and they felt cool and clean. Hatcher stared at himself in the mirror. He had not seen his own face for more than three years. Now clean-shaven, with his hair scissored back to the bottom of his neck and combed, he could have looked worse. His cheeks and eyes were hollow and he was thirty pounds underweight, but it could be worse. He could be dead. He could be sharing heavenly mushrooms with 126. He rolled the sleeves up above his elbows and went back on deck.
‘Well, I must say, you look A-one, sir, just A-one,’ Pratt said.
‘Smoke?’ Hatcher rasped.
Pratt fumbled in his briefcase.
‘Yes, sir, yes, sir, right here.’ He handed Hatcher a pack of Dunhills. ‘Your brand, I believe.’
‘It is?’ Hatcher said, staring at the package. He turned it over a couple of times before he figured out how to peel the wrapper off. He lit one up, took a deep drag, and almost coughed to death. His face turned purple and he gasped for breath.
‘Hands over your head!’ Pratt shrieked and held Hatcher’s arms up. He stopped coughing finally and sat down on the gunwale. He looked at the cigarette for a moment and threw it overboard.
‘We have some fresh fruit, excellent cheese, wine, uh, sliced chicken and roast beef. Also there’s some beer and Coca-Cola down in the fridge,’ Pratt said and, laughing nervously, added, ‘It’s a regular old cruise ship.’
Hatcher stared almost quizzically at Pratt and kept staring until the fat man began to feel uncomfortable, then he said, ‘Coca-Cola. Yeah.’
‘How did Sloan arrange my pardon?’ Hatcher’s ruined voice asked.
‘Well, uh, it’s not exactly a pardon —‘
‘What do you mean?’ he whispered menacingly.
‘You see, Mr. Hatcher, Madrango is going through a rather traumatic upheaval right now. There was a military coup and the new president, his name is Garazzo —‘
‘Garazzo! He sent me up there.’
‘Oh, that’s right. You see, there was a democratic election just after you, uh, went away, and Garazzo and his people were, uh, displaced by Venzio. But then, four weeks ago, Garazzo, uh, pulled off this, uh, coup and he’s president again. Anyway, he arranged for your escape.’
‘Escape?’ Hatcher’s green eyes glittered dangerously.
‘It’s just a formality,’ Pratt said hurriedly. ‘They won’t try to extradite you or anything like that. I mean, nobody’s even going to know you’re out, know what I mean?’
‘Where’s Sloan?’
‘You’ll see him when you get to Washington.’
‘Washington?’
‘Right. We’re going to hustle you right on out of the country, yes siree. . . . He’s, uh, dying to see you.’
Hatcher stared at him again. He was intrigued by the man’s face, by the layers of fat that seemed to reduce his features to miniatures. A little face peering out of a big, fat head.
‘How’d you get mixed up in this?’ he growled to Pratt.
‘I’m a career diplomat,’ Pratt said, trying to sound proud of it.
‘Some things never change,’ Hatcher whispered.
They could see pillars of black smoke rising from the city when they were still twenty miles away.
‘It’s got a fires!’ the captain said, pointing upriver.
‘It’s got a fires,’ Pratt mimicked, shaking his head. He stood up and looked over the bow, toward the capital city. ‘My God, there must have been a counterattack on the city,’ Pratt wailed. ‘The whole place is burning up.’
‘What do we do now?’ Hatcher snarled anxiously.
‘I’ll try to radio the embassy,’ Pratt said and disappeared below. Hatcher kept watching the towers of black smoke as they got closer to the city. He could hear explosions and gunfire. When Pratt returned, he was smiling.
‘They’re going to send a chopper to the pier. It’s in friendly hands,’ he said excitedly. ‘They’ll fly us straight into the embassy.’
‘Why’re you doing all this for me?’ Hatcher demanded.
‘I, uh, I really don’t know, sir. They didn’t tell me that. They just said to go down with the papers, bribe the warden, and bring you back. If you want to know the truth, Mr. Hatcher, they don’t ever tell me anything.’
‘I drop you off and scramming,’ the captain yelled to them.
‘Yeah, right,’ Pratt said. ‘You scramming. Know what they told me? The captain speaks perfect English, that’s what they told me. See what I mean?’
As they neared the pier they saw the chopper, a four-passenger job, sweep over the warehouses along the edge of the river and hover over the bank, churning up the water below it. Pratt stood up and waved to them. The captain guided the scow along the pier and bumped it gently. So he couldn’t speak English, Hatcher thought. He sure knows how to run a boat.
‘You go now, good luck, senors,’ he yelled.
Pratt scrambled to get up on the railing, and as he did, a shell exploded a hundred yards away, tearing out the corner of a building. A naked woman ran down the street with her hair burning. A jeep squatted on flat tires,
