The Adventurers (23 page)

Dax's eyes swept down the field. "Is he here?"

"At the end, near the gate."

But Dax had already seen the car and was running down the field. His father got out of the car and embraced him. "Why didn't you tell me you were coming?" Dax asked.

His father smiled. Dax was growing. He was up to his shoulder now. Another year and he would no longer be able to look down at him. "I wasn't sure that I could."

"I'm glad you did." It was the first time his father had ever come to the school.

"Is there a place we could go for tea?" "There is a patisserie in the village."

They got into the car. "The coach told me that you said I would have my own horses next year." "Yes."

"Where are we going to get the money?" Dax asked. "We can't afford it."

The consul smiled. "El Presidente will send us four mountain ponies."

Dax looked at him silently.

"Is there anything wrong?"

There was such a look of concern on his father's face that Dax did not have the heart to tell him that good polo ponies required years of training. Instead he reached over and took his father's hand. "That's wonderful," he said, squeezing it tightly.

"Don't be a fool," Sergei said. "Spend the summer with us at Cannes. Robert's father has a villa there and a boat."

"No. I have to work with the horses if they are going to be any good by fall."

"You're wasting your time," Sergei said positively. "You'll never make polo ponies out of those mountain goats."

"Coach thinks I've got a chance."

"I don't see why your father just doesn't buy regular ponies. Everybody knows you South Americans are lousy with money."

Dax smiled to himself. If Sergei only knew the truth. "It would be a good thing for my country if they turned out well. Perhaps, as my father always says, it would convince Europeans that we can do other things besides grow coffee and bananas."

Sergei got to his feet. "I'm going down to the village. There's a new waitress at the patisserie. Want to come along?"

Dax shook his head. There were other things he could do with five francs. "No, I think I'll bone up for the exams."

He sat quietly at his desk after Sergei had gone. It was three years now that he had been in France. He felt a restlessness, and got up and went over to the window. He looked down at the rolling lawns and neat gardens.

A wave of sudden homesickness swept over him. He longed for the wild untouched mountains. Everything here was too neat, too orderly. There was no excitement in discovering a new path, a new way to come down from the mountains. Here there were always set roads to follow.

All civilization seemed to be like that. Even his father, who was prepared to observe the rules and respected them, had never thought it would prove this confining. With each new rebuff, each new disappointment, he seemed to shrink more and more within himself. His betrayal by Ramirez had been only the beginning.

There were other incidents, far more subtle and destructive. Promises made to support Corteguay in its quest for independence from British and American political and financial domination. There were lines Dax had never seen before in his father's face. There was a hesitancy, an uncertainness in his manner that marked the beginnings of old age. These last three years of failure had taken their toll.

Dax felt all these things, and at times he wanted to cry out to his father that this life was not for them, that they ought to return home to the fields and the mountains, to a world they understood. But the impulse remained bottled up inside him. He knew his father would not listen, could not. The determination to accomplish his mission, the hope that he might succeed still burned deep within him.

There was a soft knock at the door behind him. He turned. "Come in."

The door opened and the Baron de Coyne entered. They had never met before. "I'm Robert's father. You must be Dax."

"I am, sir."

"Where is Robert?"

"He should be back shortly, sir."

"May I sit down?" Without waiting for an answer, the baron dropped into an easy chair. He glanced briefly around the room. "Things haven't changed much since I was here."

"I suppose not."

The baron glanced over at him suddenly. "I suppose things rarely do change no matter how much we want them to."

"I don't know, sir." Dax wasn't quite sure of the baron's meaning. "I guess it depends on the thing we want changed."

The baron nodded. "Robert mentioned that you might be spending the summer with us."

"I'm afraid not, sir. But I'm very grateful to have been asked."

"Why can't you come?"

Dax felt the lameness of his answer. "I'm training some Corteguayan ponies for polo."

