The Long escape Read online

  O.K., I said. Mr. Parker is just passing through. Where is he going?

  I couldn't answer that one.

  O.K., then. What else do you know about him?

  He speaks rusty Spanish.

  That could mean something, some time, but not yet. What else have you got?

  A small boy's photograph.

  I thought about the photograph for a long time. I didn't believe that Molly Jean had made up the story about finding it under the seat cushion, because I knew she could have done better for two hundred and fifty pesos if she had wanted to try. But even assuming that the picture belonged to Parker, and that it had slipped out of his wallet while he "was showing his papers to any one of the eighty-four people who would want to look at them between the Texas border and Mexico City, it was strictly zero evidence. He hadn't left any kids behind in Pasadena. The picture could be a nephew, friend, brother, his old man, a bastard son of his youth, himself, or something he had won in a bingo game.

  The passport angle was all I really had to work on. I went back to the consulate on the off chance that they midit knoAV something.

  They didn't know much, but they had more on Parker than they would have had if he hadn't had to get the export permit. He was traveling on a passport

  restricted to the Western Hemisphere, which was the way most passports were issued in the years after the war.

  That made things real easy. Writing off Canada and the States as improbables, I could expect to find Parker in (a) Mexico, (b) one of nineteen other American republics, (c) Belice, (d) the Guianas, (e) the Caribbean islands, or (f) at the South Pole. I left Iceland off the list. I knew it was technically part of the Western Hemisphere because I spent a couple of years there with an Army rifle guarding a lot of ice after the destroyers-for-bases deal, but I figured Parker wouldn't go to Iceland by way of Mexico City unless he was as dopy as the War Department, who made me list all of my qualifications for service in Latin America, including a better Spanish vocabulary than an English one and good contacts all the way from Nuevo Laredo to Punta Arenas, and then sent me to Reykjavik. I didn't think Parker was that dopy.

  There are times when you have to do things the hard way. I took my hat in hand and went around to the consulates. Wherever I knewsomebody I asked for information, and wherever I didn't know anybody I paid mordida. Adams would scream like an eagle when he saw mordida on my expense account, but it's the easiest way to do business in Mexico City. And it didn't

  cost him much. I got a strike at my seventh consulate.

  Parker had obtained a visa for Guatemala. This surprised me, because Guatemala was right next door. If he was planning to hide out there, he was leaving a pretty broad trail.

  It was a cinch that he had gone on by plane. The Pan American highway still had a big gap in it north of the Guatemalan border, steamer services from Aca-pulco and Vera Cruz were catch-as-catch-can, and nobody in his right mind would ride the narrow gauge raihvay that stumbles down the Isthmus of Tehuantepec whenever the tracks haven't been stolen. I hopped the first flight out for Guatemala City.

  What I had in mind was a nice, quiet five-hour session with the plane's magazine rack. I didn't get it. An old boy with a limp grabbed the seat next to me, introduced himself as Doctor somebody or other, and bent my ear from the middle of Mexico to the middle of Guatemala. Inside of half an hour I knew everything that he did. He was oroino^ to Guatemala for his arthritis, he had three children and four grandchildren, he liked old-fashioneds made with Southern Comfort, he was an Elk, he had performed the first successful osculectomistotomy on the Pacific Coast, and so on. I couldn't brush him off for just being friendly. Wlien we sat down at Guatemala City, I was worn to a frazzle.

  Doctor Gimp was staying at the Hotel Victoria. He wanted me to be sure to look him up there and have a Southern Comfort old-fashioned. I said I'd be sure to do that. When he finally unhooked himself and went away, I hunted up a fellow named Jaime, a friend of mine who worked at the airport.

  Jaime was checking over the flight list of the plane I had come in on. I said, "What's the name of the doctor who sat next to me on the plane? An old bird, traveling alone."

  Jaime ran his finger down the flight list.

