The Seeds of Fiction

by Bernard Diederich

  The first chapter of the initial version that Graham had written in Anacapri did, however, appear as a short story the year following Omar’s death, in a publication called Firebird and entitled ‘On the Way Back’.

  Then, as a tribute to his friendship with the General, Graham decided to write a non-fiction book about that friendship. The book proved also to be a tribute to Chuchu. In Getting to Know the General Graham noted, ‘As we drove I told Chuchu of the novel which I was planning, and perhaps that is the reason why it never came to be written beyond the first chapter. To tell a story is much the same as to write it — it is a substitute for the writing.’

  22 | GREENE’S OTHER WAR

  Even while in Central America, where war was very real, Graham was seriously preoccupied, even obsessed, by his own war at home. Many an evening would end with his talking of his anxiety and fears about what ‘the scoundrel from Nice with Mafia connections’ would do next. He worried aloud about Yvonne and her daughter Martine, and his thoughts were often with them on the faraway Côte d’Azur.

  Graham would become uncharacteristically emotional and angry in telling the story of his war. Stoking the fires of controversy and provoking polemics in the exogenous realm were not new to Graham, but this was different. The matter was so serious that he had gone public and was forced, he said, to use his own literary guerrilla tactics.

  Graham recounted that Martine had become fed up with the horrible man to whom she was married. She had obtained a divorce as well as custody of their child. (She was pregnant at the time of the divorce with their second child.) ‘But the conditions of the divorce,’ Graham explained, ‘restricted Martine to live with her children within a five-mile radius of her angry ex-husband. The injustice of it all was outrageous.’

  Graham had called Guy Daniel, the ex-husband, to his small apartment to discuss Martine’s rights. Daniel was adamant. She and the two children must remain within the restricted area. Graham claimed that the ex-husband was making all their lives impossible, in fact terrorizing the family. The French police, he said, did nothing. It was then, he said, that he began his own inquiry and learned the depth and pervasiveness of corruption and organized crime in Nice where Martine’s ex-husband lived. The family skirmish had turned into a political war that engulfed Nice. One evening in Panama City Graham talked at length about the then-mayor of Nice, Jacques Médicin, and his alleged ties to the ‘Mafia mob’, as well as Daniel’s purported connection. He was extremely worked up about the lack of recourse and what he termed ‘justice’.

  Indeed when Graham read our Time cover story (23 November 1981) on South Florida entitled ‘Paradise Lost — Trouble in Paradise’ and headlining the fact that Miami had been hit by a hurricane of crime, drugs and refugees, Graham saw a parallel to the underside of the picture-postcard French Riviera city of Nice. In a letter dated 29 November 1981 he wrote:

  Congratulations on your story in Time about Florida. It reminded me only too uncomfortably of the position here with Nice. As I think you know I have been engaged with my friends in a war which has lasted nearly three years with the criminal milieu there. It has involved an Inspecteur Général coming down to Nice from the Ministry of Justice and a Controlleur General from the Ministry of the Interior. A few days ago I was in Paris and we saw the Inspecteur Général of the Police at the Ministry.

  He went on to describe the situation in Nice as

  a wall formed by corrupt police officers, corrupt magistrates and corrupt avocats which it is very difficult to pierce. You mustn’t quote this. All the same if your man in Paris wants one day to do a story of Florida in France we can give him lots of material but I must have due warning and have confidence that nothing will be printed which I feel undesirable … I am thinking indeed of writing a book which Max Reinhardt would publish in French and English called like Zola’s J’accuse’

  I did as Graham suggested and passed on word to my editors in New York to advise our Paris bureau that Graham was prepared to talk to them about his personal war. Then on 18 February 1982 Graham wrote:

  Many thanks for your letter of February 3. As you will have seen Time did a small and rather ineffective story I thought but a nice a Dutchman called Van der Veen came to see me. However as a result of his visit I did have one that was rather more important from Madame Le Roux whom perhaps you know lost a daughter who has disappeared probably forever during the war of the Casinos here. She is a valuable ally and a very formidable woman. The counter-attack is taking form now … I shall have to go to Paris in a few days to see my allies.

