HONKY IN THE WOODPILE Read online

  He must already have been a trifle disenchanted with the setup in his country, because owing to some minor slight committed by his father against Don Amedeo’s predecessor the Ponzas were in disfavor and Sabatano harassment had reduced their fortune. If he’d been brought up to be content with the normal smug status-quo attitudes of the Madrugadan upper class he wouldn’t even have considered studying something as constructive as medicine. The garzos, traditionally, were money-managers: landed gentry, financiers, politicians, enjoying the exercise of personal power. They seldom sank lower than owning department stores.

  It wasn’t travel, though, which toppled him finally to the left. It was his brother.

  Raid, seven or eight years his senior, had early established his reputation as an artist, drawing his subjects from Madrugadan folklore including badoan, the local counterpart of voudoun or macumba. His paintings rapidly found their way into major European and American collections.

  As he delved deeper into the culture of the Madrugadan poor, copying their symbols in embroidery, pottery, wood-carving and so on, he had become very concerned about their plight. Down the hill (everywhere on both Grand and Petty Madrugada could be divided into down the hill, or wealthy, and up the hill, or poverty-stricken) vast luxury hotels, gambling casinos and smart new California-style villas were springing up. A mile or two inland families of a dozen were crammed into one-room shacks with no water, drainage or electricity.

  Angered by this—which came as a shock to him even though he’d spent his whole life in Madrugada—almost incidentally he took to writing poetry, too, beginning with formal poems and proceeding to topical verses, often fiercely satirical against the Porfiroso régime, set to catchy popular tunes. One in particular, which became a theme song for the liberation movement, spread among the people like a forest fire. Fierro sang it to me; it had the same kind of compulsive urgency as José Martí’s Guantanamera, and went to a variant of En Passant Par La Lorraine.

  On learning who was responsible for these gibes at his government, Don Amedeo would dearly have liked to jail Rafé, but by then his reputation protected him. He was almost the only internationally famous citizen of the country.

  He infected Fierro with his views when the latter came back from abroad, just in time for the funeral of their father, who left a diminished but still handsome fortune. As a result, the brothers agreed to put their legacy to constructive use and founded a free clinic for the poor on the outskirts of Brascoso. Rafé decorated its walls with splendid murals; Fierro not only worked there three days a week, but also taught rudimentary nursing and hygiene to volunteers. Virtually single-handed, he created a sort of “barefoot doctor” system, as they call it in China.

  Delighted that something like this was happening, a great many people turned up who were willing to help, and a hard core of about thirty gave regular support. They all had one thing in common, although their professions were diverse: they were from middle-class families whose further aspirations had been blocked by the stranglehold of the garzos—maintained by their agents the Sabatanos. Consequently they were fairly well educated, outwardly prosperous… but inwardly going crazy with frustration.

  Don Amedeo did his best to discourage the venture. The continuance of his power depended on keeping the common people ignorant, illiterate, and convinced that disease was due to magic. It was at this stage that the brothers were beaten up by the Sabatanos. But very soon the murals attracted wealthy tourists, who spread the news of the clinic’s existence rather as though it were Schweitzer’s Lambaréné, and from all over the world help poured in: monetary donations, gifts of bedding and sometimes crates of drugs.

  Fierro, still at that time basically as a-political as he had been while he was a student, admitted he had been overjoyed with that much, merely because it meant the Sabatanos could not interfere as easily as before. Rafé, however, had clearer insight, and demanded, “Are we to live forever on other people’s leavings?”

  Other people echoed his question. The mere existence of the clinic had made it a focus for dissident opinion. Politically enlightened young men and women, as well as the somewhat more conservative and meliorist group who had supported the Ponzas from the beginning, were holding regular conferences there, almost the only free political discussions in the country.

  That was how a young firebrand named Carlos Deniz came on the scene.

