Read Waiting for Orders Online
Authors: Eric Ambler
Waiting for Orders (16 page)
It was a fascinating occasion. Guyana, which has a multiracial population, was learning to live with political independence just then and not finding it easy. There were two major ethnic groups: the black descendants of African slaves and the brown descendants of indentured Indian labourers brought in by the British when slavery became illegal. During the hundred years since then the two groups had lived and developed separately. The African blacks had taken to the professions and become the country’s doctors, lawyers and administrators; the Indians had made business and money-making their special concerns. The blacks were mostly Christian and the court lawyers among them, the judges and barristers, wore wigs like their Inns of Court brethren. The browns were mostly Hindu and on their houses flew flags to the greater glory of mother India, though none of them had ever been there. The suburbs of Georgetown in which these two ‘majorities’ lived were all adjacent. A British army peacekeeping force had had to be called in to stop the fighting and
killing. The police force was more of a gendarmerie with members of the Portuguese and Chinese minorities represented in it, and even, it was said, a few British. Guyana was a big country and the mountainous interior with its rain forests was still largely unexplored. A border dispute with Venezuela had been going on for sixty years or more. There was diamond mining up there near the frontier. The dispute would go on for another sixty years.
The Little Theatre Club presented four plays that evening. Two had been selected from the Samuel French catalogue of one-act plays available for licensing by amateur groups; the other two were by local writers and being performed for the first time. One of the published plays was by Emlyn Williams and at first I hoped to use that production as a measure of theatrical effectiveness with which to assess the others. It was an early play and was about the struggle of a young man to break his emotional ties with and get away from the Welsh village in which he had been born. I recognized the theme; it was about Emlyn as a young man long before he wrote
The Corn is Green.
True, it was odd to see and hear a railway stationmaster in rural Wales played by a Chinese and his wayward son played by a black African twice his size, but it all seemed to work in the theatre. So did the other three plays. The trouble was that they all had the same theme: everyone with roots in Georgetown wanted to get away from them. The plays they chose to perform were either foreign parables based on that theme or bold local expressions of it. It could have been monotonous, but the casting was so eccentric that the plays held you. Most amateur theatricals tend to have difficulty casting some parts. In Georgetown they seemed to have none. If the actor could read the part satisfactorily he or she was given it, regardless of race, colour, shape or size. There might be racial strife in the suburbs but in the Georgetown Little Theatre the harmony was impressive.
After the show there was a big party to which we were invited. The hostess was a remarkably beautiful young black woman who was the director and presiding genius of the Little Theatre. The party was in her rather splendid house; her husband was young, white and a senior manager in the Georgetown off-shoot of a Caribbean trading company with
roots in London. I congratulated him on the evening and his house. He nodded glumly and glanced across at his wife dazzling the other end of the room. ‘She does a wonderful job,’ he said, ‘but we’d like to get out.’
‘Of this house?’ Joan and I were in the flimsy squalor of the Park Hotel.
‘No, out of Guyana.’ It was like a scene from one of the plays. ‘There’s no future here. Surely that’s obvious.’
‘Where would you go? Back to England?’
‘God no. We want to go to the States.’
‘Whereabouts there?’
He took me aside and handed me another drink. ‘Well, I’ve done business with a lot of auto people there, people like Ford and General Motors. We rather fancy Detroit. You live and work in America, what do you think?’
I thought quickly and rather desperately. This was in the mid-sixties. Martin Luther King had had a dream and the civil rights movement was making steady progress; but the progress had been chiefly in the other Southern states where the reaction against it had been most violent. If he had proposed Los Angeles I could have said with some confidence that San Francisco might be a better choice, or better still, Seattle; General Motors had a truck plant up there and a white English businessman with an intelligent black Guyanan wife might well be an acceptable social novelty. About Detroit I just didn’t know. So what I said, lamely, was that in his place I would go to Detroit and find out for myself what the job prospects were like for alien managers.
Joan was amazed when I told her about it later.
