Mask of the Andes. Jon Cleary
us—’ The other guests drifted past, their small talk showing the smallness of their circle: they had no one to talk about but themselves. They had already exhausted the main topic of the evening, the bombing of the bank: it dignified one’s enemies to discuss them too long and too openly. But they were uneasy, moving restlessly throughout the house, as if to stand too long in the one place would only invite attack. ‘Have you asked the young men what they think, Francisco and Hernando?’
On cue Francisco came up, nodded coolly to Taber, then put his hand possessively under Carmel’s arm. ‘My friends want to meet you. Everyone on this side of the room looks so serious—’
Carmel went with Francisco, and Alejandro Ruiz laughed. ‘There is your answer, Dolores. The younger men want only to enjoy themselves.’
‘Tonight, perhaps,’ said Dolores. ‘But tomorrow—?’
No one was prepared to discuss tomorrow. Obermaier and Condoris moved off, bowing stiffly like twin automatons as they passed people; Taber wondered if Condoris had ever been a cadet under Obermaier. McKenna took Dolores’s arm. ‘I think I’d better go and pay my respects to the Bishop. He’s over there with his Jesuit buddy from the university. Maybe they can tell us about tomorrow.’
‘Not my brother,’ said Alejandro Ruiz. ‘He leaves tomorrow to God.’
‘And the Jesuit?’
‘He will prefer to discuss the past. He’s been fed on logic and logic is safer when discussing history. You’ll never find a crystal ball in a Jesuit’s cell.’
Taber and Ruiz were left alone. They looked at each other, Taber warily, Ruiz with the confident stare of a man master in his own house. ‘Have you improved anything since we last met, Senor Taber?’
‘Nothing,’ Taber admitted. ‘But I’ve only just learned you are chairman of the local Agrarian Reform Council. Perhaps you can help me improve things.’
‘How?’
‘I have a shipment held up by the local Customs chief. I think he is waiting for some graft.’
‘Did he ask you for money?’
‘You know he wouldn’t do that. But I know the system as well as you, Senor Ruiz.’
‘I pay graft to no one.’
I’m suffering from foot-in-mouth disease, Taber thought. ‘I did not mean to suggest that you did. But neither do I – pay graft, I mean. That’s why I have several thousand dollars’ worth of stuff stuck down at the railway yards and can’t get at it.’
Ruiz had seen his wife, across the room, nod peremptorily at him to begin recirculating. He got wearily to his feet, sourly aware that there were times when he was not master in his own house. ‘I shall see what can be done, Senor Taber. But I can promise nothing. There is room for improvement in our Customs.’
Taber had a sudden intuition: Ruiz was putting him on trial. Everything he was going to do for FAO here in San Sebastian province would eventually have to go through the Agrarian Reform Council. Nothing would come out of Customs till he had proved himself. And proving himself meant proving that he was not a radical, that he would not advocate too much change.
‘Excuse me,’ said Ruiz. ‘I have my other guests to attend to.’
Taber was left alone. He looked across the room and saw Carmel surrounded by half a dozen young men and girls; she smiled at him, then she was blotted out by Francisco, who moved deliberately in front of her. Taber looked around, saw the Partridges bearing down on him, and escaped into a side room. Obermaier and Condoris were there, heads close together; they looked up as he came into the room, then turned away. He moved on, looking for a place to sit, to put up his feet and be alone. He might even try getting slightly drunk on Obermaier’s beer, if he could find any.
He stopped one of the servants. ‘Could you get me two – no, four bottles of beer? Brewery beer, not chicha.’ He wanted none of the Indians’ maize beer. ‘I’ll be in this room here.’
It was not so much a room as an alcove off the long hall. He sat down in another monk’s chair, thinking, Christ, isn’t there a comfortable chair anywhere in this house? Did the bloody Spaniards believe in making themselves uncomfortable when they sat, as a penance for all their other excesses? He felt he was being watched and he looked up into a pair of gimlet eyes on the wall: a Ruiz glared at him from the seventeenth century. Get stuffed, Alejandro or Francisco or Hernando or whatever-the-hell-your-name-was. None of you, neither past Ruiz nor present Ruiz, is going to stop me doing my job here. I may never feel at home in your house, I will never be part of history; but none of that is going to stop me from doing my job. I’m here to improve things, to change things, and I’m going to bloody well do my best to see that it happens. So put that in your arquebus and see if you can fire it.
He heard voices coming down the hall and he sat farther back in the chair, hoping he would not be seen. McKenna and Dolores Schiller went by, heads close together, talking in low voices. They had passed on out of sight before Taber realized how close together they had been. He could not remember ever having seen a priest and a young attractive woman walking hand in hand like lovers.
3
Carmel heard the door of her bedroom open quietly, then close again. She sat up in bed, at once feeling the cold air that came in through the open window. Francisco, in pyjamas and thick dressing-gown, crossed to the window and closed it. Then he came and stood by the side of the bed.
‘I haven’t come to your room before. I know how the altitude bothers one at first.’
‘It is still bothering me, Pancho. Too much for any of that.’
‘Lie down or you will catch cold.’ He looked around the room, dimly lit by the moonlight filtering through the curtained window. He found the large convector heater and plugged it in. ‘Father really should have the house centrally heated.’
Carmel lay back in the wide canopied bed. Francisco came back, took off his dressing-gown and got into bed with her. He reached for her breast, but she stopped his hand, holding it against her rib cage. She was wearing wool pyjamas, something she had not worn since she had been a child; it was remarkable how virtuous and safe wool made you feel. She would have to recommend it to the Wool Secretariat or whatever it was, as another selling point. ‘I said no.’
‘You were gay enough tonight at the party. No sign of soroche.’
She knew that was the name for altitude sickness; she had a bottle of soroche pills on the table beside the bed. ‘It was the party that brought it on. Maybe I was too gay.’
He rolled away from her, lay flat on his back. ‘It is not because of Taber, is it?’
She laughed, genuinely amused. ‘You’re crazy, Pancho. My God, I haven’t even thought of him that way—’
‘He’s a man.’
He rolled back towards her, close to her, proving he was a man, too.
‘So’s your uncle the Bishop. So were fifty per cent of the guests tonight. I don’t mentally fall into bed with every man I meet, Pancho. You better watch your manners or you’re likely to get kicked where the stallion got the knife. Cojones, isn’t that what they’re called in Spanish?’
‘I do not like vulgar women.’
‘Said he, trying to put his hand between her legs. Pancho, I’m not going to let you make love to me—’
‘You have not stopped me before. Not even our first night.’
‘That was Paris. There was no soroche there.’ Nor love, either; only the making of love.
‘Most people are over soroche in a day or two. You have been here four days.’
‘Maybe today set me back. Most people don’t have