‘That’s right,’ said Hannie.
Hannie lay on her bunk in her very clean cell, staring mindlessly at the ceiling. She had gone through her trial merely denying her responsibility for the hidden packages. There was no point in defending herself further. The Brazilian government had no tolerance for drug smugglers, and she was given eight years. She did not care. There was nothing she could do except sit in her rather comfortable little cell with its white paint and crucifix and think. It was peaceful in her cell, but she could not do very much thinking. She felt she was going mad.
She had, however, more or less worked out when the plant must have been made. It could have happened while she was out for a walk on the night in Rio when she had met Green. But anyone who had planted the drugs on a total stranger in a Rio hotel would have to reclaim them when the carrier got to the other end, in London. They would have to orchestrate a very ingenious luggage switch at the airport or else rob her later when, for all they knew, she might be met by two brothers in the CID or whisked off to a castle in Scotland. It was too chancy for the sort of drug operators who got the stuff up professionally in little New York-style plastic packets. There was no chance that the cocaine had been planted by a dedicated scientist in the middle of the Mato Grosso. This took the whole thing back to New York, and she knew, logically and instinctively, that the plant had been made there. Her hotel room had been entered while she was out. The man to whom she had delivered Duncan Kyte’s message had the healthy, corrupted, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant appearance of a man with bad connections. It had been done in New York all right, but she could not work out why. And although she tried to blame Duncan Kyte, she knew that there was no reason for a man desperate for the delivery of items which might save his life to complicate matters for the bearer of those goods.
Her lawyer had urged her to make representations to the embassy, to her family, to friends in Britain. But Hannie had broken. She did not care. ‘Your husband?’ the lawyer had said urgently. ‘Surely he will come and help you.’ Hannie felt that she would rather face the electric chair than Adam’s reluctant assistance. She laughed at the lawyer and said, ‘The biggest favour I can do him is go to gaol.’
Now she lay there in her little white room muttering, ‘I went to gaol. I went directly to gaol. I did not pass Go. I did not collect £200.’ So it goes, so it goes, so it goes, she thought to herself. She lay on her bunk, absolutely numb. Under her pillow was a letter she had just received from Duncan Kyte. He was plainly desperate. He told her that he had discovered that the plant specimens were at Heathrow but could not be released without her signature, and he implored her to write a letter authorizing him to collect them. He added that he was making efforts to secure her release, that he would not cancel the post-dated cheques awaiting her at her solicitor’s, but that he must have the plants as soon as possible.
Hannie, on her bunk, thought vaguely that she must write to Heathrow to save Kyte’s life or something, but then she started thinking about the other Kyte, with the blossoms from what she now saw as a poison-plant in his hair. All plants, in this business, she thought to herself and laughed. The fat wardress, the nice one, came in and looked at her strangely. Hannie stopped laughing and tried to seem ordinary. She knew enough to work out that she was all right where she was and that if she behaved too oddly they might take her out of her little room and make her go somewhere else. She did not want to leave the little room, ever. These rooms, she guessed, were where they put the women who were a cut above the others. Judging from the noise below, in the compound where the other women talked or laughed or suddenly started screaming and fighting, there was a rough end of town, even in a gaol, and she was not part of it. Down there were the prostitutes and thieves, the Brazilians. They had noisy quarrels about who had stolen a pair of shoes, or a man. They wept for their children. They pulled each other’s hair. Hannie did not want to have to live with them, or anybody else. She did not want to go to a mental institution either. She wanted to stay where she was.
