I asked the cop on duty who he was. He replied that he was an officer from the Ministry of Marine. Started to interfere with honest seamen they had now! He had been down there three times since the morning on quick visits to inspect the ship’s papers.
‘Can I go on board and talk to him? I’m a skilled fisherman and want a job.’
‘You can, but stay in sight,’ he replied.
I went aboard and touched my forelock to the inspector.
‘Got a job, captain?’
Close to and only because I suspected it, I saw that the beard was false.
‘You are a Spaniard?’ he asked.
I recognised his voice, for I had once listened to it with considerable anxiety.
‘I am an Englishman and we met in London. The Señorita Teresa may have mentioned my name.’
He showed no surprise. That, I think, was his greatest asset as an undercover operator.
‘Are we ready for sea?’ he asked one of his two companions.
‘Nearly.’
‘Nearly is not enough. We have given the game away.’
An armed cutter was just turning across the entrance to the dock.
‘I should not have risked that third inspection,’ he said. ‘Now follow us and do whatever we do,’ he added to me.
The three went ashore, again saluted by the policeman, and strolled casually towards the town.
‘Late as usual. Why can’t this damned country do anything on time?’ the officer complained.
He did not hurry and the other two kept to his pace. It would have been inconceivable for the harbour police to think that the distant shouts were meant to alert them as the inspector and his assistants strolled so casually to a waiting car. They circled around fish vans and into the car-park. Cap, uniform coat and neat beard were swiftly discarded. We were transformed into three respectable, shirt-sleeved civilians plus one dirt-stained labourer – me. The smart naval lieutenant turned out to be Felipe Montes, the polite and dashing polo player who had interrogated me in London. On the face of it, all appeared so simple; but one must not consider the populace of Puerto Santa Maria as law-abiding and ready to expose a criminal. The sympathies of at least half of the labouring classes of the capital were against Heredia and, given any sort of chance, formed an unorganised conspiracy of silence. More they dared not offer.
We stopped and parked in a space left empty, then walked a little way to a line of cars crammed so closely together against the wall that it seemed nearly impossible to extract one without knocking some paint off its neighbour. Felipe put two pads under the knees of his trousers and crawled under a caravan. At the touch of a switch or button, the floor slid back revealing a flight of narrow steps, which led down to what, at first sight, appeared to be the floor of a nightclub.
‘Simple really,’ Felipe explained, switching to his English, faultless except for the accent. ‘It was a nightclub, and when Heredia closed it down we converted it into two dormitories, one for men and another for women. All we have to do is change the caravan which closes the entrance every three or four days. It would make a perfect club for active Retadores if we did not have to take extreme care in leaving or entering. There is always a sentry up top to signal when the coast is clear. And if it isn’t clear, all that can be seen is a chap emerging from doing a job under the bonnet.’
‘Teresa Molinos is here?’
‘No. But safe, I hope. She has told me everything up to handing over the Punchao to you.’
‘And now it is yours if you can get away with it.’
‘That should not be difficult,’ he said. ‘McMurtrie can re-open the excavations.’
‘McMurtrie would hand it straight to Heredia or his wife and take a reward. You must go in force to be sure of capturing it and getting clear.’
‘This fellow, Pepe, knows where it is?’
‘He might guess, but I doubt it. Tell me honestly – after such a defeat have you any chance of overthrowing Heredia?’
‘Not unless one of his generals revolts. And none of them will while success is so uncertain. His army fought well by what you tell me.’
‘Can I see Teresa?’
‘Forgive me if I do not tell you where she is. If Heredia gets his hands on you or her, you will have told him everything you know by the time he lets you die.’
‘Cheerful! Forgive me, but for the same reason I have not told you where the Punchao is – not in McMurtrie’s excavations, I assure you.’
‘But will you lead us to it?’
‘Of course. Then my duty is over.’
‘Well, a bath, clean clothes and then a long night’s rest. Meanwhile I shall call a council of war.’
‘You command here?’
‘Yes. And possibly everywhere. I think our former commander has bolted over the frontier.’
‘You will take the presidency if Heredia is forced to resign?’
‘Not if I can help it. I am not fit for such power. I should get out of hand. You remember doubtless when I turned the Second Murderer on to you. I was as bad as Heredia. Honestly I thanked God when you got away.’
‘And he?’
‘Good as new after a week in hospital patched up.’
Chapter Eight
It was luxury to sleep secure with no necessity to wake every hour and listen, and more luxury still to dream in clean clothes. When I got up – they had been careful to let me sleep – the council of war was over, but a dozen of them remained round the table and very courteously rose to greet me as I walked into the central hall which, I swear, still held the tenuous ghost of the perfumes of the sweating chorus. This council of the revolution let me eat my breakfast in peace and then Felipe Montes said that there was one point which it was essential for a raiding party to know: was the Punchao hidden in the forest or buried in the open?
‘Near the edge of thickest forest,’ I replied, ‘and you will need a light ladder. While you are at work you cannot be seen from anywhere. The danger will be when the party is escaping with the Punchao. I don’t know if there are any posts of Heredistas covering the edge of the forest, but there could be. Sir Hector’s former camp may be under suspicion and the Punchao is only about half a kilometre from there.’
