- Colonel Perez: Who is in here?
- Dr. Eduardo Plarr: Signora Fortnum.
- Colonel Perez: Oh, I see... Is this why you've been lying to me?
- Dr. Eduardo Plarr: An affair always involves a few lies.
- Dr. Eduardo Plarr: You say he was shot trying to escape.
- Colonel Perez: Yes. It's quite straightforward, isn't it?
- Dr. Eduardo Plarr: Oh, yes... Just I can not understand why he was trying to escape backwards.
- Colonel Perez: You really needn't worry about this one. If there was any question of his being innocent, he wouldn't be here.
- Dr. Eduardo Plarr: What do you mean?
- Dr. Eduardo Plarr: He would have been disappeared... In the river, probably.
- Dr. Eduardo Plarr: You've got him.
- Colonel Perez: I've, um... been asked if you'd be prepared to help out occasionally at the prison with resistencia.
- Dr. Eduardo Plarr: In what capacity?
- Colonel Perez: Dr. Barabanto has been extremely helpful, but he's... of course, he's... he's not available all the time. And we do seem to find ourselves quite often in need of reliable medical opinion.
- Dr. Eduardo Plarr: What you mean is, you often need to know if someone's fit enough to be tortured.
- Colonel Perez: Alright, I'll tell 'em you're busy.
- Dr. Eduardo Plarr: You do that... Look... I don't think you like this any more than I do.
- Colonel Perez: Ugh... The way I look at it - if a country hands itself over to the irrationals - every man for himself.
- Colonel Perez: I have to take every possibility into account, doctor. Even a crime of passion.
- Dr. Eduardo Plarr: Passion? I'm an Englishman.
- Colonel Perez: The general will never release any prisoners, you know.
- Dr. Eduardo Plarr: Depends on American aid. If the Americans told him to release...
- Colonel Perez: The Americans don't give a damn! He's anticommunist. That's what they're paying for... Are you a communist, Eduardo?
- Dr. Eduardo Plarr: I've always found Marx unreadable.
- Belfrage: British Ambassador: Well, I'm afraid the situation looks pretty bleak. The... Foreign Minister takes the view that it's a Paraguayan affair. The Paraguayans refuse to discuss the matter on the grounds that the President's on holiday, and Whitehall's position is that they won't be held to ransom by criminals.
- Dr. Eduardo Plarr: Surely, the Americans could help.
- Belfrage: British Ambassador: No, they are most unsympathetic, I'm afraid. Of course, if the ambassador hadn't taken against Fortnum so violently and insisted on driving himself, they'd have kindapped him, but he appears to be impervious to that line of reasoning.
- Dr. Eduardo Plarr: Is there nothing you can do, Sir Henry?
- Belfrage: British Ambassador: Alas, it's all... extremely ticklish. Apart from anything else the relations between us and the Argentinians are very shaky. It's not even as if the poor devil were any good at his job. All I ever hear about him is complaints.
- Dr. Eduardo Plarr: Complaints?
- Belfrage: British Ambassador: Yeah, that's right. Um, Fortnum's wife, that patient of yours, is um... undesirable. Curious, but in my experience, that word is only ever applied to woman who are quite the opposite... I'm doing all i can, you know. Really, I am. If he'd been a business tycoon, of course, things would have been quite different. Yeah, the trouble is... Fortnum's such a pitiably small bear.