Several fat men accompanied me to the police station, including the one who had struck me. He carried my aunt’s scarf, the evidence of a crime. ‘It’s all a mistake,’ I assured him.
‘Mistake?’ His English was very limited.
At the police station – a very imposing building, built to withstand a siege – everyone began to speak at once with noise and fury. I felt at a loss how to behave. I kept on repeating ‘Ingles’ without any effect. Once I tried ‘Ambassador’, but it wasn’t in their vocabulary. The police officer was young and worried – I imagine his superior officers were all at the parade. When I said ‘Ingles’ for the third time and ‘Ambassador’ for the second he hit me but without conviction – a blow which hardly hurt me at all. I was discovering something new. Physical violence, like the dentist’s drill, is seldom as bad as one fears.
I tried ‘Mistake’ again, but no one could translate that word. The scarf was handed from one to another, and a patch of snot was pointed out to the officer. He picked up what looked like an identity card and waved it at me. I suppose he was demanding my passport. I said, ‘I left it at home,’ and three or four people began to argue. Perhaps they were disagreeing on the meaning of what I said.
Oddly enough it was the man who had struck me who proved most sympathetic. My nose was still bleeding and he gave me his handkerchief. It was not very clean and I feared blood poisoning, but I didn’t want to reject his help, so I dabbed rather tentatively at my nose and then offered him his handkerchief back again. He waved it away with a gesture of generosity. Then he wrote something on a piece of paper and showed it me. I read the name of a street and a number. He pointed at the floor and then pointed at me and held out the pencil. Everyone pressed nearer with great curiosity. I shook my head. I knew how to walk to my aunt’s house, but I had no idea of the street. My friend – I was beginning to think of him as that – wrote down the name of three hotels. I shook my head.
Then I spoilt everything. For some unknown reason, standing beside the officer’s desk in the hot and crowded room, with an armed sentry at the door, my mind went suddenly back to the morning of my stepmother’s funeral, the chapel full of distant relatives, and the voice of my aunt breaking the reverent whispers: ‘I was present once at a premature cremation.’ I had looked forward to the funeral as a break in the orderly routine of my retirement and what a break it had proved. I had been worried, I remembered, about the rain falling on my lawn-mower. I began to laugh, and when I laughed all the enmity returned. I was again the insolent foreigner who had blown his nose on the flag of the Colorado party. My first assailant snatched away his handkerchief, and the officer, pushing aside those who stood in his way, strode to my side and gave me a severe cuff on my right ear which began to bleed in its turn. Desperately trying to find the name of anyone they might know, I let out Mr Visconti’s alias. ‘Señor Izquierdo,’ I said with no effect at all, and then, ‘Señor O’Toole.’ The officer paused with his hand raised to strike again and I tried, ‘Embassy – Americano.’
Something about those words worked, though I was not sure whether the working was in my favour. Two policemen were summoned and I was pushed down a corridor and locked into a cell. I could hear the officer telephoning and I could only hope that Tooley’s father really knew the ropes. There was nothing to sit on in the cell – only a piece of sacking under a barred window too high for me to see anything but a patch of monotonous sky. Somebody had written on the wall in Spanish – perhaps a prayer, perhaps an obscenity, I couldn’t tell. I sat down on the sacking and prepared for a long wait. The wall opposite me reminded me of what my aunt had said: I trained myself to be thankful that the wall seemed to keep its distance.
