The Comedians (19 page)

‘You own this hotel, don't you?'

‘Yes.'

‘You were in the police station yesterday?'

‘Yes.'

‘Next time you see me don't stare at me. I don't like to be stared at. Who is the old man?'

‘The Presidential Candidate,' I said.

‘What do you mean? Presidential candidate for where?'

‘For the United States of America.'

‘Don't joke with me.'

‘I'm not joking. You can't have read the papers.'

‘Why has he come here?'

‘How would I know? He saw the Secretary of State yesterday. Perhaps he told
him
the reason. He expects to see the President.'

‘There's no election now in the United States. I know that much.'

‘They don't have a President for life like you do here. They have elections every four years.'

‘What was he doing with this – box of offal?'

‘He was attending the funeral of his friend, Doctor Philipot.'

‘I'm acting under orders,' he said with a hint of weakness. I could understand why it was these men wore dark glasses – they were human, but they mustn't show fear: it might be the end of terror in others. The Tontons Macoute in the car stared back at me as expressionless as golliwogs.

I said, ‘In Europe we hanged a lot of men who acted under orders. At Nuremberg.'

‘I don't like the way you speak to me,' he said. ‘You are not open. You have a mean way of talking. You've got a servant called Joseph, haven't you?'

‘Yes.'

‘I remember him well. I interviewed him once.' He let that fact sink in. ‘This is your hotel. You make a living here.'

‘No longer.'

‘That old man will be leaving soon, but you will stay on.'

‘It was a mistake you made to hit his wife,' I said. ‘It's the kind of thing he's likely to remember.' He slammed the door shut again and they drove the Cadillac back down the hill; we could see the end of the coffin pointing out at us until they turned the corner. Again there was a pause and we heard them at the barrier; then the car put on speed, racing down towards Port-au-Prince. To where in Port-au-Prince? What use to anyone was the body of an ex-Minister? A corpse couldn't even suffer. But unreason can be more terrifying than reason.

‘Outrageous. It's outrageous,' Mr Smith said at last. ‘I'll telephone to the President. I'll get that man . . .'

‘The telephone doesn't work.'

‘He struck my wife.'

‘It's not the first time, dear,' she said, ‘and he only pushed me. Remember at Nashville. It was worse at Nashville.'

‘It was different at Nashville,' he replied and there were tears in his voice. He had loved people for their colour and he had been betrayed more deeply than are those who hate. He added, ‘I'm sorry, dear, if I used expressions . . .' He took her arm and Madame Philipot and I followed them up the drive. The Duponts were sitting on the verandah with the little boy, and all three were eating vanilla ices with chocolate sauce. Their top-hats stood beside them like expensive ash-trays.

I told them, ‘The hearse is safe. They only broke the glass.'

‘Vandals,' Monsieur Hercule said, and Monsieur Clément touched him with a soothing undertaker's hand. Madame Philipot was quite calm now and without tears. She sat down by her child and aided him with the ice-cream. The past was past, and here beside her was the future. I had the feeling that when the time came, in however many years, he would not be allowed to forget. She spoke only once before she left in the taxi which Joseph fetched for her. ‘One day someone will find a silver bullet.'

The Duponts, for want of a taxi, left in their own hearse, and I was alone with Joseph. Mr Smith had taken Mrs Smith to the John Barrymore suite to lie down. He fussed over her and she let him have his way. I said to Joseph, ‘What good to them is a dead man in a coffin? Were they afraid that people might have laid flowers on his grave? It seemed unlikely. He wasn't a bad man, but he wasn't all that good either. The water-pumps for the shanty-town were never finished – I suppose some of the money went into his pocket.'

‘The people they very frightened,' Joseph said, ‘when they know. They frightened the President take their bodies too when they die.'

‘Why care? There's nothing left as it is but skin and bone, and why would the President need dead bodies anyway?'

‘The people very ignorant,' Joseph said. ‘They think the President keep Doctor Philipot in the cellar in the palace and make him work all night. The President is big Voodoo man.'

