Face to the Sun

by Geoffrey Household

  He went on to explain that I had certainly been kidnapped by a wholly inexperienced cell of Los Retadores messing about in London to keep an eye on United States propaganda which insisted that Heredia’s opponents were all communists. Felipe Montes, the first chap who interviewed me, was a left-wing idealist and a polo player. From my description, Sir Hector said, he seemed to have taken a commando course before joining the London cell. The thug, whose head I had used as a battering-ram, passed as a porter and was probably glad to have something to do. The silvery voice undoubtedly belonged to Teresa, a deadly little piece who fascinated our newspaper men but was more at home in the mountains with a Kalashnikov. She’d be ready to dynamite Claridge’s if it was the only way of keeping the Punchao out of Heredia’s hands.

  ‘But is it really so important?’ I asked. ‘After all, it’s only a scaled-down copy.’

  ‘Think of it as an ensign like the swastika or the Red Cross. It’s seventeenth-century work and the Spanish or Italian genius who made it had the original in front of him.’

  ‘You think it had not been melted down with the other golden treasures of the Incas?’

  ‘There are hordes of Indians and mestizos who believe that it was not. I was always amazed how groups around it in the museum were hypnotised by it. It was theirs, you see, their own art, the emblem of the godhead of the ancestors. If my father-in-law can identify it with his government, he’ll die in his bed.’

  ‘Is there any way we can get it back so that he doesn’t know that Doña Juana walked off with it?’

  ‘What’s this?’ he laughed. ‘You seem more interested in saving my mother-in-law from the consequences of her folly than in democracy for Malpelo. Well, I might be able to put it back in its museum case, but what’s the good? Juana must put it back exactly where she found it. And only she can describe where that was. Heredia does not know yet that it is missing. He’s reviewing troops in the north – so we have time.’

  ‘Were you a curator at the museum?’

  ‘Lord, no! I was studying the canals which once led the streams from the High Andes down to the coast.’

  ‘Then you are not directly interested in the Punchao?’

  ‘Let me put it frankly. Los Retadores would not hesitate to destroy that divine, mystical beauty for the sake of politics. I’m damned if I let them. But that means I am helping to keep Heredia in power. Why? Because some of the money he steals from the people goes to support my mother-in-law, my wife and myself. We are both thieves, my dear Mr What’s-your-Name.’

  ‘When is the next flight to Malpelo?’

  ‘Tomorrow night. She is quite safe till then. Claridge’s police and the Embassy have been warned of a possible plot to steal that tiara. I know the house where you were detained. The tenants are plain exiled citizens of Malpelo and nothing is known against them. But I will see they are watched. And somebody from the Embassy will be at Heathrow to see her and any parcels through Customs.’

  ‘And when she arrives will the Retadores know that she may be carrying the Punchao?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘What excuse can she give for leaving so soon after arrival?’

  ‘She heard of the cell of Retadores and was afraid of assassination.’

  I asked him if there was in fact any such risk.

  ‘Very unlikely. Heredia’s vengeance would be appalling. There are better chances of grabbing the Punchao before it’s back in its place. Imagine the fuss on her arrival! Functionaries, footmen, and, in her private apartments, a troop of lady’s maids! She is going to find it hard to enter her husband’s office, and may offer a dozen chances for the Punchao to disappear in the crowd. That’s why I am travelling with her. Why don’t you come too as a friend and colleague of mine? I’ll pay your fare and when you come home I promise to find you a job and you can invest your two hundred thousand without a care in the world.’

  Apparently, Juana had accepted Hector’s explanation that they needed a second guard and that I was the only desperado who knew the whole story and could be trusted to keep his mouth shut. It was a tempting offer. I replied that I might accept it if he would tell me what earthly use I would be to him in Malpelo.

  ‘Rather like the conjurer’s stooge. There is sure to be a moment when dear Juana plays the fool with the Punchao, and I may need help to make it disappear.’

  ‘I don’t want to be thrown in with the state jaguars.’

