Flames Coming out of the Top

by Norman Collins

  Dunnett lay still on his back for a moment staring at the ceiling—” … urged him to stay by promising to provide him with a beautiful wife”: he said the words over to himself slowly. Then he remembered Kay and hastily put such thoughts from his mind. He laid Prescott down on the chair beside him and opened the Handbook at the comparative table of Bolivian imports.

  Chapter II

  Back In the office the difference in his status was discernible already: it was impossible any longer to rank him with the clerks—even with the most senior of them, some of whom had been with Govern and Fryze since they were boys and by now looked in imminent danger of dying in it. Every time he was called into Mr. Govern’s office the schism which divided him from his associates grew wider.

  For the first time in his life he began taking papers home with him, packing his attaché case with the thin sheets of tropical notepaper covered with the violet ink hair-strokes and spider markings of Señor Muras’s ingenious clerk. They were documents that could be appreciated to their fullest only in the isolation of a private study. An imaginative and resourceful mind had conceived them, and it required a cold and analytic intelligence for their unravelment. In the quiet of his back room in Fairfax Gardens, Dunnett discovered many things. He learned, for instance, of one case of assorted tinned fruits which the Compañia Muras had bought in at Amricante which appeared seven times on one statement. It was entered as Fruits (Various); it was shown again as Canned Goods (Fruits); it came up once more under the maker’s name, Dimont’s Fruits, and last of all sprang to new and astonishing life under the various species as Tinned Prunes, Tinned Apricots, Tinned Peaches, Tinned Pears. By the time it had been thus expansively inscribed its value on paper had mounted up from a mere one pound three shillings and sixpence to a substantial sum that was over nine pounds; and the miracle that a firm founded by a Scotsman in the East End of London could sell tinned fruits to savages in Eden was passed over unnoticed.

  Those redundant entries worried Dunnett: admittedly no one who has worked in a counting house is ever surprised at anything that happens there, from the accidental adding in of the date to not carrying forward the total to the next page. But with Señor Muras there seemed to be more to it than simply that. That particular case of assorted tinned fruits, which apparently haunted the entire stock sheet, must have been accompanied by only one invoice; the counterpart of it had reached the London office. It was under the loving hands of some little Dago clerk working assiduously and to a purpose of his own that it had spawned and flourished. Dunnett looked forward to meeting that clerk.

  And the letters of Señor Muras! They all seemed to decorate the same illusion of prosperity by emphasising the remarkable value of the stock. They hinted obscurely and with grandeur that if it were wanted, he could convert all those valuables into gold to-morrow; but he managed also to convey delicately that it would not be his idea of business to do so. And so it was that his regular quarterly payments had stopped quite suddenly, broken off with the abruptness of a rift in a love affair. There had been nothing offensive or threatening in his manner: it was simply that he no longer paid. Meanwhile Govern and Fryze had continued to pour their riches into that land of war and famine; it was only latterly that they had eased up a little, striking off from Señor Muras’s indents the more expensive and lavish items. By now his stock-in-hand figure held on Govern and Fryze’s account was something over eleven thousand pounds. It was unheard of in their line of business; Mr. Li, in Hong Kong, the biggest of their agencies, maintained a steady eight thousand, and Mr. Ras, who represented the firm in Burma, had double the turnover of the whole South American business and never exceeded a modest stock figure of four thousand.

  To all appearances, indeed, Señor Muras was spending his time desperately importing goods from England only to hoard the stuff when it got there in his own strange store rooms in Amricante. On the face of it it seemed a fanciful and extravagant pastime; but Dunnett wondered whether it really should be considered on its face value at all. He had his own shrewd and unrevealed suspicion that the store rooms of the Compañia Muras might be quite bare and the pockets of Señor Muras exceedingly well lined.

  Mr. Govern evidently shared the suspicion. “You may find the whole thing’s a swindle,” he said. “In which case, cable me before you do anything.”

  “What sort of swindle?” Dunnett asked cautiously.

  “Oh, just the ordinary sort,” Mr. Govern replied. “False stock accounts. You can’t trust these South American audits.”

  “And if it isn’t that?”

  “You’ve got to stop there till you’ve found out what it is. It must be something, you know: a house doesn’t suddenly stop paying its bills without a reason.”

  “I’ll find out all right,” Dunnett answered him.

  “And cable me before you do anything,” Mr. Govern repeated. “I want to know what’s happening step by step. I’d rather send no one there than have things happening I haven’t been consulted about.”

  Mr. Govern was an active man and wanted to do everything himself. With his gift for organization he was convinced that no one else single-handed could perform even the simplest operation; and in the result no one else could.

  “Go along to Mr. Verking and get him to go through the stock sheets with you and mark it down to what it ought to be,” he said. “Only don’t actually post anything without showing it to me first. I want to know what you’re putting down.” Mr. Govern turned away and placed his finger on the bell for his secretary: it was his way of intimating that the interview was at an end.

