Face to the Sun Read Free Page A

which I transferred the
valuables, less one emerald ear-ring which I kept to identify myself as the correct possessor of the jewellery and able to return it. After depositing the briefcase at a bank, I bought smart
trousers and a gentlemanly coat, a dressing-gown, a few paperbacks, paper and envelopes to fill up space, and set off with my parcels to Gower Street, managing to reach my room unseen. With the
laundry bag now holding the foul remains of my forty-eight hours’ distress and my suit laid out for cleaning, I could now face the landlady and search the advertisement columns of the more
expensive dailies for the expected offer of a reward.

Chapter Two
    It was the third day of living with my criminality, and I was becoming accustomed to it. Half of me was ashamed; the other half not without pride in ac­complishing, as an
amateur, an act which would have dismayed a professional. An act, yes. It irrevocably separated the self which had stolen from the self which would not dream of doing any such thing. Right and
wrong had little to do with it. My pride was in action.
    I rang for breakfast and the newspapers. When the girl arrived I gave her my suit to be cleaned and my wash to be washed with proper geniality. She did not seem to have noticed the temporary
absence of the laundry bag. Clad in my new dressing-gown like any mature student on a postgraduate course at London University round the corner, I opened the paper for a leisurely look through the
advertisements. I was amazed to see, occupying a quarter of the front page, a picture of my lady of Harrods in her resplendent youth. She was Juana Romero, daughter of a Mexican father and a
Californian mother.
    It was not the theft of the jewellery which was news, but the victim. In her youth she had been a famous film actress; the toast of the two Americas they called her. One reporter only had
recognised her married name from the police reports, and he deserved his scoop. The beautiful brown eyes had been swimming with tears as she told him of her loss. She had been dreaming of her past
without a thought for the bag at her little feet. In her time she had been squashed into shape by the arms of Rudolph Valentino himself – the reporter put it more delicately – for her
figure was then of the type which fascinated teenagers, Hollywood producers and the American military. She had been, wrote the emotional hack, the envy of all women. I doubt it. The exuberant
display probably started the later craze for weight reduction. And there she was on the front page in a ‘revealing’ swimsuit; it hadn’t a chance of being anything else.
    She had married the Father of her Country. He was then only a colonel, but the pair of them were so popular that the cathedral had been packed with the press, the generals and the politicians,
all of them haunted by a foreboding of what this marriage of celebrities might bring about. It took him three more years to reach the top by a revolution rather less bloody than usual. She had done
well for her husband and herself. The paper listed her loss as the tiara of emeralds and diamonds, the ear-rings and necklace. She had not said a word of the golden sun. I remembered my earlier
conjecture that it could have been acquired from a museum. Now that I knew who she was, that was indeed possible.
    I shall call the lady’s country the Republic of Malpelo, for it would be shameful to brand a charming and impoverished little state with meekly tolerating a Father of the Country. Fatherly
methods of government are much the same in Africa and Latin America, and I had learned them by experience. I had been surprised that the African had bothered to denounce corruption and supposed
that it was for the benefit of international financiers, for nobody within the country would ever have believed that the American firm had won that contract on reliability alone. All the same I
liked that great, black, bemedalled bugger until the last time I came