HE HAD TO BREAK out of this place, seek advice, establish his authority as Julian’s brother. He could no longer accept the situation merely because he wished to remain close to the sick man. Neither could he wait patiently for Julian to recover. And he was not to be deterred by a flourishing of pistols. Melodramatic gestures were native to these people, part of their quarrelsome temperaments, their sudden excitability. They were gestures that meant no more than schoolboy threats of mayhem and neck-breaking. The idea that anyone might pull a trigger was preposterous.
Even if escape entailed walking all the way to Trajano, he would accomplish it somehow. He would see the British Consul and explain everything to him. But the case, if he went beyond the facts, was a little difficult to explain, and the facts were very simple. His interference had been resented, he had been threatened and placed under restraint.
“Of course,” the Consul would say, “I sympathise with you, Mr. Page, but it is natural for these people to safeguard your brother, even by extreme means, if they are convinced that their doctor is the right man.”
“But don’t you see that there’s something strange going on?”
“In what way, Mr. Page?”
“Well, this doctor, for instance –”
“But Dr. Larreta is a distinguished man, an acknowledged expert on tropical diseases.”
“Take the woman, then. She was on that plane from Cristobal.”
“Mr. Page! Cristobal is a few hours away by air. In this country people use planes as we at home use buses.”
“Then why not tell the truth about it? Why all these evasions and prevarications?”
“Why should anyone confide in an intruder? That is what you are, sir. An intruder. These people are trying to save your brother’s life. What do you want me to do about them? Call the police? Have them arrested?”
“The doctor –”
Always, in the cycle of that imaginary interview, he came back to Larreta.
“What about this talk of a changed mental attitude, the sort of thing that follows sleeping sickness? Wasn’t he preparing me for some form of deterioration?”
“My dear sir, are you suggesting that this is a case of brain-washing?”
“Exactly. He’s giving my brother injections. What sort of injections? Drugs can condition the brain to anything. To an unwished marriage, let us say; to the acceptance of an unwanted wife.”
“Dear, dear! Always harping on the woman! If she is as attractive as you say, would it require a shot in the arm to make her seem desirable? I think, Mr. Page, you have been reading some pseudo-scientific horror stories.”
“Then there’s nothing you can do for me?”
“Not as British Consul. As a private individual, I can give you the address of a good psychiatrist.”
The anguished Lewis looked out upon the dark shadows of the gods in the forecourt. In the dining-room behind him, the two he had left were shouting at one another, wolf and wildcat again.
This was something that the smug, complacent Consul should hear. Then he would believe that there was justification for a complaint.
“Justification, Mr. Page? Merely a matter of temperament. These Latin-Americans, you know! Probably the altitude!”
Lewis went into the living-room and searched the book-case till he found an old medical encyclopaedia.
“Coma is a condition of. . .”
He knew what coma was.
“It may result from the effect of poisons on the nervous system . . . alcohol . . . opium . . . the derivatives from barbituric acid . . . malaria, sleeping sickness, diabetes . . . coma vigil . . . severe fevers . . .”
Larreta might have spoken by the book.
From the article on encephalitis lethargica Lewis learned little more than the doctor had told him.
But none of this need necessarily apply to the case of Julian. Larreta had invoked it merely to plant an idea in the mind of his interlocutor. It was he, Lewis, who was being brain-washed.
He returned the book to the shelf and walked out on to the veranda. He was finished with the imaginary Consul. There was not a shred of evidence that he could lay before anybody. Peculiar acts and reactions; a few things overheard and perhaps misconstrued, for his Spanish was faulty; and he had nothing more but suspicion.
The game they were playing might be a conspiracy to put him out of his brother’s favour, and, if this were all, Julian would soon resolve it. Just as soon as he recovered consciousness. . . .
Larreta’s car materialised out of the night. Lewis waited, but he had no opportunity of talking to the doctor when he came from the sick-room. Benevides did all the talking, and Benevides had brought his anger from the dining-room. Larreta was a diminished creature, spluttering nervously, protesting feebly about something.
