A Flag for Sunrise

by Robert Stone

  Something was in the road ahead; Justin stopped in her tracks. It was an animal running along the inshore shoulder, but it did not run so much as prance. And it was not an animal, it was a kind of man. The light was still strong enough for her to make out some of its colors—a topping of flaxen hair, white garments that were stained.

  Back behind the wheel, she could not be certain that the stains were red. They were bright, of that she was sure. No fruit she knew would stain that brightly. She could not make the stains be anything but blood.

  And she understood then that the creature she had seen was the young Mennonite who had passed the mission weeks before. The hillside now was darkening and apparently deserted, the road empty of traffic. Justin shivered, turned her headlights on and started the jeep for home.

  Holliwell hobbled along a rutted pathway lined with frangipani toward the dining hall. The stars were out, the wind easy.

  The half dozen working tables in the Paradise’s utilitarian refectory were lined up along the seaward edge of the hall. Japanese lanterns hung from the rafters above them and from wire stays in the palm grove between the tables and the beach. On the other side of the huge floor space, some officers of the Guardia were lined up at the bar, drinking rum and listening to old Lucho Gatica records on the jukebox. Looking over the line of tables, Holliwell saw Mr. Heath sitting by himself over a gin and a dish of peanuts. Heath looked up and called him over.

  “Hurt your foot, did you?” he asked. His face was florid in the lantern light, his nose and the skin under his eyes marked with swollen veins.

  “I kneeled on a sea urchin over by the Catholic mission. There was a nun standing by to pull the spines out for me.”

  “Good luck. Was that sister Justin?”

  “I never asked her name. I think she’s the only one there.”

  “Yes,” Heath said. “What brought you over that way?”

  Holliwell shrugged. “Nothing special.”

  “What do you make of them over there?”

  “I don’t know what to make of them,” Holliwell said. “What do you make of them?”

  “They’re quite pleasant, didn’t you think?”

  “Yes,” Holliwell said. “Yes, they are.”

  Heath and Holliwell dined on fresh dorado. As they took dinner Mr. Heath said that he had been offered a position in the fruit company’s new resort enterprise.

  “Old hands like me are redundant since the blight,” he told Holliwell. “The profits are in tourism. So it’s take that up or retire.”

  “And which will you do?”

  Heath smiled vaguely. At that moment, Holliwell realized how drunk the man was.

  “When I first came out here,” Mr. Heath said, “ten bandits and myself were the only force of law in two hundred miles of mountains. Great days they were.”

  Holliwell nodded.

  “We could put a company blanket on a tree stump—leave it for weeks and no one would dare touch it. We were respected. We respected ourselves as well. Every morning I could get up and say—Yo sé quien soy. Understand?”

  “Sure,” Holliwell said.

  “My men were able to say that because I made them able. And I didn’t do it by avoiding their eyes and tipping them ten shillings for smiling at me. D’ye see?” He did not wait to be encouraged. “It reflected my training.”

  Holliwell was about to ask him where his training had been acquired.

  “Nineteen years of age I was in the legion—the Légion Etrangère. Sidi Barras. Christ, great days!”

  “And you came here after that?”

  For his question, Holliwell received a momentary glance of dark and profound suspicion. It was a look to stay the timid and was obviously meant to be.

  “After that I was in the Ceylon police. Had a bit of trouble there … a damn religious procession in Kandi. I was shown the instruments, you might say. Drove off in superintendent’s car after a party and that was that. Then I came out here.”

  “Do you ever go back to England?”

  “Can’t,” Heath said. “She’s not there, bless her. Not my England. Of course, I was home for the war. I was with the Second Army.”

  “Montgomery … wasn’t it?”

  Heath laughed. “Yes. Monty. Teetotaler.”

  When the server took their plates, he called for more gin. Holliwell, who was fighting a wave of fatigue, would try to counter it with another small rum.

  “We’re going to have tourists coming down here at the rate of a few thousand a month. We’re going to have me spying through keyholes so the hotel staff doesn’t pinch their Minoxes. We’re going to teach the people to steal and we’re going to teach them contempt for us.”