  Mr. Verking was almost embarrassingly helpful. He derived a vicarious excitement from the trip which Dunnett was making. Like most really hard-boiled men he was extremely sentimental at heart. He looked at the young man about to embark on his first real adventure and his heart overflowed towards him. “Beware of the tropics,” he warned him. “Once they get hold of you they won’t let you go again.”

  But it was in his advice on the manner of handling foreign personnel that Mr. Verking was most helpful. He was not handicapped by any neurotic weaknesses towards those races not fortunate enough to have been born English. He grouped together all those nationalities with whom he had been brought closely into contact—the Chinese, the Malays, the Argentinians—under one comprehensive and unflattering heading of unreliability, though he made a mental reservation in the case of the Chinese who were, he admitted, able to sit on the top of a stool and add up figures as well as the next man. But it had been a guiding principle with him that if any foreigner really showed himself at home with figures it is just as well to alter one’s signature at the bank and change the combination on the counting house safe.

  “Don’t spare ’em,” he advised. “Go slap in and see everything. If you give ’em time to clear up you won’t learn a thing. Walk straight in and lock the door on them. Don’t let them out again till you’re satisfied.”

  “I see,” said Harold Dunnett dubiously.

  “Bully ’em.” Mr. Verking insisted. “That’s what it comes to. It’s their country and you mustn’t let ’em remember it. The only thing they understand is strength. They’d put a knife in your back as soon as look at you if they thought they could get away with it.”

  Dunnett smiled faintly. It was obvious that Mr. Verking was letting his memory and imagination run away with him. He was forgetting that things had changed even in the far away corners of the earth since young Mr. Reginald Verking, in a very new suit of white ducks, had stepped off the P. & O. mail-boat at Hong Kong some time back in the ’nineties.

  But Mr. Verking took a cynical view of progress. “You can laugh,” he said ominously. “But I’ve met these gentry. They’re nothing more that a lot of bloodthirsty animals, the whole crowd of ’em. Look at their Presidents—just one big assassin ruling over a lot of little ones.”

  “I’ll watch my step,” Dunnett told him.

  Mr. Verking nodded. “That’s the spirit,” he said. “You watch your st
ep and you’ll be all right. Don’t let ’em come up behind you. They’re nothing but a lot of human sharks.” He crossed over and stood beside Dunnett. “They’ve got their funny little ways,” he added. “Did I ever show you that?” He broke off and began rolling up his sleeve. Dunnett looked in surprise at the arm which Mr. Verking was holding out before him: it was tattooed all over. A woman and a snake entwined in a mazy pattern of purple filigree.

  “It’s … it’s very clever,” Dunnett remarked.

  “Not that,” Mr. Verking replied. “That” he pointed to a broad white weal that ran through the centre of the design, cutting off one of the lady’s legs from the rest of her body. “Do you know how I got that?”

  Dunnett shook his head.

  “Debt collecting,” Mr. Verking answered. “A Malay did it. Came out with his knife while I was still fumbling with the receipt book.”

  “Well, you survived it, at any rate,” Harold Dunnett reminded him.

  The remark seemed to rouse Mr. Verking. “Would you like to know how?” he asked sharply.

  Dunnett told him he would.

  “I’ll show you.” Mr. Verking walked over to his desk and unlocked the bottom drawer. There was something heavy inside wrapped in a wash-leather duster. He laid it on the writing-pad and undid it carefully. It was a large Colt revolver. “That’s how,” he said triumphantly. “That’s something that all of ’em understand.”

  “I … I see,” Dunnett repeated doubtfully.

  “Come to think of it, you’d better take it with you,” Mr. Verking went on. “You never know when you may want it.”

  “But I shouldn’t know how to use it,” Harold Dunnett replied.

  “You’d find out soon enough if you had to,” Mr. Verking assured him. “It’s a sort of second sense in an emergency.” He picked it up and handed it to Harold by the butt.

  Dunnett stepped back a pace. “No really, thank you,” he said. “This isn’t my line at all.”

  Mr. Verking seemed hurt. “You needn’t turn up your nose at it,” he said. “They make ’em smaller nowadays, but they don’t make ’em any better. You could knock a horse over with this one.”

  Dunnet started to excuse himself, but Mr. Verking was clearly in no mood for listening to him. “You’re a fool if you don’t,” he said. “If more men went about armed there wouldn’t be so many murders.”

  “But I haven’t got a licence,” Harold Dunnett reminded him.

  “Soon see about that,” Mr. Verking began, but stopped himself. The door up the corridor opened and there was the sound of someone’s coming. Mr. Verking took two quick paces forward and thrust the gun into Dunnett’s pocket. “Careful,” he said, “it’s loaded.” Dunnett tried to protest, but the thing had happened. The gun was there. It weighed down his pocket like a flat iron.

  “Don’t worry,” said Mr. Verking. “It can’t go off so long as the safety-catch is down.”

  The door opened and old Mr. Fryze stood there, fussy, white-haired, formal.

