A Flag for Sunrise Read Online Free PDF

busboy took their unfinished lunches away.
    “On the Caribbean coast of Tecan there’s a little place the locals call French Harbor. A couple of clicks down from Puerto Alvarado. For the last thirty years the American Devotionists have had a mission there but they’re on their last legs now and they want to close it down. The only people left there are a priest in his sixties and an American nursing nun. Now the Devotionists have been asked about this and their provincial in New Orleans is being very cagey—but it seems that these characters won’t come back.”
    The drinks arrived; Marty raised his glass in salute.
    “There’s a lot of medieval church diplomacy going on. The provincial says he’ll cut off their funds but he hasn’t. The priest and nun say they’ll come back presently but they won’t. Also the Tecanecan government has become aware of their presence and the Tecanecan government is extremely paranoid.”
    “And extremely murderous,” Holliwell said.
    “O.K.,” Marty said, “they’re murderous troglodytes and we put them in. But there it is. The Tecanecans suspect that the two of them are somehow mixed up in subversive activities but it hasn’t got a line on them and it doesn’t want a hassle with the church.”
    “And what do your sources say?”
    “That these people are wrongos, Commies et cetera. That’s what they always say. You know, Tecan is a special situation—it’s still the fifties there. Our ambassador is a Birchite moron. The cops lock you up for reading Voltaire.”
    “Another corner of the free world.”
    “Don’t give me clichés, Frank. Save them for the meetings of your professional association and someday they’ll make you their president.”
    He finished his drink looking pained.
    “Listen, old chap—I want to know what these people are up to. They’re my compatriots and erstwhile co-religionists and they’re fucking with El Toro down there. Somebody may have to bail them out.”
    “I’m not going down there to spy on them.”
    “Spy on them? Are you crazy? They’re already being spied on seven ways from sundown by people who’d love nothing more than to mess with their private parts.”
    Holliwell signaled for another pair of stingers.
    “You’re going to Compostela. It would be the easiest thing in the world for you to get a Tecanecan visa and check out French Harbor. Go diving, go bonefishing. There’s even an Old Empire ruin a few miles from there for you to scramble around. The thing is,” he went on, before Holliwell could protest, “it’s me that wants to know about these people. Not so much the outfit as just me. And I’d like to get it not from some informer or right-wing spook—but from somebody with some sensitivity. Somebody who could give me a real insight into what they think theyre doing down there. You might be in a position to help everybody out.”
    “The last time I thought I was in that position things didn’t work out very well.”
    “So what do you want? A perfect world? Tell me something, Professor, have you stopped believing that people have to take sides?”
    “No,” Holliwell said. “People have to take sides.”
    “What side are you on then? Do you really think the other guys are going to resolve social contradictions and make everything O.K.? Worker in the morning, hunter in the afternoon, scholar in the evening—do you really believe that’s on, Frank?”
    “No,” Holliwell said.
    “Well, it’s them or us, chum. Like always. They make absolute claims, we make relative ones. That’s why our side is better in the end.”
    “Is that what you believe?”
    Marty shrugged. “Sure I believe it. You believe it too. Anyway I’m not recruiting you and it’s not some kind of hostile operation. I told you what I wanted—just a little insight. It could be that we have something to learn from these two people in Tecan.”
    “Why don’t you just write them a letter. Ask them what it is they want down