‘Baron Samedi?'

‘Ignorant people say yes.'

‘So nobody will attack him at night with all the zombies there to protect him? They are better than guards, better than the Tontons Macoute.'

‘Tontons Macoute zombies too. So ignorant people say.'

‘But what do you believe, Joseph?'

‘I be ignorant man, sir,' Joseph said.

I went upstairs to the John Barrymore suite, and I wondered while I climbed where they would dump the body – there were plenty of unfinished diggings and no one would notice one smell the more in Port-au-Prince. I knocked on the door, and Mrs Smith said, ‘Come in.'

Mr Smith had lit a small portable paraffin-stove on the chest-of-drawers and was boiling some water. Beside it was a cup and saucer and a cardboard carton marked Yeastrel. He said, ‘I have persuaded Mrs Smith for once not to take her Barmene. Yeastrel is more soothing.' There was a large photograph of John Barrymore on the wall looking down his nose with more than his usual phoney aristocratic disdain. Mrs Smith lay on the bed.

‘How are you, Mrs Smith?'

‘Perfectly all right,' she said with decision.

‘Her face is quite unmarked,' Mr Smith told me with relief.

‘I keep on telling you he only pushed me.'

‘One doesn't push a woman.'

‘I don't think he even realized I was a woman. I was, well – sort of assaulting him, I must admit.'

‘You are a brave woman, Mrs Smith,' I said.

‘Nonsense. I can see through a pair of cheap sun-glasses.'

‘She has the heart of a tigress when roused,' Mr Smith said, stirring the Yeastrel.

‘How are you going to deal with the incident in your article?' I asked him.

‘I have been considering very carefully,' Mr Smith said. He took a spoonful of Yeastrel to see whether it was the right temperature. ‘I think one more minute, dear. It's a little too hot still. Oh yes, the article. It would be dishonest, I think, to omit the incident altogether, and yet we can hardly expect readers to see the affair in proper perspective. Mrs Smith is much loved and respected in Wisconsin, but even there you will find people who are prepared to use a story like this to inflame passions over the colour question.'

‘They would never mention the white police officer in Nashville,' Mrs Smith said. ‘
He
gave me a black eye.'

‘So taking all things into consideration,' Mr Smith said, ‘I decided to tear the article up. People at home will just have to wait for news of us – that's all. Perhaps later, in a lecture, I might mention the incident when Mrs Smith is safely by my side to prove that it wasn't very serious.' He took another spoonful of Yeastrel. ‘It's cool enough now, dear, I think.'

II

I went reluctantly to the embassy that evening. I would have much preferred to know nothing of Martha's normal surroundings. Then, when she was not with me, she would have disappeared into a void where I could forget her. Now I knew exactly where she went when her car left the Columbus statue. I knew the hall which she passed through with the chained book where visitors wrote their names, the drawing-room that she entered next with the deep chairs and sofas and the glitter of chandeliers and the big photograph of General so-and-so, their relatively benevolent president, who seemed to make every caller an official caller, even myself. I was glad at least that I had not seen her bedroom.

When I arrived at half past nine the ambassador was alone – I had never seen him alone before: he seemed a different man. He sat on the sofa and thumbed through
Paris-Match
like a man in a dentist's waiting-room. I thought of sitting down silently myself and taking
Jours de France
, but he anticipated me with his greeting. He pressed me at once to take a drink, a cigar . . . Perhaps he was a lonely man. What did he do when there was no official party and his wife was out meeting me? Martha had said that he liked me – the idea helped me to see him as a human being. He seemed tired and out of spirits. He carried his weight of flesh slowly, like a heavy load, between the drink-table and the sofa. He said, ‘My wife's upstairs reading to my boy. She'll be down presently. She told me you might call.'

‘I hesitated to come – you must be glad of an evening sometimes to yourselves.'

‘I'm always glad to see my friends,' he said and lapsed into silence. I wondered whether he suspected our relationship or whether indeed he knew.

