The Comedians

'An ugly customer,' I said uneasily. Then I noticed that Mr Smith was returning the stare. One couldn't see how often the man blinked because of the dark glasses; he might easily have closed his eyes and rested them and we would not have known, yet it was Mr Smith's blue relentless gaze which won the day. The man got up and closed the door of his office. 'Bravo,' I said.

'I shall remember him too,' Mr Smith said.

'He probably suffers from acidity.'

'It's highly possible, Mr Brown.'

We must have been there more than half an hour before the Foreign Minister's secretary got any attention. In a dictatorship ministers come and go; in Port-au-Prince only the chief of police, the head of the Tontons Macoute and the commander of the palace guard had any permanence - they alone could offer security to their employees. The Minister's secretary was dismissed by the sergeant like a small boy who has run an errand and a corporal led us down the long corridor of cells that smelt like a zoo. Jones sat on an upturned bucket beside a straw mattress. His face was criss-crossed with pieces of plaster and his right arm was bandaged to his side. He had been tidied up as well as could be, but his left eye could have done with a raw steak. His double-breasted waistcoat looked more conspicuous than ever with a small rusty stain of blood. 'Well, well,' he greeted us with a happy smile, 'look who's here.'

'You seem to have been resisting arrest,' I said.

'That's their story,' he said brightly. 'Got a cigarette?'

I gave him one.

'You haven't a filter tip?

'No.'

'Ah well, mustn't look a gift-horse … I felt this morning things had taken a turn for the better. They gave me some beans at midday, and a doctor chap came and worked on me.'

'What are you charged with?' Mr Smith asked.

'Charged?' He seemed as puzzled at the word as the Foreign Secretary had been.

'What do they say you've done, Mr Jones?'

'I haven't had much of an opportunity to do anything. I didn't even get through the customs.'

'There must be some reason? A mistaken identity perhaps?'

'They haven't explained things very clearly to me yet.' He touched his eye with caution. 'I look a bit the worse for wear, I expect.'

'Is that all you have for a bed?' Mr Smith asked with indignation.

'I've slept in worse places.'

'Where? It's hard to imagine …'

He said vaguely and unconvincingly, 'Oh, in the war, you know.' He added, 'I think the trouble is I had the wrong introduction. I know you warned me, but I thought you were exaggerating - like the purser.'

'Where did you get your introduction?' I asked.

'Someone I met in Leopoldville.'

'What were you doing in Leopoldville?'

'It was more than a year ago. I do a lot of travelling.' I had the impression that to him the cell was unremarkable, like one of the innumerable airports on a long route.

'We've got to get you out of here,' Mr Smith said. 'Mr Brown has told your chargй. We've both seen the Secretary of State. We've stood bail.'

'Bail?' He had a better sense of reality than Mr Smith. He said, 'I tell you what you can do for me, if you wouldn't mind. Of course I'll pay you back later. Give twenty dollars to the sergeants as you go out.'

'Of course,' Mr Smith said, 'if you think it will do any good.'

'Oh, it will do good all right. There's another thing - I have to get that business of the introduction straight. Have you a bit of paper and a pen?'

Mr Smith provided them and Jones began to write. 'You haven't an envelope?'

'I'm

afraid

not.'

'Then I'd better phrase it a bit differently.' He hesitated a moment and then he asked me, 'What's the French for factory?'

' Usine?'

'I was never very good at languages, but I've picked up a bit of French.'

'In

Leopoldville?'

'Give that to the sergeant and ask him to pass it on.'

'Can he read?'

'I think so.' He stood up as he returned the pen and said in the polite tone of dismissal, 'It was good of you chaps to call.'

'You've got another appointment?' I asked him ironically.

'To tell you the truth those beans are beginning to work. I've an appointment with the bucket. If either of you can spare a little more paper …'

We collected between us three old envelopes, a receipted bill, a page or two from Mr Smith's engagement book, and a letter to me, which I thought I had destroyed, from a New York real-estate agent regretting that at the moment he had no clients interested in the purchase of hotel properties in Port-au-Prince.

'The spirit of the man.' Mr Smith exclaimed in the passage outside. 'It's what brought you people safely through the blitz. I'll get him out of there if I have to go to the President himself.'

I looked at the fold of paper in my hand. I recognized the name written there. It was that of an officer in the Tontons Macoute. I said, 'I wonder if we ought to involve ourselves any further.'

'We

are involved,' Mr Smith said with pride, and I knew that he was thinking in the big terms I could not recognize, like Mankind, Justice, the Pursuit of Happiness. It was not for nothing that he had been a presidential candidate.

CHAPTER V

1

NEXT day a number of things distracted me from the fate of Jones, but I do not believe that Mr Smith for one moment forgot him. I saw him in the bathing-pool at seven in the morning, lumbering up and down, but that slow motion - from the deep to the shallow end and back - probably aided him to think. After breakfast he wrote a number of notes which Mrs Smith typed for him on a portable Corona, using two fingers, and he dispatched them through Joseph by taxi - one note was to his embassy, another to the new Secretary for Social Welfare whose appointment had been announced that morning in Petit Pierre's paper. He had enormous energy for a man of his age, and I am sure he was never for a moment distracted from the thought of Jones sitting on the bucket in his prison cell while he remembered the vegetarian centre, which one day would remove acidity and passion from the Haitian character. Simultaneously he was planning an article on his travels which he had promised to write for his home-town journal - a journal needless to say Democratic and anti-segregationist and sympathetic towards vegetarianism. He had asked me the day before to look his manuscript over for errors of fact. 'The opinions of course are my own,' he added with the wry smile of a pioneer.

My first distraction came early, before I had got up, when Joseph knocked on my door to tell me that against all probability the body of Doctor Philipot had already been discovered; as a consequence several people had left their homes and taken refuge in the Venezuelan Embassy, includinig a local police-chief, an assistant-postmaster and a schoolteacher (no one knew what their connections had been with the ex-Minister). It was said that Doctor Philipot had killed himself, but of course no one knew how the authorities would describe his death - as a political assassination, perhaps, engineered from the Dominican Republic? It was believed the President was in a state of fury. He had badly wanted to get his hands on Doctor Philipot who one night recently under the influence of rum was said to have laughed at Papa Doc's medical qualifications. I sent Joseph to the market to gather all the information he could.

My second distraction was the news that the child Angel was ill with mumps - in great pain, Martha wrote to me (and I couldn't help wishing him another turn of the screw). She was afraid to leave the embassy in case he asked for her, so it was impossible for her to meet me that night as we had arranged by the Columbus statue. But there was no reason, she wrote, why, after my long absence, I should not call in at the embassy - it would seem natural enough. A lot of people made a point of dropping in now that the curfew had been raised, if they could avoid the eye of the policeman at the gate, and he usually took a ration of rum in the kitchen at nine. She supposed they were preparing the ground in case a time came when they wanted to claim political asylum in a hurry. She added at the end of her note: 'Luis will be pleased. He thinks a lot of you' - a phrase which could be interpreted two ways.