The Three Sentinels (6 page)

The comic, complex encounter was unexpectedly restful. He slept well. Papaya was up to the highest remembered standard, the question of lunch confidently left to Amelia. Lorenzo, preserving his
sergeant-on-parade solemnity drove him down to his office. Cartoon of a capitalist. He only needed a top hat and a cigar.

He was greeted by Pilar Alvarez and decided that in the office she looked as a private secretary ought to look—statuesque, well-groomed, with fine, brown eyes. At a guess, she modelled
herself on, say, a minor New York executive, but her warmth was not so standardised. She showed him the files and explained existing routine. After half an hour of it he asked half-humorously:

‘Whose side are you on?’

‘I am paid to be on yours, Mr. Darlow,’ she answered as if he had accused her of disloyalty.

A silly, impulsive question it had been. What the devil had he expected her to say? He should have waited a whole intimate office week before probing.

‘My shorthand conversation. You’ll soon get used to reading it. What I meant was: do you see any solution that we foreigners don’t?’

‘At present only force.’

‘Colonels required?’

‘They are all glad you were one yourself.’

She said ‘they’ not ‘we’, so after all she did not wholly identify herself with the Company. It would be interesting to know why not. Pride perhaps.

‘What do you think Mr. Thorpe would be doing now?’

‘His inventory probably.’

‘Good Lord! Why?’

‘None of them like being idle.’

‘What sort of man is he?’

‘Very English.’

It was the first unpuzzled smile she had given him. Evidently she liked Thorpe. On the field anything was forgiven to a man of marked character whatever his failings in tact and temperament.

‘Could we tell him to drop it and come up here now?’

‘We could.’

And another of those smiles for himself. But he would have to be careful with her. He sensed a slight contempt for the men, the Company and the whole god-awful mess. On the other hand he had no
doubt that she could run the correspondence with London and the Ministry nearly on her own, stalling both of them while he got down to essentials.

‘See if you can get him, and meanwhile fill up this empty desk with all the stuff I must see and whatever you think I oughtn’t to!’

Paper words. Business words. No opinion that was not hedged. There was nothing factual and incisive except from the would-be strong men like Gateson who chose their own facts. He was thankful
when Ray Thorpe plunged into the office: short, thick, reliable, intelligent so far as he went. And you will not, he told himself, assume how far he goes. You’re the General Manager, not
Gypsy Petulengro.

‘Tell me what happened. They all talk round it like a cat with a scorpion. How the hell did those women get lost?’

‘Well, sir, you don’t know the track.’

‘Yes, I do. Road, rail—we couldn’t afford either of them then, but we surveyed routes for the lot before it was decided to stick to water transport.’

‘They cleared out along the beach at dusk and no one knew a thing till nearly midday. The tide had covered their trail by then.’

‘Launch?’

‘At once. And a land party. But no sign of them by nightfall. They had twenty hours’ start. The chaps camped and were up before dawn, sure of finding them for they’d be
exhausted after marching at that pace. But still nothing. Half the party with all the water kept up the search. The rest beat it back here.’

‘What did Birenfield do?’

‘Wired for troops, aircraft, the lot. But that took time. At our end he gave up.’

‘So you went.’

‘Took a mule pulling fifty gallons of water and our portable wireless. Four of my best men came along and Catalina Garay. The women would listen to her. We knew that.’

‘And your wife, I hear.’

‘Had to have another woman.’

The brusque reply inhibited any more questions on that subject. But the keep-off sign did not, Mat decided, imply that Mrs. Thorpe had shown any unwillingness. Just the opposite. There was an
enviable partnership so intimate that strangers were not admitted.

The women had entered the track all right, but lost their heads when they thought it was leading them too far inland. Their only guide to the Capital was the coast. So they turned off to the
south along a tempting bit of plateau—easy walking, Thorpe said, but so hard that a bulldozer wouldn’t have left any trace let alone bare feet. Then they had to march across the lay of
the country, up and over bald ridges stripped by trickling gravel and the sun. Up and over. Now waterless and far gone they staggered down to the sea. There was no kindly beach offering a route to
the south, only a small cove where the canyon ended at the surf.

