Traitor’s Blood
Reginald Hill
for
DAVID and HELEN
Trail-blazers
after Rome, Africa!
Thou old unhappy traitor,
Briefly thyself remember: the sword is out
That must destroy thee.
KING LEAR, Act IV, Scene 6
1
… over by Christmas …
Dr Quintero was drunk when he diagnosed my stomach cancer but that was no reason for disbelieving him.
He’d been drunk when he arrived on Isla de Margarita eight years before, shortly after the folding of his fashionable Caracas practice. Once I’d established that the scandal had been moral rather than medical, I hired him. He’d been drunk when he diagnosed my prickly heat, my hepatitis, my tape-worm and my psycho-neurosis, and it hadn’t stopped him from being right yet.
He seemed genuinely upset when he gave me the results of my tests. I asked him, how long? and there were tears in his eyes as he told me it could all be over by Christmas. Six months. It wasn’t long to make up for a wasted forty years. I doubted I could do it. Quintero told me to take it easy, but I decided to follow his example rather than his advice.
Luis drove me back up to the hacienda where I picked up a bottle of Rémy Martin and a jug of ice and lay back in the chinchorro slung between two pillars of the verandah. A flight of scarlet ibis sailed past to roost on the lagoon. I paid them little heed, but drank steadily till the sun sank with scarcely a hiss into the twenty-mile strait that separated the island from mainland Venezuela. Numero Siete came and sat beside me for a while but went away when I ignored her. It occurred to me that there would be no Numero Ocho. Only Numero Uno had had a name. She’d lasted two years, long enough to give her delusions of permanency. I gave commands and thereafter avoided the same mistake by frequent changes. Somewhere deep inside I knew that I was disabled from deep relationships, perhaps forever.
The light faded fast. Luis appeared at the foot of the verandah and regarded me uneasily. He wanted me to go inside so he could switch on the floodlights and let the dogs loose. Security hardly seemed a priority at that moment but it was a still, clammy evening and the mosquitoes would soon be out. I rolled out of the hammock and bore my half-empty bottle inside. Towards midnight I rang Kate. The drink had confused me and I was working on the principle that Venezuela was about four hours ahead of London time. It wasn’t.
I doubt if she’d have been polite to me, sober, in the middle of the day. Drunk, at four a.m., I was allowed only the speaking space permitted by her incredulity.
‘It’s Lem,’ I said.
‘Who?’
‘Lem. Your ex-husband. Listen, Kate, I’ve got to see Angelica …’
‘What do you mean, “got to see”? Do you know what time it is?’
‘For Christ’s sake,’ I shouted. ‘Who’s worried about the sodding time? I’ve got to see Angelica. I’ve a right to see her! She’s my daughter.’
‘Right? You gave up all your rights ten years ago, or have you forgotten? You disgusting bastard, if you want to see her, you get on a plane and come back here and she can look at you behind bars where you belong.’
‘I might just do that, you cow,’ I yelled. ‘And if I did, you’d be sorry, you’d all be sorry, the bloody lot of you!’
The phone went dead. I went back to my bottle. An hour later I fell across my bed. Behind me the door opened. Numero Siete stood there, slim, brown, naked. Our eyes met. She turned and went, quietly closing the door behind her.
I fell asleep and almost immediately my dream came. Pa was drowning in a raging sea. He stretched out his hands to me and cried. ‘Help me, Lem! Please help me!’ I swam towards him with a powerful, easy stroke, reached my hands tantalizingly close, laughing at his efforts to catch them. Then with a last despairing lunge he seized my wrists just as he sank and drew me down after him beneath the stifling waves.
I woke suddenly. There was half an ounce left at the bottom of the cognac bottle. I tossed it down and returned to a black uncharted sleep.
Next morning I was still drunk. I breakfasted on black coffee, worked out the time difference correctly, and rang Uncle Percy at his Gloucester Place flat.
