Jon Cleary - Mask of the Andes

Suarez’s office was like that of the director of a museum. Yellowed sheets of regulations hung on the wall like ancient scrolls; a Wanted smuggler stared out from a poster like a cave dweller. Suarez himself was a dapper mestizo with one eye that was walled and the other suspicious. He nodded without smiling and waited for Taber to make the opening remark. All right, you bastard, Taber thought, no pleasantries.

‘An FAO officer was here on a short visit three months ago. He recommended that sulphur, fertilizer and some other soil additives should be used around here. He ordered it and it was dispatched at once. Senor Pereira understands the shipment has now arrived.’

Suarez nodded, a barely perceptible movement. ‘Yes.’

‘Then we’d like to take delivery of it.’

‘That is impossible. The necessary papers have not arrived.’ He spoke Spanish with the correctness of someone who had had to learn it; Quechua had been his childhood language. These are the worst, Taber thought. The converts to a way of life were as dedicated as the converts to a religion.

‘I have the papers here with me. Duplicates.’

‘I must have the originals. They have not arrived.’

‘Where are they?’

Suarez shrugged, his good eye as blank as the other.

‘How long will they be arriving?’

Another shrug. Out in the yards the engines hooted: derisively, thought Taber, trying to hold on to his temper.

‘The chemicals are urgently necessary. The farmers need them.’

A third shrug. ‘The papers are also necessary.’

Taber looked around the office, wondering if it was worthwhile wrecking. But the steel cabinet, the plain table and chairs, the old rusty typewriter, were government issue: Suarez would probably be glad to have them replaced. Taber looked down at the dapper little man and wondered what the penalty would be for wrecking a corrupt Customs chief. Death, probably: the system had to be protected.

‘I shall write to La Paz at once and ask them to send the papers special delivery.’

Suarez shrugged yet again. ‘It will be no use hurrying them. They are notoriously slow and inefficient up in La Paz.’

‘Shall I quote you?’

For a moment the good eye flickered; then there was a fifth shrug. ‘As you wish.’

One more shrug, you little bastard, and I’ll risk the firing squad. ‘I shall write today. Adios.’

Outside in the main hall again Pereira, hurrying to keep up with Taber’s long strides, said, ‘It’s his way of surviving. Why didn’t you pay him the bribe he wanted?’

‘One more remark like that and I’ll wreck you. ’ Taber stopped, looked about him, blind with rage. ‘I’ll bloody wreck someone!’

Pereira backed away, hands held up in front of him; all his gestures seemed borrowed from old silent movies. ‘A man of principle! So inspiring to see—’

Suddenly Taber’s rage went, he took off his cap, scratched his head and laughed. ‘Miguel, you’re a beaut. When did you last take out a principle and look at it?’

Pereira was offended. He said nothing till they were back at the Land-Rover. ‘It is not easy to be a man of principle all the time, not when one has to survive—’

Taber felt sorry for the chubby little man; after all, his own survival was guaranteed. ‘Miguel, I’m no paragon. I’ve bent my principles so often I could have strung them together and made a hippie necklace out of them. But I like to tell myself that when I’ve bent them, no one else has suffered – at least not as far as I know. But that bastard inside there—!’ He looked back into the station, his temper rising again. ‘I’m here to help you people and I’m buggered if I’m going to pay through the nose for the privilege!’

‘You would not have to pay, Harry, not personally. Suarez will not want much, a few dollars, that’s all, a token payment—’

‘It’s just the principle of the thing with him, that what you mean?’

‘Yes,’ said Pereira eagerly; then realized he had been trapped.

Plaintively he said, ‘Harry, it has been the system for centuries. The Spanish officials started it as soon as they arrived here after Pizarro. It is a way of life. Do not the English treat the Welfare State as a way of life?’

‘Go on,’ said Taber, avoiding a touchy point.

‘Suarez is not a rich man, he has a wife and five children to support. Is not FAO’s annual budget ten to fifteen million dollars a year? A few dollars – will they be missed from petty cash?’

‘They will be by me,’ said Taber emphatically, made even sorer by the reference to the Welfare State; he was glad his father and mother had died before they had seen their ideal abused. ‘Look, Miguel, I’ve paid bribes before. But now I’m growing tired of it. If it were just to get something of my own, something personal, I might slip Suarez a few bob. But this is not for me, it’s for the campesinos you and I are supposed to be helping—’

‘Oh, I appreciate the horns of your dilemma, Harry! Oh, indeed I do. One side of me has nothing but disgust for my compatriot Suarez. But the other side—’ He shrugged; and Taber almost hit him. ‘I am a practical man, Harry. It is the only way to survive.’

‘Then we’re going to be impractical and take the risk of survival. At least as far as Suarez is concerned.’

‘The sulphur and the rest of it will stay in his sheds till he expires. Then we shall only have his successor to deal with. He will be exactly the same, Harry. A Customs man who did not take bribes would never be promoted, not in this province. It would destroy the system. So how do you propose to have the shipment cleared?’

‘I’ll think of something,’ said Taber doggedly, and succeeded in hiding his hopelessness. He had been battling graft for years, never winning even a skirmish with a corrupt official; there had been places, East Africa for instance, where there had been honest officials eager to help rather than to hinder; but he had heard with despair that the system had begun to creep in even there. He had once met an official in Brazil who boasted of his ‘honest corruption’, who set a price according to the income of the man seeking the favour and never went above it. But now Taber had reached the end of his patience. Not just with corruption, but with bureaucracy, obstruction, betrayal, even with FAO itself. He had once been a dedicated team man, but he had become a loner because the team had let him down. Bribery was part of the subscription fee as a member of the team and he was no longer going to subscribe. ‘I’ll think of something.’

He left Pereira to return to the office in the Land-Rover with the driver. Though he did not dislike the little man, he had had enough of him for the moment; Pereira could not stop talking and he would only continue the argument throughout the day that one should compromise, should accept the realities of a way of life. Taber knew the Bolivian was right, that he should not attempt to bring in here the standards of an outsider. But that did not mean he had to suffer a lecture all day long. He excused himself, saying he had to buy some personal necessities, and quickly left Pereira before the latter could protest he would accompany him. He crossed the road, narrowly avoiding being hit by a truck whose driver, one of an international breed, held to the principle that pedestrians were an expendable nuisance. He made it safely to the opposite side and dived into the crowd of Indians drifting through the big market opposite the station.

Taber always enjoyed markets anywhere in the world. It was an exposure of people’s lives; they revealed not only their wants but their character. Smithfield and Covent Garden and market day in any county town revealed more of the English character than any Gallup poll; and he believed it was the same all over the world. The bright fruits, the coloured rubble of vegetables, the rugs, the copper utensils, were only the surface kaleidoscope; the faces of the sellers and buyers were the real essence. Here even the Indians opened up their expressions, shucked off their masks and revealed the living people behind them.