HONKY IN THE WOODPILE

by John Brunner

  I’d asked, naturally, why Santandero himself couldn’t do the job I’d been given, and the reason was simple. He dared not show himself openly; too many Sabatanos might recognize him and shoot on sight. He was currently spending most of his time on an out-island where support had been particularly strong for Juan Bautiz’, and Fierro preferred to ask him to come to Brascoso only when it was absolutely necessary.

  Fair enough.

  I was too fatigued, I found out, to undertake the extensive walk I’d planned, and after only an hour or so I stopped off at the open-air bar of a hotel directly fronting the sea to rest my legs and review my assignment. That was where I was spotted by a woman I wished would instantly drop dead.

  “Oh, how wonderful,” she gushed, “to find someone else who’s come all the way from England!”

  SEVEN

  “May I join you?” she added, doing so. I noticed for the first time that this hotel was called the Blue Riband. In English. If she was the kind of person who picked a hotel in some distant resort because its name happened to be in a familiar language, then in addition to hating her I decided I also disliked her.

  I glared at her, but she wouldn’t take the hint, and I dared not start a conspicuous argument. She was, at a rough estimate, forty, and trying to look thirty: brown hair, green eyes, freckles mostly concealed under a layer of foundation cream, a fairly good figure mostly revealed by a brown and yellow bikini and matching beach-wrap. One could safely deduce that she was determined not to waste a moment of her trip, and had not rested since leaving the plane but spent her time making up and getting changed into something “suitable”.

  I did vaguely remember seeing her in the crowd at London Airport, wearing a black fur coat. Just conceivably she might have followed me…? No, I dismissed that idea. She was probably a pure coincidence.

  Incontestably, though, she was also a bloody nuisance.

  “I’m Alicia Crowell, by the way,” she added brightly as the waited brought my drink. I’d ordered caxa—pronounced “casher”—the local firewater distilled from sugarcane syrup and flavored with gentian, not quite rum but near enough. Fierro had recommended it, and I found he’d been right.

  “Garçon!” she said. “I mean—uh…!”

  Playing the helpless female, too. But the waiter grinned at her.

  “Yes, madam? What would you like?”

  Taken aback, she hesitated, then ordered gin and tonic. If she expected me to pick up the tab for that, she was wrong. A train of thought which she had briefly interrupted got under way again in my head.

  Manuel García, another suspect on Fierro’s list: doing nicely as manager of a bar called the Tres Hojas, just outside Brascoso on the road to the luxury suburb of Buenas Aguas. It was actually owned by a garzo family, like practically everything in Madrugada, but that made no significant difference, I’d been told; garzos very seldom soiled their hands directly with commerce, it being a terrible come-down. Like snooty Victorians talking about people “going into trade”.

  So provided García kept on making fat profits, he was left largely to his own devices. As he’d been described to me: a man of about fifty, sympathetic to the liberation movement because he detested the high-handed arrogance of the Sabatanos and the fact that after years of hard—successful—work he was doomed to be permanently a hired hand. The movement had relied on his bar as a post office for confidential messages, since it was patronized not only by tourists but also by the better-off Madrugadans owing to his policy of booking local singers and having his band play the local music. In fact it had been at the Tres Hojas that Jesús Lorreo first made his name.

  Whether he had simply managed to disguise his involvement completely, or whether he had weakened under pressure or been bribed, was what Fierro wanted to find out. He had said, “I would prefer not to suspect him because he is such a nice guy, but logic dictates that I must. Details of all the coups of ours which failed had been relayed through Manuel.”

  “And you are…?” Alicia probed, leaning back on her chair, letting her wrap fall away from her shoulders and minutely wriggling her hips.

  Oh, Christ. One of them. One of the type who think all black men are so obsessed with white women they only have to wink and some big stud will come running! Fifteen years earlier, I guess, she could have hooked me; it was a matter of principle with me then. Nowadays I have other principles in mind.

  I said curtly, “Max,” and let my mind wander off down a more important path.

