Road To The Coast

by John Harris

  ‘That’s about it,’ she said sharply. ‘It’ll give me a lot of fun.’

  ‘I’ll bet you stayed awake all night thinking that one up.’

  To her consternation, he laughed out loud. ‘You’re batting on a sticky wicket,’ he said. ‘If I were you, I wouldn’t go in for that kind of villainy.’

  ‘I’ll do anything.’

  ‘I’m sure you will, but it so happens that I’ve got half the rebel narks in the country on my tail already and it wouldn’t help your cause to fetch ’em all into this district, sniffing about and taking names and addresses. Now would it?’

  She stared at him, disconcerted by his gaiety and dismayed by the implication of what he was saying. Then he grinned, his red hair adding somehow to the unrepentant look on his face.

  ‘Oh!’ Suddenly angry, she took a swing at him, wanting to knock the smile off his face, but he caught her wrist and held it.

  She snatched her hand away and he laughed outright with such real mirth that her anger boiled up.

  ‘I suppose you think all this is funny?’

  ‘Not really,’ he said soberly. ‘It isn’t very funny to me and I suppose it’s even less funny to you.’

  ‘I would have to choose you,’ she said, her rage dying as his smile grew less mocking. Then, as she became curious, it disappeared altogether.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ she asked.

  ‘I wish I were.’

  ‘Is that what you meant when you said you were persona no grata or whatever it was?’

  ‘Of course it is. What did you think I meant?’

  ‘No wonder you made all that fuss last night,’ she said. ‘No wonder you looked at me as though I were something the cat had dragged in.’ In her generous way, she was already managing to feel sympathy for him. ‘What did you do? Murder somebody? I wouldn’t put it past you.’

  He shook his head, smiling, watching her, enjoying her changing expressions.

  ‘I’ll bet it’s the only kind of villainy you haven’t tried,’ she observed. ‘Well, whatever it was,’ she went on, a little put out by his amused stare and feeling she ought to put on more show of scorn, ‘don’t come to me for sympathy. You should keep your nose clean. I’ve no time for people like you who can’t do an honest job and then start complaining when things fall on top of them.’

  ‘Who’s complaining?’

  His cheerfulness baffled her and as her curiosity finally became too much for her, her anger collapsed completely. ‘What did you do?’ she asked.

  He indicated the briefcase. ‘Money. Duffy dropped me in for it. I told you about Duffy. He was always one with an eye for a quick turnover. Always a bit close to the wind. It was the easiest thing you ever saw. Just like falling off a log.’

  She remembered something he’d said the night before. ‘Whose was it?’ she asked. ‘These people who’re trying to push the government out?’

  He nodded. ‘It was to pay the troops or bribe the people they wanted to bribe. Something like that. It had come from Montevideo. There are a lot of Big Brother’s enemies on that side of the river. He’s been chasing them across for years and they’ve been building up quite a resistance movement there of people whose interest it serves to push him out – politicians, businessmen, cattlemen, the usual crowd.’

  ‘Wherever it came from, it wasn’t yours to pinch,’ Grace said with caustic realism.

  He started back at her, unmoved. ‘No. Come to think of it,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t. Only they shouldn’t leave it lying around, should they? It was asking for trouble.’

  ‘Strikes me lots of people ask for trouble.’

  Caught by his enthusiasm, he didn’t seem to hear her. ‘It was in dollars,’ he said. ‘Lovely American dollars – the universal currency – so it couldn’t be traced, so it wouldn’t change its value whatever happened. In briefcases. Over seventeen thousand five hundred dollars per. Seven thousand quid, just lying around, asking to be lifted. The story was going the rounds that it was more. They weren’t very careful, I must say, and everybody seemed to know all about it. Everybody I knew, that is.’

  She had a brief glimpse of the shallow sphere in which he had revolved, full of bright lights and bars and big cars, a sphere with a shady underside to it and doubtful customers from all over the globe whispering over the pink gins.

  ‘That was probably because it came from the people who’d got plenty and were losing it fast under Big Brother’s régime,’ he went on. ‘But there wasn’t more, in spite of what they said. That was the lot, though God knows, it seemed enough to be tempting at the time.’