  He was the sole survivor of a group of young garzos—many of them friends of the Ponzas—who had attempted to take advantage of the fact that theoretically the Madrugadan constitution provided for more than one political party, and had put up candidates in opposition to Don Amedeo’s at the last rubber-stamp elections. But they should have known better. The Sabatanos had made the notion as much of a nullity as it is in, say, Liberia, and they used a very simple technique. Badoan, like most cults of divine possession, used a hypnotic drug to induce a holy trance, an extract of a native plant known as yoma-xi. A large overdose of that stuff could destroy the higher mental faculties overnight… as was demonstrated on the persons of the rival candidates. Who was going to vote for a slobbering idiot? End of threat.

  Some of the Ponzas’ supporters had already heard rumors about this; Deniz provided chapter and verse and convinced them that it was fruitless to stick to constitutional methods in face of such ruthless opposition. Instead, quite sensibly in the circumstances, he urged that they should take the Tupamaros of Uruguay as a model, since there was not yet enough popular support to foment a true revolution: kidnap wealthy tourists, for example, and hold them not for a cash ransom but until the government agreed to provide a school or a hospital in an area where one was badly needed, or raid foreign banks and blow the safes of hotels with a large tourist clientele in order to distribute the money directly to the poor.

  That idea caught on, fast. Suddenly, with hardly any planning, hundreds of young men and women—chiefly those who had been exposed to foreign contacts owing to the immense tourist trade—started inventing means of private rebellion.

  The original group of thirty, give or take a few, were at first reluctant to approve this more direct type of resistance. It was Rafé, apparently, who won them over by proposing that the new movement should trade on the first Madrugadan revolution, as that had traded on the public images of its own day, and who suggested not only that the leadership of the movement should be merged in a composite personage known as Juan Bautiz’, but that all acts of subversion and sabotage should be credited to El Cristo Negro. Shortened into a two-syllable slogan, “Criné!”, that crudely chalked name was left at the scene of scores of successful coups.

  Don Amedeo, no longer a young man and known to be often ill with gastric ulcers, fretted and fumed, but he was fighting a hydra; every time one of its heads was chopped off—whether by his own Sabatanos, or by the inefficient police, or by the special units of his toy army which were being re-trained by the Americans on the lines of the Bolivian Rangers—two more sprouted in its place.

  The movement’s most spectacular achievement was calling the first general strike in Madrugadan history. It lasted nearly a week in the spring of ‘67 and even closed down the American naval base for part of that time. It must have been as a result of that that Washington decided to negotiate with the insurgents. Even then, however, the Ponzas presented themselves merely as go-betweens, spokesmen for the real leader who hid behind the name of Juan Bautiz’. Remembering Castro, the Americans accepted this assurance.

  And then, without warning, their coups began to fail. A millionaire was to be abducted from a car between the airport and the city of Brascoso; the millionaire wasn’t in the car, but an armed Sabatano was. A house was being used to prepare nitroglycerine for safe-cracking; there was a raid and three irreplaceable trained chemists died in an explosion. Money stolen from a hotel was found to be marked, and everyone who received a gift from that source in the typical manner was arrested, beaten to a pulp, and tossed contemptuously back on the street.

  “Someone we tr
usted,” Fierro said bitterly, “must be a blagro.”

  It was the first time I’d heard the word. I asked for a translation.

  “Blanco-negro. Who appears one color while his heart is another.”

  Like an Orao. I nodded. “And you have no idea who?” I probed.

  Fierro sighed. “It could be any one of the thirty people who went to make up our imaginary Juan Bautiz’… No, I exaggerate. Some of them are dead or in jail, some are in exile, some I would trust with my very life. One of possibly—six.”

  “I see,” I said. “Go on.”

  The blagro—the nigger, or more aptly the honky, in the woodpile—did his work only too well. Always bad-tempered, and now impatient for victory, Carlos Deniz revised his earlier belief that Madrugada was not yet ripe for a revolution with full-scale popular support. Things had indeed changed, and the movement enjoyed immensely more sympathy than it had done a few years back, but in Fierro’s view still not enough. On hearing that, Deniz accused the Ponza brothers of having sold out the movement themselves and decamped for one of the out-islands with a small group of hot-headed would-be Guevaras, calling himself openly Juan Bautiz’.

