by Len Deighton
‘Home again,’ said the steward to no one in particular. A steam crane trundled along the narrow-gauge dockside rail to where it could reach the cargo hold. It made a lot of smoke, and a clatter of sound.
Paz sniffed the air as he picked up his cheap canvas bag to move along the deck. He could smell rotting fruit and the discharged fuel oil that lapped against the hull. He did not like his first taste of Tepilo, but it was better than living on the charity of his stepmother. He hadn’t come here for a vacation. He’d come here to fight in the revolution: the Marxist revolution.
As he waited his turn on the narrow accommodation ladder, he looked again at the town. Against the skyline stood a monument surmounted by a gigantic crucifix. He was reminded of the tortured Christ who, with gaping wounds and varnished blood, had haunted his dimly lit nursery. This humid town suggested the same stillness, mystery and pain.
There was nothing to be done about it now. Angel Paz had burned his boats. He’d deliberately ignored the travel arrangements that his uncle Arturo had made for him. He’d cashed in the airline ticket and routed himself so that the last leg could be done by ship. He’d never work for Don Arturo in any capacity. No doubt Arturo would be furious, but to hell with him. Paz had found people in Los Angeles who could put him in contact with the MAMista army in the south. Not even one of Don Arturo’s thugs would be able to find him there.
The steward approached him, picked up his bag and accompanied him down the gangway. Paz was the only passenger with whom he could talk real Spanish: ‘Put fifty pesetas into your passport and give it to the little guy in the dirty white suit. He’ll keep ten and give forty to the customs and immigration. That’s the way it’s done here. Don’t offer the money direct to anyone in uniform or they are likely to give you a bad time.’
‘So I heard,’ said Paz.
The steward smiled. The kid wanted to be a toughguy; then so be it. He still wasn’t sure whether the big tip he had given him was an error. But that was last night and he’d not asked for any of it to be returned. ‘Plenty of cabs at the dock gates. Ten pesetas is the regular fare to anywhere in town. Call a cop if they start arguing. There are plenty of cops everywhere.’
‘I’m being met,’ Paz said and then regretted such indiscretion. It was by such careless disclosures that whole networks had been lost in the past.
‘They don’t let visitors inside the customs area unless they have a lot of pull.’
‘I see.’
‘It’s these guerrilleros,’ said the steward. ‘They are blowing up the whole town piece by piece. Stupid bastards! Here you are; give fifty to this sweaty little guy.’
The man thus introduced wore a white Panama hat with a floral band and a white tropical-weight suit that was patched with the damp of nervous sweat. With quick jerky movements he took the US passport and snapped his fingers to tell an Indian porter to carry Paz’s bag. The man dashed away. Paz and the Indian followed him. The huge galvanized-iron customs shed was deserted except for four sleeping blacks. The white-suited man danced along, sometimes twisting round and walking backwards to hurry him along. ‘Hurry Hurry!’ His voice and his footsteps echoed inside the shed. The man kept looking back towards the ship. The four priests had lost a piece of baggage and he was anxious that they should not find it, and get through the formalities without his aid and intervention. Some of the officials were inclined to let priests through without the customary payment. This was not a practice the white-suited man wished to encourage, even by default.
With only a nod to two uniformed officials, the man went to the wrought-iron gates of the yard. He waited to be sure that the policeman let Paz out and followed him to the street. ‘Another twenty pesetas,’ said the man at the last minute. ‘For the porter.’ The Indian looked at Paz mournfully.
‘Scram!’ Paz said. The Indian withdrew silently.
The white-suited man returned his passport with a big smile. It was a try-on. If it didn’t work no hard feelings. He tried again: ‘You’ll want a cab. Girls? A show? Something very special?’
‘Get lost,’ Paz said.
‘Cocaine: really top quality. Wonderful. A voyage to heaven.’ Seeing that he was totally ignored, the man spilled abuse in the soft litany of a prayer. He didn’t mind really. It was better that he got back to the ship, and retrieved that suitcase he’d hidden, before the priests found it.
