Dunnett took it and read it carefully. “Thanks,” he said quietly, “I’ll endorse it and pass it over.” The realisation that he had got what he came for made him suddenly feel limp and exhausted. In the hour of victory, all that he felt was a little sick.
There was a silence between them after that, and Dunnett could feel that Señor Muras was waiting to say something. When he did speak, his voice was low and intimate.
“Señor Dunnett,” he said. “A month ago I had never even heard your name. To-morrow I go on and you go back. If I am to say what is on my mind I must speak now. If we ever meet again we shall be different men by then.”
“What is it you want to say?” Dunnett asked.
“It is not easy to put it into words,” Señor Muras answered. “It is a piece of advice from someone who has seen a great deal of the world.” He broke off and began playing with the cigar between his fingers. “In brief, it is this,” he said, “You are a young man of great ability and integrity. You have been sent out on a difficult mission on which I was determined you should fail—and you have succeeded. You are now going back to London. Unless you are careful you will simply be an animal in a cage that has been let out for an airing.” Señor Muras paused and played with his cigar again.
“Well?”
“Suppose you did not go back?” Señor Muras suggested. “Suppose you were to come with me on the gunboat to Asuncion and on to Rio. You could be a rich man tomorrow.”
“You forget why I came,” Dunnett answered.
“I’m forgetting nothing,” Señor Muras answered. “It is because of that loyalty that I want to have you. In business I have been cheated all my life. It is not my rivals I have had to fear but my associates. You can send back the money to London and resign. At least you will have done what you were sent out to do. An opportunity such as this does not come twice to any man.”
“What opportunity?”
“To come in with me,” Señor Muras answered. “At the moment I’m a millionaire.”
Dunnett steadied himself. “Why are you offering me this?” he asked.
“Because I need you,” Señor Muras answered. “Because you’re incorruptible.”
Dunnett shook his head. “It’s impossible,” he said briefly.
Señor Muras leant forward. “May I ask why?” he enquired.
“Because I’m going to be married when I get back.”
Señor Muras paused. “That is something else that I like about you,” he said slowly. “Here you are with the world at your feet and you are still faithful. But I wonder if you are wise. It will be three months before you can get back. Anything may have happened by then. If the girl is beautiful you cannot expect her to have been left alone. And a girl who is lonely is very easy prey. For all you know she may already have agreed to be somebody else’s. There may be a letter on the sea at this moment telling you that she has changed her mind.”
“I don’t think so,” Dunnett replied.
“Have you been in love often?”
“No; only this one.”
“Then it is possible that it may not last. Most men discover that it is not the first woman they fall in love with who satisfies them.”
“Perhaps our standards are different,” Dunnett remarked.
Señor Muras did not reply immediately; when he did so, it was to ask a question.
“Do you find Carmel beautiful?” he asked.
“I think she is very beautiful,” Dunnett answered. “I hope she finds a good husband.”
“She is more than beautiful,” Señor Muras answered. “She is …” He stopped himself and looked at his watch, “I have been talking too long,” he said, “you must be tired.” He led the way across the saloon and they mounted the stairs without speaking. At Dunnett’s door he paused. “If you should change your mind,” he said quietly, “you can tell me in the morning. It would still be time. The gunboat isn’t calling for us until nine-thirty. Good-night, Mr. Dunnett.”
“Good-night, Señor Muras,” Dunnett answered. He turned and entered the third guest-room. It was a well serviced little chamber with a large metal spittoon, a rope ladder in case of fire, somebody else’s shirt in the corner and two thicknesses of corrugated iron in between the sleeper and the night sky.
Chapter X
The Paraguayan offensive, under the expert direction of Major Schultz, late of the Imperial German Staff, was brilliantly successful, precisely because it was completely unexpected. The storm broke from what, metaphorically speaking, was a clear sky. Actually it came on a steamy, delirious morning when the bright green cascades of the banana leaves broke through the ground mists like rushes in a marshland. At one moment there were nothing but the usual sounds of morning—the hysterical screams and whistles of the tropical song-birds contributing their quota to the discordant dawn chorus—and, at the next, twelve-pounder shells were bursting in the centre compound and sending clots of greasy mud high over the tops of the umbrella palms.
Major Schultz had spent many sleepless nights scratching his square, close-shaven skull while he had been moving his twelve hundred tattered and exhausted warriors up through the Chaco into temporary quarters under the lee of the town. But it was the manner of Señor Muras’s departure that gave him his real opportunity. He recognised it as one of those master strokes of Fate on which, in the last analysis, all fruitful military campaigns depend. It had come about simply enough. The Captain of the gunboat, after pocketing Señor Muras’s honorarium, had gone straight to his superior officer. Major Schultz’s pale blue eyes lit up behind their thick pebble glasses when he heard. He commanded the gunboat Captain to proceed at once to Subrico and prepare to fulfil his mission. But he gave him confidential and over-riding instructions.