  There was a lawyer called Pedro Latanores whom Fierro had grave doubts about, too; a rather young man, thin and bespectacled, notoriously ambitious, who had on three or four occasions defended victims of the Sabatanos, yet was still in business.

  Complaints the Sabatanos were involved in seldom made it to court; however, owing to the existence of the American naval base and the increasing number of visitors, it had been found necessary now and then to go through the motions, to keep up the fiction that Madrugada was a democratic bastion of the Free World where you’re innocent until proven guilty.

  It was a matter for debate, Fierro had said, whether Latanores was (a) what he claimed to be, a genuine sympathizer of the revolutionaries, using the cases he took on as a means of demonstrating how tyrannical the government really was, or (b) a bit of window-dressing, a dupe of Don Amedeo exploited for PR purposes—as it were, “Look, the accused do have the benefit of a competent lawyer, don’t they?”—or (c) in Don Amedeo’s pay, collaborating with the garzos despite his convincing displays in court, and passing on to them information given to him in confidence by his clients.

  “You are from London, aren’t you, Max? I’m not mistaken in thinking I remember you from Heathrow?”

  Absent-mindedly I shook my head.

  “Oh, good! You know, so many people say they can’t—uh—they can’t tell your people apart, but it’s ridiculous, isn’t it? Especially if you’re coming to a country like this one. I mean it’s either laziness or affectation, and both ways it’s something to be ashamed of. I broke up with a boy-friend in London once, who liked Chinese food—well, so do I, but he could never remember which of the waiters was serving us. I could. I always could.”

  Omigawd.

  Next there was Adelita Fal. Fierro had described her vividly: an ex-teacher who had been hired by the local radio service—there was no TV here except a one-channel six-till-ten evening service which didn’t even cover the whole of Grand Madrugada—when a big grant was made from an American charity to finance educational broadcasting. She’d been assigned to the history section of the program. But someone disapproved of the kind of facts she introduced into her half-hour slots and got her fired. Now she was working for a chain of movie theatres. (Grandiose term; the company owned four.)

  She was apparently a very masculine woman, fortyish, and cast in the standard diesel-dyke mold… for which, of course, a society like Madrugada’s made no provision. The official reason for her dismissal from the radio had been that she corrupted the young. Shades of Socrates. Seduction by radio waves, yet!

  It might be that she was opposed to Don Amedeo’s government not because she honestly held the political views she had tried to put over in her broadcasts, but because she felt handicapped and imposed on for her sexual orientation. Moreover she was a very heavy drinker. Either could offer the Sabatanos a blackmail hold… and her programs had been among those most keenly listened to by the Ponzas’ supporters, because now and then she had included a prearranged signal in them, to trigger a coup, which she had had to be told about in advance.

  Fierro had said frankly, “I don’t like the woman—if she is a woman! But precisely because I know I don’t like her, I’m afraid I may be suspecting her unjustly.”

  I made some kind of vague noise in answer to Alicia’s last remark, and she went on chattily.

  “You are English yourself, aren’t you? I mean, born in England? So many people don’t think of—uh—colored people as English, but I remember I was once at a part
y where there were people from all over the world and I charged up to somebody very dark and asked, ‘Where are you from?’—and of course he said, ‘Birmingham!’”

  “No, Jamaican,” I said, and went on thinking.

  And, to conclude the list, there was a guy called Daniel Praxas, who was the likeliest traitor in Fierro’s view. He was a staunch Catholic who had tried for the priesthood in his twenties and been rejected, though he would never admit why. Now, in his mid-thirties, he was the proprietor of a repository not far from Brascoso Cathedral, which I’d spotted from a distance during my short stroll, with a lucrative set of contracts to supply devotional necessities to it, from church furnishings to communion wafers. Into the bargain he was a bachelor, probably fighting like hell against impulses parallel to Adelita Fal’s.

