HONKY IN THE WOODPILE Read online

  “I seem to have nowhere else to go,” Fierro muttered. “Naturally I’d rather go home, for it’s my dearest ambition to crucify the traitor who destroyed our movement, next of course to doing what Señor Curfew described as ‘throwing Don Amedeo into the Toblino’”—with a nod at me—“but if I were recognized in Madrugada I’d be in jail in five minutes… You know something?”

  We looked expectant.

  “I must have been crazy, I guess. I was thinking, well, perhaps if I like London I should come here because there are so many problems in Cuba one ought not to burden the Havana government with other people’s troubles as well, and there is a long love of liberty in England. But—well!”

  When I heard that, the fury which had been simmering and seething in me since Dr. Small was killed, which I’d mastered pretty well in spite of the treatment the Ponzas had had from the skinheads, in spite of the way the police had acted, in spite even of Michael’s recent news, just exploded.

  “What the hell did you expect?” I blasted. “What do you read—the newspapers or the PR handouts? Look at the Immigration Act! Look at those poor bloody East Africans with British passports being bounced around Europe like—like shuttlecocks! Look at the right-wingers who are so powerful now they have to be bribed with jobs in the bloody Cabinet!”

  “Like Bellingham,” Michael said sourly. The guy was officially Minister Without Portfolio, but everyone knew why. “Christ, doesn’t anyone but me know there’s a job waiting for him on the board of Cape and Western Mineral when he quits politics?”

  “And fifty thousand shares,” I snapped. “Lodged in a trust account at the Bank of Table Mountain. I even have a note of the account number somewhere.”

  “The hell you say!” Michael stared at me. “Let me have it, then! I’ve been after proof for a year or more.”

  “What good do you think it’s going to do?” I retorted. “Here, look!” There was a wall-clock above the TV, and by it I’d just spotted that it was ten p.m. and news was due to start on the commercial channel. I twisted the set’s knobs and a boom rang out, the sound of Big Ben starting to strike the hour. A voice said, “Race-riots in five cities!”

  “Thought so!” I raged. “It’s not Dr. Small they mention first, hear? It’s the riots!”

  And cut short the second boom with the volume control.

  “I’m sick of this country!” I said. “Sick! The smug hypocrisy, the greed, the holier-than-thou bit, everything! I’ve done what I can to tear the mask off and show the truth behind it, and where’s it going to get us if we carry on? Same place it’s always got people who happen to wear a dark skin! Overcrowded slums—miserable jobs—the worst of whatever’s going and quite likely jail to follow!”

  “You think it doesn’t make other people sick too?” Michael said stonily.

  “Oh, shit! You fucking liberals with your—”

  “Señor Curfew!” Fierro’s voice inserted as neatly as a needle. “You were then born in this country? I gathered you spent your childhood in Jamaica.”

  My rage evaporated. It does that, most of the time. It isn’t mine, after all; it’s fumes from the foulness other people have stuffed into my memory. One day I’m going to get even with those bastards, but…

  “You’re right,” I said effortfully to Fierro, and reached for my glass. “Sorry,” I added to Michael. “Your trouble is you’re a nice guy, but you’re fighting a losing battle.”

  On the TV screen, images of destruction: a police van disgorging men into a crowd of blacks who were smashing store windows.

  “You mean that, don’t you?” Michael said eventually.

  “Of course I mean it. Think I’m flapping my lips to cool my face?”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw that Sonia had arrived in the doorway carrying a tray laden with bowls of soup and bread-rolls and wine in a cut-crystal decanter. She’d been crying; her eyes were red.

  “Yes,” I said. “A losing battle. Because there’s nothing you can put your finger on, nothing you can grab hold of and say: here it is, fix this and everything will be fine! A policeman who hates blacks—he gets told off, ‘be a good boy next time’—next time! And he says of course I will… and do you believe him? Some bastard shoots a black MP just because he is black, and he’s going to get away with it. Do you think he isn’t going to get away with it?”