To pass the time I took out my pen and began to doodle on the whitewash. I put down my initials and was irritated, as often before, because they represented a famous sauce; then I wrote the date of my birth, 1913, with a dash against it where someone else could fill in the date of my death. It occurred to me to record a family history – it would help to pass the time if I were to have a long stay – so I wrote down my father’s death in 1923 and my stepmother’s less than a year ago. I knew nothing of my grandparents, so the only relative left me was my aunt. She had been born somewhere around 1895, and I put a question mark after the year. It occurred to me to try to work out my aunt’s history on the wall which had already begun to take on a more friendly family air. I didn’t entirely believe all her stories and perhaps I might discover a chronological flaw. She had seen me at my baptism and never again, so she must have left my father’s house somewhere around 1913, when she was eighteen – it could not have been long after the snapshot had been taken. There had been the period with Curran in Brighton – that must surely have been after the first world war, so I put Dogs’ Church 1919 with another question mark. Curran had left her, she had gone to Paris, and there in the establishment in the Rue de Provence she had met Mr Visconti – perhaps about the same time as my father died in Boulogne. She would have been in her twenties then. I began to work on the Italian period, her travels between Milan and Venice, Uncle Jo’s death, her life with Mr Visconti, which had been interrupted by the failure of his Saudi Arabia scheme. I put tentatively the date 1937 against Paris and Monsieur Dambreuse, for she had returned to Italy and been reunited with Mr Visconti at the house behind the Messaggero before the outbreak of the second war. Of the last twenty years of her life I knew nothing before the arrival of Wordsworth. I had to admit that I had found nothing intrinsically false in the chronology. There was ample time for all she had told me to happen and a great deal more besides. I began to speculate on the nature of the quarrel with my so-called mother. It must have occurred round about the time of the pretended pregnancy – if that story were true … The door of the cell was thrown open and a policeman brought in a chair. It seemed a kindly action and I got up from the sacking to take advantage of it, but the policeman pushed me roughly away. O’Toole came in. He looked embarrassed. ‘You seem to be in trouble, Henry,’ he said.
‘It’s all a mistake. I sneezed and then I happened to blow my nose …’
‘On the Colorado colours outside the Colorado HQ.’
‘Yes. But I thought it was my handkerchief.’
‘You are in an awful spot.’
‘I suppose I am.’
‘You could easily have a ten-year sentence. Do you mind if I sit down? I’ve been standing for hours at that damn parade.’
‘Of course. Please.’
‘I could ask for another chair.’
‘Don’t bother. I’m getting used to this sack.’
‘I guess what makes it worse,’ O’Toole said, ‘is that you did it on their National Day. It seems kind of provocative. Otherwise they might have been content to expel you. What made you ask for me?’
‘You said you knew the ropes and they didn’t seem to understand “English Embassy”.’
‘Your people don’t count for very much here, I’m afraid. We provide their arms – and then there’s the new hydro-electric station we are helping them to build … not too far from the Iguazú Falls. It will serve Brazil too – but Brazil will have to pay them royalties. Great thing for the country.’
‘Very interesting,’ I said with some bitterness.
‘Of course I’d like to help you,’ O’Toole said. ‘You are a friend of Lucinda. I’ve had a postcard from her by the way. She’s not in Katmandu. She’s in Vientiane. I don’t know why.’
‘Look, O’Toole,’ I said, ‘if you can’t do anything else, you might at least ring up the British Embassy. If I’m to have ten years in prison I’d like a bed and a chair.’
‘Sure,’ O’Toole said, ‘I can arrange all that. I guess I could arrange your release too – the Chief of Police is a good friend of mine …’
‘I think my aunt knows him too,’ I said.
‘Don’t bank on that. You see, we’ve had some fresh information about your relative. The police don’t want to act, I guess some money has passed, but w
e’re bringing pressure on them. You seem to be mixed up with some pretty shady characters, Henry.’
‘My aunt’s an old lady of seventy-five.’ I glanced at the notes I had made on the wall: Rue de Provence, Milan, Messaggero. I would have certainly called her career shady myself nine months ago, and yet now there seemed nothing so very wrong in her curriculum vitae, nothing so wrong as thirty years in a bank. ‘I don’t see what you can have against her,’ I said.
‘Your friend, that black fellow, came to see us.’
‘I’m certain he told you nothing against my aunt.’
‘That’s right, he didn’t, but he had plenty to say about Mr Izquierdo. So I persuaded the police to keep him out of circulation for a while.’
‘Is that part of your social research?’ I asked. ‘Perhaps he suffered from malnutrition.’
‘I guess I sort of lied to you, Henry,’ he said, looking ashamed again.
‘Are you in the CIA like Tooley told me?’
‘Well … kind of … not exactly,’ he said, clinging to his torn rag of deception like a blown-out umbrella in a high wind.
‘What did Wordsworth tell you?’
‘He was in a pretty bitter mood. If your aunt hadn’t been so old I’d have said it was love. He seemed jealous of this guy Izquierdo.’
‘Where’s Wordsworth now?’
‘He’s sticking around. He wants to see your aunt again when things blow over.’
‘Are they likely to blow over?’
‘Well, Henry, they could. If everyone were reasonable.’
‘Even my sneeze?’
