The Honorary Consul (14 page)

       His secretary was a pretty young woman called Ana. She was dauntingly efficient and the daughter of an influential official in the public health department. Doctor Plarr sometimes wondered why he had never been tempted to make love to her. Perhaps he hesitated because of the white starched uniform which she had adopted of her own wish—it would creak or crackle if one touched her: she might have been connected to a burglar alarm. Or perhaps it was the importance of her father, or her piety, real or apparent, which deterred him. She always wore a small gold cross round her neck, and once, when he had been driving through the square by the cathedral, he had seen her emerge with her family from Sunday Mass carrying a missal bound in white vellum—it might have been a first Communion present, for it closely resembled the sugar almonds which are distributed on such occasions.

       The evening when Léon and Aquino came to see him, he had dealt with all the other patients before it became the turn of the two strangers. He had not remembered them because there were always new faces waiting his attention. Patience and patients were words closely allied. His secretary came with a crackle to his side and put a slip of paper on the desk. "They want to see you together," she said. He put back on the shelf a medical book he had been consulting in front of a patient—for some reason patients gained confidence if they could see a colored picture, an aspect of human psychology which American publishers knew well. When he looked back the two men were standing side by side in front of his desk. The smaller, who had protruding ears, said, "It is Eduardo surely?"

       "Léon," Plarr exclaimed, "it is Léon, Léon Rivas?" They embraced with a certain shyness. Plarr asked, "How many years...? I haven't heard from you since you sent me that Ordination card. I was sorry I could not come to the ceremony—it would have been unsafe for me."

       "That is all over anyway."

       "Why? Have they thrown you out?"

       "I am married for one thing. The Archbishop did not like that."

       Doctor Plarr hesitated.

       Léon Rivas said, "I am very lucky. She is a fine woman."

       "Congratulations. Who in all Paraguay did you find willing to celebrate the marriage?"

       "We made our vows to each other. You know a priest at a marriage is never more than a witness. In an emergency... this was an emergency."

       "I had forgotten things were so easy."

       "Oh, I can assure you not so easy. It needs a lot of thought. That sort of marriage is more irrevocable than in a church. Don't you recognize my friend?"

       "No... I don't think so... no..." Doctor Plarr tried to strip away the thin beard and identify some schoolboy face which he might have known years ago in Asunción.

       "Aquino."

       "Aquino? Why of course it's Aquino." Another embrace: it was like a military ceremony, a kiss on the cheek and a decoration awarded for a dead past in a devastated land. He asked, "What are you doing now? You were going to be a writer, weren't you? Are you a writer?"

       "There are no writers left in Paraguay."

       "We saw your name on a parcel in Gruber's shop," Léon said.

       "So he told me, but I thought you were police agents from over there."

       "Why? Are you watched?"

       "I don't think so."

       "We have come from over there."

       "Are you in trouble?"

       "Aquino has been in prison," Léon said.

       "They let you out?"

       "The authorities did not exactly invite me to go," Aquino said.

       "We were lucky," León explained. "They were transferring him from one police station to another, there was a little shooting, but the only man who was killed was the policeman we were going to pay. He was shot by his own side, by accident. We had given him only half the money in advance, so we got Aquino cheap."

       "Are you going to settle here?"

       "Not settle," Léon said. "We are here to do a job. Afterward we shall go back."

       "You are not patients then?"

       "No, we are not patients."

       Doctor Plarr appreciated the dangers of a frontier. He got up and opened the door. His secretary was standing beside the filing cabinet in the outer office. She inserted a card here, a card there. Her cross swung to and fro as she moved, like a priest's censer. He closed the door. He said, "You know, Léon, I'm not interested in politics. Only medicine. I am not like my father."

       "Why are you here and not in Buenos Aires?"

       "I was not doing very well in Buenos Aires."

       "We thought you might want to know what had happened to your father."

       "Do you know?"

       "I think we may soon be in a position to find out."

       Doctor Plarr said, "I had better make notes about your condition. I'll put down low blood pressure for you, Léon, a suspicion of anemia... Aquino—perhaps your gall bladder... I will put you down for x-rays. You understand my secretary will expect to see what diagnosis I make."

       "We believe your father may be alive still," Léon said. "So naturally we thought of you..."

       There was a knock on the door and the secretary came in. She said, "I have finished all the cards. If you would let me go now..."

       "A lover waiting?"

       She said, "Today is Saturday," as though that ought to explain everything.

       "I know that."

       "I want to go to Confession."

       "Oh," Doctor Plarr said, "of course, I am sorry, Ana. I forgot. Of course you must go." His lack of desire for her irritated him, so he deliberately found an occasion to vex her. "Pray for me," he said.

       She ignored his flippancy. "If you will leave those two cards on my desk when you have finished..." Her dress crepitated, as she went out, like a nocturnal insect.

       Doctor Plarr said, "I doubt if her Confession will take very long."

       "Those who have nothing to confess always take the longest," León Rivas said. "They want to please the priest and give him something to do. A murderer has only one thing on his mind, so he forgets all the rest—perhaps worse things. One can deal with him very quickly."

       "You still talk like a priest, Léon. What made you marry?"

       "I married when I lost faith. A man must have something to guard."

       "I can't imagine you without your faith."

       "I only mean my faith in the Church. Or in what they have made of it. Of course I know one day things may be better. But I was ordained when John was Pope. I am not patient enough to wait for another John."

       "You were going to be an 'abogado' before you became a priest. What are you now?"

       "A criminal," Léon said.

       "You are joking."

       "No. That is why I have come to you. We need your help."

       "To rob a bank?" Doctor Plarr asked. He couldn't take Léon seriously, when he looked at those familiar protruding ears and remembered so much...

       "To rob an Embassy—you might call it that."