  He had supported the clinic since its inception on a Christian-charity basis, and had been drawn into the collective Juan Bautiz’ some time later, when he had diffidently offered to smuggle some items the insurgents needed under cover of one of his regular shipments of communion wine. Fierro, though, had always wondered whether it was genuine anger against the régime of Don Amedeo which motivated him. He didn’t think so. Praxas was forever inveighing against the way the local people contaminated orthodox Catholicism with home-brewed superstition and all kinds of locally-invented saints, more fervently venerated than the official Vatican list.

  “Such a man is vulnerable to pressure,” Fierro had said. “I know, because during my childhood I too was influenced—I was even sent for a while to a Jesuit school in Brascoso, although my father was regarded as a comparative freethinker. If such a man were…”

  “Leaned on?” I’d suggested, and he’d given an emphatic nod.

  “Precisely. And I’m much afraid he has been.”

  “Wasn’t it awful about Dr. Small?” Alicia went on cheerfully. “I haven’t heard any news since leaving London, have you? Have they caught the man who did it yet?”

  “No. And I don’t expect they will, either.”

  So there they were, the six former members of the Juan Bautiz’ consortium who inexplicably had been neither shot, nor jailed, nor driven into exile. Not at all what you’d imagine revolutionaries to be like, given that they were all reasonably prosperous, all except Jesús Lorreo from middle-class backgrounds with good education, all doing handsomely under the government they claimed to despise. One might legitimately ask, I guess, why Fierro and Rafé had had to enlist such people.

  Well, I could give a short answer. You have to make do with what you can get.

  Hell, I once overturned an illegal government with a gang of people I normally wouldn’t want to share a sidewalk with! There was a blackmailer who supplied little boys to wealthy whites, then milked them of hush-money; there were two or three murderers, and I had suspicions about another; there were criminal psychotics and God knows what else in that bunch.

  But by the time someone got around to scrutinizing their reputations under a microscope it was too late. They’d done the job and the usurpers had gone crash into a treason trial.

  No, I wasn’t inclined to complain about the caliber of support Fierro had managed to whistle up. Rather, I was minded to compliment him on finding so many people who would commit themselves in a country which put a mental straitjacket on ninety-nine per cent of its people the moment they were out of swaddling-clothes.

  “Oh, Max, that’s a terrible thing to say! You sound so cynical, as though you don’t expect them to even try and catch the killer! If it had happened in a place like South Africa…”

  I stopped listening. I’d had my belly full. Once, I guess, I’d have joined polite argument with her, tried to straighten her out on various points, not convinced it was worth doing but doing it anyway regardless of the fact that she was merely chatting up someone she pictured as a black stud to enliven her vacation with.

  But here I was in a country which had had a black government for nearly a hundred and fifty years. And was, it anything to be proud of?

  And…

  And I and this horrible woman Alicia weren’t the only people who had recently arrived in Brascoso from London. Right there, across the roadway bordering the shore, coming up wet from the water in a tiny, tiny bikini, parading along the beach of fine sharp white sand, registering the reaction of every man for a hundred yards in all directions including me—

  Dolly Quentin.

  “I seem to have offended you. Sorry!”

  In a coarse complaining tone meaning: “It’s your fault—I was doing my best to be agreeable.”

  “What?” I glanced up. But Alicia wasn’t there; I saw her striding back towards the entrance of the hotel. The waiter was hovering, and promptly swabbed the table with a damp cloth and in so doing contrived to add her drink-ticket to mine, tucking it under the saucer of my glass.

  I pulled it out again and told him in my best Spanish, “No! I’m the father, mother and favorite lover of a he-goat if I pay for her drinks!”

  He looked at me stonily and decided I meant what I said. With a swish of his hips he stamped angrily away. Too bad.

  I looked back towards Dolly. She had paused on reaching an air-bed spread on the sand in the shade of a beach-umbrella to pick up a gaudy thigh-long wrap. As she drew it on she was gazing at me, smiling.

  I decided I hated her too.

  EIGHT

  I cursed myself silently several times, like a chess-player whose near-perfect plan of attack has been screwed up because his opponent has done the worst possible thing in reply. Here I’d been in Brascoso a matter of hours, and I’d been spotted by pure chance!

