Flames Coming out of the Top

by Norman Collins

  The bedroom into which she took him was like the rest of the hotel. It was large and well proportioned and in need of renovation. Over the carved fourposter a bare electric light bulb hung, and the square of carpet that stood in front of the dressing-table was threadbare in the centre. The girl put down the case and left him. A few minutes later the taxi-driver, complaining audibly of the weight, came staggering up the staircase with the cabin trunk: he did not conceal his contempt for the Avenida, and made it perfectly clear that any man who elected to stay at the Avenida when the Gran and the Plaza were ready to open their doors to him was ignorant of the art of living.

  It was when he came to unpack that Dunnett discovered the first of the material shortcomings of the Avenida—one by one the hooks detached themselves from the woodwork as he hung things on them: evidently the wood was powdery all through with dry rot. He turned aside to the drawers. These opened smoothly enough and had apparently recently been swept out. But since the sweeping another kind of life had moved in. The drawer was now occupied by a small jet-black spider—a sinister little bogey that scuttled like clockwork—two earwigs and a family of silver fish. The whole bottom of the drawer seemed to be in motion when it was opened.

  When he had replaced his clothes in the cases they had come in, Dunnett lay back on the massive bed—it was like stealing a rest in a museum—and took stock of things. He had that feeling of sudden relaxation after tension, of flatness even, that is the journey’s end. Now that he was there, it all seemed so absurdly simple; so easy to stop going to bed in a back room in Walham Green and start going to bed in a back room in Amricante. But already he was aware within himself of a curious sense of misgiving, a feeling of insecurity. The trouble was that he was lonely. So lonely that he did not want to do anything but lie on his bed and think about Kay. If only she could have been there too; that would have been the thing. If they had both been here together on some crazy millionaire honeymoon, the five thousand miles would have all been part of the sparkle. He took out her photograph and set it in the centre of the dressing-table. The open, friendly eyes smiled back at him. In a way it made him lonelier still to think that for nearly six months this was all that he would have of her.

  There was a knock at the door, and a short, untidy man in a frockcoat that was too tight for him was standing there bowing and announcing that dinner was about to begin.

  The dining-room of the Avenida was a long room giving on to the street through two large plate-glass windows, gaily stencilled with a design of mural scenes; a whole herd of frosted glass cows wandered aimlessly across the transparent expanse. Like everything else about the Avenida, the room gave the impression of having known better days; even the paper rosettes did little to deceive.

  There were two waiters of the kind, who, having early in life risen to the select heights of a de-luxe restaurant, had steadily and systematically declined until they were by now about half-way along the downgrade that led at the far end to a post as service hand in a cafeteria. One of them handed Dunnett the menu, leaving an imprinted thumbmark where he had held it, while the other alternately ran a glistening finger round his collar to loosen it from his neck and cut a stack of long loaves into short, appetising sections. The meal was not good, but it was at least satisfying. Dunnett rose from it feeling that he had been living all his life on the sinewy flesh of obscure fish and senile beasts fried in vegetable oils. The best thing about it had been a bottle of South American beer. The beer had neither smelt nor tasted like beer; it might have been a temperance drink concocted for the delectation of those who disliked the real thing. But it had the same satiating quality as the food; another mouthful of either would have been too many.

  The meal over, Dunnett sauntered out into the street. It was already dusk and the lights were coming on in the principal streets. The lamp-posts were ornate affairs like cathedral candlesticks, and each one of them supported three large globes. It was evident, however, that they had been designed for decoration rather than for illumination and, except for a pool of primrose light at their base, the street remained in darkness. But with the lighting of the lamps the town seemed suddenly to be coming to life; it might have been a ritual to draw people from their houses. The chairs outside the Gran, which half-an-hour before had been an empty expanse of green wicker, set on an oblong of neatly swept sand, bounded at intervals by commodious-looking spittoons, were rapidly becoming a centre of intercourse and entertainment. The tired business men of the town appeared from nowhere trailing after them their complement of womenfolk, and occupied the vacant tables, ordering short, potent drinks that looked as though they might have come out of a fairy tale. By the time he reached the end of the Rua Chile, Dunnett felt that he knew a great deal about the social life of Amricante.