Lewis could catch no word of what was said. He could gather only that Benevides was dissatisfied with Larreta, but no comfort was to be derived from this. All he now had was the hope that the turning point in Julian’s illness was really near.
When the house was quiet he went to the sick-room. The Indian women were used to his visits by now and took no notice of him. One of them was always there, seated in the chair, telling a rosary or straining at needlework in the faint glow from the neon bulb.
To-night there was another visitor. Leite stood by the bed, motionless, staring down at Julian. Perhaps she came often, but this was the first time that Lewis had seen her there. He closed the door silently and waited. For a long time she held that rigid pose; so long a time that his eyes became accustomed to the half light.
At last she moved back a step. Her shoulders lifted and her elbows jerked to her body in a shudder. She turned, and he saw her face clearly in the rose glow. There was something like hatred in her look, or it might have been disgust. Disgust with sickness, perhaps; with the wasted, corpse-like figure it had made of a man.
When she saw Lewis her face became blank, and she passed without a word or a second glance at him.
He moved hopefully towards the bed, but he could find not the slightest sign of improvement in Julian, and after his period of watching he went away with the conviction that Larreta had deceived him.
The night for him was troubled by anxiety and despair, yet in the morning hope returned. The doctor himself might be wrong, if he had lied. Some time the coma had to end.
Lewis was alone at breakfast. Benevides had already gone off along the valley on the trail of the labourers. Manuel supplied that much information, but, pressed for more, he was silent and surly. He had become less and less talkative, more and more insolent.
“You can help yourself to coffee,” he said. “I have to attend to Doña Leite.”
“Have you been for the mail?”
“There is nothing for you.”
But surely Anne must have sent some reply to his message from Santa Teresa. Benevides was holding it back. Or there had been some hitch, some delay in arranging her passage.
He was cheered by the hope that she was still safe in London, but it did not survive the moment.
On his way to the sick-room he saw that Manuel was at work in the office. Only Manuel was allowed to clean the office. The precious telephone had to be guarded, by lock or the faithful houseboy. No extension could be used without the permission of Benevides. But the telephone was something that Lewis had come to ignore. There was no one to whom he could appeal.
The watching Indian woman gave him a word of greeting and moved a chair for him. He sat close to the bed. This time he intended to share the watch till the doctor came. Then he would insist on staying, so that he might see what went on.
He leaned forward in his chair and spoke, as he always did.
“Julian, old man! Can’t you hear me?”
The Indian woman took no notice. She was used to these vain conjurations of the foreigner.
He saw, or imagined he saw, a faint trembling of the nostrils, but he had deceived himself many times. It was some effect of the feeble breathing, or it might be an illusion caused by waves of vibration from the vacuum cleaner in the office.
The vacuum-cleaner whined so loudly, he had to lean farther forward to listen to the breathing.
He thought the low sound of a sigh must be more self-deception, yet it had seemed so real that it drew from him a sharp whisper of appeal.
The Indian woman, at her morning devotions, was in a trance of prayer, her fingers moving from bead to bead.
“Julian!”
This time there could be no mistake about the response. Lewis heard the rasping respiration and saw a movement under the skin of the throat.
Julian opened his eyes, closed them, opened them again. Tensely, Lewis bent nearer.
“Lewis . . .” The name was scarcely audible. The lips continued to move, and Lewis was silent, holding his breath for fear he might miss a word.
“Where’s Anne? Did you bring . . . ?”
Julian’s eyes closed, and the watcher had the fear that the coma had taken him away again.
“She’s coming, old boy. She’s on the way. We’ll meet her together at Santa Teresa.”
The Indian woman looked up from her beads and crossed herself, but was unaware of anything unusual.
She lowered her eyes and began another decade of Aves.
“Julian! You’re all right now. Do you hear what I say? You’ll soon be on your feet again.”