  In May Graham published J’accuse: The Dark Side of Nice. The book actually made it to the bookstores on the Riviera, but every copy was purchased and burned. The French courts then banned the book, and Martine’s ex-husband won a libel suit of 52,000 francs against Graham and his publisher.

  An Englishman attacking the French judicial system was not popular in France. Graham was attacked in some French newspapers. In a page out of the small-world encyclopaedia, Richard Eder, the New York Times correspondent whom Graham had met in Port-au-Prince during the Haiti crisis in 1963, had by now become the New York Times’s bureau chief in Paris. Eder flew to Antibes, interviewed Graham and filed a story on the troubles Graham termed the ‘criminal milieu of Nice. Both Graham and Eder were sued, but the case was eventually dropped.

  The war had ballooned into a war of principle, and Graham had unleashed his talent and every other resource at his disposal to fight what he branded as an evil. When Eder asked the 77-year-old author, who had just finished Monsignor Quixote, whether he didn’t think what he was doing was a parallel to the book’s protagonist, a parish priest in Spain, and duelling with windmills, Graham smiled and replied, ‘I wrote a sonnet when I was 20. It was about the peace of old age. Now I find it not so peaceful at all!’ (New York Times, 3 February 1982).

  A month earlier Graham decided to send a copy of Monsignor Quixote, his book about faith and doubt, to the Mayor of Nice, the notorious Jacques Médecin. In return he received a copy of an expensively printed book entitled Cuisine niçoise by Médecin himself. The author thanked Graham for his book and in his dedication stated, ‘To Graham Greene, to whom the title Cuisine niçoise keeps a lot of secrets’. ‘Cuisine niçoise can have a double meaning and imply more than cooking.

  In his letter of 18 February 1982 Graham had also written:

  Chuchu rang me up about a week ago from Panama. He says that he knows that Omar was killed by a bomb in the plane but that he couldn’t give me the details over the telephone. He is very anxious that I should come back in the summer, but I doubt whether I will be able to. I am not keen on doing so now that Omar has gone and I’m not anxious to lose my life in El Salvador.

  P.S. I also wonder whether the war with the milieu will allow me to leave Antibes. I can’t leave Yvonne on her own to deal with things. My letter to The Times [about the situation in Nice] caused a bigger explosion than I had expected and I am rather exhausted with journalists, telephone calls and parlaphone calls. For the moment I wouldn’t ask Time to do any more about the Antibes story.

  By the following month, on 29 March, Graham had changed his mind about the Time stringer-correspondent and was in a combative mood, describing him as ‘an awful little man’ who had published after a ‘poor piece in Time a really nasty piece in People, packed with inaccuracies and venom. I long to see him down here because then I will give him a couple of blows on the ears. But I think you might warn your office that he is a thoroughly unreliable reporter who shouldn’t be left at large.’

  ‘Yes, the battle still continues,’ he wrote on 30 August,

  and it’s impossible to make many plans for the summer. I have escaped to England for about ten days and have now started a book on Torrijos called Getting to Know the General — a very personal one which I hope will come off. I shall get you to read it in proof if it gets so far. I had read your story about Cuba in the European edition of Time, but I enjoyed reading it again. I do think the Reaga
n administration is badly mishandling Fidel. I get telephone calls occasionally from Chuchu who urges me to return to Panama, but I feel it would be like going to see Hamlet played by an understudy. The other day he told me that there were two Salvadorean guerrillas in Paris who were coming down to see me in Antibes, but I had to tell him I was away that weekend and they never showed up. He also sent Gaetano’s [Cayetano’s] regards! He’s convinced that Omar was killed by a bomb. If that was the case I suppose it was the junta in Salvador who were responsible. I’m asking my sister to send you a copy of J’accuse, but she is away on holiday at the moment and it will be some time before it arrives. I do wish Time magazine wouldn’t keep on sending me the appalling Dutchman whom they have in Marseilles. I won’t speak to him.

