“Ha, ha. I have got you, have I?”
“On the contrary. Check.”
“I can soon cure that.”
“Check again. And mate.”
He won two games in succession.
“You are too good for me,” Aquino said. “I ought to take on Seńor Fortnum.”
“I have never seen him play.”
“You are a great friend of his?”
“In a way.”
“And of his wife?”
“Yes.”
Aquino lowered his voice. “That baby he is always talking about-is it yours?”
Doctor Plarr said, “I am sick to death of hearing about that baby. Do you want another game?”
As they were putting out their pieces they heard the sound of a rifle shot, very far off. Aquino seized his gun, but there was no repetition. Doctor Plarr sat on the floor with a black rook in his hand. It grew damp with sweat. Nobody spoke. At last Father Rivas said, “Only someone shooting at a wild duck. We begin to think everything has to do with our affair.”
“Yes,” Aquino said, “even the helicopter might have belonged to the city council if you can forget the military markings.”
“How long is it before the next radio news?”
“Another two hours. There might be a special announcement though.”
“We cannot leave the radio on all the time. It is the only radio in the barrio. Too many people know about it already.”
“Then Aquino and I might as well have our game,” Doctor Plarr said. “I will give you a rook.”
“I do not want your rook. I will beat you in a straight match. I am out of practice, that is all.”
Over Aquino’s shoulder Doctor Plarr could see Father Rivas. A small and dusty object, he looked rather like a shrunken mummy dug out of the ground, together with a few treasured possessions which had been buried with him-a revolver, a tattered paper volume. Was it a missal? Doctor Plarr wondered. A book of prayers? With a sense of extreme boredom he repeated his old refrain, “Check and mate.”
“You play too well for me,” Aquino said.
“What are you reading, Leon?” Doctor Plarr asked. “Do you still read your breviary?”
“I gave that up years ago.”
“What have you got there?”
“Only a detective story. An English detective story.”
“A good one?”
“I am no judge of that. The translation is not very good, and with this sort of book I can always guess the end.”
“Then where is the interest?”
“Oh, there is a sort of comfort in reading a story where one knows what the end will be. The story of a dream world where justice is always done. There were no detective stories in the age of faith-an interesting point when you think of it. God used to be the only detective when people believed in Him. He was law. He was order. He was good. Like your Sherlock Holmes. It was He who pursued the wicked man for punishment and discovered all. But now people like the General make law and order. Electric shocks on the genitals. Aquino’s fingers. Keep the poor ill fed, and they do not have the energy to revolt. I prefer the detective. I prefer God.”
“Do you still believe in Him?”
“In a way. Sometimes. It is not so easy as all that to answer yes or no. Certainly he is not the same God as the one they taught us at school or in the seminary.”
“Your personal God,” Doctor Plarr said, teasing again. “I thought that was a Protestant heresy.”
“Why not? Is it any worse for that? Is it any less likely to be true? We no longer kill heretics-only political prisoners.”
“Charley Fortnum is your political prisoner.”
“Yes.”
“So you are a bit like the General yourself, Leon.”
“I do not torture him.”
“Are you sure of that?”
Marta returned from the town alone. She asked, “Is Diego here?”
“No,” Father Rivas said, “surely he went with you-or did you take Pablo?”
“He stayed behind in the town. He said he would catch me up. He had to collect petrol. The car is nearly dry, he said, and there is no reserve.”
Aquino said, “That is not true.”
Marta said, “He was very frightened by the helicopter. By the old man too.”
“Do you think he has gone to the police?” Doctor Plarr asked.
“No,” Father Rivas said, “I will never believe that.”
“Then where is he?” Aquino demanded.
“He may have been arrested on suspicion. He may have gone with a woman. Who knows? Anyway there is nothing for us to do. We can only wait. How long now before the news comes on?”
“Twenty-two minutes,” Aquino said.
“Tell Pablo to come in. If they have spotted us, there is no point in leaving him outside to be picked off alone. Better to keep together at the end.”
Father Rivas took up his detective story again. He said, “The only thing we can do is hope.” He added, “What a wonderful peaceful world this one is. Everything is so well ordered. There are no problems. There is an answer to every question.”
“What are you talking about?” Doctor Plarr asked.
“The world in this detective story. Can you tell me what Bradshaw means?”
“Bradshaw?”
It seemed to Doctor Plarr that this was the first time he had seen Leon so relaxed since the long arguments they used to have when they were schoolboys together. Had he, as the situation grew darker, lost the sense of responsibility, like a roulette player who abandons his chart and no longer bothers even to watch the ball? He should never have tried to be a man of action: as a priest at a bedside he would have been most at his ease waiting passively for the end. “It’s an English family name,” Doctor Plarr said. “My father had a friend Bradshaw who used to write to him from a town called Chester.”
“This one seems to be a man who knows all the trams in England by heart. The trains never take more than a few hours to go anywhere. And they always arrive on time. The detective only has to consult Bradshaw to know exactly when… What a strange world your father came from. Here we are little more than eight hundred kilometres from Buenos Aires and the train is supposed to take a day and a half to make the journey, but it is often two or three days late. This English detective is a very impatient man. He is pacing the platform of the station in London, waiting for the train from Edinburgh-that is nearly as far as Buenos Aires surely? - and the train is half an hour late, according to this man Bradshaw, and yet the detective thinks something must be wrong. Half an hour late!” Father Rivas exclaimed. “It is like when I was a child and I would be late in coming home from school and my mother would worry and my father used to say, ‘But what could happen to the child between here and the school house?’”
Aquino said with impatience, “And Diego? Diego is late too, and I tell you I worry.”
Pablo came into the hut. Aquino told him at once, “Diego has gone.”
“Where to?”
“To the police perhaps.”
Marta said, “All the way into town he talked about the helicopter. And when we came to the river-oh, he did not say anything, but it was the way he looked. At the ferry landing he said to me. That is strange. There are no police controlling the passengers.’ I said to him, ‘And the other side-can you see all the way across there? And can you tell a policeman when he is out of uniform?’”
Pablo said, “What do you think, Father? I introduced him to you. I feel ashamed. I told you he was a good man to drive the car. And a brave man.”
Father Rivas said, “There is no reason to start worrying yet.”
“I have to worry. He was my countryman. All you others come from across the border. You can trust each other. I feel as though I were Diego’s brother and my brother had betrayed you. You should not have come to me for help.”
“What could we have done without you, Pablo? There is nowhere in Paraguay where we could have hidden the Ambassador. Even taking him across the river would have been too dangerous. Perhaps it was a mistake to include any of your countrymen in our group, but El Tigre never thought of us as foreigners here in Argentina. He does not think in terms of Paraguayans, Peruvians, Bolivians, Argentinians. I think he would like to call us all Americans, if it were not for that place up there in the north.”