lost a good mechanic this morning.’
‘Yes, an inconvenience, but much of life generally is.’
‘When do you want me to go?’
‘If you left now, you could make the half-way point by dark. There is an inn at Huerta. A poor place, but adequate. It was a way-station in the old stage-coach days. You could spend the night there. Be at Huila before noon tomorrow. This suits you?’
Amazing how polite he was being about it all. ‘Absolutely,’ I said, but the irony in my voice seemed to elude him.
‘Good,’ he nodded in satisfaction. ‘Let’s go in and I’ll give you the final details.’
His office was just off the patio at the front of the building, a small cluttered room with a polished oak desk and a surprising number of books. My shoulder holster and the Enfield were lying on the desk and he tapped them with the end of his stick.
‘You’ll be wanting that, I’ve no doubt. Rough country out there these days.’
I took off my jacket and buckled on the holster. He said, ‘You look uncommonly used to that contrivance, sir, for a man of your obvious education and background.’
‘I am,’ I told him shortly, and pulled on my jacket. ‘Anything else?’
He opened a drawer, took out two envelopes and pushed them across. ‘One of those is a letter to Gomez, the man to whom you’ll deliver the goods in Huila. He has a supply of petrol by the way, so you’ll be all right for the return trip. The other contains an authorization to make the journey signed by Captain Ortiz, in case you are stopped by rurales.’
I put them both in my breast pocket and buttoned my jacket. He selected a long black cigar from a sandalwood box, lit it, then pushed the box across to me. ‘You’ll have a drink with me, sir, for the road?’
‘We have a saying where I come from,’ I told him. ‘Drink with the devil and smile.’
He laughed till the tears squeezed from his eyes, the flesh trembling on the gross body. ‘By God, sir, but you’re a man after my own heart, I can see that.’
He shuffled across to a side cabinet, opened it and produced a bottle and a couple of tumblers. It was brandy, and good brandy at that.
He leaned one elbow on the cabinet and eyed me gravely. ‘If I might be permitted the observation, sir, you don’t seem to care very much about anything. About anything at all. Am I right?’
That strange, rather pedantic English of his had a curious effect. It made one want to respond in kind. I said, ‘Why, it has been my experience that there is little in life worth caring about, sir.’
I could have sworn that for a moment there was genuine concern in his eyes although I considered it unlikely he could ever have afforded such an emotion.
‘If I may say so,’ he observed heavily, ‘I find such sentiments disturbing in one so young.’
But now the conversation had gone too far and we were into entirely the wrong territory. I emptied my glass and placed it carefully on top of the cabinet. ‘I’d better be on my way.’
‘Of course, but you’ll need a little eating money.’ He produced a wallet and counted out a hundred pesos in ten-peso notes. ‘You should be back here by tomorrow evening if everything goes smoothly.’
By now he was looking quite pleased with himself again which simply wouldn’t do. I stuffed the money carelessly into my jacket pocket and said, ‘Life has taught me one thing above all others, Mr Janos, which is that anything can happen and usually does.’
His face sagged in genuine and immediate dismay for, as I discovered later, there was a strongly superstitious streak in him, his one great weakness. I laughed out loud, turned and walked out. A small victory, perhaps, but something.
I was eighteen years of age when I first saw men die. Easter, 1916, and a sizeable section of Dublin town going up in flames as a handful of volunteers decided to have a crack at the British Army.
And I was one of them, Emmet Keogh, hot from my books at the College of Surgeons, still young enough to believe a cause – any cause – could be worth the dying. A Martini carbine gripped tightly in my hands, I sweated in ill-fitting green uniform and crouched at the window of an office in Jacobs’ Biscuit Factory, a romantic place to die in, waiting for the Tommies from the Portobello Barracks to find us which they did soon enough.
During a slight lull in the proceedings a Mills bomb came through the window and rolled to a halt in the very centre of that busy office.
There were six of us who should have died, but for some reason it didn’t go off until I’d thrown it back out of the window at the troops who had chosen that precise moment to make a rush across the yard.
Life, then, or death, was an accident one way or the other. Time and chance and no more than that. Let it be so. Certainly from that day on it conditioned not only my actions but also my thinking. Janos had been closer to the truth about me than he knew.
For the first few miles out of Bonito the road wasn’t too bad, in fact had obviously been metalled at some time in the past, but not for long. Soon it changed into a typical back-country dirt road with a surface so appalling that it was impossible to drive at more than twenty-five miles an hour in any kind of safety.
In the distance, the Sierras undulated in the intense heat of late afternoon and I drove towards them but slightly to the north-west, a great cloud of white dust rising from the loose surface coated everything including me.
A flat brown plain stretched on either hand as far as the eye could see, dotted with thorn bushes and mesquite and acacias. I was alone on a road that led to nowhere through a land squeezed dry by the sun, barren since the beginning of time.
God, but there were times when I ached for my. own country, for the sea and the mountains of Kerry, green grass, soft rain and the fuchsia growing on dusty hedges. The Tears of God we called it.
I passed nothing that lived for the first hour, then a dot in the far distance grew into a herd of goats, an old man and two young boys in charge, barefooted, ragged, so wretchedly poor that even their straw sombreros were falling to pieces. They stood watching me, faces blank, making no sign at all, the sullen despair of those truly without hope.
I stopped a mile or two farther on to get rid of my jacket, being well soaked with sweat by then and drank and sluiced my head and shoulders with lukewarm water from a four-gallon stone jug someone had thoughtfully roped into place in front of the passenger seat.
From there on things became so bad that I had to drive very cautiously indeed, sometimes at not more than ten or fifteen miles an hour and the heat and the dust were unbelievable. I had been on the road for three and a half hours, had seen no one except the goatherds, was beginning to believe I was the only living thing in this sterile world, when I found the priest.
The Mercedes was a little way off the road and had ploughed its way through a clump of organ cactus. The priest stood at the side of the road, his cassock and broad-brimmed hat coated with dust, and waved me down. I braked to a halt and got out.
He recognized me at once and smiled, ‘Ah, my Irish friend.’
His front near-side
