The first warning came at Fabergé, as Roper and his party were about to take their leave. The guests had left. Langbourne and Moranti had left with them. Colonel Emmanuel and Roper were exchanging last bear hugs as a young soldier came running up the track, calling and waving a piece of paper above his head. Emmanuel took the paper, glanced at it and handed it to Roper, who pulled on his spectacles and took a pace away to read in greater privacy. And as Roper read, Jonathan saw him shed his customary lassitude and stiffen; then methodically fold the paper and put it in his pocket.
"Frisky!"
"Sir!"
"A word."
Parade-ground style, Frisky marched facetiously over the bumpy ground to his master and came to attention. But when Roper took him none too gently by the arm and murmured an order in his ear, Frisky must have wished he hadn't been so damn funny. They entered the helicopter. Frisky went purposefully ahead and brusquely beckoned Jonathan to take the seat beside him.
"I've got the runs, actually, Frisk," Jonathan said. "Jungle tummy."
"Sit where you're fucking told," Tabby advised from behind him.
And on the plane Jonathan sat between them, and whenever he went to the lavatory Tabby stood outside. Roper meanwhile sat alone at the bulkhead, acknowledging nobody but Meg, who brought him fresh orange juice and, halfway into the journey, an incoming fax, which Jonathan saw to be handwritten. Having read it, Roper folded it into an inside pocket. Then he put on his eye mask and appeared to sleep.
At Colón airport, where Langbourne was waiting for them with two chauffeur-driven Volvos, Jonathan was again made unmistakably aware of his altered status.
"Chief. I need to talk to you at once. Alone," Langbourne yelled up from the runway, almost before Meg had got the door open.
So everyone waited aboard while Roper and Langbourne conferred at the foot of the gangway.
"Second car," Roper ordered, when Meg had allowed the rest of the passengers to emerge. "All of you."
"He's got jungle tummy," Frisky warned Langbourne aside.
"Fuck his tummy," Langbourne retorted. "Tell him to contain himself."
"Contain yourself," said Frisky.
It was afternoon. The police box was empty; so was the control tower. So was the airfield, except for the white Colombian-registered private jets parked in rows beside the wide runway. Langbourne and Roper got into the front car, and as they did so, Jonathan noticed a fourth man, in a hat, seated beside the driver. Frisky opened the back door of the second car, Jonathan got in. Frisky got in after him. Tabby sat the other side of him, leaving the passenger seat empty. No one spoke.
On a huge billboard, a girl in frayed shorts spread her thighs round the latest brand of cigarette. On another she teasingly licked the erect aerial of a transistor radio. They entered the town, and a stench of poverty filled the car. Jonathan remembered Cairo and sitting beside Sophie while the wretched of the earth grovelled in the rubbish. In streets of former grandeur, between shanties built of planks and corrugated iron, stood old timbered houses crumbling with decay. Bright-coloured washing hung from the rotting balconies. Children played in the blackened arcades and floated plastic cups in the open drains. From colonial porches, workless men, twenty at a time, stared expressionlessly at the passing traffic. From the windows of an abandoned factory, hundreds of immobile faces did the same.
They had stopped for lights. Frisky's left hand, low behind the driver's seat, was drawing a bead with an imaginary revolver on four armed policemen who had stepped off the curb and were walking toward the car. Tabby read his gesture at once, and Jonathan felt him ease against the backrest and unfasten the middle buttons of his bush jacket.
The policemen were huge. They wore pressed uniforms of light khaki, lanyards and medal ribbons, and Walther automatics in burnished leather holsters. Roper's car had parked a hundred yards down the road. The traffic lights turned green, but two of the policemen were blocking the car's way while a third talked to the driver and the fourth scowled into the car. One of the men at the front was inspecting the Volvo's tires. The car rocked as another tested the suspension.
"I think the gentlemen would like a nice present, don't you, Pedro?" Frisky suggested to the driver.
Tabby was patting the pockets of his bush jacket. The police wanted twenty dollars. Frisky gave the driver ten. The driver gave them to the policeman.
"Some bugger nicked my cash off of me at the camp," Tabby said as they drove again.
"Want to go back and find him?" Frisky asked.
"I need a lavatory," said Jonathan.
"You need a fucking cork, is what you need," said Tabby.