  Holliwell began to say something about jobs for the populace. About giving them a share.

  “These people don’t like being poor, Holliwell. No one does. We’re going to teach them to be ashamed of being poor and that’s something new, you see.”

  “That’s the American way,” Holliwell said.

  Heath sniffed. “Don’t like to see a man run his country down. Not abroad.”

  “I’m not doing that. I think what’s best about my country is not exportable.”

  Mr. Heath did not hear him. “We’re all wringing our bloody hands, that’s it. We’ve been doing it since the war. Apologizing and giving in and giving over and not one black, brown or yellow life have we saved doing it. We want to be destroyed, you see. So we will be.”

  At the bar, the celebrating Guardia officers had grown progressively more hilarious. But a few of them, drunker than the others, were subsiding into a sinister quietude. They were not coastal people but Indians and mestizos from over the mountains and their style of being drunk was different. They leaned on the bar as though holding themselves up, communicating to each other in single shouted words, in whistles, sudden gestures, bursts of unpleasant laughter. Some telepathy of alcohol.

  The Miami dentist came in, accompanied by a tall youthful man in an elegant guayabera. Behind them came Mrs. Paz and her sons, all combed and scented. Their entrance was cordially saluted by everyone present, not least by the officers at the bar. Holliwell gave them good evening and Heath, who apparently knew the tall man, did the same. The tall man, Holliwell assumed, was Mrs. Paz’s brother.

  When the Cuban party were seated and served, an American couple came in from the darkness outside, and seated themselves at a table behind Holliwell’s chair. Holliwell had time to observe them as they passed.

  The woman was of a certain age—perhaps in her forties, though she might also have been sixty or even older. She wore a muumuu with a coral necklace at her fleshy throat, and her hair, dyed deep black, was pasted against her temples like Pola Negri’s. The man was lean, pale and thick-lipped. He had very close-shaven hair and small dark eyes; his face preserved a kind of desiccated youthfulness. He was in white, even to his loafers.

  The couple’s entrance induced an attitude of watchful menace in the drunken Guardia officers at the bar. But it appeared that no one knew them.

  Mr. Heath watched them sit down, drawing thoughtfully on the lemon slice that had come with his fish.

  “Stew Nabbs was in Key West,” Holliwell heard the man say. He himself was at the point of exhaustion. Of course the rum did not revive him.

  “Ugh,” the woman muttered in a deep coarse voice, “the pits. The pits.”

  The man giggled. A tiny-eyed giggle.

  “Well,” Holliwell told his dining companion, “I’m going to bed. I’m out of it.”

  Mr. Heath leaned forward and addressed him softly with a bland half smile.

  “You’re not to go. Stay where you are.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Holliwell said.

  Heath glanced over Holliwell’s shoulder at the couple and fixed his eyes on Holliwell’s.

  “I want you to listen to these people. They’re extremely interesting.”

  “What a guy,” the man behind Holliwell was saying to his friend. “
Indictments on him from here to Seattle and he’s living it up in Key West. A house, you know? A bankroll. Fuckin’ guy. But it won’t last.”

  Holliwell shrugged and frowned a question at Mr. Heath. But Heath had settled back like a man about to listen to some beloved music.

  “Stay,” Heath whispered. “Listen.”

  “You lived with him,” the woman said.

  “I went by his pad up there. Off Duval. He’s got a kid passed out in the garage—the kid’s fourteen? Fifteen? On a tank of gas. I split. I said, ‘See you, Stewart.’ ”

  “You were his pal,” the woman said.

  “New York, Clyde Hotel. Aagh. That fuckin’ place. Needle Park over there.”

  “Hey,” the woman crooned. “Hey, I remember, Buddy. Do I remember?”

  “You remember Phelan, the loan shark?”

  “I was into Phelan,” the woman said. Holliwell tried to bring her face to mind again. “You were also, Buddy. And Stew.”

  “Everybody was. Me and Stew were supposed to be whattaya-callit. His men.”

  “His leg breakers,” the woman said. In a sweet singsong, like one reminding a child of a lesson forgotten. “And legs were broken, in my recollection.”

