Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

“You’re talking nonsense.”

“Yes,” Ocampo said. “Nonsense. Ridiculous. They are ridiculous and I am ridiculous. But that’s how it goes. Someone has an idea, Frank, and that someone has to have his way all down the line.” He moved closer to Holliwell with one of his opaque Indian smiles. “There are just a few steps, understand? You go. You are seen to go. You get home and someone asks you what you saw and you can tell them Russian submarines or you can tell them the heavenly chorus — it doesn’t matter. Yes, it’s ridiculous but these people control my life. I get the credit if you go.”

“I’m afraid,” Holliwell said, “that you’re deluded.”

“I assure you,” Ocampo told him, holding the strange smile, “that I’m not.”

“I mean that literally,” Holliwell said.

He had clutched for a moment on the notion that Oscar Ocampo was now insane. But there was Marty Nolan. And Tom. And Marie, the social worker type.

“There are delusions, Frank, but not mine. Believe me when I tell you my life is in danger. You risk nothing but I have to get out of here. And I have Patrick. And they can get me a job in the States.”

“No, they can’t.” He was trying almost desperately to sober. Very deliberately he pushed the drink in front of him toward the bar and closed his eyes for a moment. “They can’t do that anymore.”

Oscar spoke to him in a low voice, the smile closing.

“I see more clearly than you. I beg you.”

Holliwell took Tom Zecca’s card from his pocket and held it flat against the bar where Oscar could see it. With all the concentration he could summon he tried to read Oscar’s expression as Ocampo looked down at the card.

“Who is this? Do you know the man? Have you heard of him?”

Oscar read the card, looked away and shrugged.

“Never. I don’t go down there. I have no idea who he is.”

“What if I tell you that he came to my lecture and that he offered me a ride to Tecan tomorrow?”

Ocampo was confused, plainly; he looked unhappy.

“I don’t know what to say. Maybe they do everything by multiplicity. You know? Maybe everything is multiple.” He was silent for a moment. “Clearly, if you go — I want it known it was for me. But maybe it’s coincidence, no? There is still coincidence, is there not?”

“Maybe there isn’t,” Holliwell said. “Maybe we’ve located ourselves beyond coincidence. You see more clearly, Oscar — you tell me.”

Ocampo did not answer him but ordered them both another drink. Holliwell declined. As Oscar’s drink came, the bar telephone began to flash again and they both watched it.

“Señor Holliwell?” the waiter called out over the music. They shook their heads; Oscar held up his hand in a gesture of refusal. The waiter, who had brought the phone, looked at them both and then walked off with it, saying something into the receiver.

“It’s not bad they think you’re a leftist. In reality it’s safe.”

“You don’t know what you’re doing, do you, Oscar?”

“Yes, Frank. What I’m told. To escape.”

“Some lecture you got me,” Holliwell said after a moment. “Who in hell were those turkeys?”

“Turkeys?” Oscar asked. “ Pavos ? Well, usually it’s the same faces. People with little to do.”

“But these days,” Holliwell said, “it would seem that everyone has something to do.”

Ocampo drank.

“There was a woman there who was very beautiful indeed and her name was Mariaclara Obregón. Back there in the happy realm of coincidence. I imagined that you might introduce us further.”

Oscar smiled and nodded.

“Mariaclara. The most beautiful and intelligent. Our Minister of Social Services. This is progressive no? A woman, beautiful?”

“Well,” Holliwell said, “that was then.”

“In my present circumstances,” Oscar told him, “there is nothing I wouldn’t do for you, Frank. In any circumstances, truly. But Mariaclara — you have to take my word because I know — unavailable. Committed. Without hope.”

“It doesn’t matter now.”

“All the same,” Oscar said dreamily, “we’re all whores here. Because of you. I mean, of course,” he explained, “because of the U.S.”

“That’s your story.” It was an old taunt of Holliwell’s. Meaningless now.

“It’s too bad, eh, Frank?” Ocampo took his thought. “We no longer can argue.”

The drink was closing in on Holliwell again. He took the bar with both hands to fight it off.

“All right. What about Nicolay? Who’s Nicolay?”

“Ah, Nicolay,” Oscar cried. He laughed with such contempt that it was almost affectionate. “Nicolay is just a …” He shook his head to find the word. “Just a turkey.”

When Pablo returned to the Paris Bar, the Callahans were nowhere in sight. Cecil, still working the bar, paid him no attention. He sat down on a stool, his eyes fixed on Cecil’s round bland face, working himself into a tight-lipped exaltation of rage.

“What the fuck, man?” he demanded of Cecil at length.

“Keep you voice down and you damn head on straight,” Cecil said without looking at him. “You been hired.”

“Yeah?” Pablo asked. “No kidding?”

Cecil shook his head at Pablo’s fecklessness.

“No kiddin’. Anythin’ wrong wif dat?”

“Not a thing,” Pablo said.

“Den you and me got no problem, eh? So if I tell you what you gone to do you gone to sit and listen and not sell me no tickets, ain’t dat right?”

Pablo laughed. “Sure, bro.”

“In de mornin’ I gone to have your passport and your gear for you. You take it, you go to de bus terminal and you get de bus to Palmas. Palmas, you understandin’ me?”

“I understand you.”

“Dat bus under way at ten in de mornin’ and you got to be on it because de commander say so and you best do it. Dese people don’ wait on you desires.”

“The thing is — what about tonight?”

“You can sleep up topside here tonight,” Cecil told him. “And you don’t say nothin’ to a soul about your billet or how you come to get it. When I give you you gear you pay me twenny dola.”

“I thought I paid you, Cecil.”

“Eh, I don’ wan’ you tickets, mon,” Cecil said. “I ’splain dat one time. Dis here is trouble. I be goin’ to trouble on you behalf. Natural ting is you pay me for it.”

“You’re the only game in town, ain’t you, Cecil?”

“ Precisamente , mon.”

Pablo went out and found another bar and watched darkness fall over the piers. With the quick failing of light, the place filled with banana loaders. Feeling crowded out, Pablo went to sit in the park beside the navy building where he had spent part of his afternoon. The stations of the afternoon birds in the ceiba trees were taken up by the birds of night.

Gypsy, Pablo thought. Gypsy mongrel like my mother. He could remember very clearly his morning walk with the dogs in the brake outside of town and the cold inside him when he shot them down. Then the sun on the scaled skin of the trailer going home.

His line was playing out; there was poison in his blood. For the sake of the little boy it was better that he not be there. Better that the woman abuse him with her damned unconsciousness, leave him without clothes, leave him to ratburgers and television all night, than that Pablo be there to bring the curse down, bring the knowledge of bad blood, bring murder.

From the naval barracks there sounded a bugle call, and the sentries at the gate were relieved with a halfhearted precision that would have given the loosest Coast Guard admiral a case of the chokes. Pablo thought the bugle call was the saddest sound he had ever heard.

Son of a whore. The words made him tremble and he repeated them to himself with a fascination that chilled his blood. Pablo, son of a whore. Hijo de puta. Pablo. Sometimes it seemed that was the world’s whole message to him — that was all it ever told him. He could catch it in every roll of laughter and see its meaning framed in the mildest eyes.