HONKY IN THE WOODPILE Read online

  But as he reached Trafalgar Square, where he was scheduled to address a mass meeting, Small was shot.

  We knew—we all knew—that the assassin had fired from South Africa House. It overlooks exactly that stretch of roadway which the procession was passing down at the time. We also knew, without having to be told, that the police would fail to catch the killer, that the South Africans would blandly invoke diplomatic immunity, and that if anyone was going to avenge Dr. Small it would have to be by—ah—private enterprise.

  Which was why skinheads and others were out bashing Pakis and Windies, and the police were even more eager than usual to arrest blacks.

  Not that they ever needed much encouragement… I’d heard stories similar to mine from a score, a hundred acquaintances a bit less articulate than I am, a bit less able to talk back to the fuzz. Having been arrested and beaten up in Jo’burg, in Athens, and more other places than I can count, I’d always argued that the climate was all the same milder here. Today it was as though the country had sighed with relief at being able to abandon the pretense.

  The cab-driver said awkwardly, “I—uh—I think that was bloody disgusting, sir. What the busies did to you, I mean.”

  My head throbbed and my belly was as sour as if it had been poured full of fresh lime-juice. But I managed to say, “Thanks for everything. Without you God knows what might have happened.”

  “You know, sir, my niece,” he said, and hesitated. “She—well, she got married to one of your people. Got a kid, a little girl. About three now. Sweetest thing you ever saw, and bright with it. I wasn’t in favor, if you don’t mind my saying so. But seeing that kid—well, it made a difference, if you know what I mean.”

  “Yes,” I said. It was easier than nodding. My neck was too stiff for that.

  “And I don’t like them skinheads!” the driver concluded with a fierce snap of his dentures. “One of the other drivers works for my firm stopped for a bunch of ‘em once, they beat him up and stole the cab!”

  Did anyone ever advance the theory that the Good Samaritan had previously been attacked by a gang of Judaean thugs? It would fit.

  But I was too damned tired and ill to hold a proper conversation. I said without really knowing what I was talking about, “Oh, hell… Sometimes it just doesn’t seem worth going on. Sometimes I think I ought to get the hell out and settle in a country with a black government.”

  Beside me, Fierro stirred. He said, “Well, if you ever take the decision, don’t head for my country. Last time I got beaten up on the street in plain sight of everyone was by the Sabatanos at home. And they don’t let your friends come to the police station and rescue you.”

  The cab slowed. We’d reached the block where the Rafterys lived.

  THREE

  Sonia, Michael’s plump and pretty wife, met us at the main entrance. She wasn’t alone. A black American couple were with her. I’d first made their acquaintance during the long committee meetings a bunch of us had held to sort out administrative problems connected with the now-aborted conference. Tall, lean, rather handsome with his thick high natural hair and full beard, Gilbert Quentin was something of a fire-breather, while his wife Dolly was purely and simply one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen, slim, about five-four, with huge dark eloquent eyes and a velvet voice.

  “Max!” Sonia cried as I stiffly climbed out. “Are you all right? Is Mr. Ponza with you?”

  “Yes, he’s here.” Turning to help him out. “Señor Ponza, this is Mrs. Raftery, and—”

  I broke off. With one foot on the ground, he had stopped in mid-movement, staring at Gilbert—who was doing his utmost not to stare back. Still being somewhat dazed, I couldn’t figure out any reason for this.

  “We’ve met,” Fierro said at length in a tone as chilly as the January weather.

  “Well, Sonia, we’ll be on our way!” Gilbert said brightly. To me he added, “We’ve just been keeping Sonia company until someone else arrived, you know. The meeting broke up and everybody scattered. I imagine Michael told you?”

  “Honey,” Dolly began, “don’t you think we—?”

  I saw him cramp his fingers on her arm. “No, sugar, we’d only be in the way if we hung around any longer. Let’s get home. Maybe we can take over this cab, hm?”

  They shook hands with Sonia, and then she hurried me and Fierro out of the cold.

