Waiting for Orders (18 page)
Read Waiting for Orders Online
Authors: Eric Ambler
The President raised his eyebrows. ‘With all respect, General, I don’t think we could expect them at this time to believe you of all people. I also think that the news that I am to
be kept under what amounts to house arrest in Alazan province will not help to convince them either.’
‘Then what do you propose? You can scarcely remain here in the capital.’
‘Naturally not.’ The President sat back in his chair. He had assumed a statesmanlike air now. ‘It is quite clear,’ he said, ‘that we must achieve an orderly and responsible transfer of power. I shall, of course, resign in order to make way for the Liberation Front. However, in your place, I must say that I would regard my continued presence anywhere in this country as undesirable. These people to whom I am to appeal tonight will only respond with restraint because of their loyalty to me. That loyalty will continue as long as they are able to give expression to it. You would do better really to get rid of me. As soon as I have spoken to my people you should get me out of the country as quickly as you can.’
‘Exile?’ It was the Chief of Police who spoke up now. ‘But if we exile you that looks no better than house arrest in Alazan. Worse, possibly.’
‘Exactly.’ The President nodded approvingly. ‘The solution I suggest is that I am permitted to announce to my people that I will continue to serve them, the nation, and the Liberation Front, but in a different capacity and abroad. Our embassy in Nicaragua is without an ambassador at present. That would be a suitable appointment. I suggest that after I have recorded my broadcast I leave the country immediately in order to take up my post.’
The council discussion that ensued lacked the vehemence of the earlier exchanges. The strain of the past twenty-four hours was beginning to tell on General Perez and his colleagues; they were getting tired; and the sounds of firing from the south side were becoming more insistent. Time was running out. It was one of the newsmen who drew their attention to the fact.
‘General,’ he said to Perez, ‘has it occurred to you that if the President doesn’t talk to these people of his pretty soon they’re all going to be out on the streets anyway?’
The President recognized the urgency, too, but refused to be hurried. As he pointed out, there were matters of protocol to be dealt with before he could make his appeal to the people. For one thing, his resignation would have to be redrafted. Since, he
argued, he was now to be appointed his country’s Ambassador to Nicaragua, references in the present draft to his incompetence would obviously have to be deleted. And there were other clauses which might be interpreted as reflections on his personal integrity.
In the end, the President wrote his own act of resignation. It was a simple document but composed with great care. His radio speech, on the other hand, he scribbled out on a cabinet desk pad while technicians, hastily summoned by jeep from the central radio building, were setting up a recording circuit in the anteroom.
Meanwhile, telephone communication had been restored to the Palace, and the Controller of the Presidential Secretariat had been released from arrest and put to work in his office.
His first task had been to contact the Nicaraguan Ambassador, give him a discreetly censored account of the current situation and request him to ascertain immediately, in accordance with Article 8 of the Pan-American Convention, if his government would be prepared to accept ex-President Fuentes as
persona grata
in the capacity of ambassador to their country. The Nicaraguan Ambassador had undertaken to telephone personally to the Minister of Foreign Relations in Managua and report back. His unofficial opinion was that there would be no opposition to the proposed appointment.
With the help of the air force council member present the Controller next spoke to the officer in charge at the International Airport. He learned that of the two civil airliners grounded earlier that evening, one had been southbound to Caracas, the other, a Colombian Avianca jet, had been northbound to Mexico City. Fortunately, a Vice-Consul from the Colombian Consulate-General was already at the airport, having been summoned there by the Avianca captain to protest the grounding. The Controller spoke with the Vice-Consul who said that Avianca would be willing to carry ex-President Fuentes as a passenger to Mexico City if the Mexican Government would permit him to land. A call to the Mexican Embassy explaining that ex-President Fuentes would be in transit through Mexican territory on his way to his post as an accredited diplomatic representative to the republic of Nicaragua secured the necessary permission.
The President already had a diplomatic passport which needed only minor amendments to fit it for its new role. All that was needed now to facilitate his departure was confirmation from the Nicaraguan Ambassador that he would be accorded diplomatic status in Managua. Within an hour, the Nicaraguan Government, acting promptly in the belief that they were helping both parties to the arrangement, had replied favourably.
The escape route was open.