  The man began to curse immoderately.

  “How was your dive today?” Heath asked.

  “I was just thinking of the dive,” Holliwell said. “It was a lot of things.”

  The young man was speaking again.

  “That little harelip from Riker’s. The fuck was doing six bits a day and going to Phelan. Simpleminded. Phelan says put the arm on the little stiff. So we go to the big hotel there, the Ansonia. They got offices there, everything. Pay phone and we order shit from Riker’s. An hour later comes the harelip and we jump him. He runs, he screams like a cooze. Runs up a dozen flights of stairs. Finally me and Stew get him on the top floor. We hold him over the stairwell by his feet and it rains coin. His change, his wallet, his works, everything goes—and he’s upside down there making little bird noises. The whole goddamn time he never let go of that burger.”

  “Down the purple corridor,” the woman declared, “the scarlet ibis screaming ran.”

  “You know what Phelan says? He says how come you didn’t drop him?”

  Holliwell’s eyes met those of Mr. Heath.

  “Twixt, wasn’t it?” Heath asked. “I remember that wall very well. See anything marvelous?”

  “There was something down there. I don’t know what.”

  “Stew had holes in his shoes,” Buddy told his dining companion. “He wore rubbers every day. Fucking Clyde Hotel.”

  “And Phelan passed away?”

  “Did he ever,” Buddy said.

  “Did you find it frightening?” Heath asked Holliwell.

  “Oh,” Holliwell said, “I suppose. I gather it’s a sinister place.”

  “It’s never been my idea of a sinister place,” Heath said.

  “Right after Phelan got it,” the man behind Holliwell said, “Stew’s wig snapped. He went funny.”

  “Ha,” the woman said, “I heard. I know what it was.”

  “No, Olga,” the man said. He lowered his voice. “No, you don’t.”

  The officers at the bar were much quieter now, drunk almost to silence. They neglected to play the jukebox. At one end of the dining hall, a waiter was counting out white candles from a stack on a table before him.

  “We were still in the Clyde. Stew was chicken-hawking. All these kids, in and out. He dealt. He had a string.”

  “Those kids are lousy,” Olga said. “Detestable.”

  “He left town. He did one.”

  “He did?”

  “He did one. He took this chicken out.”

  “Curtains?”

  “I’m telling you,” Buddy said. “He went to L.A. I saw him there. Hollywood he went to.”

  “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” Olga said.

  “He had chickens on skateboards. Dolls, a couple. Hustling.”

  “Tray bizarre,” Olga said.

  “Bizarre. He was on Percodans. He was into snuffing. Him and a friend.”

  “Some friend.”

  “They had clients took pix. They ran the roads, Stew and this friend. Chicken snatching. Kids up the bazoom, they grabbed them. The freeways, like. Off the street.”

  “Gollywilkins,” Olga said.

  The Japanese lanterns in the palm grove flickered, went out, then came on again. The officers at the bar were leaving. One of them staggered past the tables into the grove, belched loudly and began to piss in the frangipani. Over the palm crowns hung an infinity of stars.

  “It’s the simple life down the wall at Twixt,” Mr. Heath told Holliwell. “Clean down there. One sees so far.”

  “I was thinking it was the same up here.”

  “Humanist fallacy,” Heath said. “Appearances deceive. There’s a philosophical difference.”

  Holliwell was unable to answer. Mr. Heath had proved himself a philosopher and once again Holliwell caught the saffron taste of Vietnam. The green places of the world were swarming with strong-arm philosophers and armed prophets. It was nothing new.

  Heath was looking over Holliwell’s shoulder, holding his expression of affable uninterest. Buddy had lowered his voice further, it trembled with rodential wariness.

  “Chickens were disappearing. Stew had these pix. He sold them. Famous names, he says.”

  “Intense.”

  “Me, I’m shit scared. I know this is happening. Stew knows I know. His friend is a big pinhead.”

  “Poor baby.”

  “The cops are finding these children, Olga. Blipped. Bitty kids almost. Sans parts. It’s big in the paper.”