“No.”
By a convulsive effort Julian lifted his head from the pillow. Lewis held him, and his hands reaching behind the thin shoulders felt the trembling of the body. The thin voice rose to a cry, and the Indian woman was on her feet, staring, unable to believe what she saw.
“Lewis!” Julian cried. “Keep them away. They’re killing me. They want . . . want . . . want . . . Oh, God!”
He was in agony, trying to get his breath. Then the woman believed, and she ran from the room, screaming shrilly for Manuel, for Doña Leite, for anyone who would come.
The whine of the vacuum-cleaner died in a complaining moan, but there was a new noise to accompany the clamour in the corridor: the swish of tyres on gravel outside the window. The doctor had arrived.
Lewis heard nothing but the frantic voice of his brother.
“The drugs ... It began . . . began . . . Izar-izarzar-zar-br-br . . .”
The meaningless sounds were forced out between chattering teeth. Julian struggled and another word emerged.
“Poison, poison, poison . . .”
He kept on repeating it as though the mind, beaten by the shivering body, could go no farther.
Hands from behind seized Lewis and he was sent staggering back from the bed till the door-post saved him from falling. Manuel was there, shouting Spanish oaths, reaching out as though he wanted to seize the helpless Julian.
Then Lewis reasoned and moved. There was one slender, fleeting chance. The door of the office was open. If he could get inside and lock it, the telephone would be his. He could call the police. He could talk to the Consul, and now the Consul would have something to listen to. He would have minutes at least before they broke down the door and hauled him out.
Larreta was coming along the corridor, but Larreta knew only that he was wanted urgently in the sick-room and he swerved to let the desperate man pass.
There was no key in the antique lock of the office; no way of securing the door except by a chair under the handle.
Lewis took that one precaution and dashed to the telephone. The chair was not enough. He needed something to check the inevitable attack. He cursed Julian’s passion for antique locks. He cursed the sluggishness of the rural exchange. He gripped the receiver tightly, waiting for an answer. He wrenched open the drawer of the desk with his free hand.
A man fond of pistols might have more than one in the house. But there was nothing in the drawer; only some papers and a few round green pebbles. And Manuel was at the door, shouting wildly and shoving with all his strength against the impeding chair.
No answer came from the exchange. Lewis worked the cradle of the receiver violently. Then he saw that the chair-legs were slipping on the polished floor. He crashed the receiver down, grasped a heavy ebony ruler, and sprang to meet the houseboy.
Caught off balance as the door flew open too suddenly, Manuel offered an easy target for the ruler. He thudded to the floor, and there was no one behind him in the corridor. Lewis ran back to the phone and this time he heard a faint voice on the humming line.
“Policia !” he shouted. “Pronto ! Policia ! Policia.”
Then Leite was in the room, calling to him to stop and struggling to get the receiver away from him.
When he saw the doctor and two of the men-servants behind her, he gave up. Manuel was on his feet again, and Manuel had murder in his eyes. Before anyone thought of intervening, he lurched across the room and leaped at Lewis, forcing him back across the desk with fingers fastening on his throat.
A sharp command came from Leite. Then, as the Indians seized the houseboy and pulled him back, she turned on him in a fury.
“Keep your hands off him, you snapping dog! I’ll have you tied up. Do you hear me? Tied up!”
“We’ll see who’ll be tied up when Pascual returns.”
“Throw him out!” she ordered the Indians.
They forced him through the doorway with obvious reluctance. Doña Leite had to be obeyed, but Manuel was still Manuel.
“Leite, please control yourself,” the doctor begged. “This is something for me to handle.”
He looked as if he needed a measure of control himself. He was quaking as he faced the defeated Lewis. His thin voice trembled so that his words came with difficulty.
“Señor Page, I am amazed that you should behave in this way after our talk together.”
“Be amazed,” Lewis retorted. “I don’t want to hear any more of your talk. I’ve heard enough from my brother.”
