Was the mans name OToole by any chance?
It was.
Hes here in Asunción now.
Yes, I know that. But he is not finding people so cooperative here. After all, the General has German blood.
He was with me on the boat and he told me he was doing social research.
Thats quite untrue. Like the Metropolitan Museum. Hes in the CIA.
Hes Tooleys father.
Tooley?
The girl on the Orient Express.
How very interesting. I wonder if that could be of any use to us, my aunt reflected. You say he was on the boat with you?
Yes.
He may have been following you. Such a fuss about a few pictures. I seem to remember that you and his daughter became great friends on the train. And there was all that business of the pregnancy
Aunt Augusta, that had nothing to do with me[271].
Rather a pity, Aunt Augusta said, under the circumstances.
Wordsworth came into the room wearing the butchers apron in which I had first seen him in the flat above the Crown and Anchor. Then his services in washing up had been recognized and praised, but I could tell they were taken for granted now.
Chop finished?
We will have our coffee in the garden, my aunt said grandly.
We sat down in the meagre shade of a banana tree. The air was sweet with orange and jasmine, and the moon swam palely in the pale blue daylight sky. It looked as worn and thin as an old coin, and the craters were the same colour as the sky, so that one seemed to be looking through holes at the universe behind. There was no sound of traffic. The clip-clop of a horse belonged to the same ancient world of silence.
Yes, its very peaceful, my aunt said, only an occasional gunshot after dark. The police are sometimes trigger-happy[272]. I forget whether its one lump or two.
I wish you would tell me a little more, Aunt Augusta. I cant help being puzzled. This big house and no furniture and Wordsworth here with you.
I brought him from Paris, Aunt Augusta said. I was travelling with rather a lot of ready money nearly everything I had left, though I kept enough in Berne to pay for your ticket. A frail old lady like myself needed a bodyguard. It was the first time I had ever heard her admit to being old.
You could have taken me with you.
I wasnt sure about your attitude to certain things. You were rather shocked, you remember, about that gold bar in Istanbul. What a pity General Abdul made a mess of the affair[273]. We could have done now with the twenty-five per cent.
Where has all your money gone, Aunt Augusta? You havent even a bed to sleep in.
The mattresses are perfectly comfortable, and I have always found a soft bed enervating. When I arrived here poor Mr. Visconti was in a very low state. He was living on credit in a really horrible little hotel. All his money had gone on his new passport and bribes to the police. God knows how Dr. Mengele manages, but I expect he has a numbered account in Switzerland. I only arrived just in time. He was sick too, poor fellow, from living mainly on mandioca.
You could have taken me with you.
I wasnt sure about your attitude to certain things. You were rather shocked, you remember, about that gold bar in Istanbul. What a pity General Abdul made a mess of the affair[273]. We could have done now with the twenty-five per cent.
Where has all your money gone, Aunt Augusta? You havent even a bed to sleep in.
The mattresses are perfectly comfortable, and I have always found a soft bed enervating. When I arrived here poor Mr. Visconti was in a very low state. He was living on credit in a really horrible little hotel. All his money had gone on his new passport and bribes to the police. God knows how Dr. Mengele manages, but I expect he has a numbered account in Switzerland. I only arrived just in time. He was sick too, poor fellow, from living mainly on mandioca.
So you gave him your money a second time, Aunt Augusta?
Of course, what do you expect? He needed it. We bought this house for a song[274] (someone was murdered here twenty years ago and people are very superstitious) and what was left has been well invested now. We have a half share in a very promising enterprise.
A Dakota by any chance?
My aunt gave a little excited giggle. Mr. Visconti will tell you all about it himself.
Where is he?
He meant to be back yesterday, but there has been a lot of rain and the roads are very bad. She looked with pride at the empty shell of her house. She said, You wont know this place in a weeks time. When the chandeliers are hung in the hall, and the furniture arrives. I so wanted it to be ready before you came, but there were delays in Panama. A lot always depends on Panama.
And what about the police?
Oh, they wont interfere with an established business, my aunt said.
All the same, another day passed and Mr. Visconti had not returned from wherever he was. My aunt slept late on her mattresses, Wordsworth was busy cleaning, and I walked around the town. Preparations were in progress for some festival. There were decorated cars of pretty girls parked at street corners. Outside the cathedral and the military academy, which faced each other over the little memorial tank, squads of soldiers goose-stepped. There were pictures of the General everywhere sometimes in uniform and sometimes in civilian clothes looking like the amiable well-fed host of a Bavarian Bierstube[275]. There had been unpleasant stories in Buenos Aires about his early rule enemies tossed out of airplanes into the jungle, bodies washed up on the Argentine shore of the two great rivers with their hands and feet bound with wire, but there were cheap cigarettes on the street and cheap whisky in the stores and no income tax to pay (so my aunt had told me) and even the bribes were not unreasonable if one were doing well and could pay regularly, and the oranges lay under the trees hardly worth the bother of gathering when they were threepence a dozen in the market, and everywhere there was the smell of flowers. I hoped that Mr. Viscontis investment would prove a success. There were worse places than this to end ones days.