The Seeds of Fiction

by Bernard Diederich

  Graham wrote in a letter dated 17 June 1980:

  A tardy good wishes for the anniversary you must have been celebrating last Saturday. How time flies! You must have been very newly married when I first met you and Ginette. I very much look forward to reading your book on the Somozas. A young reporter who came to interview me this year — I think he was Dutch — apparently at one time knew the Somozas and was a friend of Tacho. He told me that Tacho used to read my books! Well, one isn’t responsible for one’s readers.

  About Managua in August. I can’t for the moment decide as it all depends on the situation here. Yvonne and [her daughter] Martine are having a good deal of trouble with the ex-husband of Martine who belongs to the Mafia and I don’t like leaving them for too long at a time. I have to leave them on July 6 to go to Spain at the invitation of the Mayor of Madrid and afterwards to do my annual trip with my friend Father Duran, and I hope the trip will revive my interest in a comic novel [Monsignor Quixote] I began. But let’s keep in touch about Managua.

  18 | WAITING FOR THE GUERRILLA

  In a letter dated 30 July 1980 Graham wrote, ‘Chuchu has been on the phone and I have told him that I’d go out to Panama some time between 16 and 20 August. Apparently the General wants me to have a look at Nicaragua. It would be great fun if you came too.’

  He now stood at the corner window in Suite 921 in the Hotel El Continental and looked out at the vacant lot across the street where a circus was setting up. He was fascinated by the effort of two elephants, tethered to stakes in the ground, swinging their trunks back and forth in desperation, trying to reach what little straw was left in the mud just out of their reach.

  ‘The poor devils are starved,’ he said.

  I joined him at the window. Via España, Panama City’s main thoroughfare, was filled with traffic. I drew his attention to the buses with their bright, exotic artwork, reminiscent of Haiti.

  We had just returned from a gluttonous meal of bacalao (dried codfish), preceded by our customary rum punch ordered by Graham as ‘not too sweet and with an extra dash of Meyers’s [rum], please’.

  Not only did he show sympathy for the hapless elephants, but he saw their predicament as a metaphor for our own. We were virtually shackled to the room, waiting. Graham hated waiting. The past three days had been just that: waiting. But in this case a man’s life was at stake, and we had no alternative but to wait. The conversation over lunch had been about family, which was rare for him; he rarely discussed his family.

  ‘Last year I put my money in a trust for my two children. I might live to ninety, and there is no reason why they shouldn’t enjoy it before they get old,’ he said.

  I had picked up the bill for the rum punches at the Holiday Inn, and because they were made to his instructions the cost for the two drinks came to an incredible $37 — tip not included. Graham offered to pay with the credit card to which he charged all his expenses, but I insisted and put the bill on my Time expense account.

  ‘How generous they are,’ Graham said of Time and Life and told me again of his reporting for Life in South-East Asia. It was also the year that Time had honoured Graham with a cover story introducing his works to millions of the magazine’s readers. (The fact that Graham had written articles for Life in no way influenced the editors of Time in their choice of Graham as a cover subject.) Time pegged their story to the publication of Graham’s latest book, The End of the Affair, and pronounced him the writer of the day.

  Graham was happy with the article in Time, which ended its long and provocative cover piece as follows:

  How much fuss will posterity make about Graham Greene? Will it rate him as high as Hemingway or Faulkner? Will he outlast Evelyn Waugh? Will he be mentioned in the same breath as Dostoevsky? Only posterity can answer. But with these three contemporaries, at any rate, Greene can hold up his head. He is as accomplished a craftsman as they, and without the mannerisms with which the two Americans have begun to burlesque their own styles. He has neither the snigger nor the snobbery that are Waugh’s trademarks. But when Greene is compared with Dostoevsky, the great shocker of the 19th century, all his books together would not match one Brothers Karamazov. That the comparison should even come to mind, however, suggests its inevitability. Graham Greene, like Dostoevsky, is primarily and passionately concerned with Good and Evil. There are not many competitors in that field.

