He said to Beatrice, ‘I was just leaning forward to switch on the engine. That saved me, I imagine. Of course it was his right to fire back. It was a real duel, but the third shot was mine.’
‘What happened afterwards?’
‘I had time to drive away before I was sick.’
‘Sick?’
‘I suppose if I hadn’t missed the war it would have seemed much less serious a thing killing a man. Poor Carter.’
‘Why should you feel sorry for him?’
‘He was a man. I’d learnt a lot about him. He couldn’t undo a girl’s corset. He was scared of women. He liked his pipe and when he was a boy the pleasure-steamers on the river at home seemed to him like liners. Perhaps he was a romantic. A romantic is usually afraid, isn’t he, in case reality doesn’t come up to expectations. They all expect too much.’
‘And then?’
‘I wiped my prints off the gun and brought it back. Of course Segura will find that two shots have been fired. But I don’t suppose he’ll want to claim the bullets. It would be a little difficult to explain. He was still asleep when I came in. I’m afraid to think what a head he’ll have now. My own is bad enough. But I tried to follow your instructions with the photograph.’ ‘What photograph?’
‘He had a list of foreign agents he was taking to the Chief of Police. I photographed it and put it back in his pocket. I’m glad to feel there’s one real report that I’ve sent before I resign.’
‘You should have waited for me.’
‘How could I? He was going to wake at any moment. But this micro business is tricky.’
‘Why on earth did you make a microphotograph?’
‘Because we can’t trust any courier to Kingston. Carter’s people
whoever they are have copies of the Oriente drawings. That means a double agent somewhere. Perhaps it’s your man who smuggles in the drugs. So I made a microphotograph as you showed me and I stuck it on the back of a stamp and I posted off an assorted batch of five hundred British colonials, the way we arranged for an emergency.’
‘We’ll have to cable them which stamp you’ve stuck it to.’
‘Which stamp?’
‘You don’t expect them to look through five hundred stamps, do you, looking for one black dot.’
‘I hadn’t thought of that. How very awkward.’
‘You must know which stamp..
‘I didn’t think of looking at the front. I think it was a George V, and it was red -or green.’
‘That’s helpful. Do you remember any of the names on the list?’ ‘No. There wasn’t time to read it properly. I know I’m a fool at this game, Beatrice.’
‘No. They are the fools.’
‘I wonder whom we’ll hear from next. Dr Braun… Segura…’
But it was neither of them.
The supercilious clerk from the Consulate appeared in the shop at five o’clock the next afternoon. He stood stiffly among the vacuum cleaners like a disapproving tourist in a museum of phallic objects. He told Wormold that the Ambassador wanted to see him. ‘Will tomorrow morning do?’ He was working on his last report, Carter’s death and his resignation.
‘No, it won’t. He telephoned from his home. You are to go there straight away.’
‘I’m not an employee,’ Wormold said.
‘Aren’t you?’
Wormold drove back to Vedado, to the little white houses and the bougainvilleas of the rich. It seemed a long while since his visit to Professor Sanchez. He passed the house. What quarrels were still in progress behind those doll’s house walls?
He had a sense that everyone in the Ambassador’s home was on the look-out for him and that the hail and the stairs had been carefully cleared of spectators. On the first floor a woman turned her back and shut herself in a room; he thought it was the Ambassadress. Two children peered quickly through the banisters on the second floor and ran off with a click of little heels on the tiled floor. The butler showed him into the drawing-room, which was empty, and closed the door on him stealthily. Through the tall windows he could see a long green lawn and tall sub-tropical trees. Even there somebody was moving rapidly away.
The room was like many Embassy drawing rooms, a mixture of big inherited pieces and small personal objects acquired in previous stations. Wormold thought he could detect a past in Teheran (an odd-shaped pipe, a tile), Athens (an icon or two), but he was momentarily puzzled by an African mask -perhaps Monrovia?
The Ambassador came in, a tall cold man in a Guards tie, with something
about him of what Hawthorne would have liked to be. He said, ‘Sit down, Wormold.
Have a cigarette?’
‘No thank you, sir.’
‘You’ll find that chair more comfortable. Now it’s no use beating about the bush, Wormold. You are in trouble.’
‘Yes.’
‘Of course I know nothing -nothing at all -of what you are doing here.’
‘I sell vacuum cleaners, sir.’
The Ambassador looked at him with undisguised distaste. ‘Vacuum cleaners? I wasn’t referring to them.’ He looked away from Wormold at the Persian pipe, the Greek icon, the Liberian mask. They were like the autobiography in which a man has written for reassurance only of his better days. He said, ‘Yesterday morning Captain Segura came to see me. Mind you, I don’t know how the police got this information, it’s none of my business, but he told me you had been sending a lot of reports home of a misleading character. I don’t know whom you sent them to: that’s none of my business either. He said in fact that you had been drawing money and pretending to have sources of information which simply don’t exist. I thought it my duty to inform the Foreign Office at once. I gather you will be receiving orders to go home and report who to I have no idea, that sort of thing has nothing to do with me.’ Wormold saw two small heads looking out from behind one of the tall trees. He looked at them and they looked at him, he thought sympathetically. He said, ‘Yes, sir?’ ‘I got the impression that Captain Segura considered you were causing a lot of trouble here. I think if you refused to go home you might find yourself in serious trouble with the authorities, and under the circumstances of course I could do nothing to help you. Nothing at all. Captain Segura even suspects you of having forged some kind of document which he says you claim to have found in his possession. The whole subject is distasteful to me, Wormold. I can’t tell you how distasteful it is. The correct sources for information abroad are the embassies. We have our attaches for that purpose. This so-called secret information is a trouble to every ambassador.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I don’t know whether you’ve heard it’s been kept out of the papers but an Englishman was shot the night before last. Captain Segura hinted that he was not unconnected with you.’
‘I met him once at lunch, sir.’
‘You had better go home, Wormold, on the first plane you can manage the sooner the better for me and discuss it with your people -whoever they are.’ ‘Yes sir.’
The R.C.M. plane was due to take off at three-thirty in the morning for Amsterdam by way of Montreal. Wormold had no desire to travel to Kingston, where Hawthorne might have instructions to meet him. The office had been closed with a final cable and Rudy and his suitcase were routed to Jamaica. The codebooks were burnt with the help of the celluloid sheets. Beatrice was to go with Rudy. Lopez was left in charge of the vacuum cleaners. All the personal possessions he valued Wormold got into one crate, which he arranged to send by sea. The horse was sold -to Captain Segura.
Beatrice helped him pack. The last object in the crate was the statue of St Seraphina.
‘Milly must be very unhappy,’ Beatrice said.
‘She’s wonderfully resigned. She says like Sir Humphry Gilbert that God is just as close to her in England as Cuba.’
‘It wasn’t quite what Gilbert said.’
There was a pile of unsecret rubbish left to be burnt.