Flames Coming out of the Top (6 page)

The driver was a bigger man than Dunnett had realised; the representatives of the Gran and Plaza fell back as he approached. He took hold of the suitcase and the smaller of the two trunks and went back to the car carrying them with the ease of a milkmaid. Dunnet followed with his personal papers and Mr. Verking's revolver tucked under his arm.

There was something dramatic about the nature of their exit. First, the driver raced his engine until the whole quayside hummed, and next he let in the clutch with the suddenness of a spasm. The car jumped off the ground for an instant and then rushed forward through the dock gates. Back on the quayside the two rival tourist agents had renewed their disagreement. Each was apparently blaming the other for the complete and spectacular escape of their mutual prey.

The docks were some little distance from the middle of the town. Between these two centres of life there ran a narrow stony track fringed on one side by a tramline along which at
unpunctual intervals there bumped a red and yellow tramcar with a striped awning. The Chevrolet had evidently travelled along the route before: the driver knew the spots to avoid, and occasionally cut acutely across the double ridge of tram lines in an effort to get round the worst craters. The ride assumed the character of a dodging game in a carnival.

The taxi stopped abruptly as it had started, and the driver got down. “Gran Hotel España.” he announced triumphantly.

“But I don't want the Gran Hotel España,” Dunnett explained. “I want the Hotel Avenida.”

“Very high-life hotel,” the driver volunteered.

“I don't want a very high-life hotel. I tell you I want the Avenida.”

“Sí, Sí,”
the driver admitted his mistake and hastened to repair it. He warned away the porter who came forward struggling into his jacket, jerked his car into reverse and swung across the square in a broad arc; women and pack mules scattered behind him. Then he pulled up again in the Calle Corrienteo.

“Hotel Plaza,” he said, and clapped his hand on the button of his horn to attract attention.

“I told you I wanted the Avenida,” Harold Dunnett shouted above the clamour of the horn. He was beginning to get angry, and remembered Mr. Verking's advice as to how to treat foreigners. “And bloody well go there at once.”

The driver understood Dunnett this time. He turned the car a second time and drove off at once to the Avenida. It took some little time to get there, as it lay on the road between the dock and the Gran Hotel España.

The Avenida, when they got there, had an air all its own. It was very obviously not a very high-life hotel. The blinds over the windows and the entrance porch were stained and ragged; and the woodwork, once a full chocolate brown, was by now so much discoloured by the weather as to vary from a muddy coffee to a bleached vacant white. Nevertheless, flowers in small wire bowls were suspended from almost every
available projection, and gay rosettes of coloured papers had been arranged to set off the drabness of the exterior. It was as though one person, probably a woman, had set out to do the best that could be done to disguise, if not actually avert, the hostile and remoreseless passage of time. Mr. Govern's guide book must have been even more out of date than he had realised.

As Dunnett looked, a tall girl came out. She stood in the doorway for a moment shading her eyes with her hands, and then walked over to the taxi. Without a word she removed the two suitcases and began to carry them indoors. She moved with a kind of unhurried gracefulness. As Dunnett watched her he doubted if she could have been more than nineteen or twenty.

When he had followed her into the patio he was surprised that no one else came forward. The Avenida might have been without other staff. The girl was standing in the centre, her breasts rising and falling from exertion. “A bedroom for el Señor?” she enquired.

Dunnett nodded.

“A single bedroom?” she continued. “A single bedroom,” he told her.

“Follow me, please.” She reached down for the suitcases and led the way to the staircase. At the foot of it Dunnett touched her on the arm and removed one of the suitcases.

“Please?” she asked in astonishment.

“Too heavy for a girl to carry,” he explained. “I'll bring it up myself.”

She seemed rather hurt. It was obvious that she regarded it as being in some measure a slight on the kind of service which the Avenida could offer. It was obvious also that she was not used to having other people do things for her.