‘Never saw such a bloody awful place! Yellow death behind you, white death ahead of you. Christ!’

Clinging close to the half-shade of wet rocks, as if they had been the missing husbands damp with loving sweat, the women had properly bitched the searching plane. Bitched the tracked vehicles
of the army, too, which dutifully covered impossible valleys. Meanwhile Thorpe’s party found them, led by the chance of an empty can shining in the sun. Beyond the next ridge they came on the
corpse of a child with a little gravel scratched over it. After that it was easy for Catalina to guess how the minds of the women had worked.

There in the cove they were—seventeen of them dead and the rest giving the children the cream of the sea foam to drink when they cried. Thorpe signalled back his approximate position and
kept a column of smoke going which was bound to be seen off shore.

‘Ourselves we’d rather have walked back and chanced it,’ he said. ‘But the only hope for the women and children was the launch.’

A boat carrying a line was hurled into the cove at the cost of one broken arm. Its crew rigged a running cable to the launch, anchored on good ground beyond the surf, and somehow got those
helpless women away. But Catalina was drowned and lost and two men smashed to pulp trying to save her.

‘And you?’

‘Went last. I should have gone first to see how it worked.’

‘It wouldn’t have done. Sinking ship and all that.’

‘That’s what I thought. But if I’d had real guts I should have tried it on the dog and let ’em talk afterwards. The missus would have understood, which is all that
matters.’

‘Who frightened those blasted women out of their wits in the first place?’

‘The Government say communist agents.’

‘Under the bed?’

‘No. What was on it.’

‘Facts, please, Mr. Thorpe.’

‘Can only give you what Catalina told my wife.’

‘That’s probably as near gospel as we’re likely to get.’

‘They didn’t like their husbands with a pocketful of money among all the dockside whores of the Capital.’

‘They used to take that as natural—at any rate for a couple of days off. There must have been more to it.’

‘There was. Police hanging round at night.’

‘Rape?’

‘Worse than that. For money.’

‘Why weren’t they knifed?’

‘Nobody knew about it. All the men had gone from those old shacks beyond the refinery.’

‘But I still don’t understand.’

‘The women wanted to get to their husbands then and there. Not a month or two later, in case of results. I don’t mean that they were all at it—only a dozen or so of the
dirtiest. But the panic caught on like an epidemic and even the decent ones were infected.’

‘The women who were rescued—haven’t they talked?’

‘Not so far as I know. They wouldn’t. Their men were shipped back the same week. And my wife and I kept it quiet. We didn’t want to be responsible for a massacre.’

‘You told Birenfield?’

‘Yes—when he kept on drivelling about left-wing agitators. He didn’t believe it. I didn’t myself till Jane looked it all up in the library. Collective hysteria,
it’s called.’

‘What does the field make of it?’

‘Just that. Collective hysteria in their own words. When their husbands were not sent back as promised, the women persuaded themselves they never would be.’

‘The police must know.’

‘Those who were responsible, yes. I doubt if Captain González does.’

‘We’ll leave it that way. Imagine you haven’t told me!’

‘May I let Jane know that I have?’

Mat noticed the change. First, the facetious ‘my missus’, then ‘my wife’, now ‘Jane’. Confidence was established.

‘Of course. Now, when was the last check on the explosives store?’

‘Mr. Gateson made one recently, and a police patrol visits the perimeter.’

‘You mean, it’s in their orders to visit.’

‘Shall we run up there, sir? I have a key.’

‘Just quietly. In your truck if it’s outside. I don’t want to put ideas into anyone’s head.’

The store was up to professional standard, sheltered by a high earth bank, fenced by unclimbable barbed wire and approached by a narrow road from the abandoned field. The wire was intact and the
gate padlocked. Inside the store itself the boxes were neatly stacked, contents labelled, lids sealed. A carbon copy of the inventory was in a frame screwed to the wall. Evidently Gateson had given
his personal attention to explosives with model efficiency.

‘Just as you remember it, Mr. Thorpe?’

‘I think so. You suspect there might be some missing?’

‘I only know that they have sticks of gelignite down in the town.’