‘They’re not going anywhere,’ she said; ‘that house goes with his job, she told me. Besides they wouldn’t be allowed to take any money out. Seattle? They’re not crazy up there. They might take her, or him, but not him and her. They’re better off here. Here, as long as she’s with him, he’ll be all right.’
Once, going through immigration at LA airport on our way home, we were stopped by a supervising official who looked again at our passports and the Green Cards confirming our status as resident aliens. She was large, black and had a well educated voice.
‘Mrs Ambler, you’ve been resident since ‘thirty-eight. Mr
Ambler, you’ve been resident since ‘fifty-eight. You’ve been here long enough. How come you haven’t applied for citizenship? Can’t you make up your minds or don’t you care?
Joan said something about our not getting round to it. We were dismissed with a cold nod. She knew as well as we did that for UK British passport-holders who paid their US taxes and social security, citizenship was not important. One couldn’t vote in elections, of course, but we had shaken hands with Lyndon B. Johnson and said ‘hello’ to Richard M. Nixon, and so had no desire to vote. Unless one was very rich indeed and into oil and cattle in such a big way that one could make a few extra millions legally out of depletion allowances, there was not much point in being a citizen. Naturally, if one came from a Central American sugar republic or Eastern Europe or some place like North Vietnam, things were different.
For safe drivers in California periodic renewal of a driving licence is almost automatic; almost, but not quite. There is an eyesight test and, much to my surprise, there came a day when I failed the test. Thereafter I had to wear glasses. I also had to learn to type. Years of writing and rewriting by hand had done peculiar things to some bones in my neck. It had become painful to use the right hand. I wrote the whole of one novel laboriously with my left. There was a chiropractor named Doc Mitchell at the MGM studios to whom I became addicted. Joan was tired of making television and wanted to return to films. The best English-speaking films were now being made in Europe. As a student Joan had been to the Sorbonne as well as Oxford. We were both nearing sixty. It was time, perhaps, for us to look for fresh fields.
‘The Blood Bargain’ was one of the things that I wrote with my left hand. It began as a political thriller with a Central American setting and as an experiment. In the old days it would have been destroyed when it failed to develop. After the fire I had become more careful. When a London editor, George Hardinge, wrote asking for a short story that had not been published before, I had another look at the experiment and found that I still liked ex-President Fuentes. Spanish America has had too many military dictators. Fuentes is a crook, of course, but he is not a monster; nor would he ever have become one. He is a liar, a cheat, a politician and a good family man.
E
X
-President Fuentes enjoys a peculiar distinction. More people would like to kill him now that he is in retirement than wanted to kill him when he was in power.
He is a puzzled and indignant man.
What he fails to understand is that, while men like General Perez may in time forgive you for robbing them, they will never forgive you for making them look foolish.
The
coup d’état
that overthrew Fuentes’ Social Action Party government was well organized and relatively bloodless.
The leaders of the
coup
were mostly Army officers, but they had understandings with fellow-dissidents in the Air Force and Navy as well as the discreet blessing of the Church. A price for the collaboration of the Chief of Police had been agreed upon well in advance, and the lists of certain left-wing deputies, militant trade union officials, pro-government newspaper editors, Castro-trained subversives, and other undesirables whose prompt arrest would be advisable, had been compiled with his help. Similar arrangements had been made in the larger provincial towns. Although the conspirators were by no means all of the same political complexion, they had for once found themselves able to sink their differences in the pursuit of a common goal. Whatever might come afterwards, they were all agreed upon one thing; if the country were to be saved from corruption, Communist subversion, anarchy, bankruptcy, civil war, and, ultimately, foreign military intervention, President Fuentes had to go.
One evening in September he went.
The tactics employed by the ‘Liberation Front’ conspirators followed the pattern that has become more or less traditional when a
coup
is backed by organized military forces and
opposed, if it is opposed at all, only by civilian mobs and confused, lightly armed garrison units.
