Now and Then, Amen

by Jon Cleary

  The Fraud Squad called at Ballyduff headquarters and asked to see Mr. Tewsday. The two officers were shown into his office: Inspector Zanuch and a young detective-constable whose name was Maloney or something like that. Tewsday, who had always had the potential, had grown into a snob, a man who failed to recognize inferiors, even in his own organization.

  “We were duped, Inspector.” He decided to be utterly frank, he laid his case on the table like a saint pleading guilty to over-zealousness. “We relied upon those we thought were honest experts.”

  “They’ve fled the country, Mr. Tewsday.” Zanuch was already the second-best dressed man on the force, a conservative dandy who matched the man opposite him. Alongside them Detective-Constable Malone looked like a vagrant who had wandered into the wrong room. “We estimate they’ve made a quarter of a million dollars each, all tax free, which should buy them a nice hideaway somewhere. That, as they say, leaves you holding the baby.”

  “You surely don’t think a corporation like ours would be a knowing partner in a conspiracy to defraud? Or, indeed, that I would be?” He had been made a Commander of the British Empire in that year’s Honours List: the Empire no longer existed and he commanded nothing, but CBE meant something after one’s name, even if most of the natives weren’t quite sure what it meant.

  Zanuch looked at Malone. “Constable Malone has dug out some interesting facts, Mr. Tewsday. Perhaps you’d like to hear them?”

  Malone took out a notebook. “On November the first last you hosted a lunch at the Wentworth Hotel in a private dining-room. You told a group of bankers and stockbrokers that you personally had been to inspect the mining leases in Western Australia, to wit, the Bundiwindi leases, and that you had then gone on to Perth and seen the ore samples tested for the nickel content you claimed, to wit, eight per cent. The true content was a non-commercial one per cent, is that not right?”

  “Where did you get that information?”

  “From two of the stockbrokers and one of the bankers present. And from one of the geologists on the leases—he said you’d never been near Bundiwindi.”

  Tewsday looked at the young detective. He was tall and well-built, a ramshackle dresser, someone Tewsday felt he didn’t need to remember; the police force, he guessed, was full of these nondescripts. “What makes you think I’d risk my reputation by concocting anything like those men have alleged?”

  “Greed?” said the nondescript.

  Tewsday gave him a hard, second look then. “That’s an indiscreet remark, Constable. You may live to regret it.”

  Inspector Zanuch said, “We have a good deal of evidence, Mr. Tewsday. I suggest it might be a good idea if you got in touch with your lawyers.”

  Tewsday sat very still, even his plump hand lying like a dead starfish on his desk. He was barely into his forties now, but he had looked middle-aged for the past five years: this had been the destined portrait of him and he had been growing into it since he was in his mid-twenties. He had a plump pink-marble look to him and, unless he lost weight, one had the impression that the marble wouldn’t age any more. There was, however, a crack in the marble at the moment.

  “I think I’d better have a few words with someone.” He stood up. “Will you excuse me for ten minutes? My secretary will get you some coffee.”

  “Can we trust you, Mr. Tewsday?” said Zanuch. “Maybe Constable Malone had better go with you.”

  “No.” Tewsday’s voice was hard. “I’ll be back, Inspector. I don’t run out.”

  There were two large offices on this floor, his own and that of the other joint managing director. On the floor above, having the space to itself, was the office of the executive chairman. This was accessible without appointment only to Tewsday and the other managing director. Fingal Hourigan had never been a gregarious boss and now he had become almost monastic.

  He looked up in irritation as his long-time, long-suffering secretary, Miss Stevens, a durable, patient woman, showed Tewsday in. “What’s the matter?”

  “We’re in trouble,” said Tewsday and told him about the Fraud Squad’s visit.

  “Is what they say true?”

  “Up to a point.”

  “Jesus!” Fingal sat back in his high-backed chair. His hair was iron-grey now, but touches of white were showing through. “How many times have I told you to cover your tracks? You’ll never learn, you youngsters. Did you go over to Western Australia to inspect the leases?”

