
second day he was convinced.

It had not been difficult to find out. As national hero and friend of the president, he was given everything he requested. Yes, they said, she had been the president’s mistress and she had
been raped by Herrera’s security police. They had treated her badly and after the coup she had been found wandering the streets. She had not spoken a word since; her mind was gone. It was
sad, such a beautiful girl, and as mistress of the president she would never have been poor. Now, of course, it was impossible for the president to touch her, now she had been raped. Nor would any
other man accept her. She was dead to all men now.

As soon as he could walk far enough William had gone to see her. She had not known him. He talked to her but she did not reply. Her dark eyes rested on him without recognition. She was utterly
passive. She would walk beside him and would respond to simple statements about change of direction or standing or sitting, but anything beyond that it was impossible to know whether she even
heard. After the first visit he had gone back to bed and resolved to die if she died, otherwise never to leave her.

Since then he had got used to talking to her. He would put her arm through his and every day they would walk in the grounds. He would tell her everything, hoping that one day something would get
through. She was no longer in overalls but in clothes he had ordered for her. The private room where she now slept was bright and quiet. It was imposible to tell whether she noticed her
surroundings but she showed no sign of unhappiness. The doctors had described her as ‘deeply withdrawn’.

Ines had been to see her twice in the early days but had been distressed by the experience. It was not in her nature to be anything other than cheerful and she could not be cheerful when faced
by no response at all. After the second visit she had cried, saying she could not bear to do it again. William had promised to call her if Theresa’s powers of recognition ever returned and
meanwhile secured for her a permanent position at the club as El Lizard’s secretary, responsible for bookings. She was petitioning the new government to release her father from prison.

William decided he would sit with Theresa that day rather than walk. He was still prone to headaches on exertion which, they told him, should wear off after a year or so. He was particularly
tired because Carlos’s visit had not been the first that day. In the morning Sally had come with Max Hueffer and flowers and chocolates. Sally described how she had cleaned up the flat and
removed her things. She wanted to talk about divorce arrangements. William said he would go along with anything. Max formally asked for his blessing on their union while Sally, who used to be so
dismissive of displays of emotion or sentiment, looked on with the exaggerated meekness of the born-again. William had had another headache.

Theresa sat in one of the cane chairs by the open window of her room. It was not as quiet as it should have been because one of the nurses on the lawn had her radio on. Theresa might have been
looking out or she might have been looking at the window-frame. William took the chair next to hers, held her hand and began talking. Her eyes moved to him briefly, then back to the window. He told
her that the mystery of Box’s body was almost resolved. It had begun when he had asked for Box’s special shoes as a memento and had been sent the wrong pair. Further requests failed to
elicit the right ones. He had then asked for other items of Box’s clothes, but the only article forthcoming was the colonel’s sword with which Box had tried to defend Ines and the
girls. It had been cleaned and polished. Box’s body was by then said to be en route for London in the EE(C) coffin, which was no doubt as Box would have wished. Special Information Services
plc had behaved decently. They had chartered an aeroplane for the coffin and had sent William a particularly favourable offer on the new share issue. They had also said that if he stayed on they
would appoint him their permanent salaried representative. His own company had meanwhile changed their decision about pulling out; they wanted him to stay and were prepared to drop the new name,
Britbooks, and revert to the English Bookshop. They had also offered a pay rise but he still hadn’t replied. He was considering putting Ricardo, who was now out of hospital, in charge. They
would accept whatever he said now that he was so well established in the country, and he felt he still owed Ricardo something, even though Ricardo was already boasting everywhere about his wounds
received in the civil war and the patronage of his new friend, the president; and even though his father, formerly a colonel in an obscure regiment, was now the general in charge of the palace
guard.

Next there had been an urgent message from Special Information Services sent via the embassy and unfortunately indecipherable because it used the code known only to the departed coffin. London
reluctantly agreed to send it again in an accessible though restricted format, but the cipher operator succumbed to professional stress and had to be flown home to be dried out. At the same time
Feather went missing on a diplomatic bag run to Rio, where he was thought to have submerged himself in one of his periodic debaucheries; Nightingale was apparently too distraught to attend the
office. The ambassador had fled home on leave, and the plane bringing the replacement cipher operator from Rio had diverted to La Paz, where a national holiday had just started. London’s
message had eventually been delivered to William by Max Hueffer.

‘I guess your guys prefer to trust our guys than their guys in your embassy,’ he had said. ‘I can see why. It would be embarrassing for your headquarters if it got
out.’

The signal said that the body in the coffin was not Box’s but that of an unknown man with a beard and one eye. This had become apparent only when Mrs Box had viewed the remains. Legal
complications arising from the importation and possession of an unknown corpse meant that there could be no question of a rapid re-export. The police had got to hear about it, customs had impounded
the EE(C) and the company had had to engage and brief in full one of the City’s top law firms. There was also serious concern as to whether or not the equipment had been compromised before
despatch. Security Section (abbreviated to SS) was prepared to concede that the unknown corpse might pose no threat but was most anxious that William should identify it and discover the
circumstances of death and substitution. Tests were being carried out to establish date and cause of death. Had the coffin been handled and filled by security-vetted personnel, as requested?
William was to locate and despatch the correct body with all speed. He was not to worry about expenses.

All that had been over a week ago. He had done what he could, he told Theresa, but even if he’d been more mobile he’d have been unlikely to have any more success. None of the corpses
known to the city authorities was Box’s. The most likely explanation was that he had been buried instead of the bearded one-eyed man and was now inhabiting the cemetery that had sheltered the
last days of his life, though the local custom of displaying corpses before burial made it very odd that the differences would have gone unnoticed. Nevertheless – all William’s
enquiries were channelled through the presidential office – the authorities were anxious to exhume every body buried since the coup and arrange them for inspection. William thought not; he
also thought he should not tell London that the offer had been made. He remembered Box telling him about a dead African lady who had been despatched to London under similar circumstances. Box would
have revelled in this one, he thought, and the more he thought it the more he felt that one day Box would do so indeed.

Then there had been the rumour from the hospital about the foreigner with gunshot wounds who had discharged himself, or at least disappeared, before the hospital records had caught up with the
influx of casualties at the time of the coup. There had been many with gunshot wounds, and patients who could, nearly always left with something like alacrity since the hospital was widely known as
a place where people came out with more diseases than they took in with them. The foreigner had been operated on and treated afterwards, but no one could remember precisely what for or by whom; he
had simply disappeared and dropped out of mind, one problem fewer.

This was when William had become convinced. He did not dare say so, partly out of superstition and partly because he did not want to provoke a torrent of unanswerable questions from London. He
was finding that all bureaucracies were alike, that his own firm and Special Information Services plc had more in common with each other than either would like to believe. But for him it was the
very lack of detail that made it all but certain; that was Box’s style. It was one of the two best bits of news he could have had, and in the privacy of his room he had done a little jig for
joy, which had brought on an immediate headache.