The Honorary Consul (3 page)

       "Why not Charley?"

       "An old man and a drunk? You're her doctor, Plarr. Tell me a little bit of the truth. I don't ask for a very big bit."

       "Why do you always want the truth?"

       "Contrary to common belief the truth is nearly always funny. It's only tragedy which people bother to imagine or invent. If you really knew what went into this goulash you'd laugh."

       "Do you know?"

       "No. People always conspire to keep the truth from me. Even you lie to me, Plarr."

       "Me?"

       "You lie to me about Saavedra's novel and Charley Fortnum's baby. Let's hope, for his sake, it's a girl."

       "Why?"

       "It's so much more difficult to detect the father from the features." Doctor Humphries began to wipe his plate clean with a piece of bread. "Can you tell me why I'm always hungry, doctor? I don't eat well, and yet I eat an awful lot of what they call nourishing food."

       "If you really wanted the truth I would have to examine you, take an x-ray..."

       "Oh no, no. I only want the truth about other people. It's always other people who are funny."

       "Then why ask me?"

       "A conversational gambit," the old man said, "to hide my embarrassment while I help myself to the last piece of bread."

       "Do they grudge us bread here?" Doctor Plarr called across a waste of empty tables, "Waiter, some more bread."

       The only Italian came shuffling toward them. He carried a bread basket with three pieces of bread and he watched with black anxiety when the number was reduced to one. He might have been a junior member of the Mafia who had disobeyed the order of his chief.

       "Did you see the sign he made?" Doctor Humphries asked.

       "No."

       "He put out two of his fingers. Against the evil eye. He thinks I have the evil eye."

       "Why?"

       "I once made a disrespectful remark about the Madonna of Pompeii."

       "What about a game of chess when you have finished?" Doctor Plarr asked. He had to pass the timesomehow, away from his apartment and the telephone by the bed.

       "I've finished now."

       They went back to the little over-lived-in room in the Hotel Bolivar. The manager was reading 'El Litoral' in the patio with his fly open for coolness. He said, "Someone was asking for you on the telephone, doctor."

       "For me?" Humphries exclaimed with excitement. "Who was it? What did you tell them?"

       "No, it was for Doctor Plarr, professor. A woman. She thought the doctor might be with you."

       "If she rings again," Plarr said, "don't say that I am here."

       "Have you no curiosity?" Doctor Humphries asked.

       "Oh, I can guess who it is."

       "Not a patient, eh?"

       "Yes, a patient. There's no urgency. Nothing to worry about."

       Doctor Plarr found himself checkmated in under twenty moves, and he began impatiently to set the pieces out again.

       "Whatever you may say you are worried about something," the old man said.

       "It's that damn shower. Drip drip drip. Why don't you have it mended?"

       "What harm does it do? It's soothing. It sings me to sleep."

       Doctor Humphries began with a king's pawn opening. "KP4," he said. "Even the great Capablanca would sometimes begin as simply as that. Charley Fortnum," he added, "has got his new Cadillac."

       "Yes."

       "How old's your home-grown Fiat?"

       "Four—five years old."

       "It pays to be a Consul, doesn't it? Permission to import a car every two years. I suppose he's got a general lined up in the capital to buy it as soon as he's run it in."

       "Probably. It's your move."

       "If he got his wife made a Consul, too, they could import a car a year between them. A fortune. Is there any sexual discrimination in the consular service?"

       "I don't know the rules."

       "How much did he pay to get appointed, do you suppose?"

       "That's a canard, Humphries. He paid nothing. It's not the way our Foreign Office works. Some very important visitors wanted to see the ruins. They had no Spanish. Charley Fortnum gave them a good time. It was as simple as that. And lucky for him. He wasn't doing very well with his mate crop, but a Cadillac every two years makes a lot of difference."

       "Yes, you could say he married on his Cadillac. But I'm surprised that woman of his needed the price of a Cadillac. Surely a Morris Minor would have done."