  Setting down her tray, Sonia’s hands were shaking so much that the dishes and glasses clinked like chattering teeth.

  Unexpectedly Fierro said, “Señor Curfew!”

  I looked at him.

  “Señor, I do not know very much about you, but I have heard that sometimes you will—ah—you will accept an assignment?”

  “Yes. And right now I’d take any assignment that would get me out of Britain.” I wasn’t shaking with fury any longer, but I was still shaking. Delayed shock, I guess.

  “In that case…” He hesitated, then seemed abruptly to make up his mind. “In that case I have a proposition for you.”

  “Yes please!” I said. “My God, yes please!”

  SIX

  “Know something?” I said to Fierro at Heathrow two days later as he waited—and waited—and waited to see me off. “I think if the Wright brothers had been black you’d get race-riots at airports all the time.”

  We were surrounded by hundreds of travelers whose flights had been delayed or diverted owing to fog. They were fuming.

  He saw what I meant, and grinned, but there was no amusement in his expression.

  When I said on the spur of the moment that I’d go to Madrugada, I was talking out of fury and frustration. But nothing had happened in the past forty-eight hours to change my mind. Fighting for the cause in Britain is like grappling with a ghost. You catch hold, and it turns out to be a wisp of mist you’ve captured…

  Fierro was under orders to quit the country today, and he wasn’t inclined to argue. But so was Rafé, and the doctors said he ought to rest up for a while before facing a long flight. About lunch-time a smug bureaucrat in a smart Whitehall office had conceded that being kicked in the head by a gang of thugs did indeed constitute grounds for having his permit extended. But he’d kept us hanging around for nearly four hours first.

  Also, according to the news, some seven hundred people had appeared in court this morning on charges connected with the weekend rioting; about four hundred and fifty of them were black or colored. Among the people who had not been arrested was the killer of Dr. Small.

  See what I mean?

  What Fierro wanted me to do was simple. It had been a year or so since he had last had reliable accounts of the suspect members of the composite Juan Bautiz’. He needed to know whether there had been any change in any of their circumstances sufficient to indicate which one of them was being paid off by the garzos for betraying the liberation movement. He had been considering smuggling one of his own associates back into the country for the job, but the risk of the guy being recognized was too great. He had made the snap decision that my judgment could be trusted, and asked if I would go to Madrugada for two or three weeks, contact and evaluate all six, and report back. Someone ostensibly unconnected with the movement could certainly do a better job with less interference, so I’d agreed.

  Simple, sure—but it didn’t start simply. Nor, in the upshot, did it ever turn out that way…

  It wasn’t visa trouble I ran into; on a British passport I was automatically entitled to a ninety-day visit. It was airline trouble. I found I couldn’t fly direct from London to Brascoso on a Monday in winter; either I’d have to go via Bermuda or the Bahamas and continue on a local airline, island-hopping, or change planes in Madrid and take a Spanish flight terminating at Mexico City. I opted for the latter, thinking it would be quicker. The hell it was. What with fog and missed connections I arrived in Madrugada at that pitch of exhaustion where I knew I could neither concentrate with all my normal faculties if I stayed awake, nor drop straight off to sleep if I lay down. I felt lousy.

  Still, he
re I finally was at Brascoso Airport, a very beautiful and very modern layout jutting into the Atlantic from the western side of Grand Madrugada. Planes landing there now and then dived nose-first into the sea, Fierro had told me, there being only one runway big enough to accommodate intercontinental jets. Circling down towards it gave a fine view of the islands, but also exposed aircraft to an irregular strong wind funneled between Grand and Petty Madrugada.

  We’d been lucky. Our plane had socketed home on the runway like a dart heading straight for double-top.

  During the descent I’d had my first sight of many things I’d been studying up on, with what concentration I could muster, since leaving London: the famous Ocean Bridge, for example, three-quarters of a mile long, which spanned the Toblino—the churning, roiling strait between the two biggest islands. I didn’t like the look of it, whatever caused it. Even from a height of several hundred feet one could see the waves cresting crazily, and the rushing random pattern of the currents. It reminded me of the sea at the base of the waterspout which killed… but never mind. That was long ago and far away.