Uncle Percy, more properly Sir Percy Nostrand, my godfather, was the only person in England I could call a friend and the only visitor I’d ever received on Margarita, apart from a few journalists that Luis set the dogs on. And even his visit had had to wait until just a couple of months earlier when his retirement from a fairly muted career in Whitehall had, as he put it, ‘released him from the constraints of public duty’. Well, perhaps it was an old-fashioned notion of duty which prohibited an unimportant Civil Servant from accepting the hospitality of an escaped criminal, but it was an equally old-fashioned notion of loyalty which had made him my only defender and kept him my only friend when the balloon went up, and for that I was eternally grateful.
The line was bad, but he wasn’t unprepared to hear from me.
‘Kate was on to me first thing this morning,’ he shouted. ‘Lem, you really shouldn’t have contacted her like that. She was most distressed.’
‘No. I’m sorry,’ I yelled. ‘Tell her I’m sorry. Uncle Percy, I have to see Angelica. Soon. Please, can you get her to fly out here as soon as possible? Perhaps you could bring her yourself.’
‘Lem, we’ve been through this before. Kate still feels bitter and threatening phone calls in the middle of the night haven’t altered the situation for the better. In two years, when Angie’s eighteen, she can make up her own mind. But sixteen’s a sensitive age. I can’t help seeing Kate’s point of view. Lem, why the sudden urgency? It’s only a few weeks since I saw you and you seemed content enough to be patient then.’
I thought of telling him. But what good would it do unless he then told Kate and that smacked of begging. I didn’t want to see my daughter under such conditions.
I said, ‘Oh, put it down to a bad bout of depression, Uncle Percy. Thanks for trying.’
I returned to the bottle and made it my constant companion for the next few days. That wasn’t unusual. But I started to do my drinking very noisily in the Bella Vista or the Concorde in Porlamar, and that was. I’d lived a very quiet life, partly for security reasons but mainly because my situation in Venezuela had been very ambivalent ever since I arrived in Caracas ten years before, not quietly as planned, but with Chief Superintendent Hunnicut of Scotland Yard hot on my trail.
I’d done the groundwork, knew a lot of the right people and was able to make out some kind of case for citizenship on the grounds of Mama’s nationality. But it was Hunnicut himself who tipped the balance. His shout-loudly-at-the-thick-Dagoes attitude got right up the thick Dagoes’ noses. I was allowed to stay. But I didn’t get a passport, and the unwritten condition was that I lived quietly on Mama’s old estate on Margarita Island and gave plenty of warning if I visited the mainland.
For ten years this had suited me very well. For ten years I’d been so self-effacing that there’d probably been complaints in Caracas that I wasn’t even a tourist attraction.
Well, all that had changed now. You don’t get too many British visitors on Margarita Island but those who did come were soon quickly aware of the identity of the noisy drunk with the generous disposition. Antonio Lemuel Ernest Sebastian Stanhope-Swift, 6th Viscount Bessacarr, the well-known charity embezzler, illegal arms dealer and fugitive from justice. Not that that bothered them. Most were only too keen to rub shoulders with a headline-maker. Only on that last night in the Bella Vista’s patio restaurant looking out across the wide sweep of the bay did I run into any active opposition.
I had taken Numero Siete with me and I was in fine and noisy form. Hearing the bray of Home Counties Englis
h across the room, I despatched Eduardo, the head waiter, with a jeroboam of champagne for the party.
Five minutes later he was back, small worry lines crinkling his sallow skin around the eyes, followed by an acolyte pushing the ice-tub trolley.
‘Qué pasa, Eduardo?’ I demanded.
He ironed out the worry lines with one of his most golden smiles and said, ‘Your friends are desolated, Señor Swift. They have drunk so much already that they cannot do justice to your gift. They thank you and beg that they may be allowed to postpone their enjoyment to another evening.’
I smiled back as I draped my napkin across my lobster thermidor and stood up. Numero Siete watched me with indifference, Eduardo with alarm, while at the bar Luis instinctively slid his hand down to the waistbelt where he liked to tuck his .38 Special.