  “The parents don’t care,” Olga said. “They sell them.”

  “Snuff pix, chickens, that was Stew. He was obnoxious about it. He said it was big.”

  “Did he say he liked it?”

  “He never said. I figure he liked it, right? I was scared, Olga. I left town.”

  “The kids ask for it sometimes,” Olga said. “They’re lousy at that age.”

  “That’s what Stew says. I says: See you, Stew. I was scared.”

  “This,” Olga said, “is why I won’t live in Los Angeles today.”

  When they stood up, Heath gave them a friendly nod. Holliwell forced himself not to turn around.

  “Do you know how I came to notice them?” Heath asked. His florid face held the polite amiable smile. “It was a way of laughing that bastard had. When I heard him laugh I knew what I had before me.”

  “Not your ordinary run of tourist,” Holliwell offered.

  “Yes … well, what’s ordinary today? There’s a very rubbishy sort of American loose on the world these days. If you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “All kinds of people have money and leisure in the States. Surely you know that.”

  “I thought the American of thirty years ago was a better type,” Mr. Heath said. “Not much savoir-faire but a sounder sort of chap.”

  “I know who these people are,” Holliwell said. “I know what they come out of. I know more than I want to about them.”

  “So their dinner conversation doesn’t shock you?”

  “Does it shock you?”

  “Not me, mate. I was there when we went into Belsen and quite honestly that didn’t shock me either.”

  “What did it do for you?”

  “It aroused my workmanlike instincts,” Mr. Heath said. “I have the same reaction to … them.”

  “Olga and Buddy.”

  “Yes. Olga. And Buddy. They make me think—ha, boyo. Time to go to work.”

  “It is the same,” Holliwell insisted. “Up here and down the wall. It’s the same process.”

  “That’s very tender-minded of you. Are you going to tell me all that lives is holy?”

  “Not me,” Holliwell said. “But even Olga and Buddy have a kind of innocence, don’t they? And their friend in the story?”

  “Holliwell,”
Heath said. “Holliwell—God may forgive Olga and Buddy and company—he doesn’t have to share the world with them. You have children, I suppose?”

  Holliwell confessed that he did.

  “There’s someone murdering children in the villages here, did you know that? He’s killed five kids already.”

  “I didn’t know. But that has nothing to do with these people.”

  “Don’t you know your own side, man? I can assure you that I do. And when I hear that laugh—when I catch that pong in the air I feel like our good missionary friends, ready to go into my cure of souls. I believe that God gave the likes of Olga and Buddy and the late Rudolf Hoess into my especial keeping. But because this civilization is corrupt and cowardly, because it insists on being tyrannized by weak, bent neurotics who don’t know the fucking meaning of self-respect or mercy—I can’t do my job.”

  His knuckles were white on the glass of gin. He blinked and sipped of the drink and smiled again. “So I feel frustrated, you see.”

  The officers of the Guardia were leaving the bar. The last to go whistled unpleasantly for the shy black barmaid who had been nervously serving them; when she came up to him, he stuffed a wad of bills under the bodice of her bright tight dress. Then he turned and watched the two men at the table across the hall.

  “I’m a copper, really,” Heath said.

  “Why did you ask me if I was frightened down the wall?”

  “Ah,” Heath said, “rude of me. Sorry.”

  “I didn’t think it was rude. Just a little peculiar.”

  “My manners are dreadful,” Mr. Heath said. “I expect I’ll have trouble in the resort business.”

  At Serrano on the windward shore, the frayed ends of a norther whipped the winch chains against the stabilizers and set the mooring lines to groaning. The dock lights showed soiled whitecaps speckling the milky harbor. Pablo worked the fuel line with one of Naftali’s pier hands. Freddy Negus leaned against the bridge housing, smoking, staring into the darkness beyond the lights. He was waiting for Tino.

  Naftali’s men worked quickly. The crates of weapons, greased in creosote, were loaded in the holds on a waterproof tarp; the tarpaulin’s ends were tucked down and the holds half filled with sixteen-pound blocks of ice. Within an hour of tying up, the Cloud was nearly ready to get under way again.