‘I was sorry to hear that your boy had caught mumps.'

‘Yes. It is still at the painful stage. It's terrible, isn't it, to watch a child suffering?'

‘I suppose so. I've never had a child.'

‘Ah.'

I looked at the portrait of the general. I felt that at least I should have been here on a cultural mission. He wore a row of medals and he had his hand on his sword-hilt.

‘How did you find New York?' the ambassador asked.

‘Much as usual.'

‘I would like to see New York. I know only the airport.'

‘Perhaps one day you'll be posted to Washington.' It was an ill-considered compliment; there was little chance of such a posting if at his age – which I judged to be near fifty – he had stuck so long in Port-au-Prince.

‘Oh, no,' he said seriously, ‘I can never go there. You see my wife is German.'

‘I know that – but surely now . . .'

He said, as though it were a natural occurrence in our kind of world, ‘Her father was hanged in the American zone. During the occupation.'

‘I see.'

‘Her mother brought her to South America. They had relations. She was only a child, of course.'

‘But she knows?'

‘Oh yes, she knows. There's no secret about it. She remembers him with tenderness, but the authorities had good reason . . .'

I wondered whether the world would ever again sail with such serenity through space as it seemed to do a hundred years ago. Then the Victorians kept skeletons in cupboards – but who cares about a mere skeleton now? Haiti was not an exception in a sane world: it was a small slice of everyday taken at random. Baron Samedi walked in all our graveyards. I remembered the hanged man in the Tarot pack. It must feel a little odd, I thought, to have a son called Angel whose grandfather had been hanged, and then I wondered how I might feel . . . We were never very careful about taking precautions, it could easily happen that my child . . . A grandchild too of a Tarot card.

‘After all, the children are innocent,' he said. ‘Martin Bormann's son is a priest now in the Congo.'

But why, I wondered, tell me this fact about Martha? Sooner or later one always feels the need of a weapon against a mistress: he had slipped a knife up my sleeve to use against his wife when the moment of anger came.

The man-servant opened the door and ushered in another visitor. I didn't catch the name, but as he padded across the carpet I recognized the Syrian from whom a year ago we had rented a room. He gave me a smile of complicity and said, ‘Of course I know Mr Brown well. I did not know you had returned. And how did you find New York?'

‘Any news in town, Hamit?' the ambassador asked.

‘The Venezuelan Embassy has another refugee.'

‘They will all be coming to me one day, I suppose,' the ambassador said, ‘but misery likes company.'

‘A terrible thing happened this morning, Excellency. They stopped Doctor Philipot's funeral and stole the coffin.'

‘I heard rumours. I didn't believe them.'

‘They are true enough,' I said. ‘I was there. I saw the whole . . .'

‘Monsieur Henri Philipot,' the man-servant announced, and a young man advanced towards us through the silence with a slight polio limp. I recognized him. He was the nephew of the ex-Minister, and I had met him once before in happier days, one of a little group of writers and artists who used to gather at the Trianon. I remembered him reading aloud some poems of his own – well-phrased, melodious, a little decadent and
vieux jeu
, with echoes of Baudelaire. How far away those times seemed now. All that was left to recall them were the rum punches of Joseph.

‘Your first refugee, Excellency,' Hamit said. ‘I was half expecting you, Monsieur Philipot.'

‘Oh no,' the young man said, ‘not that. Not yet. I understand when you claim asylum you have to make a promise not to indulge in political action.'

‘What political action are you proposing to take?' I asked.

‘I am melting down some old family silver.'

‘I don't understand,' the ambassador said. ‘Have one of my cigars, Henri. They are real Havana.'

‘My dear and beautiful aunt talks about a silver bullet. But one bullet might go astray. I think we need quite a number of them. Besides we have to deal with three devils not one. Papa Doc, the head of the Tontons Macoute and the colonel of the palace guard.'

‘It's a good thing,' the ambassador said, ‘that they bought arms and not microphones with American aid.'