Graham Greene (20 page)

“After he sold them out?”

“Yes, but you see he's worth more to them now. He knows all the Walker-Keefe secrets and Alvarez's secrets, too.”

I expressed my opinion of everyone concerned.

“It shouldn't surprise you,” complained the captain. “You know the country. Every man in it is out for something that isn't his. The pilot wants his bit, the health doctor must get his, the customs take all your cigars, and if you don't put up gold for the captain of the port and the
alcalde
and the commandant and the harbour police and the foreman of the
cargadores,
they won't move a lighter, and they'll hold up the ship's papers. Well, an American comes down here, honest and straight and willing to work for his wages. But pretty quick he finds everyone is getting his squeeze but him, so he tries to get some of it back by robbing the natives that robbed him. Then he robs the other foreigners, and it ain't long before he's cheating the people at home who sent him here. There isn't a man in this nitrate row that isn't robbing the crowd he's with, and that wouldn't change sides for money. Schnitzel's no worse than the President nor the canteen contractor.”

He waved his hand at the glaring coastline, at the steaming swamps and the hot, naked mountains.

“It's the country that does it,” he said. “It's in the air. You can smell it as soon as you drop anchor, like you smell the slaughterhouse at Punta-Arenas.”

“How do
you
manage to keep honest?” I asked, smiling.

“I don't take any chances,” exclaimed the captain seriously. “When I'm in their damned port I don't go ashore.”

I did not again see Schnitzel until, with haggard eyes and suspiciously wet hair, he joined the captain, doctor, purser, and
myself at breakfast. In the phrases of the Tenderloin, he told us cheerfully that he had been grandly intoxicated, and to recover drank mixtures of raw egg, vinegar, and red pepper, the sight of which took away every appetite save his own. When to this he had added a bottle of beer, he declared himself a new man. The new man followed me to the deck, and with the truculent bearing of one who expects to be repelled, he asked if, the day before, he had not made a fool of himself.

I suggested he had been somewhat confidential.

At once he recovered his pose and patronised me.

“Don't you believe it,” he said. “That's all part of my game. ‘Confidence for confidence' is the way I work it. That's how I learn things. I tell a man something on the inside, and he says: ‘Here's a nice young fellow. Nothing stand-offish about him,' and he tells me something he shouldn't. Like as not what I told him wasn't true. See?”

I assured him he interested me greatly.

“You find, then, in your line of business,” I asked, “that apparent frankness is advisable? As a rule,” I explained, “secrecy is what a—a person in your line—a—”

To save his feelings I hesitated at the word.

“A spy,” he said. His face beamed with fatuous complacency.

“But if I had not known you were a spy,” I asked, “would not that have been better for you?”

“In dealing with a party like you, Mr Crosby,” Schnitzel began sententiously, “I use a different method. You're on a secret mission yourself, and you get your information about the nitrate row one way, and I get it another. I deal with you just like we were drummers in the same line of goods. We are rivals in business, but outside of business hours perfect gentlemen.”

In the face of the disbelief that had met my denials of any secret mission, I felt to have Schnitzel also disbelieve me would be too great a humiliation. So I remained silent.

“You make your report to the State Department,” he explained, “and I make mine to—my people. Who they are doesn't matter. You'd like to know, and I don't want to hurt your feelings, but—that's
my
secret.”

My only feelings were a desire to kick Schnitzel heavily, but for Schnitzel to suspect that was impossible. Rather, he pictured me as shaken by his disclosures.

As he hung over the rail the glare of the sun on the tumbling water lit up his foolish, mongrel features, exposed their cunning, their utter lack of any character, and showed behind the shifty eyes the vacant, half-crooked mind.

Schnitzel was smiling to himself with a smile of complete self-satisfaction. In the light of his later conduct, I grew to understand that smile. He had anticipated a rebuff, and he had been received, as he read it, with consideration. The irony of my politeness he had entirely missed. Instead, he read in what I said the admiration of the amateur for the professional. He saw what he believed to be a high agent of the Government treating him as a worthy antagonist. In no other way can I explain his later heaping upon me his confidences. It was the vanity of a child trying to show off.