Once through the gate, Paz put his bag down in the shade. A cab rolled forward to where he was standing. It was, like all the rest of the line, a battered American model at least fifteen years old. Once they’d been painted bright yellow but the hot sun and heavy rains had bleached them all to pale shades – some almost white – except in those places where the bodywork had been crudely repaired. The cab stopped and the driver – a bare-headed man in patched khakis – got out, grabbed his bag and opened the door for him. In the back seat Paz saw a passenger: a woman. ‘No … I’m waiting,’ said Paz, trying to get his bag back from the driver. He didn’t want to ride with someone else.
The woman leaned forward and said, ‘Get in. Get in! What are you making such a fuss about?’
He saw a middle-aged woman with her face clenched in anger. He got in. For ever after, Paz remembered her contempt and was humiliated by the memory.
In fact Inez Cassidy was only thirty – ten years older than Paz – and considered very pretty, if not to say beautiful, by most of those who met her. But first encounters create lasting attitudes, and this one marred their relationship.
‘Your name is Paz?’ she said. He nodded. The cab pulled away. She gave him a moment to settle back in his seat. Paz took off his glasses and polished them on his handkerchief. It was a nervous mannerism and she recognized it as such. So this was the ‘explosives expert’ so warmly recommended by the front organization in Los Angeles. ‘You are not carrying a gun?’ she asked.
‘There was a man in a white suit. He took me straight through. I wasn’t stopped.’
It annoyed her that he had not answered her question. She said, ‘There is a metal detector built into the door of the shed. It’s for gold but if sometimes …’ Her voice trailed off as if the complexities of the situation were too much to explain. ‘If they suspect, they follow … for days sometimes.’ She gave him a tired smile.
Paz turned to look out of the car’s rear window. They were not following the signs for ‘Centro’; the driver had turned on to the coastal road. ‘There is no car following us,’ said Paz.
She looked at him and nodded. So this was the crusader who wanted to devote his life to the revolution.
Paz looked at her with the same withering contempt. He’d expected a communist: a dockworker, a veteran of the workers’ armed struggle. Instead they’d sent a woman to meet him; a bourgeois woman! She was a perfect example of what the revolution must eliminate. He looked at her expensive clothes, her carefully done hair and manicured hands. This was Latin America: a society ruled by men. Was such a reception a calculated insult?
He looked out of the car at the sea and at the countryside. The road surface was comparatively good but the thatched tin huts set back in the trees were ramshackle. Filthy children were lost amongst herds of goats, some pigs and the occasional donkey. It was not always easy to tell which were children and which were animals. Sometimes they wandered into the road and the driver sounded the horn to clear the way. Hand-painted signs advertised fruit for sale, astrology, dress-making and dentista. Sometimes men or women stepped out into the road and offered edibles for sale: a fly-covered piece of goat meat, a hand of bananas or a dead lizard. Always it was held as high in the air as possible, the vendor on tiptoe sometimes. They shouted loudly in a sibilant dialect that he found difficult to comprehend.
‘Checkpoint,’ said the driver calmly.
‘Don’t speak unless they ask you something,’ Inez ordered Paz. The taxi stopped at the place where the entire width of the road was barred by pointed steel stakes driven deep into it. The driver got out with the car papers in his hand.
A blockhouse made from tree trunks had become overgrown with greenery so that it was difficult to distinguish from its surrounding bush and trees. Grey-uniformed Federalistas, their old American helmets painted white, manned the obstacle. One of them went to the rear of the car and watched while the driver opened the trunk. The other held a Rexim machine gun across his body as if ready to fire it. Paz looked at it with interest. He had seen them before in Spain. In the Fifties a Spanish manufacturer sold the gun as ‘La Coruña’, but it was too heavy, too cumbersome and the price was wrong. They went out of business.