  “No. I took the word of our two experts. You met them, we agreed they looked on the up-and-up. I found out after they’d bolted that there was only one intersection that showed eight per cent, but it would have yielded nothing commercial, it was so narrow and shallow.”

  “Well, whatever happened, we’ve been left holding a crock of shit.” When he was wildly angry some of the old Chicago street argot slipped back on to his tongue. “You can carry it.”

  “You okayed the float, Fingal.”

  “Have another look at the prospectus. You won’t find my name anywhere on it. But yours is, with that big flash signature of yours.”

  The two men stared at each other; the war between them would never end. Fingal had not allowed the enmity between them to blind him to Tewsday’s business talent: he had promoted him as he had deserved to be. As a balance and a threat he had created a joint managing directorship: Borsolino, Tewsday’s sour rival, occupied that. Tewsday, for his part, had stayed on at Ballyduff, riding out the occasional rude rebuff, because he was on course towards his ambition, some day soon to be chairman and chief executive of what was now one of the five largest corporations in the country. Ballyduff was a battlefield, but no campaign medals would be issued. Both men kept their hatred of each other very private.

  “It won’t reflect too well on Ballyduff,” said Tewsday.

  Fingal reflected on that. “Okay, I’ll see what I can do. Go back downstairs, tell those cops you’ll talk to them in a couple of days when you’ve seen our lawyers. Stall „em. Handle „em with kid gloves—you’re good at that.” He wanted to say greasy kid gloves, but restrained himself. “I’ll get in touch with Joe Redford.”

  Tewsday left him, drew on kid gloves and went downstairs to stall Zanuch and Malone. Fingal got up and walked to one of the big windows of his huge office. This new Ballyduff House had been up only a few months; here on the sixty-ninth floor, one floor under the boardroom, where he also ruled, he was king of the city. Here, if he so wished, he could piss on the citizens from a great height. He was already the richest man in the land and in his pockets he had enough politicians to form a party of his own.

  Joe Redford was one of them. He was the conservative Premier of the State, a politician who knew he and his party would be tossed out at the next elections. He was in his late sixties and his last hurrah, feathering his nest as fast as he could pick up the necessary. From his window Fingal could look south and almost directly into the window of the Premier’s office. He walked back to his desk, picked up the phone and talked to Redford on a private line for ten minutes.

  Two days later a senior officer called in Inspector Zanuch and said the case against Bundiwindi Mining would be dropped. Zanuch argued, but only half-heartedly; he could sense corruption, even though he couldn’t smell it. Three months later the senior officer was driving a new car, one that seemed expensive for a man on his salary. The Premier’s wife had $50,000 deposited in her bank account by Sugarcane Properties, a company registered in Queensland and used by Fingal for such donations. Tewsday emerged unmarked, except for this further debt to his enemy.

  8

  I

  THE LETTER had said: My uncle came to Nicaragua last November, a month before I left to come home to Sydney . . .

  Mary Magdalene knew exactly where she was, even though the windows were boarded up. She had been to this village several times, though not in the past six months. The Contras had been in control of this mountain area for that long and the Bishop in her own region had forbidden any of the priests, nuns and lay w
orkers to come near any of these villages. No one had expected the Contras to come down out of the mountains on a kidnapping raid.

  The village where she worked was on a small lake below a tangle of low mountains. She had set up the school when she had arrived here two years ago; she was assisted by a part-Indian nun, Sister Carmel, and an American lay worker, Audrey Burke. There was a two-room schoolhouse, built of adobe by the villagers, and a two-room hut where the three women lived. A lean-to kitchen had been built on the outside of the hut. It was all very primitive, but then everything, she had learned, was comparative. Audrey, however, brought up in a House and Gardens kitchen and who thought a microwave oven was essential to survival, was of the opinion that humility as taught by Christ could sometimes be a drag.

  It was Audrey, a thin pretty girl from Kansas City, who had come running in to say there were soldiers in Jeeps at the end of the village’s main street. Mary Magdalene had gone out of the schoolhouse into the bright sunlight and the first thing she saw was the mineral-water vendor running down the street, pushing his rattling cart ahead of him. “They’ve taken Señor Caracas and his children!”