President Fuentes made two tape-recordings of the appeal to his supporters, one for the radio, the second for use by a loudspeaker van in the streets of the
sumideri.
Then he signed his resignation and was driven to the airport. General Perez provided an escort of armoured cars.
The plane, with ex-President Fuentes on board, took off a little after midnight. Five hours later it landed in Mexico City.
News of the Liberation Front
coup
and of the President’s voluntary resignation and ambassadorial appointment had been carried by all the international wire services, and there were reporters waiting for him. There was also, despite the early hour, a protocol official from the Department of External Relations to meet him. Fuentes made a brief statement to the reporters, confirming the fact of his resignation. On the subject of his appointment as Ambassador to Nicaragua he was vague. He then drove to a hotel in the city. On the way there he asked the protocol official if it would be convenient for him to call upon the Minister of External Affairs later that day.
The official was mildly surprised. As Ambassador Fuentes was merely passing through Mexico, a brief note of thanks to the Minister would normally be the only courtesy expected of him. On the other hand, the circumstances of Fuentes’ sudden translation from President to Ambassador were unusual and it was possible that the Minister might be glad of the opportunity of hearing what Fuentes himself had to say on the subject. He promised that he would consult the Minister’s personal assistant at the earliest possible moment.
The Minister received Ambassador Fuentes at five o’clock that afternoon.
The two men had met before, at conferences of the Organization of American States and on the occasion of a state visit to
Mexico paid by Fuentes soon after he became President. It was a tribute to the Minister’s natural courtesy as well as his self-discipline that Fuentes believed that the Minister liked him. In fact the Minister viewed him with dislike and disapproval and had not been in the least surprised or distressed by the news of the Liberation Front
coup.
However, he had been amused by Fuentes’ ability to emerge from the situation not only alive and free but also invested with diplomatic immunity; and it modified his distaste for the man. He was, one had to admit, an engaging scoundrel.
After the preliminary politenesses had been disposed of the Minister inquired courteously whether he could be of any service to the Ambassador during his stay in Mexico.
Fuentes inclined his head: ‘That is most kind of you, Mr Minister,’ he said graciously. ‘Yes, there is one thing.’
‘You only have to ask.’
‘Thank you.’ Ambassador Fuentes straightened up a little in his chair. ‘I wish,’ he said, ‘to make formal application to be considered here as a refugee, and formally to request political asylum in the United States of Mexico.’
The Minister stared for a moment, then smiled.
‘Surely you must be joking, Mr Ambassador.’
‘Not in the least.’
The Minister was puzzled, and because he was puzzled he put into words the first obvious objection that came into his head.
‘But in the United States of Mexico, even though you are not accredited to the Federal Government, you already, by virtue of the Pan-American Convention, enjoy diplomatic status and privileges here,’ he said.
It was a statement which he was later to regret.
Ambassador Fuentes never took up his post in Nicaragua.
One of the first official acts of General Perez’s Council of the Liberation Front was to set up a committee, headed by the Professor of Political Economy at Bolívar University, to report on the financial state of the Republic.
It took the committee only a few days to discover that during the past three years ex-President Fuentes had authorized printings of five hundred peseta banknotes to a total value of
one hundred million dollars and that twenty of those hundred millions could not be accounted for.
The Governor of the National Bank was immediately arrested. He was an old man who had spent most of his life in the National Archives gathering material for a scholarly study of colonial Spanish land grants. He had been appointed to the bank by Fuentes. He knew nothing about banking. He had merely carried out the orders of the Minister of Finance.
Fuentes had been his own Minister of Finance.
Interviewed on the subject by the press in Mexico City, ex-President Fuentes stated that the committee’s revelations had shocked, horrified, and amazed him. He also said that he had no idea where the missing twenty million might be. Regrettably, he was unable quite to refrain from smiling as he said it.
Ex-President Fuentes’ retirement has not been peaceful.
During the five years he held office as President there was only one serious attempt on his life. Since he resigned the Presidency, ceased to concern himself with politics, and went to live abroad, no less than three such attempts have been made. There will doubtless be others. Meanwhile, he has had to fight off two lots of extradition proceedings and a number of civil actions directed against his European bank accounts.