  She said nothing, feigning indifference, and for a moment there was silence, then he saw the curiosity still in her eyes.

  ‘Chap called Salazar put us on to it,’ he said with a grin. ‘He was a major and he was in the know. He’d got all the gen but he was scared to touch it. He’d been sliding round it for days, like aspic on a hot plate, trying to pluck up courage to have a bang at it.’

  ‘I bet you didn’t slide long.’

  He laughed. ‘Duffy went for it bald-headed. I’ll say that for the old boy. All we did was change the briefcases. Just picked ’em up and put some more in their place. Our three for three of theirs. Fair exchange, no robbery.’

  ‘No robbery! My God!’

  He shrugged. ‘As it happened, the treacherous bastards cheated us. One of ’em was full of leaflets.’ A twisted look appeared on his face. ‘Leaflets and a bundle of bank notes for the printer.’

  ‘Didn’t anyone stop you?’ she asked.

  His grin returned. ‘Didn’t get a chance,’ he said. ‘We left three different ways. So they’d never trace us. Without so much as a good-day to each other or a kiss your hand. Walked out of the place separately, as though we were perfect strangers to each other. And that was that. One case each.’

  ‘And what was in the cases you left? Newspapers?’

  He grinned once more, his face full of wicked pleasure again. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Toilet paper. American toilet paper. A cheap line Duffy was trying to get rid of. Pink and blue and yellow, with a little motto on each sheet. I bet they enjoyed reading ’em.’

  ‘It sounds funny to you!’ She tried hard to look severe. ‘But it was a lot of money.’

  ‘Well, it was and it wasn’t.’

  ‘How do you mean? – Here!’ – she turned on him, her face pink and indignant – ‘here I am, listening to all this, and you’re the very man I gave my money to, to look after. In Flores, remember? It’s a damn good job I didn’t trust you and only gave you part of it.’

  He stared at the disclosure, then he laughed. ‘Only part?’

  ‘You didn’t think I’d be fool enough to turn over the lot, did you?’

  ‘You needn’t have worried,’ he pointed out. ‘You could have had it back any time you liked.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He shrugged. ‘Let is slip. It’s nothing. In effect, it means that I’m taking you on – wherever you want to go.’ He looked vaguely sheepish, as though he felt faintly embarrassed, after all his talk of villainy, to have been caught out in a good deed.

  She gazed up at him, furious with him for his teasing but weak with gratitude and relief. He was quite serious now, his smile gone, and she suddenly felt a great warmth of affection for him.

  ‘Honest?’ she asked.

  He nodded. That highly developed instinct of his for self-preservation had been tormenting him all night but stirred by her contempt, her insults, her complete indifference to all the facets of his charm that normally so impressed, what conscience he still had left had been sufficiently moved by her story for him to be unable completely to abandon them.

  He had gone on hoping all through the hours of darkness that by morning something would have turned up that would make abandonment easy for him, a providential end to the fighting perhaps, or some other foreigner on the way to the coast on to whom he could load them without any twinges of remorse, but the sound of that gravel-voiced radio
announcer whose claims of success failed to hide the fact that the government was tottering on its last legs had thrust the onus for taking care of them squarely back on to his own broad shoulders.

  ‘I’ve decided there isn’t an Ash born who can resist an appeal for help from a damsel in distress,’ he said, trying to make a joke of it. He ginned impertinently. ‘Besides,’ he concluded, ‘in her gratitude, you never know how she might react.’

  She was unembarrassed by the outrageousness of the suggestion behind his words.

  ‘You’ve got a nerve,’ she said.

  ‘Opportunism, I think it’s called.’

  She studied him with a vague unwilling admiration. ‘There’s one thing about you,’ she said. ‘I’ve never seen anyone with less worry about psychosis or neurosis.’

  ‘I’ve always been noted for being dim.’

  ‘Anyway,’ she said cheerfully. ‘It makes a change these days!’ She turned away, preparing to collect her belongings. ‘There’s one thing that comes out of all this, I suppose,’ she said. ‘After what you’ve just told me, I shan’t worry any more about not having enough money to get home. If I’m stuck, I’ll borrow some of yours.’