  ‘You’d have their whiskers off them before they noticed it. Give me your passport and I’ll have it visaed as my assistant.’

  I was stupidly alarmed at giving away my identity. He appreciated my hesitation and pointed out that there could be no conceivable connection between his old archaeological pal and black crocodile bags. Only two of the London Retadores had seen my face long enough to recognise it. One of them was almost certainly in hospital, and the other, Felipe Montes, would be politely detained at the consulate at the time when passengers to Malpelo checked in.

  So I handed over my passport. He read off my real name, Edmond Hawkins, and asked:

  ‘Any relation to the great admiral?’

  ‘Direct descent on the wrong side of the blanket.’

  ‘Splendid! It’s time there was another Hawkins to raise hell on the Spanish Main.’

  Chapter Three

  At the airport there had been no sign of my kidnappers and I settled down comfortably with absolute confidence that nobody had any interest in tracing the Edmond Hawkins, obscurely arrived from Africa, even as far as Gower Street, let alone Malpelo. I was sitting next to Hector McMurtrie with Doña Juana in front of us with a row to herself. She was carrying a large and luxurious box of chocolates which she placed on the rack immediately above her seat where we two could also keep an eye on it. Hector spent much of the flight briefing me – since I was to pass as an archaeologist – with some elementary facts about the politics of Central America and the cultural influence of the great civilisations of Mexico and Peru.

  We arrived just in time. President Cayetano Heredia was expected to return to his capital next morning, having scattered the guerrilleros into the mountain forests, burned their villages and turned his troops loose on their women who struggled behind the rearguard, weighed down by pots, pans, bedding and babies. Well, my African had fathered his country by the same methods and the result was stark peace. For such peace, how high a price is justified?

  Heredia was not modest when exhibiting his power. The airport was lit up. A squadron of cavalry was lined up below the steps of the aircraft to welcome and escort his wife. Hector assured me that he and I would be expected to join the party and we were ushered to a second car, behind Juana’s, surrounded by the glittering men and polished horses of the escort. I could understand that the city was so impressed by shows of such presidential magnificence that it forgot the anger and anarchy of the mountains.

  I checked in at the chief hotel and then joined Juana and her son-in-law, who was naturally staying at the palace, for a triumphant glass of champagne in her private apartment. She cleared out her personal staff and when the three of us were alone said with her most winning and still girlish giggle:

  ‘Now it’s time for us to have a chocolate.’

  ‘You’d better visit his office alone,’ Hector advised. ‘I noticed that when we passed the President’s office there was an armed guard on the door and if he knows his job he won’t let Edmond Hawkins in.’

  ‘He will do what I tell him,’ Doña Juana said superbly. ‘But perhaps it would be easier for him if Mr Hawkins stops here in the room. We shall not, I hope, be more than a minute.’

  She rose from her chair with what the Hollywood of her youth believed was majesty, flourished a key and with the chocolate box under her arm made for the door followed by Hector. Meanwhile, I amused myself by inspecting the portraits of three early twentieth-century presidents and one of Cayetano Heredia. I did not expect such a contrast. Heredia stood in field uniform against a background of happy peasant
s in a neat village. His face was a military mask revealing only the inevitability of such content and prosperity under his command. The other three were all sashed and frock-coated, one sitting at his desk, one presiding over an admiring congress, one merely standing gracefully at some kind of civic reception – all with the thin-lipped faces of grandees of Spain, unintelligent perhaps, but obedient to the rules of Religion and Law.

  I turned round to face Juana, a suddenly pathetic sight like a partly inflated, wrinkled balloon, and a Hector with a set face no longer coloured by the wind and sun of the Scottish moors. So far as I remember his words, here they are:

  ‘Yes, that chocolate box had been carefully packed and the Punchao del Dia intact and beautiful. I could swear that the circle of little suns winked at us. It had been standing upright in a domed glass case – the sort of case they use to display some rare stuffed bird – and that was contained in a wooden cabinet pillared and hand-carved with the heads of little beasts.

