“But you are sending us away… Sandy, I won’t have it. We are too old friends to be bundled off like stray dogs from a racecourse. You are in some awful pickle and we must help.”
“I am sending you away,” said the waiter gravely, “because I want your help—when the time comes. There’s another woman in this business, Janet, and I want you to be with her. I want you both. I pay you the compliment of saying that I can’t do without you. You will go back to Olifa to the Hotel de la Constitucion, and you will make friends with an American girl there. She is expecting you and she will give you your instructions.”
“I know,” said Janet. “She is Mr Blenkiron’s niece—a Miss Dasent. What is her Christian name?”
The waiter looked puzzled. “I’m afraid I don’t know. I never asked her.”
VII
The waiter at the Regina was an exemplary servant. He dispensed the morning meal of fruit and coffee with soft-footed alacrity. At the mid-day dejeuner, when it was the custom of the Company’s officials, including some of the greatest, to patronise the hotel, he had the big round table in the north window, and in a day or two had earned the approval of his fastidious clients. Miguel was his name, and presently he was addressed by it as if he had been an old feature of the establishment. Those solemn gentlemen talked little, and at their meals they did not ransack the wine-list or summon the cook, but each had his little peculiarities of taste which Miguel made it his business to remember. He was always at their elbow, smiling gravely, to anticipate their wants. In the evening the restaurant was less full, only the guests living in the hotel and a few junior officials, for it was the custom of the magnates to dine at the club. In the evening Miguel was frequently off duty in the restaurant, engaged in other branches of hotel work, and twice a week he had his time after 7 p.m. to himself.
The waiter did not spend his leisure hours in his attic bedroom, which was like an oven after the sun had beat all day on the slatted roof. Once or twice he joined his fellow-employees in a visit to the cinema or to a shabby little gaming-room where one drank cheap aguardiente and played a languid kind of poker. But generally he seemed to have business of his own, and the negro porter at the back entrance grew familiar with his figure arriving punctually on the stroke of midnight, and chaffed him heavily about an imaginary girl. It was no one's business to keep watch on this humble half-caste, whose blood showed so dearly in his shadowy finger-nails and dull yellow skin, But if he had been followed, curious things might have been noted…
He generally made for a new block of flats on the edge of the dry hollow which separated the smelting works from the city, and he frequently varied his route thither. This place, with its concrete stairs and white-washed walls, was not unlike a penitentiary, but it housed many of the work engineers and foremen. He would stop at a door on the third landing, consult his watch as to the hour, wait a minute or two, and then knock, and he was instantly admitted Thence he would emerge in half an hour, generally accompanied by someone, and always in a new guise. Sometime he was a dapper Olifero clerk with a spruce collar and an attache case; sometimes in rough clothes with big spectacles so that his former half-caste air disappeared, and he might have been an engineer from Europe; sometimes a workman indistinguishable from an ordinary hand in the furnaces. He always returned to the same door about half past eleven, and issued from it once more the waiter at the Regina.
Between the hours of 7.30 and 11 p.m. the waiter seemed to have a surprising variety of duties. Occasionally he would pass the evening in one of the flats, or in a room in another block which adjoined the costing department. There he would meet silent people who slipped in one by one, and the conversation would be in low tones. Maps and papers would lie on the table, and there would be much talk of the names on certain lists, and notes would be pencilled alongside them. Sometimes there would be a colloquy on one or two, and then the waiter would do most of the talking—but not in Spanish. Sometimes the meeting would be at a cafe in a back street, which could only be entered by devious ways, and there, over glasses of indifferent beer, the waiter would make new acquaintances. His manners were odd, for he would regard these newcomers as sergeant regards recruits, questioning them with an air of authority. There were strange ceremonies on these occasions, so that the spectator might have thought them meetings of some demented Masonic lodge. Sometimes, the waiter in one of the rooms of the big block of flats would meet a figure with the scorched face of a countryman and the dust of the hills on his clothes—often in the dour form of the Mines Police and once or twice dressed like mestizo farmer. Then the talk would be hard to follow—strings of uncouth names, torrents of excited description, and a perpetual recourse to maps.
But the waiter’s most curious visits—and they happened only twice during his time at the Regina—were to a big house behind the Administration Headquarters, which stood in what for the Gran Seco was a respectable garden. At such times the waiter became the conventional clerk, very dapper in a brown flannel suit, yellow boots, and a green satin tie with a garnet pin. He was evidently expected, for, on giving his name, he was admitted without question, and taken to a little room on the first floor which looked like the owner’s study. “Senor Garcia from the Universum”—thus he was ushered in, and the occupant greeted him gruffly with “Come along, Garcia. Say, you’re late. Have you brought the figures I asked for?”—followed by the injunction to the servant, “I can’t be disturbed for the next two hours, so I guess you’d better disconnect the telephone. If anyone calls, say I’m mighty busy.”
Then the occupant of the room would lock the door and pay some attention to the windows, after which he would greet the waiter like a long-lost brother. He was a big man, with a sallow face but a clear healthy eye—a man who looked as if he would have put on flesh but for some specially arduous work which kept him thin. He would catch the so-called Garcia by the shoulder as if he would hug him, then he would pat his back, and produce such refreshments is are not usually offered to a junior clerk. Strangely enough, there would be no mention of the awaited figures from the Universum.
“How much longer can you stick it?” he asked on the second occasion. “You’re looking peaked.”
“I’ve another week here. Then I break for the open. I doubt if I could keep it up for more than a week, for people are asking questions. Have you squared it with old Josephs and notified the Universum people?”
The big man nodded. “But after that you’re beyond my jurisdiction. Peters in the Police is prepared for you, but it’s up to you to slip over to him without exciting comment. The cook-boy at the Universum has got to perish. Can you manage that neatly?”
“I’ll try. I’ll have to do a lot of perishing in the next fortnight, before Luis picks me up. I’m terrified of going sick, you know. The Regina hasn’t done me any good, and the Tierra Caliente isn’t exactly a health-resort.”
The other looked at him with affectionate anxiety.
“That’s too bad… I haven’t an easy row to hoe, but yours is hell with the lid off, and the almighty vexation is that I can’t do much to help you. Just at present the game’s with you. For the love of Mike keep on your feet, sonnie. You don’t mean to go far into the Poison Country?”
“Not a yard farther than I can help. But Luis says I must be at least a couple of days there. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of myself.”
After that the conversation was conducted in low tones, as if even the locked door and the guarded window might have ears. But had that talk been overheard, one phrase would have puzzled the eavesdropper, a phrase which constantly recurred and was spoken by both with a certain hesitation, even in that secret room. It was “Los Patios de la Manana,” which, being translated, means “The Courts of the Morning.” It might have been a mere password, or the name of some authority to which the speaker was subject, or a poetic description of a place. Most likely the last, for a map was produced—an amateur map neatly drawn and coloured, inscribed