‘Good heavens no.’
‘Report on what then, Senor Vormell?’
Wormold said, ‘Well, things like…’ But he hadn’t the faintest idea on what subjects Lopez was capable of reporting. He remembered only a few points in the long questionnaire and none of them seemed suitable, ‘Possible Communist infiltration in the armed forces. Actual figures of sugar-and tobacco-production last year.’ Of course there were the contents of waste-paper baskets in the offices where Lopez serviced the cleaners, but surely even Hawthorne was joking when he spoke of the Dreyfus case -if those men ever joked. ‘Like what, Senor?’
Wormold said, ‘I’ll let you know later. G back to the shop now.’
It was the hour of the daiquiri, and in the Wonder Bar Dr Hasselbacher was happy with his second Scotch. ‘You are worrying still, Mr Wormold?’ he said. ‘Yes, I am worrying.’
‘Still the cleaner -the Atomic cleaner?’
‘Not the cleaner.’ He drained his daiquiri and ordered another.
‘Today you are drinking very fast.’
‘Hasselbacher, you’ve never felt the need of money, have you? But then, you have no child.’
‘Before long you will have no child either.’
‘I suppose not.’ The comfort was as cold as the daiquiri. ‘When the time comes, Hasselbacher, I want us both to be away from here. I don’t want Milly woken up by any Captain Segura.’
‘That I can understand.’
‘The other day I was offered money.’
‘Yes?’
‘To get information.’
‘What sort of information?’
‘Secret information.’
Dr Hasselbacher sighed. He said, ‘You are a lucky man, Mr Wormold. That information is always easy to give.’
‘Easy?’
‘If it is secret enough, you alone know it. All you need is a little imagination, Mr Wormold.’
‘They want me to recruit agents. How does one recruit an agent, Hasselbacher?’
‘You could invent them too, Mr Wormold.’
‘You sound as though you had experience.’
‘Medicine is my experience, Mr Wormold. Have you never read the advertisement for secret remedies? A hair tonic confided by the dying Chief of a Red Indian tribe. With a secret remedy you don’t have to print the formula. And there is something about a secret which makes people believe… perhaps a relic of magic. Have you read Sir James Frazer?’
‘Have you heard of a book code?’
‘Don’t tell me too much, Mr Wormold, all the same. Secrecy is not my business I have no child. Please don’t invent me as your agent.’
‘No, I can’t do that. These people don’t like our friendship,
Hasselbacher. They want me to stay away from you. They are tracing you. How do you suppose they trace a man?’
‘I don’t know. Be careful, Mr Wormold. Take their money, but don’t give them anything in return. You are vulnerable to the Seguras. Just lie and keep your freedom. They don’t deserve the truth.’
‘Whom do you mean by they?’
‘Kingdoms, republics, powers.’ He drained his glass. ‘I must go and look at my culture, Mr Wormold.’
‘Is anything happening yet?’
‘Thank goodness, no. As long as nothing happens anything is possible, you agree? It is a pity that a lottery is ever drawn. I lose a hundred and forty thousand dollars a week, and I am a poor man.’
‘You won’t forget Milly’s birthday?’
‘Perhaps the traces will be bad, and you will not want me to come. But remember, as long as you lie you do no harm.’
‘I take their money.’
‘They have no money except what they take from men like you and me.’
He pushed open the half-door and was gone.
Dr Hasselbacher never talked in terms of morality; it was outside the province of a doctor.
Wormold found a list of Country Club members in Milly’s room. He knew where to look for it, between the latest volume of the Horsewoman’s Year Book and a novel called White Mare by Miss ‘Pony’ Traggers. He had joined the Country Club to find suitable agents, and here they all were in double column, over twenty pages of them. His eye caught an Anglo Saxon name -Vincent C. Parkman; perhaps this was Earl’s father. It seemed to Wormold that it was only right to keep the Parkmans in the family.
By the time he sat down to encode he had chosen two other names -an Engineer Cifuentes and a Professor Luis Sanchez. The professor, whoever he was, seemed a reasonable candidate for economic intelligence, the engineer could provide technical information, and Mr Parkman political. With the Tales from Shakespeare open before him (he had chosen for his key passage -‘May that which follows be happy’) he encoded ‘Number 1 of 25 January paragraph A begins I have recruited my assistant and assigned him the symbol 59200/5/1 stop proposed payment fifteen pesos a month stop paragraph B begins please trace the following…’
All this paragraphing seemed to Wormold extravagant of time and money, but Hawthorne had told him it was part of the drill, just as Milly had insisted that all purchases from her shop should be wrapped in paper, even a single glass bead. ‘Paragraph C begins economic report as requested will follow shortly by bag.’
There was nothing to do now but wait for the replies and to prepare the economic report. This troubled him. He had sent Lopez out to buy all the Government papers he could obtain on the sugar and tobacco industries -it was Lopez’ first mission, and each day now he spent hours reading the local papers in order to mark any passage whic1 could suitably be used by the professor or the engineer; it was unlikely that anyone in Kingston or London studied the daily papers of Havana. Even he found a new world in those badly printed pages; perhaps in the past he had depended too much on the New York Times or Herald Tribune for his picture of the world. Round the corner from the Wonder Bar a girl had been stabbed to death; ‘a martyr for love’. Havana was full of martyrs of one kind or another. A man lost a fortune in one night at the Tropicana, climbed on the stage, embraced a coloured singer, then ran his car into the harbour and was drowned.
Another man elaborately strangled himself with a pair of braces. There were miracles too; a virgin wept salt tears and a candle lit before our Lady of Guadalupe burnt inexplicably for one week, from a Friday to a Friday. From this picture of violence and passion and love the victims of Captain Segura were alone excluded -they suffered and died without benefit of Press.
The economic report proved to be a tedious chore, for Wormold had never
learnt to type with more than two fingers or to use the tabulator on his machine. It was necessary to alter the official statistics in case someone in the head office thought to compare the two reports, and sometimes Wormold forgot he had altered a figure. Addition and subtraction were never his strong points. A decimal point got shifted and had to be chased up and down a dozen columns. It was rather like steering a miniature car in a slot machine. After a week he began to worry about the absence of replies. Had Hawthorne smelt a rat? But he was temporarily encouraged by a summons to the Consulate, where the sour clerk handed him a sealed envelope addressed for no reason he could understand to ‘Mr Luke Penny’. Inside the outer envelope was another envelope marked ‘Henry Leadbetter. Civilian Research Services’; a third envelope was inscribed 59200/5 and contained three months’ wages and expenses in Cuban notes. He took them to the bank in Obispo.
‘Office account, Mr Wormold?’
‘No. Personal.’ But he had a sense of guilt as the teller counted; he felt as though he had embezzled the company’s money.
Chapter 2
Ten days passed and no word reached him. He couldn’t even send his economic report until the notional agent who supplied it had been traced and approved. The time arrived for his annual visit to retailers outside Havana, at Matanzas, Cienfuegos, Santa Clara and Santiago. Those towns he was in the habit of visiting by road in his ancient Hillman. Before leaving he sent a cable to Hawthorne. ‘On pretext of visiting sub-agents for vacuums propose to investigate possibilities for recruitment port of Matanzas, industrial centre Santa Clara, naval headquarters Cienfuegos and dissident centre Santiago calculate expenses of journey fifty dollars a day.’ He kissed Milly, made her promise to take no lifts in his absence from Captain Segura, and rattled off for a stirrup-cup in the Wonder Bar with Dr Hasselbacher.