  ‘Many thanks for the cuttings about Panama,’ he wrote on 4 October. ‘I have started a book called Getting to Know the General in which the General and Chuchu will be the main characters. If it is ever finished (I have done 15,000 words so far) of course I’ll let you see the typescript as you play a part in the story. I hope you won’t lose your life in Haiti.’ Graham was concerned about the danger of being ‘bumped off’ by Interior Minister Dr Roger Lafontant, who opposed my return in 1980 to interview President-for-Life Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier. Reporting from Haiti in subsequent years I took particular care to keep out of the way of Lafontant and other Macoutes.

  Then on 7 October Graham reported, ‘I have done more than a quarter of the book about Omar and I will certainly call on your help and criticism if I ever get it finished. I had a telephone call from Nicaragua and old Father Cardenal a few nights back inviting me on behalf of the junta to go there. I hedged because I am very busy here and said it might be possible in November but I doubt if it will.’

  Still later he announced in a letter dated 22 December that he was returning to Panama on 3 January 1983 and would ‘then go on with Chuchu to Nicaragua. The junta are inviting me there. It would be good if there was a chance of your visiting at the same time, but I realize that it is no longer your field of action.’

  Chuchu had finally succeeded in persuading Graham to pick up a ticket from the KLM office in Amsterdam that Omar had ordered for him and been held there since his death. Chuchu would not take no for an answer. In January 1983 Graham flew to Panama, and when the pilot announced that they were about to land at the newly renamed Omar Torrijos Herrera International Airport, Graham recalled, he had a somewhat comforted feeling. The fact that the airport, which Omar had rebuilt, now bore his name filled a little of the void. However, when he found he was booked not in the old Continental Hotel but in the plush new Marriot’s presidential suite, and had been assigned a member of the Panamanian National Guard’s G2 as bodyguard, he wondered what had happened to Omar’s proletarian Panama.

  Graham was soon to learn that the struggle to fill Torrijos’s boots had begun even before his demise. At his death Omar left his youthful former education minister, Aristides Royo, in the presidency and Colonel Florencio Florez as chief of staff of the National Guard. In March 1982 Colonel Florez, a gum-chewing career officer with a reputation for honesty, had been easily shoved aside by a trio that included Deputy Chief of Staff Colonel Rubén Darío Paredes, Intelligence Chief Manuel Noriega and the Guard’s secretary-general Colonel Roberto Díaz Herrera. On 30 July 1982, the eve of the first anniversary of Omar’s death, Paredes made his move. He replaced President Royo. In resigning the presidency Royo explained to a national television audience that he was suffering from a sore throat. It became a historic removal of a president in Panama in what instantly became known as the ‘gargantazo’— ‘sore-throat coup. With Paredes’s nod, Vice-President Ricardo de la Espriella, a former chief executive of Panama’s national bank, moved up to the presidency. Behind the scenes Noriega was consolidating his power and combining both the police and National Guard into what became known as the Panama Defense Forces (PDF). The Guardia was in effect turning its back on Omar’s promised transition to democracy and popular rule.

  Graham liked Ricardo de la Espriella but didn’t particularly take to Paredes, who was known as a heavy-footed right-winger and who later proved no match for the more nimble Manuel Noriega (whom Graham didn’t like either). Chuchu did not feel it was necessary to fill Graham in on the Byzantine intricacies of the Guardia power play that was now part of the Panamanian landscape. The new leadership, Chuchu said, wanted Graham to go on to Nicaragua and then to Havana to sprinkle a little stardust of friendship. Panama’s new strongmen were in need of friends. None of the ambitious Guardia officers, Graham later told me, could hold a candle to Omar. Paredes had moved into Rory’s house on Calle Cincuenta and was acting like the new leader.

  Almost as embarrassing was Paredes’s present to Graham of an expensive Rolex watch with the inscription ‘To an English brother of General Omar Torrijos from General Paredes.’ On his return to Antibes Graham wrote, on 15 April 1983, ‘General Paredes embarrassed me by presenting me at lunch with an inscribed gold Rolex watch which I noticed in the Faubourg in Paris was sold at 66,000 frs! I couldn’t very well refuse it but I am having it demolished for its gold bracelet … so that it becomes possible to wear!’