‘I guess so. As for Mr Izquierdo’s smuggling racket – no one cares a devalued dime about that if only he’d be reasonable. Now you know Mr I.’
‘I’ve never met him.’
‘Maybe you know him under another name?’
‘No,’ I said.
O’Toole sighed. ‘Henry,’ he said, ‘I want to help you. Any friend of Lucinda can count on me. We can have this whole thing tied up in a few hours. Visconti’s not important, not like Mengele or Bormann.’
‘I thought we were talking about Izquierdo.’
‘You and I and your friend Wordsworth know it’s the same man. So do the police, but they protect these guys – anyway till they run out of cash. Visconti nearly ran out of cash, but then Miss Bertram arrived and paid up.’
‘I don’t know a thing,’ I said. ‘I’m simply here on a visit.’
‘I guess there was a good reason why Wordsworth met you in Formosa, Henry. Anyway I’d like to have a word with your aunt and a word from you might make it easier for me. If I persuaded the police to let you go, you and I could see her together …’
‘What exactly are you after?’
‘She must be anxious about Visconti by this time. I can reassure her. They’ll only hold him in jail a few days till I give the word.’
‘Are you offering her some kind of bargain? I warn you she won’t do anything to hurt Mr Visconti.’
‘I just want to talk to her, Henry. With you there. She mightn’t trust me alone.’
I was feeling very cramped on the sacking, and I saw no reason why not to agree.
He said, ‘It may take an hour or two to get you released. Everything is disorganized today.’ He stood up.
‘How are the statistics, O’Toole?’
‘This parade’s put everything out. I was afraid to drink any coffee for breakfast. All these hours of standing without taking a leak. I ought to cancel today altogether. It’s not what you’d call a normal day.’
It took him more than an hour or two to persuade them to let me go, but they forgot to take the chair from the cell after he’d gone and they brought me some thin gruel, and these I took for favourable signs. To my own surprise I wasn’t bored, though there was nothing I could usefully add to the history on the wall, except two problematical dates for Tunis and Havana. I began in my head to compose a letter to Miss Keene describing my present circumstances: ‘I have insulted the ruling party of Paraguay and I’m mixed up with a war criminal wanted by Interpol. For the first offence the maximum penalty is ten years. I am in a small cell ten feet by six, and I have nothing to sleep on but a piece of sacking. I have no idea what is going to happen next, but I confess I am not altogether unhappy, I am too deeply interested.’ I would never really write the letter, for she would be quite unable to reconcile the writer with the man she had known.
It was quite dark outside when at last they came to release me. I was led back down the corridor and through the office, and there they solemnly returned me my aunt’s red scarf, and the young officer slapped my back in a friendly way, urging me through into the street where O’Toole waited for me in an ancient Cadillac. He said, ‘I’m sorry. It took longer than I thought. I’m afraid Miss Bertram will be nervous about you too.’
‘I don’t think I count much beside Mr Visconti.’
‘Blood’s thicker than water, Henry.’
‘Water’s not the term to use for Mr Visconti.’
There were only two lights on in the house. As we came through the trees at the bottom of the garden someone flashed a light in our faces, but the light went out before I could see who held the torch. I looked back from the lawn and could see nothing.
‘Are you having the place watched?’ I asked.
‘Not me, Henry.’
I could tell that he was uneasy. He put his hand inside his jacket.
‘Are you armed?’ I said.
‘One has to take precautions.’
‘Against an old lady? My aunt’s the only one here.’
‘You can never be sure.’
We went forward across the lawn and climbed the steps. The globe in the dining-room shone down on two empty glasses and an empty bottle of champagne. It was still cold to the touch when I picked it up. When I put it down I knocked over one of the glasses and the sound rang through the house. My aunt must have been in the kitchen, for she came at once to the door.
‘Where on earth have you been, Henry?’
‘In prison. Mr O’Toole helped me to get out.’
‘I never expected to see Mr O’Toole in my house. Not after what he did to Mr Izquierdo in Argentina. So you are Mr O’Toole.’
‘Yes, Miss Bertram. I thought it would be a good thing if we could have a friendly talk. I know how anxious you must be about Mr Visconti.’
‘I’m not in the least anxious about Mr Visconti.’
‘I thought perhaps … that not knowing where he was … all this long delay …’
‘I know perfectly well where he is,’ my aunt said. ‘He’s in the lavatory.’ The flush of water could not have come more exactly on cue.