       "But I'm no criminal, Léon." He added deliberately, "Except for an abortion or two," to see if the priestly eyes would flinch a little, but they stared back at him with indifference.

       "In a wrong society," Léon Rivas said, "the criminals are the honest men." The phrase came a bit too glibly. It was probably a well-known quotation. Doctor Plarr remembered how first there had been the law books Léon studied—he had once explained to him the meaning of tort. Then there had been ail the works of theology—Léon was able to make even the Trinity seem plausible by a sort of higher mathematics. He supposed there must be other primers to read in the new life. Perhaps he was quoting Marx.

       "The new American Ambassador," Léon said, "is planning to visit the north in November. You have contacts here, Eduardo. All we need are the exact details of his program."

       "I'm not going to be an accomplice in murder, Léon."

       "There will be no murder. A murder would be of very little use to us. Aquino, tell him about the treatment they gave you."

       "It was simple," Aquino said. "Not at all up-to-date. Nothing electric. Like the 'conquistadores' they managed with a knife..."

       Doctor Plarr listened with nausea. He had been present at many unpleasant deaths which had affected him less. In those cases there had been something to do, some means of helping in however small a degree. He felt sickness at this narrative in the past tense, just as years ago, when he was a young student, he had been upset by the dissection of a cadaver for educational purposes. When it came to a living body there was always curiosity and hope. He asked, "And you didn't talk?"

       "Of course I talked," Aquino saidi "They have it all in the files now. The counterinsurgency section of the CIA was pleased with me. Two of their agents were there, and they gave me three packets of Lucky Strike. A packet for each man I had betrayed."

       "Show him your hand, Aquino," Léon said.

       Aquino laid his right hand on the desk like a patient seeking advice. Three fingers were missing: the hand without them looked like something drawn up in a fish net from the river where eels were active. Aquino said, "That was why I began to write poetry. Verse was less tiring than prose with only a left hand. I could learn it by heart. I was allowed a visitor every three months (that was another reward they gave me) and I would recite her the verses I had made."

       "They were good verses," Léon said, "for a beginner. A kind of Purgatorio in 'villancico'."

       "How many of you are there?" Doctor Plarr asked.

       "A dozen of us crossed the border, not counting El Tigre. He was already in Argentina."

       "Who is El Tigre?"

       "The one who gives the orders. We call him that, but it is a term of affection. He likes to wear striped shirts."

       "The scheme sounds mad, León."

       "It has been done before."

       "Why kidnap the American Ambassador here instead of the one you have in Asunci6n?"

       "That was our first plan. But the General takes great precautions. Here, you must know it yourself, they have much less fear of guerrillas since the failure in Salta."

       "All the same you are in a foreign country."

       "South America is pur country, Eduardo. Not Paraguay. Not Argentina. You know what Che said, 'The whole continent is my country.' What are you? English or South American?"

       Doctor Plarr remembered the question, but he still could not answer it as he drove into the city past the white Gothic prison which always reminded him of a sugar decoration for a wedding cake. He told himself that Léon Rivas was a priest, and not a murderer. And Aquino? Aquino was a poet. It would have been easier to discount the danger to Charley Fortnum if he had never seen him lying unconscious on a box, a box so oddly shaped that it might have been a coffin.

3

Charley Fortnum woke with the worst head he could ever remember having. His eyes were aching and his vision was blurred. He whispered, "Clara," putting out his hand to touch her side, but all he touched was a mud wall. Then an image came to his mind of Doctor Plarr standing over him during the night with an electric torch. The doctor had told him some implausible story of an accident.

       It was daylight now. The sunlight seeped across the floor under the door of the next room, and he could tell, even through his bruised eyes, that this was no hospital. Nor was the hard box on which he lay a hospital bed. He swung his legs over the side and tried to stand up. He was giddy and nearly fell. Clutching the side of the box, he saw that he had been lying all night upon a coffin. It gave him, as he would have put it, a nasty turn.

       "Ted?" he called. He didn't associate Doctor Plarr with practical jokes, but there had to be some sort of explanation, and he was anxious to be back with Clara. Clara would be frightened, Clara wouldn't know what to do. Why, she was afraid even to use the telephone. "Ted?" he called again in a dry croak. Whisky had never treated him like this before, not even the local brand. Whom the bloody hell had he been drinking with and where? Mason, he told himself, you've got to pull yourself together. It was always to Mason he attributed his worst errors and his worst failings. In his boyhood when he still practiced confession it was always Mason who knelt in the box and muttered abstract phrases concerning sins against purity, though it was Charley Fortnum who would leave the box, his face ashine with beneficence after Mason's absolution. "Mason, Mason," he whispered now, "you snotty little beast, Mason, what were you up to last night?" He knew that when he exceeded the proper measure he was apt to forget things, but never before had he forgotten to quite this extent... He took a stumbling step toward the door and for the third time called out to Doctor Plarr.

       The door was pushed open and a stranger stood there waving a sub-machine gun at him. He had the narrow eyes and jet black hair of an Indian and he shouted at Fortnum in Guaraní. Fortnum, in spite of his father's angry insistence, had never learned more than a few words of Guaraní, but it was clear enough that the man was telling him to get back onto the so-called bed. "All right, all right," Fortnum said, speaking English so that the man would no more understand him than he understood Guaraní. "Keep your shirt on, old man." He sat down on the coffin and said, "Piss off," with a sense of relief.

       Another stranger in blue jeans, naked to the waist, came in and ordered the Indian away. He carried a cup of coffee. The coffee smelled like home, and Charley Fortnum was a little comforted. The man had protruding ears and for a moment Charley was reminded of a boy at school whom Mason had unmercifully teased, though Fortnum repented afterward and shared a bar of chocolate with the victim. This memory gave him-a sense of reassurance. He asked, "Where am I?"