The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway - Ernest Hemingway [220]
“I don’t think if people gambled for what they could afford it would be very interesting. Do you, Enrique?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been able to afford it.”
“Don’t be silly. You have lots of money.”
“No I haven’t,” I said. “Really.”
“Oh, everyone has money,” he said. “It’s just a question of selling something or other to get hold of it.”
“I don’t have much. Really.”
“Oh, don’t be silly. I’ve never known an American who wasn’t rich.”
I guess that was the truth all right. He wouldn’t have met them at the Ritz bar or at Chicote’s either in those days. And now he was back in Chicote’s and all the Americans he would meet there now were the kind he would never have met; except me, and I was a mistake. But I would have given plenty not to have seen him in there.
Still, if he wanted to do an absolutely damn fool thing like that it was his own business. But as I looked at the table and remembered the old days I felt badly about him and I felt very badly too that I had given the waiter the number of the counterespionage bureau in Seguridad headquarters. He could have had Seguridad by simply asking on the telephone. But I had given him the shortest cut to having Delgado arrested in one of those excesses of impartiality, righteousness and Pontius Pilatry, and the always-dirty desire to see how people act under an emotional conflict, that makes writers such attractive friends.
The waiter came over.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“I would never denounce him myself,” I said, now trying to undo for myself what I had done with the number. “But I am a foreigner and it is your war and your problem.”
“But you are with us.”
“Absolutely and always. But it does not include denouncing old friends.”
“But for me?”
“For you it is different.”
I knew this was true and there was nothing else to say, only I wished I had never heard of any of it.
My curiosity as to how people would act in this case had been long ago, and shamefully, satisfied. I turned to John and did not look at the table where Luis Delgado was sitting. I knew he had been flying with the fascists for over a year, and here he was, in a loyalist uniform, talking to three young loyalist flyers of the last crop that had been trained in France.
None of those new kids would know him and I wondered whether he had come to try to steal a plane or for what. Whatever he was there for, he was a fool to come to Chicote’s now.
“How do you feel, John?” I asked.
“Feel good,” said John. “Is a good drink hokay. Makes me feel little bit drunk maybe. Is a good for the buzzing in the head.”
The waiter came over. He was very excited.
“I have denounced him,” he said.
“Well then,” I said, “now you haven’t any problem.”
“No,” he said proudly. “I have denounced him. They are on their way now to get him.”
“Let’s go,” I said to John. “There is going to be some trouble here.”
“Is best go then,” said John. “Is a plenty trouble always come, even if you do best to avoid. How much we owe?”
“You aren’t going to stay?” the waiter asked.
“No.”
“But you gave me the telephone number.”
“I know it. You get to know too many telephone numbers if you stay around in this town.”
“But it was my duty.”
“Yes. Why not? Duty is a very strong thing.”
“But now?”
“Well, you felt good about it just now, didn’t you? Maybe you will feel good about it again. Maybe you will get to like it.”
“You have forgotten the package,” the waiter said. He handed me the meat which was wrapped in two envelopes which had brought copies of the Spur to the piles of magazines which accumulated in one of the office rooms of the Embassy.
“I understand,” I said to the waiter. “Truly.”
“He was an old client and a good client. Also I have never denounced anyone before. I did not denounce for pleasure.”
“Also I should not speak cynically or brutally. Tell him that I denounced him. He hates me anyway by now for differences in politics. He