6
I WAITED with excited curiosity to see Mr Visconti. Not many men can have been so loved or have been forgiven so much, and I had an image in my mind’s eye to fit the part, of an Italian tall and dark and lean, as aristocratic as his name. But the man who came through the door to meet us was short and fat and bald; when he held his hand out to me I saw that his little finger had been broken and this made his hand resemble a bird’s claw. He had soft brown eyes quite without expression. One could read into them whatever one liked. If my aunt read love, I felt sure that O’Toole read dishonesty.
‘So here you are at last, Henry,’ Mr Visconti said. ‘Your aunt has been anxious.’ He spoke English very well with practically no accent.
O’Toole said, ‘You are Mr Visconti?’
‘My name is Izquierdo. To whom have I the pleasure …?’
‘My name’s O’Toole.’
‘In that case,’ Mr Visconti said with a smile which was rendered phoney by a large gap in his front teeth, ‘pleasure is not the word I ought to use.’
‘I thought you were safe in jail.’
‘The police and I came to an understanding.’
O’Toole said, ‘That’s what I’ve come here for – an understanding.’
‘An understanding is always possible,’ Mr Visconti said, as though
he were quoting from a well-known source – perhaps from Machiavelli, ‘if there are equal advantages on either side.’
‘I guess there are in this case.’
‘I think,’ Mr Visconti said to my aunt, ‘there are still two bottles of champagne left in the kitchen.’
‘Two bottles?’ my aunt asked.
‘There are four of us, my dear.’ He turned to me and said, ‘It is not the best champagne. It has travelled a long way and rather roughly by way of Panama.’
‘Then I suppose,’ O’Toole said, ‘your arrangements with Panama are now okay.’
‘Exactly,’ Mr Visconti said. ‘When the police arrested me at your suggestion they thought they were once again arresting a poor man. I was able to convince them that I am now again potentially a man of means.’
My aunt came in from the kitchen carrying the champagne. ‘And glasses,’ Mr Visconti said, ‘you have forgotten the glasses.’
I watched Aunt Augusta with fascination. I had never seen her taking orders from anyone before.
‘Sit down, sit down, my friends,’ Mr Visconti said. ‘You must forgive the rough nature of our chairs. We have passed through a period of some privation, but all our difficulties, I hope, are over. Soon we shall be able to entertain our friends in proper fashion. Mr O’Toole, I raise my glass to the United States. I have no ill feelings towards you or your great country.’
‘That’s big of you,’ O’Toole said. ‘But tell me, who’s the man in the garden?’
‘In my position I have to take precautions.’
‘He didn’t stop us.’
‘Only against my enemies.’
‘Which do you prefer to be called, Izquierdo or Visconti?’ O’Toole asked.
‘By this time I have grown quite accustomed to both. Let us finish this bottle and open another. Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie-detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie-detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.’
‘You’ve had experience of them?’ O’Toole asked.
‘I had a session with one before I left BA. The results, I suspect, were not very useful to the police – or to you. You received them, I imagine? I had prepared myself beforehand very carefully. They strapped two rubber belts around my arms and I thought at first they were taking my blood pressure. Perhaps they were doing that among other things. They warned me that however much I lied the machine would always tell the truth. You can imagine my reaction to that. Scepticism is inbred in a Catholic. First they asked me a number of innocent questions, such as what was my favourite food, and did I become breathless going upstairs? As I answered those innocent questions I thought very hard of what a joy it would one day be for me to see again my dear friend here and my heart beat and my pulses jumped, and they couldn’t understand what was making me so excited about walking upstairs or eating cannelloni. Then they allowed me to calm down and afterwards they shot the name Visconti at me. “Are you Visconti?” “You’re Visconti, the war criminal,” but that had no effect on me at all because I had trained my old daily woman to call me Visconti in the morning when she drew the curtains. “Visconti, you war criminal, wake up.” It had become a homely phrase to me meaning “Your coffee is ready”. After that they went back to the question about going upstairs and this time I was very calm, but when they asked me why I liked cannelloni, I thought of my darling and I got excited again, so that at the next question which was a serious one, the cardiogram – if that’s what it was called – became much calmer because I stopped thinking of my dear. In the end they were in quite a rage – both with the machine and with me. You notice how champagne makes me talk. I am in the mood to tell you everything.’
Travels With My Aunt Page 24