In ten days, in the limited area of a two-thousand-ton steamer, one could not help but learn something of the history of so communicative a fellow-passenger as Schnitzel. His parents were German and still lived in Germany. But he himself had been brought up on the East Side. An uncle who kept a delicatessen shop in Avenue A had sent him to the public schools and then to a “business college,” where he had developed remarkable expertness as a stenographer. He referred to his skill in this difficult exercise with pitying contempt. Nevertheless, from a room noisy with typewriters this skill had lifted him into the private office of the President of the Nitrate Trust. There, as Schnitzel expressed it, “I saw ‘mine,' and I took it.” To trace
back the criminal instinct that led Schnitzel to steal and sell the private letters of his employer was not difficult. In all of his few early years I found it lying latent. Of every story he told of himself, and he talked only of himself, there was not one that was not to his discredit. He himself never saw this, nor that all he told me showed he was without the moral sense, and with an instinctive enjoyment of what was deceitful, mean, and underhand. That, as I read it, was his character.

In appearance he was smooth-shaven, with long locks that hung behind wide, protruding ears. He had the unhealthy skin of bad blood, and his eyes, as though the daylight hurt them, constantly opened and shut. He was like hundreds of young men that you see loitering on upper Broadway and making predatory raids along the Rialto. Had you passed him in that neighbourhood you would have set him down as a wire-tapper, a racing tout, a would-be actor.

As I worked it out, Schnitzel was a spy because it gave him an importance he had not been able to obtain by any other effort. As a child and as a clerk, it was easy to see that among his associates Schnitzel must always have been the butt. Until suddenly, by one dirty action, he had placed himself outside their class. As he expressed it: “Whenever I walk through the office now, where all the stenographers sit, you ought to see those slobs look after me. When they go to the President's door, they got to knock, like I used to, but now, when the old man sees me coming to make my report after one of these trips he calls out, ‘Come right in, Mr Schnitzel.' And like as not I go in with my hat on and offer him a cigar. An' they see me do it, too!”

To me, that speech seemed to give Schnitzel's view of the values of his life. His vanity demanded he be pointed at, if even with contempt. But the contempt never reached him—he only knew that at last people took note of him. They no longer laughed at him, they were afraid of him. In his heart he believed
that they regarded him as one who walked in the dark places of world politics, who possessed an evil knowledge of great men as evil as himself, as one who by blackmail held public ministers at his mercy.

This view of himself was the one that he tried to give me. I probably was the first decent man who ever had treated him civilly, and to impress me with his knowledge he spread that knowledge before me. It was
sale,
shocking, degrading.

At first I took comfort in the thought that Schnitzel was a liar. Later, I began to wonder if all of it were a lie, and finally, in a way I could not doubt, it was proved to me that the worst he charged was true.

The night I first began to believe him was the night we touched at Cristobal, the last port in Valencia. In the most light-hearted manner he had been accusing all concerned in the nitrate fight with every crime known in Wall Street and in the dark reaches of the Congo River.

“But I know him, Mr Schnitzel,” I said sternly. “He is incapable of it. I went to college with him.”

“I don't care whether he's a rah-rah boy or not,” said Schnitzel, “I know that's what he did when he was up the Orinoco after orchids, and if the tribe had ever caught him they'd have crucified him. And I know this, too: he made forty thousand dollars out of the Nitrate Company on a ten-thousand-dollar job. And I know it, because he beefed to me about it himself, because it wasn't big enough.”

We were passing the limestone island at the entrance to the harbour, where, in the prison fortress, with its muzzle-loading guns pointing drunkenly at the sky, are buried the political prisoners of Valencia.