  ‘Well, Juana unlocked the cabinet, lifted the glass case and put the Punchao back, expecting it to stand up,’ he went on. ‘But it would not; it fell flat. It had no base to stand on. She looked to me for help and the supposed masculine skill with metals and gravity. I couldn’t see how the hell it ever did stand up, and told her to try to remember exactly how it had been when she took it away. She hadn’t seen that there was any problem. Now that she thought about it, she believed it stood on two lower rays of the sun. That was impossible. The rays were not thick enough and their points were fine. I supposed that it had somehow been held upright by the glass case and I looked for a hole in the side or back of the Punchao where some tiny support could have been. No sign. Then a protrusion or a hole in the base where it had stood? I asked Juana if she was sure that it was upright and was answered by a mother-in-law’s standard look of contempt.

  ‘I ran my fingers over the base to feel for any sort of support which eyes had failed to see. Nothing. Then, as a wild theory, a magnet in the wooden cabinet? But a magnet wouldn’t work on gold. By God, I began to think that the Punchao still had some mystical power until I remembered that it was only a model of the original. Well, we closed the wooden cabinet, leaving the Punchao on the floor of the inner glass case, and locked the door of the office. I explained to the sentry that Juana’s wails were due to anxiety for her gallant husband.’

  Well, if Hector couldn’t find the solution it was unlikely that I could; in their desperation, however, they looked for advice from Hawkins, the Government Analyst or Hawkins, the accomplished thief. I suggested that the only course was for Juana to admit that she had longed to take a close look at the Punchao – just curiosity which killed the cat – had taken it in her hands and couldn’t put it back as it was. Would darling Cayetano tell her how it stood upright? Innocent enough story which would also account for her fingerprints if he wanted them taken.

  ‘What about yours and Carlota’s?’ Hector said to me.

  ‘If you or Doña Juana have recovered enough to warn me when he is thinking of calling in an expert from the police, I shall be over the frontier and you won’t see me for dust.’

  ‘Which frontier? You’ll need a mule for most of them.’

  ‘Kindly leave me one tied up ready in the hotel patio.’

  I said the usual exaggerated farewells to Juana and took the official car to my hotel, and much needed sleep.

  In the morning I was awakened by the rumble of tanks and troop carriers down the main street and a scatter of cheers. The President had returned from his latest skirmish against democrats for the sake of democracy. I reckoned that I had better lie low and cultivate Hector’s discreet neutrality. At any rate, one mission had been accomplished. The Punchao was back in time with never a sign of its short visit to London.

  Hector turned up in the blessed cool of the evening, while I was wondering if Heredia, like Marlborough, had jumped straight into the matrimonial bed without even taking his boots off. Far from it! Hector told me that his first visit had been to his office, from which he had emerged flaming furious. Juana stammered out her story, using every trick of her cinematic youth, finally falling on her knees in tears and begging his forgiveness. Such abject penitence was pretty rare, Hector gathered, and so all the more satisfactory. The President was completely mollified and took her into his office to show her how the damned thing worked.

  A highly skilled watchmaker had been employed by Heredia to work on the Punchao without affecting the perfection of its ornament. The object was to enable the designers of the new state emblem to study the effect whether vertical or horizontal. To make it stand up you had to slide one of the little flashing suns; that controlled a tiny watch battery which dropped a length of fine wire to form a third leg to the two lower rays. If the Punchao was lifted the wire automatically returned to its coil. Anyone but the guilty Juana would have had the sense to wonder, when she removed it, how it had ever stood up.

  But it would not stand up now. I must have damaged the very delicate machinery in my agitated passage from the public lavatory to another. So Heredia had ordered a car, a driver and a couple of armed guards and sent the Punchao round to the watchmaker for examina­tion and repair.