  "Only one doctor aboard. A. R. Benson, U. S. citizen. widower, age sixty-five, weight eighty kilos, destination Guatemala, passport number 1605, profession retired, three pieces of luggage. Want me to find out where he's staying?"

  "I already know where he's staying. I just want to look out for him next time I take one of your planes. Do you have the same vital statistics on all of your passengers?"

  "Sure."

  "See what you can give me on Robert R. Parker. He landed here about five years ago, maybe a fcAV months over."

  "Five years ago? Are you kidding?"

  "No. I'm on a job, Jimmy. I'll pay for the research, if you have a man you can put to work on it."

  Jaime was a good boy. I had to wait around until his shift was finished, but then he took me into town and we spent half an hour in a file room leafing through old flight records until we found Robert R. Parker coming in.

  All I learned that I didn't know already was that his weight had held pretty steady during the fifteen years since he had taken the physical examination for the insurance company. His destination, according to the record, was Guatemala, which didn't mean a thing. He was carrying one piece of luggage, which didn't mean a thing either, except that he was traveling light and fast.

  I said, "On a hunch, let's see if we can check him out again. My guess is that he didn't stay more than a week or two."

  He had stayed six days. We dug up another flight record that booked Robert R. Parker on to Te^uci-galpa, in Honduras.

  My first idea was to go right on to Tegoose and pick up the trail there. But I had time to think about it, since I couldn't get a plane until the next day, and I began to get curious. Why had Parker spent six days in Guatemala? I knew it wasn't to admire the scenery.

  There are only three or four good hotels in Guatemala City. I checked them. My man had stayed at the San Carlos, as I learned for the five quetzales it cost me to get the clerk to let me nose through old registration cards. I had Parker's dates down cold by then, and I knew his handwriting from the Dear Helen note, or I would have missed it completely. He had signed himself Roberto Ruiz P.

  This will look like a joke to a lot of North Americans, but it made me sit down and readjust my sights. In Latin America, a man uses both his father's name and his mother's name as his own. The son of Joe Blow and Mary Doe, for instance, is legally Joe Blow Doe. In the South American countries, he is sometimes addressed as Seilor Blow Doe and sometimes as Seiior Blow, but in Central America he is usually Senor Blow, although he may sign his checks Joe Blow, Joe Blow Doe, or Joe Blow D, My man, as long as he had to use his passport, was still Robert R. Parker. But he could also get by as Robert Ruiz Parker, Roberto Ruiz P., and, for all practical purposes, Roberto Ruiz.

  I sweated gumdrops figuring this one out.

  I had started with a middle-aged estadounidense who didn't speak enough Spanish to be able to sell an automobile in Mexico City. Now I had a man who was using a Latin name, who knew enough, half an hour

  after landing in Guatemala, to sign himself as a Central American would, and whose Spanish was picking up fast. The last part wasn't just a guess. He had to speak Spanish if he was going to be Roberto Ruiz. As far as appearance went,'he could be anything, because there isn't any more of a standard Latin American type than there is a standard North American type. Half my friends were redheads or sandy-colored people named Guillermo Ramirez Cruikshank or Juan Wurdemann Ayala or Andres Martinez Levy. Roberto Ruiz Parker would fit in anywhere.

  I didn't have any luck tracing him around Guatemala. He had stayed two nights at the San Carlos, checked out, checked back in again three days later, and left for Honduras the next morning. I followed him.

  Smelling out a five-year-old trail in the States would be impossible. People move arou
nd too freely. In Central America, you have to have visas and exit permits and clearances with the National Police and Ministries of the Interior and Ministries of War, Navy and Aviation and customs officials and immigration officials and health authorities and a few others, I had them all, as well as good connections, so traveling for me was just normally difficult. Robert R. P., who had started from scratch, left a trail like a snowplow.

  He was Robert R. Parker at Toncontin airport in

  Tegucip^alpa, because that was what his passport said. He turned into Roberto Ruiz at the only good hotel whi( Ii had been operating when he was there, and he was still Roberto Ruiz when lie booked passage to La Ceiba, on the Caribbean coast, by way of SAHSA, the jerkwater airline that carries coastal traffic. He didn't need a passport for that jump.

