Antón almost at once discovered a bit of information which Rafael’s diffident questions about fish marketing had not brought to light. The Rosita, a boat previously unknown, had called at Cabo Desierto on the same day that the new General Manager arrived. It had sold cheap on the quayside and had remained overnight. The fish was not fresh, and the skipper was suspected of having bought a job lot out at sea for sale to the hungry in Cabo Desierto.
If this was the boat which had brought the stranger and his boxes, it was easy to account for his transport. There were often empty trucks parked at night between the port offices and the quay, ready for business unaffected by the boycott such as lifting supplies to and from the market, the port and the Company Farm. So long as a vehicle was not parked bang in the middle of the main street the Company turned a blind eye. The weather was the same under cover or outside, and its transport could not possibly be stolen.
So it only needed a collaborator on shore to see that a truck with its ignition key in place was parked in a dark corner where no one would notice the driver. That part would fit Lorenzo very well. He had started in the garage, was always in and out of the workshops and above suspicion whatever his activities. González might not have known anything. He and his police had no interest in routine movements of stores continuing for an hour or two after sunset.
Rafael himself had not the time to keep watch on the old field. Talk, all the unncessary, resented talk, already allowed him too few hours for sleep. So again he delegated the job to Antón, asking him to see that Lorenzo or anyone else who turned up between dusk and dawn in the neighbourhood of 32A was invited to explain his business. In a Christian manner, Rafael insisted; a knife might have to be shown but must not be used if there were no resistance. He found that, like any other commander, he had to tell his intelligence officer a good deal more than he wanted. However, the story was credible without any mention of Don Mateo; it was not essential to give an account of Chepe’s movements after he had acquired his stick of gelignite.
Mr. Manager’s hint about the Union could be correct, but that did not mean that one had to start touching one’s cap to a helpless boss. Rafael resented those searching and inconvenient eyes when not answering them face to face. He was reluctant to admit that the explosives might be meant for the dam. It was indestructible. Sabotage of the water was an empty threat, covering some other dirty plan.
He did at least spend an hour inspecting the Charca, giving himself the excuse of an evening walk with Chepe. The pipe line from the old field to the head of the ravine seemed a possible objective, but what was the good of blowing it up when no water was coming down any way? Then the downstream valve or the outlets or both? But how? He knew nothing of the placing of explosives and little of their effect.
He stood on top of the dam looking westwards at the sun resting on a copper Pacific. He felt that he was on the edge of the world and that beyond was nothing, friendly or hostile. This mood, common among all his friends and perhaps even to those heartless technicians in their gay houses up on the ridge, was suddenly broken by a spurt of cold water on the back of his neck. Chepe jumped up laughing from the edge of the Charca with a water pistol in his hand.
‘So that is what you learn in school!’
‘I did not go today, papacito.’
Chepe’s small possessions varied from week to week according to the objects available for barter among his schoolfellows. Whatever he had, there was no need for anxiety. It had never occurred to him to steal.
‘Then where did you get this weapon with which you dare to squirt your father?’
‘The Man gave it to me.’
‘You must not accept presents from him.’
‘It was not a present. It was a bribe.’
‘That I can believe!’ Rafael exclaimed indignantly. ‘What did he want you to do?’
‘To go to school.’
‘Where did you meet him?’
‘Up the hill. I was looking at the window of the shop.’
In the executive suburb there was a small general store for the convenience of oil wives who had some chance of finding there whatever they had forgotten to buy in the town. It also sold toys attractive enough for children to point at them and cheap enough for mothers to drop them in the basket with the groceries.
‘He asked me why I was not at school.’
‘And why weren’t you?’
‘Because I now know how to read and write.’
‘There are other things to learn besides reading and writing.’
‘That was what Don Mateo said.’
‘And then, Chepe?’
‘He bought this gun for me if I would promise to go to school every day for a month.’
‘And you will do so?’
‘Of course. I gave him my word.’
Rafael did not approve, but could not help being proud of this son of his who innocently wandered everywhere and even managed to be on good terms with González without involving his father.
The significance of the water-pistol could not be missed. It was a reminder that the water supply was a pistol held at his head and that he must keep an eye on the Charca. The unfathomable mind of Don Mateo disquieted him; he was continually being disarmed.
Next day at dusk he set a picket of four men, two on top of the dam and two on the road below where they could rouse with a shout the nearest cottages. It did not matter that they could only be armed with pick handles. They were like soldier ants at the entrance to the nest. One signal from them, and reinforcements would swarm out to leave no more of any saboteur than broken flesh.
It was soon plain that sabotage would have been easy. A man could work all night on the Charca undisturbed. From Manuel Uriarte’s house away at the end of the cultivated land came the occasional tinkle of a guitar if the breeze was from the north. Rafael had always imagined that behind the distant lighted windows was an austere scientist writing up his notes. There was never any other sound unless one counted the just perceptible rustle of nightly growth as leaf and stalk adjusted to the continual, minuscule crowding of fertility.
On the old field Rafael’s other and more secret operation was quickly productive. At dawn on the third morning Antón came down with the news that his search had been successful.