The only thing she hated was the half-hour exercise each day. Every afternoon, the compound was cleared of its seething crowd of women, and they pulled her out of her little room to go and walk about with the other four women who were too good for the gaol. There was the tall, thin, repressed one she called the Governess, and the young woman with the raven hair and the huge dark eyes, the Beauty. The other two were German girls who wore sneakers and jeans. Hannie called them the Valkyries. There were no particular rules against talking to the others, but Hannie, who felt threatened by the sky, so brilliantly blue above her, stood by the wall as much as possible. Sometimes she made herself walk about the yard a bit or went and stood and looked through the barbed wire to the perimeter beyond. One day she found a tortoiseshell comb on the ground and handed it back to the guard. She hoped there would not be a row later on about which of the other women it belonged to. Sometimes she could not help standing in the yard and weeping, although she did not know why. She seldom cried in her little room. When they took her back, she was comforted by the sound of the door banging and the key turning in the lock. Then she was at peace again and could lie down on her bunk and rest some more. There was another bunk in the room, opposite her own, but she never used it or even sat on it. It was not hers. She kept all her things, such as her toothbrush and her spare dress, on her own side of the cell.
Now she looked around her room and thought that, although she had not wanted to come here before, she was pleased. Later they brought her some food—beans and meat—and she ate a little of it, for she was cunning enough to know that if she ate nothing at all they would take her away for forced feeding or might even make her leave her little room for good. After she had swallowed the food she remembered that she was thirty-four and would be forty-two when she came out of gaol. Then she lay down and dozed. She woke up thinking uneasily about the letter under her pillow. Kyte was stupid.
His letter was like someone nagging at her. He said she should never have risked his plants to try to make extra money by bringing drugs into the country. That was stupid. She had not. Kyte was stupid and so was his brother. She would have had a good rest, she thought, when they released her.
Later the cell was dark. She said into the darkness, ‘Bye, Baby Bunting/Mummy’s gone a-hunting/Gone to get a rabbit skin/To wrap the Baby Bunting in.’ She sang, ‘Bye, Baby Bunting,’ and tears came to her eyes. She brushed them away and said aloud, ‘When Adam delved and Hannie span, who was then the gentleman?’ She laughed and said it a few times more until the thin wardress, the nasty one, came and told her to stop. So she did stop. She lay there having a nice rest and thinking, I’ll feel better when I’m more rested. She was careful not to say this aloud. She went to sleep then, but had bad dreams and woke up screaming.
One day she heard them discussing her outside her door at dawn. She thought they thought she was asleep. They also thought she knew very little Portuguese. That way did not have to talk much to them. One said, ‘She’s getting weaker. We’ll have to inform the Governor.’ The other said, ‘She’ll come round, they always do. She needs a firm hand.’ This was the thin one who did not like Hannie. She thought Hannie was proud. She herself was in love with someone who was not in love with her. She thought Hannie did not know, but she did. Meanwhile Hannie thought of nice things—a field, a tree, a herd of gazelles running, ice skaters dancing, a pattern made by a kaleidoscope. She tried not to dream, for when she did she sometimes dreamed of bad things like puppets coming to life in horrible ways, or spooky houses full of horrors which never quite emerged, or people following her. Once she dreamed she was on a boat on a sea which never moved and where there was no wind. Just occasionally she had good dreams about rivers, or that she was walking along with someone she loved who loved her. But often she dreamed she was being left behind at a station or an airport.
She did not know it, but she had been in gaol for five weeks.
One afternoon when she was taking exercise with the four other
women, a storm broke. The leaden air moved. Wind lashed her. There was thunder. Lightning flashes illuminated the dark compound. Rain began to pour down. Hannie backed along the wall of the prison until she got to the corner. Then she slipped down the wall and sat crouched there with her hands over her ears and her eyes shut. The kind, fat guard led her inside. Once the door was locked she lay down and slept. Later she awoke. The storm had ended, the other women were back in the compound. A terrible fight broke out. Hannie lay there, afraid, with her fingers in her ears. Then there was silence. A woman called, ‘What is it?’ Another called, ‘Rosalia! Your child is dead!’ The air was pierced by a howl, like that of an animal. And then came the wailing of the women, all the women, as if they had all lost a child, as if all their children were dead. It went on and on. The guards tried to stop it halfheartedly but failed. Even they, Hannie thought, could not deny this awful sound. She fell asleep with this noise in her ears.
