Flames Coming out of the Top (9 page)

“Señor Muras's compliments and his car is at the door,”
he reported. “Señor Muras asks if you will consider it as your own?”

“Thank him very much,” Dunnett replied. He turned politely to the clerk and then resumed his study of the ledgers.

“You don't want to go now?” There was a trace of anxiety in the clerk's voice.

“That's all right,” Dunnett answered. “You can tell the chauffeur to wait.”

“But Señor Muras's dinner party. You will be late.”

“How long does it take to get there?”

The clerk looked doubtful. “It is some way,” he said. “Certainly some way.”

“A couple of miles?”

“More than that.”

“Five miles?”

“I do not know.”

“What do you mean, you don't know?”

“I have never been there.”

“You live here, don't you?”

“Yes, Señor Dunnett.”

“And you don't know where Señor Muras lives?”

“No, Señor.”

“How's that?”

“He lives too far out.”

“More than five miles then. You mean twenty-five perhaps.”

The clerk bowed his head. “I do not know. I have never followed him.”

“Then he doesn't live in Amricante?”

“He has a
hacienda”

Dunnett replaced the cap on his fountain pen. It was useless trying to work with the prospect of the dinner party in the distant
hacienda
being thrust under his nose. “Then you think I ought to go now?”

“Unless you would rather that I telephoned and said that you had been detained. Señora Muras would quite understand.”

“Oh, that's all right. I'll go now.” Dunnett got up from his chair and closed the ledgers. “Tell someone to get those books and lock 'em up in the safe. Don't leave 'em lying about like that. They'll either get burnt or get stolen. Funny things happen to books in this firm.”

“Yes, Señor Dunnett.” He gave Dunnett a little bow and held the door open for him. Altogether he was about the smoothest young man whom Dunnett had ever met. It was like being waited on by a chorus boy.

Señor Muras's car was its own reward. It was one of the largest cars Dunnett had ever seen, certainly the largest he had ever been in. Perhaps its effect of size was accentuated by the colour. The car stood there in the sunlight; vast, gleaming, ivory. But there was more to it merely than colour. A glance at the interior showed that it was a cruiser among cars; a family could have been housed in the back compartment without overcrowding. It was simply a huge, mechanical chariot, glittering with chromium and the badges of various motoring fraternities; along the front it had as many horns as an orchestra. Altogether it was a car on the millionaire scale of things. It might have been a Rajah's state coach. Only the mascot, a bright-coloured Mickey Mouse, detracted from the noble lines of the thing.

The chauffeur was young and dignified. A smooth, over-massaged face gave way to a plump, feminine body: he was like a singer in oratorio. He allowed his eyebrows to rise expressively when Dunnet gave him the name of the Hotel Avenida, and managed to convey that Señor Muras's car and the Avenida were somehow not on the same plane of things. He sank his feelings, however, and allowed the Cadillac to get under way. It sailed forward with the grace of an air-ship.

There was a farewell group on the steps of the Avenida when they got there. The tall girl whom Dunnett had seen on his first night was standing a little to one side, looking on as though she were not altogether one of the party. One step
below her was an elderly woman, presumably her mother. She was gesticulating with the short fat man who had summoned Dunnett to dinner. He was clothed now in a tail coat and button boots, and was clearly resentful about something. His expostulations could be heard across the street.

“Am I a baby?” he was shouting. “Am I still at the breast? Can I have not even one evening of my time away from the society of women? Must there always be women everywhere I put my foot down?”

The chauffeur took no notice: he sat at the wheel of the car magnificently ingoring the uproar at his elbow. For a moment Dunnett hesitated. But he had not reckoned on the fact that the angry man outside was also a hotel keeper. As Dunnett aproached his whole manner and speech became changed. He gave a bow that was almost a genuflection and stood aside for Dunnett to pass. As soon as Dunnett had gone, however, the family dispute was renewed. “Am I never to enjoy a moment's pleasure?” the man kept demanding rhetorically; “am I to be fined if I smile?”

The elderly woman looked at him with an expression of complacent loathing. “You're sober now and you're disgusting,” she said. “You'll be worse when you're drunk.”