  In Panama City on 22 August 1980 the weather was as hot and humid as it always is in the midst of the rainy season. Graham had arrived three days earlier on a KLM flight from Amsterdam. It was his fourth trip to Panama, and this time he was on a mission. He could have been playing the part of a character in one of his books. The year before he had had an operation, and he had become obsessed with the complex marital misfortunes of Yvonne’s daughter. It was not Martine’s divorce that bothered him but the unjust and corrupt system that, he said, confined her to an area of the Riviera that was literally under the nose of the ‘scoundrel ex-husband’ whom he said was terrorizing the family.

  Still, he had found time to write another book, Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party. He dedicated the book to his daughter, Caroline Bourget, ‘at whose Christmas table at Jongny [Switzerland] this story first came to me’. The idea for the book, he said, came from the gaily wrapped Christmas crackers that produce a small bang and a few goodies when tugged apart.

  One night in April 1979, an hour or so after midnight, Graham was awakened from sleep in his Antibes home by the persistent ringing of the telephone. It was Chuchu, wanting to know when Graham was coming to Panama. ‘Graham,’ he said, ‘the General is sending someone to meet you.’

  A few nights later the envoy from the General arrived in Antibes and telephoned Graham. When they met the young messenger explained that General Torrijos was concerned about the fate of two English bankers kidnapped by the Salvadorean guerrillas. The rebels holding the two bankers had lost contact with the bankers’ home office. Torrijos’s messenger brought a mysterious Mexico City telephone number with him to be passed on to the bankers’ home office to enable them to re-establish contact with the guerrillas and complete the negotiations for their release. The messenger explained that all they wanted Graham to do was find the home office of the bankers. Graham had never heard of the Bank of London, but his sister Elisabeth managed to track down their head office.

  The guerrillas wanted the bank to know that they had modified their demands. Only the ransom remained to be paid.

  Graham said that when they finally located the bank, ‘I told the bank people who were suspicious and surprised by my call that I had spent time in Central America and had good contacts there. It was a simple enough task,’ he said, brushing off his involvement and ultimately saving the lives of two fellow Britons.

  Whenever he told this story Graham said he had half-expected to receive a case of Scotch from the bank for his role in gaining the two bankers’ freedom. No such expression of thanks ever arrived. ‘But then again,’ Graham added, ‘they probably thought I got my cut from the $5 million ransom money they paid out.’

  In January 1980 Graham received another cloak-and-dagger telephone call. He believed the caller was from the South African intelligence service. He introduced himself as Mr Shearer, Pretoria’s chargé d’affaires in the French capital and explained that South Africa’s ambassador to El Salvador, Archibald Gardner Dunn, had been kidnapped by the guerrillas there. No one had been able to establish contact with his captors. Shearer asked Graham for help.

  In recounting the incident in Getting to Know the General, he wrote, ‘It almost seemed at that moment as though Antibes had become a small island anchored off the coast of Central America and involved in all the problems there.’

  As he later told me, he remembered how the Mexico City telephone number had worked for the two kidnapped bankers. But he said he had destroyed it, ‘washed it down the loo’. He suggested Shearer contact an investigator at Lloyd’s International who might still have the number. Indeed, the Lloyd�
�s man had the number. He gave it to Shearer, who in turn gave it to Graham, asking him to see what he could do. After talking with his government in Pretoria, Shearer told Graham that no one in the Dunn family was up to the job of negotiating with the guerrillas. The ambassador’s wife was dying of cancer in California, and his son, who ran a nightclub in El Salvador, was not considered a good enough communicator. Dunn’s daughter was too young. Graham said he had suggested that someone pretend to be a member of the family and initiate the negotiations.

  It took a many attempts with the telephone before Graham got through to Mexico City. The mysterious telephone number was that of Habeas, a centre set up by Gabriel García Márquez. The 52-year-old Colombian writer lived part of the time in Mexico City and had created Habeas (short for habeas corpus) several years earlier to promote human rights and to help save lives whenever possible.