‘Por favor,’ I said to the acolyte, relieving him of the champagne trolley. Pushing it before me, I threaded my way across the room to the party of English diners. The source of the trouble was evident at a glance, a slim grey-haired man with that look of calm certainty which sits equally well on the faces of elder statesmen and the backside of elder baboons.
‘Mira, chico,’ I said to him. ‘I hear you don’t like my drink.’
Some of the others looked a little embarrassed at my approach. He didn’t even twitch a muscle.
‘Thank you, no,’ he said as if refusing to let a waiter top up his glass.
‘What’s wrong with it?’ I demanded.
Now he looked me full in the face.
‘With the drink, nothing. It’s an excellent wine,’ he said.
‘OK. So drink,’ I said.
‘But we do not care to share the profits of crime,’ he continued. ‘So you must excuse us on this occasion, Señor Swift. Good evening.’
It was the veneer of politeness that got to me. It reduced the incident to a good story for a St James’s club, a piece of propaganda for true breeding.
‘Have it your own way, chico,’ I said, seizing the jeroboam and untwisting the wire round the cork. ‘If you won’t drink, you can drown!’
The cork popped. I put my thumbs over the neck of the bottle and shook it violently like a racing driver celebrating a Grand Prix victory. The champagne fizzed and fountained out, spraying everyone at the Englishman’s table and also at most of the neighbouring tables. There was a babble of protest, a scraping of chairs. I roared with triumphant laughter, not at the consternation I was causing but at the look of sheer animal fury I had provoked on those well-bred, controlled features.
Somewhere at the edge of the room there was another pop, as if some other reveller had decided to join in the fun. Then more screams of outrage. But somehow these had a different note, the pitch of real terror. I saw the look of fury on the white-headed Englishman’s face fade as he looked beyond me.
Slowly I turned.
At the seaward entrance to the patio stood four men. Over their heads they wore nylon stocking masks. In their hands they carried machine-pistols. Immediately before them, arms raised, were three men I recognized as hotel security officers, probably attracted, and distracted, by the scene I had caused with the champagne. While at the bar, more alert than they but still not alert enough, Luis was sliding off his stool with his right hand dangling at his waist-belt and his left exploring a rapidly spreading patch of red at his right shoulder.
That was the pop I had heard. I took my thumbs off the neck of the bottle and the jet of champagne immediately detumesced to a gurgling overflow and then fell silent altogether.
‘Mr Swift, over here,’ commanded one of the intruders.
I didn’t move.
‘Quickly, or we start firing.’
The gun barrels jerked menacingly, not in my direction but towards the terrified diners.
Carefully I set the jeroboam down in front of the Englishman. The fellow was really cool, I had to give him that.
‘Perhaps I will have a glass after all,’ he said.
‘Move it!’ screamed the gunman.
I went towards him.
‘Listen, you bastard,’ I said. ‘What the hell …’
The pistol barrel came round and crashed against my jaw. I almost went down but one of the others caught me under the arm and I was dragged half-conscious from the room.
Behind me I could hear the gang-leader screaming, ‘Tell them this is the work of the Bravo Commando of FALN. Tell them that we intend to scour this foreign scum from our land and put their criminal wealth in the people’s pockets. Tell them …’
What else they were to be told I didn’t hear. I was half dragged, half carried a short distance on to the beach, then I was flung face down into the back of a sand-buggy and as it raced along the beach my arms were pinioned and broad bands of surgical tape slapped across my eyes and mouth. A couple of minutes later I was dragged out of the buggy and tossed into some kind of motorboat. I lost interest in externals after that, concentrating all my efforts on not choking on my own spittle and vomit. I was aware of being transferred to another land vehicle whose movement was marginally less distressing than the boat’s. That too finally halted. I was dragged out, frog-marched into a building (I heard a door slam behind me), bumped down a flight of stairs and deposited with a stunning crash on to a concrete floor. There was a babble of voices, relieved, self-congratulatory. Then one commanding voice spoke, footsteps retreated, a door closed.