“I shall not get drunk,” the man retorted angrily. “Do I look as though I intended to get drunk?”

In response to so direct an invitation Dunnett turned and looked at him. On the whole, he did. He was an untidy little lump of a man with eyes puckered up in loose pouches as though someone had run a cord through his cheeks and pulled it tight. Above the pouches, his eyes showed small and listless, with the white heavily streaked in red, like marbles. Across his middle he wore a gold and magenta sash like a banner. It was evident from the way he wore it that it was a part of the regalia of some semi-mystic order or sodality. Though to inexperienced eyes he appeared simply a messy little man with a ridiculous strip of coloured silk round his stomach, to the initiated he was nothing less than a Grand
Eagle of the Second Order in the Lodge of the Ancient Order of Bolivian Eagles.

“I go,” he shouted; “I speak to whom I like. I come back when I like, and I drink everything I like. To-night I relax myself.” He waved his fist defiantly in the air and stepped backwards off the bottom step.

When he had recovered himself and left them, the woman and the girl came back into the hotel. Dunnett stood for a moment watching them. The woman was scowling as she walked, as though she wished that she had struck her husband while he was still sober enough to appreciate it. The girl, however, was placid and unmoved. Her gentle, oval face did not reveal any emotion. When she saw Dunnett, she smiled politely. “
Buenas tardes”
she said. She spoke as though nothing had ever disturbed the quietude of the Avenida's vestibule.

“You will be dining here to-night?”

Dunnett shook his head. “I'm dining with a friend,” he said.

“That is a pity,” the girl explained sadly. “We have an excellent, large dining-room.”

“I know,” Dunnett answered. “I've seen it.”

The girl made no further remark. She appeared to realise that if he had actually been there, no useful purpose could be served by romancing about it. The very fact, that after having dined there once he now elected to dine elsewhere might in itself be significant.

When Dunnett came down again he found the chauffeur sitting back smoking a thin black cigar. He threw it onto the road at Harold's approach, and it lay there burning like a time fuse before some nihilist outrage. The chauffeur appeared to derive some subtle satisfaction from the fact that Dunnett had changed into a dinner jacket. He made no attempt to control his surprise that anyone who stayed at the Avenida should even possess a dress suit.

The car was as fast as it was large. Dunnett lay back against the luxurious cushions curling his toes in anticipation of the
crash. To have hit anything in this car would have been like a head-on collision in a feather bed. Señor Muras's chauffeur assumed grandly that his was the major road and kept his foot down. They swept through the town ignoring the baser existence of smaller vehicles. At one crossroads the native traffic policeman blew his whistle and raised his truncheon for the car to stop. At the last moment, however, the sight of two tons of ornate automobile bearing down on him at sixty miles an hour was more than he could bear. With a brief squeal of terror, he stepped from his appointed standing place in the highway and bolted for the pavement. Señor Muras's chauffeur tore past him.

As they were passing the Post Office Dunnett signalled to the driver to stop. He had suddenly remembered Mr. Govern's injunction to keep the head office constantly informed, and decided that this was the moment to do so. The nice irony of the situation pleased him. To ride about in a man's magnificent limousine was one thing: to stop the car and send off the man's commercial death warrant by cable was something else again. Dunnett reflected that it was exactly the sort of thing that Señor Muras himself would have enjoyed doing.

He went up the steps two at a time and in under the magnificent carved headpiece: he did not really pause to look, and was only vaguely conscious of an oppressive design of a naked woman and little children marching uphill in the direction of a marble sun. Like most South American sculpture it was symbolic; symbolic and fleshy and about three sizes too large. The central hall of the Post Office was on the same imposing scale; it might have been used for drilling armies. There was no statuary here, but the hand of the sculptor had lain heavily on the frieze; a pageant of surging national history ran round the walls.

Dunnett went over to the counter marked
Telegramas
and tapped on the glass. After a while, a man with long waxed moustaches and the air of a general came forward and demanded his interrupter's business. Upon hearing the reason
for the call he relaxed a little, but still behaved with extreme dignity: he handed Dunnett a cable form as though it were a favour.

