Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

Rum was making his poisoned leg throb.

There was no reason to get angry. At his age one took things as they were. Despair was also a foolish indulgence, less lethal than vain faith but demeaning. One could not oppose the armies of delusion with petulance.

It was necessary to believe in oneself. Very, very difficult. One was a series of spasms, flashes. Without consistency, protean, infantile — but one would have to do. The loneliness was hard.

In the greening twilight, he thought of the great silence that had settled on the reef. The fear and the muted coral colors hung in his recollection like fragments of collective memory, a primordial dream. Closing his eyes, he could hear again the rhythm of his breathing and feel the panic drugs surging in his blood.

He had no business down there.

Three men carrying firewood came down the road, their bent figures outlined against the aqua and scarlet horizon. Approaching the Paradise grounds they turned off to follow the shore where their passage and their burdens would not worry the nerves of sensitive guests. It was a diorama of toil and poverty, and Holliwell, in his easy chair, felt suitably guilty. B. Traven — but they were all south of cliché, so it was simple reality. Familiar moral frissons qualified as insights. Carrying wood always felt different depending on your health, your state of mind and the time of day; sitting in a resort watching the peons was always the same for people whose education prepared them to do it properly; the final emotion was self-pity.

He had no business under the reef. Nor had he any business where he was, under that perfumed sky.

He reminded himself that he had his business like everyone else. It was as real as anyone else’s and so was he. His business was done in University Park, a perfectly real place though recently constructed. It was to husband and father, to teach, even to inspire, and to endure. These things were not trivial. A monstrous pride might despise them, but honor could not. Because who does one think one is?

At times one has only a slender notion. One is only out here in this, whatever it is.

Whirl. People disappeared and were said to have died, as in war. Or their contexts changed like stage flats leaving them inappropriately costumed, speaking the wrong lines. Some disappeared in place, their skulls hollowed out by corrosive spirits or devoured by parasites.

The world and the stations of men changed ruthlessly; the funhouse barrel turned without slowing. The fall of last week’s airplane sends amazed salesmen down the ledge. The coral polyps and sawfish receive a dry rain. In suburban shopping centers the first chordates walk the pavement, marvels of mimesis. Their exoskeletons exactly duplicate the dominant species. Behind their soft octopus eyes — rudimentary swim bladders and stiletto teeth.

Just out here. Each one alone. The rest is fantasy.

It had been to consider too curiously to consider so. As the stars came out, fear broke over his heart like a dawn of unwholesome colors. Rags in the wind, the taste of a tannery. It was a childhood image.

He drank more but the rum didn’t do it. That’s what you get, he thought.

In the last hours of afternoon, Pablo sat pacing himself in the E Wowo Bar, drinking light rum and doing speed. Well after dark, he hit the street; he felt himself an instrument of stealth and strength. He followed the palm-topped wall of the Governor’s Palace, grim, almost angry.

Naftali’s Hollandia Hotel was two blocks beyond the palace on the far side of the street. Pablo sauntered across, strung tight and trying to loosen it down. Trying to ease it, cool it.

The Hollandia was no more than a two-story stone house with a little garden behind its pastel gate. Four tiled steps led up to its veranda. Pablo mounted them quickly and went inside. The foyer was deserted, the cubicle-sized desk unattended. In a curtained room behind it, someone was watching television, a comedy with music, in Spanish from the Caracas station. No one came out when Pablo went upstairs.

The second-floor corridor smelled of varnish and insecticide. At the far end of it a loosely fitted shutter creaked in the gentle wind and lightly battered the window casing. The sound covered Pablo’s soft steps as he went along the hall.

There was only one transom showing light and it was at the windowed end of the passage, above the room numbered eight. Across the hall was a water cooler with a plastic glass resting on it. As he passed the cooler, Pablo glanced back over his shoulder toward the stairs, then placed himself beside the door to room eight. He was disturbed to hear voices sounding from inside, speaking some foreign language he had never heard before. Dutch maybe. But after he had listened for a while, he determined that there was only one voice, a single speaker. The voice sounded vacant and slurred, like that of a drunk man talking to himself.

Well, well, thought Pablo. You put yourself away a little early, my friend.

He went to the cooler and silently filled the plastic glass. Then he crouched down outside the door and began to pour the contents of the glass underneath it. The door opened at the first spout.

Standing above Pablo was a hawk-faced man in a blue bathrobe and carpet slippers who was pointing what appeared to be an automatic pistol down Pablo’s throat. The hand holding the gun was unsteady but purposeful. Pablo set his plastic glass down and rested on one knee, a genuflection.

“What’s this, sailor,” the hawk-faced man inquired, “the wine of astonishment?”

When the old man leaned down to take Pablo’s weapon from beneath his open shirt, Pablo realized how unsteady the man’s hand actually was. Had he not been thrown so off balance himself, he might have tried a move. But he had lost for the moment. The sclerotic nature of the old man’s movements both frightened and encouraged him.

“Come visit,” the man said to Pablo. “I been expecting you all night.”

“Not me,” Pablo said, blinking under the shaded light of the room. “We both got the wrong people. See, I was playing a joke on a friend of mine.”

“Aha,” the man with the gun said. “Funny.”

“Honest to Christ,” Pablo pleaded. “Now just take it easy!”

“Tell me something. How easy you want me to take it?” He motioned Pablo deeper into the room. It was a room that was clean and without character, unclaimed by its occupant, everything the management’s. “In my former organization when funny people poured water under our doors we would blow the door apart.”

“Hey, man … honest to Christ!”

“If I would have done that it would have been your blood I’d see coming under my door. But I’d wait before I put my head out, believe me.”

“It’s a mistake is all, see.”

The man carefully seated himself on the side of his bed; he was half turned away from Pablo.

“I saw you on the boat today. You stank all over the dock of petty thief.” Naftali was inspecting the serial number on the stock of Pablo’s service forty-five. “But a petty thief with problems. Right away I knew we’d meet again.”

He had put his own gun down on the bed to look at Pablo’s.

“This is U.S. government property, no?” Naftali asked. He removed the clip from Pablo’s gun, set it down and picked up his own automatic. Leaning back on the bolsters, he held the gun on his lap.

“That’s right,” Pablo said.

“And you … whose property are you?”

Pablo made him no answer.

“Well, you’re too late, thief.” Naftali took a piece of paper from his bathrobe pocket, wadded and threw it toward Pablo. What Pablo picked up and read was a bank receipt for the transfer of gulden three hundred eighty thousand to the Amsterdam branch of the Nederlandse Algemeen Bank. The account to which the money was consigned was held in the name of a M. Blanc, a resident of Brussels, Belgium.