Two more soldiers were sitting on a log, smoking and steadying ancient Lee Enfield rifles in their outstretched hands. Standing back in the shade was another man. Dressed in a white shirt and dark trousers, he wore fancy Polaroid sun-glasses. On his belt he had an equally fancy automatic pistol with imitation pearl grips. He did nothing but watch the man and woman in the car. Paz had seen such men at the docks. They were the PSS, the political police.
The taxi’s boot slammed closed with enough force to rock the car on its springs. Then the driver and the soldier collected the identity papers which Inez offered through the lowered window. The papers were taken to the man in the white shirt but he didn’t deign to look at them. He waved them away. The papers were returned to Inez and the driver started the car.
It was not easy to get the wide Pontiac around the metal stakes. It meant going up on to the muddy shoulder. The soldiers watched but did not help. Paz offered to get out and direct the driver but the woman told him to sit still. ‘It is all part of the game,’ she said.
When the driver had negotiated the obstacle the blank-faced man in the white shirt gave them a mocking salute as they pulled away. ‘It is all part of their stupid game,’ she repeated bitterly. She felt shamed in a way that only Latins understand. She gave him his passport and put her own papers back into a smart tote bag. ‘Most of them can’t read,’ she said. ‘But you can’t depend on that.’ She clipped the bag shut and said, ‘A friend of mine – a nurse – broke curfew almost every night using a liquor permit to get through the patrols.’
‘And got away with it?’
‘Until last month. Then she ran into one of the courtesy squads that patrol the tourist section where the hotels are. The lieutenant was at school with her.’
‘She was lucky.’
‘They took her to the police station and raped her.’
Paz said nothing. Her quiet answer had been spoken with a feminist fervour; she wanted to make him feel guilty for being a man. He looked out of the window. They were passing through a shanty-town. It was unreal, like sitting at home watching a video. Children, naked and rickety, played among wrecked cars and open sewage. A big crucifix guarded the entrance to the camp. At its base stood an array of tin cans holding flowers and little plants. One of them was a cactus. The sun beat down upon the rain-soaked sheets of corrugated metal and the draped plastic that made the walls and roofs. It produced a steamy haze. Through it Paz saw the distant buildings of downtown Tepilo. They shivered in the rising air like a miraged oasis.
After another mile of jungle they came to an elaborate stone wall. They followed it until there was a gateway. There they turned off, to find a comfortable house set in five acres of garden. ‘Is this a hotel?’ Paz asked.
Once it had been a magnificent mansion but now the grandiose stone steps, and the balcony to which they led, were crumbling and overgrown with weeds.
‘Sometimes,’ said Inez. She got out. He picked up his bag and followed her up the steps and into the house. A grand carved staircase led to the upper floor. She showed him to his room. Everything was grandiose, old and slightly broken like the servant who followed them into it. He opened the shutters and pulled the curtains aside. ‘You offered your services to the movement,’ she said after the servant had left.
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know anything about explosives?’
‘I am an expert.’
She smiled. ‘Well, Mr Expert, I need you. Come with me.’ She took him to an attic room where a kitchen table was littered with bomb-making equipment. ‘Teach me to make a bomb.’
He looked at the way the things were laid out on the scrubbed table: scissors, insulation tape and string. There were some steel ball-bearings in a tray that might have been made as a crude triggering device, also a sharpened pencil and a notebook. Only a woman would have arranged it all so neatly. ‘You are mad,’ he said.
‘Teach me!’
‘With this junk?’ He extended a hand but did not touch anything.
‘I’ll get anything else you need,’ she said.
‘What are you trying to blow up?’ he asked. She hesitated. He turned to look at her. ‘You’ll have to tell me.’
‘A safe. A steel safe in the Ministry of Pensions.’ He studied her to see if she was serious. ‘Three times we have tried. None of the bombs exploded. This is our last chance while we still have a way of getting into the building.’
He looked at the equipment but did not touch it. He said, ‘We must wear coveralls and gloves. Just handling this stuff will leave enough smell on you to alert a sniffer dog. They use sniffer dogs in Tepilo, I suppose?’