At seven o’clock next morning, therefore, the Hernando Arias de Saavedra, looking very neat in its dress of service grey and deep olive green, pounded its way up river and anchored under the shade of a eucalyptus swamp two hundred yards off the landing pier. The Bolivian sentry who had been told to expect it, waved his vest in friendly greeting—he was doing his washing at the time—and got down to some serious delousing. The Hernando Arias de Saavedra’s Captain waved back; and then, obeying his new orders, he suddenly opened fire.
The shooting was not particularly good. The shells were just tossed in anyhow. But the effect of surprise was terrific. It was as irresistible as a thunderstorm. And one lucky shot fell in the central compound where the horses were. Bits of harness were splashed everywhere and the whole air was filled with squealing. When General Orero came stumbling out of the lavabo where he had been quietly sitting, he found himself in the middle of a shambles. His terror was increased by the fact that he imagined himself to be in his first air raid.
When the opening shell brust, Dunnett was standing over the tin wash-basin busily cleaning his teeth. All that he knew was that the flimsy hotel shuddered on its perch and a rain of fragments came hammering down on to the corrugated iron roof. For a moment he thought that some sort of ancient cannon in the encampment had exploded. And then he looked into the main street. One of the adobe huts inhabited by a family of five had been turned completely inside out.
Sumultaneously every door in the hotel was wrenched open and the frightened guests appeared. Señor Muras was the first. He was dressed in scarlet silk pyjamas with magenta frogs. He ran up and down the landing roaring for the manager. Carmel Muras appeared behind him in a white wrap. She was not in the least alarmed, only curious.
“What the hell?” she asked, when she saw Dunnett.
The manager was no calmer than the rest when he could be found. He merely kept repeating that it was the first time that anything of the sort had happened in his hotel. He was still protesting when the stern gun of the Hernando came into action, and, firing over the steam-boat’s funnel like a mitrailleuse, cast up a shell into the leper colony.
With a scream of terror the manager broke away from his guests and dashed down the street into the brick-built cellar o
f the mercado. He was thus the first of the hotel’s occupants to be killed. A stray bullet of the Subrican defence corps got him as he came round the corner.
With the second explosion Señor Muras recovered his nerve. He drove Carmel back to her room and began snatching at the buttons of his own pyjama jacket. Dunnett felt absurdly superior simply by virtue of the fact that he already had his trousers on. By the time he had found his boots as well, two more shells had fallen. The last one cracked the glass of his bedroom window. He could feel the rush of air from it even inside the bedroom. And to his own surprise he felt strangely calm; calm but exhilarated. His fingers were tingling but his head was perfectly clear. On an impulse of the moment he returned to his room and removed Mr. Verking’s revolver. There was something oddly reassuring in the feel of the massive walnut butt in his hand.
Not that General Orero had been inactive in the meantime. The ten-pounder in the gunboat had been got into action and the gun corps was going through the motions of artillery drill in grim earnest. Their firing was no better than the Paraguayans’, but the eucalyptus branches above the Paraguayan boat were soon scattered. The Hernando Arias de Saavedra drew anchor and sailed down the stream round the bend. Its shots after that went wide of the mark. They fell idly and capriciously and some failed to explode. But they were deeply destructive to the morale.
General Orero did his best. He lined his men up in battle formation along the river bank to repel any landing party. But he did not reckon on concerted attack, and did not know that at that moment Major Schultz’s vanguard were hacking their way through the tangled jungle on the eastern side of the town, proceeding in accordance with an impeccable strategy of which they understood nothing. The first to emerge were two Indians carrying the several parts of a machine gun. They put it together under the direction of a young Paraguayan officer, and began spraying the street. The noise was like that of a mechanical riveter. General Orero hastily reversed his defences and sent a body of picked men to remove the machine gun nuisance. No sooner had they gone than Major Schultz moved up his landing forces under the cover of the Hernando Arias de Saavedra. They came up swiftly and efficiently in canoes, murdering the astonished sentries as they came. The Subrican gunboat was captured by a boarding-party of eight men and its officers jumped overboard. In the face of this colossal treachery, General Orero found himself trapped. He gave the command for hand-to-hand fighting. Rifles were dropped and machetes came back into their own. General Orero himself made his way to the hotel, dodging from house to house as he came.
Last of all, up the river in a small launch with a pair of binoculars in his hand came Major Schultz. He was in time to stop the Captain of the Hernando from killing his own men by a too enthusiastic bombardment. He ordered the man to restrict himself to demolishing the waterfront. And all the time he was speaking, he kept wiping the mist off his glasses: he was pathetically short-sighted and for most of the battle he was unable to see a thing.
Inside the hotel, Señor Muras had taken command of the situation. He acted throughout with commendable thoroughness. There were only two other guests in the hotel—a Frenchman interested in banana concessions and a Bolivian agent of the river steamboat company—and Señor Muras at once began instructing them in the art of defence. From the way he set about it, he might have been making barricades all his life. He piled the marble-topped tables up against the windows and doors so that anyone attempting to get in would find a solid sheet of stone confronting him, and wedged the whole construction in place with the chairs. Soon there was nowhere to sit and nothing to sit at; but at least the place was impregnable from the street. Just as they had finished, the Paraguayan Indian machine gunner shifted his emplacement a little and began absent-mindedly spraying the buildings. A spurt of bullets—they came so fast that those inside the hotel never knew how many—came crashing in through the flimsy side wall, leaving a pattern of splintered holes, and cleared the bar of bottles. It was as though someone had gone along with a hammer smashing the whole row to ruins. The room reeked of spirits and the floor now glittered with broken glass.
