Грэм Грин - The Comedians

'I will tell you what happened,' Captain Concasseur said. 'The policeman on duty was strangled. He was probably asleep. A man with a limp took his gun, a mйtis took his revolver, they kicked open the door where the others were sleeping …'

'And they let them get away?'

'They would have shot my men. Sometimes they spare the police.'

'There must be a lot of men with limps in Port-au-Prince.'

'Then where is Joseph? He should be sleeping here. Someone recognized Philipot, and he is not at his home. When did you last see him? Where?'

He signalled to the same man. This time the man kicked me hard on the shin, while another snatched the chair from under me, so that I found myself where I didn't wish to be, at Captain Concasseur's feet. His shoes were a horrible red-brown. I knew

that I had to get upright again or I would be finished, but my leg hurt me and I wasn't sure I could stand. I was in an absurd position sitting there on the floor as though at an informal

party. Everyone was waiting for me to do my turn. Perhaps when I stood up they would kick me down again. That might be their idea of a party joke. I remembered Joseph's broken

hip. It was safer to stay where I was. But I stood up. My right leg gave a shoot of pain. I leant back for support against the

balustrade of the verandah. Captain Concasseur changed the position of his gun to cover me, but without any haste. He had an attitude of great comfort in the chaise longue. Indeed he

looked as though he owned the place. Perhaps that was his intention.

I said, 'What were you saying? Oh yes … I went last night with Joseph to a Voodoo ceremony. Philipot was there. But we didn't speak. I left before it was over.'

'Why?'

'I was disgusted.'

'You were disgusted by the religion of the Haitian people?'

'Every man to his taste.'

The men in sun-glasses came a little nearer. The glasses were turned towards Captain Concasseur. If only I could have seen one pair of eyes and the expression … I was daunted by the anonymity. Captain Concasseur said, 'You are so frightened of me that you have pissed in your pantalon.' I realized that what he said was true. I could feel the wet and the warmth. I was dripping humiliatingly on the boards. He had got what he wanted, and I would have done better to have stayed on the floor at his feet.

'Hit him again,' Captain Concasseur told the man.

'Dйgoыtant,' a voice said, 'tout а falt dйgoыtant.'

I was as astonished as they were. The American accent with which the words were spoken had to me all the glow and vigour of Mrs Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of the Republic. The grapes of wrath were trampled out in them and there was a flash of the terrible swift sword. They stopped my opponent with his fist raised to strike.

Mrs Smith had appeared at the opposite end of the verandah behind Captain Concasseur, and he had to lose his attitude of lazy detachment in order to see who it was who spoke, so that the gun no longer covered me and I moved out of reach of the fist. Mrs Smith was dressed in a kind of old colonial nightgown and her hair was done up in metal rollers which gave her an oddly cubist air. She stood there firmly in the dawn light and let them have it in sharp fragmented phrases torn out of Hugo's Self-Taught. She told them of the bruit horrible which had roused her and her husband from their sleep; she accused them of lвchetй in striking an unarmed man; she demanded their warrant to be here at all — warrant and again warrant: but here Hugo's vocabulary failed her — 'montrez-moi votre warrant'; 'votre warrant oщ est-il?' The mysterious word menaced them more than the words they understood.

Captain Concasseur began to speak, 'Madame,' and she turned on him the focus of her fierce short-sighted eyes. 'You,' she said, 'oh, yes. I've seen you before. You are the woman-striker.' Hugo's had no word for that — only English could serve her indignation now. She advanced on him, all her hard-won vocabulary forgotten. 'How dare you come here flourishing a revolver? Give it to me,' and she held out her hand for it as though he were a child with a catapult. Captain Concasseur may not have understood her English, but he understood very well the gesture. As though he were guarding a precious object from an angry mother, he buttoned the gun back inside the holster. 'Get out of that chair, you black scum. Stand up when you speak to me.' She added, in defence of all her past, as though this echo of Nashville racialism had burnt her tongue, 'You are a disgrace to your colour.'

'Who is this woman?' Captain Concasseur asked me weakly.

'The wife of the Presidential Candidate. You have met her before.' I think for the first time he remembered the scene at Philipot's funeral. He had lost his grip: his men stared at him through their dark glasses waiting for orders which didn't come.

Mrs Smith had recovered her grasp on Hugo's vocabulary. How she must have worked all that long morning when Mr Smith and I visited Duvalierville. She said in her atrocious accent, 'You have searched. You have not found. You can go.' Except for the absence of certain nouns the sentences would have been suitable ones for the second lesson. Captain Concasseur hesitated. Too ambitiously she attempted both the subjunctive and the future tense and got them wrong, but he recognized very well what she intended to say, 'If you don't go, I will fetch my husband.' He capitulated. He led his men out and soon they were going down the drive more noisily than they had come, laughing hollowly in an attempt to heal their wounded pride.

'Who was that?'

'One of Jones's new friends,' I said.

'I shall speak to Mr Jones about it at the first opportunity. You can't touch pitch without … Your mouth is bleeding. You had better come upstairs and I will wash it in Listerine. Mr Smith and I never travel anywhere without a bottle of Listerine.'

3

'Does it hurt?' Martha asked me.

'Not much,' I said, 'now.' I could not remember a time when we had been so alone and so at peace. The long hours of the afternoon faded behind the mosquito-netting over the bedroom window. When I look back on that afternoon it seems to me we had been granted the distant sight of a promised land — we had come to the edge of a desert: the milk and honey awaited us: our spies went by carrying their burden of grapes. To what false gods did we turn then? What else could we have done other than we did?

Never before had Martha come of her own will, unpressed, to the Trianon. We had never slept before in my bed. It was

for half an hour only, but the sleep was deeper than any I have known since. I woke flinching from her mouth with my wounded gum. I said, 'I received a letter of apology from Jones. He told Concasseur that he took it as a personal insult that a

friend of his should be treated like that. He threatened to break off relations.'

'What relations?'

'God knows. He asked me to have a drink with him tonight. At ten. I shan't go.'

We could hardly see each other now in the dusk. Every time she spoke I thought it was to say that she could stay no longer. Luis was back in South America reporting to his Foreign Office, but there was always Angel. I knew that she had invited some friends of his for tea, but tea doesn't last very long. The Smiths were out — another meeting with the Secretary for Social Welfare. This time he had asked them to come alone, and Mrs Smith had taken the Hugo Self-Taught with her in case interpretations were required.

Now I thought I heard a door slam, and I said to Martha, 'I think the Smiths are back.'

'I don't care about the Smiths,' she said. She put her hand on my chest and said, 'Oh, I'm tired.'

'A good tired or a bad tired?'

'A bad tired.'

'What's wrong?' It was a stupid question in our position, but I wanted to hear the words I often spoke, on her own tongue.