  And failed disastrously when he tried to raise an army and storm Don Amedeo’s private island, Aranjuez. His weak forces were betrayed and overcome. The American troops Don Amedeo had asked to help didn’t even have to join in.

  According to what I’d read, the people were supposed to have turned against his followers because they broke up religious ceremonies, in particular pocomania, rites of possession using the yoma-xi drug, which they viewed as one of the means whereby the government kept its death-grip of superstition on the populace. I said as much to Fierro, and he denied the suggestion vigorously.

  “Never! Such an action, we were all agreed, would be a fatal mistake. For one thing, most Madrugadans have no other—what shall I call it?—no other drama in their drab lives than what their religion offers, and would logically resent an attack on their hallowed traditions; for another, you cannot persecute people out of their old beliefs—did not the Christians try exactly that, and does not the survival of the originally African cults in Madrugada prove their failure?—and for a third thing, among the genuine followers of Don Sábado there is much resentment against the Sabatanos who in their view profane the sacred name.”

  However that might be, the day came when Fierro and Rafé—keeping up the appearance of their normal routine for obvious reasons—set out as usual for their clinic and found it in flames, with Sabatanos preventing the local people from fighting the fire. They didn’t stop. They drove straight to a small fishing-port where they had active sympathizers and were smuggled to Havana, just in time.

  During the next month or two the movement was shattered, its networks of person-to-person contact broken up, its finances appropriated, many of its leading organizers put on trial and automatically convicted. Eventually, dropping all pretense, the Ponzas set up the Madrugadan Government in Exile to keep the torch of resistance alive, but their hands had been tied for a year or more. The Americans had forgotten the idea of having to sign a new lease for their naval base; the people had stopped believing that there was a time-bomb ticking beneath Don Amedeo’s chair; and the tourists were jollifying as though nothing had happened at all.

  “And why we failed,” Fierro said simply, “was because before people will rise to protest against the way they are cheated and lied to and deprived, they must understand what would happen if they were not so treated. I learned that from my brother, who went to live in those dirty shacks up the hill, who slept with the animals and drank the foul water and ate the food with dead insects in it. But we could never explain it to our friend Carlos, who had such dreams of glory and wished to achieve the kind of victory that eluded Ché.”

  I waited. After some thought, he added the clincher.

  “You know, my brother has sometimes said that the happiest people he has ever met were up the hill on Grand Madrugada. Because like dogs, not like human beings, they had the scraps from the table of the rich man, and if they grew unhappy and miserable they could be sure the Sabatanos would put them down.”

  FIVE

  Then the front door of the apartment opened with a bang and we both glanced—ridiculously—in that direction, and Sonia called out, “Michael, shh! You’ll wake Olga again!”

  “Sorry.” Not sounding as though he meant it. And, still peeling off his coat, he entered the living-room. Sonia came right on his heels.

  “Michael, something terrible has happened. Mr. Ponza says Gilbert works for the CIA!”

  He stopped dead, on the point of throwing his coat over a couch, and then ground back into movement like a rusty piece of machinery. Above his red beard his face was grey.

  “Get me a drink, please,” he said at length, and slumped into a chair. “That’s all I needed… You’re sure?” he added to Fierro.

  “Certain.”

  “Then it’s just as well the conference has been cancelled, isn’t it? Thanks”—to Sonia as she handed him a glass. He gulped a mouthful.

  I said, “What about—?”

  But at the same moment Fierro said, “Have you news of my brother?” I let him take precedence.

  “Yes, I called up just before I left the police station. He’s not badly hurt. The ward sister I spoke to said he’s slightly concussed, but rest should take care of that, and there probably won’t be any scars.”