  In their living-room, full of plain white wooden furniture and gaudy canvas cushions, the TV was playing. It was just nine o’clock and the news had started on BBC-1 a moment earlier. Sonia turned the sound down as she waved us to chairs, and brought coffee and brandy. Once again, this time in black-and-white—which seemed appropriate—I saw the procession swing into Trafalgar Square complete with flags and banners and steel bands, and then…

  I shut my eyes as Dr. Small threw up his arms and collapsed.

  “Michael said the shot must have come from South Africa House,” Sonia ventured, sitting down opposite us.

  “Not much doubt of that,” I muttered. I’m an expert in that kind of thing… in theory. Actually I never did carry out an assassination, but I’ve shot quite a few people, and I know about lines of fire and suchlike matters.

  “Oh, God,” Sonia said wearily. “It’s like a bad dream! And those bastards who—Mr. Ponza, are you all right?”

  I glanced at him. He had grazed his hand, maybe while we were fighting the skinheads, maybe later, and the doctor at the police station had wrapped it in a bandage. Holding his brandy balloon in his other hand, he was wiping the white cloth up and down on the curved glass.

  He said, not looking at us, “That man we met as we came in.”

  “Gilbert Quentin?” Sonia countered. “What about him?”

  “You do not know he is an agent of the CIA?”

  There was an absolutely frozen silence, as though we had been instantly surrounded by dry ice. I saw Sonia’s mouth working, but no sound emerged; it was like the images on the TV.

  I cast back in my mind over the short period I’d known Gilbert. He’d volunteered to take on the job of arranging accommodation for the delegates to the conference; in fact, he’d probably booked the rooms in which Fierro and Rafé were staying. We’d been glad to let him handle that—he seemed to know the Race Relations Act by heart, and he was capable of dealing with the most mealy-mouthed hotel managers.

  Because he was introduced to me by Michael Raftery, I’d never questioned his credentials, nor indeed paid too much attention to him. Nothing he’d said or done had given me the least impression he was other than what he claimed: a dedicated supporter of the cause, radical, but willing to put in a lot of groundwork on a project that appealed to him in spite of his occasional fits of furious impatience.

  We all get those…

  I said eventually, “How do you know?”

  “Last time we met was in Miami in ‘67. But he was calling himself Martin then, and he had short hair and no beard.”

  My brain had cleared a little, like sediment settling out of muddy water. I drained my brandy-glass and mutely held it towards Sonia for a refill. But at that moment her daughter Olga cried out in the next room, and she hurried to see what was wrong.

  So I got up and helped myself.

  I said over my shoulder, “That must have been when things were going well for Juan Bautiz’.”

  “Yes. So well, the American government were prepared to negotiate with us, to ensure that if we did take over they could continue to lease their submarine base on Petty Madrugada. One did not wish to concede that, and I must admit that if I had known Fidel then I’d have taken a different stand, but at the time the prospect of losing the dollars which it brings in… Of course, though, things no longer go well for us. And for all I can tell the fact may be due to that man you know as Gilbert Quentin.”

  Suddenly he laughed, a harsh ugly sound. “Amazing that they should let him run the risk of being recognized! One might almost imagine that Rafé and I were to be put away by your police, shut in a ja
il cell before we had the chance to… but no. That is excessively paranoid even for me.”

  He sighed and passed his bandaged hand over his face.

  “A sense of persecution comes easily to me, Señor Curfew! It stems, I guess, from having been hounded out of a country which anyway the general world knows little about. Often I find people can’t even locate it on the map, let alone say what its people are like, or its government.”

  “That was true for me too,” I admitted, resuming my chair. “Until recently, at least. When I heard you and your brother were attending our conference, I studied up on it a little.”

  It had caused quite a sensation, the news that the Ponzas were coming. Michael’s organization—the All-Nations Campaign Against Colonialism, “Ack-Ack”—was fairly well regarded, but it wasn’t often that the head of a government in exile turned up to its meetings.