Now she dreamed of Angelina’s bare feet on the dry track on Beauregard, saw a scramble of half-clad black children outside the shacks on St Colombe. She dreamed of a column of women—mother and daughter and daughter’s daughter, carrying waterpots on their heads through the desert in the Republic of Chad.
She dreamed of the half-Indian woman she had seen as she came into Rio in a taxi, walking between some huts beside her husband, who carried a lidded cardboard box, a little larger than a shoe-box. The woman’s face betrayed nothing, nor did the man’s, but a child tagging along behind them in the dust had been crying. The taxi driver, a cigarette between his lips, said, ‘It could be a dead baby—they go to bury it. Too many children, you see.’ Then, in her dream, as if a camera backtracked, she saw a great vista of the women she had seen. They bent over their crops, hoeing, weeding and planting.
They carried burdens—babies, water, vegetables, piles of laundry. She saw them tending their young, their old, their sick and their dying. She woke with a sense of the everlasting patience of the women, patience wide as the sea, fathomless, without borders or boundaries, patience as old as mankind itself, which has kept children alive and men on their feet for the next hard day and the next since the beginning of human history.
Well, well, Hannie Richards, said a voice in the cell, you never noticed the background to the main event, the big performance, did you? Never noticed all this for what it was, while you waltzed your superstar personality through the landscape, carrying a faked passport, a little well-tooled luggage and a small consignment of this, that and the other? You’ve been like a kind of upper servant at the court of Marie Antoinette, doing nicely on the perks, a bottle of wine here and a golden louis there, while all the time the people producing that wealth were standing about starving in the streets. The voice stopped.
She woke up properly, seeing the ceiling of her cell as if for the first time. The wailing of the women had stopped. They were talking now. Hannie Richards, gaunt, grey, thin as a skeleton, lay on her bunk. Her mind was clear.
She did not notice the sound of feet coming up the corridor outside her cell, nor hear the voices. She was not even particularly aware of her cell door opening.
Then, ‘Hannie,’ said the voice of her fellow-pirate, the tall man who had dragged her down the hillside during the earthquake, who was at the fountain in Rome. ‘Hannie. Your friends have sent me. You’re free now.’
She turned her head and saw the man she knew. A shorter, fat man stood behind him. She recognized the governor of the prison.
‘You are released, Mrs Richards,’ he said in Spanish.
‘Thank you,’ she said. She could not understand what was happening, but she knew something was expected of her. She stood up feeling suddenly dizzy. ‘Who are you?’ she asked the tall man.
‘James Carter’ he said. ‘You don’t know me. Your friends asked me to come and collect you.’
She distantly recognized the old world of evasions, concealed instructions and half truths. He meant she did know him. He meant her to ask no more questions in front of the Governor. He held out her shoulder bag and said, ‘Put your things in here. We can leave straight away. We’re booked on a flight to London in a few hours’ time.’
The old world came back hot and strong. Fumblingly she collected her toothbrush, washing things and a pair of shoes and put them in the bag. She picked up the white dress, black jacket and white hat and handed them to the kind guard, who stood behind the Governor.
Not long afterwards she and James Carter walked out of the prison into bright sunshine. Traffic whizzed by, startling Hannie. He helped her into a car and said, ‘I’ve booked a hotel room. We can go there. You can eat and then rest until it’s time to go to the airport.’
She said, ‘I’d like to go straight to the airport. I don’t mind waiting a long time.’
He gave her a shrewd look and told her, ‘We could go to the cinema. To pass the time.’
‘All right,’ she said.
‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,’ he said. ‘English subtitles—that OK?’
‘Yes,’ she said gravely.
‘You’ll have to wait outside in the cab while I go to the hotel and pick up my luggage,’ he said.
Hannie sat in the corner of the cab watching the busy streets, the street vendors, the avenues of trees. She saw no women, no man with a cardboard box containing a dead baby and no snivelling child dragging behind, but she knew they were there. They were somewhere and always would be.