“What are we waiting for?” Carmel asked. “It won’t be bottles next time.”
“It’s worse in the street,” Dunnett answered. “Here they are just guessing at us. Out there they’d get us every time.” He was surprised how cool he was. He felt almost as though he had been under fire all his life.
The man who was feeling it worst was the French banana merchant. He was white-faced and jittery, and his eyes kept straying to the next circular gaps in the wall as though he expected all bullets to enter by the same holes. “There must be some way out,” he kept saying. “There must be some way out.” Then he remembered something and pointed to the back of the hotel. “There is a road that goes into the forest,” he said. “Please God it has been left open.”
Señor Muras stepped forward. He waved his hand deprecatingly in the Frenchman’s face. “Not to move,” he said, “I will investigate for myself.” He turned to Dunnett. “You may come with me.” Señor Muras was really superb in his self-assurance.
The hotel seemed suddenly strangely quite. The gunboat had stopped firing, since the garrison had surrendered, and the only noise that now came from the town was the sound of desultory shooting from somewhere down by the river bank, the kind of sound that means that one or two men with rifles are picking off any stragglers whom they can see to fire at. When the native machine gunners without warning loosened off another round of ammunition at random it came as an unforgivable assault on the ears. At the back of the hotel the air of calm was even more pronounced. There might never have been a bombardment. The bank of forest trees, brilliantly verdant now that the mist had cleared away, were waving unshuttered in the half breeze.
“It leads through the forest to the military river,” said the banana man indicating the narrow path before them: he had crept delicately along the passage in their wake and was now trembling with excitement at the thought of escape. “There’s a little landing stage at the top. And some boats. Perhaps we could get one if we all stuck together.”
Señor Muras contemplated the pathway for a moment. He was not now so keen as he had been on trusting the Paraguayans. “We will go,” he said briefly. He went back into the saloon to get his company together; the flimsy walls rattled as he passed. “Out there,” he said, pointing down the passage and through the open door at the end, “is escape. Say your prayers and keep your heads low. As soon as you are clear of the buildings run for it. Run like a deer. We shall all meet again in the entrance to the forest.”
At that moment the light at the end of the passage was blocked out. It was General Orero. His face looked very drawn and grey above the gaudy tabs on his collar. In both hands he held a revolver as though he had been holding up the entire Paraguayan army single-handed. He advanced steadily down the passage without speaking, almost with the air of one leading a procession. At the door of the saloon he stood quite still staring full at Señor Muras.
Señor Muras greeted him with enthusiasm. “You are still alive,” he said. “That is wonderful. You can show us the way up the river.”
General Orero did not reply. He stood there, like a minister about to address a gathering. Then he lowered one of his revolvers until it was pointing somewhere in the middle of Señor Muras’s body and said slowly: “You are a Paraguayan agent. I am going to shoot you.”
At the words Señor Muras opened his mouth like a fish gulping in air, but no sound came. He raised his hands in front of him as if to protect himself and began backing away across the room, his eyes fixed upon the small point of the revolver. But it was no use. General Orero followed him as he moved. Then, carefully and deliberately, he pulled the trigger three times, firing the last two shots into the body as it lay on the ground. At that range the bullets went in their target with a soft clup-clup: it was quite distinct from the uproar of the discharge.
When the first shot was fired, Señor Muras was knocked over by the impact. But
he was not dead. His knees were slowly arching and one foot was already off the ground when General Orero fired again. His body bounced right off the floor this time, and when he was still again he started groaning. No one interfered: perhaps it was the other revolver that dissuaded them. They stood round watching this sinister ritual between the two men, one living and one dying. Muras’s groans increased. General Orero bent over and fired again at a two-foot range. This time there was silence. General Orero dropped the gun and walked silently out of the room.
It was Carmel who spoke first. She went down on her knees but got up again hastily: her father was not in any state to be touched. “Isn’t anyone going to do anything?” she asked. “That’s murder.”
The inadequacy of the remark did not strike anyone at that moment: they were all too dazed to comprehend. They could only stand there trying to look away from the enormous figure on the floor. Just before the last shot, Señor Muras had endeavoured to shield his eyes. His arms were still crossed over his face as though he were expecting someone to strike him.
Carmel Muras turned on Dunnett suddenly. “You call yourself a man,” she started screaming, “and you allow someone to do that before your eyes without raising a hand to stop it. You’re just a cowardly Englishman, that’s what you are. You’re a murderer yourself because you could have saved him. Murderer! Do you hear me? Murderer!” She looked round for something to throw but there was nothing within reach. Then her eye caught something. She bent down and picked up from the floor a great sliver of glass from one of the broken bottles: it had a ragged edge like an icicle.
Flames Coming out of the Top Page 19
