IT WAS FIVE HOURS earlier in Trajano, and Lewis Page, hungry and exasperated, was wondering when he was going to get his lunch. He was having trouble with an official whom he took to be an immigration inspector, and his Spanish, long unused, was woefully unable to meet the demands put upon it.
“Your passport, please!”
That was easy enough both to understand and to answer. It was also easy enough to aver what should have been patent to anyone glancing at the personal information clearly set out. But question followed question, and the more he stammered and hesitated, the more excited and unintelligible the examiner became. Incomprehensible demands were fired at Lewis and repeated before he could turn a page in his phrase-book.
Another official, attracted by the noise, came to the counter and stared at him as if mentally calculating his anthropometric measurements. He took the passport from his colleague, squinted at the unflattering photograph of the victim, shook his head, and muttered something.
“Isn’t there anyone here who understands English?” Lewis mopped his sweating brow. “Interpreter!” he demanded. “Interpreter!”
“Intérprete,” the second official corrected him academically, and went on with his muttering.
“Can I be of service, sir?”
The voice was politely inquiring, with a transatlantic emphasis on the “sir.”
Lewis turned to face a tall, lean man of middle age, immaculate in tussore suit and wearing a broad-brimmed panama hat.
“It’s very good of you, señor. I’m most grateful.”
With the help of the volunteer interpreter the examination proceeded swiftly, but its purpose was still incomprehensible to the flustered Lewis.
“This is a new passport, issued two months ago?”
Lewis lifted his shoulders, but obliged with the redundant affirmative.
“Have you any other passport?”
“Of course not. You have to surrender the old one to get a new one.”
“How many visits have you made to San Mateo in the last fifteen months?”
“Not any. This is the first since I was here ten years ago.
“Why did you come here ten years ago?”
“To see my brother.”
“What is your business this time?”
“The same. Purely personal.”
“Where is your brother?”
“That’s what I would like to know,” Lewis confided in his rescuer. “I expected him to meet me here, but he hasn’t turned up.”
The questions went on and on. What business was he engaged in, in London? How long had he stayed in New York? What contacts had he made there? Did he meet anyone in Cristobal? Was it not true that he had been in touch with a man calling himself Juan Perez?
Lewis sighed. “I’ve never heard of the man. I met nobody in Cristobal. What is all this about?”
The two officials muttered together confidentially and thumped the passport in turn.
“Be patient,” the rescuer advised. “I think they are coming to the conclusion that you are not the man they took you for.”
“Not the man! I’m Lewis Page. Isn’t that clear to them?”
The stranger stroked a greying goatee that finished off his long sun-browned face. His dark eyes showed a light of amusement that might have been ironic.
“Hush!” he urged.
The questioning was resumed.
“Who is this brother of yours?”
“His name is Julian Page.”
“What is his business in San Mateo?”
“He has a coffee plantation in the Rosario district.”
More muttering. An interpolation by the stranger. Then:
“This Julian Page: he is the archaeologist?”
“Si, si, the archaeologist.”
Si, si, si, si, si ... The sibilants hissed, a pencil scratched the officials smiled and murmured apologies.
“I just don’t understand,” Lewis complained. “Did they take me for some sort of criminal?”
“A gun-runner, probably.” The stranger again stroked his goatee and was even more amused. “We are all a little nervous about the Bartolistas, so you must excuse official curiosity in the line of duty. Perhaps you are not acquainted with the local situation, sir. The exiled Enrique Bartol has never given up hope of regaining the presidency. A lamentable fellow, our Enriquito, but persistent. There are rumours: a fifth column, agents coming and going, an insurrectionary air force harboured by one of our despicable neighbours. Perhaps there is nothing in any of it, but our worthy government sometimes shakes in its shoes.”
The stranger laughed, displaying even rows of gleaming teeth. “I am glad I was able to extricate you from our politics,” he added.
“I’m deeply in your debt.” Lewis offered his hand. “May I know your name?”
“Balaguer.” The rescuer bowed slightly. “Mauricio Balaguer y Lucientes. At your service. It seems we are joined in disappointment, Mr. Page. You expected to be met by your brother. I expected to meet a friend. He was not on the plane, so perhaps he has been arrested as a gun-runner.” Señor Balaguer enjoyed his little joke. “What will you do now, sir?”
“I don’t know.” Lewis scowled uncertainly. “I had better wait a while. There may have been an accident. A flat tyre or something. It’s a long road from Rosario. I think I should telephone.”
“I, too, must call a number. Perhaps you would like me to get through to your brother’s place for you?”
