“But tonight-surely it’s a little bit special.”
“The Ambassador’s car will have been found in the upper Paraná. They will be searching every house on the border, and they will have warned them in Encar-naci6n across the river. There will be road blocks on the road to Rosario. The patrols here must have been cut. They need the men elsewhere. And this is the last place they will look for him with the Governor waiting at his house to take him to the airport.”
“I hope you are right.”
For a moment, without meaning to, Doctor Plarr raised his eyes as the car lurched round a turning, and he saw on the pavement a deck chair containing a stout elderly woman whom he knew, as he knew the small open doorway behind her-her name was Seńora Sanchez and she never slept before her last customer had gone home. She was the richest woman in town or so it was believed.
Doctor Plarr said, “What happened about the Governor’s dinner? How long did they wait?” He could imagine the confusion. One couldn’t telephone to a lot of ruins.
“I do not know.”
“Surely you had somebody on the watch?”
“We had enough on our hands.” He was back with the amateurs; it seemed to Doctor Plarr that the plot would have been better written by Saavedra. Ingenuity, if not machismo, was distinctly lacking.
“I heard a plane. Was it the Ambassador’s?”
“If it was, it must have gone back empty.”
“You seem to know very little,” Doctor Plarr said.
“Who is hurt?”
The car drew suddenly and roughly up on the margin of a dirt track. “We get out here,” Aquino said. After Doctor Plarr had left the car he heard it being backed a few yards. He stood still, letting his eyes grow accustomed to the dark, until he was able to see by starlight the kind of place they had brought him to. It was part of the bidonville which lay between the city and the bend of the river. The track was almost as wide as a city street, and he could just see a shack made out of dried mud and old petrol cans hidden among the avocados. As his sight cleared he began to make out other huts standing concealed among the trees, like men in ambush. Aquino led him on. The doctor’s feet sank more than ankle deep in mud. Even a jeep would have to pass slowly here. There would be plenty of warning if the police made a raid. Perhaps after all they were amateurs of some intelligence.
“Is he here?” he asked Aquino.
“Who?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, there are no microphones in the trees. The Ambassador, of course.”
“Yes, he is here all right. But he has not come round after the injection.”
They moved as quickly as they could along the mud track, passing several dark huts. The silence seemed unnatural-not even a child crying. Doctor Plarr paused to recover breath. “These people,” he whispered, “they must have heard your car.”
“They will not talk. They think we are smugglers. Anyway you can imagine-they are no friends to the police.”
Diego led the way down a side turning where the mud was even deeper. It had not rained for two days, but in this barrio of the poor the mud lay permanently until the dry season was well advanced. There was nowhere for the water to drain, and yet, as Doctor Plarr knew well, the inhabitants had to walk as much as a mile in order to find a tap which gave water fit for drinking. The children-he had treated many of them-were big-bellied from protein deficiency. Perhaps he had been many times down this very track-it was indistinguishable from all the others; he had always needed a guide when he visited a patient here. For some reason The Taciturn Heart came back to his mind. To fight for one’s honour with knives over a woman, that belonged to another, an absurdly outdated world, which had ceased to exist except in the romantic imagination of writers like Saavedra. Honor meant nothing to the starving. To them belonged the more serious fight for survival.
“Is that you, Eduardo?” a voice asked.
“Yes, is that you, Léon?”
Somebody held a candle up long enough for him to reach the threshold. Then the door was closed quickly behind him.
In the light of the candle he saw the man whom they still called Father Rivas; Léon looked as thin and immature in his T-shirt and jeans as the boy he had known in the country across the border. His brown eyes were too big for his face, the large ears set almost at right angles to his skull made bun resemble one of the small mongrel dogs which haunted the barrio of the poor. There was the same soft fidelity in the eyes and a vulnerability in the protruding ears. He could have been taken in spite of his age for a shy seminarist.
“You have been a long time, Eduardo,” he complained softly.
“Ask your driver Diego about that.”
“The Ambassador is still in a coma. We had to give him a second injection. He was thrashing around too much.”
“I told you a second shot would be dangerous.”
“Everything is dangerous,” Father Rivas said gently, as though he were in the confessional warning someone against the temptation of proximity.
While Doctor Plarr unpacked his briefcase Father Rivas went on, “He is breathing very heavily.”
“What will you do if he stops breathing altogether?”
“We shall have to change our tactics.”
“How?”
“We shall have to announce he was executed. Revolutionary justice,” he added with an unhappy grin. “Please, I beg you, do all you can.”
“Of course.”
“We do not want him to die,” Father Rivas said. “Our job is to save lives.”
They went into the only other room, in which a bed had been improvised out of a long wooden box-he couldn’t see clearly what kind of a box-with a few blankets spread over it. Doctor Plarr heard the deep uneven breathing of the drugged man, like someone struggling awake from a nightmare. He said, “Bring the light closer.” He bent down and looked closely at the flushed face. For a long moment he couldn’t believe his eyes. Then he laughed from the shock of what he had seen. “Oh Léon,” he said, “you have taken up the wrong profession.”
“What do you mean?”
“You would do better to go back to the Church. You are not made to be a kidnapper.”
“I do not understand. Is he dying?”
Doctor Plarr said, “You needn’t worry, Léon, he’s not going to die, but this isn’t the American Ambassador.”
“Not…”
“This is Charley Fortnum.”
“Who is Charley Fortnum?”
“Our Honorary Consul,” Doctor Plarr said in the same tone of mockery which Doctor Humphries had employed.
“But that is impossible,” Father Rivas exclaimed.
“Charley Fortnum’s veins run with alcohol, not blood. The morphine I gave you would have acted more gently on the Ambassador. The Ambassador is afraid of alcohol. They had to provide Coca-Cola for the dinner tonight. So Charley told me. He will be all right in a little while. Leave him to sleep it off,” but before he had time to leave the room the man on the wooden box opened his eyes. He stared at Doctor Plarr and Doctor Plarr stared back at him. It was as well to know for certain whether he were recognized.
“Take me home,” Fortnum said, “home,” and then his body lurched sideways into a deeper sleep.
“Did he recognize you?” Father Rivas asked.
“How would I know?”
“If he recognized you it would complicate matters.”
Somebody lit a second candle in the outer room, but no one spoke; it was as though they all waited to catch a suggestion in another man’s eyes as to what should be done now. At last Aquino said, “This will not please El Tigre.”
“It’s really rather comic,” Doctor Plarr said, “when you think of it. That must have been the Ambassador’s plane I heard, and he was in it. On the way back to Buenos Aires. I wonder how the Governor’s dinner went without an interpreter.” He looked from one face to another, but no one smiled in return.
There were two men in the room who were unknown to him, and for the first time he noticed a woman who lay asleep on the floor in a dark corner-he had mistaken her for a poncho which someone had dropped. One of them was a Negro with a pockmarked face, the other an Indian who spoke up now. He couldn’t understand the words-they were not Spanish. “What is he saying, Léon?”