  Her eyes were bright with new hope and he gave a cautionary gesture. ‘Here, steady on,’ he said. ‘Not so fast. It’s not so simple as that. There’s just one point–’

  She raised her hand, brushing aside his protest.

  ‘Don’t spoil it, Buster,’ she said, warm and friendly again willing to forgive the anger he’d caused her. ‘The knowledge that we’ve got financial backing’s going to make me sleep a lot easier tonight, so don’t go into it too deeply. I’d just as soon forget, in fact, where it came from and who it belongs to, and enjoy the knowledge that it’s there if we want it.’

  He studied her for a moment, then he shrugged, and she eyed him curiously, her head on one side. ‘You’re not joking?’ she asked. ‘You really meant it? – about taking us on.’

  He nodded. ‘Press on regardless and damn the torpedoes. You’re too bloody honest for me. It becomes infectious.’

  To his surprise, she began to laugh. She started off with a smile, then an explosive snort that caught on, and finally came out in a deep rich chuckle, as full and ripe as the woman herself.

  ‘My God,’ she said, ‘what a pair we are! Here I am, trying to dodge the police and out of all the people in the whole damn country who might have popped up to help me, it had to be you. Now, between us, we’ve got every cop in the place after us, I should think. That’s rich, it really is.’

  Ash began to laugh also and finally Teresa, without knowing what it was all about, started laughing too, infected by their mirth.

  Then abruptly, Grace stopped and pushed him angrily. ‘What the hell are we sniggering at?’ she said hotly. ‘We’ve got nothing to laugh about. Neither of us. We’re in it up to the neck. Both of us. It strikes me, friend Harry Ash, Esquire, that you and me had better stop fighting with each other as from now and concentrate on what we’re doing. We’ll get nowhere fighting except in gaol. If we stick together and back each other up, though, we might make it, so long as that blasted ship doesn’t go before we can get aboard her. How about it? All for one and one for all, as the saying goes.’

  He nodded and they shook hands solemnly, ritualistically.

  ‘OK.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Now, for God’s sake, let’s get going again. I’m getting nervous.’

  Eight

  Santa Rosa de Paraná, where Ash expected to pick up the SS Ballaculish, was an old town perched on one of the bluffs which at intervals broke up the flatness of the country-side through which they had driven since dawn. It stood on a hillock above the marshy land that was inundated every time the rains came and the south-easters stemmed the waters of the river in the delta until they finally overflowed their shallow banks upstream and as often as not left the area without communication. With its few trees, it seemed like an island above the monotony of the wild reedy areas that fringed the river, wide empty acres that were peopled only by frogs and waterfowl.

  Its warehouses and offices, whose corrugated iron sheeting banged whenever the pamperos blew, huddled together in a strong aura of hides and bones, along the greasy concrete of the wharves at the end of a jetty that extended far out into the river, a stopping place for the ships that plied between the coast and Asunción a thousand miles inland. Behind them, a long rutted road ran into the town, unpaved and bordered with grass, straight and ugly and flanked by blue, pink and yellow houses among the sparse eucalyptuses. The only buildings in the whole area above one storey were a few residences with heavy tiled roofs and wide-arched porticos fringed with hanging moss which were clustered among the offices round the church, a blue building vaguely like a Christmas cake, with twin towers decorated with a mixture of Spanish colonial architecture and modernistic plasterers’ fancy, whose coloured tiles caught the sun as they groped above the trees.

  ‘Looks a bit of a bloody junk heap,’ Ash commented severely, looking across the town at the worn stonework of the church and the raucous starlings that chattered among the pinnacles. ‘As if it’d all fall down if somebody coughed.’

  He indicated the neglected trappings of dictatorship which were still in the streets, the portraits repeated ad nauseam on walls and in offices and shops and on the fronts of buses, the slogans swelling to enormous size outside the empty party headquarters whose occupants were doubtless downriver somewhere trying to stem the tide of revolution with guns or propaganda.

