The Honorary Consul Read Online Free PDF Page A

the cell too that he had developed a hungry passion for 'chipá', those doughy rolls made out of mandioca, that can only be properly appreciated after semistarvation. "What went wrong, Aquino?"
           "The car would not start. Dust in the carburetor. That was it, Diego? And then there was a police patrol."
           "I meant who is dying?"
           "Nobody, we hope."
           "Léon?"
           "He is all right."
           "Why did you telephone? You promised not to involve me. Léon promised."
           He would never have consented to help them if it had not been for Léon whom he had missed almost as much as his father when he and his mother left on the river boat. Léon was someone whose word he believed that he could always trust, even though his word seemed later to have been broken when Plarr heard that Léon had become a priest instead of the fearless 'abogado' who would defend the poor and the innocent, like Perry Mason. In his school days Léon had possessed an enormous collection of Perry Masons stiffly translated into classical Spanish prose. He lent them carefully, one at a time, to selected friends. Perry Mason's secretary Delia was the first woman to arouse Plarr's sexual appetite.
           "Father Rivas told us to fetch you," the man called Diego said.
           He continued to call Léon Father, Doctor Plarr noticed, though he had broken a second vow when he left the Church and married, but that particular broken promise was not one which worried Plarr, who never went to Mass except when he accompanied his mother on one of his rare visits to the capital. Léon, it seemed to him, was struggling back from a succession of failures toward the primal promise to the poor he had never intended to break. He would end as an 'abogado' yet.
           They turned into Tucumán and then into San Martin, but Doctor Plarr after that tried to avoid looking out. It was as well not to know where they were going. If the worst happened he wanted to betray as little as possible under interrogation.
           They were driving fast enough to attract attention. He asked, "You are not afraid of the police patrols?"
           "Léon has them all mapped out. He has studied them for a month."
           "But tonight—surely it's a little bit special."
           "The Ambassador's car will have been found in the upper Paraná. They will be searching every house on the border, and they will have warned them in Encar-naci6n across the river. There will be road blocks on the road to Rosario. The patrols here must have been cut. They need the men elsewhere. And this is the last place they will look for him with the Governor waiting at his house to take him to the airport."
           "I hope you are right."
           For a moment, without meaning to, Doctor Plarr raised his eyes as the car lurched round a turning, and he saw on the pavement a deck chair containing a stout elderly woman whom he knew, as he knew the small open doorway behind her—her name was Señora Sanchez and she never slept before her last customer had gone home. She was the richest woman in town or so it was believed.
           Doctor Plarr said, "What happened about the Governor's dinner? How long did they wait?" He could imagine the confusion. One couldn't telephone to a lot of ruins.
           "I do not know."
           "Surely you had somebody on the watch?"
           "We had enough on our hands." He was back with the amateurs; it seemed to Doctor Plarr that the plot would have been better written by Saavedra. Ingenuity, if not 'machismo', was distinctly lacking.
           "I heard a plane. Was it the Ambassador's?"
           "If it was, it must have gone back empty."
           "You seem to know very little," Doctor Plarr said.
           "Who is hurt?"
           The car drew suddenly and roughly up on the margin of a dirt track. "We get out here," Aquino said.