  And I had to have my mind on the present, or I might never get out of this country alive. Fierro had warned me of that, and he hadn’t minced his words.

  “It is small pay, I can offer, Señor Curfew,” he had said, “for risking your life.”

  To which there was only one answer. “The way things are going, some of us will be better off dead, won’t they?”

  Still, I was fairly well provided for. I wouldn’t be short of funds for expenses; Rafé had put aside a large chunk of the proceeds from his painting in a safe-deposit in Brascoso, intending them of course to finance the liberation movement, and had had to abandon them. There should be about ten thousand US dollars in the box, in cash, and I was to be contacted by an associate of the Ponzas, a man named Diego Santandero, whom they absolutely did not suspect of treachery, and given the vault number and the right key.

  Also I had a good solid cover, arranged for me by Michael Raftery: a commission to prepare an article, with photographs, for the color supplement on exotic holidays which one of the posh London Sunday papers was scheduled to publish at Easter.

  And Fierro had dictated to me full notes about the six suspects, which I had committed to memory and flushed down the plane’s toilet about two minutes before the seat-belt signs went on for landing.

  I long ago gave up wasting money on expensive equipment—so many times I’ve had to abandon a whole stack of it in order to save my skin. So I had little with me in the way of gear apart from a cheap Russian camera of a make you can pick up almost anywhere in London, and some shabby but adequate East German binoculars.

  Through the latter, as the DC-8 settled towards the airport, I’d gained a clearer impression of Brascoso than the map could supply. Really, this was two cities in one, and indeed people were coming to distinguish between Old and New Brascoso. The old part was rather drab, dominated by the port—which had lost much of its trade now, since another port on the far side of the island that had begun merely as an oil-terminal had been greatly expanded since World War II and now was capable of handling all sorts of freight. Still, this was the area of greatest historical interest, and the cathedral, the House of Deputies and most major public buildings were sited there. The new part was dominated by office-blocks, apartment buildings, supermarkets on the American pattern, and a vast baseball stadium completed two or three years ago.

  The setting, one had to admit, was marvelous: backed by the dark-green vegetation of the hillside, flanked by white beaches and the curling surf of the Atlantic, facing which huge expensive resort facilities had sprung up—hotels, casinos, open-air dance-floors, luxury restaurants and bars.

  And on the beaches I saw the kind of thing which too damned many people still think of as the epitome of progress. Well, it’s true you wouldn’t see it in South Africa.

  Officially, there was no color bar in Madrugada. How could there be in a country whose very president was black? Well, strictly speaking he was a lot less black than me, and I only have to call myself black because the buckras have forced it on me. (That poison goes deep.) Actually I’m about five-eighths African-type black, plus maybe another eighth Indian-colored—a lot of small traders from India settled in Jamaica—and the rest is composed of assorted sixteenths of English, Scottish, Irish and French. Not that the parties responsible ever acknowledged their contribution…

  The garzos, on the other hand, over the century and a half since independence, had systematically “heightened the color”, and Don Amedeo apparently was not noticeably browner than the Swedes you see at Torremolinos in high summer.

  Anyway! There on those beaches was a fine mix of people, pink, tan, brown and black, in tiny scraps of cloth, dark glasses and a layer of sun-lotion. Groovy.

  But not so impressive if you’ve been warned in advance that all the prettiest black girls on the expensive beaches are prostitutes working the tourist trade.

  And, according to Fierro, so were the handsomest men. He’d told me, “I’ve known two or three who pad their trunks with cottonwool, not just in front to make a better impression, but behind—because their piles stain their pants if they don’t.”

  What a way to make a living.

  All of which was buzzing through my mind while I waited in the arrivals hall to be cleared by customs and immigration. That was when I had my first sight of a pair of Sabatanos. They were black, both of them, with the almost plum-blue sheen you don’t generally see outside Africa, and they were lounging in the front seat of a new Buick convertible just beyond the huge tinted double glass panes that shut out the subtropical heat I badly needed to drive the chilly London fog from my bones.