‘Then it’s not from here. We have no more now—only a little guncotton and some ammonal and dynamite. Personal knowledge, sir, or someone breathing fire over drinks?’

‘Personal. Have you ever noticed how the first twelve hours in a new place are often the most productive?’

‘I hope to God …’

‘No. I slept very well.’

‘To think there was always such good will! And now the dead hang over us like those damned hills.’

‘What would you do in my place to stop them falling?’

‘Make a balls of it. I can’t bear standing around, so I’d force the pace. Law and order pronto!’

‘You think I shouldn’t?’

‘No. Play it cool and let them come to you.’

‘Rock of Ages stuff?’

‘Eh?’

‘Hide myself in thee.’

‘Well, it looks as if there is room enough,’ Thorpe replied with a grin.

‘Thank you. But the furniture hasn’t arrived yet. I have to wander round a bit myself and ask questions.’

‘Sons,’ said Captain González in a tone that was paternal rather than familiar, ‘not for a moment do I forget the instructions given to me by the
Minister of Labour in person. Firmness without brutality!’

He did not look paternal, apart from a weariness of expression such as any father might fall back on when exasperated by his own powerlessness. His lemon-coloured face was a mask of professional
geniality which had long since ceased to reflect moral values.

‘It is the duty of all of us,’ he went on, ‘to show the world, which has its eyes upon us, that in the Republic the glorious traditions of humanity are preserved.’

‘Nothing simpler, Captain,’ Rafael Garay replied, ‘provided the police keep out of it.’

The office of Captain González together with barracks for his sixty policemen had been constructed in the Cabo Desierto customs shed. Since the quarters had been furnished by the Company,
they were considerably more imposing than the average police station elsewhere. González delighted to show himself off in such surroundings and had developed an almost ministerial taste for
conferences.

Rafael Garay and Gil Delgado were themselves somewhat impressed by the comfort of the chairs in which they sat opposite the Captain’s desk though they had no respect for the man himself.
After the first few interviews with him they had realised that if he were never provoked into leaving his office he was unlikely to do so of his own accord.

‘How are your invalids, Captain?’ Gil Delgado asked with a faultless pretence of kind enquiry.

‘Better. Much better, thank you. What a mercy no one was killed! As it is, I have been able to report that never was the situation out of hand.’

That first and decisive battle with the police had been an affair of overwhelming numbers pouring down to the port in a spontaneous burst of anger—a few wild shots on one side, knives and
iron bars on the other. González, reluctant to admit that his men had run like rabbits, circulated the official myth of a heavily armed gang before which the police had retreated with
dignity to avoid provocation and bloodshed. That suited Garay and Delgado very well, for in fact their men had few arms—only a few cheap pistols bought in calmer days more to show to friends
than for use, and now some better ones lifted from unconscious policemen. There were not even any sporting guns in a community which had only inedible sea birds to hunt.

‘Good, my sons, let us leave it so!’ González went on. ‘Least said, soonest mended. But it is my duty to warn you that there must be no interference with that most noble
and sympathetic person, our new General Manager. Any accident and you all go to gaol!’

‘Who’ll take us?’ asked Gil Delgado.

‘Quietly! Quietly! What can you do against the weapons of the police ?’

‘Turn them round.’

‘Gentlemen, I beg of you! Is that the way to talk?’ Captain González exclaimed, placing his hands upon his desk as if to rise. ‘All I ask is consideration for Don
Mateo.’

Truculence, Rafael thought, went down well at meetings but should not become a habit. Gil always liked his power to be felt. There was no object in bullying a man who was always looking over his
shoulder in case he got into trouble with the Government or the Company. González’s dislike of any definite action entirely suited their policy.

‘One can always speak with you, Captain,’ he said, ‘and be sure of a hearing.’

‘With you, Sr. Garay, it is always a pleasure. Now, tell me in confidence—has Don Mateo made any offer?’

‘There is no offer we will accept.’

‘Good! I understand your feelings. But if he does, do not take it as an insult!’

‘If it is an insult, it is. If it is not, it is not. We want nothing more than to work our lands and forget.’