  Even if the government in question existed mostly on paper.

  “I gather,” Fierro muttered, staring down into his glass, “some people have been wondering why I decided to come to this conference.”

  I’d been one of them. I nodded.

  “I—well! I was excited by the idea! About coming to this country, too, for the first time. This morning, you know, I went to look at the house where lived José de San Martín, the great liberator of Argentina, and then I visited the grave of Marx. And this evening…” He gave a shrug. “Did you reach any conclusion from your studies?”

  “That the sooner you throw Don Amedeo into the Toblino, the better it will be for Madrugada.”

  “Ah, you were thorough! The maps say Torbellino, don’t they? As though it were Castilian Spanish.”

  It’s a tide-race between Grand and Petty Madrugada: what they call in the Channel Islands a “swinge”. I said, “Well, I’m used to that sort of notion. I learned my English in Jamaica, but when I came here I had to re-learn most of what I thought I knew. Same with French. I picked that up first in Martinique, when I went there to look for my grandfather’s family. Not that I found them—who cares about a baby abandoned at the side of the road?”

  He looked at me somberly. “Do you know something strange, señor? I often think of my oppressed country in just those terms: a baby crying by the roadside while the rest of the world goes by unheeding.”

  One says just Madrugada—singular—as one speaks of Bermuda, although there are in fact two large islands and dozens of little ones, “out-islands”, bearing grandiose Spanish names like Asturias, Andalucía and Aragon.

  In some ways Madrugadan history paralleled that of Haiti, except that it involved a Spanish legacy instead of a French one. Back in the eighteenth century, when most of South America belonged to Spain, that cluster of islands about equidistant from the Bahamas, the Bermudas and Puerto Rico was a very useful waystation for trade with Mexico, Cuba and the Spanish Main, and there was a flourishing slave-market in the capital, Brascoso—originally and in full Puerto Borrascoso, “stormy port”, either because the first settlers had been driven there by a hurricane or because the town was nearly wiped out by one.

  Gradually, as the South American republics declared their independence, its importance waned, and when in 1825 a revolt of slaves and indentured laborers took place it met with only nominal resistance. It wasn’t worth hanging on to the islands any longer.

  The wealthy Spaniards were slaughtered, or expelled if they were lucky, and a government took over composed partly of blacks, partly of poor whites—mostly sailors who had been put off their ships, or deserted from them, but with an admixture of people deported from Spain for political offences. The latter, obviously, were the driving force behind the rebellion, and as a matter of principle they displayed their solidarity with the freed slaves by taking black wives or, if they were already married, acknowledged mistresses. Their descendants came to be known as “garzos”, meaning “blue-eyed”, even though blue eyes actually stopped cropping out in their families within three generations.

  Unfortunately for the high hopes of the revolutionaries, their new government collapsed very rapidly into corruption, nepotism and rule by terror… thanks to the second president of the republic, Don Jaime Porfiroso.

  Fierro had mentioned being beaten up by the Sabatanos. I’d heard about them. Their history was a long one, and their reputation about on a par with that of the tontons macoutes. As far as I could make out—because what passed for history in Madrugada, apparently, would have been dismissed in other countries as a garbled mishmash of folklore and lies—it was Don Jaime who dragged them into the act because he was furious at having been passed over for the presidency in favor of one of his colleagues in the revolutionary junta.

  Their name had nothing to do with sabotage, and everything to do with Don Sábado, the local counterpart of Baron Samedi, sometimes known as “The Lord of the Day before the Day of the Lord”… Satan, as missionaries later declared. (Ignorant idiots. He was much more of an Antichrist.)

  Most of the inhabitants at the time of the revolution were barely more than semi-Christian, and had embraced the white man’s faith only in the vague hope that it might better their miserable lot. Most of the leading rebels weren’t religious at all, but left-over adherents of the abortive cult of Reason, which was founded in France and done for after Napoleon came to power, and they had this idyllic vision of a perfectly free nation populated by Noble Savages in which everybody would love everybody else.

