Again a file drawer was noisily closed. ‘Ethel,’ Miss Jenkinson said, ‘unless you can relieve your feelings more silently, I shall return you to D.3.’ Hawthorne went thoughtfully away; he had the impression that Miss Jenkinson with considerable agility had sold him something she didn’t herself believe in a gold brick or a small dog -bitch, rather.
Wormold came away from the Consulate Department carrying a cable in his breast-pocket. It had been shovelled rudely at him, and when he tried to speak he had been checked. ‘We don’t want to know anything about it. A temporary arrangement. The sooner it’s over the better we shall be pleased.’ ‘Mr Hawthorne said..
‘We don’t know any Mr Hawthorne. Please bear that in mind. Nobody of the name is employed here. Good morning.’
He walked home. The long city lay spread along the open Atlantic; waves broke over the Avenida de Maceo and misted the windscreens of cars. The pink, grey, yellow pillars of what had once been the aristocratic quarter were eroded like rocks; an ancient coat of arms, smudged and featureless, was set over the doorway of a shabby hotel, and the shutters of a nightclub were varnished in bright crude colours to protect them from the wet and salt of the sea. In the west the steel skyscrapers of the new town rose higher than lighthouses into the clear February sky. It was a city to visit, not a city to live in, but it was the city where Wormold had first fallen in love and he was held to it as though to the scene of a disaster. Time gives poetry to a battlefield, and perhaps Milly resembled a little the flower on an old rampart where an attack had been repulsed with heavy loss many years ago. Women passed him in the street marked on the forehead with ashes as though they had come up into the sunlight from underground. He remembered that it was Ash Wednesday. In spite of the school-holiday Milly was not at home when he reached the house perhaps she was still at Mass or perhaps she was away riding at the Country Club. Lopez was demonstrating the Turbo Suction Cleaner to a priest’s housekeeper who had rejected the Atomic Pile. Wormold’s worst fears about the new model had been justified, for he had not succeeded in selling a single specimen. He went upstairs and opened the telegram; it was addressed to a department in the British Consulate, and the figures which followed had an ugly look like the lottery tickets that remained unsold on the last day of a draw.
There was 2674 and then a string of five-figure numerals: 42811 79145 72312
59200 80947 62533 10605 and so on. It was his first telegram and he noticed that
it was addressed from London. He was not even certain (so long ago his lesson
seemed) that he could decode it, but he recognized a single group, 59200, which had an abrupt and monitory appearance as though Hawthorne that moment had come accusingly up the stairs. Gloomily he took down Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare how he had always detested Elia and the essay on Roast Pork. The first group of figures, he remembered, indicated the page, the line and the word with which the coding began. ‘Dionysia, the wicked wife of Cleon,’ he read, ‘met with an end proportionable to her deserts.’ He began to decode from ‘deserts’. To his surprise something really did emerge. It was rather as though some strange inherited parrot had begun to speak. ‘No .1 of 24 January following from 59200 begin paragraph A.’
After working for three-quarters of an hour adding and subtracting, he had decoded the whole message apart from the final paragraph where something had gone wrong either with himself or 59200, or perhaps with Charles Lamb. ‘Following from 59200 begin paragraph A nearly a month since membership Country Club approved and no repeat no information concerning proposed sub-agents yet received stop trust you are not repeat not recruiting any sub-agents before having them properly traced stop begin paragraph B economic and political report on lines of questionnaire left with you should be despatched forthwith to 59200 stop begin paragraph C cursed galloon must be forwarded kingston primary tubercular message ends.’
The last paragraph had an effect of angry incoherence which worried Wormold. For the first time it occurred to him that in their eyes -whoever they were he had taken money and given nothing in return. This troubled him. It had seemed to him till then that he had been the recipient of an eccentric gift which had enabled Milly to ride at the Country Club and himself to order from England a few books he had coveted. The rest of the money was now on deposit in the bank; he half believed that some day he might be in a position to return it to Hawthorne.
He thought: I must do something, give them some names to trace, recruit an agent, keep them happy. He remembered how Milly used to play at shops and give him her pocket money for imaginary purchases. One had to play the child’s game, but sooner or later Milly always required her money back. He wondered how one recruited an agent. It was difficult for him to remember exactly how Hawthorne had recruited him except that the whole affair had begun in a lavatory, but surely that was not an essential feature. He decided to begin with a reasonably easy case.
‘You called me, Senor Vormell.’ For some reason the name Wormold was quite beyond Lopez’ power of pronunciation, but as he seemed unable to settle on a satisfactory substitute, it was seldom that Wormold went by the same name twice.
‘I want to talk to you, Lopez.’
‘Si, Senor Vomell.’
Wormold said, ‘You’ve been with me a great many years now. We trust each other.’
Lopez expressed the completeness of his trust with a gesture towards the heart.
‘How would you like to earn a little more money each month?’ ‘Why, naturally… I was going to speak to you myself, Senor Vommel. I have a child coming. Perhaps twenty pesos?’
‘This has nothing to do with the firm. Trade is too bad, Lopez. This will be confidential work, for me personally, you understand.’ ‘Ah yes, Senor. Personal services I understand. You can trust me. I am discreet. Of course I will say nothing to the Senorita.’
‘I think perhaps you don’t understand.’
‘When a man reaches a certain age,’ Lopez said, ‘he no longer wishes to search for a woman himself, he wishes to rest from trouble. He wishes to command, “Tonight yes, tomorrow night no”. To give his directions to someone he trusts..
‘I don’t mean anything of the kind. What I was trying to say well, it had nothing to do…’
‘You do not need to be embarrassed in speaking to me, Senor Vemoll, I have been with you many years.’
‘You are making a mistake,’ Wormold said. ‘I had no intention.. ‘I understand that for an Englishman in your position places like the San Francisco are unsuitable. Even the Mamba Club.’
Wormold knew that nothing he could say would check the eloquence of his
assistant, now that he had embarked on the great Havana subject; the sexual
exchange was not only the chief commerce of the city, but the whole raison d’ tre
of a man’s life. One sold sex or one bought it -immaterial which, but it was
never given away.
‘A youth needs variety,’ Lopez said, ‘but so too does a man of a certain age. For the youth it is the curiosity of ignorance, for the old it is the appetite which needs to be refreshed. No one can serve you better than I can, because I have studied you, Senor Vomell. You are not a Cuban: for you the shape of a girl’s bottom is less important than a certain gentleness of behaviour…’ ‘You have misunderstood me completely,’ Wormold said.
‘The Senorita this evening goes to a concert.’
‘How do you know?’
Lopez ignored the question. ‘While she is out, I will bring you a young lady to see. If you don’t like her, I will bring another.’
‘You’ll do nothing of the sort. Those are not the kind of services I want, Lopez. I want… well, I want you to keep your eyes and ears open and report to me…’
‘On the Senorita?’