‘Yes.’ She went to a huge closet in the corridor. From one of the shelves she took freshly laundered coveralls and cotton gloves. ‘We are not complete amateurs,’ she said, and held the coveralls up to see that they would fit him.
When he was dressed, with his hair tucked into a pirate-style scarf, he picked up the wrapped sticks of explosive and looked at them closely. ‘Oshokuyaku, probably picric acid.’ He sniffed at it cautiously as if the smell alone was lethal.
‘It cost a lot of money,’ she said. She had expected an explosives expert to be bolder with the tools of his trade. Was he afraid, she wondered.
‘Then you were taken, honey! That stuff was obsolete twenty years ago. The only good news is that it looks like it’s been stored properly.’ He put the explosive down gently and sorted through a cardboard box that contained a jumble of odds and ends: rusty screws, wires, detonators, a tube of glue and more sticky tape. ‘You’ve got the rough idea,’ he said grudgingly.
She opened a drawer and produced some brand-new batteries. ‘They are fresh and tested,’ she said.
‘How are you going to set it off?’
From the closet she fetched a wind-up alarm clock, still in a cardboard box. She put it on the table in front of him. ‘I need two clocks,’ he said. ‘Give me another.’
She got a second one. ‘Why two?’
‘In case one doesn’t work properly,’ he said. He tore the boxes open. They were an old-fashioned style: circular with a bell on top and Mickey Mouse on the face.
He placed the clocks side by side on the table and looked at it all. ‘Have you got any other explosive?’
She shook her head.
‘No American stuff? No Semtex? Russian Hexogen?’
‘This is all we have, until the next consignment comes. We had gelignite but it was oozing some sort of chemical.’
‘It’s not still around here is it? That was nitro running out of it.’
‘They buried it.’
‘You people are loco,’ he said again. ‘You need proper explosive.’
‘What’s wrong with that explosive?’
‘You’ll never make a bomb with that Japanese shit.’
‘They said it was fresh from the factory. It came in last month.’ She sounded desperate. Her face was white and drawn. He thought she was going to burst into tears. ‘This task is important.’
Paz looked at her thoughtfully, and then back to the bomb. ‘It just won’t explode,’ he said. ‘These American detonators won’t fire Jap explosive. You might as well connect it to a bundle of tortillas.’ He expected her to try to laugh, or at least to speak, but she was devastated by the disappointment. He said, ‘American explosive is high-quality and very sensitive. American caps will blow American explosive but they won’t make this stuff move.’
‘We’d need a booster to put between the caps and the charge,’ he explained patiently. ‘Then we might make it explode.’
‘You could do it?’
‘Could you get sugar?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Sodium chlorate?’
‘Do they use it to make matches?’
‘Yes.’
‘We raided a match factory to get some once. Someone said it was for bombs. I could get some.’
‘How long would it take?’
‘I’ll speak on the phone right away.’
‘Careful what you say. A whole lot of people know what sodium chlorate can do.’
‘Go downstairs and tell one of the servants to cook a steak for you. There is plenty of food here. Suppose everything you need is brought to the Ministry of Pensions? Could you do it on the spot?’
‘Who said I was going to plant the bomb?’
She looked at him with unconcealed derision. This was the showdown; the time when he was forced to come to terms with the true situation. He had placed himself under the orders of the MAMista. That meant under the orders of this woman, and of anyone else to whom the Movimiento de Acción Marxista gave authority.
He spoke slowly. ‘We must have coveralls and gloves and kerosene to wash with. And good soap to get rid of the smell of the kerosene.’
‘I will arrange all that.’ She showed no sign of triumph but they both knew that their relationship had been established. It was not a relationship that Paz was going to enjoy.
He picked through the box to select some pieces of wire and a screwdriver and pliers and so on. He put these things alongside the explosive and the clocks. ‘I will need all those things. And a tape measure at least a metre in length.’