  Gabo liked to keep a low profile. He felt the less publicity Habeas got the more effective it could be. From France Graham telephoned García Márquez and asked him for help. Gabo was opposed to political kidnapping, and he did what he could to help the victims in an anonymous way, but he was aghast at Graham’s request because the hostage represented the white supremacist pariah state of South Africa.

  I visited Gabo at his house in San Ángel in Mexico City, and he reiterated his position. When I told Graham of this he told me to ask Gabo if he had read The Human Factor. ‘If he has,’ Graham said, ‘he will know how I feel about the South African government.’

  There were five different Salvadorean guerrilla groups in the field, and establishing contact with the faction holding the ambassador was no small feat. Yet, despite his philosophical distaste for the kidnap victim, Gabo called Graham back a few days later and told him the guerrilla group holding Gardner was the largest rebel faction, the FPL. The guerrillas deemed South Africa to be the devil incarnate; therefore contact with them should be made by the family and not a representative of the South African government. To everyone’s surprise, and possibly thanks to a little prodding from General Torrijos, the guerrillas indicated that they would consider a plea from Graham Greene and agreed to meet him to discuss Ambassador Dunn, who at this point had become known as the ‘forgotten hostage’.

  Thus six months later Graham went to Panama again and invited me to join him there. He also wrote to Shearer to inform him of his trip and the fact that the guerrillas appeared ready to meet him to discuss the case. Shearer thanked Graham but said that contact had been established and it was best to leave it to ‘people in Washington’. The South African government, Shearer added, had a very clear policy in such cases: no dealing with kidnappers. When Graham later briefed me in Panama I asked whether he thought The Human Factor had affected his contact with Shearer and his superiors.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Graham replied.

  After ten months in the hands of the FPL guerrillas, the life of South African ambassador Gardner Dunn seemed lost. It was, Graham noted, eerily similar to the human tragedy he had written about in The Honorary Consul — almost like life imitating art. Kidnapping had become a thriving industry for the Salvadorean guerrillas. Ransom money from the rich was needed to make war on them. Unknown to us at the time, a fund had been set up by friends of the hapless Dunn in both South Africa and El Salvador to try to meet the ransom conditions. The guerrillas were demanding an incredible $20 million and the publication in sixty-five languages in 110 countries of their manifesto.

  They were also demanding that El Salvador’s ruling junta sever diplomatic ties with South Africa, Israel and Chile. Ironically, on 28 November 1979, the day ten young guerrillas had seized Dunn as he left the South African embassy in San Salvador, the junta, which had been in power only six weeks, was actually in the process of severing diplomatic relations with Pretoria and Dunn was about to retire from a long diplomatic career.

  For three days we had been waiting in Panama City for the rendezvous. We assumed it would happen in a safe house, perhaps outside the city. Graham thought it wouldn’t entail blindfolds and that sort of rubbish, because he could be trusted. However, extreme precautions would still have to be taken in meeting with the most wanted and active guerrilla leader in all of Latin America, a man who had been seldom seen and we suspected had a large price on his head — dead or alive — by the Salvadorean and perhaps American intelligence agencies.

  ‘It’s so boring waiting,’ Graham repeated over and over. We also had a date at some point in Managua, so we decided to go ahead and plan that trip. Besides seeing revolutionary Nicaragua, Graham wanted to visit Belize again and discuss with Premier George Price the status of its independence from Great Britain. Graham had recently written a letter to The Times stating his distrust of the Guatemalan military, which he feared might gobble up their little neighbour once Britain pulled out. Nor did he have much confidence in British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who, Graham believed, just wanted to dump Belize, even if it was into the lap of the Guatemalan military.