‘You have got Lorenzo?’
‘No, Chief, he never appeared. But, better still, I have the explosives.’
‘Where were they?’
‘Look! Sometimes a man such as Antón is needed. He is no mechanic, but when it comes to ropes and tackle and wedges and greasing a ramp, they listen to him. A hole boarded up—what had been there, I asked myself. What had I seen? I know the field better than you at work in your shop or Lorenzo who only drives along roads. What had I taken out of that hole which is boarded up?’
It was like the triumphant recital of a hunter come home with meat or of a valiente who had left his enemy dead. Rafael waited patiently until Antón, running short of breath, spread out his hands to invite him to repeat his question.
‘So where were they?’
‘You may well ask, Rafael! You told me to watch around 32A, but there was never any hole near it. Then I remembered a hole at 32, east of the derrick—a hole deep enough to hold a donkey where I myself pulled out the bailing engine more than six years ago. So I went to 32. Where the hole should be were some bits of old iron scattered so that no one should walk over it and hear his footsteps hollow. I kicked away the rubbish, and there was the cover of boards smeared with oil and gravel like the rest of the ground. And there beneath were the boxes!’
How then could Lorenzo have missed it? Rafael was sure from his behaviour that he had been instructed where to find the cache, and with so simple a description he could not go wrong.
‘But if Lorenzo was told it was at 32, son! He can read.’
‘He can’t read what isn’t there, Rafael. The number board has blown down. That was why Chepe didn’t notice it.’
It made sense. The numbering of the wells depended on whe
n they were drilled. 32 had been an unprofitable wild-cat. It stood among the fifties which had been drilled later and deeper. 32A, however, was where it ought to be, among the other thirties. Rafael could imagine how Lorenzo had started off in the right direction and then found only wells numbered in the fifties and no 32 at all. He naturally assumed that he had got lost in the dark maze of derricks and turned back to the more or less regular ranks of the thirties. There he found 32A all right, but no hole. So he was more lost than ever.
However, it was hard to see how the man from the fishing boat Rosita, a stranger whose face Chepe did not know, could be so familiar with the abandoned wells of the old field. A possible answer was that he had been given an accurate map of the route from 58, where his truck stopped, to 32 and so had found the boarded hole without any trouble.
Rafael woke the boy up and asked if he had seen the stranger looking at a map. Chepe, always eager for conversation as soon as he opened his eyes, demanded to know what a map was. Rafael explained that it was like a scale drawing in the carpenter’s shop, but of places not things. Chepe thought very solemnly, put his forefinger to his nose, hastily withdrew it and came out with the information that the stranger had sometimes looked at a piece of paper.
The worrying question was who had drawn the map. Antón’s answer to that was the hated Company, the assassins capable of any iniquity. A month earlier Rafael’s answer would have been the same; but now at least he could rule out the present boss who had warned him that Chepe’s toffee, as he called it, could be meant for the water. And if Don Mateo had any reason to suspect where it was he would never have employed his zombie of a chauffeur in the dark but sent out a bold, no-nonsense search party.
‘Leave it where it is until we have need of it!’ he said. ‘And not a word to anyone. There is a lot I do not understand.’
‘But we must have weapons, Chief!’ Antón protested. ‘Every man should have some of this stuff in his house. We must have weapons. I tell you that even the Mayor’s revolver—the firing pin does not reach the cartridge.’
‘To hell with the Mayor’s revolver!’
But Rafael’s gloom faded away as he remembered the incident. Antón had extracted the revolver from the municipal holster in full view of a delighted crowd while the Mayor was waving his arms and trying to be heard.
‘Not yet, friend,’ he said more gently. ‘This explosive may not be so easy to use as you think. Perhaps Lorenzo will show us when we are ready to make him talk.’
Chapter Seven
There was no denying that the comfort of the Club’s shaded terrace was extraordinarily pleasant. A month earlier it would have been beyond any possible day-dream that Mat should find himself, well-paid, back in all the sensuous satisfactions of the tropics. Under his eyes in the comparative cool of the evening the tennis players twanged their little balls back and forth. Further away there were half a dozen couples on the nine-hole golf course. Eighteen had been planned with three long holes on top of the ridge, two devilish short ones and a long, downhill drive back to the valley. Every day at the bar someone would regret that Cabo Desierto had got the Sentinels on the ridge instead.
He had moved too far away from his compatriots. In war that had been unnoticeable. Even in a government office it had been disguised by the smoothness of routine for seven hours and thereafter the dispersal of colleagues into their private lives. But here—here the Company had made a home from home for its executives as well as its workers and, by God, he preferred the latter! He would rather have been sitting in the town café and knew it and hoped it didn’t show. Probably not. His surface was as genial as anyone could wish. But even these expatriate suburbanites did in the end judge a man by his actions and not by his image. He knew they could not quite make him out. He appeared to be doing nothing too contentedly, and the nothing was not being done in the right places. As González had pointed out, it was hard to tell where he would be and why he was there. The proper places in which to do nothing were the offices or the Club. Or at home with a whisky bottle. They’d have forgiven that.