  La Ceiba is a banana port; hot, steamy and dirty. It squats and swelters at the shore end of a pier where ships tie up to load bananas brought down from the plantations on a narrow-gauge railway. The town offers an open-air movie when you get tired of watching the banana trains, and a casino with a marimba band when yoti get tired of the movie. That's the works. The only sensible reason for going to La Ceiba would be because you were a banana on your way to the States, or because you wanted a job with the fruit company. Parker wasn't a banana.

  I went to the fruit company offices, told them my business, and asked for a peek at their employment records. They were a lot more obliging than I had a right to expect. I was turned over to a girl who brought out a raft of books and helped me dig.

  She was a nice kid, about twenty. We didn't find anything in the books, but I took her to the casino that night. We drank fresh pineapple juice and I

  listened to her talk English with the funniest accent you ever heard. She had been born in Utila, one of the Bay Islands that lie thirty miles off the Honduranean coast, and her English had come down from the British pirates, Sir Henry Morgan and Blackbeard and the others, whose crews had intermarried with the natives. Her own name was Morgan,

  She said, "My mudder wahs from Belice. My great-great-grahnd-fadder wahs an Englishmon, a piraht. I ahm a Hondurahnean. Isn't thaht funny?"

  '"Have you ever been to the States?"

  "Oh, no, mon. But wahns I went to Tegucigalpa, and I hahv been in Tela ahnd Puerto Cortes many times."

  Tela and Puerto Cortes were other banana ports up the coast, a couple of hours by boat. I said, "You must know this part of the country pretty well."

  "Yes, mon."

  "Maybe you can tell me something. What would make a man, an American who did not need a job and had no interest in bananas, want to come here to La Ceiba?"

  I didn't mean it quite the way it sounds. She thought La Ceiba was some punkins, after the islands, and she got huffy. I smoothed her down and asked the same question in a different way.

  She said, "Perhaps he wanted to go to the States. The bahnahnah boats carry pahssengers."

  "Could he get clearance papers here—visas and thing! like that?"

  '''"I don't know, truly, mon. Mr. Henderson could tell you thalit."

  "Who is Mr. Henderson?"

  "He works in our accounting department. He is ahcting United States sub-consul here."

  "ril talk to him tomorrow. Let's dahnce—dance, I mean."

  She introduced me to Mr. Henderson the next morning.

  He was a dried-up, precise-mannered old piece of leather who had been with the company for forty years. His acting sub-consul's job was a sideline that paid him a little gravy for fixing up the papers of anybody who wanted to ride the banana boats. I asked him if he knew anything about a man named Roberto Ruiz or Robert Ruiz Parker or Robert R. Parker, who might have wanted something from the United States acting sub-consul five years before.

  He recognized the name. I knew it by the way his eyes flickered. It struck me as strange, because you wouldn't expect a name to ring the bell right away after five years. And he began to sweat, which was even stranger. It was hot enough down here on that tropical coast to make my shirt stick to my back and my under-

  wear feel like melted fly paper, but I had been living in the highlands for so long that I couldn't take the lowland heat. The pirate's great-great-granddaughter, ho had brought me to Henderson's office, looked pleasantly cool. So did everybody else I had seen, except Henderson.

  He said, "Parker? Why—I can't say. I'd have to look at my records."

  "I'd appreciate it."

  He went to get them.

  I had an idea I'd be able to dig more out of him if there was nobody listening in, so I told the girl she needn't wait and maybe we could have another pineapple juice later in the day. She said, Yes, mon, and went aAvay.

  Henderson came back.

  "I remember now." He had got over his first scare. He didn't look so moist over the eyebrows, now. "Mr, Parker wanted to know if he could obtain passage on a ship going to the east coast of South America."

  "Where did he want to go in particular?"