He is wealthy, of course, and can afford to pay for the protection, both physical and legal, that he needs; but he is by no means resigned to the situation. As he is fond of pointing out, other men in his position have accumulated larger fortunes. Moreover, his regime was never unacceptably oppressive. He was no Trujillo, no Batista, no Porfirio Diaz. Why then should he be hounded and harassed as if he were?
Ex-President Fuentes remains a puzzled and indignant man.
From California we went to live in French-speaking Switzerland.
Clarens, our resting place, is on the north shore of Lac Léman and at the far end of the lake away from Geneva in the canton of Vaud, once in the middle ages the territory of the Counts (Vert et Rouge) of Savoy. It was these counts who built the castles of Chillon and La Tour-de-Peilz to protect their lands from the savagery of the barbarian mountain tribe who came from the region which is now described as the canton of Berne and the Berner Oberland. Berne and its agents, the bishops of Berne and Sion, stayed for two hundred years until, to quote a local historian, ‘Ce fut enfin, en 1798, la révolution vaudoise. Le Pays de Vaud devint un canton suisse et reste un pays.’
However, ten years went by before the Bernois could be persuaded to recognize Vaud’s independence as a canton and it took Napoleon to enforce the separation. The Helvetic tribes had always been jealous of territorial boundaries. Even the Roman legions, tough customers themselves, had found it easier in the end to bypass Helvetic lands than to face the trials of marching through them. For foreigners like Joan and me Berne was the federal capital, a place of embassies and consulate-generals and a place worth visiting for the pictures in its fine art gallery. For the Vaudois, however, the word Berne was also a reminder of things past. The local garage man told me of this without really meaning to do so. I had ordered a new car from him, but until it was delivered I was driving rental cars which I picked up at Geneva airport. Our furniture and other belongings were still at sea in a container ship and, while Joan completed her work on a film she was making at Paramount, I
commuted between London and Clarens. The offending car was the third I had rented and I did not even know what make it was. I had stopped at the garage to top up with petrol and to find out when my own car would be delivered; I had made the mistake of ordering an extra – real leather on the seats. I was given no chance to ask questions: the
garagiste
came out of his office to greet me the moment I stopped. ‘Ah, monsieur,’ he cried, ‘vous êtes bernois maintenant.’
He was smiling broadly when he said it. Clearly there was a joke here that I did not understand. I asked him what it was. He pointed to the registration plates on the rental car. Except for transients with TT plates car registrations were always cantonal. BE stood for Berne. I liked the
garagiste.
We were about the same age and he had done his military service in the artillery. In his lapel he wore a small enamel badge with the silhouette of a field gun. It could have been a miniature version of the Royal Artillery cap badge I had worn during my military service. I had also served for a time with a regiment from Ulster and learned to take a hint about the odd quirk or prejudice without asking stupid questions. In Vaud a foreigner was better off driving a car with French-speaking plates; or Italian, or British.
With tourists the Vaudois are infinitely patient. From foreigners intending to live in the canton, however, they require respect for local sensibilities. When I went to buy light bulbs at the local Uniprix – no tourist buys sixty-watt light bulbs – the stern matriarch at the check-out till corrected me sharply when in counting out some small change, I used the words quartre-vingts-dix for ninety.
‘Non, monsieur, non. Ici nous sommes suisse et vaudois. Les français disent quatre-vingts-dix. Bien. Ils sont français. Ici nous sommes vaudois et nous disons “nonante”. C’est beaucoup plus simple. D’accord?’
‘D’accord, madame.’ For her, after all, the
révolution
of 1789 had been
vaudoise.
After that, I said
huitante
and
nonante
with everyone else.