“Now, there,” said Schnitzel, pointing, “that shows you what the Nitrate Trust can do. Judge Rojas is in there. He gave the
first decision in favour of the Walker-Keefe people, and for making the decision William T. Scott, the Nitrate manager, made Alvarez put Rojas in there. He's seventy years old, and he's been there five years. The cell they keep him in is below the sea-level, and the salt-water leaks through the wall. I've seen it. That's what William T. Scott did, an' up in New York people think ‘Billy' Scott is a fine man. I seen him at the Horse Show sitting in a box, bowing to everybody, with his wife sitting beside him, all hung out with pearls. An' that was only a month after I'd seen Rojas in that sewer where Scott put him.”

“Schnitzel,” I laughed, “you certainly are a magnificent liar.”

Schnitzel showed no resentment.

“Go ashore and look for yourself,” he muttered. “Don't believe me. Ask Rojas. Ask the first man you meet.” He shivered, and shrugged his shoulders. “I tell you, the walls are damp, like sweat.”

The Government had telegraphed the Commandant to come on board and, as he expressed it, “offer me the hospitality of the port,” which meant that I had to take him to the smoking-room and give him champagne. What the Government really wanted was to find out whether I was still on board, and if it were finally rid of me.

I asked the official concerning Judge Rojas.

“Oh, yes,” he said readily. “He is still
incommunicado.”

Without believing it would lead to anything, I suggested:

“It was foolish of him to give offence to Mr Scott?”

The Commandant nodded vivaciously.

“Mr Scott is very powerful man,” he assented. “We all very much love Mr Scott. The President, he love Mr Scott, too, but the judges were not sympathetic to Mr Scott, so Mr Scott asked our President to give them a warning, and Señor Rojas—he is the warning.”

“When will he get out?” I asked.

The Commandant held up the glass in the sunlight from the open air-port, and gazed admiringly at the bubbles.

“Who can tell?” he said. “Any day when Mr Scott wishes. Maybe, never. Señor Rojas is an old man. Old, and he has much rheumatics. Maybe, he will never come out to see our beloved country any more.”

As we left the harbour we passed so close that one could throw a stone against the wall of the fortress. The sun was just sinking and the air became suddenly chilled. Around the little island of limestone the waves swept through the seaweed and black manigua up to the rusty bars of the cells. I saw the barefooted soldiers smoking upon the sloping ramparts, the common criminals in a long stumbling line bearing kegs of water, three storm-beaten palms rising like gallows, and the green and yellow flag of Valencia crawling down the staff. Somewhere entombed in that blotched and mildewed masonry an old man of seventy years was shivering and hugging himself from the damp and cold. A man who spoke five languages, a just, brave gentleman. To me it was no new story. I knew of the horrors of Cristobal prison; of political rivals chained to criminals loathsome with disease, of men who had raised the flag of revolution driven to suicide. But never had I supposed that my own people could reach from the city of New York and cast a fellow-man into that cellar of fever and madness.

As I watched the yellow wall sink into the sea, I became conscious that Schnitzel was near me, as before, leaning on the rail, with his chin sunk on his arms. His face was turned towards the fortress, and for the first time since I had known him it was set and serious. And when, a moment later, he passed me without recognition, I saw that his eyes were filled with fear.

When we touched at Curaçao I sent a cable to my sister, announcing the date of my arrival, and then continued on to the
Hotel Venezuela. Almost immediately Schnitzel joined me. With easy carelessness he said: “I was in the cable office just now, sending off a wire, and that operator told me he can't make head or tail of the third word in your cable.”

“That is strange,” I commented, “because it's a French word, and he is French. That's why I wrote it in French.”

With the air of one who nails another in a falsehood, Schnitzel exclaimed:

“Then, how did you suppose your sister was going to read it? It's a cipher, that's what it is. Oh, no,
you're
not on a secret mission! Not at all!”

It was most undignified of me, but in five minutes I excused myself, and sent to the State Department the following words:

“Roses red, violets blue, send snow.”

Later at the State Department the only person who did not eventually pardon my jest was the clerk who had sat up until three in the morning with my cable, trying to fit it to any known code.

Immediately after my return to the Hotel Venezuela Schnitzel excused himself, and half an hour later returned in triumph with the cable operator and ordered lunch for both. They imbibed much sweet champagne.