“Told me what, Charley?”
“Doctor Plarr is dead.”
“Yes. Colonel Perez came here. He told me.”
“The doctor was a good friend to you.”
“Yes, Charley. Are you comfortable like that? May I fetch you a pillow?” He thought that after all their love-making and deception it was hard Plarr had not earned a single tear. The Long John had an unfamiliar taste, he had become so accustomed to Argentinian whisky. He began to explain to Clara that it would be best if for the next few weeks he slept alone. In one of the guest rooms. The plaster round his ankle made him restless, he said, and she must sleep well-because of the child. She said yes, of course, she understood. It would be arranged.
Now as he shunted on his crutch away from the cemetery toward the hired car, a voice said to him, “Excuse me, Mr. Fortnum…” It was the young fellow Crichton from the Embassy. He said, “I wondered if I could come out to your camp this afternoon. The Ambassador has asked me… there are certain things he wants me to talk over with you…”
“You can have lunch with us,” Charley Fortnum said. “You will be very welcome,” he added, thinking that anyone, even a man from the Embassy, would help to preserve him from the solitude he would otherwise have to share with Clara.
“I am afraid… I would very much like to… but I have promised Seńora Plarr… and Father Galvao. If I could come about four o’clock. I am catching the evening plane to B A”
When he got back to the camp Charley Fortnum told Clara that he was too tired to eat. He would sleep a bit before Crichton came. Clara made him comfortable-she had been trained to make men comfortable as much as any hospital nurse. He tried not to show that the touch of her hand irritated him when she arranged the pillows. He felt his skin tighten when she kissed his cheek and he wanted to tell her not to trouble. A kiss was worth nothing from someone who was incapable of loving even her lover. And yet, he asked himself, what fault was it of hers? You don’t learn about love from a customer in a brothel. And because it was not her fault he must be careful never to show her what he felt. It would have been a lot simpler, he thought, if she had really loved Plarr. He could so easily picture how it would have been if he had found her heartbroken, the gentle way in which he would have comforted her. Phrases from romantic novels came to his head like “Dear, there is nothing to forgive.” But as he played with the fancy he remembered she had sold herself for a gaudy pair of sunglasses from Gruber’s.
The sun through the jalousies striped the floor of the guest room. One of his father’s hunting prints hung on the wall. A huntsman held a fox above the ravening hounds. He looked at the picture with disgust and turned his face away-he had never killed anything in his life, not even a rat.
The bed was comfortable enough, but after all the coffin with the blankets had not really been very hard-better than the bed in his nursery when he was a child. There was a deep quiet here, broken only by an occasional footstep from the kitchen region or the creak of a chair out on the verandah. There was no radio to announce the latest news, no quarrelling voices from an inner room. To be free, he discovered, was a very lonely thing. He could almost have wished the door to open, to have seen the priest come shyly in, carrying a bottle of Argentine whisky. He had felt an odd kinship with that priest.
There had been no ceremony at the priest’s funeral. He had been shovelled quickly away in unconsecrated ground, and Charley Fortnum resented that. If he had known about it in time he would have stood by the grave and said a few words like Doctor Saavedra, though he could not remember ever having made a speech in his life: all the same he could have found the courage in the heat of his indignation. He would have told them all, “The Father was a good man. I know he didn’t kill Plarr.” But his only audience, he supposed, would have been a couple of gravediggers and the driver of the police truck. He thought: at least I’ll find out where they stowed him and I’ll lay a few flowers there. Then he fell into a deep sleep of exhaustion.
Clara woke him because Crichton had arrived. She found his crutch and helped him on with his dressing gown, and he went out on to the verandah. He lowered himself down beside the dumbwaiter and said, “Have a Scotch.”
“It’s a bit early, isn’t it?” Crichton asked.
“It’s never too early for a drink.”
“Well, a very small one then. I was saying to Mrs. Fortnum what a terribly anxious time she must have had.” He put the glass down on a small table without taking any.
“Cheers,” Charley Fortnum said.
“Cheers.” Crichton took his glass up again with reluctance. Perhaps he had hoped to leave it untouched on the table until the canonical hour. “There are things the Ambassador wanted me to talk over with you, Mr. Fortnum. Of course I needn’t tell you how very, very worried we have all been.”
“I was a bit worried myself,” Charley Fortnum said.
“The Ambassador wants you to know we did everything in our power…”
“Yes. Yes. Of course.”
“Thank God things turned out all right.”
“Not everything. Doctor Plarr’s dead.”
“Yes. I didn’t mean…”
“And the priest too.”
“Well, he deserved what he got. He murdered Plarr.”
“Oh no, he didn’t.”
“You haven’t seen Colonel Perez’s report?”
“Colonel Perez is a bloody liar. It was the Para’s who shot Plarr.”
“There was a post mortem, Mr. Fortnum. They checked the bullets. One in the leg. Two in the head. They were not army bullets.”
“You mean the surgeon of the 9th Brigade checked them. You can tell the Ambassador this, Crichton, from me. I was in the next room when Plarr went out. I heard all that happened. Plarr went out to try to talk to Perez-he thought he might save all our lives. Father Rivas came to me. He said he had agreed to postpone the ultimatum. Then we heard a shot. He said, ‘They have shot Eduardo.’ He ran out.”
“And gave him the coup de grace,” Crichton said.
“Oh no, he didn’t. He left his gun where I was.”
“With his prisoner?”
“It was out of my reach. He had an argument with Aquino in the other room-and with his wife. I heard Aquino say, ‘Kill him first.’ And I heard his reply…”
“Yes?”
“He laughed. I heard him laugh. It surprised me because he wasn’t a man who laughed. A shy sort of giggle sometimes. Not what you’d call a laugh. He said, ‘Aquino, for a priest there are always priorities.’ I don’t know why, but I started to say an ‘Our Father,’ and I’m not a man who prays. I only got as far as ‘thy Kingdom’ when there was another shot. No. He didn’t kill Plarr. He hadn’t even reached him. They carried me past the bodies. They were ten feet apart. I suppose if Perez had been there he would have thought of rearranging them. To make the distance right for a coup de grace. Please tell the Ambassador that”
“Of course I’ll tell him what your theory is.”
“It’s not a theory. The Para’s scored all three deaths-Plarr, the priest and Aquino. It’s what they call good shooting.”
“They saved your life.”
“Oh yes. Or Aquino’s bad aim. You see he had only his left hand. He came nearly up to the coffin I was on before he fired. He said, ‘They’ve shot Leon.’ He was too excited to keep the gun steady, but I don’t suppose he would have missed a second time. Even with his left hand.”
“Why didn’t Perez get your story?”
“He didn’t ask me for it. Plarr said once that Perez always has to think about his career.”
“I’m glad they got Aquino anyway. He was a murderer-or wanted to be.”
“He’d seen his friend shot. You have to remember that. They’d been through a lot together. And he was angry with me. I made friends with him and then I tried to escape. You know he fancied himself as a poet. He used to recite me bits of his poems and I pretended to like them, though they didn’t make much sense to me. Anyway, I’m glad the Para’s were satisfied with three deaths. Those other two-Pablo and Marta-they were only poor people who got caught up in things.”.