  “Señor Curfew, I thank you again,” Fierro said with great formality, and half-rose in order to sketch a bow to me. I shook my head.

  “It was a pleasure,” I said, meaning it. “According to what you’ve been telling me about Madrugada, things there are clear-cut, hard-and-fast. In this country… Well, it’s on the verge of driving me crazy, I tell you straight. You said you went to look at Marx’s grave this morning, but this evening our so-called ‘wonderful policemen’—Michael, what about those bastards, anyway?”

  “Back on duty,” he said with a sullen grimace.

  “What?” Sonia erupted before I could.

  “Not even going to be suspended. Just reprimanded. Someone got to top level before I did. ‘Excessive zeal,’ that’s what they called it. ‘In exceptional circumstances.’ Oh, yes—and there was something about ‘justifiable misapprehension.’ That knife and the bit of pipe.”

  There was a dead pause. During it, I thought quite seriously about borrowing a gun and going after that car with Hargreaves and Hooper in it.

  Eventually Fierro said, not looking in my direction, “Señor Curfew, as you probably know, they admitted me and my brother to England only for the weekend of this conference.”

  “Don’t tell me!” Michael muttered. “The strings I had to pull to convince them you weren’t going to assassinate the Queen and make off with the Crown Jewels!”

  Fierro gave him a smile without the least trace of humor. “Yes. Well, let me put it this way. At first I was disappointed at the shortness of my allotted stay. At this moment I am not disappointed any more.”

  There was another silence. Sonia broke it, rising.

  “Would you like something to eat?” she ventured. “I was going to feed everyone, you see, when the meeting ended, and I have all that soup and salad in the kitchen…”

  “I guess I could manage soup,” I said. “Nothing more solid for the moment, though. My throat still hurts.”

  She looked at me with tears forming in her eyes, and suddenly ran out of the room.

  Fierro said as the door swung to, “Mr. Raftery!”

  Michael looked up gloomily.

  “I am not impressed with your security, you know.”

  “I’m not surprised. I owe you an apology, and everybody involved in the conference— Just a moment, I have an idea!” Michael snapped his fingers. “I can make sure Gilbert doesn’t fool anyone else, I think!”

  With sudden energy he headed for his desk in the far corner, where a phone rested half-buried among mounds of paper, and hunted until he locat
ed a note on a much-used scratchpad.

  “Ah!” he said with satisfaction, and composed a number. I craned to watch the dial, and recognized it: the unlisted number of the night duty officer at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square.

  Not a bad idea. I jumped to my feet.

  “Let me!” I said, and commandeered the receiver just as it began to utter the ringing tone—not the British buzz-buzz, but the American rrrr. They’re far too canny to let the GPO install phones which might carry secure conversations.

  Shortly a voice said, “Corkran!”

  I didn’t recognize the name. I haven’t tangled too much with the Yanks lately.

  “Gilbert Quentin,” I said, copying the way Gilbert himself spoke. I’m good at that sort of thing; it’s among my chief professional assets.

  “What? You damned fool, what do you mean using this line?”

  “Ah.” I switched to another voice, not my normal one. “Then he is one of yours, is he?”

  “What?” Realizing belatedly he’d been deceived. “Who is that? Who are you?”

  “The guy who just blew Gilbert Quentin’s cover, baby,” I said. “Tell him from me he’s not fit to play Santa Claus, let alone anything tougher!”

  And cradled the phone.

  “How did you come to have that number?” I asked Michael, who had managed a sad smile. He shrugged.

  “A Panther gave it to me the other day, and I thought it might come in handy.”

  “Good thinking,” I said, and smiled as broadly as I could without cracking that scab on my lip.

  “But they will trace the call,” Fierro said.

  “Who cares? Special Branch tap my phone anyway,” Michael grunted. “Another drink? I don’t hear Sonia coming with the food.”

  We accepted silently.

  “And what about you now, Señor Ponza?” Michael continued. “You’ll have to go back to Cuba, I suppose?”