  On his way back to the hotel he asked a man, who was busily leaning against the ornamental base of a lamp-post, if he knew the whereabouts of the Compañia Muras; he did not want to have to waste time by enquiring in the morning. The loafer was grave and courteous: the Compañia was down by the harbour, he said: the gentleman could not miss it. In the meantime, he suggested, the gentleman might care to be conducted to an exclusive dance-hall with refined hostesses which he had the honour to represent. Dunnett excused himself.

  His first night at the Avenida was a bad one. After fourteen days at sea nothing seemed really steady. The bed gave sudden unexpected lurches and the floor rose and fell with the regularity of a ship in a heavy ocean roll. The strangeness of the room too, was a distraction; even in his sleep he was aware that things were in their wrong places. Also the noises were different. The creakings of a ship at sea had been supplanted by a host of more insidious, more intimate, sounds. Doors shut, and there was a burst of sudden laughter; footsteps approached along the passage and died away again to the accompaniment of stealthy whispers; somewhere in the street a man sang snatches of rowdy melody; towards dawn a dog barked down by the harbour and then, from high up in the town itself, came a cry—perhaps a child’s, perhaps a woman’s, perhaps only an owl’s; in the room above him, after it was already light, someone undressed and threw a pair of high-heeled shoes on to the floor with a noise like castanets.

  Dunnett woke in the morning hot-eyed and unrested. He washed in tepid water and put on his best suit. It felt hot and stifling and flannelly; already the morning showed signs of being hot. Then he studied himself in the mirror. He looked spruce and upright and businesslike; altogether he was precisely the sort of man that he wouldn’t care to find himself up against. There was only one thing that made him doubt himself: he looked so English, so uncompromisingly and obviously Nordic. Something was needed to give him an air of experience, of background. He decided in favour of a cigar; everyone else in Amricante smoked cigars and, with one of those between his teeth, he might be able to pass himself off as having been knocking about all his life in second-rate South American seaports.

  The man who sold the cigar took a professional interest in the sale. Nothing but the best would content him. When he found that Dunnett did not know the names of any of the native brands he dived behind the counter and produced something special. It was a large dark cigar, tightly rolled and as thick as a cane, a corpulent brunette among cigars. On the band was a picture of the bust of a woman holding in one hand the eagle of liberty and in the other the torch of learning. The cigar, which had been primed with saltpetre, crackled a little when lit, and thereafter burnt with an unquenchable, chemical ferocity. Dunnett suffered it to remain between his fingers, sampling its fragrance from afar.

  The taxi-driver knew all about the Compañia Muras as soon as Dunnett mentioned it; evidently it was far from being merely a hole-and-corner affair. This driver had none of the finesses of his craft. They tore along the dock-road like an arrow. If there was a hole in the road he hit it even if it nearly knocked him off his seat. Dunnett, with Mr. Govern’s letter of authority in his pocket, sat bracing himself against the sides of the cab.

  He saw his destination some m
inutes before they reached it. The words COMPAÑIA MURAS were printed in six-foot letters along a whitewashed wall some hundred yards in length. Outside the wrought iron gates which enclosed the entrance courtyard an elderly negro was sitting, evidently on guard. His appearance, admittedly, could not have been called guardian-like: he was simply a withered old monkey with a head of hair like tufted cotton wool; the seat on which he was sitting was an upturned petrol can. But the mere presence of the guard was something. It gave an air of substance and solidity to the name of Muras.

  The negro jumped up when the taxi stopped, and hobbled over. He was quite toothless and the most that he could manage were a number of vague jubilatory noises as though Dunnett’s arrival had been the awaited second-coming. At every mention of the name “Muras” he appeared to grow more excited, and led Dunnett across the dusty courtyard with ceremonial enthusiasm, stepping back for him at doors and repeatedly looking over his shoulder to satisfy himself that his distinguished visitor was still following him. Dunnett came, fumigating the courtyard with his cigar as he walked.