“Señor Page, you will listen to me. Then, if you care to, you may telephone the police or anyone you wish.”
“You will listen,” Leite insisted, and, with the two Indians holding him, Lewis was left with no choice.
“I warned you clearly enough,” Larreta complained. “The damage you have done by encouraging your brother to over-tax his strength may be beyond repair. I, certainly, will take no responsibility for the consequences.”
“He wanted me to know the truth,” Lewis answered hotly. “Now I know it.”
“The truth? You have a super-intelligence, señor, if you can distinguish the truth from the hallucinations of a sick man. I told you that the end of the coma might disclose a changed mental attitude. I do not know what happened to send you shouting for the police, but it is very plain that you are the victim of the deterioration in your brother’s mind. A man who comes suddenly from the fantasies of delirium may easily confuse those fantasies with reality.”
“Is that all you have to say?”
“It should be enough for a reasonable man.”
“If you are a reasonable man, you can have no objection to my calling the police. You can tell them that I am subject to hallucinations, if you wish. Let them decide between fantasy and reality. I have listened to you. Now I will use the telephone.”
“No!” Leite interposed. “I forbid it.”
Larreta shrugged and walked from the office, asserting that he was needed in the sick-room.
Lewis faced Leite.
“So you will stand aside, señora, while your husband is being poisoned?”
She looked at him for a long time before she answered in a quiet voice.
“Your brother is not being poisoned. The doctor has told you the truth.”
“I think you believe it, señora. I am almost convinced that you do. If I am right, you are being deluded. Nothing is wrong with my brother’s mind.”
He was sure of it then and he maintained it later, even when he recalled the seeming gibberish that had come from Julian. He believed there was some meaning to those scrambled sounds, but no pondering could give him a clue to it. He tried to repeat the syllables, to write them down before he forgot them.
E-zar . . . e-zar-zar-zar . . .
It had been laid down that he should not visit the sick-room again except in the company of the doctor, and now he was under close guard, watched whenever he moved. As he paced the floor of his room, he was aware that one of the Indians was standing outside the door, and he had the thought that, when Benevides returned from the valley, the room might become his cell, with the key on the outside of the door.
He had demanded news of Julian and had been told that a serious relapse had occurred. The sick man was unconscious again, his condition critical. If he died . . .
Someone knocked. Lewis hesitated. Leite called his name and he opened the door.
She handed him a slip of tinted paper.
“I am sorry,” she said. “My brother must have taken it.” She was embarrassed. “I didn’t know,” she added.
He read the message from Anne.
FLYING NEW YORK TONIGHT SAILING BY ATACAMA TUESDAY SEE YOU SOON ALL LOVE TO YOU AND UNCLE JULIAN
To-day was Wednesday. The Atacama was on her way, speeding down towards Panama.
He looked up to find Leite’s troubled gaze upon him.
“Why did you have to come here?” she cried. “Why did you?”
She was gone before he could think of anything to say. Then he worried over her, wondering why she was in such torment. He was sure that she had no love for Julian. She had shown not even pity for the sick man; rather revulsion. Julian for her was a means to an end, and the end was something designed by Benevides.
Lewis was in torment himself. It was treachery to Julian to give a thought of sympathy to the woman. Instead of probing for a hidden meaning, he should have taken her question literally and answered it accordingly.
“I came here to borrow money, but that’s of no account now. I’m staying here to save Julian’s life, and I’m staying till I am sure he is out of danger. I’ll find some way. You may be certain of that.”
He was certain of it himself. As soon as night came he would break out of his prison. He would risk the bullets of any guards that he might encounter, but he had the belief that he could evade them.
The trees grew thickly at the end of the drive, and under cover of darkness he must succeed. By the time the moon rose he would be far down the road to Trajano, away from these barbarous hills.
“I must save him,” he repeated to himself. “I will save him.”
He felt the power in him, but it was a delusion. Before the night came, Julian was dead.