Free Doctor Frigo by Eric Ambler Page B

away.
    ‘I’ll be here when the Doctor comes down, Antoine. Make sure that he doesn’t leave without seeing me. Monsieur Villegas will receive him now.’
    Villegas has a vast bedroom-cum-study with three tall windows looking out over the Grand Mamelon to the sea. The air-conditioning is formidably efficient.
    He rose from his desk to greet me and for a moment Ithought it was my father standing there. Then I remembered something long forgotten. My father’s political protégés, the up-and-coming Party men he favoured, had always been of the same physical type, youthful projections of himself. It must have been a disappointment to him that I took after my mother’s side of the family.
    Villegas, anyway, is remarkably like him. Is it possible that the similarity has been cultivated?
    He is tall with only a small paunch, and, for a man of his age, apparently well preserved. The complexion is pale, smooth and clear, the thick grey hair carefully tended. There is a patrician air about him, which makes it easy to forget that
his
father was a customs inspector; just as the candid brown eyes, staring through one into the middle distance as if in a search for truth, make it easy to forget that he is a politician. He has glasses which, while I was there, he held mostly in his left hand, raising them to his eyes now and then as if they were a lorgnette. It is the sort of mannerism that could have been acquired through his work as a university lecturer. He wore a pale blue shirt with a dark blue cardigan, white slacks and espadrilles. On the desk I noticed a box of cellulose tissues. As he came forward he stuffed a used one into his shirt pocket.
    He shook my hand warmly. ‘Delighted to see you, Dr Castillo. Truly a pleasure.’ He smelled faintly of cigar smoke and an eau-de-toilette.
    As I made the appropriate responses he patted my shoulder and held up his glasses to look me over.
    ‘I can recognize you, I think,’ he went on, ‘but only just.’
    ‘From old photographs, Don Manuel?’
    ‘Not at all. We have in fact met before, though I would be most surprised if you had remembered.’ He led me to a sofa and we sat down sideways so as to face one another.
    ‘It was at the Mass for your father,’ he said.
    ‘Oh.’
    ‘Yes. You behaved with great dignity and calm. I have a son who is now just about your age then. He is reasonablyserious, I think – indeed he has hopes of being accepted as a student by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – but he has never had to face that kind of situation.’
    ‘We all hope that he never has to, Don Manuel.’
    I was also hoping fervently that he would now drop the subject, but he seemed determined to pursue it.
    ‘Naturally in your case the Mass was only one of a series of ordeals. There had been the fracas at the airport and then the funeral, to say nothing of the student demonstrations and the street fighting. The Mass was in the nature of a culmination. That is why I would have been surprised if you had remembered our meeting, even though poor Hermanos introduced us. I had the impression, admirably calm and dignified though you were, that you were beyond feeling very much that day, that your senses were by then completely numb.’
    ‘Not entirely, Don Manuel, though I was certainly preoccupied. There had been talk by the army commander of forbidding a public Mass for my father. My mother was deeply disturbed by the threat. The Mass was permitted only after she and I had agreed that we, the whole family, would quietly leave the country immediately afterwards. The agreement was negotiated on our behalf by a man my mother trusted, a man we believed to have been my father’s friend.’
    ‘Ah yes. The trusted, the ever-faithful Acosta!’ The sneer in his voice was more weary than bitter. ‘
Just for a few weeks, Doña Concepcion, until passions have cooled.
I can almost hear him saying it. Naturally your mother believed him. I’ve no doubt you believed him too. And who