  The office itself was a glass-fronted building like a buffet in a railway station. Inside there was a table and three chairs and two long rows of desks, at which were sitting a number of men who were immediately recognisable as Germans. Square-headed, blue-jawed, weak-eyed, they sat there, a little group of out-of-place compatriots all diligently learning the language, the local business methods and the possibilities of German economic penetration.

  Dunnett’s name was taken by a youth, with black, eloquent eyes and a waist like a ballet dancer’s.

  “Perhaps you have already made an appointment with el Señor?” the youth asked.

  Dunnett denied this and gave him the letter. The envelope was marked conspicuously “Private and Confidential” and was left unsealed only by courtesy to the bearer. The youth seemed impressed. He took the letter behind a coloured glass screen and read it. When he emerged he was far more impressed. He took another long, embracing look at Dunnett out of the tail of his eye and hurried down the office out of sight. Dunnett waited. Five minutes later he was still waiting. He began to wonder if the sinister Señor Muras had simply destroyed the letter and was going to refuse even to see him. At the end of a quarter of an hour he went up to the visitor’s bell on the counter and rang it sharply. He only wished that Mr. Verking had been there to see him do it. The German clerks went on working without looking up—they had not looked up even when Dunnett entered—but the beautiful youth came running.

  “Did you tell Señor Muras that I was here?” Dunnett demanded.

  “Excuse, please,” the youth replied. “Señor Muras was prevented at his house before leaving. Only now arrived. Will you kindly to follow? Two steps down, thank you. Señor Muras very much looks forward to nice, personal visits.” The speaker had a high, lisping voice and spoke with the conscious pride of the professional linguist. It was his remarkable talent as a conversationalist that had earned him his present position.

  They came to a studded-leather door at the far end of the corridor and the youth stopped. He knocked twice and then threw the door open. “Señor Dunnett,” he announced magnificently.

  The room into which Dunnett stepped was a large one; it was as much a drawing-room as an office. A suite of chairs and a couch stood against the wall. The brilliant sunshine outside had been sifted down by green Venetian blinds and the room itself was no more than dimly lit. There seemed to Dunnett, as he stood there, to be altogether too much foreground and middle distance: he recognised that he would have to walk twenty paces before he was properly inside. And then, as he raised his eyes, he saw the other occupant of the room. At a desk at the far end, a man in a white alpaca coat was sitting, his back halfway towards the door. For a moment Dunnett doubted what he saw; the back that was towards him must have been nearly three feet across. The first effect was of a clumsily rolled-up mattress diligently poring over a pile of papers. Doubt was, however, dispelled by movement. The man at the desk made two attempts to heave himself to his feet and finally got himself into a standing position. Then, on amazingly small feet like a child’s, he crossed the room towards Dunnett, holding out a hand like a boxing glove.

  “Mr. Dunnet,” he exclaimed. “How very nice of you. I was expecting you last night.”

  “You were expecting me …” Dunnett began, and stopped himself.

  “Why, naturally,” Señor Muras answered. “I would have come to your hotel myself but I thought you would probably be resting. There are moments, are there not, when a stranger, a total stranger, can intrude?”

  “Might I ask,” Dunnett enquired coldly, “how you knew I was here?”

  Señor Muras smiled; it was a smile that ran downwards from his small, heavily pouched eyes to the voluminous folds of his chin. “You asked the way of one of my clerks last night,” he explained. “He naturally informed me.”

  “But how did he know my name?”

  “He didn’t,” Señor Muras replied: “I enquired at the Post Office this morning. They told me that there were several letters waiting for you Poste Restante and that they bore the names of Govern and Fryze on the envelope. So I put two and two together and here we are.” He smiled deprecatingly as he spoke.

  “Is it usual for a Post Office to give that sort of information?” Dunnett asked. “In England, Post Offices regard the letters they handle as confidential.”

  “It is the same here,” Señor Muras assured him. “They only give information to people they know they can trust. They soon get to know one sort from the other.”