The baron nodded solemnly. "Very commendable. I shall be most interested in what results you achieve. If you are at all successful it could prove of value to your country. It will show France that Corteguay can do other things besides grow coffee and bananas."

Dax stared at him. These were almost the exact words his father had used. He felt his spirits begin to lift. If a man like Robert's father felt this, perhaps things were not so bad after all. Perhaps there was still hope for his father's mission.

CHAPTER 6

Sylvie began to pick up the dishes, and Dax got up from the table. A moment later he went outside. Arnouil and Fat Cat leaned back in their chairs. Fat Cat began to roll a cigarette.

Arnouil was silent for a moment, then put the stub of a small cigar in his mouth. He didn't speak until after Fat Cat had lighted his cigarette. "The boy is alone too much. He never smiles."

The smoke drifted across Fat Cat's face. He didn't answer.

"He should not have stayed here and worked all summer," the coach continued. "He should have gone with his friends."

Fat Cat shrugged. "Are not the ponies shaping up?"

"More than shaping up. They were born for this game; they will revolutionize it. But surely his father must see that a boy should have fun."

Fat Cat took the cigarette from his lips and looked at it. It wasn't too bad for French tobacco. A trifle sweet perhaps, but not bad. "Dax is not like other boys," he said carefully. "Someday he will be a leader in our country. Perhaps he will even become el presidente."

"Even Napoleon was a boy once," the coach replied. "I'm sure he did not allow his destiny to rob him of his youth."

"Napoleon became a soldier by choice. He had not been a warrior since the age of six."

"And Dax has?"

Fat Cat looked at the coach. He nodded silently. "When Dax was not yet seven el Presidente himself held the gun as Dax pulled the trigger that executed the murderers of his mother and sister."

The coach was silent for a moment. "No wonder then the boy never smiles."

The night was quiet and the air cool with the first breeze from the west as Dax walked down to the stable. The horses whinnied when they heard him coming, and he took the sugar he always kept in his pocket and gave them each a lump. Then he went into their stalls and stroked their necks gently. They whinnied again, a soft lonesome sound.

"We're all homesick," he whispered. They didn't like the confinement of the stable. They missed the open corral.

"Dax?" Sylvie's voice came from the stable door.

"I'm in here with the horses."

"What are you doing?" she asked curiously, walking over to him.

He looked out at her over the bars of the stall. "I thought I'd come down and keep them company for a while. They get lonesome so far from home."

She leaned against the bars. "Do you get lonesome too, Dax?"

He stared at her. She was the first person who ever had asked that question. He hesitated. "Sometimes."

"Do you have a girl back home?"

He thought for a moment of Amparo, whom he had not seen in three years. He wondered what she was like now. Then he shook his head. "No, not really. Once when I was nine a girl decided to marry me. But she outgrew it. She was only seven herself and very fickle."

"I have a boyfriend," she said, "but he is in the navy. He has been away for six months, and it will be another six before he returns."

He looked at her. It was the first time he had thought of her as a girl. Until now she was just someone around the stables, riding the horses and fooling around like anyone else. Except for her long hair there had seemed to be nothing feminine about her, no roundness visible in the man's shirt with the rolled-up sleeves or tight dungarees. Suddenly he noticed the female softness of her.

"I'm sorry," he said, without really knowing why he was, except that for the moment she seemed as alone as the horses or himself.

The horses whinnied again. He held out some lumps of sugar to her. "They want you to feed them."

She took the sugar and crawled between the bars. The horses nuzzled against her, each greedy for his ration. She laughed as one of them pushed her with his nose and she stumbled back against Dax. Involuntarily his arms went around her.

For a moment she stared up into his face, her eyes on his, then abruptly he let her go. There was a hard, tight, almost painful knot in his stomach. His voice sounded harsh even to himself. "I guess they've had enough."

"Yes." She seemed to be waiting.

He felt the tightening in his groin, the pounding at his temples. He turned and started through the bars. Her voice brought him back.

"Dax!"