The bedroom into which she took him was like the rest of the hotel. It was large and well proportioned and in need of renovation. Over the carved fourposter a bare electric light bulb hung, and the square of carpet that stood in front of the dressing-table was threadbare in the centre. The girl put
down the case and left him. A few minutes later the taxi-driver, complaining audibly of the weight, came staggering up the staircase with the cabin trunk: he did not conceal his contempt for the Avenida, and made it perfectly clear that any man who elected to stay at the Avenida when the Gran and the Plaza were ready to open their doors to him was ignorant of the art of living.

It was when he came to unpack that Dunnett discovered the first of the material shortcomings of the Avenida—one by one the hooks detached themselves from the woodwork as he hung things on them: evidently the wood was powdery all through with dry rot. He turned aside to the drawers. These opened smoothly enough and had apparently recently been swept out. But since the sweeping another kind of life had moved in. The drawer was now occupied by a small jet-black spider—a sinister little bogey that scuttled like clockwork—two earwigs and a family of silver fish. The whole bottom of the drawer seemed to be in motion when it was opened.

When he had replaced his clothes in the cases they had come in, Dunnett lay back on the massive bed—it was like stealing a rest in a museum—and took stock of things. He had that feeling of sudden relaxation after tension, of flatness even, that is the journey's end. Now that he was there, it all seemed so absurdly simple; so easy to stop going to bed in a back room in Walham Green and start going to bed in a back room in Amricante. But already he was aware within himself of a curious sense of misgiving, a feeling of insecurity. The trouble was that he was lonely. So lonely that he did not want to do anything but lie on his bed and think about Kay. If only she could have been there too; that would have been the thing. If they had both been here together on some crazy millionaire honeymoon, the five thousand miles would have all been part of the sparkle. He took out her photograph and set it in the centre of the dressing-table. The open, friendly eyes smiled back at him. In a way it made him lonelier still to think that for nearly six months this was all that he would have of her.

There was a knock at the door, and a short, untidy man in a frockcoat that was too tight for him was standing there bowing and announcing that dinner was about to begin.

The dining-room of the Avenida was a long room giving on to the street through two large plate-glass windows, gaily stencilled with a design of mural scenes; a whole herd of frosted glass cows wandered aimlessly across the transparent expanse. Like everything else about the Avenida, the room gave the impression of having known better days; even the paper rosettes did little to deceive.

There were two waiters of the kind, who, having early in life risen to the select heights of a
de-luxe
restaurant, had steadily and systematically declined until they were by now about half-way along the downgrade that led at the far end to a post as service hand in a cafeteria. One of them handed Dunnett the menu, leaving an imprinted thumbmark where he had held it, while the other alternately ran a glistening finger round his collar to loosen it from his neck and cut a stack of long loaves into short, appetising sections. The meal was not good, but it was at least satisfying. Dunnett rose from it feeling that he had been living all his life on the sinewy flesh of obscure fish and senile beasts fried in vegetable oils. The best thing about it had been a bottle of South American beer. The beer had neither smelt nor tasted like beer; it might have been a temperance drink concocted for the delectation of those who disliked the real thing. But it had the same satiating quality as the food; another mouthful of either would have been too many.

The meal over, Dunnett sauntered out into the street. It was already dusk and the lights were coming on in the principal streets. The lamp-posts were ornate affairs like cathedral candlesticks, and each one of them supported three large globes. It was evident, however, that they had been designed for decoration rather than for illumination and, except for a pool of primrose light at their base, the street remained in darkness. But with the lighting of the lamps the town seemed suddenly to be coming to life; it might have been
a ritual to draw people from their houses. The chairs outside the Gran, which half-an-hour before had been an empty expanse of green wicker, set on an oblong of neatly swept sand, bounded at intervals by commodious-looking spittoons, were rapidly becoming a centre of intercourse and entertainment. The tired business men of the town appeared from nowhere trailing after them their complement of womenfolk, and occupied the vacant tables, ordering short, potent drinks that looked as though they might have come out of a fairy tale. By the time he reached the end of the Rua Chile, Dunnett felt that he knew a great deal about the social life of Amricante.