Seen from a passing car on the main road just above it, the harbour of Clarens is unusually attractive. Most lakeside yachting marinas are bleak places out of season or in bad weather when the dinghy-class sails are furled and the ten
metre plutocrats are stuffing themselves with beef fondue in their cabins. Clarens was different. Storms on Lac Léman can be sudden, violent and dangerous for any vessel smaller than a broad-beamed steamer. The year we arrived an excursion boat from the French side was capsized by a squall. Among the drowned was a party of school children on a holiday outing. Clarens has one of the few safe harbours on the north shore. One of the reaons for the safety is the Ile de Salagnon, a small off-shore island with a few poplar trees and an Italian style villa on it and a decrepit boat house. Nobody lived in the villa which was said to be owned by a rich Zuricher and infested with rats. Rats notwithstanding, the island shelters the entrance to the harbour which lies between the stone quay of the marina, now called the Port du Basset, and the steep headland which gives shelter to the west. On the Port du Basset side there is a clutter of chandlers’ stores, sail lofts and work sheds which service the weekend yachtsmen, the racing-dinghy young and the visitors with boats on trailers who pay to have their boats winched in and out of the water. The lake police watch-post is a modern building on the other side of the harbour next to the covered docks where the lake patrol and rescue cutters are kept at the ready. Apart from dashing out to save ham-fisted yachtsmen from death in the summer squalls they monitored the antics of Scandinavian hippies in rented power boats. This was not always easy; the harmless pot-smokers sometimes had LSD trippers with them. LSD, it may be recalled, was first synthesized in Switzerland and its commercial manufacture was controlled by a pharmaceutical concern in Basel. It was no student-lab kitchen LSD they brewed but the real thing.
We had an apartment at Chemin de l’Ile de Salagnon, 1, a small modern building of great charm. Our neighbours in it were a Belgian steel man and his wife and, on the ground floor a Swiss army colonel of engineers, also retired. There are not many colonels in the Swiss army and this one, having spent a lifetime building army barracks and mountain fortifications, was a bit eccentric. He was a keen gardener and while at work liked to wear a red fez with a silk tassel hanging from it. His wife, a handsome and cultivated woman, was also very timid. The colonel had a heart condition. René, the Belgian steel man, did not care for military men; in the First War he had worked as
a driver for too many of them. René was one of nature’s businessmen. He had five pensions, all from steel companies dealing internationally. He and Yvonne his wife spoke most European languages but the best years of their lives had been spent in a big company apartment on Park Avenue in New York. That, however, had been yesterday. Now they had, with us and monsieur le colonel, a commanding view of the lake and the snow-capped Dents du Midi beyond: picture postcard stuff which we tended to ignore. Nearer, and infinitely more interesting, were the goings-on in the port, the yachts, their owners and the birds: swans, mallard ducks, coots and Bonaparte gulls, which had black triangular markings on their heads which looked like the hat worn by the Emperor on the field of Marengo. At the end of the lake beyond Villefranche there was a broad delta where the young river Rhone, flowing from its headwaters in the high alps, entered Léman. Part of the delta was a water-bird reserve and occasionally we had weird and highly coloured visitors. They were not welcomed; our swans could turn nasty and unless the visitor was very large it could be mobbed by the coots. Coots are not crazy but they often behave as if they were. Bonaparte gulls are very well behaved and do not quarrel and screech like herring gulls. Of course, there are no herring in Léman and no gull is going to get excited about perch fished from that lake. The fillets of perch one gets in the restaurants come from fish farms up in the mountains. Things were different, and possibly better, when the Counts of Savoy spent time in their castles and their servants’ farm animals could drink from the lake.
Apart from the stone piers of du Basset and small houses like the one we lived in the harbour has not changed much. It still functions as a place of safety. When, in the 19th century, steamers started carrying passengers around and across the lake the Clarens steamer landing stage was built further along the rue du Lac, nearer the Clarens shops and the new abattoir.
Clarens has not often appeared in the pages of history. Paul Kruger, first president of the Boer Republic of the Transvaal, fled to Clarens on the outbreak of the Boer War and died there in 1904. The Kruger National Park is named for him and so is the gold rand coin. The house he died in, now the
Krugerhaus
, is a stone’s throw from the Port du Basset and used to have a
plate on the door with instructions to would-be visitors. Perhaps there is still someone there to keep the brass polished. Of much greater interest to me was the mystery of where in Clarens Igor Stravinsky had lived and worked during those splendidly productive years before the First War. There is a photograph of him taken in 1915 in the garden of a villa just along the lake at Ouchy. Also in the photograph are Léonide Massine, Léon Bakst and other Ballets Russes notables; but Stravinsky himself lived in Clarens, either in the rue Gambetta or in part of a large house which is now a private school for girls. At least that was the story until the seventies when the composer died in New York. In Clarens then it was conceded that Stravinsky had had lodgings in several houses in those critical years when he had written
Firebird
and
The Rite of Spring
, but that most of them had probably been in or near the rue Gambetta; near enough anyway, for it had been decided to name a street after him in his honour and, more particularly, the honour of Clarens. There were dozens of rue Gambettas in the region; a rue Stravinsky in Clarens would be a lasting distinction.