  “Ah, Mr. Verking, been giving Mr. Dunnett some advice about foreign parts?” Mr. Fryze enquired, blandly. “Words of warning from an older man, Mr. Dunnett, remember.”

  The last day at the office was not at all what Dunnett had looked forward to. For some reason he suddenly felt an overpowering affection for everything around him; even Mr. Plymme, who had continued to the end to put every obstacle in the way of his going, now appeared an almost welcome and congenial figure, a piece of the cosy, familiar world that he was leaving so abruptly. And as the morning proceeded he grew more and more depressed. He just sat at his desk pretending to work and thinking all the time of Kay. Five months was nothing really, he kept telling himself; other men had spent five years abroad, cut off from their wives and families. It was the sort of thing that was supposed to make a man. But there was no disguising that somehow the fun seemed to have gone out of it all. Overnight the whole adventure of his going had come to look different: he now saw it in the light of a bitter, if temporary, exile, as something inflicted on him by an unimaginative world that was run on a strictly cash basis for their own profit by men like Mr. Govern. If he could have slipped out of the whole affair and still have saved his face he would have done so.

  He was glad of the fact that he had something definite to do at lunch time. Mr. Verking had given him the address of the one firm of tropical outfitters who really understood how a ventilated shirt should be made, and Dunnett was going to collect his order. In the ordinary way he joined a little group of men in an A.B.C. tea-shop. It was pleasant enough to sit in the long, noisy room, where the cigarette-smoke was hot enough in winter to steam over the windows, playing dominoes on a marble slab around a litter of cups and plates and thick china sugar basins. But to-day he was relieved that he was not going. He did not feel in the least like exchanging stories with the rest of them and keeping up a cheerful, silly, banter with the waitress. He turned instead and walked in the other direction, a gloomy, discontented figure, this man whose lot was the envy of the whole office, the special representative who, in his way, was to become another of the legends in the long history of the House.

  The tropical outfitter’s was in Signet Court, by the river. A little flight of steps that no one ever used nowadays— Spaniards’ Steps they were still called—ran down beside it. For no special reason Dunnett went down the steps. The noise of traffic was blotted out step by step as he descended. And then he stood there and the river stretched out in front of him, sliding away from the stone beneath his feet. He had come quite casually without any real purpose in his mind, but now that he was beside it, he was surprised how completely the river answered to his mood. There it was, in the midst of the muddle and meanness of London, a great, fantastic highway, a tidal by-pass pouring right through the centre of the metropolis. Just looking at it made everything else—the high standing of Govern and Fryze, Mr. Plymme’s petty jealousies, the singular defalcations of Señor Muras and even, in a way, the broken happiness of Kay Barton—fall into place in a longer scheme of things. It was a part of another and less hastily changing world. For all its strings of barges and floating orange boxes and overhanging cranes and river police boats, that river came right out of the past, slapping and gurgling at the foot of the present where he stood. When he called in at Pettitt and Nash’s ten minutes later to pick up his parcel of shirts, with the neat array of little eylet holes under the arms and the stand-away sweat-proof collars, he was a normal and collected man again.

  The afternoon was naturally a busy one, far too busy for any misgivings or regrets. Mr. Govern emerged at ten-minute intervals from the glass-domed inner room, his office coat rucked across his shoulders, to make sure that nothing had been forgotten. “I don’t want to find that anything’s been left in the air when I get in on Monday,” he kept saying. “Go over everything just as though you weren’t ever coming back again.” All the same, it was Mr. Govern who glanced at his watch shortly after five and told Dunnett that if there were any private matters that he wanted to attend to he might as well get along now. And so the handshaking began.

  Mr. Fryze was very dignified about it. He left the fireplace, in front of which he was accustomed to stand, and came half-way towards the door. At that point he stopped and Dunnett wondered if that were to be all. But just at that moment a pale, bony hand came out from the starched shirt cuff and offered itself to be shaken. Harold took it with some misgivings : it was an old, withered hand, cold and lifeless. And there was a ceremonial flavour to it all: he made it evident that he did not go around offering his hand to everyone.

  With Mr. Govern it was different, it was the firm hand-shake that exists between men of the world. He handed over the advance expenses, £50 in sterling and £50 in bolivianos, and came over to the door and almost out into the corridor to say good-bye. His last words, “Good luck, and remember to cable before you actually do anything,” were to recur to Harold Dunnett with varying emphasis and significance many times during the coming months.

/>   He said good-bye to the others in turn. Mr. Plymme was perfunctory and unenthusiastic: he drew his hand away as soon as he had given it. Mr. Verking kept clapping him heavily on the back and reminding him of their last conversation together; he did not actually refer to the revolver, but he made it quite clear where, in his opinion, safety lay. And Mr. Frampton was almost overcome. He regarded it as an honour for the whole department that Mr. Dunnett should have been chosen; in a way it was a tribute to his training. He clasped Harold’s hand several times very firmly as though he were saying good-bye to a favourite son, and appeared almost ready to break down over it all. Dunnett was surprised and rather embarrassed to find there was so much human feeling in an office.