Doctor Frigo (33 page)

They picked me up at the second.

It was still light but the sun was low and the courtyard shadowy. There was a brief rustle of footsteps and then they were walking so that I was between them.

‘Slow down, Doctor, no hurry.’ It was the one on the left.

‘Our car’s just beyond the corner there.’

The one on the right showed me the pistol she was holding flat against her stomach. ‘We sent your driver off,’ she said.

They were both young, the man with a short, neatly trimmed beard, the girl with long straight hair. The bush-shirts they wore were of a familiar pattern.

‘El Lobo?’ I asked.

‘Of course.’ The man again.

‘Why kidnap me?’

‘Kidnap Saint Frigo? You must be joking. He just wants comradely consultation in a friendly atmosphere of solidarity.’

‘I’m due at the French embassy shortly.’

‘Of course you are. That’s where we told your driver to pick you up. Only a cocktail party though, isn’t it? Won’t matter if you’re a bit late.’

Their car was old but the engine ran as if it were new. I was placed in the back with the girl. As we started off she smiled at me.

‘If this were a kidnapping, Comrade Doctor, you’d be on the floor with a sack over your head and an injection to keep you quiet. As it is, you just enjoy the ride.’

‘What sort of injection?’

‘I don’t know what stuff we use. Why?’ I noticed that she kept the gun pressed against her stomach. Habit perhaps.

‘Just medical curiosity.’

At first we seemed to be heading for the docks, then we swung left towards the almost deserted delta area. Few of the channels there are navigable for any distance. The early summer rains which fall on the mountains bring down so much silt that, apart from the main channel which affects the port, most remain undredged. They are left to the mangroves and the mussel fishermen. Still, nearer the sea there are a few small boatyards and a yacht anchorage. In
the days when big money still lived in the city there was even a yacht club, and some expensive weekend houses were built near-by. It was to one of these that I was taken.

Built on concrete piers with a landing stage below and a cantilevered terrace jutting out, it had obviously been planned at a time when it was believed that hitherto uninhabitable sites in the area could be made habitable by the magic of DDT. It had long been abandoned by its owners and, too far out for squatters, it had remained so. Recently someone had cleared the old track to it with machetes, but by car it was still only just approachable.

By now the sun had gone and the place was in darkness, but as we approached a flashlight beam showed on the terrace and then was deflected downwards on to some stone steps.

‘There’s El Lobo signalling for you,’ said the driver. ‘Just go on up. We’ll take you to the French embassy later.’

By the time I got to the top of the steps the mosquitos had found me. El Lobo chuckled. He was wearing a gauze contraption like a beekeeper’s hat over his head. ‘Don’t worry Doctor,’ he said, ‘we’re all screened inside.’

They were not only screened but also completely blacked-out. It was extremely hot in the barrack-room. I call it that, because that’s what it looked like: a long bare space with eight camp beds in it, four a side, and a trestle table in the middle with eight chairs. On the trestle table stood two pressure lamps. He motioned to me to sit down and took off his gauze hat.

‘If you wanted to talk,’ I said, ‘wasn’t there an easier way of doing it than with this cloak and dagger nonsense?’

‘Oh yes. If it had been just talk I could have come to the hotel, but I wanted to show you something as well.’ He looked at me thoughtfully for a moment. ‘Did you intend to screw Father Bartolomé’s balls off, or did it just happen?’

‘As far as I was concerned it just happened.’

‘I thought so. Montanaro’s a clever little bugger. You’ll have to watch yourself now, though, won’t you? The knives
will be out. You’re seeing Santos tomorrow morning I hear.’

‘You hear a lot.’

‘Didn’t I tell you at St Paul? There’s not much we don’t know. But just at the moment there’s one important piece of the picture missing, and
you
know what it looks like.’ When I said nothing he went on. ‘Rosier knows something, not much but something and he’s worried. Delvert probably knows more but isn’t saying, and there’s no way of making him. But you must know it all. What’s really the matter, medically I mean, with our self-proclaimed President?’