Next minute the surgical tape was ripped from my face taking chunks of my beard and moustache with it.
Standing over me removing the nylon mask from his face, was the FALN guerrilla leader.
I looked up at him in loathing.
‘You fucking idiot, Dario,’ I said. ‘You nearly killed me!’
He grinned unconcernedly and stooped to untie my bonds.
‘Shut up, Señor Swift,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a lot to do.’
2
… welcome home! …
We spent the next hour making tapes and taking photos.
The tapes were easy. I just let my voice sound progressively weaker and more stumbling as I read the prepared script. The photos we did in reverse order, that is, the worst first. We started with one of me looking half conscious, cheeks sucked in, hair and beard unkempt and combed out to look as long as possible, a grimy blood-stained bandage wrapped around my right hand.
‘Better give me the ring now,’ he said.
I handed it over.
‘Where will you get the finger?’ I asked.
‘No shortage of fingers in the ranchitos!’ He laughed.
We then worked backwards, taking half a dozen of me looking progressively better, the last one being done after I’d given my hair and beard an initial trim. No one was likely to remember the state of my coiffure immediately before my sudden departure from the Bella Vista.
Finally I opened the US passport Dario produced. It was in the name of William Banks. There was an entry stamp showing that Mr. Banks had landed at Simon Bolivar airport at Maiquetia two days earlier. The photograph of me was eight years old. I’d given out word that I was suffering from ring-worm and not moved from the hacienda for two months till the hair grew again. Now I set it alongside the shaving mirror and consulted it from time to time as I worked on my face.
Dario sat and watched, a foul-smelling cigarillo dangling like a fuse from his lips.
‘Still working at the university, are you?’ I asked. Despite myself, I was nervous and needed conversation to steady the hand wielding the cut-throat razor.
‘In line for senior lecturer,’ he said proudly.
‘In moral philosophy?’ I laughed. He looked offended, but I wasn’t impressed. He’d looked offended eight years ago when I’d offered him his first bribe. He and a couple of FALN militants (the guerrilla wing of FLN, the National Liberation Front) had broken into my ranch-house to assassinate me. Dario, a first-year university student, had come along out of bravado and had saved himself by collapsing in a dead faint when Luis had cut his two companions in half
with a machine-pistol. He’d wanted to effect the same division on Dario, only more slowly, but I’d taken pity on the boy’s youth and also his good sense as he spilled everything he knew about FALN into my tape-recorder. After he’d finished, I pointed out to him how distressed his friends would be to hear that tape and then offered him a very large retainer if he’d care to work for me.
I’d read the man right. The combination of bribery and blackmail was irresistible and he returned to his FALN cell as the heroic survivor of a desperate assault on the vastly superior might of the English criminal fascist. My idea at first was merely to use him as a listening-post in the midst of my enemies. But then it had occurred to me that if ever I should need to get out of Venezuela without anyone knowing I’d gone, someone like Dario could be very useful. Just to disappear would have been easy enough, but what I really wanted was to be able to convince the powers that be, on both sides of the Atlantic, that I was safely taken care of.
So was born the plan. I’d never really thought I’d have to use it.
I winced now as I drew the razor down my left jawbone. There was a large bruise where the pistol had hit me.
‘Look what that lunatic’s done!’ I said angrily.
Dario shrugged.
‘You’re lucky it’s not worse. He thought it was for real. They all did.’
‘Who are they?’
‘Some of my students. Enthusiasts for the cause. Don’t worry about the bruise. I brought some make-up to cover the white skin where the sun hasn’t burnt you. It should do the trick.’
It wasn’t perfect but it helped. I rubbed it along my jaw and into my scalp where I’d thinned twin tracks into my hair to give a widow’s peak. A pair of spectacles finished the job. William Banks stared back at me out of the mirror, bespectacled, balding, with a neatly clipped blonde moustache. I didn’t look exactly like the passport photograph, but who the hell does?
Dario looked at me critically, nodded his approval and said, ‘You’ll pass. Señor, about my money …’
Traitor's Blood Page 1