They were so obsessed by the tactics of recovering the Punchao that they had not considered the difficulty of holding it. Back it would go into darkness when it should be flashing its message of peace to all Malpelo. Well, until the Retadores entered the capital in triumph, the Punchao was safer where it was than anywhere else. That moment of triumph was, on the face of it, very far away, for after so crushing a defeat, the struggle would be long until Heredia was overthrown.
I asked if I were entitled to speak to the council and was encouraged to go ahead.
‘Why not leave the Punchao where it is, safe from Heredia?’ I asked. ‘I will tell you where it is hidden, will show it to you if you wish. Then forget it till your last victorious battle. I can imagine it being carried to the palace through the streets of Santa Maria by – well, why not Teresa Molinos?’
‘If we can see it and be sure that it is safe, you could be right,’ Felipe said.
‘But without the Punchao we cannot raise another army,’ one of them objected.
‘Why not? The people are with us and each one of us can raise a force in his own province.’
‘Arms?’
‘We have enough. Look at the raid which won back the Punchao. We only need artillery and we can buy that from the Russians. We shall have no difficulty in persuading them that we are revolting against a dictatorship of the Right.’
‘Let us see the Punchao and then decide!’
They all agreed, but hated the idea of leaving the Punchao in the darkness of the trees with an aged vulture as its only guardian. So did I.
I remained underground in the car-park. Meanwhile, a chosen party slipped out singly or in pairs across the road bridge to Nueva Beria with the usual filthy and indecipherable papers. I came last with Felipe, both stinking
of cheap spirits and incontinence. The police post was only too glad to let us through.
The country between Hector’s first camp and the edge of the forest we found to be loosely patrolled by the army. At one point the beat of the piquet appeared to pass within a hundred yards of Donna’s old den, but they had no interest in the Punchao, only in the approaches to Nueva Beria. Heredia’s intelligence could give him only one certainty: that the Punchao had vanished from the battlefield and was either with me or still with Teresa.
That thought led me to another. I appreciated the extreme security with which Felipe had surrounded her, but now I held the whip hand.
‘Before I show you the Punchao,’ I said, ‘you must tell me where Teresa Molinos is.’
‘Man, I do not want to put you both in danger.’
‘But there is no reason why, if I am captured, it should lead to her.’
‘I do not think, dear comrade, that as a fortunate Englishman you have any experience of torture.’
‘As you will, then, but give me your word of honour that she is as safe as she can be.’
‘I give you my word of honour. She is the treasure of the Retadores and every one of us would willingly die in her service.’
It was not that somewhat exaggerated Latin rhetoric which impressed me but his fear that I might break under torture. He could be right. I had no means of telling.
‘Then come with me!’
They had not brought the ladder. It could have meant too much explanation to the police post on the bridge. So remembering my escape on Richmond Green I asked the tallest of them to support himself against the tree trunk while I clambered on to his shoulders, and then up by way of the first little branch. Even so, access to the nest was a good deal safer than my former monkey act and I brought down the Punchao still wrapped among dead leaves which showed flashes of bright gold set in the green and black.
How the devil I was to get it to the ground intact was a puzzle, for I had nothing now in which I could wrap it and my hands were fully occupied. I solved the problem by taking off all my clothes and making a rope of them; once on the ground it seemed to me curiously right that I should be stark naked: the priest’s tribute to the sacred symbol. My companions remained oddly silent, and I suspect that they too felt something of the sort.
The question now was whether to put it back in the charge of the vulture or to take it with us. I was in favour of taking it with us since twigs and leaves were no longer as secure as they had been, and there were double the number of footprints around the tree. So the Punchao, now again a wanderer, returned to the vagabond home upon my chest. Where else were we to put it? The security of the car-park could not be trusted. Any hiding place in the trees was desperately uncertain. A safe house was the only answer – not impossible, Felipe thought, but the risks of transport, of police searches, of accident were too dangerous. Donna’s ‘small estate’ was close by, but as soon as there were any indication that it might have contained the Punchao as well as the guard dog, it would be stripped above and below the surface.
So we started on our way back to get clear of the vital area without as yet any clear idea of where we were bound. It was always the frontier which attracted us, in spite of the risk that our neighbours across the border might return the Punchao to Heredia as state property.
Dreams, all dreams! Any competent detective would be able to tell from the tracks that something had been moved into or out of the tree and that six men had been engaged. To this day I don’t know what happened. The police on the bridge must have had second thoughts about the six peasants who came across separately instead of rolling over as one single body of noisy drunks and passed on the advice to detain and question any of these who had not yet reached his stated home. Again we had underrated Heredia’s secret police.
The first sign that all was not well was that the piquet had been increased to three men and had been moved to the edge of the forest where they were examining the footprints on the ground. We got away in the twilight by circling Donna’s former paddock and on to the well-beaten track to Ramales. That wretched village had to be avoided so we aimed for the bridge over which the all-conquering tanks had come. There were a couple of sentries on that too, posing still another question: Did the Civil Guard know that they were on the track of the Punchao or not? I thought they did not; they were still after stragglers from the defeated Retadores. I was wrong.