The wording of the cable was not altogether easy. Mr. Govern had urged frankness, however, and Dunnett set to work. “PROFOUNDLY UNEASY STOP,” he wrote, “DO NOT LIKE THE LOOK OF THINGS AT ALL STOP ACCESS TO RECORDS VERY DIFFCULT STOP M. EXCEEDINGLY EVASIVE STOP FURTHER REPORT LATER DUNNETT.”

He stood by while the man made elaborate calculations on a small pad. Apparently sending a cable from Amricante was a profitable business for someone. Before it was ready to go off it bore three stamps, each showing the likeness of a different national saviour, and had been imprinted also in four places in purple. When at last it was complete, the Post Office official sealed it down and put it in a small tray beside him. He did so in a manner which suggested that though the preliminaries were matters of urgency and importance the actual sending of the message could wait; nothing, he managed to convey, can hurry all the way over five thousand miles.

Dunnett returned to the car conscious of having done his duty by the firm. It had not been easy but, so far as Round One was concerned, he had won.

The Ride to the
hacienda
was a long one. Outside the town the road bore steeply upwards. To anyone standing in the Calle Orientales and looking along it from the sea, the road could be seen doubling backwards and forwards upon itself in its efforts to climb the foothills of the Cordilleras. At first the surface was metalled; the car swept along, silent and swift. Then the metalling gave place to a shifting surface of loose stones; the note of the wheels on the surface changed and the car began to shoot out a fusillade of fragments behind. Then this stopped and they came to the rock highway that led up into the mountains. All pretence of a modern road had been discarded now, and the car lurched along on a track that had been carved out for horses. With every yard of the ascent the landscape was becoming blacker and more grim.

They turned the corner round a savage escapement of rock and Dunnett saw before them the familiar sugar loaf of the Fiery Mountain. It looked less regular and compact than it had done when viewed from the sea. It was no longer a neat, well-proportioned cone bearing a little plume of smoke on its head. It had become a cruel, rugged mountain, a projecting landmass of rifts and crevasses. The crater at the top was broken and irregular, like an old china bowl that has been chipped. Through the notches, white hot tendrils of lava had been sent out; these were now petrified and ran down the side of the mountain as ecstatically mingled as those of a vine. Considered from any geological point of view, the Fiery Mountain could not really have been called an inspiring volcano. It lacked ferocity. The only indication of the earth's internal furnace was a thin spiral of smoke which trailed upwards into the heavens blurring the extreme cobalt of the
sky. But there was a sultry, sulphurous odour that hinted at other things. It reached the nostrils first in little wafts and then remained intrusive and irritating. Dunnett closed up the windows of the car; he found something oddly disconcerting in smelling the earth they were travelling on being burnt up beneath him.

They climbed steadily for perhaps fifteen minutes, perhaps half-an-hour; Dunnett took no notice of time, and merely sat looking at the smooth nape of the man who was pouring his car round corners as though it were oil. And then the road began suddenly to drop. It fell away one foot in ten. Cornering, alarming enough before, instantly became a mingled ordeal of human calculation and the bounty of Providence. Only the merciful absence of all other traffic, wheel or foot, preserved them. The road at last levelled itself out and the surface became stones once more. The chauffeur gave the car its head; it swept along again, an insane impetuous engine in an ancient stationary world.

The road must in fact still have been dropping, however, for vegetation began to appear again. At first there was more moss on the sides of the boulders; then bunches of coarse grass and stray rock plants; and finally even flowers. By the time they had gone another mile they were running through open rolling grass land and there were herds of cattle feeding. Only the skyline with its blue, savage peaks, served to remind them this was not some gentle domestic landscape in England.

Another piece of familiar civilisation had suddenly come into the picture. Alongside the road there now ran a three strand wire fence. Dunnett could not remember when it had first arrived. It stretched back as far as he could see and ran on ahead into the vague distance. It was a Great Wall of China among fences. At one point there was a gate set between two glaring concrete pillars. The chauffeur stopped, unlocked the gate, took his car through and locked up again. They were on a private road this time, as apparently endless as the one they had just quitted. Dunnett smiled to himself;
it was evident that Señor Muras lived on a splendid and expensive scale. Then the car slowed down. They were approaching a clump of trees in the shelter of which stood a long white building.