He looked at her, one foot still half through the bars.

"I'm lonely too."

He still did not move. She came toward him and laid her hand lightly on the hardness at his groin. With an almost frenzied moan of pain he pulled her toward him and all the tensions of his youth and loneliness burst into a shattering crescendo of flame.

Later he lay quietly in his room listening to the soft sounds of Fat Cat's breathing in the other bed. The pain inside him was dissolved now. Suddenly Fat Cat's voice came out of the darkness. "Did you fuck her?"

He was so surprised that he did not even try to evade the question. "How did you know?"

"We could tell."

"You mean her father—"

Fat Cat laughed. "Of course. Do you think he is blind?"

Dax thought for a moment. "Was he angry?"

Fat Cat chuckled. "Why should he be? Her fiance has been away for almost a year. He is aware that a filly in season needs servicing. Besides, she's old enough."

"Old enough? She must be about my age."

"She's twenty-two. Her father told me so himself."

Twenty-two, Dax thought, almost seven years older. No wonder she had made the first move. She must have thought him a stupid boy to wait this long. He felt the tightness begin again at his loins as he remembered how they had lain together. Abruptly he got out of bed.

"Where are you going?"

He turned in the open doorway. Suddenly he laughed. This was a new escape, a new kind of freedom. He should have discovered this long before. "Wasn't it you who told me that once wasn't ever enough?"

CHAPTER 7

Robert came into the room just in time to hear his father say, "What do you need a swimming pool for? You have the whole Mediterranean."

His sister Caroline pouted. And when she twisted her pretty little face into a pout everyone, including the baron, was affected. "It's so gauche." Her lower lip was quivering tremulously. "Everyone goes to the beach."

"What difference does it make?"

"Papa!" Caroline sounded on the verge of tears.

The baron looked at her, then at his son. Robert smiled. He knew better than to take sides. His little sister had a way all her own.

"All right, all right," his father said finally. "You will have your swimming pool."

Caroline burst into a smile, kissed her father, and ran gaily from the room, almost knocking over the butler, who was on his way in. "Monsieur Christopoulos to see you, sir."

"Excuse me, Father. I didn't realize you were busy."

The baron smiled. "No, Robert, don't go. I shan't be long."

Robert settled himself into a chair in a corner across the library from his father's desk. He watched the visitor settle himself. The man's name had sounded vaguely familiar but he wasn't much interested. He picked up a magazine and began leafing through it idly when something his father said caught his attention.

"Have you considered Corteguay?"

Robert looked up.

"Registering your ships there would be of more value than Panamanian registry."

"I can't see how," the visitor answered in a thick Greek accent.

Robert worried his memory until the name came suddenly clear. Christopoulos. Of course; the gambler who along with Zographos and Andre controlled the syndicate that ran the tout va at all the casinos from Monte Carlo to Biarritz. He wondered what a gambler had to do with ships.

"In the event of war," his father said, "Panama would be forced to declare herself on the side of the United States. Corteguay has no such ties. Not to Britain, not to the States, not to anyone. She alone of all the South American countries could maintain neutrality. She would run no danger of the loss of outside aid or financial support. These have already been denied her."

"But in case of war the United States surely would make overtures to Corteguay. How can one be sure that such blandishments would be resisted?"

The baron smiled. "A clearly neutral fleet of ships based in the Americas, with the right to sail the seas free from attack by either side, would be more than worth its tonnage in gold. The beginning should be made now to ensure that neutrality."

The Greek nodded thoughtfully. "It will be most expensive." He looked down at his carefully manicured nails. "It is not easy to support an entire country."

"True," the baron replied quietly, "but that is exactly what must be done." He got to his feet. The meeting was over. "My participation in such a project must be contingent on that."

Christopoulos rose also. "I will inform my associates. Thank you for these moments of your valuable time."

The baron smiled. "Not at all. It was my pleasure to sit across a table from you without a deck of cards between us."