‘Fibromyositis. Muscular pain in the neck and shoulders.’

‘I know that’s what you’re saying at the moment, and I know that just a few days ago you were saying something else. Some sort of dystrophy. Now I could
make
you tell me, but I don’t want our relationship to move on to that kind of footing. I’d prefer to do a deal with you.’ He waited again. ‘No comment?’

‘None whatever.’

‘All right then, I’ll go on. Supposing we were to do a deal. What would you say if I told you that I could deliver my side of it here and now?’

‘Ask what on earth you were talking about.’

‘General, formerly Colonel, Escalon, that’s what I’m talking about. The man who had your father killed. Don’t you remember? When we were in St Paul I asked you if you’d like to question him. You couldn’t decide, or didn’t want to. Maybe you thought I was just talking. I don’t know. But I wasn’t just talking. He’s in a room upstairs, and we have everything he’s said down on tape. We’ve even transcribed it. All you’ve ever wanted to know – on a platter.’

The heat in the place was suddenly insufferable. I slipped off my jacket and undid my tie. He watched me calmly.

‘Naturally,’ he went on, ‘I could just have run the tape
for you and produced the transcript. But in your place that would have made me suspicious. Anyone can make a tape and transcribe it. That doesn’t mean that it has the provenance claimed for it. Better, I thought, for you to see the General in person, alive and disposed to be cooperative. Then you could be quite sure. So we’ve cleaned him up a bit, given him a deci of brandy and told him to expect a visitor. Well?’

‘If you could fake a tape, you could fake a General. How do I know who he is?’

‘I was wondering if you’d ask that.’ He fished in his pocket, brought out a thin bundle of papers and began passing them across the table to me. ‘That’s an old cutting from
La Hora.
Colonel Escalon congratulating a winning polo team. He’s in the centre of the picture. Taken fifteen years ago. Doesn’t look much different now. Worn quite well. Here’s another picture. Taken ten years ago. General Escalon attending a reception for the US Vice-President. That’s him third from the left. And here’s his current civilian identity card, though he’s still using his military title as you would expect. Sixty-six now, but he’s led a healthy life. Some loose flesh around the neck and under the eyes, but no great change.’

I examined the pictures carefully. Lobo was quite right. The same face looked out at me from each one – the same alert eyes, the same straight nose, the same firm, soldierly chin with its characteristic tilt upwards, the same prominent thyroid cartilages.

I nodded. ‘All right. These are photographs of General Escalon.’

‘Then let me introduce you to the man himself.’

I followed him upstairs. There were four doorways along the passage there. A bush-shirted young man stood in front of one of them. At a nod from El Lobo he unlocked the door.

Inside was what had once been a main bedroom. Now, all it contained by way of furniture was a card table, with a
portable tape-recorder and a bottle of brandy on it, and four rattan chairs. An oil lamp hung from a hook in the ceiling. As we entered, another of El Lobo’s paramilitary girls rose from a chair by the table and stood respectfully at attention. The old man sitting on the other side of the room didn’t move.

As Lobo had said, he had been cleaned up. He was wearing a white shirt, freshly pressed slacks and sandals. They hadn’t been able to do much about the mosquito bites though. Several of those on his arms and bald head he had scratched and they were bleeding. The face I had seen in the photographs downstairs had a grey stubble on the jowls and upper lip. The once alert eyes now stared at us dully. He had an empty glass in his hand.

‘General,’ El Lobo said, ‘may I present Dr Ernesto Castillo?’

The General looked me up and down, then raised his empty glass in a kind of mock salutation.

El Lobo gave the girl a sharp look. ‘I said one deci only.’

‘That’s all I gave him.’

The General spoke. ‘Quite right. Less than a glass. Contrary to popular belief one’s toleration of alcohol tends to diminish with age.’ He pointed the glass at me. ‘He’s a doctor. Ask him. The same thing happens with other drugs.’

‘We’re not here to discuss medicine, General.’ El Lobo pulled up a chair. ‘We’re here to talk about your part in the murder twelve years ago of the Doctor’s father, Clemente Castillo.’