  On Friday morning, as we waited for Chuchu to arrive, Graham read aloud his horoscope in the Miami Herald. He’d had breakfast alone in his room, reading the proofs of The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, a 664-page book edited by Mark Amory, a well-known author and journalist. I tapped on his door and handed him the Herald. He chuckled as he read out loud. ‘Breakthrough occurs — green light flashes for new project, adventure.’ Graham was a Libra, born on 2 October 1904. He marvelled at the forecast and read on. ‘Take cold plunge into future; let go of imagined security blanket!’ ‘Well,’ he sniffed, ‘superstitious I am, but I’ve never had need of a security blanket. It’s the opposite with me.’ The Herald’s horoscope had been prepared by Sydney Omarr, a syndicated columnist. Laughing at the name, Graham mused, ‘I wonder if our Omar didn’t have something to do with this.’

  Our Omar could indeed make things happen. My horoscope was even more intriguing. ‘Time is on your side. Know it and play waiting game. See places, people in realistic light. Scenario abounds with clandestine arrangements, mystery, temporary seclusion and romance …’ My editors at Time would have been impressed, since I was in Panama on the off-chance Graham’s presence would produce a story.

  We spent the morning with Chuchu rummaging about the waterfront market expecting to make contact at any moment. Knowing Omar’s enjoyment of pranks, we half expected him to arrange the ‘contact’ as they do in the movies, complete with secret passwords.

  Several curanderas (healers) pointed out the merits of their herbs, and one began to tease Graham, proclaiming that a certain plant possessed just the right rejuvenating qualities for him. Chuchu, our womanizing Marxist, insisted that the curandera was right and that her concoction was known for its aphrodisiac power, which ensured that a man of a hundred could enjoy sex. Graham, his hands folded behind his back as if not trusting them with the medicinal plants, laughed and tactfully changed the subject. Pointing to black vultures perched on nearby wharf pilings, ‘I can’t stand those horrible creatures,’ he said. Chuchu suggested that instead of aphrodisiacs we seek an antidote for his fear of vultures.

  The evening before we were supposed to depart to Managua we went to meet Omar at Rory Gonzalez’s house at Calle Cincuenta for a small party. One of the visitors that evening was the General’s oldest daughter, Carmen Alicia, who was studying to be a dentist. Looking very prim and proper in a school-style blazer, she came in and kissed her father, who was obviously very proud of her. She shook hands with each of us and left. Another guest was Omar’s pretty former secretary who arrived with their baby daughter, only a few months old. ‘When I can communicate with her [the baby],’ Omar joked to the distress of his mother, ‘I won’t need you.’ She spoke excellent English and engaged Graham in conversation. ‘What will happen to our child if something happens to the General?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing to worry about,’ Graham said.

  Graham, who was seemingly immune to the effects of alcohol, had been handed a special edition of Black Label scotch dubbed ‘Swing’ by
the General. Graham looked at the bottle and suggested ‘swig’ was a more appropriate name. The General and I were drinking champagne, a gift, someone mentioned, from Tony Noriega. The General was wearing sandals and a sports shirt. He had come out of his rustic retreat at Coclesito just to see Graham.

  The mood was convivial, and there was plenty of laughter. At this point we were all getting a little drunk. Close to midnight we sat down to a Chinese takeaway, and after dinner the General switched to cognac.

  Omar asked Graham about the characters in his book, Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party, but the plot was just a little too foreign for him. We settled it by saying it was just like our party but set in Switzerland. The conversation moved on to poetry, prose, philosophy and politics. There was an especially emotional discussion on what would happen to the region if Ronald Reagan won the US presidency. ‘Carter listened and understood us. Reagan will not try and understand us if he is elected,’ Torrijos said. ‘Without trying to be an election prophet, these elections will be won by Carter by a close margin, but I would prefer Reagan emotionally as it would allow me to put my spurs on again and see if he is as macho as he claims to be.’

  Concerning the principal purpose of Graham’s visit to Panama, the General advised us to put off our trip to Managua for a day as he was sure the Salvadorean guerrillas, despite the delays we had encountered, wanted to talk with Graham. He added that representatives of the five guerrilla groups were at that very moment holding a unity meeting in Panama City. By now we were alone with the General; it was already early morning. He was stretched out on the sofa, his eyes closing.