  Jose Caracas was the village’s principal employer. He owned a coffee plantation and also grew corn and wheat for the neighbouring markets. His father had been a Somoza supporter and had fled to the United States when the Somoza regime was toppled. Jose had stayed on and made his peace with the Sandinistas. Because he treated his employees with respect and good wages and because they had not complained against him, his holdings had not been seized; the Government was a silent partner, in return respecting his ability to run a successful commercial venture. His three older children were at school in Managua, the capital, but his two youngest came here to the parish school, another toleration by the Government.

  “Where’s Father Roa?” Mary shouted, but the mineral-water man rattled on past her at full speed.

  “He’s gone into Esteli,” said Audrey.

  “Damn! He’s never around when we need him.” Father Roa, old and a drunk, had given up the ghost, if not the Holy Ghost, and no longer cared about his flock. They could find their own way to Heaven where, he hoped, he would be waiting for them, young again and sober.

  “Why would the soldiers be taking Señor Caracas?” Audrey was not qualified as a teacher or, indeed, for anything. She had turned up out of nowhere one day, fresh-faced and fresh with that American enthusiasm that Mary Magdalene found endearing and exasperating at the same time. They were always so optimistic. “It must be a mistake.”

  It was a mistake, all right; they were not Government soldiers. Mary looked up the street and saw now that the few villagers who had been out in the midday heat had disappeared into their homes. Out on the lake two flat-bottomed boats that had been about to come in had turned back and now stood offshore. Four Jeeps, crammed with Contras in camouflaged green battle-dress, were coming down the narrow street; behind them she recognized the battered old Oldsmobile that was José Caracas’s only relic of the family’s lost affluence. The small convoy came to a halt in front of the school.

  “Go back inside.” He was a young lieutenant with a soft wispy beard and hard dark eyes.

  “Where are you taking Señor Caracas? Leave the children with us.” She had come out without her hat and she was squinting in the bright reflection flung up from the red dust of the road.

  “Go back inside,” he repeated. “It’s none of your business. You outsiders are a pain in the ass.”

  “What’s the difference between us and the other pains in the ass, the Americans who are working with you?” Mary was glad that it was Audrey, an American, who asked the question.

  Sister Carmel stood quietly in the background, as if trying to lose herself in the thin shadow flung by the overhang of the school’s roof. Mary could not blame her: Carmel would have to remain here, no matter which side won the civil war. If an old Spanish-blood priest did not want to fight, who could blame a part-Indian nun if she chose to be neutral? God Himself hadn’t yet made up his mind whose side he was on in this war-racked country.

  “Leave the children with us,” said Mary doggedly. “Where’s their mother?”

  Half a dozen parakeets, like small green missiles, suddenly took off from the strawberry tree beside the schoolhouse. The lieutenant turned his head sharply; all at once he looked nervous. Then he looked back at Mary, but said nothing. The three soldiers in the Jeep behind him, mere boys, looked sheepish. Mary stared at them, then wheeled and went up the line to the Oldsmobile. It was a convertible, but the top, ragged and patched, was up against the midday sun. Two soldiers were in the front seat and José Caracas was slumped in the back seat, his arm wrapped protectingly round his two small daughters.

  “For your own sake, Sister Mary, don’t interfere.” He was a small, jovial man; or had once been. All the joviality had gone and had left just a shell. He wore a white shirt and white trousers, but they were dirty, as if he had been dragged through the dust, and there was a large patch of blood on the shirt. He looked at Mary with glistening frightened eyes and she realized with a shock that he was weeping. “They have killed my wife.”

  The two children shuddered and he wrapped his arms tighter round them.

  “It was an accident,” said the young soldier behind the wheel. He, too, looked sheepish, like the soldiers in the Jeep at the front of the column. He believed in his cause, but he hadn’t expected to kill women. “She was trying to protect the children and the gun just went off.”