As darkness fell, the tanks of two armoured brigades together with trucks containing a parachute regiment, signals units, and a company of combat engineers rolled into the capital. Within little more than an hour, they had secured their major objectives. Meanwhile, the Air Force had taken over the international airport, grounded all planes, and established a headquarters in the customs and immigration building. An infantry division now began to move into the city and take up positions that would enable it to deal with the civil disturbances that were expected to develop as news of the
coup
, and of the mass arrests that were accompanying it, reached the densely populated slum areas with their high concentration of Fuentes supporters.
A little after eight thirty a squadron of tanks and a special task force of paratroopers reached the Presidential Palace. The palace guard resisted for a quarter of an hour and suffered casualties of eight wounded. The order to surrender was given personally to the guard commander by President Fuentes ‘in order to avoid further bloodshed’.
When this was reported to General Perez, the leader of the
coup
, he drove to the Palace. He was accompanied by five senior members of the Liberation Front council, including the Chief of Police, and no less than three representatives of the foreign press. The latter had been flushed out of the Jockey Club bar by an aide earlier in the evening and hastily briefed on the aims and ideals of the Liberation Front. General Perez wished to lose no time in establishing himself abroad as a magnanimous, reasonable, and responsible man, and his regime as worthy of prompt diplomatic recognition.
The newsmen’s accounts of the interview between President Fuentes and General Perez, and of the now-notorious ‘blood bargain’ that emerged from it, were all in substantial agreement. At the time the bargain seemed to them just another of those civilized, oddly chivalrous agreements to live and let live which, by testifying to the continued presence of compassion and good sense even at moments of turmoil and destruction, have so often lightened the long, dark history of Latin American revolution. The reporters, all experienced men, can scarcely be
blamed for misunderstanding it. They knew, as everyone else knew, that President Fuentes was a devious and deeply dishonest man. The only mistake they made was in assuming that the other parties to the bargain had made due allowance for that deviousness and dishonesty and knew exactly what they were doing. What the reporters had not realized was that these normally wary and hard-headed officers had become so intoxicated by the speed and extent of their initial success that by the time they reached the Presidential Palace they were no longer capable of thinking clearly.
President Fuentes received General Perez and the other Liberation Front leaders in the ornate Cabinet Room of the Palace to which he had been taken by the paratroopers who had arrested him. With him were the other male occupants of the Presidential air raid shelter at the time of his arrest. These included the Palace guard commander, the President’s valet, the Palace major domo, two footmen and the man who looked after the Palace plumbing system, in addition to the Minister of Public Welfare, the Minister of Agrarian Education, the Minister of Justice, and the elderly Controller of the Presidental Secretariat. The Minister of Public Welfare had brought a bottle of brandy with him from the shelter and smiled glassily throughout the subsequent confrontation. Agrarian Education and Justice maintained expressions of bewilderment and indignation, but confined their oral protests to circumspect murmurs. The thin-lipped young captain in charge of the paratroopers handled his machine pistol as if he would have been glad of an excuse to use it.
Only the President seemed at ease. There was even a touch of impatience in the shrug with which he rose to face General Perez and his party as they strode in from the anteroom; it was as if he had been interrupted by some importunate visitor during a game of bridge.
His calm was only partly assumed. He knew all about General Perez’s sensitivity to foreign opinion, and he had immediately recognized the newsmen in the rear of the procession. They would not have been brought there if any immediate violence to his person had been contemplated.
The impatience he displayed was certainly genuine; it was impatience with himself. He had known for weeks that a
coup
was in preparation, and had taken the precaution a month earlier of sending his wife and children and his mistress out of the country. They were all now in Washington, and he had planned, using as a pretext his announced wish to address personally a meeting of the Organization of American States, to join them there the following week. His private spies had reported that the
coup
would undoubtedly be timed to take advantage of his absence abroad. Since the
coup
by means of which he himself had come to power five years earlier had been timed in that way, he had been disposed to believe the report.