  Encouraging Graham to go to Nicaragua was the fact that he now felt only sympathy for the plight of the Sandinista revolution, partly because all of his prophecies had come to pass. Reagan was determined to oust the Sandinistas and was secretly funding and training their foes, who had become known as the Contras. He had written from France:

  I am doing what I can here but it is very little. The Nicaraguan ambassador rang me up and asked me to sign a letter proposed by [Sergio] Ramirez of the [Sandinista] junta — quite a ferocious letter which García Márquez and author Carlos Fuentes are also signing. I have also signed a telegram to the Nicaraguan Press Agency here, which they are sending out to all chiefs of state. The Mickey Mouse bomb [a reference to a booby trap Contra bomb placed in a child’s lunch box] has also been useful and I have publicized it to the best of my ability. Just off to London now for my surgical check-up.

  Much later Graham revealed to me that his earlier operation on his ‘gut’ had been identified as cancer. During his check-up he had received the heartening news that his cancer had not reappeared.

  Before he had left Panama for Nicaragua, President de la Espriella, in a ceremony at Panama City’s Palace of Herons, and in the presence of Omar’s two strapping sons, the National Guard high command and a beaming Chuchu, presented Graham with the country’s Grand Cross of the Order of Vasco Nuñez de Balboa. While Graham said he was embarrassed by the award, he was none the less moved. ‘I had done nothing to justify such a decoration,’ he protested to Espriella. He was later to write in Getting to Know the General, ‘My sense of embarrassment increased when I became tangled up in the ribbon and the stars. I felt like a Christmas tree in the process of being hung with presents.’ (He was not the only Brit to be honoured. His friend, the ballerina Dame Margot Fonteyn, had also received the decoration.) Another moving moment occurred when he flew over Cerro Marta, the crash site of Omar’s plane, in a bucking helicopter along with Torrijos’s eldest daughter Carmen Alicia and Chuchu. It was the first time that Chuchu, for all his certainty about a bomb, had gone near the crash site.

  In January 1983 I met up with Graham and Chuchu in Managua while reporting an article headlined ‘Rising Tides of War in Central America’ for Time. The story appeared in the 14 February 1983 issue of the magazine in which the cover story was ‘The KGB Today: Andropov’s Eyes on the World’. Interestingly Graham had expounded a pet theory to Omar that the KGB could well be the vehicle for change in the Soviet Union. Graham really believed that the USSR’s Communist Party chief Yuri Andropov — a former head of the KGB — was a dove. In Nicaragua, meanwhile, the clashes between the US-backed counter-revolutionaries and Sandinista military forces were becoming more frequent.

  Graham was impressed by the Church people, both Catholic and Protestant. Most were outspoken critics of Reagan’s
policy of aiding the Contras. Graham met with nuns in Ciudad Sandino and was taken on a tour of the war zone near Nicaragua’s border with Honduras. On his return he asked me whether he had been shown a quiet sector of the Contra war. I assured him that there was no peaceful area near that border.

  On Graham’s last night in Nicaragua, at dinner at an outdoor Mexican restaurant, Los Antojitos, across the street from Managua’s InterContinental Hotel, he appeared tired and somewhat bewildered. He was staying in what he described as ‘a posh, well-guarded residence of a wealthy Sandinista’. However, his overall mood was good for having survived the war zone trip. ‘An ambush would have made it a little more exciting,’ he chuckled.

  The Sandinista Land-Rover jeeps were, he commented, the closest he had been to a coffin. In an ambush he felt there would be no way of getting out the back of the vehicle. (Three months after Graham’s trip Time’s chief of correspondents Richard Duncan, along with two editors from the magazine and veteran foreign correspondent Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post, were ambushed although unharmed by Contra rebels while travelling in a Sandinista military convoy. They were moving down the road from the little town of Jalapa, near the Honduran border, to an airfield to return to Managua when the mortar attack occurred. Five government soldiers guarding the journalists were killed and six wounded.)