  Mary put her hands on the side of the car and leaned forward, feeling sick and faint. Rose Caracas had been a friend, a quiet plump women who was the right complement to her thin, jovial husband; there had been nothing in her life but him and her children. One heard of deaths every day in this country, but this was the first death of a friend.

  She had not come here originally to take sides in the war, political or military. The order had been working here in Central America for over a hundred years, not always in a non-partisan way; in the 1920s it had been known by the locals as the Little Sisters of United Fruit. Over the past two years, however, the younger nuns, more politically aware than their older sisters, had begun to question their own neutrality. Rome might lay down its edicts, but Rome knew little, if anything, of the pain and bewilderment in these red-dust, green-tangled hills. One prayed to God for advice and, if He didn’t strike one down with a bolt of lightning, one took it as approval of what one was doing. She was sensible enough, however, to run indoors whenever an electric storm had struck. She had never run away from the Contras.

  She straightened up. “Leave the children with me, Señor Caracas. I’ll take care of them till you return.”

  “No.” The young lieutenant had come up from the front of the convoy, treading quietly in the dust as if to ambush her. “Damn you, Sister, get into the car! You’re coming with us!”

  He swung open the door of the car, grabbed her roughly and thrust her in before she could resist. Audrey came running up, yelling, and attacked the lieutenant, throwing both fists at him at once in the way women do. He took hold of one of her wrists, stepped aside and pulled her head first into the side of the car; some American instructor had taught him unarmed combat. Audrey’s head hit the car with a horrible thump and she slid down into the dust and lay there.

  “Drive on!”

  He ran ahead, jumped into the leading Jeep and the convoy took off at once. Mary Magdalene scrambled up from the floor of the Oldsmobile, looked out over the side and back at the inert figure of Audrey still lying in the middle of the roadway, with Carmel, taking sides at last, running towards her.

  Caracas moved over in the back seat and Mary slid on to it beside him. She took one of the children from him and cradled her in her lap. “There, Teresa, we’ll be all right. We’ll be all right.” But the little girl looked at her with no faith at all.

  Ten minutes later the convoy came to an abrupt halt. The lieutenant came back to the Oldsmobile and Mary and Caracas were both bli
ndfolded with dirty bandanas. Then the convoy moved off again and travelled for another hour, climbing all the time. Once it stopped, not moving for ten minutes or so; Mary heard the clatter of a helicopter and guessed that the convoy must have pulled in under some trees to hide from a Government Mi-24. They must have been well hidden; the helicopter cruised up and down the road, then swung away and was gone out of earshot in a moment. The convoy moved on, then at last stopped; Mary, blind but not deaf, knew they had arrived in some village. She was feeling car-sick from the constant twisting and turning of the road and from the smell of the bandana tied round the upper part of her face: it was like having her face buried in someone’s armpit. Teresa was taken from her arms and Mary herself was led, gently, by the young driver, out of the car and into a house. It was a campesino’s house: she could feel the dirt floor under the crepe-soled boots she wore.

  The young driver took off the bandana. She rubbed her eyes and blinked at him, standing there in his embarrassment. “What are they going to do to us?”

  “I don’t know, Sister, not you, anyway. They’re going to take Señor Caracas and the children across the border.” He lowered his voice. “Don’t make the lieutenant angry, Sister. He might kill you.”

  She looked at him with horror, not believing him. But he was deadly serious; she could see the horror in his own face. He was part-Indian, but he didn’t have the mask that the full-blooded Indians could sometimes wear.

  “Why would they want to do that, for God’s sake?”

  “Not they. Him. He’s a fanatic, Sister.” He couldn’t understand fanaticism, that was something that wasn’t in the printed-in-the-USA army manuals. His face had started to change; he was putting on the mask. Perhaps, she thought, they never lose it, that the Spanish blood in him can never crumble it. But then, she remembered, there was also a Spanish mask, something that had come out of Africa with the Moors long ago. She began to feel something that had been creeping into her for the past six months, that she might never feel at home in this country. The young driver said, “What’s your name? Are you an American?”