But he had seen nothing. Until he had been to Ombidos, he had not known what cruelty was. And with the men who had done… those things… he had smiled and joked. He had not killed one of them; had not throttled with his bare hands a single one of the torturers, because he had to return and bear witness.
‘Is it true that messages have gone to the Minister in Rio to tell of the bad things at Ombidos?’ asked Furo, staring trustingly at his master.
‘Yes, it is true. To Antonio Alvarez, the Minister for Amazonia.’
‘And he is coming to Manaus. So he will go to Ombidos and see for himself? He will make it right?’
Rom shook his head. ‘He will come, Furo. He will dine at the Sports Club and go to Madame Anita’s brothel with the Mayor and attend some meetings at the Town Hall in his tight suit and pointed shoes. But he will not go to Ombidos.’
Antonio Alvarez, a man approaching sixty… A gourmet who travelled with a French chef; a dandy who kept a retinue of hairdressers, valets and masseurs in his mansion in Rio… Nothing on God’s earth, thought Rom, would get Alvarez to that hell-hole. It was said that once he had been different — an idealist and a patriot — but that had been decades ago. Some personal tragedy was supposed to have turned him into the man he now was, the man Rom knew: wily, powerful, idle…
Yet it was only Alvarez and the government he served that could clean up the cess-pit that was the Ombidos Rubber Company. The company had no foreign shareholders: impossible to evoke, as Casement had done on the Putumayo the conscience of Great Britain or the United States.
‘Shall I sling the hammocks now, Coronel?’
Rom nodded. Yet long after his servant slept, he still sat and watched beside the moonlit river.
‘But he shall go,’ he said aloud. ‘He shall go to Ombidos.’
The first week’s run of Swan Lake ended as it began with fifteen curtain calls for Simonova, though the last of these needed a little assistance from Dubrov, who seized the winch-handle from the stage hand who had been turning it and had been about to pack up and go home. The following week was to open with La Fille Mal Gardée, a relatively undemanding ballet in which the ballerina is merely required to be enchanting, innocent and tender, qualities which Simonova believed herself to possess in abundance. With the dreaded Nutcracker in which Masha Repin was to star still a week away, and Olga signalling her recovery by biting the thermometer in half and demanding borscht, the Company settled down to their well-earned Sunday rest.
At least… most of the Company. In the bedroom which Harriet shared with Kirstin and Marie-Claude, a rehearsal was in progress.
Marie-Claude’s star was rising high. Her meeting with Mr Parker had been wholly successful. He had given her a substantial sum for her costume and expenses, and promised that her sizeable fee would be waiting for her, in cash, on the evening of her appearance. With her usual efficiency, Marie-Claude had left instructions about the music with which she was to be accompanied, the topography of the cake, the arrangement of the concealed footstool which would enable her to leap effortlessly on to the banqueting table. She had even agreed to a brief run-through on the actual morning of the dinner — but to polish up the finer points of her routine she preferred the privacy of the Hotel Metropole.
‘I wish my Aunt Louisa could see you,’ said Harriet, grinning at her friend.
Marie-Claude was in costume: a pair of black fishnet stockings, an inch-wide band of black froth which apparently constituted knickers and two minuscule black and crimson rosettes which adhered by some mysterious process to her breasts. They had put their three chairs together in a circle to constitute a ‘cake’; the beds, pushed into the shape of a horseshoe, stood in for the banqueting tables and in the middle of the centre one, an upright bolster impersonated the Minister for Amazonia.
‘Harriet, you must do the music,’ instructed Marie-Claude. ‘It’s the Offenbach first. Then when I’m on the table, it’s the slow bit from The Odalisque — I’ve marked it there… Then back to the Offenbach for my exit.’
Harriet nodded. Since her lunch with Verney she had waited patiently for the ache left by his rejection to fade. It had not done so, but now, as she had set herself to work, so she set herself to help her friend. And trained to sight-read in the Bach choir at Cambridge, she launched into a very respectable rendering of La Belle Hélène.
In the bottom of the ‘cake’ crouched Marie-Claude, wrapped in the golden mantle of her hair. Then — at precisely the point where the music soared to a crescendo of expectancy — she burst!
It was a splendid spectacle: sudden, dramatic, timed to a split-second. Even Kirstin, busy sewing a miniature scabbard for Tante Berthe’s hat-pin, gasped and Harriet was so overcome that she lost her place in the score. One moment there had been nothing and the next second there was Marie-Claude, her dimpled arms extended, her lightly rouged palms turned upwards and her smile held with undiminished vigour until even the most distantly placed of the diners must have feasted on its rich promise.
When she was certain that the gentlemen had looked their fill, Marie-Claude caught hold of the iron ring which the Metropole kindly supplied for those guests who travelled with their own hammocks and, swinging her legs high over the chair, jumped down on to the floor.
‘In the proper cake there will be a little wooden ledge,’ she explained and, indicating to Harriet a quickening of the tempo, began to dance.
The sight was unforgettable. In Cambridge the plump and brassy Lily at Madame Lavarre’s had occasionally given the girls a glimpse of what she did in her class for ‘stage’; and it had seemed saucy and titillating in the extreme but Lily, as Harriet now realised, was an infant. It was fortunate that Marie-Claude was familiar with the music to which she danced, for Harriet, gazing wide-eyed at her friend, was providing only the sketchiest of accompaniments.
Her ravishing smile unimpaired by her exertions, her hips apparently hinged only most lightly to her torso, Marie-Claude performed movements that Harriet had scarcely known existed. She smoothed down her own waist, she lifted her legs so high that it seemed as if the froth of lace must be torn most hideously asunder… She did incredible things with her hair — now covering her face with it; now tossing it away so that it whipped out behind her; now, as the music grew softer, winding strands of it round her wrists. She bent forward to let her crossed hands dabble in the dimples of her knees, then backward so that the solitary brilliant in her navel shone straight into the ‘eyes’ of the bolster that was Antonio Alvarez.
‘Ça va? she enquired as Harriet, hoarse and overcome, limped to the end of the passage. ‘That was about seven minutes, I think?’
‘Six and a half,’ said Kirstin, looking at the ormolu clock they had borrowed from the hotel lounge.
‘I understand now about Salome,’ said Harriet. ‘Why they gave her John the Baptist’s head, I mean. I used to think it was too much: a whole head just for a dance.’
Marie-Claude was not at all pleased with the compliment. ‘She was a gloomy lady. They are altogether an exceedingly depressive people, the old Hebrews, and veils are not at all fashionable. But I use some of the same effects when I get on the table. One has to be more legato on tables — especially out here, I suppose, with so many insects eating into the wood.’