  "We didn't get that far. There are no ships leaving from this part of the country for the south, except occasional nitrate carriers returning to Chile. Mr. Parker did not want to go to the west coast."

  "All of the company's ships go north?"

  "Yes. To the States or to England."

  "I see."

  I didn't see anything, but I thought about it. Mr. Henderson looked at the floor, at his desk, at the dock, and out the window at the coco palms along the beach.

  I said, "Had you ever met Parker, or heard of him, before he came to La Ceiba?"

  "No."

  "Did you ever meet him again, or hear of him, after he left here?"

  "No."

  "The only time you ever had anything to do with him was during his one visit here?"

  "Yes."

  "What happened while he was here?"

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "What happened between you and Robert R. Parker that bothers you now because I am asking questions about him?"

  He looked at me. His leathery face got wet all over again. He didn't say a word.

  "He didn't have to come to the accounting department to find out about ship schedules, did he?"

  He still didn't answer. He just got wetter and more miserable.

  It wasn't the kind of digging I enjoyed, but I got it out of him at last. He thought I was FBI or something

  and when I talked about calling in the company manager, he gave up. The company manager is God in those little banana ports.

  It turned out that he had renewed Parker's passport, probably for a price, although we didn't go into that, and had spent five years worrying about it because he wasn't sure that he had the necessary authority. The passport had been a regular two-year deal, open to a two-year extension which any consul could authorize. But Henderson was only a lousy acting sub-consul, and the poor devil had been expecting the United States Secretary of State down on his neck every day for five years because he had exceeded his authority. No wonder he remembered Parker's name.

  He almost cried when I said it was nothing to me what he had done. I told him that the passport had probably gone where nobody would ever see it again, so he needn't worry too much about it. Then I asked him if Parker had spoken English or Spanish.

  He thought for a while.

  "Both."

  "You're sure?"

  "Yes. He spoke English with me. But we have many Spanish-speaking employees here, and one of them brought him to my office. I remember that he thanked the man for his courtesy."

  "You mean 'gracias'?"

  "A little more than that. And I think I must have heard him speak it at other times, because I have a distinct impression that he was bilingual. Most of us are here, you know."

  "You'd say his Spanish was adequate, then?"

  "Yes. Certainly adequate."

  "Would you recognize him from this picture?"

  Henderson peered nearsightedly at the snapshot.

  "I would say it was he if it were shown to me as his picture," h
e answered cautiously. "I would not pick it out of a group of pictures."

  "Can you give me any idea at all of his general appearance?"

  Henderson looked old and apologetic. I said, "Was he fat, thin, tall, short, blue-eyed, brown-eyed, dark-skinned, light-skinned? Did he wear glasses? Did he have a mustache? Did he have a wart on his nose? How would you describe him?"

  "I—I'm afraid I'm not very observant about such things. He was just an average elderly man with no particular distinguishing characteristics. I'm sorry. I only saw him for a few minutes, and it was a long time ago."

  "It doesn't matter. Thanks a lot."

  I left Mr. Henderson with his five-year-old guilty conscience and went for a swim.

  i HE giiest house that the banana company turned over to me was a clean little cottage down by the beach in a grove of coco palms. The cottage was mostly verandah, screened all around against sand flies and furnished with a refrigerator full of cold pineapple juice. Late that night, after I had gone for another swim—the moon was up, and the surf felt like warm soup—I got myself a milk bottle full of pineapple juice out of the refrigerator and went into conference with it and the Parker documents.

  I hadn't gained ground on him. On the other hand, I was learning more about him every day. I didn't know why he had picked a backwater like La Ceiba as the place to get his passport renewed, unless he just happened to notice that it was running out while he was there, but the fact that it needed renewing meant he had held it for two years, so he must have been planning his getaway for a long time—long enough in which to learn how to speak Spanish, for example. But I was pretty sure he hadn't learned his Spanish in the States. The know-how to keep two names and two identities