Our Man In Havana Read Online Free Page A

shirt like a ship’s under demolition. He walked at the edge of the pavement, beyond the yellow and pink pillars of a colonnade, in the hot January sun, and he counted every step as he went. As he passed the Wonder Bar, going up Virdudes, he had reached ‘1,369’. He had to move slowly to give time for so long a numeral. ‘One thousand three hundred and seventy.’ He was a familiar figure near the National Square, where he would sometimes linger and stop his counting long enough to sell a packet of pornographic photographs to a tourist. Then he would take up his count where he had left it. At the end of the day, like an energetic passenger on a trans-Atlantic liner, he must have known to a yard how far he had walked.
    ‘Joe?’ Wormold asked.’ I don’t see any resemblance. Except the limp, of course,’ but instinctively he took a quick look at himself in the mirror marked Cerveza Tropical, as though he might really have been so broken down and darkened during his walk from the store in the old town. But the face which looked back at him was only a little discoloured by the dust from the harbour-works; it was still the same, anxious and crisscrossed and fortyish: much younger than Dr Hasselbacher’s, yet a stranger might have felt certain it would be extinguished sooner – the shadow was there already, the anxieties which are beyond the reach of a tranquillizer. The Negro limped out of sight, round the corner of the Paseo. The day was full of bootblacks.
    ‘I didn’t mean the limp. You don’t see the likeness?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘He’s got two ideas in his head,’ Dr Hasselbacher explained, ‘to do his job and to keep count. And, of course, he’s British.’
    ‘I still don’t see …’ Wormold cooled his mouth with his morning daiquiri. Seven minutes to get to the Wonder Bar: seven minutes back to the store: six minutes for companionship. He looked at his watch. He remembered that it was one minute slow.
    ‘He’s reliable, you can depend on him, that’s all I meant,’ said Dr Hasselbacher with impatience. ‘How’s Milly?’
    ‘Wonderful,’ Wormold said. It was his invariable answer, but he meant it.
    ‘Seventeen on the seventeenth, eh?’
    ‘That’s right.’ He looked quickly over his shoulder as though somebody were hunting him and then at his watch again. ‘You’ll be coming to split a bottle with us?’
    ‘I’ve never failed yet, Mr Wormold. Who else will be there?’
    ‘Well, I thought just the three of us. You see, Cooper’s gone home, and poor Marlowe’s in hospital still, and Milly doesn’t seem to care for any of this new crowd at the Consulate. So I thought we’d keep it quiet, in the family.’
    ‘I’m honoured to be one of the family, Mr Wormold.’
    ‘Perhaps a table at the Nacional – or would you say that wasn’t quite – well, suitable?’
    ‘This isn’t England or Germany, Mr Wormold. Girls grow up quickly in the tropics.’
    A shutter across the way creaked open and then regularly blew to in the slight breeze from the sea, click clack like an ancient clock. Wormold said, ‘I must be off.’
    ‘Phastkleaners will get on without you, Mr Wormold.’ It was a day of uncomfortable truths. ‘Like my patients,’ Dr Hasselbacher added with kindliness.
    ‘People have to get ill, they don’t have to buy vacuum cleaners.’
    ‘But you charge them more.’
    ‘And get only twenty per cent for myself. One can’t save much on twenty per cent.’
    ‘This is not an age for saving, Mr Wormold.’
    ‘I must – for Milly. If something happened to me …’
    ‘We none of us have a great expectation of life nowadays, so why worry?’
    ‘All these disturbances are very bad for trade. What’s the good of a vacuum cleaner if the power’s cut off?’
    ‘I could manage a small loan, Mr Wormold.’
    ‘No, no. It’s not like that. My worry isn’t this year’s or even next year’s, it’s a long-term worry.’
    ‘Then it’s not worth calling a worry. We live in an