  ‘God bless Big Brother,’ he said. ‘I bet he’s so cross at the moment, he could bite himself.’

  He seemed gay and strangely elated, with Grace there beside him and the child fidgeting with excitement between them – as though he had found something he had been seeking for years. Even the sight of the soldiers who filled the town, still dusty from an all-night drive from Córdoba, failed to depress him.

  They were everywhere. Machine guns had been set up at the crossroads and in front of the station on the deserted line outside the town, and their ugly muzzles frowned over the market place where scared youngsters waited to run errands with boxes on pram wheels for the women still trying to shop.

  Ash was cheerfully contemptuous of their threat, however, showing off a little, pointing out what faults he could find with a professional eye and a rich vocabulary of derision. ‘Sloppy-looking lot,’ he kept saying. ‘Enough to make a sergeant of the Guards weep white mice.’

  He seemed to be filled with a firm impression that anything the troops could do he could do better, which to Grace was remarkably reassuring, even with the mortar in the Plaza san Martín in front of the church, and alert, steel-helmeted men lounging under the poplars and the acacias and the spiky palms, the exhaust smells of their lorries mingling with the scent of the mimosa and myrtle in the shabby public gardens behind. There were more of them standing over their weapons among the orange trees that lined one side of the square, their eyes on the narrow roads debouching from among the crooked crumbling houses on to the fountain that centred the broad stretch of asphalt, which was white with the droppings of generations of pigeons from the church towers.

  In spite of the troops, the life of the town seemed to be going on normally enough. An ancient bus, jeeringly labelled “El Terrífico” and dripping with people, ground towards the docks past an antique ox-cart with vegetables in from the country; and a donkey, its ears flapping like semaphore flags, tottered under a couple of baskets of fruit as its owner prodded it from the rear with a stick.

  Several of the official buildings had their entrances sand-bagged against siege but there was still an old man near the newspaper kiosk feeding the pigeons as though it were something he did every day of the week, and a chestunt vendor waiting near the gate of the convent opposite – apparently without a great deal of hope for no one seemed to be buying. An idler, stretched across half a dozen chairs in front of a dark little café plastered with adverts, listened to the church bell booming its thud
ding monotone and tried to read the headlines on someone else’s paper, one eye all the time on the schoolchildren sidling past the guns in the square, their gaze straining at their eye corners with curiosity.

  Just off the docks, Ash found a couple of shabby soldiers who lounged against a pile of fustian-covered bales of wool awaiting shipment, waving away the noisy flies that bred around the frigoríficos and meat packing yards along the river and made their way into every little town along its length. He climbed from the Ford and, standing four-square in front of them like a sergeant-major, shouted at them in Spanish until they managed to click to life and led him into an office half-hidden by a vast military car.

  When he re-emerged, he was accompanied by an officer and, as the two spoke together, Grace and Teresa watched silently, holding their breath with anxiety.

  ‘The ship is anchored up the Saolito,’ the officer was saying. ‘It runs into the Paraná just upstream. She’s lying off Mareo Fuerte, a few kilometres north of here, but I ought to warn you that fighting might break out in the area at any time. We’ve received information of revolutionary forces trying to break through to the banks and I’ve got a company of infantry stationed in the village. On the other hand’ – he shrugged – ‘I can see no possibility of travel to the coast by any other means for some time.’

  His anxious manner, as nervous of himself as he appeared to be of the towering Ash, contrasted oddly with his proud Castilian nose and dramatic stance, and Grace strained her ears as he spoke to catch one word that might have some meaning for her, clutching Teresa’s hand all the time and demanding to know what was being said.

  ‘What’s he going on about?’ she kept saying. ‘What’s he telling him, Tess?’

  The officer was pointing vaguely along the bend of the river now as it curved to the east, where they could see a side-paddle ferry boat alongside the landing state surrounded by silent lighters. Dejected and forgotten, it looked like a vast Mississippi steamboat, with its tall stack and the baroque yellow dragons on its paddle casings that were redolent of crinolines and negroes. Its decks were still littered with sacks and packing cases, as though it had been quitted in a hurry, and along one side the paint was blistered in a dark line.