  Cancel that. On reflection: not by chance. If I hadn’t been so boiling mad I might have predicted that Gilbert wouldn’t be pulled off his assignment just because someone had blown his London cover. If he’d been one of the American negotiators in Miami in ‘67, it followed that he was a long way up the CIA totem-pole, most likely a specialist in Madrugadan affairs, and the risk of Fierro or Rafé recognizing him despite his new beard and natural hair-style would have been taken in stride. (Obviously the matter wouldn’t have come up until very recently, anyway; it had only been some ten or twelve days before the conference that Fierro had announced his intention of attending in place of the minor spokesman originally scheduled to take part, and I’d met Gilbert a good five or six weeks earlier.) What more logical next step than that he’d be re-assigned to the one place the Ponzas certainly couldn’t be—Madrugada itself?

  Now how was I to get out from under this?

  I’d been bracing myself, naturally, for a confrontation with Dolly, and wishing like hell I wasn’t so fatigued. To my amazement, however, instead of crossing the road to talk to me, she had started to bundle up her belongings—a job with which two handsome beach-bums promptly offered to help her—and now, swinging a big straw bag decorated with beads, she was heading towards a station-wagon parked some twenty or thirty yards away. She didn’t even glance back. Moreover she had come on her own, or at least there was no one waiting for her in the car.

  The bums loaded the umbrella and air-bed for her, and she thanked them and beat off their persistent importuning, and I watched the car saw back and forth until it was facing the other way, then roar off. At the next curve there was a fork. She took the inland branch, the one which led to that lush suburb Buenas Aguas, almost the only exception to the rule that the higher up the hill you lived the poorer you must be. On the back of a rudimentary map for tourists which I’d picked up at my hotel there was a picture of one of the villas there, and it looked like something out of the Hollywood Hills.

  I felt bewildered. Part of the problem was that of course I hadn’t seen or talked to Gilbert since being told he was an agent, and before that I hadn’t paid much attention to him and his wife. I had almost no idea of the relationship between them, except that they were childless by policy; Gilbert, the talking one of the pair, had mentioned the fact over coffee after one of our committee meetings. Twice or three times Doll
y had accompanied him, but either she’d gone to the kitchen with Sonia to prepare the refreshments, or she’d sat apart, seeming moody, although she listened intently enough. If I’d had the least inkling our small, hard-working inner group had been infiltrated, I’d have kept my eyes and ears wide open, noting every aspect of everybody’s behavior. As it was, what little I knew about the Quentins offered almost no hints for action.

  It offered lots of warnings against inaction, though. I rapidly reviewed and revised my original plans. Question, impossible to answer: was Dolly now immediately going to tell Gilbert I was here? Was she going to conceal the fact for private reasons? What could such reasons be? Did she know about his real work, or was she living in sublime ignorance? It’s not unheard-of for an agent to keep his job secret from his wife—tough, but possible if his wife isn’t particularly interested in him as a person.

  No, I’d have to assume she was going to mention my presence. Hence…

  I fished out my billfold and inspected with curiosity an assortment of the money I’d collected at the airport. The local currency was called doblones—originally doubloons—and there were immense numbers of noughts on all the banknotes I’d acquired. No coins—there hadn’t been any in circulation for years. I left a thousand of them for my drink, about eighty American cents.

  Obviously Madrugada was one of those countries where it comes cheap to be a millionaire.

  I returned to my hotel along a street lined with shops on the point of closing for the noon-to-three siesta. Hopefully the assistants hauling down grilles and blinds noted my London-bought clothing and paused until I had passed before finishing the job. Shoeshine-boys with their own feet bare and little battered boxes under their arms also reacted until they realized I was wearing sandals, then cursed me, and three well-dressed shills thrust leaflets into my hand, one for a night-club, one for a handicrafts store, and one for a tour of Brascoso After Dark “including a visit to a genuine BADOAN ceremony!!!”