It never materialized. The local Stravinsky committee found that Clarens could not change any of its street names without higher municipal authority. The higher authority concerned was Montreux, a parvenu tourist resort built on the detritus of mountain land slippages and already notorious for its second rate Modern Jazz Quinzaine and its no less nasty Rose d’Or Television Awards Festival. It had lost its casino – totally destroyed by a Yugoslav arsonist who made a daring escape by night train to Italy – and the new international convention centre had yet to be paid for. Avid for any kind of publicity which could bring the place a little cultural respectability they stole Stravinsky’s name from Clarens. The rue du Casino in Montreux became the rue Stravinsky.
This disgraceful coup caused lasting ill-feeling in Clarens. If Montreux wanted cheap publicity, it was argued, it had more suitable material right in Montreux and Russian-born material too. Why not a rue Nabokov? The author of
Lolita
had made his home there on the sixth floor of the Palace Hotel. True, he was still alive and of a reclusive disposition, but the change could have been made without his prior knowledge, and then put to
him as a surprise present on his next birthday. Or there was Noel Coward up there in Les Avants; that was municipally sous-Montreux just as Clarens was. It was Madame Pettiloup, the grocer, who cleared the air for me on that aspect of the matter. In Vaud persons honoured with named streets had to be dead, as dead as Gambetta. Clarens should have put up a statue or a portrait bust of Stravinsky, the way Vevey was putting up a statue of Charlie Chaplin, even though he lived at Corsier, which was sous-Vevey, and was still alive. Did I know that we had a famous British author living in Clarens? His name was Cronin, A.J. Cronin, and he was one of her best customers. He had a very nice house up the road at Baugy; he was very old though, and did not welcome strangers. Madame Pettiloup was in her eighties and it seemed likely that Dr Cronin was even older. Joan had a better time marketing chez Pettiloup than I did; she was never waited on by Madame Pettiloup herself, always by one of her young and cheerfully efficient daughters-in-law.
For a dozen or more years we travelled, we explored, we worked and we enjoyed the company of friends. Of course, Joan’s work took her often away from the Ile de Salagnon. I had an easier passage. During our years in Switzerland I wrote five novels and learned a lot about publishing in Europe that I had not known before. My first good French translator was a Parisian who later brought his family to live in Clarens. My German language publisher, Daniel Keel, lives and works in Zürich. He and his wife Anna remain valued friends.
Our immediate neighbours in Clarens, René and Yvonne Thieren, were charming people and we used to enjoy our occasional expeditions with them. These were nearly always to good restaurants in or near Geneva where René had contacts from bygone days when he had been a steel executive. French wines are dutiable in Switzerland but the frontier between France and the Swiss canton of Geneva is almost impossible to patrol effectively. There is, or used to be, a going rate for dutyfree vintage champagne of the better marques. René knew that market. We used to drive to the restaurant where there would be a table reserved for lunch. Our car would be left outside. After an excellent lunch and a brief chat about money with the proprietor of the place we would drive back to Clarens with six
cases of champagne in the boot. René and Yvonne would take four, we would take two. Our garages below the house both had inner doorways leading to our air-raid-shelter-cum-cellar area, and we had a porter’s trolley. The only difficulty about these outings was the matter of whose car we went in.
René, though a good man in other respects, was a really bad driver. He liked big powerful American cars and he drove competitively as well as dangerously. He jumped red lights and hooted impatiently if the driver in front seemed to him excessively cautious. He shouted and made insulting gestures. His wife, Yvonne, though a relentless back-seat driver, could do nothing to restrain him; he seemed not to hear a word she said. She sat in a back seat because she preferred it to the front; her family in Belgium had a title of some sort and she had been brought up to sit in the back seat of a landaulette and give instructions to the chauffeur through a speaking tube. Unfortunately she had never lost the habit. When I was the driver and she was in the back with Joan the monologue continued. With me, however, she did not have to order prudence; with me she became a lane changer and a tailgater (‘Quick, Eric, he will get through on the yellow’); but that was better than René’s awful thrusting.