Lewis could not dream of putting him to the trouble, but it was no trouble at all to a man like Señor Balaguer y Lucientes who knew the tricks of the exchanges as well as the peculiarities of the local idiom. Alas, after an extended encounter with the telephone department in rapid-fire Spanish, he had to report that the Rosario line was out of order and no calls were being accepted.
“It happens in San Mateo,” he apologised, and Lewis, waiting while his new friend made his own call, began to think that anything might happen in San Mateo.
The intense heat was more than troublesome to one unaccustomed to it. He looked anxiously up and down the long hall of the airport building, but no hurrying figure of Julian appeared to comfort him.
“Now,” Señor Balaguer said, “we must consider what to do. If you start at once for Rosario, you might miss your brother on the way. Undoubtedly, when he finds he is too late for the airport, he will go to the Europa. Everybody goes to the Europa, so that is where he will expect to find you. We will leave word here with the inquiry officer. Then my car is at your service.”
The lean, brown-faced fairy godfather had assumed full sponsorship. Lewis was beyond resistance, but at the Europa he insisted that his friend should take lunch with him. Before Señor Balaguer left, he offered further advice and the telephone number of a car-hire man who spoke English.
“But wait a little while,” he urged. “Your brother may yet arrive. It has been a great pleasure to make your acquaintance. Perhaps we shall meet again some day. Who knows? Meanwhile I must be on my way. Au revoir, Mr. Page. Hasta la vista.”
Lewis sat in the foyer of Trajano’s premier hotel and waited. Through the open, colonnaded front, he looked out across the Plaza with its old herring-bone pavement and its Bolivar in bronze. The palms in front of the Municipal Theatre drooped in a parched, complaining way, as if the heat were too much for them.
The watcher dabbed at his sweating brow and shifted in his cane chair. Movement was agonising. Gluey garments seemed to rip strips from suffering flesh.
Three o’clock, and still no Julian! Lewis eased the strap of his wrist-watch. He gazed at the ineffectual long-bladed fans that whispered faintly as they revolved overhead. He raised himself gingerly from the chair and walked out under the high-arched colonnade, but it was no cooler there.
Trajano, or at any rate the Plaza, was little changed in ten years, except that a new block of offices had gone up on the north side. And yes, an unfamiliar president occupied the ornate pedestal in front of the administration building, but there was nothing peculiar in this. The politics of San Mateo represented an unending struggle between the Bartolistas and the Recaldistas, complicated by the occasional intervention of the Phalangistas and the Communistas.
So the effigies of political heroes came and went on the Plaza. Only Bolivar had permanence, undisturbed by coups and revolutions, and the general populace seemed no more moved by the changes than the great Liberator himself. “Some day they will take up soccer,” Julian used to say. “Then there will be real danger to life and limb.”
All the same, it was no joke when you were questioned at the airport as a suspected purveyor of arms to the faction on the run.
Confound Julian! Whatever the trouble – flat tyre, choked carburettor, transmission – he should be here by now.
Lewis bought a paper from a newsboy and returned indoors. A heading on the front page posed a question in heavy type: “DO YOU WANT THEM BACK?” And the cutline under a double-column group picture was obviously in favour of a decided negative, for it identified the group as Enrique Bartol and his gang of bandits, taken at the last cabinet meeting before their overthrow.
Bartol himself seemed a jovial sort to Lewis, but perhaps the smile was merely a political trick. Some of his lieutenants were less prepossessing, and one or two of them looked as though the editorial description were justified.
The accompanying article talked of a new menace to the peace and prosperity of San Mateo. Exile had not damped the ardour of Enriquito. The Bartolistas were plotting and the enemies of the Republic were aiding them. Eternal vigilance must be exercised. . . .
Insurrection, civil war! All the worn clichés were trotted out to titillate the clientele of the cafés but they left Lewis unmoved. He refused to be alarmed. All the years that Julian had lived in San Mateo he had been involved in only one political incident, and of that he had written in high glee.
Curiously enough, it had occurred at the time of Bartol’s flight and one of the deposed ministers – one of those in the picture, no doubt – had figured in it, demanding hospitality at the point of a pistol and subsequently going to earth in a hole from which Julian had recently excavated a stone god.
Lewis scanned the group again, then turned the page. A long article on Juan Avila, San Mateo’s distinguished composer, caught his eye. Lewis had never heard of Juan Avila, but Anne would probably be interested, so he tore the sheet carefully, folded the page, and stowed it in his wallet.
A few minutes later, deciding that it was useless to wait any longer for Julian, he telephoned the car-hire man recommended by Señor Balaguer.