  Don Jaime decided he knew better. Cynically, but logically, he exploited religious imagery to gain support among the common people. A few of the rebels saw what he was getting at and were happy to take advantage of his insight. The man who stirred up the revolt, and earned Don Jaime’s hatred by becoming—very briefly—president when it succeeded, was among them. He adopted the name of Juan Bautiz’, “John Baptist”, and connived at Don Jaime’s plan, after the fall of Grand Madrugada, to win the country people on the other islands to their side by broadcasting the legend of a mysterious figure who had allegedly appeared from nowhere at a crucial moment during the storming of Brascoso and turned the tide in favor of the rebels. This personage, a perfectly black man who ultimately grew to be nine feet tall and much stronger than John Henry, was theophanized as El Cristo Negro.

  He was promptly, and correctly, identified with numerous African deities whose memory had survived among the former slaves, and a secret society developed founded on this belief. Don Jaime fostered it. Two years later, when the cult had had time to spread, he enlisted its followers as the nucleus of a secret police and exterminated everyone who opposed his bid for supreme power, including his former friend and colleague Juan Bautiz’.

  The recipe for rule by superstition and terror which he evolved worked so well that one of his direct descendants was still in power: Don Amedeo Porfiroso, who had succeeded to office in 1955. The presidency had never escaped from the grip of the garzos; now and then there was a coup, but it was always a kind of domestic affair, and indeed bearers of only three surnames had held the office, all their families being related by blood or marriage.

  And, along with the garzos, the Sabatanos had survived too. Naturally, they no longer worshipped El Cristo Negro or his alter ego, Don Sábado. That was left to the illiterate peasants. The upper crust were good Catholics, with maybe a dash more superstition in their creed than one would find in most places, and the Sabatanos dutifully imitated their masters, to the point now and then of infiltrating them and handing on their former intermediate status to newcomers—hand-picked—while they climbed another rung up the ladder of power.

  Eventually, however, the outside world began to impinge. The process started during World War I, when the Americans contracted for the right to use the fine harbor on Petty Madrugada as a naval base, but they came and went and left hardly any trace apart from some winked-at gambling and smuggling financed from the States. In World War II they asked for the same privilege again, and set up a first-class submarine base which was a key factor in winning the Battle of the Atlantic, a
lthough the Madrugadan government cannily maintained official neutrality until a week before VE-Day.

  By that time, as might have been expected, the regular transfusion of dollars into the country’s shaky economy had become a necessity, so the base was still there, much enlarged. Moreover during the fifties and sixties the islands had become a major holiday resort, patronized by wealthy Mexicans, pre-Castro Cubans, and Spaniards.

  It was taken for granted that the government of the garzos was a stable one. Nearly as much investment had been poured into the two big Madrugadan islands as into the Bahamas, both in the form of finance for hotels, casinos and other resort facilities, and in the off-shore funds for which Brascoso was a notorious home address.

  And then, virtually by accident, Fierro Ponza turned up.

  Having rapidly reviewed in memory what little I knew about this backward country of his, I said, “Tell me, señor, is it true that you just—ah—drifted into your present situation?”

  “Oh, yes!” He sounded surprised. “I’m a doctor, am I not? What business I have in politics, I don’t know. And yet what’s the point of curing individuals when the whole nation is mortally diseased? Don’t they talk about ‘the greatest good’?”

  He hesitated, staring into nowhere, and eventually he said, “You see…”

  After that, for—oh, I don’t know how long: half an hour, forty minutes?—I simply sat, fascinated, while he talked about the right and wrong way to build a revolution, not just theorizing, but drawing on his own experience. And, of course, on Fidel’s; I understood they’d become close friends recently.

  By the time he’d finished, I knew one thing beyond a doubt. I liked this man!

  FOUR

  He was a garzo himself, naturally; otherwise his family would never have been able to send him to study medicine in Mexico City and New York. He was away from home for six years.