‘I’ve told you all about that. I’ve told you everything I know, about that and a lot of other things.’

‘Then you can tell it again. In particular we would like to hear again about Manuel Villegas’ involvement in the assassination plot.’

The General yawned. ‘I’ve told you all of it.’

El Lobo got up and went to the tape-recorder. ‘Sit down please, Doctor, and listen. You’ve heard the General’s voice
now. You’ll know it again when you hear it on tape. It’ll sound slightly different because he was under stress then, but not much.’ He looked at the girl. ‘You’ve got the right reel on? And fresh batteries?’

She nodded and he switched on. The General’s voice came out of the machine with a note of hysteria in it.

‘Oh switch it off!’ The General was on his feet and waving the glass from side to side. ‘I’d sooner hear my own voice than that thing squawking.’

El Lobo switched it off. ‘Sit down, General, and, if you don’t want to be put back in your old room, you’ll keep calm. Are you ready now to answer our questions?’

The General sat down again immediately and stared at his glass. ‘Yes.’

‘Then we’ll go back to the beginning. Why was it decided to kill Señor Castillo?’

‘Because he had become a nuisance, dangerous. He was about to form a coalition that would have led in the end to only one thing, civil war. That was the Action Committee’s unanimous opinion. He had to go. A plan was made.’

‘And how did Villegas come into the plan?’

The General sighed as if bored by having to explain the obvious. ‘Any fool can plan and carry out a political
assassination if he has the means at his disposal. The intelligent planner looks beyond the act itself and the desirability of it. What other benefits, he asks, can be made to accrue? In other words, who can most advantageously be blamed for the act? In that case the answer was simple. The Democratic Socialists themselves should be blamed and their party split. So we decided to use Villegas. Instead, thanks to Pastore’s bungling, he used us, or tried to. He wanted Castillo dead, because he planned to take his place. But he didn’t want any split, so he sabotaged our cover arrangements.’

‘What cover arrangements?’

‘We had organized a direct connection between the arms used in the killing, Czech Model 58 assault rifles with folding stocks, and their purchase a month earlier by one of Castillo’s own lieutenants.’

‘Which one?’

‘Paco Segura.’

‘Did he in fact purchase them?’

‘Of course not. But we had all the evidence to prove that he had. Until Villegas got it through Pastore, that is.’

‘So Villegas let you assassinate Castillo, knowing exactly how and when it was to be done, but left you with no one in his party to blame.’

‘That idiot Pastore was double-crossed completely.’

‘And Clemente Castillo too, wouldn’t you say, General?’

‘That’s all you expect of politicians, isn’t it? Naturally they double-cross one another. If we hadn’t moved quickly and proscribed their party, we’d have had a Coalition led by Villegas at our throats.’

‘And Pastore took the blame.’

‘He’d earned the blame. A stupid incompetent! What would you expect us to do? Pin a medal on him?’ His eyes wandered. ‘I’d like some more of that brandy. That’s if you want me to go on talking.’

‘Let’s ask your victim’s son. What about it, Doctor?’

‘Give him the whole bottle,’ I said and got to my feet.

‘You don’t want to question him yourself?’

‘No, thank you.’

I opened the door and went out into the passage. The young guard stood back to let me pass.

‘Is there a toilet here?’ I asked.

He pointed to another door. I didn’t have time to close it behind me. El Lobo and the guard stood outside and watched me while I vomited. When my stomach was empty I straightened up and then found that the flush didn’t work.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘That’s all right. No proper drains here for years. I’ve heard that the Nuevo Mundo’s food has been getting worse lately. They need new kitchens.’

‘That’s very tactful of you, Lobo, but it wasn’t the hotel food.’

‘Shall we go downstairs again, Doctor? A little whisky might help I think.’

I followed him down. He got a bottle of whisky and two glasses and then sat facing me across the table. I sipped the whisky he poured and closed my eyes for a moment. I heard him get up and go back to the cupboard. When he returned he had a long envelope in his hands. He was holding it by the edges and dropped it on the table in front of me.