       "I'm being unfair," Doctor Plarr said. "It wasn't only because he looked after royalty. There were quite a number of Englishmen in the province in those days—you know that better than I do. And there was one who got into a mess over the border—the time when the guerrillas went across—and Fortnum knew the local ropes. He saved the Ambassador a lot of trouble. All the same he was lucky—some ambassadors are more grateful than others."

       "So now if we are in a spot of trouble we have to depend on Charley Fortnum. Check."

       Doctor Plarr had to exchange his queen for a bishop. He said, "There are worse people than Charley Fortnum."

       "You are in bad trouble now and he can't save you."

       Doctor Plarr looked quickly up from the board, but the old man was only referring to the game. "Check again," he said. "And mate." He added, "That shower has been out of order for six months. You don't always lose to me as easily as that."

       "Your game's improved."

2

Doctor Plarr refused a third game and drove home. He lived on the top floor of a block of yellow flats which faced the Paraná. The block was one of the eyesores of the old colonial city, but the yellow was fading a little year by year, and anyway he couldn't afford a house while his mother was alive. It was extraordinary how much a woman could spend on sweet cakes in the capital.

       As Doctor Plarr closed his shutters the last ferry was approaching across the river, and after he got into bed he heard the heavy thunder of a plane which was making a slow turn overhead: it sounded very low, as though it had lifted off the ground only a few minutes before. It was certainly not a long-distance jet overflying the city on the way to Buenos Aires or Asunción—in any case the hour was too late for a commercial flight. It might, Plarr thought, be the American Ambassador's plane, but he had never expected to hear that. He turned off the light and lay in the dark thinking of all the things that could so easily have gone wrong as the noise of the engine faded, beating south, carrying whom? He wanted to lift the receiver and dial Charley Fortnum, but there was no excuse he could think of for disturbing him at that hour. He could hardly ask: did the Ambassador enjoy the ruins? Did the dinner pass off well? I suppose at the Governor's you must have had some decent steaks? It wasn't his habit to gossip with Charley Fortnum at that hour—Charley was an uxorious man.

       He turned his light on again—better to read than worry, and as he knew now what the ending would be without any possibility of mistake, Doctor Saavedra's book proved, a good sedative. There was little traffic along the river front; once a police car went by with the sirens screaming, but Plarr soon fell asleep with the light still burning.

       He was awakened by the telephone. His watch stood at exactly two in the morning. He knew of no patient likely to ring him at that hour.

       "Yes," he asked, "who are you?"

       A voice he didn't recognize replied, with elaborate caution, "Our entertainment was a success."

       Plarr said, "Who are you? Why tell me that? What entertainment? I'm not interested." He spoke with the irritation of fear.

       "We are worried about one of the cast. He was taken ill."

       "I don't know what you are talking about."

       "We are afraid the strain of his part may have been too great."

       Never before had they telephoned him so openly and at such a suspect hour. There was no reason to believe that his line was tapped, but they had no right to take the smallest risk. Refugees from the north were often kept under a certain loose surveillance in the border region since the days of the guerrilla fighting, if only for their own protection: there were cases of men who had been dragged home to Paraguay across the Paraná to die. There had been an exiled doctor in Posadas... Because he was a man of the same profession the doctor's example had been present often in Plarr's mind since the plans for the entertainment were first disclosed to him. This telephone call to his apartment could not be justified except in a case of great urgency. One death among the entertainers—by the rules they had set themselves—was to be expected and justified nothing.

       He said, "I don't know what you are talking about. You have the wrong number." He replaced the receiver and lay looking at the telephone as though it were a black and venomous object which would certainly strike again. It did two minutes later, and he had to listen—it might be an ordinary patient's call. "Yes—who are you?"

       The same voice said, "You have to come. He may be dying."

       Doctor Plarr asked with resignation, "What do you want me to do?"