It was neither stragglers nor the Punchao they were after. It was me. I was known to have got away from Ramales with the Punchao and Teresa. The chap whose importunate bowels had fooled the guard on the bridge at Puerto Santa Maria was probably me. And there was some evidence that I had fallen in with the equally dangerous Felipe Montes.
Felipe and I cleared out of the immediate district with the Punchao, leaving the other four to find their own way to the car-park or the frontier. I thought of taking refuge with the curandera but that would have put both Pepe and her at risk. The only other place I knew where we could rest in peace and discuss future plans was the old cave on the way to Ramales.
Very cautiously, we approached it with Felipe leading. He had just time to scream half a warning when there was a blinding flash of light from the interior and he dropped in a hale of fire. To go back to the entrance was certain death so I dived for the narrow passage at the back of the cave where we had stabled the horse and never explored more deeply.
As the light was still focused on Felipe’s shattered body I had a fraction of a second to get behind the remains of a smooth, upright boulder beyond which the passage carried on. Flakes and chips of stone formed a screen to my left but none of them struck me for I was protected from the line of fire. One of my assailants walked forward to pick up my body and received two rounds of my machine-pistol at close range. In their astonishment at anybody being still alive in the passage they ceased fire for a moment which gave me time – so far as time existed at all – to extend my right arm and shoot out their light. Another score for my African Father of his Country; he may have turned me into a thief, but he did give me an education in self-defence. My resentment of his treatment of me faded away for good.
Before they could plaster the darkness from a spare battery, I found that I had splashed into a pool and was behind a rock fall from the roof. Beyond it was a narrow strip of grey – well, optimism could almost call it grey. I splashed towards it and saw the vague outline of a tree. Deciding that I was justifiably at war I waited for them, bagged at least two and shot out their light again. They left the tunnel after that, or perhaps there were no more of them.
I found myself on the hillside faintly lit by a quarter-moon. The golden chain of the Punchao was remarkably strong, hanging round my neck like an insistent, importunate friend whom you wish was at the bottom of the sea but cannot shake off. There on the grassy slope above the peacefully running streamlet I took it off. It looked at me even in that ghostly light through its golden disks, claiming to be immortal.
‘You wouldn’t bloody well have been immortal if I had not been lying on you,’ I said aloud.
‘And if my cousin the moon had not helped us both,’ it seemed to answer.
I put it back with grudging thanks and stood up to have a look round the hillside. Below me all was black. Ahead of me, the silver stream had trickled along its miniature valley until it formed a pool which overflowed when the water was high enough. The only possible route to follow was back towards its source which must lie in the tableland high above Ramales. But then a better idea occurred to me: to follow the stream down in the darkness to its junction with the river, which should not be far from the bridge over which the tanks had launched their surprise attack. Or why not march even further and put the Punchao back in a home which it knew, behind the veil of white water at the fall to the sea? Easy to find. And if I were no longer available Teresa would know the exact spot – if, that is, Teresa’s refuge could be known.
So dawn discovered us – me and the Punchao – well to the sout
h of Ramales and nearly half-way to the beach where we had hidden from the Heredistas behind the waterfall. The forest was now cut from the tracks of the two armies moving up to the northern frontier and progress could be fast. It was most unlikely that the search for the Punchao would be directed at the fall when Heredia knew that it had been present at the main battle and the mutiny.
‘You’ll be pretty comfortable there,’ I told the Punchao.
I had got into the habit of talking to it as the most important member of the party. I think the discharge of so many firearms in a closed space had affected my hearing and, slightly, my reason.
I need not go into all the narrow escapes and mistaken paths which accounted for three full days and nights until I heard the moaning of the sea followed by many anxious hours of pure boy-scouting while I explored the two headlands which surrounded the beach to make sure that there would be no woman and child still searching for their beloved dead. When I was satisfied that I was alone, I crept under the waterfall and replaced the Punchao in its former hole, covering it with gravel.
And now for Teresa. That she was not already over the frontier was certain, for there would be then no reason for the secrecy of her message; nor was she in the capital – fairly safe if she was still dressed as a boy and among friends who could be trusted. I could not envisage Teresa bearing inaction with patience. It would be useless to cage her in a position bounded by nothingness from breakfast to bed. On the other hand, she was not one for the forest and a tent or sleeping bag unless it was in some way a command post.
Somewhere in remote country there must be the nucleus of a future government and she had been trusting to Felipe to put me in touch with it; the message of ‘polo’ was meant to give me a hint. It did not. Some of the temporary inhabitants of the car-park would undoubtedly be Felipe’s collaborators, but if he would not answer questions they certainly would not. Polo. The message was too vague for me to understand. Perhaps I might if I knew more of Malpelo and its landowners who appeared to be lying low in their estates or safely abroad in Paris.
Face to the Sun Page 11