  Hector stayed on to have the hotel dinner with me, for Juana had arranged a tête-à-tête supper with the returning hero. We sat late, and during our third bottle I thought I heard the distant crackle of machine-gun-fire; so did other guests who buried their noses in their plates. Hector was not particularly curious, saying that he supposed it was the Retadores at it again, trying some futile stroke of terrorism to show the President that his recent consignment of American arms was not so effective in the city as it had been in the mountains.

  In the morning, I looked out of my bedroom window and observed two police vans cruising slowly down the street. At intervals they would stop and interrogate individuals, especially if they showed any sign of wanting to escape. Some were thrown roughly into the vans; to judge by their clothing, they were all poor or down from the villages. I asked at the desk what the reason was for all this activity and was told that when one of the presidential cars had entered a narrow street in the old town the night before it had been blasted by a sudden burst of gun-fire. The driver and two guards had been killed outright while the workshop of a watchmaker had been sacked and the proprietor shot. The attackers had escaped on foot and were believed to have reached a car outside the city. Nobody knew why the watchmaker had been singled out. The neighbours and the local tavernas swore that, like most devoted craftsmen, he had no political opinions at all.

  When I had finished breakfast I was approached by a sergeant of police who asked if I was Don Edmondo Hawkins, and politely invited me to accompany him. It was a grim spot to which he took me: an office in the headquarters of the civil police, whitewashed and sound-proofed. An imposing civilian sat at a desk with two chairs opposite. That upon which I was ordered to sit had a bloodstain on the back, perhaps deliberately left uncleaned.

  ‘You are a friend of the President’s son-in-law, are you not?’ he began. ‘Where did you first meet him?’

  A nasty one, that! Hector must have been asked that question too and I could not know what he had replied.

  ‘At some conference at the British Museum, I believe it was,’ I answered cautiously.

  ‘La Presidenta states that after your arrival you paid a short visit to her at the palace.’

  ‘That is correct. We had been fellow travellers for so long, and it was at her invitation.’

  ‘She left you alone in her apartment for some time?’

  ‘Yes. She had some urgent business with her son-in-law. To telephone Doña Carlota perhaps.’

  ‘When she returned, did she appear agitated?’

  ‘Not agitated. One might say puzzled. But I left very soon afterwards.’

  Damn the woman! What impulsive lie had she produced? I began to see why I was being questioned. But I could not have carried the news that the Punchao was to be returned to the watchm
aker because she did not then know it herself.

  ‘After President Heredia returned from the punitive expedition did you see Sir Hector?’

  ‘Not till the evening.’

  Hector would have confirmed that, but it was still just possible that I could be the informer.

  ‘What time did you arrive at the hotel?’

  ‘About seven, I think.’

  The hotel, if asked, would confirm that, so it was no good to put the time of arrival later. The Retadores would have had three hours to organise and carry out the raid. But even if Hector had told me that the Punchao was at the watchmakers, how could I have let the Retadores know? I had had no visitors and had not got up from the table to telephone. The principal suspects were Juana or Hector himself and both were untouchable.

  ‘And what business has brought you to Malpelo?’

  ‘I am an archaeologist with an interest in the cultural affinities of the Indians of Central America and, as Don Hector McMurtrie was returning to Malpelo with the Presidenta, he asked me if I would like to accompany him. Of course I jumped at the chance.’

  ‘What do you know of the Punchao del Dia?’

  ‘I am most eager to see it and to judge for myself how closely the model corresponds to the description given by the Conquistadores.’

  ‘Why did Don Hector escort the Presidenta back to Malpelo?’

  ‘Because she was afraid of possible assassination.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘In London, he told me, there is an organised gang of exiles from Malpelo.’

  ‘Their names?’

  ‘He could give them to you if you don’t know them already.’

  ‘Thank you, Don Edmondo. I regret that I must detain you for further questioning, possibly by the President himself. You will be made as comfortable as possible.’

  I asked of what crime I was suspected, and was told with a half-smile that I was suspected of communication with enemies of the state. Obviously, he thought, but dared not say, that the President had a bee in his bonnet.