He never felt his isolation when reality intervened. And what the hell did he mean by reality, Mat asked himself? Well, it included the men and the town and Garay and his son and even Captain González; it did not quite include the games-players and their wives, though he admitted it would if the field were working flat out and at peace. Meanwhile their morale could safely be left to Bill Gateson who was now strolling rather smugly across the lawn to the Club House after a masterly bit of umpiring. Gateson identified himself absolutely with the Company. He couldn’t see that it had done anything wrong in detaining those husbands in the Capital; it had been just a tactful delay, not a grossly broken promise. His job and this green playground were reality for him. God Almighty! Reality was the bodies of seventeen women and five children painstakingly collected from their route and now buried in the new cemetery between high tidemark and the refuse of the shacks where they had lived.
He waved to Gateson to join him. As soon as he had made his cheerful gesture, one of the club waiters hurried over to his table and put in front of him a paper on a saucer as if it were a bill to sign. Sr. Delgado wants to know where he may see you. Mat pretended to sign it, writing: Tonight, 11 p.m. Garden of my house. Reality had intruded upon Decorum. A very proper marble relief for the Albert Hall, Mat thought—with fig-leafed waiter in the background who probably understood enough English to be able to pass on unguarded conversation to Delgado.
‘Didn’t see you this morning,’ Gateson said.
‘No. I was at the school, Bill.’
‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘Nothing more than any other bloody school. I was arranging for school lunches. They have ’em in England. Why not here?’
‘Who’s going to pay for them?’
‘The Three Sentinels. Meanwhile, a loan to the Mayor.’
‘You’re getting no response, Mat.’
‘On the edge of it, I think. If I’m wrong I’ll have to take up golf again.’
‘I didn’t know you played.’
‘As a boy. It was a game then.’
‘What was your handicap?’
‘I always remember that. At fifteen it was fifteen.’
‘Pretty good. What made you give it up?’
‘Watching monkeys. Objectless activity.’
‘I say, that’s a bit strong, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Ever watched monkeys?’
‘I can’t say I have.’
‘They give you the woollies after a time.’
The temptation to shake up Gateson was irresistible, but Mat knew he shouldn’t do it. He turned on the charm, made room for the Chief Accountant and the Chemist, ordered more drinks and produced a couple of good stories which Cabo Desierto could not possibly have heard before since they happened to be true. He was in top gear again, extending his momentary exhilaration to the lot of them.
A secret visit from Gil Delgado could be the beginning of the end—and then, with luck, a return to the golden days of Cabo Desierto when there was no need for any of these subtleties. If you wanted to talk to the General Manager you bust into his offices with the drilling mud on your boots and got on with the business; or if you were a workers’ delegate with a grievance you could go and raise hell with young Mat Darlow who would shout you down and fix it.
He walked home—another eccentricity which his subordinates hoped they were not expected to copy—and in by the gate of his house which now belonged to him alone. He had made González remove that futile police guard altogether. Nothing could be said for it except the fish stew. Attracted by the nightly scent he had gone out for a plate, bringing a bottle with him. A very profitable hour had convinced him that all the police had ever planned was a safe line of retreat.
He warned Pepe that he would be sitting by the pool after dinner and officially not at home.
‘You needn’t come out to see if I want anything.’
‘I understand, Don Mat
eo. I will tell Amelia to see that your room has fresh flowers—and some champagne perhaps?’
‘Business, friend, not fun! Two chairs and brandy and cigars on the pedestal of the boy.’
‘What boy?’
‘The rim of the pool, I meant.’
‘You are too much alone, Don Mateo. Yet there are so many who are fond of you.’
‘It’s a pity that my three ladies are so jealous.’
‘In England?’
‘Up there on the ridge, Pepe.’
At half past ten he sat back in his chair and waited. Funny mistake, that! He must have been imagining a place for the bronze boy so often that the statuette had become real. He wasn’t looking forward to this interview with Delgado as much as he had. There was a smell of treachery. What an extraordinary word to think! Growing respect for that mad priest, Garay, evidently had something to do with it. Prejudice against Delgado was illogical and unjust—exactly the same feeling that made one despise the fellow who came over from the enemy in war, though his information might be beyond value and his motives impeccable.
Delgado came pacing round the house looking right and left into the darkness like a lion distrustful of some scent on the wind. There was indeed a leonine touch about him, for he was a big, loose man with a brown mane—possibly the lightest hair among the workers of Cabo Desierto—and a sandy skin much the colour of Mat’s own. He sat down with a nod and without shaking hands.
‘I give you my word that we are alone,’ Mat said.
‘Don Mateo, I believe you are not a man to say something without a purpose.’
‘Brandy?’
‘Thank you, no.’
‘Then I am compelled to drink alone, if you will excuse me. How is Don Rafael?’
‘As always.’
‘That is why you have come by yourself?’
‘He has a lot to do.’
‘More than ever now. What made him put a guard on the Charca?’
‘Don’t play with me! Because you advised it.’
‘I was not sure whether he had told you.’
‘We have no secrets from each other.’
The Three Sentinels Page 9