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friendship it was possible to offer.
    Now Chuchu had become a great man in their eyes, even among the officers, for he was known to be the trusted companion of the General. There had been a colonel here, Sanjur, who started a rebellion in ’69 after the General had exiled his fellow colonel and seized power. The General was at the time on a visit to Mexico, but he immediately took a plane back to David, to the consternation of the conspirators who thought that he would be content to follow President Arias and Colonel Martínez without fuss to Miami. From David he set off towards the capital and the rebellion collapsed. The junior officers were forgiven, Colonel Sanjur was imprisoned, but the CIA arranged his escape by bribery and took him to the Canal Zone.
    Another Wild Pig buttonholed us in the camp. He needed money badly and for long he had day-dreamed of an occasion when the General would visit the camp and speak to him and he would find the courage to tell the General of his trouble. He had three children – well, he admitted to us, not three, it was really only two, but three sounded a lot better, he thought, and he was in genuine need of three hundred dollars. Three hundred? Well, of course, two hundred would satisfy him, but it was always well to ask for more than you actually needed.
    The real object of Chuchu’s visit to the camp was to get ammunition for a new acquisition of which he was very proud. He already had quite an arsenal at his home ready for confrontation next year with the Yanquis if it came to street fighting, but this was something special – a Russian repeating pistol which could be adjusted to fire from the shoulder. He had obtained it from a friend in the Cuban Embassy in exchange for a Belgian revolver. There was obviously magic to him in the mere word Russian. We would try it out, he promised, when we got to David.
    When we reached Santiago we had a very bad meal at what appeared to be the only restaurant – a Chinese one. I was encouraged by the sight of a Gordon’s bottle behind the bar and I ordered a gin, but whatever the bottle contained it wasn’t gin. I said so and the Chinaman smiled and smiled. We chose for safety a very European dish, chop-suey, and I asked for some pimento sauce to cheer it up. The bottle certainly had the right label, but what it held was only coloured water, and when I complained the Chinaman smiled and smiled and smiled. The restaurant formed part of an hotel, but we thought it better to look elsewhere.
    We found a motel and asked for two rooms. ‘But where are the girls?’ the proprietor asked with astonishment and suspicion.
    Chuchu took off his revolver belt and laid his revolver on his bedside table with the safety catch raised. ‘A precaution?’ I asked and often later back in France I had reason to recall the aphorism with which he replied, ‘A revolver is no defence.’ He was indeed a wise man. Even the motel’s doors proved, as he had said, that the Devil existed.
    On the road to David Chuchu was in high spirits, casting a glance back from time to time as though his sight could penetrate the boot where the beloved Russian pistol rested. He told me a bizarre story of one of his last visits to David. The Dean of Guatemala University, an honoured guest of Panama, was with him – also a bottle of whisky which the Dean had emptied while Chuchu drove. The Dean was quite drunk by the time they arrived and for some reason all the hotels were full, so they went to the police station to beg a cell for the night, but the cells were full too. There remained the little square with its stone benches, but the benches were all occupied by fourteen homosexuals. Luckily Chuchu was in uniform. He ordered a guardia to summon the homosexuals before him and after giving them a long reproving address he dismissed them to their homes. Then he and the Dean were able to sleep on the benches in the empty square.
    In David we went to the barracks of the National Guard, so