James Carter got his bag from the hotel while Hannie, the door of the cab slightly ajar, waited outside. She was taking no chances. As the car took off, she became nervous again.
He said to her, ‘Your friends’ names are Julie St Just, Elizabeth Lord and Margaret Wilkinson. These are the tickets for the plane back to London.’ And he showed her two airline tickets.
She must have felt reassured, for she fell asleep for most of the film and almost missed the end, the final shoot-out in Bolivia.
‘At least you’re getting out alive,’ James Carter remarked as they left the cinema. ‘Now it’s time for dinner.’ In the restaurant a band played mechanical Latin American music. The players wore bright costumes. It was early, but a few parties of prosperous diners sat at the tables. Hannie, still in the flowered dress she had been wearing in prison, felt uncomfortable, and said so.
‘You’ll feel better when you’ve had something to eat,’ said James. As she picked up her spoon to eat the soup he had insisted on ordering for her she noticed her own hands. They were very thin and pale. She had not seen herself in the mirror since she left the hotel. ‘I bet I look awful,’ she said to him.
‘I’ve seen you looking better,’ he told her.
‘That was you, then,’ she said, ‘in those other places? St Colombe?’
‘Australia, Italy,’ he said. ‘I get about a lot. I’ve been interested in you for years. Like a groupie, really.’
‘Who are you?’ she asked.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m in the same game as you, in a way. Weapons.’
‘You mean an arms trader?’ Hannie said.
‘I’ve been described as that—in the Daily Mirror. But eat your soup and don’t make faces at me. In any case,’ he said with some regret, ‘I’ve got to face the fact that the game’s over. So you can spare me your criminal-style snobberies, bank robbers looking down on housebreakers, muggers bashing ponces in prison because they despise men who live off women. All that. Anyway I’m thirty-two, and it’s a cut-off point. The fun’s disappearing and the grot’s getting worse. They’re all getting into nukes now. I don’t like it—too indiscriminate.’
‘It can’t have been the playing fields of Eton up to now,’ Hannie said.
‘Come off it,’ he said. ‘Do you know what percentage of weapons are supplied by independent arms traders, these days? About five per cent or less. The rest is one government selling arms to another, for profit or politics or both. And the more sophisticated the technology gets, the more difficult it becomes for the independent operator.
It’s a dying trade, has been since the thirties. The fact of the matter is I’m fascinated by weapons, weapons technology, that sort of thing. But I’m getting too old to continue with my boyhood enthusiasm. And either the clients are looking grimier or I am beginning to see how grimy they are. Five years ago I thought I was selling to gallant patriots—now half of them look like bloodthirsty maniacs. They don’t want guns any more. They’re all itching to get their hands on an H-bomb so they can hold the world to ransom from a suite in a Hilton hotel somewhere.’
How romance dies,’ Hannie said thoughtfully.
He grinned at her. ‘In that area,’ he said, ‘when one door closes, another one opens.’
‘I hope you’re wrong,’ she said.
‘Come on, Hannie Richards,’ he said, ‘nothing’s worse than a man with a hangover who’s sworn off the stuff—not when he goes round and makes a fuss about his auntie’s small dry sherry before dinner. You got burned, that’s all that happened. It’s a miracle, you got away with it for so long.’
‘Yes,’ she said soberly. She stared round the restaurant, looked at the small musicians with their Indio faces, churning out their colourless version of their own music to make a background for the wealthy diners. She studied the heavy male faces at the tables, and the faces of their womenfolk. She stared at their make-up, their clothes, their jewellery. They must be among the most beautiful, the most extravagant, the best-dressed and looked-after women in the world, she thought. They were like queens.
‘A touch of the green monster?’ James asked tastelessly.
Hannie shook her head. ‘Women don’t always look at other women in that way. Sometimes they’re just wondering who they are, not where they got their shoes or if they had a nose job—I had a dream in prison about the women I’ve seen. Poor women.’
Hannie Richards Page 21