  As he spoke he pulled up a chair and offered it to Dunnett. Then he sat down again himself. The sitting down was not an immediate process; he eased his body bit by bit, sagging a little at the knees as he did so, and finally collapsed backwards on to the seat. From where he was sitting Dunnett could get a better view of him. He was simply a vast sack of a man. Underneath the swelling alpaca jacket, his body, forced somehow into a blue silk shirt, was a great spreading volume of extravagant manhood. Whenever he moved, he rippled. For a moment Dunnett got the impression that the whole man was merely an unstatic, liquid mass held together by a suit of loose clothes. But the face belied the liquidity. In the midst of a framework of folds and creases there was a face that was firm and hard and acquisitive. The eyes were small and deep set, perpetually puckered into the beginnings of a smile; indeed, the whole face was set in an expression of smiling and contemptuous benevolence. The contempt lurked mostly in the mouth. The corners of that were turned down too sharply for there to be any benevolence there. And the teeth, small and rounded, were set back from the lips. Altogether it was an unpleasant, rapacious sort of mouth. At that moment, the mouth was smiling to match the eyes. But there might have been a line drawn across the face in the middle so that the mouth could have been condemning people to be shot while the eyes were still smiling with a kind of mesmeric cordiality.

  “So they sent you all this way to see me,” Señor Muras remarked musingly. “And had they any special object or was it just a courtesy visit, might I ask?” He spoke as though either object would have been equally welcome.

  “They want me to go through the books for the company,” Dunnett replied. He endeavoured to make his voice sound experienced and authoritative. “And they want me to take a check of the stock sheets.”

  Señor Muras leant back and inserted his thumbs into the arm-holes of his waistcoat. He spread a heavy waft of scent all round him as he did so; apparently he was bathed in perfume. “I believe there was something to that effect in the letter,” he remarked casually. “I didn’t set much store by it.” He paused and began to fan himself idly with Mr. Govern’s notepaper. Then he turned to Dunnett again. “I am an older man than you are,” he said in a low, serious voice, “and I know exactly how you must feel. I can assure you that I should feel just as embarrassed myself if I had to go suddenly into someone else’s office and ask to go all through his private ledgers.”

  “I don’t feel in th
e least embarrassed,” Dunnett replied stiffly. “It’s only part of the routine of the company. All exporting houses have to send someone round from time to time.”

  Señor Muras’s smile broadened. “No need to apologise,” he said. “I’ve already told you that I understand. So far as I’m concerned I shan’t ever refer to it again.”

  “Would it be convenient if I began straight away?” Dunnett enquired. “I’d like to get started on the books this morning if possible.”

  The smile vanished, but Señor Muras did not move. “That is the spirit I admire,” he said reflectively. “So strangely typical of youth. And so foreign. All fire and impatience. You come thousands of miles, and all that you think about when you get here is finishing your work so that you can go back again.” He passed his hand across his forehead and resumed. “But in a sense I don’t like it,” he said. “It makes me feel so middle-aged; I seem tired and indifferent to things. But there you are: I’ve got a daughter of nearly twenty. I’m not so young as I was.”

  Dunnett got to his feet. “If you wouldn’t mind showing me where things are,” he said, “I’d like to start checking your receipt notes by our invoices.”

  Señor Muras did not attempt to move: he regarded Dunnett through half-closed eyes. “If I had had your energy, your energy and your head for business, I should be a richer man now than I am. Only last month one of my clerks stole a whole month’s consignment of goods from under my nose, and I had to make up the loss out of my own pocket.”

  “Could you please take me through to the counting house?” Dunnett asked a little more pointedly. “There’s a lot of work to be done.” He began to move towards the door as he spoke: he knew that if he stopped, little by little he would be drawn into the entangling web of Señor Muras’s conversation.

  Still Señor Muras did not move. “I prosecuted my clerk,” he said. “He was only a young boy. A very handsome-looking fellow too. But I made myself do it. A thief in our midst is not a pleasant thing; and once a man’s integrity had gone there’s nothing left to save.” He looked at Dunnett again and his eyes smiled invitingly. “You said that you wanted to check the stock?” he asked.