  Not for them the crude badges of identity the tontons macoutes have adopted in Haiti—dark glasses even in a night-club, white suits and the rest. “The Sabatano,” Fierro had said, “identifies himself by his air of majiz’ or machismo as you’d call it in regular Spanish: in other words, by his expression, his bearing and his voice.”

  There was only one absolutely characteristic point. They wore guns in shoulder-holsters, and if they ever found anyone on any of the islands wearing a gun in the way reserved to Sabatanos, they would shoot him. With his own gun as well as theirs, whether or not they’d already killed him. A sort of trademark.

  One of these was wearing a pale cream suit and a locally made straw hat with a broad brim; the other wore a pale blue jacket over a yellow shirt and a sort of baseball cap shading his eyes.

  In neither case was there any doubt about the gun.

  I got let in without trouble, as I’d expected. There was no doubt some slight risk that either Gilbert or quite likely Special Branch in London might have put the news that I’d been seen in company with Fierro on the international security grapevine, but one of the problems of a totalitarian régime is that you have to duplicate the internal power-structure to play one branch of it off against the other—witness the SS and the SA—and Fierro had assured me you’d never catch Sabatanos, the political police, stooping to the routine processing of new arrivals.

  Then I headed for a hotel called the Valencia, because it was medium-sized, medium-priced, conveniently sited on the vague border between Old and New Brascoso a couple of blocks inland from the seafront… and the lair of two of Fierro’s prime suspects.

  The owner, Sarita Redón, was the widow of a man who had made the dangerous mistake, about ten years ago, of trying to publish an independent weekly paper critical of the government. The Sabatanos had blown up his printing-shop and beaten him to death. On learning that before he died he had been tended at the Ponzas’ clinic, she had sworn the brothers her eternal gratitude.

  Through them, however, she had met and become the mistress of a popular local singer, Jesús Lorreo. Even though he sang exclusively in the local patois, he was well off. He had a fanatical following of youthful fans all over Madrugada, and moreover he provided just the kind of ‘local color’ tourists wanted. He h
ad a long-term contract with the Brascoso branch of a big American record company, and if people took home a souvenir record after a vacation here ten to one they took something of his. Often, indeed, it was a song by Rafé that they picked—Lorreo had been the first professional singer to include Rafé’s work in his repertoire, and allegedly the company had resisted the government’s attempts to ban the records when the Ponzas were driven into exile, because they were far and away the best sellers in their list. There was only one exception: all the recordings of Rafé’s revolutionary anthem had been seized and smashed.

  Lorreo had shared his good fortune. Apart from setting his mistress up in her hotel, he had given generously to the Ponzas’ clinic in memory of his own humble origins up the hill, and had continued to do so even after he learned that some of the funds were being surreptitiously diverted to the liberation movement. Señora Redón had also supported the insurgents, and now and then she had sheltered a wanted man in the Valencia.

  But the Sabatanos had not clamped down on either of them when the crunch came. Consequently Fierro was doubtful about that story of the record company insisting that Lorreo’s versions of Rafé’s songs remain on sale, and he was likewise wondering just how eternal Sarita Redón’s “eternal gratitude” might be.

  I caught a glimpse of her as I checked in. Behind the reception desk there was a sliding glass window communicating with a small office where she held court, strangely enough having no direct access to the lobby. Through it I saw a plump but attractive woman of thirty-five, over-dressed and laden with necklaces and rings, who fitted Fierro’s description perfectly. She was engaged in a discussion with a tall man whom I later learned to be Juan, her head-waiter, factotum and confidant, and didn’t notice me.

  When I’d dumped my bags, I set off to get acquainted with the city. I might not have much time to wander around later. Fierro was due to pass a message from Havana, vouching for me, to this man Diego Santandero, and after I’d been contacted no doubt I’d be very damned busy.