On his way back to the hotel he asked a man, who was busily leaning against the ornamental base of a lamp-post, if he knew the whereabouts of the Compañia Muras; he did not want to have to waste time by enquiring in the morning. The loafer was grave and courteous: the Compañia was down by the harbour, he said: the gentleman could not miss it. In the meantime, he suggested, the gentleman might care to be conducted to an exclusive dance-hall with refined hostesses which he had the honour to represent. Dunnett excused himself.

His first night at the Avenida was a bad one. After fourteen days at sea nothing seemed really steady. The bed gave sudden unexpected lurches and the floor rose and fell with the regularity of a ship in a heavy ocean roll. The strangeness of the room too, was a distraction; even in his sleep he was aware that things were in their wrong places. Also the noises were different. The creakings of a ship at sea had been supplanted by a host of more insidious, more intimate, sounds. Doors shut, and there was a burst of sudden laughter; footsteps approached along the passage and died away again to the accompaniment of stealthy whispers; somewhere in the street a man sang snatches of rowdy melody; towards dawn a dog barked down by the harbour and then, from high up in the town itself, came a cry—perhaps a child's, perhaps a woman's, perhaps only an owl's; in the room above him, after it was
already light, someone undressed and threw a pair of high-heeled shoes on to the floor with a noise like castanets.

Dunnett woke in the morning hot-eyed and unrested. He washed in tepid water and put on his best suit. It felt hot and stifling and flannelly; already the morning showed signs of being hot. Then he studied himself in the mirror. He looked spruce and upright and businesslike; altogether he was precisely the sort of man that he wouldn't care to find himself up against. There was only one thing that made him doubt himself: he looked so English, so uncompromisingly and obviously Nordic. Something was needed to give him an air of experience, of background. He decided in favour of a cigar; everyone else in Amricante smoked cigars and, with one of those between his teeth, he might be able to pass himself off as having been knocking about all his life in second-rate South American seaports.

The man who sold the cigar took a professional interest in the sale. Nothing but the best would content him. When he found that Dunnett did not know the names of any of the native brands he dived behind the counter and produced something special. It was a large dark cigar, tightly rolled and as thick as a cane, a corpulent brunette among cigars. On the band was a picture of the bust of a woman holding in one hand the eagle of liberty and in the other the torch of learning. The cigar, which had been primed with saltpetre, crackled a little when lit, and thereafter burnt with an unquenchable, chemical ferocity. Dunnett suffered it to remain between his fingers, sampling its fragrance from afar.

The taxi-driver knew all about the Compañia Muras as soon as Dunnett mentioned it; evidently it was far from being merely a hole-and-corner affair. This driver had none of the finesses of his craft. They tore along the dock-road like an arrow. If there was a hole in the road he hit it even if it nearly knocked him off his seat. Dunnett, with Mr. Govern's letter of authority in his pocket, sat bracing himself against the sides of the cab.

He saw his destination some minutes before they reached it.
The words COMPAÑIA MURAS were printed in six-foot letters along a whitewashed wall some hundred yards in length. Outside the wrought iron gates which enclosed the entrance courtyard an elderly negro was sitting, evidently on guard. His appearance, admittedly, could not have been called guardian-like: he was simply a withered old monkey with a head of hair like tufted cotton wool; the seat on which he was sitting was an upturned petrol can. But the mere presence of the guard was something. It gave an air of substance and solidity to the name of Muras.

The negro jumped up when the taxi stopped, and hobbled over. He was quite toothless and the most that he could manage were a number of vague jubilatory noises as though Dunnett's arrival had been the awaited second-coming. At every mention of the name “Muras” he appeared to grow more excited, and led Dunnett across the dusty courtyard with ceremonial enthusiasm, stepping back for him at doors and repeatedly looking over his shoulder to satisfy himself that his distinguished visitor was still following him. Dunnett came, fumigating the courtyard with his cigar as he walked.

The office itself was a glass-fronted building like a buffet in a railway station. Inside there was a table and three chairs and two long rows of desks, at which were sitting a number of men who were immediately recognisable as Germans. Square-headed, blue-jawed, weak-eyed, they sat there, a little group of out-of-place compatriots all diligently learning the language, the local business methods and the possibilities of German economic penetration.