       "We'll pick you up in the street in exactly five minutes. If we are not there, then in ten minutes. After that be ready every five minutes."

       "What does your watch say?"

       "Six minutes past two."

       The doctor put on a pair of trousers and a shirt; then he packed a briefcase with what might be required (a bullet wound seemed the most likely trouble) and ran lightly down the stairs in his socks. He knew the noise of the lift was audible through the thin walls of every flat. By two ten he was standing outside the block and at two twelve he went in again and shut the door. At two sixteen he was watching a second time in the street and a two eighteen he was back inside. Fear made him furious. His liberty, perhaps his life, seemed to lie in hopelessly incompetent hands. He knew only two members of the group—they had been at school with him in Asunción—and those who share one's childhood never seem to grow up. He had no more belief in their efficiency than he had when they were students; the organization they had once belonged to in Paraguay, the Juventud Febrerista, had effected little except the death of most of the other members in an ill-advised and ill-led guerrilla action.

       Indeed it was that very sense of amateurism which had persuaded him to become involved. He hadn't believed in their plans, and to listen to them was only a mark of friendship. When he questioned them about what they would do in certain eventualities the ruthlessness of their replies seemed to him a form of play acting. (They had all three taken minor parts in a school performance of 'Macbeth'—the prose translation did not make the play more plausible.)

       Now, as he stood in the dark hall, watching intently the luminous dial of his watch, he realized he had never for a moment believed they would reach the point of action. Even when he had given them the precise information they required of the American Ambassador's movements (he had learned the details from Charley Fortnum over a Long John) and supplied them with the drug they needed, he still didn't believe that anything would really happen. Only when he woke that morning and heard Léon's voice, "The show goes on," did it occur to him that perhaps these amateurs might after all be dangerous. Was it Léon Rivas who was dying now? Or Aquino?

       It was two twenty-two when he went outside for the third time. A car swerved round the block and stopped, the engine running. A hand waved to him.

       As far as he could tell in the light of the dashboard, he didn't know the man at the wheel, but his companion he was able to guess at in the dark by the line of the thin beard which outlined the jaw. It was in a police station cell that Aquino had grown his beard and had begun to write his poetry, and it was in the cell too that he had developed a hungry passion for 'chipá', those doughy rolls made out of mandioca, that can only be properly appreciated after semistarvation. "What went wrong, Aquino?"

       "The car would not start. Dust in the carburetor. That was it, Diego? And then there was a police patrol."

       "I meant who is dying?"

       "Nobody, we hope."

       "Léon?"

       "He is all right."

       "Why did you telephone? You promised not to involve me. Léon promised."

       He would never have consented to help them if it had not been for Léon whom he had missed almost as much as his father when he and his mother left on the river boat. Léon was someone whose word he believed that he could always trust, even though his word seemed later to have been broken when Plarr heard that Léon had become a priest instead of the fearless 'abogado' who would defend the poor and the innocent, like Perry Mason. In his school days Léon had possessed an enormous collection of Perry Masons stiffly translated into classical Spanish prose. He lent them carefully, one at a time, to selected friends. Perry Mason's secretary Delia was the first woman to arouse Plarr's sexual appetite.

       "Father Rivas told us to fetch you," the man called Diego said.

       He continued to call Léon Father, Doctor Plarr noticed, though he had broken a second vow when he left the Church and married, but that particular broken promise was not one which worried Plarr, who never went to Mass except when he accompanied his mother on one of his rare visits to the capital. Léon, it seemed to him, was struggling back from a succession of failures toward the primal promise to the poor he had never intended to break. He would end as an 'abogado' yet.

       They turned into Tucumán and then into San Martin, but Doctor Plarr after that tried to avoid looking out. It was as well not to know where they were going. If the worst happened he wanted to betray as little as possible under interrogation.

       They were driving fast enough to attract attention. He asked, "You are not afraid of the police patrols?"