MAMista. Len Deighton

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