Mask of the Andes. Jon Cleary

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СКАЧАТЬ the police chief did not understand English. ‘What experience have you had, Senor Taber?’

      ‘Only indirectly, Captain. I have worked in countries where some of my projects have been blown up.’

      ‘What countries were they?’

      ‘I never speak ill of old clients,’ said Taber.

      McKenna got him off the hook. ‘The raid on the bank this morning was pretty stupid. I understand they didn’t even try to heist any of the money. Is that right, Captain?’

      ‘Heist?’ Condoris did not understand American slang.

      ‘Did they attempt to steal any money?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘So they killed a policeman and blinded the bank clerk. What good will that do their cause?’

      ‘No good at all. We should have more such raids.’ Alejandro Ruiz, tired of circulating, had seated himself in one of the monk’s chairs beside the group. ‘We should throw open the banks, let them overdraw on their account of what goodwill they have with the campesinos. The dead policeman’s father is a campesino. The clerk was a mestizo, with a dozen cousins who are campesinos.’ He read the expression on Taber’s face. ‘You are surprised at my knowledge, Senor Taber? I own the bank. Today’s raid was a demonstration against me personally.’

      Carmel, still unsettled by this casual talk of terrorism, said, ‘Aren’t you afraid they might try to raid your house tonight? I mean—’ She gestured at the guests, every one a possible target for the revolutionaries.

      ‘Why do you think the chief of police is here? How many men do you have out in the plaza, Captain?’

      ‘Fifty,’ said Condoris. ‘Another thirty in the field behind your house. You are safe, Senor Ruiz.’

      Ruiz nodded, taking his impregnability for granted. ‘We shall soon be rid of them. They will never succeed, because they are mostly outsiders and the campesinos will have nothing to do with them when it comes to full revolution.’

      ‘What if they raise a local leader, one of us?’ Dolores Schiller’s voice had risen a little: no one had to lean forward to hear her now.

      ‘Where will they get him?’

      Dolores shook her head. ‘You are the only one who is so confident. The rest of us—’ The other guests drifted past, their small talk showing the smallness of their circle: they had no one to talk about but themselves. They had already exhausted the main topic of the evening, the bombing of the bank: it dignified one’s enemies to discuss them too long and too openly. But they were uneasy, moving restlessly throughout the house, as if to stand too long in the one place would only invite attack. ‘Have you asked the young men what they think, Francisco and Hernando?’

      On cue Francisco came up, nodded coolly to Taber, then put his hand possessively under Carmel’s arm. ‘My friends want to meet you. Everyone on this side of the room looks so serious—’

      Carmel went with Francisco, and Alejandro Ruiz laughed. ‘There is your answer, Dolores. The younger men want only to enjoy themselves.’

      ‘Tonight, perhaps,’ said Dolores. ‘But tomorrow—?’

      No one was prepared to discuss tomorrow. Obermaier and Condoris moved off, bowing stiffly like twin automatons as they passed people; Taber wondered if Condoris had ever been a cadet under Obermaier. McKenna took Dolores’s arm. ‘I think I’d better go and pay my respects to the Bishop. He’s over there with his Jesuit buddy from the university. Maybe they can tell us about tomorrow.’

      ‘Not my brother,’ said Alejandro Ruiz. ‘He leaves tomorrow to God.’

      ‘And the Jesuit?’

      ‘He will prefer to discuss the past. He’s been fed on logic and logic is safer when discussing history. You’ll never find a crystal ball in a Jesuit’s cell.’

      Taber and Ruiz were left alone. They looked at each other, Taber warily, Ruiz with the confident stare of a man master in his own house. ‘Have you improved anything since we last met, Senor Taber?’

      ‘Nothing,’ Taber admitted. ‘But I’ve only just learned you are chairman of the local Agrarian Reform Council. Perhaps you can help me improve things.’

      ‘How?’

      ‘I have a shipment held up by the local Customs chief. I think he is waiting for some graft.’

      ‘Did he ask you for money?’

      ‘You know he wouldn’t do that. But I know the system as well as you, Senor Ruiz.’

      ‘I pay graft to no one.’

      I’m suffering from foot-in-mouth disease, Taber thought. ‘I did not mean to suggest that you did. But neither do I – pay graft, I mean. That’s why I have several thousand dollars’ worth of stuff stuck down at the railway yards and can’t get at it.’

      Ruiz had seen his wife, across the room, nod peremptorily at him to begin recirculating. He got wearily to his feet, sourly aware that there were times when he was not master in his own house. ‘I shall see what can be done, Senor Taber. But I can promise nothing. There is room for improvement in our Customs.’

      Taber had a sudden intuition: Ruiz was putting him on trial. Everything he was going to do for FAO here in San Sebastian province would eventually have to go through the Agrarian Reform Council. Nothing would come out of Customs till he had proved himself. And proving himself meant proving that he was not a radical, that he would not advocate too much change.

      ‘Excuse me,’ said Ruiz. ‘I have my other guests to attend to.’

      Taber was left alone. He looked across the room and saw Carmel surrounded by half a dozen young men and girls; she smiled at him, then she was blotted out by Francisco, who moved deliberately in front of her. Taber looked around, saw the Partridges bearing down on him, and escaped into a side room. Obermaier and Condoris were there, heads close together; they looked up as he came into the room, then turned away. He moved on, looking for a place to sit, to put up his feet and be alone. He might even try getting slightly drunk on Obermaier’s beer, if he could find any.

      He stopped one of the servants. ‘Could you get me two – no, four bottles of beer? Brewery beer, not chicha.’ He wanted none of the Indians’ maize beer. ‘I’ll be in this room here.’

      It was not so much a room as an alcove off the long hall. He sat down in another monk’s chair, thinking, Christ, isn’t there a comfortable chair anywhere in this house? Did the bloody Spaniards believe in making themselves uncomfortable when they sat, as a penance for all their other excesses? He felt he was being watched and he looked up into a pair of gimlet eyes on the wall: a Ruiz glared at him from the seventeenth century. Get stuffed, Alejandro or Francisco or Hernando or whatever-the-hell-your-name-was. None of you, neither past Ruiz nor present Ruiz, is going to stop me doing my job here. I may never feel at home in your house, I will never be part of history; but none of that is going to stop me from doing my job. I’m here to improve things, to change things, and I’m going to bloody well do my best to see that it happens. So put that in your arquebus and see if you can fire it.

      He СКАЧАТЬ